Read Ebook: The Flute of the Gods by Ryan Marah Ellis Curtis Edward S Illustrator

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Ebook has 1597 lines and 90559 words, and 32 pages

"Thanks, thanks that you wish it. I do not speak of it to give sad hearts. I speak because of the days when I may be gone, and another than me will hold the knowledge of a sacred place where the Sun Father hides his symbol. It is good that I hear of the men who let themselves go into ashes, and when if they had said once:--'I know where it is--the metal of the Sun!' all might have gone free and lived long days. My children:--it may be that some day one of you will hold a secret of the sacred place where strong magic lives! If it be so, let that man among you think in his heart of the twenty times ten men who let themselves be burned into ashes by the white men of iron! Guard you the sacred places--and let your ashes go into the sands, or be blown by the winds to the four ways. But from the sacred things of the gods, lift not the cover for the enemy!"

The old man trembled with the intensity of the thought and the dread of what the unborn years might bring.

After a moment of silence the governor spoke:

"It may be that you live the longest of all! No one knows who will guard the things not to be told. But no Te-hua can uncover that which belongs to the Sun Father, and the Earth Mother."

"It is true:--thanks that it is true!"--said the other men, and Tahn-t? knew he was listening to things not told to boys.

"Thanks that you speak so," said the Ruler. "Now we have all spoken of this matter. It is done. But the magic of the white hunters of gold, we have not yet heard spoken. How is it, boy, that you have brought all these signs of it:--what made blind their eyes?"

"Not anything," said Tahn-t?. "It was a long time I was with them. Some men had one book, or two, other men had papers that came in great canoes from their land in Spain. Some had writings from their fathers or their friends. These I heard read and talked of around the camp fire. When they went away some things were thrown aside or given to the padres who were to stay and talk of their gods. All I found I hid in the earth. The people of Ci-bo-la killed Padre Juan, and I traded a broken sword for his books and his papers. The sword I also had buried. They were afraid of the books, I had learned to read them, and I was not afraid."

"And you came from Ci-bo-la alone?" asked the governor,--"it is a long trail to carry a load."

"All was not carried from there. I came back to Ci-cu-y? to learn more from Padre Luis who meant to live there. He did not live so long, but while he lived he taught me."

"The men of Ci-cu-y? killed him too?"

"They made him die when they said I must not take beans or meal to him where he lived in a cave, and where he made prayers for their shadow spirits."

"You wanted that he should have food?" asked the Ruler.

"I wanted that he should live to teach me all the books before the end came," said the boy simply. "It is not all to be learned in two winters and one summer."

"That is true," said K-ya-fah the Ruler. "All of a man's life is needed to learn certain things of magic. It is time now that you come back and begin the work of the Orders. You have earned the highest right a boy has yet earned, and no doors will be closed for you on the sacred things given to people."

"We think that is so," said the governor--"no doors will be closed for the son of S-hanh-que-ah, the Woman of the Twilight."

This was the hour he had dreamed of through the months which had seemed horrible as the white man's hell. One needs only to read the several accounts of Coronado's quest for the golden land of the Gran Quivera in 1540-42 to picture what the life of a little native page must have been with the dissatisfied adventurers, by whom all "Indians" were considered as slaves should their service be required.

Men had died beside him on the trail--and there had been times when he felt he too would die but for the thought of this hour when he could come back, and the council could say--"It is well!"

"I thank you, and my mother will thank you," he said with his eyes on the stones of the kiva lest the men see that his eyes were wet. "My mother said prayers with me always, and that helped me to come back."

"The prayers of the Shadow Woman are high medicine," assented one of the men. "She brought back my son to live when the breath was gone away."

"As a little child she had a wisdom not to be taught," affirmed the Ruler--"and now it is her son who brings us the magic of the iron men. Tell us how you left the people of Ci-cu-y?."

