The Flute of the Gods

by Marah Ellis Ryan

The other looked at her, and beyond her, and said nothing. The words of Yahn were words of angry insistence on the thought she had never yet been able to express––and to say it to even the god medicine woman who sheltered a witch, was to speak it aloud, and have it forgotten!

“You are wise in medicine craft but do you know how this grew?”––she demanded––“I know––I feel that I know!––the mountain fire or the sky fire broke it that the white stone of fire could be shot like an arrow into the heart of it. To keep some count it was made like that by the Most Mysterious;––and in the hand of the Mystery it was held––and the hand was closed over it while the mountains came down to the rivers, and the rivers made trails through rock walls. When the hand was opened and the sun looked on it, it was grown into one;––can you with all high medicine put them apart?––can you break the black and leave the white not broke? Can you make two colors of the powder you would grind from it between grinding stones?––Yet the two colors are there! Like the two colors are Ka-yemo and Yahn Tsyn-deh. One they were made by some magic of the Great Mystery, and no woman and no man, and no lies of women, can break them apart! When you hear them lie another time, you can look at this stone, and know that I said it!”

She had worked herself into such a passion that the long smothered rage against the women who spoke her name lightly in the village spent itself on the one 276 woman of all who lived most apart from such speech. But aloud had Yahn Tsyn-deh said once for all that her life was as the life of Ka-yemo, and that no earth creature could make that different, and for the saying of it aloud she was a happier woman.

And Gonzalvo who listened to her defiance, fancied that the silent woman of mystery had given her chiding, and that Yahn was doing wordy battle for the new Castilian friends.

All the more could he think so when Yahn joined him with her great eyes shining like stars, and braided in her hair some flowers he had plucked for her––and walked back to the camp with him openly before all men!

And she said to him;––“I like only men who fight,––men who are not afraid. Tell your priest who does not like me that now is the time to speak again to the council of the sun symbol and of brothers. The old men have seen that your fighting was good, and that it saved them their women. This will be the time to speak.”

“But their proud Cacique––”

“It is a good time to speak––” she insisted––“else will Tahn-té grow so tall with prophecies that his shadow will cover the land, and the men in the land,––tell your priest that the shadow has grown too tall now for one man. Other men have fought well and taken scalps––yet only one name is heard in your camp––the name of Tahn-té who sees visions in the hills!”

He wondered at her mocking tone of the visions in the hills, for no other Indian mocked at the visions of the sorcerer.

Don Ruy was well agreed to get back to the fair camp by the river, and so pleased with them were 277 their new comrades in arms, that he was amused to see more than one dame of the village trudging homewards across the mesa:––they forgot to doubt the new allies who had helped send the Navahu running to the hills. When he reached Povi-whah he rallied Chico that he kept close to the camp and found so many remembered records to put safely down the “Relaciones,” when there were more than a few pairs of strange dark eyes peeping from the terraces.