Outland

by Mary Austin

I saw Persilope stooping to her, urging that she was tired, that she had come too far that day, she would be clearer in the morning. She shook her head still, looking once long at me, and once almost slyly at the smith, and then at us no more, but only at her husband, as she walked slowly along the meadow against the saffron-tinted sky. Then we were taken away, Herman and I, to our respective huts.

The place called Deep Fern by the Outliers lay in the middle of three half hollow basins looking seaward, and clearing all the intervening hills. Barriers thick set with redwood, dividing the cupped space like the ridges of a shell, ran into a hollow full of broad oaks and brambles. Between the ridges brooks ran to join the creek that, dropping in a white torrent to the basin called Lower Fern, made a pool there, from which it was also called Deer Lake Hollow. The upper basin, long and narrow, was named from the falls, Leaping Water.

The camp of the Outliers lay in one of the widest of the furrows between the ridges where the redwoods marched soldierly down to the stream side. Above it, between Deep Fern and a place called Bent Bow, lay Council Hollow. It was there, when the moon was an hour high, a battered-looking moon, yellow and low, went all the Outliers to consider what was to be done about us. It was a windy hollow, oval shaped, with long white knuckles of rock sticking out along the rim, where no trees grew, nothing taller in it than the shadows of the penstemon which the moon cast upon the rocks. Whenever the wind moved, there was a strong smell of sweet grass and yerba buena. There would have been about thirty men of the Outliers gathered when we came up the ridge from Deep Fern. We halted with the women at a point where we could see, near to one end, a little fire of crossed sticks low on the ground. The Outliers were at all times sparing of fire and cautious in the use of it.

The Council had been sitting some time, I think, upon other matters, when we took up our station on the rising ground. Trastevera went down, winding between the rocks toward the ruddy point of fire. The moon was moving in a shallow arc not high above the ranges, and some hurrying clouds scattered the light. We could see little more than the stir of her going, the pale discs of faces or the shining of an arm or shoulder in the clear space between the shadows of the clouds.

She went on quietly, all talk falling off before her until she stood in the small, lit circle between the leaders, who inquired formally of her had she anything to say of importance on the business of the two strangers.

“Only this,” she said, “that although I was greatly troubled before they came, by a sense of danger impending, I am now free from it so far as the House-Folk are concerned.”

“But do you,” questioned Prassade, “sense trouble still, apart from these?” He motioned toward Herman and me, who had been brought behind her almost to the circle of the flare.

“Trouble and shadow of change,” she said, and after a pause: “Shall I speak?”

Without waiting for the click of encouragement that ran about the Hollow, she began:

“You know all of you that I have, through no fault, the blood of the Far-Folk, which has been for a long time the blood of traitors and falsifiers. And yet never at any time have I played traitor to you nor brought you uncertain word, except”—I thought her voice wavered there—“in the matter of the hostage.”