Although the Chiefs, and those who would succeed them in the Feathered Council, had gathered on the bank of the river to watch me enter the Caverns of Darkness, I had not realized that they did so only because it was their custom to watch the Ordeals of the Scarlet, until I went to Na-ka-chek’s tepee the following morning. He warned me that it would not be easy to remain impassive if I had to see brave men die because the limit of their endurance had been passed.
“Remember, Piyanah, that to show sympathy would only make their task more difficult. I won my Scarlet by the ordeal of fire; twenty small tribal marks, branded into my body. The burns were not deep and healed before the next moon, but they chose each place so that it should bring the greatest intensity of pain…the soft skin of the arm-pit, inside the thighs, under the instep. It was not easy to breathe slowly and deeply, not to allow a single gasp of pain, to keep the muscles of my face smooth and untroubled.
“I was nearly defeated because I heard a woman whimper when she saw smoke curling up from my right nipple which the brand was charring. Until then I had been alone with pain, and could keep separate from it because it was an enemy I must fight. I was not Na-ka-chek, son of the Chief; I was Na-ka-chek the symbol of Man, who down the generations had fought with pain…and won. The compassion of that woman dragged me back to reality. I was no longer man against pain; I was a man suffering pain that was part of himself. Instead of being a solitary champion I knew there were people to whom I could appeal for help; there was no need for me to fight alone. Pain was an enemy whom I deliberately invited to pass through the stockade of my dwelling. I had summoned him to afflict me; how then could I call on the courage of the years to fight at my side? It was the last brand of the twenty, and my small mortality was just sufficient to endure it…had it been even the nineteenth, Na-ka-chek would have flinched, would have cried out, would have betrayed the Scarlet.”
“If that woman had loved you,” I said, “she would have given you strength, not weakness. She could have sent her courage and endurance to enter you, instead of whimpering with the pain she felt at the sight of your suffering. Raki and I learned this when we were undergoing the ordeals of the brown feather. He gave me his strength, not his fear; his belief that I would win, not his terror that I might fail. When I went through the caverns he was part of me: he made me believe that together we were stronger than the dark water. The love between us was clear as the star we shall set in the sky; his was the extra strength in my arms that held the canoe steady in the torrent, the thrust on the paddle which kept me out of the vortex, the bar of light which showed me the way out of the caverns; and it was his voice which called to me from the green water between the rocks of the last rapid. He took on himself the anguish we both felt when we knew danger might part us; he took my fear into his own belly, so that my body was steady and I could think clearly. It is very difficult to learn that quality of love, to be able to say, ‘Give me your fear, and I will carry it’; instead of wailing because love has made you vulnerable to so many tears.”
“You share wisdom with your mother, Piyanah; and I am very proud that two such women have let me honour them.”
He saw that I was moved at this betrayal of emotion, yet instead of becoming immediately remote, as he had always done before when he found himself displaying warm humanity, he smiled and put his hand on my shoulder, saying:
“Na-ka-chek in his own way tried to give you his strength during the days when you needed it. When he parted you and Raki he lived again through the parting from your mother; when he called you back from your little valley he woke from his dream of happiness, which for three moons he had found in the birch woods of the summer weather. It has not been easy, my daughter, never to show you the kindliness and understanding that your mother had made part of your ordinary days: so many times I have longed to talk to you about her, so that in your words I might hear an echo of her voice. I wanted to cherish you because you are her daughter, and I have had to drive you to further endurance because you are my son.
“I made Raki live as a squaw not only because I knew it was vital to the building of the bridge over the canyon, but also because in him I made expiation. I betrayed your mother because I feared that if a woman shared my tepee the Braves would forget to honour the scarlet of my forehead-thong. Yet I made Raki become as a woman: I saw him pluck the arrows of mockery from his flesh, and clean the poison from the wounds with water from the spring of understanding. So many arrows he suffered, and his flesh is clean…and I, Na-ka-chek, the Chief honoured by his tribe, knew that I had fled from the threat of one such arrow, lest I die from the fester of the wound.”
“Dear Father!” I smiled. “Do you know I have never dared to call you that before, even in my heart? Since I entered your tepee only a little while ago, we have been sitting cross-legged on a coloured blanket, or so it would seem to anyone who watched, yet we have built a bridge over our canyon. There is no longer a gulf between us over which I can only see you proud with feathers against the night sky, as Raki and I saw you long ago, after we had made the first journey. We no longer have to shout commands, or promise obedience, or proclaim laws in loud clear voices: we can talk, Father, of the things that live in our hearts, softly, and without considering the words.”
