Outland

by Mary Austin

We could see the casual turning of the owner’s head as some invisible string from the guard’s stretched, pointed finger seemed to move it like a mechanical toy. Almost before it rounded the curve, old Noche took himself out of the seaweed and blew foam at them in derision.

The care and keeping of me fell to Evarra, by whose neglect a proper dealing with me was kept in abeyance, and to old Noche, with whom I began to be very well acquainted. Noche had the soul of a craftsman, though with no very great gift. Whenever the smith was busy at a forge improvised of two beach stones and a flint, mending fishhooks and hammering spear-heads from bits of metal picked up along the sand, Noche would choose to lie puffing his cheeks to blow the fire while Ravenutzi fitted his movements to the rhythm of the wind as it rose to cover the light clink of his hammers. Or the old man would sit with his lips a little apart and in his eyes the bright fixity of a child’s, laying out iridescent fragments of abalone in curious patterns in which Ravenutzi took the greatest interest.

It was singular to me that the design the old man struggled with oftenest, the smith let pass. I had observed this the more because I became sure that there was no smallest hint of it escaped him, and the suspicion was fixed in my mind by its revelation of a great singularity in the character of Ravenutzi himself.

Time and again I had seen Noche laying out his abalone pearls in a design which, however dearly it was borne within his mind, seemed reluctant in expression. He would place the salient points of his pattern, connecting them by tracings in the sand, and when he had taken the greatest pains with it, startled, would sweep out the whole with his hand. There were times when its preciousness so grew upon him that he would not even commit it to the dust, but formed the delicate outline with his finger in the air.

One of those occasions, when it was full noon, and the tide charged thunderously along the coast, all the Outliers lying up in the windy gloom of the cypresses, I knew by the absorbed and breathless look of him that Noche had accomplished for once the whole of his design. He bent above it crooning in his beard, so absorbed in the complete and lonely joy of creation that he neither saw nor sensed the shifting of the stooped, twisty trunks above him to the form of Ravenutzi.

How he had come there I could not imagine, but there he bent from the flat-topped foliage, the mouth avid, the eyes burning and curious. As the shifting of his position brought him into line with my gaze he passed to a fixed intentness that held me arrested even in the process of thought. It left me uncertain as to whether it were not I who had been caught spying instead of Ravenutzi, and merely to meet that look in me had been, after all, the object of his secret scrutiny.

And this was what separated him from the others more than his dark skin and his clipped and nasal speech, making me sure, before I had heard a word of the Far-Folk, of some alien blood in him. Whatever one of the Outliers did, whether you agreed with him or not, there was at least no doubt about it.

That was how the days were going with me all the time Herman was writing me letters and tearing them up again, deciding that I was mad or foolish or both.

On the evening of the last day, about the time he had entered on the trail by Broken Tree, we were setting out for I knew not what far home of the Outliers. I was carried still in my litter, but that was more kindness than captivity, for though I count myself a good walker, I made poor work of keeping even with their light, running stride. We were not many hours out; it was after moonset, and I had lost all track of the time or the way, being a little sick with the motion, and very tired of it. I could guess this much, that we were rounding a steep and thick-set hill by what might have been an abandoned wagon road, for our pace increased here. Suddenly the company was arrested by sharp resounding cries and the crackling of underbrush on the slope above us. So does the night estrange familiar things, that I could get no clue at all to what the cries might be, except that it was some creature blundering and crying distressfully, making as if to cross our trail.

The Outliers were themselves alarmed by it, and considered a moment whether they should halt to let it pass before us or hurry on to leave it behind. But the check and the beginning of movement had caught the attention of the lost creature, for it turned directly toward us, and begun to come on more rapidly, redoubling its cries. Now I thought, though it seemed so extraordinary, that it said “Mona!” in a wild and urgent manner. Then it seemed to have slipped or bounded, for the slope was steep, and fell with a great clatter of stones and snapping of stems directly in our trail.