Chapter XI: The Passing of the Master-Girl

And of the rest of the deeds of the Master-Girl, and of her extreme wisdom, foresight and daring, what shall I say? Time would fail me to tell of her dealings with the White Wolves and the Beaver Totem, the Elks and the Red Clouds, and twenty tribes more; yea, and how she, moved thereto by memories of early humiliations, crossed the ranges in force and wiped out her old people the Little Moons; as to which grim deed I desire to express no opinion. Human nature, even nowadays, is queer, nor was it less queer in the Days of Ignorance. Let us admit that a warfare begun in self-defence was carried on for conquest. Her new weapon, her generalship carried all before her, and in her day the Sun-and-Moon Totem waxed great, throve and multiplied, became a dominant clan, pushing back the hunting and war parties of all other names for a month's journey and more. Nor was it a brief episode, for this woman, the Great Chieftainess, as men called her during her life, and for long after, ruled her tribe for so many seasons that if a man were asked to tell how long, that man must hold up his two full hands six times, and yet show three fingers beyond ("three _whole men_ and three _toes_" by Eskimo count). So many times did the black-cock go a-lekking during the reign of the Master-Girl.

In her day every man of her tribe had not less than two wives. Yea, even her husband; for being childless herself, she, loving her Pŭl-Yūn with an exigeant and emulous love, was minded to see him with a larger family of young braves and girls to his name than any other man of the Totem, and to this end supplied him with wives whom she picked and trained: conjugal arrangements distressing to us moderns, but still existing among the Primitives of the Aurès Mountains in Southern Algeria, and which in the case of Pŭl-Yūn and Dêh-Yān in no wise lessened the reverence which the husband paid to the wife of his youth, nor the more exacting and jealous love with which she returned his affection.

Moreover, did she not arm and train an especial force of women archers?--women who hunted by moonlight?--These, and the Good Wolves of their training, were the camp-guard, both of the home stockade at the quarries whither the tribe removed, and of the flying camps in war-time. Sorely dreaded were they by the foemen of other Totems, as well for their close and accurate shooting as for their midnight raids, for the men of the Old Stone Are dreaded to go among dark woods for good and sufficient reasons, and having this fear engrained in their beings, had imagined and come to believe in a-many strange and dismal Things which haunted the dark beside those upon which an axe could bite, which beliefs are held, or at least acted upon, by not a few of their descendants to this hour (albeit by daylight they will in nowise allow that they feel any nervousness at all, nor will admit that Anything whatsoever exists to warrant it).

This Amazon force was recruited from among the fleetest and hardiest of the unmarried girls. Admission to its ranks was jealously restricted and hedged about according to the manner of savages by secret and severe initiatory ceremonies celebrated by virgin priestesses under the light of the New Moon, in forest retreats, to which no man was ever admitted.

And to this, Pŭl-Yūn, war-chief and arch-priest of the rival Sun-Disc cult, was brought to consent, an admission of the moral ascendency of the Master-Girl which will not be lost upon the discerning reader.

She would seem to have had a great time of it, but of her many campaigns (as of those of Kai Khosroo and of Genghis Khan and other conquerors whose exploits were too complete to be recorded) no faintest hollow whisper has come down to us. The chronicles of the First Woman-Chief (what a wealth of richly-embroidered incident is lost to mankind!) were writ in that earliest cuneiform script, the arrow-head, upon that most perishable of materials, the bodies of her foemen.

It may be surmised that the movements of the tribes whom her conquests dispossessed may account for some of the otherwise inexplicable migrations and settlements of peoples ignorant of the bow, the Australian to wit, and the still lower Tasmanian.

Proudly she lived, ruling her household vigorously and strictly, nor did her masterfulness decrease with advancing age.

* * * * *

And what of the end? what of the final scene which closes in and rounds off the longest and most eventful of lives?

To them it came suddenly. Pŭl-Yūn, grey, hale, unbent, had grown somewhat silent, husbanding breath and powers which he had private reasons to suspect were failing, albeit no man of his body-guard had yet seen his doubt reflected in the silent side-glancing face of a fellow.

The summer heats were upon the land, a great drought, the tall and stalwart elder had overtaxed himself in the noon-day sun at a game-driving. When the evening meal was cooked, he did not eat. Dêh-Yān urged uselessly. All that night he was restless, dreaming, speaking in his sleep, but not of enemies, no, for this the keenly-solicitous wife, holding her breath, listened in vain. To whom might she lay this sickness?--a bewitching, obéah-work doubtless, but, for ten days' march in any direction was there a man who dared think in his inmost heart evil of the great chief? No, there was none in all that region that peeped or moved the wing.