“Yes, Piyanah,” he said, very gently. “We have crossed our canyon; and the first thing I must bring to you by that bridge is…Fear. The first thing I shall say to you as we stand side by side will betray a promise to Raki.”
I felt fear writhe inside me like a snake. “What promise?” I said, trying to keep my voice level.
“That I should not tell you he had demanded the right to an Ordeal of the Scarlet. He did so when he was sure that you were going to accept the caverns. He said, ‘Piyanah and I will always be equals and wear feathers of the same colour.’ It was not his pride that spoke, Piyanah, but because he knew there was a very small chance that you would live through the ordeal. If you came back from the caverns he would honor your Scarlet with his own: if you waited for him on the other side of the water the ordeal might let him join you without bringing dishonour to the tribe.”
The horrors of ordeals of which I had heard but not yet seen flashed through my mind. Raki smeared with honey while fire-ants covered him with a black pall. Raki’s flesh charring while sweat ran down his expressionless face and his eyes spoke of pain which his proud lips would not acknowledge. Raki falling from the precipice, when his bleeding fingers slipped from the last narrow crack: his body turning over in the air before the cruel teeth of the waiting rocks crushed it to pulp.
“Which ordeal must he pass?” And I was surprised that my voice sounded as though I was asking an ordinary question.
“The Eagle Rock.”
Narrok’s ordeal! Then Raki might be blind too. Was he already thinking, when he looked at the sky, “I must fill my eyes with that strong, clear blue and cherish the shape of the clouds, so that they will stay with me through the long night.” Was he thinking, “I must not stare at Piyanah, or she will guess that something is wrong. I shall always remember Piyanah’s face, and the way she moves, and her skin, warm with the colour of deep autumn. But I shall never see her smiling down at our children, or her serenity when we are growing old.”
“The Eagle Rock is considered less dangerous than the caverns, Piyanah,” said my father. “You must believe, we must believe that the Great Hunters would not have brought us so far along the path only to lead us to a cliff that cannot be climbed. At sunset the tribe will rejoice that both my children are of the Scarlet.”
“Yes, Father, we must rejoice. …”
I knew Raki would be wondering, “How long can I keep Piyanah from knowing? Should I have told her yesterday, so that she had time to prepare herself for the ordeal of watching me…which will be so much worse than my having to dive? Will she understand why I did not tell her until the last moment, or will hurt bewilderment be the last thing I shall see in her eyes?”
Raki was with some of the other Chiefs’ sons outside the tepees, waiting to join the procession to the Place of the Ordeals. I went to him, trying desperately to make my voice sound undisturbed.
“Tomorrow you will wear the Eagle’s Scarlet.”
“Then…you know?”
“Yes, and I know you are going to win, Raki. You have never been afraid of heights, and I know the Great Hunters will make the pool deep, and safe…and easy.”
“So you are not worried about me?”
“A little…but I have been afraid for you so many times, Raki, and nothing ever went wrong. This time I know we are going to be safe. The feathers of the future will be like wings on which you will glide down on the air…our wings, the past and the future keeping today in safety.”
“I am sure I shall be safe, Piyanah,” he said confidently. “I ought to have told you yesterday, but I was so abysmally frightened when you were in the caverns that I didn’t want you to be disturbed by the same demon…the demon made out of imaginary horrors.”
“I am glad you didn’t tell me until today. It is so much more difficult to be certain of security when you are half asleep and very tired. …”
There was no more time for us to talk, for we had to follow Father in the procession of Chiefs.
We stood on the edge of the pit of rattle-snakes. The man had been down in the pit since dawn, and now it was nearly noon. There were five snakes, sliding among the small stones at the bottom of the pit: one had begun to rattle angrily and was coiled to strike. Another was flowing over a bare foot whose toes were clenched to the sand with the effort of remaining motionless.
I knew the man was terrified, for his body was slimy with sweat and his coarse black hair clung to his skull as though he had been swimming. His feet were wide apart and the muscles of his legs and thighs were braced with the effort of standing still. A line of red on both wrists showed that he must have been clenching his hands to make the thongs, which bound them behind him, cut into his skin. I knew he had longed for this sharp, clean pain, to jerk him out of the swaying sickness brought by the crawling death in which he stood.
