Old Mars Read online

  Upon my arrival, the first thing to command my attention were the bodies of the dead. Many were sailors in the rough canvas as common to ships of the line as to merchants or pirates, but several wore the uniforms of soldiers of the colonial guard. And among them were strange, jointed objects like nothing so much as the legs of massive crabs as thick as a strong man’s thigh and as long as my own body. I instructed my men to step lightly and be ready to flee back to the Dominic, but I hardly needed to bother. I say without shame that there was something eerie about the Vargud, and I walked her decks mindful of tales of the Flying Dutchman and of plague ships that ride the ocean currents long after the crews have died. Her quarterdeck burned with a forgelike heat, but the pale flames remained oddly fixed. The sails were not of canvas, but an odd mineral weave that the heat would not consume. At the helm, the burned remains of a man stood, hands fused to the wheel. As I paused there trying to imagine what unholy conflagration could leave such damage behind it, the voice of my third mate, Mister Darrow, called out to me.

  Mister Darrow was a New Englander, and though some may be his equal in seamanship, there has never been born into this world a man more laconic. To hear the alarm in his voice chilled me to the bone. I recall his precise words. Captain Lawton, you’re needed in the hold. Seeing them written here, they seem prosaic, but I assure Your Majesty that at the time they seemed a cry from Hell. I drew my pistols and ducked belowdecks, prepared, so I believed, to find anything.

  I was mistaken.

  To those accustomed to the hold of a ship of the line, the belly of a fluyt is an improbable thing. They are large and robust, fit to fill with crates enough to make the journey between old world and new yield a profit. In the vast interior darkness of this ship, I found only a half dozen of my own men and two things more: a pallet stacked as high as my waist with gold in the shapes and designs I had come to know as Incan, and a woman standing before it, sword in one hand, pistol in the other, and soaked by her own blood.

  Looking back upon the moment, there cannot have been so much light as I remember, but I swear to you I saw her in that dimness as clear as in full day. She stood half a head taller even than myself, and I am not a small man. Her skin was the color and smoothness of chocolate and milk, her hair only half a shade darker. She wore a man’s trousers and a brocade jacket any gentleman of court would have been proud of, though it was cut to her figure. Her eyes were the gold of a lion’s pelt, and the lion’s fierceness also set the angle of her jaw.

  I saw at once that she was grievously injured, but she blocked the path to the treasure with her body and would let no man pass. Indeed, as I stepped in, she shifted the barrel of her pistol neatly to my forehead, and I had no doubt that the slightest movement of her finger would end my life. Mister Darrow knelt on the deck, a junior crewman called Carter lying at his feet, hand to his shoulder.

  “What’s this, then?” I asked.

  “Mine,” the woman said. “What you see here is mine, and you will not have it without slaughtering me as you have my people.”

  “I’ve slaughtered no one, miss,” I said, amending myself with, “or at least no one here. I am Captain Alexander Lawton.”

  “Lawton?” she said, and I thought a flicker of recognition touched her expression. “The same who stood against Governor Smith?”

  “And lost,” I said, making a joke of it. “I am the same.”

  “Then you are the answer to my prayer,” she said. “You must return me to my ship.”

  Darrow cast a glance toward me, and I shared his thought. Her wounds had no doubt rendered her subject to delusion, for we stood within her ship even as she asked to be returned to it.

  “Put down your weapons, and I will do what I can,” I said. Her pistol did not waver.

  “Give me your word of honor.”

  Your Majesty, I find myself hard-pressed to describe the emotions that arose in me with those words. She stood outnumbered and outgunned, and she did not beg. Her words were not a request, but a demand. For years, my word of honor had been hardly worth the breath it took to speak it, and yet she insisted upon it as if it were a thing of value.

  “I cannot offer what I do not have,” I said. “But I promise you will come to no harm.”

  Her expression grew serious. She lowered her pistol, and as if continuing the same motion, crumpled to the deck. It was all that I could do to kneel in time to break her fall.

  “Carter’s hurt,” Mister Darrow said. “Tried to part the miss there from her gold.”

  “Seemed the right thing,” young Carter said.

  “Will you live?” I asked, lifting the unconscious woman up.

  “Will or won’t, sir,” Carter said. “Either way, crossing her’s a mistake I’ll not make twice.”

  I left Mister Darrow in possession of the burning ship and transported the woman of whose name I was still ignorant to the Dominic and Doctor Koch. Your Majesty is perhaps aware of Doctor Koch’s somewhat unsavory reputation, and I cannot claim that it is undeserved, for we were unsavory men, but when I appeared at his cabin with an unfamiliar and unconscious woman in my arms, I can truthfully report that his oath as a man of healing lent him an expression of concern better fitted to a mother dog nuzzling her injured pup. He bade me leave her with him to have her hurts attended, and swore that he would call for me as soon as she came to herself. It was not a promise that he kept, but given the circumstances, I cannot hold the fault against him.

  I returned to the deck in time to hear Darrow’s dry voice agreeing that the gold the Vargud had carried was a fair load. In the sunlight, the gold shone with a richness and beauty that I had never seen before, as if the metal were alive and aware. I have seen my share of treasures, but I sensed in that moment that the riches before me were of a different order than any I had known.

