The Sky And The Forest (15 page)

Lanu and he hacked a clearing in the steamy undergrowth, felling and dragging aside saplings and creepers alike, so that he could look up and see blue sky above him, a hole in the greenery which had roofed him in for so many days, over the edge of which his brother the sun glared down at him brassily. Loa saluted him with fraternal affection. The habits of thought of a life time were not so easily cast aside; whatever doubts Loa entertained regarding his being a god, he still could not see the sun without an instinctive family feeling. Here there was plenty of young sappy wood for the gratings before the fire on which plantains could be cooked, and Musini and Nessi prepared the food, not without the usual friction. Nothing Nessi did seemed to satisfy Musini, and nothing Musini said pleased Nessi. But the plantains were delicious. All their lives they had been accustomed to a diet in large part of bananas, and a return to them after all this time was gratifying. Loa, gulping down the starchy things, never spared a thought for the old days when he had complained bitterly about being given bananas for dinner. He ate with contentment, and Lanu, squatting beside him, ate with relish.

It was not merely a meal for today; the bananas would provide a meal for tomorrow and the day after, for, split in two and toasted before the fire, they shrank into leathery morsels that could be pressed together into lumps which could at least sustain life. With the certain prospect of two days' food before them, they were raised infinitely above the status of nomads living from meal to meal, and they were all vaguely conscious of their bettered station in life, temporary though it might be. At the thought of the temporary nature of the change Loa felt a tiny temptation. Here were bananas, the staff of life. It was open to them to stay where they were, forever, to make a fresh clearing, to build themselves houses, to begin a new town. But he put the temptation aside without even considering it and without even knowing he had been tempted. He was going “home,” and the difficulties he had encountered so far in the forest made no difference to his resolution.

“We need more plantains,” said Musini. “Come, Nessi!”

The two women left Loa and Lanu sitting together. Lanu was preparing a bow for his father out of one of the saplings they had cut; he was shaping the stave with his little axe, fining it down progressively towards the ends, with many a careful look along the length of it to make sure he was keeping it balanced.

“A big bow this will be, my father,” he said. “The cord will have to be tough for you to draw it to the full.”

“Musini will prepare the cord, and then your father will draw it,” said Loa, the contentment arising from a stomach full of plantains making him drowsy. Night was gathering for its final rush upon them, and he was ready to sleep.

“I sent an arrow today,” gossiped Lanu, “against a bird beside the stream. Grey and white he was in colour. Oh, how he flew back into the trees when my arrow went past him! My arrow plunged into the marsh and I lost it -- a good arrow it was, too. When I have finished this bow I must make many more, both for you and for me.”

He chipped away delicately with the axe at the bow stave; the fine steel edge took off the shavings as neatly as could be desired. Lanu, squatting with the bow between his knees, was an epitome of mankind. He was using steel and making a bow, two of the greatest inventions which have brought about man's material progress. But more than that; he was making a bow not for instant use, but against a future need, displaying that thought for the morrow which enables man to rise superior to the animals about him. And also he had not invented the bow; he was copying what he had seen other men doing, making use of tradition whereby every generation can rise superior to the preceding one. Tools, forethought, and tradition made the history of man's advance, and the boy with the axe and the bow exemplified all of them.

Musini came quietly back with a hand of bananas on her back, and squatted down to peel them and dry them at the glowing fire; Lanu gave her a moment's attention as he worked on the bow.

“We shall need a long stout cord for this bow, my mother,” he said.

“I will make it,” she answered quietly. She licked her fingers to keep them from burning, and began to turn the bananas on the wooden grill.

“I could eat more now,” said Lanu, and Musini handed him a hot plantain without demur, and brought one to Loa when he held out his hand.

The minutes passed as they ate and worked and gossiped; Loa found himself nodding off in the darkness as sleep crept upon him.

“It is dark now,” he said. “Where is Nessi?”

Musini came over to him from out of the faint light of the fire.

