The Sky And The Forest

First published 1948

There had been much rain during the night, and the morning air was still saturated with moisture, heavy and oppressive, and yet with a suspicion of chill about it, enough to make flies sluggish and men and women slow in their movements. But now the sun was able to look over the tops of the trees into the town, calling out the wreaths of steam from the puddles, and shining down upon Loa's woolly head as he walked out into the west end of the street. Four women, not yet gone to the banana groves, ceased their chattering at his appearance and fell on their knees and elbows, pressing their noses against the muddy soil. Loa ran his eye over them as he walked past them; he was more used to seeing the backs of men and of women than to looking into their faces. A little boy came running round the corner of a house -- he was of an age when running was still something of a new experience for him -- and stopped at sight of the crouching women and of Loa's passing majesty. His finger went to his mouth, but it had hardly reached it when his mother put out her arm, without lifting her face from the earth, and seized him and flung him down, face downwards as was proper, holding him there despite his struggles, and when he had recovered from his surprise sufficiently to wail in protest she managed to get her hand over his mouth and moderate the noise. That was right.

The distraction was sufficient to turn Loa from continuing his way down the street. He stood and looked idly along to the far end. The crouching women, conscious that he was remaining near them, writhed in troubled ecstasy, the bunched muscles along their backs standing out tensely, while their concern communicated itself to the little boy so that he ceased to struggle and wail, and instead lay limp and submissive. The sun was shining brightly into Loa's eyes, but the sun was Loa's brother and did not need to avert his face and grovel in his presence. Loa raised his left hand -- the one that held his leafy fan -- to shade his eyes as he gazed down the street. He did not know what he was looking for nor why he was doing this, and the realization did not come to him even when he had made certain that nothing was different from usual; actually it was an unrecognized feeling of unrest which had stirred a faint desire that today something should be different. Loa could not analyse nor recognize his emotions. He was a god and always had been.

His brother the sun had now come tardily to recognize the fact, as he sometimes did, and had drawn a veil of dilatory cloud over his face. The tribute was gratifying, and Loa did not need to shade his eyes any longer.

“Ha!” he said, pleased with his power; and he turned, immense in his dignity, and walked back to his house at the end of the street.

Indeharu and Vira made a half-circle so as to keep behind him and followed him back, as they had followed him out. Indeharu's back was bent with age, but even if it had not been he would have bent it and walked with a stoop, just as did young Vira; it was right and proper to walk with humility when attending upon the god. Loa was free for the moment of the unrest which had manifested itself earlier. His right hand swung his iron battle-axe, and his iron collars and bracelets jangled as he strode along, his naked toes gripping the thin and drying mud of the street. Lanu was playing in the small open space in front of Loa's house and came running up with a smile; Lanu could face the god, for Lanu was a god too, Loa's child. There were other children, with their mothers in the banana groves or behind the house, but they were not gods. Lanu was the first-born. Although that was not why he was a god it was probably the reason why Loa had been fond of him at his birth, before the birth of children became a commonplace, and had played with him and petted him and treated him with so much condescension and fondness that clearly he could not be a mortal who must abase himself in the god's presence, and consequently he had never been trained into abasement.

Loa dropped his battle-axe and fan, and caught Lanu under the armpits and swung him up into the air kicking and squealing with delight, holding him there for long pleasurable seconds before setting him on his feet again. Loa unclasped his leopardskin from about his throat and put it over the boy's shoulders, to Lanu's immense pleasure. The boy clasped the forelegs round his neck with the brooch, draped the skin over his left shoulder, and strutted off, very pleased with himself, while Loa followed him fondly with his gaze. Even a god could love his son.

Loa picked up his battle-axe and fan, and seated himself on his stool; the latter was made merely of three curving branches, polished, and bound together with cane fibre into a distorted tripod. To sit on it at all called for a careful placing of the fleshy parts; to sit on it for long called for constant shifting of them; but it was more dignified than squatting on one's heels -- that was what men and women did -- and the stool by raising the body above the ground kept it out of the way of ants and other creeping creatures. Indeharu and Vira squatted before him, and Loa swept the flies from himself with his fan and prepared himself to listen to their morning report.

“Uledi dies,” said Vira; as much the younger man it was his place to speak first.

“She dies?'‘ asked Loa.

“She does indeed. Now her head is drawn back. There is foam on her lips. Every hour the poison shakes her. Her arms and legs go stiff as she struggles with it, stiff like tree trunks although she tosses about in her battle with the poison, and she cries out with words that mean nothing. Then once more she ceases to struggle, and lies sleeping again. She has slept since last there was yellow water in the river.”

“I know that,” said Loa.

“There is no flesh on her bones, and now there are sores on her skin.”

“Yes,” said Loa, rubbing his chin.

This trouble was not infrequent in the town. For no apparent reason some individual, man, woman, or child, would suddenly become somnolent, sleeping continuously except when roused to take food. Sometimes they slept themselves straight into death; sometimes, as in Uledi's case, they died more violently, but whichever way it was they died once they began to sleep, sometimes in a short time, sometimes in a long time.

“It is a deadly poison,” commented Indeharu.

“Yes,” said Loa again.

Life could not end except by human agency. Somebody must be poisoning Uledi, and Loa's heavy face was contorted into a frown as he wrestled with the problem. Face after face flitted across the field of his mental vision, but not one seemed to be connected with the poisoning of Uledi. Soon he abandoned his review of the population of the town. Seven hundred people lived in it; he did not know how many, nor did his language contain words for the numeral, but he knew it would take too long to think about every one of them. The bones, the five slender rib bones which lay in his house, would tell him if he asked them.

