Part 35 (1/2)

”Sir,” Dimmick said, and went.

”The remaining bones,” Sun said, ”are merely bones. As to the two creatures that attacked us, Lord Atwood and I have conferred, and our conclusion is that they were survivors of whatever catastrophe broke the tower, and laid waste to the countryside around. We suppose that Martians, like certain organisms of Earth, may enter in times of drought into a state of suspended animation. We believe they were the builders of this tower. The manner of their attack on you, Mr Shaw, suggests considerable telepathic gifts; the manner of their flight appears at least partially telekinetic. But no doubt they were quite mad, after centuries of hunger and thirst and uneasy dreams. If not for Mr Dimmick's quick shooting and Lord Atwood's peerless will, who knows what they might have done.”

Dimmick stretched out the dead monster on the ground. It was nightmarishly thin, and paler by far than the specimen in Atwood's library, as if it had been bleached by the centuries. The bullet-wound was nearly bloodless. Sun and Atwood performed a somewhat undermanned version of the Rite of Jupiter, which they'd previously used in London for speaking to the dead. They didn't wait for any particular hour, on the theory that they had no way of knowing what the appropriate hour of Jupiter was on Mars, and so any hour was as good or as bad as the next. In any event, they got no answers out of the corpse. It remained stubbornly inert, as if it were relieved to at long last be dead.

The storm appeared at sunset. The darkness of evening became solid. The clouds descended from the heavens and swept towards them. The storm seemed to boil at its edges, and the faint light of the sun sparked across it like frozen fire. It was too dreadful to look at for long. The expedition retreated from the windows and hunkered down on the floor of the tower, where they crouched, wrapped up two to a blanket, and waited for the storm to pa.s.s.

Everything went dark.

It was soundless at first. Then, all of a sudden, there was a dreadful thundering that seemed to come from all directions at once, and to have always been there. The tower trembled. Dust roared in through the windows. Some of it roared out again; some of it heaped against the wall and began to weigh down on the blankets. Rather a lot of it went directly down Arthur's throat, it seemed to him, and he began to cough and splutter. The storm thrashed against the tower until the whole structure sounded like a drum being beaten. Several of the stone beams overhead cracked and fell-smas.h.i.+ng, they learned later, a lantern, some tins of food, and some of Atwood's paints. The noise was like great beasts roaring and cras.h.i.+ng against the walls.

It went on for an hour, perhaps two. Long enough for Arthur to become convinced, as he huddled in his blanket, pressed up against a s.h.i.+vering Vaz, that the screaming of the storm was a voice, that there were words in it, though none he could understand. Long enough to imagine that he heard Atwood's voice, answering it. Long enough to convince himself that he was imagining things, and then to change his mind again, and again.

When the storm pa.s.sed, they crawled out of the tower. The rocks and dunes were much the same as ever. There was a weak light in the sky, and the air felt sc.r.a.ped clean.

The storm had shattered so many of the beams overhead that there was no way of climbing up to the windows again, certainly not by means of rope and tea-kettle.

Atwood announced that it was time to move on. He waved away questions about the markings in the tower as if they'd been merely a childish obsession, one he had long since outgrown. There was a new certainty in his manner as he told them that he had a destination in mind, where they might-if they were lucky-find what they needed to plan their return home.

”A library, of sorts,” Atwood said. ”A laboratory, one might say. More to our purpose, an observatory.”

”Excellent news,” Sun said. ”And how did you learn of this place?”

”While you have been pacing, Mr Sun, I have been translating the markings of the Martian language. I think you can all see that the Martians are-or were-astronomers of great learning. Consider the windows upstairs. What are they if not telescopes? A marriage of science and magic. Wondrous. But sadly ruined by the pa.s.sage of time, and useless to us. There are others, and better; and I can find them.”

Arthur said, ”Where?”

”Where? Where are we going? High ground, of course.”

Arthur said, ”How far?”

Atwood said nothing. He stood at the window and pointed into the distance; westwards, through the violet gloom, into the weird slanting half-light and shadow. On the far horizon, there was a mark that might have been the tapering mountain Arthur had seen through the telescopic window upstairs. It s.h.i.+fted in and out of visibility. First a mountain, then no mountain, then a mountain again.

”Good G.o.d, Atwood. You must be joking.”

”You find our predicament funny, Mr Shaw? How odd.”

”What if another storm crosses our path?”

”It won't. Rest a.s.sured.”

