The Sky And The Forest (3 page)

Indeharu was waiting for the ceremony to begin. Loa stood forward.

“Sister,” he said, looking down the river to the distant reach whither his erring sister had strayed. “Come back from under the water. Come back into the sky. The -- the -- “

“The nights are dark,” prompted Indeharu, as he always had to do.

“The nights are dark, and your sons and daughters cannot fill the sky. Come back. Grow bigger, for the nights are very dark. Come back, my sister.”

Somewhere under the surface of the river his sister was hiding; everyone knew of the liking she had for the big yellow river. A few people who had been caught by darkness away from the town and who had been forced to spend the night beside the river had told him of how she stretched her arms out over the water and how her spirit danced on its surface. Every month she wandered back to it and hid herself in its depths, and had to be recalled by her brother.

A cloud of butterflies was flying along the river in a vast bank, reaching from the surface nearly up to the level of Loa's face, more than a hundred feet; stretching nearly half a mile across the river and a quarter of a mile down it. With the wind behind them they passed rapidly downstream, a lavender-tinted cloudbank. Flaws of wind recoiling from the bank whirled parts of it into little eddies, and the sun shining down caught the millions of wings and was reflected back in a constant succession of rosy highlights. Lanu clapped his hands at the sight of them.

“What are they?” he asked, excitedly.

“They come from the sky,'‘ answered Loa, heavily.

No doubt they were beautiful, but Loa was too disturbed mentally by the vast distances to experience more than mixed emotions regarding them. His brother the sky was looking down at him from all directions, and he did not like that; it was like having an enemy at his back. Across the river the forest was dwindled to a mere strip of blue in the steamy atmosphere. It was frightening to see the forest so insignificant, the sky so big. It gave Loa no doubts regarding his own status as a god -- the first among equals, among sky and forest and river and sun -- but it disturbed him violently by its disruption of the usual state of affairs. It was not respectable, it was not usual, it chafed him and irritated him.

“Look! Look!” said Lanu, pointing.

Far up the river there was a dark speck to be seen. It moved upon the surface, and as it moved reflected sunshine winked from it. A boat, with the sunshine gleaming on the wet paddles. That was a phenomenon to be regarded with a dull lack of interest. There were other men in the world, Loa knew, besides the people of the town and the little men. Some of them went about on the river in canoes. In the days of Nasa, Loa's father, there had been another town near, here by the water's edge; but Nasa and his people had fallen upon it one night and killed everybody in it and had feasted lavishly in consequence for days afterwards. The men of that town had used canoes, so Indeharu said. So other men existed, and some of them used canoes on the river. And rain fell from the sky; there was no need to think farther about either matter. The young women and the young men were gazing up the river at the canoe, and talking excitedly about it, their excitement mingled with some trepidation because they knew so little about other people. But Loa knew no fear; there was no reason why he should fear anything in the world.

“I go,” he said to Indeharu, for he wanted to free himself from the irritation of thus being exposed to the sky.

“Loa goes back!” proclaimed Indeharu.

Vira hustled the young men off along the path to make the way safe, and Indeharu followed them. As Loa left the high point to descend again to the forest the remainder flung themselves on their faces, their noses to the ground, for him to walk past them, but Loa hardly spared a glance for the row of glistening dark brown backs. He walked on along the path, and breathed more freely and gratefully as he left the sky behind him and entered into the steamy twilight of the forest. Before him Lanu capered along, full of the joy of living. Lanu had devised a new way of walking. Instead of taking strides with alternate feet he was trying to step twice with each foot in turn. He poised on one foot and skipped, and then poised on the other foot and skipped, his arms held high as he balanced. So they went back into the forest, Loa swinging his battle-axe and Lanu skipping in front of him.

