The Flute of the Gods Part 14

No one knew, and the women looked at each other in question. The peace of the wise woman's words was killed by the bitter laugh of Apache Yahn.

When the bitter mood touched the girl, the Te-hua people remembered that her mother was of that wild Apache people--enemy to all. At times she could be a maid like other maids--with charm and laughter--a very bewitching Yahn who made herself a beauty barbaric with strings of gay berries of the rose, or flat girdles of feathers dyed like the rainbow. Her bare arms had bracelets of little sh.e.l.ls. Into the weaving of her garments she had put threads of crimson in strange patterns--they were often the symbols of the Apache G.o.ds or spirit people, and when she chose she made the other women feel fear with them. Her own mother who told her of them, would not have worn them thus--but Yahn was more Apache than her mother.

One woman sh.e.l.ling corn for the meal, suggested that if the Te-hua people had not mountain strength it might mean war as the people to the South had endured that other time--when the men at Tiguex were burned to ashes by the strangers.

"Oh, wise Sah-pah!" and Yahn laughed at the late thought,--"Has the thing at last come to the mind of one of you?"

"I thought of it also," said one of the other women sulkily.

"Ai:--you all thought--but none of you dared say words while the new Ruler and the wise governor kept silent to the people!" she taunted them. "Of all the women I only can speak in the speech of the strangers."

"Think you we will see them?" asked one girl doubtfully--"will we not all be sent to the hills the days when they come?"

"In other villages they did so in that long ago day--some men never let their women be seen of the white men who wore the iron."

"I will not be sent to the hills," decided Yahn. "From Ke-yemo and from Tahn-te I know their words. I will talk for the strangers. I will learn many things!"

"When was it you learn so much?" asked Sah-pah jealously.

"A little--little at a time all these years!" declared Yahn in triumph. "Tahn-te wanted not to forget it--so he said to me the words--now they are mine."

The women regarded her with a wonder that was almost awe,--there might be something infernal and unlucky in talking two ways.

"If it be war, think you Ka-yemo will be the war chief as he has been made?" queried Sah-pah. "He will be made second if there is fighting,--think you not so?"

Yahn apparently did not think, but she did listen.

"We know how it was with his father Awh-we--" said one. "In that day of trial he failed that once in the battle with the Yutah. The old men let him pull weeds in the corn when the next war came."

The strong fingers of Yahn broke the bird's claw, and she tossed it from the terrace edge, and selected another.

"But the new young wife Koh-pe may make the son of his father brave for all that," and Sah-pah who was not young and not winsome, watched Yahn, and felt content when she saw the Apache eyes grow narrow and the teeth set. "A wife with many robes and many strings of sh.e.l.ls and blue stones, makes a man strong to fight for them. Ka-yemo will be a strong man now."

"He is of my clan--Ka-yemo!" said Yahn panting with pent up fury, "he can fight,--all of our blood can fight!--if the war is here we can show you of the Panyoo clan how the Tain-tsain clan can fight with the new enemy!"

They all knew that Yahn Tsyn-deh could indeed fight, she wore eagle feathers and had a right to wear them since a season of the hunt on the Navahu border when a young warrior had stolen her for his lodge, and with his own club set with flint blades, had she let his spirit go on the shadow trail, and to her own village had she brought the scalp and the club, also his robe and beads of blue and of green stone--and she made the other women remember it at times.

"Ho!--and will it be you who bears a spear and a shield and a club on that day?" asked Sah-pah the skeptic.

"I fight that day--or any day, as strong as the fight any man of yours can ever make!" This retort of Yahn was met with half frightened giggles by the other women. Sah-pah had been unlucky in the matter of men. Yet, her list of favorites had not been limited, and the sarcasm of Yahn was understood.

"It is good there is some one brave to meet the strangers!" and the smile of Sah-pah was not nice. "Maybe you go to ask for a man--maybe it is why you learn their words--maybe the Tain-tsain clan will ask for a white man for you!"

"When _I_ ask--I will not be made a laugh, and sent home with a gift,"--and the other women squealed with shrill laughter and had great joy over the quarrel. The eyes of Sah-pah blazed. She tried to speak but her fury gave voice only in throaty growls, and an older woman than all of them stepped between them in protest.

"To your own houses--all you who would fight!" she decided--"go fight your own men if they send you away with gifts, but by my door I do not want panthers who scream!"

Sah-pah sulkily obeyed, and Yahn laughed and continued her work.

"It is not good to laugh when the bad fortune comes to any one," said the old woman, but Yahn refused to be subdued.

"It is true, mother--" she insisted--(all elderly women are mothers or aunts to village folk)--"it is true. When the dance of the corn was here and the women made choice of their favorites--it is well known that Sah-pah did follow Phen-tza a long ways. He laughed at her." Yahn herself laughed as she told it,--"he laughed and he asked why she comes so far alone--and he gives her his blanket and goes away! That is how he takes her for favorite that day!--he only laughs and let go his blanket to Sah-pah!"

The old woman put up her hand that her laugh be not heard. The humor of primitive people is not a delicate thing, and that the blandishments of Sah-pah had been of no use--as was witness the blanket!--had made many laugh around the night fires. Yet the old "mother" thought it not good that quarrels should grow out of it.

"Is your heart so bright with happiness that you understand nothing of the shame another woman may know, Yahn Tsyn-deh?"--she asked seriously. "Sah-pah is of the free woman--and we are not of her clan to make judgement."