”Atwood-”

”Shaw. Have you ever had a dream...” Atwood stared at the mountain and the sunrise and collected his thoughts. ”Have you ever had a dream, Shaw, in which-for a moment, for a brief, tremendous moment-it appeared to you that you stood upon a high mountain-top, and that beneath you was laid out all the world, as G.o.d must see it, day and night at once? And the sky, Shaw, as if a great black veil had been pulled aside, so that you could see the stars-and hung between them the silver thread of your life, as you have lived it and now live it and will live it, the beginning swallowing the end?”

”I don't believe I have.”

”I did once. In the Alps. I had a fever, the doctors said. I was no older than you are now.”

”This is no dream, Atwood.”

”Of course it's not.”

Clouds obscured the mountain. The sun glowed faintly through them.

”Cheer up, Shaw.” Atwood began to try to light a match. ”We shall find her.”

”Hmmph.”

”Blasted thing!” Atwood threw the dead match on the ground.

Sun lit a match, cupped it, and handed it to Atwood, who thanked him and lit his cigarette.

”It's a pity,” Sun said, ”That you didn't climb higher, Mr Shaw.”

”Excuse me?”

”Yesterday, Mr Shaw, in the tower. His Lords.h.i.+p and I went up after you and what's-his-name-the sailor. Had you climbed a little higher you would have seen a window that looked on Earth. A blue gem in a bed of velvet. It was a thing worth going a long way to see.”

”It certainly was,” Atwood said. ”Now, Shaw, perhaps you should go and help Dimmick; I hear him tossing our supplies about, and we have little enough to spare as it is. If he breaks the bottle of champagne, I'll have to have someone shot.”

It took an hour or two to gather up their supplies and dig out the sleds. Atwood smoked and stared into the distance. Payne was silent throughout the work, scratching grimly at his rash. After a while, he took one of the revolvers and wandered around the back of the tower. n.o.body made any move to stop him. But for whatever reason, he decided not to shoot himself after all, and fell in with the rest of them as they headed west.

Chapter Thirty-four.

Time flattened, as if the weight of the sky pressed it down. As the expedition moved westwards across the face of Mars, Dimmick marked the days and hours, his ice-axe ringing out through the gloom. Sometimes it seemed to Arthur that that was the purpose of their expedition: to mark their presence on the planet. To show that they had been there, should anyone else happen by, a thousand years from now.

The light was unnatural, the emptiness unbearable. Shapes swum in and out of the gloom. Sometimes it seemed that Atwood was suddenly very far in the distance, and at a weird angle, as if the expedition had somehow become scattered. That never failed to induce panic. When they camped-at irregular intervals, when full darkness and treacherous terrain made progress impossible-they huddled for warmth, like a picture Arthur had once seen: penguins on a frozen rock.

They were tormented by visions. Fragmentary, momentarily alarming horrors or absurdities. The wind carried telephone noises. A flicker of h.e.l.l-fire dancing on the horizon. Rats underfoot, or the noises of London traffic. A column of ants crawling endlessly across the dunes. Mosquitos. Perhaps there really were mosquitos, or something like them. Certainly there was something in the air that buzzed and whined. Something that bit them. They watched the skies for more of those half-dead monsters they'd met in the tower. Did they see them? They weren't sure. Something seemed to move through the clouds, casting long shadows that slipped across the plains like hunting wolves. Once Frank reported that the sun had become a vast eye. He became convinced that the expedition had somehow shrunk to the size of germs, and that the vast eye of a scientist in London was studying them. He sat on the ground, saying that he refused to be anyone's experiment, and it took over an hour to talk him out of this delusion.

Everyone's hair grew wild. They ate sparingly, and rarely slept. Atwood and Sun maintained that they needed neither food nor water nor sleep, but even they seemed to struggle to believe it. They practiced exercises of discipline and self-denial. Even so, the expedition's supplies dwindled. Ropes frayed and snapped, as if something had been gnawing at them. Teeth yellowed and fell out. Hair thinned. They began to look like monsters, even to one another. The rash on Arthur's arms spread and thickened and climbed onto his shoulders. Everyone suffered from it, even Atwood. Arthur began to see patterns in it, shapes, of unclear significance-it drove him mad that he couldn't see what it was writing on his back, no matter how he craned his head! It began to resemble the s.h.i.+mmering skin of the Martians, their mottled wings. Perhaps that, too, was a hallucination.

They pa.s.sed other ruins. The structures were days apart, and solitary, like the houses of desert hermits. No two were exactly the same. A stepped pyramid. A high crescent wall, half-enclosing a dome of empty stone. A cl.u.s.ter of towers growing out of each other like the stalks of a cactus. Minarets, monoliths. Structures that looked oddly familiar, like earthly houses or a Scottish castle or a London railway-station or a Bombay temple; other top-heavy structures that could make sense only to winged creatures, that could exist only in feeble gravity. They didn't explore them. Atwood would allow no detours from their path.