Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War by Richard Ellis Preston Jr. Read Free Book Online Page B

never felt before.
    The sounds of boots on timber came pounding up behind him.
    “Max!” Calypso shrieked.
    Something powerful lifted Buckle from behind. He had been lifted up by the hair. He saw his feet kicking in the air.
    Balthazar Crankshaft had never before raised his hand against one of his own children, and never would again. But that morning, as Max was carried bleeding to the infirmary by the weeping Calypso, Romulus Buckle had the tar beaten out of him by the grand old man of the Crankshafts.
    And Buckle, his arse pink and his ears bruised, never cried. He deserved what he got. Part of him had wanted to be hated, had wanted to die.

    Buckle took a deep breath and brushed Max’s hair back from the scar on her forehead. The skin felt cold and clammy.
    Max had expressly forgiven him—the very next morning over breakfast—but her graciousness, her concern for the offender’s feelings, had done nothing but wound him to thequick. In later years, if the scar was noticed by a schoolmate, Max would claim that she barely even remembered the incident. But Buckle knew that Max remembered. And it pained him to think that she did.
    Martians never lied, people said. Max said. But Max was only half Martian.
    The water in the iron pot came to a boil, a thousand bubbles pinging against the metal. Buckle unsheathed the knife and stuck the blade into the rolling water.
    Buckle was no surgeon, but he had a surgeon’s work to do.
    And Max’s life depended on him doing it well.

THE APPRENTICE SURGEON
    B UCKLE SLID HIS HEAVY COAT off Max and unhooked the latches of her bearskin. He tried to pull the fur lining from her left side, but found that the copious amounts of blood, now frozen in scarlet gobbets of ice, had stuck it to her woolen sweater beneath. He used his knife to cut the sweater away. The sweet, coppery smell of blood swamped his nostrils. As he worked the bearskin and the black woolen sweater out from under her light form, cradling her head against his thighs as he raised her upper body slightly, he found that the blouse beneath was in shreds, a white silk garment now utterly soaked the color of scarlet, heavy with slushy blood.
    Buckle worked quickly, handling Max as he would a sleeping baby. He wondered if he should give her a shot of morphine. He decided against it. She was unconscious now. She would need the painkiller once she roused. There was not a lot of it.
    Max started trembling. She was terribly weakened, susceptible to the cold. And the cave air did not feel much warmer, though the heat of the adolescent fire surged at his back. But it would have to do.
    Applying the knife to Max’s blouse, Buckle sliced it away, revealing the skin underneath: skin pale as cream where he wiped it, skin adorned with curving black stripes. Max’s entireleft side was awash in thick blood that looked black in the firelight, down to where it had pooled over the belt at her waist. His heart sank, there was so much of it, steaming in places, dripping down the ribs. He pulled away the tattered remnants of the blouse, and she lay exposed from the waist up.
    It would have surprised Buckle, if he had time to consider it, that Max’s well-muscled stomach was all white. Buckle had never seen Max’s body beyond her face, neck, and hands. She had always kept it hidden under sleeves and high collars. Hers was a beautiful form, very human in appearance, except for the black stripes upon it, tapering off along her rib cage and swirling around her small, pink-nippled breasts, but Buckle was in no state of mind to register such things. Even though his invasion of her well-guarded privacy was necessary to save her life—he was her doctor now, after all—if anything, he experienced a sense of impropriety as he worked. And there arose another emotion, guilt, a despair at the violence of the wounds she had suffered in his defense, but he was too absorbed in his task to give such feelings any attention.
    The sabertooth had sunk its fangs