I am not sure how long it was before I knew that soon the tension which held him motionless was going to snap. The sun beat down into the pit and I could see the pupils of his eyes dilating and the flare of his nostrils as he tried to draw deep breaths to quieten his racing heart. The neck muscles stood out like thongs: then his head fell forward on his chest and he began to sway. …
The first rattler got him behind the right knee and knocked him forward on his face. He fell on a second snake, and I saw it strike twice, full in the throat. He whimpered, like a frightened child, and tried to stagger upright, thrusting out with his pinioned hands.
A pole thudded down behind him and a Brave from the same tribe slid down into the pit and crushed two of the snakes with his tomahawk. Two other Braves flung fish-spears and killed the other snakes. When they carried the man up, the flesh round the punctured wounds was already beginning to turn black. They laid him on the ground and covered him with a blanket.
The Chiefs walked away. The man had failed in an ordeal; he would die; he was no longer of interest.
“Don’t they even try to suck out the poison?” I whispered to Raki.
“They would, if it would be of any use; but four rattlers got him, two in the throat. He will die soon…his tribe know it and so does he. They will be cutting wood for his funeral pyre before he is cold.”
Raki and I were part of a circle which might have been a council round a watch-fire, but instead of flames burning against the night a naked man stood motionless as a totem-pole, waiting for two Braves from different tribes to prepare him for his ordeal.
At a sign from his Chief—he belonged to the Thundering Herds—he lay on the ground, his feet wide apart, his arms outstretched on either side. His ankles and wrists were secured by thongs to wooden pegs driven into the ground. On one side of him were placed two clay jars, and on the other a rush basket, plastered with mud and firmly covered.
One of the attendant Braves picked up the first jar and poured a stream of pale honey on the man’s body; smoothing it evenly over the skin from the neck to a line midway between the navel and the dividing of the loins, from the shoulders to the elbows, and from the knees to the soles of the feet. Then from the second jar he scooped handfuls of what looked like heavy bear’s grease, but it was nearly black and had a strong, pungent smell. With this he covered all the parts of the body that were not already glistening with honey, but left the face and head untouched.
When this was finished, the second Brave wrenched the cover from the basket and turned it over on its side. A dark stream that stirred like boiling pitch poured out; a stream which divided into spreading trickles…of ants. For a few moments they poured over the ground, questing in every direction: then they converged into three files and marched towards the feast which had been prepared for them.
The ants which tried to climb on the man’s hand fell back and died when they touched the black grease, but the rest flowed steadily over their dead, to cover the body with terrible swiftness and purpose. A few strayed onto the face, which might still have been carven wood, even though I saw the lower lip begin to swell and a thin trickle of blood where an ant had torn a notch in the flesh.
Now he seemed to be wearing a tunic and leg coverings of black-red iridescence, that shimmered in the blazing sunlight as ants poured over each other in their lust for honey. I knew that if he moved they would attack as though a thousand war bows were loosed at the command of a Chief. Even if he managed to remain stock-still they might be hungry when they had finished the honey and decide to make a kill, to gorge on flesh; and ants can strip a carcass to clean bones with more terrible precision than buzzards.
Until then I had not seen the thread of honey leading away from his right side to the half-empty jar. It was the narrow path which might lead them to march in search of fresh plunder; a narrow, shining path, which held the only hope of victory over this multitudinous enemy.
When I could no longer bear to look at the man’s face, so terribly still above the quivering pall which covered his body, I tried to quell the queasiness of my belly by watching some of the Chiefs. There was a cold smile on the mouth of the Leaping Waters; to him this deliberate cruelty was a sensuous enjoyment, it held the warmth he had never found in women, the satisfaction deeper than a good smoke. The Chief of the Thundering Herds betrayed his inward anxiety only because his skin over his knuckles was pale with the strain of his clenched hands. He had taken care that his face was expressionless, that the muscles of shoulders and thighs were loosely flexed, but the hands betrayed his tension. Would he have understood a little of what I felt for Raki? Or was he thinking only of the honour of his tribe?”
Some of the older Chiefs, who must have seen this ordeal many times, did not have to pretend indifference: the ordeals were part of the tribal laws, a duty to be undertaken according to custom, but having no quality of horror or compassion. Only the Chief of the Smiling Valleys made no effort to conceal his repugnance; it was obvious that he attended the spectacle only because to refuse would have lost him the protection of the Thirty Tribes. He avoided looking at the ordeal; he let his pipe go out and then sent his son to fetch a brand from the nearest fire, and remained oblivious that this interruption was considered a breach of courtesy. He scratched his comfortable belly, slowly and reflectively, and then took off one moccasin and appeared to be entirely absorbed in taking a thorn from his foot. The pose of boredom was well done, but I knew he was feeling nearly as sick as I was. If we had not already decided that our tribe must go South, I should have known it then!
