Part 6

She said it frankly, merely as a statement of fact, but there was an unconscious admiration in her gaze. “We need you and we . . . perhaps we need the girls.” She said the last with a singular, enigmatic emphasis.

“Right,” said Jim heartily. “You fix it up for us, get the audience. I want to be out of here. We’ve been tied here like time-keepers in a tower.”

“Our king will die. That is sure now. Our girls must act; it is now or never!”

VIII REBELLING VIRGINS

It was from Sonya that we first learned any tangible details of this new realm. She and I, with Dolores and Alice, were seated by Dr. Weatherby’s bedside. Two days had passed. His condition was unchanged. We were sure now that he would never regain consciousness.

The old king too, was more gravely ill than before. He had sent for us so that at his bedside we might take the oath of service. Jim had gone with Ren. The rest of us remained beside the dying doctor. The end would come soon, at any time now, doubtless.

Sonya was talking softly. I turned from the bedside to regard her earnest face.

“This city,” she was saying, “we call Kalima. There was an ancient tribe dwelt here; the chief, they thought he was a god, the god Kali.” She was addressing Alice, but now she turned to me. “Our land lies in a great depression of this globe’s surface. Once, perhaps, it was the bottom of some great sea. It rises into mountains everywhere. It is not large; we are less than a quarter of a million people. The caves are at the foothills.

“You will hear more of them later.” She had waved aside a question of Dolores’. “On the Great Island, not far from here, is what we call the Village of the Virgins, where now about three hundred of our girls are living in rebellion.”

“Rebellion against the government?” I asked.

“Yes. Against the man-made laws.” She smiled her quiet, grave smile. “You have come, you strangers, at a time to find our nation in what we girls think is a condition very grave. You, my friends, will understand very well what we girls are protesting against. And now, with our prince and princess vanished, and our king about to die, the time has come to—”

She checked herself suddenly.

Alice was regarding her with a blue-eyed gaze of quite obvious admiration. Dolores moved over on the low couch; her hand plucked at the hem of Sonya’s smock as it lay just above her knees and touched the smooth white metal band that encircled her leg.

“Sonya, what is that? Just for ornament? It’s very pretty.”

“No,” she said. “Not altogether for ornament. Every woman wears one.” She brushed her fingers across it; her smile was quizzical. “It is, in fact, well . . . it had become almost a symbol of what we girls are striving for. The virgins’ band. You see, it is quite unmarked. No man’s name is engraved there. I’ll explain in a moment.”

“Our king, with twenty of his counsellors—my cousin Ren is one of them—rule the nation. They make no new laws. The old laws are good enough for them. The guards, you would call them police, are all the army we have.

“They are all men, young, sturdy fellows who have no thought but to do what they are told. Which is right, of course. It is the laws which are wrong, inhuman. They are very old laws. They have now become customs, traditions, handed down from father to son.”

Her tone was suddenly bitter. She gestured with a slim, expressive hand. “I must talk more calmly. These things against which we have now come to open rebellion, were doubtless necessary at the beginning. The laws were made by men who knew no better.

“The difficulty is in the sex of our children. Out of three births, two on the average are females and only one a male. We have, therefore, twice as many females as males—twice as many women as men. Or at least, there would be twice as many if—” She checked herself again.

“Thus we have . . . I think Ren said that on earth it was termed polygamy. A man may marry more than one woman.”

Dolores said impulsively, “Oh, I would not like that! It used to be a custom in many parts of the earth, but there is almost none of it now.”

“We girls of this generation do not like it either,” said Sonya.

Her voice turned very grave. “What we are rebelling against is far worse. Often our girl children, if they seem not destined to be beautiful, are killed. The father does not wish the expense of too many girls.

“Girls or women are never allowed to work. They must only strive to be beautiful. And when they have at last reached the proper age, to get rid of them by marriage, the father must pay a large tax to the state.

“At the age of twenty a girl must choose one of the men who has recorded his name as desiring her. Any man is legally eligible to do that. He may have no wife as yet. Or he may have one wife, or several. If he has the necessary money for the tax, and deposits it with the government, his name is recorded.

“You see,” she was cynical now, “the government needs the money. And it likes our girls to be beautiful. Fifty men may record their names as desiring a girl who is very beautiful.

“She can choose but one man. But the government only refunds half the money the others have deposited. It makes a lot of money on a very beautiful girl.”

“A sort of lottery!” I exclaimed. “With women as the prizes.”

“I do not understand,” said Sonya. “But that is the way it is with us. Beautiful girls are profitable to the government. No girl-child who showed promise of beauty has ever been found murdered.

