The Sky And The Forest (22 page)

Loa found it hard to understand what the men in the canoe were doing, especially as frequently they stopped out of sight for long intervals in one of the narrow reedy channels. On the occasions when he could see them one or the other of them leaned perilously over the side of the canoe and drew something out of the water, and sometimes he would toss something white into the bottom of the boat -- these mysterious fish, Loa supposed, which Lanu and Musini had talked about. But once they stopped for a long time still, with one man standing in the canoe -- all Loa could see was the black dot of the man's head over the level of the reeds. This stop explained itself. Loa saw the man's arm rise in the unmistakable gesture of bending and loosing a bow; the canoe had been waiting for one of the innumerable marsh birds to come within range.

The canoe threaded its way in and out among the reeds, and Loa watched it with his interminable patience; patience the more laudable because he was not waiting for something certain, nor even for any definite possibility. He was just waiting, in case something, he knew not what, should happen. He and Lanu were close to the water's edge here, each behind a tree. Before them ran one of the reedy channels of the delta; about them was marshy land, not impassable, with the roots of the trees growing in it -- Musini was farther back, waiting too, with the same patience. About them brooded the sweltering heat and the deep silence of the forest, and the reek of the delta was in their nostrils. The distant cry of birds only served to accentuate the silence about them as they stood like statues, not daring to move because the canoe was out of sight and they did not know where or when it would reappear. Then they heard sounds, coming from not far away -- almost the same sounds as had first broken in upon Loa's apathy, the sound of wood against wood, the murmur of voices, even a laugh like the one they had heard before. Loa's muscles tightened; he notched his bowstring into his arrow and half drew it. He could see that Lanu was doing exactly the same. The canoe emerged round the corner of the reedy channel, heading down it straight towards them. Loa waited with his bow bent, as the canoe crawled along towards them, ever so slowly. At long arrow range the canoe stopped, and again one of the men leaned over the side -- Loa could see the canoe heel over dangerously -- to draw something out of the water and examine it and drop it in again, something that looked like a basket of reeds. Then the canoe resumed its course towards them, rocking a little with the strokes of the paddlers, yawing a little from side to side of the channel. Loa was actually quivering, so tensely expectant was he, but he must wait -- wait -- wait. But now the moment had come, with the canoe close beside him, not twenty feet from his arrowhead. He stepped out and drew his bow to the full and loosed, seized another arrow and loosed again, and yet a third time. Lanu's bow twanged beside him. At that close range the hard wooden arrowhead, hardened in the fire and sharpened to a needlepoint, could penetrate easily even through something as tough and as elastic as human skin. Loa's first arrow struck the man in the bow of the boat below the armpit and went in deep between the ribs. His second arrow struck lower and farther forward and penetrated as deeply. Even without the poison on the heads those wounds were mortal. Loa used his third arrow on the second man, who had turned an astonished face towards them with Lanu's arrows sticking in his back and his arm. Loa's arrow whizzed in at the opened mouth at the same moment as Lanu's third arrow struck him in the breast. He fell backwards, tipping over the crazy dugout. Both bodies vanished beneath the dark surface of the backwater, and the canoe, filled with water, floated with only a strip of gunwale showing. Beside it floated a collection of debris -- the two paddles, a couple of dead birds, half a dozen white-bellied fish, a bow and some arrows, a wooden bailer.

Loa and Lanu stood by the bank waiting for the boatmen to reappear, but the dark water was undisturbed as Musini came up and stood beside them.

“They are dead?” asked Musini.

“They are there,” said Loa, pointing into the backwater. With the relief from tension and from his apathy of yesterday his voice sounded cracked and unnatural.

“They are dead!” said Lanu. “We killed them, Loa and I With our arrows from here we killed them. How surprised they were when we stepped forward with our bows bent. We struck as the snake strikes. “We -- “

“Peace, son,” said Musini, breaking in on his rhapsody. “And now? The men are dead, and the boat is there.”

It was like Musini to call attention to the difficulties ahead. The canoe, just showing above the water, floated five yards from the bank, quite beyond their reach, and Loa was a trifle nonplused.

