Chapter VII: Part 7

The Council met early on the second morning, going down toward Council Hollow before the dew was dried upon the fern. All the camp, scattered as it was in a great treeless tract, hung in the breathless quiet of suspense. There was scarcely any stir of talk or movement except now and then among the Far-Folk, who lay all together like cattle on a warm hill slope, turning toward the sun.

Herman and I, since no one seemed to regard us, thought of going down to revisit the meadow and the lovely open water below the Leap. But the expectant sense that brooded over the camp bound us to the consideration of what might be decided about us personally at the Council. If we looked afar at the sea rim, trying to make out at what point we were, we looked suddenly back to see if the councilors were not coming up the hill. If we heard a lark rising with its breast all brightening yellow from some grassy water border, we listened the more anxiously immediately to hear if any one had come to call us in to judgment.

When the shadows were gone far toward midday we heard what might have been the breaking out of bird songs low and urgently through all the open woodland. There was a sound of feet moving all together, and then some one calling us by name. The Council men were coming up from the Hollow and the Outliers crowded up to them to hear what they had to say. They said nothing whatever until we were all come into hearing, and ranged, the Far-Folk on one side and we on the other, on the crown of a hill, open, and having a large grassy space beyond it.

I thought then, and I have not since reconsidered it, that of all times the noon is the most solemn in which to deliver judgment. When all the earth is quiet, shadows folded up, no bird singing, no beast abroad, all the outer sense drowses under the sun glare. At such a time to hear a voice crying punishment and doom is more terrible than any hour of night. A convocation of wolves in the open sun would not have seemed more singular, but this was not a business which could await a gentler time.

We could see Persilope standing up, all expression beaten out of his face by the sun, like leaf under the gold beater’s hand. Presently when we were all well quieted, he began in a voice pitched for carrying, but toneless as the light, ordering some skins to be spread in the grassy space in front of him. Then it was ordered that all the Outliers who had anything of the King’s Desire should bring it to that place. The chief held up as he spoke, the circlet which he had taken from Oca’s head; and as he turned it in the sun, it melted and ran a ring of changing fire. When he had done speaking he cast it down with so much force that the setting, which was old and delicate, burst and sent the stones scattering like broken coals. There was a little pause after that, and then Noche, springing up from behind him, held up the King’s Cup, but neither so high nor so steadily. A little laggard of perception, as the very strong commonly are, the point of what Ravenutzi had said about the way in which he had come to learn the secret of the Treasure, had driven slowly to the old man’s brain. Now it troubled his countenance: his eyes were dark sockets between the drift of his brows and beard. He held up the vase in his hands.

“Cup of the Four Quarters,” he said, “O Cup of Tears!” His strength surged in him with the recollection; the bowl crumpled in his grip, he bent back the base upon the stem and dropped it on the ground.

After him came every man with what he had; armlets and buckles and chains of wrought and beaten gold and jewels, and the jeweled lamps and vessels. The heap grew; it glittered and darted pain into the eyes; it had green and blue and ruby gleams in it that winked and mocked the sun. When it was all in—all but the great rubies which lie still in a place known only to some few of us who are not likely to go there to fetch them—and the men had sat down again, Persilope began.

He spoke steadily and without passion, saying what was well known to them, that a curse was laid on whoever lifted the King’s Desire. But the truth was, the curse lay in the mere possession of it by whatever means; as if one should expect to keep a viper in his house and not himself be stung by it. Itlan had been destroyed for it, and all those of their own people who had kept the Treasure since, had purchased nothing but wars and trouble with it. All of which being within their knowledge and true, it was agreed for the safety of the Outliers to cast out the King’s Desire as men would a poison snake which they had found among the huts.

At this there was a spark, a quiver of expectancy among the Far-Folk. As if they imagined, eyeing it so greedily, that the treasure heap was to be handed over to them as it lay, not so very unlike the snake of his comparison, coiled glisteningly upon itself with red jeweled eyes.