“But woman’s beauty fades, and there are many female mouths to feed, and female bodies to clothe and house. It makes more work for the men and the men do not like to work. And so—”

The cynicism had left her voice. A hush fell upon her tragic words. “And so, when a woman can no longer bear children, when her beauty is going, then she is considered a burden.

“She has never been trained to work. She is useless; an expense.

“Each year our old women are chosen—a certain number of them, depending on the birth-rate—are chosen to die. They are given a blanket, a little food, and are taken to a place we call Death Island. Left there alone, they live a while. Then die.

“I’ve seen them draw the death number! I’ve seen, on the island, their wasted bodies lying huddled!” Her voice choked. “But they go away, start for the island so patient, so resigned.

“It is that for which we are in rebellion more than anything else! We of this generation now cannot stand it. We will not stand it!”

To my mind had come memories of the savages of our earth, not so many centuries ago. They too, had thought it expedient to leave aged members of their tribes to die. The vision Sonya was invoking to my imagination was horrible. I found my voice.

“Your men here, Sonya, surely they are not all against you girls? Your cause?”

“No,” she said. “But how many are with us at heart, we do not know. And men are very strange. You cannot talk with them; they pretend you are not intelligent enough to be worthy of talking. My cousin Ren—”

Ren! It seemed incongruous.

She went on, “He is like all the rest. It is not, from his viewpoint, inhuman. It is the way things always have been. His mother died that way. He says, ‘Her life was ended.’ He says that men, brave men, meet death that way. Their life is over, the creator calls them and they go bravely.”

“But,” said Dolores, “the man who hands out the death number is not the creator.”

“Ah,” said Sonya, “but if you told that to a man he would say you do not understand.”

Her hand went to her leg. “You asked me about this band. It is placed upon us when we are just maturing. On it is engraved the name of the man we are to marry.

“If he divorces us, that is written here, and the name of the man who next takes us. Our marriage record: written plain that all may see!” Her fingers touched the band’s smooth surface. “There is nothing on mine, as yet. And there never will be, unless we win our case.”

Alice said, “Are you one of the rebels?”

“I am at heart, and I’m working with them. Technically, legally I am not. It is nearly a year yet, as you on your earth measure time, before I am of the age when I can be forced to marry.”

“What have the girls done?” I asked. “Refused to marry?”

“Yes. About eighteen hundred of them. Most are just about at the legal age. They left the cities, went to the Great Island, and there they have built themselves a village. They grow food there; they work; they are self-supporting. To many old women and a few girl-children, they have given sanctuary.”

“And the government does nothing about it?” I exclaimed.

“They did, at first. Men were sent to the Virgins’ Island to get some of the old women; but the girls forcibly resisted them. Some of the girls were killed. Nothing much has been done about it since. The government, I think, does not know what to do.”

She was scornful. “Our girls are very beautiful. It would not be profitable to kill them.”

Alice said, “You reach the marriage age in a year, Sonya? Have any men recorded their names for you?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “There were eight, I think, when I last went to the records.”

“But you wouldn’t marry any of them? Or perhaps I should not ask.”

“Why not? There is no secret in such things. One man whose name is recorded for me I love very dearly. Our prince.”

A sound from Dolores interrupted her. Dolores was sitting with hands to her forehead and eyes closed. She murmured, “I caught someone’s thoughts! Now they come again.”

We waited through a breathless silence. Then Dolores murmured, “The prince. You called him Altho? It is he!”

Sonya gripped her. “What is he thinking? Tell me! Tell me quickly!”

Then she too, received the thoughts. She sat tense. “Oh, the princess is dead! Killed!”

“Killed!” echoed Dolores. Then her face went vague: she was getting nothing more.

But evidently Sonya was still in communication. She cried aloud involuntarily, “Altho! Dearest, dearest Altho! Where are you? Tell Sonya. Oh, he does not know! Or he cannot tell me! He says—” it was a stark whisper of horror—“he says soon he will be killed too.”

She sprang to her feet, then abruptly sat down again. “Altho! Altho, where are you?”

The communication broke. Her face went vague, puzzled, empty. And then despairing.

Beyond the window, in the street below the balcony, a sudden murmur of voices floated up to us. We went to the balcony. It was night now, a night of pale stars in a cloudless sky. Shouting people were coming up the street. They appeared in a moment at the bottom of the hill, a crowd of men, a hundred or more. They came forward, swept around the corner, and vanished. Above the babble was a single sentence. A man called it. Others took it up.

Sonya murmured, “They say, ‘Our king is dying.’ And the princess dead! And your grandfather. . . . Death everywhere!”

The man in the street shouted again. And Sonya sprang from the couch.

