The Sky And The Forest (18 page)

The character of the riverbank changed as they went along. The land began to trend upwards, with the water washing at the foot of a low cliff of earth; even the nearly-vertical face of the cliff was thickly grown with vegetation, young trees projecting out from it almost horizontally. No tree had a long life there with the cliff being steadily undercut by the river, for this was the bluff at the far end of a loop. They had to keep to the top of the cliff, for the water lapped at its very foot. Behind them the sun sank slowly across the river, his face almost obscured in a sullen haze.

They came to a point where the cliff face was seamed by a steep gully running down to the water; a weak spot in the face had been deeply undercut and had collapsed, leaving a fairly easy descent with a little beach at the foot of it. It seemed a good place in which to camp, with convenient access to water, while the sides of the gully would conceal their fire at the bottom. As if to make the site completely desirable, at the lip of the gully grew no fewer than three young trees of the species of giant acacia, which gave them the forest beans which constituted the bulkier half of their diet. With one accord they halted there and busied themselves with preparations for the night, gathering beans and dead wood. It was for Musini and Lanu to light the fire; Loa saw them start work and then with axe and bow climbed back up the gully; a little good fortune might bring them some addition to their meagre supper, and in any case it was desirable both to keep guard up here against some surprise attack and to reconnoitre the ground round about. At the head of the gully he paused to look back; down by the water Lanu and Musini were bending over their preparations for a fire, while the sun, now buried in a purple cloud, was slowly approaching the almost invisible farther bank of the river. Right underneath it was a vague speck --some canoe, possibly, on some mysterious journey.

Loa wandered off into the twilit forest. Despite the need for silence he had to take the precaution of slicing with his axe a bit of bark from some of the trees he passed, for it was necessary that he should find his way back to the gully; in his left hand he held his bent bow, with the string fitted into the groove of an arrow whose shaft was clasped under his forefinger and thumb. A single motion would enable him to draw and loose, should a monkey or a bird happen into range. Only a few black leathery funguses rewarded his search, and he ate those as not worth the trouble of carrying back; he found nothing else before the increasing darkness of the forest warned him to return to the gully. He turned back, to pick his way from blaze to blaze -- even now his vigilance not relaxing, lest some of the little people should be following up his trail, unlikely though that might be with night coming on.

Faintly through the silent forest there came a high-pitched cry, twice repeated. The first sound of it brought him to a halt, looking about him with all the vigilance of a man who within an hour may be hanging on a roasting spit, but the repetition sent him hurrying through the trees with a reckless lack of precaution. It was Lanu's voice, he knew. Lanu was in danger, in fear; Loa broke into a run, his heart pounding with anxiety. He emerged at the top of the gully while it was still full daylight. A wisp of smoke drifted out across the bronze river from a little fire; but there was no human creature in the gully, no one at all. He ran wildly down it, his naked feet sliding in the loose earth, and there, beside the fire, he could read part of the story in the footprints that had torn the ground round about it. Many men had been there, and there had been something of a struggle. A single arrow, one of Lanu's, lay at a distance from the fire, but everything else had disappeared; save for that a clean sweep had been made. A thick chain of footprints -- where individual ones could be distinguished they pointed both to and from the fire -- led along the beach at the water's edge, and Loa, following the tracks round the little point there, could read the rest of the story in the mud, for there, with the water lapping up to it, was a deep groove, the mark of a canoe grounding, with the muddled footprints all about it.