Such an expectation, if it amounted to that, died with Persilope’s next sentence, which was, briefly, to the effect that for all these reasons it had been determined that when the Treasure was buried again, as it shortly would be, it was to be followed by a forgetfulness from which there would be no revival. It was to be forgetfulness of such a fashion—here he looked over at Ravenutzi and the bleakness of his delivery augmented—that there would be no picking of their brains afterward.

I could see that the news of this conclusion had already spread and been accepted by the Outliers. It was, perhaps, in the eye of all that had recently occurred, not strange they should accept it with so much gravity, and on the part of the women with some consternation.

I looked over at Trastevera where she sat close to her husband. I saw her look doubtfully; write with her finger in the dust. Then I saw that no Outlier looked at any other, but down or up. I thought I understood that though they agreed with the judgment, no one wished to assume the responsibility and drink so deeply of the Cup. It had not yet occurred to me that there was any other way in which complete forgetfulness could be secured.

I saw Persilope search his people slowly with his glance before he spoke in a voice heard to the outer ring.

“Outliers, are you all here?”

It was followed by the rustle and murmur by which they took account of themselves and of those left beyond River Ward with the wounded. The murmur, swelled to affirmation, passed from group to group and was handed up to Persilope by the nearest council-men.

“We are all here.”

“Know then,” he said, his voice and words shaping to formality and sounding drearily in the white aching noon, “that there is a service to be performed for the common good, and a penalty to be undertaken. The Council leaves it open to any man who loves the common good so much, now to offer himself. Is there any so offers?”

And still the eye of no Outlier sought any other eye, only I saw Trastevera look up from her drawing and, leaning a little past the others, gaze steadily toward some spot beyond her with a long, compelling look. Before I could follow it to its point of attention, almost before Persilope had done speaking, I saw Noche getting on his feet, blinking a little as though the light abashed him, and fumbling embarrassedly at his girdle like a child.

“If I should be counted worthy ... if I could be trusted again....” He shook with eagerness. “Tribesmen, it is my right, for it was through my doddering old tongue the secret escaped.... Ask him.” He pointed to Ravenutzi. “He said so; ask _them_.” His great, gnarly arm, like the stump of an oak, was stretched toward Prassade and Mancha, and it trembled like an oak when the axe is at its roots. “Ask them if he did not say so at the Place of Caves ... though I would have died rather....”

“It was from _my_ hand the Ward was loosed ... under _my_ eyes he seduced her mind ... fool, fool!” This was the voice of Waddyn, who rose up in his place behind Noche, tall and very gaunt, as some old wolf of the wilderness. He struck himself on the breast. “We are old men,” he said, “shall we have discredit at the last? Chief, are we accepted?”

In their eagerness he and Noche had struck hands together like two children come to beg a holiday, dropping apart as the murmur of acceptance ran among the Outliers and made them men again. “You are accepted,” announced Persilope. So they sat down again, each in his place, quite contented.

There was a little pause here. I was trying from where I sat to have a glimpse of Ravenutzi, to see how this affected him, if at all, when I heard some disturbance behind me, and a voice crying out:

“No, no, I cannot lose you both!”

I turned, and I saw Prassade stooping to disengage his knees from his wife’s clinging, and holding her from him by the shoulders, begin to speak.

“I also....”

“Outliers,” he said, and by the hollowness of his voice and the sinking of his cheek under the red beard they saw what havoc grief and disgrace had made in him, “Outliers, it is through my blood dishonor came, and one of my blood must cure it. There is none but me.”

There was a general outcry of dismayed protest and assurance.

“Not you, Prassade, not you....”

“No fault of yours....”

“She has paid....”

“She was but a child, she has paid in full....”

And then from the woman at his feet:

“Think of _me_, Prassade.”

“Think of what I think on day and night,” cried Prassade, “and let me go.”

“Prassade,” said the young chief, greatly troubled, “in that which we propose to do, when this business is settled, I shall have great need, as in the past I have had great benefit, from your interest and advice....”

