A woman at the loom shaded her eyes with her hands. “The men are under the trees, dressed up to dance.” Another looked. “They are coming from under the trees—that’s a new dance!” A third, carrying a large jar, stopped to look. “They have their spears and clubs. I see Saran. He has hawk wings bound upon his head.—Ha, you grinding women! They looked that way when they came down upon your huts!” As she strained to look, her grasp upon the jar loosened. It slipped from her hands and broke at her feet in twenty fragments. “Mao-Tan! choke that Ji-Ji!”
The women generally began to observe. Marzumat rose from a stone beside a hut door. The men left the grove. The sun dazzled against their array—she saw Saran with the hawk wings bound upon his head....
Saran and Endar and all the others came across the space between the grove and the huts. They came shouting and swiftly. The women saw their procedure as inconceivable; then, in a moment, the inconceivable became the actual.
While the men used their weapons, their spears and clubs for advantage, they were not used to the uttermost. But they made for advantage, as did muscular strength and training in battle, as did organization, as did prepared attack! Even so, there was for a long time breathless, swaying struggle. The women were not weak-thewed, and behind them stood ancient powers of combat. Furious anger sustained them against the valley men. Man and woman, old kindnesses, old unities, were forgotten. All grudges were remembered, all separatenesses. They wrestled, they fought, and around all their own noise rose the crying of children.
The war-men had strong advantage, and they had swelled their numbers by the herdsmen. A woman and man, wrestling together, reeled near to the eleven bondwomen where they were gathered by the grinding-stones.
The woman cried, panting. “Gilhumat, you and the others give help!”
Gilhumat’s laughter rose and whistled like a storm. “Give you help? No! We shall stand still and rest, O women who grind women like corn!”
Marzumat cried to no one. She lifted a great stone, struck Endar Blackbeard with it, and stretched him at her feet. Two war-men came against her, then herdsmen crept up behind and seized her arms. Saran appeared before her, shaking his spear. She foamed at him and his hawk wings.
At last there parted the struggling mass—the men flushed conquerors, the women flung to earth, bruised with clubs, panting, beaten.... The men produced a rite which, with some self-pluming, they had devised and rehearsed.
Bondmen drove toward the trodden space sheep from the fold. Saran, the war-head, Endar Blackbeard, and other chief men took bow and arrow, shot strongly, and brought this game to earth.... The men were here, the beaten women there, the slain beasts lying beyond the two groups.