The Sky And The Forest (23 page)

“Yes,” said Lanu.

It was a new toy to him. He had mastered his fears, and it had been a delightful and exciting experience to learn to control the canoe on the alien water. He had the feeling that he wanted to paddle canoes all the rest of his life.

“We cannot do that!” said Loa, uttering the first words that came into his head.

“Oh,” said Lanu.

It could hardly be said that he was disappointed. It was something more than life could really offer, to own a canoe. Gone almost beyond memory were the days when he was a

privileged little boy who sometimes wore a leopard-skin cloak, and who had a real steel axe such as marked him out far above his playmates. But as the vision receded facts came into his mind to support his despairing plea.

“We might get more fish,” he said. “You like fish. You could walk along the bank while I paddled down the river. There might be other rivers to cross. We might -- we might even cross the big river!”

That was saying far too much, for to Loa the suggestion was so fantastic as to demand instant rejection.

“No!” he said. “Never! Come out of the boat.”

Lanu was near tears, and rebellion stirred within him, not so much against his father as against fate; Musini saw it and came to the rescue with a suggestion.

“Perhaps at home,” she said, “you will have a canoe. There we are near the big river, and perhaps Loa will give you one. You will be able to make it.”

It was some mitigation of Lanu's disappointment; it distracted him from his present desires by setting him thinking about the future.

“I think I could,” he said.

He looked down at the crazy craft that was suddenly so dear to him, trying to note in his mind how it was constructed. A tree trunk had been hollowed out -- Lanu saw how the bow and stern were shaped -- and to give more freeboard a plank had been attached along each gunwale, sewn to the dugout with fibre, in much the same way as the houses which he just remembered had been built by Tolo and Tolo's brothers.

“Come, my son,” said Loa, more gently.

Now that the initial shock of Lanu's revolutionary suggestion had died away, he could talk more reasonably, especially as the nervous tension of his first trip in a boat was dying away too. He held out his hand to Lanu and swung him up onto the bank, and the masterless canoe drifted away from the shore.

“I shall keep this,” said Lanu, indicating the paddle which he still retained in his hand -- in point of fact he actually did keep it by him for two whole days in the forest, as a memento of the canoe.

They turned to enter again into the forest, all of them a little subdued and silent. Somewhere at the back of Loa's mind strange thoughts were stirring, awakened by Lanu’s absurd suggestion about the canoe and by Musini's equally absurd suggestion about making one. Could it be? Might it happen? Fish were undoubtedly good to eat. Out on the broad river a man -- not Loa, certainly not Loa, but conceivably Lanu -- might enjoy a freedom of movement and an ability to carry baggage that the forest could not offer. The slave raiders had made use of the river. The most vaulting ideas, quite shapeless at the moment, were coming to life in Loa's brain, such fantastic ideas, in fact, that Loa was disturbed by them, tried to put them out of his mind in his distrust of novelty.

Musini brought him back to the world of the matter-of-fact.

“We have these birds to eat,” she said -- she had fastened to her girdle the birds picked out of the water after the upsetting of the canoe. “We should eat them soon.”

So that same day that he first tasted fish and first went upon the water Loa had his first taste of duck. It was indeed a revolutionary day.

Their woodcraft had inevitably improved immeasurably since first they had been compelled to live in the forest. Once they had been town dwellers, living a definitely urban life on the produce of a cultivated land, and Loa even more than the others had been an ignoramus about the practical details of life among the trees; he had not had Lanu's intense and recent experience on the fringe of the forest with his playmates. But months of education in the hardest school of all had taught them much. They could flit like shadows through the forest. No mushroom half hidden in leaf-mould could escape their keen observation. They could read the tracks of the little people and detect instantly their buried skewers and their pitfalls. They were not so continuously hungry and they could make their way among the trees without often coming against obstructions, which their newly developed senses enabled them to avoid without actual thought. And all this enabled them to travel with far greater speed than when they had first begun their journey. They kept the great river on their right hand, cutting off the bigger loops by keeping to the high ground without any difficulty at all, and they were only just conscious of their improvement. If they had been asked, they would certainly have hesitated before agreeing that they had improved -- at the back of their minds was a feeling that behind them, at the point where Loa had been rescued from the slavers, was a bad country where life was very difficult, and that here life was easier.