“I can get it,” said Lanu, eagerly.

He took the axe and severed a creeper which climbed the tree beside which they stood, and then, dragging at it with all his weight, he tore it down from its anchorage far enough to be able to sever it again, cutting off a piece twenty feet long.

“See,” said Lanu, and, standing carefully at the water's edge, he cast the end of the creeper over the canoe. When he dragged the creeper in the canoe undoubtedly moved, and came an inch or two nearer. Another cast just moved it again.

“Ha!” said Musini, her interest and approval caught.

She looked round her and approached a fallen branch and was going to cut a section from it with the axe, but a glance from her brought Loa to her side, for there was something vaguely improper about a woman using cutting tools of steel. Loa cut off the length she indicated and Musini hastened to fasten it to the end of Lanu's creeper. Now a bold cast beyond the canoe, and a careful pulling in, brought the waterlogged boat much nearer, and two or three further attempts brought it so close that it grounded beside the bank where they could just reach it.

“And now?” said Musini again.

For answer Lanu leaned far out from the bank and took hold of the gunwale of the canoe, heaving at it. “Water lapped over the side out of it, and Loa came to his help. With a powerful heave they were able to pour a good deal of the water out, so that the canoe floated against the bank with a fair amount of freeboard. Lanu began to climb in.

“No! No!” said Musini in sudden panic.

She had qualms about this enterprise; the water of the backwater was dark and mysterious, and boats were strange things, and she had fears for her son, but Loa put his hand on her shoulder and restrained her. Lanu climbed into the canoe with a laugh which was checked when the crazy craft wobbled violently under him so that he nearly capsized it again. Common sense made him sit down in the water in the bottom and stabilize the boat a little; he laughed again, but a trifle nervously, and the nervousness was the more perceptible when he glanced round and saw that the canoe had left the bank and he was drifting free. But after all, he had been in a canoe before, when he and his mother had been captured; he knew one could float in one and survive the experience, and his father had told him much about them with an inaccuracy Lanu knew nothing about.

His momentum carried him out to the floating material, and he reached out -- with a sudden hesitation on account of the lurches of the canoe -- and took a paddle. He waved it triumphantly and was about to try to use it when his eye caught sight of the bailer floating beside him; he had seen a bailer used on his short previous voyage. He took the bailer and set the water flying out of the boat, laughing excitedly again now. With the boat nearly empty he tried to pick up the other floating things. He had to use the paddle he had to get to the other one, and his first amateurish digs sent the little boat circling round in a quite unpredictable fashion, and his attempts at managing it made it rock frighteningly again. But soon he had picked up paddle and bow and arrows and fish and all, looking back at his parents with all his teeth flashing in a grin, while they for their part regarded him with parental pride -- combined with a little of the consternation of the hen who has mothered ducklings. It was only a few moments before the obvious fact was brought home to Lanu that the canoe turned away from the paddle; by taking a stroke first on one side and then on the other he was able to propel it in some sort of straight line. It was wonderful. He headed the boat towards where his parents stood, and after one or two failures managed to come up beside them. Loa leaned over and took hold of the side and drew it against the bank.

“We have a canoe!” said Lanu in ecstasy.

Perhaps Musini felt that she did not want to be outdone in the matter of innovations.

“And there are fish,” she said. “Give me that one, Lanu. I am hungry.”

Lanu handed her the fish and Musini took it in her two hands. Only once before had she eaten fish, and then it had taken some coaxing on the part of the old woman who had guarded her to induce her to do it, but she set about it now with a determined nonchalance designed to impress her menfolk. She took a determined bite out of the fish's belly.

“Good,” she said, with her mouth full.

The flesh was full of bones, and somewhat insipid, but for a hungry woman it was excellent food.

“Give me one too,” said Loa.

