The Flute of the Gods
by Marah Ellis Ryan · English · Gutenberg #30125 · 552,177 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Flute of the Gods
Author: Marah Ellis Ryan
Illustrator: Edward S. Curtis
Release date: September 28, 2009 [eBook #30125]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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Transcriber's note
In this text, some place and personal names were printed
with a macron over a vowel or vowels. These are shown
in this text as follows. For example [=a] means a
macron appeared over the letter "a" in the text, as in
K[=a]-ye-fah. S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah indicates a single
macron appeared over two consecutive "a" characters in
the name.
THE FLUTE OF THE GODS
by
MARAH ELLIS RYAN
Author of "Told in the Hills," "Indian Love Letters," "The Soul of
Rafael," etc., etc.
Illustrated by Edward S. Curtis
[Illustration: "BY THE ARROW I HAVE SAID IT!" _Page 120_]
New York
Frederick A. Stokes Company
Publishers
Copyright, 1909
By Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved
September, 1909
THE FLUTE OF THE GODS
PREFACE
In romances of the aborigines of the so-called New World there is
usually presented savage man or woman modified as may be by the
influence of European mythologies in various authorized forms. But,
certain people of this New World possessed at least a semi-civilization
centuries before the coming of white conquerors.
When man ceases to be nomadic, builds houses of stone and mortar,
terrace upon terrace,--walled and fortressed against the enemy,--when
he has fields of growing grain, textile fabrics, decorated pottery, a
government that is a republic, a priesthood trained in complex ritual,
a well stocked pantheon, a certain understanding of astronomy and
psychic phenomena, he may withal be called barbarian, even as was
Abraham on Moriah barbaric when the altar of his god called for
sacrifice of his only son. But a people of such culture could not with
truth be called savage.
The tale told here has to do with these same historic barbarians. That
there is more of depth to the background of American Indian life than
is usually suggested by historians has been made clear of two tribes
by Dr. Le Plongeon in his _Sacred Mysteries of the Mayas and Quiches
11500 Years Ago_. Similar mysteries and secret orders exist to-day in
the tribes of the Mexicos and Arizona. In certain instances the names
and meanings of offices identical with those of Yucatan survive, to
prove an ancient intercourse between the Mayan tribes and those who
now dwell in the valley of the Rio Grande. The Abbe Clavigero left
account of a thousand years of the history of one tribe as transcribed
by him from their own hieroglyphic records. Lord Kingsborough may have
been far astray with his theory that the people of America were the
Lost Tribes of Israel, but the researches embodied in his remarkable
_Antiquities of Mexico_, demonstrated the fact that they were not a
people of yesterday.
As to historic notes used in this tale of the more northern Sun
worshipers: Cabeza de Vaca, the first European to cross the land from
the Mississippi to Mexico (1528-1536), left record in Spanish archives
of Don Teo the Greek. Casteñada, historian for the Coronado expedition
(1540-1542), left reluctant testimony of the worse than weird night in
one Indian town of the Rio Grande, when impress was left on the native
mind that the strong god of the white conquerors demanded much of
human sacrifice. In that journal is record also of the devoted Fray
Luis, of whose end only the Indians know. In _Soldiers of the Cross_
by Archbishop Salpointe, there is an account of a god-offering made in
1680 (after almost a century of European influences), warranting the
chapter describing a similar sacrifice on the same shrine when the
pagan mind was yet supreme and the call of the primitive gods a vital
thing.
It is yet so vital that neither imported government nor imported
creeds have quite stamped it out. Only the death of the elders and the
breaking up of the clans can eradicate it. When that is done, the
Latin and the Anglo-Saxon will have swept from the heart of the land,
primitive, conservative cults ancient as the Druids.
With thanks to the Indian friends who have helped me, I desire
especially to express my obligation to Edward S. Curtis, whose
wonderful volumes of _The North American Indian_ have been an
inspiration, and whose Indian pictures for this book of mine possess a
solid value in art and ethnology far beyond the mere illustration of
text.
M. E. R.
CONTENTS
I. THE WOMAN FROM THE SOUTH 1
II. THE DAY OF THE SIGN 11
III. OF THE JOURNEY OF TAHN-TÉ 18
IV. WHITE SEEKERS OF TREASURE 29
V. TAHN-TÉ AMONG STRANGERS 42
VI. TAHN-TÉ--THE RULER 56
VII. THE SILKEN SCARF 63
VIII. THE STORY BY THE DESERT WELL 74
IX. YAHN, THE APACHE 103
X. SHRINES OF THE SACRED PLACES 111
XI. THE MAID OF DREAMS 124
XII. COMING OF THE CASTILIANS 137
XIII. A PAGAN PRIEST IN COUNCIL 167
XIV. THE COURIER AND THE MAID 201
XV. THE GIVING OF THE SUN SYMBOL 221
XVI. THE TRUE VISION 244
XVII. THINGS REVEALED ON THE HEIGHTS 252
XVIII. THE BATTLE ON THE MESA 262
XIX. THE APACHE DEATH TRAP 271
XX. THE CHOICE OF YAHN TSYN-DEH 289
XXI. THE CALL OF THE ANCIENT STAR 298
XXII. "AT THE TRAIL'S END!" 306
XXIII. THE PROPHECY OF TAHN-TÉ 319
XXIV. THE BLUEBIRD'S CALL 329
ILLUSTRATIONS
"BY THE ARROW I HAVE SAID IT!" _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
THE ONE TOWN OF WÁLPI 3
THE PRAYER TOKEN 15
BLOOD-RED STARS IN THE GREEN OF HIS CROWN 19
TO DON RUY, A MESSAGE IN THE MOONLIGHT 65
THE PLACE OF THE PALMS 95
THE PRAYER OF YAHN TSYN-DEH 109
YAHN AT THE GRINDING STONE 113
KA-YEMO 119
THE SIGNAL FIRE TO THE MOUNTAIN GOD 125
AND REACHED HIS HANDS TO HIS BROTHERS--THE STARS 129
THE MAID OF DREAMS 131
STRAIGHT TO HIM DRIFTED THE BLUEBIRD'S WING 135
A LONELY FIGURE DESPITE HER TROPHIES 139
TAHN-TÉ STEPPED FORWARD 179
THE PAGE 199
INTO THE KIVA OF COUNCIL THEY DESCENDED 207
ONE GIRL WAITED AT THE PORTAL 245
IN CASTILIAN WAR DRESS HE STOOD 257
SHE LED HIM UP THE ANCIENT STAIRWAY 283
ONLY A WITCH LED TO DEATH 311
"BACK! THING OF THE EVIL ONE!" 325
TAHN-TÉ; THE OUTCAST 327
ONLY A TRAIL ACROSS THE DESERT SANDS 333
THE FLUTE OF THE GODS
CHAPTER I
THE WOMAN FROM THE SOUTH
Aliksai! In Tusayan the people were living! It was the year after the
year when the great star with the belt of fire reached across the sky.
(1528.)
The desert land of the Hopi people stretched yellow and brown and dead
from mesa to mesa. The sage was the color of the dust, and the brazen
sky was as a shield made hard and dry by the will of the angry gods.
The Spirit People of the elements could not find their way past that
shield, and could not bear blessings to Earth children.
The rain did not walk on the earth in those days, and the corn stood
still, and old men of the mesa towns knew that the starving time was
close. In the kivas fasted the Hopi priests, the youth planted prayer
plumes by the shrines of the dying wells, and the woman danced dances
at sunrise, and all sang the prayers to the gods:--and each day the
store of corn was lower, and the seed in the ground could not grow.
In the one town of Wálpi there were those who regretted the seed
wasted in the planting,--it were better to have given it to the
children, and even yet they might find some of it if the sand was
searched carefully.
"Peace!" said old Ho-tiwa, the Ancient of the village, and the chief
of Things of the Spirit. "It is not yet so bad as when I was a boy. In
that starving time, the robes of rabbit skins were eaten when the corn
was gone. Yet you see we did live and have grown old! The good seed is
in the ground, and when the rain comes--"
"When it comes!" sighed one skeptic--"We wait one year now,--how many
more until we die?"
"If it is that you die--the rain or the no rain makes no change--you
die!" reminded the old man. "The reader of the stars and of the moon
says a change is to come. Tell the herald to call it from the
housetops. This night the moon is at the big circle--it may bring with
it the smile of the glad god again. Tell the people!"
And as the herald proclaimed at the sunset the hopeful words of the
priests who prayed in the kivas, old Ho-tiwa walked away from the
spirit of discontent, and down the trail to the ruins of Sik-yat-ki.
All the wells but that one of the ancient city were useless, green,
stagnant water now. And each day it was watched lest it also go back
into the sands, and at the shrine beside it many prayers were
planted.
So that was the place where he went for prayer when his heart was
heavy with the woe of his people. And that was how he found that which
was waiting there to be found.
It was a girl, and she looked dead as she lay by the stones of the old
well. As he bent over to see if she lived, the round moon came like a
second sun into the soft glow of the twilight, and as it touched the
face of the girl, the old man felt the wind of the south pass over
them. Always to the day he died did he tell of how that south wind
came as if from swift wings!
[Illustration: THE ONE TOWN OF WÁLPI _Page 1_]
He called to some men who were going home from rabbit hunting in the
dusk, and they came and looked at the girl and at each other, and drew
away.
"We have our own women who may die soon," they said: "Why take in a
stranger? Whence comes she?"
No one had seen her come, but her trail was from the south. She wore
the dress of a pueblo girl, but she was not of their people. Her hair
was not cut, yet on her forehead she carried the mark of a soon-to-be
maternity--the sacred sign of the piñon gum seen by Ho-tiwa when he
went as a boy for the seed corn to the distant Te-hua people by the
river of the east.
"I come here with prayer thoughts to the water," said the old man
noting their reluctance,--"and I find a work put by my feet. The
reader of the skies tells that a change is to come with the moon. It
is as the moon comes that I find her. The gods may not be glad with us
if our hearts are not good at this time."
"But the corn--"
"The corn I would eat can go to this girl for four days. I am old, but
for so long I will fast,--and maybe then the gods will send the
change."
So the girl was carried to his house, and the women shrank away, and
were afraid--for the clouds followed the wind swiftly from the south,
and the face of the moon was covered, and at the turn of the night was
heard the voice of a man child--new born of the strange girl found by
the well in the moonlight. Ho-tiwa in the outer room of the dwelling
heard the voice--and more than the child voice, for on the breath of
the wind across the desert the good rain came walking in beauty to the
fields, and the glad laughter of the people went up from the mesa, and
there was much patter of bare feet on the wet stone floor of the
heights--and glad calls of joy that the desert was to live again!
And within the room of the new birth the women stared in affright at
the child and at each other, for it was most wonderfully fair--not
like any child ever seen. This child had hair like the night, eyes
like the blue of the sky, and face like the dawn.
One man among them was very old, and in his youth had known the Te-hua
words. When the girl spoke he listened, and told the thing she said,
and the women shrank from her when it was told.
"She must be a medicine-woman, for she knows these things," she said,
"and these things are sacred to her people. She says that the blade of
a sacrifice must mark her child, for the boy will not be a child as
other children." And at the mention of the knife the people stared at
each other.
"There is such a knife," said Ho-tiwa. "It belongs to the Ancient
Days, and only the gods, and two men know it. It shall be as she says.
The god of the sky has brought the woman and has brought the child,
and on the face of the child is set the light of the moon that the
Hopi people will never again doubt that the gods can do these
things."
And there was a council at which all the old men talked through the
night and the day. And while they talked, the rain poured in a flood
from the gray sky, until men said this might be magic, for the woman
might have brought witchcraft.
But the old chief said no evil craft could have brought the good
rain:--The wind and the rain had come from the south as the girl had
come from the south, and the light on the face of the child was a
symbol that it was sacred.
Then one man, who had been an Apache prisoner, and found his way back,
told of a strange thing;--that forty days to the south where the birds
of the green feathers were, a new people had come out of the Eastern
sea, and were white. The great kings made sacrifices for them, and
planted prayer plumes before them--for they were called the new gods
of the water and the sunrise.
And the girl had come from the south!
Yet another reminded the council that the words of the girl were
Te-hua words, and the Te-hua people lived East of Ci-bo-la and
Ah-ko--the farthest east of the stone house building people.
"Since these are her only words, the child shall be named in the way
of that people," said Ho-tiwa. "The sacred fire was lit at the birth,
and on the fourth morning my woman will give the name in the Te-hua
way, and throw the fire to burn all evil from his path, and the sacred
corn will guard his sleep. Some of you younger men never have heard of
the great Te-hau god. Tell it to them, Atoki, then they will know why
a Te-hua never sends away a poor stranger who comes to them."
The man who knew Te-hua words, and had seen the wonderful Te-hua
valley in his youth, sent smoke from his ceremonial pipe to the four
ways of the gods, and then to the upper and nether worlds, and spoke:
"_Aliksai!_ I will tell of the Te-hua god as it was told to me by the
old man of Kah-po in the time of starving when I went with the men for
the sacred corn of the seed planting:
"The thing I tell is the true thing!
"It was time for a god to walk on the earth, and one was born of the
piñon tree and a virgin who rested under the shadow of its arms. The
girl was very poor, and her people were very poor; when the piñon nut
fell in her bosom, and the winds told her a son was sent to her to
rest beneath her heart, she was very sad, for there was no food.
"But wonderful things happened. The Spirits of the Mountain brought to
her home new and strange food, and seeds to plant for harvest:--new
seeds of the melon, and big seed of the corn:--before that time the
seeds of the corn were little seeds. When the child was born, strange
things happened, and the eagles fly high above till the sky was alive
with wings. The boy was very poor, and so much a boy of dreams that he
was the one to be laughed at for the visions. But great wise thoughts
grew out of his mountain dreams, and he was so great a wizard that the
old men chose him for Po-Ahtun-ho, which means Ruler of Things from
the Beginning. And the dreamer who had been born of the maid and the
piñon tree was the Ruler. He governed even the boiling water from the
heart of the hills, and taught the people that the sickness was washed
away by it. His wisdom was beyond earth wisdom, and his visions were
true. The land of that people became a great land, and they had many
blue stones and shells. Then it was that they became proud. One day
the god came as a stranger to their village:--a poor stranger, and
they were not kind to him! The proud hearts had grown to be hard
hearts, and only fine strangers would they talk with. He went away
from that people then. He said hard words to them and went away. He
went to the South to live in a great home in the sea. When he comes
back they do not know, but some day he comes back,--or some night! He
said he would come back to the land when the stars mark the time when
they repent, and one night in seven the fire is lit on the hills by
the villages, that the earth-born god, Po-se-yemo, may see it if he
should come, and may see that his people are faithful and are waiting
for him to come.
"Because of the day when the god came, and they turned him away for
that his robe was poor, and his feet were bare;--because of that day,
no poor person is turned hungry from the door of that people. And the
old men say this is because the god may come any day from the South,
and may come again as a poor man.
"And this was told to us by the Te-hua men when we went for seed corn
in that starving time, and were not sent away empty. _Aliksai!_"
The men drew long breaths of awe and approval when the story was
ended. The old man who had found the girl knew that the girl had found
friends.
But the mysterious coincidence of her coming as the rain came--and
from the south--and the fair child!
Again the man who had been a prisoner with the Apaches was asked to
tell of the coming of the white gods in the south where the Mexic
people lived. He knew but little. No Apache had seen them, but Indian
traders of feathers had said it was so.
The men smoked in silence and then one said:--"Even if it be so, could
the girl come alone so far through the country of the hostile
people?"
"There is High Magic to help sometimes," reminded the old chief. "When
magic has been used only for sacred things it can do all things! We
can ask if she has known a white god such as the trader told of to our
enemies."
And the two oldest men went to the house of Ho-tiwa's wife, and stood
by the couch of the girl, and they sprinkled sacred meal, and sat in
prayer before they spoke.
And the girl said, "My name is Mo-wa-thé (Flash Of Light) and the name
of my son is Tahn-té (Sunlight). We may stay while these seeds grow
into grain, and into trees, and bear harvest. But not always may we be
with you, for a God of the Sky may claim his son."
And she took three seeds from the fold of the girdle she had worn.
They were strange seeds of another land.
The old men looked at each other, and remembered that to the mother of
the Te-hua god, strange seeds had been given, and they trembled, and
the man of the Te-hau words spoke:
"You come from the south where strange things may happen. On the trail
of that south, heard you or saw you--the white god?"
And she drew the child close, and looked in its face, and said,
"Yes--a white god!--the God of the Great Star."
And the old men sprinkled the sacred meal to the six points, and told
the council, and no one was allowed to question Mo-wa-thé ever again.
The seeds were planted near the well of Sik-yat-ki, and grew there.
One was the tree of the peach, another of the yellow pear, and the
grain was a grain of the wheat. The pear tree and the wheat could not
grow well in the sands of the desert, only enough to bring seed again,
but the peach grew in the shadow of the mesa, and the people had great
joy in it, and only the men of the council knew they came from the
gods.
And so it was in the beginning.
CHAPTER II
THE DAY OF THE SIGN
Mo-wa-thé,--the mother of Tahn-té, drew with her brush of yucca fibre
the hair-like lines of black on the ceremonial bowl she was
decorating. Tahn-té, slender, and nude, watched closely the deft
manipulations of the crude tools;--the medicine bowls for the sacred
rites were things of special interest to him--for never in the
domestic arrangement of the homes of the terraces did he see them
used. He thought the serrated edges better to look at than the smooth
lines of the home dishes.
"Why can I not know what is that put into them?" he demanded.
"Only the Ancient Ruler and the medicine-men know the sacred thing for
'Those Above.'"
He wriggled like a beautiful bronze snake to the door and lay there,
his chin propped on his hands, staring out across the plain--six
hundred feet below their door--only a narrow ledge--scarcely the
length of the boy's body:--divided the wall of their home from the
edge of the rock mesa.
Mo-wa-thé glanced at him from time to time.
"What thoughts do you think that you lie still like a kiva snake with
your eyes open?" she said at last.
"Yes, I think," he acknowledged with the gravity of a ceremonial
statement, "These days I am thinking thoughts--and on a day I will
tell them."
"When a boy has but few summers his thoughts are not yet his own,"
reminded Mo-wa-thé.
"They are here--and here!" his slender brown hand touched his head,
and heart,--"How does any other take them out--with a knife? Are they
not me?"
"Boy! The old men shall take you to the kiva where all the youth of
the clan must be taught how to grow straight and think straight."
"Will they teach me there whose son I am?" he demanded.
Her head bent lower over the sacred bowl, but she made no lines. He
saw it, and crept closer.
"Am I an arrow to you?" he asked--"sometimes your face goes strange
like that, and I feel like an arrow,--I would rather be a bird with
only prayer feathers for you!"
She smiled wistfully and shook her head.
"You are a prayer;--one prayer all alone," she said at last. "I cannot
tell you that prayer, I only live for it."
"Is it a white god prayer?" he asked softly.
She put down the bowl and stared at him as at a witch or a sorcerer;--one
who made her afraid.
"I found at the shrine by the trail the head you made of the white
god," he whispered. "No one knows who made it but me. I saw you. I am
telling not any one. I am thinking all days of that god."
"That?"----
"Is it the great god Po-se-yemo, who went south?" he whispered. "Do
you make the prayer likeness that he may come back?"
"Yes, that he may come back!"
"My mother;--you make him white!"
She nodded her head.
"I am whiter than the other boys;--than all the boys!"
She picked up the bowl again and tried to draw lines on it with her
unsteady fingers.
"And you talk more than all the boys," she observed.
"Did the moon give me to you?" he persisted. "Old Mowa says I am white
because the moon brought me."
"It is ill luck to talk with that woman--she has the witch charm."
"When I am Ruler, the witches must live in the old dead cities if you
do not like them."
Mo-wa-thé smiled at that.
"Yes, when you are Ruler. How will you make that happen?"
"All these days I have been thinking the thoughts how. If the moon
brought me to you, that means that my father was not like others;--not
like mesa men."
"No--not like mesa men!" she breathed softly.
Mo-wa-thé was very pretty and very slender. Tahn-té was always sure no
other mother was so pretty,--and as she spoke now her dark eyes were
beautified by some memory,--and the boy saw that he was momentarily
forgotten in some dream of her own.
"No one but me shall gather the wood for the night fire to light
Po-se-yemo back from the south lands," he said as he rose to his feet
and stood straight and decided before his mother. "The moon will help
me, and your white god will help me, and when he sees the blaze and
comes back, you will tell him it was his son who kept the fire!"
