The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 03

by Anthology

  At the edge of the water another man was lying, whom I assumed Mercer had felled. There was a great commotion from the boat. I ran toward it. A man was standing beside it--an old man with snow-white hair. He stood still, seeming confused and in doubt what to do. As I neared him he turned clumsily to avoid me. I passed him by and bounded over the boat's gunwale, landing in its bottom. The first thing I saw was Mercer struggling to his feet with four of the Mercutians hanging on him. One had a grip on his throat from behind; another clutched him about the knees.

  The two others let go of him when they heard me land in the boat. One had evidently had enough, for he dived overboard. The other waited warily for my onslaught. As I got within reach I hit at his face, but my blow went wild. He hit me full in the chest, but it was the blow of a child.

  At that instant I heard Mercer give a choking cry, and out of the corner of my eye saw him go down again. I could waste no more time upon this single antagonist. The man had his hands at my throat now. I seized him about the waist and carried him to the gunwale. He clung to me as a rat might cling to a terrier, but I shook him off and dumped him in the water.

  I turned to Mercer just as he was struggling to his feet again, and in a moment more between us we had felled his two assailants. Mercer's face was very white, and I saw blood streaming from a wound on his head; but he grinned as he faced me.

  "Have we--got 'em--all?" he gasped. He dashed the blood away from his eyes with the flat of his hand. "I fell--damn it--right at the start, and hit my head. Where are they all? Have we got 'em?"

  Miela alighted in the boat beside us.

  "Two are running," she said. "They are together. Hasten."

  We jumped out of the boat. Miela flew up, and we followed her guidance through the dense woods. We could make much better speed, I knew, than the Mercutians. "We'll get them all, Ollie," I shouted at Mercer. "They're not far ahead. See up there--Miela's evidently over them now."

  We came up to them after a few hundred yards. It was the old man, and one of those whom I had first encountered. They did not wait for us to attack them, but stopped stock still, flinging their arms wide in token of surrender.

  Miela came down among us, and we went back to where we had lain hidden in the palmettos. There we had left a number of short lengths of rope. While we were tying the arms of these two prisoners behind them and fettering their ankles so they could not run Anina joined us.

  "Two--in water," she cried; and then added something to Miela.

  "Two were in the water. Now they are in the woods, running. Anina will show you."

  Miela stood guard in the boat over our first two prisoners, while Mercer and I rounded up the others. It was half an hour or more before we had them all trussed up, but none of the ten escaped. We were a long time reviving two of those we had injured, but finally we had them all lying or sitting in the boat.

  Mercer's head had stopped bleeding. He washed it, and I found his injury no more than an ugly scalp wound.

  "I fell and cut it on something," he explained lugubriously. "Couldn't see for the blood in my eyes. But we got 'em, didn't we?"

  Under Miela's direction Mercer and I shoved the boat out into the stream. I need not go into details regarding the propelling mechanism of this craft. Miela explained it hastily to me as we got under way. It used a form of the light-ray from a sort of strange battery. The intense heat of the ray generated a great pressure of superheated steam in a thick metal cylinder underneath the keel.

  This steam escaped through a nozzle under water at the stern of the boat, and its thrust against the water propelled the boat forward. The boat was constructed to draw very little water, and when going fast its bow planed upward until only the stern of the hull touched the surface. It was steered by a rudder not much different from some of those types we are familiar with on earth. When we got out into open water I found the boat was capable of great speed. This I attributed not so much to the efficacy of its propelling force as to the lightness of the boat itself. It was built of some metal that I may perhaps compare with aluminium, only this was far stronger and lighter. The boat was, in fact, a mere shell, extraordinarily buoyant.

  Miela sat in the stern, steering and operating the mechanism. I sat with her. Mercer was farther forward, beside Anina, talking to her earnestly. Our prisoners lay huddled in various attitudes--frightened, all of them, and obviously in no condition to give us further trouble. They were, I saw now, not ruffians by any means, but rather men of superior intelligence, selected by Tao evidently as those best fitted for spreading his propaganda among the people of the Great City.

  We made slow progress down the bayou. Some of its turns were so sharp and so overhung with trees, and obstructed by fallen logs, we could hardly get through. During the latter part of the trip the bayou broadened rapidly, dividing into many channels like a delta.

  We came out into the open sea finally--a broad, empty expanse, with a mirrorlike surface. The curvature of the planet was even more apparent now; it seemed almost as though the water should be sliding back downhill over the horizon.

  We turned to the left as we came out of the delta, and for the first time Miela put the boat to the limit of its speed. The best comparison I can make, I think, to this rapid, noiseless, smooth progress, is that of sailing on an iceboat.

  We sped along some five or ten miles, keeping close inland. I saw some of the small thatched shacks along here, though not many. For a while the shore remained that same palm-lined, half-inundated marshland. Then gradually it began to change, and we came upon a broad beach of white sand.

  We landed here, and found the girls with the platform waiting for us. Miela took Anina and one or two of the older girls aside, and gave them last instructions.

  "What do I do--just dump them on the other shore?" Mercer asked me.