It was all plain now. A canoe with many men in it, seven or eight at least and perhaps a dozen, had crept into the shore here, concealed by the point from Musini and Lanu in the gully. The men in the canoe had seen the fire from the river and had paddled silently to the shore close beside it. Creeping round the point they had peered round to see the woman and the boy intent on their work at the fire -- a pair of deep footprints showed where a single scout had stood still for a long time staring at them unseen to make sure it was not an ambush. Presumably he had turned and beckoned to his fellows. Then had come the sudden rush;

Musini and Lanu had been seized -- it was then they had uttered the screams Loa had heard -- and carried off to the canoe; and now they were gone, Loa could not tell whither, for a canoe leaves no tracks. The sun plunged into the forest across the river, leaving above it a pile of purple cloud. In a few moments it would be dark, and Loa, distracted with misery though he was, hastened back to the fire to search about it in the last gleam of daylight. He did not find what he feared he might; look as he would, he could see no drop of blood upon the torn-up earth. Whatever else had happened, it was probable that neither Musini nor Lanu had been wounded. No spear had pierced them, certainly. No club had dashed out their brains; even if they had been merely clubbed into insensibility a drop or two of blood would have probably fallen from the battered scalp, and he could be almost sure that none had done so. Night swept down upon him even while he bent to reread the story of the torn earth. He stumbled back again to where the canoe had grooved the beach, the last place where his wife and son had touched the earth, and there, in the darkness, his misery overcame him. He sat down and wept, his forearms on his bent knees, his face upon his forearms, shaken by his sobs, while round him the water lapped and gurgled and chuckled.

In time he grew calmer, with the calmness of something approaching despair. He looked out unseeing in the blackness of the night across the river. Overhead a star or two showed faintly between the clouds; there was no moon. Oddly at that moment of supreme misery he realized that he had not, for a very long time, called the moon from out of her retirement in the river. There had been a time when he and his whole world had sincerely believed that she would not leave it if he did not call her, that the nights would remain dark if he did not summon his wayward sister back to the sky. His sister! Alone there by the pitch-dark river Loa had a moment of self-realization, of self-contempt. The moon was no more a sister of his than she was a sister of the little people's. He was a mere mortal, like anyone else, and the most lonely and miserable of mortals at that, and the most useless. It was his grievous fault that Musini and Lanu had been captured. He remembered with a sneer his precaution in going to reconnoitre the landward side of their camp, without any thought at all for the peril that menaced them from the water. He had even seen the canoe across the river, and in his utter folly he had given it no thought. The dark invisible water lapping at his feet mocked him as he sat with his face in his hands.

It was a terrible night, a night of misery and despair, in which his few moments of sleep were tortured by frightful dreams. He was a gregarious animal suddenly confronted with the possibility of lifelong compulsory solitude, a defenceless animal without a friend in the world, the prey of every living creature in the forest. But that was only part of his emotion. He was stirred as deeply as might be by the loss of his wife and child, Musini and Lanu, who had stood by him when he was a slave, who had chosen to encounter hardship and peril to set him free, whose devotion to him had never faltered. He had a sense not merely of physical loss, but of spiritual loss as well. “While there was emotion left in him he wept for Musini and Lanu, until at last he was completely exhausted. Even with the dawn he still sat in melancholy apathy. Possibly he might have stayed there and starved if a new stimulus had not aroused him. It beat upon his ear for some time before it penetrated into his consciousness -- the steady rhythm of a drum. A drum! There was no doubt about it. Not very far away in the forest a drum was beating out an exciting, triumphant metre, borne clearly through the trees to his ears. He had no doubt that it came from the town whose doors his nostrils could just detect. It called him to action, roused him to do something.

His subconscious may have been at work during the night, underneath his misery. Or the sound of the drum may merely have called forth a prodigy of thinking in his brain. The town was near. Was it not possible that it had been people from the town, incredibly using a canoe, who had captured Musini and Lanu? And in that case was it not likely that Musini and Lanu were still captives in the town? They had been carried off alive -- they probably had not been slain yet. It was not so much hope as a ferocious determination that filled him and quickened his sluggish pulse. He picked up axe and bow and arrows. A few forest beans scattered round the remains of the fire caught his notice, and he ate them raw for a scanty breakfast, and he drank deeply of the water of the river. Then he started off towards the town, desperate, the enemy of mankind. The sound of the drum came more and more clearly through the trees, accompanying the scent of humanity. It almost made Loa abandon the caution of movement which had become habitual to him; but he still instinctively scanned the ground before him for pitfalls and poisoned skewers; he still halted at every glade to look ahead and listen for enemies. Along with the sound of the drum he now heard human voices, roaring a chorus to the meter. There must be some kind of rejoicing in the town.