He took from his girdle the downy feather of an eagle, stepped
outside to the edge of the mesa and with a breath sent it beyond him
into space. A current of air caught it and whirled it upwards in token
that the prayer was accepted by Those Above.
And inside the doorway, Mo-wa-thé, watching, let fall the medicine
bowl at this added evidence that an enchanted day had come to the life
of her son. Not anything he wanted to see could be hidden from him
this day! Powerless, she knelt with bent head over the fragments of
the sacred vessel--powerless against the gods who veil things--and who
unveil things!
It was the next morning that Mo-wa-thé stood at the door of Ho-tiwa
the Ancient one;--the spiritual head of the village.
"Come within," he said, and she passed his daughters who were grinding
corn between the stones, and singing the grinding song of the sunrise
hour. They smiled at her as she passed, but with the smile was a
deference they did not show the ordinary neighbor of the mesas in Hopi
land.
The old man motioned her to a seat, and in silence they were in the
prayer which belongs to Those Above when human things need counsel.
Through the prayer thoughts echoed the last thrilling notes of the
grinding songs at the triumph of the sun over the clouds of the dusk
and the night.
Mo-wa-thé smiled at the meaning of it. It was well that the prayer had
the music of gladness.
"Yes, I come early," she said. "I come to see you. The time is here."
"The time?"
"The time when I go. Always we have known it would be some day. The
day is near. I take my son and go to his people."
"My daughter:--his people he does not know."
"My father:--no one but the winds have told him--yet he knows much! He
has said to me the things by which I feel that he knows unseen things.
I told him long ago that the stars as they touch the far mesa in the
night are like the fires our people build to light our god back from
the south. Yesterday he tells me he wants to be the builder of that
fire and serve that god. My father in this strange land:--my son
belongs to the clan whose duty it is to guard that fire! I never told
him. Those Above have told him. I have waited for a sign. The gods
have sent it to me through my son--we are to go across the desert and
find our people."
"It is a thing for council," decided her host. "The way is far to the
big river,--it is not good that you go alone. Men of Ah-ko will come
when they hear us stamp the foot for the time of the gathering of the
snakes. When they come, we will make a talk. If it is good that you
go, you will find brothers who will show the trail."
"That is well;" and Mo-wa-thé arose, and stood before him. "You have
been my brother, and you have been my father, and my son shall stay
and see once more the rain ceremony of the Blue Flute people, and of
the Snake people, and when he goes to his own land, he can tell them
of the great rain magic of the Hopi Priests."
"He can do more than that," said the Ancient. "In council it has been
spoken. Your son can be one of us, and the men of the Snake Order will
be as brothers to him if ever he comes back to the mesa where the Sun
Father and the Moon Mother first looked on his face. In the days of
the Lost Others, all the people had Snake Power, as they had power of
silent speech with all the birds, and the four-foot brothers of the
forests. Only a few have not lost it, and the Trues send all their
Spirit People to work with that few. Your son may take back to your
people the faith they knew in the ancient days."
[Illustration: THE PRAYER TOKEN _Page 13_]
So it was that the boy watched the drama of the Flute people from the
mesa edge for the last time. The circle of praying priests at the
sacred well; virgins in white garments facing the path of the cloud
symbols that the rain might come;--weird notes of the flute as the
chanters knelt facing the medicine bowl and the sacred corn; then the
coming of the racers from the far fields with the great green stalks
of corn on their shoulders, and the gold of the sunflowers in the
twist of reeds circling their brows. He did not know what the new land
of his mother's tribe would bring him, but he thought not any prayer
could be more beautiful than this glad prayer to the gods. Of that
prayer he talked to Mo-wa-thé.
Then eight suns from that day, he went from his mother's home to the
kiva of the Snake Priests, and he heard other prayers, and different
prayers, and when the sun was at the right height, for four days they
left the kiva in silence, and went to the desert for the creeping
brothers of the sands. To the four ways they went, with prayers, and
with digging-sticks. He had wondered in the other days why the men
never spoke as they left the kiva, and as they came back with their
serpent messengers for the gods. After the first snake was caught, and
held aloft for the blessing of the sun, he did not wonder.
He had shrunk, and thought it great magic when the brief public
ceremony of the Snake Order was given before the awe-struck
people:--It had been a matter of amaze when he saw the men he knew as
gentle, kind men, holding the coiling snake of the rattles to their
hearts and dance with the flat heads pressed against their painted
cheeks.
But the eight days and nights in the kiva with these nude, fasting,
praying men, had taught him much, and he learned that the most
wonderful thing in the taming of the serpents was not the thing to
which the people of the dance circle in the open were witness. He was
only a boy, yet he comprehended enough to be awed by the strong magic
of it.
And of that prayer of the serpents he talked not at all to Mo-wa-thé.
And the Ancient knew it, and said. "It is well! May he be a great
man--and strong!"
From a sheath of painted serpent skin the Ruler drew a flute brown and
smooth with age.
"Lé-lang-ûh, the God of the Flute sent me the vision of this when I
was a youth in prayer," he said gently. "I found it as you see it long
after I had become a man. On an ancient shrine uncovered by the Four
Winds in a wilderness I found it. I have no son and I am old. I give
it to you. Strange white gods are coming to the earth in these days,
and in the south they have grown strong to master the people. I will
be with the Lost Others when you are a man, but my words here you will
not forget;--the magic of the sacred flute has been for ages the music
of the growing things in the Desert. The God of the Flute is a god old
as the planting of fields, and a strong god of the desert places. It
may be that he is strong to lead you here once more to your brothers
on some day or some night--and we will be glad that you come again.
For this I give the flute of the vision to you. I have spoken.
Lo-lo-mi!"
CHAPTER III
OF THE JOURNEY OF TAHN-TÉ
The journey of Tahn-té to his mother's land of the East was the wonder
journey of the world! There were medicine-men of Ah-ko for their
guides, and the people were many who went along, so no one was afraid
of the Navahu of the hill land.
And a new name was given to his mother. Ho-tiwa gave her the name, and
put on her head the water of the pagan baptism to wash away that which
had been. The new name was S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah and it meant the "Woman
who has come out from the mists of a Shadow or Twilight Land." And
they all called her by that name, and the men of Ah-ko regarded her
with awe and with respect, and listened in silence when she spoke.
For the first time the boy saw beyond the sands of the desert, and in
the high lands touched the running water of living springs, and
scattered meal on it with his prayers, and bathed in the stream where
green stems of rushes grew, and braided for himself a wreath of the
tasselled pine.
"_Ai-ai!_" said his mother softly,--"to the people of my land the pine
is known as the first tree to come from the Mother Earth at the edge
of the ice robe on her bosom. So say the ancients, and for that reason
is it sacred to the gods--and to the sacrifices of gods. Have you, my
son, woven a crown of sacrifice?"
But Tahn-té laughed, and thrust in it the scarlet star blossom growing
in the timber lands of the Navahu.
"If I am made sacrifice I will have a blood strong, living reason," he
said, with the gay insolence of a young god walking on the earth.
But the older men did not smile at the bright picture he made with the
blood-red stars in the green of his crown. They knew that even untried
youth may speak prophet words, and they made prayers that the wise
woman of the twilight land might not see the day when her son became
that which he had spoken.
He carried with him a strange burden:--an urn or jar of ancient days
dug from one of the buried cities of the Hopi deserts. On it was the
circle of the plumed serpent, and the cross of red and of white. It
was borne on his back by a netted band of the yucca fibre around his
brow, and in it were young peach trees, and pear trees--the growing
things of the mystic seeds given to the medicine-men of the Hopi the
day of the boy's birth.
Seeds also were being carried, but it was the wish of the mother that
her son carry the growing things into the great valley of the river
P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé.
Even into the great rift of the earth called Tzé-ye did he carry it,
where the cliff homes of the Ancient Others lined the sides of the
cañon and the medicine-men of Ah-ko spoke in hushed tones because of
the echoing walls, and of the strong gods who had dwelt there in the
days before men lived and died.
"The dead of the Ancient ones are hidden in many hollow places of the
stone," explained one of the men who spoke the language of Te-hua
people. "And it is good medicine for the man who can walk between
these walls where the Divine Ones of old made themselves strong. You
do not fear?"
[Illustration: BLOOD-RED STARS IN THE GREEN OF HIS CROWN _Page 18_]
"I do not fear," said S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah, the woman of the twilight,
"and my son does not fear. Before he was born to the light of the Sun
Father, I made the trail from the level land of the west where the
snow is, to the deep heart of the world where the plants have blossoms
in winter time, and the birds sing for summer. Beside it this deep
step down from the world above is like the thickness of your finger
against the height of a tall man."
The men stared at her in wonder, and Tahn-té listened, but could not
speak when the older men were silent.
"There is such a place," said the oldest of the men. "It is to the
sunset. The water comes strong there, and it is a place of the gods,
as this place is. And you have seen it with your eyes?"
"I have seen it, and the water that is so strong looks from the top
like this reed of this ancient dwelling place," said S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah,
and she pointed to the waving slender lattice grass of the cañon.
"I have heard of it, but our people do not cross it in these days,"
said the old man. "Our friends the Te-huas cross it--and cross a
desert beyond when they go to the Love Dance of the Chinig-Chinik who
live by the sunset sea. In my youth I thought to go, but old age is
here and I have not yet seen it." Then after an interval of thoughtful
silence he said:--"You have crossed that river in the heart of the
world--I did not know that women went to the Love Dance."
"I can not tell you. I also do not know," said S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah
quietly, and the boy saw that the eyes of all the men were directed
strangely to his mother. "I do not belong to the Order from which the
people are sent to the Dance of Love or the Dance of Death. My eyes
have not seen the waters of the sunset sea."
"Then you did not go beyond the river in the heart of the rocks?"
asked the old man. "You did not cross over?"
"I did cross over. I have seen the sands of that far desert of which
you speak. I have seen the trees of which one leaf will cover a man
from the sun, and more leaves will make a cover for a dwelling. I have
seen the water run there at the roots of those trees as this water
runs in the shadow of this rock, and--ai!--ai-ah! I have seen it sink
in the sands when it was needed most--and have heard it gurgle its
ghost laugh beneath the hot trail where the desert lost one
wandered."
Her head bent forward and her hands covered her eyes. The boy wanted
to ask where this place was of which he was hearing so much for the
first time. What was there in the wonderful journey of the wise woman
to make the tears come and her voice tremble? But the old Shaman of
Ah-ko reached out his hand and touched her bent head.
"It is true, my daughter of the Te-hua, that the Snake priest of the
Hópitû told in council that high medicine was yours. Yet all he could
not tell me. You have lived much, oh woman! Yet your heart is not
hard, and your thoughts run clear as the snow water of the high hills.
It is well that you have come with us, and that you have talked with
us. When the hidden water mocks with laughter so far beneath the
desert sand that no man lives to reach it:--then it is that men die
beside the place their bleeding hands dig deep. You have heard that
laughter, and have lived, and have brought back your child out of the
sands of death. It has given you the medicine for your son that is
strong medicine. You have lived to walk with us and that is well."
"Yes, thanks this day, it is well," said the other men.
At Ah-ko, "the city of the white rock," the silent, shy Medicine-Woman
of the Twilight and her son were feasted like visiting rulers of a
land.
To his wonder they sang songs of thanks that the gods had let her come
to them once again, and they asked that she make prayers with them.
The woman with whom the rain and the sweet fruit had come to the far
desert was a woman to be feasted and propitiated--all the more that
she disclaimed aught of the divine for herself; but when they spoke of
her son she was silent. His life was his own in which to prove what he
might be.
Here he saw no girls with the head bands for their burden of water
bottles as in Tusayan. He saw instead the beautifully poised vases on
the heads of the women while they paced evenly over the rock of the
mesa or the treacherous sand hills, and the great walled reservoir of
shining green water was a constant source of delight to him. Eight
times the height of a man was the depth of it, and at the very bottom
in an unseen crevice was the living spring pulsing out its heart for
the long line of women who brought their decorated jars to be filled.
The evening of their arrival he found his mother there in the shadow
of the high rock walls.
"Are you sad, my mother, that you walk alone and sit in the shadow?"
he asked, but she shook her head.
"I come because this place of the deep water is precious to me," she
said. "Make your prayer here, my son, make your prayer for the people
who thirst in the desert of this earth life. There are many deserts to
cross, and the enchanted hills and the enchanted wells of content are
but few on the trail."
He made the prayer, and scattered the sacred pollen of the corn to the
four ways, and again took up his query.
"The enchanted mesa Kat-zi-mo I have seen and already the men have
told me its story," he said. "But of this well there is no story
except that in the ages ago the water was brought high with the wall,
and when the Apache enemies came, the people could not starve for
water even while the fighters fought a long time. That is all the
story--there is no magic in that."
"There is always magic in the waters of the desert," and the Woman of
the Twilight. "One other time I drank of the water of this well. It
was enchanted that time, for every moving light and shadow on its face
have I remembered all the days and all the nights. Give me to drink of
it now with your own hands, and it will be then precious for two
reasons."
He did as she said, and wanted to ask of that other time and could
not.
"Thanks this day, thanks for my son," she said and sprinkled water to
the four ways and drank. "Not again shall I see you--oh joy place in
the desert! Give your magic to my son that he may carry it to the free
running water of his own land!"
In Tusayan his mother had been to him Mo-wa-thé, the pottery maker who
made the finest of all vessels, but on the wonder trail in the new
lands he found that she was strangely learned. And when she spoke of
the place of the well on the high mesa and said it was precious for
magic there, he walked silent and awed beside her, for the magic world
held the Great Mystery, and only through prayer must it be spoken.
He knew that his lot was more fortunate than that of any other boy
alive, an the long trail where each night around the camp fire the men
told tales of the Ancient days when gods walked on the earth and
taught wisdom to the people. Each tribe had its own sacred truths
given by its own gods, and he was learning of many. In the great cañon
of Tzé-ye--the abiding place of the Navahu Divine Ones, he had heard
with awe of the warrior boy gods who were born of the Sun and of the
Goddess Estsan-atlehi and set out to slay the terrific giants of evil
in the world. But the medicine-men of Ah-ko were quite sure that the
Ancient Ones of their own race had proof that the Supreme Power is a
master mind in a woman's form. It is the thing which thinks and
creates, and her twin sister is the other mind which only remembers.
Prayers must not be said to the goddess who only remembers--but many
prayers belong to the goddess who creates. And the most belovéd of all
is the goddess E-yet-e-ko (Mother Earth) who nourishes them all their
days. He learned that they planted their corn and their cotton by the
stars and the plum blossoms, in the way his mother said they did by
the river of her land, also that the great bear of the stars was
called by them the great animal of cold weather, and that the Sun had
eight children, or wandering stars in the sky.
He heard many more things, but the wisdom of it was too deep for a boy
to know, and the words of the symbols were new, and not for his
understanding. How big--how very big the world of the Tusayan desert
had seemed to him as he stood on the mesa of Wálpi and looked to the
south where old Awatabi (the high place of the Bow) stood in its
pride, and rugged Mishongnavi with her younger sister Shupaulevi
against the sky, so beautiful, that the sacred mountain Dok-os-lid of
the far away, looks sometimes like a cloud back of those villages, and
sometimes like the shell of the big water from which its name was
taken.
But all those wonderful Hopi mesas with their fortresses on each, were
within the running time of a morning, and not in any of them were
there forests or living streams, or strange new things. Only the
clouds and the shadow of the clouds on the sand,--or the sun and the
glory of the sun on the world, made the heart leap with the beauty of
the land of the Hopi people. But here were new things each day.
When the boys of Ah-ko in friendly rivalry ran races and leaped great
spaces, and shot arrows into a melon with him--and then ate the
melon!--they asked how many years he had lived and he laughed and did
not know.
"I had so many," he said holding up the fingers of both hands and
pointing to his eyes,--"When I followed your men down the trail from
Wálpi in Hopi land. But I have seen so much, and lived so much that I
must be very old now!"
This the boys thought a great jest, and said since he was old he could
not run races, or see straight to shoot, and he must let himself be
beaten. But the boys who tried to beat him were laughed at by the old
men who watched, and he was given a very fine bow to take on his
journey, and never any boy crossed those lands so joyously as he who
carried all the way the growing sprouts of the new trees.
And at Ah-ko a little tree from the urn, and some of the seeds were
given, but the winter to come was a hard winter, and the ice killed
them, so the fruit from the strange far-off trails was not for Ah-ko.
They had rested, and were about to depart, when Tahn-té, watching with
other boys the war between two eagles poised high above the enchanted
mesa, saw on the plain far below the figure of an Indian runner, his
body a dark moving line against the yellow bloom spread like a great
blanket of flowers from Mount Spin-eh down and across the land.
He only watched because the man ran well--almost as well as a
Hopi--and did not see in the glistening bronze body the herald of a
new day in the land.
At the edge of the cliff they watched to see him appear and disappear
in the length of the great stairway of the fortress. Some day each boy
among them would also be a runner in his turn for ceremonial reasons,
and it is well to note how the trusted men make the finish.
It is not easy to run up the two hundred foot wall of Ah-ko at the end
of a long trail, but this man, conscious of watchers, leaped the last
few steps and stood among them. Only an instant he halted, in surprise
face to face with the boy Tahn-té who stood nude and fair beside dark
companions.
Tahn-té was accustomed to the curious regard of strangers who visited
the country of Tusayan. He had heard so often that he was a child of
the sky that this explanation of his fairer skin seemed to him a very
clear and logical explanation of the case.
But after the runner had been listened to by the governor and fed, and
a herald from the terraced housetop had called aloud the startling
message brought by him to the people of Ah-ko, the boy went away from
the other boys, and wrinkled his brows in boyish thought, and stared
across to the ancient crater of Se-po-chineh until his mother sought
him, and found him.
"You are weary, my son, that you come alone from the others?"
"The others only talk yet tell nothing," he said gloomily, "and of
that which the runner tells I wish to hear much. You hear what he says
of white men like gods who come from the south searching for the blue
stones and the stone of the sun fire, and taming strange beasts to
carry them on their way?"
"Yes, it is true, I hear," she said.
"And you think it is magic? Is it that they are gods--or demons--or
men like these men?"
"If they were gods would they not know where the stones of the
sunlight are hidden in the earth?"
"Are they children of the moon or the sun, or the stars that they are
white?" he demanded.
"It may be so," she said very lowly, conscious that his gloomy eyes
were trying to make her see what he felt, but she must not see, and
she spoke with averted head.
Then he rose and stood erect and stretched out his arms their widest
and surveyed himself with measuring gaze and a certain pride, but the
other thought came back with its gloom and he laughed shortly with
disdain of himself.
"I have felt stronger than all the boys--always! Do you know why that
has been? I know now why--it was because I stood alone,--I was the
only child of the light and I dreamed things of that. Now a man tells
us there are many such people, and their magic is great, and my
strength goes because of the many!"
His mother stroked his hand reassuringly. "Na-vin (my own)," she said
steadily. "I have felt your dreams, and I also dream them. Fear no one
born of the light or of the darkness, and when you are a man you will
have all your strength--and more than your own strength."
"You say that, my mother?"
She held her head erect now and looked straight and steadily into the
eyes of her son.
"I say it!"
And he remembered that it was more than his mother who spoke, it was
the Medicine Woman of the Twilight and of the strange places, and the
far off thoughts.
He lifted her hand and breathed on it. "I am again Tahn-té," he said,
and smiled. "You make me find myself!"
CHAPTER IV
WHITE SEEKERS OF TREASURE
When Alvarado marched his band of adventurers into the pueblo Ua-lano
to the sound of tom-toms and flutes of welcome, an Indian woman with a
slender boy stood by the gate and watched the welcome of the
strangers.
An exceedingly reckless, rakish lot they were--this flower of the
Mexican forces who the Viceroy was only too willing should explore all
lands, and seas, so they kept themselves away from the capitol.
The women and the children shrank back as the horses clattered in.
Some laughed to cover their fear, others threw prayer meal, and their
fright made the commander notice the blanketed figure of the woman
whose eyes alone shone above the draperies held close, and who stared
so keenly into each white face as they passed.
"Who is the dame in the mask of the blanket?" he asked of his host
Chief Bigotes--the courteous barbarian who had crossed seventy leagues
of the desert to ask that his village be honored by the god-like ones
from the south.
Bigotes looked at her, did not know, but after inquiring came back and
spoke.
"It is a strange thing but it is true," said the interpreter, "she is
called the One from the Twilight Land. She went as a girl from Te-hua
to Ah-ko for study with the medicine people of one order there. One
night it was as if she go into the earth, or up in the sky. No one
ever see her any more. It was the year of the fire of the star across
the sky. Now she comes from the west and so great a medicine woman is
she that leading men are sent to guard her on the trail to the Te-hua
people--and to guard her son."
