Chapter VII

REVOLT OF THE WINGED VIRGINS.

It was a run of some two miles across the level of the city to where the street began the ascent of the inner slope of the valley-side. A street like a wide road, with verdure over it, sometimes interlocking overhead; and low stone houses, set back in gardens or small cultivated patches of field.

The emergency street lights were not adequate. It was dark everywhere; dark and confused. People were in the street, or gathered before their dwellings, apprehensive of the coming storm. But I saw it was more than that—an excitement at something transpiring.

No one heeded us as we dashed along. I had to measure my pace for Toh. With my giant leaps, I could at once have outdistanced him.

A city cart passed us, drawn by a gruesome, insect-like brue, a giant jointed thing. I heard a girl crying within the cart.

There were many girls flying about. Like huge, aimless frightened birds, they flapped overhead. We passed a house with one of Roc's official carts standing before it. His yellow-jacketed guards were lined at the garden wall—gray-skinned, heavy, dull-featured men from the Cold Country. The brue in the cart harness stretched its jointed length at ease along the ground and lifted its head with an uncanny pseudo-human movement as though listening.

And from the house came the screams of a girl.

"Toh! What is happening?"

But Tama's brother urged me to the other side of the street. We passed the house unnoticed by the guards. But I think that the brue was aware of me. Its head turned with bristling, waving antenne.

Toh panted, "Faster, Guy. I can—go faster."

We climbed the hill, passed the last of the houses. I carried Toh in my arms for a little way so that he might recover his breath. We reached the top of the cliff. Naked metal crags up here. The valley of the city lay stretched beneath us. Lights were moving everywhere. The forms of flying girls—a party of them went over us, their great wings waving as they breasted the wind, their draperies flowing behind them.

The naked, rolling waste of the uplands lay before us. The lurid sky hung close overhead. The wind was increasing. Soon the rain would come.

"Which way, Toh?"

"Near here."

We attained a near-by eminence, half a mile or so from the city rim, a level space of jagged, broken crags. The city was hidden from here. Bowlders lay strewn about. Rifts yawned like black gashes in a wild confusion of metal rock. The smooth places gleamed like burnished copper in the brief red lightning-flares of the storm. It was an inferno of glare and crackling thunder-puffs.

Toh gasped throatily: "Let us—wait here."

We crouched in a hollow of an arching rock-spire. Then Tama came. She had been waiting near by, and saw us arrive. She came soaring from overhead—a dark blob against the red sky.

Toh gripped me. "There she is!"

Her body hung breast down. Her ten-foot spread of wings tilted, swayed as she circled, balancing, descending. She fluttered down, her feet dropping, her wings flapping backward as she righted herself to land on tiptoe before us.

She waited for them on the metal cliff.

"Guy—you came! I was afraid that Toh could not get in to you."

It was brighter up here than down in the city. The red sky painted Tama's deep-red feathered wings a lurid crimson. They were folded now as she stood before us, arching from her shoulder-blades, with their tips just clearing the ground behind her.

She wore the usual silky gray-blue trousers, bound at her ankles; her bare feet were encased in sandals, with gold cords crossing her instep and fastened to the lower trouser hem. And a silken, gray-blue scarf wound about her waist, crossing in front, passing up over her breast and shoulders, crossing again between the wings behind and descending to the waist.

Her hair was a glossy black. It covered her ears; and its two long thick plaits were laced tightly with silken cords. They came forward over each shoulder; each was fastened to her body in two places—at the waist, and again where the plait ended, at the outside of her trouser leg, just at the knee.

"Guy—"

I noticed that from her belt a knife handle protruded. I seized her out-stretched hands.

"Tama, what is going on to-night? This turmoil—?"

Several inches shorter than Toh, she stood like a child before me. But there was nothing of the child in her swift vehement words. Nor in the flash of her dark eyes, the set of her jaw.

"Guy, I have need to question you. Quickly. Please, will you answer?"

I held her hands and stood gazing down at her upturned face. The red sheen of the storm deepened its flush.

"Yes," I said.

"You know not—you know nothing of the events of the two day-cycles past. To-day—yesterday—Roc has held you really a prisoner."

"That I did not know, Tama. I did not realize—"

"No," she retorted cynically, "because you had work; no need to go out. But yesterday I sent Toh to try and get you. They would not let him in. And the things that are transpiring in the city—"

A vision of Roc rose before me. His hawk-like gray face; his long black hair, shot with white for all his youth, streaming over his ears. His leer as he assigned the work that I was to do, and told me to proceed with the completion of my rocket-cylinder.

Tama demanded abruptly, "Guy, can you get control of any weapons?"

"No."

