Queen of Mars - Book III in the Masters of Mars Trilogy (15 page)

He moved his head in a “whatever-you-say”
gesture.

After a moment he asked, quietly, “Will my
niece Rebecca be along soon?”

“Yes, of course. It is time for my noon meal.
Will you join me?”

“No, thank you. I have business to attend to.
But I will stay until Rebecca arrives.”

As if on cue, the door flew open, and my
lady-in-waiting arrived, bearing a tray. This was a new duty for
her, but one she had earned. She had been one of the few to survive
the massacre at Valles Marrineris, and had eventually found her way
to Bradbury. She also bore Hector by his leash. She gave a cursory
nod to her uncle and set the tray down on my table set by the
window.

At the sight of the dog I dropped my white
fur on the floor and rushed to greet his slobbering form. He was
straining at the leash and whining, and when Rebecca let go he
leaped into my arms and nearly knocked me over.

“Good heavens!” I shouted, holding him up by
the front paws and examining him. “What have they been feeding you?
You’re twice the size you were at Copernicus’s farm!”

His fat belly was proof of this, and when I
dropped him to the floor he walked around dragging it as if it were
a pouch beneath him.

“There’s no way on Mars you can travel with
me now!” I said, laughing. “You will have to stay here and get even
fatter!”

He barked, and pawed at the ground, his ears
flopping, and looking up at me with his sad eyes.

“No, I’m sorry, this is how it must be!”

“Rebecca,” Thomas said quietly, “remove the
dog, please.”

“But I’ve just seen him!” I protested. “Here,
let me give him something to eat–”

Thomas was there, gently staying my hand.
“Please see Hector later, your majesty. We have important matters
to discuss.”

“Very well...”

Reluctantly, I allowed Rebecca to remove the
whining beast, who pawed and yowled as he was put outside the door
and given over to a guard.

“You are tasting and handling the Queen’s
food now, I understand?” Thomas asked innocently, as Rebecca
returned. He stood beside his niece at the table.

“Oh, yes,” Rebecca said brightly. “Her
regular attendants are being outfitted to ride with her, so I
offered–”

Thomas reached around her and put an extended
claw into my tea, bringing it quickly to his lips.

“It is mocra,” he said, his voice filled with
sadness, and before I could protest he had drawn his dagger and
thrust it deep into his niece’s breast.

She let out a startled cry, and already blood
was flowing from the deep and fatal wound.

Her uncle lowered her gently to the floor,
his eyes never leaving her own.

“Why did you do this?” he asked gently. “Was
there not enough shame already on our family?”

“I—” Rebecca gasped, her eyes suddenly bright
with fury. “I did it to avenge my grandfather! To avenge his
murder!”

“Jeffrey was not murdered, he was rightfully
executed. As you have now been.”

Thomas shook his head slowly, even as she
closed her eyes, and her last breath escaped. He laid her body down
flat on the floor and stood up, his dagger limp in his hand.

“She was a fool among so many fools,” he
said, his voice suffused with melancholy. “She drove your mother
slowly mad with poison, and assassinated poor old general Xarr. She
was in league with the mercenaries at Valles Marrineris, and
provided them with the mocra that incapacitated your army. I began
to suspect when she returned unharmed from the battle. And then,
when she did all she could to become keeper of your food, I knew.
She was a gentle soul, and could never use a blade. Poison was her
way. And today she would have assassinated you.” He sighed heavily.
“All for a fool’s idea that her grandfather was some kind of
patriot! He was a fool who assassinated your grandmother for a
foolish idea, and brought a curse upon all of us.”

He paused, and his eyes were filled with
infinite sadness. “This is a burden that cannot be borne, your
majesty. My family is now forever in disgrace. Her grandfather was
an assassin, and she the same. Her father and mother, as you know,
are long dead, and I brought her into your service. I am as guilty
as she. King Sebastian is gone, so there is no need for me. I am
the last of my family. It must end here.”

“Thomas–!”

Before I could stop him, he thrust his dagger
into his own breast, at the heart, and fell instantly dead at my
feet.

