©2025 SammyC

We climbed a ridge, following the late afternoon sun as it led us to the west. Before us was what Amos calculated to be another full three-day ride to reach the outer walls of the Western Kingdom, where I was to marry Prince Kelvin. Our wedding would petition the Gods to spare us from The Dagger of Heaven, headed directly at us and threatening to exterminate all life on our planet.

Behind us, we hoped Senshi’s band of road bandits was many hours and kilometers away. Malcolm and his company of four riders promised to delay Senshi’s pursuit of us. I cannot help but think that’s the last I will ever see him or his men. The five of them against Senshi’s corps of a dozen regulars gave them long odds of surviving a confrontation. Still, after three hours on the run, we stopped to see if there was any sign of Malcolm in the distance.

“He’s a goner, Rani. We should keep running. It was a doomed proposition. 12 against 5.” Amos tried to place his splinted arm around my shoulders but ended up chucking my cheek instead. “Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for that savage?”

“He told me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.” I sighed.

Amos fumed and tripped over his intended reply, just spluttering his disgust.

Merlyn and Luna came up alongside us on their Rumperdon.

“Why are we stopping?” Merlyn asked.

“Rani wants to see if her swain has survived Senshi’s arrows,” sniffed Amos.

“I’m afraid we’ve seen the last of Malcolm, child.” Merlyn’s voice took on a sympathetic, maternal tone. “He wasn’t right for you, Rani. There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

“Merlyn, you know I hate seafood—”

“It’s a—”

“While you two natter on about Malcolm’s fate, I’m going to look over the ridge and see if anyone’s gaining on us.” He leaped down off our Rumperdon and walked some ten meters away. “And has everyone forgotten he was planning to hand us over to a bunch of cannibals?”

“He said he wouldn’t trade me…” I muttered to no one in particular. Merlyn gave me a disapproving look and clucked her tongue.

“Your nascent vanity surprises and disappoints me, Rani. As the leader of your people, you should always place the welfare of your subjects above your own.”

“I’m sorry, Merlyn.”

“Even if that savage was very cute.” Merlyn crossed her arms and almost fell off her seat in the basket she shared with Luna, who reached out with both hands just in time.

Amos came running back to us. “Quick, we have to move! Senshi’s band is down in the valley, maybe five kilometers behind us. Twenty minutes tops away.” I helped Amos back up onto the basket on our Rumperdon. “Don’t spare the whips, people!”

“Did you see Malcolm with them?” I cautiously asked.

“They were five clicks in the distance, Rani. They looked like an army of ants. I couldn’t even make out if they had heads and arms. Just forget about him. Please.”

I was about to say something cogent when a sun shower erupted, filling the air with sheets of rain. On this planet, Merlyn tells me, sun showers occur more frequently because of the relatively shallow depth of the atmosphere. Relative to our home planet, of course. Clouds are lower to the ground and the sun can shine through unobstructed. To me, it’s beautiful but aesthetics is not a field of learning I was much interested in, much to Merlyn’s disappointment.

While it was helpful for us to follow the westward progress of the sun, the torrents of rain impeded our own progress as the ground turned muddy and slippery. In addition, we were getting soaked. But there was no shelter in sight. And Senshi’s band was bound to ignore the rain and wet conditions in their desperate pursuit of us.

The sun seemed to be reflecting off an object or structure in the near distance, down in the valley below the ridge. I poked Amos in his left arm, drawing a painful groan.

“Look, down there, up ahead a bit. What’s that?”

“It looks like a mound similar to the ones Luna’s father told us about. The giant mounds left behind thousands of years ago by the race that was native to this planet. But those were made of baked mud and timber. This looks like it’s made of metal. The way the sunlight glimmers off its surface—”

“Let’s go and see what it is. At the very least, it might shield us from the rain,” I pleaded.

“Do you think anyone is inside? Alive, that is?” Amos’ voice betrayed a quaver of fear.

I had already motioned to the others to turn with us and descend from the ridge in the direction of the strange, glimmering mound. “I just made another executive decision.”

When we reached the mound, it turned out to be much larger than it appeared from the vantage of the ridge. It towered above us, taller than our palace at home. And, as Amos had surmised, it was constructed from a sort of very shiny metal, the likes of which no one, even Merlyn, had ever imagined. She was stunned and silent when I asked her if she knew anything about it. Luna was unable to enlighten us either. Apparently, her father, the Assistant Royal Geographer who had disappeared several years ago on his annual expedition trying to map the continent, had never mentioned coming across such a giant metallic mound in his travels.

The rain was still pelting down hard on our little caravan. Instead of continuing to gawk at the structure, I suggested to Amos that we “knock on the door,” though the exterior appeared to be seamless. No entrance presented itself to our eyes.

“Hello!” Amos shouted at the top of his lungs. “Hello! We are travelers in need of shelter! Hello?”

We did not receive a reply. The sound of the wind swirling and rain splattering the ground around us was all that we could hear. Suddenly, as if extruded from the surface of the structure, a flying thing, something mechanical, hovered above us and slowly descended to our eye level. The dark lens of its central eye aimed itself at me for a few seconds, then moved to do the same for each member of our caravan. Its seeming inspection of us finished, it ascended to a height a meter above our heads and remained still in mid-air.

“Please identify yourselves. What is your business here?” We were stunned. The thing had spoken in a deep, feminine voice, authoritative yet non-threatening.