“No, no!...” The man’s voice was a desperate gasp merely. “Never shall I give counsel who could not advise my own child against dishonor”—holding his wife from him still, though the poor creature worked toward him on her knees. “Never shall I beget children again who have been betrayed by my own child.... Ah ... let me go ... let me go ... and by service ... by forgetting....” There was something almost of madness in his wounded desperation. I suppose his wife must have seen that. She left off entreaty and took his hand, fondling it quietly, turning as she was, upon her knees, toward Persilope and the elders, quite broken and submissive.

“It is best you let him go,” she said, “he will be happier so.”

Prassade caught at this, his lip was wet with eagerness.

“Ay, ay, how can I know happiness again? She knows I cannot.”

“Are you sure,” said Persilope to the wife, “that you are prepared for ... that you understand?”

“I understand,” she answered back, neither of them looking at the man in question. “If it means peace for him, I am....” She threw out her hands to show how obedient she was to destiny.

“Am I accepted, chief; am I accepted?” The man trembled with the hope of deliverance.

“You are accepted,” the chief admitted, seeing there was no one disposed to deny him. There was a space of stillness in the bright palpitating noon before Persilope, measuring the heap of gold and jeweled vessels with his eye, had turned back and said: “It wants yet another.”

Then I saw his wife leaning a little from where she sat with her glance still fixed and compelling. I followed it past the line of elders and found it fixed on Ravenutzi. Before I could shape in my mind what wordless urgency lay behind that look, I saw the smith rise slowly, and stepping carefully among the rows of seated captives, come and stand beside Prassade and the two others. Trastevera sunk backward in her seat with the look of one justified in a long belief.

“I,” he said, “offer myself.”

At this simple and unexpected intrusion of the smith into the situation, there burst from the Outliers a sudden sharp hiss of refusal and indignation. It was followed instantly after by harsh ironical laughter. Cries sounded, here and there two arms and a head cast up, like the crest of a wolf out of a pack, protestingly, and hands pulled him down again.

“The smith, the smith!” they cried. “A reparation, a reparation!”

They were fierce for the moment with the irony of the situation and their grim enjoyment of it. Yet, though there was a kind of justice in making the man who had dared most to possess the King’s Desire the best keeper of it, I thought they might easily have found a better punishment. Ravenutzi was, as I believed, a man of great sensibility. There must have been many things in that connection he would be wishful to forget. And I could not understand why his willingness to take the Cup in such company confirmed in Trastevera the hope of a latent nobleness in him which had been her own excuse for her former kindness. Neither could I any more understand the unmirthful humor of the Outliers.

Nor, I think, did the Far-Folk then understand it, looking askance and half hopeful, as if in spite of everything they expected Ravenutzi’s wit to bring something out of the situation to their profit. But the Outliers continuing to shout: “The smith, the smith! A reparation!” Persilope was obliged formally to announce his acceptance.

Ravenutzi’s part in the reburial of the Treasure being settled, the four men went to work to cord it up conveniently for carrying. Without further ceremony they took tools for digging and set out from the camp with the Treasure swung between them. They went toward the deep forest and by such a trail that, when they had passed over a little rise of ground a few hundred yards from us, no one could see the way they went. No one moved from his place lest he should accuse himself of a wish to do so.

We sat and watched below us the banner of the Leap stream through its irised changes, saw the shadows shrink and stretch toward afternoon. Sat so still that a little black bear came out of the manzanita and _whoofed_ and ran across the outstretched legs of the Outliers, and a troop of deer trotted up from the valley and stared soft-eyed at us, skirting the rim of the hollow. Two or three hours went over us, and hawks began to dart out of the scrub to hunt before we heard the four returning. They were tired, overdone, but they had bathed at the creek and set their clothing in order. No soiling traces betrayed where they had been.

They came up and delivered themselves as for inspection to Persilope. What followed was very brief.

“Is it accomplished?” said the chief.

“It is accomplished.”

“You are prepared, then?”

“We are prepared.”

Some slight bequests followed concerning articles of property, which the chief took as executor.

“My young sons ...” said Prassade.

“Are mine.”

“Then we are ready.”

