Chapter XXVII: The Siege Of The Lone City

Our losses totaled nearly a hundred and fifty girls. We brought back with us on the platforms but six wounded. I shall never forget that hour we spent searching among the wreckage--those blackened, twisted forms of what had once been men and women. I shall not describe it.

Of all the boats which Tao had dispatched on this ill-fated expedition, only one escaped to return with news of the disaster. I was glad now that one, at least, had survived, for the report it would give would, I felt sure, dissuade Tao from making any other similar attempt at invasion.

Our broken little army made its way slowly back to the Great City. We went, not in triumph, but indeed with all the aspect of defeat. The people received us in a frenzy of joy and gratitude to the girls for what they had done.

This first battle took place, as I have said, just after we four had returned from our tour of the Light Country, and before the recruiting of the young men was fairly under way. To this recruiting it proved an extraordinary stimulus. The girls, having been in successful action, stirred the young men of the nation as probably nothing else could, and all over the country they came forward faster than they could be enrolled.

It was two or three days after the battle that Miela came to me one morning with the wounded girl she and I had rescued in the air.

“We have a plan--Sela and I--my husband,” she said.

The girl seemed hardly more than a sweet little child--fifteen or sixteen, perhaps. It gave me a shock now to realize that we had allowed her to go into such a combat. One of her blue-feathered wings was bound in a cloth. Its lower portion, I could tell, had been burned away.

“Never will she fly again, my husband,” said Miela, “for she is one of those who has sacrificed her wings that we might all be safe from the invader.”

She then went on to explain that now, while this feeling of gratitude to the girls ran so high among the people, the time seemed propitious for changing the long-hated law regarding their wings. I had not thought of that, but agreed with her wholly.

I called the people into the castle gardens that same night. Never had I seen such a gathering. We allowed fully ten thousand to come in; the rest we were forced to send away.

Miela made a speech, telling them that in recognition of the girls’ services in this war, I had decided to allow them henceforth to keep their wings unmutilated after marriage. We exhibited this little girl, Sela, as one who had given her power of flight, not as a sacrifice on the altar of man’s selfishness, but in the service of her country. Then Sela herself made a speech, in her earnest little child voice, pleading for her sisters.

When she ended there may have been some unmarried men in our audience who were still against the measure--doubtless there were--but they were afraid or ashamed to let their feeling be known. When the meeting broke up I had ample evidence of the people’s wishes upon which to proceed.

Within a week my congress met, and the law was repealed. We informed the other cities of this action, and everywhere it was met with enthusiasm.

Enlistment and war preparations went steadily on, but despite it all there were more marriages that next month--three times over--than in any before. I had now been in power some three months, and the time was approaching when we were ready to make our invasion of the Twilight Country. We had been maintaining a rigid aërial patrol of the Narrow Sea, but no further activities of the enemy had been threatened.

The expedition, when it was ready, numbered about a thousand young men, each armed with one of the hand light-ray cylinders; fifty officers, and about fifty older men in charge of the projectors and rockets, who, for want of a better term, I might call our artillery corps. There was also the organization of girls, and a miscellaneous corps of men to handle the boats, mechanics to set up the projectors, and a commissariat.

The thousand young men represented those we had selected from the several thousand enlisted in the Great City. All the rest, and the many thousands in the other cities, we were holding in reserve.

We took with us, on this invading expedition, only small-wheeled trucks, on which to convey the larger projectors, and storage tanks and other heavy apparatus, for the Lone City river ran directly to the point where we planned to conduct our siege.

Some forty large boats were required to carry the men, ammunition and supplies. Mercer and I, with Anina and Miela, traveled as before through the air on the two platforms with the girls. We crossed the Narrow Sea without incident and entered the river.

Several hours up, the river narrowed and entered a rocky gorge, four or five hundred feet wide and a thousand feet deep, with almost perpendicular sides. Along one of these ran the Lone City trail. We passed through this gorge. The river here flowed with a current that amounted almost to rapids. Our boats made slow progress. Finally we emerged into an even wilder country, almost devoid of trees. Here we made our first night’s encampment.

Noon of the next day found us approaching the Lone City. We did not need to surmise now that Tao would be warned, for far away on the horizon ahead we saw the beams from his great projectors mounting up into the blackness of the sky. Some four miles from the Lone City the river we were ascending swept off to the right. This was its closest point to the city, and here we disembarked. There were several docks and a few houses, but we found them all deserted.

The Lone City was particularly well suited to defense, even though the lay of the country was such that we were enabled to approach here within four miles, and establish our base in comparative safety. The country was wild and rocky, with few trees. The river bed lay in a cañon. From where we landed, a valley so deep and narrow, it might almost be termed a cañon, also led up to the city.

This valley was some two miles wide, with a level floor, and precipitous, rocky sides towering in many places over a thousand feet. Above it stretched a broken plateau country. The valley had many sharp bends and turns, as though in some distant past it had been the bed of a great river that had eroded its tortuous course through the rock.

The Lone City lay shut in at the bottom of this valley between two of its bends. It was a settlement of perhaps ten thousand people, the only city in the Twilight Country, with one exception, on this hemisphere of Mercury.

We established our field base here at the river, and I devoted the next few days to informing myself of the exact lay of the country, and the methods of defense of the city Tao had provided.

I found this defense the height of simplicity, and for its purpose as effective as it well could be. A vertical barrage of light surrounded the city, extending upward into the air with the most powerful projectors some ten or fifteen miles, and, with those of the spreading rays, forming a solid wall of light at the lower altitudes. There were no projectors past the first turn in the valley toward the river--where they could have been directed horizontally--and none of them on the cliff tops above the city. Thus, although we could not get over this light-barrage, we could approach it closely in many places.

Tao’s tactics became immediately evident. He had thrown an almost impregnable barrier close about him and, trusting to its protection, was making no effort to combat us for the moment with any moves of offense.

My first endeavor was to find a position on top of the cliffs from which the city could be reached with a projector. It was practically the only thing to do. The city could not be approached in front from the valley floor; its entire surface beyond the turn was swept by the light-rays. Approach from below in the rear was likewise barred.