“He says, ‘Our king is dead.’” She laughed hysterically. “Death everywhere! I must go to the Island of the Virgins. Will you come? I can take you. The virgins are ready! We must act at once!”

IX THE NAMELESS HORROR

It was the first time we had had any freedom since our arrival. Ren had not returned with Jim. If the king were really dead, there would be a great confusion at the castle. They might be detained indefinitely.

Sonya would not wait. “A few hours only,” she urged. “Then we will be back. I will leave a message for my cousin and your friend.”

The first shock of Dr. Weatherby’s death was over. There was no advantage in the girls remaining here.

We started finally. On the lower floor of the house we found long dark cloaks and donned them, with a queerly flat, mound-shaped hat for me and light scarfs to cover the girls’ heads. The lower door was open. Ren had left it so, knowing that Sonya would stay with us.

Technically we were prisoners. But Sonya paid scant ceremony to that now. The king was dead: our oath of allegiance to the nation would be taken for granted.

“My allegiance goes to you,” Dolores said naively. “You girls.”

Alice nodded.

“Yes,” said Sonya. “But do not say so openly. And you, my friend, Leonard—you are a man—be careful what you say if you have any sympathy for our cause.”

Sympathy! How mild a word, as again visions of what she had told us sprang before me!

In this residential section of the city there was at this hour no traffic in the street. The shouting crowd had disappeared. Sonya led us to the main street level. The pedestrian bridges were above us.

An unnatural silence seemed to hang about the dark, somnolent city, as though it only seemed sleeping and was wide awake. A tenseness was in the air. The houses were dark, but in almost every window I fancied that figures were watching, faces peering out.

We avoided the lights. Mounted the hill for a block or two, then turned into a very narrow street of shadows.

The houses here, the back of houses, I assumed, were blank, two-storied walls.

We passed each of them hurriedly. My heart was thumping. Sonya had said that these were merely back entrances to inner courtyards of the houses. But it seemed, to my sharpened fancy, that in every one some horrible lurking thing was waiting to spring upon us.

Sonya was leading. She was taking us through a back way to her home, to get the vehicle that would transport us to the island. We were nearing the end of the alley; it opened ahead of us into a broad street with a dim glow of light illumining it. To our right, just ahead, was a courtyard entrance: a yawning cave-mouth of emptiness.

We had almost reached it when Sonya abruptly halted, checked our advance as though she had struck some invisible barrier, stopped, and shrank backward, pressing against us. And her hand in terror was over her mouth to stifle a scream.

I saw it then, what she was seeing. A thing, something monstrous, lurking in the blackness of that cave-like house entrance, a thing huge, of vague, grotesque outline, an upright thing, with a great balloon-like head, bobbing from side to side, two eyes glowing in the darkness. And below them, where a neck might have been, two other smaller eyes, green, blazing points of fire.

In all my veins the blood seemed freezing, prickling needle-points of ice exuding through my pores, my scalp prickling at the hair-roots. I was stricken with fright and horror. But an instinct, so that I scarcely realized what I was doing, made me pull Sonya soundlessly backward, sweep all three of the girls behind me and downward. And as they sank to the pavement, I crouched tense in front of them.

The thing seemingly had not heard us, or seen us. It advanced out of the darkness of the doorway; in the dimness of the outside light I saw it more clearly, a thing like a great upright animal, ten feet tall, perhaps, and monstrously cast in human mold, with thick, bent legs. It had a long, thick trunk with wide, powerful shoulders and a deep, bulging chest, and arms that dangled nearly to its knees.

Its head, no wider than its powerful neck, was small, round, and flat on top. There seemed a face; its tiny blazing eyes were plain in the darkness.

A two-headed thing! The small head was bent forward. Behind it, as though astride of the shoulders, was another head, balloon-like: huge, wider than the shoulders, a head seemingly inflated, distended. A large flat face. The thing took a step. Its large head wobbled as it moved.

My hand behind me kept the girls motionless. The thing came to the end of the narrow street, emerged into the glow of light there. It did not pause—the light obviously was not to its liking—it bounded sidewise, noiseless on padded feet, and was gone into the shadows.

But in that instant under the light, I had seen it more clearly. A giant, gorilla-like figure. A man! Black hair seemed upon its body, but the body was partially clothed. And I fancied I had seen a belt strapped about its waist, with dangling weapons.

The bobbling head astride upon its shoulders was very different from the rest of the thing. A bloated membrane? I got that impression. It seemed a smooth, dead-white skin; I thought I had seen distended veins on it.

And as the powerful body leaped, I fancied I saw thin little arms, four of them, hanging inert from the bloated head.

