of them had increased, until I could see the outer ring melting into the
twilight of the trees, eyes in formless faces of amazement and alarm.
Now at the admission of a difficulty, they all turned toward her with
that courtesy of inward attention by which, when one of them would
understand more of a matter than lay directly before him, each turned
his thought upon the subject gravely for a time, like so many lamps
lighted in a room, and turned it off again with no more concern when the
matter was resolved. But even as she smiled to acknowledge their help
she shook her head.
“No,” she repeated, “I cannot tell.” She turned and looked at me, and I
gave her the look back with so deep a wish to have her understand that
no trouble should come to them by me, that she must have sensed it, for
her look went on by me and stopped at Herman.
“You?” she questioned.
“Tell her,” said Herman, who had not caught all the words, but only the
general purport of her speech, “tell her that all we ask is to go to our
own homes, unharmed and harming no one.”
Now that was not exactly what I had in mind, for though I would not for
worlds have made trouble for the Outliers, I wished nothing so little as
being sent away before I had got to know more of them. But before I
could frame a speech to that end, Trastevera spoke again more lightly.
“Now that I have seen them, there seems nothing in them but kindness and
well-meaning. Indeed it is so unusual a thing that House-Folk should
discover us, that I am not sure we ought not to pay them some little
respect for it.”
She made me a little whimsical acknowledgment of this sentiment, but
before I could think of a reply, some slight shifting of the ringed
watchers thrust forward Ravenutzi. I recalled suddenly what I had
neglected to state in the midst of Prassade’s explanation, that his
finding me was not the first intimation I had had of the presence of
Outliers in the neighborhood of Broken Tree. Up to this time I had
observed that when the Outliers had their heads together on any matter
of immediate concern, it had been Ravenutzi’s habit to keep a little to
one side, as though not directly affected. Now as I saw him pushed into
the cleared space by the stream side, it stirred dimly in my mind that
the circumstance of my first meeting with him, which I had not before
mentioned, might mean something. I hardly understood what.
I must have made some motion, some slight betraying glance which the
smith detected. While the words were in my throat he looked at me,
subtly, somehow encompassingly, as if he had projected his personality
forward until it filled satisfyingly all my thought. I no longer thought
it worth while to mention where I had first seen Ravenutzi nor what I
had found him doing. I was taken with a sudden inexplicable warmth
toward him, and a vague wish to afford him a protection for which he had
not asked and did not apparently need. Swift as this passage was, I saw
that Trastevera had noted it. Something dimmed in her, as if her mind
had lain at the crossing of our two glances, Ravenutzi’s and mine, and
been taken in the shadow.
“For the disposing of the House-Folk,” she finished evenly, as though
this had been in her mind from the first to say, “you had better take
counsel to decide whether they shall be given the Cup at once, or be
kept to await a sign.”
I saw Persilope stooping to her, urging that she was tired, that she had
come too far that day, she would be clearer in the morning. She shook
her head still, looking once long at me, and once almost slyly at the
smith, and then at us no more, but only at her husband, as she walked
slowly along the meadow against the saffron-tinted sky. Then we were
taken away, Herman and I, to our respective huts.
The place called Deep Fern by the Outliers lay in the middle of three
half hollow basins looking seaward, and clearing all the intervening
hills. Barriers thick set with redwood, dividing the cupped space like
the ridges of a shell, ran into a hollow full of broad oaks and
brambles. Between the ridges brooks ran to join the creek that, dropping
in a white torrent to the basin called Lower Fern, made a pool there,
from which it was also called Deer Lake Hollow. The upper basin, long
and narrow, was named from the falls, Leaping Water.
The camp of the Outliers lay in one of the widest of the furrows between
the ridges where the redwoods marched soldierly down to the stream side.
Above it, between Deep Fern and a place called Bent Bow, lay Council
Hollow. It was there, when the moon was an hour high, a battered-looking
moon, yellow and low, went all the Outliers to consider what was to be
done about us. It was a windy hollow, oval shaped, with long white
knuckles of rock sticking out along the rim, where no trees grew,
nothing taller in it than the shadows of the penstemon which the moon
cast upon the rocks. Whenever the wind moved, there was a strong smell
of sweet grass and yerba buena. There would have been about thirty men
of the Outliers gathered when we came up the ridge from Deep Fern. We
halted with the women at a point where we could see, near to one end, a
little fire of crossed sticks low on the ground. The Outliers were at
all times sparing of fire and cautious in the use of it.