  I gathered my breath to order it all taken below, when the cry Zeeah loy again interrupted the proceedings. I took the speaking trumpet and called up to Quohog. The first part of his reply—Zeeah een, Catin. Ghana.—was perfectly comprehensible to one who had shipped with him. A ship of the line, and worse, one that bore the personal flag that my old nemesis Governor Smith affected. The second part, however—Eeah mantu!—escaped me at the time. I was later to understand that my brave lookout had meant He has monsters. At once, my crew and I leapt to action. The planks laid between the Dominic and the Vargud were pulled back, the lines between us cut, and we hoisted sail.

  I must presume that Your Majesty has not had occasion to spend some years aboard ship with the same crew. Allow me, then, to report that there is a rapport that grows between men in long association at sea, an unspoken comprehension that outstrips the mere anticipation of orders to a point where they become almost unnecessary. Please do not think I am boasting when I say that my crew worked as a single creature with a hundred hands and a single mind between us, for in this particular, as in everything I set down here, my sole ambition is to apprise you of the facts. When I say then that it was not five minutes of the clock before we were set free of the Vargud and under way, I am being generous. The Dominic claimed a shallow draft, a proud mast, and Mister Kopler’s expert hand at the wheel. It was a combination that had seen us safely through a dozen pursuits. And yet, when I looked back across that wide sea, the governor’s ship was closing fast. The wind was not high, and I had great faith that whatever fortunate current the governor had happened upon would soon fail him, and we would make good our escape.

  I was mistaken.

  Over the following hour, it became clear that the governor’s ship was not only keeping pace with us, but gaining. Through my spyglass, I saw her prow cutting through the water as though driven by some invisible force. I also saw the unmistakable uniforms of the colonial guard upon her deck. There was something else, though, which I thought at first I only imagined. Upon the deck, towering over the soldiers, a massive statue stood reminiscent of nothing so much as a grotesque spider, and yet it was no spider. When I spied another such in the riggin
g, this one moving with the swift and sure motions of a thing alive, I recalled the objects on the Vargud that I had taken for crab’s legs. Improbable as it seemed, this was no statue, but a living thing, a beast as terrible as if ripped from the pages of Revelation. And further, one of these beasts had met its end there before the doomed ship had managed to escape its pursuers, and now two more, the colonial guard, and Governor Smith himself were racing toward me to finish the job. They carried more cannon than we did. They had many soldiers with muskets. Governor Smith had, it appeared, allied himself with the forces of Hell. There was aboard the Dominic not a word of panic, no weeping or prayer, but only the concentration that fear can bring, for we had no doubt that if we were caught, we would perish.

  So much did the governor’s ship command my attention that I did not see or hear it when our guest regained the deck. I only caught a scent of blood and magnolia, took my spyglass from my eye, and she was beside me. Doctor Koch had bound her wounds in rag and gauze and strapped her left arm against her ribs, but she stood as sure as a woman uninjured. When she spoke, her voice was crisp.

  “Where are we?”

  I gave her our location in rough terms, and she insisted on seeing the charts. I watched her golden gaze flicker over my maps of the Carib Sea. She placed a single dusky finger on a place not far from our position.

  “Here,” she said. “Take us here.”

  “If we turn, they will intercept us.”

  “If we continue without turning, they will overtake us. One will not be better than the other.”

  “Is that where you were fleeing to the first time you were caught?” I asked.

  “It is,” she said. “And it is our only hope now.”

  I hesitated, I admit. Only a few hours earlier, I had seen this same woman ask to be returned to the ship on which she stood. I had carried her exhausted form in my arms. I had no cause to believe her in her right mind or to trust her judgment if she was. She sensed my reluctance and turned her eyes to me. In the dimness of the hold, when she had been half-mad with pain and fear, she had been a handsome woman. In the light of the Caribbean sun, she was unmatched. A joyful recklessness took me, and I smiled as fully and honestly as I had in years.

  “Mister Kopler,” I called. “Hard to starboard!”

  The Dominic groaned under the sudden change, her flanks and spars bent by the weight of the sea and the power of the air. The governor’s ship changed course as well, bringing her closer and closer to us. I could read the name on her side now. The Aphrodite bore down upon us so near I saw the puffs of smoke and heard the reports of rifles as the soldiers on her deck took aim on us, hoping for a lucky shot. The great spiderlike beasts were chittering and crawling along her yardarms and masts. Though she was not yet at broadsides to us, I saw her gunports beginning to open. The moment was very nearly upon us when flight would no longer be an option, and the battle would be joined.

