The Sky And The Forest (10 page)

“They are indeed different,” agreed Loa.

Nessi had pointed to two armed men lounging by the entrance to the village; they were dark brown rather than the deep black of the spearmen, and they carried shields of plaited reeds, and short stout bows with a few arrows whose heads were wrapped in leaves -- poisoned arrows, therefore -- altogether, in colour and weapons, resembling the men of Loa's town rather than the strange barbarians who had captured them. But they were just as hostile.

“Go away!” shouted one of them as they approached, and, when Nessi and Loa still advanced, he put an arrow on his bowstring menacingly.

“Go away!” he repeated, levelling the arrow with every intention of drawing and loosing.

““We must turn aside,” said Loa.

From where they stood they could just look up the street. Naked black women were moving about it on domestic duties, carrying wooden jars of water and so on, and they caught a glimpse of a white-robed Arab. Then Loa led Nessi along the top of the slope, high above the river. On their left hand were the old village clearings, the usual wild tangle of stumps and creepers, so dense that even a single agile man would have difficulty in picking his way through; a yoked couple could never do it. Strangulation or a broken neck would be the fate of one or both of them before they had penetrated ten yards -- there was no escape in this direction. At the far end of the clearing the rocky slope had narrowed down to a few yards, and there the forest began, with the path by which they had come. Here lounged two more men with shields and bows. There was no word in Loa's limited vocabulary for “sentries.” He had to think of them by the elaborate circumlocution of “men who wait to stop other people passing,” but at least that exactly described them.

“Turn back,” said one of them as Loa and Nessi drew near.

He was as ready to shoot as had been his colleague at the other end of the clearing, and the whole width of the gap, from where the clearing ended to the water's edge, was no more than fifty yards. Moreover, the spaces between the trees, Loa saw, were closed by a double row of pointed stakes, leaving only the path free. There was no way of escape this way, either. They were on the water's edge here, where the river ran, golden-brown, its otherwise smooth surface disturbed here and there by the ripples and eddies of its progress. Far out, a huge tree was being carried rapidly down, now and again turning over and round, raising fresh branches and roots towards the sky as it went. Loa saw the gaunt limbs raised in silent and unavailing appeal to the sky, and he was shaken by fresh emotion. He was as helpless as that tree-trunk.

“May you die!” he suddenly shouted at the sentries.

He shook his fist at them in rage. “May the bowels of your children rot! May -- “

“Oh, let us run away,” said Nessi, for one of the sentries was coming towards them menacingly. “Come!”

Nessi tried to run, and when the pull of the chain choked her she put her hands up to it to hold it clear of her windpipe and plunged forward, dragging Loa with her.

“Oh, quickly!” said Nessi.

Her panic infected Loa, and they ran back to lose themselves among the crowded couples along the water's edge, the chains of the yoke dragging at their necks when the irregularities of the ground made them diverge or converge a little.

It was a strange bond between them, was that yoke. It held Loa and Nessi together and yet it kept them apart. They could not even touch each other with outstretched fingertips, and yet neither of them could move a yard without not merely the consent but the co-operation of the other. They could never be out of each other's sight or hearing; there was nothing the one could do without the other being aware of it. If one should fall, the other suffered equally. It compelled each to walk with due attention to the other's well-being. When they lay down to sleep on the unlevel ground it was necessary for each to see that the other was comfortable; if one should roll over or slip a little down the slope the other had perforce to conform. They had to be brave together, or timorous together. One could not be restless or try to explore if the other were torpid, nor could the torpid one remain torpid -- each had to sink or rise to the other's level of activity. Because of the yoke Loa and Nessi experienced all the disadvantages of intimacy and enjoyed none of the advantages. They could easily make each other uncomfortable and unhappy, but it was almost impossible to make each other comfortable or to console each other. They could not even speak to each other privately -- at that distance apart they must needs talk loudly enough for others to hear. All their secrets they must share with each other, and yet they could have no secrets unshared with the world.

