I heard a cry from the bank, a bell-like contralto, vibrant, imperious—in archaic Uighur:
“Come back! Come back. Yellow-hair!”
I swung round to see. The falcon ceased its bufferings. Upon the farther bank was the Wolf-woman upon her great black mare, the captive girl still clasped in her ann. The Wolf-woman’s eyes were like sapphire stars, her free hand was raised in summons.
And all around her, heads lowered, glaring at me with eyes as green as hers were blue, was a pack of snow-white wolves!
“Come back!” she cried again.
She was very beautiful—the Wolf-woman. It would not have been hard to have obeyed. But no—she was not a Wolf-woman! What was she? Into my mind came a Uighur word, an ancient word that I had not blown I knew. She was the Salur’da—the Witch-woman. And with it came angry resentment of her summons. Who was she—the Salur’da—to command me! Me, Dwayanu, who in olden time long forgot would have had her whipped with scorpions for such insolence!
I raised myself high above the white water.
“Back to your den, Salur’da!” I shouted. “Does Dwayanu come to your call? When I summon you, then see that you obey!”
She stared at me, stark amazement in her eyes; the strong arm that held the girl relaxed so that the captive almost dropped from the mare’s high pommel. I struck out across the water to the farther shore.
I heard the Witch-woman whistle. The falcon circling round my head screamed, and flew. I heard the white wolves snarling; I heard the thud of the black mare’s hoofs racing over the blue sward. I reached the bank and climbed it. Only then did I turn. Witch-woman, falcon and white wolves—all of them were gone.
Across my wake the emerald-headed, emerald-crested serpents swam and swirled and dived.
The golden pygmies had climbed upon the bank.
Jim asked:
“What did you say to her?”
“The Witch-woman comes to my call—not I to hers,” I answered, and wondered as I did so what it was that compelled the words.
“Still very much—Dwayanu, aren’t you, Leif? What touched the trigger on you this time?”
“I don’t know.” The inexplicable resentment against the woman was still strong, and, because I could not understand it, irritating to a degree. “She ordered me to come back, and a little fire-cracker went off in my brain. Then I—I seemed to know her for what she is, and that her command was rank insolence. I told her so. She was no more surprised by what I said than I am. It was like someone else speaking. It was like—” I hesitated—“well, it was like when I started that cursed ritual and couldn’t stop.”
He nodded, then began to put on his clothes. I followed suit. They were soaking wet. The pygmies watched us wriggle into them with frank amazement. I noticed that the angry red around the wound on the little man’s breast had paled, and that while the wound itself was raw, it was not deep and had already begun to heal. I looked at my own hand; the red had almost disappeared, and only a slight tenderness betrayed where the nectar had touched it.
When we had laced our boots, the golden pygmies trotted off, away from the river toward a line of cliffs about a mile ahead. The vaporous green light half hid them, as it had wholly hidden our view to the north when we had first looked over the valley. For half the distance the ground was level and covered with the blue-flowered grass. Then ferns began, steadily growing higher. We came upon a trail little wider than a deer path which threaded into a greater brake. Into this we turned.
We had eaten nothing since early morning, and I thought regretfully of the pack I had left behind. However, it is my training to eat heartily when I can, and philosophically go without when I must. So I tightened my belt and glanced back at Jim, close upon my heels.
“Hungry?” I asked.
“No. Too busy thinking.”
“Indian—what brought the red-headed beauty back?”
“The wolves. Didn’t you hear them howling after her? They found our track and gave her the signal.”
“I thought so—but it’s incredible! Hell—then she is a Witch-woman.”
“Not because of that. You’re forgetting your Mowgli and the Grey Companions. Wolves aren’t hard to train. But she’s a Witch-woman, nevertheless. Don’t hold back Dwayanu when you deal with her, Leif.”
