think. Now I have a mind to go and see what this girl is like who sets
all people by the ears, and when I have found her I shall come to tell
you.”
She smiled sidewise whimsically as she stooped to the chaparral again.
Though there was inordinate hate in her look and insuperable hardness,
there was that in her fierce, tormented spirit so laid hold on me that I
neither put out my hand nor raised my voice to stay her as she went.
XI
HOW THE OUTLIERS CAME UP WITH THE FAR-FOLK AT A PLACE CALLED THE SMITHY,
AND HERMAN CAME BACK TO RIVER WARD
Nothing in all that struggle initiated by the lifting of the King’s
Desire, pleased me so much as the way the Far-Folk outstretched
themselves by their own cunning. They had chewed the cud of the old
grudge so long, disgorging and regorging, that life smacked no other
savour for them. They made the mistake of imagining no other among their
enemies. That slow treachery of Ravenutzi’s, while it burned against the
honor of the Outliers, kept the habit of treacherous thinking alive
among their enemies. The Far-Folk wasted themselves upon the method and
left not much to reckon with beyond the fact of possession.
Let them once get their hands upon the King’s Desire! They asked no more
than that, planned very little more. Communication with Ravenutzi was
difficult. Never greater than the time of the Meet from which they hoped
so much, when the thought of the Treasure was uppermost in every man’s
mind. Then hope overrode precaution and drew them, when they had most
need to keep in the dark, to cluster just beyond River Ward like
wastrels above the water where the dead are about to rise. There, had he
not had other business for his thoughts, Mancha should have discerned
them. But the Hammerer’s preoccupation, though it saved them from
detection by increasing the sense of safety, hurried the unearthing of
the King’s Desire.
News of this move only reached the Far-Folk as they lay all together,
with no preparation for flight or siege, in a shallow cañon back of
River Ward, humming with excited talk, like a hive about to swarm. The
mere hint of frustration fanned them into a fury, which was succeeded
when the Treasure was actually in camp, by gross, babbling boastfulness
and exultation. Close on this came word from Ravenutzi that he had fled
the Outliers with the Ward, and they were to await him in a place called
the Smithy.
If they wondered why he should have taken so much trouble for a girl who
had already served her turn, they had either less interest in his
relation to her, or trusted him more. What did concern them was that the
same message told them that by this time the Outliers were in a fair way
to discover the loss of the King’s Desire.
They judged they would be tracked and planned their defense in keeping
with what they thought the Outliers’ probable estimate of themselves.
They reasoned that the Outliers would be expecting lies in the enemy’s
country. They left a boy behind them to watch. If the Outliers lost the
trail he was to run and bring the Far-Folk word. If they struck the
trail to the Smithy he was to turn them from it by the simple truth.
There they overdid themselves. The Outliers, not yet inured to lies,
believed what the boy told them.
They caught the boy—one with some spirit in him meriting a better
employment—crawling through the scrub half a day beyond River Ward, and
brought him before Persilope, where he scratched and cursed awhile and
then fell sullen under their questioning. Let them kill him, he said,
but he would not tell where his people were, nor how to get at them.
“Nay, we will not kill you, lad,” Noche reassured him, “we love you so
much.” Here he wrapped his great arms about the boy, handfast behind his
back as the captors had brought him in, and lifted him against his
breast.
“So,” he laughed, “will you not tell me for love where the Far-Folk
are?”
“No.” The boy’s face flushed purple, the breath came whistling through
his teeth.
“One,” said Noche, and the muscles of his back began to swell.
“Two,” said Noche.
“Yes-s-ss!” sung the boy’s rattling breath.
And when Noche, who would have cracked the ribs of a grown man as well,
set him down, the boy staggered and was sick, and admitted they were at
the Smithy. He had been entirely within his instruction in that, but he
must have seen the unwisdom of telling the truth as he had been
instructed, when the Outliers set out immediately in that direction. His
distress was evident and genuine, he moaned and whimpered, came fawning
to Persilope.
“Why, what ails the boy?” said he, perplexed. “We want no more of you.”
