Old Mars

Count Jack had been standing, staring, transfixed. I took his hand, his palm still damp with concert sweat, and skirted around the end of the still-smoking scar. We ducked, we ran at a crouch, we zigzagged in our tails and dickey bows. There was no good reason for it. We had seen it in war movies. The Uliri war machines strode across the camp, slashing glowing lava tracks across it with their heat rays, their weapon-arms seeking out fresh targets. But our soldiers had reached their defensive positions and were fighting back, turning the Uliri’s own weapon against them and bolstering it with a veritable hail of ordnance. The troopers who had manned our spotlights now turned to the heat rays. Skymasters were casting off, their turret gunners seeking out the many-eyed heads of the Uliri Tripods. The war machine that had so hideously killed the brave Onbashi stood in the river, eye blisters turning this way, that way, seeking targets. A weapon-arm fixed on us. The aperture of the heat ray opened. Hesitated. Pulled away. Grasping cables uncoiled from between the legs. We scuttled for cover behind a stack of barrels—not that they would have saved us. Then a missile cut a streak of red across the night. The war machine’s front left knee joint exploded. The machine wavered for balance on two, then a skymaster cut low across the canal bank and severed the front right off at the thigh with a searing slash of a heat ray. The monster wavered, toppled, came down in a blast and crash and wave of spray, right on top of the boat that would have carried us to safety. Smashed to flinders. Escape hatches opened; pale shapes wriggled free, squirmed down the hull toward land. I pushed Count Jack to the ground as the skymaster opened up. Bullets screamed around us. Count Jack’s eyes were wide with fear, and something else, something I had not imagined in the man: excitement. War might be brutal and ghastly and ugly, as he had declaimed on the Empress of Mars, but there was a terrible, primal power in it. I saw the same thrill, the same joy, the same power that had commanded audiences from Tipperary to Timbuktu. I saw it and I knew that, if we ever returned to Earth and England, I would ever be the accompanist, the amanuensis, the dear boy; and that even if he sang to an empty hall, Count John Fitzgerald would always be the Maestro, Sopratutto. All there was in me was fear, solid fear. Perhaps that is why I was brave. The guns fell silent. I looked over the top of the barrels. Silvery Uliri bodies were strewn across the dock. I saw the canal run with purple blood like paint in water.

The skymaster turned and came in over the canal to a low hover. A boarding ramp lowered and touched the ground. A skyman crouched at the top of the ramp, beckoning urgently.

“Run, Maestro, run!” I shouted, and dragged Count Jack to his feet. We ran. Around us heat rays danced and stabbed like some dark tango. A blazing war machine stumbled blindly past, crushing tents, bivouacs, repair sheds beneath its feet, shedding sheets of flame. Ten steps from the foot of the ramp, I heard a noise that turned me to ice: a great ululating cry from the hills behind the camp, ringing from horizon to horizon, back and forth, wash and backwash, a breaking wave of sound. I had never heard it, but I had heard of it, the war song of the Uliri padva infantry. A hand seized mine: the skyman dragged me and Count Jack like a human chain into the troop hold. As the ramp closed, I saw the skyline bubble and flow, like a silver sheen of oil, down the hillside toward us. Padvas. Thousands of them. As the skymaster lifted and the hull sealed, the last, the very last sight I had was of Yuzbashi Osman looking up at us. He raised a hand in salute. Then he turned, drew his sword, and, with a cry that pierced even the engine drone of the skymaster, every janissary of Oudeman Camp drew his blade. Sword points glittered, then they charged. The skymaster spun in the air, I saw no more.

“Did you see that?” Count Jack said to me. He gripped my shoulders. His face was pale with shock, but there was a mad strength in his fingers. “Did you? How horrible, how horrible horrible. And yet, how wonderful! Oh, the mystery, Faisal, the mystery!” Tears ran down his ash-smudged face.