The little drums again began to beat. At first only a few, then steadily more and more until there were scores of them. This time the cadences were lilting, gay, tapping out a dancing rhythm that lifted all weariness. They did not seem far away. But now the ferns were high over our heads and impenetrable to the sight, and the narrow path wove in and out among them like a meandering stream
The pygmies hastened their pace. Suddenly the trail came out of the ferns, and the pair halted. In front of us the ground sloped sharply upward for three or four hundred feet. The slope, except where the path ran, was covered from bottom to top with a tangle of thick green vines studded along all their lengths with wicked three-inch thorns; a living chevaux-de-frise which no living creature would penetrate. At the end of the path was a squat tower of stone, and from this came the glint of spear-heads.
In the tower a shrill-voiced drum chattered an unmistakable alarm. Instantly the lilting drums were silent. The same shrill chatter was taken up and repeated from point to point, diminishing in the far distance; and now I saw that the slope was like an immense circular fortification, curving far out toward the unbroken palisade of the giant ferns, and retreating at our right toward the sheer wall of black cliff, far away. Everywhere upon it was the thicket of thorn.
The little man twittered to his woman, and walked up the trail toward the tower. He was met by other pygmies streaming out of it. The little woman stayed with us, nodding and smiling and patting our knees reassuringly.
Another drum, or a trio of them, began to beat from the tower. I thought there were three because their burden was on three different notes, soft, caressing, yet far-carrying. They sang a word, a name, those drums, as plainly as though they had lips, the name I had heard in the trilling of the pygmies…
Ev-ah-lee… Ev-ah-lee… Ev-ah-lee… Over and over and over. The drums in the other towers were silent.
The little man beckoned us. We went forward, avoiding with difficulty the thorns. We came to the top of the path beside the small tower. A score of the little men stepped out and barred our way. None was taller than the one I had saved from the white flowers. All had the same golden skin, the same half-animal yellow eyes; like his, their hair was long and silky, floating almost to their tiny feet, They wore twisted loin-cloths of what appeared to be cotton; around their waists were broad girdles of silver, pierced like lace-work in intricate designs. Their spears were wicked weapons for all their apparent frailty, long-handled, hafted in some black wood, and with foot-deep points of red metal, and barbed like a muskalonge hook from tip to base. Swung on their backs were black bows with long arrows barbed in similar manner; and in their metal girdles were slender sickle-shaped knives of the red metal, like scimitars of gnomes.
They stood staring at us, like small children. They made me feel as Gulliver must have felt among the Liliputians. Also, there was that about them which gave me no desire to tempt them to use their weapons. They looked at Jim with curiosity and interest and with no trace of unfriendliness. They looked at me with little faces that grew hard and fierce. Only when their eyes roved to my yellow hair did I see wonder and doubt lighten suspicion—but they never dropped the points of the spears turned toward me.
Ev-ah-lee… Ev-ah-lee… Ev-ah-lee… sang the drums.
There was an answering roll from beyond, and they were silent.
I heard a sweet, low-pitched voice at the other side of the tower trilling the bird-like syllables of the Little People— And then—I saw Evalie.
Have you watched a willow bough swaying in spring above some clear sylvan pool, or a slender birch dancing with the wind in a secret woodland and covert, or the flitting green shadows in a deep forest glade which are dryads
half-tempted to reveal themselves? I thought of them as she came toward us.
She was a dark girl, and a tall girl. Her eyes were brown under long black lashes, the clear brown of the mountain brook in autumn; her hair was black, the jetty hair that in a certain light has a sheen of darkest blue. Her face was small, her features certainly neither classic nor regular—the brows almost meeting in two level lines above her small, straight nose; her mouth was large but finely cut, and sensitive. Over her broad, low forehead the blue-black hair was braided like a coronal. Her skin was clear amber. Like polished fine amber it shone under the loose, yet clinging, garment that clothed her, knee-long, silvery, cobweb fine and transparent. Around her hips was the white loin-cloth of the Little People. Unlike them, her feet were sandalled.
But it was the grace of her that made the breath catch in your throat as you looked at her, the long flowing line from ankle to shoulder, delicate and mobile as the curve of water flowing over some smooth breast of rock, a liquid grace of line that changed with every movement.
It was that—and the life that burned in her like the green flame of the virgin forest when the kisses of spring are being changed for the warmer caresses of summer. I knew now why the old Greeks had believed in the dryads, the naiads, the nereids—the woman souls of trees, of brooks and waterfalls and fountains, and of the waves.