“But, oh, I have lied to you,” whined the lad. “I have lied; you will
kill me when you learn how I have lied. They are not at the Smithy.”
“Where then?”
“Oh, oh, I do not know. Over there. At Eagle Rock, perhaps. But
certainly not at the Smithy.”
His anxiety undid him; Noche came close.
“Shall I say three to you, my youngling?”
The boy fell silent and shivering. All the rest of that journey Noche
kept him serviceable by the mere motion of his arms.
The place called the Smithy lies in the pit of a blind cañon, all of
rusty red volcanic stone. Half-cooled it seems, smudged black with
smoke, encrusted with flakes of dark lichen like soot. Some Junipers
grow there, wind depressed, all asquat above the rocks like dwarfed,
warty things crept out of the ruins to take the sun. In the middle of
the pit half a score of pines staggered together as if awry with labor
at the cold forges. Here the Far-Folk repaired to wait the smith and
gloat upon his work. Here, when the earth melted in its own shadow under
a sky of dusky blueness, whitening to an unrisen moon, the Outliers
found them. The Far-Folk had eaten, and sat about on the broken stones
gloating. Even in repose, and from the top of the hill where the
Outliers looked down at them, they had the attitudes of exultation. The
King’s Desire lay uncorded in their midst, the little low fire struck a
thousand bright reflections from it. Red eyes of gems winked from behind
a screen of golden fret. At the head of the circle sat the chief of the
Far-Folk, and the Cup of the Four Quarters was between his knees.
This Oca was a lithe man, well bronzed, of a singular, wild, fearless
bearing; he had a beard of thick, wavy locks that he blew back from his
lips as he talked, accommodated to the carriage of his head like
sculptor work. Around his mouth there was the evidence of something
half-formed, undependable, the likeness of half fabled wood-creatures.
In his eyes, which were bright and roving, and on his brow, there was
the witness of extraordinary intelligence. He had a laugh, short and
bubbling, that came always at the end of his words and belied their
seriousness; it was as if some sardonic half-god sat in him and laughed
at his assumption of being a man. He laughed now as the Outliers looked
down on him, lifting the Cup of the Four Quarters, blowing back his long
lip locks to drink.
The Outliers had come, I say, to the top of the cañon at dark, for they
had not been very sure of the way, and had scorned to squeeze further
help from their captive. They hung there straining through the dusk to
take the lay of the land and for the moment forgot the lad. He must have
had some good stuff in him, for all that afternoon he had been white
with high resolve, when they thought him merely frightened. The
Outliers’ party halted where the coiled and undulating strata flowed
down the sides of the cañon like water lines in old bas-reliefs. Under
the wiry trees they made out sparkles of red and green and figures
moving. Just then the boy managed, by slipping on a pebble, to bring his
throat a foot from Noche’s hand and to let out a cry formless and
anguished, breaking off in mid-utterance like a trumpet torn asunder. To
it succeeded the sound of a limp body dropping among disjointed stones,
the rush of the Outliers going down, and the scuttling of the Far-Folk
in the blind gully like scared sheep in a runway.
It was very quickly over. The cry had done its work and the advantage of
the ground was all to the Far-Folk; dark people as they were, the dark
befriended them. When the Outliers loosed their slings the first sound
took them into cover. There was heard the crack of the sling stones
followed by sharp groans, but by the time our men got down to the twisty
trees there was not a spark of the Treasure nor one of the Treasure
lifters. They stumbled on some of the Far-Folk women who had lingered to
wake the sleeping children, and took them, with a good part of their
baggage. By the time the moon came up there was nothing to be seen of
either party but one slim body of a lad, with his back broken, growing
cold in a deep cairn of stones.
Persilope moved on with the slingsmen to keep the trail of the Far-Folk
warm, and Mancha, who preferred the work that promised earliest news of
Zirriloë, came back with the captives to River Ward.
In the early half light, as they traveled, they were aware of a tall
woman with long hair blowing, who came and stood on a hill overlooking
them for long enough to have counted all the captives. When she had told
them over, she wrung her hands and bit upon them, and vanished into the
morning mist. I supposed it must have been Ravenutzi’s wife. She was
still looking for some clue of him and had not found it.