Who in her household then? She brooded, vainly pondering. All the next day her man lay silent, refusing the various foods which she prepared with her own hands. At sunset she summoned the clan; her subject wives, their handmaidens, daughters and slaves sate around the silent hut: beyond the royal enclosure in a wider ring squatted the body-guard, his sons and grandsons, and the staunchest of the braves of the tribe, grizzled ring-men upon whose scarred, brown chests shifted and glittered the trophies of forty battles. They squatted mute, hand over mouth, knowing well what was a-doing inside, jealous, remorseful, anxious; someone should die for this!--yes, to the fire with her, though she were the beauty of the tribe, or with him, if he were the best archer of them all!

Dêh-Yān came forth and perambulated the concourse, a V-shaped sprig of the witch-hazel in her hands; seven times she went through them and about them, but the twig turned to none. Rhabdomancy had failed her. Silently she had come, silently she went, still an-hungered for vengeance, and still unsatisfied re-entered the dark hut.

"It is none of our people," she said, but there was no reply from the sick man. Her breath came short, she approached, touched, felt him. He was dead--dead of the broken heart which kills silently and swiftly so many gallant savages when stricken with one of the mysterious sicknesses for which they know no remedies and for which they cannot account.

Going forth she dismissed the assembly, bade the women of the royal household still their tongues and their children, and returning to the dark wigwam squatted all night beside her dead, revolving many things. Once her courage wavered and her faith in herself. "Husband! Chief! _Is this my doing?_"

But, for the main of her vigil the heart within the woman was insurgent. She had ruled too long without the physical or spiritual touch of restraint to brook an injury even from Death himself. Too proud to weep, and too self-contained to give vent to the passion of pent wrath which burnt her bosom, she crouched dumb and suffering whilst the constellations wheeled across the black vault overhead--her whole nature yearning desperately for her lost mate.... _Give me back my man!_

Just before the dawn-streak she must have slept, for a voice and a presence were in the hut, her husband's; but not as she had hoped to see and to hear him, with a clear doom-word as to whom she was to hold to account for his death; no, nor as she had known him these many years, a grey, massive familiar figure. He returned to her smiling and bland, youthful, exquisitely beautiful and young, the happy bridegroom of her youth, who had been the first to hail her as chieftainess of the tribe. She exclaimed with rapture, spread her arms for him, and--he was gone. She was alone with the corpse.... "_He needs me!_" she said. "Wait for me, Pŭl-Yūn. I will not be long!"

In one moment her resolve was taken. All her life had been a series of swiftly-taken intuitive decisions, this was the last. The drowsing watchers without found her standing in the rift of the hanging skins before the doorway. "Wood," was her word. "Bring wood--much wood, let every man, woman and child bring a faggot, dry and fit. Your lord is a-cold and I am minded to warm him."

There was something terrible in the calmness and intensity of her face, although the words were wild enough, for, what shall a man need with a stack of dry kindling at midsummer?

"This will surely be a very great and sore burning," muttered this one and that as they went their ways to the forest. Hardly dared man or woman look one upon another, so heavily lay upon all the dread of an accusation of witchcraft, of having commerced with the Unseen Powers of Darkness to the hurt of their chief.

This is the canker of savage life, the haunting, still-impending secret terror that walketh in darkness, from which few uncivilised communities are long free.

Of this the Sun-and-Moon-Men had known little or nothing for the space of four generations. The dominant personality of the Master-Girl had brooked no interference from self-chosen mystery-mongers; sixty years of splendid health, unshaken by wound or accident, had afforded scant openings for the medicine-man. As High-Priestess of the Moon-rite she had been a law unto herself and to her people, nor had her unbroken sequence of success in war provided occasions for witch-smellings or human sacrifices. Yet, as in the southern Europe of our day the habit of delation has survived the Inquisition, so among the people of her tribe oral tradition of the dread ritual persisted, the rusted and long-disused machinery for exorcism and inquest for necromancy lay ready to hand, and might be put together and set a-working at any juncture, should authority but crook its little finger in signal. Yes, now was the time, and before night a score of their best warriors and handsomest women might be expiating the crime of "overlooking" the dying chief.