"They were having glad dances that the Christians were gone, and that the padres were dead as other men die. So long as they let me I carried food and water to Padre Luis. Then they guarded me in the kiva, and laughed at me, and when they let me go I knew it was because he was no longer alive. No:--they did not harm me. They were too pleased that I could tell them of where their slave whom they called the 'Turk'--led the gold hunters searching for the Quivera of yellow metal and blue stones. They had much delight to hear of the woeful time of the white men. I could stay all my days at Ci-cu-y? and be precious to them, if I would talk of the trouble trail to Quivera, but when I had seen that the Padre was indeed gone to the Lost Others, my work was no more at Ci-cu-y?. I took his books also for my own--and all these things I have brought back at Povi-whah to make good my promise when I went away. Some things in the books, I know, and that I can tell you. Of the rest I will work until I do know, and then I can tell you that."

"That is good," said K-ye-fah the Ruler. "You shall be as my son and in the long nights of the winter moons we will listen. The time told of in the prophecies of Ki-pah is coming to us. He said also that in each danger time would be born one to mark the way for the people to follow--in each danger time so long as the Te-hua people were true to the gods!"

Tahn-t? breathed on the hand of the old men, and went up from the kiva into the cool night of the early summer.

It was too wonderful a night for aught but to reach up in thought to the height of the warm stars. They came so close he could feel their radiance in his heart.

Twice had his name in council been linked to the prophecies of the wise and mysterious prophet of the ancient days! Always he had known that the Woman of the Twilight and he were not to live the life of the others. He had not known why they were set apart for unusual experiences, but to-night he dared to think. With the words of the wise men still in his ears--the rulers who could make and unmake--he knew that no other boy had ever heard the praise and promise he had heard. He knew they thought they were giving words to one who would be a leader in the years to come--and this first night under the peace of the stars, he was filled with a triumph and an exaltation for which there were no words.

He would be a leader--not of war--not of government for the daily duties of village life, but of the Things of the Spirit which seemed calling within him to highest endeavor. He knew as yet nothing of Te-hua ceremonies--he had all to learn, yet he felt inspired to invent some expression for the joy which was his.

The new moon seemed to rest on the very edge of the mesa above him:--the uplifted horn looked like a white flame rising from purple shadows.

To the Indian mind all signs are symbolic,--and the flame was exactly above the point where the light was set ceremonially and regularly to light the Indian god back to his own people!

A point of white flame above that shrine of centuries!

His thought came so quickly that all the air of the night appeared alive with the unseen--and the unseen murmured in his ears, and his memories--and in his heart!

Suddenly he stretched his open hands high to the stars, and then ran across the level to the foot of the bluff. It was high and very steep, but wings seemed his--his heart was on the summit, and his body must follow--must get there before the white flame sank into the west--must send his greeting to answer the greeting of the god!

In the pouch at his girdle was the fire flint, and a wisp of the silky wild flax of tinder. Two sticks of dead scrub pi?on was there; he broke them in equal lengths and laid them in the cross which is the symbol of the four ways, and of the four winds from which the sacred breath is drawn for all that lives--the symbol also of union by which all human life is perpetuated. All fires of sacrifices,--or of magic power, must commemorate these things which are sacred things, and Tahn-t? placed them and breathed upon them, and touched them with the spark from the white flint, and then arose in joy and faced the moon yet visible, knowing that the god had seen his answering flame on the shrine--and that it meant a dedication to the Things of the Spirit.

Like a flash came the memory of that other time at the edge of that other mesa in Hopi-land! He had said those words to his mother--and had forgotten them. He could never forget them again, for the god had sent them back to him to remember. And Tahn-t? trembled at the wondrous signs given him this night, and sprinkled meal to the four ways, and held prayer thoughts of exaltation in his heart.

And this was the last day of the boy years of Tahn-t?.

He began then the years of the work for which his Other Self told him he had been born on earth.

TAHN-T?--THE RULER

Summers of the Sun, and winters when the stars danced for the snow, had passed over the valley of Povi-whah. New people had been born into the world, and old people had died, but the oldest man in the council, K-ye-fah--the Ruler of Things from the Beginning, had lived many years after the time when he thought the shadow life must come to him. And to the Woman of the Twilight he had said that it was her son who kept him living--her son to whom he taught the ancient things of his own youth. In the keen enthusiasms he had found such a son as he had longed for. The lost daughter, K-ye-povi, he had never found--and never forgotten. To Tahn-t? he had talked of her until she almost lived in their lives. The face of the god-maid on the south mesa had for K-ye-fah the outline of chin and backward sweep of hair strangely akin to the face of the lost child. He liked to think the god-maid belonged more to his clan of Towa Toan--the High Mesa clan--than to another.