"Speak no words to me of a bright heart!" said Yahn, and arose, and went away. Across the roofs she went to the stairway of her dwelling, where she had lived alone since the death of her mother. It was a good room she entered, very white on the walls, and the floor white also, with the works of her own fingers on the smoothness of it. In a niche of the thick wall stood a bronze G.o.d, and a medicine bowl with serrated edges, and a serpent winged and crowned painted in fine lines to encircle it. On the wall was a deerskin of intricate ornamentation, good and soft in the dressing, it was painted in many symbols of the Apache G.o.ds and the prayer thoughts. From her mother Yahn had learned them and had painted them in ceremonial colors. The great G.o.ddess of the white sh.e.l.l things--and white flowers--and white clouds--was there, and the sun G.o.d was also there, and the curve of the moon with the germ of life in its heart. The morning star was there--and also the symbol of the messengers from the G.o.ds. Circling all these sacred things was the blue zig-zag of the sky lightening by which Those Above send their decrees to earth children who know the signs, and at each corner the symbols of the Spirit People were on guard.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PRAYER OF YAHN TSYN-DEH _Page 109_]

Sah-pah had said once that they might be devil things, and not G.o.d things, and Yahn had watched her chance, and emptied a jar of dirty water on her head for that, and no more women said things of the walls of Yahn Tsyn-deh's house. But whether she deemed them holy or not holy, she hung the necklace of birds' claws under the symbol of the G.o.ddess Stenaht-lihan, and then prostrated herself and lay in silence.

After a long time she spoke.

"All this that the Apache blood be not lost in the flood of a shame!

All this that no Te-hua woman ever again sees that my heart has been sick--all this that a double curse of--"

But in the midst of her words of whispered prayer speech failed her--and tears choked her until she sobbed for breath. With all her will she wished to curse some one whom all her woman's heart forbade her harm!

CHAPTER X

SHRINES OF THE SACRED PLACES

When new things cast shadows across the Indian mind, every cloud touching the moon is watched at its birth and at its first hours of the circle, also the stars. And for those other worlds,--the planets--is it their brotherhood to the earth that is sealed by a living sacrifice as they come and as they pa.s.s again from the visible path in the sky?

The Reader of the Stars lives often above the mists of the earth dews.

The door of the high priest Po-Ahtun-ho faces the way of the South that the shadows of the moon and the shadows also of the sun, make reckonings for him of that which must be noted. So it has been since ancient days.

But for the Reader of the Stars there is a door not like another door; even to the stranger who runs as in a race, the house of the stars is seen and noted, and known as the sacred place for high prayer, and the record of the G.o.d things.

In Pu-ye the Ancient--and the deserted through centuries, the dwellings of high priests are marked beyond shadow of doubt, and each Te-hua man knows as well the dwelling of the Ruler of five centuries ago in Pu-ye, as he knows the door of his own brother across the court of the village. And the door of the stars is still beautiful there in Pu-ye.

Day time or night time the lines of ancient dwellings look ghost-like in their whiteness. Only medicine men with prayer rites ever sit alone in the deserted rooms. The men from the river villages on the way for the pine of the hills used in their sacred dances, do halt to scatter prayer meal at sacred places where the water once ran:--there is ever the hope that if prayers enough are thought, the springs in the Mother Mountain may make fertile again the fields of the high levels,--for in the days of the carving of Pu-ye from the white cliffs there were certainly many streams and wide harvests in the land that is called now the desert lands.

And to the west is Tse-c[=o]me-u-pin, the sacred mountain where the lightning plays, and westward also, but not so far, is the Cave of the Hunters where prayers are made to the Trues--the guardian spirits of the Sacred Ways, and the wild things of the forest, symbolizing sacred ways and sacred colors. These places of prayer and of sacrifices are here to-day--and the way to them is marked by the symbols of stars and of planets--many eyes see them--but the readers of them are not so many to-day. A Te-hua man will tell you they are the forgotten records of the Lost Others--and will sprinkle prayer meal craftily to make amends for the truth which is half a lie. The unspoken pagan G.o.ds of the Lost Others have endless life, and eternal youth, in the land.

All is as it was in the ancient day, except that the dwellings have changed from the ancient places, and the priests go over more ground to reach the high places of prayer.

In the valley of the P[=o]-s[=o]n-ge many vigils were kept through the nights of the Springtime, as messages from the south brought word of the steady, and thus far, harmless advance of the white strangers. The treachery at Tiguex in the day of Coronado was a keen memory. It would take much wisdom to avoid war with the iron men of the white G.o.d, yet keep their own wives and daughters for their own tribe.

Many arrows were made--also spears and shields. Men went hunting and women dried the meat, pounding it into shreds for the war trail if need be. From earliest dawn were heard the grinding songs as the corn of yellow and blue and red and white was ground by the maidens keeping time to the ancient carols--and ever above the head of the worker was hung the sacred and unhusked ear, which, when resting, she contemplated, kneeling, and the thought in her heart must be the sacredness of the life-giving grain, and the prayer of thanks that it was given by the G.o.ds to the people.

Tahn-te, going from the river bath of the dawn, crossed the terrace of Yahn Tsyn-deh, and caught brief glance of her face thus lifted above the grinding stone. The steadiness of the quiet prayer was contrast decided, compared with the last wild prayer she had come to make at his feet:--begging for magic of any nature since the laws of the clans forbade that she be wife to her cousin to whom she had given love.