The lambing season, the spring season, the season of fresh green and of birds that sang from every flowering bush passed into a summer hot and dry. The stream shrank to a silver thread, the flocks found but parched herbage. Sometimes clouds came up, but they never overspread the blue vault. They rolled away, and the earth again lay bare beneath the sun. The sun bleached the huts, turned brown the growth upon the hillsides, and the standing trees. The herdsmen went afar with the bands of the four-footed. The bondwomen carried water over the wide, pebbled stretch from which the stream had gone, or kneeling before hollowed stones, beat and ground the corn into meal. The weather made a fever in the blood. It was weather in which effect followed like a hound at the heels of cause.
A woman stood in the doorway of one of the huts. She looked at the grinding women, but looked somewhat absently. It was not a novelty now—other-group women grinding the valley corn! Presently, however, she remarked an absence. “Where is Gilhumat?”
A woman looked up from the grinding, shaking elf-locks from her eyes. “Endar, the black-bearded, shot an arrow at a great bird. The bird fell over the hill-top. Endar bade Gilhumat stop her grinding and go find the bird.”
The woman in the doorway turned her head over her shoulder. “Marzumat, come hither!”
Marzumat came out of the dusk. “Endar,” said the first woman, “shot a bird and it fell over the hill-top. Endar bade Gilhumat stop her grinding and go find the bird!”
“Where is Endar?”
“Lying under the tree yonder.—There is Gilhumat now!”
They watched Gilhumat coming down the hillside. She bore upon her shoulders a large bird, its plumage showing copper hues in the sun. Marzumat looked at her with her brows knitted, her lips parted. Gilhumat approached the level ground, came upon it, and to the tree under which Endar had stretched his length. She lowered the bird from her shoulder and it lay motionless beside the war-man. Gilhumat returned to her grinding.
The woman with the dark-red hair breathed quickly. Leaving the doorway she moved through the beating sun to the tree where lay Endar. “Endar!”
Endar sat up. “What is it, O Marzumat?”