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"Your paintings don't belong here!" She Who Knows cried. "This is our shrine! We built it for Her! And we came here to worship Her and ask Her guidance." Diligently she scrubbed at the painted image until it was a messy ruin. She reached for the others then, but she wasn't able to reach them: her arms were too short. Only the spider-like arms of Other Ones could reach that far up the rock.
But she was satisfied that she had made her point. She scrambled down from the rocks and walked back to the place where the two groups of warriors still faced each other.
"You understand?" she asked the Other Ones. "This is our shrine! Ours!" She went toward them, right up to them, fearlessly. They stirred uneasily, but none lifted his spear. They were afraid of her, she knew. A holy woman, a woman with the Goddess within her: they didn't dare offer any resistance.
She glared up into their faces. They towered above her, tail as trees, tall as mountains. She pointed toward the west.
"Go back there, to your own country," she said. "Leave us alone. Let us make our offering in peace, you ugly bad-smelling animals! You blockheads! You stupid beasts!"
She caught hold of the Other One closest to her and pushed him in the direction she had been pointing. He drew back from her touch, taking a few steps away. She made a shooing gesture at him.
"Keep going! All of you, get moving!"
She Who Knows moved among them like a whirlwind, shouting, pushing. They edged nervously away from her as though she were carrying a plague. She followed after, waving her arms, yelling at them, single-handedly driving them out of the immediate vicinity of the shrine.
Then she halted and watched them go. They drew off perhaps a hundred and fifty paces, to a place where one of the two smaller rivers emerged around a bend and shot forth between a double wall of rocks. There they halted; and now, for the first time, She Who Knows saw that there was an encampment of Other Ones back there, a cluster of women and children and old people, hidden away in a bushy gully.
All right, She Who Knows thought. They have been driven away from the shrine; that was as much as she could hope to accomplish. But it was no small thing, and she had done it all by herself-though the fire of the Goddess had been burning within her all the while, or she never would have succeeded.
She went back to the men of the War Society.
"Without even a spear," she said to them triumphantly.
Young Antelope shook his head. "What a crazy woman you are!" But his eyes were shining with admiration.