The Sky And The Forest

  “That is so,” agreed Musini. “Yet has Lanu been clever. He has been like a man. Lord. It was Lanu who made the bow and the arrows. Lanu is our worthy son.”

  “It was I who killed the grey-faced man,” said Lanu. “Did you see him fall? My arrow was in his throat, where I had aimed it. It was I who made the poison. I used the creeper juice. I made it as I had seen Tiri the son of Minu make it.”

  “It was well done, son,” said Loa. “And how was it you came to escape when first the Arabs came to the town?”

  They told him between them, Musini and Lanu, of their adventures on the day of the raid and since then. They had fled into the clearing at the first alarm, together, for Lanu had been sleeping in his mother's house. Lanu had snatched up and borne with him his little ceremonial axe, his latest present from his father, and it had stood them in good stead. Without it they would have been nearly helpless in the forest, but with it they had the power that edged steel conveys. Lanu had shaped and trimmed the bow; Musini had braided the bowstring from the flexible creeper fibres. They had followed the slave caravan from camp to camp, living on what they could gather in the forest. With vigilance and precaution they had escaped the snares of the little people, although twice arrows aimed at them had narrowly missed one or other of them. Every day at some time or other they had seen Loa, far more often than he had seen them, and by continual watching they had made themselves familiar with the Arabs' methods, so that eventually they had planned the rescue and carried it out successfully.

  “That was well done indeed, my son,” said Loa.

  There were the strangest feelings inside him at that moment, the oddest misgivings. Lanu was a clever little boy, but it could not have been Lanu who was responsible for all this. Lanu could not have displayed the singleness of purpose, the resolution and the ingenuity which had resulted in his rescue. Lanu might have loved his father, but -- Loa's newfound humility asserted itself -- it was incredible that he would have gone through all that risk and labour to rescue him except at the instance of his mother. It must have been Musini who did the planning and who showed the resolution. It must have been Musini's devotion which had kept them to the task. An odd state of affairs indeed, when women should thus display initiative and determination; there was something unnatural and disturbing in the thought of it.

  And it was disturbing in a different way to think of Musini's devotion. In the time of his divinity, Loa would have thought nothing of someone running risks to help him or even to contribute slightly to his comfort; but since that time Loa had been in contact with a new reality. It was not a god whom Musini had rescued -- Loa faced the fact squarely -- but a slave, a slave in bonds, a worthless chattel. It could not have been from religious conviction that Musini had exerted herself thus. It was Loa the man and not Loa the god whom she had rescued. There must be a personal tie. All this was terribly difficult to work out in Loa's untrained brain and with his limited vocabulary Loa, the man with forty wives, knew almost nothing of love until now. He was facing something nearly as new as what he faced when he first felt doubts about being a god. It called for a fresh orientation of himself. Thanks to his recent experiences, Loa found difficulty in swallowing the undoubted fact that Musini must love him for himself alone. He could not take it sublimely for granted. His exhausted brain grappled feebly with all these astonishing developments, with the new phenomenon of love, with the concept of women being capable of decisive action, and then it shrank back exhausted from the encounter.

  “I am thirsty as well as hungry,” said Nessi.

  She was voicing everyone's sentiments, but that did not help her.

  “Did I not say shut that mouth?” snapped Musini. “Let us sleep, for we are weary.”

  The blackest possible night was round them, the darkness of night in the forest, when the hand could not be seen before the face. Beneath them the leaf mould was soggy and damp; around them the stifling hot moist air was not stirred by the slightest breeze. Nessi had petulantly flung herself prone at Musini's rebuke, with a jerk at the pole which had forced Loa to change his position. He tried to settle himself again; Musini's arms found him and pillowed his head upon her shoulder regardless of the discomfort the yoke and chain brought her. They slept in a huddled group, bitten by insects, with the sweat running irritatingly over their naked skins until the chill of dawn crept through the trees, momentarily bringing a coolness that was pleasant until it broke through their sleep to set them shivering and huddling even closer together.

  CHAPTER 9

  In the grey twilight it was Musini who proposed the first move of the day.

  “Now let us take off this yoke from your neck, Lord,” she said. “Lanu, come and see what must be done.”