All this time Ravenutzi had not said a word. One by one the Outliers, as I had seen them do with Daria, came up to take their leave. It was done with a deep and moving brevity. I came in my turn and cried a little over old Noche.

“Have you forgiven me for overhearing what you never meant for me?” said I.

“Child, I bless you for it: but for you we might not have had back again what my prattling lost.”

All this time no one spoke to Ravenutzi. Trastevera stopped before him for a moment or two, and some wordless assurance of reconciliation passed between them. He had not asked for farewells from his own people and the Outliers had not suggested it. All being over, the four men began to walk from the camp and away from the sun. As they passed the old King of the Far-Folk, he stood up, biting his long beard.

“Oh, my King,” said Ravenutzi, speaking loud that the Outliers might suspect no hidden communication, “I have done what I could.”

“O smith,” said Oca, bitter with impotence, “it shall be remembered.”

They passed on until they had reached a knoll that lifted them clear of intervening scrub. They stood there, turned facing us; the light, strong against them, made them indistinct, the wind blurred the folds of their garments. I looked about expecting one with the Cup, and saw instead a score of the slingsmen measuring off their ground.

They stood with the sun to their backs and swung their slings lightly to free them for action. Until that moment I had not a notion what was really forward, nor I think had the Far-Folk. When they heard the slight preparatory whistling of the slings I saw the wife of Ravenutzi start as if they had stung upon her flesh. She looked up and saw the four standing so quietly and the young men with their slings drawn to position across the grassy intervening space. Noiselessly she sprang up and began running. Swiftly as she cleared the space between her and Ravenutzi it was not swift enough. The word was given, the slings were up and whirling; swifter than birds the stones took their flight. I saw her leaping on the knoll and her husband’s arms opened to receive her, then I heard the singing of the stones and saw them go down, with her body across his, all so quietly, as grass is mown in summer.

XV
HOW HERMAN AND I CAME BACK TO BROKEN TREE

Before any bird awoke, and while the wood was morning gray, the Outliers began to move westward next day from Leaping Water. Morning did not break but there was a widening of the gray space, a warming of the slight wind, and then the chill that settled into weeping fog. Blunt crowns of hills peered at us through the parting mist, and seemed mysteriously to move behind it and at the next lifting peer upon us from another quarter. Dim files of trees marched down upon us from obscurity and marched away again. Far to the left we heard the rain charging the river cañon, and the stir of invisible cohorts enfilading behind the locked ranges.

I could not make out where we were, except that our general movement was toward lower ground, and from the position of a pale yellow blur that appeared in the sky about midday, I gathered that we had moved south and west. In this space of half obscurity, wet mist, sodden grass, pale shadow and pale sun, the Far-Folk moved with us. Neither they nor Herman nor I cared to ask what was meant toward us, nor speculated as to what we should do about it. I suppose no philosophy could have devised more justice in the end than the working of their own natures had brought to pass. Whoever had met death on this occasion had met it so much of his own act that the event left no sense of mal-adjustment, and with it died both remorse and recrimination.

We had reached by this time, Herman and I, a large faith in the reasonableness of nature. Whatever came to us, we felt the processes of life rising to heal it like the sap to a tree’s scar.

We kept close together, saying little, going all that day in intermitting fog and rain, until the sky cleared well toward sunset. We had come to a halt an hour past on a wild open headland, and saw huge uncouth shapes of cloud hurrying to caverns of the sun. Fog lay thick in the hollows, hills islanded above it; as it cleared and sunk and the dry land appeared we saw how large and good the country was; hills upon hills, and hills beyond, wooded and bare, broken and rolling land. Nowhere was there a man trace, no smoke going up from the cañons, nor window lights below the trees. To the west the fog lay unpierced, stretching seaward, level and roughed on the surface like waves, beginning to take a red tinge from the sun. It was not until then that we had some hint of why we had halted in this place. We saw the Outliers drawn up into some sort of order, with the Far-Folk opposing, and the two chiefs between.