We moved, all of us, from Windy Covers that day to a place beyond the
Ledge, but near enough to the Gap for us to fall back upon our own
country if need arose. That night, before Mancha got in from the Smithy,
Herman came back again. It was the pale end of night, the moon was gone
ghost white, and the wind was awake that runs before the dawn. I was
lying sleepless in my bed under the buckthorn when I heard the whisper
of their arrival on the far side of the camp.
I had said to myself that I owed Herman no welcome. Though there was no
personal tie between us, there was in our common condition of aliens
among the Outliers an obligation to look out for me, which he had no
right to neglect. Here was I left to he knew not what pains and
inconveniences while he ran after this wild girl and a faithless,
dishonored man. The more I considered this, the less of satisfaction it
brought me. For whatever the pitiableness of the girl’s case, and I felt
there might be something in that, it was no affair of Herman’s. Why
should he set himself beside her and against all other women who had
kept right and true, by what pains and passionate renunciations I seemed
now to feel myself seized and participated. I saw myself with the others
affronted by any excusing of Zirriloë. That my friend should so excuse
her pointed and made personal the offense.
I was so sure of this resentment, and it was so palpable a barrier in my
own mind to the renewal of intimacy, that when Herman, before he had
eaten or rested, came stealing among the stretched figures, I could not
imagine what he was looking for. He crept with long, stooping pauses
where an arm thrown up or a drawn cover concealed an identity, until he
came to where I lay, wrapped in a cougar skin under the buckthorn. Then
I knew by the full stop, and by the long breath of easement after strain
that it was I he wanted.
He sat down a very little way from me, on the hillock of a broken pine.
Though I could not see his eyes in that light, I made out that his face
was turned toward me, and that he leaned it upon his hand. Whether he
felt some emanation of my resentment and was troubled by it, or whether
from weariness, he moved uneasily and sighed. He must have grown more
accustomed to the dark by traveling in it, for presently he reached out
to brush lightly some small twigs and leaves that had fallen on my bed,
and felt or saw the barely perceptible stir I made.
“Mona?” he whispered.
“Well?”
“Did I wake you? I did not mean to. Do you wish to sleep again?”
“I am not asleep.”
I suppose he expected some question which would give him leave to begin
with what his mind was full of, but I had already heard the whisper,
handed from bed to bed. I guessed what ill success the expedition had,
and I had no wish to hear Herman’s part in it. I lay still and made out
the faint movement in the leaves of the buckthorn, until, by the slow
clearing of the dark, I could see the droop of his figure with fatigue,
and I was not proof against that.
“You are very tired; why do you not go and lie down?”
“If you don’t mind I would rather talk.”
He moved over nearer and seemed to get some comfort from my proximity,
for he began without any further encouragement.
Herman, he said, had not kept close to the Outliers but with Mancha had
scouted far to the left in the hope of coming on some trace of the
Far-Folk’s secret camp, where he imagined Zirriloë might be hid. They
had followed fruitlessly on faint clues, and finally with no clues at
all, and had come to no conclusion except that the fugitives must be
still on the Outlanders’ side of the Ledge. The track had gone far north
of Windy Covers and there was no other passage known for so great a
distance as to be impracticable.
“There is a way,” said I.
And as soon as I had said it I was overtaken with a swift certainty.
This secret way by which Ravenutzi and the girl had gone must be the
same one the wife had come through with her torn hands, venturing so
much to ease her need of him by talking to me. I was so struck by the
idea that, by just the time she had taken to wait for me at Windy Covers
she had missed seeing Ravenutzi help the girl tenderly over that same
trail, that I began at once to tell Herman about it, to his great
amazement.
“You did that,” he said; “you talked to her and let her go, knowing what
harm she had in her mind to do?”
“She was a desperate woman; she could have killed me before help came if
I had given the alarm. In any case,” I protested, “I would not have
given it, because she trusted me. But no harm will come to the Outliers.
This is a private quarrel.”
