The Sky And The Forest (5 page)

The economy of the town was built up round the iron axeheads made by Litti and his predecessors. They had enabled the forest to be cleared and crops of manioc and banana to be grown, thereby distinguishing Loa's people from the little men and women who wandered in the forest living on what they could catch, and on what they could steal from the cultivated plots. Probably in the first place the town had come to be situated where it was because of its proximity to the outcrop of iron ore. Yet iron was still a valuable and scarce commodity; an axehead represented several weeks of labour on the part of several men, so that the small axehead Loa was having made for Lanu was an extravagant gift; while the set of ornaments for which Loa was now negotiating was worth a wife -- was worth a pension for life, in other words. Litti's iron tools represented a prodigious capital investment. The few iron cooking pots in the town were precious heirlooms, and no one ever dreamed of using iron in arrowheads; sharpened points of hard wood were always used for those. In fact these dwellers among the trees naturally made use of wood for as many purposes as possible, and iron was mostly used for the cutting of wood.

Tali had now perfected the rhythm he had been striving for. There was a neat series of beats, and then a hesitation, like a man stumbling, a recovery, and then another stumble. A man could hardly keep from laughing when he heard that rhythm. It was a good joke, something really funny, catching and captivating. The dancers were grinning with pleasure and excitement. They had formed round Tali in a semicircle, and the dance to suit that rhythm rapidly evolved itself. They closed slowly in on him with mock tenseness and dignity. Then a sudden sideways shuffle, half in one direction and half in the other. A quick interchange of places, a backward swirl, and they were ready in the nick of time to begin the cycle again. It was an exciting and stimulating dance, amusing and yet at the same time intensely gratifying artistically. People came swarming from all points to join in, and the semicircle grew wider and wider. Soli, mother's brother's son of the dying Uledi, leaped into the centre.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey hey hey!”

He was up on his toes, posturing picturesquely. He reeled to one side, he reeled to the other side, while behind him the crowd neatly shifted in time with him, interchanging in a geometrical pattern vastly gratifying. Tali thumped and thundered on his drum. His eyes were staring into vacancy over the heads of the dancers. He touched the side of the drum with his elbow to mute it, and its tone changed from loud mirth to subtle mockery,

“Hey!” shouted the crowd.

Tali introduced a new inflection into the rhythm. He made no break in it; perhaps not even a metronome could have measured the subtle variation of time. But now the drumbeat told of high tragedy, of vivid drama. Soli in the centre caught the change of mood, and found words for it.

“The tall tree totters!” he intoned. “Run, men, run!”

The drum thundered, the dancers interchanged.

“Run, men, run!” roared the crowd, catching the final beats.

“It hangs upon the creepers,” sang Soli in his nasal monotone. “Down it falls!”

Beat -- beat -- shuffle -- shuffle.

“Down it falls!” roared the crowd.

Tali remembered the shrieking monkey which a few months back had been brought down entangled in the vines when a tree had been felled. He muted the drum again, and Soli followed his line of thought.

“Silly little monkey!” wailed Soli. “How he cries!”

The drum fell almost silent, so that the united tread of bare feet could be plainly heard in the dust.

“How he cries!” mocked the crowd.

Now the drum changed to a savage mood.

“Watch him as he struggles!” sang Soli.

He allowed a whole cycle of the rhythm to go by to allow the tension to build up. The drum roared savagely.

“Watch him as he struggles,” sang Soli. “Cut his throat!”

Beat -- beat -- shuffle -- shuffle.

“Cut his throat!” shrieked the crowd.

Practically everybody in the town had come to join in the dancing now. On one wing Indeharu's grey head was conspicuous, bobbing about as he capered on his skinny legs amid a group of excited girls. Loa stood alone behind Tali; he might perhaps have capered with the crowd, for his divinity was such that he need never fear for his dignity, but the habits of a lifetime kept him by himself. Alone behind Tali he leaped and bounded to the intoxicating rhythm. Strange feelings were stirred up within him by it. Inwardly he was seething; he was bursting with inexpressible emotions. He sprang into the air and shook his battle-axe at the sky above the forest, the distant, unfriendly sky, usually so contemptuous. He felt no awe for the sky now. He waved his battle-axe and by his actions he challenged the sky to come down and fight it out with him, and he exulted when the sky shrank away from him in fear.

