Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War by Richard Ellis Preston Jr. Page B

his boot, but in the instant he should have drawn it, he could not bring himself to do so.
    Max lifted the wooden club, her sweat-slicked naked torso, swathed in loose bandages and blood, agleam in the firelight, her black hair swirling around her face where the black eyes now burned with surreal flashing prisms of colors, and poised her arm to strike.
    “Max! It is Romulus!” Buckle shouted, raising his arms.
    Max stiffened. The table leg dropped from her hand, hitting the stone floor with a dull
thunk
next to Buckle’s ear. She released a long, shuddering sigh and fell forward, collapsing atop him, her hair cascading across his face.
    Buckle held still. Max’s heart hammered against his chest, surging through her cold skin, striving too frantically, too hard. He carefully pressed his arms around her, intending to gently roll her over onto her bedding again.
    Max lifted her head above Buckle’s and looked into his eyes. For a long moment she stared at him, stared at him from very far away, the blacks of her irises streaming with purple flickers.
    Max leaned forward and, closing her eyes, brought her trembling lips to his.
    Buckle, his ears still ringing, realized that she was kissing him, her lips cold but velvet, and tasting slightly of blood, a soft, tender lover’s kiss.
    Yet he responded, kissing her back, but what manner of moonlit mess was this? She was near dead, drained of blood, half mad and exhausted. And yet, as her kiss continued, her mouth moving on his, her body upon his, her weak heart suddenly pounding with a vitality he would have been certain was lost to her, he felt a deep-buried yearning rise in his soul.
    Max was cooing in the way that contented Martians cooed. It was faint and small and deep in the recesses of her throat, but Buckle heard it.
    Buckle needed to get her covered up again, back into bed—she was half frozen and so terribly wounded. Gently, oh so gently, he placed his fingers on Max’s cheeks and lifted her head. The cooing stopped. The kiss stopped. Max jerked her head up. Her dark eyes looked deep into Buckle’s, searching for something, groping blind, and then lost their coherence, the sparks vanishing away as if dropped into a bottomless well.
    “Max…” Buckle whispered.
    Max’s eyes closed. She uttered a sigh and went limp, her head dropping on Buckle’s shoulder, the length of her body quivering with a million tiny quakes. Buckle reached for the bearskin and pulled it on top of them, letting Max’s light body remain atop the length of him, her face mere inches away, the eyelids fluttering as the eyeballs beneath. She was dreaming, perhaps. Good. If she was dreaming, a morphine-fueled lotus sleep, then she was far away from the pain and the cold. He would get her good and warmed up by the time she awakened.And she would wake up. Romulus Buckle had cheated death many times before, and, taking Max under his wing, he would do it again.
    Buckle could smell Max, her breath, her skin, and it was a pleasant, sunburned meadow sort of smell, detectable under the sickly-sweet stink of sweat and coppery-scented blood.
    It was so strange to be so close to her.
    He pressed her to him, close, for a long time, and slipped into a mild drowse.

THE BLACK CARRIAGE
    M AX WAS RIDING IN A carriage; the interior was all black, velvet and leather, and the window curtains were open, the world outside passing in the dark-gray-and-purple blur of night. She heard horses racing, the carriage team, iron shoes pounding the earth, noses snorting breath. She was wearing black, she knew, a heavily stitched gown, but all she could see of it were her tight-fitting sleeves of embroidered satin that covered all but the fingers of her hands, the seams lined with black pearls.
    She was there but she was not there.
    But she was not cold anymore. She was not in pain.
    She did not feel anything.
    Her perspective shifted, and she was outside of herself now, a spectator perched high up on a stone wall studded by