The last warrior in line looked back down the trail. The Black Dog was following them. Its mouth dropped white saliva. At Farim they held a victory dance; but it was not a satisfactory victory dance. There were no dead warriors propped up, bloody sword in cold hand, to watch and approve the dancers. The two slaves they had taken sat with their heads bowed and their hands over their eyes, crying. Only the Black Dog watched them, sitting under the trees, grinning. All the little rat dogs of the village hid under the huts. “Soon we will raid Hoa again!” shouted young Gim. “We will follow the Spirit Dog to victory!”
“You will follow me,” said the war chief, Yu. “You will follow our advice,” said the oldest man, Imfa. The women kept the mead jars filled so the men could get drunk, but stayed away from the victory dance, as always. They met together and talked in the starlight by the drying racks.
When the men were all lying around drunk, the two Hoa women who had been captured tried to creep away in the darkness; but the Black Dog stood before them, baring its teeth and growling. They turned back, frightened.
Some of the village women came from the drying racks to meet them, and they began to talk together. The women of the Farim and the Hoa speak the women’s language, which is the same in both tribes, though the men’s language is not.
“Where did this kind of dog come from?” asked Imfa’s Wife.
“We do not know,” the older Hoa woman said. “When our men went out to raid, it appeared running before them, and attacked your warriors. And a second time it did that. So the old men in our village have been feeding it with venison and live coneys and rat dogs, calling it the Victory Spirit. Today it turned on us and gave your men the victory.”
“We too can feed the dog,” said Imfa’s Wife. And the women discussed this for a while.
Yu’s Aunt went back to the drying racks and took from them a whole shoulder of dried smoked venison. Imfa’s Wife smeared some paste on the meat. Then Yu’s Aunt carried it towards the Black Dog. “Here, doggy,” she said. She dropped it on the ground. The Black Dog came forward snarling, snatched the piece of meat, and began tearing at it.
“Good doggy,” said Yu’s Aunt.
Then all the women went to their huts. Yu’s Aunt took the captives into her hut and gave them sleeping mats and coverlets.
In the morning the warriors of Farim awoke with aching heads and bodies. They saw and heard the children of Farim, all in a group, chattering like little birds. What were they looking at?
The body of the Black Dog, stiff and stark, pierced through and through with a hundred fishing spears.
“The women have done this thing,” said the warriors.
“With poisoned meat and fishing spears,” said Yu’s Aunt.
“We did not advise you to do this thing,” said the old men.
“Nevertheless,” said Imfa’s Wife, “it is done.”
Ever thereafter the Farim raided the Hoa and the Hoa raided the Farim at reasonable intervals, and they fought to the death on the traditional and customary battlefields and came home victorious with their dead, who watched the warriors dance the victory dance, and were satisfied.
The War across the Alon
IN ANCIENT DAYS in Mahigul, two city-states, Meyun and Huy, were rivals in commerce and learning and the arts, and also quarreled continually over the border between their pasturelands.
The myth of the founding of Meyun went thus: the goddess Tarv, having spent a particularly pleasant night with a young mortal, a cowherd named Mey, gave him her blue starry mantle. She told him that when he spread it out, all the ground it covered would be the site of a great city, of which he would be lord. It seemed to Mey that his city would be rather a small one, maybe five feet long and three feet wide; but he picked a nice bit of his father’s pastureland and spread the goddess’s mantle on the grass. And behold, the mande spread and spread, and the more he unfolded it the more there was to unfold, until it covered all the hilly land between two streams, the little Unon and the larger Alon. Once he got the border marked, the starry mantle ascended to its owner. An enterprising cowherd, Mey got a city going and ruled it long and well; and after his death it went on thriving.
As for Huy, its myth was this: a maiden named Hu slept out in her father’s plow lands one warm summer night. The god Bult looked down, saw her, and more or less automatically ravished her. Hu was enraged. She did not accept his droit du seigneur. She announced she was going to go tell his wife. To placate her the god told her she would bear him a hundred sons, who would found a great city on the very spot where she had lost her virginity. On finding that she was more pregnant than seemed possible, Hu was angrier than ever and went straight to Bull’s wife, the goddess Tarv. Tarv could not undo what Bult had done, but she could alter things a bit. In due time Hu bore a hundred daughters. They became enterprising young women, who founded a city on their maternal grandfather’s farm and ruled it long and well; and after they died, it went on thriving.
Unfortunately, part of the western boundary line of Hu’s father’s farm ran in a curve that crossed the stream to which the eastern edge of Tarv’s starry cloak had reached.
After a generation of disputing about who owned this crescent of land, which at its widest reached about a half mile west of the stream, the descendants of Mey and Hu took their claims to their source, the goddess Tarv and her husband Bult. But the divine couple could not agree on a settlement, or indeed on anything else.
Bult backed the Huyans and would hear no arguments. He had told Hu her descendants would own the land and rule the city, and that was that, even if they had all turned out girls.
Tarv, who had some sense of fair play but did not feel any great warmth towards the swarming progeny of her husband’s hundred bastard daughters, said that she’d lent Mey her mantle before Bult raped Hu, so Mey had prior claim to die land, and that was that.
Bult consulted some of his granddaughters, who pointed out that that piece of land west of the river had been part of Hu’s father’s family farm for at least a century before Tarv lent her mantle to Mey. No doubt, said the granddaughters, the slight extension of the mantle onto Hu’s father’s land had been a mere oversight, which the City of Huy would be willing to overlook, provided the City of Meyun paid a small reparation of sixty bullocks and ten thubes of gold. One of the thubes of gold would be pounded into gold leaf to cover the altar of the Temple of Mighty Bult in the City of Huy. And that would be the end of it.
Tarv consulted no one. She said that when she said the city’s land would be all that her mantle covered, she meant exactly that, no more, no less. If the people of Meyun wanted to coat the altar of Starry Tarv in their city with gold leaf (which they had already done), that was fine, but it had no effect on her decision, which was based on unalterable fact and inspired by divine justice.
It was at this point that the two cities took up arms; and from this time on Bult and Tarv played no recorded role in events, however constantly and fervently invoked by their descendants and devotees in Meyun and Huy.