“But consider,” I explained to Herman for Noche’s sake; “if we drink Forgetfulness at the last, what does it matter how much we know before? And besides, he is suffering to tell me. Go on, Noche.”
Once you had old Noche started, his talk ran on like the involute patterns he loved to trace upon the sand, looping to let in some shining circumstance or set off some jewel of an incident. It was a wonderful treasure by his account: lamps thick with garnets, crusted with amethysts, and the cup of the Four Quarters which a dead king held between his knees.
Outside we could hear the creaking of the boughs as the wind pounced and wallowed, stalking an invisible prey. Within the hut we saw in the old man’s story, the summer island from which the tale began, far southward, rising from the kissing seas. All at once he left off, breathing quick, his nostrils lifted a little, quivering, his head turning from side to side, like a questing dog’s. We had heard nothing but the trickle of rain down the corrugated trunks, but Noche, turning his attention toward the doorway, twitched his great eyebrows once, and presently broke into smiling.
“Trastevera,” he said; and then a very curious thing happened. Some patches of the red and brown that had caught my attention from time to time at the burl of the redwood opposite stirred and resolved into Ravenutzi. How long he had been there I had no notion. Though I was well acquainted with that wild faculty of the Outliers to make themselves seem, by very stillness, part of the rock and wood, I was startled by it quite as much on this occasion as on the first time of my meeting him. It was not as though Ravenutzi made himself known to us by a movement, but drew himself out of obscurity by the force of his own thinking. The fact of his being there seemed to shoulder out all question as to why he was there in the first place. He was looking, with that same curious fixity that held me when I caught him dyeing his hair at the spring, not at me, but at Trastevera approaching on the trail. She came up the trail in that lifting mood with which the well body meets weather stress, as if her spirit were a sail run up the mast to catch the wind. She came lightly, dressed as the women mostly were, in an under tunic of soft spun stuff, of wood green or brown color, but her outer garment was all of the breasts of water birds, close-fitted, defining the figure. She looked fairly back at Ravenutzi as she came, smiling from below her quiet eyes. He walked on past her so casually that only I could say that he had not merely been passing as she passed. But I was sure in my own mind he had been sitting close by Evarra’s hut for a long time.
She gave us Good Friending as she came in, but it was not until Noche, in response to a sign from her, had taken Herman out by the brook trail, that she spoke to me directly.
“If you made a promise to me in regard to your being here and what you shall see among us, would he, your friend, be bound by it?”
“Well, in most particulars; at any rate, he would give it consideration.”
“Does he love you?”
“No,” I said. I was sure of that much.
“How do you know?”