Arabella of Mars(16)
*
Having finished her paltry breakfast, she determined that she would concentrate her attentions on the inns nearest the aerial ship docks. If Simon were still in London, she thought, he would no doubt have taken lodging there.
The docks were not difficult to find. With Mars in opposition, dozens of Mars-bound ships were departing each day, floating up into the sky like Newton’s Bubble—the soap bubble in the great man’s bath which had led him to the principle of aerial buoyancy. All she had to do was follow their path down to its origin.
The Mars Docks, once she arrived, proved to be a riot of clamor and noise that made the London streets on which she had spent the previous day seem bucolic by comparison. Men and beasts labored, hauling boxes and barrels to and from the docks; sweating stevedores walked in treadwheels, powering the cranes that lifted bales of cargo to the ships’ decks; hawkers cried the virtues of their products, ships, and services; and under all rumbled the ever-present roar of the great furnaces.
But it was the Marsmen—the ships themselves—their masts swaying as they bobbed on the tide, that drew Arabella’s attention. Smaller than the seagoing ships they resembled, they differentiated themselves by being constructed of honey-blond khoresh-wood, which gleamed like gold in the early morning sun.
Without khoresh-wood, or “Marswood” as the English styled it, Marsmen would be tiny ships like the fragile little Mars Adventure in which the brave Captain Kidd had been the first Englishman to reach Mars. Kidd had been very lucky to survive his arrival on Mars, and if not for his discovery of the khoresh-tree he would not have returned. Stronger than oak but lighter than wicker, khoresh-wood was now both the major item of Martian export and the material that made interplanetary travel practical.
And with that thought, the sough of wind in the spars and rigging made her ache with homesickness, reminding her as it did so painfully of the similar sound made by the Martian wind in the khoresh-trees of Woodthrush Woods. Perhaps some of these brave ships might be built of wood from her family plantation … the very plantation where, even now, Michael might be taking toast with guroshkha-jam and planning his day.
Her stomach clenching at the responsibility that had fallen to her, she continued down toward the docks, hoping against hope that she might not be too late.
*
The inns of the Mars Docks were mostly on Rotherhithe Street, grand imposing structures with names like The Asteroid, The Khoresh-Tree, and The Thork, whose sign depicted a Martian warrior, properly a thorakh, with the traditional oval shield and forked spear. The Martian shown on the sign had clearly not been drawn from life; though his spear and shield were reasonably authentic, his carapace—painted as a hard, unnatural red—was far shorter and wider than any actual Martian’s, and his hands were simple two-pincered claws like those of an Earth crab. Also, he was naked as a savage, lacking the true thorakh’s colorful battle dress.
Simon’s purse, Arabella reflected, would be heavy with the money obtained from pawning his family silver, and he planned to return richer still, so she selected the largest and most luxurious inn of them all, The Martian King, to begin with. The inn’s sign depicted a figure having a Martian’s eye-stalks and mouth-parts, but otherwise human, in the garments of a Medieval English monarch; the wide and solid door was of khoresh-wood, a pointless luxury.
The keeper of the inn affected a buff coat, aping those of Company ships’ captains, and a haughty attitude likewise. “We’ve no need of errand-boys today,” he said as Arabella approached.
“I am looking for my cousin,” she replied, undeterred. Dozens of similar encounters in the last day had inured her to any amount of hauteur. “Simon Ashby, from Oxford. Have you a guest by that name?”
The innkeeper’s expression showed clearly that he did not believe any cousin of such a shoddy-looking figure as Arabella could possibly be a guest at his fine establishment, but he did consult his guest-book. “No, we have not…,” he said without looking up.
“Thank you anyway.” She turned to leave.
“He departed just this morning.”
That stopped Arabella where she stood. “What?”
“Are you deaf as well as ill-mannered, young man? I said that he departed this morning.”
Arabella’s heart hammered in her chest. “Did he say where he was going? I have … I have some important news for him.”
The innkeeper peered at his guest-book. “It says here that he booked passage on the Marsman Earl of Kent.”
At this news Arabella’s pounding heart seemed to stop cold.
*
“Earl of Kent!” Arabella shouted as she ran toward the docks, the cobbles slick under her feet. “Earl of Kent! Where is the Marsman Earl of Kent?”
Passerby after passerby gave her no reply save an annoyed or disdainful glance. On she rushed, dodging dray-carts and stevedores rolling heavy barrels. “Where is the Earl of Kent?” Finally one stranger pointed, saying something about the Heron Place dock.
But this new intelligence seemed only to make her search the harder, as she now sought two targets rather than one. Again and again she doubled back, chasing up and down the sea-wall, importuning strangers for directions and trying to sort out contradictory advice. No one seemed to know where the Earl of Kent might be found.
At last she found herself on a stinking, filthy wharf at the foot of Heron Place. Surely this was the dock the stranger had indicated, yet the ship that bobbed nearby was no Marsman at all, merely a nameless cargo barge, and the area was practically unpopulated.