Marden Fee

CHAPTER 1 A YOUNG MAN IS ACCUSED, AND THE STORY OF HIS CRIME BEGINS

If from a great height we look down on the scene of my story, we shall see the convex surface of the earth as a small shining disk, one of a myriad spinning coins tossed into space by the unknown minter; and, if our vision serve us, we shall see, moving on that disk, events that are now ages old. So we may begin in however remote a past, and, descending stage by stage, make our own terms with time, the line of our vertical downward flight being the instrument with which, at our pleasure, we may accelerate or retard its motion. Somewhere upon the face of that small world is England; somewhere on England is the South Downland; and in the heart of that country—microcosm of a microcosm—lies the little patch of territory, as yet undefined, that is one day to be known as Marden Fee. It is a small enough space, but the world itself is no bigger in meaning; for meaning is of the heart, and all that the heart knows and suffers can be read, if it can be read at all, as plainly in this hamlet as in the universe at large: more plainly indeed, for the less contains the greater, and here is an horizon that curves comfortably into the eye.

But Marden Fee is not yet in being; we can but see the place where it will one day be; and now, as we watch from our chosen height, Koor the patriarch, stately in his house of wattle and daub, sits in judgement on one of his many sons. A female of his tribe—a young girl of whom, as it happens, Koor himself is both father and grandfather—has been touched, and the patriarchal prerogative flouted, by the golden-bearded young upstart who now, with hate sparkling in his eyes, stands in a circle of spears five strides from his father. Koor is ancient and very hairy. His old body, much of which is naked, bears the scars of a thousand mutilations; his face seems all but featureless, nothing beyond wild beard being visible except a spike of nose, a wrinkled receding forehead, and two small bright frosty eyes. His hands, clasped over his plump belly, are brown and knotted; his fingers are so thin that they extend like claws from his huge knuckles. By the standards of the time he is fabulously old: the number of his moons is indeed beyond the computation of his contemporaries, although, since his birth, at every period of the moon’s pregnancy—for the moon at regular intervals becomes big with a brood of stars—the left ear has been cut from a female wolf-cub, and these powerful tokens, nearly six hundred by now, at this very moment hang about his neck in the form of a necklace: not only a symbol of age and authority but a device of great practical use, since this mutilation of ears enables Koor to hear the secret speech of his enemies. At sight of that monstrous charm every man with treachery in him puts a check even on his thoughts, for the wolf has quick hearing, and these many wolves together, with Koor’s cunning added, may perhaps learn even the thing that is not said. So thinks the lean wizard who stands at the Old One’s side and at intervals, in a chanting voice, testifies to the malice of the gods towards them that suffer a sinner in their midst. A crafty fellow, this wizard. He has told many tall stories in his time, and it is his tragedy, making him the half-demented scarecrow we now see, that he has always ended, even if he did not begin, by believing them himself. He is thinking, now, that Koor is old and losing his power, and that the time is fast coming when he, the wizard, must choose a new master and betray the old. Master? Or tool? He doesn’t know. He only knows that he is mortally afraid of that necklace, of which the tradition is older than himself, who is next in age to Koor. ‘Woe and pestilence on them that suffer a sinner!’ he moans, with mechanical unction. There is safety in that formula, and by making that much noise he will prevent, so he hopes, his thoughts from reaching the Old One. One man alone, in all this assembly, fears not the necklace; and that one is the prisoner, Ogo, who, thinking himself already as good as dead, is emancipated from all other fears. Ogo’s thoughts run free as water in a broad stream, but the bed of this stream has been broken, the mud stirred into motion, by a dropped pebble, the anticipation of death; so that all the man’s memory, except when he reaches a state of trance, is clouded and rippled by conjecture.

Could we pierce beyond that cloud, smooth away those ripples, his memories would be clear to read: how it all began, this dire trouble, many days ago—and ‘many’ to him means ‘more than seven’, for after seven is mystery—many days ago when he and Hawkon, his brother and comrade, met with some few others of the sons of Koor and talked mischief of their father. The conference took place, as was most necessary, deep in the forest and far from the clearing, the broad green valley, where, with Koor’s great squat for centre, the tribe lived. Even so it was a desperate and dangerous affair. But Hawkon today was intoxicated with himself. He had done wonders, he said. He, he alone, had raided a foreign people half a day’s journey distant, and was come back with a tale of having killed many men and captured a woman for wife. The many men killed may have been a fiction: a theory that does not impugn Hawkon’s honesty, for on the journey home, with a bride for company, he had had time to weave fancies, and the capacity to distinguish, in retrospect, between fancy and fact was not general among the sons of Koor, for whom the life of dreams was as valid as waking experience and often in memory confused with it. But whatever men he had slain or not slain, of the woman captured there could be no doubt, for there she was, young and taking, and already following Hawkon’s every gesture with slavish adoration. There she was and you could look at her if you liked, but if you were wise you would not look too long or too appreciatively, lest Hawkon should be tempted to add to his greatness by thrusting his flint-headed spear into your belly. For, though to kill sib was a crime, to punish adultery—even before it was committed—was a virtuous deed. Since Hawkon had touched this woman, and taken her for wife, she was to all others forbidden; only by enforcing such taboos, which encouraged every man to acquire a foreign woman for himself, could Koor be sure of retaining his own monopoly rights over all the women of the family. The law, however, was not of Koor’s invention: he had had it from his father, and there is no doubt—or in Koor’s mind there was no doubt—that it had come in the first place from those mysterious unseen powers who were, as it fortunately chanced, chiefly concerned with maintaining the prestige and power of the Old One. Koor and his wizard frequently communed with these gods, and seldom failed to profit by what they heard. If drought could not be brought to an end by the ritual watering of the sacred stone, then a child must be buried up to its neck in the ground so that by its lamentations, and still more by the small rain of its tears, it should soften the heart of the rain-god. These or similar things had only to be done often enough, and rain would certainly fall, or cease falling, whichever was desired. Thus, by the scientific method of trial and error, for every evil could be found a remedy: one needed only a little patience, a little reverence, and much faith.

Hawkon’s woman was tall and dark and very lusty. She nestled in the crook of her lord’s arm and gazed at him dumbly while he discoursed. ‘She is my woman,’ said Hawkon, not for the first time. ‘She is my woman. She’s a good one, I can tell you. I shall call her name Flint, because there’s fire in her.’

‘A woman!’ sneered Ogo. ‘What name can a woman have?’

Ogo was consumed with jealous hatred of this outlandish big-breasted female who was engaging all his beloved Hawkon’s attention. Moreover his question was pertinent; for Hawkon must have known, as well as anyone else, that a woman, though she might be called this or that, could have no very name of her own, as a man had. Ogo was called Ogo; Hawkon was called Hawkon; but these were not their names. Each had a secret name, known only to himself and to the god who, communicating through the wizard, had given it to him at the first audible sign of puberty, which is the breaking of the voice (for it is then that the man enters the child and speaks in him). To utter one’s true name aloud was the gravest risk one could take; and to whisper it in the ear of one’s friend was the mark of the most absolute love and trust, since it made him a gift of one’s very soul. It was to say, in effect: ‘My life is in your hands; I would not live a moment longer than you wish.’ This extreme of devotion being naturally a rare experience, another name was chosen that should stand for the true name without betraying it. Ogo, for example, was called Ogo; his name was called Urding; but his name itself only he knew, he and his one comrade, Hawkon, to whom he had confided it. So, in declaring that he would call his woman’s name Flint, Hawkon was talking offensive nonsense. If he had said that he would call her so, the remark would have been blameless enough, for clearly even a woman must be called something.

‘It shall be as I say,’ said Hawkon, glaring fiercely at his friend.

The two young men confronted each other with menace in their looks. In years, had they reckoned so, they were still in their teens. Both were fair, with beards of a downy growth. Hawkon was slightly the bigger of the two—a brawny fellow well matched with this woman Flint. But Ogo was as tall as a man needs be, and had a quickness denied to the other; the habitual expression of his face was that of an innocent animal, gravely intent. It was in his mind now that he must kill Hawkon, or himself be killed; and the fact that this idea did not at once issue in action—for in the tumult of his jealousy he had forgotten fear of Koor’s law—marks him off as something of a freak in his community. He hesitated; he faltered; he shrugged his shoulders.

‘So be it,’ he said. A sick and weary grin troubled his features for a moment. ‘She is your woman, and it is you that will call her.’

The others—they numbered six, all told—grunted with excitement, with approval, with disappointment. Or it may be they grunted only from habit. And after a long silence the boy called Stare said suddenly: ‘Koor the Old One quivers. His voice is a frog’s voice.’

‘He is a falling tree,’ said another.

‘Worms are eating him. He lives too long.’

They growled like dogs, these young men. They laughed and uttered contemptuous obscenities about their oppressor. But Hawkon, in the midst of the uproar, struck a note of warning. ‘The Old One has many ears, many eyes, many hands. The Wise One sits at his side and the gods are his gods.’

Ogo was gazing thoughtfully at a young sapling. He said: ‘This is a tree. This is not Koor. But——’ He struggled with an idea beyond expression. He had no language for his thought, and therefore his thought was not complete. He wanted to say: ‘But if it were Koor.’ But ‘if it were’ was a conception too difficult for him. He had then to choose between saying: ‘This tree is a tree’ or ‘This tree is Koor’. Either statement would have been understood and accepted without question, but neither was what he wanted. The first meant nothing; the second meant more than he dared commit himself to. His problem was this: if he identified the tree with Koor, and struck it down, would Koor die, or would he, Ogo, be himself assaulted by Koor’s all too observant gods? But he could not even state the problem. He glanced at the blank faces of his companions, vainly seeking help of them; then shut his mouth with a snap and was silent.

CHAPTER 2 OGO KILLS ONE STRANGER AND BEFRIENDS ANOTHER

By this incident two seeds had been sown, without his knowledge, in Ogo’s mind: doubt of Koor’s invincibility and the resolve to possess a woman. Neither doubt nor resolve was clearly articulated. Nor was Ogo aware of the unrest within him. He was restless, but the restlessness was not accentuated by knowledge of it, as it would have been in a man who had learned the trick of considering himself as a person, a centre of events. Without thought he felt an itch to go adventuring. And without plan, being driven by a motive that made no mark on his consciousness, he went. He went swiftly, unhesitatingly, with a simple directness that intelligence could not have achieved, would indeed have thwarted. He went in quest of a strange people. And he went stooping, with nostrils quivering for scent and ears intent for sound. The pelt of a wolf that he had himself slain covered his loins and one shoulder; and a strip of raw hide, fastened round his middle with a wooden peg, held his one weapon, a short-handled flint axe that had a sharp edge for cutting and cleaving and a blunt round head for use in close fighting.

Darkness came twice, full of devils and danger; and still his obscure purpose held him and mastered his fears. He had passed over many hills and into a forest that was strange to him. He had eaten nothing but a snail or two since he left the squat, and for hours had drunk nothing but a handful of the dew he found trickling, in slow meagre drops, down the trunk of a tree and coaxed with infinite patience into his cupped palm. And he had met nothing human. At the beginning of the third darkness, crouching and shivering, he heard a mighty-snorting and stamping and the sound of breaking branches. The hunted beast, black in the half light, came within a hand’s touch of him and fell, pierced through the eye, no more than a dozen strides away. Its brazen screeching shook the world. The hunters, howling triumphantly, gathered round the carcass. They were foreign men; their garb and their gestures were outlandish; Ogo became rigid. A picture flashed into his mind: the boar plunging into its trap, a concealed pit; the hunters hurling stones upon it; its escape, by some magic; and this, the end of the chase. In and out of his mind the picture flashed, more quickly than the intake of a breath; and left no memory but only the certain knowledge that it had all happened so and so. The fear that had made him shiver now made him still. His mouth watered; his belly ached with desire; his lips curled back, baring the dog-teeth. Raw flesh and warm blood—in fancy he tasted them already. He was appetite. But he was something else as well, and that something else, that spark in the earth of him, saved him from running straight to his death. The hunters, a disorderly rabble, had leapt upon the carcass and were hacking at it with their knives and axes, and tearing at it with their long fingers. Their frenzy infected him with a like frenzy, but he controlled it. The danger he feared was not that of death or torture at the hands of this strange gang: his fancy did not stretch so far. What he feared most was to lose this chance of meat. The light was fast failing; the prancing figures appeared jet-black and their faces featureless; behind them a triangular patch of greenish sky was visible, framed by trees. Ogo was so near these strangers that he could hear their grunts, their panting breath; yet their yells and chattering, their greed and snarling anger, came to him swathed in the soft shadows of dusk and with an effect of remoteness. He was all intentness, every nerve taut with the ecstasy of crisis; yet there was something dreamlike, for him, in this unwonted waiting, this conflict of impulses. He was engaged in a new adventure, the adventure of thought.

