The man called Nigh was the official tale-bearer, or spy, in the tribe of Koor. His function, undisguised, was to gather scandal and bring it to the Old One. He was the eyes and ears of Koor, was indeed sometimes so styled: but the purpose he in practice best served was that of discouraging the lawless. With this fellow moving amongst them, one with them in blood but actively and ostentatiously in the service of the Old One, the sons of Koor were little tempted to transgress. Nigh was a figure-head, a moral force. It was an open secret that the real work of spying was done not by the tale-bearer himself but by others who carried tales to him. Who were these others? Some had died violently: the rest remained anonymous, alive, and active. The squat was full of informers, habitual or casual. It might be you, or you, or you, that betrayed me. It might be my son, my daughter, or the friend of my bosom: for the danger of shielding a sinner, the punishment to be expected of the gods, was well known to everyone. There existed, therefore, a double incentive to righteousness, a double fear: fear of the gods, and fear of Koor’s law, of which Nigh was the slinking symbol. What Nigh heard, Koor would hear within the hour; what Koor heard, Hasta heard. These three constituted in effect the supreme council of state. In Koor was power; in Hasta was wisdom; in Nigh was everlasting watchfulness.
There was need of watching, and need of an executive council, in this primitive but not entirely simple society. Existence was complicated by many rules and prohibitions, some grounded in experience and serving the common weal, others quite arbitrary, queer mental antics incidental to the long protracted agony of a new birth. Slowly, grotesquely, the life in these people was struggling towards a new form. The animal was aspiring towards manhood, the savage to civilisation. Instinct was still lusty; but reason, newly born, was awake and crying. There were so many things that a man must do, and so many more that a man must not do. There was magic and counter-magic; spells, charms, incantations; blessing and cursing. Danger lurked in the most unexpected places, the most ordinary chance. Certain words, and particularly certain names, must not be spoken: euphemism and periphrase were essential constituents of everyday speech, and even the substituted words, if used too often in the same sense, became tainted by the unmentionables they hinted at. After words, the chief source of evil was woman; and, chief among women, those virgins who had reached puberty. If you chanced to tread, unknowingly, on a leaf or twig or blade of grass that since the sun’s rising had been in contact with one having the custom of women upon her, and she a virgin, you became unclean; and nothing would suffice, for your own health and the tribe’s, but that you should be isolated, shunned, and starved, for a period of three days. Married women were another matter: they were their husbands’ responsibility, and the husbands were held to have a monopoly of the evils as well as the blessings associated with them—a provision that would have made the life of the great Koor himself, that much-married man, an enterprise of extraordinary delicacy, and of infinite hazard, had he not, with Hasta in perpetual attendance, protected himself from this, that, and the other, by a hundred and one several and powerful charms. Koor no doubt had his own troubles, but this was not one of them. For the other men of the tribe, his sons and grandsons, women were an ever-present peril. After puberty every man must be at pains, in respect of his father’s wives and daughters, to avoid not only the major sin, but any other physical or social contact. His own mother, no less than his sisters, must become strange to him, to be addressed formally, and from a distance. Both the law and expediency suggested that he should be equally distant with his brothers’ wives, but this law, though generally acknowledged and obeyed, had not for him the magical paralysing power of the more ancient law of sib. Nor were breaches of it, short of adultery, punished with the same severity; since such breaches did not threaten Koor’s privilege, except indirectly.