Suddenly a sigh went up from the watching circle. I thought the ants had struck, and it was only with a strong muscular effort that I could turn my head to make myself see what had happened. The ants had found the new source of honey, and were surging towards it with such eagerness that in some places they were three or four deep on the ground. There were islands of skin showing among the black torrent; the islands widened, as though a river in flood was suddenly subsiding. There was still a thick black ring round his navel, where the rear-guards of the enemy host gorged themselves at the pool before seeking new hunting-grounds. Now less than a hundred remained; these seemed to hear an order from one of the leaders, for they scurried in the direction of the half-empty jar, plunging fearlessly off the precipice of knee or shoulder to stagger on through the forest of grass-blades.
The Chief of the Thundering Herds stood up, drew his hunting knife to slash through the thongs on the man’s wrists and ankles, and lifted to his feet the man who had won new honour for his tribe. Then with his forefinger he traced the tribal mark on the forehead and breast of the Scarlet Feather. His son came forward and handed a lighted brand to the Chief, who set fire to the jar of honey on which the ants still feasted. The flames blazed up; it was the ants, not the man, which were no longer useful.
I expected to be able to speak with Raki before he went to prepare for his ordeal, but he must have decided it was easier for us both not to try to put our thoughts into words. A crowd had gathered on the slopes leading to the Eagle Rock, but I went with the Chiefs to join my tribe on the edge of the pool into which Raki must dive.
The deep water looked no larger than a long canoe and the crag towered into the sky above it. Could Raki see from up there that only a quarter of the pool was safe and that in the rest the treacherous rocks lurked just beneath the surface? Could he see them, or would the cloud shadows make him misjudge the colour of the water?
Dorrok, Gorgi, and Tekeeni were close to me, but I did not notice Narrok until I heard a quiet voice say:
“He will not fail, Piyanah. He has not betrayed his eyes nor the light of his heart, as I had done. I was divided between the will to die and the will to live; that is why I was caught between the two sides of the water until you and Raki brought me fully to life again.”
“He’s ready!” It was a shout from someone in the crowd.
The height seemed to have made Raki look shorter and broader. Narrok gripped my arm: “In a moment he will be climbing out of the pool to stand beside you. Steady, Piyanah, give him your courage to keep him steady.”
A groan went up from the crowd, as the body hurtled through the air, too close to the rock-face. Blank, unbelieving horror swept over me in a dark flood. I saw blood pouring like smoke through the water of the pool. Why does no one run forward to save Raki’s body? I can’t move. Why doesn’t Dorrok go for me? Why are they letting a strange Chief touch Raki? Raki, whose face is only a pulp of red flesh. …
I heard my father’s voice, very far away yet solid as stone, “The Yellow Skin failed, Piyanah, but Raki will win!”
“The Yellow Skin?” I wanted to cry and laugh and scream with relief. The arm dangling from that crushed shoulder, from that dead body which T’cha’s father carried in his arms, was not Raki’s! It was yellow…it was not Raki’s!
“Quiet, Piyanah!” Dorrok’s voice, sharp and authoritative. I realized with shame that a convulsive sob had burst out of me.
“I’m sorry, Dorrok. I didn’t know that two men were going to dive. …I thought it was Raki. Why are they waiting, Dorrok?”
“For the blood to clear from the pool. It will not be long now.”
A desperate call for help formed into words inside my head, “Great Eagle, please remember your rock and give the power of your wings to Raki. Great Fish, make him wise in water. Great Hunters, protect him, protect him…”
Raki stood far above me on the towering pinnacle; his hands stretched above his head as though he was thanking the Lords of the Sky. Slowly, so very slowly, he plunged down through the air; his body curved like a bow, his arms steady as gliding wings.
“He is going to do it! He is going to!” Dorrok was exultant.
I saw Raki flash by into the green water. I heard a shout of acclamation go up from the watching thousands. I saw him break surface, shaking the water from his eyes.
Then I felt his arm, wet and real and alive, round my shoulders. I was trying to thank the Great Hunters, trying not to fling my arms round him, trying to say calmly, “I knew you were going to be safe, Raki.”
But most of all I was trying not to weep for joy; because our happiness was safe between our hands though I had thought it crushed to pulp at the foot of the Eagle Rock.