For husband and wife, for two people who had long been intimate, the yoke would have caused difficulties enough; but Loa and Nessi had hardly known each other. Loa had been the god, immense and unapproachable, before whom Nessi had to prostrate herself; Nessi had been a pretty wench that chance had never before thrown his way. He knew much more about her now -- he knew just how her head was set on her shoulders and how her arms swung as she walked. Looking round the pole he learned all about her back and thighs; as the day lengthened he watched the gradual fading of the weals left by the kurbash. She was a fine figure of a woman, of the slender type which Loa favoured (unlike most of his fellows), with good muscles that showed to advantage under her skin when she set herself to climb a slope. Yet she was eternally out of his reach.

It was obvious to Loa by the end of the day that no ordinary attempt at escape would succeed; the simple precautions taken by the raiders, and their centuries of experience in the handling of newly captured slaves, made it quite impossible to get away. The yoke was as important an invention as the kurbash in the Arab subjugation of Central Africa; it was by means of these two instruments that a handful of spearmen and bowmen were able to keep a thousand captives under control.

Keeping everyone stark naked was another simple means of maintaining dominance. A naked man or woman cannot conceal a weapon, or a tool to assist in escape, or a food reserve to be used in the event of escape. It reduced to some extent, too, the chances of infectious disease and of skin parasites being spread through the camp; but, more than anything else, the mere fact of nakedness was a repressive factor; in the simple communities from which the slaves had been taken nakedness was nothing to excite comment in itself. Nakedness implied poverty or helplessness, for clothing was a matter of ornament and hardly one of protection and had nothing to do with modesty. The naked man or woman felt more useless and helpless and was therefore more easily kept in slavery.

Perhaps the meagreness of the rations doled out helped -- no spirit could remain high when only sustained by two double handfuls of tapioca a day. Already Loa was hungry, and he grew hungrier as the days passed. Nessi at the other end of the pole wept with hunger. Never in her life had her belly gone unfilled--usually it had been unsatisfied on a diet exclusively of starch, but never unfilled -- until now. She wanted to join the wistful groups hanging hopelessly round the feeding troughs, and she was inclined to sulk when Loa objected. Loa would rather sit on a lofty point of the encampment and survey the scene around him. He could force himself now to endure the unwinking gaze of the sky, to stare across the mysterious river at the distant shore on the other side, and he was interested in observing the behaviour of his guards. The mumbo-jumbo of the Moslems, their ablutions and their prostrations, interested him. He was sharp enough to guess that these formalities were in honour of some god, but he could not guess which god it was. It was more than could be expected of his uneducated mind that it should develop a good working theory regarding comparative religion, but having been a god himself made him something of a practical theologian. Stirring in the dark recesses of Loa's mind there were some curious thoughts, and there was a stern conflict going on. When a man who has always thought of himself as a god begins to have atheistical doubts the conflict is bound to be severe. Loa might well have gone insane if his interest had not been caught by his surroundings -- if, for instance, Nessi's whims and moods had not kept him busy, and if he had not been wondering about escaping.

The majority of his fellow captives were apathetic in their misery, content to hang round the feeding troughs or merely sit staring at vacancy. There were a few active spirits, but not many, and the kurbash kept them in check. And if the kurbash did not achieve its end there was another punishment possible. Loa never knew what was the crime of the two of his fellow slaves who suffered the death penalty. They may have tried to escape, or they may have gone insane and struck a Moslem. No one really knew, but everyone knew how they died, for they were perched upon stakes of impalement in the centre of the encampment, and there they stayed, screaming throughout one long day, screaming at first so loudly that they could be heard from one end of the camp to the other. Later the screams died down to delirious moans. Loa knew about inflicting death; he had killed people in cold blood himself. And he knew about casual cruelty, the result of carelessness or indifference. But deliberate cruelty of this frightful kind was something new to him. He sat and watched under lowering eyebrows the writhings of the tortured men. It was all part of his education. He had never had to keep men in subjugation -- allegiance to him had been voluntary, so ingrained by habit and tradition as to be classed as instinctive -- but now he knew how it was done.