I could not tell how old she was—hers was the pagan beauty which knows no age.
She examined me, my clothes and boots, in manifest perplexity; she glanced at Jim, nodded, as though to say there was nothing in him to be disturbed about; then turned back to me, studying me. The small soldiers ringed her, their spears ready.
The little man and his woman had stepped forward. They were both talking at once, pointing to his breast, to my hand, to my yellow hair. The girl laughed, drew the little woman to her and covered her lips with a hand. The little man went on trilling and twittering.
Jim had been listening with a puzzled intensity whenever the girl had done the talking. He caught my arm.
“It’s Cherokee they’re speaking! Or something like it—Listen…there was a word…it sounded like ‘Yun’-wini’giski’…it means ‘Man-eaters.’ Literally, ‘They eat people’…if that’s what it was… and look…he’s showing how the vines crawled down the cliffs…”
The girl began speaking again. I listened intently. The rapid enunciation and the trilling made understanding difficult, but I caught sounds that seemed familiar—and now I heard a combination that I certainly knew.
“It’s some kind of Mongolian tongue, Jim. I got a word just then that means ‘serpent-water’ in a dozen different dialects.”
“I know—she called the snake ‘aha’nada’ and the Cherokees say ‘inadu’—but it’s Indian, not Mongolian.”
“It might be both. The Indian dialects are Mongolian. Maybe it’s the ancient mother-tongue. If we could only get her to speak slower, and tune down on the trills.”
“It might be that. The Cherokees called themselves ‘the oldest people’ and their language ‘the first speech’—wait—”
He stepped forward, hand upraised; he spoke the word which in the Cherokee means, equally, friend or one who comes with good intentions. He said it several times. Wonder and comprehension crept into the girl’s eyes. She repeated it as he had spoken it, then turned to the pygmies, passing the word on to them—and I could distinguish it now plainly within the trills and pipings. The pygmies came closer, staring up at Jim.
He said, slowly: “We come from outside. We know nothing of this place. We know none within it.”
Several times he had to repeat this before she caught it. She looked gravely at him, and at me doubtfully—yet as one who would like to believe. She answered haltingly.
“But Sri”—she pointed to the little man—“has said that in the water he spoke the tongue of evil.”
“He speaks many tongues,” said Jim—then to me:
“Talk to her. Don’t stand there like a dummy, admiring her. This girl can think—and we’re in a jam. Your looks make no hit with the dwarfs, Leif, in spite of what you did.”
“Is it any stranger that I should have spoken that tongue than that I now speak yours, Evalie?” I said. And asked the same question in two of the oldest dialects of the Mongolian that I knew. She studied me, thoughtfully.
“No,” she said at last—“no; for I, too, know something of it, yet that does not make me evil.”
And suddenly she smiled, and trilled some command to the guards. They lowered their spears, regarding me with something of the friendly interest they had showed toward Jim. Within the tower, the drums began to roll a cheerful tattoo. As at a signal, the other unseen drums which the shrill alarm had silenced, resumed their lilting rhythm.
The girl beckoned us. We walked behind her, the little soldiers ringing us, between a portcullis of thorn and the tower.
We passed over the threshold of the Land of the Little People and of Evalie.
CHAPTER IX.
THE SHADOWED-LAND
The green light that filled the Shadowed-land was darkening. As the green forest darkens at dusk. The sun must long since have dipped beneath the peaks circling that illusory floor which was the sky of the Shadowed-land. Yet here the glow faded slowly, as though it were not wholly dependent upon the sun, as though the place had some luminosity of its own.
We sat beside the tent of Evalie. It was pitched on a rounded knoll not far from the entrance of her lair within the cliff. All along the base of the cliff were the lairs of the Little People, tiny openings through which none larger than they could creep into the caves that were their homes, their laboratories, their workshops, their storehouses and granaries, their impregnable fortresses.
