Slowly the man nodded.
Most Indians grow old quickly, and are withered like dried-up apples as soon as the later years come upon them. But Secotan, although his hair was gray, had still the clear-cut face with its arched nose and heavy brows of a younger man. Only his eyes, deep, piercing, and very wise, seemed to show how long he had lived and how much he had learned.
“Our fathers and their fathers before them have always known that we must distrust the sea,” he said at last. “No matter how blue and smiling it may be it can never be our friend. We may swim near the shore, we may even launch our canoes and journey, if the way be short, from one harbor to another when the sky is clear and the winds are asleep. But always we are to remember that the sea is our enemy and a treacherous enemy in the end.”
He turned away to stare at the hills again, but Nashola lingered, not yet satisfied. It was unheard-of boldness to question Secotan’s words, yet the boy could not keep his hot protests to himself.
“But is it not wrong to pretend to fear what we do not?” he objected. “Do the spirits of the water actually rise up and tell you that we must keep to the shore? I do not believe it; although my grandmother says so until my ears ring again.”
Secotan turned his head quickly, as though to hide the ghost of a smile.
“The voices of the wind and the breakers and of the thunder all cry the same message,” he declared, “and wise men have learned that it warns them to hug the land. You must heed your grandmother, even though her words are shrill and often repeated.”
He would say no more, so Nashola went away, pondering his answer as he walked down the hill. After all, no harm had come to him from entering the medicine man’s presence unbidden, as his comrades had all said. He answered their questions very shortly as they came crowding about him, and to the persistent queries of his grandmother he would say nothing at all. Yet the others noticed that his canoe lay unused in the shelter of a rock on the sandy beach where he had left it, and that he swam in the sea no more.
The days passed, the hot, quiet summer passing with them. One evening, as they all sat about the camp fire, one of the older warriors said quietly:
“The time is near when our medicine man must go from us.”
“Why?” questioned Nashola’s grandmother, while the boy turned quickly to hear.
“He has not sat upon the hill nor before the door of his lodge for three days, and the venison and corn we have carried to him have lain untouched for all that time. One of us who ventured close heard a cry from within and groaning. It may be that he must die.”
“But will no one help him?” cried Nashola. It was not proper that a boy should speak out in the presence of the older warriors, but he could not keep his wonder to himself.
“There is danger to common folk in passing too close to the medicine man’s lodge,” his grandmother explained quickly. “There are spirits within who are his friends but who might destroy us. And when he is ill unto death and the beings from another world have come to bear his soul away, then must no man go near.”
“Sometimes a medicine man has a companion to whom he teaches his wisdom and who takes his place when he is gone,” said the man by the fire. “But even that comrade flees away when death is at hand and the spirits begin to stand close about his master. Yes, such a man must die alone.”
All through the night Nashola lay awake, thinking of what he had heard. Secotan was, he knew, a man of powerful magic, but he could not forget that there was a look in his eyes and a kindliness in his tone that seemed human, after all. Must he suffer and die there, without help, merely because he was greater and wiser than the rest? Or, when death came close and the host of unearthly beings gathered about him, would he not feel it of comfort to have a living friend by his side? It was long past midnight and in the black darkness that comes before day, before the boy came to final resolution.
He crawled out from under the shelter of his lodge and slipped noiselessly through the sleeping camp. Every rustle in the grass, every stirring leaf in the thicket made him jump and shiver, yet he kept steadily on. The sharp outline of Secotan’s pointed lodge poles stood out against the stars, halfway-up the shoulder of the hill. The door showed black and open as he came near, but there was no sound from within. The only thing that seemed alive was a dull, glowing coal in the ashes of a fire that was not quite dead. The boy stooped down before the door and spoke in a shaking voice:
“Secotan, Secotan, do you still live?”
A hollow, gasping whisper sounded from the shadows within:
“I am living, but death is very near.”
Nashola stood still for a moment. He could picture that gaunt figure lying helpless on the ground, with the darkness all about peopled by strange shapes visible to the sorcerer’s eyes alone, crowding spirits come to carry him away to an unknown world. But even as a wave of icy terror swept over him, he remembered how fearful it would be to lie all alone in that haunted darkness, and he bent low and slipped through the door.
“I know that all the spirits of the earth and air and water are with you,” he said as he felt his way to the deerskin bed and sat down beside it, “but I thought, among them all, you might wish for a friend beside you who was flesh and blood.”
A quivering hand was laid for an instant on his knee.
“There is no man who does not feel terror when he comes to die alone,” the medicine man whispered, “and Secotan is less of a man than you.”
Through the dragging hours Nashola sat beside him, listening with strained ears to every sound—the soft moving of a snake through the grass before the door, the nibbling of a field mouse at the skin of the tent, the sharp scream of a bird in the wood captured by a marauding owl. The blackness grew thinner at last, showing the lodge poles, the shabby skins of the bed, and finally the sick man’s face, drawn and haggard with pain. As the dawn came up over the hills, he opened his eyes and spoke:
“Bring those herbs that hang against the lodge pole and build up the fire. When the stones about it are hot, wrap them in wet blankets and lay them in the tent. The gods may have decreed that I am to live.”
