1899- Journey to Mars

“Most excellent, Billy. I appreciate your attention to my deficiencies.”

[ 11 ]

At twenty-four years of age, Avinash Rathmandu Joseph was ready for his life to come to an end. He had begun to fear that he might not die, and this new revelation engendered a great deal of anxiety. His body was deeply bruised and battered in many places, such that he dared not move. His joints were swollen and painful. He had become...thin. There was an English word for the condition, but it escaped him. Avi, as his family and friends called him, could no longer feel the pain in his stomach. At first it had been a hunger more powerful than any sensation he had ever felt. But like all things, it had arisen and eventually passed over him like the waves of the sea. The hunger was now gone, as was any hope that he might see daylight again. There was only the light when they came for him and took him to the room a few feet away. There the torture sessions continued. The sessions seemed as though they were weeks apart, but Avi suspected they were actually every few days. His sense of time, like his hunger, had...departed. There was only the water—he could hardly recall drinking water, but he dreamed of it as he dreamed of food and the faces of his family—and breathing. Avi could smell nothing—not even his own stink.

A hard clang on his cell door made Avi jerk, and the movement opened the long, oozing gash on his hip again. The scarred face of the Chief Guard showed in the small, barred opening. He smiled, and it was not a nice smile. “Avi, the hanging of your person is to be accomplishing with the morning. What a joyous day it will be. And for more news of happiness I am telling you of the happenings of your father. It was seeming, on my visit to his home, his weakness caused his face to be falling in the pot of potato curry and cooking was accomplished all the way to his demise. I thought I would leave you in thinking of your faceless father as the hanging man’s hour comes.”

Avi’s heart filled with grief and he sobbed, although there was not enough moisture in his body for tears. It is my ending, then. I will be the son unable to avenge his father’s spirit. His despair was total, and he slumped to the rough stone floor, curling into a ball, waiting for the coming dawn, and the noose.

When the female voice called to him, Avi thought he was dreaming. Then he heard it again, faint, coming from a finger-wide crack in the wall between his cell and the next.

“Avi.”

Avi put his mouth near the crack and said, “Who are you?”

“Me name’s Bixie Cottontree. I be wit yah on the gallows tomorrow.”

Avi thought her accent was British, but with a melodic lilt. “Why are you to die?”

“They be callin’ me a witch, yah, and that is enough for dem.”

She sounded young, younger than Avi. He said, “I am sorry for your dying tomorrow.”

Bixie said, “Don’t ye be despairin’, Avi mon. We won’t be two puppets dancin’at the end of British twine, I tell yah. Bruddah Death be flyin’ from de sky tomorrow, but not for us.”

Avi was happy to hear a voice, but now he knew this woman was insane. Death flying from the sky? Craziness. Still, it was good to hear someone talking to him in a kind voice. He asked, “Where are you from?”

“The far side of the world; Jamaica.”

“Ho

w do you come to Ceylon?”

“It’s a long story, Avi. I was kidnapped. I’ll be tellin’ them complete to yah in the future, when ever-ting’s irie.”

“Your kidnappers sent you to this prison?”

“The kidnappers be long sleepin’ wit Day-vee Jones, and dat is part of dah story. I’m here because I’m good at healin’ the sick ones on dis island. The noble British doctors of Colombo were jealous, and sent dem poisonous words to the Chancellor, sayin’ that I practiced Voduo.”

“Do you?”

“Oh yes.”

“And that is punishable by the hanging of you?”

“Dats me sentence mon: to hang beside the traitor Avinash Rathmandu in dah mornin’. But I tell you, Avi, death be comin’ to save us. We’ll not be perishin’tomorrow. Now, get some rest. Dis talk be makin’ me throat more tirr-stee dan I already was. I will walk wit you in the morning.”

Avi didn’t answer. She was crazy, there was no doubt. But he felt better after talking and listening to her, and a small thread of hope wormed its way into him. He prayed that this Voduo Witch from the far side of the world was a true prophet of tomorrow. He lay his head on the stones and went to sleep.

[ 12 ]

John Carter stood at the bow of the gray, sleek airship as the keel tickled the top leaves of Ceylon’s jungle canopy while it sailed a silent path through the moonlit night. The gray blimp above the deck was almost invisible in the night. John glanced at the eight large, woven baskets lined along the gunwales, then looked into the distance for landmarks. The gray hull, sails, and dirigible of the Wraith blended in the night sky so well as to be almost invisible, and the large propellers behind the ship’s rudder were feathered to no more sound than a soft summer breeze through trees.

It was stealth John Carter was after, and he was an expert at it. The ship, the planning, the men in his crew, they were all hand-picked and extensively trained in every aspect he knew. They studied and practiced the secrets of the Neen-jahs, the black-pajama wearing, deadly warriors of the Japanese Islands, and the fierce ghosts of the American Southwest desert, the Apaches. He had them read volumes on the tactics of ambush and attack ranging from Alexander the Great to Arminius and Hannibal, to those of the Bengal Lancers and the tactics he learned at West Point. The crew was, to a man, formidable, and none more so than the red-headed, grinning Scottish Highlander approaching him now.

Ian Mackenzie was a tall, rawboned clansman from the stony mountains above Loch Maree, who John rescued from a rock precipice as the Scotsman waited for the last of a group of lowland bandits who had finally cornered him. Ian sat on a rock, his huge, two-handed claymore with the strange rose-colored blade across his knees, a six-foot longbow and quiver with three arrows remaining at his feet. He held a bagpipe and played “Will Ye No Come Back Again?” as he waited for the remaining dozen of his wary enemies to climb the final twenty feet to the crest.

John slowed the airship so it was within inches of the man and looked him over. Ian was bleeding from a long cut on his forearm and had a red stain low on the side of his white shirt and another one on his torn kilt. John said, “Would you care for a lift?”