Arabella of Mars (6 page)

From time to time she paused, gasping, peering in every direction. But Beatrice was nowhere in sight, and any sounds of pursuit were inaudible over her pounding heart.

After she knew not how long a time, exhaustion compelled her to stop. She crept into the darkness in the shade of a rock wall and lay panting on the cold ground there for just a moment's rest.

A moment later, or so it seemed, she woke with a gasp from sleep. The moon had entirely vanished, and the sun's wan light had begun to illuminate the horizon. Somehow, despite the excitement of the chase, fatigue had gotten the better of her.

Immediately she began to shiver from chill and weariness. The earth beneath her felt cold as ice, and besides the effort of escape she had barely slept or eaten in the last two days. She hugged herself miserably and bunched her sodden, soiled shift beneath herself as best she could.

What could she do? She had nothing—no family, no friends, hardly any money, not even decent clothing. Only the locket with Michael's picture, and a grim determination.

The rising sun limned a farmhouse on a rise not far away. Arabella levered her stiff and protesting body to its feet, and began walking toward it.

*   *   *

The kitchen door creaked open a crack and a wrinkled, suspicious face peered out. “Who might you be?” the old woman said.

“Arabella Ashby, ma'am,” she replied. Her voice, after a cold night sleeping on bare earth, was little more than a croak.

The woman snorted. “What d'yer want?”

For a moment the apparently simple question vexed her completely. What
did
she want? To report the terrible crimes that her cousins had perpetrated upon her, and planned to perpetrate upon her brother. To send word to her mother of her situation. Most of all, to prevent Simon from traveling to Mars and carrying out his monstrous scheme. But that could all come later. Just now she was cold, and weary, and hungry. “Please, ma'am,” she rasped, “I've been the victim of a horrible crime. If I might come in, and warm up for a bit, and—”

“Strumpet!” the old woman interrupted. “Away with ye.” And with a firm, harsh motion she shut and latched the door. A moment later her eye reappeared at the window nearby, fixing her with a hostile glare.

Arabella stood motionless, stunned and appalled by the woman's inhospitality.

A hand joined the eye at the window, gesturing unequivocally:
Go away
.

Arabella spat at her—or tried to, her mouth being so dry that only a tiny drop of spittle escaped her lips to fall ineffectively on the dirt before the door—turned, and walked away.

She cursed herself for her naiveté. A filthy, disheveled, bloodied young woman, in a scandalous state of undress, with a mad story of imprisonment, betrayal, and murder? She should never have expected to be believed. And even if she should somehow find someone who accepted her outlandish tale, it might be hours or days before they took any action. In that time Simon could easily take passage to Mars, and once the ship had launched he would be beyond the power of any one to stop him.

Arabella gritted her teeth and turned her steps toward the rising sun.

Toward London.

*   *   *

She could not walk all the way to London, of course—not if she wished to catch up with her cousin in time. Simon had taken the mail-coach, but no such option was open to Arabella. Even though she had what she hoped was sufficient money for the fare, for a woman of quality to travel on a public conveyance without male accompaniment was completely inconceivable.

If only she had not been born a woman.…

Arabella stopped dead in the path, appalled at the notion which had just occurred to her.

She shook her head and walked on.

As she proceeded, she debated with herself whether theft and deception could truly be justified by necessity. At the same time, she kept a sharp eye out for an opportunity to commit those very sins.

Finally, as she topped a rise, she came upon a small but prosperous farm. Wheat waved in the fields, chickens scratched in the yard, cattle grazed contentedly.…

And clean clothes hung on a fence, apparently having been left to dry overnight.

Arabella looked all around. There was no one in sight.

To steal was a sin. But at this very moment Michael might be rising from his bed, yawning and stretching, unaware of the doom that approached him.…

“I have no choice,” she whispered to herself, touching the locket.

Moving as quickly and as quietly as she could, she descended from the rise and scrambled over the low stone wall marking the edge of the property. From the wall it was only a few steps to the fence on which the clothing hung.

