Free Queen of Mars - Book III in the Masters of Mars Trilogy by Al Sarrantonio Page B

time.”
    For a moment I stood pat, until I heard him
snoring inside.
    Then, angry and tired, I crawled in after
him, to find that for such a small feline he took up a lot of
space, and had to conform my own curl to his own sprawl, leaving me
with little room to sleep and his boot precariously close to my
face. But I was suddenly exhausted, and finally slept –
    – only to be awaked soon after by the wind,
which had begun as a background hiss for my bad dreams, and which
steadily increased to a whine and on to a howl before I was awake,
watching the walls of our poor structure rattle and shake like a
dying man, and buckle toward me with each pounding fist of gusting
wind.
    Copernicus slept blithely on through it all,
and when I briefly unzipped the tightly closed front flap to look
out, I was instantly blinded by rushing, pelting sand. I could see
nothing a half foot in front of my face, and pulled my head back in
immediately.
    The wind only increased, and all that day,
try as I might, I gained no more sleep.
    When at last darkness was falling, tinting
the walls of the tent with darker light, the wind subsided, and
then fell to nothing.
    Copernicus awoke, stretched, and cried his
habitual, “Ah!”
    I looked at him balefully when he asked, “Did
you sleep well?”
    “The sandstorm kept me awake.”
    He frowned, and then said, “Oh! You mean the
wind, of course. That was no sandstorm. You’d best pray to your
benefactor that we don’t run into a real sandstorm, your
majesty.”
    He pulled out hardtack from his tunic, and
after a while I did also, and almost treasured its dry, brittle
taste in my empty stomach, which I then washed away with a few
bitter sips from my canteen.
    Then we packed, pulling our tent free
from the sand walls which had built around it and breaking it down,
pulling the hoods from our horses before feeding and watering them,
and riding off, once again, into the indeterminate night.
    T he next night and
day went much as the one before, and the one after that, also. I
began to think, as fools often due when offered repetition, that
this Great Desert wasn’t so great at all, and had nothing to show
me that I could not handle. When the clouds rolled in on the third
night and Copernicus began to make noises of alarm, I laughed and
waited for them to disperse as they had on the first night. But
they didn’t and only thickened, and then a fierce hot pelting rain
began, with drops as big as a knuckle, which at first refreshed
with their wetness but then began to assault.
    “Tie the horses down, and get the tent up as
quickly as possible!” Copernicus shouted, jumping from his mount
and yanking the tent poles from their makeshift scabbard. I
followed with the tent itself, and soon we had secreted ourselves
inside, pushing our way through a thickening mixture of sand and
water which resembled not so much mud as a kind of semi-liquid
rock. Around us the landscape was turning to something resembling
lava, rivers of water and viscous sand where only dry dunes and
hollows had existed twenty minutes before.
    “I hope we drove the tent stakes deep
enough!” Copernicus fretted, as the floor beneath us undulated with
flowing mixture of sand and rain. It felt like we were floating on
a river, when in fact the river was flowing beneath us.
    “Pray it doesn’t last long – they seldom do,”
Copernicus said.
    “And if it does?”
    His doomed look told me all I needed to
know.
    But as quickly as the pelting rain had come
it stopped – as if a giant switch in the sky had been violently
turned off. One moment there was the roar of watery fury on our
roof, and then it disappeared.
    Already the ground beneath us stopped moving,
and then settled.
    “Quickly!” Copernicus cautioned. “We must
break the tent down now or we’ll never get it out of the sand!”
    We crawled out into a bizarre landscape of
scudding clouds, dark patches of deep star-studded night overhead
and a red black landscape altered around us