Terry Pratchett: Tama Princes of Mercury

"Where is Tama?" Jimmy asked.

Guy was still anxiously at the window. And now Tama was coming. We went to the cabin doorway to meet her.

She came, flying low over the frozen lake. A great, whitebodied, red-winged bird! Flying sluggishly as though tired, but she was only hampered by the weight of her clothes, and Earth's heavy gravity.

The wonder of Tama had never ceased to thrill me.

The men of Mercury were very much like the men of Earth.

But the women with their great feathered wings Her warm knitted suit made her slim body white as the surface of the frozen snow-covered lake. But her long black hair was waving in the wind; and her crimson-feathered wings with their ten-foot spread showed plainly in the twilight.

Her body hung at an angle, breast down. She flew straight for our doorway, fluttered down, her feet dropping, her wings flapping backward as she righted herself to land on tiptoe among us. She was panting with the flying effort, and laughing, and the frosty evening had brought into her clear white cheeks a mantling red.

"Tamal" exclaimed Guy. "You shouldn't fly out before it's dark."

"No one saw me, Guy. I must get out. It smothers me indoors... . Oh, good evening, Jimmy!" A few minutes later Tama had taken off the knitted suit, and wore now her native garments. Beside the tall, queenly Rowena, Tama was an elfin, fantastic figure indeed. As small as Toh, They were, in fact, twins, twenty-one years old.

Tama stood before me. "You are not angry at me, Jack?"

"Well-"

"Guy is." Elfin little creature, pouting at me to placate my anger.

But like her brother, there was about her a decided dignity. The set of her )aw could be firm; her dark eyes, twinkling at me now, could flash with command. On Mercury, as Guy had told us, she was leader of all the winged virgins of the Light Country.

On Mercury, a leader. But here on Earth, so strangely fantastic! Her crimson-feathered wings were folded now as she stood among us. They arched from her shoulder blades, with their flexible feathered tips just clearing the ground behind her. She wore silky fabric, gray-blue trousers bound at her ankles; sandals encased her bare feet. A silken gray-blue scarf was wound about her waist, crossing in front, covering her breast and shoulders, crossing again between the wings behind and descending to her waist.

"Angry, Jack?"

"Well-" I found it difficult to be angry; yet she should not have gone out.

We sat down to discuss the voyage to Mercury in the Cube. Guy sat with his arm about Tama. It was no secret that they were in love. They were to be married as Tama wanted, on Mercury, in her native Hill City, at the end of this forthcoming trip.

"I am glad," said Tama. "It seemed so long, waiting here." The elfin look was gone from her now. With her thoughts back on Mercury she was Tama of the Light Country, a leader.

She met my gaze.

"It is not that I do not like your Earth, Jack. But you know I am worried about things in the Hill City. My girls, the winged virgins as you call them. Jimmy, tell me just what Dr. Grenfell says. We go, surely?"

"Sure thing!" said Jimmy.

Late into that night and most of the next morning we discussed it; then Jimmy had to leave.

"See you in a week," he told us. "I'll come up and fly you down to Trenton." We stood beside his tiny dragon to see him take off. If we had only known under what terrifying stress of circumstances we next were to see him! The remainder of that memorable day passed without incident. Jimmy left )ust before noon. That evening we all retired early. Our log-cabin bungalow was a rambling, manyroomed structure. Rowena and I had a bedroom off the living room. Toh and Guy slept in another room; Tama occupied a room alone. And Eliza, the housekeeper, had a bedroom nearby.

It was after midnight when I awakened. I had slept uneasily, perhaps the stimulus of Jimmy's exciting news. What \yoke me up, I do not know. I started into full wakefulness, and at once became aware that Rowena was not beside me.

The room was cold, the house wholly silent. Through the drawn window blinds faint shafts of moonlight were straggling. Rowena's negligee was gone from the chair beside curbed.

I lay listening in the silence. The door to the living room was open; a log in the dying fire fell with a sound startlingly loud.

And then I heard something that set me shuddering, and took me out of bed with a bound. 4 crunching in the snow outside the cabin! Footsteps! And, it seemed, low murmurs of voices! I reached the living room. The waning fire illumined it with flickering yellow light and waving shadows. A shaft of moonlight showed me that the outer door was open; it hung askew on its hinges, the top one broken so that it dangled forward into the room! My confusion lasted no more than a moment, however.

I found myself shouting, "Rowenal Guy!" At the door I saw a trail of footprints in the snow. Not our beaten path to the lake. These ..led sidewise toward a line of naked trees. I thought that in the moonlight there were dark blobs of retreating figures off there! The frosty outer air struck at me as I stood thinly clad.

Our overcoats hung on pegs near the living room door. I recall donning a heavy coat and pulling boots over my bare feet.

My shouts brought the household. A confusion of figures and voices.

"Jack! What the devil-"

"Jack-Guy and Toh were plucking at me. Then Toh saw the broken door.

"Oh-" He darted at it. Stooped. Straightened. "Burned! The hinges burned with a heat-ray! Where is TamaP" Guy and Toh were here! But not Rowenal Not Tamal The housekeeper appeared; stood stricken with terror.

"Mr. Jack-what is it? Tell mel What's wrong? What-" I ran outside. The distant figures had vanished. In the house the voices and tramping steps of Guy and Tob resounded.

Guy shouted, "Tamal Rowenal Tamawhere are you?" Guy met me at the doorway; his face was livid in the moonlight.

"Gone! They're not here!" Eliza was screaming with shrill, hysterical wails.

I gasped, "I think I saw them out there among the trees!" We seized our large-bore rifles, which stood in a corner of the room. Guy and Toh drew on overcoats and boots.

In a moment we started. The moon went under a passing cloud. The white snow surface turned dark gray, but the trail was plain. A wide, scuffled path, many footsteps. The edge of the forest was a few hundred feet away. We were half running. I suddenly realized, heedlessly running I stopped, and drew Guy and Toh crouching beside me behind the huge bulk of a fallen tree.

"Wait! They must be close ahead. I saw them!" We could not fire on any distant figure, with the girls possibly among them.

Toh murmured, "It must be Mercuriansi"

"They can't travel fast," I whispered. "The Earth's gravity is too great. If we can decide their direction, then circle and get ahead of them" I checked my words. Beside me in the snow, almost at my feet, a dark object was lying. I reached for it. A torn piece of cloth. There was light enough for me to see it.

A portion of a man's coat sleeve. The wrist cuff had some insignia on it. It was queerly burned, blackened where a segment of it had been melted away by a blast of heat.

It was from the uniform of Jimmy Turk! I had no time to do more than show it to Guy and Toh.

The Mercurians had seen us. From the edge of the nearby forest a narrow beam of blue-green light came with a hiss, like a tiny lightning bolt darting over us. It caught a snowdrift twenty feet away; melted a hole like a clean-bored tunnel with vapor rising from it.

I leaped up, against the efforts of Toh and Guy to pull me down. A figure stood at the forest edgethe bundled shape of a man in animal skins. I shot. My rifle stabbed its spurt of yellow flame. The report echoed in the still night air over the frozen lake.