The riot of moving figures suddenly resolved itself into a kind of pattern. One taller than his fellows stood on the beast’s head and with his axe made menacing circles in the air. He uttered a strident cry, and disorder was quelled. The beast had been already partially dismembered; and now, with much pushing and pulling, the remaining bulk of him was set in motion. Seeing himself frustrated of food Ogo acted quickly. He began crawling backwards, and continued so, his toes clutching into the soft soil, until he judged it safe to turn and make for a point at which, if he were cunning enough, he might intercept the tail of the procession. It was too much to hope that any scraps would have been left lying on the ground. Having changed direction he ran with all speed, stopped and listened, ran again, stopped and listened. Yes, he had struck their path. The main party was moving away from him, this way; the last stragglers were approaching him, that way. He knew them, the bad hunters, the greedy ones, eager to fill their own bellies at the tribe’s expense. Foreign though they were, he counted, without thought, on their resembling his own people in this. So sure were his senses that he knew within a yard where they would pass him, and seeing a tree whose foliage overhung the spot went up it like a monkey and poised himself expectantly upon a sleek slim branch, clinging with his toes alone. The stranger came nearer, nearer; slowly and with frequent halts and gnawing at the large lump of boar’s flesh he carried in his arms. There were others in his wake, and these others would be either more or less richly laden than he. As to that, Ogo dared spend no time in conjecture. He could smell the meat; he could see the man; he pounced fiercely. The stranger staggered and fell, with Ogo’s fingers clutching his neck, and Ogo’s knees fastened on his back. He uttered one piercing yell of astonishment and then was silent, wriggling and rolling on the ground. He raised himself on one arm, pawed at the ground, once, twice, three times, and was on his feet again. Ogo clung like a cat. In a frenzy the strange man fixing himself backwards, and Ogo, still clinging, fell with him. First his buttocks struck the ground, then his head; all the breath seemed to rush out of him in one gasp. His grip relaxed. But with the first movement of his enemy, the first beginning of a lightning-swift movement, he slid from under him, dodged a blow, felt for and found his axe, and struck. Between aiming and striking—one action—he caught his first glimpse of his enemy’s face, long, large-eyed, hairy, smeared richly with the blood of that interrupted feast. After striking, and seeing the stranger fall loosely and lie still, he took no second glance but at once began searching for the spoil, his ears still intent for any sound of approach. The moon was not yet risen who sends long shafts and broad patches of brightness but makes shadows blacker. The world was dusky and quiet. But for his hunger Ogo would have been mastered by fear of the creeping presences about him; would have longed for light as he now longed for meat. All his being was gathered up and projected into this search, except that while he crawled and peered and touched, his mind filled with craving, his quick animal senses watched over him like sentries. The surrounding forest flowed into him in a series of smells and noises having each its own meaning. When he had found his meat, and set his teeth into it with savage lust, he realized suddenly the significance of his victory, remembering that he had killed a man. He had killed a man, and the demon of that man was now with him in this dark forest. So began another search; for he did not at once recall where the dead body lay. He proceeded with infinite caution, shuddering with fear. It was necessary above all things that he should not come into physical contact with the body: the dead are taboo, and the taboo is contagious. Yet he must find it without delay, and by prayers and offerings placate the demon. His eyes were accustomed to the darkness, and a star or two came to light him, and to shew him a huddled corpse with shattered skull, staring eyes, and blood-besmeared agonized face. The mouth was open. The attitude accused him. Ogo went down on his knees and rocked himself to and fro with wailing lamentation. ‘Noble stranger, forgive me. You were my enemy, but now you are my friend. See how I kneel and acknowledge you my friend. Do not be angry with me. I will do penance; I will serve you; you shall have the best of my meat.’ With the flint of his axe he hacked off a choice morsel and thrust it reverently into the open mouth of the corpse. ‘Let us be enemies no longer, O mighty one.’

The ceremony over, his fears momentarily stilled, he resumed his meal. But presently he caught the faint faraway sound of an approaching footfall. Something was coming: he knew it to be a man, and a lame man. He stopped eating. He glided deep into the undergrowth and lay down with his face towards the approaching stranger, his chest resting on the meat, his axe ready to hand. He had blunted the cruel edge of his hunger and could now, for a while, give himself to watching and waiting.

There drifted into his mind a picture of Hawkon’s woman, the woman called Flint; and the hidden motive of this adventuring began to invade his consciousness. What if the coming one should prove to be no man after all, but a woman. Fire ran in Ogo’s veins. He forgot the lump of boar, cold and clammy, that the upper part of his body was resting on. He forgot his less than half-assuaged hunger; and forgot it not in a new bodily hunger but rather in a new sense of manhood, a proud resolve to go back to his tribe, as Hawkon had done, bringing a fine female for trophy. Until that should be accomplished he hated Hawkon with a hatred made sharper by frustrated love. But the newcomer was not a woman. He was a small, rat-faced fellow, and moved slowly, with evident pain but without sound, dragging a wounded foot that left a red trail in his wake. Ogo let him pass unchallenged and unmolested; and not till the rustle of his going had ceased did he conceive the idea of following him. This wounded man was on his way to a tribal squat. What else? And in that squat there must be women that a cunning one, with Hawkon’s example to inflame him, might snatch and carry away. Following was an easy matter, even in the fast-gathering darkness. Ogo came out of hiding, nosed for scent, found it. He was still encumbered by his booty, which he now carried slung across his shoulders; but its strong smell did not confound him in this new quest. Man’s blood is different. But he had not followed far before he became eager to overtake the stranger, and quickening his pace soon did so, he being so fleet and the stranger hampered by lameness. He came close upon him. The stranger turned at the sound of his step.

‘Not shout,’ urged Ogo in a husky whisper. ‘Not shout.’ He held high his axe, as a sign of power. He lowered it, fastened it again to his belt, and shewed his empty hands: a sign of peace. ‘We are friends,’ said Ogo.

The stranger, with a brief bark of terror, broke into a run; was brought down by his wounded foot; and at once overtaken. He knelt before his captor waiting dumbly for the axe to fall. His voice was silent, but his wide eyes screamed for him.

Ogo shook his head vigorously, thrust his face close to the stranger’s, and grinned reassurance. ‘Not hurt you. We are friends. Ogo wants water.’ They stood face to face, mouthing and grimacing at each other in the dark. Ogo thought his captive a stupid fellow, for he had much ado to make him understand plain speech, and he had a tiresome trick, this foreigner, of repeating Ogo’s words, slowly, as if trying them over, and then, with an insufferable air of correction, offering others in their place. But communication was established. ‘Ogo wants water. You bad foot. Ogo carry you.’ It was agreed. They were indeed friends.

CHAPTER 3 HAWKON SPEAKS WITH HIS WOMAN

There had been a time, within living memory, when the Koor family had subsisted entirely on the hunting and snaring of animals and on casual foraging for edible roots and fruits and fungus; and the hunters were still, and likely to remain, the most powerful and privileged class. Agriculture, however, was now firmly established as something more than a fantastic experiment. The wild grasses had been coaxed and tamed; the two natural terraces at the base of the Great Ox, the nearest of five surrounding hills, had been tilled and sown and cossetted with pious and bloody observances; and the grain, during many seasons, had grown more sleek and abundant. At harvest-time even the great lords of the hunt would join their humbler brethren and for a while wield the flint sickle instead of axe and spear; but in the threshing of the grain they took no part, and its grinding served to keep the women out of mischief. Other processes followed: some of the flour would be stored away in the clay pots which the women had learned to make, and some would be at once made into paste and baked in a covered pit filled with heated stones. At this point the interest of the hunters would revive. Some liked the stuff to be soggy in the middle, with a hard outer crust; others demanded that it should be hard and dry-throughout; but all found it a comfort to the belly, and a good deal better than nothing when lean times came. It was from a woman, captured by Koor himself in his more vigorous days, that they had learned the trick of agriculture; she, coming of a people versed in such things, had been the first among them to hoard grain for sowing, and scatter it over a little patch of ground cleared and tilled by implements of her own making, flint-headed picks and spades of deerhorn. For this she had been accorded as much honour as a woman needs. She became the mother of many sons, and died in giving birth to Hawkon.

Hawkon, squatting at ease in his house, glanced at Flint and thought suddenly of Ogo. He was indulging in one of his rare moments of reflection. For as long as he could remember, the tribe of Koor had lived in this valley, though sometimes in dreams there came to him fragmentary pictures, derived from hearsay, of another squat, another valley, whence they had migrated. But he took small account of dreams, if only because for the most part he forgot them in the moment of waking. He lived not at all in the past; a very little in the future; most of all, in common with his kind, he lived in the present, which is action. Where he differed from most of his fellows was in the degree of his looking forward. They, with rare exceptions, could look no further than from the moment of waking to the moment of sleep, and in practice seldom looked so far. From the kill to the feast, from the feast to the next hunt: this was the usual measure of their fancy. But Hawkon had greatness in him: his imagination, given rein, could range over tomorrow and even into the next day; and, more than that, unknown to him, working secretly, it could carry him forward to a goal that he had never consciously aimed at. He was crafty as well as ambitious, but he was more ambitious than crafty. His ambition was a pure instinct, unhampered by intelligence. Every plan that formed in his mind he instantly translated into action. He was incapable of waiting. And because the obscure force working in him was always timely, never premature, in releasing an idea into his mind, he seldom made a mistake with consequences too big for his energy to override. Although young he was already a leader in the hunt, and he accepted his position without question, almost without noticing it. Even the dogs recognized his quality: the two best of them, swiftest and fiercest, followed him fondly wherever he went and would sleep nowhere but at his side. When his tongue was loosened he would boast indeed: but only as a child boasts, in a naive impersonal fashion, as though the deeds he celebrated were but distantly related to himself. It was so he thought of them, or so would have thought if he had thought of the matter at all. These things, though they had issued from him, were not in any intimate sense his: having happened, they belonged to the external world, the world of action. Of the internal world he was unaware: its events, for him, were of one kind with the rest, or differing only in a degree that caused but momentary doubt and perplexity.

His latest exploit had brought him a higher prestige, and a deeper personal satisfaction, than he had ever known before. The woman Flint was a good woman: of that there could be no doubt. Hasta the Wise had asked and obtained the gods’ approval of her; Koor the Father had uttered the words of sanction; and the tribe had received her with envious admiration. And so the alliance was sealed with the bond of law. Koor, being in his ripe age woefully short-sighted, could not see the woman clearly enough to desire her for himself; moreover he had learnt the wisdom first of allowing, later of encouraging, such youthful enterprise as this of Hawkon’s. For he was obscurely aware that, law or no law, every young man was his potential rival for the possession of the younger women, and the fact that he himself happened to be too feeble to enjoy his rights made him the more implacably jealous of their possible infringement. The young men themselves, all but Hawkon, secretly thought it very poor fun that Flint should be Hawkon’s alone, when there was such a lamentable dearth of women; but they kept their thoughts to themselves, and Hawkon, in his simplicity, never doubted that they were as pleased as he was. But to this there was one obvious exception. Even Hawkon could see that he had made an enemy of Ogo. And though he had not foreseen this hostility, having in fact never given the problem of Ogo a moment’s thought, it did not surprise him in the event. It was Ogo who had helped him to build this magnificent house, and had shared it with him ever since: a broad shallow trench, eight feet by six, paved with pebbles, carpeted with ferns and rushes, and sheltered by a roof of wattle and daub. A wall of piled slabs of stone surmounted the trench and doubled the height of the house, so that a man could stand upright under his own roof-tree; and there were steps leading into it. That two people alone should have had the sole use of a house that could have sheltered ten is eloquent of the respect with which Hawkon was regarded in the tribe. For many moons he and Ogo and the two dogs had shared this house, and now, remembering Ogo, he missed him; and the odd thought flashed into his mind that there would be no more of that queer agreeable talk with which Ogo had been wont to enliven the dark hours until sleep came. He will never sleep here again, thought Hawkon. And so, he went on, painfully thinking it all out, he will sleep somewhere else. His face cleared. His spasm of thinking was over. Ogo dropped back into oblivion.

With Ogo gone, there was room again in his mind for the woman he was staring at. He called her. She came obediently, and knelt, awaiting his pleasure. The only light in the room came from the small square aperture at the top of four rough-hewn steps leading to the outer world, and the woman’s face was in shadow. Hawkon seized her long black hair and pulled her nearer. He stared intently at her face; and she, proudly, with a half-smile, gave back his stare. He was mightily pleased, and obscurely flattered, that she gave no sign of fearing him. From the first moment of her capture, that had delighted him. She had shewn fight but no fear. She had fought tigerishly, rousing anger in him. But the anger, his and hers, had been innocent of malice or hatred: and she had seemed, in the end, as proud in her defeat as he in his victory. They had now been together three days. His joy in her was fresh. The fire that had won her her name burned fiercely.

‘Listen,’ commanded Hawkon.

The half-smile vanished. The eyes widened. She was all listening.

‘This woman,’ said Hawkon—he touched her head, her feet—‘this woman is Hawkon’s woman.’

‘She is Hawkon’s woman,’ answered Flint solemnly: by which she meant: Hawkon is my man.

