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Updated: May 3, 2025
"We'll meet boats," he said. "What will the people think of me? Don't let's start anything if we can help it." "You lie there." Anina indicated the bottom of the boat at her feet. "No one see you then. I steer. They do not notice me. Nobody care who I am." Mercer had still the very vaguest of ideas as to what they would do when they got to the Water City.
We did not hesitate, but shoved our way forward, elbowing them away roughly. Suddenly, some twenty feet ahead of us, I saw Miela and Anina come to the ground, and in a moment more we were with them again. The crowd was less dense here, and about us there was a considerable open space, Miela pointed out a man leaning against the trunk of a palm tree near by and glaring at us malevolently.
He shivered as he thought of the danger they were about to invite. Then he explained to Anina what they were to do. She listened carefully, with the same expectant, eager look on her face he had seen there so often before. They left the blanket and fur jacket on the ground, and, making a wide detour around the fire, came back to the river bank several hundred yards above the boat.
I'm coming!" He tripped near the top of the stairs and fell in a heap onto the platform below, but he still held the cylinder clutched tightly in his hand. Anina groped her way down to him. He gripped her by the arm. He was trembling like a leaf. The crackling of the burning house above came down to him; the cries of the men were stilled. "Come, Anina," he half whispered.
He set one of the captives free. "Anina, tell him to sit quiet until we've gone. Then he can cut the others loose." He tossed a knife into the box. "Come on, Anina; let's get away." They were about ready to start back, when Mercer suddenly decided he was hungry. He hopped off the platform. "They don't need all that food." He gathered some of the little flat cakes of dough in his hands.
They watched a few moments in silence. Then Mercer took the cylinder, and flashed its light into the air. "If it's anybody connected with Tao, that'll show they'd better keep away," he explained grimly. Anina smiled. "Tao people cannot fly, Ollie." A few moments more and they saw what it was. And within ten minutes they had landed at the mouth of one of the bayous, and Miela and I were with them.
I did not wonder then that the women were ready to fight, almost, rather than part with them. Difficulties of language made our conversation during the meal somewhat halting, although Miela acted as interpreter. Lua and Anina both expressed their immediate determination to learn English, and, with the same persistence that Miela had shown, they set aside nearly everything else to accomplish it.
"Mercer, where are you taking us?" I exclaimed once. "You shall see very soon now," Anina answered me. "What we have found, Ollie and I and our plan you shall understand it soon." We had to be content with that. An hour later we found ourselves well around behind the Dark City and hardly more than four miles outside it. A great jagged cliff-face, two hundred feet high perhaps, fronted us.
His eyes turned again toward Anina. "And, say about letting those girls keep their wings. I'm strong for that. Let's be sure and fix that up before we leave." It was not more than half an hour later when the king's guards arrived to conduct us to the castle. Meanwhile young Mercer had discovered he was hungry and thirsty.
Sounds in the underbrush reached me now from other directions, and I knew that the men had spread apart and were stalking the boat, expecting Mercer to be in or near it. Had they all come down here? I wondered. And where was Anina? I looked down at Miela warningly as I felt her move slightly. "We'll wait till they're all near the boat," I whispered to Mercer.
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