“It was as though I were in his mountain. He told me many things—great and wonderful things. To-morrow I am going again to the wood—to praise Arzan again and listen again.”
“Then you will stand upon the god-stone and sing his words?”
“So!” said Ramiki. “In a great song. To which the folk will listen as I listened to Arzan.”
Halmis looked at him in silence. When she spoke it was in a whisper. She bent forward, her hand touched his knee. “Ramiki.... Did Arzan really speak? Perhaps it was only you—speaking to yourself?”
Her words had behind them at least an amount of comprehension. If it had been that way she could match it from her own experience!... Sometimes she thought that she really had seen the god or had heard the voice. At other times she thought blackly that it was only that Halmis who seemed a negligible thing. But she did not confide these doubts to the folk before whom she prophesied. Nor would Ramiki. Nor did she see how any could be brought to question Arzan in him.
Nevertheless, she ached to take the tall bright feather from Ramiki’s headdress—to take it at least for a time! In fact, she felt much as Ramiki felt. Where he had Halmis before him, she had before her Ramiki. When it came to that jealousy, there was small difference between them.
The difference between them was a matter of the status of men and the status of women—of hunters’ stations. And this hunter may have a coign of vantage and, in security, bring down the game he wishes to bring down, and that hunter may be placed disadvantageously and the matter end quite differently.
Ramiki’s eyes burned. He looked over Halmis’s head at the many-shaped and tinted clouds. “Arzan spoke—Arzan! He told me things about women that I had not thought of before!”
Halmis sat in silence. Before her, between her and Ramiki, formed a picture of the god-stone and the three trees behind it, and the people pressing close, and Ramiki chanting greatly to them what Arzan had told him—making them believe. At his best Ramiki was a great prophet.... What had Arzan told him?
She raised her eyes. “What did Arzan tell you?”