He grunted satisfaction and made her come nearer still. They began fondling each other. Every day since their coming together, and several times a day, Hawkon had demanded and received this assurance. He was not aware of repeating himself, and Flint was far from weary of his repetitions. She thought him the strongest, bravest, most desirable man in the world; she thought him a very god among men. She also thought him likely to prove a better master than the man he had slain to get her. That one, too, in his time, had been a god; but now he was dead and forgotten. Enough of him. He was not to be compared with this wonderful Hawkon; for Hawkon was alive, and though she did not know clearly what death meant she did know that between being dead and being alive there is all the difference in the world, especially when husbands are in question. Hawkon in her eyes was perfection, but for a certain uncouthness he had in common with his fellow tribesmen. This house he had brought her to was a good house, though she had lived in better. But its condition did not please her. Having by ample smiles and wondering gestures professed the greatest admiration for everything, she lost no time in making everything as different as possible. This was put there and that was put here. The whole place was drastically cleansed, so that Hawkon, returning after a day’s absence, found himself ill at ease in it, and had to be cajoled into accepting the new order. Indeed she could not help making a wry face when she thought of the squalor he had been content with. But she was happy. She was wanted. And it was, after all, part of Hawkon’s perfection that he so evidently needed looking after. This her heart knew, though she was racially too young, by about five thousand years, to have a mind capable of formulating such an idea.

Now, as they lay in each other’s arms drowsy and satisfied, the woman’s mind began receiving images of that former life of hers, in time so recent but in sensation so remote. And presently she became restless in her lord’s embrace. His arms, without his rousing, released her. He rolled over, snorted, and would have plunged more deeply into sleep, but the hands of the woman were busy waking him. She wanted to talk. And she was not unwilling to test her power over him by risking his displeasure. Gentler methods failing, she flung herself upon him with vigorous caresses. He woke suddenly, and started up.

‘Huh?’ His eyes turned to the doorway; his hand sought a weapon.

She soothed him. ‘There is only Flint.’

He looked at her. ‘Flint is my woman,’ he remarked. His voice was truculent, but what it had uttered seemed to give him satisfaction in retrospect. His look, at first startled and angry, became amorous.

The woman laid her head in his lap. ‘It is so,’ she said. And after a moment’s silence added: ‘The sons of Koor are great. Hawkon is great.’

‘Huh? It is so.’

‘There is hunting here, and Hawkon is the great hunter. There is sowing and reaping of grain.’

Hawkon assented.

‘But,’ said Flint, ‘there are no herds.’

‘I don’t know that talk,’ answered Hawkon, after a long and thoughtful silence. ‘That is strange talk.’

Flint made haste to propitiate him. ‘My people are less than your people. There is no hunter like Hawkon. But my people have much meat. My people have herds.’

‘What is that?’ asked Hawkon. The talk was boring him. It was silly talk. But the woman was lusty, round of limb, exciting. He made an effort to listen a while longer.

‘My people have captured beasts alive. Of few they get many. So there is much meat. There is much meat to eat and much milk to drink. So I am fat.’ She stroked her own arm. ‘See? I am fat.’

She was talking over her lord’s head. Her enthusiasm was carrying her away. In another moment he would jump up, kick her aside, and stride out in search of more manly conversation. But meanwhile he humoured her by asking: ‘I don’t know milk. What is milk? That is silly talk.’ He shrugged his shoulders.

She tried to explain milk to him by pantomime, holding an imaginary child at her breast and with one hand squeezing the nipple between its eager gums. ‘See? The young one. He takes milk from his mother.’

Poor Hawkon did not see. ‘What young one?’ He looked suspicious. The woman was playing tricks on him, was she?’ Where is he, this young one?’

‘My people,’ persisted Flint mulishly, ‘take milk from their beasts. And so we are fat people.’

Hawkon looked at his woman no longer. His thoughts were elsewhere. He was rigid with listening. And when she spoke again he put his hand out and closed her mouth. Then, without noise, he went to the doorway and stood watching it. Flint, equally silent, crept to his side, vigilant, submissive, ready for his commands.

‘There is a shadow across the doorway,’ said Hawkon, in a low tone.

She was silent.

‘It is Nigh the Tale-Bearer,’ said Hawkon.

The shadow moved, and was gone.

CHAPTER 4 THE OLD ONE CONFERS WITH HIS MINISTERS

The man called Nigh was the official tale-bearer, or spy, in the tribe of Koor. His function, undisguised, was to gather scandal and bring it to the Old One. He was the eyes and ears of Koor, was indeed sometimes so styled: but the purpose he in practice best served was that of discouraging the lawless. With this fellow moving amongst them, one with them in blood but actively and ostentatiously in the service of the Old One, the sons of Koor were little tempted to transgress. Nigh was a figure-head, a moral force. It was an open secret that the real work of spying was done not by the tale-bearer himself but by others who carried tales to him. Who were these others? Some had died violently: the rest remained anonymous, alive, and active. The squat was full of informers, habitual or casual. It might be you, or you, or you, that betrayed me. It might be my son, my daughter, or the friend of my bosom: for the danger of shielding a sinner, the punishment to be expected of the gods, was well known to everyone. There existed, therefore, a double incentive to righteousness, a double fear: fear of the gods, and fear of Koor’s law, of which Nigh was the slinking symbol. What Nigh heard, Koor would hear within the hour; what Koor heard, Hasta heard. These three constituted in effect the supreme council of state. In Koor was power; in Hasta was wisdom; in Nigh was everlasting watchfulness.

There was need of watching, and need of an executive council, in this primitive but not entirely simple society. Existence was complicated by many rules and prohibitions, some grounded in experience and serving the common weal, others quite arbitrary, queer mental antics incidental to the long protracted agony of a new birth. Slowly, grotesquely, the life in these people was struggling towards a new form. The animal was aspiring towards manhood, the savage to civilisation. Instinct was still lusty; but reason, newly born, was awake and crying. There were so many things that a man must do, and so many more that a man must not do. There was magic and counter-magic; spells, charms, incantations; blessing and cursing. Danger lurked in the most unexpected places, the most ordinary chance. Certain words, and particularly certain names, must not be spoken: euphemism and periphrase were essential constituents of everyday speech, and even the substituted words, if used too often in the same sense, became tainted by the unmentionables they hinted at. After words, the chief source of evil was woman; and, chief among women, those virgins who had reached puberty. If you chanced to tread, unknowingly, on a leaf or twig or blade of grass that since the sun’s rising had been in contact with one having the custom of women upon her, and she a virgin, you became unclean; and nothing would suffice, for your own health and the tribe’s, but that you should be isolated, shunned, and starved, for a period of three days. Married women were another matter: they were their husbands’ responsibility, and the husbands were held to have a monopoly of the evils as well as the blessings associated with them—a provision that would have made the life of the great Koor himself, that much-married man, an enterprise of extraordinary delicacy, and of infinite hazard, had he not, with Hasta in perpetual attendance, protected himself from this, that, and the other, by a hundred and one several and powerful charms. Koor no doubt had his own troubles, but this was not one of them. For the other men of the tribe, his sons and grandsons, women were an ever-present peril. After puberty every man must be at pains, in respect of his father’s wives and daughters, to avoid not only the major sin, but any other physical or social contact. His own mother, no less than his sisters, must become strange to him, to be addressed formally, and from a distance. Both the law and expediency suggested that he should be equally distant with his brothers’ wives, but this law, though generally acknowledged and obeyed, had not for him the magical paralysing power of the more ancient law of sib. Nor were breaches of it, short of adultery, punished with the same severity; since such breaches did not threaten Koor’s privilege, except indirectly.

In such a community Nigh’s office was no sinecure. Another in his place might well have been oppressed with a sense of his responsibilities. But Nigh, gliding back from Hawkon’s house to make his report to the Old One, carried an all but blank mind. He had heard the voices; he had more than surmised the embraces; and these things had for the while excited him, making him grin in a troubled fashion, and roll his eyes, and bite his knuckles. But now, already, it was all forgotten. He was empty. His feet took him where, after a tour of the squat, they always took him. His lean curving shadow strode with him. He was an oldish man, in years not far short of thirty; he stooped; he breathed with the noise of a dog breathing. So much miscellaneous stuff had been poured through this sieve, so much hearsay and history, so much malice, so many bleeding scraps of his people’s life, that of himself there was little left. Nature had made him sickly, and so a prey to fear; habit had made him furtive and cruel; his mental life at its meagre best was an obscene phantasmagoria; what else there was of him eludes our scrutiny, being so small a spark so deeply hidden. Stooping, moving slantwise, and pawing the air in front of him as though he pulled at a rope, he carried his emptiness into the presence of his master the Old One, into that great house, that veritable nest of houses (for were there not three separate rooms of it?) where Koor lived and ruled, served by his woman and protected by Hasta the wise eunuch.

Koor’s squat—they had but one word to express the two things, the individual house and the encampment as a whole—was constructed on the same principle as Hawkon’s and all others in the community; and though much bigger than his, its size, when considered in relation to the number of people it accommodated, was not impressive. Nor was the interior worthy of the majesty it contained. It was unbeautiful and unsavoury, or would have been considered so by such a woman as Flint, that fastidious one. Yet no one outside the household entered it without something of awe and fear: the awe of mysterious and complex origin, the fear more definite and rational The large outer part, in which the Old One received such members of the family as were permitted to visit him, had been the scene of many an orgy, many a conference, many a judgement. Its mud floor was strewn with dead leaves, pebbles, and decaying grass; its walls were hung with animal skins imperfectly cured. At all seasons a fire burned or smouldered in the middle of the floor, the smoke escaping where it could. This was the tribal hearth, a symbol of great power, as well as a practical convenience to Koor, who in his old age suffered greatly from the cold. Near the fire, but not too near, he would sit, the Old One, with Hasta at hand, Nigh within reach, and perhaps one wife, supposedly the most devoted, squatting vigilant and adoring behind him. All other women, on these public occasions, were huddled away out of sight and left to meditate on their own unimportance.

Koor, today, was in a genial mood. His greeting was affable. He stopped munching, tore with his teeth a strip off the piece of meat he was engaged in eating, and handed it to Nigh with a grunt. Nigh received it eagerly, and the next few minutes were spent happily by father and son, while Hasta looked hungrily on. The last morsel swallowed, Koor’s manner changed. He eyed his tale-bearer sharply, and uttered a single interrogative noise that was like a threat.

‘Ugh?’ said Koor.

‘There is nothing,’ answered Nigh. He seemed to plead with the old man. For, as always, he felt guilty and afraid, fancying that on his rounds he must have seen and forgotten a hundred misdemeanours. ‘There is nothing.’

‘What of that one?’ Koor’s eyes shone with inquisitorial lust. ‘He stays?’

Nigh was at a loss. His glance fell. His hands fluttered. ‘That one? Is it . . . is it . . . is it the young Hawkon?’

Raising his eyes fearfully he received a quick cruel blow in the face from his father’s fist. He cowered, screaming with fear. He whimpered, and then was silent.

‘The name must not be spoken,’ remarked Hasta mildly. ‘The name must not be spoken, or that one will hear us. Tell the father, O Nigh, what you have seen and heard of that one.’

‘I saw him and heard him. He is with his woman.’

‘He stays?’ asked Koor again.

‘Yes. He is with his woman.’ He had already forgotten Koor’s castigation of him in recalling this earlier grievance, that Hawkon had a woman. ‘He stays.’

‘He does not go?’ There is nothing like making sure. But Koor’s question meant more than that.

‘If he goes, others go. There are comrades.’

‘If they go,’ said Koor . . . and was silent.

Not even to these intimates dared he say how glad he would be to see the last of these vigorous and enterprising young men. As hunters they were exceedingly valuable, but their existence had begun to trouble him. Their strength and skill were now a kind of insolence in his sight. And not they alone troubled him. He was beset by troubles on every side. The pains of his body, the weariness, the fears. Above all, the fears. He, the father, the Koor, was the greatest and strongest man in the tribe: in battle he could have killed any three of them in as many strokes: this was his creed and the creed of the tribe, and he dared admit in his mind no doubt of it. Moreover the gods were with him, working for his perpetual aggrandizement, protecting his person; and he in return served the gods by enforcing their laws. This was notorious, undeniable. But it did not comfort him. He was afraid. Every day he felt feebler in spirit; every day dreaded the least challenge to his authority; every day, to hide his fears from the sight of men, grew more greedy and testy and cruel. I am the Koor. They can’t touch me. They fear me. I am sacred. I am strong. I am the mighty one in battle, the great hunter, the lord of my people. All these women, they are mine. This house is the biggest house. When I say kill, the man is already dead. They daren’t touch me: I have good magic: the gods are my gods. Hasta says so, Hasta the wise one. . . . All day long, and sometimes half the night, his mind muttered these things; and at times his lips moved, too, without his knowing it. Mingled with his fears, fears none the less fearful for being shapeless, came fragmentary pictures of a vanished glory; but these, for the most part, he glanced at without recognition. They came and went quickly. Fear never went, except when driven away by appetite; and even then never went far. Fear watched for his waking, grinned him good day, and followed at his elbow like a sponging friend.

Koor shot glances this way and that: at Hasta the wise one, at Nigh the tale-bearer. They were afraid of him, and in their fear was solace and reassurance. His glance rested at last on Nigh, and became an angry stare. ‘Is there any more to tell?’ His tone was peremptory.

‘There is nothing,’ said Nigh.

