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Updated: May 5, 2025
She, then, like other married women, was not permitted to fly, although the beauty of her wings was unspoiled. I sent two of the old men to stand by the head of the stairs. Miela had given me her knife, and I handed it now to one of them, trying to make him understand that he was to bar the passage of any one who should not be allowed up.
I doubted if it were copper, since even in this hot, moist air it seemed to have no property of oxidation. I asked Miela about it, and she gave me its Mercutian name at once; but of course that helped me not a bit. She added that outcroppings of it, almost in the pure state, like the great deposits of native copper I had seen on earth, occurred in many parts of Mercury.
Miela swooped down at him, and he struck at her with his knife; but she avoided it with an incredibly swift turn, and a second later had passed him and was crossing the courtyard. Round and round she flew, her great wings flapping audibly, a giant bird circling its prey. The man turned continually to face her. Several times she swooped toward him, and as swiftly avoided his blow.
We had had no more trouble that day. After the encounter in the king's garden Mercer and I had followed the two girls swiftly home. We were not molested in the streets, although the people crowded about us wherever we went. "Why did none of Baar's friends come to his rescue up there in the garden?" I asked Miela. "Surely there must have been many of them about."
I knew Miela would return in a moment that she had met some friend or relative yet I could not suppress the vague feeling of sorrow and the knowledge of my own incapacity that swept over me. For the first time then I wanted wings wanted them myself that I might join this wife I loved in her glorious freedom of the air.
"You cold, Ollie," she said accusingly. She lifted an edge of the blanket. "Here you sleep, too." He stretched himself beside her, and she flung a corner of the blanket over him; and thus, like two children lost in the woods and huddled together for warmth under a fallen log, they slept. The news that Mercer and Anina had been left in the Twilight Country completely dumfounded Miela and me.
There was little about us then, as we stood there dispirited and physically tired out, that would have commended respect from our subjects. "We must get some sleep, Miela," I said. "Things will look very different to us then." It must have been mid-afternoon when we awoke. Ano was at hand to report that Baar and his men, and all the king's guards, must have fled the city.
I could see by the look on his face he was holding on to this thought as a possibility that might make Alan's plan unnecessary. "I've thought about it constantly," the professor said, "ever since these facts first came to us through Miela. It would be important.
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.
"He believes he can present you to the people as men of earth who are our guests, and that they will accept you in friendly spirit, most of them." The king spoke to one of his advisers, who abruptly left the room. "He will call the people now," Miela went on, "and will speak to them from the tower all who can leave their tasks to come. You will stand there with him.
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