It was gone. I breathed again. Behind me the huddled girls were shuddering. At my ear Sonya was whispering,

“The Nameless Horror!”

X THE FLIGHT TO THE VIRGINS’ ISLAND

We did not continue down that street. Sonya took us back. We turned another corner, and another. Soon we were near her home. She had not swerved from her purpose to take us to the Virgins’ Island. This thing we had seen was one of many of its kind which dwelt in the fastnesses of the mountains beyond the caves.

They never came out into the light; none, Sonya thought, had ever been seen more clearly than we had seen this one. No man of this realm, to Sonya’s knowledge, had ever ventured into the caves to seek them out.

I could not understand such a condition. On earth, nothing had ever been so fearsome but that man had sought to destroy it. But these people were of a different cast of mind.

“Sonya,” I demanded, “how long have these things been in the caves?”

“They were first seen only just before our prince and princess vanished.”

We reached Sonya’s home, a low, oval stone building, dark in its enshrouding garden of flower-trees. She led us aside, toward a small outbuilding. I suddenly paused.

I was in sympathy with Sonya and her cause, but was not the plight of the prince more important? Had I not better go and join Jim now, and follow the course we had planned?

We reached the dark, single-storied outbuilding. Sonya touched a switch. A soft glow showed inside. It was a square building of stone and metal, windows barred by a metal screening, a doorway with a hinged screen.

“Sonya,” I said, “just what is this you intend doing?”

She regarded me. Alice and Dolores stood beside her. I found myself arrayed against the three of them.

“Why,” she said, “we are going to the Island of the Virgins. The girls are ready; we have been waiting—” she hesitated, then finished, “waiting for this chance which has come tonight.”

“What chance? The king being ill or dead?”

Her eyes flashed. “Yes. The girls are ready. They will come back with us, now.”

She stood with shoulders squared, a defiant little figure before me.

I said, more gently, “What are you girls planning to do, Sonya?”

I think she had already told Alice and Dolores. They moved closer as though to defend her. Alice flashed me a defiant look.

I repeated, “What are you planning to do?”

Her eyes held level. “It is not my secret. You are a man. I have no right to tell you.” She added very slowly, but wholly without emotion,

“I think perhaps you had better go back.”

It struck me with a vague sense of shame. I felt like a deserter.

Alice said calmly, “Are you going back, Len?”

With what loyalty these girls already were banded against me! Little Dolores clutched me.

“Don’t do that, Leonard! Sonya, you misunderstand him.”

I tried to explain myself. “It’s only because I thought the other course would be better for the prince,” I finished. “How long will this take us, Sonya?”

Sudden tears were in her eyes. “I believe you! But you must know that I . . . least of all, would delay to help him I love! Mine is the better way, and we won’t be long—a few hours at most.”

I yielded, “All right, Sonya. You know best.”

We entered the building, a large room divided by the metal screening into huge cages. A great commotion, the flapping of wings, greeted our entrance. Travel in this realm indeed was primitive. We were to go by air, on a gliding platform drawn by giant birds trained to harness.

Sonya pulled down a swinging tube of light from the ceiling and held it toward one of the cages. Eight giant birds were there, soft, gray-white feathered bodies, heads small, round and bald with black top-knots like plumes.

They stood upon short legs, yet were as tall as myself. They seemed very gentle; they regarded us timorously, but curiously. They knew Sonya; as she entered the cage, they nuzzled with their beaks against her smock.

“Ah, Nana! They want sweets,” she laughed. One, more bold, pecked at her pocket. She leaned, and with her shoulder heaved it away. Then she produced small pieces of sweetmeat and made them each take a piece decorously.

“They are well trained, you see?” She rested an arm against the great curving side of one of them. I could well imagine that on its soft back she could have ridden into the air. One had lazily opened its wings; a feathered spread of fifteen feet at least, graceful wings, gray-white, with tips that were solid black.

The platform was under an enclosure of the flat roof. Sonya rolled it out, a platform some ten feet long, by six wide. Soft furs covered its surface. It was mounted upon small wheels, with a frame set in small cylinders of compressed gas as cushions against the shock of landing.

Midway of the platform, underneath, was a cross rod. Sonya extended its sections sidewise, each jutting out some six feet beyond the platform edge. To each of the ends of this rod, a bird was harnessed. The other six were in two strings in front, three in a string, one in advance of the other.

There were reins for the leading birds to pull their heads gently from one side to the other, a rein to pull downward on their feet, another rein, which when drawn upon, raised a cushion to press upward against the bird’s throat.

It took Sonya only a few minutes to harness them. I had been inspecting the platform. It was built of a light metal framework, upon which a thin, strong membrane was stretched. The whole seemed light as a kite.