‘That one is a good hunter, eh?’

Nigh grunted affirmatively.

‘Let him be careful what he’s up to,’ said Koor, with a fierce grin. ‘I am Koor.’

CHAPTER 5 BIKKOO, THE FRIEND OF OGO, WORKS A STRANGE MAGIC

Ogo, with the little rat-faced stranger in his arms, and a large lump of boar’s flesh slung across his back, stamped through the dark forest, this way, that way, wherever the stranger directed. He had perforce to stamp, his legs being weak with much travelling, and his load heavy. The noise made by his progress inspired him with fear, and with a kind of guilt, for it did violence both to his instinct and to his hunter’s habit. It seemed to him that the whole world of men must now be aware of his movements; from every side, in his fancy, suspicious eyes watched him. But all fears, though active, were subdued by his master-passion: he must have water. The taste of meat had sharpened his thirst; his throat was dry and burning; his head began sagging forward, with mouth open and hanging tongue. Sometimes he tottered for a step or two, and nearly fell; and then the man in his arms would gasp and clutch at him desperately. Ogo said nothing. He went on and on. Great bats zigzagged around him. He trod on darkness, a darkness that crackled or swished or squelched, a lurching billowy darkness, now up, now down. Bushes loomed suddenly in his path; roots clutched his feet; leafy boughs struck him with cold hands; and once a gigantic bird rose up screaming before him and beat its way into the sky with a sound like creaking timber. An evil spirit, a dire omen; but Ogo still went on. His thirst pressed forward, dragging the tired feet after it, the suffering mind, the burdened body. The pace became slower, and between one footfall and the next the sibilant quietude of the forest sang in his ears, and he could hear, with his mind’s eye could see, against this background of listening silence, the stealthy rustle of small things escaping his menace. Moonlight, a pale pervasive ghost, came trickling in, creating a world of misty sculpture and clear-cut shadows. The stranger, at first and for a long while silent, now chattered without ceasing in his small rusty voice. It was this way, this way. There was water, good water, and they would soon reach it and drink of it and feast together. Ogo was good. They were friends and would share the meat and drink. Ogo was good and Bikkoo was good. Very good both, and good friends. So ran the stranger’s talk: he was fast losing blood, and the grip of his fingers had weakened. At every second step Ogo felt a drop of liquid warmth spatter his own naked thigh and begin trickling down him. But he thought still of nothing but water. He did not waste himself in wondering how long the agony must continue. He was beyond hope and beyond despair. His mind was small and dim. Thirst filled him and he went dumbly on.

At last, and as it seemed abruptly, he came upon a dark river flowing through the forest with a gentle garrulousness. He stared in wonder; it was unexpected, almost incredible, being so much broader than any stream he had seen before. It was too broad for leaping, and too deep, he surmised, for wading. He laid his burden down in the lush grass of the river bank, and, stooping to the water with one hand clutching deep into the turf for support, he filled himself and slaked his fire. Everything became suddenly dark in his sight and swayed giddily about him. His eyes bulged; his body seemed ready to burst; there was thunder in his ears. He lay on his back in the grass, rolled over, writhed into a squatting posture, and vomited violently. After that he felt better and was ready for a meal. He glanced round for Bikkoo, who lay, a few strides distant, quite still and apparently sleeping. On his side Bikkoo lay, curled up, knees to chin; one arm, with open hand and wide-spread fingers, stiffly extended on the ground. He had not moved from the spot where Ogo had placed him. Ogo remembered the meat, which was still fastened across his back. He unslung it and fell to eating, and the night air soon began to seem less cold to him, though he would none the less have been glad of the shelter and the company that was now given to a strange woman, and gladder still, as the bright intentness of his eyes confessed when he thought of her, to be to that woman what Hawkon was, to be her lord and her mate, with Hawkon ousted and ashamed; but his musing mind did not dwell long on that past, which seemed so remote and unreal, for there were ten thousand things in the immediate world pressing for attention, the shadows and the silver, the trees, the grass, the river, the rustling night, the creeping presences, and the sharp eyes of the sky. These things, pouring on to his body, streaming in through ears and eyes and mouth and nostrils, made in his mind a pattern, which, changing as he stared, presently grew rich in promise of comfort; for the earth he lay on became a woman, vastly proportioned, between whose mountainous breasts he found shelter and satisfaction. He felt upon him the glow of her great gentle eyes, saw the smile of her tenderness filling the sky, until darkness wrapped him round, warm soft swaddling protective darkness, in which he lay, curled up and at peace, soothed by the rhythm of her heart, which was the heart of the world.

But something moved into the stillness and instantly the forest crowded back. Bikkoo had raised himself on one elbow and was staring at Ogo. His face was shadowed, but there was no doubt of his staring. Ogo, without moving, watched him. What next? Slowly, with pain, Bikkoo began dragging himself across the grass. Ogo stood up.

‘Huh?’

‘Very good friends,’ said Bikkoo.

Ogo grunted thoughtfully. He was rested, and but that it was still night he was satisfied. He had taken meat and drink, and there was more to take when he wanted it. The hidden purpose of his first setting out was forgotten. Now and again it had flashed into consciousness, but for the most part it did its work in secret. At the moment he had no intentions of any kind. He was aware of no desires. Had he been alone he would have stayed where he was, idle, with his larder at hand, until roused from this comfortable lethargy by some want or whim. Bikkoo’s presence prevented that. Bikkoo was a stranger and a problem. With Bikkoo he was instinctively watchful and alert: not with the alertness of hostility, for he judged the man to be helpless against him, but in a spirit of candid curiosity. Bikkoo was a stranger, different from the men Ogo knew. He looked different and was different: everything about him was odd and exciting. Instead of a wolf’s pelt he wore round his middle a broad band of plaited grasses. Now would you believe it? His eyes, too, were somehow different from those of the Koor family; his nose was sharper; his brow broader. And, most astonishing of all, he had lived among alien people under an alien law, had never been inside the Koor squat. Small wonder that Ogo stared, noting with radiant excitement and satisfaction every detail of his queerness. Bikkoo, with equal frankness, stared back. It was an exhilarating experience for both of them. They grinned at each other with wide wondering grins. The tension of the night’s terror was relieved. Ogo offered a piece of the meat, and Bikkoo received it eagerly, set his teeth into it, and laughed his appreciation. In the act of eating he was funnier and more different than ever. Ogo was delighted with him.

After eating together they became a little talkative, finding that they possessed more words in common than had at first appeared, and these words went limping along supported on the crutches of a highly expressive and intelligible sign-language. Was Bikkoo going back to his tribe? He was not. Where was Bikkoo’s tribe? It was somewhere: it was over there or over there. Was it a big tribe, and had they plenty of women? What kind of squats did they live in? Were the devils of the sky pleased with them? . . . There seemed no end to Ogo’s inquisitiveness, once the subject was started. He was ready to talk of his own people, and so would have been puzzled by Bikkoo’s reticence had he noticed it; but he did not notice it, his real interest being in Bikkoo himself, not in Bikkoo’s unseen relations. To have inferred the existence of a Bikkoo tribe at all was a powerful feat, the leap of an exceptionally active mind: to dwell long on the idea, to give it body and detail, would have carried Ogo unnaturally far from the here and now, the world of immediate wants and satisfactions, in which he was most at home. But he asked one other question. ‘Men hunting. Kill big beast. You belong to them?’ He patted the meat that lay between them on the grass. For it was, after all, not Bikkoo alone, but Bikkoo in conjunction with those earlier events, the hunt and the kill, that had suggested to Ogo the existence of a foreign tribe and set his fancy groping for a picture of its way of life. Or had these things only given shape to a nebula that had been already in his mind; and was there, among his small crowding thoughts, one thought that without his knowledge took command of the others, pushing them this way and that, persuading, cajoling, grouping and drilling them, and urging them forward, with itself borne high in their midst, till the brain should no longer be able to endure their organised pressure but must release them, one host single in aim, back into the heart whence they had come as a crazy rabble, back into the blood, the glands, the nerves, the sinews, the whole physical man, and so into action? His question about the women of Bikkoo’s tribe had been but one of many, and put without any conscious ulterior motive; nor had he listened with anxiety for the answer. As to those hunting men, Bikkoo shook his head and his face was empty of guile. He had evidently seen and heard nothing of the hunt. ‘My people bad people,’ he confided. ‘Not go back. They kill me.’ He had run away. He was outcast. Ogo, liking him, both as an amusing novelty and because they had each rendered the other a service, believed without question that the tribe, not Bikkoo himself, was to blame for his having run away, though this idea, that in any conflict between tribe and individual the tribe as a whole could be ‘bad’ and the individual ‘good,’ was the most astonishing heresy that had ever been presented to him. To Ogo, ‘good’ was what the law of Koor ordained. Sometimes it happened to be also what he himself wanted, but in general he was inclined towards being ‘bad.’ Fear of Koor and the terrible gods of Koor checked his unlawful inclinations, however, often before he became aware of them: his mind, as well as his body, was in thrall. Had it occurred to him that Bikkoo, being outcast, was perhaps taboo, a source of infinite danger, he would have been crazy with fear, would have gone through his whole small repertory of self-protective magic and exhausted himself in prayers of propitiation and in the performance of cleansing ritual. But no such doubts entered his mind. He was happy and friendly and well fed. His only conscious wish was that the night would quickly pass. In the intervals of chattering with Bikkoo he remembered the innumerable demons that infest darkness. Their shapes loomed hideous in his mind’s eye. He shuddered, recalling the face of the man he had killed. He wanted to mention this matter to his companion, wanted to halve his fears by sharing them; but he knew better than to attempt that, for to talk of demons in their own neighbourhood is to increase their malignity and power. So whenever a pang assailed him he did no more than stretch out his hand, and touch Bikkoo, and grin wistfully. And Bikkoo, seeming glad of these shy contacts, would grin back and say: ‘Very good friends, huh?’ He seemed to have quite forgotten his injured leg, but was reminded of it sharply enough when he tried to get up from the ground. Bikkoo in pain was an immensely funny sight to Ogo. When he fell moaning to the ground Ogo laughed with pleasure in the diverting sight. It was the best joke in the world. But he came to his help none the less, hoisting him up carefully, and lending him a shoulder to lean on. In this he rendered service to himself as well as to Bikkoo, for he was anxious not to be left alone and feared that this strange little man, an inscrutable creature, might take it into his head to run off by himself. After repeated trial and failure Bikkoo found himself able to walk, with Ogo’s help: and together they moved away, keeping close to the river. Ogo was excited and curious. Where was he being led? ‘Bikkoo’s boat,’ answered Bikkoo again and again: an answer that Ogo could make nothing of, for he had never heard that word before; but presently they came upon the boat itself, and very cunningly hidden it was, afloat in a tiny natural kink in the river’s serpentine body, and hidden from sight by a low drooping tree, a thick canopy, whose nether leaves, trailing the water, were tugged gently and without avail by the tide. Ogo was at some pains to see the boat, and when he saw it he did not understand. He saw a long dark shape, a log of which a substantial part had been hacked away, scooped out, by untold labour with an axe. What did it mean? He did not understand, but he was so near understanding that his eyes sparkled anew with excitement. ‘Bikkoo’s boat,’ said Bikkoo again, and abandoning the support of Ogo’s shoulder he seized an overhanging branch, swung lightly for a moment, and dropped, Ogo uttered little wondering cries, and stared at the miracle, half-afraid. Bikkoo sat in the boat; the boat still lay on the surface of the water. It was clearly magic. ‘Come,’ said Bikkoo. ‘Ogo come too. Bring meat. Very good friends.’ Ogo, clutching the meat to his breast, stared down at the man in the boat. In this little bay the river’s flux was hardly perceptible: there was only a gentle lap-lapping against the boat’s sides. The overhanging tree cast a dark shadow, in which the boat and Bikkoo made a shadow darker still; but beyond, where Ogo’s glance travelled through gaps in the boughs, flakes of moonlight lay on the lithe water. It was magic. It was wizardry. Was it a magic he could learn, or would he invite the curse of the unseen if he went further with this wizard? This way and that he looked, drawn and repelled by the adventure that offered itself. But his indecision lasted no more than an instant, and now he was in the boat, having ventured the perilous leap, and he uttered a squeal to find it move, as though alive, under the impact. Bikkoo with a big bladed stick pushing off from the bank, Ogo swayed where he stood, tumbled backwards into the bottom of the boat, and shut his eyes in terror. He felt wet leaves lingeringly stroke his face, as the boat from its dark bower moved into mid-stream.

