Arabella of Mars by David D. Levine
Prologue
MARS, 1812
THE LAST STRAW
Arabella Ashby lay prone atop a dune, her whole length pressed tight upon the cool red sands of Mars. The silence of the night lay unbroken save for the distant cry of a hunting khulekh, and a wind off the desert brought a familiar potpourri to her nose: khoresh-sap, and the cinnamon smell of Martians, and the sharp, distinctive fragrance of the sand itself. She glanced up at Phobos—still some fingers’ span short of Arcturus—then back down to the darkness of the valley floor where Michael would, she knew, soon appear.
Beneath the fur-trimmed leather of her thukhong, her heart beat a fast tattoo, racing not only from the exertion of her rush to the top of this dune but from the exhilaration of delicious anticipation. For this, she was certain, was the night she would finally defeat her brother in the game of shorosh khe kushura, or Hound and Hare.
The game was simple enough. To-night Michael played the part of the kushura, a nimble runner of the plains, while Arabella took the role of the shorosh, a fierce and cunning predator. His assignment this night was to race from the stone outcrop they called Old Broken Nose to the drying-sheds on the south side of the manor house, a distance of some two miles; hers was to stop him. But though Khema had said the youngest Martian children would play this game as soon as their shells hardened, it was also a sophisticated strategic exercise … one that Michael, three years her elder, had nearly always won in the weeks they’d been playing it.
But to-night the victory would be Arabella’s. For she had been observing Michael assiduously for the last few nights, and she had noted that despite Khema’s constant injunctions against predictability, he nearly always traversed this valley when he wished to evade detection. Its sides were steep, its shadows deep at every time of night, and the soft sands of the valley floor hushed every footfall—but that would avail him little if his pursuer reached the valley before he did and prepared an ambush. Which was exactly what she had done.
Again she cast her eyes upward. At Michael’s usual pace he would arrive just as Phobos in his passage through the sky reached the bright star Arcturus—about half past two in the morning. But as she looked up, her eye was drawn by another point of light, brighter than Arcturus and moving still faster than Phobos: an airship, cruising so high above the planet that her sails caught the sun’s light long before dawn. From the size and brightness of the moving light she must be a Marsman—one of the great Mars Company ships, the “aristocrats of the air,” that plied the interplanetary atmosphere between Mars and Earth. Perhaps some of her masts or spars or planks had even originated here, on this very plantation, as one of the great khoresh-trees that towered in patient, soldierly rows north and east of the manor house.
Some day, Arabella thought, perhaps she might take passage on such a ship. To sail the air, and see the asteroids, and visit the swamps of Venus would be a grand adventure indeed. But to be sure, no matter how far she traveled she would always return to her beloved Woodthrush Woods.
Suddenly a shuff of boots on sand snatched her awareness from the interplanetary atmosphere back to the valley floor. Michael!
She had been careless. While her attention had been occupied by the ship, Michael had drawn nearly abreast of her position. Now she had mere moments in which to act.
Scrambling to her feet in the dune’s soft sand, she hurled herself down into the shadowed canyon, a tolerable twelve-foot drop that would give her the momentum she needed to overcome her brother’s advantages in size and weight.
But in her haste she misjudged her leap, landing instead in a thorny gorosh-shrub halfway up the canyon’s far wall and earning a painful scratch on her head. She cursed enthusiastically in English and Martian as she struggled to free herself from the shrub’s thorns and sticky, acrid-smelling sap.
“Heavens, dear sister!” Michael laughed, breathing hard from his run. “Such language!” He doubled back in order to aid her in extricating herself.
But Arabella had not given up on the game. She held out her hand as though for assistance … and as soon as he grasped it, she pulled him down into the shrub with her. The thorny branch that had trapped her snapped as he fell upon it, and the two of them rolled together down the canyon wall, tussling and laughing in the sand like a pair of tureth pups.
Then they rolled into a patch of moonlight, and though Michael had the upper hand he suddenly ceased his attempts to pin her to the ground. “What is the matter, dear brother?” Arabella gasped, even as she prepared to hurl him over her head with her legs. But in this place there was light enough to see his face clearly, and his expression was so grave she checked herself.
“You are injured,” he said, disentangling himself from her.
“’Tis only a scratch,” she replied. But the pain when she touched her injured scalp was sharp, and her hand when she brought it away and examined it beneath Phobos’s dim light was black with blood.
Michael brought his handkerchief from his thukhong pocket and pressed it against the wound, causing Arabella to draw in a hissing breath through her teeth. “Lie still,” he said, his voice quite serious.
“Is it very bad, then?”
He made no reply, but as she lay on the cool sand, her breath fogging the air and the perspiration chilling on her face, she felt something seeping through her hair and dripping steadily from the lower edge of her ear, and the iron smell of blood was strong in the air. Michael’s jaw tightened, and he pressed harder with the handkerchief; Arabella’s breath came shallow, and she determined not to cry out from the pain.