“Do you always want Nessi, Lord?” she asked softly.

“Here am I, the mother of Lanu, and here is your bed which I have prepared of banana leaves. Think no more about Nessi tonight.”

Loa was too well-fed and sleepy to question the arrangement.

“Lord,” whispered Musini in the darkness, “I -- I -- am your servant.”

That was a declaration of consuming love in the limited vocabulary of Musini and Loa. A leopard snarled frightfully in the treetops not far off, and the monkeys he was stalking chattered and bustled in affright, and the sound of their terrified movements came down to the unhearing ears below. Then simultaneously came the last frantic shriek of a stupefied monkey who had fled along a branch within reach of the waiting leopard, and the triumphant howl of the leopard as his iron claws closed upon it. Then there was silence through the forest.

And in the morning Nessi was not with them, although so assiduously did Musini attend to their wants that her absence was not forcibly called to their attention. Musini found embers in the remains of the fire, and blew them into a glow. She toasted a fresh supply of bananas for their morning meal. She wrapped fresh leaves round the bananas she had dried the night before, and she bound them with creepers to make the bundles easy to carry. Loa heaved himself up a little stiffly in the wet morning air, and only now did he bring thought to bear on the subject of Nessi's absence. It occurred to him that she was perhaps sulking some distance off because he had chosen to lie in the arms of Musini the night before. Women had curious whims and fads, and took exception to the oddest things.

Well, he was not going to involve himself in any of the women's quarrels. Let them settle them among themselves. He stepped off into the undergrowth, flourishing his flail, his feet leading him along the path they had trodden down towards the banana trees, and there he found Nessi, and knew the reason why she had not come back to them. The quarrel between her and Musini was undoubtedly settled. The ants were swarming over Nessi, into her open eyes, and the gaping mouth from which a blackened tongue protruded, and over the body which was already swollen with corruption after the long hot night. Loa saw all this, and walked quickly back to the others, and Musini raised her eyes from her work to look at him intently.

Lanu's thoughts were progressing along the same lines as had Loa's.

“Where is Nessi?” he asked. “We wait for her.”

Loa moodily poked the ashes of the fire with the end of his flail, and at length Musini answered for him.

“We shall wait no longer for Nessi,” she said. “She will not come with us today, nor ever.”

“But why not?” asked Lanu, yet as he asked the question a glance at his parents' attitudes gave him some hint of the truth.

“We shall go on without her, my son,” said Loa, heavily.

“Indeed we shall,” said Musini, and with those words Loa caught a vague glimpse of himself in his true role.

God he might still be, but he was a family god now, literally familiar and not to be feared. To be humoured, perhaps, placated a little when necessary; something more like a mascot than a tribal deity, to be led and coaxed in the ordinary affairs of life. The powers he had were something unaccountable but not because of them was he to be dreaded. He might know the way through the forest; he might at some future time again make use of supernatural forces when he read the past or divined the future with the heaped-up bones; he might be more than man in some ways, but in others -- at least in Musini's eyes and probably in Lanu's -- he was less. He could not carve a bow or make a fire, and to that extent he was dependent and parasitic upon his family.

Loa felt all this, although he did not think it out logically. But when they left their camping place and set out on their day's march he purposely did not lead them past Nessi's body. He did not want Lanu to know every detail of the truth, for it seemed to preserve for himself a little of his dignity if Lanu did not know everything. This was a tottering world; to find women not only resenting their husband's polygamy but actually taking such drastic steps about it was almost as great a shock to him as his original deposition from divinity. And during the day Musini strung phrynia leaves on a length of creeper and made for herself a kilt which she girt about her waist. It was a saucy and provocative garment, like those which marriageable girls extemporized before they graduated to the more sober bark cloth of marriage -- bark cloth took long to prepare and there was no chance of making any here, so that there was plenty of excuse for Musini's action, and yet the association of ideas was somewhat disturbing. Until now she had been apparently content to go naked.