"Faith! Your strangers are a handsome pair. The boy would make a fine
page in a civilized land. He is the fairest Indian I've seen."
The boy knew that his mother and himself were objects of query, and
stood stolid, erect and disdainful,--the stranger should see that all
their clanking iron, their dominating swagger, and their trained
animals could not make him move an eyelash of wonder.
But to his mother he said:
"They have much that we will need if we ever fight them; their
clanking clothes and shields can break many arrows."
"Why do you talk of fighting?"
"I do not know why. It is all I thought of as I looked at them."
One thing interested him more than all else, and that was a man in a
grey robe who carried a book, and turned the pages in absorbed
meditation; sometimes his reading was half aloud, and Tahn-té slipped
near each time he could, for to him it looked as if the man talked to
the strange white paper.--He thought it must be some sort of high
magic, and of all he saw in the new comers, he coveted most of the
contents of those pages,--it was more wonderful than the clanging
metal of their equipment.
A tiny elf-like girl followed Tahn-té as a lost puppy would, until he
asked her name, and was told it was Yahn--that she lived in Povi-whah
by the big river and that her mother was visiting some society of
which she was a member,--that she was in the kiva and could not be
seen for four days and nights, and in the coming of the beasts and the
strangers, her caretaker had lost her, and the home where she had
stayed last night she did not know.
She knew only she was lost, and some boys had told her that the new
kind of beasts ate little girls. She did not weep or call, but she
tried to keep her little nude body out of sight behind Tahn-té if a
horse or a mule turned its head in the direction she was.
So glad she was to be protected that she told him all her woes in the
strange town. The greatest was that a dog had taken from her hand the
roasted ear of corn she had been eating, and she wished Ka-yemo was
there, he would have maybe killed the dog.
Inquiry disclosed the fact that Ka-yemo was not her brother; he lived
in Provi-whah. Her own name was Yahn. No:--it was not a Te-hua name.
It was Apache, for her mother was Apache--and the Te-hua men had
caught her when they were hunting, and always her mother had told Yahn
to stay close to the houses, for hunting enemies might bear her away
into slavery--and Yahn was not certain but these men on the beasts
might be hunters.
She was very tiny, and she spoke imperfectly, but shyness was not a
part of her small personality, and she insisted on making herself
understood. To Tahn-té she seemed like a boy rather than a girl, and
he called her Pa-ah-dé which is the Te-hna word for "brother"--and
later he gave her to his mother to keep her out of the way of the
horses and the strange men.
And thus it was that Tahn-té, and Apache Yahn saw together the strange
visitors from the south, and Yahn, though but a baby, thought they
might be hunters whom it would be as well to hide from, and Tahn-té
thought much of the coats of mail, and how lances could be made to
pierce the joints.
He heard the name of the man with the black robe and the magic thing
of white leaves from which he talked--or which talked to him!--it was
"Padre"--there was also another name and it was "Luis." It meant the
same as "Father Ho-tiwa" or "Brother Tahn-té."
To the man from whom the rakish Spanish soldiers bent the knee and
removed the covering from the head, Tahn-té felt no antagonism as he
did for the men who carried the arquebus and swords. The man who is
called "Father" or the woman who is called "Mother" with the Indian
people, is a person to whom respect is due, and through Bigote he had
heard--by keeping quiet as a desert snake against a wall--that the man
of the grey robe who was called "Father" was the great medicine-man of
the white tribe. Through him the god of the white man spoke. In the
leaves of the white book were recorded this god's laws, and even these
white men who were half gods, and had conquered worlds beyond the big
water of the South, and of the East, bent their knees when the man of
the robe spoke of the sacred things.
Of these things he spoke to his mother, and was amazed to learn that
she knew of the white man's gods, and the white men's goddess. Never
had she talked to him of this, and she did not talk to him much now.
She only told him that all she knew would belong to him when the time
came, and that the time seemed coming fast--but it was not yet. When
he was older he could know.
When he talked to her of the many white pages in which the white god
had written, she told him that much wisdom--and strong magic must be
there. The white men had no doubt stolen for their earth-born god the
birth story of Po-se-yemo, the god of her own people. But his magic
had been great in that land across the seas and that people had
written words of the earth-born god as had certain tribes of Mexico,
and all that the god said and did had been written plainly as had been
written the records of Quetzel-coatle of the South, and it was not
good that their own tribe had not the written records of their gods.
"It may be that the time has come to make such records," said Tahn-té,
"our people should not be behind the other people."
"We have no written words,"--said his mother;--"our head men who
govern have only the deerskin writings of Ki-pah the wise, who lived
long ago and did much for the people of Kah-po and Oj-ke, and the
people of the river."
"Of him I have not heard," said Tahn-té--"was he a god?"
"No--no god, but he lived and worked as a god. He came to this land
before the day of my grandfathers. When the time is come, the men of
my father's people will tell you the work he did in our valley, and
what he said. So will tell you the old men of Provi-whah and the old
men of Kah-po. He came to a land, not to one people, and on the
deerskin he painted things never seen but by the wise men who know how
to read it."
The boy stared moodily into the sun swept court of Ua-lano. There were
so many things in the world of which no one had ever told him!
"If I am very good, and say very many prayers, and wait on the gods
very carefully, will the wise men of the medicine orders tell me of
the deerskin records some day?" he demanded.
"Some day--it may be so," she conceded.
"Good! I will think of that each day as the sun comes up!" he stated.
"And the magic of the white man's writings I will learn for myself. It
is a thing which is not kept for sacred places, and no prayers are
needed for that!"
The woman of mystery regarded him strangely, yet spoke no word. The
magic of the white conquerors was wonderful magic to her, yet she
could not ask her son why he only spoke of them as ever beyond some
wall which they must not cross,--and of their knowledge as strong
knowledge, yet not sacred knowledge.
Between the woman and her son there was often a wall of silence. Even
her love could not cross it. There were always spoken or unspoken
questions which she left without answers. He was only learning this in
the wonderful journey of the desert lands, and he asked fewer
questions,--but looked at her more. And:--she knew that also!
The man of the talking white leaves, and the grey gown set in the
center of the court a white cross, and all the soldiers knelt, and in
front of the dwellings the brown people knelt also--which the
Christians deemed a special dispensation that so many heathen had been
brought so quickly to their knees at the mere sight of the holy
symbol. And in the morning Father Luis decided he would baptize all of
them, and have a high mass for the salvation of their souls. The boy
who watched the book so closely, was, he felt sure, a convert at mere
sight of the white leaves, and the heathen mother would no doubt
clamor also for sanctification.
But in the early dusk of the morning the boy and his mother were on
the trail for the home valley of the river P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé of which he
had dreamed. With them were people of Kah-po, and people of Provi-whah
and the Apache woman and her child Yahn. Yahn made some one carry her
most of the hard trails, and talked much, and asked many things of the
little growing trees in the old urn of ancient Tusayan.
And when they came in sight of the sacred mesa, Tuyo, a runner was
sent ahead to tell the governor and the head men of the strange new
people of the clanking iron at Ua-lano, and the wonderful and belated
home-coming of the lost woman of many years' mystery.
Because of this they were met at the edge of the mesa by many, and the
Woman of the Twilight knelt and touched the feet of the governor and
asked that the gate of the valley be open to her and to her son. And
Tahn-té knelt also and offered the growing things.
"These are sacred things of which the Ruler must speak," said the
governor. "I am but for one short summer and winter, but the Ruler is
for always. Of the new things to bear fruit we still speak in
council,--also of the new people trading a new white god for blue
stones, and painted robes."
But Tahn-té knew that a welcome was theirs, for the governor would not
have come outside the walls except it had been so, and the old man
watched keenly the delight of the boy as the river of that land came
clear before him spread at the foot of the wide table land, and the
great plain below. Trees grew there, and between them the running
water shone in the sun. The Black Mesa Tuyo, Mesa of the Hearts,
arose from the water edge,--a great dark monument of mystic rites,
and wondrous records of the time when it had been a breathing place
for the Powers in the heart of the earth. The rocks were burned so red
it always seemed that the fire was still under them. And south was the
God-Maid mesa:--its outline as the face of a maid upturned to the
sky.
Beyond the river stretched the yellow corn fields--the higher land
like a rugged red skeleton from which the soil had been washed,--and
beyond that was the great uplift of the pine-clad mountains where the
springs never failed, and the deer were many.
Wild fowl fluttered and dove in the waters of the river, grey pigeons
flew in little groups from the trail; as they walked, two men in
canoes caught fish where a little stream joined the big water of
P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé--in every direction the boy was conscious of a richer,
fuller life than any he had yet seen. His mother was right--her people
were a strong people! and their villages were many in the valleys of
the river.
In Povi-whah the clan of the Arrow Stone people welcomed the Twilight
Woman as their own, and the men and women who had journeyed with her
from Ua-lano looked glad to have journeyed with her,--they had to
answer many questions.
Tahn-té also had much practise in the Te-hua words when he tried to
tell them what the peach was like, and what the pear was like, and the
youth were skeptical as to peaches big as six plums.
A boy larger than he flipped with a willow wand at the urn with the
little trees, and told him that in Provi-whah a boy was whipped if he
lied too often!
"How many times may a boy lie and not be whipped?" asked Tahn-té, and
the other boys laughed, and one stripling gave him a fillet of otter
skin in approval, and said his name was Po-tzah, and that their clan
was the same.
But the tiny Yahn who looked from face to face, and saw the anger in
the face of the boy of the willow wand, caught the switch and brought
it down with all the force of her two chubby arms on the nurslings
brought from Hopi land.
Tahn-té caught her and lifted her beyond reach of the urn.
"I should have let the strange beasts of the iron men eat you," he
said. "You shall go hungry for peaches if you kill the trees!"
The others laughed as she wriggled clear--and lisped threats even
while keeping out of range of his strong hands.
"Always she is a little cat of the hills to fight for Ka-yemo," said
Po-tzah. "Little Ka-yemo will some day grow enough to fight alone!"
Ka-yemo scowled at them, and muttered things, and sauntered away. He
was the largest of all of them, but one boy does not fight six!
Yahn was in such a silent rage that she twitched and bent the willow
until it was no longer any thing but a limp wreck:--she would break
something!
"That is the Apache!" said Po-tzah. "I think that baby does not forget
to fight even when she sleeps."
The little animal flung an epithet at him and ran after the sulky
Ka-yemo:--evidently her hero and idol.
The mother of Tahn-té was called in council for things of which
Tahn-té was not to know. But he learned that she was of the society of
the Rulers:--that from which the spiritual head was selected when the
Po-Ahtun-ho or Ruler no longer walked on the earth.
After the council sacred meal was sprinkled on the trees in the urn,
and the priests of the order of Po-Ahtun divided them between the
Winter people, and the Summer people, that it be proven which the care
of the new fruit would belong to for prayers, and each planted them by
their several signs in the sky. His mother spoke to him when alone and
told him he was now to do a boy's work in the village, and his
training must begin for the ceremonies of high orders into which the
council wished him to enter.
"To serve our people?"
"Yes:--it will be so--to serve our people."
"Since it is to be like that, may I also speak?"--he asked. "May I not
speak to the men who decide? I have thought of this each day since
Ua-lano. At some time I must speak:--is not this the time?"
"It may be the time," she assented. "We will go to the old men of the
orders. It may be they will listen."
All night they listened, and all night they talked, and the old men
looked at the mother strangely that the son should speak the words of
a man in council.
"Thanks that you let me speak," he said. "Thanks! It is true what you
hear of the white gold-hunter's magic. It is strong. It is good that
we find out how it is strong. My mother tells you how the Snake
priests of Tusayan make me of their order, so that I can know that
magic for the rain ceremony. In my hands also was given the Flute of
Prayer to the desert gods, and to know Hopi prayers does not hurt me
for a Te-hua:--it is Te-hua prayers my mother teaches me always! So it
will not hurt me to learn the magic of the men of iron. They are
strong and they will be hard to fight. The grey robe man is the man
who teaches of their gods. He teaches it from magic white leaves in
his hand, on the leaves there are words--other iron men can talk from
them, but only the grey robe is the priest and teaches. He would teach
me if I would serve him--then I could have their magic with our own."
"It may be evil magic," said one.
"It tames the strange beasts as the Hopi prayers tame the snakes,"
replied the boy--"and every day the beasts do work for these people."
The old men nodded assent--it certainly must be strong magic to do
that!
But a man of the Tain-tsain clan arose.
"This woman has been gone many moons on a strange trail," he said.
"The son she brings back to her clan speaks not as a youth speaks. It
is as if he has been very old and grows young again. It may be
magic--and again it may be that he is half lost in his mind and dreams
the dreams of a man. It is a new thing that men listen to a child in
council."
Then K[=a]-ye-fah the aged Po-Ahtun-ho made a sign for silence, and
sat with closed eyes, and it was very quiet in the council until he
spoke.
"You have brought a big thought out of the world of the Spirit People,
Phen-tza," he said. "It has been given to you to say, and that is
well! It has been given to me to see--and I see with prayer. When the
God-thought is sent to earth people is it not true that the child of
dreams, or the man of dreams, is the first to hear or to feel that
thought? Was not the earth-born god, Po-se-yemo, called a youth that
was foolish? Was he not laughed at by the clans until he wept? Was he
not made ashamed until out of his pain there grew a wisdom greater
than earth-wisdom? Let us think of these things, and let us hear the
words of the child who dreams."
"It is well," said another, "even when half the mind is gone, it may
be gone only a little while on the twilight trail to the Great
Mystery."
"The life music comes in many ways," said K[=a]-ye-fah, the Ruler.
"Many reeds grow under the summer sun, but not in all of them do we
hear the call of the spirit people when the wild reed is fashioned for
the flute. The gods themselves grow the flutes of High Mystery. This
youth is only a reed by the river to-day--yet through such reed the
gods may send speech for our ears."
"We will listen," said the others. "Let us hear more of the men whose
blankets are made of the hard substance." And at this Tahn-té again
took courage and spoke.
"These iron men say they are only on a hunting trail--they say they
will not trouble the people--that is what their men say who speak for
them! But if one boy, or one man, could talk as they talk, you men of
Povi-whah would know better if they speak straight. My mother has
found the trail to her people on the right day, and has brought me
here. I want to be the boy who learns that talk of the hunters of the
blue stones and sacred sun metal of the earth, and then I can come
back and tell it to the wise men of my mother's people."
"But you may not come back."
"I will ask all the Powers that I will come back. My mother will pray
also, and her prayers are strong."
"I will pray also," said S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah.
The men smoked, and the boy watched them and waited until K[=a]-ye-fah
spoke.
"That which the son of this wise woman says is to be well thought
of;--it may be precious to us in days not yet born of the sun. You who
listen know that we are living now in a day that was told of by Ki-pah
in the years of our Lost Others, and Ki-pah spoke as the god
Po-se-yemo spoke:--he was given great magic to see the years ahead of
the years he lived."
"It is true," assented the governor--"It was when the people yet lived
in the caves, and the water went into the sands in that highland--that
is when he came to our Lost Others--Ki-pah--the great wisdom. He came
from the south, and taught them to come down from the caves and build
houses by the great river, and to turn the water to the fields here.
All things worked with him--and Kah-po--and Oj-ke and P[=o]-ho-gé were
built and stand to this day where he said they must be built. He knew
all speech, and could tell magic things from a bowl of clear water. It
was in the water he saw men who were white, and who would cover the
land if we were not strong. These men are the men he saw in the water.
I think it is so, and that this is the time to be strong."
CHAPTER V
TAHN-TÉ AMONG STRANGERS
The one thing to which the boy gave awed attention was that when the
time came for the villages to fight--a leader would be born to
them--if the people of the valley were true to their gods they would
be strong always, Ki-pah the prophet told them to remember always the
war star in the sky--the star Po-se-yemo had told them of, when it
moved, the time to make war would be here.
And when the time came to fight, a leader would come to them, as he,
Ki-pah had come! Because of this thought was the heart of the boy
thrilled that he had been called a reed by the river--a reed through
which music of the desert gods might speak.
He was filled with wild fancies of mystic things born of these
prophecies. And the old men said that perhaps this was the time of
which Po-se-yemo, the god, and Ki-pah, the prophet, had told!
The vote of a Te-hua council has to be the agreement of every man, and
the star of the morning brought dawn to the valley before the last
reluctant decided it was well to send a messenger to learn of the
strange gods.
But as the sun rose Tahn-té bathed in the running water of the river,
and his prayer was of joy:--for he was to go!
In joy, and with the light of exaltation in his face he said farewell
to boy thoughts, and walked lightly over the highlands and the valleys
to Ua-lano, and thence followed the adventurers to Ci-cu-yé and bent
the knee to Father Luis, and kissed the cross, and let water be
sprinkled over him, and did all the things shown him with so glad a
heart that the devoted priest gave praise for such a convert from the
pagan people. So pleased was he with the eagerness of Tahn-té to
learn, that he made him his own assistant at the ceremonies of the
Holy Faith.
And after each one, the boy washed his hands in running water, and
scattered prayer meal to the gods of the elements, and to the Sun
Father God, and knew that in Provi-whah his mother was praying also
that he be not harmed by the god of the gold hunters--and that he come
back strong with the white man's magic.
The boy Ka-yemo of the Tain-tsain clan was also sent--but neither boy
was told of the quest of the other. The old men decided it was better
so. Without pay they went with the Spanish adventurers, one serving
the men of arms and learning the ways of the strange animals, and the
other serving the priests and learning the symbols of the strangers'
creed of the one goddess, and two gods, and many Go-h[=e]-yahs, called
saints by the men of the iron clothes.
They both saw many strange things in Ci-cu-yé, and they saw the
strange Indian slave, whom the old men of Ci-cu-yé instructed to lead
the men of iron from their land with the romance of Quivera. And the
slave did it, and told the strangers of the mythic land of gold and
gems, and lost his life in the end by doing so, but the life of the
romance was more enduring than any other thing, and the spirit of that
treasure search still broods over the deserts and the mountains of
that land.
But the stay of Ka-yemo was not even the length of the first winter
with the strangers. For in Tiguex where the great captain (Coronado)
wintered, and made his comfort by turning the natives out of their
houses, there was a season of grievous strife ere the Spring came, and
the two boys of Te-hua saw things unspeakable as two hundred Indians
of the valley, captured under truce, were burned at the stake by the
soldiers of the cross.
One of the reasons for the crusade to the north as written in the
chronicles of Christian Mexico was to save the souls of the heathen
for the one god,--and his advocates were sending the said souls for
judgement as quickly as might be!
Tahn-té stood, pale and tense in the house where the chapel of Fray
Juan Padilla had been established,--once it had been the house of the
governor of the village who might even now be among the victims of the
broken trust.
On the altar was a crucifix in gold on ebony, and the eyes of the boy
were not kindly as he regarded it.
"They lie when they say you are a god of peace like our god
Po-se-yemo," he said. "They lie when they say you are the god of the
red man--you are the white god of the white people--and you will let
the red men hold not anything that your white children want!"
He heard himself speak the words aloud there alone where the new altar
was--he seemed to hear himself saying it over and over as if by the
sound of his own voice he could kill the sound of the tortured red men
in the court.
A blanketed figure ran in at the open door, halted at the sound of
Tahn-té's voice--and then flung himself forward. It was Ka-yemo and
his teeth were chattering at the thought of the inferno without.
"It may be they will not look for us here," he said as he saw who it
was in the chapel--"Perhaps--if one keeps near--to their strong god:
and you are close also--and--"
"I stay close because it is my work,"--said Tahn-té. "Some of the men
tied to the stakes out there bent before their strong god and said
prayers there.--Did it save them?"
"They will kill us--we will never see our people--they will kill us!"
muttered Ka-yemo shaken with fear.
"I do not think they want to kill us:--they still need us for many
things. We are only boys, we have not wives that we refuse to give to
the white men--if we had it might be different, who knows?"
"Is that the cause?"
"The white men will give a different one--but that is the cause!
The men of this valley think it is enough if they give their
houses, and their corn, and their woven blankets to their fine white
brothers:--the red men are foolish men,--so they burn at the stake
out there!"
Ka-yemo stared at him, and crouched in his blanket.
"You say strange things," he muttered. "I think when they get crazy
with the spirit to kill that they will kill us all. I do not stay to
be killed--I go!"
Tahn-té staring at the emblems of holiness on the altar scarcely heard
him.
