Part 10

“Just after Council. Mancha wanted to go, but they said his place was at River Ward. If he had been there all this time the Far-Folk mightn’t have got through. They let Herman do what he liked, because if it hadn’t been for him they wouldn’t have found out about the stealing so soon. And look here”—he showed me a spray of toyon berries—“I went and found this after the trackers had gone. I felt around in the dark and found it. It was the last thing she touched. It was only half broken off. She hadn’t expected to go away; she was surprised and she left it half broken off.” He put it up in his tunic again. “I don’t know why she went away with Ravenutzi, but I know she never told him where the Treasure was.”

He was so certain of that, I had no heart to trouble him with doubts. As we came down the trail we saw the top of Windy Covers all alive, rippled and streaked with motion.

“Some one is coming,” Lianth volunteered.

“It looked just like that this morning. How can you tell?”

“Oh, I can’t tell that. I knew how just before you asked me. The way I know Zirriloë didn’t tell Ravenutzi about the King’s Desire; I just know.”

It was, in fact, some of the Outliers who had not been at Deep Fern, drawn from their own places by that mysterious capacity of evil news to spread. They came hurrying all that day and the next. The Covers were peopled thick as a rabbit warren. Coveys of quail whirred up from it with a sharp explosive sound and broke toward the wooded land. Except for that, and the fact that the quail did not come back again, there was no sign. Men sat close in the tunnels, and it was dreadful to see the working in them of their resentment of betrayal. So much the worse because they knew it had been half invited. They had accepted a hostage of the Far-Folk, who never spoke straight nor did truly. What wonder, then, if he had done after his kind? They knew—at this point resentment rose to its burningest—they had always known, and knowing, could not have done otherwise. Ravenutzi came under honorable conditions, and they had served him honorably, being so much the debtor to their own natures. They were not only sick to be dishonored, they sickened of dishonor. As they sat in the green glooms of Windy Covers their bodies heaved and flushed, eyes reddened, hands wrenching at invisible things. Now and then, at the mention of a name or a circumstance, some quick, explosive breath would struggle with a curse; the gorge of the spirit rose.

Never among the Outliers had I found myself so unfriended. I felt myself burned upon by their rages, but they cared nothing for my burning. To have harped upon my own resentment was to advertise myself a witness of their betrayal. I judged best to be as little in evidence as was compatible without making myself a target for the Far-Folk. I found myself as lonely as could well be expected.

Late of the second day I went down to the edge of the chaparral where the trees began to invade it, standing apart and singly, and the chaparral had made itself small to run under the trees. I found an island of dry litter under a pine, and drew myself up in it, out of the pervading bitterness and betrayal, flooding so fiercely under Windy Covers.

It was incredibly still here; neither bird hopped nor insect hummed. The shadows shook in the wind. I sat with my head against the pine and my eyes closed. By degrees I thought the wind increased and drew into a long whisper which was my name. This fancy comforted me with the notion that whoever abandoned me, the wood was still my own. I heard it several times before a crackling in the bushes aroused me. I turned to observe another woman struggling anear through the thick stems of manzanita. As she crept and wormed toward me she drew on to her knees in the open space under the tent of the pine. Then I saw that she was the tall woman who had loved Ravenutzi. I saw more than that; she had come to me through great difficulty and by hard ways, her dress was torn, her hands scratched and bleeding, her hair, which was bound under a leathern snood, disheveled. But whatever her difficulties, they had not marred her so much as the passions that wasted her from within. She was more beautiful; the long, flushed throat, the red, scorning lip, the eyes darkened and hollow. But she was so plainly gnawed upon by grief that as we knelt there, I half risen on my knees and she on hers confronting me, I could feel nothing but pity.

“You!” I whispered dryly.

“Speak low,” she said, though indeed we had done nothing else, so did the stillness of the place weigh upon us. We were completely isolated in a ring of shadow, the chaparral coming up to the outer boughs of the pine, and the fan-spread branches meeting it a foot above our heads.

“I have waited for you all day,” she whispered. “Tell me, have you found him? Where has he taken her?”

“I do not know. We have no trace of them.”

“But which way did they go? From what point did they leave the Meet? Something—surely you know something?” She clasped her cut palms together, and I saw a slight flinching at the pain they gave her. She cast it off impatiently as though it were an interruption to her understanding.

“Tell me first what you are to him, that you should ask?”

“His wife!”

“You—so young——”

I had an instant vision of Ravenutzi’s white hair, and then as I had first seen him washing his hair at the pool of the Leaning Bay. At the recollection, and perhaps a slight flicker of amusement in her face, the two things leaped together in my mind.