CHAPTER 6 THE FEASTING, THE DREAM OF STARE, AND THE RETURN OF A GREAT HUNTER

Dusk was fast gathering, and the tongues of flame that rose from the great open space in front of the Old One’s squat, where the kill was roasting, sent tall shadows dancing against the sky. Shadows scarcely less tall, and even more actively fantastic, sketched and parodied the movements of the expectant crowd. Whenever the Koor hunters returned with their spoil there was rejoicing and chattering excitement throughout the squat. It was then that the domestic folk, the craftsmen and the scavengers, the tillers and delvers, the old and the lazy, felt most kindly towards these lordly and agile young men. Nor is it to be supposed that Koor himself, in his greatness, sat aloof and unmoved on such an occasion, waiting royally for his meal to be prepared and brought to him. On the contrary he would be there with the others, as soon as the word went round. He would be there, and conspicuously there, demanding and receiving all the choicest bits for himself. He would be there, with Nigh at his heel and Hasta at his elbow, and with his women flocking round him but careful, since they valued their lives, not to come between him and the food. The awful presence of these three was on the whole a good and salutary thing for the tribe; for, though it sharpened appetite at the expense of geniality, it also put a check on the worst excesses of greed and restricted to the dimensions of riot what might well have become a massacre. As soon as Koor, and after him Hasta and Nigh, had eaten as much as they could hold, and secured for future consumption as much as they could conceivably need until the next kill, they were ready enough to see justice done. After them would come the hunters themselves, the strong ones, who had therefore good reason, as well as proved ability, to protect the privilege and enforce the authority of the great three. Finally all who remained unfed were permitted to crowd round the communal roast and take what they could get, with such interference in the interests of equity as their masters had time or inclination for. These others included all women and children and all merely manual workers. The feasts varied in size and quality. Roast bear was good; red deer was better; boar was better still; and wolf or beaver was better than nothing. Best of all by far, best and biggest, was the great ox. The hunting of the great ox was a tremendous and glorious affair, and the roasting of him an intoxicating spectacle, one that provoked singing, dancing, frantic laughter, playful fighting, and a general wantonness of demeanour. Nor were the eyes alone delighted. The nose, with an even greater rapture, received the good news. The mouth watered. The belly grew wistful, remembering past joys. It was high festival indeed. In the great ox, moreover, there was spiritual as well as bodily nourishment; for he was strong and fierce, a mighty warrior in defence of his cows, as was the cow in defence of her calves; so that in eating him you were eating of this strength and this fierceness and making them your own. By the same token the flesh of a victorious rutting stag was doubly desirable, and that of his vanquished rival fit only for female consumption. Wolves were craven as well as cruel and treacherous, and so were resorted to only in times of famine. Frogs and newts and freshwater fishes gave of their slippery elusiveness; birds of their quick hearing and swift flight. The snake was sacred and taboo.

But tonight there is nothing dubious about the feast, for the great ox is here, plain to see and to smell. Propped up on two forked stakes a few feet above the blazing logs, and dripping, alas, some of the best of his fat substance into the fire, he presents such a joyous spectacle that it is difficult to believe that he himself takes less pleasure in it than we do. The eyes of Koor shine with a rapture of anticipation. He feels wonderfully well and strong, and as young as the youngest of his grandchildren. And soon the feast is ready and he falls to, quite undeterred by the hungry and envious watchfulness of his family. He and his two counsellors stuff their skins tight, and the sign is given that the hunters may now approach. In a flash they are at work, and with them is a woman. Horror of horrors! She is seized and flung back. At the moment we have other things to do than punish women, or it would go hard with her. But what is this? She is back again, that woman. We are shocked. We cannot believe our eyes. Such devastating insolence is without precedent. We howl our execration and rush at her with our knives and axes waving.

‘Wahoooo!’ cried Flint. ‘I am Hawkon’s woman.’

The young men hesitated. The name of Hawkon held them in check. They growled, but they did not strike.

‘I take meat for my lord Hawkon,’ announced Flint, with superb arrogance. But she watched the men shrewdly, and was careful to take nothing. She waited to be served. In this her instinct chose wisely, for she could not have touched the ox again with impunity.

The elders gathered round. There was a hasty and angry conference.

‘Where is Hawkon himself?’ asked the hunters. And Koor, with gall in his heart, echoed the question.

‘He is still away,’ said Flint. ‘He is doing great deeds.’

Koor turned to the young men. ‘Did he go with you, this Hawkon?’

‘He came hunting with us. He killed with us. Then he left us.’

‘It is often so,’ added another.

‘He is a great hunter,’ said Stare, the youngest among them.

These were his friends and followers. They were united in their testimony.

‘It may be,’ said Hasta tentatively, ‘that he has been bedevilled. I will consult the gods.’

‘Do so,’ ordered Koor.

‘Meanwhile,’ said Stare, ‘we will give the woman what is his by right.’ Without waiting for an answer he hacked a great slice from the animal and put it into Flint’s hand. She had bewitched him. The nearness of her made him mad.

Koor, with a scream, rushed upon the young man, struck at him wildly, and failing of his aim fell to the ground. The young men laughed. Hasta and Nigh were at the Old One’s side. He was on his feet again in an instant. He glared about him, and the laughter died away. One of his woman approached with obsequious love. He grinned at her, snarled, and felled her with a blow. Her outcry pleased him, restored him to good humour. He laughed, and everyone laughed with him, except Flint, who had vanished with her spoil, and the young men, who, resuming their meal, had already forgotten the untimely interruption. Stare alone kept it in mind for a while, but soon, in the pleasure of eating, he too forgot. The vehemence of his appetite subsiding, he squatted down on the ground within the circle of warmth radiating from the great fire, and occupied himself in gnawing at the few tough fragments of bone and gristle that remained to him of his share in the feast. He hardly noticed the noisy departure of his comrades and the chattering arrival at the roast of the lower classes. He sat and gazed at the red embers. He was fed and drowsy and comfortable, and deaf and blind to the riot around him, for in the fire he saw a forest, and in the forest a man hunting. Stare’s eyes became dreamily intent. The man in the forest crouched and crawled, followed by his two dogs. They had wind of the quarry, but the scent was elusive. Stare’s heart thumped violently: he felt the man threatened by some as yet unseen danger, and with that thought a wild beast leaped out of the surrounding shadows, a fantastic wild beast all teeth and talons and blazing eyes. The dogs ran away howling. The man was torn to pieces and eaten. Stare moaned softly, and shifted on his haunches, trying to shake himself free of the dream. He remembered Flint, how she had stood within a hand’s touch of him, her eyes bright, her face dusky in shadow, the round lithe contours of her body burnished and gleaming in the firelight. His mouth widened and his lips curled back, uncovering the teeth. But comfort and warmth drew him back into drowsiness. His eyes were glazing with the glow of the fire. And now he found himself stealing furtively towards the squat of his comrade Hawkon. In the doorway he hesitated, seeing a large black snake coiled up, and apparently asleep, on the top step. At once the snake awoke, and began uncoiling itself. It was a beautiful creature, sleek and shining; and Stare felt a kind of tenderness gush in his heart as he watched it. Tenderness, and reverence as well; for all beauty and all power were expressed in that lithe shape. Yet he raised his axe to strike, victim of conflicting terrors. In some hidden way he felt that the snake was dangerous, so that he dared not let it live; yet to kill it would be a terrible thing, bringing a curse upon him. In a frenzy he struck at it, battered it to death, reduced it to a shapeless nauseating mass, and woke with a shriek.

He thought no more of Flint, who at that moment stepped out of her squat, for the hundredth time that evening, to watch for the return of her lord. And now she was rewarded. He came at last, heralded by the noise of baying, and driving before him, with shouts and menacing antics, the source of the noise, a lusty hind. The animal’s front legs were hobbled together, so that she moved with difficulty and could not run at all. She was all but exhausted with the daylong struggle to escape; her baying, at first ferocious and continuous, was now plaintive and infrequent. She was weary and suffering and insulted; her udder was bursting with milk, and the fawn that ran at her side could not reach the nipples while Hawkon relentlessly urged her on. Hawkon was too triumphant to feel his tiredness, though it was indeed the hardest day’s work he had ever done. The capture of Flint had been child’s play compared with this capture. He had first seen the animal early that morning: one of a herd which he had stalked with infinite skill and cunning, and had had leisure to watch. Most of the herd were placidly browsing, but one or two of the mothers among them were giving suck to their young, and at sight of that the queerest notion, quite unforeseen, flashed into Hawkon’s head. He could not for the life of him have told where it came from. And of that idea, instantly translated into action, this triumphant homecoming was the sequel. The hind could not learn submission, any more than her fawn could learn the wisdom of leaving its mother. The chase, the struggle, the capture and recapture, the binding and dragging and goading—it had been a conflict of epic dimensions. But Hawkon was as patient as nature. The whole of him was in his task, and he had not noticed the passing of time. And now he was back, with the dogs dragging themselves limply at his heels.

At sight of him and his capture Flint uttered a cry of wonder. He grunted and went into his squat, ignoring her. He was suddenly hungry. The hind, driven no longer, sank to the ground; the fawn began vigorously sucking. Flint, approaching her boldly, but careful to keep beyond reach of her jaws, stroked her steaming flanks. The hind turned her great violet eyes towards the woman, and it may be that the relief she felt, the comfort of having the milk drawn from her distended udder, became thereupon associated with the presence of Flint, who from that moment was no stranger to her. And presently Hawkon came out. He had found his meat and eaten of it, and only a sudden fear lest the hind should escape prevented his immediately sinking into sleep. Seeing Flint he was surprised. He had forgotten her. He became pleased with her and proud of his exploit.

‘Hawkon is a great hunter,’ said Flint.

Hawkon waxed talkative and began to tell her how it had all happened. ‘And now,’ he finished,’ we shall have milk.’ He drove the fawn away and tried to put himself in its place, receiving a kick in the face for his pains. He returned the kick with extreme violence. Flint soothed him.

‘Tomorrow,’ she assured him, ‘we shall take milk from this beast.’

‘And that one,’ said he, pointing to the fawn, ‘I shall eat. You shall have some too, because you are my woman.’ Then he told her the tale all over again. ‘We shall have milk,’ he pointed out, recalling attention to his idea. ‘I am clever and strong.’

Flint was all admiration. ‘You are great and very clever,’ she said. And paused a long while before adding: ‘We must tie the beast, lest it escape us in the night.’ She did not tell him what was also in her mind: that the fawn must not be killed tomorrow.

The talk turned on ways and means.

CHAPTER 7 OF A WOMAN AND A WEDDING, AND HOW OGO DROPPED HIS AXE

Bikkoo paddled his boat downstream, and Ogo sat marvelling. So easy was their motion, so intimate their conjunction with the river, that it seemed sometimes as if they were at rest, with the forest on both sides flowing past them. At other times the winding river was a snake on whose back they rode into the unknown. The demons of the forest were now, thought Ogo, held in check; and it comforted him to be moving away from the one among them that he most feared, that of his slain enemy, whose face and staring eyes were more livid and vivid in retrospect than he had seen them in fact, and from whose mouth still protruded his peace-offering. Was the demon of the dead man placated? Was the offering accepted? Had the prayers availed? Lacking a sign, he could not answer these terrifying questions; and there was nothing for it but to yield himself humbly into the river’s keeping, and with new prayers invoke the spirit of the river, that it might hide and protect him from the encompassing darkness. ‘You are a kind river,’ he said. So he believed, and was resolved to believe. ‘You are kind. You are mighty. You are very big. You will keep Ogo safe and not let them hurt him. I am Ogo and I will be your man. You are kind. You are big. I will be good and speak well of you wherever I go.’ The spirit of the river made no audible response, but Ogo felt fortified by his prayers, and the fears of the night dwindled away. The wash of the cleft water soothed him, and the soft sheen pouring from the sky coloured his thoughts, till, with tiredness aiding, they became dreams.

Morning came like an answer to his prayers, bringing him sight of a new world and a world of new wonder, the sea. He saw it in the near distance; at first, as his gaze followed the direction of Bikkoo’s pointing finger, not to be distinguished from the red sky. He could not believe it to be water, but when, both having abandoned the boat, his companion led him to a high ground from which a vast horizon was visible, disbelief could not restrain his chattering excitement. Of fear now he knew nothing, for the pleasure that filled him was the pleasure of reassurance. The sky was kind; the forest at his back was friendly; and this new monster, the sea, was a good monster, quiet and well disposed to him. All this he believed to be sober truth. For him the world was personal: it was indeed a multitude of persons, who stood always in a perfectly definite relation to himself. Sometimes they were angry with him. The wind would screech, the trees would shake in their wrath, and the sky become black with fury; and it was this malice in the storm, rather than its destructiveness, that made storms terrible. Sometimes the sky was sulky and out of humour, sometimes playful, sometimes sleepily content and forgetful of him; for he had as many moods, this changing sky, as any other god or man. But now, visibly and obviously, he was smiling; the sleek sea was smiling too; small freshets of wind hurried to and fro over the ground smelling the dewy fragrance of the grass; and the forest (when Ogo looked back at it) trembled with pleasure in its own greenness. Ogo grinned greeting at everything he saw, feeling himself to be surrounded by a vast friendliness. Bikkoo seemed to share his pleasure, though not his surprise. Ogo’s surprise, indeed, was largely the cause of Bikkoo’s high spirits. The little man pointed proudly to the sea, as though he had made it himself. As he did so, Ogo uttered a little squeal and turned to run. Three strange black-bearded faces were peering at him over the cliff’s edge; three pairs of hands clawed the turf for support. Seeing themselves seen the strangers howled ferociously, and the row of faces lengthened. Hairy bodies and agile limbs appeared, with spears attached to them, and were lost to sight in the grass. The strange faces, all alike, came crawling quickly across the intervening ground. Ogo was already racing back towards the forest, dragging Bikkoo by the hand. But before they had gone many paces his companion’s grip tightened and tugged at him, and Ogo was pulled to a standstill to see the little man stagger backwards, with upflung arms, impaling himself upon a spear that had transfixed him in the small of the back. Ogo, after one glance at the writhing body, tore the spear out, and turned desperately towards the enemy. He hurled the spear at the nearest face. It entered the open exultant mouth and the man fell choking. Bikkoo writhed no longer, but lay, a loose heap, in his own blood. Ogo ran on alone, making for the boat.

