Queen of Mars - Book III in the Masters of Mars Trilogy (9 page)

“What are those?” I said, pointing them out
to Copernicus, who was engaged in tightly tying down everything on
our two mounts, double and triple covering everything he could,
especially his precious telescope, which had disappeared under a
bulge of blanket layers.

“Tornadoes,” he said simply, returning to his
work, which I helped with in my clumsy way.

Then he sat down beside his horse, crossed
his legs, and closed his eyes.

“Now what?” I asked.

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“For nightfall, of course. Only a madman
would head into the Great Desert during the day.”

In a moment his chin lolled forward, and he
then gently collapsed onto the ground and curled up into sleep.

I tried to follow but could not, but sat
instead contemplating the subtle play of sinking sunlight on the
sands, and the changing colors of the landscape, from severe even
pink to shades of russet and dark brown, as dusk approached and
finally fell.

Just as I was nodding off to sleep,
Copernicus rose from the ground, stretched, and cried, “Ah!” He
shook me gently awake and said, “Time to leave!”

“But I had no sleep,” I complained, seeking
to find the ground and slumber.

“All the worse for you, then, your majesty,”
he said, and jostled me until I stood and then mounted my
horse.

It was cloudy, and pitch dark when our mounts
made the first sifting steps into the sands.

A hot breeze assaulted us from the west, as
more stars overhead were eaten by mounting cloud cover.

Copernicus sighed. “This is not good,” he
said. “Our first night, and we’re to be welcomed with a storm.”

But it never materialized, and as we pushed
out way down into the bowl the clouds magically dispersed above us,
and Phobos and then Deimos rose and set, and dawn found us
surrounded by hot sand, and pitching a poor man’s tent which
Copernicus had packed and now unpacked, which stood chest high at
the apex and five feet wide at the floor, but could be sealed on
all sides.

“The smaller the better,” Copernicus
explained, “since it gives the wind less area to work on.”

I stretched, feeling hot and ill
tempered.

“There isn’t even a breeze,” I snapped. The
sky had remained cloudless, and the sun stood out like a hot, angry
coin against the pale and otherwise empty sky.

“Wait an hour,” the little fellow said
patiently, and crawled into the tent.

While I stood regarding the empty landscape,
hill upon rolling hill of nothing but bright pink sand, he added,
“I suggest you stay out of the heat as much as possible, and get
some sleep this time.”

For a moment I stood pat, until I heard him
snoring inside.

Then, angry and tired, I crawled in after
him, to find that for such a small feline he took up a lot of
space, and had to conform my own curl to his own sprawl, leaving me
with little room to sleep and his boot precariously close to my
face. But I was suddenly exhausted, and finally slept –

– only to be awaked soon after by the wind,
which had begun as a background hiss for my bad dreams, and which
steadily increased to a whine and on to a howl before I was awake,
watching the walls of our poor structure rattle and shake like a
dying man, and buckle toward me with each pounding fist of gusting
wind.

Copernicus slept blithely on through it all,
and when I briefly unzipped the tightly closed front flap to look
out, I was instantly blinded by rushing, pelting sand. I could see
nothing a half foot in front of my face, and pulled my head back in
immediately.

The wind only increased, and all that day,
try as I might, I gained no more sleep.

When at last darkness was falling, tinting
the walls of the tent with darker light, the wind subsided, and
then fell to nothing.

Copernicus awoke, stretched, and cried his
habitual, “Ah!”

I looked at him balefully when he asked, “Did
you sleep well?”

“The sandstorm kept me awake.”

He frowned, and then said, “Oh! You mean the
wind, of course. That was no sandstorm. You’d best pray to your
benefactor that we don’t run into a real sandstorm, your
majesty.”

He pulled out hardtack from his tunic, and
after a while I did also, and almost treasured its dry, brittle
taste in my empty stomach, which I then washed away with a few
bitter sips from my canteen.

Then we packed, pulling our tent free
from the sand walls which had built around it and breaking it down,
pulling the hoods from our horses before feeding and watering them,
and riding off, once again, into the indeterminate night.

