Outland

by Mary Austin

“But what am I to do?”

“Hold the will to help me. Be friends with the smith if he is friendly, and say nothing of this to any one but me. When your time comes to take the Cup I will see that it is made light for you.”

It did not sound very difficult, and perhaps I did not take it very seriously; at any rate I gave the promise. Trastevera unwinding herself from the striped cloth like a moth coming out of a chrysalis, resumed her feather coat and left me with that suddenness I had learned to expect of the Outliers, like a bird flitting or a weasel slipping in the chaparral.

On the very first occasion of our being alone together after that I demanded of Evarra what Trastevera had meant by saying that she was of the blood of Ravenutzi, and that the blood was traitorous. I could ask that safely, because I had learned that, except in the one important matter of the Treasure, the Outliers had no skill in concealments and no knowledge whatever of indirection. It was as if somewhere in their history they had so sickened of the stuff of treachery that their teeth were set on edge at the mere attitudes of it, tricks, pretensions and evasions.

So I knew that if I opened a forbidden matter, Evarra would tell me so flatly, and that would be the end of it. And if it was permissible to speak at all, she would do me no such discourtesy as not to speak freely.

It was a very old affair, she said, but one well known among the Outliers. In one of their quarrels with the Far-Folk one of their own women was taken and kept. Afterward she had been returned to her home by purchase, and had had a child shortly after, begotten upon her unwillingly by one of the Far-Folk. From that child Trastevera was descended. The blood of the Far-Folk, said Evarra, was a foul strain, but they had mixed it with the best of theirs, and there was no more treason left in it than there was soiling of last season’s rains in the spring that watered Deep Fern. None of the Outliers had even remembered it until Ravenutzi came. As for these Far-Folk, they were to the Outliers all that cat was to dog, hill-dwellers, seeking treeless spaces, holes in the rock and huts of brush; wiry folk, mocking and untruthful. But they were such inveterate craftsmen that a man of them could sooner smudge himself at a forge making a knife to trade you for a haunch of venison, than go a-hunting for his meat himself. It was so most of the iron implements I had noticed had been circulated among the Outliers. For their part they preferred casting themselves joyously forth on the day to come back well furnished by their own hands.

But a man of the Far-Folk would sit all day with his nose to a bit of hammered metal, graving on it strange patterns of beasts and whorls and lacing circles. When it was done, said Evarra, there was no great pleasure in it, for it would not glitter as a bit of shell, nor brown nor brighten as a string of berries, nor be cast every hour in a new pattern like a chaplet of flowers, but remained set forever, as the Far-Folk in their unkempt ways.

They were piliferous too, and lived in such relation as weasels might to the people of the Ploughed Lands; by which term she always spoke of the few farmers whose homesteads I could occasionally see from Outland. The Far-Folk would go down by night across the borders of the Outliers to the farmyards for their scraps of metal, and ate fruit from the orchards. It was to purchase free passage for such expeditions through disputed territory that they had given hostage to their foes at Deep Fern; free leave to go and come from Deer Leap to the River Ward, and between Toyon and Broken Head. Up to this time the compact had been scrupulously kept, though it was evident from Evarra’s manner of admitting it, she begrudged any good opinion I might have of the Far-Folk on that account.

“And what harm have you had from Ravenutzi?”

Ah, that was as might be, if you counted the failure of Trastevera’s visions and his making a fool of old Noche with his smith’s tricks. The old man had thought of little this year past but forge work and designs—and prating to the children of the King’s Desire. “If it had been my child listening to him,” finished Evarra, “I should have smacked him.”