Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War (7 page)

Balthazar, Calypso, and the governess, Catherine Flick, always did their best to separate Buckle from the Martian children, but he was always looking for an opening to pull hair, splash ink, or trip up. His punishments had increased in intensity, from being sent to his room to shoveling the dung out of the mews, but it deterred him little.

He simply could not rein in his anger.

One day, Buckle caught Max alone in the corridor of the house, without the company of Tyro or an adult. They were both on their way to geometry class, Balthazar’s leather-bound books tucked under their arms, and their paths from opposite ends of the house had somehow intersected.

Buckle immediately pounced. He swiped Max’s books out of her hands, and they tumbled to the floor in heavy thuds. Her eyes flashed crimson in her goggles. He laughed, hating her, despising the slender, black-and-white striped hands that looked so out of place at the ends of her dress sleeves.

“Look at me, you black-eyed zebe!” Buckle snarled. He ripped off her goggles, the aqueous humor spewing as they came free. Face dripping, Max stared at him, her big black eyes brimming with defiance. Brimming with hurt.

“You look like a bug!” Buckle shouted, tossing the goggles aside. “Stinkbug!”

Max stepped forward in a way she never had before. Jammed in her left fist was a geometry compass, which she now swung, driving the sharp point into Buckle’s right shoulder with surprising force, plunging it into the muscle deeply enough for the compass to remain stuck there even when she removed her hand.

Buckle froze. The Martians never fought back. The Martians had always endured his attacks stoically, covering themselves as best they could and waiting for an adult or an older child, like the eldest son, Ryder, to step in for them.

Not this time.

Max stared at him, her eyes calm, victorious, condescending, and aquamarine.

Buckle’s shoulder suddenly hurt like hell. He jerked the compass out of his flesh and hurled it against the wall, where it left a little splotch of blood before dropping to the floor with a clunk.

Max turned and ran. Buckle sprinted after her.

He was going to kill her.

They ran and ran, down the long corridors of Balthazar’s grand Tehachapi house. Max dashed like a gazelle, veering through doorways with elegant speed, her skirt fluttering about her legs, but Buckle, coming on with his greater size and speed, closed the gap; he grabbed one of her long black braids, lovingly threaded by Calypso, and yanked her head back.

Max lunged forward, jerking the braid out of Buckle’s grasp. She stumbled and slammed headfirst into the oak jamb of the parlor door frame. Her forward motion suddenly arrested, Max dropped in a fluttering pile of skirt. She lay on her back, legs twitching, blood, bright red, crimson as cherry pigment, spilling from the gash in her forehead, trickling across both the white and black stripes.

Buckle could not take his eyes off her. Something strange worked inside him, a disconcerted, unspeakable, unfair remorse: something he had never felt before.

The sounds of boots on timber came pounding up behind him.

“Max!” Calypso shrieked.

Something powerful lifted Buckle from behind. He had been lifted up by the hair. He saw his feet kicking in the air.

Balthazar Crankshaft had never before raised his hand against one of his own children, and never would again. But that morning, as Max was carried bleeding to the infirmary by the weeping Calypso, Romulus Buckle had the tar beaten out of him by the grand old man of the Crankshafts.

And Buckle, his arse pink and his ears bruised, never cried. He deserved what he got. Part of him had wanted to be hated, had wanted to die.

Buckle took a deep breath and brushed Max’s hair back from the scar on her forehead. The skin felt cold and clammy.

Max had expressly forgiven him—the very next morning over breakfast—but her graciousness, her concern for the offender’s feelings, had done nothing but wound him to the
quick. In later years, if the scar was noticed by a schoolmate, Max would claim that she barely even remembered the incident. But Buckle knew that Max remembered. And it pained him to think that she did.

Martians never lied, people said. Max said. But Max was only half Martian.

The water in the iron pot came to a boil, a thousand bubbles pinging against the metal. Buckle unsheathed the knife and stuck the blade into the rolling water.

Buckle was no surgeon, but he had a surgeon’s work to do.

And Max’s life depended on him doing it well.

THE APPRENTICE SURGEON

B
UCKLE SLID HIS HEAVY COAT
off Max and unhooked the latches of her bearskin. He tried to pull the fur lining from her left side, but found that the copious amounts of blood, now frozen in scarlet gobbets of ice, had stuck it to her woolen sweater beneath. He used his knife to cut the sweater away. The sweet, coppery smell of blood swamped his nostrils. As he worked the bearskin and the black woolen sweater out from under her light form, cradling her head against his thighs as he raised her upper body slightly, he found that the blouse beneath was in shreds, a white silk garment now utterly soaked the color of scarlet, heavy with slushy blood.

Buckle worked quickly, handling Max as he would a sleeping baby. He wondered if he should give her a shot of morphine. He decided against it. She was unconscious now. She would need the painkiller once she roused. There was not a lot of it.

Max started trembling. She was terribly weakened, susceptible to the cold. And the cave air did not feel much warmer, though the heat of the adolescent fire surged at his back. But it would have to do.

Applying the knife to Max’s blouse, Buckle sliced it away, revealing the skin underneath: skin pale as cream where he wiped it, skin adorned with curving black stripes. Max’s entire
left side was awash in thick blood that looked black in the firelight, down to where it had pooled over the belt at her waist. His heart sank, there was so much of it, steaming in places, dripping down the ribs. He pulled away the tattered remnants of the blouse, and she lay exposed from the waist up.