T
he next night and
day went much as the one before, and the one after that, also. I
began to think, as fools often due when offered repetition, that
this Great Desert wasn’t so great at all, and had nothing to show
me that I could not handle. When the clouds rolled in on the third
night and Copernicus began to make noises of alarm, I laughed and
waited for them to disperse as they had on the first night. But
they didn’t and only thickened, and then a fierce hot pelting rain
began, with drops as big as a knuckle, which at first refreshed
with their wetness but then began to assault.

“Tie the horses down, and get the tent up as
quickly as possible!” Copernicus shouted, jumping from his mount
and yanking the tent poles from their makeshift scabbard. I
followed with the tent itself, and soon we had secreted ourselves
inside, pushing our way through a thickening mixture of sand and
water which resembled not so much mud as a kind of semi-liquid
rock. Around us the landscape was turning to something resembling
lava, rivers of water and viscous sand where only dry dunes and
hollows had existed twenty minutes before.

“I hope we drove the tent stakes deep
enough!” Copernicus fretted, as the floor beneath us undulated with
flowing mixture of sand and rain. It felt like we were floating on
a river, when in fact the river was flowing beneath us.

“Pray it doesn’t last long – they seldom do,”
Copernicus said.

“And if it does?”

His doomed look told me all I needed to
know.

But as quickly as the pelting rain had come
it stopped – as if a giant switch in the sky had been violently
turned off. One moment there was the roar of watery fury on our
roof, and then it disappeared.

Already the ground beneath us stopped moving,
and then settled.

“Quickly!” Copernicus cautioned. “We must
break the tent down now or we’ll never get it out of the sand!”

We crawled out into a bizarre landscape of
scudding clouds, dark patches of deep star-studded night overhead
and a red black landscape altered around us – a hiss of drying
sands arose, sending clouds of steam into the again-dry air.
Already the sand was drying out underfoot, clumps held together by
water falling and flaking apart. Our tent was mired in a pool of
the stuff, and we dug around it madly before the sheer weight of
drying sand kept it as a souvenir of the desert.

“I don’t understand,” I said to Copernicus as
I furiously scooped sand away from it – it seemed to be sinking
beneath us.

“The water goes back into the air, but the
first rains went deep enough to be retained by the desert. Some of
it will end up in underground aquifers. Some will form quicksand
pools which won’t dissipate for days. The violence of the change
when the hot sand once again takes over from the temporary water is
such that anything of the surface will be sucked down into the
ground – including the horses!” he cried, abandoning the tent for a
moment to run to the horses, nearly ankle deep in sand and slowly
sinking as I watched. He slapped them on their flanks and they
reared up, then moved their hoofs and were free.

As I stood regarding this I felt my own boots
sinking into the ground, and had to yank them up, one after the
other, before falling to the work of reclaiming the tent.

Copernicus rejoined me, and before long, with
a mighty heave, we pulled the collapsed structure free of the pit
in which it had been mired.

I looked down to see a retreating pool of
water, which cracked and dried as I watched, then broke apart, with
a sighing sound, into a plain and level measure of desert sand.

We lay the tent out on the now dry sandy
surface nearby, and collapsed exhausted next to it. The horses were
safe, and the night was once again clear and beautiful and full of
stars, which Copernicus regarded with clear lust.

“If I wasn’t so tired I would set up the
telescope,” he remarked, craning his head high to regard a red star
overhead.

But a moment later he was asleep and snoring,
and before long I followed his example, and retained the first
sleep I had claimed since the beginning of our journey.

“A
s you’ve seen,”
Copernicus remarked the following night, one crystal clear and free
of even a hint of breeze, “the desert has its own set of rules. It
has its own weather, its own way of tending to itself.”

I nodded, in a slightly better mood than I
had been. I had slept nearly a whole night and following day, and
my belly was full of hardtack and my thirst, which was not as great
now as it had been at the beginning of this journey, had been sated
with a mouthful of water from my nearly empty canteen.

“I’ve heard that there are tribes of nomads
who never leave the desert,” I said, and I saw him, under the faint
light of Deimos, shiver.