“Soli is her mother's brother's son,” said Vira.

That was a very special relationship, conferring particular privileges in the matter of inheritance, and might supply a motive. Loa for a moment thought the problem solved, but Vira and Indeharu were not looking at each other, and his instincts, the sensitive instincts of an uneducated man, told him there was something suspicious in the atmosphere. He did not have to follow along the path of deduction and logic, from the fact that Indeharu and Vira were carefully refraining from exchanging glances, to the fact that their expressions were unnaturally composed, and then on to the fact that Vira bore an old grudge against Soli -- something to do with a haunch of goat over which they had quarrelled -- and from that to his knowledge of Indeharu's enmity towards Soli. It had never even occurred to him that this enmity issued from the old man's fear of a possible young rival. Loa's instincts leaped all the gaps, without any painful building of bridges, and warned him that he -- he, the god -- was being subjected to influence, an indirect influence and therefore one to be suspected.

“Soli is Uledi's mother's brother's son,” he said, his voice as expressionless as the others' features. “We know that, then.”

The slight discomposure apparent in the faces of his two councillors told him that his instincts had been right; Indeharu and Vira were disappointed. He was confirmed in his decision to take no immediate action against Soli.

“The men are felling more trees,” said Indeharu, changing the subject, and pointing into the forest towards the area where the tree-felling was in progress.

“They may do so,” said Loa. As far back as his memory could go -- Loa had been king and god since he was a little boy younger than Lanu -- Indeharu had managed the economic details of the town's life satisfactorily. A forest tract had to be cleared two years in advance of the time when the plantain crop sown in the clearing began to fruit, and it was a prodigious effort to make such plans. Loa never troubled himself with them. Yet thinking about the plantain crop reminded him he was hungry, and he raised his voice.

“Musini!” he called. “Bring me food.”

“I hear you,” replied Musini from behind the house; she had a shrill voice with an edge to it.

“When the trees are down,” went on Indeharu, “Tolo will build a house. His father Linisinu and his father's brothers will help him.”

“Where will the house be?” asked Loa, and as Indeharu began to reply Musini came with the wooden bowl of food.

Loa looked at the contents with disappointment.

“Baked plantain!” he said, disgustedly.

“Baked plantain with oil. Precious oil,” said Musini,, sharply. There was never enough oil in the town, the oil palms being too sparing of their produce. “I have eaten no oil since the moon was full last. The oil is all for you.”

Loa put down his battle-axe and fan, took the bowl, and transferred a handful of the plantain soaked in oil to his mouth.

“Is it not good?” demanded Musini, aggressively. “What better food can I provide for you than baked plantain and oil? Is it the heart of an elephant you would like? Or a savoury dish of the tripe of a young goat? When last was an elephant killed? No goat has borne a kid for two months.”

“Say no more,” said Loa, irritated. He had eaten elephant only three or four times in his twenty-five years of life; goat's tripe was perhaps his favourite dish, and Musini touched him on the raw by mentioning it -- which was what she planned to do, being a bad-tempered shrew.

“Say no more!” she quoted at him. “Say no more! Then say no more when I bring you rich red oil upon your baked plantains. Say no more until an antelope is caught and we eat the roast flesh!”

“Be silent, woman!” shouted Loa, beside himself with rage. The thought of roast antelope was almost more than he could bear. He was on his feet now, brandishing the wooden bowl and actually dancing with passion. Musini saw the look in his face and was frightened.

“Your servant is silent,” she said hastily, and turned to go. Yet even then before she was out of earshot she was grumbling again.

Musini was Lanu's mother, Loa's first and chief wife, and had been associated with Loa since his childhood. She did not prostrate herself before him except on occasions of high ceremonial, because little by little through the years ceremony between the two of them had lapsed as a matter of practical convenience. But her habit of scolding at Loa, of goading him to exasperation, had another origin. She wanted to assert herself, and she felt as if she did not want to live if she did not. She infuriated Loa as a means of self-expression, as an artist paints or a musician composes. Besides, she was drawn to this course of action by a subtle lure, by the indescribable temptation of danger. She risked her life every time she angered Loa. There was a fearful pleasure in coming as near to destruction as possible and then withdrawing just in time. Shuddering fear tempted her like a drug.

Loa took another mouthful of baked plantain with growing distaste, his mind running on devious tracks. That unrest which had set him gazing down the street, which had brought him to his feet at Musini's gibes, was a symptom -- although he did not express it so to himself -- of his hunger for meat, rich meat, full of proteins and fats and mineral salts. The African forest was niggardly of its meat supply; of all the animals domesticated by man the goat was the only one able to live there, and even the goat did not thrive; a high mortality among the town's herd made goat's flesh a rarity. The plantain was the stable food, which ironically the forest allowed to be produced in utter abundance with almost no effort. A space had only to be cleared in the forest, the suckers planted, and eighteen months later there was a dense grove of plantain trees, each bearing its huge hand of fruit. The crop was never known to fail and there was no known limit to its production. Manioc was almost as easily grown; the work of clearing had to be rather more thorough, the planting was rather more arduous, but with ample virgin soil for the growth a crop was assured in return for small labour. Manioc and plantains; the forest gave these generously, so that there were always bananas and tapioca, tapioca and bananas, on which a man could live. Tapioca and bananas meant a continuous diet of starch; the oil palm lived only scantily and precariously here on the verge of the inner plateau of Africa, and its rich orange-coloured oil, so generous of fat, was almost as great a rarity as goat's flesh.