It would have surprised Buckle, if he had time to consider it, that Max’s well-muscled stomach was all white. Buckle had never seen Max’s body beyond her face, neck, and hands. She had always kept it hidden under sleeves and high collars. Hers was a beautiful form, very human in appearance, except for the black stripes upon it, tapering off along her rib cage and swirling around her small, pink-nippled breasts, but Buckle was in no state of mind to register such things. Even though his invasion of her well-guarded privacy was necessary to save her life—he was her doctor now, after all—if anything, he experienced a sense of impropriety as he worked. And there arose another emotion, guilt, a despair at the violence of the wounds she had suffered in his defense, but he was too absorbed in his task to give such feelings any attention.

The sabertooth had sunk its fangs into Max’s shoulder near the neck, plunging into the muscle just above her clavicle. The two puncture wounds were dark red, deep, as regular as drill holes, and still wide open, leaking both blood and clear fluid. They were awful wounds, to be sure, but the beastie had not locked down, or Max would most surely be dead. The sabertooth’s first bite was for capture; the second bite would have been for the kill.

More worrisome even than the bite wounds were the long claw slashes down Max’s back. Buckle carefully shifted her onto her uninjured right side to investigate. There were four separate gashes, each one longer and deeper than the next, ripped down
the flesh of her back from the top of the shoulder blade to the waist. The narrow, ragged wounds had bled badly, though he could not see that any had sunk deep enough to damage the bones or organs beneath.

Buckle decided to start with the bite wounds. He eased Max onto her back again, and then removed the pot from the fire, so the boiling water would not evaporate away. Taking the surgical knife from the pot, he cut away a section of the gauze roll, dipped it in the water, and began wiping the icy gouts of blood away from Max’s neck. Blood oozed from the bite punctures, flooding the white skin immediately after he wiped it. He used a small handful of the bandages to continue cleaning, but the cloth was soon soaked completely through.

Buckle filled the syringe with hot water from the pot; he sank the point of the needle into the first bite wound and drove his thumb down on the plunger, expressing the near-boiling water with as much force as he could. He continued pressing the plunger until the water flooded out of the flesh clear and clean, and then repeated the procedure with the second wound. With the veins below freed from the debris and coagulate that had stifled them, new blood flowed from the bite punctures in rivers.

Buckle unscrewed the Fassbinder’s Penicillin Paste tin and sank two fingers into the pale-green balm, then plugged the fingers into Max’s wounds, stanching the blood flow. He placed a folded gauze bandage on Max’s shoulder and pressed down on it. Max shifted, ever so slightly, uttering a small, plaintive sigh. The sound nearly broke Buckle’s heart. She started shivering. He felt her quivering muscles tighten as if she might be coming around.

Buckle cautiously turned Max onto her stomach, allowing the weight of her body to maintain the pressure on her shoulder
bandage, and immediately set to cleaning the claw wounds. Her thick black hair had become unbound from whatever device she had pinned it with, and he swept it aside. Her flesh continued to shiver, and he worked as fast as he could, a little more roughly than he would have liked, irrigating the length of the cuts with the syringe and wiping the excesses of blood away with the gauze. He used much of the rest of the penicillin paste to seal the wounds before laying strips of bandage along the length of each of them.

Buckle was going to have to wind the gauze around her body to fasten the bandages tight to the wounds. He leveraged her onto her right side again; the bandages, already half-soaked with blood, remained in place, stuck to the wounds by the combination of coagulate and Fassbinder’s paste.

“Perhaps it would be best if I were to sit up for you to proceed with your wrappings,” Max said in a hoarse whisper, startling Buckle. Her voice was even but quivering underneath, soaked with pain.

“Max,” Buckle whispered, overjoyed at the sound of her voice, peering down at her face. “Stay still. I can manage. I am going to give you morphine.”

Max opened her eyes, the big black orbs shimmering in the orange firelight. “Not yet, Captain. Finish your surgery first.” Max planted her right hand on the floor and pushed with a feeble but determined heave, attempting to sit up.

“Stay still. Blue blazes!” Buckle cursed. “Damn it, Max. All right.”

Careful not to disturb any bandaging, Buckle slipped his hands under Max’s armpits and assisted her into a sitting position. She was shivering violently again, her teeth clamped against the convulsions, breathing hard through her nose. Her
black eyes wavered gold in the deeper layers, the Martian color of pain.

Buckle began unwinding the gauze at Max’s shoulder, looping it around her torso and under each arm, circling the back, and returning to cross the injured shoulder again. His face was often mere inches from hers as she waited him to finish his work, and if she was embarrassed by her nakedness, she never showed it, nor made any attempt to cover herself.

Buckle did not care one whit about her privacy right now. She was sitting up. She was speaking. She was very alive.

“You do not listen to me as your captain, but I will demand that you listen to me as your surgeon,” Buckle said.

“Aye,” Max whispered, with effort, followed by a rough swallow. She lifted her arms from her body slightly so that it would be easier for Buckle to loop the gauze. The motion must have caused her great discomfort, for she took a deep breath. Buckle tightened the bandages and tied off the ends. He laid Max down on the bearskin on her uninjured side, her frighteningly cold skin trembling under his warm fingers, and quickly covered her with his coat, tucking it up neatly under her chin. She was looking at him, looking at him with her big, bottomless black eyes, and he smiled at her.