It was a homing instinct that took him to the boat, for the boat was associated in his mind with safety and peace and quiet dreams. But, as he remembered only just in time, it was also associated with Bikkoo. Therefore to enter it, to touch it, would be the craziest folly. Bikkoo was dead: a friend had become a demon, and hostile. For the dead are lonely and resentful. They lust after the lost delight of living, and seek, in envy of our felicity, to draw us after them into the everlasting night. They cannot forgive us for being alive when they are dead. They hold us, indeed, guilty of their death, and we ourselves, though it be against all reason, feel twinges of doubt and remorse. We did not contrive it, but could we not perhaps have prevented it, and aren’t we in some obscure fashion profiting by it? Ogo was innocent enough. Even in the terror of being hunted he could grieve that his friend was lost to him. But his conscience was guilty: the belief was deep-rooted that the dead had a grudge against him, and against all living souls. So Bikkoo’s boat, by means of which he could perhaps have put the river between himself and his pursuers, must not be touched. But, though they were close at his heels, he was already hidden by trees from even the foremost of his enemies; and now with new hope he gave himself to the task of running. He ran on and on: at first with the mounting speed of frenzy, but later, his fears subsiding, at a swift unvarying pace. Running became a habit, effortless and unnoticed; and morning had already half spent itself before he lay down to rest. He was deep in the forest. His surroundings were strange to him. There was no sound of following feet.

Noon came and passed. Dusk fell. With darkness all his old terrors came creeping upon him. That he had eaten nothing since daybreak, the meat having been abandoned with the boat, was no great matter; for it often happened that he went for days without food and suffered no harm. By now he had forgotten his pursuers, remembering only the wild beasts of the forest, and the still wilder demons. He remembered Bikkoo and began chattering prayers at him. ‘Very good friends, Bikkoo. Don’t be angry with me. Don’t hate me. Don’t follow me. Go away. Very good friends.’ He hoped that Bikkoo might be cajoled into good humour by this repetition of his own favourite phrase. For a long while he dared not abandon his body to sleep, lest, while it lay empty, the soul being away on its wanderings, it should be entered and possessed by the homeless spirit of the dead man; for there is no end to the malice and cunning of demons. But at length for very weariness he crawled into the deep obscurity of the undergrowth and made himself a nest for the night. By great good luck he had come upon a stream, whose voice, cool and clear like the voice of a small warbling bird, reached him still where he lay curled up on a bed of bracken. He slept lightly, easily, with ears awake, and rising at the first beginning of day resumed his eager aimless journeying. He drank deep of the stream and felt fresh and strong, but hunger sent him searching for food until he found a nest of mice. That was good eating indeed, and a handful of fungus went well with it. He made a good meal.

And now a kind of panic possessed him, driving him on and on: not the panic of being pursued by murderous faces, but a driving desire for humankind. He began to hope again for the sight and company of a strange people. At noon that day he saw a woman, idle and listless, sauntering inadvertently towards him. Not till he was within a few strides of her did she notice his step and look up. Taken unawares she gave one glance, and ran. She had uttered no word or cry. Fear was quick in her. She was small and nimble; her grace and fleetness made his pulse leap joyfully. The pursuit was brief and silent. He caught her by the shoulder, and she turned and flung herself at him. Her nails tore at his face, and her teeth drew blood from his fingers, but the trivial pain of these injuries did not for an instant distract him from his purpose. Soon she was powerless in his grasp, her bosom heaving, her nostrils dilated. To feel the life that moved in her made him mad. He bore her to the ground. Her resistance was at an end. The terror that spoke in her eyes edged his desire, but when he had had his will of her another and a strange feeling woke in his heart. She was shaking with sobs, and her sobs hurt him. He knelt at her side and gazed down with puzzled eyes, unaware that it was not she, but the mystery of his own compassion, that puzzled him. He was all bewilderment, his first proud sense of triumph and fulfilment having dwindled away. This girl by some magic was putting her pain into him. He wanted to comfort her, but he did not know that he wanted it. His tenderness was dumb: he could only stare stupidly, and wait till her grief should have spent itself. From time to time he grunted interrogatively. ‘Ugh? Ugh?’ His questions availed nothing, and at last, unable to bear his pity any longer, he lifted his hand to strike her. She, with a little moan, flung out her own hand to meet it. Her clinging fingers constrained him downwards till his face lay close to her own; her arms came round his neck. She lay moaning, her terror unsubdued. And now Ogo, in sympathy, moaned with her. But this queer terror of hers disconcerted him, so that he was very ready to be angry again. Its persistence thwarted him of a triumph more subtle than that of physical possession, a triumph whose nature he could not even dimly conceive, though he felt the lack of it: he was unaware that until he could know himself pleasing to this woman of whom he had had pleasure, his heart must remain unsatisfied of its deepest desire. But in time she became quieter, and finally she was silent and still. He spoke to her; grinned; searched her face for an answer.

‘We are sib,’ she said. Her voice was harsh with despair.

He leaped to his feet. He stared down at her with fear and sudden loathing. ‘It is not.’

‘It is so,’ she answered coldly. ‘We are sib.’

He beat his breast, raving aloud. ‘Who are you?’

‘I am called Wooma. I am the daughter of the daughter of Koor. And you are a son of Koor.’

‘I don’t know you.’ Ogo, fiercely calm again, fought against the fact and the curse that confronted him. ‘I’ve never seen you.’

‘I have seen you, but I have kept my face to the ground as a woman must.’

‘It is not,’ said Ogo. ‘You are not a daughter of Koor. You are a strange woman, and you have magic that tells you these things.’ But he did not believe what he said, and seeing her unmoved by his accusation he fell into despair. ‘We are sib?’ he asked.

‘It is so.’

‘Then I shall kill you.’

He snatched up his axe, which lay on the ground attached to his discarded belt; and if the girl had moved to escape he would have given chase and killed her in hot blood. But her movement was one not of escape but of willing acquiescence. Supporting herself on her long supple arms, she raised her body towards him, offering, with head flung back, the full pointed breasts and the living throat. He was checked, and again puzzled. He uttered an inarticulate noise, half question, half menace; and watched for her to shrink, writhe out of reach, and run. She did not move. They stayed so, mute and motionless, like sculpture, till, dropping the axe, with a low growl he straddled across her, seized the lithe column of her body in his arms, and set his teeth amorously in the soft flesh of her shoulder. She screamed briefly. Her arms enfolded him. He raised his head and looked long into her wild eyes.

‘I shall not kill you,’ he said. ‘You are my woman.’

Her eyes filled with glory. ‘Lord, I am you,’ she answered.

The wedding was intimate and radiant, fire with fire. Having broken the sacred law, they were accurst, and lay naked to the vengeance of gods and men. But, since nothing could alter that, since there was no avoiding the doom, the shame that might have divided them was a bond drawing them closer together. In the tragic isolation of this shame they were made indissolubly one; for each to the other was the sole refuge in a world grown suddenly hostile. In their fancy the sun eyed them with burning accusation and the air shrank from the infection of their sin. Danger was all about them; destruction was certain; and their delight in each other was the sharper because it must be brief, a snatched instant of eternity. It was not long before the cloud of terror came back into Ogo’s eyes. He was thinking perhaps of the story of Strong, another of the friends and followers of Hawkon: Strong the hunter who, being pursued and tempted in the forest by a forbidden woman, had driven his spear through her throat, so preserving his virtue and winning the applause of all the tribe. A shining example, but one that it was too late for Ogo to think of following. His glance returning to Wooma, he was surprised again by a feeling he could neither understand nor express. His hand touched her. They bared their teeth at each other and gazed with bright eyes.

Presently he began asking questions.

‘I took milk from the deer that Hawkon has,’ answered Wooma. ‘And the woman Flint caught me and beat me. So I ran away here, into the forest, to escape her, and to make magic against her.’

‘You have magic?’ Ogo was awed, and a little repelled. The rest of her tale had passed over his head. Milk from the deer—what crazy talk is this? But magic—that is familiar enough. And dangerous.

‘No.’ Wooma was quick to see his shrinking. ‘I am Wooma. I have no magic of my own. But I found Flint hopping in the likeness of a frog, and I killed her. I said, This frog is not a frog: it is the woman Flint that Hawkon has taken. And I beat her with a stone like this, three times. So now Flint is dead and Wooma is afraid to go back.’

Ogo shuddered, and looked about him uneasily. ‘Where is this place? Where is the Koor?’

She pointed to the shadow of the tree they sat under. ‘See, lord, the dark ghost of the tree.’ She pointed to a near bush. ‘See, lord, the bush.’

‘I see them,’ assented Ogo.

‘When the dark ghost has crawled to the bush, and touches him, we are in the squat of Koor.’

‘I am thirsty,’ said Ogo. He could not believe that Koor’s squat was so near, a mere hour’s journey; for his surroundings were unfamiliar. He was suspicious of Wooma, but answered her nothing. ‘I am thirsty.’

She rose, and stretched out her hand, and led him to the slope of a green hill dotted with juniper bushes. To us, who watch, the scene may suggest an ancient map, with stiff little trees pictured in black upon a yellow ground, dolphins riding the sea, and at the base of this particular hill three words of flowing script to tell us that here a spring gushes. It pleased Ogo, when he had quenched his thirst at this spring, to climb the hillside in search of he knew not what. Perhaps it was in his mind, though not in his consciousness, that a man might lie up there, in the shadow of a juniper bush, and be secure from a surprise attack. He was glad to be out of reach of those tall forest trees, and took pleasure in the fading brightness that lay on the grassy slope. Each small blade and spear cast its individual shadow—faint pencillings on a green and golden quilt. Ogo and Wooma lay quiet in each other’s arms, forgetful of danger. A rabbit, within a spear’s length of the bush that sheltered them, came out of his burrow and listened. The shadow of the bush grew longer. It was the hour of stillness and mellowing light, the pause between day and dark, when colours deepen under the varnish of sunset, and the voices of birds, calling infrequently a belated phrase, assume the clarity and remoteness of familiar legend. In the west, the gold of the sky gradually darkened to red. The sun spilled himself on the horizon. For a moment the lovers turned from each other to stare at this dying and immortal majesty. To Ogo the sight was full of meaning and portent, as always; but now a hint of new meaning was mingled with the old. An emotion stirred in him that was neither fear nor desire. His child mind became full of questions, and in this woman, or in something that made this woman mysteriously himself, he seemed to find the hint of an answer. In the having of her there was not only pleasure and power, but a third joy, release; and these three now were fused for Ogo in the emotion that man, in later childhood, has called beauty. Ogo laid a light hand on her bosom, then pointed towards the sky, trying to express his sense of some quality shared by these two objects of his love. But the thought, the feeling, was inarticulate. Responding to his caress, Wooma grinned lovingly. His face remained grave, his eyes full of the question that filled his heart. He was aware of a vital need: he wanted to give himself utterly to this woman, to pour out his life at her feet as the sun-god poured the blood of his splendour on the far edge of the world.

He came very close to her and spoke in her ear. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You are my woman. You are Ogo and I am Wooma. Listen. I will tell you my name.’

CHAPTER 8 THE HERD CALLS AND THE LOVERS ANSWER

Ogo’s shame was too radical a growth to die: it went on existing side by side with this new exultant feeling of release and fulfilment. There was room in him for these contradictions: his mind, because he never looked into it, accommodated them without the smallest difficulty. And at present, with Wooma at hand to see and touch, joy was uppermost. He was not even now capable of questioning the rightness of the law that condemned him; and yesterday, in the first onset of his despair, the mere instinct of gregariousness and the driving torment of guilt might have sent him back to Koor and to death. He had not in that moment doubted that he must suffer the penalty of his crime; nor even, so profound his identity with the tribe, wished to do so. But with the going down of the sun, the long warm night of friendliness and love, and the waking that found beauty still in his arms, the scope and direction of his being were imperceptibly changed. Shame, not repudiated, was forgotten. Pride lifted his head. Towards the world in general he felt masterful; towards Wooma he felt, not only swaggeringly possessive, but patrimaternal, as though she had been, as no doubt his idea of her was, a very part of himself, child begotten and born of his conscious and unconscious desires. The penalties he and she had incurred were well known to him: for the man, death; for the woman, mutilation, and a banishment that in practice amounted to death. Except at the seedtime sacrifice, when the earth-god demanded the blood of a ripe virgin, the killing of a woman after puberty was of bad omen: it was sufficient that the offending female should be formally cast out, with the curse of Hasta on her head, and driven with spears into the wild, so that she might carry her contamination to a foreign people, or, as was more probable, be eaten by wolves or die of starvation and the terror of the curse. This was the fate that Ogo feared for Wooma; for though it was all a matter of tradition and hearsay, no event of the kind being in his personal memory, there were tales in plenty, a body of sacred legend, to give force and shape to his imaginings. It was necessary therefore that he should take Wooma as far as possible away from the Koor squat. As for himself, he was enlarged and completed in this woman, and his appetite for life was doubled.