Nashola worked frantically all through the day. He filled the lodge with steam from the hot stones, he brewed bitter drafts of herbs and held them to Secotan’s lips once in every hour by the sun. After a long time he saw the fever ebb, saw the man’s eyes lose their strange glittering, and heard his voice gather strength each time he spoke. For three nights and days the boy nursed him, all alone in the lodge, with men bringing, food to leave at the door but with no one willing to come inside. When at last Nashola went back to his own dwelling, Secotan was sitting, by his fire, weak and thin, but fairly on the way to health again.
The friendship that had grown up during that night of suffering and terror seemed to become deeper and deeper as time passed. There was scarcely a day when Nashola did not climb the hill in the late afternoon to sit under the rustling oak tree and talk for a long hour with the medicine man. His companions of his own age looked askance at such a friendship and his grandmother begged and scolded, but without avail.
Almost always, as he sat with his back against the tree, or lay full length in the long grass that was beginning to be dry and yellow with the coming autumn, the boy would fix his eyes upon the hills opposite through which there showed a gleam of sea. Like the picture of some forbidden thing was that glint of blue, framed by the green slopes and the sky above. He could see the whitecaps, the dancing glimmer of the sun, and the gray sea gulls that whirled and hovered and dipped before his longing gaze. He would lift his head to sniff the salt breeze that swept through the cleft in the hills, and to listen for that far-off thunder that could sometimes be heard as the great waves broke on the beach. At last, one day when he had sat so long with his friend that dusk was falling and the stars were coming out, he broke through the silence with a sudden question:
“Secotan, what lies beyond that sea?”
The medicine man shook his head without sp
eaking.
“My grandmother says ‘Nothing,’ pursued Nashola, “but I know that cannot be. Is it one of the things that I must not ask and that you may not tell me because you are a sorcerer and I am only a boy?”
Secotan was silent so long that Nashola thought he did not mean to reply at all. Even when he spoke it did not seem to be an answer.
“Do you see those seven stars?” he said, “that are rising from the sea and that march so close together that you keep thinking they are going to melt into one?”
“Yes,” answered the boy. “I often lie before our lodge door and watch them go up the sky. There are bigger stars all about them, but somehow I love those the best, they are so small and bright and seem to look down on us with such friendly eyes.”
“It is told among the medicine men,” Secotan went on slowly, “that many, many moons ago, long before this oak tree grew upon this hill, before its father’s father had yet been planted as an acorn, our people came hither across just such a sea as that. Far to the westward it lay, and they came, a mere handful of bold spirits in their canoes, across a wide water from some land that we have utterly forgotten. Some settled down at once upon the shores of the waters they had crossed, but some pressed eastward, little by little, as the generations passed. They filled the land with their children and in the end they came to another sea and went no farther. But the men who had led them were of a different heart than ours; there were always some who were not content to hunt and fish and move only as the deer move or as the seasons change. They wished to press on, ever on, to let nothing stop the progress of their march. It is said that when they came to this sea there were seven brothers who, when their people would no longer follow, launched their canoes and set off once more to the eastward, and never came back.
“They dwell there in the sky, we think, and they shine through those months of autumn that are dearest of all the year to our people, when the days are warm and golden before the winter, when the woods are bare and hunting is easy, when the game is fat from the summer grazing and our yellow corn is ripe. They come back to us in the Hunter’s Moon and they watch over us all through the cold winter. We call them the Seven Brothers of the Sun.”
Nashola was silent, waiting, for he knew from his friend’s voice that there was more that he wished to say.
“Your mother, who is dead, was not of our blood, they tell me. Your father took her from another tribe and they had brought her captive, from the north of us, so that she is no kin of ours. Sometimes I think that there must have run in her veins the blood of those seven brothers and that, in you, their bold spirit lives again. There is no one of your kind who loves the sea as you do, who has no shadow of a fear of it. And you are first, in all my life, who has asked me what lay beyond.”
“I should like,” said Nashola steadily, still watching the gray water and the gleam of stars above it, “I should like to go and see.”
“Often I have wondered,” the man went on, his voice growing very earnest, “whether you would not like to come to dwell with me, to learn the lore that makes me a medicine man and to take my place when I must go. I, who was taught by the wisest of us all, have waited long to find some one worthy of that teaching, and able to hold the power that I have. You can be a greater man than I, Nashola; not only your whole tribe will do your bidding and hang upon your words, but the men of our race all up and down the coast will revere you and talk of you as the greatest sorcerer ever known. Will you come to my lodge, will you learn from me, will you follow in my way?”
Nashola tried to speak, choked and tried again.
“I cannot do it,” he said huskily.
“Why?”
There was a sharp note of wonder, hurt friendship, even of terror, in the man’s voice.
“The people of our village say you are not like other men,” said the boy. “They say you can call the friendly spirits of the forest and the hostile gods of the sea, and that you have wisdom learned in another world. But I, who am your friend, think it is not so. I love you dearly, but I know you are a man as I am. I know the sea is only water and that the forest is only trees. I—I do not believe.”