"I go, Tahn-té,--I go if I have to swim the river with the ice.--Do
you stay here to be killed?"
"I am here to learn many things--I learn but little yet, I cannot
go."
"But--if you die?"
"I think it is not yet that I die," said Tahn-té--"There is much to
do."
"And--if I live to see--our people?"
"Tell my mother I am strong--and I feel her prayers when the sun comes
up. Tell the governor I stay to learn what the white god does for the
red men; when I have things to tell the people I will come back to
Povi-whah."
But the ice of that winter melted, and the summer bore its fruit, and
the second spring time had come to the land before Tahn-té crossed the
mesas and stood at his mother's door.
"Thanks--that you have come," she said, and wept, and he held her hand
and did not know the things to say, only:--"Thanks that our gods have
brought me back."
"And the magic of the white man?"
"It is here," and he opened a bag made of buffalo skin, and in it were
books and papers covered with written words. She looked on them with
awe. Her son was only a boy but he had won that which was precious,
and earned honors from the men of her tribe and her clan.
"Not to me must you tell it first," she said--"The Ruler will hear
you, and the governor,--they will decide if it is to be known, or if
it is to be secret."
The old men sprinkled prayer meal--and smoked medicine smoke over the
books to lift any lingering curses from the white men's god, and then
the boy opened the pages and made clear how the marks stood for words,
and the words put all together stood for the talk of the white god. It
was a thing of wonder to the council.
"And it is a strong god?" asked the Ruler.
"It is strong for war:--not for peace," said the boy.
"Ka-yemo brought back the words of the medicine-man of the grey
blanket who talked of their god. All his talk was of peace and of love
in the heart. Is that true?"
"It is true. He was a good man. It may be that some men are born so
good that even the gods of the men of iron cannot make them evil. And
Padre Luis was born into the world like that."
"We listen to you to hear of the moons and the suns since you went
away."
The boy told of the fruitless search to the east for the wonderful
land of the slave's romance, where the natives used golden bowls
instead of earthen vessels for food, where each soldier was so sure of
gaining riches that the weight of provisions carried was small lest
the animals be not strong enough to carry all the gold and the food
also.
The old men laughed much at this search for the symbol of the Sun
Father along the waters of the Mischipi, and commended the wise men of
Ci-cu-yé who had the foresight to plan the romance, and to send the
slave to lead the adventurers to the land of false dreams.
It was bad, however, that the strangers had not lost themselves in the
prairies, or were not killed by the fierce tribes of the north:--it
was bad that they came back to the villages of the P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé
river.
Then the boy told of the final despair of the conquerors, and their
disheartened retreat to the land of the south. For two years they had
terrorized the people of the land--worse enemies than the Navahu or
the Comanche or the Apache fighter, then when they had made ruins
where towns and gardens had been, they said it was all of no use since
the yellow metal was not found in the ground.
"Did the wise men of iron not know that where the yellow metal is in
the earth, that there is ever the symbol of the Sun Father, and that
it must be a thing sacred and a hidden place for prayer?"
"They did not know that:--no man told them."
K[=a]-ye-fah, the ancient Ruler blew smoke from his pipe to the four
ways, and spoke.
"Yet among the men they burned to ashes in the village square were
many who could have told them that, and three who could have told them
where such prayer places were hidden! It is well, my children, that
they did die, and not tell that which the Sun Father has hidden for
his own people:--it is well!"
"It is well!" echoed the others of the council.
"We all die when the day or the night comes,"--continued the old man.
"It is well that we die in bravery for the sake of the others who have
to live and walk the earth path. It is well that we have strong hearts
to think about. One day I shall go in the ground with my fathers; I am
old, and the trail has been long, and in my old days the sunlight has
been covered for me."
Tahn-té did not know what he meant, but the other men bent their heads
in sympathy.
"It is twice four moons since my child K[=a]-ye-povi was carried away
in the darkness when we fought the Navahu in the hunting grounds to
the west,"--he continued. "No one has found her--no trader has brought
her back. When a woman, she will not know her own people, or our own
speech. I think of that, and grow weak. Our people have never been
slaves--yet she will be a slave for our enemy the Navahu! So it is
that I grow old more quick, and the time may come soon to sleep on our
Mother--the Earth."
"We wish that it comes not soon," said the governor, and the others
signified their assent.
"Thanks, thanks that you wish it. I do not speak of it to give sad
hearts. I speak because of the days when I may be gone, and another
than me will hold the knowledge of a sacred place where the Sun Father
hides his symbol. It is good that I hear of the men who let themselves
go into ashes, and when if they had said once:--'I know where it
is--the metal of the Sun!' all might have gone free and lived long
days. My children:--it may be that some day one of you will hold a
secret of the sacred place where strong magic lives! If it be so, let
that man among you think in his heart of the twenty times ten men who
let themselves be burned into ashes by the white men of iron! Guard
you the sacred places--and let your ashes go into the sands, or be
blown by the winds to the four ways. But from the sacred things of the
gods, lift not the cover for the enemy!"
The old man trembled with the intensity of the thought and the dread
of what the unborn years might bring.
After a moment of silence the governor spoke:
"It may be that you live the longest of all! No one knows who will
guard the things not to be told. But no Te-hua can uncover that which
belongs to the Sun Father, and the Earth Mother."
"It is true:--thanks that it is true!"--said the other men, and
Tahn-té knew he was listening to things not told to boys.
"Thanks that you speak so," said the Ruler. "Now we have all spoken of
this matter. It is done. But the magic of the white hunters of gold,
we have not yet heard spoken. How is it, boy, that you have brought
all these signs of it:--what made blind their eyes?"
"Not anything," said Tahn-té. "It was a long time I was with them.
Some men had one book, or two, other men had papers that came in great
canoes from their land in Spain. Some had writings from their fathers
or their friends. These I heard read and talked of around the camp
fire. When they went away some things were thrown aside or given to
the padres who were to stay and talk of their gods. All I found I hid
in the earth. The people of Ci-bo-la killed Padre Juan, and I traded a
broken sword for his books and his papers. The sword I also had
buried. They were afraid of the books, I had learned to read them, and
I was not afraid."
"And you came from Ci-bo-la alone?" asked the governor,--"it is a long
trail to carry a load."
"All was not carried from there. I came back to Ci-cu-yé to learn more
from Padre Luis who meant to live there. He did not live so long, but
while he lived he taught me."
"The men of Ci-cu-yé killed him too?"
"They made him die when they said I must not take beans or meal to him
where he lived in a cave, and where he made prayers for their shadow
spirits."
"You wanted that he should have food?" asked the Ruler.
"I wanted that he should live to teach me all the books before the end
came," said the boy simply. "It is not all to be learned in two
winters and one summer."
"That is true," said K[=a]-ya-fah the Ruler. "All of a man's life is
needed to learn certain things of magic. It is time now that you come
back and begin the work of the Orders. You have earned the highest
right a boy has yet earned, and no doors will be closed for you on the
sacred things given to people."
"We think that is so," said the governor--"no doors will be closed for
the son of S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah, the Woman of the Twilight."
This was the hour he had dreamed of through the months which had
seemed horrible as the white man's hell. One needs only to read the
several accounts of Coronado's quest for the golden land of the Gran
Quivera in 1540-42 to picture what the life of a little native page
must have been with the dissatisfied adventurers, by whom all
"Indians" were considered as slaves should their service be required.
Men had died beside him on the trail--and there had been times when he
felt he too would die but for the thought of this hour when he could
come back, and the council could say--"It is well!"
"I thank you, and my mother will thank you," he said with his eyes on
the stones of the kiva lest the men see that his eyes were wet. "My
mother said prayers with me always, and that helped me to come back."
"The prayers of the Shadow Woman are high medicine," assented one of
the men. "She brought back my son to live when the breath was gone
away."
"As a little child she had a wisdom not to be taught," affirmed the
Ruler--"and now it is her son who brings us the magic of the iron men.
Tell us how you left the people of Ci-cu-yé."
"They were having glad dances that the Christians were gone, and that
the padres were dead as other men die. So long as they let me I
carried food and water to Padre Luis. Then they guarded me in the
kiva, and laughed at me, and when they let me go I knew it was
because he was no longer alive. No:--they did not harm me. They were
too pleased that I could tell them of where their slave whom they
called the 'Turk'--led the gold hunters searching for the Quivera of
yellow metal and blue stones. They had much delight to hear of the
woeful time of the white men. I could stay all my days at Ci-cu-yé and
be precious to them, if I would talk of the trouble trail to Quivera,
but when I had seen that the Padre was indeed gone to the Lost Others,
my work was no more at Ci-cu-yé. I took his books also for my own--and
all these things I have brought back at Povi-whah to make good my
promise when I went away. Some things in the books, I know, and that I
can tell you. Of the rest I will work until I do know, and then I can
tell you that."
"That is good," said K[=a]-ye-fah the Ruler. "You shall be as my son
and in the long nights of the winter moons we will listen. The time
told of in the prophecies of Ki-pah is coming to us. He said also that
in each danger time would be born one to mark the way for the people
to follow--in each danger time so long as the Te-hua people were true
to the gods!"
Tahn-té breathed on the hand of the old men, and went up from the kiva
into the cool night of the early summer.
It was too wonderful a night for aught but to reach up in thought to
the height of the warm stars. They came so close he could feel their
radiance in his heart.
Twice had his name in council been linked to the prophecies of the
wise and mysterious prophet of the ancient days! Always he had known
that the Woman of the Twilight and he were not to live the life of the
others. He had not known why they were set apart for unusual
experiences, but to-night he dared to think. With the words of the
wise men still in his ears--the rulers who could make and unmake--he
knew that no other boy had ever heard the praise and promise he had
heard. He knew they thought they were giving words to one who would be
a leader in the years to come--and this first night under the peace of
the stars, he was filled with a triumph and an exaltation for which
there were no words.
He would be a leader--not of war--not of government for the daily
duties of village life, but of the Things of the Spirit which seemed
calling within him to highest endeavor. He knew as yet nothing of
Te-hua ceremonies--he had all to learn, yet he felt inspired to invent
some expression for the joy which was his.
The new moon seemed to rest on the very edge of the mesa above
him:--the uplifted horn looked like a white flame rising from purple
shadows.
A white flame!--a _white_ flame!
To the Indian mind all signs are symbolic,--and the flame was exactly
above the point where the light was set ceremonially and regularly to
light the Indian god back to his own people!
A point of white flame above that shrine of centuries!
No eyes but his saw it at exactly that angle--of course it was not
meant for other eyes. It was meant that it should be seen by him alone
on his first night with the people he meant to work for! With the
memory of the prophecies in his ears had he seen it. It could mean
only that the god himself set it there as a proof that the devotion of
Tahn-té was acceptable--and that he had been born of his mother that
the prophecies might be fulfilled at the right time--and that the
light of the moon on his face had meant----
His thought came so quickly that all the air of the night appeared
alive with the unseen--and the unseen murmured in his ears, and his
memories--and in his heart!
Suddenly he stretched his open hands high to the stars, and then ran
across the level to the foot of the bluff. It was high and very steep,
but wings seemed his--his heart was on the summit, and his body must
follow--must get there before the white flame sank into the west--must
send his greeting to answer the greeting of the god!
In the pouch at his girdle was the fire flint, and a wisp of the silky
wild flax of tinder. Two sticks of dead scrub piñon was there; he
broke them in equal lengths and laid them in the cross which is the
symbol of the four ways, and of the four winds from which the sacred
breath is drawn for all that lives--the symbol also of union by which
all human life is perpetuated. All fires of sacrifices,--or of magic
power, must commemorate these things which are sacred things, and
Tahn-té placed them and breathed upon them, and touched them with the
spark from the white flint, and then arose in joy and faced the moon
yet visible, knowing that the god had seen his answering flame on the
shrine--and that it meant a dedication to the Things of the Spirit.
And as he stood there on the mesa's edge, exalted at the wonder of the
night, he did not speak, yet he heard the echo of words in his own
voice:--"_No one but Tahn-té shall gather the woods for the fire to
light Po-se-yemo back;--and when he sees the blaze, and comes back,
you will tell him it was his son who kept the fire!_"
Like a flash came the memory of that other time at the edge of that
other mesa in Hopi-land! He had said those words to his mother--and
had forgotten them. He could never forget them again, for the god had
sent them back to him to remember. And Tahn-té trembled at the
wondrous signs given him this night, and sprinkled meal to the four
ways, and held prayer thoughts of exaltation in his heart.
And this was the last day of the boy years of Tahn-té.
He began then the years of the work for which his Other Self told him
he had been born on earth.
CHAPTER VI
TAHN-TÉ--THE RULER
Summers of the Sun, and winters when the stars danced for the snow,
had passed over the valley of Povi-whah. New people had been born into
the world, and old people had died, but the oldest man in the council,
K[=a]-ye-fah--the Ruler of Things from the Beginning, had lived many
years after the time when he thought the shadow life must come to him.
And to the Woman of the Twilight he had said that it was her son who
kept him living--her son to whom he taught the ancient things of his
own youth. In the keen enthusiasms he had found such a son as he had
longed for. The lost daughter, K[=a]-ye-povi, he had never found--and
never forgotten. To Tahn-té he had talked of her until she almost
lived in their lives. The face of the god-maid on the south mesa had
for K[=a]-ye-fah the outline of chin and backward sweep of hair
strangely akin to the face of the lost child. He liked to think the
god-maid belonged more to his clan of Towa Toan--the High Mesa
clan--than to another.
"If she had not gone into the shadow land, her face would have looked
that way," he said.
"And we could gather bright flowers for her hair,"--said the
boy--"they would be sweeter than the cold, far brightness of the stars
where the god-maid waits," and he pointed to where Antares gleamed
from the heart of the Scorpion above the dusk profile,--"I think of
K[=a]-ye-povi as the dream maid. She will be my always young
sweetheart--my only one."
"That is good," said K[=a]-ye-fah--"very good for the work of the
unborn years."
For the youth was to carry on the tribal prayers to the gods when
K[=a]-ye-fah no longer walked on earth. And his teaching must be
greater than all other teaching, for the Ruler was planning for the
work of the days to come.
And in a day of the early spring the work was made ready, for to
S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah he said:--"A week ago So-hoah-tza went under the
waters of the river and never breathed again. To him was given the
guard of the sacred place of the Sun Father. I have not yet made any
other the guardian. You are the woman of the order of the Po-Ahtun--I
give you the guard to keep. Call the governor--but call your son
first. You shall be guard as So-hoah-tza was guard, but Tahn-té shall
be guard as I have been! Lean lower, and let your ear listen and your
heart keep sacred the word. I go to our Lost Others--but I leave you
to guard."
The governor came, and all were sad, but no one thought that the life
was over. K[=a]-ye-fah talked and smiled as one who goes to a feast.
But Tahn-té, standing tall and still by the couch said:--"It will be
over! This morning he wakened and said he would go with the sun
to-day. He has no other thought, and he will go!"
And the women wept, and made ready the things of burial for the high
priest of the highest order. If Tahn-té said he would go into the
shadows at that time--the women knew that it would be so. Tahn-té, as
they knew him, joyous in the dances of the seasons,--was never in
their minds apart from Tahn-té the prophet whose dreams even as a boy,
had been beyond the dreams of the others who sought visions.
And as the sun touched the black line of the pines on the western
mountain, the aged Ruler asked for his wand of office, and the
governor gave it to him, and with his own hand he gave it to Tahn-té,
that even when his own form was covered with the soil, his vote would
be on record in the minds of those who listened--and that vote gave
to his pupil in magic, the wand of power--The youngest qualified
member of the Order of Spiritual things was thus acclaimed as the
Po-Ahtun-ho, a Ruler of Things from the Beginning.
Twenty-four years he had lived--but the time of life with the white
men had counted more than double. In magic of many kinds he was more
wise than the men of years, and the heart of his mother was glad with
the almost perfect gladness when Tahn-té stood in the place of the
Ancient Wisdom and listened as the ear of the god listens to the
recitation of many tribal prayers.
The Po-Ahtun-ho also listens at times to the individual appeals of the
things of every day life--as a father listens to a child who seeks
advice. To the more ancient Rulers the younger people were often
afraid to go--various "uncles" of the village were appealed to
instead. But the youth of Tahn-té made all things different--even the
love of a man for a maid, was not so small a thing that the new Ruler
made the suppliant feel how little it was.
And one of the first who came to him thus--who knelt and offered a
prayer to him, the prayer of a love, was the little Apache tigress who
had been first of his own village to greet him in Ua-lano--Yahn
Tsyn-deh, who had grown so pretty that the men of the other villages
talked of her, and her mother had asked great gifts for her. But the
mother had died with the winter, and Yahn refused to be subject to the
Tain-tsain clan of her father, and there had been much trouble until
she threatened to go back to her mother's tribe, and many thought it
might come to that after all--for she was very strong of will.
But before Tahn-té the Po-Ahtun-ho she crouched, and sobs shook her,
and her hair covered her face as a veil.
"If it is of the clan, Yahn, it is to the governor you should
speak:--" said Tahn-té--"from him it may come to me if he thinks best.
There are rules we must not break. Because I carried you, when little,
on my shoulder, is no reason to walk past the door of the governor and
bring his duties to me."
He spoke kindly, for his heart was kind towards the little fighter of
boyhood's days. Her alien blood was ever prompting her to reckless
daring beyond the customs of Te-hua maidens. In a different way, he
himself was an alien and it helped him to understand her. But this day
he saw another Yahn--one he had not known could hide under the
reckless exterior.
She tossed back her hair and faced him.
"How should I speak with Phen-tza the governor--he is the uncle of
Ka-yemo! It is he who has helped do this thing--he would make me a
slave or have me whipped! How should I speak with him? Ka-yemo knows
that the governor his uncle, will--"
"Ka-yemo! What has Ka-yemo done? What trouble does he make?"
"Oh--no trouble!" her words were bitter words,--"Only the governor his
uncle, has talked with the family of Tsa-fah and the marriage is made
with his daughter Koh-pé of the beads, and you--know, Tahn-té--you
know!"
Tahn-té did know, he regarded her in silence.
"Speak!"--she pleaded. "You are more than governor--you are the
Highest! Magic is yours to make and to unmake. Unmake this thing! With
your magic send him back to me--to me!"
"Magic is not for that:--it is for Those Above!"
Again she flung herself at his feet and wept. The sobs hurt him, yet
he must not lift her. She begged for a charm--for a spell--for black
magic to strike dead the wearer of the red bears and the blue beads,
for all wild things a wild passion could suggest.
"If you could see into the other years you would be content to have it
as it is," he said gently--"the years ahead may--"
"I care nothing for the years ahead! I want the _now_!--I want--"
"Listen!" he said, and she fell silent with covered face. "That which
you feel for Ka-yemo is not the love of marriage. A man takes a wife
for love of a wife and a home and children in the home. A man does not
chain himself to a tigress whose bite and whose blows he has felt. A
man would wish to be master:--what man has been born who could be
master in your home?"
"You do not know. You have lived a different sort of life! I could be
more than another wife--than any other wife! I shall kill some one!--"
and she rose to her feet--"unless the magic comes I kill some one!"
"And then?"
"Then Phen-tza the governor will have me strangled, and they will
take me to my grave with ropes of raw hide and there will not any
where be a sad heart for Yahn Tsyn-deh."
"You see how it is--he is precious to you--as he always has been. But
your love is too great a love for happy days. Always it will bring you
the ache in the heart. No thing of earth should be given the love like
that:--it is a fire to burn a whole forest in the days of its summer,
and in the winter snows there will be only ashes."
"Good!--then I, Yahn, will rather burn to the ashes in such summer
days, and be dead under the snows in the winter of the year!"
"And after that?"
"After that will not the Po-Ahtun-ho be Ruler always? Will he not
remember his friends who are precious in the Beyond as he remembers
this one to-day?" she asked mockingly. "K[=a]-ye-fah told the council
that you have lived a life no other man lives, and that no woman is
precious to you:--when you find the woman who is yet to come, may a
viper poison her blood--may a cat of the hills tear her flesh! May you
love until madness comes--and may the woman find only death in your
arms--and find it quickly!"
When the Woman of the Twilight came in from the field with yellow corn
pollen for the sacred ceremonies, the lattice of reeds at the outer
door was yet shaking as from touch of a ruthless hand, or a strong
wind.
"Who was it that cried here?" she asked. "Who has left you sad?"
"Perhaps a prophetess, my mother," answered Tahn-té, and sat
thoughtful where Yahn had left him. And after a long time he arose
and sought the governor.
But it was fated that the governor and the new Ruler were not to talk
of the love of a maid or the marriage of a man that day.