Deep-rooted indeed must be this antique belief, since it died out in our England only within human memory (if it be truly dead) and still survives in the Celtic Fringe. The sensitive, impressionable poetical Welshman is a thousand years nearer to his past than his fellow-subject of King Edward across Offa's Dyke. In broad daylight, nay, by gas-and-candle-light, the man is as we, and in one or two of the arts is more than we; he professes, and truly believes, some evangelical creed, and glances askance at the superstitious mummeries of the detested Establishment; but, let sickness, sorrow or misfortune strike him, and, in the deep overhung country lanes, or by the hearth whilst mountain winds rumble in the stone chimney, he begins to doubt. The Old Faith, the doggerel charms, the scraps of nurse-lore, may there not be something in them after all? He can whisper his misgivings to his brother Celt in their native speech, it seems natural, possible, probable, but, to a question put to him in the English he stiffens, or more probably puts on that impenetrable air of simplicity which has baffled the keenest seeker for folk-lore.

As for his cousin across St George's Channel, is it yet ten years since a poor epileptic woman was held down and burned to death upon her own hearthstone by her husband, family and neighbours with atrocious circumstances, and according to some immemorial rite which might have been lifted straight from Mashonaland or the days of the Cave Men?

Heavy of heart the wood-collectors departed upon their quests, heavy of heart, but light of heel. Woe to the laggard who hung back, to the woman whose bundle was small, or who seemed to fear, and to avoid the eye of the great chieftainess. Before mid-day every faggot was ready--where should the pile be built?--_where were the stakes?_

Dêh-Yān, hollow-eyed and of an ominous mien, paced the circle, took note of the burdens, then, whilst all throats grew tight and dry, and all breaths thickened, their ruler with regal wave of arm bade bear the wood to the inner stockade and pile it round the royal wigwam. There was a general movement to carry out her orders, this was no time for questioning. Whilst this black mood of their chieftainess held, and whilst her mate lay silent within (sick?--possessed?--overlooked?--forespoken?--not _dead_, oh, surely not dead!) at such a juncture, with the air thick with doubt and suspicion, prompt, blind, implicit obedience was safest. What this last order meant who could guess? Many were guessing. What might come next, who dare surmise?--yet all were surmising.

Dêh-Yān had withdrawn within the wigwam: crouched there in the gloom she heard the crackle and snap of piled brush. The small place was dominated by the presence of mortality in dissolution. Her mind was divided, half with her dead, half turned jealously towards the workers without. She felt that they were listening--knew their minds and the workings of them, knew that hopes of respite were dawning, glancings forward, previsions of a possible sequel other than the one which each feared. One event was coming home to them, the super-sensitive faculties of the savage at full strain could get no tidings of the chief who had withdrawn himself from his braves for two days. This absence, this silence spoke but one word--Death!

Then, as she mused, something moved in the darkness behind her with the quiet, unbreathing, soft sinuosity of a snake. Turning swiftly she pounced and caught--a slim ankle! Her captive lay mute, panting thickly, shuddering strongly. Dêh-Yān without speaking ran an open hand over the features, followed out the limbs, and beside the relaxed hand lay something which she had not handled for many a year, reminiscent of her far-away youth, her own personal fire-sticks, long disused.

"This is little Fallow-Doe," she said softly and without anger, naming her dead lord's favourite grand-daughter, "but, what does young Fallow-Doe here? unbidden in the place of death?"

"O mother," whimpered the girl, "I knew--I could not help it--I thought--yes, I have eyes too--thou art leaving us! Oh, do not forsake thy children! What shall we do?--To whom shall we look? Yes, _He_ there is dead--we know; but, how we know not. All must die. Our times come. Maybe his time came. I do not think that any of the tribe bore a black heart towards him. But, O my mother, if it is Obi (and thou knowest best), charge whom thou wilt. Charge _me_! I will die for him, though my heart is as white as a full moon; but, oh, do not leave us!"

The mourning widow withheld her answer, and when the word came, it was breathed softly and motherly. "Little girl, thy heart is white, I know it; but no whiter than the hearts of the rest. Get thee gone now by the way thou camest, and say nothing of thy coming hither until the third day at evening."

The child slipped eel-like under the tent-skirts and into the loosely-piled faggots. Dêh-Yān patted the space left vacant and smiled, for the fire-sticks were gone too. She arose, gravely smiling, and took from a skin wallet that hung high a pair of round stones, dense and very heavy, and struck them softly one against the other, and lo! the darkness was lightened with pale green sparks, for these were nodules of pyrites, her latest discovery, and one which would die with her to be rediscovered in later times. "You will not fail me, I think," she murmured, and began to arrange the tinder, crooning the first notes of her death-song to herself as she worked.

