Outland

by Mary Austin

The Council, so Evarra’s husband told us, was not the immediate outcome of the incidents of the Meet. Matter for it had been growing these ten years past, ever since the unearthing and reburial of the Treasure had been undertaken on Trastevera’s account. It had been so long since they had any feeling of its reality, except as the point on which their honor hung! But after Noche had seen the Treasure, the craftsman’s soul of him was forever busy with the wonders of it, brooding on the fire of its jewels as a young man on the beam of a maiden eye. All the children who had come to maturity these ten years past had been nourished on the Treasure tale, livened and pointed by Noche’s account. With the advent of the hostage, interest in the King’s Desire as a possession had rather increased through the awakened appreciation of smith’s work among them. Ravenutzi had made curious ornaments for the women of bits of metal found in deserted summer camps, the patterns of which reproduced, so far as the Far-Folk remembered them, the wrought gold of the King’s jewels.

Both the items which were responsible for this liveliness of curiosity—the exemption of Trastevera and consequent reburial of the Treasure, and the acceptance of the hostage—had been strongly opposed by part of the Council. Now they thought themselves justified by the turn of events. They thought further that the incident of Daria and her lover called loudly for measures which should stem this current of departure from old usage. A Ward had been released from her obligation of forgetfulness; another had ventured to plead for it. A young man had loved a Ward and dared to avow it during the term of her Wardship. Here was one of the Far-Folk teaching smitheying to the Outliers. Here were House-Folk going about among them talking of forbidden things. Matter enough for Council if ever Council was. More disconcerting, here was Mancha, Ward of the Outer Borders, Mancha of the Hammerers, who had opposed the hostage and stood for the inviolateness of obligation, come out suddenly as the leader, the precipitator, of revolt. Evarra’s man fumed over this and the probable reason for it. Upon which point, though I was at no loss myself, I did not see fit to enlighten him.

The Council had begun soberly in the consideration as to whether some formal penalty should be visited on the Ward who had dared to love, and the man who had ventured to love her. It had been disrupted widely by the question, which seemed to spring up simultaneously among the younger men, as to why there should be a Ward at all.

It was the nature and the exquisite charm of the life of Outland that it could not carry superfluous baggage either of custom or equipment. Question as to the continuance could not have arisen had there not run before it some warning of dead weight, like the creaking of a blasted bough about to fall. Such warning they had in the incidents about which the Council was met. The mere question was not so disquieting as the speech Mancha made upon it, a speech which, proceeding from an impulse perhaps not very well defined in his own mind, and not guessed by his audience. His private determination to get Zirriloë free so that he might make love to her, was neither very direct in its process nor clear in its conclusion.

Why, said Mancha, waste the youth of a girl, always the chiefest and loveliest, keeping a Treasure for which the Far-Folk had ceased to struggle. Did they not prefer pilferings of House-Folk? Had they not sold their best man for a free passage to the Ploughed Lands? Honor, said he, had been kept alive by the custom of the Maiden Ward. But was honor so little among the Outliers that they had to buy it at the price of a girl’s love-time?

Moreover, declared Mancha of the Hammerers, it was a form of honor which they did not trust her to keep. Besides, keeping was the business of men. Further, said the Ward of the Outer Borders, not having made it very clear where his speech tended up to this point, there was a better way of keeping the Treasure effectively out of reach of the Far-Folk. There was a way costing them nothing of which, since it was new to him, and he no speech-maker—this much was sufficiently clear at any rate—he begged leave to let Herman of the House-Folk put for him. This was what broke and scattered the Council like a blast of wind on burning leaves. They blew out this way and that, sparking and flaring, saying it was an incredible thing and impossible that the House-Folk should come to Council, or, coming, should have anything to say worth hearing. Some blamed Mancha and some the occasion. Some there were who laughed, unbound their slings and went hunting. Said they:

“This is mere child’s talk, when you have business afoot call us.”

Others, deeply angered at the flouting of old customs, went out suddenly, picked up their women with a sign and set out without farewells for their own places. Of these we heard nothing again until a greater occasion grown out of that same slighted Council called them.

There were many, however, and these chiefly of the younger men, who stayed to hear Herman’s idea, which was as he explained to me a little later at the pine tree by the shallows, perfectly feasible. It was nothing less than that the Outliers should become, as he said, civilized.

“It is quite impossible, you know, that they should go on living like this indefinitely. They are practically cut off from the sea already, and every summer there are more and more campers. Think how these hills would be overrun, and with what sort of people, if we went back to Fairshore and told what we know of the Treasure?”