We hurried and came up to that privileged place near Trastevera which her favor reserved for us, and I observed that the eyes of Oca burned red like a weasel’s, as he turned them this way and that on the emerging hills, fingering his great beard. The glitter of wet on his shoulders like bronze, touched with reflected color of the westering fires, the bearskins that clothed him below, and the blowing of long lip locks gave him an appearance most wild and befitting the hour. He looked, and Persilope looked, standing poised and at ease as a stag gazing.

“It is a good land,” said the King of the Outliers.

“Good enough.”

“And large.”

“As you say, large,” admitted the King of the Far-Folk, looking askance, his hands forever busy with his beard.

“Large enough for two peoples to live in it, each unmolested?”

Oca’s eyes roved over the whole circle of the outlook before he answered.

“Large enough.”

“Oca,” said the young man, not the least troubled by this curtness nor put out by it, “you have done us as much harm as you could, which is not so much as you wished. I leave you to count the good you have got by it. It was an old quarrel, but it occurs to me that since the chief cause of it has ceased to exist, there is little use in our quarreling. But there is no reason why we should be friends. Do you follow me?”

“You are plain enough.”

“I will be plainer. Not only do we Outliers wish no quarrel with you but we wish never to set eyes on you again, nor so much as to happen on the places where you have been. Therefore if you will choose you out a quarter of this land, which, as you say, is large enough, you and your people will have leave to go seven days in that direction, after which you shall see no more of us. But all this part where we have been, from the Ledge to Broken Tree, is forbidden ground. Neither you nor any generation of yours to set foot in it. We will see to that.”

He spoke with a controlled and quiet energy that fell on the old man’s fury of defeat like steady rain.

“As for us, we shall go south from here a great distance. So,” said Persilope, “if you choose, to-morrow my men will set you on your way, and you shall have no more to do with us except of your own seeking.”

Oca looked back over his people standing sullen and attentive, and read but one thought in them.

“We would go now,” he said.

“As you will. Only choose.”

It was a generous offer, but perhaps Persilope knew his man. Oca looked north and south: he must have had by his wild instinct the better knowledge of the country. He might have seen in that unstinted gaze some trace—pale smoke ascending or pointed roof—that advised him of the neighborhood of men, men to be plotted against, evaded, pilfered from, to give to his life the zest of cunning that it craved. He stretched his hand northward.

“I will go there,” he said.

“From those three far peaks, then, to this broken headland, and from thence as the crow flies to the sea. Do you accept the conditions?”

“O Persilope, what else is there to do?”

“Go, then.”

On the motion of Persilope stepping back all the Outliers fell back a little also to give them room. We saw the Far-Folk set in motion. Oca himself went a few paces, but he was, after all, a king; words of thanks stuck in his throat no doubt. He dragged them out, perhaps by the process of tugging at the locks of his beard.

“Your offer is just. We will keep faith with you. My thanks to you,” he said, and when Persilope had dismissed the subject with a gesture, he turned his back in departing and did not look our way again.

We saw them go down the hill and drown in the lake of mist, and after an interval come out on the other side rounding a hill front, after which we saw them no more. It was a visible relief to the Outliers to be rid of them. We moved a space down the headland, made cover from the rain and slept quietly.

In the night all the tide of mist and fog drained out to sea and left the heavens tender.

By the sun we saw that we had come much nearer the coast than I had realized; we saw the sapphire spangled belt of the sea lying low under the hills, and suspected a faint odor of drying weed mixed with the breath of the budding forest. Gladness came up with the sun and sang the love of life awake.

Spread abroad seeking food, we heard the Outliers laughing in the well sunned spaces. It was still very early and the shadows airy when they called to us. They came about us in a ring of friendly faces, and it was so good a day to be alive in, we had forgotten to be afraid what they might do with us.

“You heard us say last night,” began Persilope, when we had been brought before him in a grass walk between the madroños, “how we should go south from here where the forest comes down to the sea and there are no House-Livers. The places where you knew us we shall not know again.” He saddened at that, and a shadow of sadness fell on all their faces. “But I doubt”—here he smiled—“if we were still there, whether you could find us again.”

“Not without your consent.”