Some young men of the town hunting in the forest had captured a strange woman. They brought her back with them, and everyone assembled to look at her and to listen to her absurd speech. Delli, her ridiculous name was, she said -- in itself that was enough to make people laugh and clap their thighs. All her words were comical like that, with l’s where r’s should be, and the strangest turns of speech. Everybody in the town knew there were many ways of addressing people; one spoke differently, with different words, if one were addressing one person, or two persons, or many persons, or if the persons addressed were old or young, male or female, married or single, important or unimportant. But this woman muddled it all up, and spoke (when it was possible to disentangle her curious pronunciation) to the crowd as if it were made up of three little children. Everyone laughed uproariously at that.

They brought her to Loa where he sat on his tripod stool with Indeharu and Vira standing behind him, and they swarmed close round her to hear the quaint things she said.

“Who are you?” asked Loa.

“Delli,” she said.

That ridiculous name again! Everyone laughed.

“Where do you come from?”

“I come from the town.”

That was just as ridiculous as her name.
This
was the town, and everyone knew it. She rolled her eyes from side to side at the crowd, a very frightened woman. She held her hand over her heart as she looked about her, naked save for a wisp of bark cloth. She was a very puzzled woman as well, quite unable to understand why the simple things she said should occasion so much merriment.

“She was in the forest eating amoma fruits,” interposed Ura, one of the young men, explaining with the proper gestures how they came to catch her. “She did not hear us. Maketu went over that way. Huva went over there. We went silently forward through the trees. Then she saw Maketu and ran. Then she saw Huva and ran the other way, towards me. I was behind a tree, and I sprang out and I caught her. She hit me, here, on my shoulder, and she scratched with her nails. But still I held her. She could not escape from Ura.”

“She was eating amoma fruits?” asked Loa.

“Yes.”

Amoma fruits were not good eating; their watery acid pulp could not deceive a healthy stomach for a moment. Children ate them during their games, but no sensible person ever did. Loa stared harder at the strange woman. The scar-tattooing on her cheeks and upper lip was of an odd pattern. She was terribly thin, like a skeleton, her bones standing out through her skin, and her breasts fallen away to empty bags although she was a young woman, not yet the mother of more than two children or so. And her body and legs and arms were covered with scratches, some of them several days old, some of them fresh, but altogether making a complete network over her. She was calmer now, but Loa's next question threw her into a worse panic than ever.

“Why were you in the forest?” asked Loa.

Her face distorted itself with fear.

“Bang bang,” she said, and repeated herself. “Bang bang.”

That was almost too funny to bear, to see this amusing woman shaking with fright and to hear her say “bang bang!” She goggled round at the laughing throng and took a grip of herself. When she spoke again the intensity of her emotion made her voice a hoarse whisper, but silence fell on the crowd and every word could be heard.

“Men came,” she said. “Many men, at night. We were all asleep. Bang bang. Bang bang. Men were killed, women were killed. My man was sleeping beside me, and he woke up and took his spear. Everyone was shouting. Other men of the town came running into the house. Some were wounded. We stood by the door with spears and we would not come out although they shouted to us to come out. Houses were burning so that we could see out. Bang bang. Bang bang. Fire in the night, like red lightning. My man fell down and he was dead. Still we would not come out. Then our house burned. They were waiting for us outside the door so I would not go out when the men did. I jumped up and caught the roof beams of the house. Not all the thatch was burning so I pulled the thatch aside and climbed through the roof. I stood there and all the town was burning. Bang bang. Bang Bang. The thatch was burning beside me and so I jumped. I jumped far, very far. The old clearing was beside our house and I jumped into it, right into the bushes. I tried to run through the bushes, but I could not go far, not in the dark. I lay there and saw the flames and heard them shouting. My baby -- I think I heard her cry too.”

Delli stopped speaking, her hand to her heart again. A babble of talk rose from the crowd the moment it ceased to be repressed by the dramatic nature of Delli's utterance. The fantastic tale must be discussed. Loa waved his arm for silence.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“I lay there,” said Delli, “and daylight came while the flames were still burning. I climbed an old tree trunk and looked into the town. The people were gathered at one end, with the strange men round them. Some of them were pale men.”

