Scarlet Feather
Page 30
“Aren’t you even a little afraid?”
“No, my Raki, I am strong and confident and happy! And you can’t be happy and afraid at the same moment.” As I said this I knew it was true, and splendid. “I am so very happy, Raki, and it’s not just because I am hiding from fear. I have had several curious pains, they have a rhythm like a very slow drumming. I am sure that Miyak has decided to be born, yet the pains are beautiful and exciting, and proud.”
There was a sound of distant thunder. Raki went to look out across the valley, where fire was flickering in the sky above the hills. “The moon is rising,” he said. “When the storm breaks, the air will be much cooler.”
I knew he was only pretending he wasn’t worried about my pains, so I lay still and waited for him to come back to me. Pain touched me again and then receded with the sound of thunder. I was restless, and longed for the clouds to let down their rain so that I could walk naked in the rush of clean water.
Without looking at me, Raki said, “Tell me when you have another pain…and you must tell me exactly how much it hurts, please don’t hide it from me, Piyanah.”
“It is much easier to have a pain in the belly than a pain in the heart…this is much easier than being parted from you even for a day. Come and lie down beside me so that we are very close and then the pain won’t matter at all.”
Later I found it so difficult to lie still that we went out into the friendly woods.
Thunder was still sounding but the rain clung to the sky. My body was sticky with sweat and I thought of going down to the river to try to get cool. Then I had a pain so strong and sudden that I had to hold on to a tree to stop myself crying out.
Raki led me back to the tepee. He wanted to fetch Rokeena, but I would not let him, and made him promise not to tell any of the others what was happening. He piled wood on the fire until light shone through the open flap. Usually in the hot weather there was only a thread of smoke rising from the watch-fire, but tonight, in spite of the intense heat, we both needed the security of flames against the darkness.
The thunder was louder than an avalanche, but I was grateful to the storm spirit because it drowned the whimper I could not hold back when the pain made me understand how it would feel to be crushed by a grizzly.
Raki crouched beside me, trying to shield me from the pain. I gasped and doubled up…it made me think of the women we had left in the Great Thirst, curled in their narrow graves. Thunder and Pain wore the same dark feathers and bore down on me with awful majesty.
I felt as though my body was being torn apart. “Raki, my belly must be splitting. I don’t want to leave you, Raki. I’m not really frightened…but I don’t want to leave you.”
A last great crash of thunder; then a silence more profound than deep water.
The side of the tepee grew thin, like mist under the morning sun; I saw a man wearing the feathers of a Chief, and behind him a splendid company who shone with light, pale and clear as the moon. I ran towards them. …
Then I heard Raki’s voice above the rain that seemed to drum with a message from the Great Hunters.
“We were right, Piyanah! It was like the kid…”
His voice was more beloved even than the splendour of my vision… “Oh, Raki, I am so happy!”
I realized that I was back in my body, and it had again become important. “Raki, are you quite sure my belly didn’t split?”
He took my hand. “Quite sure…but feel it for yourself.”
“It feels very empty, and the skin is horribly loose. I told you Miyak was going to be a son. …”
“He may be a daughter; I haven’t had time to look yet. …Yes, he is a son! A very healthy, angry son by the sound of him!”
I felt too drowsy to look at him yet…I had seen Miyak of the feathers and he might be difficult to recognize in his little body. “Raki, you had better wrap him in something or he may feel cold.”
“It is very warm tonight.”
“Not as warm as it was inside me,” I said, and then added urgently, “Put him down, Raki! Something else is happening to me. …Have I had another baby? It didn’t hurt nearly as much as the first one. …”
“No,” he said reassuringly, “it was only what I told you would happen…just the same as the goat.”
I laughed and found it easy to laugh. “The next time I see a goat I’m going to apologize to it for not being properly sympathetic!”
Raki went out of the tepee and I heard the fire hiss as he threw something into it. Rain was falling steadily, but under the shelter of the overhanging rock the fire still burned. He came back, sluiced his hands in a bowl of water and then washed the blood off me. I was naked and comfortable; he put a breech-clout stuffed with moss between my legs, and covered me with a blanket for I had begun to shiver.
I suddenly wanted to see the baby: Raki put it in the crook of my arm and lay down beside me. The eyes of my son were dark as sloes with the blue bloom of the new born. I said to Raki, “Now I know why a bear with cubs is more dangerous than the most savage of grizzlies!”
He laughed, the soft warm laugh of deep contentment, “If the father bear felt as proud of his cub as I do no one would dare to come near his cave!”
Then, as we had promised, all the women came to see that the Chief’s son was without blemish, and Miyak watched them with a wise stare as he received his first homage from the tribe.
