CHAPTER 12

Half a year later, my prince and I were wed in a stately public ceremony in Helium, the official seat of Carthan's paternal royal family. The city rejoiced as Carthan – grandson of John Carter, Warlord of Barsoom; great-grandson of Tardos Mors, Jeddak of Helium – and I, Lara O'Dae, a woman from Jasoom, pledged our troth to one another with golden bracelets and then rode the fabulously bejewelled ceremonial thoats through sun-lit streets where millions wished us well with wild waves and cheers.

Even upon Barsoom there is the tiresome custom of the "receiving line", and our list of guests from every corner of the planet may have been the most illustrious in its history. I believe there were 12 jeddaks present, beginning with Dejah Thoris's grandfather, Tardos Mors and her father Mors Kajak. There was Thuvia's father, Thuvan Dihn; and black Xodar from the Otz Valley. Ulysses Paxton, his princess Valla Dia and her father, Jeddak Kor San, had flown in from Duhor. Carthoris's sister Tara was there with her mate Gahan, Jeddak of Gathol, with their daughter Llana and her mate Pan Dan Chee. I met Kantos Kan, John Carter's great friend and now Jed and Supreme Commander of the armed forces of the Heliumetic empire. In another life and another time he might have captured my heart with his charm and good looks.

You may imagine then what I felt when, already overwhelmed by this glittering assemblage, I saw striding across the vast throne-room floor the most fearsome creature imaginable: an alien, standing fifteen feet tall, with olive skin, six limbs and a frightful tusked visage I doubted even a mother could love. He wore an array of out-sized weaponry that could have (and probably had!) taken on a battalion. My self-preservation sense kicked into high gear, and my right hand itched for a sword.

Then my perception shifted and, awestruck, I abruptly realized who he was. He stopped within a few feet of us while John Carter made the introductions. His great eyes gazed down at me in curiosity as he boomed, "Kaor, Lara of Jasoom!" Then he reached out to touch my now-red hair and said, "Remarkable!"

I couldn't stop myself from cringing when his huge arm came toward me, and my racing thoughts and frantic struggle to control my emotions must have been evident on my face.

"Do you fear me?" he asked, drawing himself upright in surprise. His words drew the attention of everyone in the throne room, bringing conversation to a halt. There was a disconcerting air of expectation in all those around me.

Intuition told me the only way to react to this complex, terrifying personage was with unvarnished truth. Hoping, too, that his long friendship with John Carter had familiarized him with irony, I said, "Admittedly, my lord, my first instinct upon seeing you was to run you through where you stood. Fortunately for us both I am not armed this day." With a wide grin I thrust forth my arm, adding with heart-felt sincerity, "You honour us with your presence, Tars Tarkas."

His great shout of laughter filled the room. "I see what you mean, John Carter – she is a feisty addition to your already extraordinary family." Instead of gripping my arm as men would, he gingerly wrapped the long fingers of a great fist twice around my hand Earth-style, and the Jeddak of the Tharks offered a surprisingly graceful bow. "The honour is mine, Princess."

He stepped aside, turning to where his daughter had been waiting half hidden behind his massive bulk, a smaller but no less formidable version of her famous father. Sola and I felt an immediate empathy but our conversation was necessarily short. In time we would become close friends, spending many pleasurable hours in each other's company.

The two Tharks moved along the line after a few moments. Staggered at meeting them in person – and still bemused by the honorific – I swayed on watery knees. Both Carthan and John Carter gripped my arms to steady me.

Pasting a pleasant public smile on my face I said sweetly through my teeth to the Warlord of Mars, "You might have warned me they would be here, Jack!"

He chuckled. "I had no doubt you would acquit yourself admirably, Lara."

"Nor did I, love," said Carthan with an admiring grin. "Well done!"

I rolled my eyes at him in exasperation. "I see. A conspiracy! You were both testing me, knowing I had never seen a green man before. Don't ever do that to me again, either of you!"

I sensed but ignored the amused look they exchanged over my head.

. . . . . .

The celebrations lasted days throughout the Heliumetic realms, with jed and jeddak vying for the privilege of banqueting the newlyweds. It was a wearying time for both of us, and after a week of flying from city to city, greeting endless lines of citizens, and eating far more than was necessary to sustain life, we had had enough. Carthan and I decided, at the suggestion of Ulysses and Valla Dia, to perpetuate the tradition they had introduced – the honeymoon.

There are still many areas of Mars that remain unvisited, some because they are known to be inhabited by warlike peoples; some by reason of sheer inaccessibility, such as the northern and southern poles and the enormous swamps which are all that remain of the once planet-spanning oceans; and others because explorers and mapmakers simply never returned home to describe them. Since Mars' land area is nearly as large as Earth's dry land area, there remain vast tracts where no one has ever stepped foot.

Carthan had always been fascinated by geography, and as a boy had pestered his grandfather for stories about Earth's famed explorers, and pored over maps of its seas and continents. He had even fashioned a globe at John Carter's suggestion. The globe still stands on a shelf in our apartments. Judging by its accuracy I believe he knows as much about my native planet's geography as I do.

There is another globe standing beside it – one of Barsoom, also made by Carthan, which labels vast areas as "unexplored". When the question of a destination for our wedding trip arose, we had no difficulty with the choice. One of Carthan's life-long ambitions is to explore and chart the undiscovered places on Barsoom. I simply wanted to see more of the planet. It was literally a matter of spinning the globe, shutting one's eyes, and touching a place at random. When I raised my finger, we saw that it indicated one of the little-known volcanic regions lying on the equator west of Helium's longitude.