“That poor girl,” he said, “if she should find her!”
“In that case,” said I, “would you back Ravenutzi to back his wanton or
his wife?”
“Mona—you have no proof!”
“You said—the day she came out of the woods by Leaping Water—that she
was the sort to do anything for the man she loved. Well—she is that
sort.”
“Mona!”
“Perhaps it was not for love then. You said she could appreciate—things.
Perhaps Ravenutzi promised her a——”
“Mona! Mona!” he said, with so sharp an anguish that if I had not felt I
owed it to all honorable women to show him where he stood, I should have
left him to his dear illusion. Yet to see him so excusing treachery for
the sake of a tinted cheek or the way a wrist was turned, set me white
hot and throbbing.
“Would you rather,” I said, “she had done it for love, or for the King’s
Desire?”
I could not see his face, but his voice was troubled with amazement.
“Mona—I—I was not prepared for this.” It was too dark to see, but I
guessed the pauses to be the swallowings of his throat. “I thought you
would be glad to have me go to that poor girl and make things as easy
for her as I could. You never seem to think how she must have suffered
before she came to this.”
“She hid it well. And depend upon it, Herman, whatever sufferings a
woman has in such a case, whatever struggles, they are _toward_ the
thing she would do, not away from it.” I do not know how I knew this,
but the moment I had spoken I was quite sure. “If she struggles,” I
said, “it is to justify her right to do it, to quiet compunction, to
appease her fears. Zirriloë came to the end too quickly to have suffered
much.”
We were both still after that, while the heavens whitened and showed me
a little of how worn he was and what marks of the trail were on him. I
suppose he must have felt the melting of my mood toward him, for
presently his hand stole toward me and began to finger the loose end of
my cougar skin.
“You never seem to think, Mona”—he hesitated—“what this might mean to
me.”
“Well, what does it mean?”
I tried, I think I tried, not to make my voice sound so yielding that he
should suppose me softened toward the shame and wrong of it, nor so hard
that he might imagine the hardness grew out of my caring what it meant
to him. I must have fallen a little to one side or the other, for it was
a long time before he began again.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I am hardly sure myself. There was a time
before we came to Outland—how long ago was that, Mona?—when I fell short
of much that you said and thought. There was something in books and
poetry and music, especially in music, that you were always expecting me
to understand, and the expectation irritated me. I fell into the way of
denying and despising that something, and trying—I am afraid succeeding,
too, in making myself feel that it sprang from some superiority in me
not to understand.... Are you listening, Mona?”
“Yes, Herman.”
“It was not that I felt the want of it so much in myself, but other
people—you, Mona—missed it in me. There was a door to all that, about to
swing upon the latch ... and I could never swing it. And then we came to
this free life ... and Zirriloë.... Did you think I was in love with
her, Mona?”
“Were you in love with her?”
“I don’t know ... she made the door swing back ... she had such a way of
walking ... and that little smile of hers coming and going ... she was
all those things made manifest. A man would understand. I liked to do
things for her. It was a way of serving all the loveliness of women ...
it was serving you, Mona....”
“Ah,” I said, “I would have understood better if the service had been
paid in person.”
“I suppose so.”
He was both humble and reluctant in his acknowledgment, and paused so
long a time after it that I could mark the ebb of the dark from the
highest hills and the full slopes emerging rounded with verdure. But I
found I had nothing to say to him in all this, and perhaps he expected
nothing.
“If she could have stayed so ...” he began again, “as long as she stayed
so, I could feel ... what was it you used to say? ... the roll of the
world eastward.... But to have it end like this ... in meanness and
betrayal ... I wish I might have brought her back with me!”
“Better that you did not, considering what she would come back to meet.
If she loved Ravenutzi she is having her happiness now. If she suffers
at all it is not for what she has done but for what you may think of it.
And if there is any deep-felt misery going on in this anywhere, it is on
the part of Ravenutzi’s wife.”
“Ah, I had forgotten there was a wife.”
I meant he should not forget, nor lose for that shallow girl any of the
deeper opprobriousness that should attach to the double betrayal. But I
was taken by surprise to have him turned by that suggestion quite in
another direction.