Still the drum beat on with its maddening rhythm. Soli or some other had introduced a variation into the dancing; after the crossing over step everybody whirled twice round now in wild abandon. The pace had increased slightly, too; the mocking beat of the drum had perceptibly accelerated. Tali was working on his drum as though possessed of a devil, and the people were leaping and whirling and shouting in time to it. Carried away by the wave of excitement Loa came bounding into the semicircle. Every leap took him a yard into the air; he swung the heavy battle-axe round his head in a wide circle. Soli met him in front of the crowd, and pranced to join him. The axe came whistling through the air, and Soli saw it just in time. If he had not, he would have gone to serve Loa’s ancestors at that very moment. But Soli had the quickness of thought that made him such a good extempore singer, and the deftness of balance that made him a good dancer. He ducked under the sweep of the glittering edge. The unexpended force of the blow carried Loa right round, and Soli took advantage of that to bolt into the crowd and make himself inconspicuous there,

Loa made no attempt to pursue him; indeed, he was hardly conscious that he had struck at anyone and he could not have named the man who had had such a narrow escape. The blow was the merest gesture. There would have been gratification in the feeling of the axe cleaving flesh and bone, but there was no sense of disappointment in its absence. Loa forgot the incident immediately. He swung his axe, rejoicing in the whistle it made as it parted the air. He whirled faster and faster, carried round by the weight of the blade. Tali at the drum worked up to a climax, writhing in ecstasy as he pounded out the accelerating rhythm. Faster and faster; no living creature could stand that pace for long. Indeharu over at one side fell almost fainting to the ground, and the girls among whom he was dancing stopped, gasping. As one tree brings down another, or as fire spreads from trunk to trunk, so the halt spread through the crowd. Men and women fell, sobbing for breath, and yet laughing with pleasure. Tali gave a final thump to his drum and allowed himself to fall limp on top of it, as exhausted as the others. The cessation of the music found Loa alone on his feet; the sudden ending of it all struck him rigid, so that for a moment he stood like an ebony statue, the axe held above his head. Then his knees sagged and he sank to the ground as well.

It had been a good dance, deriving additional zest from the fact that it had been entirely spontaneous, without any planning at all. Whatever might be Tali's failings as a worker in iron, he certainly made up for them by his merits as a drummer. He deserved a wife, even though that meant withdrawing the labours of a young woman from the communal activities of the town for Tali's personal benefit. Loa felt full of gratitude towards Tali. He might even in a prodigal gesture have given him a wife for nothing, but he remembered how much he wanted those iron ornaments for Lanu. Tali would have to wait until Lanu's little axe was finished and the iron ornaments well on the way towards completion. It was highly convenient that Litti was willing to put in so much labour to buy a wife for his son.

Over at the place where iron was made, the charcoal fires had burned down to a mere heap of white ashes. Lying within the heap presumably was the lump of iron that Litti would fashion into an axehead for Lanu. The dance had delayed its completion -- even old Litti and the children at the bellows must have been drawn into the dance -- but that was the way things happened. When Loa walked back to his house he saw Delli lying in her pen, deep in conversation with Nari, the old woman who had been left to guard her. They were the only human beings left at this end of the town when the dance had been in progress. They had fallen into talk, the way women will, despite the difficulties of the strange jargon Delli spoke; despite the fact that Delli had not long to live.

Loa squatted in his house close to the open door. It was a dark night, and the darkness inside the house was hardly relieved at all by the glow of the fire which his women had, at his command, lighted outside the door. Uledi was dead of the sleeping sickness, and Loa had to determine who it was had ended her life. For this purpose darkness was necessary, darkness and flickering firelight. Loa had taken the bones -- the half-dozen slender ribs -- from their usual resting place at the base of the grotesquely carved wooden figure that stood against the far wall. He had set a rough hewn table, of dark wood and with short legs, in front of him so that the firelight flickered over it, and he had laid the bones upon it. All round him there was a hushed silence, for the women knew what he was doing. They were frightened as well as awed. In one of the huts close by, a child began to cry in the night, but the wailing was instantly stilled as the child's mother caught her infant to her breast.

