Outland
Copyright© 2025 by Mary Austin
Chapter 6
IN WHICH I AM UNHAPPY AND MEET A TALL WOMAN IN THE WOOD
When the vines dropped back from Ravenutzi’s hand upon the wall of boughs through which the Ward and her Keepers passed, it was as if the step that carried them out of sight of the Outliers had also carried them out of knowledge. Not an eye that any other eye could discover, nor any inquiring word strayed upon their vanished trail. In the three days before they returned to the Meet, or it was proper to mention them, they would have visited the King’s Desire, and Zirriloë would be informed of everything pertinent to that connection.
During these three days no Outlier concerned himself with their whereabouts lest he should be thought to have some concern about the Treasure. With the exception of Noche, I believe no Outlier had even so much as curiosity about it. It had been so long since any man had seen it, that until Noche’s account of what the cache contained began to be current, I think they had not any clear idea what the Treasure might consist in. It was something that the Far-Folk wanted and the Outliers did not mean they should get. The struggle kept alive in them tribal integrity and the relish for supremacy.
The practice of not speaking of the Treasure during the three days’ absence of the Ward, had taken on a rigidity of custom which Herman and I did not feel ourselves bound to observe. We could talk of the Treasure and of Zirriloë, and we did that same morning.
When the shadows were gathered close under the forest border, and even to our accustomed eyes there was no sign of the Outliers, other than the subdued sense of gladsome life spread on the pleasant air, I found a place I knew. There the creek went close about the roots of the pine between shallow sandy shoals, and there Herman came to talk to me of the Love-Left Ward. As he sat there at my feet pitching stones into the shallows, that effulgence of personality which had streamed from him at the opening of that day, and now suffused his manner with an unaccustomed warmth, lay quite beyond my reach.
Some of the dread with which Daria had met the obliteration of memory and identity, moved me to draw from Herman an assurance that nothing could quite wipe out from him all recollection of the fellowship and the good times we had had together. It began to appear an alarming contingency that I should be turned out at any moment in a strange country to find my way back to life in company with a man I did not know and whose disposition toward me was still to be learned. It would have become Herman to be very nice to me at this juncture, and while I sat feeling blankly for the communicating thread, he began to talk of the Ward.
“Some of the women should have gone with her,” he said; “somebody interested in her. It’s all stiff chaparral from here to the ridge. The girl will never stand it.”
“You don’t really know where they have gone,” I hinted, “and Daria doesn’t seem to have suffered.”
“Oh, Daria! But this girl needs looking after. You can see that it means a lot to her, losing—everything. She would have appreciated—things. That string of red berries now—she would have done justice to rubies.”
“The great necklace of red stones? Well, she probably knows where they are by this time.”
“A lot better use for them than keeping them in a hole in the ground,” Herman insisted, “especially when it costs the youth of a girl like that to keep them there.”
“I know at least one Outlier who will agree with you.”
“Who, then?”
“Mancha.”
“Did he say that? What makes you think so?”
I have often wondered why having gone so far I did not go further and tell Herman frankly what I thought I had discovered of Mancha’s state of mind. I have wondered oftener, if I had spoken then, if anything would have come of it different or less grievous than what did come. Whatever prevented me, I answered only that he seemed to me a man less bound by custom and superstition than his fellows, and Herman agreed with me.
“But I can tell you,” he said, “that Zirriloë wouldn’t hear of it. You can just see how her whole soul is bound up in the keeping of her vows. She could be true as death to—anybody.” He went on to say how he derived this assurance from the way the sun-touched color of her cheek spread into the whiteness of her neck, and from the blueness of the vein that ran along her wrist, and her springy walk. He ran on in this fashion taking my agreement very much for granted. What I really had thought was that in spite of her beauty and wraptness, the girl had rather a shallow face and would be as likely to be as much engrossed and as sure of herself in any other circumstances. And I was so much disappointed at Herman’s extraordinary failure of perception that I could not allow myself to say anything about it. I felt that a personal note must unreasonably attach to any woman’s attempt to show that a more beautiful one is not necessarily a woman of more personal fineness. I was so irritated with myself for being irritated that I was glad to hear Evarra calling down by the willows, and to leave Herman pitching pebbles into the shallows. Though it turned out that Evarra was asleep under a madroño and nobody had called me.
During those three days while the Ward and the keepers were away, there was a great deal going on in the fenced meadows and by Deer Lake and at the bottom of deep wells of shade in the damp cañons. It was a broken, flying festival, no two events of which took place successively in the same quarter, for the Outliers wished not to occupy ground long enough to leave upon it any mark of use by which House-Folk might suspect their presence. The great events of the Meet went on in so many places that nobody ever saw the whole of them. That was why I had no more talk with Herman and saw him but once or twice until Zirriloë came back again. I heard of him, though, and that in a manner and matter that surprised me very much.