His sense of direction told him that he was keeping closer to the river than he expected, and he had not gone downhill at all -- he was walking along the top of the bluff. He had no clear idea of what he was going to do; actually he was so desperate that he may have been courting sudden death. The forest suddenly became dense and overgrown, with shrubs and creepers intermingled, and, with the noise of the town increasing, he guessed he had reached the edge of the belt of old clearings round the town. With his mind suddenly made up, he plunged into the undergrowth, creeping under, climbing over, hacking a way through with his axe, keeping a wary eye open the while for snakes. The sweat poured down his dark skin, for in the undergrowth the heat was intense and the labour heavy. He wriggled on and on cautiously, with the din of the town growing ever greater, until at last he parted a bush in front of him and had a clear view. He could see a circle of houses of a strange type -- round houses, thatched differently from what he was accustomed to. They faced onto a central space; between the houses he could see something of it, and the coming and going of many people, first this way and then that way. A dance was certainly in progress. He wanted a better view than this, and he turned to his right and began to crawl along, keeping in the final fringe of dense vegetation through which progress was not too difficult and yet which screened him from possible sight as long as he kept down. A hundred yards of this opened up a wider vista between the huts. He could see fully into the central open space. Cautiously he backed into the undergrowth, and, lying full length, parted the grass stems before his eyes as he looked out. A man lying flat is more likely to escape observation than one standing up, being below the natural eye-level.

There were trees standing in this open space, unlike the main street of his own town, and at the far side the dance was going on; more people than he could count (and yet, he thought, less than had dwelled in his own town) moving from side to side in a great semicircle to the beat of the drum, which was out of his sight. Under a great tree a little group of standing figures centred about a seated one; Loa could just make out the movement of fans which, he guessed, were keeping the flies off the chief. He had no word for “chief”; he had to phrase it to himself that if this were his town that man would be he. He almost thought of the chief as the “Loa” of the town -- the clearest proof that Loa had learned much in the last weeks regarding his own relative importance, both present and past. But it was not the chief, it was not the dance, that attracted Loa's attention. He did not spare so much as a glance for the tethered goats which meant milk and meat. What attracted his attention was a little palisade of stakes in the shade of another tree, a good deal nearer. It was more than a palisade; it was a cage, wound about with creepers. Loa's heart nearly came out of his mouth as he saw it and guessed what it might imply. He swallowed painfully and fought down the impulse to crawl farther out of the undergrowth for a nearer view. It was just the sort of pen in which humans destined for food might be fattened; but, look as he would, he could see nothing -- so closely woven were the sides of the pen and so deep the shade in which it stood -- of what was inside it, if anything.

Everything he could see of it told him that it was in use; it seemed to be complete, and no one would trouble to rebuild a pen when the victims had been taken out. But if the inmate, or inmates, were lying down -- as was to be expected -- he would not be able to see them. Loa looked all round the village and the open space. He was as near to the pen as he could ever get unobserved; there would be no advantage in a further change of position. He set himself to wait, to see what would happen. The sun blazed down into the undergrowth around him so that he was in a steady trickle of sweat; insects plagued him and hunger and thirst assailed him, but he forced himself to lie there waiting; he called to his assistance all the endless patience of the forest.

If there was a victim in the cage it might well be Musini or Lanu -- they even might both be there. He had not realized, when they camped the night before, either how near they were to the town nor how near the town was to the river. It was confirmation of his previous theory. Being as near to the river as this the town might easily be populated by the canoe-using people whom he knew to exist, and if it were, it seemed far more likely that it was a canoe from this town which had captured his wife and child than one from any other town. If that were the case it would be Lanu and Musini who would be in that cage. Their captors would certainly fatten them before eating them; Loa remembered realistically how worn and thin they both were. He called forth fresh reserves of patience.