  The yoke was of tough elastic wood; the few links of chain were stoutly attached by staples driven deep into the ends. Lanu tugged at them, as Loa had often done, and equally unavailingly.

  “You must cut through the wood, son,” suggested Loa.

  It was not so easy to do with an axe, although with a knife it would have been comparatively simple. Loa could be of no help; all he could do was to sit as still as he could on the ground while Lanu chipped away at the end of the yoke, with Musini holding it steady in desperate anxiety that expressed itself in fierce curses at Nessi at the other end of the yoke lest she should move. Lanu removed chip after chip; the edge of the axe found a crack in the end of the pole and enabled him to lever off a larger chip still. Eventually both limbs of one of the staples were exposed over most of their length.

  “Try to pull that out now,” said Lanu, speaking as one man speaks to another.

  Loa put one hand to the chain and one to the yoke, tugging with all the strength the awkward position allowed. The veins stood out on his forehead; he tugged and he tugged, and suddenly the staple flew out. Loa dropped chain and yoke, and stepped out, free of his bonds. It was a strange sensation. He could look at Nessi, still held at her end; he could look at her from different angles, and at different distances, and he could step hither and thither without any thought for her. The feel of his free neck and shoulders was almost unnatural. He danced in his sense of freedom and Lanu danced with him. A great wave of paternal affection surged up in Loa. Lanu was no little boy now; recent events had made a man of him, child though he was, but Loa loved him. Nessi was watching them, waiting her turn to be set free.

  “Now we can go,” said Musini.

  She must have forgotten the fact that Nessi was still fastened in her end of the pole; it was only a momentary incident, but it seemed as if Musini intended that she and Loa and Lanu should strike off now through the forest, leaving Nessi to trail the yoke after her until overtaken by inevitable death from starvation or at the hands of the little people. But Loa and Lanu had turned and addressed themselves to the task of freeing Nessi at the moment Musini spoke, so that the implications of the words passed unnoticed. They chipped away at the yoke until a long pull by Loa tore out the staple, and yoke and chain fell to the ground.

  “It is gone!” said Nessi, breathing relief.

  She knelt and embraced Loa's knees in thankfulness; it was an immediate change in her demeanour. Yesterday they were fellow slaves, sharing the utter equality of the yoke. Today the memories of Loa's divinity came flooding back, and Nessi grovelled before him as different as could be imagined from the peevish wench whom he had to placate in the slavers' camp.

  “That is well,” said Musini grimly. She had picked up the little axe and was swinging it idly in her hand. “And now?”

  They all four looked at each other.

  “And now?” said Musini again.

  Four human beings -- setting aside for the moment Loa's fictitious divinity -- in the immensity of the twilit forest; naked, their sole possessions the little axe and the bow which it had helped to shape. Their world of security with its solid past of tradition and seemingly changeless future had been destroyed, and this was the moment of their rebirth into a new world, as if they were babies without
parents. Rain in thick heavy drops was falling about them from the dense screen of foliage overhead, monotonous and depressing. They were community dwellers, accustomed all their lives to living in the bustle of a town surrounded by their fellows; bred, moreover, for a hundred generations as community dwellers. The little people wandered in the forest migrating eternally in little groups each no larger than a family, but Loa and the others were not little people. In each person's mind, even in little Lanu's, there was the longing for a permanent settlement, for houses, and plantain groves. Their minds went back miserably to the past and returned empty and longing. All waited for someone else to speak, but Lanu and Musini and Nessi turned their eyes upon Loa. It was not inspiration that came upon him. He was voicing his own sentiments and those of everyone else when he spoke, the words torn from him by his inward yearnings.

  “Let us go home,” he said.

  “Home!” echoed Nessi in a fervent sigh.

  “Home!” said Lanu with a skip of joy.

  For a moment it seemed as if the twilight of the forest had lifted, as if the raindrops had ceased to fall about them. The futility of their existence had ended with the suggestion of a purpose, with a plan for the future. As they thought of home they thought of the sunlight blazing into the town's street, the cries of the children and the smoke of the cooking fires; that vision died out when they remembered what had happened to the town, and yet something remained to which their minds could cling. There would at least be the site of the clearing, overgrown by forest. The banana groves would not yet be overgrown. It was a place they knew, the place where they had spent their whole lives. More than that; the suggestion of going home provided them with an objective. Mere futile wandering in the forest had no appeal for them; home was a goal towards which they could struggle.

