The Inheritors

  “This is the cold of the water where the log was."

  She came and knelt by him and rubbed his chest with her hands and kneaded the muscles of his neck. She took his head on her knees and shielded him from the wind till his coughing was done and he lay still, shivering slightly. The new one woke up and scrambled down from Fa's back. He crawled among the stretched legs with his red thatch glistening in the light. He saw the fire, slipped under Lok's raised knee, took hold of Mai's ankle and pulled himself upright. Two little fires lit in his eyes and he stayed, leaning forward, holding on to the shaking leg. The people divided their attention between him and Mai. Then a branch burst so that Lok jumped and sparks shot out into the darkness. The new one was on all fours before the sparks landed. He scuttled among the legs, climbed Nil's arm and hid himself in the hair of her back and neck. Then one of the little fires appeared by her left ear, an unwinking fire that watched warily. Nil moved her face sideways and rubbed her cheek gently up and down on the baby's head. The new one was enclosed again. His own thatch and his mother's curls made a cave for him. Her mop hung down and sheltered him. Presently the tiny point of fire by her ear went out.

  Mai pulled himself up so that he sat leaning against the old woman. He looked at each of them in turn. Liku opened her mouth to speak but Fa hushed her quickly. Now Mai spoke.

  “There was the great Oa. She brought forth the earth from her belly. She gave suck. The earth brought forth woman and the woman brought forth the first man out of her belly."

  They listened to him in silence. They waited for more, for all that Mai knew. There was the picture of the time when there had been many people, the story that they all liked so much of the time when it was summer all year round and the flowers and fruit hung on the same branch. There was also a long list of names that began at Mai and went back choosing always the oldest man of the people at that time: but now he said nothing more. Lok sat between him and the wind.

  “You are hungry, Mai. A man who is hungry is a cold man." Ha lifted up his mouth.

  “When the sun comes back we will get food. Stay by the fire, Mai, and we will bring you food and you will be strong and warm."

  Then Fa came and leaned her body against Mai so that three of them shut him in against the fire. He spoke to them between coughs.

  “I have a picture of what is to be done."

  He bowed his head and looked into the ashes. The people waited. They could see how his life had stripped him. The long hairs on the brow were scanty and the curls that should have swept down over the slope of his skull had receded till there was a finger's-breadth of naked and wrinkled skin above his brows. Under them the great eye-hollows were deep and dark and the eyes in them dull and full of pain. Now he held up a hand and inspected the fingers closely.

  “People must find food. People must find wood."

  He held his left fingers with the other hand; he gripped them tightly as though the pressure would keep the ideas inside and under control.

  “A finger for wood. A finger for food." He jerked his head and started again.

  “A finger for Ha. For Fa. For Nil. For Liku.."

  He came to the end of his fingers and looked at the other hand, coughing softly. Ha stirred where he sat but said nothing. Then Mai relaxed his brow and gave up. He bowed down his head and clasped his hands in the grey hair at the back of his neck. They heard in his voice how tired he was.

  “Ha shall get wood from the forest. Nil will go with him, and the new one." Ha stirred again and Fa moved her arm from the old man's shoulders, but Mai went on speaking.

  “Lok will get food with Fa and Liku." Ha spoke:

  “Liku is too little to go on the mountain and out on the plain!" Liku cried out:

  “I will go with Lok!" Mai muttered under his knees:

  “I have spoken."

  Now the thing was settled the people became restless. They knew in their bodies that something was wrong, yet the word had been said. When the word had been said it was as though the action was already alive in performance and they worried. Ha clicked a stone aimlessly against the rock of the overhang and Nit was moaning softly again. Only Lok, who had fewest pictures, remembered the blinding pictures of Oa and her bounty that had set him dancing on the terrace. He jumped up and faced the people and the night air shook his curls.

  “I shall bring back food in my arms…” he gestured hugely. "…so much food that I stagger...so!" Fa grinned at him.

  “There is not as much food as that in the world." He squatted.

  And under this right one…” he held it out “…the quarters of a cow."

  He staggered up and down in front of the overhang under the load of meat. The people laughed with him, then at him. Only Ha sat silent, smiling a little until the people noticed him and looked from him to Lok. Lok blustered:

  “That is a true picture!"

  Ha said nothing with his mouth but continued to smile. Then as they watched him, he moved both ears round, slowly and solemnly aiming them at Lok so that they said as clearly as if he had spoken: I hear you! Lok opened his mouth and his hair rose. He began to gibber wordlessly at the cynical ears and the half- smile. Fa interrupted them.

  “Let be. Ha has many pictures and few words. Lok has a mouthful of words and no pictures."

  At that Ha shouted with laughter and wagged his feet at Lok and Liku laughed without knowing why. Lok yearned suddenly for the mindless peace of their accord. He put his fit of temper on one side and crept back to the fire, pretending to be very miserable so that they pretended to comfort him. Then there was silence again and one mind or no mind in the overhang.