Of these facts however—especially of the need for flight—he was something less than conscious, except in fleeting moments of alarm. With even more decision than usual, the present—its needs and its joys—occupied him to the exclusion of remote dangers; and when he and Wooma had come down from their high place, and foraged for food, and caught a young rabbit and shared it, they turned their attention again to each other and spent the morning in idle amorous play. Yesterday and its terrors seemed far away indeed: the new life alone was real. The gods having not yet stricken them, they had forgotten the gods. Yet pictures that might at any moment become plans were forming in Ogo’s mind. He fell into a long silence.

‘What are you seeing?’ asked Wooma. Silence she could endure, but not pensiveness. It troubled her that he should have thoughts secret from her. ‘What are you seeing, Ogo? Wooma is here.’

‘I am seeing a river,’ said Ogo, ‘with many fishes in it that a man might catch with his hands. I am seeing a small squat near this river, and a man and a woman eating the fishes.’

‘The man is Ogo. And the woman is Wooma, his woman.’

‘It is so.’

He continued his daydreaming. The door of the squat opened towards the river. There was the forest for hunting in and the river for escape. And at the river’s end there was the sea.

Wooma searched his face. ‘What are you seeing now?’ she asked anxiously.

‘I am seeing a tree strook down by the man’s axe. The tree groans, and the tree’s demon is angry. But the man is not afraid. He is mighty. He is fearless.’

‘The man is Ogo,’ affirmed Wooma.

‘It is so. With his axe the man strips the tree of its waving arms. The tree has a fat body and now it is naked. Many days and many darks the man works with his axe at the tree. He is making a boat.’

Wooma said nothing. Her face assumed the fixed grin of incomprehension, and she stared at the ground.

‘And now,’ said Ogo excitedly, ‘the boat is on the top of the water, and the man is sitting in it. He beats the water with a flat stick, and the boat swims away.’ Ogo laughed with pleasure and glanced at Wooma for applause. Her face was downcast. ‘Ugh?’ he said. He was puzzled and his tone impatient.

‘Lord!’ She nestled closer, and looked timidly up at him.

Ogo sat rigid and sulky. ‘Doesn’t it please you, what I am seeing?’

Her face crumpled with grief. ‘Lord,’ she wailed, ‘at first you were seeing a man and a woman. Now you are seeing only a man.’

‘Ugh?’ He was baffled. ‘Ah!’ He understood. ‘But the woman is there too, my soul. She is in the boat. She is Wooma.’ He bit her ear tenderly, and she was happy again. But she asked him no more about his thoughts. He had been already too long away from her. She was lonely, neglected, jealous. Wanting nothing but him, her heart demanded that he should want nothing but her.

Ogo resumed his thoughts and the recitation of them, his body swaying and his voice rising and falling in a chant. ‘Ogo and Wooma are in the boat, and the boat is a bird flying on the water. The spirit of the river is noble and kind. He is very big, but he speaks in a little voice, and Ogo is his friend. Ogo is his friend and he is the friend of Wooma. Ogo and Wooma are in the boat. They ride on the river’s back and the demons of the forest cannot catch them. The sun smiles on the river. He laughs and is friendly. The sun and the river laugh together. The man shouts with a loud noise and the woman claps her hands. Ogo and Wooma are in the boat. Ogo and Wooma are joined with the boat in flight. The wind runs to meet them, and because the river is good and mighty the wind lets them pass. So they come to a great water at the end of the world. It is a good water, and the sky is a good sky, and the water and the sky touch each other and are friends. The man and the woman and the boat—’

She gripped his arm in a fierce grip. ‘There are men coming.’

They jumped up, looking round for a hiding place.

‘There are dogs with them,’ said Ogo. That meant that unless the dogs had already scented quarry, no hiding-place would shelter the lovers for many seconds. ‘Where is my axe?’ he cried (for the axe still lay where he had dropped it twelve hours ago). They stared at each other wildly, and already there was distance between them. The steps came nearer; and now to the dogs’ barking was added the sound of human voices. These sounds reminded the lovers of what they had put out of mind. They remembered the law of sib, and each to the other became tainted with the terror of the curse: the spirit of the herd mastered and divided them. They ran in different directions. Wooma went first, Ogo watching her in stupid despair. Then he crawled into the undergrowth. The conflict of impulses made him numb. His hiding was purposeless and half-reluctant. And when from his cover he saw the young man Stare approach, he shouted a greeting and moved forward to meet him. Burning with guilt, he was surprised at Stare’s quiet acceptance of him. ‘There’s good hunting,’ said Stare. ‘Come on.’ He had not seen Ogo for many days. Ogo had been away and forgotten. Now he was back. ‘Where’ve you been?’ asked Stare. But there was hunting afoot; the others, half hidden by trees, were pressing forward; and he did not wait to be answered. He went on, and Ogo followed him.

Wooma, out of reach and hearing, flung herself down. She lay sobbing, raging with grief. She hated Ogo and wanted him. That last sight of him, when she had seen Koor looking out of his eyes, shone luridly in her memory. The same shrinking distaste, born of fear, had been legible in her own glance. But that she did not know or remember. The law in itself, being a man’s law given by man’s gods, had less hold on her than on him. For him it had a mysterious inward power; for her it was something external that had to be obeyed. Not since his avowal of yesterday, that she was his woman, had she had a moment’s shame until now; since that high peak of her life he had been, for her, both law and conscience. And now he had accused and condemned her and with one look cast her out. Having exhausted herself with weeping she lay quiet and numbed for many hours; then rose and wandered aimlessly, without hope, until the forest began filling with the red glow of sunset. The hour came charged so richly and cruelly with reminiscence that sorrow shook her again. And the threat of darkness terrified her. She pictured the returning hunters, with Ogo, forgetful of her, in their midst; she saw the shadows gathering to enclose her; and her feet began following where her heart had already gone. She was very young, a child; she had been companioned only by women jealous of her budding loveliness, and touched by no man except Ogo. But the squat of the tribe was her home; the valley was friendly; and the shape of the surrounding hills was like a lyric in her memory. And now, she surmised, Ogo was there; and to be near Ogo was necessary to life; for, till the next man claimed her, she was his alone. She forgot Flint’s malice and the vengeance she had taken upon Flint. She forgot Koor and his laws. The forest with every passing moment grew more dim and dreadful, and she ran faster and faster, calling on Ogo to save her. There came no answer, but when at last she descended the familiar hill, and emerged from the forest that covered it, she gained new heart, seeing that there was still light in the sky, and knowing herself back among her own people. Trembling, but dry-eyed and quiet, and keeping to the edge of the two broad terraces of tilth at the base of the hill, she ran lightly into the valley and across the clearing in the direction of the women’s quarters. In the doorway of Koor’s squat, which she must pass on her way, crouched a dark motionless figure, Nigh the Tale-Bearer. He grinned as he watched her, and moistened his lips. But he made no sound, and she went by without seeing him.

CHAPTER 9 OGO IS BETRAYED BY HIS FRENZY, WITH NIGH AIDING

Seven days passed before Ogo and Wooma set eyes on each other again, days in which, for Ogo, all that had happened in the forest seemed like a dream. It was not the less real for that, but it belonged to a different order of reality. Back among his own people, accepted by them, and taking his place once more in the hunt and the common life, he almost believed at last that it was his soul, which he pictured as another body, a shadowy duplicate of himself, that had had those experiences while he had lain asleep. The wandering, the slaying, the meeting with Bikkoo, the wooing of Wooma: all this belonged to another world, which he could re-enter only in sleep and then only by chance. He was not easy; he was intimately changed; but for the while he was able to move without overmuch difficulty or danger in his accustomed social groove. He had moments of strange absentness, when silence fell upon him and his eyes stared wonderingly into a far distance; but at other times he talked much, and quickly won a reputation for story-telling. All that could be safely told he told freely and in graphic detail, with a great wealth of mimicry and gesture. He even claimed to have met and possessed a strange woman; but this part of the tale no one believed. ‘Where is she, this woman?’ demanded Hawkon, with curling lip; and Ogo’s account of how she had escaped him while he slept exposed him to jeers and to polite grins that were harder to bear than jeers. In this way he learned the wisdom of confining his story within more credible bounds, telling the whole truth about the boar hunt, the man slain, Bikkoo, the river magic, and his first sight of the sea, with such additions as fancy suggested to him. He told his stories again and again; they became richer and stranger with each telling. He made songs and chanted them, and others chanted with him. By the exercise of his unsuspected talents he won many hearts, even the Old One himself taking pleasure in the entertainment. He was active, talkative, brimming over with his own cleverness. But somewhere within him was an ache he would not heed, a silence, a bottomless pit of sorrow and hunger; somewhere in his heart the thing that he had never told, and did not think of, lay coiled like a snake ready to rise and strike him.

With Wooma it was otherwise. For her the life with Ogo in the forest, brief though it had been, was the true and continuing reality, and these days of dearth, with women eyeing her suspiciously and scolding her to work, and Koor the all-powerful and all-capricious a vast shadow in the background, were nothing but a nightmare suspension of that life, a dream imposed. She was waiting but not expectant. She waited, without hope, for something to happen that should set her heart beating again. She was not so crazy as to think that Ogo would claim her and steal her away from the tribe: nor could she have planned so far ahead. For the most part she chose to believe herself rejected and forgotten by Ogo, and did believe it, immersing herself almost ecstatically in the humiliation of it, except in moments when his parting look grew dim and faded on the screen of her memory, giving place to images of love. Many rumours of him reached her ears: of his hunting, his gaiety, his stories and songs. She wondered at these things and rejoiced in them, appropriating some of the praise to herself who was part of him, feeling his exploits to be in some sense her own; but side by side with this flame of love, this pride that was like a mother’s pride, there burned a hatred engendered by her frustrated desire. The pretence that he was hers did not suffice to allay her murderous resentment when she remembered that he had forced her, won her heart, and at last turned against her. Now he was happy, and she was nothing. She came at times within an ace of conceiving the idea of denouncing him to Koor, at whatever cost to herself. Yet at other times she was all humility and submission, thrust deeper into her heart the knife he had pierced her with, and cried, luxuriating in pain: Ogo is great, Ogo is cruel, and Wooma is nothing to him; Ogo is proud, and Wooma is trodden under foot. In this abjection she found an obscure pride.

It was in returning from the hunt with Hawkon and his comrades that Ogo next saw her. She, with other women, was at work on the lower terrace, breaking the ground with a flint-headed pick. As he neared her she straightened her bent back and looked at him with steady challenging eyes. Taken unawares, he halted and gazed back. Recognition flashed between them. For Ogo, because he had put her out of mind, the sight of her was overwhelming. Light blazed in him; the drums of war began beating in his blood: the unuttered homesickness of his heart vanished in promise of appeasement: and with a cry he ran towards her. An answering cry of horror checked him; he remembered his surroundings, and, drooping where he stood, watched her turn quickly her back on him and resume her work. Someone put a rough hand on him, and he started round to find Stare grasping his shoulder. Stare’s eyes were anxious. ‘Where’re you going, brother? You come with Stare.’ There was accusation as well as question in his look, and Ogo met it with bewilderment. Since Ogo’s return to the tribe these two had been much together: there was affection between them. Ogo longed to ease himself of his burden, but he dared not utter the words that would make his friend shrink back in fear and loathing. So in silence he suffered himself to be led away. No more was said; the secret remained with him as far as he knew; but the precarious peace of his existence was shattered, for Wooma in that instant had returned and invaded him and now filled him with the fire of agony and bliss. He was distraught, not knowing how he could live without her, feeling indeed that he was already dying for lack of her. He lay in his corner of the squat and gave himself up to sickness. Stare watched and derided him and brought him food, knowing nothing of his trouble. Ogo sulked and would not eat. It seemed that a madness had come upon him: a rumour that brought many visitors to stare at him with religious awe. Hasta came, scenting rivalry; for in madness, which is a sign of peculiar attention from the gods, a man may speak and do magic. And Nigh came, curious to learn the truth of a matter that had provoked so many fantastic tales. Ogo was dumb and would not eat. He sat rigid, seeing and hearing nothing. It was Nigh himself who, after many days, led him out of this trance.

‘Through the mouth of Hasta the Wise One the gods have spoken,’ said Nigh, rehearsing a ritual.

‘Through my mouth,’ said Hasta, ‘they have chosen the woman for the sowing . . .’

‘By my hand,’ said Nigh, ‘she shall be slain, and her blood scattered.’

‘So,’ chanted Hasta, ‘will the earth-god be won to favour. The sky will smile and send water to quench him; the grain will swell in the dark womb; and the harvest will be plentiful for all the sons of Koor.’

‘It is so,’ murmured the young men reverently.