The Council had been sitting some time, I think, upon other matters,
when we took up our station on the rising ground. Trastevera went down,
winding between the rocks toward the ruddy point of fire. The moon was
moving in a shallow arc not high above the ranges, and some hurrying
clouds scattered the light. We could see little more than the stir of
her going, the pale discs of faces or the shining of an arm or shoulder
in the clear space between the shadows of the clouds.
She went on quietly, all talk falling off before her until she stood in
the small, lit circle between the leaders, who inquired formally of her
had she anything to say of importance on the business of the two
strangers.
“Only this,” she said, “that although I was greatly troubled before they
came, by a sense of danger impending, I am now free from it so far as
the House-Folk are concerned.”
“But do you,” questioned Prassade, “sense trouble still, apart from
these?” He motioned toward Herman and me, who had been brought behind
her almost to the circle of the flare.
“Trouble and shadow of change,” she said, and after a pause: “Shall I
speak?”
Without waiting for the click of encouragement that ran about the
Hollow, she began:
“You know all of you that I have, through no fault, the blood of the
Far-Folk, which has been for a long time the blood of traitors and
falsifiers. And yet never at any time have I played traitor to you nor
brought you uncertain word, except”—I thought her voice wavered
there—“in the matter of the hostage.”
If there had been any wavering it was not in the councillors, whose
attention seemed to stiffen to the point of expectation as she went on
steadily.
“When it was a question more than a year ago whether the Far-Folk should
send us their best man and cunningest as a hostage for accomplished
peace, you know that I was against it, though I had no reason to give,
beyond the unreasoning troubling of my spirit. Later when Ravenutzi was
brought into our borders, and I had met with him, there was something
which sang to him in my blood, and a sense of bond replaced the
presentiment. All of which I truly admitted to you.”
So still her audience was, so shadowed by the drift of cloud, that she
seemed, as she stood with her face whitened by the moon, and the low
fire glinting the folds of her dress, to be explaining herself to
herself alone, and to admit the need of explanation.
“And because,” she said, “I could not be sure if it was a foreseeing, or
merely my traitor blood making kinship to him, you took the matter to
council and accepted the hostage. Are you sorry for it?”
At this, which had been so little anticipated, there went a murmur
around the hollow as of doubt not quite resolved. Several cried out
uncertain words which a ruffle of wind broke and scattered. Prassade
wagged his red beard, shouting:
“No! By the Friend!”
“Then,” she went on, more at ease, I thought, “as it was with Ravenutzi,
so with these. I saw trouble, and now I do not see it; trouble that
comes of keeping them, or trouble of letting them go. That I cannot
determine for you. So I say now, if you do not regret what you have done
by Ravenutzi, do the same with these, accept and hold them, waiting for
a sign.”
She left off, and the moon came out of the cloud to discover how they
stood toward it, and went in again discovering nothing.
Then a man who had already pricked himself upon my attention, stood up
to argue the matter. He was short and exceedingly stout of build. Above
the thick bands of leather that protected his lower limbs, he wore no
dress but a cougar skin bound about the thick columnar body and held in
place by a cord passing over the shoulder. He was armed with a crotched
stick that had an oblong pointed stone bound in the crotch by thongs,
the handle of which was so long that, as he stood with his hands, which
were wide and burned but shapely, resting upon it, the head of the
weapon lay upon the ground. What was most singular in his appearance, as
he stood blocked solidly against the half-lit sky, was his hair. It was
pale yellow, crisp and curling, and rayed out erectly from his head as
though it were the emanation of some natural force or property of the
man, curiously and independently alive above the square and somewhat
meaningless regularity of his countenance.
“Why,” inquired he, “were these House-Folk brought here to Deep Fern?
Why not made to drink forgetfulness when first taken?”
“Evarra had forgotten the Cup,” Persilope explained; “she thought it
could be gathered at Broken Tree, but she had forgotten how much further
the season is advanced in that neighborhood.”