  Quite without warning, all the people shared a picture inside their heads. This was a picture of Mai, seeming a little removed from them, illuminated, sharply defined in all his gaunt misery. They saw not only Mai's body but the slow pictures that were waxing and waning in his head. One above all was displacing the others, dawning through the cloudy arguments and doubts and conjectures until they knew what it was he was thinking with such dull conviction.

  “To-morrow or the day after, I shall die."

  The people became separate again. Lok stretched out his hand and touched Mai. But Mai did not feel the touch in his pain and under the woman's sheltering hair. The old woman glanced at Fa.

  “It is the cold of the water." She bent and whispered in Mai's ear:

  “To-morrow there will be food. Now sleep." Ha stood up.

  “There will be more wood too. Will you not give the fire more to eat?"

  The old woman went to a recess and chose wood. She fitted these pieces cunningly together till wherever the flames rose they found dry wood to bite on. Soon the flames were beating at the air and the people moved back into the overhang. This enlarged the semicircle and Liku slipped into it. Hair crinkled in warning and the people smiled at each other in delight. Then they began to yawn widely. They arranged themselves round Mai, huddling in, holding him in a cradle of warm flesh with the fire in front of him. They shuffled and muttered. Mai coughed a little, then he too was asleep.

  Lok squatted to one side and looked out over the dark waters. There had been no conscious decision but he was on watch. He yawned too and examined the pain in his belly. He thought of good food and dribbled a little and was about to speak but then he remembered that they were all asleep. He stood up instead and scratched the close curls under his lip. Fa was within reach and suddenly he desired her again; but this desire was easy to forget because most of his mind preferred to think about food instead. He remembered the hyenas and padded along the terrace until he could look down the slope to the forest. Miles of darkness and sooty blots stretched away to the grey bar that was the sea; nearer, the river shone dispersedly in swamps and meanders. He looked up at the sky and saw that it was clear except where layers of fleecy cloud lay above the sea. As he watched and the after-image of the fire faded he saw a star prick open. Then there were others, a scatter, fields of quivering lights from horizon to horizon. His eyes cons
idered the stars without blinking, while his nose searched for the hyenas and told him that they were nowhere near. He clambered over the rocks and looked down at the fall. There was always light where the river fell into its basin. The smoky spray seemed to trap whatever light there was and to dispense it subtly. Yet this light illumined nothing but the spray so that the island was total darkness. Lok gazed without thought at the black trees and rocks that loomed through the dull whiteness. The island was like the whole leg of a seated giant, whose knee, tufted with trees and bushes, interrupted the glimmering sill of the waterfall and whose ungainly foot was splayed out down there, spread, lost likeness and joined the dark wilderness. The giant's thigh that should have supported a body like a mountain, lay in the sliding water of the gap and diminished till it ended in disjointed rocks that curved to within a few men's lengths of the terrace. Lok considered the giant's thigh as he might have considered the moon: something so remote that it had no connection with life as he knew it. To reach the island the people would have to leap that gap between the terrace and the rocks across water that was eager to snatch them over the fall. Only some creature more agile and frightened would dare that leap. So the island remained unvisited.

  A picture came to him in his relaxation of the cave by the sea and he turned to look down river. He saw the meanders as pools that glistened dully in the darkness. Odd pictures came to him of the trail that led all the way from the sea to the terrace through the gloom below him. He looked and grew confused at the thought that the trail was really there where he was looking. This part of the country with its confusion of rocks that seemed to be arrested at the most tempestuous moment of swirling, and that river down there spilt among the forest were too complicated for his head to grasp, though his senses could find a devious path across them. He abandoned thought with relief. Instead he flared his nostrils, and searched for the hyenas but they were gone. He pattered down to the edge of the rock and made water into the river. Then he went back softly and squatted to one side of the fire. He yawned once, desired Fa again, scratched himself. There were eyes watching him from the cliffs, eyes even, on the island, but nothing would come nearer while the ashes of the fire still glowed. As though she were conscious of his thought the old woman woke, put on a little wood and began to rake the ashes together with a flat stone. Mai coughed dryly in his sleep so that the others stirred. The old woman settled again and Lok put his palms into the hollows of his eyes and rubbed them sleepily. Green spots from the pressure floated across the river. He blinked to the left where the waterfall thundered so monotonously that already he could no longer hear it. The wind moved on the water, hovered; and then came strongly up from the forest and through the gap. The sharp line of the horizon blurred and the forest lightened. There was a cloud rising over the waterfall, mist stealing up from the sculptured basin, the pounded river water being thrown back by the wind. The island dimmed, the wet mist stole towards the terrace, hung under the arch of the overhang and enveloped the people in drops that were too small to be felt and could only be seen in numbers. Lok's nose opened automatically and sampled the complex of odours that came with the mist.