"If she had not gone into the shadow land, her face would have looked that way," he said.

"And we could gather bright flowers for her hair,"--said the boy--"they would be sweeter than the cold, far brightness of the stars where the god-maid waits," and he pointed to where Antares gleamed from the heart of the Scorpion above the dusk profile,--"I think of K-ye-povi as the dream maid. She will be my always young sweetheart--my only one."

"That is good," said K-ye-fah--"very good for the work of the unborn years."

For the youth was to carry on the tribal prayers to the gods when K-ye-fah no longer walked on earth. And his teaching must be greater than all other teaching, for the Ruler was planning for the work of the days to come.

And in a day of the early spring the work was made ready, for to S-hanh-que-ah he said:--"A week ago So-hoah-tza went under the waters of the river and never breathed again. To him was given the guard of the sacred place of the Sun Father. I have not yet made any other the guardian. You are the woman of the order of the Po-Ahtun--I give you the guard to keep. Call the governor--but call your son first. You shall be guard as So-hoah-tza was guard, but Tahn-t? shall be guard as I have been! Lean lower, and let your ear listen and your heart keep sacred the word. I go to our Lost Others--but I leave you to guard."

The governor came, and all were sad, but no one thought that the life was over. K-ye-fah talked and smiled as one who goes to a feast.

But Tahn-t?, standing tall and still by the couch said:--"It will be over! This morning he wakened and said he would go with the sun to-day. He has no other thought, and he will go!"

And the women wept, and made ready the things of burial for the high priest of the highest order. If Tahn-t? said he would go into the shadows at that time--the women knew that it would be so. Tahn-t?, as they knew him, joyous in the dances of the seasons,--was never in their minds apart from Tahn-t? the prophet whose dreams even as a boy, had been beyond the dreams of the others who sought visions.

And as the sun touched the black line of the pines on the western mountain, the aged Ruler asked for his wand of office, and the governor gave it to him, and with his own hand he gave it to Tahn-t?, that even when his own form was covered with the soil, his vote would be on record in the minds of those who listened--and that vote gave to his pupil in magic, the wand of power--The youngest qualified member of the Order of Spiritual things was thus acclaimed as the Po-Ahtun-ho, a Ruler of Things from the Beginning.

Twenty-four years he had lived--but the time of life with the white men had counted more than double. In magic of many kinds he was more wise than the men of years, and the heart of his mother was glad with the almost perfect gladness when Tahn-t? stood in the place of the Ancient Wisdom and listened as the ear of the god listens to the recitation of many tribal prayers.

The Po-Ahtun-ho also listens at times to the individual appeals of the things of every day life--as a father listens to a child who seeks advice. To the more ancient Rulers the younger people were often afraid to go--various "uncles" of the village were appealed to instead. But the youth of Tahn-t? made all things different--even the love of a man for a maid, was not so small a thing that the new Ruler made the suppliant feel how little it was.

And one of the first who came to him thus--who knelt and offered a prayer to him, the prayer of a love, was the little Apache tigress who had been first of his own village to greet him in Ua-lano--Yahn Tsyn-deh, who had grown so pretty that the men of the other villages talked of her, and her mother had asked great gifts for her. But the mother had died with the winter, and Yahn refused to be subject to the Tain-tsain clan of her father, and there had been much trouble until she threatened to go back to her mother's tribe, and many thought it might come to that after all--for she was very strong of will.

But before Tahn-t? the Po-Ahtun-ho she crouched, and sobs shook her, and her hair covered her face as a veil.

"If it is of the clan, Yahn, it is to the governor you should speak:--" said Tahn-t?--"from him it may come to me if he thinks best. There are rules we must not break. Because I carried you, when little, on my shoulder, is no reason to walk past the door of the governor and bring his duties to me."

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