THE SEVEN BROTHERS OF THE SUN
Nashola did not live in fairyland, although there were seasons when
his country was so beautiful that it might well have belonged to some
such enchanted place. He did not know whether he loved it best when
the thickets were all in bloom with pink crab apple and the brown,
wintry hills had put on their first spring green, or when every valley
was scarlet and golden with frost-touched maple trees in the autumn.
But to-day it was neither, being hot midsummer, with the wild grass
thick and soft on the slope of the hill that he was climbing, and with
the heavy foliage of the oak tree on the summit rustling in a hot,
fitful breeze. It was high noontide with the sunlight all about him,
yet Nashola walked warily and looked back more than once at his
comrades who had dared follow him only halfway up the hill. His was no
ordinary errand, for, all about him, Nashola felt dangers that he
could neither hear nor see. Before him, sitting motionless as a
statue, with his back against the trunk of the oak tree and his keen,
hawk-like face turned toward the hills and the sky, was Secotan, the
sorcerer and medicine man, whom all of Nashola's tribe praised,
revered, and dreaded.
None but the full-grown warriors used to venture to have speech with
him, and then only as he sat in the door of his lodge, with the men in
a half circle before him. They never came alone. Along all the
seaboard, the Indians talked of Secotan, the man most potent in spells
and charms and prophecies, who was said to talk with strange spirits
in his lodge by night and who could call up storms out of the sea at
will. This spot at the summit of the hill, where the medicine man sat
so often, sometimes muttering spells, sometimes staring straight
before him across the valley, was magic forbidden ground, where no one
but himself was known to come. Yet the young Nashola, only fifteen
years old, and far from being a warrior, had been told that he must
consult the medicine man and had been in too much haste to seek him in
his own lodge or to wait until he could persuade a comrade to go with
him.
Stretched along the river below them was the camp of Nashola's
brown-skinned people, where springs gave them fresh water and where
the eastern hills of the valley gave shelter from the winter storms
that blew in from the sea. Beyond those green hills were rocky slopes,
salt swamps, a stretch of yellow sand, and then the great Atlantic
rollers, tumbling in upon the beach. The Indians of Nashola's village
would go thither sometimes to dig for clams, to fish from the high
rocks, and even, on occasions, to swim in the breakers close to
shore. But they were land-abiding folk, they feared nothing in the
forest, and would launch their canoes in the most headlong rapids of
the inland rivers; yet there was dread and awe in their eyes when they
looked out upon the sea. Not one of them had ever ventured beyond the
island at the mouth of the harbor.
They were a shifting, wandering people, moving here and there with the
seasons, as the deer and moose moved their grazing grounds, but their
most settled abiding place was this little green valley where they
spent a part of every year. Sometimes word would come drifting in,
through other tribes, of strange, white-faced men who had landed on
their shores, but who always sailed away again, since this was still
the time when America was all the Indians' own. What they did not see
troubled them little and they went on, undisturbed, hunting and
fishing and paying their vows to the spirits and demons that they
thought to be masters of their little world.
The old, wrinkled squaw who was Nashola's grandmother was the only one
of them all who seemed oppressed with care. The boy, whose parents
were dead, was her special charge and was not, as he should be, like
other Indian lads. He was slim and swift and was as skillful as his
companions with the bow and spear, but he had a strange love for
running along the sea beach with the waves snatching at his bare,
brown legs, and he was really happy only when he was swimming in the
green water. The day he swam to the island and back again, paying no
heed to the shouts and warnings of his friends, and declaring, when he
landed, that he would have gone farther save that the tide had
turned--that day had brought his old grandmother's patience to an end.
"It is not fitting that one of our tribe should be so familiar with
the sea," she stormed at him. "We were not born to master that wild
salt water; the gods that rule us have said over and over again that
the woods and rivers are ours, but that we are to have no dealings
with the spirits of the sea. Since I cannot make you listen, you shall
talk to some one who will. You shall go to ask the medicine man if
what I say is not so."