“The Sandies?” he said. “We can only hope
this desert is wide enough that we don’t come across a Sandy.”

“Why? I’ve heard that they are cousins to the
gypsies, and of a like temper.”

“Hardly. They boil kits alive, so happy are
they to find meat of any kind – never mind what they would do to a
full grown feline.”

I laughed shortly. “That sounds like an old
wives’ tale.”

He brought his horse around to face me, and
stopped in his tracks. “It is no myth,” he said. “You must
remember, I live on the other side of this desert. When I was a kit
one of my playmates was spirited off in the middle of the night by
Sandies and never seen alive again. His bones were found years
later, half covered by sand at the bottom of a dune. His skull was
never found.”

“How do you know it was him?” I asked, eager
to play devil’s advocate. “And how do you know he was spirited away
by Sandies? Every community has stories about beasts and outsiders,
who they demonize and ascribe with powers and foul rites. Look at
our concept of the gypsies, before my father fell in with them? He
found them to be moral and even patriotic. Darwin told me stories
that he had heard while growing up about gypsies that would curl
your facial hair. And they turned out to be one hundred percent
untrue. We always demonize the ‘other’.”

Copernicus merely shook his head, unable or
unwilling to change his mind. “Believe me, we do not want to meet
up with a Sandy.”

I shrugged. “As you wish.”

He was studying the dawn horizon, a mottled
band of red and brown with strange patches. One of the tornadoes
which we had witnessed periodically from afar was whipping its way
from east to west, leaving a high brushstroke of dust behind
it.

“We will travel a bit during the day, today.
We need to find an oasis, and water, even if it takes us out of our
way, and they are much harder to come across at night.”

I said nothing in answer, trusting his
judgment, and we mounted, heading northwest toward one of the
darker patches of landscape, a ruddy red blot in the distance.

It proved not to be an oasis, but rather a
strange outcropping of red rocks thrust up through the surrounding
sand. We passed this strange sculpture by and went on.

Our next destination was a fortuitous one, a
dark patch which resolved itself from brown to dark green as we
approached, and proved to be what we sought. There was a deep,
bubbling pool of water surrounded by tiny desert flowers of blue
and yellow. We filled our canteens. Our horses lapped greedily at
this bounty, and it proved to be so cool and refreshing that I
resolved to take a quick bath.

Copernicus, filled with modesty, moved off to
examine the flora at the edge of the oasis while I removed my tunic
and undergarments and slipped blissfully into the pool. The water
was almost cold, and I happily submerged myself, feeling the dust
and sand slide out of my fur.

Something tickled my foot and I looked down
into the murky deep, just making out a huge shape –

With a yelp I was out of the pool and
shivering on the bank, pulling on my underthings. I watched in
wonder as a long, thin tentacle, mottled and dark blue in the sun,
snaked up out of the water as if testing the air. It grew
impossibly long, five feet, six feet, seven–

“Amazing!” Copernicus cried, appearing beside
me. “A Gigantus! Here in the middle of the Great Desert! That pool
must lead to an underground ocean or deep river!”

I continued to shiver.

“You’re lucky he didn’t pull you down,”
Copernicus said gravely, as the tentacle formed a loop at its tip
and then slowly sank back into the water, leaving a tiny splash
behind.

In a moment the pool was smooth and
inviting as it had been, but I was putting on the rest of my
clothes and turning my back on it.

“W
e have water to
last us the rest of the trip,” Copernicus announced happily an hour
later, as we left the oasis behind and headed due north once more.
He was studying the horizon and sky, paying particular attention to
the west, which was now suffused with a line of mist or sand which
rose high into the sky.

“I don’t like the looks of that,” Copernicus
said. “But it may blow south of us.”

We pitched our tent in the early afternoon,
after leaving the oasis, and any Sandies (“Where there is water
there are Sandies,” Copernicus had declared) and sought to sleep,
but Copernicus rose every half hour to check this approaching line.
It did indeed move to the south, behind us, he reported, but was
still growing in the west when night fell. We went on, and as the
night wore on I heard, very faintly at first, a distant keening
sound that grew incrementally.