Part 7

Beneath it, set in the space between its landing gear, was a system of small, flexible wings, and movable cones through which the air rushed. And there was a horizontal and vertical rudder, with flexible tips. Flying skill was needed. There were several controls near the front of the platform, where now the reins were held in a notched cross-bar.

“We are ready,” said Sonya. She stretched upon her side on the fur covering of the platform with the reins and the controls before her.

We took our places beside her and behind her, lying at full length, arms crooked into leather straps to hold us. Sonya called to the birds. Eight of them as one, leaped upward. The great wings flapped. We moved, rolled across the roof. At its edge we lifted with a jerk.

The low housetop, the dark trees, other roofs, the dim city lights all slid downward into a blur of shadow. On a long slant, we headed upward into the starlit night.

I lay on my side, clinging to that swaying, leaping platform. The wind surged past, tearing away every sound save the flapping of those giant wings. A graceful bird on each side of me, two strings of them slanting upward in front, winged swiftly up into the night, drawing me after them.

The dark world was lost and gone. The star encrusted dome of the heavens encompassed everything.

This was not an air voyage. It was flying. The platform fluttered, slid over the air like some swiftly drawn kite. The heavens swung with a dizzy lurching. I gazed over the edge at the dark, moving landscape far down.

The faint lights of the city showed a thinly-built, suburban area, then the shore of a star-lit sea ahead. Primitive flying, with the first startling strangeness of it gone, its romance swept over me, a magic carpet upon which I lay, magically flying over reams of mystery, a flight unreal—romantically miraculous.

I was brought back from roaming fancy. Dolores, lying beside me, was pulling at my shoulder. I caught her words before the wind snatched at them.

“Look, Leonard! There is the island!”

There was no fear of this flight upon Dolores’s face. Only an eager wonderment, her mind struggling with these sights: romantic, awing to me, how much more so to her so newly emerged from a life-long darkness! “See the island, Leonard!”

We were, I suppose, no more than a thousand feet high. The shore of the sea was nearly beneath us, a dark, curving shore of gray sand with gentle white waves rolling upon it. Beyond the shore, some ten miles out, a dark island showed. It seemed irregularly circular.

As we swept closer its beach became visible, gray-white sand with white rollers. A tangle of vegetation was behind the beach, a forest jungle with the land sloping up over gentle foothills to a cone-shaped hill which occupied the island’s center.

Along one shore of the island, yellow and blue spots of lights were showing among the trees at the edge of the beach. It was all dim in the starlight. Far ahead, where the sea unbroken reached the horizon of stars, a yellow glow had come to the sky.

Sonya gestured, “The moon is rising.”

It came with a startling abruptness. A great yellow world swung up, twice, three times the visual size of our moon: a glowing yellow disk, marked with the dark configurations of its mountains. It rose horn-shaped, mounted straight up, slowly, but with a movement quite visible. The stars paled around it. A flood of yellow light lay upon the sea in a broad path of rippling gold.

The island was bathed in the golden flood. We were much closer to it now, swooping a few hundred feet above its beach which along here was broad and hard. The jungle was beside us, a fairyland of tropical verdure.

Warmed by the waters of the sea, and perhaps by hidden fires of the cone-shaped hill, the vegetation grew to giant size.

A giant forest edged with gold, mysteriously dark, romantic, amorous, scented with spices and the heavy perfume of flowers.

We landed upon the beach where the warm waves were liquid gold beside low, primitive, palm-thatched dwellings set like ground nests in the verdure.

With the rush of our flight gone, I felt a new warmth in the air. Upon my cheeks was the caressing breath of a warm breeze from the sea; it stirred the palm-fronds to amorous whispering.

White figures were drawn back from the beach to watch us land. They crowded forward into the moonlight, young girls, slim and white, with long, flowing black hair.

As I stood up and stepped from the platform to the sand, some of them scattered and fled with startled feminine cries into the enshrouded foliage. Others came shyly forward, crowded around us—golden nymphs in the moonlight, with a brief, veil-like garment from shoulder to thigh.

They were surprised at me, a man, here upon their island. They crowded around Sonya, talking seemingly all at once, casting mistrustful glances at me, and glances of curiosity and friendliness at Alice and Dolores.

What Sonya said to them I could only guess. It caused an excitement; like fauns, many of them leaped away, running down the beach, scattering over the village. In the distance I could hear their cries, and other cries, shouts, a great activity beginning.

And presently there was heard the cheep of giant birds, the flapping of their wings as they were released from their cages and brought out to be harnessed. Far ahead down the beach in the moonlight, presently a crowd of the girls began rolling out a huge platform.