“But now,” said Evarra, “I have prepared it, and there is nothing more
to do.” She came forward, and I observed that she held a wooden bowl
against her breast from which steam arose, and an aromatic smell.
The moon had risen early on the track of the sun. The shallow lap of
hills in which we stood gave directly westward to the belated glow that
diffused through the moon shadows an amber bloom, in which, though the
faces of the Outliers shone indistinctly, every motion and purpose was
discernible. I could see then that Evarra’s purpose was to give Herman
and me to drink of some herb which should cause us to forget all that
had happened to us since we had crossed their borders at Broken Tree,
and so send us home again. It met with so much approval that I spoke
hurriedly to forestall it.
“No, no!” I cried. “We have done no harm to you that you should do so
great a harm to us. If you must send us away, why, send us, and we will
give you our word, and that is the best thing we have to give, that no
one shall know of what has happened these four days. But do not take
away the recollection from us.” I spoke so earnestly and meant so much
what I said, taking Herman’s hand so as to include him in the vehemence
of my request, though I do not think he had any particular feeling at
the time, that I made some way with them.
“Nothing is farther from our thoughts,” I said, seeing Evarra hesitate,
“than to bring harm upon you. Not for the world would we betray your
ways nor your homes nor your treasure——”
I do not know why I should have mentioned treasure, except that seeing
old Noche’s flowing head outlined against the pale luminosity of the sky
that instant, brought it to my mind. The word popped out on my tongue as
suddenly as it had popped in. Instantly there was a sharp crackling of
exclamations and a stir as of people rushing together when a brand has
snapped out of the fire, followed by a portentous stillness. Into this
bay of sound the red-pointed beard of Prassade projected itself.
“Who,” he cried, “has been telling of treasure in the hearing of
House-Folk?”
“No one, no one,” I protested, anxious not to provoke blame; “it is only
that I overheard the children——”
“It was I,” admitted Noche regretfully, “old fool that I am. I was
telling the children, and I did not think she understood so much.”
“Fool!” said Prassade; “and twice fool for being an old one!”
But Persilope corrected him.
“At the time of the Wardship it is permitted to tell the children of the
King’s Desire and the keeping of it.”
“But not in the presence of House-Folk,” Prassade insisted, “nor by one
who thinks there is no harm in a jewel if only it shines well and has a
story to it.”
There was more to this which the wind broke and carried away, arms
lifted and heads cast up within the shadow, turbulence and murmurs of
denial. I heard Trastevera say, half to herself:
“Trouble come indeed, when one Outlier calls another a fool in open
council.”
“It is nothing,” whispered Evarra at my shoulder, “all this talk. Though
you had the King’s Desire in your hand, yet you would stay if Persilope
thought she wished it.”
Then the yellow head of Mancha crinkled in the circle of the fire, his
face under it grotesquely blocked with light, like some ancient mask,
crying:
“Signs—do we wait for Signs? Here is a Sign: first the woman comes, and
then the man seeking her. Now, if they are not returned speedily to
their own place who may not come looking for the two of them? And if,
being kept, they escape by chance and go back talking of treasure——”
“But a Sign!” cried Persilope, interrupting him. “Outliers, here is a
Sign. These House-Folk have found us in a place where none of their kind
so much as mark our trails. Within a day after being in our camp they
have heard of the King’s Desire, and talked openly of it. This is a Sign
that they are more favored by the Friends of the Soul of Man than any of
their kind. Is it not a Sign?”
We could see men rising to their feet here and there, and some cried
out: “A Sign! A Sign!” And then other broken phrases, torn and trumpeted
by the wind. Persilope took the bowl from Evarra, holding it out over
the fire with a motion to extinguish the dying flame.
“One has seen strangers coming, and strange things have come; shall we
not wait upon her word?” he cried. I could make nothing of the confused
murmur which ringed the hollow. Persilope must have read acquiescence in
it, for he partially emptied the contents of the bowl upon the fire and
then passed it to Mancha, Ward of the Outer Borders, to see what he
would do. Mancha, smiling, handed the cup to Trastevera as a sign of
unbroken confidence; she, as I guessed, so accepting it. That was the
last I saw of her before Evarra hurried me away, holding high the bowl,
slowly pouring the ceremonial water, silvered by the moon.
