If from a great height we look down on the scene of my story, we shall see the convex surface of the earth as a small shining disk, one of a myriad spinning coins tossed into space by the unknown minter; and, if our vision serve us, we shall see, moving on that disk, events that are now ages old. So we may begin in however remote a past, and, descending stage by stage, make our own terms with time, the line of our vertical downward flight being the instrument with which, at our pleasure, we may accelerate or retard its motion. Somewhere upon the face of that small world is England; somewhere on England is the South Downland; and in the heart of that country—microcosm of a microcosm—lies the little patch of territory, as yet undefined, that is one day to be known as Marden Fee. It is a small enough space, but the world itself is no bigger in meaning; for meaning is of the heart, and all that the heart knows and suffers can be read, if it can be read at all, as plainly in this hamlet as in the universe at large: more plainly indeed, for the less contains the greater, and here is an horizon that curves comfortably into the eye.
But Marden Fee is not yet in being; we can but see the place where it will one day be; and now, as we watch from our chosen height, Koor the patriarch, stately in his house of wattle and daub, sits in judgement on one of his many sons. A female of his tribe—a young girl of whom, as it happens, Koor himself is both father and grandfather—has been touched, and the patriarchal prerogative flouted, by the golden-bearded young upstart who now, with hate sparkling in his eyes, stands in a circle of spears five strides from his father. Koor is ancient and very hairy. His old body, much of which is naked, bears the scars of a thousand mutilations; his face seems all but featureless, nothing beyond wild beard being visible except a spike of nose, a wrinkled receding forehead, and two small bright frosty eyes. His hands, clasped over his plump belly, are brown and knotted; his fingers are so thin that they extend like claws from his huge knuckles. By the standards of the time he is fabulously old: the number of his moons is indeed beyond the computation of his contemporaries, although, since his birth, at every period of the moon’s pregnancy—for the moon at regular intervals becomes big with a brood of stars—the left ear has been cut from a female wolf-cub, and these powerful tokens, nearly six hundred by now, at this very moment hang about his neck in the form of a necklace: not only a symbol of age and authority but a device of great practical use, since this mutilation of ears enables Koor to hear the secret speech of his enemies. At sight of that monstrous charm every man with treachery in him puts a check even on his thoughts, for the wolf has quick hearing, and these many wolves together, with Koor’s cunning added, may perhaps learn even the thing that is not said. So thinks the lean wizard who stands at the Old One’s side and at intervals, in a chanting voice, testifies to the malice of the gods towards them that suffer a sinner in their midst. A crafty fellow, this wizard. He has told many tall stories in his time, and it is his tragedy, making him the half-demented scarecrow we now see, that he has always ended, even if he did not begin, by believing them himself. He is thinking, now, that Koor is old and losing his power, and that the time is fast coming when he, the wizard, must choose a new master and betray the old. Master? Or tool? He doesn’t know. He only knows that he is mortally afraid of that necklace, of which the tradition is older than himself, who is next in age to Koor. ‘Woe and pestilence on them that suffer a sinner!’ he moans, with mechanical unction. There is safety in that formula, and by making that much noise he will prevent, so he hopes, his thoughts from reaching the Old One. One man alone, in all this assembly, fears not the necklace; and that one is the prisoner, Ogo, who, thinking himself already as good as dead, is emancipated from all other fears. Ogo’s thoughts run free as water in a broad stream, but the bed of this stream has been broken, the mud stirred into motion, by a dropped pebble, the anticipation of death; so that all the man’s memory, except when he reaches a state of trance, is clouded and rippled by conjecture.