A runner had been sent to Povi-whah from Kat-yi-ti. He gave his
message, and stayed to eat while other runners took the trail, and
before the sun had moved the width of a hand across the sky, the
villages of Kah-po and Tsa-mah and Oj-ke were starting other runners
to Ui-la-ua and far Te-gat-ha and at Kah-po the head men gathered to
talk in great council over the word brought from the south.
For the word was that the men of the iron and the beards and the white
skins were again coming to the land of the People of the Sun. They
came in peace, and searched for the lost padres. A man of the gown was
with them for prayers, and a Te-hua man who had been caught by the
Navahu long winters ago and traded to the land of green birds. The
Te-hua man said the white people were good people, and he was guiding
them to the villages by the big river, P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé.
CHAPTER VII
THE SILKEN SCARF
Of the many godly enterprises set afoot for exploration and conquest
in New Spain of the sixteenth century, not all have chronicles
important enough for the historian to make much of. But there were
goings and comings of which no written record reached the archives.
Things forbidden did happen even under the iron heel of Castilian
rule, and one of the hidden enterprises grew to be a part of the life
of the P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé valley for a time.
Not that it was unchronicled, but there was a good reason why the
records were not published for the Spanish court.
It was a pretty romantic reason also--and the usual one, if we may
trust the world's judgment of the foundation of all trouble. But a
maid tossing a blossom from a Mexic balcony could not know that the
stranger from Seville to whom it was thrown was the son of an
Eminence, instead of the simple gentleman named Don Ruy Sandoval in a
royal letter to the Viceroy. With him travelled his tutor whose
tutelage was past, and the position a difficult one for even the
Viceroy to comprehend.
Since the youth rebelled at the habit of a monk--he had been given a
space for adventure under godly surveillance. The godly surveillance
limped a trifle at times. And because of this did Don Ruy walk again
in the moonlight under the balcony and this time more than a blossom
came to him--about the stem of a scarlet lily was a flutter of white!
The warm light of the Mexic moon helped him to decipher it--a page
from Ariosto--the romance of Doña Bradamante--and the mark of a pen
under words uttered by the warrior-maid herself--words to warm a
cooler youth than this one from over seas:--"_Why seek I one who flies
from me?--Why implore one who deigns not to send me reply?_"
Whereupon there was no further delay as to reply--there was found an
open gate to a garden where only stars gave light, where little hands
were held for a moment in his--soft whispers had answered his own--and
he was held in thrall by a lace wrapped señorita whose face he had not
even looked on in the light. All of Castile could give one no better
start in a week than he had found for himself in three days in the new
world of promise.
For there were promises--and they were sweet. They had to do with a
tryst two nights away--then the lady, whom he called "Doña Bradamante"
because of the page torn from that romance, would enlighten him as to
her pressing need of the aid of a gentleman, and courage would be hers
to tell him why a marked line and a scarlet lily had been let fall in
his path--and why she had trusted his face at first sight--though he
had not yet seen her own--and why--
It was the usual thing--the page of a poem and a silken scarf as a
guerdon of her trust.
He found the place of the tryst with ease for a stranger in the Mexic
streets, but a glimmer of white robe was all he saw of his unknown
"Doña Bradamante." Others were at the tryst, and their staves and arms
lacked no strength. He heard a woman scream, then he heard her try
again to scream and fail because of a hand on her throat, and beyond
that he knew little for a night or two, and there was not much of day
between.
Monkly robes were the next thing in his range of vision--one face in
particular, sallow and still with eyes glancing sideways, seeing all
things;--divining much! soft steps, and bandages, and out of silence
the excited shrillness of Don Diego Maria Francisco Brancadori the
tutor:--the shepherd who had lost track of his one rather ruffled
lamb.
Pious ejaculation--thanks to all the saints he could think of--horror
that the son of an Eminence should be thus abused--prophecies of the
wrath to come when the duchess, his mother--At this Don Ruy groped for
a sword, and found a boot, and flung it, with an unsanctified word or
two, in the direction of the lamentation.
"You wail worse than a dog of a Lutheran under the yoke," he said in
as good a voice as he could muster with a cut in his lip. "What matter
how much Eminence it took to make a father for me--or how many
duchesses to make a mother? I am labelled as plain Ruy Sandoval and
shipped till called for. If you are to instruct my youth in the path
it should tread--why not start in with a lesson on discretion?"
At this hopeful sign of life from the bundle of bandages on the monk's
bed, Maestro Diego approached and looked over his illustrious charge
with a careful eye.
"Discretion has limped far behind--enterprise, else your highness
would cut a different figure by now--and--"
[Illustration: TO DON RUY, A MESSAGE IN THE MOONLIGHT _Page 63_]
"Choke back your infernal highnesses!" growled the younger man. "I
know well what your task is to be here in this new land:--it is to
send back reports of duty each time I break a rule or get a broken
head. Now by the Blood, and the Cross, if you smother not your titles,
and let me range free, I tell you the thing I will do:--I will send
back a complaint against you to Seville--and to make sure that it
goes, no hand shall carry it but your own. Ere they can find another
nurse maid for my morals, I'll build me a ship and go sailing the
South seas for adventure--and your court tricksters will have a weary
time in the chase! I like you better than many another godly spy who
might have been sent, and I promise myself much joy in the journal of
strange travels it is in your mind to write. But once for all,
remember, we never were born into the world until a week ago!"
"But your Excellency--
"By the Great Duke of Hell! Will you not bridle your tongue when the
damned monks are three deep at the key hole?"
By which it will be seen that the travels of the pious Don Diego were
not all on paths of roses.
A little later the still faced priest of the stealthy glances came in,
and Don Ruy sat on the side of the bed, and looked him over.
"You are the one who picked me up--eh? And the gentlemen of the
streets had tossed me into a corner after discreetly starting my soul
on its travels! Warm trysts your dames give to a stranger in this
land--when you next confess the darlings, whisper their ears to be
less bloodthirsty towards youth innocence!"
The man in the robe smiled.
"That unwise maid will make no more trysts," he said quietly,--"not
if she be one important enough to cause an assault on your Highness."
"Did they--?"
"No--no--harm would not be done to her, but her destiny is without
doubt a convent. The men who spoiled your tryst earn no purses as
guard for girls of the street,--sacred walls will save them that
trouble for a time--whether maid or wife I dare promise you that! It
is as well you know. Time is wasted seeking adventure placed beyond
mortal reach."
"Convent--eh? Do your holy retreats teach the little tricks the lady
knew? And do they furnish their vestals with poems of romance and
silks and spices of Kathay?"
He drew from an inner pocket a little scarf of apple green with
knotted fringes, and butterflies, various colored in dainty broidery.
As the folds fell apart an odor of sweetness stole into the shadowy
room of the monastery, and the priest was surprised into an
ejaculation at sight of such costly evidence, but he smothered it
hastily in a muttered prayer.
After that he listened to few of the stranger's gibes and quips, but
with a book of prayers on his knee he looked the youth over carefully,
recalled the outburst of Don Diego as to origin, and the adventurer's
own threat to build a ship and sail where chance pointed. Plainly,
this seeker of trysts, or any other thing promising adventure, had
more of resource than one might expect from a battered stranger lifted
out of the gutter for the last rites.
The priest--who looked a good soldier and who was called Padre Vicente
"de los Chichimecos" (of the wild tribes) read further in his book of
hours, and then spoke the thing in his mind.
"For a matter of many years in this land of the Indies I have waited
for a man of discreet determination for a certain work. The virgin
herself led me to the gutter where you groaned in the dark, and I here
vow to build her a chapel if this thought of mine bears fruit."
"Hump! My thanks to our Lady,--and I myself will see to the building
of the chapel. But tell me of the tree you would plant, and we'll then
have a guess at the fruit. It may prove sour to the taste! Monkly
messes appealed to me little on the other side of the seas. I've yet
to test their flavor on this shore of adventure."
Padre Vicente ignored the none too respectful comment--and took from
his pocket a bit of virgin gold strung on a thread of deer sinew.
"Your name is Don Ruy Sandoval," he said. "You are in this land for
adventure. You content yourself with the latticed window and the
strife of the streets--why not look for the greater things? You have
wealth and power at your call--why not search for an empire
of--this?"
Then he showed the virgin gold worn smooth by much wearing.
Don Ruy blinked under the bandage and swore by Bradamante of the
adventure that he would search for it gladly if but the way was
shown.
"Where do we find this golden mistress of yours?" he demanded, "and
why have you waited long for a comrade?"
"The gold is in the north where none dare openly seek treasure, or
even souls, since Coronado came back broken and disgraced. I have
waited for the man of wealth who dared risk it, and--at whose going
the Viceroy could wink."
"Why wink at me--rather than another?"
"That is a secret knotted in the fringes of the silken scarf there--"
said Padre Vicente with a grim smile. "Cannot a way be found to clear
either a convent or a palace of a trouble breeder, when the church
itself lends a hand? You were plainly a breeder of trouble, else had
you escaped the present need of bandages. For the first time I see a
way where Church and the government of the Indies can go with clasped
hands to this work. In gold and converts the work may prove mighty.
How mighty depends whether you come to the Indies to kill time until
the day you are recalled--or improve that time by success where
Coronado failed."
"And if we echo his failure?"
"None will be the wiser even then! You plan for a season of hunting in
the hills. I plan for a mission visit by the Sea of Cortez. Mine will
be the task to see how and where our helpers join each other and all
the provisioning of man and beast. Mine also to make it clear to the
Viceroy that you repent your--"
"Hollo!"--Don Ruy interrupted with a grimace. "You are about to say I
repent of folly--or the enticing of a virgin--or that I fell victim to
the blandishments of some tricky dame--I know all that cant by
rote!--a man always repents until his broken head is mended, but all
that is apart from the real thing--which is this:--In what way does my
moment with a lady in the dark affect the Viceroy of the Indies? Why
should his Excellency trouble himself that Ruy Sandoval has a broken
head--and a silken scarf?"
Padre Vicente stared--then smiled. Ruy Sandoval had not his wits
smothered by the cotton wool of exalted pamperings.
"I will be frank with you," he said at last. "The Viceroy I have not
yet addressed on this matter. But such silken scarfs are few--that one
would not be a heavy task to trace to its owner."
"Ah!--I suspected your eminence had been a gallant in your time,"
remarked Don Ruy, amicably--"It is not easy to get out of the habit of
noticing alluring things:--that is why I refused to do penance for my
birth by turning monk, and shrouding myself in the gown! Now
come--tell me! You seem a good fellow--tell me of the 'Doña
Bradamante' of the silks and the spices."
"The destiny of that person is probably already decided," stated the
priest of the wild tribes, "she is, if I mistake not, too close to the
charge of the Viceroy himself for that destiny to be questioned. The
mother, it is said, died insane, and the time has come when the
daughter also is watched with all care lest she harm herself--or her
attendants. So I hear--the maid I do not know, but the scarf I can
trace. Briefly--the evident place for such a wanton spitfire is the
convent. You can easily see the turmoil a woman like that can make as
each ship brings adventurers--and she seeks a lover out of every
group."
"Jesus!--and hell to come! Then I was only one of a sort--all is fish
to the net of the love lorn lady! Maestro Diego would have had the
romance and the lily if he had walked ahead instead of behind me!--and
he could have had the broken head as well!" Then he sniffed again at
the bit of silk, and regarded the monk quizzically.
"You have a good story, and you tell it well, holy father," he said at
last,--"and I am troubled in my mind to know how little of it may be
truth, and how much a godly lie. But the gold at least is true gold,
and whatever the trick of the lady may be, you say it will serve to
win for me the privilege to seek the mines without blare of trumpets.
Hum!--it is a great favor for an unknown adventurer."
"Unknown you may be to the people of the streets, and to your ship
mates," agreed the Padre. "But be sure the Viceroy has more than a
hint that you are not of the rabble. The broils you may draw to
yourself may serve to disquiet him much--yet he would scarce send you
to the stocks, or the service of the roads. Be sure he would rather
than all else bid you god speed on a hunting journey."
"But that you are so given to frankness I should look also for a knife
in the back to be included in his excellency's favors," commented Don
Ruy. "Name of the Devil!--what have I done since I entered the town,
but hold hands with one woman in the dark--and be made to look as if I
had been laid across a butcher block on a busy day! Hell take such a
city to itself! I've no fancy for halting over long in a pit where a
gentleman's amusements are so little understood. If the Doña of the
scarf were aught but an amiable maniac the thing would be different. I
would stay--and I would find her and together we would weave a new
romance for a new world poet! But as it is, gather your cut throats
and name the day, and we'll go scouring the land for heathen souls and
yellow clinkers."
Padre Vicente de Bernaldez was known by his wonderful mission-work to
be an ecclesiastic of most adventurous disposition. Into wild lands
and beyond the Sea of Cortez had he gone alone to the wild tribes--so
far had he gone that silence closed over his trail like a grave at
times--but out of the Unknown had he come in safety!
His fame had reached beyond his order--and Ruy Sandoval knew that it
was no common man who spoke to him of the Indian gold.
"Francisco de Coronado," stated this padre of the wilderness, "came
back empty handed from the north land of the civilized Indians for the
reason that he knew not where to search. The gold is there. This is
witness. It came to me from a man who--is dead! It was given him by a
woman of a certain tribe of sun worshippers. To her it was merely some
symbol of their pagan faith--some priestly circle dedicated to the
sun."
"It sounds well," agreed Don Ruy--"but the trail? Who makes the way?
And what force is needed?"
For a guide the Padre Vicente had a slave of that land, a man of
Te-hua baptized José, for five years the padre had studied the words
and the plans. The man would gladly go to his own land,--he and his
wife. All that was required was a general with wealth for the
conquest. There were pagan souls to be saved, and there was wealth for
the more worldly minds. The padre asked only a tenth for godly
reasons.
Thus between church and state was the expedition of his Excellency Don
Ruy Sandoval ignored except as a hunting journey to the North coast of
the Cortez Sea--if he ranged farther afield, his own be the peril, for
no troops of state were sent as companions. The good father had
selected the men--most of them he had confessed at odd times and knew
their metal. All engaged as under special duty to the cross:--it was
to be akin to a holy pilgrimage, and absolution for strange things was
granted to the men who would bear arms and hold the quest as secret.
Most of them thought the patron was to be Mother Church, and regarded
it as a certain entrance to Paradise. Don Ruy himself meekly accepted
a role of the least significance:--a mere seeker of pleasure
adventures in the provinces! It would not be well that word of risk or
danger be sent across seas--and the Viceroy could of course only say
"god speed you" to a gentleman going for a ride with his servants and
his major domo.
And thus:--between a hair brained adventurer and a most extolled
priest, began the third attempt to reach the people called by New
Spain, the Pueblos:--the strangely learned barbarians who dwelt in
walled towns--cultivating field by irrigation, and worshipping their
gods of the sun, or the moon, or the stars through rituals strange as
those of Pagan Egypt.
Word had reached Mexico of the martyrdom of Fray Juan Padilla at
Ci-bo-la, but in the far valley of the Rio Grande del Norte--called by
the tribes the river P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé,--Fray Luis de Escalona might be
yet alive carrying on the work of salvation of souls.
The young Spanish adventurer listened with special interest as the
devotion and sacrifices of Fray Luis were extolled in the recitals.
"If he lives we will find that man," he determined. "He was nobly
born, and of the province of my mother. I've heard the romance for
which he cloaked himself in the gray robe. He should be a prince of
the church instead of a wandering lay brother--we will have a human
thing to search for in the world beyond the desert--ours will be a
crusade to rescue him from the infidel lands."
CHAPTER VIII
THE STORY BY THE DESERT WELL
Don Diego marvelled much at the briskness of the plans for a season of
hunting ere his troublesome charge was well able to see out of both
eyes. But on being told that the range might be wide, he laid in a
goodly stock of quills and parchment, for every league of the land
would bring new things to his knowledge.
These records were to be entitled "Relaciones of the New and Wondrous
Land of the Indian's Island" and in those Relaciones the accounts of
Padre Vicente were to loom large. Among the pagan people his war
against the false gods had been ruthless. Maestro Diego was destined
to hear more of the padre's method than he dared hope in the earlier
days.
José, the Indian of the North whose Te-hua name was Khen-zah, went
with them--also his wife--the only woman, for without her the man
would not go in willingness. Two only were the members added by Don
Ruy to the cavalcade--one a stalwart fellow of many scars named Juan
Gonzalvo who had known service with Pizarro in the land of gold--had
lost all his coin in an unlucky game, and challenged the young
stranger from Seville for the loan of a stake to gamble with and win
back his losses. He looked good for three men in a fight. Instead of
helping him in a game, Don Ruy invited him on the hunting trip!
The other addition was as different as might be from the toughened,
gambling conquistador--a mere lad, who brought a letter from the hand
of the Viceroy as a testimonial that the lad was a good scribe if it
so happened that his sanctity the padre--or his Excellency Don Ruy,
should need such an addition in the new lands where their hunting
camps were to be. The boy was poor but for the learning given him by
the priests,--his knowledge was of little save the knowledge of books.
But his willingness to learn was great, and he would prove of use as a
clerk or page as might be.
Padre Vicente was not present, and the cavalcade was already two days
on the trail, but Don Ruy read the letter, and looked the lad over.
"Your name is--"
"Manuel Lenares--and called 'Chico' because I am not yet so tall as I
may be."
"It should be Manuella because you look not yet so manlike as you may
be," declared Ruy Sandoval,--and laughed as the angry color swept the
face of the lad. "By our Lady, I've known many a dame of high degree
would trade several of her virtues for such eyes and lips! Tush--boy!
Have no shame to possess them since they will wear out in their own
time! I can think of no service you could be to me--yet--I have
another gentleman of the court with me holding a like office--Name of
the Devil:--it would be a fine jest to bestow upon him a helper for
the ponderous 'Relaciones'!" and Don Ruy chuckled at the thought,
while the lad stood in sulky embarrassment--willing to work, but not
to be laughed at.
He was dressed as might be in the discarded garments of magnificence,
well worn and visibly made over to fit his young figure. His cloak of
old scarlet, too large for him, covered a patched shirt and jacket,
and reached to his sandal straps of russet leather:--scarce the garb
of a page of the Viceregal court, yet above that of the native
servant.
"You are--Spanish?"
Again the face of the youth flushed, and he shrugged his shoulders and
replaced his velvet cap with its pert cock's feather.
"I have more than enough Spanish blood to send me to the Christian
rack or stake if they caught me worshipping the pagan gods of my
grandmother," he stated briefly, and plainly had so little hope of
winning service that he was about to make his bow and depart in search
of the Padre.
But the retort caught Don Ruy, and he held the lad by the shoulder and
laughed.
"Of all good things the saints could send, you are the best," he
decided--"and by that swagger I'll be safe to swear your grandsire was
of the conquistadores--I thought so! Well Chico:--you are engaged for
the service of secretary to Maestro Diego Maria Francisco Brancadori.
You work is seven days in the week except when your protector marks a
saint's day in red ink. On that day you will have only prayers to
record, on the other days you will assist at many duties concerning a
wondrous account of the adventures Don Diego hopes for in the heathen
land."
"Hopes for:--your Excellency?"
"Hopes for so ardently that our comfort may rest in seeing that he
meets with little of disappointment on the trail."
For one instant the big black eyes of the lad flashed a shy
appreciation of Don Ruy's sober words and merry smile.
"For it is plain to be seen," continued that gentleman--"that if Don
Diego finds nothing to make record of, your own wage will be a sad
trial and expense."
"I understand, your Excellency."
"You will receive the perquisites of a secretary if you have indeed
understanding," continued Don Ruy, "but if there are no records to
chronicle you will get but the pay of a page and no gifts to look for.
Does it please you?"
"It is more than a poor lad who owns not even a bedding blanket could
have hoped for, señor, and I shall earn the wage of a secretary. That
of a page I could earn without leaving the streets and comfort."
"Oho!" And again the eyes of Don Ruy wandered over the ill garbed
figure and tried to fit it to the bit of swagger and confidence.--"I
guessed at your grandfather--now I'll have a turn at you:--Is it a
runaway whom I am venturing to enroll in this respectable company of
sober citizens?"
"Your Excellency!" the lad hung his head yet watched the excellency
out of the corner of his eye, and took heart at the smile he saw--"it
is indeed true there are some people I did not call upon to say
farewell ere offering my services to you, but it is plain to see I
carried away not any one's wealth in goods and chattals."
