Under the Moons of Mars Page 16

  A GAME OF MARS

  BY GENEVIEVE VALENTINE

  “The Princess may not move onto a threatened square, nor may she take an opposing piece.”

  —The Chessmen of Mars

  When Tara stepped from her flier, she was surprised her brother was not there to greet her.

  Djor Kantos was.

  Djor Kantos, a noble of the city. Djor Kantos, who had been her intended husband, until the morning a year ago that she discovered he cared for another.

  That was the morning she’d taken her flier into a storm and ended up a prisoner of the Kaldanes, a living player in a gladiatorial game of Jetan.

  Much had changed since then.

  “Princess,” he greeted. “Your mother, Dejah Thoris, has bid me make you welcome.”

  It was a formal speech—too formal for old friends—and he didn’t look her quite in the eye.

  (Too much had changed.)

  “You’re kind,” she said. “Where is Carthoris?”

  “Your brother and his wife should be here shortly,” Djor said, frowned. “Do you mind my greeting you?”

  “No,” she said too quickly, and when he held out his hand she took it without looking him in the eye.

  (Her husband was waiting at home in Gathol. Djor Kantos had not been hers for a year, and she had not loved Djor Kantos to distraction then; why was it so hard to meet him now?)

  They walked to the audience hall in a silence that made it hard to breathe.

  They had grown up together; he’d been her dance partner, her sparring partner. (They each tested skills against her brother, Carthoris, and the ongoing tally of wins had been the biggest argument she and Djor Kantos ever had. Both of them hated to lose.)

  How quickly two people can grow to be strangers, she thought.

  Then they were at the door, and Tara was face-to-face with her mother.

  “Greetings, Dejah Thoris,” said Tara in the formal manner, but a moment later Tara was caught in an embrace, their arm-bangles clanging, as her mother said, “How I’ve been expecting you!”

  Tara grinned. “I still have a whole speech our advisors wrote for me—a list of your best qualities. Apparently, that’s very good for trade. Should I recite it now or wait for Carthoris?”

  Dejah Thoris laughed, and Tara even caught the ghost of a smile on the face of Djor Kantos.

  Then a messenger burst into the hall.

  He was followed by two sword-wielding guards, but the messenger looked so terrified that Tara knew it couldn’t just be the guards that worried him.

  Something else, something worse, was wrong.

  As soon as the messenger saw them he cried, “I request the audience of Dejah Thoris!”

  “You have it,” she said. “Speak.”

  He fell to one knee, his eyes fixed on the floor.

  “Princess,” the messenger gasped, “your son’s ship has been destroyed—in the Bantoom desert outside Manator!”

  Tara went cold.

  Manator was the city of the Kaldanes.

  But even as Dejah Thoris gripped the arms of her throne in terror and demanded the messenger explain, Tara knew what the messenger would tell them next.

  There were no bodies.

  Kaldanes took their captives alive, and saved them for the Game.

  Djor Kantos was standing at her mother’s side, asking the messenger for information he wouldn’t have, and Tara felt as though it was all at a great distance, as if that horrific city was already dragging her back across the burning sand.

  (For my brother’s sake, she thought, her heart pounding. My brother!)

  Without thinking, Tara was running for the armory, then for her flier, her favorite shortsword in her hand.

  It was a shame, she thought, to leave Helium again so soon. Gathol was still not her city, and she had been so looking forward to coming home again.

  But she had no choice. By the time her mother had spoken to her advisors, had made plans, had dispatched soldiers enough to overpower the Kaldanes, Carthoris and Thuvia would be dead.

  In Manator, Jetan was played to the death, and Kaldanes did not delay their pleasures. They would be pulled onto the board before they had time to strategize, because a hasty Game meant better fighting.

  Tara had survived the Game as a Princess, forbidden to fight, fought over—but she had watched, and learned.

  Now it was time to show what sort of pupil she was.

  (To go alone might well be suicide, but there was no time to wait—there was no time.)

  Her flier was standing open on the landing pad, and she was already in the cockpit when she heard echoing footfalls from the palace.

  “Where are you going?” Djor shouted.

  She said, “To Manator.”

  Tara expected him to tell her how her mother needed her, or that she had other considerations that should keep her home, or that there was nothing she could do.

  But he only glanced back at the palace and squared his jaw, as if he was deciding something.

  “Then I go too,” he said, turning back to her.

  She bristled—she had been very headstrong about small things, not long ago—but there was not enough time left, not even to be proud.

  “Come, then,” she said, starting the engine, “and close the door behind you. We have to reach the Bantoom desert before dark, or we’ll be too late.”

  “For what?”

  She smiled, all teeth. “For the Game.”

  Tara knew better this time how to navigate the ravine and the vicious storm between Helium and Manator, though the winds battered them until her hands were white-knuckled on the controls.

  Behind her, Djor braced himself as best he could. Her flier was meant only for one, and he spent the journey kneeling beside her with one hand on her chair for balance, like a sprinter about to hear the starting horn.