The river made a wide, shallower curve than usual, but in the curve the land was marshy as always, and Loa branched away from the river without hesitation. There was something almost resembling a track here, a path trodden by the forest antelope and by the little people along the easiest going, and Loa led the way along it, silent of tread, quick of eye, alert and ready for instant action. His eye for ground, naturally good, and cultivated now to a high condition of efficiency, told him that the river was approaching him again on his right hand, for the slope was increasing -- imperceptibly to anyone save himself -- and the character of the forest was changing, imperceptibly, again, to almost anyone save himself. Only the minutest differences told him this, but he was in no way surprised when the light through the trees on his right front began to increase, when the uphill trend of the ground became more steep, and the leaf-mould under his feet grew thinner so that he could feel rock beneath it. At the crest the rock broke clean through the surface into a succession of low pinnacles, and Loa came out from the trees into an open space at the lip of the bluff, with the great river beneath him.

He had been ready for something like this, but not exactly this. He shrank down, he almost cowered before what he saw, yet it was not his usual weakness in the presence of great distances. When Lanu and Musini came up to him he could not speak; he moved his lips but could make no sound, so overpowering was his emotion. Lanu looked round him, at the rocks, at the curve of the river, at the trees growing densely about them, projecting horizontally from the steep bank in their quest for light and air. He rubbed his eyes like someone in a dream.

“I have seen this before,” he said, and Loa nodded, his chest heaving.

Musini had sat down on a lichen-covered block of rock, for her pregnancy was now so far advanced as to make her seize every opportunity to rest. She looked round her too.

“It is our river,” she said. “This is where we used to come from our town.”

“It is where you used to speak to the moon,” said Lanu to Loa, and stopped a little guiltily. They all knew that Loa had not summoned his sister the moon out of the river for months and months now, and yet she still came back to the sky after each absence.

“So it is,” said Loa, hoarsely.

“Through there lies the way home. Only a little way,” said Musini, pointing through the forest.

“Yes indeed,” agreed Lanu excitedly.

He seized a lump of rock in both hands, whirled it round, and flung it out into the stream, where it raised a splash. That was what he used to do when he was brought here in that other life, but now it was a far larger rock that he threw. He was almost a man now.

“Let us go,” he said. “What are we waiting for?”

Loa looked round at the two of them. They had not had his experience. They had never known what it was to be a god one day and a slave the next. This was a moment of triumph, to return after all these uncounted months to a familiar place, but Loa had learned to distrust moments of triumph. He felt apprehensive; he did not know exactly why. But his apprehensions goaded him to a convulsive mental effort, as he made himself try to picture what he expected to find if he went home along the forest path. The first feeling was that he would find it as he had always seen it, always save for the one morning when the slave raiders came. The orderly street with the tall wooden houses on each side, the throngs of women going about their domestic business, even Litti the worker in iron busy at his forge. That was the mental picture that memory conjured up; and he knew, with strange clairvoyance, that Musini and Lanu could see similar mirages. But Loa was a realist now, and no dreamer. The last time he had seen the town the houses had been in flames, a third of the people were captives of the slave raiders, children and old men and women had been lying in a tangled mass of corpses. Loa remembered that once at least during his recent travels he had set foot on the site of a town, a mere area in the forest where the saplings contended with the shrubs and only a few half-choked banana trees remained as evidence that man had once cultivated the spot. Certainly this was all that they might find now.