  “So we will go home,” said Musini, nodding her head significantly, chewing the cud of internal calculations.

  She did not have to say more to bring them all back to reality. They were lost in the forest; and they all knew what that meant. To go a mile into the forest -- in certain circumstances, to go a mere hundred yards -- without painstaking precautions meant being utterly lost, so that one direction seemed as good as any other. And they were separated from home by a march of many days' duration. In the forest they had no means of knowing north or south or east or west, and if they had, they still did not know whether home lay to north or to south or to east or to west of them. It was deep in the tradition of the town dweller never on any account to go into the forest beyond the well-known landmarks. And to all of them the forest was the world; they had no conception of any limits to it. Their minds could not conceive of any area that was not twilit by the shadow of vast trees, steamy hot, and dripped upon by torrential downpours of rain. So that not one of them had the faintest maddest hope -- or fear -- of ever breaking out of the forest by traveling long enough in the same direction. The world to them was made up of illimitable unknown forest with concealed in the midst of it a tiny patch of known, and therefore friendly and desirable, forest encircling their home.

  A rush of feeling surged up in Loa's breast. Courage, it may have been; obstinacy, perhaps; desperation, possibly. He could think of nothing beyond the two alternatives, on the one hand of determining to make his way home, and on the other of wandering in futile fashion here in the forest to the end of his days. The first might be mad, unattainable, but at least it was preferable to the second.

  “Yes, we will go home,” he said. “Home! We will find our way there.”

  He abandoned himself to the utterly absurd: a fanatic preaching, an impossible crusade, sweeping his audience off their feet. He brandished clenched fists at the lowering forest above them and around them.

  “Home!” he yelled again.

  “Home!” yelled Lanu, waving his bow.

  “Home!” said Nessi.

  Musini turned upon her.

  “And so before we start for home perhaps you will find us food?”

  There is food to be found in the forest, enough to support life if one is content to live like a bird, not from day to day but from hour to hour, with almost every waking moment devoted to the search. Funguses grow in the leaf-mould and on the trunks of decaying trees -- from the true mushroom, clean and delicious but rare, to the watery toadstools, foul-smelling but brilliantly coloured, a mouthful of which means death. Intermediate between them come other species of varying degrees of nutritive value and toxicity, all to be noted by a sharp eye when wandering in the forest. There are white ants, not formidable like their black and red cousins, but harmless, with pulpy bodies that offer a good deal of nutriment when eaten alive, but it takes many, many white ants to make a meal, and it is usually a matter of pure good fortune to open up one of the tunnelled channels along which white ants circulate. If a great number can be caught they can be crushed into a paste which will endure for a couple of days without rotting, making a ration that can be saved for an emergency, but at the price of some of the nutritive qualities being lost with the pressed-out juices. There are snakes and frogs; on rare occasions a good archer can bring down a bird or even, more rarely, a monkey. To secure a forest antelope the forest wanderer must cease for a time to be a wanderer. He must dig a pitfall in a game-track and plant a poisoned stake in it and wait maybe for days before an antelope falls into it -- it will never happen at all if he does his work clumsily so that the antelope's instincts are aroused and he leaps aside from the too obvious danger. In the same way, if the wanderer has time to spare he can -- as the pygmies do -- plant poisoned skewers in the track, or a concealed bent bow in the undergrowth with an arrow on the string and a trigger device that can be tripped by a strand of creeper across the path; the same device can actuate a deadfall -- a log armed with a poisoned stake hung up precariously in the branches above.

