“This city,” she was saying, “we call Kalima. There was an ancient tribe dwelt here; the chief, they thought he was a god, the god Kali.” She was addressing Alice, but now she turned to me. “Our land lies in a great depression of this globe’s surface. Once, perhaps, it was the bottom of some great sea. It rises into mountains everywhere. It is not large; we are less than a quarter of a million people. The caves are at the foothills.
“You will hear more of them later.” She had waved aside a question of Dolores’. “On the Great Island, not far from here, is what we call the Village of the Virgins, where now about three hundred of our girls are living in rebellion.”
“Rebellion against the government?” I asked.
“Yes. Against the man-made laws.” She smiled her quiet, grave smile. “You have come, you strangers, at a time to find our nation in what we girls think is a condition very grave. You, my friends, will understand very well what we girls are protesting against. And now, with our prince and princess vanished, and our king about to die, the time has come to—”
She checked herself suddenly.
Alice was regarding her with a blue-eyed gaze of quite obvious admiration. Dolores moved over on the low couch; her hand plucked at the hem of Sonya’s smock as it lay just above her knees and touched the smooth white metal band that encircled her leg.
“Sonya, what is that? Just for ornament? It’s very pretty.”
“No,” she said. “Not altogether for ornament. Every woman wears one.” She brushed her fingers across it; her smile was quizzical. “It is, in fact, well . . . it had become almost a symbol of what we girls are striving for. The virgins’ band. You see, it is quite unmarked. No man’s name is engraved there. I’ll explain in a moment.”
“Our king, with twenty of his counsellors—my cousin Ren is one of them—rule the nation. They make no new laws. The old laws are good enough for them. The guards, you would call them police, are all the army we have.
“They are all men, young, sturdy fellows who have no thought but to do what they are told. Which is right, of course. It is the laws which are wrong, inhuman. They are very old laws. They have now become customs, traditions, handed down from father to son.”