“Was that also a pretence?”

“There are herbs which will bleach the color from the hair and draw the skin in wrinkles,” she said. “He had more years than I, but we were young.”

“And the hostage, too, was it all a pretence from the beginning?”

“What else?” impatiently. “The King’s Desire was ours, and we schemed to get it back as we had first won it. I was as willing as the rest when we began. If I was not to see him again for three years, that was my part of the service, and I was proud to pay it. But I never thought of this. Oh no, never this!”

She crept up to me and eased the strained position of her limbs.

“I will tell you everything,” she moaned, “if you will only answer me. Ravenutzi was to make friends with the Ward, and seduce the secret from her. We were to lift the King’s Desire as soon as known, and nothing was to be said or hinted until the hostage was over. Then if they discovered the loss, who could be blamed for it? He was to stay the full time of the hostage, for if he came away violently, they would suspect, and go and look to see if their Treasure had been moved. I knew, or thought I knew, that if he got anything from the Ward she would have to love him. I thought he could manage it. He is very wise in women. Even you——”

I checked her there; it was evident the Far-Folk were acquainted with everything that went on at Deep Fern, but I was not going to discuss my part of it with Ravenutzi’s wife.

“You had never heard, then,” I broke in upon her, “that the Outliers chose their most beautiful young woman to be the Ward?”

“Oh, I had heard.”

She put up her hands to her face in some quick, indefinable shame. I suppose Ravenutzi had contrived to keep her convinced of the supremacy of her own loveliness.

“When the Treasure was safe in our hands,” she said, “then we heard that the House-Folk had persuaded them to show the King’s Desire and it was certain that the lifting of the Treasure would be discovered. We did not think it would be so soon, but we sent to bring Ravenutzi away. We were sure he would be killed when the Treasure party returned. While the Far-Folk waited, word came that Ravenutzi had gone to make the Ward safe in some secret place and would join us shortly. That was all. No word to me——” Anger swallowed up her speech.

I tried to soothe her.

“It was the least he could do if she had told him. The Outliers would have killed her had they found her out.”

“What matter to him if they had? We have killed Outliers before now when it was a question of the King’s Desire. Why should he be so careful of her, unless—unless he loves her?”

In the anguish of that conviction she struck with her wounded palm against the tree, and sinking her head upon the arm that Ravenutzi had rested on, with what bliss it gave her the keener anguish to remember, set her teeth in the bared, tender flesh. I let her be, writhing like a wounded snake, for a time. Then, as the best cure, I began to tell her with particularity all I could recall of the flight of the smith and the Ward from Deep Fern.

She questioned as she listened; would have me be precise.

She had never been any nearer to Deep Fern than the place where I had found her the second day of the Meet. Could she reach it easiest from here by way of Leaping Water or otherwise? Just how far was the Laurel Bank from the long meadow, and how could one get at it? I could see the purpose grow in her to strike that trail and follow it to whatever end. She listened and hardened.

“Tell me well how she looks,” she said, “so that if I find this flagrant girl I may not mistake her,” and I saw her blench as I named the points of the Ward’s beauty. She jerked and quivered. Little sentences escaped from her like phrases of a delirium, of the utterance of which I think she was unconscious.

“Little fair hands,” she said, “a trivial heart ... hair of two colors ... a snare, a snare ... a crumpled lip goes with a false tongue ...” Her jealousy kept pace. “Kill her, would they?... Let them ... does he think to keep her who could not keep her word? Does he lie safely with this false Ward while his people wait for him at——”

“Stop!” I said. “I have told you all that concerns you personally, as one woman to another. But I advise you, I am on the side of the Outliers, if you say anything of value to them I shall not keep it.”

She bit her lip.

“What do I know of what the people do in my absence, or where they foregather? It is of him I think; does he imagine me waiting in my house like a faithful wife——”

She threw out her arms, rocking on her knees.

... “Long, oh long, have I been gathering lilies!...”

I do not know whether she uttered these words in the delirium of her jealousy, or if something in the anguished gesture sent the refrain of Ravenutzi’s song sounding through and through me. I heard it shaken like an organ somewhere above the sound of tears.

... “Long, oh long, have I been gathering lilies!...”

She stood up as well as she could under the bent pine, to draw her dress into order, and asked me who had gone on the trail of Ravenutzi. I named all the men, and then Herman.

“He too!” She looked at me with curious mocking. “All the men are mad, I 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.