"What weapons are there? We girls know nothing of such things. But you, in your work—"

There are no weapons used in the Light Country of the sort which on Earth would be called modern. Explosives are unknown. There are knives, and feathered arrows flung with a sling. And several devices for longer range, mostly of the catapult principle. Crude, mechanical things.

But I understood that the government had small electronic weapons, and defensive electro-armament. There is an electro-magnetic current known to the Light Country scientists. I suppose it is something akin to what is called electricity on Earth. But I had never seen the weapons developed from it.

"They are all sealed in the storehouse, Tama, under the palace. They keep an arsenal there in case of need—an attack of savages from the Fire Country, or a revolt of the Cold Country slaves."

That last word affected her strangely. "Revolt—of slaves. Ah, yes!" A murmured, tense bitterness. Then she added, "Could you get in there?"

"No, I don't believe so."

"Have you ever been in the arsenal?"

"Let me see—yes, once, years ago."

She thought a moment. The rain was starting big, splattering drops. The wind was steadily increasing, and growing hotter now; this storm was whirling down upon us from the Fire Country.

Tama drew me closer under the overhanging rock. Toh crouched with us. He said abruptly, "There was once a long-range ray. My father told me of it."

Again a vision of Roc rose jeeringly at me. It was Roc who originally had told me of this high-powered ray, a lost and almost forgotten weapon. Centuries ago, the Light Country civilization had reached a higher peak than now. There had been many wars with the neighboring savages of the hotter and colder regions. With these declining and the population of Mercury steadily decreasing, the Light Country began to turn primitive. The ray was lost now in the dim pages of history. It was almost a legend handed down from generation to generation.

Tama said, "What sort of a ray?"

I answered, "An electronic ray-projector. The ray-current itself is known. I think the government has small hand projectors. The lost mechanism was for long range. Very high-powered. A death-ray."

Roc had smiled very strangely at me when he described what the ray must have been.

Toh put in again: "They are trying to discover that lost ray, in the government workshops."

"Yes," I agreed.

"But it is not ready now?" Tama interjected.

"I think not."

"Then we cannot get it—nor can it be used against us. You cannot get any other weapons, Guy?"

"No. Tama, these questions must tell me what—" I gripped her. "Tama, child, this turmoil to-night—?"

"I will tell you what is the meaning of this turmoil, as you call it."

I listened, amazed by her vehement, passionate words. For months past, the virgins of the Hill City had been refusing marriage—isolated instances of rebellion. I knew that, of course. But what I did not know was that two days ago, news had spread about the city of a law which Roc was proposing to the Government Council. That law had been passed this morning. And they were starting to put it into effect to-night.

"Forcing us into marriage, Guy! No longer now can we keep our wings until we take a husband."

They were clipping the wings of every girl over sixteen years of age in the city.

"So we will have no reason to refuse marriage, since we are mutilated anyway."

I thought of Roc's official cart as I had seen it before that house. And the girl screaming inside.

The city was in chaos. The girls had had two days' warning. There had been plans—preparations. The thing that they had been contemplating for months under Tama's leadership was now forced upon them.

"We are going, Guy! Open rebellion now. Two thousand virgins—I think we can get that many."

A flight—an exodus of the marriageable young girls from the Hill City. There are five other large cities in the Light Country. The girls in them would soon come also. All day the word had been circulating. This black storm aided them in escaping. A preliminary rendezvous had been determined—a hundred miles or so off in the metallic barren desert toward the central Fire Country.

Even now the girls were flying there, singly, in groups, slipping from their homes—seeking out friends to tell them also—winging away from the Hill City into the lurid, storm-filled gloom.

"And we have built little platforms," Tama was saying. "With handles, so that the girls can fly with them. We're taking the victims—the few we can gather who have already been mutilated this night. Guy, when you see the poor things! Their wings, once so beautiful, with the feathers clipped and plucked—the muscles cut—the blood streaming—"

Toh said suddenly: "I killed a man to-night."

She seemed not to hear him. I had leaped to my feet, pulling her with me. She stood now, clinging to me. And she was suddenly trembling.

"We—I want you, Guy. Want you with us. I will take you on one of the little platforms. We will hide—off in the desert. We are going permanently, Guy. Two thousand of us. And there will be others come to join us. We've got to do it! There is nothing left now. We'll find soil. Some little hidden valley where we can build shelters and grow food. There is nothing else left for us to do!"

She silenced my questions with her tumult of words: "Will you come? We need you—we are not such fools that we do not realize a man can fight for existence in the desert better than girls. There is Toh—and a few other young men are coming. A little band of you men to help—to lead us."

She ended with a wild appeal. "You of the great Earth who know so much—and yet you know so little of how the virgins of Mercury feel about their wings! Guy, will you come?"