There were several complete sets of clothes here, men's and women's both.

After only a moment's hesitation, she selected breeches, hose, a shirt, a coat, and a soft cap which seemed to be about the right size for her. She attempted to assuage her guilt by taking only those articles which seemed the most worn, which she hoped would be missed the least and might also provoke the least suspicion. Finally, from her reticule she drew a single shilling, leaving it where the clothing had been—a token payment to be sure, but she knew not what other expenses might come her way.

Gathering up the clothes into a compact packet, she took one last guilty look back at the farmer's cottage before running away across the field.

*   *   *

Secreting herself behind a hedgerow which blocked the view from the farmhouse and the nearby road, Arabella clothed herself in her stolen garments. The coat was too broad across the shoulders, she had neglected to obtain a neck-cloth, and there seemed to be several other minor articles missing, at least to judge by the buttons in the breeches which attached to nothing she could find. The space in the front of the breeches she filled with a wad of fabric torn from her tattered shift.

She left the rest of her ruined garments rolled up in the hedgerow, along with the reticule, whose contents she distributed among her pockets. From her previous clothing she retained only the shoes, sturdy Mars-made half-boots which she hoped would not appear too girlish.

Now there remained only the problem of her hair.

On Mars Arabella had never paid much attention to her hair, wearing it short enough to keep out of her eyes and combing it only when her mother insisted. But since arriving in England, the formerly occasional demands of fashion had become constant, and Arabella had been subjected to interminable rounds of combing, brushing, braiding, and fussing that left her extremely vexed. Thus it was with great satisfaction that she pulled back her hair and cut the majority of it away with her cuticle-knife, leaving the discarded strands in the hedgerow for birds to make their nests of.

The result was, even she had to acknowledge, extremely untidy, being executed with an instrument only middling sharp and without the aid of a looking-glass, but as she pulled the cap low on her brow she reflected that it was not much worse than the rest of her outfit.

But still … worn, ill-fitting, and stolen though her clothing might be, what a relief it was to have her legs properly covered again! No more would she suffer the indignity of a skirt catching on a protruding branch, nor be forced to concern herself with the prying eyes of the public upon her exposed flesh.

Her outfit was no
thukhong
—how she missed that warm, comfortable leather garment!—but in it she nonetheless felt ready for any eventuality.

*   *   *

Half an hour later, Arabella swaggered along, hands in her pockets and arms a-kimbo, aping her brother's confident stride as best she could. Ahead on the path lay an inn, where she hoped she might obtain something to eat and perhaps directions to a mail-coach or stage-coach. To cover her anxiety, she whistled loudly in what she intended as a manly fashion. She hoped she had made no dreadfully obvious mistakes with her unaccustomed garments.

The inn still lay some five hundred yards distant when she heard, and then saw, a black-and-scarlet mail-coach approaching along the road. She burst into a run, holding on to her breeches at the waist to keep them from sliding down to her ankles and hoping the wad of fabric that filled out the front did not fall too badly out of place.

As she rushed along, her brains rattling in her head from each blow of her heels on the path in Earth's heavy gravity, she saw the coach come to the inn, draw to a halt, and the guard at the rear of the carriage hand down a packet of mail to the innkeeper. The coach seemed to be just on the brink of departing.

But finally, stumbling, panting, and catching at her falling breeches, she leaned heavily against the side of the coach before it left. “I should like,” she gasped, pitching her voice as low as she could, “to take passage, to London.”

“You are in luck, my lad,” the driver said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. “There's one seat open inside.”

“Bless you, sir.” But as she reached for the door handle, the driver blocked the door with his hand.

“Seventeen shillings sixpence, sir.”

“Sev—!” Arabella's mouth hung open at the shocking fare.

“Outside's cheaper, but there's none left.” The four dusty and miserable-looking men seated on the coach's roof regarded Arabella with red-eyed indifference. “Or you could take the stage tomorrow for half the price. But this here's the Royal Mail, and we waits for no man. So what's it to be, lad, stay or go?”

