Chapter 5

THE LOVE-LEFT WARD

I was sitting under a toyon tree watching Evarra brew forgetfulness in a polished porphyry bowl, when Herman came by. It was the morning of the Meet. The Cup was wanted for her who was the Ward, and Evarra took a great deal of pains with the brew, heating the bowl slowly and, when the dry leaves began to smoke and give off an odor of young fir, dropping water gently and setting it to steep in the sun. I had hoped to discover what plant it might be, but there was little to be guessed except that it had a blue flower taken in the bud, and smelled like a wood path in the spring. Evarra sat and stirred under the toyon and answered my questions or not as she was inclined.

“Do you know any sort of an herb, Evarra, that will turn gray hair black again?”

“That I do; and black hair gray if you wish it.” But I had not caught the significance of her statement, when Herman came along, bursting full of news. He was looking almost handsome that morning, for he had put on the dress of the Outliers for the first time, and though he had managed it so as to cover more of his skin than was their fashion, it became him very well. Some satisfying quality streamed from him, according with the day. As if he had laid off something besides the dress which had come between him and the effect I had wished him to have on me.

“Come up the trail with me; I have some news for you,” he began. “May she?”

This last was to Evarra. With all the basin of Deep Fern and Leaping Water full of their own folk we had been allowed to move freely about among them, but there was still a form of keeping us under guard.

“Go up,” said Evarra, probably glad to get rid of me, “as far as Fallen Tree, where you can see the Leap between that and the clearing. I will join you presently. You can see the procession best from there, when it first comes out of the wood.”

The dew was not yet gone up from the shadows nor the virgin morning warmed a whit toward noon; the creek sang at the curve, I felt the axles of the earth sing as it swung eastward. I spread out my arms in the trail and touched the tips of the growing things, and felt the tide of abundant life rise through my fingers. Herman strode in the trail ahead and called over his shoulder:

“What are you laughing at back there, Mona?”

“News,” I answered, for I had remembered suddenly something Trastevera had said to me.

“What news?”

“How should I know, except that it is good news? The meadowsweet told it to me. What’s yours?”

“That Treasure you’re so keen about; they’ve really got it. I’ve talked with men who’ve seen it.”

“Noche?”

“He hasn’t come back yet, but Waddyn, one of the keepers—there were four of them—dug it up ten years ago and reburied it.”

“But why?”

“That’s my news. On account of Trastevera. She was the Ward ten years ago, and they were afraid to give her their wretched drug lest they should destroy her gift of Far-Seeing, as they call it. So they took counsel and decided to change the hiding-place. Prassade said it wasn’t an altogether popular movement. Some of the Wards haven’t taken kindly to the Cup when their turn came, and they feared the precedent. But anyway they did it. They made a cordon round the place where it was hid, three days’ journeys wide, and the four old men went in and dug up the Treasure and buried it again.”

“All those jewels and beaten gold?”

“Whatever it is they’ve got, colored pebbles most likely. It wouldn’t have been so bad, Prassade says, changing the place of the Treasure; that has happened several times in their history. But while they had it up they had a look at it, and Noche’s head has been turned ever since.”

“I should think it might. It’s all true, then?”

“Folk tales, likely; all tribes have them.” Though his face was turned from me on the trail, I could feel Herman’s professional manner coming on again. “It is extraordinary, though, how their social organization is so nearly like to what you would expect of a highly civilized people thrown suddenly back on the primal environment. Take their notions of property now——”

What he was going to say must have been very interesting, but just at this point we came to Fallen Tree, and saw the irised banner of the Leap floating before its resounding crash of waters. A little spit of grassy land ran here from the clearing into the dense growth, and the trail entered by it. Beyond it, pale late lilies censed the shadows of the redwoods, and below in the meadow there was nothing fairer than the bleached, wind-blown hair of the children, as they ran and shouted through the scrub. Evarra came hurrying with the Cup against her breast. Prassade and Persilope took up a station of some prominence on the point opposite us, with Mancha behind them, leaning on his long weapon. Presently the flutes began.

The sound of them stole upon us softly from far within the redwoods, keyed a little under the bell tones of the creek, and rising through it to the pitch at which the water note seems forever at the point of breaking into speech. As the procession skirted the meadow, the music emerged in a tune fetching and human. Now you heard the swing of blossoms by runnels in the sod, the beat of spray on the bent leaves by the water borders; then the melody curling and uncurling like the ringlets on a girl’s neck. With the music some sort of pageant passed, boys and girls wreathed and dancing, forming as they wound in the wood glooms, breaking and dissolving where the trail led through the bright, sunned space of the meadow. We could hear from the Outliers ranged about the clearing, light applause of laughter like the patter that follows the wind in the quaking asp.