The few girls who remained with Sonya continued talking. They were tense now, but wholly composed, beautiful, intelligent-looking girls, most of them a year or so older than Sonya, and very much the same type. Upon the left leg of each, just above the knee, was a broad metal band.

The girls now were ignoring me. But Sonya called Dolores and Alice over, and it was obvious they were welcomed.

I saw presently, some of the older women. With a few little girls among them, they came to the edge of the forest and stood timidly regarding us—infancy and age, common fugitives.

Alice was gesturing toward the sky. I turned. Off there in the starlight, in the direction we had come, was a lone bird flying. In a moment I could see its wings.

Sonya called something; and added to Alice, “A girl arriving from Kalima.”

The bird swooped in a great descending arc, a great white bird like those which had drawn our platform. Mounted upon its back was the figure of a girl, her arms clinging about its neck. It soared with poised wings, descended to the beach near us.

The girl leaped to the sand and called, “Sonya! Sonya!”

They talked in their own language; then Sonya whirled to me. Her face had gone white.

“Alta, this girl, lives very near Ren’s house in Kalima. I do not mean my home, his and mine. I mean that other house of his where you were living. Alta went there to see me.”

She was talking swiftly. Alice and Dolores drew me to one side; a common feeling of disaster was upon us all.

“Alta found the door open and went in. She read my message to Ren, that we had come here to the island. She was leaving. In the street outside she heard voices. From the window she saw Ren with your Jim. They were nearly to the house.

“Then . . . a great black thing leaped upon them, a giant, with a great, wobbling head. What we saw, Leonard! The Nameless Horror! It leaped upon them, and there were two or three others of its kind. They seized my cousin and Jim. Lifted them up, carried them off! She . . . Alta, took one of my birds, and came here to tell us!”

XI A MAN, TO PLAY A MAN’S PART

I stood a moment, transfixed with horror. Alice’s face had become as white as Sonya’s. Dolores uttered a faint little cry, “Jim!”

“Sonya—” I began. But she had turned to give orders to the girls. They sped away. I finished, “Sonya, get me back, at once!”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But you can do nothing—a stranger—you cannot talk our language.”

“I can, with you to interpret for me.”

She whirled upon Alta with other questions, then back to me. “More than ever now, I must go through with our plans. Alta says the king is not dead. But dying, he will die at any moment. We must get back.”

Down the beach the large platform was ready. A hundred girls or more were loading upon it. With a great flapping of the wings of the birds, it moved down the beach. Rose into the air. It had four strings of ten birds each, with others harnessed in tandem all along its sides. Magnificently, it sailed upward, turned in a broad arc, and passed us high overhead.

From everywhere now the girls were rising. Another great platform, and still another. A score of smaller ones; and from the forest, a hundred or more individual birds, each with a lone rider.

They flapped up from among the palms; circled overhead, with their numbers augmenting until they headed away. The first platforms were now mere blobs in the starlight. A thousand girls, I estimated, were up there in flight.

We hurried to our platform. Again we were in the air. Below us still another platform was rising; around us, three or four mounted birds circled like a convoy. We took our place in the line and sped back to the city.

“Is the king dead, Sonya?”

“No. I do not think so.”

I waited a moment. “Sonya, you girls are not armed?”

She said impulsively, “No. But in the underground rooms of the castle, the science weapons are stored. Once we get control of them—” She checked herself, but she had told me what I wanted to know. An arsenal under the castle! The weapons of a half-forgotten science of this decadent race, stored there!

I shuddered at the visions which surged to my imagination. Here in the city—a government menaced by crusading girls! This was our condition, pitiable indeed, to oppose a savage, outside enemy!

Yet what was I to do? I pondered it until a vague possibility came to me. It gripped me. It seemed feasible. I believed I could accomplish it. With swiftness of action, power, dominance, I could carry it through. A grim exaltation was upon me. A man, to play a man’s part.

We landed with a swoop upon the moonlit garden sward. The girls crowded around us, with a fringe of curious, apathetic men behind them. Sonya turned to speak to Alice and Dolores. Near by was a dark path between beds of giant flowers. I slipped from the platform. With my cloak held before my face, I avoided the girls and plunged into the shadows of the flowered path.

The path was dark, cut off from the moonlight by a great bed of flowers rising high above my head. A group of men came toward me; I stepped between the flower stalks, stood enshrouded in my cloak, my figure merging with the shadows, until the men had passed.

I caught a near glimpse of them. Young men, stalwart fellows, no doubt, according to the standards of their race. But not one of them was taller than my shoulder, and beside me, they were frail, delicate of build.

In a weaponless fight, I could doubtless have engaged two or three of them, and come off the victor.