"That is easily to be perceived," said Don Ruy and this time he did
not laugh, for with all his light heart he was too true a gentleman to
make sport of poverty such as may come to the best of men. "By our
Lady, I've a feeling of kinship for you in that you are a runaway
indeed--this note mentions the teaching of the priests--I'll warrant
they meant to make a monk of you."
"If such hopes are with them, they must wait until I am born again,"
decided the lad, and again Don Ruy laughed:--the lad was plainly no
putty for the moulding, and there was chance of sport ahead with such
a helper to Maestro Diego.
"It will be my charge to see that you are not over much troubled with
questions," said his employer, and handed back the letter of
commendation. "None need know when you were engaged for this very
important work. José over there speaks Spanish as does Ysobel his
wife. Tell them you are to have a bed of good quality if it be in the
camp--and to take a blanket of my own outfit if other provisions fall
short."
A muttered word of thanks was the only reply, and Don Ruy surmised
that the boy was made dumb by kindness when he had braced himself for
quips and cuffs--knowing as he must--that he was light of build for
the road of rough adventure.
"Ho!--Lad of mine!" he called when the youth had gone a few paces--"I
trust you understand that you travel with a company of selected
virtues?--and that you are a lucky dog to be attached to the most
pious and godly tutor ever found for a boy in Spain."
"It is to be called neighbor of these same virtues that I have come
begging a bed on the sand when I might have slept at home on a quilt
of feathers:"--the lad's tongue had found its use again when there was
chance for jest.
"And--"
"Yes:--your Excellency?"
"As to that pagan grandmother of whom you made mention:--her
relationship need not be widely tooted through a horn on the
journey--yet of all things vital to the honorable Maestro Diego and
his 'Relaciones,' I stand surety that not any one thing will be given
so much good room on paper as the things he learns of the heathen
worship of the false gods."
"A nod is as good as a wink to a mule that is blind!" called back the
lad in high glee. "Happy am I to have your excellency's permission to
hold discourse with him concerning the church accursed lore of our
ancestral idols!"
Then he joined José and Ysobel as instructed, and gave the message as
to bed and quarters. José said no word in reply, but proceeded to
secure blankets, one from the camp of Don Ruy. Ysobel--a Mexican
Indian--who had been made Christian by the padre ere she could be
included in the company, was building a fire for the evening meal.
Seeing that it burned indifferently the new page thrust under the
twigs the fine sheet of paper containing the signature of the
Viceroy.
Ysobel made an exclamation of protest--but it was too late--it had
started the blaze in brave order.
"Your letter--if you should need it--perhaps for the padre!" she
said.
"Rest you easy, Nurse," said the lad and stretched himself to watch
the supper cooked. "I have no further needs in life but supper and a
bed,--see to it that José makes it near you own! I am in the employ of
Don Ruy Sandoval for a period indefinite. And he has promised--laugh
not out loud Ysobel!--that he will see to it I am not questioned as to
whence or why I came to seek service under his banner!--even the holy
father is set aside by that promise--I tell you that laughter is not
to be allowed! If you let him see that you laugh, I will beat you when
we are alone, Ysobel--I will though you have found a dozen husbands to
guard you!"
Don Ruy did see the laughter of the woman, and was well pleased that
the lad could win smiles from all classes,--such a one would lighten
weary journeys.
He felt that he had done well by Maestro Diego. Plainly the quick wit
of the lad betokened good blood, let him prate ever so surely on his
heathen grandmother!
Don Diego felt much flattered at the consideration shown by Don Ruy
for the "Relaciones"--in fact he had so pleased an interest in the
really clever young pen-man that the Padre took little heed of the
boy--he was of as much account as a pet puppy in the expedition--but
if the would-be historian needed a secretary--or fancied he did,--the
lad would be less trouble than an older man if circumstances should
arise to make trouble of any sort.
So it chanced that Juan Gonzalvo and Manuel Lenares, called Chico,
were the only two included in the company who had not been confessed
and enrolled by Padre Vicente himself.
It was the magic time of the year, when new leaves open to the sun,
and the moon, even in the bare desert stretches of the land, brought
dreams of Castile to more than one of the adventurers.
"Good Father," said Don Ruy with feigned complaint, "Think you not
that your rigid rules for the journey might have stopped short of
hopeless celibacy for all of us?--Why a moon like that and Venus
ascendent unless to make love by?"
"The brightness of that same moon saved you nothing of a cracked pate
the hour of fortune when we first met," observed Padre Vicente
drily.--"Maids or matrons on the journey would have caused broken
heads in the desert as handily as in the city streets."
"By the faith--your words are of wisdom and much to be valued by his
highness," agreed Don Diego. "Make note of that thought for the
Relaciones Chico, my son. This pious quest may be a discipline of most
high import to all of us. Wifeless should we ride as rode the
crusaders of an older day."
"Tum-a-tum-tum!" Don Ruy trolled a fragment of love melody, and
laughed:--"I have no fancy for your penances. Must we all go without
sweethearts because you two have elected to be bachelors for the
saving of souls? Think you the Indian maids will clamor for such
salvation? I lay you a wager, good father, that I win as many converts
with love songs and a strip of moonlight, as do you both with bell and
book!"
Around the camp fires of the nights strange tales were told--and
strange traits of character unconsciously given to the light, and to
all the far seeing Padre gave note;--in emergencies it is ever well to
know one's resources.
José the Te-hua slave--caught first by the Navahu--traded to the
Apaches--thence to neighbors of the south--after years of exile, was
the one who had but few words. All the queries of the adventurers as
to gold in the north gained little from him--only he remembered that
fine yellow grains were in some streams, and it was said that other
yellow metal was in secret places, but he did not profess to be a
knower of High Things--and it was half a life time since his eyes had
rested on his own people.
He was a silent man whose words were in the main for his Ysobel and
the boy secretary. But the gold nugget worn smooth in the pocket of
Padre Vicente was as a charm to find its parent stock in all good
time! Men were with them who knew minerals in other lands!--It would
go hard but that it should be found!
He willingly let the nugget pass from hand to hand:--it was restful as
sleep to make the trail seem short. To Don Ruy he had told somewhat of
its finding, and the story in full was promised some day to the
cavalcade.
And at Ah-ko where they rested--they had not halted at hostile
Ci-bo-la!--At Ah-ko where the great pool on the high mesa made glad
their eyes, and the chiefs came to pay ceremonial visits, and the men
felt they were nearing the end;--there, at the urging of Don Ruy who
deemed it worthy of the "Relaciones"--there was told the story of the
bit of gold, the Symbol of the Sun, as it had been told to Padre
Vicente years before.
"Yes--I did mean to tell you of the finding of it," he announced
amiably. "I have listened to all your discourses and romances on the
journey--and good ones there were among them! But mine would not have
been good to tell when seeking recruits, it might have lessened their
ardor--for a reason you will shortly perceive!"
"I plainly perceive already that the good father has saved us thus far
from a fright!" decided Don Ruy.
"Since a man lived through it you can perhaps endure the telling of
it--even here in the half darkness," said the priest, and noted that
Don Diego was sharpening a pen, and Chico taking an ink horn from his
pocket. The journal of the good gentleman had grown to be one of the
joyful things of the journey, and the more gay adventurers gave him
some wondrous tales to include.
"It is not a pretty tale, but it may teach you somewhat of these brown
people of the stone houses--and some of the meaning back of their soft
smiles! It is not a new tale of to-day:--it goes back to the time when
the vessels of Narvaez went to the bottom and a few men found their
way westward to Mexico."
"De Vaca and his men?" said Don Diego. But the priest shook his head.
"Earlier than that."
"Earlier? Holy Father:--how could that be when no others--"
"Pardon me:--you are about to say no others escaped, are you not? Have
you forgotten De Vaca's own statement as to two other men who went
ashore before the sinking of the vessels, and who were never heard of
again?"
"I have heard of it with great special interest," announced Don
Ruy--"heard it in the monastery on the island of Rhodes where the
white man you speak of (for one of the lost ones was a negro) had as a
boy been trained in godly ways by the Knights of St. John. There the
good fathers also educated me as might be and tried with all zeal to
make a monk of me! Ever before my mind was held the evil end of the
other youth who fled from the consecrated robe,--for he had made a
scandal for a pretty nun ere he became a free lance and joined hands
with Solyman the Magnificent against Christendom,--oh--many and long
were the discourses I had to listen to of that heretic adventurer! He
was a Greek of a devout and exalted Christian family, and his name was
Don Teodore."
Juan Gonzalvo--called Capitan Gonzalvo in favor of his wide experience
and wise management of camp, had been resting idly on the sands, but
sat up, alert at that name.
"Holy name of God:--" and his words were low and keen as though bitten
off between his teeth--"is he then alive? Good Father--was it he? and
is he still alive?"
While one might count ten, Padre Vicente looked in silence at the
tense, eager face of his questioner, and the others stared also, and
felt that a spark had touched powder there.
"Yes:--it is true. It was that man," said the priest at last. "But why
do you, my son, wake up at the name? May it be that the Greek was dear
to you?"
"He should be dear should I find him, or any of his blood!" But the
voice of the careless adventurer was changed and was not nice to hear.
"All the gold the new land could give me would I barter but to look on
the face of Don Teo, the renegade Greek!"
"But not in friendship?"
Juan Gonzalvo laughed, and Don Diego crossed himself at that
laugh,--it had the mockery of hell in it, and the priest turned and
gave the heretofore careless fellow a keener attention than had
previously occurred to him. By so little a thing as a laugh had the
adventurer lifted himself from the level where he had been idly
assigned.
"You will not look on his face in this world, my son," said the
priest, "and enmities should cease at the grave. The man is dead. You
could have been but a child when he left Spain, what evil could have
given him your hate?"
"My father was one of the Christian slaves chained by him to the oars
of Solyman the infidel Turk! Long days and horrible nights was he
witness to the lives of Solyman the magnificent, and Don Teodore the
fortunate. When the end came,--when the magnificent patron began to
set spies on his favorite lady of the harem, the tricky Greek escaped
one dark night, and brought up in Barcelona as an escaped slave of the
Turk, pretending he had eluded the swords of the oppressor after
dreadful days of bondage."
"I remember that time," said Don Diego. "He was entertained by the
nobles, and plied with questions, and was offered a good office in the
next crusade against the unsanctified infidels."
"So it was told to me," said Juan Gonzalvo--"told by a man whose every
scar spoke of the Greek wolf! I was told of them as other children are
told the stories of the blessed saints. My first toy sword was
dedicated to the cutting down of that thrice accursed infidel and all
his blood. God:--God:--how mad I was when I was told the savages of
the new world had done me wrong by sending him to hell before I could
even spell his name for curses!"
"My son! You are doing murder in your heart!" and Padre Vicente held
up the crucifix with trembling hand.
"That I am!" agreed Gonzalvo and laughed, and laid himself down again
to rest on his saddle.--"Does it call for penance to kill a venomous
thing?"
"A human soul!" admonished the priest.
"Then he came by such soul later in life than his record shows trace
of!" declared Juan Gonzalvo, and this time the priest was silent.
"In truth, report does stand by our friend in that," agreed Don Diego.
"He lived as a Turk among the Turkish pirates, and was never so much a
Christian as are those who serve as devils, in the flames of the pit.
To slay the infidel is not to slay a soul, good father,--or--if you
are of that mind," he added with an attempt at lightness which sat ill
on him--so stiff it was as he eyed the still priest warily,--"if you
are of that mind, we can never grow dull for argument in the desert
marches. In the Holy Office godly men of the Faith work daily and
nightly on that question even now in Christian Spain."
The priest shuddered, and fingered his beads. Well they knew in those
days the "question" and "Holy office" in Christian Spain. The rack
loomed large enough to cast its shadow even to the new found shores at
the other side of the world!
And plainly he read also that two otherwise genial gentlemen of the
cavalcade were equipped well for all fanatic labor where Holy Cross or
personal hates were to be defended. It is well to know one's comrades,
and the subject of the Greek had opened doors of strange revelation to
him.
"The mind which is of God and of the Holy Mother Church is the mind
for the judgments of souls," said Padre Vicente after a silence. "We
may thank the saints that we are not called on to condemn utterly any
of God's children."
"But what of the Devil's?" asked Don Diego plainly not satisfied with
the evasive reply where he had least expected it. "What of the
children of the darkness and the Evil One?"
Padre Vicente, of the wild tribes, looked around the group and smiled.
Scarce a man of them without at least one lost life to his record--and
more than one with murders enough on his list to have won him
sainthood if all had been done for the Faith:--which they were not!
Back of them crouched dusky Indians of the village, watching with
eager yet apparently kindly interest, this after supper talk of the
strange white men of the iron and the beasts, who had come again to
their land. The priest made a cigarro--then another one, lit both and
passed the first made to the oldest chief--the Ruler of the Indian
group. The Indian accepted it with a breath of prayer on the hand of
the reverend father, and the latter sent out smoke in a white cloud
ere speaking.
"Every brown skin here is a worshipper of false gods, and is therefore
a son of Beelzebub--yet to slaughter them for that won no favors for
the last Capitan-General who led an army across this land," he
remarked, "and mine must not be the task to judge of their infidelity
to the Saints or to Christ the Son who has not yet spoken to them!"
The words were uttered with an air of finality. Plainly he did not
mean to encourage blood lust unless necessary to the work in hand. Don
Diego sulkily made the sign of the cross at the Name, and Don Ruy
noted that the good father was good on the parry--and if he could use
a blade as he did words, he would be a rare fencer for sport. One
could clang steel all day and no one be the bearer of a scratch!
"Since the illustrious and much sought for Greek is without doubt
serving his master as a flame in hell, it would add sweetness to a
fair night if you would tell us how he fared at the hands of his brown
brothers," suggested Don Ruy--"and how the Devil found his own at
last. These others will be much entertained to hear what share he had
in the finding of the gold. Strange it is that I never thought to ask
the name of the man--or you to tell it!"
The priest hesitated ever so slightly. Was he of two minds how much
to tell these over eager adventurers? Especially that one of the
curses! But the truth, as he had told Don Ruy in part, was an easier
thing to maintain, and keep memory of, than a fiction dressed up for
the new man. And the man was watching him with compelling eyes, and
the boy Chico, with eyes agog, was also alert for his endless notes.
"Yes, he had to do with the gold--much!" he said at last. "He was the
only white man who had been told the secret of it."
"Ah-la-la!" murmured Don Ruy, plainly suggesting that such evidence
would be the better for a trusty witness.--Padre Vicente heard him,
and puffed his cigarro, and half closed his eyes in his strange
patient, pale smile.
"But it is true for all that!" he insisted. "And of all places we have
crossed since Culiacan was left behind us, none seems more fitting
than this for the telling of his story."
His eyes glanced over the men circled above the great pool. The stars
were making little points of light in the rock bound water. Far below
in the desert a coyote called to his intimates. Indians loitered at
the edge of the circle. And at the rim of of the mesa, and high places
of the natural fortress, armed sentinels paced;--dusk figures against
the far sky. It was truly a place made for tales of adventure.
"Whatever evil your much hated Greek was guilty of, there is one
question to ask:--in monk's cell, or in the battles for the
wrong--left he the record of a coward?"
"No," acknowledged Don Diego--"but his zeal was damnable in all
things."
"I ask because various things which he endured could scarcely be
understood if you put him in the list of the weak or the incapable."
"Often the strength of the Evil One is a stupendous force for his
chosen people," agreed Don Diego. "That is widely known in Europe
to-day when Paracelsus with infernal magic of the mind makes cures
which belong by every right to the saints alone!"
"And the people are truly cured of their ills--truly healed?"
"Their bodies are truly healed for the life that is temporal, but each
soul is doomed for the life that is eternal. No Christian doubts that
the mental magic of the physician is donated by Beelzebub whose tool
he is."
"He was a student of exceeding depth,"--agreed Padre Vicente--"and it
may be he has found magic forbidden to man. But the Greek laid claim
to no such power as that, however much it is said that the devil loved
him! He had only a strong body, and the dislike to see it cut to
pieces for a heathen holiday."
"De Soto, it is said, found a dirk of his when he crossed the land of
Apalache years later, seeking empire. But the tribes could or would
tell nothing of the lost Greek and the negro slave. The latter was
killed by the people called Natchez, and the Greek, who had been among
many things:--a sailor, escaped by the water, leaving no trail--not
even the trail made by a white skin in a land of dusk people.
"From the Turks he had learned a trick of using stain of barks and
herbs. His hair was of brown, but the eyebrows and lashes were heavy
and dark. After using such concoction, a mirror of clear water showed
him no trace of himself except the eyes--they were blue beyond hope,
but the heavy lashes were a help and a shadow.
"With stolen arms of bow, hatchet, and a flint knife, the man went
north--wading the river edge at night, and hiding by day until the
land of the Natchez was left behind. A strong river came from the
west--and an old canoe gave him hope of finding New Spain by the water
course. That journey was a tedious thing of night prowlings, hidings,
and, sometimes starvings. Then the end of solitude came, and he was
captured by heathen rangers.
"They were a large company and were travelling west. Later he learned
they were a war company and in a fight his master and most of the
others were killed. At the rejoicing of the victors, he sang louder,
and danced more wildly than all the others, so they did not kill him.
He was traded to other Indians further west for a painted robe and
some clay pots. This last move brought him to the villages of the
stream, named later by Coronado the Rio Grande, but called by the
Indians another name, the P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé."
"The very villages where we are to go?" demanded Don Ruy.
"Possibly some of the same," said the priest. "How many of you
remember the great comet of 1528?"
Several did, and all remembered the dread and horror it spread in
Western Europe.
"Think you then what that same threat in the sky must have been to
these wild people who seek magic ever from the stars and even the
clouds. It was a threat and it called for some sacrifice propitiating
the angry gods."
"Sacrifice? Do these infidels then practise such abominations?" asked
Don Diego.
"To look at the mild eyes and hear their soft voices of these our
guests it is not easy to think it," agreed Padre Vicente, "but these
people are but the northern cousins of the men Cortez conquered--their
customs differ only in degree. To both Venus and Mars were human
god-offerings made--that day of sacrifice is not so long past, and in
that day it was done here."
"And?"
"And your lucky Greek was the one to be chosen! He was fed well as one
would fatten an ox for the knife. He had some knowledge of simple
remedies, and in brewing herbs for their sick he had also stolen the
opportunity for the further addition to his coat of color. He was to
them an Indian of an unknown tribe, yet, since he was to be offered to
the gods, he was made the very center of ceremonial dances, and
infernal heathenish customs.
"Both men and women enter into certain sacred--or infernal orders,
whose ceremonies are only known to those initiate. An inter-tribal
connection is kept up in such societies between villages speaking a
totally different language,--even though the tribes be at war, there
is always a truce for these wild creatures who dance together for some
magic, or some prayer to their false gods."
"And the truce is kept?"
"It would not be possible for a tribe to break truce of their
diabolical things of their spirits. At the ceremonies for the
sacrifice to the comet god was a girl of another tribe, and when the
Greek noted that her desire was not to see him destroyed, he had the
first glimpse of hope,--the only other he had was to remove the stain
in some way, and convince them that their gods had made a miracle to
save him."
The priest made a gesture towards the great sand drifts at every side
of rock wall and column.
"To which of you would it occur, if hiding meant chance of life--to
which of you would it occur to go under that sand for days so close to
the trail that the women with the water jars would pass you scores of
times in a day carrying water from this pool?"
"This pool?--this--"--the eyes of Don Ruy lightened--"this is then
that place of the great danger?"
"A man could not hide in the sand like that--nor deceive these wild
trailers of animals," decided Don Diego--"and of a certainty it could
not be close to the trail!"
"So we would naturally think," decided Padre Vicente. "But the Indian
girl was wiser than our wisdom, Señor, for she did aid his escape, and
she did hide him there. To get breath, his face was touching a great
wall of rock against which another was carelessly laid. The place had
been chosen with a knowledge that seemed inspired--for only close to
the trail where the sand was like to be disturbed by naked romping
children,--only there in all these deserts could he have been hidden
from their hunters."
"Here?--in this place?" again said Don Ruy. "Holy father it is a good
story--yet sounds a romance fantastic to fit this weird place of the
pool and the star shine of the night?"
"By the name of these people, the Queres, and the name of the village
Ah-ko, this should be the place of the sacrificial intentions," said
the priest. "By the careful account given, this is the pool to which
the trail led, and it may even be that the ancient Cacique to whom,
but now, I gave the cigarro, was chief priest of the sacrifice in that
day."
"A truly delectable neighbor for a help to pleasant fancy," said Don
Ruy and laughed. "If the amiable devil should be moved to sacrifice
now, I would be the nearest to his hand--think you he would make ill
use of my youth and tenderness?"