Nashola had come, therefore, to ask his question, but he found that it
needed a bold heart to advance, without quaking, into that silent
presence and to speak out with Secotan's black eyes seeming to stare
him through and through.
"Is it true," he began, "that men of our tribe should have no trust in
the sea? My grandmother says that I should hate it and fear it, but I
do not. Must I learn to be afraid?"
Slowly the man nodded.
Most Indians grow old quickly, and are withered like dried-up apples
as soon as the later years come upon them. But Secotan, although his
hair was gray, had still the clear-cut face with its arched nose and
heavy brows of a younger man. Only his eyes, deep, piercing, and very
wise, seemed to show how long he had lived and how much he had
learned.
"Our fathers and their fathers before them have always known that we
must distrust the sea," he said at last. "No matter how blue and
smiling it may be it can never be our friend. We may swim near the
shore, we may even launch our canoes and journey, if the way be short,
from one harbor to another when the sky is clear and the winds are
asleep. But always we are to remember that the sea is our enemy and a
treacherous enemy in the end."
He turned away to stare at the hills again, but Nashola lingered, not
yet satisfied. It was unheard-of boldness to question Secotan's words,
yet the boy could not keep his hot protests to himself.
"But is it not wrong to pretend to fear what we do not?" he objected.
"Do the spirits of the water actually rise up and tell you that we
must keep to the shore? I do not believe it, although my grandmother
says so until my ears ring again."
Secotan turned his head quickly, as though to hide the ghost of a
smile.
"The voices of the wind and the breakers and of the thunder all cry
the same message," he declared, "and wise men have learned that it
warns them to hug the land. You must heed your grandmother, even
though her words are shrill and often repeated."
He would say no more, so Nashola went away, pondering his answer as
he walked down the hill. After all, no harm had come to him from
entering the medicine man's presence unbidden, as his comrades had all
said. He answered their questions very shortly as they came crowding
about him, and to the persistent queries of his grandmother he would
say nothing at all. Yet the others noticed that his canoe lay unused
in the shelter of a rock on the sandy beach where he had left it, and
that he swam in the sea no more.
The days passed, the hot, quiet summer passing with them. One evening,
as they all sat about the camp fire, one of the older warriors said
quietly:
"The time is near when our medicine man must go from us."
"Why?" questioned Nashola's grandmother, while the boy turned quickly
to hear.
"He has not sat upon the hill nor before the door of his lodge for
three days, and the venison and corn we have carried to him have lain
untouched for all that time. One of us who ventured close heard a cry
from within and groaning. It may be that he must die."
"But will no one help him?" cried Nashola. It was not proper that a
boy should speak out in the presence of the older warriors, but he
could not keep his wonder to himself.
"There is danger to common folk in passing too close to the medicine
man's lodge," his grandmother explained quickly. "There are spirits
within who are his friends but who might destroy us. And when he is
ill unto death and the beings from another world have come to bear his
soul away, then must no man go near."
"Sometimes a medicine man has a companion to whom he teaches his
wisdom and who takes his place when he is gone," said the man by the
fire. "But even that comrade flees away when death is at hand and the
spirits begin to stand close about his master. Yes, such a man must
die alone."
All through the night Nashola lay awake, thinking of what he had
heard. Secotan was, he knew, a man of powerful magic, but he could not
forget that there was a look in his eyes and a kindliness in his tone
that seemed human, after all. Must he suffer and die there, without
help, merely because he was greater and wiser than the rest? Or, when
death came close and the host of unearthly beings gathered about him,
would he not feel it of comfort to have a living friend by his side?
It was long past midnight and in the black darkness that comes before
day, before the boy came to final resolution.
He crawled out from under the shelter of his lodge and slipped
noiselessly through the sleeping camp. Every rustle in the grass,
every stirring leaf in the thicket made him jump and shiver, yet he
kept steadily on. The sharp outline of Secotan's pointed lodge poles
stood out against the stars, halfway up the shoulder of the hill. The
door showed black and open as he came near, but there was no sound
from within. The only thing that seemed alive was a dull, glowing coal
in the ashes of a fire that was not quite dead. The boy stooped down
before the door and spoke in a shaking voice:
"Secotan, Secotan, do you still live?"