The path turned into a dim street that encircled the rear of the castle, into the arsenal through some postern gate along here. The arsenal was within this curving wall of stone. I passed such a gate now, a small narrow opening, half the height of my upright body. But it was blocked solidly with a metal door which I could see no way of opening.

I passed on, heading back through the city to the house in which we had been held since our arrival. Behind that house, with a viaduct connecting them, was the laboratory room in which we had arrived. Our space-vehicle was there. I could not operate the vehicle, but it held a weapon I wanted.

I remembered that Jim had brought it. In the excitement of our arrival, the strangeness of everything, we had forgotten it, the Frazier beam, brought out by an Aberdeen physicist in 1994.

I had left the castle behind me, and turned, somewhat dubiously, into another street. I was sure if I could get to Sonya’s house, where so recently we had been, I could retrace my way from there. I had planned this while on the flying platform as we circled over the castle. I had been able then to locate Sonya’s home, and to gauge the lay of the streets in between. I turned another corner. The street was brighter.

Another corner. I saw and recognized Sonya’s house. From there, my way was sure. Within twenty minutes after leaving the castle grounds, I was groping in the darkness back of the house where Dr. Weatherby’s body lay.

It was near here that the Nameless Horrors had caught Jim and Ren. But I saw no signs of them now. The viaduct connecting the two buildings was a dark thin line against the stars. The building I was hoping to enter was wholly dark. A two-story structure: the viaduct extended from its upper floor.

I prowled around. The lower window openings were all barred. The door oval was barred. A stairway led up from the ground to the viaduct. From the viaduct’s platform I saw a cornice, too high for a normal man to reach. But I leaped for it, pulled myself up upon the dome-shaped roof of a turret.

A leap from here and I was upon the main flat roof. There should be a door under a mound cover; most of the buildings had them. I located it, wrenched at its bar. It yielded. I went down a curving metal ladder, into the house.

In a moment I had located the laboratory room. Our vehicle in its full normal size lay here, dead white, an end of it tinged yellow by a shaft of moonlight.

I stepped within it, went to Jim’s cupboard, lighting a tiny battery light overhead. The Frazier weapon I sought was here. Its _copite_ cone, with smooth glistening bone handle, _copite_ headband, the tiny pulse motor, the wires; it was all complete.

A triumph swept me. I was unarmed no longer. Playing a lone hand, here in this strange world, a man, comparatively of giant strength and physical power. But I was more than that now. I had a mental weapon, and the mental strength to use it.

I did not stop to adjust the apparatus. I wound it up in its wire, and hastily retreated. I reached the street, with the weapon under my cloak. I hurried back to the castle over the same route; I did not want to chance losing my way.

But as I advanced, I had more than memory of the streets to guide me. From the direction of the castle, a blur of cries was audible, a hum, a murmur, which as I progressed resolved itself into shouts. The shouting of a mob: heavy, angry voices of men, shrill cries of girls, a single, long, agonized scream of a girl.

I was on a lower street that fronted the water. A side entrance to the castle grounds was before me. Through the trees I could see the frowning turreted walls of the castle. I stopped to adjust my weapon.

It took no more than a moment. Around my forehead, with hat discarded, I bound the headband, a narrow strip of finely woven _copite_ wire, with two small electrodes pressing my temples.

On the right side two finely drawn silk-insulated wires dangled from the headband to my neck. I tucked them under my shirt, over my shoulder, down my right arm to my wrist. A band at my wrist, to which the wires were attached, held the tiny pulse-motor in place. My heart set it in motion, to generate the necessary current.

The Frazier projector was a _copite_ cone, this one some ten inches long; its shape was a cone section, one end, the muzzle, with an open diameter of six inches, the other end, one-fifth inch, across which the diaphragm was fitted.

The bone handle screwed into place at the diaphragm. It was hollow. Within it were amplifying tubes and a transformer, miracles of smallness. The whole projector weighed some twenty Troy ounces. I plugged the two connecting wires from my wristband to its butt, gripped the handle with my index finger along its side, resting on the trigger button.

I was ready! My heart was racing. The tiny motor at my wrist was racing. I could feel the hum of the current, the prickling of it under the forehead band, its tiny stabbing throb at the electrodes pressing my temples. There was power within me.

I had flung off my cloak. I stood in the white silk shirt, dark, short, tight trousers, and high, heavy black stockings of my earth costume, stood with outflung arms for an instant and exulted in the wave of triumph which swept me. Against the people the power of my weapon would be invincible.

Furtive no longer, I advanced with bold, open strides to the gate of the castle grounds. A few men were there, evidently about to enter. They stared at me. Before the strangeness of my aspect, the boldness of my flashing glance, they quailed, cried with fear and scattered before me.