"His Sanctity, the padre was indeed wise that no word of this was
breathed in the viceregal ears of Mexico," said Don Diego with a
testiness not yet subdued over the question of utter damnation for the
souls unregenerate. "Piety would carry me far--but no warrant is mine
to follow even the Highest where cannibals do wait for unholy
sustenance!" and he arose and bowed to Don Ruy.
"Oh--Name of the Devil!" said his noble ward, and laughed and
stretched his legs. "I may not be so unholy as your words would
suggest. Give not a dog a bad name in the days of his youth!"
And at this the scandalized and pious dignitary multiplied words to
make clear how far from such meaning were his devoted intentions. But
if wild tribes must be fed ere their souls could be reached,--victims
could be found other than the heir of a duchess!
At which outburst Don Ruy suggested that he save his pious breath and
devote it to prayers, and to take some of his own medicine by
remembrance that soul of king and soul of peasant weighed the same
before high God.
"After which devout exhortation from your servant, good father, we
again give ear to the tale of that devil's disciple--the Greek Teo,"
he said, "Did they find him in the sand? And did the merciful dame
hide in the sand also?--if so the prison might not be without hope.
Holy Saint Damien!--to think that the man walked these same stony
heights--and drank from that pool!"
"They never found him in the sand." The priest ignored the other
frivolous comment. "They never found him anywhere, and a slave from
the Navahu people was made a sacrifice in his stead. The strange girl
was a Te-hua medicine maid or magic learner of things from the wise
men of Ah-ko. Her prayers were very many, and very long, and she made
a shrine for prayer on the sand beside the stone wall where he was
hidden. Their men set watch on her, she knew it, but not anything did
they find but a girl who made her prayers, and gave no heed to their
shadowings.
"When were ended her days of devotion to the false gods--then she ate,
and drank, and took the way to her own people; with moderate pace she
took that trail north, but when night came, she ran like the wild
thing she was, again to the south, crept unseen again into this
fortress, and led the rescued man as far to the west as might be until
the dawn came. With the coming of the sun, came also a sand storm of
great stress, and all trace of their steps were covered, and the
medicine maid saw in that a mystic meaning.
"To Turk and Spaniard the refugee might be only Teo the Greek, a
fugitive from all high courts. But to the Indian he was a lost God of
the Great Star for whom even the desert winds did duty. When with
moistened yucca root he rubbed his hands that the white skin showed,
she bent her head to the sand, and was his slave until ... the end!"
"It moves well, and beautifully smooth:--this tale of the outlaw,"
agreed Don Ruy--"but it is that end we are eager for--and the how it
was compassed--that she turned slave--or mistress--or both in one, as
alas!--has chanced to men ere our day!--was the doom expected from the
earliest mention of the pitiful and most devout lady--devout to her
devils! But of the end--the end?"
"The end came to him long after they parted, and for one winter and
one summer were their wanderings to the west. Of the Firebrand river
deep between rock walls he had heard, and of the ocean far beyond, and
of Mexico to the south. To reach the river they crossed dry leagues of
desert and lived as other wild things lived. But the river was not a
thing for boats or journeys, and they went on beyond it seeking the
sea. Strange things and strange lives they passed on the way. His skin
had been stained many times and his beard was plucked out as it grew.
Enough of Indian words he learned to echo her own tale to the brown
savages, and the tale was, that they were medicine people of Te-hua in
the land of P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé, and that they travelled to the shores of
the sea for dances and prayers to the gods there. And sometimes food
was given them--and some times prayers were sent in their keeping.
Thus was their journey, until in the south, in the heart of a desert
they found the place of the palms where the fruit was ripe, and the
water comes from warm springs, and looks a paradise--but is as a hell
when the sand storms come:--and human devils live to the South and by
the Sea of Cortez.
"They knew nothing of that, it was a place for rest, and a place of
food, and they rested there because of that, and gathered food for the
further journey.
[Illustration: THE PLACE OF THE PALMS _Page 94_]
"All medicine people of the tribes carry on their neck or in a pouch
at the belt, some sacred things of their magic practices, and under
the palms, when other amusement was not to be found, it pleased him to
see what his brown girl carried hidden even from her master. It took
much persuasions, for she felt that evil would happen if it was shown
except it be a matter of ceremony. Then she at last took from the
pouch, salt from a sacred lake, feather and claw and beak of a yellow
bird, a blade of sharpest flint, and--this!"
He again held the piece of gold that they might see it. Even the
Indians leaned forward and looked at it and then eyed the white men
and each other in silence. To them it was "medicine" as the priest
told the adventurers it had been to the Te-hua girl.
"Your Greek pirate of the good luck went close to madness at the
certain fact that for months he had been walking steadily away from
the place where this was found. To the girl it was a sacred thing
hidden in the earth of her land by the sun--and only to be used for
ceremonies. The place where it grew was a special hidden place of
prayer offering."
"Faith!--we all must learn prayers enough to get our share!--if prayer
will do the work!" said Don Ruy.--"Chico, it means that you get an
Indian primer,--and that you find for me a brown enchantress. His
reverence will grant us all a special indulgence for hours of the
schooling!"
Señor Don Brancadori sat up very straight and shook his head at the
priest:--so well assured was he that enough liberties would be taken
without the indulgences of holy church. Moreover it was not well to
put the deviltries of camp in the mind of so good a lad as Chico.
"And the girl gave to him the gold and told him its hiding place?" he
asked.
"We may say she gave it--thought in truth she declared it could not be
given--it could only be made a barter of for other medicine, but it
must be strong medicine. The blade of flint was to guard her magic
symbols if need be, and the man, her master, saw in that moment that
the mind he had to deal with in this matter was an Indian mind, in
which there is not reason. And to find a 'medicine' potent for charms
was a task set for a man in the place of the palms."
"Then a forgotten thing came into his mind. It had been a vow made to
an enticing creature of San Lucar. She was also devout as a young nun.
The vow was of a return--and no doubt of other meetings. The end of it
was that she gave him a rosary--(his first captors coveted that and
took care of it). But also they ate together of fruit, and as both
ladies and gallants do strange things at strange times, the lady
divided the seeds, and counted them seeking a lucky number or some
such freakish quest. And by the rosary, and by his mother, she made
him swear that when he had found fortune and a plantation in the new
world, he would plant with his own hands the seeds there, and send for
the lady to come by ship as chatelaine! Failing the plantation, he was
to return, and her own relatives would find on land or sea an office
fit for his talents:--only he was to faithfully guard the seed of the
fruit eaten in a happy hour, and her prayers would meet his own across
the waters.
"It may be that women with prayers for him had not been
plentiful--whatever the vow was it was made and sealed with the prayer
of the lady. When the savages took her rosary they gave no heed to
some brown seeds in a leather pouch--no more of them than you could
count on your fingers! A man alone for long in a wilderness gives
meaning to things he would not remember at happier times. And the
training of the Holy Church returns to even the most gardened men in
their hours of stress! So it was that the prayer of the willing dame
kept him company, as he looked on the seeds. They had become his
rosary--and were the last evidence of the nightly prayers promised by
the lady.
"Thus:--because of their smallness had they been unnoted of his
several captors. Having slipped between the lining and the cover of
the pouch he had ceased to remember them after the Indian maid
lessened his loneliness. But he went searching for them now--even one
peach seed was still with them--and some grains of the bearded
wheat--that by a special grace had fallen into a pocket on ship board
while handling grains, and as a jest on himself he had added it to the
others for the plantation to be made for the waiting dame.
"He could truly say they were 'medicine' given with prayers. But with
forgetfulness of truth, he also added much as to their divine
origin--and the wondrous power they held.
"Gladly the Indian girl let go the gold for the unknown seeds! She
further signified that now she could know always that he was a God,
for the gift of the seeds fitted some myth of her own land--some thing
of one of their false gods who brought seeds and fruits and great good
to the people.
"In that way was made the exchange of medicine for medicine beside
some pool by the palms, and well it was it was made that day, else
never would we have this golden guide! For:--it fell out that a day
later as he was hunting to the south, he was surrounded and taken
prisoner by the savages who range by the inland sea of California. The
gold had a hole as you see, he pulled hair from his head, tied the
nugget in the braid, and thus hid it for the next two years of his
life. The girl he never again heard of. She would die of a certainty
alone in the desert.
"A missionary of our order found the man in the wilderness. They were
exiles, the two for the length of a winter, and the Greek listened to
the tales of the lost fleet on which Don Teo sought the new world, and
also of the royal order for his arrest following on the next ship. For
a prisoner of Solyman the Magnificent had escaped from the galleys of
the Turk, and wild tales were told of princes of the North who gave
aid to the traffic in Christian slaves. Don Teo was by all means to be
taken back to Spain that the Holy Office learn through him the names
and numbers of the offenders!"
"Good it is to hear that the varlet was not let sleep sound all the
night!" decided Don Ruy.
"It appears there were many nights when sleep kept from him--to judge
by his confessions!" said the priest. But to go into deeper hell while
he was yet alive did not march with his wishes, and while he half
inclined to the desert again, that he might die quietly there as any
other starved wild thing does die:--a thing came which he had not
thought:--the padre died of a serpent's sting, and he, Teo the Greek,
was alone, and apart from the world again!
"It was the gown for which the savages had reverence--and he took the
consecrated robe from the dead padre and wore it--he had been driven
by misfortune back to Holy Church!
"He lived under the name of the padre as a priest in holy orders. His
reports to his superior were well counterfeited as the writing of the
man he had buried. He held that mission as the extreme outpost for
three years. He died there of a fever, but not until I had found him,
and confessed him. The gold and the tale of his wanderings he gave to
me. Much of it he told me more than once, for when men are exiles as
he was for those several years, the things of the old life loom up big
with significance. He felt that he was the _finder_ of _the way_, and
that mayhaps, Mother Church, so long forgotten by him, would be the
richer that he had lived. Masses were said for the girl dead in the
desert. She had saved him, and for a little while of life--he had
given her love!"
"He may have made a most righteous end--since it was no longer in his
power to do evil!" commented Don Ruy--"But your pirate priest would
never have let go the nugget for masses if the breath of life had kept
him company."
"Who knows!--the high God does not give us to see in the heart of the
other man," said Padre Vicente--"In the years of his trial he was made
to feel his sins against Holy Church--and when the girl died in the
desert, another life died with her. Even men of sin do give thought to
such matters."
But Juan Gonzalvo who hated him, swore at the ill luck of his escape
by death, and no one felt any pity for that first white pilgrim across
the Indian lands. All of them however gave speech of praise to the
priest's telling of the story. Don Ruy gave him leave to tell romances
in future rather than preach sermons.
The men were vastly interested to learn at last the exact region of
their destination--and that the province where the yellow metal had
been hidden by the sun was but a matter now of a few days more of
journeying--since the people of Ah-ko had brother Queres in
settlements adjoining the settlements of the Te-huas.
So, seeing that the guard was good, and that each arquebus was near,
and in readiness if need be for dusky visitors, the company fell
asleep well content. Only Don Ruy strolled over the path through the
sand and tried to fancy how the girl and the Greek had managed the
hiding there. A little of the story had been told him in the monastery
when the great plan had been made, but no names were given, and the
telling of it this night had been a very different matter--he had so
lately crossed the desert where those two refugees had wandered, that
the story had now a life unknown before. Even the sand billows and the
rock walls of the mesa spoke as with tongues. The mate to this
wonderful Ah-ko could not, he thought, be in the world any where, and
the romance of the young priestess and the Greek adventurer fitted the
place well and he felt that the priest of the wild places had chosen
rightly in keeping the story until they had climbed to this place
where the story of the gold had its beginning.
As he retraced his steps, they took him past the sleeping place of
José and his wife of Mexico. Beside them was spread the blankets of
Chico, but the lad was not there,--he was standing apart, at the edge
of the sheer cliff, looking out over the desert reaches where the sand
was blue grey in the star light.
"Hollo!"--said Don Ruy and halted in surprise, "do you select sentry
duty when you might sleep soft on the sand? Must I send you another
blanket to woo you to a bed?"
"Your Excellency has been most generous in the matter of the
blanket--one has been enough to keep record of your kindly heart."
"Then why not enjoy your sleep as a hearty lad should? Has this place
of wonder bewitched you--or has the story of the Greek and the gold
stirred you into ambitions beyond repose?"
The lad might have retorted by reminding Don Ruy that he also was
abroad while his company slept,--usually a glib pertness would have
answered his employer, but the answer came not readily, and when it
did,--his excellency saw in a surprised moment that the boy was not
such a child as the careless company fancied him.
"I have thought nothing of the Greek--and little of the gold," he
said. "But the woman who followed the love and the man across the
deserts--and who died alone somewhere in the sands like a starved
dog--of her I was thinking! All the magic she had learned could not
save her from hell when that one man came in her path!"
"But--you are only a lad and may not understand these things,"--said
Don Ruy--"The girl may have died like that, it is true, but the hell
in the life she perhaps never got glimpse of,--since she loved the
man!"
"But if the dead do know, would not a sort of hell be hers when she
learned she had given the magic medicine of her God for the idle
gift--bestowed by another mistress?"
Then the lad marched to his blankets and wrapped himself in them,
leaving Don Ruy the question to ponder.
CHAPTER IX
YAHN, THE APACHE
"Brothers:--you of the life
--Of also the fire divine!
You of the mountains
Of also the Mother Mist!
Out of the mist is a voice.
It is not the voice afraid!
Out of the shadows,
Out of the forests,
Out of the deserts
It is born!
In a good hour it is born.
The wind of the Sun sends it breath!
Brothers:--the Dawn drives the Darkness
And in the mountain strong
No one sings fear!
Out from far worlds it comes,
With the strong Dawn it comes
Brothers:--be mountain strong
Sing not of fear!"
The rising sun tipped the terraces with gold and rose, and the nude
brown men, and the men children, faced the east with hands lifted to
greet the coming of the Great Power. This was as it had been since the
time of most ancient days.
But the song chanted from the terrace by the Woman of the Twilight was
a new song, and the men made their prayers, and wondered at the singer
singing thus on the roof of her dwelling.
The dew of the hills was on her clothing and on her hair. She had
dreamed a dream and walked in the night until the words of the dream
had come to her lips, and when they came she sang them aloud and the
people listened, and the men went from their prayers and thought about
it.
Many were conscious of secret thoughts of dread at the coming of the
strangers. The priestess had spoken of the thing no one had given
voice to.
From the day when her son had been honored as Po-Ahtun-ho, the strife
of existence seemed ended for S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah. The thing she had
lived to see was now accomplished. Her days were now the gray days of
rest and of mystery. She made many prayers alone in the hills, and
forgot to eat.
She was not old, yet to Tahn-té she said, "It is over:--The time is
come when you stand alone to be strong. Your work is now the work of
the strong man, and I go to make prayers in the hills."
When she stayed over long, he sought her out lest ill should come to
her, and more than once he had walked into the village with his mother
in his arms as other people carried the little children. It was the
Woman of the Twilight, and no one laughed. At any other woman they
would have laughed to see her carried in the arms of a man.
And so, when she stood on her terrace and spoke of the voice of the
Dawn and the Mountain Mists, all listened. The men talked of it in the
kivas of each clan, and the women talked all together, and were glad.
They did not know quite what their fear had been, but it was no longer
with them since the woman of the God Thoughts said the voices sang no
fear.
Only Yahn Tsyn-deh on the terrace opposite, strung together claws of
birds for a necklace, and scoffed warily.
"Only if you are mountain strong need you have no fear," she said.
"The promise that her son is maybe the Voice and the Dawn is a good
promise--but the wise woman of the hill caves is double wise! Her song
has double thoughts. Be you all mountain strong, as gods are strong,
and no fear will come! But if the mountain strength waits not at your
door--what then happens?"
No one knew, and the women looked at each other in question. The peace
of the wise woman's words was killed by the bitter laugh of Apache
Yahn.
When the bitter mood touched the girl, the Te-hua people remembered
that her mother was of that wild Apache people--enemy to all. At times
she could be a maid like other maids--with charm and laughter--a very
bewitching Yahn who made herself a beauty barbaric with strings of gay
berries of the rose, or flat girdles of feathers dyed like the
rainbow. Her bare arms had bracelets of little shells. Into the
weaving of her garments she had put threads of crimson in strange
patterns--they were often the symbols of the Apache gods or spirit
people, and when she chose she made the other women feel fear with
them. Her own mother who told her of them, would not have worn them
thus--but Yahn was more Apache than her mother.
One woman shelling corn for the meal, suggested that if the Te-hua
people had not mountain strength it might mean war as the people to
the South had endured that other time--when the men at Tiguex were
burned to ashes by the strangers.
"Oh, wise Säh-pah!" and Yahn laughed at the late thought,--"Has the
thing at last come to the mind of one of you?"
"I thought of it also," said one of the other women sulkily.
"Ai:--you all thought--but none of you dared say words while the new
Ruler and the wise governor kept silent to the people!" she taunted
them. "Of all the women I only can speak in the speech of the
strangers."
"Think you we will see them?" asked one girl doubtfully--"will we not
all be sent to the hills the days when they come?"
"In other villages they did so in that long ago day--some men never
let their women be seen of the white men who wore the iron."
"I will not be sent to the hills," decided Yahn. "From Ke-yemo and
from Tahn-té I know their words. I will talk for the strangers. I will
learn many things!"
"When was it you learn so much?" asked Säh-pah jealously.
"A little--little at a time all these years!" declared Yahn in
triumph. "Tahn-té wanted not to forget it--so he said to me the
words--now they are mine."
The women regarded her with a wonder that was almost awe,--there might
be something infernal and unlucky in talking two ways.
"If it be war, think you Ka-yemo will be the war chief as he has been
made?" queried Säh-pah. "He will be made second if there is
fighting,--think you not so?"
Yahn apparently did not think, but she did listen.
"We know how it was with his father Awh-we--" said one. "In that day
of trial he failed that once in the battle with the Yutah. The old
men let him pull weeds in the corn when the next war came."
The strong fingers of Yahn broke the bird's claw, and she tossed it
from the terrace edge, and selected another.
"But the new young wife Koh-pé may make the son of his father brave
for all that," and Säh-pah who was not young and not winsome, watched
Yahn, and felt content when she saw the Apache eyes grow narrow and
the teeth set. "A wife with many robes and many strings of shells and
blue stones, makes a man strong to fight for them. Ka-yemo will be a
strong man now."
"He is of my clan--Ka-yemo!" said Yahn panting with pent up fury, "he
can fight,--all of our blood can fight!--if the war is here we can
show you of the Panyoo clan how the Tain-tsain clan can fight with the
new enemy!"
They all knew that Yahn Tsyn-deh could indeed fight, she wore eagle
feathers and had a right to wear them since a season of the hunt on
the Navahu border when a young warrior had stolen her for his lodge,
and with his own club set with flint blades, had she let his spirit go
on the shadow trail, and to her own village had she brought the scalp
and the club, also his robe and beads of blue and of green stone--and
she made the other women remember it at times.
"Ho!--and will it be you who bears a spear and a shield and a club on
that day?" asked Säh-pah the skeptic.
"I fight that day--or any day, as strong as the fight any man of yours
can ever make!" This retort of Yahn was met with half frightened
giggles by the other women. Säh-pah had been unlucky in the matter of
men. Yet, her list of favorites had not been limited, and the sarcasm
of Yahn was understood.
"It is good there is some one brave to meet the strangers!" and the
smile of Säh-pah was not nice. "Maybe you go to ask for a man--maybe
it is why you learn their words--maybe the Tain-tsain clan will ask
for a white man for you!"
"When _I_ ask--I will not be made a laugh, and sent home with a
gift,"--and the other women squealed with shrill laughter and had
great joy over the quarrel. The eyes of Säh-pah blazed. She tried to
speak but her fury gave voice only in throaty growls, and an older
woman than all of them stepped between them in protest.
"To your own houses--all you who would fight!" she decided--"go fight
your own men if they send you away with gifts, but by my door I do not
want panthers who scream!"
Säh-pah sulkily obeyed, and Yahn laughed and continued her work.
"It is not good to laugh when the bad fortune comes to any one," said
the old woman, but Yahn refused to be subdued.
"It is true, mother--" she insisted--(all elderly women are mothers or
aunts to village folk)--"it is true. When the dance of the corn was
here and the women made choice of their favorites--it is well known
that Säh-pah did follow Phen-tza a long ways. He laughed at her." Yahn
herself laughed as she told it,--"he laughed and he asked why she
comes so far alone--and he gives her his blanket and goes away! That
is how he takes her for favorite that day!--he only laughs and let go
his blanket to Säh-pah!"