  He squatted, puzzled and quivering. He cupped his hands over his nostrils and examined the trapped air. Eyes shut, straining attention, he concentrated on the touch of the warming air, seemed for a moment on the very brink of revelation; then the scent dried away like water, dissolved like a far-off small thing when the tears of effort drown it. He let the air go and opened his eyes. The mist of the fall was drifting away with a change of wind and the smell of the night was ordinary.

  He frowned at the island and the dark water that slid towards the lip, then yawned. He could not hold a new thought when there seemed no danger in it. The fire was sinking to a red eye that lit nothing but itself and the people were still and rock-coloured. He settled down and leaned forward to sleep, pressing his nostrils in with one hand so that the stream of cold air was diminished. He drew his knees to his chest and presented the least possible surface to the night air. His left arm stole up and insinuated the fingers in the hair at the back of his neck. His mouth sank on his knees. Over the sea in a bed of cloud there was a dull orange light that expanded. The arms of the clouds turned to gold and the rim of the moon nearly at the full pushed up among them. The sill of the fall glittered, lights ran to and fro along the edge or leapt in a sudden sparkle. The trees on the island acquired definition, the birch trunk that overtopped them was suddenly silver and white. Across the water on the other side of ^he gap the cliff still harboured the darkness but everywhere else the mountains exhibited their high snow and ice. Lok slept, balanced on his hams. A hint of danger would have sent him flying along the terrace like a sprinter from his mark. Frost twinkled on him like the twinkling ice of the mountain. The fire was a blunted cone containing a handful of red over which blue flames wandered and plucked at the unburnt ends of branches and logs.

  The moon rose slowly and almost vertically into a sky where there was nothing but a few spilled traces of cloud. The light crawled down the island and made the pillars of spray full of brightness. It was watched by green eyes, it discovered grey forms that slid and twisted from light to shadow or ran swiftly across the open spaces on the sides of the mountain. It fell on the trees of the forest so that a scatter of faint ivory patches moved over the rot- ting leaves and earth. It lay on the river and the wavering weed-tails; and the water was full of tinsel loops and circles and eddies of liquid cold fire. There came a noise front the foot of the fall, a noise that the thunder robbed of echo and resonance, the form of a noise. Lok's ears twitched in the moonlight so that the frost that lay along their upper edges shivered. Lok's ears spoke to Lok. But Lok was asleep.

  THREE

  “ Lok was aware of the old woman moving earlier than any of them, busy about the fire in the first dawn light. She built up a pile of wood and in his sleep he heard the wood begin to burst and crackle. Fa was still crouched and the old man's head stirred on her shoulder restlessly. Ha moved and stood up. He went down the terrace and made water, then came back and looked at the old man. Mai was not waking like the others. He sat heavily on his hams, turning his head from side to side in Fa's hair and breathing quickly as a doe when she is heavy with young. His mouth was open wide to the hot fire; but another fire that was invisible was melting him away; it lay everywhere on the sunken flesh of his limbs and round the hollows of his eyes. Nil ran down to the river and brought water in her cupped hands. Mai sucked the water in before his eyes were open. The old woman put more wood on the fire. She pointed into the recess and jerked her head at the forest. Ha touched Nil on the shoulder.

  “Come!"

  The new one woke too, scrambled over Nil's shoulder, mewed at her a moment, then was at her breast. Nil padded after Ha towards the quick way down to the forest while the new one milked her. They edged round the corner and disappeared into the morning mist that lay almost level with the top of the fall.

  Mai opened his eyes. They had to lean down to him before they could hear what he said.

  “I have a picture."

  The three people waited. Mai raised a hand and put it flat on top of his head above the eyebrows. Though two fires were shaking in his eyes he was not looking at them but at something far away across the water.) So intent and fearful was this attention that Lok turned to see if he could find what Mai was frightened of. There was nothing : only a log, moved from some creeky shore of the river by the spring flood slid past them and up-ended noiselessly over the lip of the fall.

  “I have a picture. The fire is flying away into the forest and eating up the trees." His breathing was quicker now he was awake.

  “It is burning. The forest is burning. The mountain is burning.."

  His head turned to each of them. There was panic in his voice.

  “Where is Lok?"

  “Here."

  Mai screwed up his eyes at him, frowning and bewildered.

  “Who is this? Lok is on his mother's back a
nd the trees are eaten."

  Lok shifted his feet and laughed foolishly. The old woman took Mai's hand and raised it to her cheek.

  “That is a picture of long ago. That is all done. You have seen it in your sleep."

  Fa patted his shoulder. Then her hand stayed against the skin and her eyes opened wide. But she spoke to Mai gently as she might have spoken to Liku.

  “Lok is standing on his feet before you. See! He is a man."

  Relieved to understand at last, Lok spoke quickly to all of them.

  “Yes, I am a man." He spread out his hands. "Here I am, Mai." Liku woke, yawning, and the little Oa fell off her shoulder. She put it to her chest.