He got to his feet, blind with misery, and went stumbling down the hill. The warm September darkness was thick about him, but up on the hill the starlight showed plainly the motionless figure sitting beneath the oak tree, never turning to look after him, uttering no sound of protest or reproach.
As September days passed into October, as the Seven Brothers rode higher in the sky, strange tales, once again, began to come from the south. More white men had been seen in their ships, sailing up and down the coast, trading with the Indians, buying the fish that they had caught and trying to talk to them in an unknown tongue.
“We have heard stories before and will hear them again,” said the older warriors incredulously. “Such tales are of the sort that old women tell about the fires on winter nights.”
“What does your friend the medicine man say of these rumors, Nashola?” asked one of the boys of his own age, but Nashola did not answer. He went no more up the hill to the big oak tree; he had held no speech for weeks with Secotan. Yet he would suffer no one to ask him why.
A day came when the news could no longer be disbelieved. A boy of the tribe, who had been digging for clams on the beach, came running home with startling tidings.
“The white men—the winged canoes—as big as our lodges—” he gasped. “Come quickly and see!”
Old men and young, squaws and papooses, every one deserted the little settlement by the river and went in wild haste up the eastward hills to look upon this strange wonder. It was a lowering day with overcast skies and water of a sullen gray and with ominously little wind. In speechless wonder the Indians stood gazing, for there indeed were three white-sailed ships, moving slowly before the lazy breeze, stanch little fishing vessels of English build, come to see whether this unexplored stretch of coast would yield them any cargo. As they watched, the largest one got up more sail, veered away upon a new tack, and was followed by the others.
“What can they be? Are they come to destroy us all?” asked a trembling old woman, and no one could answer.
“Hush,” said another in a moment, “the medicine man is coming.”
Secotan, who so seldom left his own lodge now, and who never mixed with the village folk, was climbing slowly up the hill after them. Nashola noticed that he had begun to look old, that his fierce hawk’s face was sunken, and that he walked very slowly, leaning upon his staff. The men and women drew back respectfully as he advanced and stood in a silent, waiting circle, while he shaded his eyes and gazed long at the ships, now growing smaller in the distance.
“Are they friends or enemies, Secotan?” one of the hunters ventured to ask, but the medicine man replied only:
“That must be as the gods decree.”
“Then destroy them for us,” cried the old squaw, Nashola’s grandmother. “Call up a storm that will break their wings and shatter the sides of those giant canoes. Bring wind and rain and thunder and all the spirits of the sea to overwhelm them.”
There was a breathless silence as Secotan slowly moved forward and raised his staff. Nashola, standing before the other boys, watched the medicine man’s face with eyes that never wavered. Even as the sorcerer moved there came a low mutter of thunder across the gray, level floor of the sea, and a distant streak of darker water showed the coming wind.
“There is the storm! The very winds obey him!”
The cry went up from all the Indians, save only Nashola who stood silent. The medicine man turned to look at him, then hesitated and dropped his eyes.
“Why do you wait? Raise up a hurricane, O greatest of sorcerers,” cried a man behind them.
“No,” shouted Secotan suddenly. He flung down his staff and held up his empty hands before his face. I—I will raise no storm,” he cried, “I will call no spirits from the deep—because I cannot. The wind and thunder answer no man’s bidding—storms come and go at th
e will of the Great Spirit alone. There is one soul here that I love, one being whom, in all my life, I have had for a friend. In his eyes I will stand for truth at last, although I had almost learned to believe in my magic myself. I can do none of those things that you think. I am a man without power, like every one of you!”
A roar of anger went up, a dull, savage, guttural sound that died away almost at once into silence, a quiet more ominous than an outcry could have been. Terrified by that strange apparition out yonder upon the waters, the Indians saw themselves deserted by the one person to whom they could look for courage and counsel. Only half understanding, they knew, at least, that Nashola had been the means of their medicine man’s downfall. Frenzied hands seized them both and dragged them headlong down toward the water. Visions of the savage tortures that his people wreaked upon their enemies passed through the boy’s mind, but he did not struggle or cry out, although Secotan’s set face, beside him, turned gray under its coppery skin. Some one had found Nashola’s canoe, left long unused upon the beach, and had launched it in the breakers.
“Let him go back to the sea that he loved, this boy who has never been one of us. Let the man perish in the storm that is coming without his call.”
Relentless hands flung them into the frail boat and pushed it out through the surf. Nashola crawled to the stern and took up the paddle; a crash of thunder broke over their heads and a wild flare of lightning lit the dark water as he dipped the blade. In a moment, rain was falling in blinding sheets, the wind and spray were roaring in their ears, and the ebbing tide was carrying them away, out of the harbor, past the rocky island, straight to the open, angry sea.
After a long time, Secotan, who had lain inert where he had been thrown into the boat, got to his knees and took up the second paddle. Only by keeping the little boat’s bow to the wind could immediate destruction be averted. But the medicine man’s strokes were feeble, affording little help, and at last he laid down the blade.
“It is of no use, Nashola,” he said. “Death rides on the wind and snatches at us from the black waters. Lay down your paddle and let us die.”
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 32