A hollow, gasping whisper sounded from the shadows within:
"I am living, but death is very near."
Nashola stood still for a moment. He could picture that gaunt figure
lying helpless on the ground, with the darkness all about peopled by
strange shapes visible to the sorcerer's eyes alone, crowding spirits
come to carry him away to an unknown world. But even as a wave of icy
terror swept over him, he remembered how fearful it would be to lie
all alone in that haunted darkness, and he bent low and slipped
through the door.
"I know that all the spirits of the earth and air and water are with
you," he said as he felt his way to the deerskin bed and sat down
beside it, "but I thought, among them all, you might wish for a friend
beside you who was flesh and blood."
A quivering hand was laid for an instant on his knee.
"There is no man who does not feel terror when he comes to die alone,"
the medicine man whispered, "and Secotan is less of a man than you."
Through the dragging hours Nashola sat beside him, listening with
strained ears to every sound--the soft moving of a snake through the
grass before the door, the nibbling of a field mouse at the skin of
the tent, the sharp scream of a bird in the wood captured by a
marauding owl. The blackness grew thinner at last, showing the lodge
poles, the shabby skins of the bed, and finally the sick man's face,
drawn and haggard with pain. As the dawn came up over the hills, he
opened his eyes and spoke:
"Bring those herbs that hang against the lodge pole and build up the
fire. When the stones about it are hot, wrap them in wet blankets and
lay them in the tent. The gods may have decreed that I am to live."
Nashola worked frantically all through the day. He filled the lodge
with steam from the hot stones, he brewed bitter drafts of herbs and
held them to Secotan's lips once in every hour by the sun. After a
long time he saw the fever ebb, saw the man's eyes lose their strange
glittering, and heard his voice gather strength each time he spoke.
For three nights and days the boy nursed him, all alone in the lodge,
with men bringing food to leave at the door but with no one willing to
come inside. When at last Nashola went back to his own dwelling,
Secotan was sitting, by his fire, weak and thin, but fairly on the way
to health again.
The friendship that had grown up during that night of suffering and
terror seemed to become deeper and deeper as time passed. There was
scarcely a day when Nashola did not climb the hill in the late
afternoon to sit under the rustling oak tree and talk for a long hour
with the medicine man. His companions of his own age looked askance at
such a friendship and his grandmother begged and scolded, but without
avail.
Almost always, as he sat with his back against the tree, or lay full
length in the long grass that was beginning to be dry and yellow with
the coming autumn, the boy would fix his eyes upon the hills opposite
through which there showed a gleam of sea. Like the picture of some
forbidden thing was that glint of blue, framed by the green slopes and
the sky above. He could see the whitecaps, the dancing glimmer of the
sun, and the gray sea gulls that whirled and hovered and dipped before
his longing gaze. He would lift his head to sniff the salt breeze that
swept through the cleft in the hills, and to listen for that far-off
thunder that could sometimes be heard as the great waves broke on the
beach. At last, one day when he had sat so long with his friend that
dusk was falling and the stars were coming out, he broke through the
silence with a sudden question:
"Secotan, what lies beyond that sea?"
The medicine man shook his head without speaking.
"My grandmother says 'Nothing,'" pursued Nashola, "but I know that
cannot be. Is it one of the things that I must not ask and that you
may not tell me because you are a sorcerer and I am only a boy?"
Secotan was silent so long that Nashola thought he did not mean to
reply at all. Even when he spoke it did not seem to be an answer.
"Do you see those seven stars?" he said, "that are rising from the sea
and that march so close together that you keep thinking they are going
to melt into one?"
"Yes," answered the boy. "I often lie before our lodge door and watch
them go up the sky. There are bigger stars all about them, but somehow
I love those the best, they are so small and bright and seem to look
down on us with such friendly eyes."