IV
THE MEET AT LEAPING WATER
Within five days, during which it rained and cleared, a fine long
growing rain that left the world new washed and shining, the Meet of the
Outliers was moved to Leaping Water.
This was the amphitheater of the terraced basin lying next above Deep
Fern, and took its name from the long leap of the creek that came
flashing down arch by arch from the high, treeless ridges. Five leaps it
took from Moon-Crest to the Basin, where it poured guttering, in so
steep a channel that the spray of it made a veil that shook and billowed
with the force of its descending waters. It trailed out on the wind that
drove continually, even on the stillest days, between the high wings of
the mountain, and took the light as it traveled from east to west and
played it through all its seven colored changes. It was like a great
pulse in the valley, the throb and tremble of it, flushing and paling.
The Basin was clear meadow land, well-flowered, close set by the creek,
but opening well under the redwoods, with here some sunny space of
shrubs, and there stretching up into the middle region of white firs
dozing on the steeps above the water.
It was here we began to learn about the Love-Left Ward which was the
occasion of their coming together.
The very first I heard of it was from Evarra’s slim lad, Lianth, who,
when he was sent to keep me company, would lie on the fern, propping his
chin upon his hand, and sing to me in his reedy unsexed voice, of a
maiden who had left loving for the sake of a great service to her tribe.
Then plucking up the brown moss by the roots, examining it carefully, he
would ask me if I thought it was really right for a girl to do that sort
of thing.
“What sort?”
“Give up loving and all her friends, boys she’s always—liked, you know,
and keep a Ward, like Zirriloë.”
“Did she do that?”
“Well, they chose her to be the Ward this year, and her father let her.
I don’t think he ought!”
“Why not?”
Lianth was not very clear on this point, except as it involved the
masculine conception of beauty as the sign of a real inward
preciousness. Zirriloë had a way of walking, like a wind in a blooming
meadow, she had a cheek as soft, as richly colored, as the satin lining
of unripened fir cones which he broke open to show me. _Therefore_
Prassade shouldn’t have let her forswear all loving for ten years.
“She can’t even look at a boy,” said Lianth; “only at old men, Noche and
Waddyn and Ravenutzi, and if there was—anybody—had thought of marrying
her, he’d have to give up thinking about it for ten years. And anyway,
what is the good of giving a girl secrets to keep if you have to watch
her night and day to see that she keeps them?”
There was a great deal more to this which Herman learned from the men
and the girl’s father. Prassade, whose eldest child she was, felt
himself raised to immeasurable dignity by the choice of Zirriloë, who
was in fact all that Lianth reported her, and more. To his pride it was
a mere detail that during the ten years of her Wardship she was to live
apart from all toward whom her heart moved her, kept by old, seasoned
men, who never left her except with others older and less loverly than
themselves. These six months past she had been with her watchers in a
lonely place, learning by trial what it meant to have left all love to
become the Ward of mysteries.
It was there Trastevera had been when I first saw her, to examine the
girl and discover if her mind was still steadfast.
So she found it, and so reported it to Prassade, and all things being
satisfactory, the feast of the Love-Left Ward was to take place on the
fifth day from this. When her term was done the Ward took the Cup, and
so forgetting all she had heard, returned to the normal use of women.
“But,” I said to Lianth, once when we were gathering elderberries by the
creek, “what is it all about, this secret which Zirriloë must keep, and
is not trusted in the keeping?”
“Ah!” he exclaimed impatiently, kicking at the mossy stones in the
water-bed. “Ask Noche—he is one of the keepers.”
I should have taken that advice at once, but Noche was away at the
Ledge, or River Ward, or wherever the girl was, and Evarra was much too
busy to talk. Practically all the Outliers were expected at Leaping
Water, and there was a great deal to do. As to how many there were of
them, and what places they came from, I could never form any idea, since
outside of Council Hollow they never came together in the open. At the
fight at River Ward there were forty picked men, slingsmen and
hammerers, but counting women and children there must have been quite
four times that number at Leaping Water. They ran together like quail in
the wood, and at a word melted like quail into its spacious silences.