Wave after wave of memory flowed in upon her out of the long-forgotten past, and with each some trait of her dead husband travelled towards her, towered and subsided. Battle touches, his shield before her, himself exposed, his shout of triumph rang in her ears as her shaft went home. Or a hot, breath-catching moment in the life of a big-game huntress, a lioness with ears laid to her skull, and with head, neck, back and tail in one level tawny line, broke covert and made for her snarling, and again it was Pŭl-Yūn who had stridden between her and the wrinkled black lips. She saw him leap the fence of the enclosure and throw himself in the path of the stampeding herd of buck, when the leaders of the driven mob swerved in the very jaws of the _hopo_ and were breaking back. What a man he had been! yes, they had lived, they two!

And about the time that the heat of the day began to wane, the watching tribe heard her voice raised in song within the royal wigwam, and certain duller sounds as of soft stones pounded, and, whilst all strained eye and ear, fearing the approach of the unknown with hearts high in their throats, the afternoon sunshine was dimmed by a thin smoke, and above the ridge of the wigwam, where the poles crossed, the air grew glassy like troubled water. Then, whilst the dry sticks crackled, and here and there a green one spat, the pale flame that is invisible in the sunlight turned the wood grey and shrivelled the skin hangings. The death-chant pealed intermittently from within, interrupted by coughing, but ever resumed. Soon the whole pile was alight, and on every side the crowd, though pressed upon from outside, was driven back by the heat.

"And, oh, I _did_ steal these--And I _did_ pray her not to leave us!" wept Fallow-Doe.

Strong shudders shook the throng of watchers. Wild men, whose grandsires this woman (think--a woman!) had brought to heel, whose fathers she had trained to the bow and schooled in her battle tactics, wept, actually wept!

For the chieftainess whose death-song arose fitfully and faintly above the roar of the flame, had been more than a great warrior; the dead chief had been that, a giant in fight, terrible at the axe, with a rush and a shout like the charge and the roar of a rutting stag. But, she! how put it?--at once desperate and cautious, patient as a waiting heron, sudden in attack as the same bird when its uncoiled neck drives home the dagger-beak! Other leaders were pricked to hot decisions by the approach of unsuspected peril, she, for so long their pride and marvel, had planned her battle ere the tassels hung upon the hazel and won it after the nuts were ripe--yea, and ever upon ground of her own choice. Did the Lynxes pounce at dawn, or the Sitting Bulls await her coming, 'twas all one, the event fell as she had foretold. (Wail, ye women!) Other tribes swarmed disorderly to the onset and closed with clamour and confusion; she had taught her braves the true method of advancing silently and in line; she too, had drilled them (at what pains and with what sternness!) to a battle formation already described (subsequently re-invented by a later savage genius--Tchaka), compelling her centre to mark time until her convergent horns had enveloped the headlong foe and the killing began to a general shout of "_O Moon!_" Each of her battles had been an antedated Cannæ. Tribe after tribe (names now to the young draft), scornful of woman-led warriors, had charged cheering into her traps and perished, for no quarter was given in the Stone Age, nor had the Master-Girl a use for a living enemy. (Groan, ye men, nor spare your tears for once, though the children and women see that your cheeks are wet!)

The groaning of the braves deepened, the keening of the women grew shrill, but from the core of the heat where the naked wigwam-poles, stripped now of their gear, were blazing above the pyre like torches, came never a sound.

All through that afternoon the tribe watched and waited. The sun sank to her couch blood-red, and laying her broad face upon a hill-shoulder, forbore, as minded to see the last of her priest. The fire was burning itself out, but was still too hot to approach. A circular rampart of glistering whiteness lay there with the air shuddering above it. Some of the ash retained the shape of bavin and faggot, more was flaky and formless as snow, but pulsing through it came rosy flushes from the glowing heart within. But, ah, in the centre-space where the wigwam had stood, the Great Father and the Great Mother of their people, they, who but two days since had stood for Authority, Strength, Courage and Wisdom, were now white calcined bones!

It was then that a wonder and a portent appeared, for the tribe raising scorched faces from the dreary place of burning, beheld one half of the sky steeped as it were with blood, and the Sun, their Goddess, wading therein, whilst near to her, and within that ensanguined field stood the first presence of the young Moon, a bow of palest green.

Then did the eldest son of the dead arise, and with solemnly-uplifted hands salute the Twin Totems. "Ye are there," he cried. "We hail ye both, Heavenly Watchers over your children!"