The old woman put up her hand that her laugh be not heard. The
humor of primitive people is not a delicate thing, and that the
blandishments of Säh-pah had been of no use--as was witness the
blanket!--had made many laugh around the night fires. Yet the old
"mother" thought it not good that quarrels should grow out of it.
"Is your heart so bright with happiness that you understand nothing of
the shame another woman may know, Yahn Tsyn-deh?"--she asked
seriously. "Säh-pah is of the free woman--and we are not of her clan
to make judgement."
"Speak no words to me of a bright heart!" said Yahn, and arose, and
went away. Across the roofs she went to the stairway of her dwelling,
where she had lived alone since the death of her mother. It was a good
room she entered, very white on the walls, and the floor white also,
with the works of her own fingers on the smoothness of it. In a niche
of the thick wall stood a bronze god, and a medicine bowl with
serrated edges, and a serpent winged and crowned painted in fine lines
to encircle it. On the wall was a deerskin of intricate ornamentation,
good and soft in the dressing, it was painted in many symbols of the
Apache gods and the prayer thoughts. From her mother Yahn had learned
them and had painted them in ceremonial colors. The great goddess of
the white shell things--and white flowers--and white clouds--was
there, and the sun god was also there, and the curve of the moon with
the germ of life in its heart. The morning star was there--and also
the symbol of the messengers from the gods. Circling all these sacred
things was the blue zig-zag of the sky lightening by which Those Above
send their decrees to earth children who know the signs, and at each
corner the symbols of the Spirit People were on guard.
[Illustration: THE PRAYER OF YAHN TSYN-DEH _Page 109_]
Säh-pah had said once that they might be devil things, and not god
things, and Yahn had watched her chance, and emptied a jar of dirty
water on her head for that, and no more women said things of the walls
of Yahn Tsyn-deh's house. But whether she deemed them holy or not
holy, she hung the necklace of birds' claws under the symbol of the
Goddess Stenaht-lihan, and then prostrated herself and lay in
silence.
After a long time she spoke.
"All this that the Apache blood be not lost in the flood of a shame!
All this that no Te-hua woman ever again sees that my heart has been
sick--all this that a double curse of--"
But in the midst of her words of whispered prayer speech failed
her--and tears choked her until she sobbed for breath. With all her
will she wished to curse some one whom all her woman's heart forbade
her harm!
CHAPTER X
SHRINES OF THE SACRED PLACES
When new things cast shadows across the Indian mind, every cloud
touching the moon is watched at its birth and at its first hours of
the circle, also the stars. And for those other worlds,--the
planets--is it their brotherhood to the earth that is sealed by a
living sacrifice as they come and as they pass again from the visible
path in the sky?
The Reader of the Stars lives often above the mists of the earth dews.
The door of the high priest Po-Ahtun-ho faces the way of the South
that the shadows of the moon and the shadows also of the sun, make
reckonings for him of that which must be noted. So it has been since
ancient days.
But for the Reader of the Stars there is a door not like another door;
even to the stranger who runs as in a race, the house of the stars is
seen and noted, and known as the sacred place for high prayer, and the
record of the God things.
In Pu-yé the Ancient--and the deserted through centuries, the
dwellings of high priests are marked beyond shadow of doubt, and each
Te-hua man knows as well the dwelling of the Ruler of five centuries
ago in Pu-yé, as he knows the door of his own brother across the court
of the village. And the door of the stars is still beautiful there in
Pu-yé.
Day time or night time the lines of ancient dwellings look ghost-like
in their whiteness. Only medicine men with prayer rites ever sit
alone in the deserted rooms. The men from the river villages on the
way for the pine of the hills used in their sacred dances, do halt to
scatter prayer meal at sacred places where the water once ran:--there
is ever the hope that if prayers enough are thought, the springs in
the Mother Mountain may make fertile again the fields of the high
levels,--for in the days of the carving of Pu-yé from the white cliffs
there were certainly many streams and wide harvests in the land that
is called now the desert lands.
And to the west is Tse-c[=o]me-u-piñ, the sacred mountain where the
lightning plays, and westward also, but not so far, is the Cave of the
Hunters where prayers are made to the Trues--the guardian spirits of
the Sacred Ways, and the wild things of the forest, symbolizing sacred
ways and sacred colors. These places of prayer and of sacrifices are
here to-day--and the way to them is marked by the symbols of stars and
of planets--many eyes see them--but the readers of them are not so
many to-day. A Te-hua man will tell you they are the forgotten records
of the Lost Others--and will sprinkle prayer meal craftily to make
amends for the truth which is half a lie. The unspoken pagan gods of
the Lost Others have endless life, and eternal youth, in the land.
All is as it was in the ancient day, except that the dwellings have
changed from the ancient places, and the priests go over more ground
to reach the high places of prayer.
In the valley of the P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé many vigils were kept through the
nights of the Springtime, as messages from the south brought word of
the steady, and thus far, harmless advance of the white strangers. The
treachery at Tiguex in the day of Coronado was a keen memory. It
would take much wisdom to avoid war with the iron men of the white
god, yet keep their own wives and daughters for their own tribe.
Many arrows were made--also spears and shields. Men went hunting and
women dried the meat, pounding it into shreds for the war trail if
need be. From earliest dawn were heard the grinding songs as the
corn of yellow and blue and red and white was ground by the maidens
keeping time to the ancient carols--and ever above the head of the
worker was hung the sacred and unhusked ear, which, when resting,
she contemplated, kneeling, and the thought in her heart must be
the sacredness of the life-giving grain, and the prayer of thanks
that it was given by the gods to the people.
Tahn-té, going from the river bath of the dawn, crossed the terrace of
Yahn Tsyn-deh, and caught brief glance of her face thus lifted above
the grinding stone. The steadiness of the quiet prayer was contrast
decided, compared with the last wild prayer she had come to make at
his feet:--begging for magic of any nature since the laws of the clans
forbade that she be wife to her cousin to whom she had given love.
Almost he halted, moved in his mind to speak to the girl who had
been more of comrade than had any other woman. But he remembered the
evil prayer she had spoken that day, and this was not a time to
give to thought of her anger. It was bad to have the evil wish of a
woman, but to the other man must go the cares of the village loves and
hates. All things had worked together to make him the wearer of the
white robe--to place him outside the lines of village joys or
sorrows,--his every demand was for vision of the strongly felt, yet
unseen powers. Was he the son of a god?--as in the heart of him he
still thought:--then to him belonged the fasting and the prayer of
tribal penance, and the loves and the hates of the children of
Te-hua were luxuries not for him. He was enemy to no man--and he
could be lover to no woman!
[Illustration: YAHN AT THE GRINDING STONE _Page 112_]
The old men of his own orders had taught him much of the strength of
magic which comes only to the priest who seeks no earthly mate. But
the ten years of study of the white man's magic as spoken in their
books of their gods, had taught him more. He had been witness that
their gods were strong for war, and for worldly power. His people had
need of all that power if the strangers came again and again like this
into the country of the P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé.
The picture of Yahn, kneeling by the fireplace on the terrace, her
eyes lifted to the sacred corn, brought quickly to him the memory of a
more childish Yahn who was not unhappy even in her wars.
And now--through the madness, which he was warned came to all men--now
she was a woman through that madness:--and a forsaken woman whom all
Te-hua watched for the revenge she would take.
They knew Ka-yemo could not marry with the daughter of his uncle, but
they knew also that he could not be driven into taking the daughter of
another man as wife,--and Yahn knew this also. Many robes, and blue
jewels had weighed down the love of a boyhood!
Tahn-té thought of this, and of the girl, as he passed through the
village to his own dwelling. Other maids greeted him, and followed him
with kindly eyes. By all women Tahn-té was told in many ways that the
wearer of the white robe need not live in a lonely house!
Yet he was not lonely, and when the marvels of the inviting eyes
turned towards him, he was always conscious of an ideal presence as if
the god-maid of the mesa had stepped between, and made harmless the
sorcery of the village daughters by which he might otherwise have been
enveloped.
Once, when he had confessed as much to the ancient Ruler who had been
his guide and guardian, the old man had voiced approval and
interpreted clearly for him the dream presence which was as a gift of
the gods, and clearly marked him for other loves than that of an earth
maid.
"But--if the dreams came like a maid also--but a maid so fine that it
was as a star--or a flower--or a prayer made human--then--"
"It is like that?" asked the old man, and the boy answered:
"Sometimes it seems like that--but not when I awake. Only in my sleep
does she come close, yet that dream has kept guard for me many days
until the others laugh and say I have no eyes to see a woman, I do
see--but--"
"That is well--it is best of all!" said K[=a]-ye-fah, the Ruler. "If
my own child had come back to me I might not have said it is well. My
heart would have wanted to see your children and the children of
K[=a]-ye-povi--I dreamed of that through many harvests--but it is over
now. She did not live. The trader of robes from the Yutah brought that
word, and it is better that way. I was dying because my daughter would
be slave to Navahu men--and when word comes that she died as a little
child, then the sun is shining for me again, and I live again. But
always when I think that the little child could be a woman, then it is
good to think that your children could be her children. Since it is
so--so let it be! The dream maid of the spirit flower, and of the
star, can be my K[=a]-ye-povi, and you will have the mate no other
earth eyes can ever see, and your nights and your days will not be
lonely. Also it will be that your prayers be double strong."
From that day of talk, the dream maid of Tahn-té had been a more
tangible presence--never a woman--never quite that, but in the smile
of certain children he caught swift glimpse of her face and then music
rang in the rustle of the corn or the rush of the river. When the
dream vision was beyond all measure sweet, he was certain of the
wisdom of the Ancient--for the dream and the thoughts of prayer were
double strong.
They were double strong that morning as he came from the river bath,
and the face of Yahn--and the thought of her love--brought strangely
that dream face to him in which there was no madness such as the
Apache had shown him when at his feet in prayer.
The tombé sounded softly from a far terrace where special prayer was
being made for the growing things, gray doves fluttered home with food
to their young, and little brown children--not so much clothed as the
birds!--climbed ladders to look in the dove cotes on his roof, and see
the nurslings there lift clamoring mouths for worms or other
treasure.
A woman weaving a blanket of twisted skins of rabbits worked in the
open with her primitive loom in an arbor before her door, beside her a
man whirled a distaff and spun the coarse hemp of which the warp was
made. Maids and mothers with water jars on their heads walked in
stately file from a spring near the river's edge--and above all the
serene accustomed life of that Indian village, could be heard the
drone of the grinding songs--in the valley of P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé there
was ever corn for the grinding, and the time of hunger had come not
often to Povi-whah.
Tahn-té felt a certain consciousness of the great content to which the
grinding songs and the steady beat of the prayer drum made music. He
knew better than the others, the worth of that peace, and quiet
plenty, for to the south he had seen hunger stalk in the trail of the
white conquerors, and no woman weaving a robe could be sure that it
would ever keep her children from the cold. The men of iron had
entered doors as they chose and carried thence all manner of things
pleasing to their fancy.
But the life of Povi-whah was a different life, and Tahn-té was glad
often to know that it was his land. The great medicine Mesa of the
Hearts stood like a guardian straight to the east and at morning its
shadow touched the terraces.
Strange mystic rites belonged to that place where the Ancient Others
had made high sacrifice. Great medicine was there for the healing of
all the nations--and the secret of it was with the gods. He was glad
as he looked at it that it was so close to his own people--if a day of
need should come they would have the sacred place more close than any
other people.
As he breathed a prayer and walked to his own door he met Po-tzah who
was the Feeder of the Wind that fanned the Wheat. He was the first boy
friend of Tahn-té in the valley and always their regard had been
kind.
"This is a time of much striving and I am glad to see you, and see
you here at my door," said Tahn-té the Ruler. "You come from the
ceremonial bath after a night of prayer. I go from the bath for the
making of many days and many nights of prayer. If my mother should
return before I come down from the mountains--"
"She will be in the house of my wife, and she will be as our mother,"
said Po-tzah his friend and clansman.
"Thanks that it is so in your heart," and Tahn-té took the hand of his
friend and breathed upon it. "My mother must not hear much talk of any
trouble to come. If she thought there was danger she would not go from
me, and in council it is decided that when the men of iron come into
the valley, the young wives and the little maids must live for a
season in the ruins of the wide fields of old, and my mother--the
'Woman of the Twilight' is to be the keeper of them there, and they
must not be seen of the strangers."
"They take many wives--if they find them--and are strongest?" asked
Po-tzah thinking of his own wife of a year, and the little brown babe
in its cradle of willow wands swung from the ceiling of their home.
Tahn-té smiled mockingly.
"Their priest will tell you they take but one. But their book where
their god speaks, gives to all his favorites many wives, and helps his
favorites to get them with fighting and much cunning, and in the days
when I was with the christian men who said prayers to that god, I saw
them always live as the book said--and not as Padre Luis said. That
man was a good man--a better man than his book--He was good enough to
be Indian--for that is what the Castilians call us--and all our
brother tribes."
"They call us the same as the Apache or the Hopi people?" asked
Po-tzah in wonder. "Why do they that?"
"The Ancient Father in the Sky has not wished them to know who we are.
He has darkened their minds when they tried to see. They are very
proud--that people! All they saw that was good in the villages, they
argued long about. They are sure that some of their tribe in some
older day did find our fathers and teach our people,--in what other
way could we know to spin and weave, and live in good houses!"
The Priest of the prayers to the mighty Wind of the Four Ways laughed
at the very curious ideas of the white strangers.
"Perhaps they taught our fathers also to eat when they were hungered
and take wives when the time came!" he scoffed.
While they spoke, Ka-yemo crossed a terrace and halted to look at
them, and Po-tzah commented on the fine beads now worn by Ka-yemo
since he had taken a wife--but Po-tzah thought the wife very ugly and
very stupid, and he would rather see his own wife even if her father
had been a cripple and a poor man,--and the girl have never a garment
but a poor one of her own making.
"Ka-yemo is the most beautiful man in the village," said Tahn-té,--"He
has fine looks plenty for one house."
"Tahn-té"--and his friend came more close and spoke softly, "you are
Po-Ahtun-ho, and you know wise things and many things. Do you know
enough to care nothing that Ka-yemo and his friends are not your
friends?"
[Illustration: KA-YEMO _Page 118_]
"Why is it that you think in such a way?" asked Tahn-té quietly.
"He knows the white strangers will deal with one man of the tribe if
they come,--and that will be honor for that man. He knows the words of
the strangers. If you were not the most wise he would be chosen to
make all talks, and he would be a great man. Not much has he
said;--but his friends say things! Already they ask what magic touched
the old men when you were made ruler. They say the Po-Ahtun-ho for all
time was born in the place where he says prayers."
"And I was not born in this place," said Tahn-té, as he looked at the
river valley, and remembered the desert sands of Tusayan, and the
island of rock on which he had lived and been happy once. "It is true,
Po-tzah. But the people forget when they say no other Ruler was born
apart from his people. Po-se-yemo came from a cave in the cliff. He
came down from the mountain to the people. He taught them to listen to
mountain thoughts. I come from a rock in the desert, and the old men
say I brought the Sign that the god made my way. We are yet young,
Po-tzah, when we are older we will know whether the way of the gods is
the way for this people. I know the words of Ka-yemo--but they are not
to be talked of. Alone I go to face the Ancient Father--Sinde-hési. I
go to the mountain of the Stone Face--I go to dance the dance for
ancient wisdom. The old men know that the time has come for that."
"Alone? No one in our day has danced alone before the faces! No one
has danced in that place since the time of the fire across the sky,
and that dancer did not live. You can dance there--Tahn-té?"
"I can dance there--By the arrow I have said it."
His friend looked at him with a strange new regard. Each knew what it
meant to be chosen for that dance of the ancient days.
There are two things a man may not do and have breath to live. The
sacred arrow is held aloft when an oath is made. If the thing which he
has told is a false thing the Sun Father gives lightening to the
arrow, and the man of the oath speaks no more, and lives no more. He
dies there in that place. All Te-hua men can tell you that is how it
is. No one asks another to make an oath.
Also no one asks a medicine man to dance before the ancient picture of
the stone in the hills. Only the unmated can dance there. It is the
dance to the Supreme Father who is named not often. He is that One who
gives earth creatures to the world without earth matings. Thus
Po-se-yemo, the mountain god, was given to a maid as her child, and
only the eagles and the shadow of the piñon tree knew. He also gave
the two sons of wonder to the Apache goddess who slept on the mountain
alone under the shadow of a rock reaching out. Water dripped from that
rock and brought the birth dream, and the dream came true there in
Apache land. Those two sons became the divine warriors. You can see
to-day the giants who were demons and who were slain by those two sons
who worked together for good on earth. The blood of the giants flowed
through long valleys and turned to stone, and the heads of the giants
are also stone now, and lie where they were severed from their bodies
in the land of Navahu. Thus it has always been when the Ancient Father
has sent the God-Thought to the earth. Only the Wind, or the Sun, or
the Mist of the Cloud has been mate to the mother. Yet the sons have
been strong for magic and works of wonder.
Thus there has been through the ages, one sacred place where men may
go for highest medicine--if they go before it is not too late!
Not since these two men were born had a man danced there, and the last
man who did so had danced without the truth or the faith in his heart.
No one ever knew if he found great medicine dreams, for he died there.
After many days they went--and they found him dead.
"Yes:--it is so," said Tahn-té the Ruler as he met the eyes of his
friend. "All may know that I go to the fast, and the dance, and that I
dance for them. It will be told from the house tops to-night, but when
it is told I will have reached the hills."
"I may not dance, but I also will fast, and I will work with you,"
said Po-tzah. "Others will work with you when they know. Speak for our
children to the god!"
Then he breathed on the hand of Tahn-té who was to do high work and
high penance for the tribe, and Tahn-té felt glad music in his heart
because of the words of his friend, and when he laid aside his white
robe and left his house, he spoke to no other man, but went silent to
the shrine on the mesa where the Arrow-Stone clan build the signal
fire to the mountain god in the night time. There he said the prayers
which were long prayers, and the people who had noted him as he passed
(nude but for the girdle and the downy breath feathers of the eagle)
halted at their work among the corn and the melon vines and watched
him at the shrine. From the terraced roofs also the women turned from
their weaving, or the shaping of pottery, and looked after the tall
bronze figure girded, and white plumed. They could see his
wide-stretched hands scatter the sacred meal of prayer, and then they
saw only a brown runner on the mesa outlined against the western sky.
He had entered the ceremonial run in which there is no moment of rest
from the mesa of the river to the mountains of the pine.
CHAPTER XI
THE MAID OF DREAMS
Indian prayer is not the placid acceptance of thoughts comforting. The
complete man is both mind and body--and all of him must work when the
gods are called upon for work, and by fasting and exhaustion must the
spirit path be made clear for dreams.
The first day Tahn-té had sat in meditation before the sacred wall of
the stone face, chanting the songs to the clouds and the yellow birds
of the sun color, watching the pictured rock until the lines moved
when his body swayed to the chant, and a living thing seemed before
him--the accumulated faiths of all the devotees in that place since
the god was born!
As the sun went behind the mountain he knew the village herald was
telling the people, and the leaders of Povi-whah would fast that night
and send their thoughts to him. Po-tzah would fast although Po-tzah
was not called upon by his position to do so.
And Po-tzah had said, "Speak for our children to the god."
He seemed to hear Po-tzah's voice, and the words repeat themselves in
the dusk, and--stranger still--another voice back of Po-tzah's! it
also spoke of children--through the chanted prayer he heard
it--baffling yet insistent.
Then he knew it!
He knew it as the first shadow of the visions which the prayer was
bringing:--it was the voice of the Ruler whose office he now held--the
aged man who had once worn the white robe and said--"If she had not
died--her children would be your children!"
The picture of Po-tzah's small brown babe came between him and the
sacred figure on the rock,--a strange thing for the voice to suggest!
A little child--in the dusk--and--sheltering arms around it!
"Oh You!
Oh--Indwelling God!
Come to me!
Grey ghost--white ghost
Why is the false enchantment?
Grey ghost of darkness--
White ghost of high hills
Make way for sacred magic,
Sink far your darkened spells!
O You!
O Indwelling God
Come to me!"
In the dusk a shadow--or it might have been a drooping bough of the
piñon tree--gave outline of a bent head above the outline of the
babe--only a strange trick of carving on the gray stone, and swaying
branches outlining a head--then the shoulders--then an arm about the
babe! To the mind of the mystic it was the visible temptation of a
black enchantment in the very presence of the god!--The strongest the
opposing powers could send to man u
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