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.