“Pale men?” demanded Loa.

“They had not faces like ours,” said Delli, struggling wildly to explain something beyond all experience.

Her hands went up to her own face in feverish gestures trying to convey an impression of features quite different from the broad nostrils and heavy jaws which characterized the only human faces she knew.

“They wore clothes -- so.”

Delli flung one arm across her breast and her hands fluttered as she tried to give a mental picture of an ample cloak.

“And they were pale men?” asked Loa. Clothes were something he knew something about, for he wore a leopard-skin himself and women often wore bark-cloth gowns, but pale faces were something else. “Were they like the little men?

“No! Oh no!” said Delli.

The forest pygmies were often of a far lighter shade than the village-dwelling natives, inclining to pale bronze, but they had the same kind of features as the rest of Delli's world and Loa's world.

“They were big men. Tall men,” said Delli, “with thin noses; and their faces were -- grey.”

Loa shook his head in admission that this was more than he could understand.

“What did these men do?” he asked.

“They tied the people together. With poles. They tied one end of a pole to someone's neck, and the other end of the pole to someone else's neck.”

Loa had never heard of such a thing being done. The whole story was of something beyond his experience, beyond his scanty traditions.

“What did they do next?” he asked.

“They came to the banana groves to cut fruit. And in the old clearings there were many people hidden besides me, people who had run into the clearings when the town burned. They saw us, and they came after us. They had axes and swords, and I think they caught all the other people.”

That was quite probable; a man with a sword to cut a path for himself would easily overtake an unarmed fugitive trying to make his way through the tangled undergrowth of an overgrown clearing.

“And you?”

“I went right through the clearing. A man was chasing me but he did not catch me. I came into the forest and I ran from him and then he did not chase me any more. But still I ran, and when I stopped I did not know where I was.”

This was something everyone could understand; there was a murmur of agreement in the listening throng. To lose one's way in the forest was very easy indeed; to be fifty yards from the nearest known landmark was the same as being fifty miles from it if once the sense of direction was lost. Loa knew now the explanation of Delli's network of old scars. Plunging through an abandoned clearing to escape pursuit would tear her skin to ribbons. She must have been streaming with blood by the time she reached the forest. The newer scratches must have been acquired in the ordinary course of life in the forest, searching for food.

“Where was your town?” he asked.

Bewilderment showed itself in Delli's face again.

“Many days. Many days away. I do not know. I looked for it.”

There was a puzzled murmur from the crowd. It was hard enough for anyone there to realize even that other towns existed. But everyone in the crowd knew his town so intimately and well. Despite their knowledge of the ease with which one could lose oneself in the forest, it was impossible for them to sympathize with someone who simply could not say where her town was. They could not put themselves in her mental situation; a woman might as well say she did not know where her own body was. Delli's face did not lose its look of bewilderment; her expression was fixed and she was staring at something far away.

“I cannot stand,” she said faintly, and with that she abruptly sat down.

Still bewildered in appearance, puzzled by the strange new feelings within her, she swayed for a moment, and then her head came forward to her knees, and next she toppled over on one side and lay limp and unconscious. Musini came forward and knelt over her, and prodded the bony back and the skinny loins. She raised one of the skeleton arms and shook her head over it with distaste.

“Nothing there now,” she said, letting the limp arm drop to the ground. “She has long been hungry.”

“In a pen she will grow fat,” said Loa, looking round at Vira, who nodded. It was Vira who attended to the temporal business of Loa's rule, as Indeharu attended to the spiritual. Loa had to say nothing more about the pen; Vira would attend to that. Loa looked down at the skinny limbs; plenty of food, and some days of idleness in a pen, would fill them out again. Even a healthy well fed human was all the better for three or four days in a pen; idleness improved the quality of the meat. Moreover this stranger with the queer speech and the odd experiences might be a more welcome visitor to his father Nasa than some ordinary man or woman of the town -- Musini for instance -- as she would bring with her an element of novelty. She might amuse Nasa while she served him.