"It is told among the medicine men," Secotan went on slowly, "that
many, many moons ago, long before this oak tree grew upon this hill,
before its father's father had yet been planted as an acorn, our
people came hither across just such a sea as that. Far to the westward
it lay, and they came, a mere handful of bold spirits in their canoes,
across a wide water from some land that we have utterly forgotten.
Some settled down at once upon the shores of the waters they had
crossed, but some pressed eastward, little by little, as the
generations passed. They filled the land with their children and in
the end they came to another sea and went no farther. But the men who
had led them were of a different heart than ours; there were always
some who were not content to hunt and fish and move only as the deer
move or as the seasons change. They wished to press on, ever on, to
let nothing stop the progress of their march. It is said that when
they came to this sea there were seven brothers who, when their people
would no longer follow, launched their canoes and set off once more to
the eastward, and never came back.
"They dwell there in the sky, we think, and they shine through those
months of autumn that are dearest of all the year to our people, when
the days are warm and golden before the winter, when the woods are
bare and hunting is easy, when the game is fat from the summer grazing
and our yellow corn is ripe. They come back to us in the Hunter's Moon
and they watch over us all through the cold winter. We call them the
Seven Brothers of the Sun."
Nashola was silent, waiting, for he knew from his friend's voice that
there was more that he wished to say.
"Your mother, who is dead, was not of our blood, they tell me. Your
father took her from another tribe and they had brought her captive,
from the north of us, so that she is no kin of ours. Sometimes I think
that there must have run in her veins the blood of those seven
brothers and that, in you, their bold spirit lives again. There is no
one of your kind who loves the sea as you do, who has no shadow of a
fear of it. And you are first, in all my life, who has asked me what
lay beyond."
"I should like," said Nashola steadily, still watching the gray water
and the gleam of stars above it, "I should like to go and see."
"Often I have wondered," the man went on, his voice growing very
earnest, "whether you would not like to come to dwell with me, to
learn the lore that makes me a medicine man and to take my place when
I must go. I, who was taught by the wisest of us all, have waited long
to find some one worthy of that teaching, and able to hold the power
that I have. You can be a greater man than I, Nashola; not only your
whole tribe will do your bidding and hang upon your words, but the men
of our race all up and down the coast will revere you and talk of you
as the greatest sorcerer ever known. Will you come to my lodge, will
you learn from me, will you follow in my way?"
Nashola tried to speak, choked and tried again.
"I cannot do it," he said huskily.
"Why?"
There was a sharp note of wonder, hurt friendship, even of terror, in
the man's voice.
"The people of our village say you are not like other men," said the
boy. "They say you can call the friendly spirits of the forest and the
hostile gods of the sea, and that you have wisdom learned in another
world. But I, who am your friend, think it is not so. I love you
dearly, but I know you are a man as I am. I know the sea is only water
and that the forest is only trees. I--I do not believe."
He got to his feet, blind with misery, and went stumbling down the
hill. The warm September darkness was thick about him, but up on the
hill the starlight showed plainly the motionless figure sitting
beneath the oak tree, never turning to look after him, uttering no
sound of protest or reproach.
As September days passed into October, as the Seven Brothers rode
higher in the sky, strange tales, once again, began to come from the
south. More white men had been seen in their ships, sailing up and
down the coast, trading with the Indians, buying the fish that they
had caught and trying to talk to them in an unknown tongue.
"We have heard stories before and will hear them again," said the
older warriors incredulously. "Such tales are of the sort that old
women tell about the fires on winter nights."
"What does your friend the medicine man say of these rumors, Nashola?"
asked one of the boys of his own age, but Nashola did not answer. He
went no more up the hill to the big oak tree; he had held no speech
for weeks with Secotan. Yet he would suffer no one to ask him why.
A day came when the news could no longer be disbelieved. A boy of the
tribe, who had been digging for clams on the beach, came running home
with startling tidings.
"The white men--the winged canoes--as big as our lodges----" he
gasped. "Come quickly and see!"