“You came to us strangely,” he went on, “in a strange time, and trouble entered with you.”

“Not of our making,” Herman reminded him, “nor our wishing.”

“We are sensible of that, and also that we had good from you. Therefore”—he looked about on the Outliers and the nudging and whisper of agreement ran from group to group of them—“we wish to give you good in return. We have nothing to give you such as House-Folk value, nothing but your memory of us, which we hope you may hold as lovingly as we do yours.”

“We do so,” said Herman.

“Will you take that memory then, as our gift of parting, so to keep it as the best we have to offer?”

“So to keep it as the best we have to keep,” consented Herman solemnly, and I after him.

“Why then,” said Persilope, “there is nothing more for it but to set you on your way to Broken Tree again, and to wish you Good Friending.”

The good-bys were said very quickly; they came about us with light laughter and good wishes and broke and parted into the wood again. The sun and the spring and the wind out of the south called them. I sent messages to Evarra, who stayed in the wood beyond River Ward to bury Lianth. Trastevera and some others came down the hill with us. When we had traveled rapidly for an hour they showed us the moon-shaped bay and the moon-white curve of the beach around it, and the point of cypress running far into the blue water. Later we could see the white specks of the houses, and then the close shouldering hills and the moss-hung pines, the oaks leaning all one way of the wind, and the sea-blue slopes of ceanothus. As we went our companions slipped from us, melted between sunny space and woody shadow, and mixed with the brown and green of the wood side. Now we saw bright regardful eyes and fingers laid on lips—who knew what men folk might be stirring? And now we felt to right or left the friendly presences. Finally, when we had been walking I do not know how long, suddenly there was only Herman and I in the wood, and no other.

“Herman, Herman!” I said, “they are gone, we shall never see them again.”

He looked and listened; nothing moved but the flicker of sun on a wind-stirred leaf or a winged insect in the green arcades of fern. Far back we heard the call of jays ending in a light high note of mocking laughter.

“Herman, shall we never find them?”

“Perhaps. Who knows? The trail is very plain here. If we take pains to notice it, we might come this way again.”

“Yes, let us keep the trail at least. We must find the place again. They have not forbidden us.”

We followed it close where it left the trees and ran in the grass between the blossoming lilacs. Wet folded poppies bent above it.

“It was a good time we had with them. I cannot bear to think it will never come again.”

“Yes, it was a good time. How long was it, Mona?”

“How should I know? Do you remember, the first day we went in by Broken Tree there was the first spray of lilac blossoming?”

“I remember.”

“And now all the slopes are blue and the air too sweet with them. How long is that?”

“A long time, I think. I was a professor of Sociology then.”

“And what are you now?”

“Something more, I hope. And—Mona, I think we are taking the best part of Outland away with us.”

I agreed to that too, as we walked between the blue sprayed fountains of ceanothus, and felt the swing of the earth under us.

“Are you happy, Mona?”

“Yes. Though we have lost them, and I shall never walk alone in the wood again without hoping to find them. I am happy, but I do not know why.”

“And have you quite forgiven me?”

“For what, Herman? I have nothing to forgive you.”

“For not being more, seeing more in the first place—for such a number of things. Have you—quite?”

“Yes, quite.”

We walked on and saw the curdled line of the surf, and heard the long sigh that passes up from the sea along the pines, and smelled the beaches. All at once I was aware of the soft springing of the grass under foot.

“Herman! Herman! Where is the trail? Look! We have lost it.”

We looked, and there was the locked wood behind, and the soft, untrodden turf before.

“It was here by the buckthorn, I think.”

“By the ceanothus; it came out between two pines.” But though we looked and ran, it was not in either of these places.

“Herman, we shall never find the trail to that country again.”

“Yes, Mona.”

“Ah, look for it, Herman, come and look!”

Herman stood by the ceanothus and looked at me instead. “Mona,” he said, “the trail is here.”

“Where, Herman?” But I could not look at him where he stood because of the shining of his eyes.

“Here, Mona,” he answered with a gesture, “here!”

And I turned and found it on his breast.

THE END

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.