It had been hours since we had followed her over the plain between the watch-tower and her tent. The golden pygmies had swarmed from every side, curious as children, chattering and trilling, questioning Evalie, twittering her answers to those on the outskirts of the crowd. Even now there was a ring of them around the base of the knoll, dozens of little men and little women, staring up at us with their yellow eyes, chirping and laughing. In the arms of the women were babies like tiniest dolls, and like larger dolls were the older children who clustered at their knees.
Child-like, their curiosity was soon satisfied; they went back to their occupations and their play. Others, curiosity not yet quenched, took their places.
I watched them dancing upon the smooth grass. They danced in circling measures to the lilting rhythm of their drums. There were other knolls upon the plain, larger and smaller than that on which we were, and all of them as rounded and as symmetrical. Around and over them the golden pygmies danced to the throbbing of the little drums.
They had brought us little loaves of bread, and oddly sweet but palatable milk and cheese, and unfamiliar delicious fruits and melons. I was ashamed of the number of platters I had cleaned. The little people had only watched, and laughed, and urged the women to bring me more.
Jim said, laughingly: “It’s the food of the Yunwi Tsundsi you’re eating. Fairy food, Leif! You can never eat mortal food again.”
I looked at Evalie, and at the wine and amber beauty of her. Well, I could believe Evalie had been brought up on something more than mortal food.
I studied the plain for the hundredth time. The slope on which stood the squat towers was an immense semi-circle, the ends of whose arcs met the black cliffs. It must enclose, I thought, some twenty square miles. Beyond the thorned vines were the brakes of the giant fern; beyond them, on the other side of the river, I could glimpse the great trees. If there were forests on this side, I could not tell. Nor what else there might be of living things. There was something to be guarded against, certainly, else why the fortification, the defences?
Whatever else it might be, this guarded land of the golden pygmies was a small Paradise, with its stands of grain, its orchards, its vines and berries and its green fields.
I thought over what Evalie had told us
of herself, carefully and slowly tuning down the trilling syllables of the little people into vocables we could understand. It was an ancient tongue she spoke—one whose roots struck far deeper down in the soil of Time than any I knew, unless it were the archaic Uighur itself. Minute by minute I found myself mastering it with ever greater ease, but not so rapidly as Jim. He had even essayed a few trills, to the pygmies’ delight. More than that, however, they had understood him. Each of us could follow Evalie’s thought better than she could ours.
Whence had the Little People come into the Shadowed-land? And where had they learned that ancient tongue? I asked myself that, and answered that as well ask how it came that the Sumerians, whose great city the Bible calls Ur of the Chaldees, spoke a Mongolian language. They, too, were a dwarfish race, masters of strange sorceries, students of the stars. And no man knows whence they came into Mesopotamia with their science full-blown. Asia is the Ancient Mother, and to how many races she has given birth and watched blown away in dust none can say.
The transformation of the tongue into the bird-like speech of the Little People, I thought I understood. Obviously, the smaller the throat, the higher are the sounds produced. Unless by some freak, one never hears a child with a bass voice. The tallest of the Little People was no bigger than a six-year-old child. They could not, perforce, sound the gutturals and deeper tones; so they had to substitute other sounds. The natural thing, when you cannot strike a note in a lower octave, is to strike that same note in a higher. And so they had, and in time this had developed into the overlying pattern of trills and pipings, beneath which, however, the essential structure persisted.
She remembered, Evalie had told us, a great stone house. She thought she remembered a great water. She remembered a land of trees which had become “white and cold”. There had been a man and a woman…then there was only the man…and it was all like mist. All she truly remembered was the Little People…she had forgotten there had ever been anything else…until we had come. She remembered when she had been no bigger than the Little People…and how frightened she was when she began to be bigger than they. The Little People, the Rrrllya—it is the closest I can come to the trill—loved her; they did as she told them to do. They had fed and clothed and taught her, especially the mother of Sri, whose life I had saved from the Death Flower. Taught her what? She looked at us oddly, and only repeated—“taught me.” Sometimes she danced with the Little People and sometimes she danced for them—again the oddly secretive, half-amused glance. That was all. How long ago had she been as small as the Little People? She did not know—long and long ago. Who had named her Evalie? She did not know.
The A. Merritt Megapack Page 144