“I am Princess Rani of the Eastern Kingdom. These are my traveling companions. We are enroute to the Western Kingdom—”

“Thank you for identifying yourselves but how can we be of assistance to you? You seem to have your own means of transportation.”

“At the moment, we would greatly appreciate shelter from the torrential rain. Could we abide within until the storm passes?”

“Torrential rain? It’s a mere sun shower. It should clear in half an hour or less—”

“Please, whomever or whatever I’m speaking to, we promise to leave when the storm ends—”

“Wait a moment.” Seconds passed as we sat in our baskets in the rain shower, our Rumperdons beginning to sink into the muddy ground. “You may enter.”

Another second or two elapsed before a doorway materialized in front of us, tall enough to clear our heads atop the animals and wide enough for us to enter double file. We found ourselves immediately in a cavernous room whose dimensions seemed to perfectly match the height and width of the mound as seen from outside. Placed in neat rows were machines of unknown purpose. Merlyn suggested some of them were vehicles like the ones she had seen pictures of in her collection of old books. But others surpassed our imaginations’ capacity to determine what their uses were.

In the back of the room, a large booth lined in clear glass or some substance like it, emerged from the floor, noiselessly. The doors of the booth opened to either side and a group of people stepped out, walking slowly toward us. We were still seated on our Rumperdons, visibly apprehensive.

One of them stepped forward and raised his hand in greeting. He was dressed in odd clothing. His tunic and pants were made of a smooth, clingy fabric, replete with pockets containing many small objects.

“Hello. Princess Rani? I’m honored and somewhat shocked to make your acquaintance. We don’t get many visitors here. Nor do we wish to receive many. Forgive me. My name is Alvin. These are some of my colleagues. You see, I am a district supervisor—”

“District supervisor?” I asked, interrupting him. “I don’t understand. What is a district, and how do you supervise it?”

“Forgive me. You couldn’t possibly understand, could you? Please dismount. It’s more pleasant speaking on level ground, don’t you think? As for explaining what it is I do, I’ll just tell you that you are now in The Underground City—”

“Oh no, Rani, these are the Underground People!” Amos shouted. “The cannibals that Senshi wanted to trade us to—"

“Oh, is that what Senshi told you about us? Have no fear, we do not eat other human beings. Frankly, there are better sources of protein to cultivate. Anyway, The Two Moons Tribe can’t believe that we would trade farm implements, seeds, and other goods in exchange for the unfortunate travelers they abduct if not to eat them, I suppose. It started a couple of generations ago with Senshi’s grandfather. You’ll see that the abductees are alive and well. Most of them decide to stay with our community here. Come, I’ll explain further after we get you dry clothes to wear. The storm might last through the evening. Don’t worry about your animals. We’ll see that they’re fed and given water.”

We followed Alvin’s group and stepped into the booth, which immediately closed its doors and began to descend beneath the floor. Merlyn held tight to my hand. She was trembling. Under her breath, she kept muttering, “This is marvelous and terrifying. Who are these people?” I shook my head in reply and squeezed her hand. Although it seemed to take an eternity, the booth – Alvin called it an elevator – descended a great distance underground in less than a minute. It came to a soft landing and the doors opened out into a vast space with corridors branching out in all the cardinal points.

“All of this is underground?” I asked.

“A kilometer below the surface.” Alvin ushered us into a tube-like conveyance that seemed to float above the floor. It was also covered in a transparent glass-like material so that, as we moved down one of the corridors, we could see openings into streets lined with units of housing, some several stories high. Finally, we stopped before a unit and entered it, passing some other people dressed in similar outfits to Alvin’s.

We were escorted to separate rooms furnished with beds, cabinets, tables, and chairs. I insisted that Merlyn share my room. They seemed puzzled at first but ultimately acquiesced. On the bed was a selection of outfits that appeared to be variants of what Alvin and his colleagues wore. I liked the pink outfit.

“There’s a shower stall in the room,” Alvin pointed out, pressing the wall momentarily. The wall opened up like an iris, and light illuminated a vertical space enclosed in glass. Alvin reached inside and pointed to two buttons, one green, the other red. He pressed the green one, and water streamed down from a spigot. He pressed the red button, and it stopped.

“Forgive me again. You’ve never taken a shower before, have you? It’s pretty simple, as you can see. Oh, and you don’t need towels to dry off.” He pressed a third button below the other two, and gusts of warm air filled the shower stall. “Someone will come by to collect your wet clothing. We can clean them for you. They’ll be ready for you whenever you choose to leave, although I’m hoping you’ll at least stay the night.”

“Oh no, “ I quickly replied. “We have to be on our way. We’re expected at The Western Kingdom in three days’ time. As you must have guessed, we escaped from Senshi’s clutches and she’s right on our heels—”

“We won’t let them recapture you. Rest assured. You’re safe here. And don’t worry about getting to your destination on time. Meanwhile, as soon as you’ve showered and changed, I’d like to take you to see my mother. I’m sure she’d be very interested in meeting you.” With that, he left us to our ablutions.

“I don’t understand it, Merlyn.”

“What don’t you understand, child?”

“Everyone I meet seems to be infatuated with me. Am I truly that beautiful?” I played around with the buttons in the shower stall and accidentally drenched myself further than I already had. “Oh, the Gods!”

“Curiosity killed the cat. That’s one of my favorite sayings,” Merlyn said, smiling at me.

“Well, why else would Alvin want me to see his mother? I hardly know him. But then again, I am betrothed to someone I’ve never seen.”