The old clearing in which they had discovered the banana trees was of great extent; they had to struggle for a long way through tangled undergrowth in the steaming heat, climbing over fallen trees, hacking their way through bushes. There was a wide area of young forest, where the creeper-wreathed saplings were just beginning to assert their mastery over the more lowly forms of vegetation. It was a level area, and in a clairvoyant moment Loa realized that it was the actual site of a town. Houses had stood here, and presumably there had been a big central street, and the surface during the lives of countless generations had been worn down to the bare earth. Catastrophe -- fire, presumably -- had come to the town, and had swept it utterly out of existence, and now the saplings sprouted where once the houses had stood, and the creepers and mosses covered the ground. A raid by the grey-faced men may have caused the fire. No one would ever know.

The little people were present in the forest round here in their usual numbers, all the same, for the wanderers were continually seeing their axe marks on the trees, and sometimes their poisoned skewers in the paths. And then one day they met them face to face -- or rather a single one of them, first, who appeared at one end of a short glade when they entered the other. He vanished in a twinkling behind a tree, from which a second later one of his short arrows came lobbing towards them, so slowly that they could distinctly see the single leaf which feathered it rotating in its flight. Yet slowly as the arrow came it bore death on its point, they knew. They sheltered behind the trunks, Lanu peering round with an arrow on his string ready to shoot back when a target should present itself. But the little man behind the tree had raised his voice in a loud cry to his companions, and they heard answering cries. Their peril was extreme; if they stayed where they were they would soon be surrounded, and if they moved to their right they might be hemmed in against the river and its marshes, and if they retreated they would come, he knew, to a stretch of difficult country. To the left lay their hope of safety.

“Come,” said Loa, looking round at the other two, at Lanu grinning boylike with excitement and Musini tense and anxious behind the tree.

Together they leaped across the glade, risking the arrow-flight, to the safety of the trees beyond. Loa's mind was working automatically; with the tail of his eye he was watching the trees, noticing the passages through them, lest there should be too much danger in exposing themselves in their regular progress across successive glades. They paused at last for breath in the lee of a thicket, and Loa could think again about what they should do next. They could withdraw, hoping to get round the tangled country at their backs, or they could continue to circle to their left to pass round the little people altogether, and this was the sensible course to take, for the alternative meant actually a mere postponement of the problem. Loa gesticulated to demand silence and that they should follow him. He rounded the thicket and they began a cautious progress through the forest, flitting from one tree to the next, waiting to peer and to listen, and then flitting on. His own bow was slung across his back, nor would he take it in hand. He had Lanu beside him to shoot when necessary, and he himself carried that which would deal out a quicker death than the poisoned arrow. Loa held the chain of his flail close against the staff, so as to prevent its rattling, and their feet made no noise upon the spongy leaf-mould, and all round them prevailed the stillness of the forest. Yet through that stillness, they knew, little men were creeping, with arrow on string, seeking for them, little men to whom they were only meat on two legs. At that thought Loa could not prevent himself from glancing down his naked body whose joints might soon be roasting over a fire. And he himself, the Loa who dwelt in this body . . . ?

He was in too great danger to continue such an unprofitable speculation; he shook it off, and flitted on to the next tree, and from there to the next. In their attempt to achieve silence they were more successful than even the little people. As Loa stood behind his tree making ready for his next move he heard a tiny sound, a foreign sound, distinguished from the insect noises of the forest and, his ears told him, not related to the over world above the treetops; one single brief noise of wood against wood -- an arrow against a bowstave?

A bowstave against a tree trunk? He swivelled his eyes round towards Lanu behind his tree and Lanu was looking at him, with a world of meaning in his expression. He, too, had heard the sound. They froze in their attitudes behind the trees, utterly tense, only Loa’s eyeballs moving as he stared through the creeper which swathed the tree trunk that sheltered him. So they waited, their straining ears rewarded by no further sound.