We took our time outfitting ourselves and our flyer for the trip. The Thuria (named for the nearer moon) was a wedding gift from Carthoris, being one of his on-going projects to improve the comfort of what was once a simple flying raft with an engine. Now regarded as Barsoom's pre-eminent engineer, he had constructed a strong, insulated, and incredibly light-weight cabin covering the entire deck, with every convenience imaginable, much like that of an Earthly luxury yacht. There was a fully functional kitchenette, complete bathing facilities, and a large bed/sitting room, all furnished with sybaritic elegance. He had also improved the efficiency, range, and speed of the radium engine, and streamlined the entire machine. Fifty feet long and twenty-five wide, the Thuria resembled an egg sliced in half lengthwise.

Carthoris then informed us, with no little pride, that with his improvements to the buoyancy tanks we could now circumnavigate the planet indefinitely. As well, recalling the numerous times he and his father had come close to asphyxiating in Barsoom's thin air, Carthoris had invented an oxygen extractor, and our flyer held the experimental model.

Having stowed into the spacious holds every conceivable necessity for months of exploration, from food and water to winter clothing and weapons, we then brought on board John Carter's nuptial gift - the twin offspring of Woola, his "pet" calot. To Jack's great amusement I had named the female calot "Belle" (for her remarkable beauty), and Carthan named the male "Padwar" – forever to be known (at least by me) as "Paddy".

The young calots, full-grown and each the size of a pony, stood watching from the companionway of our ship as we rose slowly above the palace roof. Standing somewhat apart from the crowd of friends and relatives waving and shouting farewells, were John Carter and his lovely princess, Dejah Thoris, quietly looking on. Just before we boarded they had embraced us both, and the Warlord offered only two words of advice: "Be diligent". I waved down at them, and wondered why he did not smile as he waved in return.

I soon forgot the tiny shiver that ran down my spine.

Our journey was leisurely, surveying the relatively-familiar and, at first, well-mapped landscape passing beneath us. We flew over hundreds of miles of the canal-irrigated greenhouses which produce the bulk of the fruit and vegetable crops on Barsoom. Then, as the canals petered out, we crossed a thousand miles of moss-covered ochre plains, home to the nomadic Green hordes. Occasionally we floated over ancient abandoned cities, and once were fired upon by Green men riding hell-bent on their huge thoats. Days more passed before we left the plains behind and began to cross a vast volcanic rock-strewn desert where nothing could grow, not even the ubiquitous ochre moss.

We exercised the calots and ourselves daily, landing whenever possible in an isolated area with miles of space for running. The four of us would take off at a dead run, though soon the calots, with ten legs apiece, outdistanced us by far. While I could run faster than Carthan, my lack of stamina in the thin air forced me to pace myself, and Carthan, with his inherited Earthly muscles, would out-last me over several miles. Even though the calots might be out of our view, they always seemed to know when we turned back to the flyer, and invariably reached it before us. Once we were aloft, the animals would doze inside on the deck or out on the companionway that circled the ship.

Half asleep after a run one afternoon, I was gazing down at the passing scene, when I was struck by how extraordinary it was. "Carthan," I called. "Come see this."

He joined me at the window and exclaimed, "Issus! That is not on any map I have seen!"

It looked for all the world like the Grand Canyon, but on a scale so immense that, from our location at its western end, its northern rim was barely visible at the horizon. Some years later I learned that the Mariner 9 Mars orbiter had photographed this huge rift, named Valles Marineris, in 1971, the year after we were wed.

The canyon, in places as wide as 150 miles, stretches a quarter of the way around Barsoom in an east-west direction – a fact we did not know then. We decided to spend a few weeks surveying and photographing it.

Carthan and I puzzled over why Barsoomians were unaware of this amazing natural wonder. We concluded that because most flyers cannot rise higher than a thousand feet, beyond which the air becomes too rarified to breathe, the canyon looks merely like unusual low hills. Even from our much higher cruising altitude of 20,000 feet – attainable only with our oxygen supply – merely a fraction of that vast chasm came into relief.

The next morning, after our exercise run on the plain at the edge of the canyon, we returned to the flyer to discover that Belle and Paddy were not waiting for us as usual. We stared at each other, confounded. They would often run miles in a circle around the flyer, but always they were there before us, greeting us with their monstrous toothy grins. Where could they be?

We waited for two hours, peering around the horizon repeatedly in an attempt to spot our companions but there was no sign of them. After that we raised the flyer to several hundred feet to begin a search. Flying in an expanding spiral from our takeoff point, we must have covered a hundred square miles of the canyon and adjacent plain without any indication that life existed below. The plain at this point and the adjoining canyon wall were rocky, where footprints would leave no sign of their passage. Completely at a loss, we returned to our landing site to wait.

We waited all that night and the next day, and for several days thereafter without any sign of the animals. We could not even imagine what had become of them.

"They can't be dead." I said in despair, cuddling close to Carthan for comfort in the ship's lounge, staring out at the bleak, lifeless landscape.

"If it were at all possible, they would have returned to us."

"Then what has happened to them? There do not seem to be any creatures out here large enough to harm a calot, never mind two."

"Who can know what is out there when no man has returned to tell the tale?"

I sat up. "We must look for them."

"How? Where?" Carthan asked. "We could spend years out here in a fruitless search."

"Carthan, we have to try. We'll give ourselves a time limit – say, ten days. If we don't find them by then, we'll . . . " I couldn't continue. The consequence was too horrible to contemplate. How could we just leave them behind?

He smiled sympathetically, "Lara, you know they are well able to take care of themselves."

"But what if . . .?"

He interrupted with a finger on my lips. "Ten days, then."

I nodded mutely.