They all three of them devoured the raw fish; it was not until he began his second one that Loa learned something of the trick of stripping the flesh from the backbone with his teeth, and also convinced himself that neither head nor fins were edible. He swallowed a good many bones but even so the fish constituted one of the few satisfactory meals he had lately had. Loa tossed the last backbone into the river. He was revivified, without a thought for the two dead men lying under the black surface of the backwater.

“Now do we cross the water?” asked Lanu, still in ecstasy.

That was a strange question to Loa, and he hesitated before replying. Could he bring himself to entrust his godlike person to the unstable surface of the water, under the glare of the unsympathetic sky? There was the kindly forest at his back, and under his feet was the earth, marshy at the moment but reassuringly solid compared with the unfamiliar element before him. All the conservatism of savagery, the fears of ignorance, raised a turmoil within him as he faced the decision. But there was only one thing to say, and he said it.

“Yes.”

The difficulties were obvious; the canoe was far too tiny to carry three people, they were down in the delta of the tributary, and they knew almost nothing about managing a canoe. Musini took charge of the details; gods might have divine inspirations, but it needed her to put them into execution.

“Let us go back to where we saw it first,” she said. “Loa, we can walk there, if you, Lanu, can make that thing come along with us.”

That was what they did, Loa and Musini walking along the water's edge carrying the impedimenta while Lanu struggled to paddle along beside them. He had untold difficulties with the little craft, more than once turning complete circles as he tried to propel her along, to Musini's acute but unvoiced anxiety, but eventually they reached the point above the delta where the last distributary parted from the river and the channel was well defined. On the other side lay the forest and the way home. Musini offered herself up for sacrifice.

“Take me over,” she said to Lanu. “Then you can return for Loa.”

She made ready to get into the canoe.

“Take care! Take care!” squeaked Lanu, by now thoroughly familiar with the instability of the dugout. It rocked violently, but Lanu contrived to keep it the right way up as Musini lowered herself into the bottom, clinging desperately to the gunwales. Her additional weight had grounded the boat forward, but Lanu shoved her free and began to paddle gingerly away from the bank, while Loa watched in frantic anxiety mingled with a strange pride. He saw the canoe circle in midstream, and he watched it take its erratic course across the river. At last he saw it reach the other side, and he saw Musini heave her growing bulk out of the boat and climb out onto the bank. There was a pause while Musini received the things which she cannily decided should be handed up to her without being imperilled by another crossing, and then the canoe came back across the water, Lanu grinning in triumph as he paddled. Loa climbed cautiously in, only half-hearing the warnings and advice which Lanu poured out. It was both sickly and frightening to feel the boat rock beneath him. With one hand he gripped the precious axe and with the other he clung like death to the edge of the boat.

“Sit in the middle. Father,” said Lanu, tone and grammar both showing a deplorable lack of respect for a parent and elder, let alone for a god.

Loa shifted his position by a terrified half-inch; the violent reaction produced by the least movement reduced him to idiocy. Lanu gave up the hope of attaining perfect balance and started to paddle, and Loa found the forest receding from him, so that he was exposed on the surface of the water to all the glare of the sky above him and on all sides. He felt as insignificant as any insect as he sat frozen with fear, mocked by the gurgling of the water around Lanu's paddle. Certainly the water was jeering at him, if not threatening him. His eyes could hardly focus on the farther shore, where Musini squatted in the shade awaiting him -- he could only see her at intervals, when the swings of the canoe brought her directly before him, for he could not even turn his eyeballs to keep her continuously in sight.

But they drew up to her in the end, and she rose to greet them.

“First give me the axe,” she said.

Loa handed it up to her, and then tried to stand to disembark. The rocking of the canoe threw him into an active panic. He was about to plunge for the shore, careless of the results to the canoe and to Lanu, but, to his credit, he restrained himself, sitting down and allowing the canoe to regain its stability while Lanu sighed with relief. Then he rose more calmly, clutched the roots in the bank, and cautiously heaved himself out. Lanu did not follow him; he sat on in the canoe, grasping the paddle with one hand and a root with the other.

“Father,” said Lanu, “cannot we keep this canoe?”

“
Keep
it?” exclaimed Loa, utterly astonished.