  "That's about it. I don't know the lay of the land over there. Anina does. You do what she tells you."

  "You bet I will," he agreed enthusiastically. "Some kid--that little girl. We get along fine. She understands everything I say to her already. I'll have her talking English like a streak by the time you see her again."

  We had removed the cords from our prisoners' ankles. I motioned them to get out of the boat. We crowded Tao's men on the platform. They were surprised, and some of them alarmed, when they saw how we proposed to transport them over the water. Miela silenced their protests, and soon we had them all seated on the platform, with Mercer at the rear end facing them.

  The fifty girls grasped the platform handles. Another moment and they were in the air, with Mercer waving good-by to us vigorously.

  Miela and I, left alone, watched them silently as they dwindled to a speck in the haze of the sky.

  We were about to start back when we saw a girl coming toward us, flying low over the water. One of those we had directed to patrol the coast, Miela said when she came closer. She saw us, and came down on the beach.

  The two girls spoke together hurriedly.

  "Tao's men in the Water City have caused great disturbance, Alan," Miela said to me.

  "Where's the Water City?"

  "Near the Great City--across the marshlands. We must get back. And when Anina and our friend Ollie have returned we must go to the Water City. It is very bad there, she said."

  Our trip back to the Great City was without unusual incident. We followed the main route at the best speed we could make.

  "We shall tell our king, of course, about this disturbance," said Miela. "Perhaps he will think there is something he can do. But I fear greatly that unless he appeals directly to the people, and they are with him--"

  "He's an old man," I said, "and all his councilors are old. They're not fit to rule at such a time as this. Suppose he were to die--what would happen? Who would be king then?"

  "A little prince there is--a mere child. And there is our queen--a younger woman, only married to our king these few years. His first queen died."

  I questioned Miela concerning her government. It w
as, I soon learned, an autocracy in theory. But of later years the king's advanced age, and his equally old councilors whom he refused to change, had resulted in a vacillating policy of administration, which now, I could see plainly, left the government little or no real power.

  Only by constantly pandering to the wishes of the people could the king hold his throne. The supreme command was held by the king and his aged councilors. At stated intervals the more prominent men of each city met and enacted laws. The cities were each ruled by a governor in similar fashion, paying tribute to the central government somewhat after our old feudal system; but for practical purposes they acted as separate nations. They were united merely by the bonds of their common need of defense against the Twilight People, and of intermarriage, which was frequent, since the virgins, flying about, often found mates in cities other than their own.

  There were courts in each city, not much more than rude tribunals, and jails in which the offenders were held. The police I have already mentioned. They, like the king's guards, were inclined in an emergency to do, not so much what they were ordered, as what they thought the people wished.

  It was all very extraordinary, but like many another makeshift government it served, after a fashion.

  Hiding the boat in another bayou, we took our way home on foot. That is to say, I ran, and Miela followed me, alternately flying and walking. We made our best speed this way, and very soon were back at home in the Great City.

  We crossed the garden and entered the front door, expecting to find Lua in the living room, but she was not there. The house was quiet.

  "She would wait up, she told me," Miela said, and, raising her voice, called her mother's name.

  There was no answer, although now I remember I thought I heard a footfall upstairs.

  We went up to Lua's room hurriedly. It was empty, and our loud cries of anxiety throughout the house evoked no response. We entered our own bedroom, and before I could make a move to defend myself I was seized tightly by both elbows from behind.

  At the same instant an arm hooked around my neck under my chin and jerked my head backward, and another pair of arms clutched me around the knees. I struggled vainly to free myself, shouting to Miela to run.

  But there were too many holding me. A moment more and my arms were tied behind me and a rope was about my legs. I was pushed into a chair, and as I sat down I saw Miela standing quietly near by, with two Mercutians holding her by the arms and shoulders.

  The man who had pushed me to the seat bent down and struck me across the cheek with the flat of his hand. His grinning, malevolent face was only a few inches from mine. I saw that it was Baar!

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  REVOLUTION.

  There seemed to be five of our captors, all of them as evil-looking men as I think I have ever seen. They rummaged about the room, evidently in search for weapons they thought I might have secreted. Then they ordered me to stand up, and without more ado led Miela and me from the house.

  This was once when I was glad of the interminable daylight. I hoped we might find some early risers about the streets, for I thought certainly the time of sleep must now be nearly over. But no one was in sight as we left the garden. We turned the first corner and headed toward the base of the mountain.

  "To Baar's house they are taking us, I think. It is on the marshland below." Miela spoke without fear of our captors understanding the English words. We took advantage of this until after a moment we were roughly ordered to be quiet.

  Lua, we thought, must have been taken away before we arrived; we would find her at Baar's house when we arrived there. We had come down to the level marshlands now, the outskirts of the city, and were passing along a path between occasional shacks. Before us, standing alone in a rice paddy, I saw a larger, more pretentious house--a wooden structure on stilts, with a thatched roof, which Miela said was where Baar lived.

  We went in single file up its board incline, and entered a squalid room with matting on the floor, a rude charcoal brazier at one side, and the remains of a previous meal lying on a table.