  She was almost glad for the storm, as it kept her from wondering why he had come with her.

  (He was as loyal to Carthoris as she was; it didn’t need to be more than that. Aid was aid.)

  Whenever she dared take a breath, she tried to explain what he could expect once they were inside the walls.

  She described the Kaldanes—parasites, jarred brains that used tentacles to attach themselves to senseless headless bodies, as most Barsoomians put on and discarded coats—and he gripped the chair until his fingers shook.

  “They are ruthless and cruel,” she said, “though one of them, Ghek, was kind to me when I was imprisoned.”

  “Not kind enough to free you,” Djor said.

  But Tara knew some things were out of a soldier’s power, and she said, “He helped me prepare for Jetan, and I will always be grateful.”

  After they were safely around the next bend, he ventured, “Tell me the Game. I haven’t seen it since I was a boy. I remember orange and black squares, and the Chief and the Princess on each side, and that each side had two flier-shaped pieces that didn’t look anything like fliers I’d seen.”

  “Fliers aren’t on the living board,” she said. “Bad luck for our escape. It’s just two more terrified men fighting for their lives in the arena.”

  He glanced at her, didn’t answer.

  She explained the rules of Jetan; panthan mercenary pieces that formed the first expendable line of defense, staid Captains and Lieutenants who moved in only one direction, Warriors who had more flexible paths, Thoat-mounted fighters who could jump intervening pieces.

  “We won’t know what to expect until they’re already on the board,” said Tara. “Often a Chief can choose his own pieces, but sometimes the Kaldanes assign them from within the prisons.”

  “Is that where your brother will be?”

  “Thuvia will be kept in a tower,” she said. “Carthoris underground. It’s a maze of cells. There won’t be time to look there. We’ll have to wait until they’re on the board before we strike, and hope Carthoris is Chief—he won’t be in danger right away, and we’ll have some time.”

  “And Th
uvia?”

  “Thuvia will be safe until after the Game,” Tara said.

  Djor raised his eyebrows. “But this Game is played to the death. How can you know she’ll be safe?”

  “The Princess does not fight,” said Tara darkly. “She is preserved, as a prize for the Kaldane that wins.”

  He frowned. Then, after a moment, he said, “I’m sorry for what you’ve seen.”

  “Don’t be,” she said. “What I’ve seen might save Carthoris’s life.”

  Still, it was good to hear; it gave her an idea why he had been so uneasy around her this last year, and why he had insisted on sharing this danger now.

  After that there was a companionable silence—the most comfortable she’d felt with him since the morning she’d realized he loved someone else. It felt familiar, and it steadied her for the fight ahead.

  Her course was bold, and her piloting sure, and she made it nearly to the Bantoom desert in one piece.

  Then the clouds thickened, and she overcorrected, and the edge of one wing caught the wall of the ravine.

  It was barely a scrape—on a calm morning she would have righted and not given it a thought until she landed back home.

  But in winds as tangled as these, deep in shadows not even the moons could reach, it was a death sentence.

  The flier ricocheted off the ravine and broadsided the opposing wall of stone. Tara and Djor were thrown against the ceiling amid a cracking and crunching Tara prayed was not bone.

  The flier careened out of control, and with her last moments Tara thought, If we must die, may this flier kill even one Kaldane when it lands.

  Then there was a sharp fall, and darkness claimed her.

  When Tara woke, it was to pain and a sandy, claustrophobic darkness that nearly drove her to panic.

  But she steadied herself, and after a few breaths she realized the crash had driven her underneath one of the consoles of her flier. She remembered her brother’s danger, and Djor, and their ruined flight.

  But if they had crashed, how was she not already in the towers of Manator? Had they been hidden from view? Were they miraculously safe?

  No knowing in hiding. Tara steeled her nerves, untangled herself from the mess of wires, and crawled out into the cabin of the flier.

  The first thing she saw was the dawn light glinting through the windshield; at least this was not a tomb.

  The second thing was that Djor was gone.

  It wasn’t a mystery that took long to solve. The entry hatch of the ship was standing open, and the floor bore the marks of someone being dragged out fighting.

  Djor had been taken by the Kaldanes, and they hadn’t looked for others because her flier sat only one.

  Poor Djor Kantos, she thought. To have come so far and be taken this way.

  But not for nothing; if she could fight for two, she could fight for three.

  She wrenched her hair into a knot, tightened her scabbard, and climbed out of her ship.

  The city of Manator rose from the sand at the edge of the horizon, jagged and hopeless behind its walls. The sun was just rising over the lower buildings—the high towers and the flier-landing pad were thrown into silhouette, long shadows that warned her back where she had come.

  Too late for that, she thought with a shudder, and started walking.

  By the time she reached the gate of Manator it was morning, and she was almost out of time.

  A guard, bemused, asked her name and business.

  “Thora,” she lied. “I’m a panthan. I am here to play Jetan.”

  The guard said, “You seem a bit young to be throwing your life away, but who can understand the decisions of the lesser-minded,” and inside the glass his brain swiveled to indicate where she should go for her work.