For a moment I stood frozen in shock. Then I
kneeled and smoothed the fur from his troubled brow. His face
relaxed into a kind of peace I had never seen in him.

“Fear not, old friend,” I said quietly.
“Because of you, because of your dedication and the service you
gave my father for so long, your family name will always be
remembered with pride on Mars.”

He had fallen onto my new white fur cloak,
which I had dropped on the floor, and there was now the red stains
of his blood on its pristine surface.

I would wear that cloak, I now resolved, with
pride, and with the blood of this great and tragic feline
intact.

W
e marched on the
last day of Spring. Though it was warm, and I sweated like an ox in
my white fur, there was a smell, the faintest of odors, of cold
climes to come. My grandfather, resplendent in red and, after much
fighting, without his F’rar crest, rode beside me. He had done
wonders with a makeshift army, turning a mass of cynical old
veterans and new recruits – farmers and manufacturing men who had
never held a sword, fired an arrow or handled a scarce firearm –
into a cohesive fighting force. There was discipline in this
trained army, and I now led them proudly.

My initial thoughts of cold were, of course,
an illusion, and we spent the first week marching north through one
of the worst early heat waves on record. My white fur was packed
away in favor of a light pink tunic. Even that was too much in the
heat and, on the seventh day of the heat wave, I abandoned it in
favor of a simple white cotton blouse. Many of the soldiers were
stripped to their skivvies, and the usual army complaints were in
order:

“Cold my arse! Feels like hell it does!”

“I doubt there’ll be any ice cap when we get
there. Must be melted clean away by now!”

“You don’t need to cook your food – just hold
it in your hand and the sun’ll do the job!”

And so on.

But this heat did not last and somewhere in
the middle of the second week the unusual heat began to give way to
the inevitable cool of the northern Spring. Skivvies were covered
with tunics, and then neck wraps and then, finally, coats and
cloaks and random wrappings. By the third week of march the
complaints had changed:

“Cold as hell it is!”

“The whole bleeding planet must be one damned
ice cap!”

“Look! My dinner’s frozen before it reached
m’ lips!”

And as the climate changed, so did the
landscape. What had been gentle dunes spotted with green hills and
blue lakes turned to windswept red vistas, white frosted ponds and
an angry, bare pink sky streaked with thin high cold-looking
clouds. The air huffed cold vapor when I breathed. My fingers felt
stiff, and the glare off the occasional patches of ice hurt my
eyes.

And then there were ice hills in front of us,
which proved slippery to our mounts, and then the Northern Cap
itself, which grew gradually in the distance from a line a bit
higher at the horizon to a climbing wall of white glaring
blue-white ice which ate up more of the northern sky every day.

It snowed once at the beginning of the fourth
week, a gentle reminder of things to come, and then it snowed again
a bit harder two days later. There was no wind to speak of, which
was a blessing, but then the wind came during the third storm,
which drove us to our tents. Scouts reported that Frane’s army was
a week’s march away, entrenched on the cap itself, and that we
would have to either make a perilous climb to reach her, or go out
of our way four days to find gentler slopes to the west. I resolved
that we would cross that bridge when we reached it.

It was well that Darwin was a good Jakra
player, for we spent nearly three days entrenched while the wind
howled and intermittent snows blew. The temperature had dropped
precipitously, and I now blessed the white fur cloak I wore, which
kept me as warm as I wished.

“Bah,” my husband said, losing his third game
in a row and throwing his cards on the ground.

“You’re sick of Jakra?”

“I’m sick of waiting. Why don’t we
march?”

“You’re always too restless, Darwin. And why
do you disappear for much of the day while we do march?”

He looked at me slyly. “I’m looking for a new
wife.”

“I doubt it,” I laughed.

“You know why I disappear,” he said. “It’s
what I do. I’m always looking for a place to hide. It’s what I’ve
always done.”

“Have you found anything interesting?”

“Always,” he said. But he did not
elaborate, for he had jumped across the mass of jakra cards to
wrestle me to the ground and kiss me.

F
inally, a day
later, the storm lifted and we resumed our march. The sky had
cleared, and it was a fierce bracing cold day, with no wind at all.
We traveled up a long, gradual snowy slope which led to a ledge.
Below us stretched an ice valley whose blue glare was startling in
the sun. We moved down a series of switchbacks to reach the
floor.

