Outland

by Mary Austin

We came often upon lovers walking in the high arched aisles, children scuttling pink and unabashed in the dappled water, or at noons, men and women half sunk in the fern deep in gossip or dozing. Such times as these we began to hear hints by which we tracked a historic reality behind what I had already accepted heartily, and Herman with grudging, the existence of the King’s Desire.

They would be lying, a dozen of them in company on the brown redwood litter, the towered trunks leaning to the firs far above them. Then one would begin to sing softly to himself a kind of rhymeless tune, all of dead kings in a rock chamber canted in their thrones by the weight of jewels, and another would answer with a song about a lovely maid playing in sea caves full of hollow light.

By this we knew the thoughts of all of them ran on the story which held the songs together like a thread. We discovered at last that it was the history of the place from which they had come to Outland, bringing the Treasure with them, pursued by the Far-Folk. Or perhaps it was they who were the pursuers, but the Treasure had been the point of their contention, and it had cost the Outliers so much that they had come to abhor even the possession of it. So having buried it, they made their honor the keeping of the secret. Because the first disturbance over it that reft them from their country had been brought about by the treachery of a woman, they put a woman to the keeping, half in irony, I think, for then they had set a watch upon the woman.

It was about this time that Herman waked to an interest on the occasion that nothing else had been able to arouse in him. He thought that a community which had arrived at the pitch of understanding that the best thing to be done with wealth was to get rid of it, would repay study. I remember his wondering if the Outliers had had any more trouble with their Treasure, or what they imagined as such, for he never would credit its reality, than we had experienced with the Coal Oil Trust. I paid very little attention to him, for all my mind was occupied in watching Ravenutzi.

From the first I had noticed that whenever there was one of those old tales, or any talk of the King’s Desire, something would spring up in his face, as slight as the flick of an eyelid or the ripple of muscles at the corner of his mouth, but something at which caution snapped wide-awake in me. I recall how once we lay all together at the bottom of the wood in the clear obscure of twilight, in a circular, grassless space where the water went by with a trickling, absent sound. One of the young men began to sing, and Ravenutzi had stopped him with some remark to the effect that the Outliers could sing it so if it pleased them, but the story as it was sung was not true.

“Come,” said the youth, “I have always wanted to know how the Far-Folk told that part of the tale so as not to be ashamed of it.” Prassade sprang up protesting that there should be no communication between them and the Hostage on a forbidden matter. Some debate followed among the elders as to that. I could see the smith sitting in his accustomed attitude, knees doubled, hands clasped about them, his chin resting on his knees. The eyes were black in the twilight under the faun’s profile and the streaked, springy hair, yet always as if they had a separate furtive intelligence of their own. It occurred to me suddenly, that in this very debate precipitated by Ravenutzi, the Outliers were talking about the Treasure, and that he did not care in what fashion so long as they talked. Instinctively as I felt this, turning in my mind like a weed in the surf, I looked toward Trastevera as one turns in a dim room toward the light, holding out my mind to her as to one of better sight. I caught the eyes of Ravenutzi, the iris, opaque and velvety, disappearing under the widening pupil of his fixed gaze. I felt the rushing suggestion back away from the shore of my mind and leave it bare. There was something I had meant to speak to Trastevera about, and I had forgotten what it was.

It was brought back to me the next day, which was the one before the move to Leaping Water. We were sitting in Evarra’s hut, Herman and I, with Noche, for the wind and cloud of the Council had contrived to blow up a rain that drummed aloud on the bent fern but scarcely reached us through the thick tent of boughs. Above us we could hear the wind where it went hunting like a great cat, but down at the bottom of the pit of redwoods it could scarcely lift the flap of the door.

And without some such stir or movement of life within, one might have passed a trail’s breadth from the house of Evarra and not suspected it, so skillfully was it contrived within one of those sapling circles that spring up around the decayed base of ancient redwoods, like close-set, fluted columns round a ruined altar. Every family had two or three such rooms, not connected, not close together, but chosen with that wild instinct for unobtrusiveness with which the Outliers cloaked the business of living. From the middle of one of these, smoke could go up through the deep well of green and mingle undetected with the blue haze of the forest. Deep within, tents of skin could be drawn against the rain which beat upon them with a slumberous sound and dripped all down the shouldering colonnade.

The tent was half drawn this morning, and no drops reached us, but seldom, light spatterings from high, wind-shaken boughs. Evarra was abroad looking after her family, and Noche had come over with Herman to sit housed with me. The Outliers had, from such indifferent observation as they had made, got the notion that House-Folk were of great fragility as regards weather. They were exceedingly careful of us, though I had seen Noche laugh as he shook the wet from his body, and take the great gusts of wind as a man might the moods of his mistress. He sat opposite us now on a heap of fern, busy at his sling-plaiting, with the placidity of a spinning Hercules, and in a frame to be entertaining. It occurred to me it might be an excellent time to beguile him into talk of the Treasure, much to Herman’s annoyance, for he was of the opinion that my having been a week among the Outliers and no harm having come of it, was no sign it wouldn’t come eventually.

“Don’t meddle with their tribal mysteries,” he protested; “if it hadn’t been for their confounded Treasure we would have been on the trail for home by now.”