Ogo alone remained silent.

Nigh kneeled before him, seized his shoulders, and peered into his eyes. ‘Listen, brother! The gods have chosen a woman for the sowing. She is young and holy. No man has touched her. She is a daughter of a daughter of Koor our master, and she is called Wooma.’

A shudder passed through the squatting body of Ogo. A deep sigh escaped him, and it was as if he woke out of sleep. Light came back into his eyes. He looked round in wonder. ‘Wooma? Where is Wooma?’

The chattering that had begun with his movement ceased at his words. The silence of awestruck conjecture fell upon the company. Triumph and malice shone in the eyes of Nigh. A vague satisfied smile visited Hasta’s lips.

‘Wooma,’ repeated Nigh, still peering at the patient. ‘Young and holy, and no man has touched her.’

‘Who is this Wooma?’ asked Ogo, on the defensive. ‘And what of her?’

With much particularity Nigh and Hasta told once more of the fate designed for Wooma: the Wise One with unction, the Tale-Bearer with relish. For to Nigh, of all his duties, this slaying of a virgin was the most congenial.

Ogo heard them in silence, and when they had ended he sat thinking and staring at distance. Nigh, for reasons of his own, watched him narrowly. The others watched because Nigh watched, and because already they scented a monstrous meaning in these events.

‘She is untouched?’ asked Ogo presently. ‘No man has taken her?’

‘It is so,’ said Nigh and Hasta.

‘Therefore,’ affirmed Ogo tentatively, ‘she is pleasing to the earth-god.’

‘It is so,’ they answered.

‘If she had been taken by a man, this Wooma, the earth-god would see scorn in our sacrifice and be angry. Is it not?’

‘It is so,’ they murmured again.

Ogo leaped to his feet. ‘I, Ogo, have taken this woman. Lead me to my father Koor.’

CHAPTER 10 KOOR, WAKING FROM DREAMS, UTTERS THE DOOM OF OGO

So he came, driven at the spear’s point, into the presence of Koor. Both Stare, who had brothered him, and Hawkon, who had once been his constant friend, were conspicuous among the warders, and their anger against him burned fiercely: Hawkon’s because he was himself the proprietor of a woman, and Stare’s because in his heart he had once cherished an unlawful desire. And all were at one in fearing that the curse of the gods might fall on the tribe before formal judgement had been pronounced and executed against the sinner. They entered Koor’s court with ceremony, Hasta leading, Nigh following, and Hawkon commanding the prisoner’s escort. The rumour of their doings filled the camp, and from the four points of the compass men came hurrying. Koor himself was almost the last to be roused, for nowadays sleep was his dearest indulgence: he loved nothing so much, once he had eaten his fill, as to lie dozing at his hearthside, with one or more of his women near, and a weapon gripped in his hand. Those who disturbed him on such occasions could count, all too confidently, on a rough welcome. Today he dreamed of love and hunting: he was filled with the pride of youth, and well matched with the bright world. He held a writhing girl under one arm, and laughed at her struggles as he strolled jauntily through the forest in search of battle. A huge bull came thundering towards him. He dropped the girl, and she clung to his knees in terror. So with his naked hands he met the bull’s assault, seized its horns and glared into its eyes. They stood rigid, man and bull; the bull was strong, but the man was arrogant. The breath of the beast scorched Koor’s face, but he laughed and glared the more fiercely; felt the bull’s strength entering his own body; and at last knew himself victorious. The horns crumpled; the great bulk sank in exhaustion under his pressure; and the forest became full of shouting men, crying: Great is Koor; mighty is Koor; Koor is the great bull and the king of bulls, and we are his people. The old woman, ill-favoured and evil-smelling, who watched the sleeping chief, she who indeed had always watched him with unwearying devotion, and asked no thanks for it, she too remembered the young Koor, and it may be that she recognized him still in this snoring and wizened old body that slept with twitching limbs and gaping mouth. She was for ever telling him how great and wonderful he was, and in some fashion she believed it, though she believed, too, that his end was drawing near, and was tormented with fear for him. And now she must risk his displeasure and wake him; for the noise of men was terrible and could bode no good. She shook him; he woke, snarling and frightened. ‘Koor is the great bull,’ he muttered. ‘Yes, yes,’ said the old woman soothingly. ‘There’s a noise of people coming. Get up, my brave lord, and face them.’

Hasta and Nigh bent their heads in reverence as the Old One rose; but Hawkon stared boldly.

Koor uttered a bark of greeting.

‘Greeting, O Koor our Father!’ cried Hasta, in his shrill voice. ‘Sin has been done in our midst. Woe and pestilence on them that suffer it!’

Koor, peering with dim eyes, motioned the Wise One nearer. ‘Stand here, my son, within reach of me. What are these young men doing in my house?’

‘Sin has been done, O Father, and they have brought the sinner for judgement.’

Koor seemed not to understand. He was filled with feeble anger by this interruption of his peace; and the display of power before him, the stalwart young men and the bristling spears, disconcerted him, so that for one instant he forgot that he, Koor, was greater and more terrible than them all.

‘Sin,’ he muttered testily. ‘What sin is this?’

Hasta crooked his finger at Nigh, who approached the Old One with gestures of fawning respect. Between them the two counsellors poured the dreadful story into Koor’s ear. Ogo watched them with eyes that had never been so keen before, nor seen so much. What these men were saying he could not hear, for there was a strange tumult in his brain. In his mortal parts he was appalled by the coil of disaster he had snared himself with; but he remained steadfast in his resolve that Wooma, his woman, must not die at the hands of Hasta: rather, if needs be, at his own, since he was her lord and had taken her. Despite its roaring commotion his brain worked busily. But it worked in secret, without his conscious supervision: like a swarm of ants his thoughts ran this way and that, picked up seeming trifles, and stored them away. One thing went here, another there: the collection grew under his dreaming gaze; but still he was unaware of the emerging pattern. Hawkon was a great hunter. Koor was old. Ogo’s enemies were many, and he had no friend. It pleased him that, being so many, or for very eagerness to see him doomed, they had not spared time to bind him. Hasta and Nigh and the Old One were still in conference. Soon it would be his turn to speak; and then—death. But he did not look so far ahead: he was content to stare at the moving lips of his accusers, and to listen idly to the patter of syllables in his mind.

When Hasta and Nigh, making much of little, at last came to an end of their story, Koor sat blinking fiercely. At last he rose to his feet and pointed a long withered finger at Ogo.

‘Speak,’ he commanded.

‘I have spoken,’ said Ogo, and he seemed to speak with a voice other and larger than his own. And the words that came seemed not of him; for they had a strange authority, as though the gods spoke them. ‘The woman chosen for the sacrifice must not be given to the earth-god, or a pestilence will come upon us all. She is curst, for I have touched and taken her.’

‘She is sib with him,’ said Nigh.

‘She is sib with him,’ murmured the young men in chorus.

‘Woe, woe, woe,’ wailed Hasta, ‘on them that suffer a sinner in their midst!’

‘Kill him,’ snapped Koor, ‘and drive the woman into the wild. Kill him, but let no drop of his blood fall among us.’

‘We will kill him,’ agreed Hawkon coolly. His manner was insolent. He spoke as to an equal, if not to an inferior. For an idea had flashed into his mind, and to Hawkon an idea was an impulse. ‘Listen, my Father. Listen, my brothers. Was this woman chosen by the gods?’

Koor looked at Hasta. ‘Answer him, my son.’

‘By the gods she was chosen,’ faltered Hasta.

‘Through the mouth of Hasta the Wise One,’ added Nigh quickly.

Hawkon’s tone became uglier, ‘Yet it was a bad choice and would have brought pestilence upon us. Were the gods, then, at fault? Or was Hasta the Wise One deceived?’

There was a murmur of admiration and anger from the young men behind him. Koor blinked stupidly. Hasta grinned with sudden terror, and turned in frenzy to the Tale-Bearer.

‘It was Nigh,’ he wailed, ‘it was Nigh that deceived me.’

‘It is not,’ said Nigh. ‘There is no fault in me. The fault is in Hasta.’

Hawkon stared challengingly at Koor, who still blinked and said nothing.

‘We are waiting,’ said Hawkon, ‘for the judgement of Koor in this matter.’

Koor stood listening to a faraway sound, and gazing with dim eyes down a forest vista. He heard the thunder of the bull’s hooves approaching, and he put out his hands and grinned fiercely. The great beast came plunging and roaring towards him. Then he saw that it was no bull after all, but a young man, an insolent young man.

‘What are you called?’ he demanded, facing Hawkon. ‘What do they call you, my son?’

‘They call me Hawkon,’ said Hawkon proudly.

‘Hawkon!’ echoed his comrades.

The murmur rose to a shout, and the Old One smiled in triumph; for in his mind it was himself they were acclaiming, Koor the mighty one, the slayer of bulls. But in the midst of the clamour the sight of Hawkon pressed back into his eyes, and he grew angry. He remembered a grievance. He remembered Ogo and the tale of his sin. He scowled.

‘Ha! You have spoken in scorn of the Wise One. You and the accurst shall die together.’ He laughed. The speech pleased him. He was intoxicated with his fantasy and delighted in the thought of this cub’s death. ‘You shall die, my son,’ he repeated, with a titter.

For answer Hawkon lifted his spear. He knew now what he must do. He knew, but he did not even now know that this for many days had been the intention buried deep in his heart. In one instant of time the seed of his ambition burst, thrust through the darkness, budded and flamed into a bright terrible flower. Its beauty enchanted him and he had eyes for nothing else. Koor was old and feeble and ugly: Koor must give place to his conqueror. Nor did he know—such flights were far beyond him—that even as Koor was now, so he Hawkon would one day be.

The spear of Hawkon pierced his father’s throat. The figures in Koor’s fantasy loomed for the last time in the dying brain. The bull charged, and was caught by its horns. It snorted fire on its captor. I am the great bull and the king of bulls, thought Koor . . .

Hawkon retrieved his spear and held it high.

‘I am the Koor,’ he cried.

‘You are the Koor, great Hawkon,’ quavered Nigh, shrinking away from sight of his dying master.

‘The gods have spoken again,’ wailed Hasta. ‘They tell me that Hawkon is the Koor.’

But the young men were in a frenzy, Hawkon having the only cool head amongst them. All their long suppressed hatred of these elders found vent in violence. The stroke of an axe silenced Hasta’s wailing, and a dozen spears leaped to transfix the Tale-Bearer. Hawkon’s voice quelled the riot, and all drew back in fear from their work. And no one noticed that Ogo was no longer in their midst; no one had seen him—in the very moment of Koor’s death—slip through into the inner room, the sacred secret place where the women sat shuddering together. If to Hawkon this killing of the Old One was triumph, to Ogo it was deliverance. And the screaming of the women at sight of him gave him no check. ‘The Old One is slain,’ he said, ‘and Hawkon is the Koor.’ He spoke to distract their attention from himself; and his eyes searched among them. He sought and found Wooma. A little apart from the others (for was she not dedicated to death?), she lay in a languid trance. She, like himself, was unfettered: being young and desirable, she could be safely entrusted to the custody of her fellow-women. ‘Come!’ he said. The women, disregarding him, were crowded at the moot door. ‘Come, Wooma. Here’s Ogo.’ She stared, screamed, jumped to her feet. But Ogo did not wait to look at her again: he was scratching and tearing, like a dog, at a small aperture in the wall. Some of the women, eager to fawn at the feet of their new lord, were filtering through into the death-chamber; and the others, staring in frightened wonder at the intruder Ogo, could do nothing to thwart his impious design. He was strong, and he was sib to them: they dared not touch him.

In the hall of doom Hawkon raised his spear again, commanding silence. And when all voices had ceased, he fell on his knees at the feet of the three corpses. ‘O Koor, I have slain you, but I am your friend henceforth. In life you were mighty, and we your sons will praise you wherever we go. Visit us not in anger, O Old One, but go far from this place, or stay where we leave you. And you, Hasta, and you, Nigh, remember us kindly, and do us no harm, for we are your friends too. You three, you mighty ones, shall have this house to live in for ever.’ He rose and turned to his brothers. ‘We will pile great stones upon them. We will fill this place with great stones, and close it up with the greatest of all, so that their demons will be comfortable and not trouble us.’

The young men ran to do his bidding. Stare alone lingered.

‘O Koor, O Hawkon,’ said Stare, with profound respect, ‘what of Ogo and the woman who have sinned together, being sib?’

The wailing of the women was no longer to be ignored. They wailed not for the death of the Old One, but because Ogo had broken into their sanctuary and snatched Wooma from them, where she lay awaiting the time of sacrifice. Sin had gone unpunished; the vengeance of the gods must fall on all the sons and daughters of Koor. . . . And so in after days, though the tribe flourished with Hawkon at its head, every misfortune that visited them was laid to Ogo’s account; many conflicting tales were told of how the sinners, perishing in the wild, were pursued for ever by the curse of their sin; and the suffering voices of Ogo and Wooma were heard in every wailing wind. The sinners themselves, in their squat by the distant river, knew nothing of these tales and heard no such voices. Strangely forgetful of the past they lived to a ripe age, and their sons made many boats.