  She found she could walk alone through the streets, and though there was no time to waste, there was still enough time for her to note the streets and alleyways, and to see that the flier platforms were guarded by only a few Kaldanes, who seemed more interested in watching the streets below than in guarding their charges.

  She prayed the novelty of the crowd would not have worn off by the time she came back this way.

  (If she came back this way. She had seen Jetan before; it was not a game with many survivors.)

  It was enough of a novelty for a young woman to play the Game that the two competing Kaldanes (whose names slimed past her in a single guttural laugh) offered her a choice of teams.

  “Come,” said one, and the arm of the headless body was held out to her in a mockery of a gentleman. “They are taking the field.”

  She stood in the gateway at the edge of the arena, watching black-armored panthans and thoats take their places along the first line, as the orange side did the same in the marked-out squares on their side of the arena.

  Tara held her breath until she saw a tall, confident figure she recognized instantly, even from so far away.

  “The black army,” she said.

  The two Kaldanes immediately launched into a fight with each other over her choice. A guard ran to stand between them and force them to their separate sides.

  Tara paused a moment in the gateway, glanced at the wall beside her, and let something fall.

  Then she was running across the arena as fast as her feet could carry her.

  She didn’t call her brother’s name (he was too clever to use his own), but still he turned and saw her before she would have thought possible, and for a moment his entire face was suffused with joy.

  It wouldn’t last—there was too much danger for joy to last—but she understood; she smiled even as she ran.

  When she skidded to a stop she didn’t dare reach for him, and he crossed his arms as if trying to keep himself from embracing her.

  “I should have known,” he said finally. “You always did love games you knew you could win.”

  “Let’s hope that holds, for your sake.” Then her smile faded. “Make me a Warrior—they have the most flexibility, and at the end of the Game you and Thuvia—”

  But here Carthoris’s face fell.

  The black Princess emerged from the shadows of the holding cell, trying bravely not to cry.

  She was a stranger.

  “Carthoris,” Tara breathed, “where’s Thuvia?”

  He didn’t answer.

  In horror, Tara turned to look where the last of the orange pieces were emerging.

  There was Thuvia, in an orange robe, taking her place as the prize.

  Beside her, the Chief of the orange pieces was already in place, staring at them, horrified.

  It was Djor Kantos.

  Tara held her breath; her fingertips went numb.

  Then a voice cried, “Let the Game begin!”

  The Game was well-matched—too well-matched—and each side lost panthans at a staggering rate until only the trickier pieces remained.

  Tara did not notice this (though she should have); she was thinking only of the gate.

  The gate had but one guard, and he had not yet noticed that she had dropped one of her thick golden bangles to keep the ground-bolt from sliding home.

  That was their escape. Her brother already knew her plan (whispered in the moments before the pieces were ordered to take their places), and as soon as Thuvia and Djor came within hearing, she’d make good on their escape. With all four of them armed, it would be easy enough to overpower the guards and steal a flier home.

  (All the while, her stomach was churning as she snuck glances at Thuvia and Djor across the board, waiting for their turn to be played.)

  However, when Tara saw that all the spaces to her right had emptied, she realized how clever the Kaldane controlling the black team must be. He had sacrificed so many panthans to give his stronger pieces room to cross the board. The thoat before her marched to battle, and she watched the last orange panthan die under its feet.

  Then her square was being called.

  With a glance at her brother, his hands fisted at his sides and his eyes fixed on her, sh
e advanced.

  The flier who slid forward gave her a pitying smile. She saw his hands shaking; he knew this Game was his last.

  “Be brave,” he said, as if to himself.

  “Die with honor,” she said.

  A few moves later, he did, and Tara stood in the square, beside his body, breathing heavily and looking at the board ahead.

  The Kaldane playing orange must have been angry with her for throwing his expectations; the next thing he moved was a thoat, pawing at the ground and straining against the reins of its rider. It had been inching toward one of their fliers, but apparently the Kaldane had lost his patience, and its course was now fixed on her.

  A screech of laughter floated through the crowd as the black-side Kaldane ordered her to take the square.

  Tara trembled, and stepped forward.

  She remembered sparring with Carthoris and Djor, when they could still barely lift their swords.

  “Watch here,” said her brother to Djor, brushing his hand along the back of Tara’s arm. “It cannot be defended, and incapacitates. Every creature has these. Find them, and use them.”

  (The soft spot of a thoat is just behind the front legs, in the space usually protected by the elbow.)

  When the thoat crashed to the sand, it trapped the rider waist-high beneath it. He struggled to reach his weapon, but it was pinned beneath the beast.

  He looked up at Tara in terror.

  Tara lifted her sword, hesitated.

  (“There is a line between bravery and cruelty,” her brother told her. “Find that, too.”)

  She stepped back, lowered her sword, and called, “I will not kill him.”

  There was a murmur from the stands, and a moment later two of the slavemasters were flanking the board.

  “I am a volunteer,” she told them. “You have no power here. I cry mercy for this man—the Gamemaster decides.”