And on the other hand . . . ? Loa remembered the encounters he had had with people from his town while he was a slave. They had hardly known him, and they had not treated him as a god. So preoccupied were they with their own affairs that they had not evinced any of the respect or the terror which his appearance had once demanded. If there were any people in the town they would have been preoccupied with their affairs for many months. How would they treat him? For a moment Loa felt that he did not care. He would not mind being the least considerable of all the men in the town if only he were home again. He would content himself with no other wife than Musini, he would reconcile himself to begging help of other men to build a house, and Lanu would have to work hard to buy himself a wife; he would endure anything just to be home. His homesickness was intense enough at that moment to make any sacrifice agreeable if he could satisfy it.

This was all very well, but Loa, standing woodenly with his wife and son growing more and more excited in front of him, felt yet other doubts and apprehensions. He could not define them at all, but his recent experiences taught him to be doubtful, to take nothing for granted. Fear had been part of the air he breathed for many months now, and he still felt fear. His whole attitude was in the strangest contrast not only with that of Lanu and Musini but also with his own of a few moments ago. His recent life had been a partial education for him. He had acquired a certain amount of logical ability, he had learned something of human nature, and, above all, he knew now that he did not live in a settled world where the unprecedented did not happen. He slid his hand up his bowstave, bent it, and slipped the string into the notch, and then gently twanged the string to make certain the weapon was ready for immediate action. He examined his three arrows to see that the heads were properly secured and that the notches of the barbs still retained their viscid poison. With his bow over his left shoulder he put out his right hand and gently took the little axe from Lanu, who happened to be carrying it at that moment.

The others looked at him in some surprise, their ebullience dying away when they noticed the gravity of his demeanour.

“Lord,” said Musini, slipping naturally into the respectful form of address. “What do you fear?”

Loa the god could not say “I do not know,” which would have been the truth, nor could he say “Everything,” which would have been a close approximation to the truth. He could only turn a terrible eye on his wife, a cold glare that repressed even Musini and reduced her to apologetic mumblings. Lanu caught the infection and strung his bow without further words, waiting for Loa to make the next move. Loa looked back across the broad river, sullen yet metallic under the sun. He even looked up at his brother the sky; he lingered unaccountably as he spun out these last few moments before starting out on what he felt in his bones to be a decisive move which would affect the rest of his life -- affect it to the extent, even, of ending it abruptly, maybe. It was strange to be seeking excuses for lingering here under the callous observation of the sky, when almost at a stride he could gain the comforting twilight of the forest; but he could not put off the move for long, not under the eyes of Lanu and Musini, nor under his own eyes. He hitched his bow more comfortably on his shoulder, took a fresh grip of the little axe, and started along the path to the town.

Lanu and Musini walked with him in silence, the former out at one side of him, the latter in the rear, weighed down somewhat by the burden she was carrying. Lanu scanned the forest ahead of them as keenly as ever he had. In the neighbourhood of a town there was always added danger from the little people, who were likely to hang round it both to rob the banana and manioc plantations and to put themselves in the way of obtaining live meat. Chips had been taken out of the bark of several trees which they passed; a gesture from Lanu called Loa's attention to chips of different heights and appearance -- both the little people and real men had passed this way within the last few weeks, to judge by the fact that lichens had hardly had time to establish themselves on the cut surfaces. And Lanu pointed, too, to footprints at the base of trees, which, to judge by his expression, confirmed that conclusion. Loa glanced at them wisely, but he was not woodsman enough to draw from the faint indications that survived any inferences on which he could rely.

There was something, however, which offered unmistakable proof that men were living near. They could smell the town as they approached it, the wood smoke and the decaying refuse; only the merest trace stealing on the air, imperceptible to any but nostrils long accustomed to the scent of river and forest. It even seemed that their ears could catch the faint sounds of a community; at any rate, what Lanu thought he heard worked him up to a fresh pitch of excitement so that he grinned and gesticulated to his father, who stolidly ignored him. This was the path Loa had trodden scores of times; the changes in the forest, eternal yet ever changing, could not prevent Loa from recognizing parts of it. Here, just where he had expected it, began the tangled second growth of the abandoned clearings, and at this point, even to a tyro's eye, it was obvious that the path entered into the tangle. Loa plunged in ahead with the axe.