Once again Darwin had left my side, which
always made me uneasy. But this was his way. Sometimes he might be
gone for a day or two at a time – but always, when he returned, my
heart leapt like a mare’s. Often when I asked him where he had been
he would shake his head, or mumble something about “hiding spots,
just in case,” – but today he returned in mid-afternoon with a wide
grin on his face. With him was an impossibly tall feline, nearly as
wide in girth as the gaoler from Robinson prison.

“This is Miklos, a real gypsy king!” Darwin
announced. Even at full-grown height, my husband came up barely to
the fellow’s chest.

“And this is little fish!” Miklos cried,
lifting Darwin as if he were a bundle of clothes and holding him
high in the air.

My husband laughed like a kit, and explained
to me, “He used to do this to me when I first met him, when I was
barely out of kithood!”

“He tried to run and hide from me, the scamp,
but I caught him up – just like a fish – ha!”

Miklos put Darwin down, and the two of them
wrestled and hugged in a most affectionate manner.

Suddenly Miklos was down on one knee before
me, and kissing my ring.

“As a gypsy king,” he said seriously, “and
like my brother Radion before me, land rest his soul, I pledge
myself and my people to you, my Queen, just as we did to your
father King Sebastian. Long live Queen Clara!”

And before I could protest he had stood up,
taken me by the scruff of the neck, and held me high in the air,
showing me like a rag doll to my own troops, who howled with
laughter, and his own people, who had materialized behind him and
began to cheer.

I could do nothing else but laugh myself, and
when the huge gypsy had set me down, saying, “I hope I have not
embarrassed you, my Queen – it is our way,” I merely adjusted my
cloak and said, “Of course not. Welcome, king Miklos.”

“He will fight with us!” Darwin announced.
“He has a hundred men but they will fight like a thousand. He’s
been tracking us for days!”

“You knew this?” I said to my husband in
surprise.

“Oh, yes. But Miklos didn’t know I was
following him!”

“Ha!” Miklos said again, and lifted
Darwin up once more. “Little fish has always been quiet, and
sneaky, and wise!”

S
uch as could be
prepared, we had a celebration that night. Doubly so, when Miklos
learned that Darwin and I were wed, and he took the two of us by
the scruffs of our necks and marched around the entire camp,
announcing our good fortune. Darwin, when let loose, introduced me
to the gypsy band’s cook, named Tyron, a sour-faced fellow who
beamed in my husband’s presence.

“I taught him everything he knows about
cooking, when we both traveled with Radion.”

At the mention of Radion – who I knew had
died fighting by my father’s side – both of them went silent.

I lightened the mood by saying, “Then it is
you, Tyron, who I have to blame for my husband’s bland preparation
of meals?”

“Bah!” he said, beginning to get angry before
he saw the joke, and Darwin broke into laughter.

“She loves my cooking – and all because of
you!” he said, slapping the gypsy cook on the back.

The sour-faced man smiled. “Then I will
prepare a special feast for you tonight, my Queen!”

“I shall look forward to it,” I said, and
left the two cooks to plan their meal.

I found Miklos, or, should I say, he found
me. He loomed up before me as I was entering my tent, and I invited
him in. He readily agreed, and produced, when we were comfortable
inside, a huge skin of wine.

“I don’t like wine,” I declared, when he
offered me the skin, which looked to be made of goat skin.

“What!” he cried. “Then you have never been
offered real wine. Taste this, please.”

I could not refuse a king’s offer, and so
brought the skin’s tip to my lips and tried it.

It was like honey in my throat.

I took a second sip, and a third.

Miklos nearly grabbed the skin from my paws
and took a great long drink, pulling the skin’s tip away from his
mouth so that the golden-red wine squirted in from nearly a foot
away.

“That is how to drink wine!” he announced,
handing the skin back to me. “Try it!”

My first try resulted in wine everywhere but
in my mouth, but soon I had mastered the trick, and the concoction,
like melted butter in the throat and warm in the belly, had begun
to work its magic on me.