Children of the Great Hunters
Miyak, three years old and so like Raki that by looking at either I could see the man as a child or the child as a Chief, was teaching his sister to crawl. Already our children recognized a close friendship, and in them we were well content that the future of the Heron was secure. Raki and I were sitting in front of our tepee, looking across the cultivation to the river. It was evening: smoke was rising from the cooking-fires, and we could see men and women working together in the fields. I was sharing their contentment, already such a rich harvest of our sowing. Raki must have known that mine were long thoughts. He said gently:
“It is autumn, and we know that the winter will be kind. The woods will sleep lightly, for here snow is only a ghost that vanishes with the coming of the sun. If Na-ka-chek could be with us now he would be happy.”
“He is often here, Raki. Miyak saw him yesterday. He told me he had been talking with an old man who wore a Chief’s headdress, like ours, but with feathers that shone, ‘like moonlight on water.’”
“Was Miyak frightened?”
“Why should a child be frightened of his grandfather?”
“I was foolish to expect it: I had forgotten that children who are born in love know that they who live beyond the sunset are their friends.”
“Raki, sometimes we think we have done very little since we came here. There have been no feats of endurance, no actions to make a legend at the Gathering of the Tribes yet we have achieved many small things; and though feathers may be small, together they can make the wings of the morning.”
“What are these new feathers?”
“They have become so familiar that they seem ordinary and unimportant: women working with their husbands, men and women laughing together, singing together—even weeping together.”
I paused to watch Gorgi walking down the hill with Cheka beside him, their son on his shoulder, their daughter clinging to her hand.
“Ordinary things, Raki—men and women going down to the river with their children. Yet you could search the Thirty Tribes and not equal that sight.”
Raki put his arm round my shoulders. “Look, my Piyanah, at the reflection of another feather you have won for them. A man carrying a baby in his arms and a woman standing waist-deep in the river mending a fish-trap.”
“It is your feather, Raki, more than mine; or did we both win it at the same time? To us, such an ordinary law, but to strangers inconceivable; that men and women should recognize that in spirit they are already both male and female, as they will be when they enter the Land of the Great Hunters. Now in this recognit
ion they can choose whatever work is closest to their hearts. They know it is nothing strange that a man should be happier—and so more useful to the community—looking after children, or cooking, or making tunics; or that a woman should be a mighty hunter, or skilled with words. Children live with their fathers and mothers and are happy…if I had to look forward to separation from Miyak when he is seven, the years would be only divisions of desolation.”
“We have given men and women to each other, and children to them both; but what have we taken away? The pride of endurance for the sake of endurance: and instead we have given them the strength to follow the ideas in which they believe. We have taken away the comfort of superstition; and given them the certainty that the Great Hunters are close and real. We have taken away the protection of impassivity; and given them kindliness in company. A rich exchange.”
“You forget that because there are no Naked Foreheads, warriors sometimes have to act as scavengers.”
Raki laughed, “It is better to be a scavenger than a Scarlet Feather who is proud of being remote from his kindred. Now the Heron are more eager to win a white feather than once they were for the Scarlet, for they have learned that an idea may be more powerful than arrows against the Sorrow Bird.”
“It must have been a great battle,” I said softly, “between the Heron and the Sorrow Bird. And the Heron won, Raki. Perhaps only Narrok, who knows the language of the drums beyond the sunset, heard the cry of the Sorrow Bird in her dying. ‘They have killed me, the People of the Heron, for they have learned to answer the Question of the Great Hunters—How many people are happier because you were born?’”
Joan Grant
Joan Grant was born in England in 1907. Her father was a man of such intellectual brilliance in the fields of mathematics and engineering that he was appointed a fellow of Kings College while still in his twenties. Joan’s formal education was limited to what she absorbed from a series of governesses, although she feels she learned far more from the after-dinner conversations between her father and his fellow scientists.
When Joan was twenty, she married Leslie Grant, with whom she had a daughter. This marriage ended soon after Winged Pharaoh was published in 1937—a book which became an instant best-seller. Until 1957 she was married to the philosopher and visionary Charles Beatty, who is the author of several books, including The Garden of the Golden Flower, a treatise on psychiatrist Carl Jung. In 1960, Joan married psychiatrist Denys Kelsey.
Throughout her life, Joan has been preoccupied with the subject of ethics. To her, the word “ethics” represents the fundamental and timeless code of attitudes and behavior toward one another on which the health of the individual and society depends. Each of her books and stories explores a facet of this code. As Denys Kelsey has written, “The First Dynasty of Egypt once knew the code well, but lost it and foundered. Eleven dynasties were to pass before it was recovered, but those were more leisurely times when the most lethal weapon was an arrow, a javelin and a club. We feel that in the present troubled days of this planet, these books must be presented.”
SPEAKING FROM THE HEART
ISBN 978-1-58567-893-3
$32.95 Hardcover
WINGED PHARAOH
ISBN 978-1-58567-886-0
$14.95 Paperback
SCARLET FEATHER
ISBN 978-1-58567-887-7
$14.95 Paperback