Old men and young, squaws and papooses, every one deserted the little
settlement by the river and went in wild haste up the eastward hills
to look upon this strange wonder. It was a lowering day with overcast
skies and water of a sullen gray and with ominously little wind. In
speechless wonder the Indians stood gazing, for there indeed were
three white-sailed ships, moving slowly before the lazy breeze, stanch
little fishing vessels of English build, come to see whether this
unexplored stretch of coast would yield them any cargo. As they
watched, the largest one got up more sail, veered away upon a new
tack, and was followed by the others.
"What can they be? Are they come to destroy us all?" asked a trembling
old woman, and no one could answer.
"Hush," said another in a moment, "the medicine man is coming."
Secotan, who so seldom left his own lodge now, and who never mixed
with the village folk, was climbing slowly up the hill after them.
Nashola noticed that he had begun to look old, that his fierce hawk's
face was sunken, and that he walked very slowly, leaning upon his
staff. The men and women drew back respectfully as he advanced and
stood in a silent, waiting circle, while he shaded his eyes and gazed
long at the ships, now growing smaller in the distance.
"Are they friends or enemies, Secotan?" one of the hunters ventured
to ask, but the medicine man replied only:
"That must be as the gods decree."
"Then destroy them for us," cried the old squaw, Nashola's
grandmother. "Call up a storm that will break their wings and shatter
the sides of those giant canoes. Bring wind and rain and thunder and
all the spirits of the sea to overwhelm them."
There was a breathless silence as Secotan slowly moved forward and
raised his staff. Nashola, standing before the other boys, watched the
medicine man's face with eyes that never wavered. Even as the sorcerer
moved there came a low mutter of thunder across the gray, level floor
of the sea, and a distant streak of darker water showed the coming
wind.
"There is the storm! The very winds obey him!"
The cry went up from all the Indians, save only Nashola who stood
silent. The medicine man turned to look at him, then hesitated and
dropped his eyes.
"Why do you wait? Raise up a hurricane, O greatest of sorcerers,"
cried a man behind them.
"No," shouted Secotan suddenly. He flung down his staff and held up
his empty hands before his face. "I will raise no storm," he cried, "I
will call no spirits from the deep--because I cannot. The wind and
thunder answer no man's bidding--storms come and go at the will of the
Great Spirit alone. There is one soul here that I love, one being
whom, in all my life, I have had for a friend. In his eyes I will
stand for truth at last, although I had almost learned to believe in
my magic myself. I can do none of those things that you think. I am a
man without power, like every one of you!"
A roar of anger went up, a dull, savage, guttural sound that died away
almost at once into silence, a quiet more ominous than an outcry could
have been. Terrified by that strange apparition out yonder upon the
waters, the Indians saw themselves deserted by the one person to whom
they could look for courage and counsel. Only half understanding, they
knew, at least, that Nashola had been the means of their medicine
man's downfall. Frenzied hands seized them both and dragged them
headlong down toward the water. Visions of the savage tortures that
his people wreaked upon their enemies passed through the boy's mind,
but he did not struggle or cry out, although Secotan's set face,
beside him, turned gray under its coppery skin. Some one had found
Nashola's canoe, left long unused upon the beach, and had launched it
in the breakers.
"Let him go back to the sea that he loved, this boy who has never been
one of us. Let the man perish in the storm that is coming without his
call."
Relentless hands flung them into the frail boat and pushed it out
through the surf. Nashola crawled to the stern and took up the paddle;
a crash of thunder broke over their heads and a wild flare of
lightning lit the dark water as he dipped the blade. In a moment, rain
was falling in blinding sheets, the wind and spray were roaring in
their ears, and the ebbing tide was carrying them away, out of the
harbor, past the rocky island, straight to the open, angry sea.
After a long time, Secotan, who had lain inert where he had been
thrown into the boat, got to his knees and took up the second paddle.