  The fruits of the forest are doled out by nature with a sparing hand; they are infinite in their variety but sparse in their occurrence; the vast trees which fight their way through to light and air and life leave small chance for fruit-bearing trees to live. Yet some of the vines bear fruit, and it is possible to drag the flexible stems down, tearing them from their hold on the trunks, until the fruit is in reach. The amoma bears a watery fruit with a bitter kernel -- either is of some use to fill an empty belly. A giant species of acacia bears pods of beans with indigestible skins yet which nevertheless can be bruised and pounded and cooked into food. There are wild plums -- tart, leathery things -- which can be found where soil conditions do not allow the trees to grow so tall; wild mangoes, woody and untempting; phrynia; even some of the bamboos which grow in the marshy spots bear berries which can be eaten and will support life.

  With all these things Loa and the others had some sort of acquaintance, largely acquired when young; wandering as infants on the edge of the clearing the ceaseless appetite of childhood had been gratified between meals by the gleanings of the forest. Loa knew less about them than any of the others, for he had had a pampered childhood as a god almost from birth. One thing he did know, and that was that it was not by standing still that food was to be found in the forest.

  “Food?” he said to Musini in reply to her remark to Nessi. “We shall find it as we go along.”

  He took the little axe from her hand and picked up the pole which had so recently joined him to Nessi. A few blows and a jerk parted one fork from the stem. The links of chain dangled from the other fork and made a clumsy, flail-like weapon, but a weapon, nevertheless. He brandished it with a feeling of satisfaction and gave back the axe to Musini.

  “Let us go,” he said.

  “Which way. Lord?” asked Musini instantly, and Loa stared round down the twilit avenues between the trees with some uncertainty.

  “It was this way that we came,” said Lanu. “You can see the tracks. That leads to the path you were following with the grey-faced men.”

  “That is the way we shall go,” said Loa. “They will have gone far onward by the time we reach the path again.”
br />   And with that, with so little ceremony, they began their vast and precarious journey. It was as well that Lanu had made his explanation regarding the tracks, for Loa's unskilled eye could see nothing on the monotonous leaf-mould. Even Lanu's sharp eyes were put to a severe test, as the profuse rains at dawn had gone far to obliterate the heavy traces they had left in their flight from the slavers. Lanu went in front, his bow and arrow ready for instant action; the others spread out behind him, looking about them as they walked, seeking something -- anything -- that would relieve in small measure the pangs of hunger that afflicted them the moment they admitted to themselves that they were hungry. Musini found a cluster of fine white mushrooms, and she brought the largest to Loa. It was wonderful to set one's teeth in the firm white flesh, to taste the keen pungent flavour of the raw mushroom, to swallow it down into a stomach that complained bitterly of being empty. Other finds of Musini's she shared with Lanu. Nessi plodded along by herself; what she found went into her own stomach.

  They came to the boggy stream which they had crossed yesterday in their flight; the leaf-mould under their feet grew less and less resilient, and water oozed out of it as they trod; soon Lanu turned back towards them in despair.

  “I do not know where we went,” he said pathetically. “I can see no more.”

  He had been proud to guide them up to this moment, and now he was pitifully aware of his shortcomings, no longer a pert young man, but a child again. And once more they all looked at Loa, while round them the silent forest waited for his decision.

  “I will tell you which way we shall go,” said Loa -- he said it to comfort Lanu more than for any other reason, for he had no plan in his mind at that moment.

  He looked round him at the silent trees, at the glades opening up around him. He could not think while he looked at them, and so he pressed his fists against his eyes as a stimulus to thought, pressed them firmly in as he used to do when he was a god and had a decision to make. The turning lights before his eyes were not disturbing like those silent glades. His mind grappled with the problem, to bear it down by sheer strength like an unpractised giant overpowering a skilled lightweight wrestler. Seeping through this bog was a little river, a childish version of the big river wherein his sister the moon was wont to hide herself. The superstitions of his lifetime warred with the hard logic inculcated by his recent experiences, for his first tendency was to think of the little stream as being endowed with human likes and dislikes, as being likely to wander here and there in accordance with its own whim, stopping if it saw fit, going on or going back if it saw fit. But he made himself realize that rivers run eternally in the same way, that some unchangeable law made them do so, just as water would always run out of a tilted bowl. A weak mortal -- or an unguided god, for Loa was not quite ready to admit his mortality to himself -- might wander in the forest in a thousand directions with no definition of route at all. But a stream must flow from somewhere to somewhere. It at least had a unity of purpose a human could not display.