There was no attempt at organized sanitation in the camp, and the stench and the flies were consequently appalling; the deluges of tropical rain that fell were welcome in one way, as washing away the filth that lay everywhere, but they added to everyone's discomfort all the same. The naked peoples of Central Africa, like naked people in most parts of the world, detest the impact of rain upon their skin. The slaves tried to huddle together during the storms; Nessi would sit in close embrace with a dozen men and women whose yokemates similarly tried to huddle together at the other end of their poles, all whimpering in chorus, each trying to shelter himself from the pitiless downpour at the expense of the others. But Loa the god sat apart and indifferent (except when Nessi's writhings, communicated through the pole, jerked him off his balance) while the thunder of his brother the sky raved overhead, and the thick clouds obscured the face of his brother the sun so that for a time it was as dark as twilight. He bore the unpleasant nagging of the heavy raindrops on his skin with some kind of stoicism; stripped of his divine dignities he was clinging to his personal dignity -- about which he had hardly thought before.

There came a day when the whole camp moved off, when the kurbash bit into dark flesh as the raiders herded the slaves into order, when shouts and cries and blows drove the slaves first here and then there in obedience to their masters. Loa and Nessi found themselves loaded again with an elephant's tusk -- not likely to be the one they had borne on their first day, but one as heavy and as bulky. It was slung to their pole in loops of cane, and then they were directed, in the footsteps of those who had preceded them, up the slope to the village, along the main street, and out at the other end to a forest path well trodden already.

“Where are we going. Lord?” asked Nessi. She still called him “Lord” and used the honorific mode of address when she asked him questions.

“To their town, without doubt,” said Loa with a bland assumption of certitude. He wished he knew.

“And when we arrive there. Lord?”

“Some man will make you his wife.”

Loa really thought it more likely that Nessi would eventually be eaten, for that was the fate of wanderers in the world he knew -- a few days of rest, and then the axe or the cord and the roasting spit. But he did not reveal his thoughts to her.

“Will a black man make me his wife. Lord?”

“Yes. You will dwell in his home, and for him you will cook the plantains and prepare the manioc. By him you will have children.”

“Ah!” said Nessi. Such a prospect, after recent experiences, reconciled her to her fate, which was what Loa was aiming at. He had had enough of her misery.

The forest, the dark silent friendly forest, had already enfolded them. The tusk that swung from their pole was heavy and hard to manage, and already the yoke and chain were galling their shoulders. Ahead of them and behind them serpentined the long line of yoked couples, each bearing burdens, sometimes slung from the poles, sometimes carried on the head. At intervals along the line walked the guards, and at rarer intervals still were the Arabs, the few representatives of an alien culture who by virtue of that culture dominated this vast assembly of human beings. The African spearmen and bowmen who were the Arabs' paid mercenaries could be trusted to see that the slaves did not attempt to escape, but could be trusted very little farther, for they, too, had led the carefree life of the forest and knew not tomorrow. They could never be impressed with the necessity for keeping the line closed up, for hurrying the march, for planning each day's journey from one source of food supply to the next. In consequence the Arab leaders were busy all the time, hastening up and down the line, upbraiding their mercenaries, flogging the slaves forward with their whips, and stationing themselves at different points, where the march was necessarily checked, in order to minimize delays and hurry everyone forward again as soon as possible.

Soon Loa and Nessi were running with sweat; soon weariness began to creep over them as they plodded on through the forest, up and down its scarcely perceptible undulations, over its dry leaf-mould, across its boggy valleys. From far, far overhead the subdued green light filtered down, from where the creepers tangled together, where the monkeys played and the parrots shrieked. Nessi's step was shortening; a gap was opening between her and the yoked pair next ahead. Very soon an Arab appeared beside them.

“Go faster!” he said, and he caught Nessi a cut with his whip that drew a yelp from her and quickened her pace.