“A desperate woman, by your account of her,” he said. “Promise me, Mona,
that you will not hold any further communication with her, and that you
will not go out of the camp without an escort. It isn’t safe, and it
isn’t quite fair, is it, to parley with the enemies of the Outliers?”
If he had stopped with the consideration of my safety, I should probably
have consented meekly like any woman when any man takes an interest in
her, but that suggestion of unfairness set me at odds again.
“I shall not do anything imprudent,” I said; “but as to the relation of
my behavior to the Outliers, that is a matter which you must leave me to
decide for myself.”
“I suppose so,” said Herman ruefully. “I beg your pardon. I don’t know
how it is, Mona, I let other women do pretty much as they like with me,
but I always find myself getting irritated if you don’t do exactly as I
say.”
I was certain Herman had never said anything like this to me before, yet
it had so familiar a ring to it that I found myself going back in my
mind for the association. I recalled what Evarra said when she asked if
Herman was in love with me, that if such were the case he would expect
me to do as he said. I was so taken up with this possibility that I
heard not too attentively the far cry of coyotes going by. There must
have been some nuance in it not of the beasts’ cry, for the Outliers
began springing up around us, listening and intent. It came again and
one answered it. By such signs we were made aware it was Mancha
returning from the Smithy.
XII
HOW AN OUTLIER SAW A TALL WOMAN FOLLOWING A TRAIL AND MANCHA MET THE
SMITH AGAIN
I have no notion how long we lay in the neighborhood of River Ward. By
this time we had lost all track of the calendar, Herman and I, and the
Outliers had none except the orderly procession of the season’s bloom
and fruit and mating time. Great umbrageous clouds came up behind the
hills and were cut down by the wind. Clear days succeeded one another,
matched so perfectly for warmth and color that the consciousness took no
account of the dividing nights. Crowns of foothills lying seaward showed
increasing green and then faint flecks of poppy color. These were our
quietest days, for though there was fighting and following, Herman and I
had no active part in it. Consider how few we were in a great land, and
no trumpeting, no shock of guns, no daily bulletin. Ten men would set
out on the mere stirring of an animal sense that beyond a certain hill
or in a known hollow lurked the breeders of offense. And then no news of
them except as they came or did not come again. Companies of Far-Folk
and Outliers would fence all day each to come at the other unsuspected:
flights and evasions and sharp encounters took place in such deeps of
leafage as dulled all sound. All this was covered, swept over as
carefully as the wild creature hides its ways.
Often now, walking on the tawny-colored hill that sleeps above the bay
with the Mission between its paws, I look back at the warm-tinted
slopes, beyond the reach of the encroaching fogs, and wonder under what
peaks, between what long blue ranges we lay that season. What tumult and
warfare goes on in those still spaces unregarded? But we have never, as
I said in the beginning, got any nearer to it than Broken Tree.
The Outliers stuck to the track of the Far-Folk, and had so much the
better of them in readiness and organization that before long they had
captured the most of their women. Under Mancha our men had sought out
their homes, abandoned so hurriedly, in the shallow, brush-grown cañons,
and had burned and broken what they found. That Ravenutzi had joined the
Far-Folk we knew, for once when they had come to parley over a wounded
man, they saw the hostage at Oca’s back directing the Council by such
knowledge of the Outliers as he had acquired by long residence. Oca blew
out his long beard, laughing as he listened.
I knew too from one of the captive women, that he still concealed from
his wife the place where he had hidden the Ward. The explanation
Ravenutzi had given to Oca of the use he should make of Zirriloë’s
person in the game that was yet to be played, set that chief chuckling
in his beard like a cataract.
But to his wife Ravenutzi had denied seriousness: laughed, kissed her
burned throat, blinded, bound her with an ingenuity of charm and
tenderness until she grew tame under his hand. Then she would rage the
more bitterly when he was away, suspecting him with the girl in hiding;
flaming with jealousy until his return found her burned out, white and
faint, creeping humbly to his caress.