  Two women were in the room as we entered. I took these to be Baar's wife and a servant. Two naked little children lay on the floor, one of them crying lustily.

  Baar glanced around as he came in, and with what I took to be an oath ordered the children removed from the room. The slave woman--I could see she was a slave by the band upon her arm--picked them up. Evidently she did not move fast enough to suit Baar's temper, for as she straightened up the man cuffed her upon the head. She stumbled to one side against Baar's wife, who was standing there, and the other woman, with a sharp imprecation, struck her full in the breast.

  Neither of them saw the look she gave as she shuffled away, carrying the infants; but I did. It was a look of the most intense hatred, born and nourished, I realized, by long ill-treatment.

  Miela and I were now bound securely hand and foot, and Miela's wings were lashed to her body. Thus rendered entirely helpless, we were laid together in a corner.

  From the talk that followed Miela gathered that Baar and his men were expecting the arrival of others. He roughly ordered his wife--a woman of the Twilight Country, obviously--to clear away the remains of their last meal and bring other food. She obeyed submissively.

  This, the first of the Twilight Country People I had seen, was a thick-set woman of perhaps thirty-five, although she might have been older, for her black hair, which fell in an unkempt mass to her waist, was beginning to gray. She wore a single garment, a pair of silken trousers, drab with dirt. Her clipped wings were covered in the usual way.

  I could see now why Miela had said these Twilight women could not fly, for this woman's torso was fat and flabby. Her skin was curiously pale--a dead, unpleasant white. Her face was broad, heavy and unintelligent. Her eyes were large and protruded slightly.

  Baar and his men ate breakfast, paying no further attention to Miela and me. Suddenly Miela spoke in a frightened whisper. "They are going now in a moment to the castle. The king they will kill!"

  It was evidently a widespread plot we now overheard. Baar's followers had for some time been talking quietly with the lower classes, and, finding they could count on their support, planned now to murder the king. Then with the queen and the little prince held as hostages, they expected that the men of science, threatened also with a revolt of the peons, would release the light-ray.

  The light-ray once in his control, Baar could make himself king. It seemed an absurd hope, but such was the plan they were now discussing. And what was far worse, I could see no way by which I could prevent the attempt.

  "They are going to the castle--now--to murder the king?" I whispered, incredulous.

  "Yes," Miela answered. "So they plan. Now--in a moment--before the time of sleep is over."

  "Isn't he guarded? Can they get in the castle without arousing others?"

  "There are the guards--a few. But Baar has promised them great wealth, and they will stand aside and let him pass. So it is arranged."

  The arrival of several other men interrupted our whispered conversation. Baar, his meal over, consulted with them hurriedly. He then instructed his wife to watch us, and after a moment they all left the house.

  The woman, who was now the only occupant of the room with us, shuffled about, clearing away the meal. I tried desperately to work my hands loose; I even tried with my teeth to gnaw Miela's bonds, but without success. Every moment counted, if we were to do anything to save the king. I wondered again where Lua was--perhaps in another part of the house here, bound as we were.

  "Miela," I whispered, "ask for food. Tell her we have had nothing for many hours. Perhaps she will loosen our bonds a little to let us eat. We may be able to do something then."

  The woman answered Miela's pleading by setting us up side by side, with our backs against the wall. She placed food before us, and then, with a knife, cut the cords that bound our arms.

  My heart leaped exultantly; but, instead of leaving us and going on with h
er work, she sat down just out of reach, holding the knife in her hand and watching us narrowly.

  "We must eat, Miela," I said, using as casual a tone as I could and pointing to the food smilingly. "Eat, and pretend not to notice her. Perhaps I can get to my feet."

  We ate the food she had given us. I tensed the muscles of my legs, and believed that, bound as I was, I might be able to leap forward and reach the woman. It was almost hopeless to attempt it, for I realized she would meet my body with the dagger point.

  We were still eating, and I was thinking over this plan, when the slave woman appeared silently in a doorway across the room, behind the woman who faced us. Something in her attitude made me look away again casually and go on with my eating.

  Miela had evidently not noticed her.

  The slave woman came slowly toward us. A moment later she hurled herself upon Baar's wife from behind. At the same instant I threw myself forward, falling prone, but within reach of the seated woman. I gripped her with my hands, fumbling to catch her wrists, but before I could succeed she toppled forward and fell partly over me.

  I heard Miela give a cry of fright. I struggled free and raised myself up to a half-sitting position. Baar's wife lay beside me dead, with the slave woman's knife buried to the hilt in her back.

  Reaching over, I took the knife from the dead woman's fingers, and with it cut the cords that bound my ankles. I sprang to my feet. The slave had retreated and stood shrinking against the side of the room, terrified at what she had done. I paid no more attention to her for the moment, but hastened to release Miela.

  We searched the house hurriedly, calling to Lua; but she did not answer, nor could we find her. When we returned the slave woman was still standing where we had left her, staring with horrified eyes at the body of her mistress.

  "Tell her what she did was right," I said. "She may have saved the king. Tell her to go to your house and wait for us."