Seventeen shillings sixpence was nearly all the money that remained in her pocket. But one day's delay could make the difference between intercepting her cousin in London and watching in helpless despair as his ship sailed away into the interplanetary atmosphere. “I shall go,” she said, and counted out the coins.

Before she had even properly seated herself, the coach jolted into motion, slamming her into the wall on one side and her neighbor on the other in irregular alternation. She felt rather like a hat being rattled about in a hat-box, and the noise precluded all conversation.

It was not until the coach was halfway to Tetsworth that she realized she had successfully posed as a boy without being questioned.

*   *   *

The day passed as though in a fever. She slept fitfully as the coach jolted along, often waking with a fellow traveler's elbow in her ribs or coat-button in her eye. She had no idea where they were; from where she sat she had only a sliver of a view through the tiny window. In the darkness and noise of the lurching coach, conversation was impossible even if she had desired it.

Her stolen clothing itched at her conscience as badly as the worn and rustic fabric itched at her body. For the hundredth time she told herself that she had had no choice—that, despite the great hardship she knew her theft would cause some unknown farmer, the risk to her brother's life was greater still. Yet she knew her beloved Khema would be terribly disappointed in her.

She remembered the automaton dancer—a tiny doll, less than two feet tall, which had leapt and pirouetted most realistically when its key was wound. It had been her favorite of all her father's automata, and very dear to him as well.

Until one day she had, in a foolish excess of enthusiasm, turned the key one too many times. The mainspring had snapped with a hideous metallic twang, leaving the dancer frozen in mid-leap.

She had been in the dunes behind the drying-sheds, desperately shoveling sand over the broken device, when Khema had found her. “What is this,
tutukha
?” she'd said.

“It's my father's automaton dancer,” Arabella had replied, her voice quavering. “It … it broke, and I thought that if I took it away and buried it he wouldn't notice it was gone.”

Khema's eye-stalks had curved back in skepticism. “It broke, did it? And I am sure that you had nothing to do with this?”

Exhausted and still all a-flutter from her frantic rush to conceal the damaged automaton, Arabella had been able to do nothing more than shake her head.

Khema had bent down to Arabella's level, her black and subtly faceted eyes fixed on Arabella's. “We Martians have a concept we call
okhaya
,” she had said. “In English you would say ‘personal responsibility,' though that does not quite convey how very important
okhaya
is to us. We believe very strongly that if one does something wrong, one should immediately admit it and make amends. To conceal a bad action, or even worse to lie about it, brings very great dishonor.” She had sat back on her heels then, the sand crunching beneath the complex carapace of her knees. Silently waiting.

Arabella had withstood that calm, expectant gaze for no more than a few seconds before bursting into tears and admitting her crime.

The automaton had not been repairable, and she had had no desserts for a month. But, though he was terribly cross at the damage, her father had said he was proud of her for her confession.

Suddenly the coach halted and the door was flung open, making her blink in the unaccustomed light. “London!” cried the driver. “All out!”

*   *   *

Arabella stumbled out into a vast confusion. Horses, men, and ladies milled all about in a riot of gaudy colors, the noise of hoofbeats and shouted conversations adding to her bewilderment. Buildings of brick and stone towered three and four stories on every side. A terrific smell of soot and dust and offal assaulted her nostrils.

“Get out there, you!” someone shouted. She turned to see a coach-and-four thundering down upon her, and threw herself from its path only to collide with a woman in a fashionable green dress. “Take a care, you guttersnipe!” she cried, and shoved Arabella rudely away.

Heart pounding, Arabella scrambled to the nearest wall and pressed herself against it, trying her best not to be trampled.

It was the most people she had ever seen in one place in her entire life. The whole population of Shktetha Station, a small town north of Woodthrush Woods, could have fit into this one street without crowding, but this mob of people filled the street and the next one and the one after that … on and on to the limits of the vast metropolis.