There was that subtle essence of rejuvenation in the air that comes
after rain. Buds of the incense shrub were swelling and odorous. All the
forest was alive and astir with the sense of invisible friendly
presences and low-toned happy talk that seemed forever at the point,
under cover of a ruffling wind or screening rush of water, of breaking
into laughter.
We came often upon lovers walking in the high arched aisles, children
scuttling pink and unabashed in the dappled water, or at noons, men and
women half sunk in the fern deep in gossip or dozing. Such times as
these we began to hear hints by which we tracked a historic reality
behind what I had already accepted heartily, and Herman with grudging,
the existence of the King’s Desire.
They would be lying, a dozen of them in company on the brown redwood
litter, the towered trunks leaning to the firs far above them. Then one
would begin to sing softly to himself a kind of rhymeless tune, all of
dead kings in a rock chamber canted in their thrones by the weight of
jewels, and another would answer with a song about a lovely maid playing
in sea caves full of hollow light.
By this we knew the thoughts of all of them ran on the story which held
the songs together like a thread. We discovered at last that it was the
history of the place from which they had come to Outland, bringing the
Treasure with them, pursued by the Far-Folk. Or perhaps it was they who
were the pursuers, but the Treasure had been the point of their
contention, and it had cost the Outliers so much that they had come to
abhor even the possession of it. So having buried it, they made their
honor the keeping of the secret. Because the first disturbance over it
that reft them from their country had been brought about by the
treachery of a woman, they put a woman to the keeping, half in irony, I
think, for then they had set a watch upon the woman.
It was about this time that Herman waked to an interest on the occasion
that nothing else had been able to arouse in him. He thought that a
community which had arrived at the pitch of understanding that the best
thing to be done with wealth was to get rid of it, would repay study. I
remember his wondering if the Outliers had had any more trouble with
their Treasure, or what they imagined as such, for he never would credit
its reality, than we had experienced with the Coal Oil Trust. I paid
very little attention to him, for all my mind was occupied in watching
Ravenutzi.
From the first I had noticed that whenever there was one of those old
tales, or any talk of the King’s Desire, something would spring up in
his face, as slight as the flick of an eyelid or the ripple of muscles
at the corner of his mouth, but something at which caution snapped
wide-awake in me. I recall how once we lay all together at the bottom of
the wood in the clear obscure of twilight, in a circular, grassless
space where the water went by with a trickling, absent sound. One of the
young men began to sing, and Ravenutzi had stopped him with some remark
to the effect that the Outliers could sing it so if it pleased them, but
the story as it was sung was not true.
“Come,” said the youth, “I have always wanted to know how the Far-Folk
told that part of the tale so as not to be ashamed of it.” Prassade
sprang up protesting that there should be no communication between them
and the Hostage on a forbidden matter. Some debate followed among the
elders as to that. I could see the smith sitting in his accustomed
attitude, knees doubled, hands clasped about them, his chin resting on
his knees. The eyes were black in the twilight under the faun’s profile
and the streaked, springy hair, yet always as if they had a separate
furtive intelligence of their own. It occurred to me suddenly, that in
this very debate precipitated by Ravenutzi, the Outliers were talking
about the Treasure, and that he did not care in what fashion so long as
they talked. Instinctively as I felt this, turning in my mind like a
weed in the surf, I looked toward Trastevera as one turns in a dim room
toward the light, holding out my mind to her as to one of better sight.
I caught the eyes of Ravenutzi, the iris, opaque and velvety,
disappearing under the widening pupil of his fixed gaze. I felt the
rushing suggestion back away from the shore of my mind and leave it
bare. There was something I had meant to speak to Trastevera about, and
I had forgotten what it was.
It was brought back to me the next day, which was the one before the
move to Leaping Water. We were sitting in Evarra’s hut, Herman and I,
with Noche, for the wind and cloud of the Council had contrived to blow
up a rain that drummed aloud on the bent fern but scarcely reached us
through the thick tent of boughs. Above us we could hear the wind where
it went hunting like a great cat, but down at the bottom of the pit of
redwoods it could scarcely lift the flap of the door.