Only by keeping the little boat's bow to the wind could immediate
destruction be averted. But the medicine man's strokes were feeble,
affording little help, and at last he laid down the blade.
"It is of no use, Nashola," he said. "Death rides on the wind and
snatches at us from the black waters. Lay down your paddle and let us
die."
"No," the boy answered, "even though death is not an hour away, we
will fight it until the very end."
Darkness shut down about them so that they could scarcely see each
other as they went on in silence. Although each combing, foam-capped
rush of water seemed certain to overwhelm them, there was a strange
exhilaration, a mad thrill in rising to every giant wave and shooting
down its green side in a cloud of spray. One--two--three--each one
seemed the last, and yet there were ever more. Nashola's arms were
numb and heavy, his head reeled, but still he struggled on. He wished
at last that death would come quickly, to still the terrible aching
weariness that possessed his whole being. The worst of the storm had
blown, roaring, past them, but the seas were still heavy and
nothing--nothing, Nashola thought, could ever bring back the strength
to his failing arms.
Suddenly the clouds were torn apart, showing a glimmer of stars and a
vague glimpse of the tossing black water all about them.
"Look, look, Nashola," cried the medicine man, pointing upward, "they
have come to help us, your kinsmen, the Seven Brothers of the Sun!"
But Nashola was not looking at the sky; his eyes were fixed on a
ghostly shape moving close ahead of them and on the fitful gleam of a
ship's lantern that tossed and glimmered in the dark. Dropping his
paddle he put his hands to his mouth and lifted his voice in a long
hail. The light bobbed and swung and an answering shout came through
the darkness.
To the weather-beaten English sailors, used to the rough adventures of
sailing new and uncharted seas, there was little excitement in picking
up two half-drowned Indians, although they had never done such a thing
before. They warmed the two with blankets, they revived them with
fiery remedies, and they sat about them on the deck, trying to talk to
them by means of signs, but with small success.
"It is no common thing to see these natives so far from shore," the
mate said to the captain, "for as a rule the Indians distrust the sea.
We cannot find out how these came to be adrift in that canoe. The
young one tries to make us understand, but the old man merely covers
his face and groans. I think he will not believe that we are men like
himself."
"Bring the boy to me," the captain ordered. "Perhaps we may be able to
understand him."
In the quiet dawn, when calm had followed the night's storm, the ship
ran in toward a rocky headland to send a boat ashore. Yet when it had
been lowered and Secotan had dropped into it, he turned to see Nashola
standing on the deck above, making no move to follow.
"I am not coming, Secotan," he declared steadily. "The chief of these
men and I have talked with signs and he wishes to carry me to his home
on this strange winged vessel. He promises that he will bring me safe
back again. Then I can tell you and all of our tribe what these white
men really are. And I have always longed to know what lay beyond this
forbidden sea."
Secotan did not protest.
"I have called you friend, I have wished to have you for my brother,"
he said, "but I must call you master now, since you have dared what I
can never dare."
* * * * *
Much has been said of the courage of those white men who crossed the
stormy Atlantic in their little vessels to explore an unknown
continent. But what of the brave hearts of those Indians who thought
the white men were spirits come out of the sea, who did not know what
ships were, yet who still dared to set sail with them? For we know
that there were such dusky voyagers, that they crossed the sea more
than once in the English fishing vessels, and that they brought back
to their own people almost unbelievable tales of cities and palaces,
or harbors crowded with shipping and of whole countrysides covered
with green, tilled fields. With all these wonders, however, they could
tell their comrades that these white beings were mere men like
themselves, to be neither hated nor dreaded as spirits of another
world. Deep dwelling in Nashola was that born leadership that makes
real men see through the long-established doubts and terrors of their
race, who can distinguish the false from the true, who can go forward
through shadowy perils to the clear light of knowledge and success.
It was in recognition of this that old Secotan, half understanding,
wholly unable to put his feeling into words, standing alone upon the
headland, raised his arms in reverent salute and cried a last good-by
to his comrade:
"Farewell and good fortune, O Brother of the Sun!"