Loa looked up at the dark sky, and at the same time laid the bones in a bundle across his palm. Without looking down, he put the ends of the bones on the table and withdrew his hand so that they fell with a clatter on the wood -- some woman within earshot, crouching in her house, heard that clatter and moaned softly with fear and apprehension. Still without looking down Loa put his forefinger among the bones and stirred them gently, just a little. Then at last he looked down at the pattern the bones had made. In the flickering firelight the bones were faintly visible against the dark wood. The pattern told him nothing at first, not even when he rested his forearms on his knees and his brow on his hands and peered down at them for a long time. Loa remembered Vira's hint that Soli was Uledi's mother's brother's son. Uledi had owned a knob of pure iron which hung on a string round her neck. She was the principal shareholder in an iron cooking pot with tripod legs -- a miracle of workmanship and convenience. Such things might well tempt her principal heir, and yet there was no hint of Soli's features in the pattern the bones had assumed. It reminded him more of the gable end of Huva's house, and yet there was no conviction about the likeness. He pressed his brow against his hands unavailingly; the bones lay uncommunicative, nor could he feel any stirrings of his spirit.

Having sat for so long he raised his eyes again to the dark sky, as black as the black treetops that ringed the town so closely. He gathered the bones up into his hand again, laid them on the table with his palm flat upon them, and then spread them by a twist of his hand. He stirred them again with his finger and then slowly transferred his gaze to them. The fire was glowing red, and the white bones reflected the colour. Then one of the logs in the fire fell down, and a little flame sprang up, dancing among the embers. Now the bones began to move, shifting on the table, and Loa felt his knowledge and his power surging up within him. That was a serpent undulating in the shadow, a little venomous snake with red eyes. And these were the rocks at the river's edge, and there was the broad river. The lowering sun was reflected in red from its whole surface. There! Someone had thrown an immense stone into the river, breaking the reflection into a thousand concentric rings. First they spread, and then they contracted and were swallowed up in a dark spot in the middle. The dark spot opened. Was that a flower expanding in the centre of it? A flower? A flower, perhaps, but that was Uledi herself within the opening petals -- Uledi in her convulsions with the foam on her lips. She turned over on her side and reached out frantically to the full extent of her right arm. She was reaching for -- what was that? What was that which evaded her grasp? Something which scuttled for concealment among the shadows over there. Was it Soli, running as he had run for the protection of the crowd before Loa's axe? Loa groaned with the anguished effort of trying to see. Somebody looked back at him over his shoulder for a moment from the shadows; white teeth and white eyeballs. That flashing grin was like Lanu's. It could not be Lanu, not his little son. No, it was a devil's face, now that it showed more clearly, a devil's face, frantic with malignant rage. The most frightful passions played over it, the way waves of combustion played over the glowing charcoal of Litti's furnace fire. The bared teeth champed, the eyeballs filled with blood. It was utterly terrifying. Loa swayed as he squatted. The flame died abruptly in the fire, and as darkness leaped at him he was momentarily conscious of the cold chill of the sweat in which he was bathed. Then his head sank onto the table.

It was several minutes before he roused himself, cramped and almost shivering. There was a foul taste in his mouth, and his legs were weak as he stood up. The bones, when he gathered them together, were cold and lifeless to his touch. And yet he had only to close his eyes to see again that frightful face. Somebody inhuman, of supreme malignancy, had poisoned Uledi. Loa's simple theology recognized the possibility of the existence of devils, but there was no profound lore about them. The major catastrophes of nature passed his world by; his people never knew famine, or droughts, or frost, or earthquake. There was no need in consequence to postulate the existence of evil forces in the world, working against the happiness of mankind. The little people in the forest, with their poisoned arrows and their pitfalls, were human enough; no man could attribute supernatural qualities to men and women whom he not infrequently killed and ate. And disease -- sleeping sickness, malaria, typhoid, smallpox and all the other plagues that kept the population constant and stagnant -- was simply not recognized as such. Loa knew of no dread Four Horsemen, and his complex language with its limited vocabulary effectively restrained him from ever venturing into theological speculations. Besides, he knew himself to be god; it was not a question of belief or conviction, but one of simple knowledge. He called his wayward sister the moon out of the river every month, and she came. The sky and the forest and the river were his brothers. Nasa his father had been a god before him, and still was a god, leading somewhere else the same life he had led here, attended by his wives, regulating when necessary the simple affairs of his people, and possibly -- no one could be quite sure -- eating meat rather more often than he had down here.