The morning of the second day I went up with the girls to race in Leaping Water. We left the Middle Basin by a trail that took the side of the hill abruptly and brought us out at the foot of the second fall, above the long white torrent of the Reach. They meant to come down with the stream to the meadow again, and the game went to the one who was least out of water in that passage. I followed the windings of the creek as near as the undergrowth allowed and heard their laughter, now louder and now less than the water noises, and saw between the trees the flash of foam change to the glancing of white limbs, and the flicker of the sun on fair bodies as they drifted through the shallows. They took the falls feet foremost, curving to its flying arch, white arms wreathed backwards and wet hair blowing with the spray. The swimmers so mixed themselves with the movement of the water and the well-sunned, spacious day, that they seemed no more apart from it than the rush of the creek or the flicker of light on leaf surfaces displaced by the wind. They were no more obtrusive than that mysterious sense of presence out of which men derive gods and the innumerable fairy host.
I had walked thus in that awakened recognition of sentience in the wild, in which all Outland had become a dream which hunts along the drowsy edge of sleep. I had continued in it for perhaps half an hour, in such a state that though I had no idea where we were on the map, I believe I could have set out suddenly in the right quarter for home. I had not heard my name pronounced, but I began to be aware within myself that some one had called. I was so sure of it that, though I had no intimation yet of any presence, I began to look about. After a little trouble I made out Trastevera on the opposite bank, between the willows, making signs that she wished to speak to me, and yet enjoining silence. The creek widened here and the girls were coming down, following like trout. I saw her press back among the swinging boughs as they went by, and guessed that something more than the ordinary occasion of the day was astir. Presently, when we heard from below the splash of laughter as the swimmers struck the rapids, she came across to me.
“Where were you yesterday when Daria took the Cup?” she asked immediately.
“By Fallen Tree, not twenty steps from you—but you were so taken up with that affair that you did not see me.”
“You heard, then, what her young man said about”—she flushed sensitively—”his reasons for her not drinking. Have you heard anything of that in the Meet?”
“Nothing that need disquiet you.”
This was not strictly true, for Evarra had told me that all those who had opposed Trastevera’s exemption ten years before were now justifying themselves in Daria’s rebellion.
“They are saying what I feared,” she said, “that it is a mistake to release the possessor of gifts from the common obligation.”
“They are wrong, then, for nothing has come of it but the momentary outburst of a sensitive spirit. After all, Daria fulfilled her vows.”
She looked at me curiously for a moment, as if she were not sure what to make of me. We were walking up and down behind the trees, her dress a-flutter, her small hands clasping and unclasping, her body rippling with the expressive accompaniment of excitement which was as natural to her as the unstrained stillness of repose.
“Do you not think it wrong,” she said, “when the findings of the Council are scorned, and I—even I—make secret occasion to talk of forbidden things?”
She wheeled upon me suddenly:
“And this plan which is hatched between your man and Mancha, perhaps you see no wrong in that?”
She was too guileless herself to have taken that method on purpose, but I felt my spirit curling like a dried leaf out of all proportion to her news. I managed to answer steadily.
“He is not my man.” It did not occur to me until afterward that it would have been a surer form of denial not to acknowledge so readily what man. “And as for any plans he may have with Mancha or any other, I do not know what they are. Nor would I be interested except that I see it troubles you.”
All the time I was resenting unreasonably that Herman should have any plans with anybody and not broach them first to me.
“I do not know very well what it is myself,” she said more quietly, “except that it grows out of this unhappy episode of Daria’s. It must refer to the Wardship, because it is rumored about that the Meet, instead of breaking up on the evening when the keepers come back, will hold over another day for Council. That must be because they wish to talk of matters that may not be opened earlier. It is Mancha, I think, who wishes it. When some of the elders reproved Daria’s lover for having allowed himself to love a Ward, and for speaking so lightly of the Keeping, Mancha said that a man could not help where his heart went, and that there was too much truth in what the young man said. Myself, I cannot account for it.”
“I can,” I said, “and though you might not feel at liberty to question me, I at least may tell you that it has to do with the Ward. He is in love with her.” And I told her all that I had seen or surmised.
“And your friend?”
“Not knowing what his plan is, I cannot give his reasons.”
“Ah!” she said for all answer, and we walked on without saying anything further until I asked her what had become of Daria.
“Gone on her wedding month; they went away this morning as soon as she was fully recovered, having seen no one. They went out by Singing Ford. And even in that,” she added, “there is something to criticize, for it is not customary for any one to go away from the Meet while the Keepers are abroad. Oh,” she cried, striking suddenly upon her breast, “it is through me, through me, that all this breaking of custom comes.”
“Why do you care so much? All customs pass and in the end are replaced by better ones.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.