  Beside me, the woman’s attention was fixed not upon the doom bearing down upon us but at the clear waters on which we rode. Your Majesty will not, I think, have made the journey to the Caribbean. But as a man who has known many seas, let me assure you that no European sea, not even that nursery of civilization, the Mediterranean, can compare with the glasslike clarity the Caribbean can on occasion achieve. If one can train one’s eyes to see past the reflected sky, it is as though we rode upon empty air. I looked down with her at the mottled green of the ocean floor, nearer here than I had expected it to be, when, without warning, she let out a whoop of the purest joy. Far below us, that which I had taken for the ocean’s bottom moved, turning slowly up toward us. The sea boiled, and the dismayed cries of the Aphrodite carried across the waves. Four great, arching walls rose up from the water, reaching, it seemed nearly to the sky. Then, like Poseidon closing his fist around us, the arching walls met and blotted out the sun.

  A roaring sound filled the world louder than anything I had ever heard, and I felt a sensation of terrible weight, as though divine hands were pressing down upon every atom of my being. Around me in the sudden gloom, I saw my men pressed slowly to the deck, and heard the protests of the Dominic as the wood all around groaned. I feared to see the ocean lapping at the rail, but the weight, whatever it was, appeared not to affect our buoyancy.

  The woman slipped to the deck as well, borne down by the same terrible heaviness. Her face was an image of triumph, and it was the last thing I saw before darkness took me.

  There is a gulf between worlds, Majesty, greater than any ocean. Its emptiness is only relieved by an unsetting sun that burns in the blackness and an unimaginable profusion of stars. Those ships that sail that upper abyss are greater than any leviathan of the lower waters that I once knew. How can I adequately describe the glory of the vessel into which I woke? How can I tell you of the grace of her lines, the power that permeated her? Imagine stepping into the vast nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where instead of stone, every arch is fashioned of living crystal that glows with light and power the improbable blue of a butterfly’s wing. Imagine the poor Dominic of Osma, which had housed myself and my men these many years, lying on her side like a child’s toy abandoned beside a stream while outside the vast window, the stars shine steady and unblinking as you have never seen through Earth’s fickle air.

  And the enemy. As beautiful as the doomed Serkeriah was, her pursuers were her echo in grotesquerie. Inhuman and insectlike, they swarmed through the void, the thousand filthy talons of a single demonic hand. Their carapaces were lit from within by a baleful light that spoke of brimstone and sulfur. Serrated claws reached out from each of these unclean bodies in a design that promised that to be touched by one was to be not merely cut, but infected. And it was on one of these, Your Majesty, that the Right Honorable Governor Smith rode with his diabolical masters.

  But I precede myself, for I knew none of this in my uncanny sleep. Indeed, I knew nothing until an unfamiliar voice reached me and called me to myself.

  “Captain,” the strange voice said. “Please, Captain. Wake up!”

  There is, as I am sure Your Majesty knows, no greater impetus that could call a man back from his own unconscious depths than the fear that those entrusted to his care and command might be in need. I roused myself only with a great effort of will, for my awareness had entirely left me until then. But when I managed to pry open my resisting eyelids, two surprises waited. The first was the man who spoke the words. Kneeling, he was still as tall as I might have stood. His hunched body was covered in a soft, tawny pelt, and his countenance, while expressive of distress and an almost unimaginable kindness, nevertheless seemed most like that of some serene, gentle, and unaccountably furry toad.

  The second surprise was that his words were not directed to me.

  “What is our situation, La’an?” the woman asked. It would be a mistake to call her voice weak. Rather, it was the voice of a strong person compromised by sleep or illness.

  “The alloy you brought us has been recovered, Captain,” the toad-man said, “but the Ikkean fleet is in pursuit. And the crew …?”

  “The crew is gone,” the woman said, regaining her feet. “We were attacked on the sea, and I alone survived. Only blind chance and these men preserved me.”

  The toad-man made a distressed chirping deep in his throat, looking around at the motley lot of us. And ragged we were, Majesty, even for such a normally tattered bunch. Young Carter lay splayed out upon the crystalline deck, and Quohog beside him, like two men asleep. Mister Kopler had risen to his knees, his eyes wide as saucers as he took in the great structure that surrounded us. Doctor Koch, his head down, scuttled among the fallen men, his eyes blind to all wonders in his haste to care for the men. And I, I confess, sat in awe, struck dumb by the marvelous and terrible fate that had befallen us. When the woman rose to her feet, I found my own, more from a vestigial sense of propriety than from the conscious exercise of will. Only Mister Darrow seemed unaffected by our otherworldly surroundings. He, with the calmness of an attorney before th
e judge, tugged his forelock to the woman.

  “My pardons,” he said. “This alloy you were speaking of. That wouldn’t be the Incan gold, would it?”

  The woman and toad-man both turned, he startled and she amused.

  “You are correct,” she said. “It is not true gold, but the rare alloy formed in the volcanic crust of some worlds.”

  “See now,” Mister Darrow said, turning to young Carter, who had only just regained consciousness. “I told you how it was too light. Real gold’s got heft to it.”

  “You’re very clever, sir,” Carter said. “So. Are we dead, do you think?”

  “Not yet,” the woman who captained that strange vessel said. “But we shall be soon. Uncrewed, the Serkeriah cannot outrun my enemy.”

  “Madam,” I said, “I fear I have underestimated both you and the severity of your plight. My men and I know nothing of how to man a vessel such as yours, but we have many years at sea together, and that unity of purpose is a power not to be discounted.”