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Throughout your voyeurism, you repeatedly return to the three men tied to tall stakes in the village center, next to the large, raised platform. They slump as though dead, but every once in a while you spy a rattling breath run its course through one of them. Two are blonde, one is not, all three are men. The blondes are wearing something akin to what you’re wearing, a shirt and work denims with a vest, though their heavy coats are nowhere to be seen. The third is in much finer clothing, a tie and a fine waistcoat decorate him, a discarded hat left in the dirt at his feet. They are ignored by the villagers.
About an hour before dusk, the men return. They come, thankfully, from the northwest, up the mountain, and not from the south where you are perched. A count reveals about eighty of them, about half are old men and young boys, and the other half are fit braves. Like the women, they wear hide cloaks, fitted moccasins, and hide trousers. Unlike the women, their chests are bare, marked sometimes with paint, sometimes with scars. All that you can clearly make out possess a brace of woven herbs twined up their right arm, set in a variety of colors.
The men enter the village, stopping before the raven poles to ritualistically scrape their moccasins in the dirt and offer a crushed bouquet of herbs to the ground before they enter. The crowd of men does somewhat raise the mood in the village, palpable even to you, and five men in particular step out to address the village. You cannot hear them, nor could you understand them if you could, but the five men, three old and two younger, are stoney-faced and hard-eyed as they deliver whatever news was in their possession. The mood changes from hopeful to…something else. Dusk is blooming, and torches and fires are lit in stunned, perfunctory motions by the villagers.
As the sky sets alight a single raven lands on a large tree stump outside of the village, and caws. The entire village seems to turn at the sound, then go much more briskly about their business. The five leaders, as you suppose them to be, begin to argue amongst themselves. A few other men take a large basket of water to the three prisoners and throw a healthy splash in each of their faces. All three jerk out of whatever reverie they’d fallen into for the day. They begin to struggle weakly as they’re untied from their posts and moved on the large platform.