I did not heed them. Beyond the gate, back from the water there was a rise of ground. I mounted it, and from the thicket of flowers that ornamented its top, gazed out at the moonlit scene.

Between the mound on which I stood, and the foot of the broad staircase leading up the broad terrace to the castle entrance, a throng of men were standing.

Spectators, standing idle. Occasionally a group of them would surge forward in one direction or the other, milling about some individual who seemed abruptly determined upon a course of action. A mob without a leader. Excited, aimless, striving for points of vantage to see what was taking place in front.

The girls were massed at the foot of the castle steps. Evidently, just before I arrived, the girls had tried to mount them. The guards were gathered in a group on top. Half way down, a girl’s body was lying. It writhed, rolled down the steps. From the crowd of men a murmur rose.

The scene was clear in the yellow moon-glow. The throng of girls at the staircase bottom, were gathering their leaders, preparing again to mount. The tense guards on top seemed confused, not knowing how to deal with this unarmed attack.

On the castle balcony, at the head of the steep metal stairway, a few other guards were standing. And on the rooftop, I could make out the doddering figures of old men, gazing down in confused terror.

There was, momentarily, a pause over the scene: a silence, expectant.

But abruptly the hush was broken by a shrill, electrical whine. It rose in pitch to a scream, a siren from the castle battlements. It screamed for a moment, then abruptly was stilled.

I wondered what it meant. The crowd was stricken breathless. But for an instant only. Then it broke into a roar of shouting.

The king had died!

I did not know it at the time, but I suspected it. On the rooftop, the old men were waving their arms; one of them seemed trying to talk to the throng. But his voice was lost in the din.

As though the siren had been a signal, the girls began swarming up the staircase, unarmed girls—unarmed save for the shining armor of their virginity and the desperation of their purpose. I stood watching; it was necessary for me to know with what arms the guards were equipped.

Some fifty young men, they stood in a group at the head of the staircase. The girls came up in a throng. I saw then that each of the guards seemed armed only with a long, curved knife, like a scimitar, incased in a black metal sheath.

Some drew these knives, waved the naked blades. But the girls were beyond intimidation. They came surging—a hundred of them in the first rank, with other hundreds pressing from below. The guards met them halfway down, a confusion of white figures with the black forms of the guards struggling in their midst.

A man with twenty girls around him. He did not want to use his naked sword. It was torn from him, the girls tearing at him savagely. He went down; the white forms swept over him. A girl who had secured his sword waved it with shrill cries.

Another guard, more desperate, was using his sheathed weapon as a club. He had cleared a space around him. A girl leaped; the club struck her head. She fell limp. But he too, was soon overwhelmed.

The girls presently were near the staircase top; the guards remaining there were standing now, all with naked swords. I could not doubt but that they would be driven to use them. The girls momentarily had paused, a dozen steps below them.

Many now were armed with swords they had taken. The blades were waving. A score of girls with the swords, pushed their way to the upper rank, gathered for concerted, frenzied action. Then, with a rush, started up the empty intervening steps.

I had been standing on that hillock, enshrouded by the flowers. I had wanted to be sure beyond a doubt, how the guards were armed, and had hoped vainly that I might locate Sonya. And a fear had struck me for Alice and Dolores. Where were they in all this turmoil?

I thought I saw Sonya now, her white-limbed figure, with the dark, high-necked smock. She was creeping alone up the steep bank of the terrace beside the staircase, trying, no doubt, to attain the top unnoticed, and thus to surprise the guards from behind.

My time had come. I stepped from the shadows of the flowers into a broad patch of moonlight. From the hillock here, I knew my figure would be visible from all parts of the scene. I stood, drawn to full height, with arms outstretched. And called with all my voice,

“Sonya! Sonya!”

The fighting did not stop, but the nearer men of the crowd turned and saw me. A murmur went up.

“Sonya! Sonya! Sonya!”

I kept repeating it. The murmur spread; rose to a shouting, shouts of wonderment, awe, and then fear. I strove to hold my voice to dominate the noise.

“Sonya! Sonya! Sonya!”

The faces were turning my way. The shouting near me died into a frightened silence. The men were milling about, with a surge away from me. Over on the stairs I saw that the girls had paused in their attack.

“Sonya! Sonya! Sonya!”

She had turned, was staring at me. I waved my arms.

“Sonya! I am Leonard; come here!”

I plunged forward down the hillock path. The crowd scattered before me.

“Sonya, come here!”

She had turned. She was coming! I advanced steadily, not running, walking swiftly, with arms outstretched, menacing the crowd with my unknown weapon. The throng was stricken motionless with the strangeness of my aspect. From the staircase, the girls were staring; the guards were staring, a sea of faces, everywhere staring.