The Sky And The Forest (6 page)

But there were devils in the world, as Loa vaguely knew. He had heard a story of some, a family of three devils, like men but covered with hair like monkeys, who had once come to the town, before even the time of his father Nasa, and who had torn men and women into fragments before succumbing to the rain of poisoned arrows directed at them. It was a devil something like this, judging by what he had seen among the bones, who had been responsible for the poisoning of Uledi. The little that Loa knew about devils chiefly concerned their aimless ferocity, so there was nothing surprising in the fact that one of them should have poisoned Uledi, who had never done him any harm or even set eyes on him as far as Loa knew. The matter was satisfactorily settled, then, and Loa could announce on the morrow how Uledi had come to die. If he had seen anything else among the bones -- if the gable end of Huva's house had stood out more clearly and for a longer time, if he had seen Soli's face, or if the bones had arranged themselves in the pattern of somebody's scar-tattooing, it would have been different. There would have been a human miscreant to denounce. The circumstances of the moment would dictate the procedure to follow after that; if the accused were not well liked, or if his (or her) motive were at all obvious, he would be instantly speared or strangled or clubbed or beheaded, but if he protested with sufficient vehemence or eloquence he might be given a further chance. There were beans that grew in the forest; Indeharu knew about them. They would be steeped in water, and the accused would have to drink the water. Usually he suffered pains and sickness, and frequently he died. If he lived, it was a proof that he had not really intended to kill his victim, but on the contrary had done it by accident or without the intention of actually causing death. The ordeal would be considered a sufficient lesson to him and the case could be dismissed with a caution.

Loa's strength was coming back to him. His legs could carry him easily now. He walked into the darkness of his house, finding his way with the ease of a lifetime's experience, and set the bones back in their proper place beside the wooden figure which symbolized something a little vague in Loa's existence. The half-dozen skulls nailed to the wall -- relics of bygone days and of distinguished individuals -- showed up faintly white, just sufficiently to permit him to see where he stood. The elephants' tusks, treasured mementoes of the few occasions when elephants had fallen into the town's pitfalls, stood in the farther corner, beyond the bed. A whole precious leopard skin had been consumed to provide the leather strips that crisscrossed the bed's framework, and another skin lay on it. No other bed like it existed in the town; it raised the occupant above the earth and the myriad insect plagues to be found there, it was cool and springy and comfortable. That was the whole furniture of the house except for the few other symbols that hung on the walls -- even Loa was not quite sure what most of them implied. The dried snakeskins, the bunch of feathers, had something to do with his royal divinity. Because of that, he thought little about them, although they struck terror into mere humans.

Loa came back to the doorway of his house.

“Musini!” he called. “Bring the girl to me.”

He had a new wife whom he had only acquired that day: Pinga, daughter of Gumi. Loa heard a low wail of terror, cut short by Musini's urgent whispering. Musini as an old woman of twenty-five had small patience for the whims of a girl of fourteen.

“I bring her, Loa,” said Musini, loudly.

Two dark figures appeared in the faint glow of the dying fire; Loa could just distinguish the girl's slight form as Musini pushed her forward with her hand on her shoulder. The girl hung back and wailed again.

“Go on, you little fool,” said Musini brusquely, giving her a final shove.

Pinga's timid steps brought her within Loa's reach as he stood in the shadow of the doorway. He reached out and took her wrist, but at his touch she cried out and tried to pull away from him.

“Idiot!” said Musini's disgusted voice from outside by the fire, but after her first startled movement Pinga stood still except for the tremblings that shook her. Loa, his hand still grasping her wrist, could feel her quivering. He displayed remarkable patience.

“Why not come to me?” he asked.

“I am frightened.”

“You are frightened of me?”

“Of you. Lord, of course. But it is not that. I am frightened of this house -- of this house.”

The terrors of the god's house presented themselves to her more violently as she thought of them, and she began to drag back from his grasp again.

“Do not be frightened,” said Loa. ''There is nothing here to hurt you.”

“And it is what you have been doing. Lord. What you have been doing this short time past.”

Loa was at a loss for a moment. It was very hard for him to realize the effect of the abject terror which lay over the town when it was known that he was at work identifying a criminal; it was something he was aware of theoretically, but he had never known terror himself and was no judge in consequence of what it did to other people. And his house, the house with the skulls, and snakeskins, and the bunch of feathers, and the carved idol, was his home as he had always known it. He could have small sympathy for those of his people who would, literally, rather die than cross its awful threshold.

“That should not frighten you,” he said.

“But it does. Lord. My belly tells me I am afraid. You have been here with the dead. You have been finding out about things, and -- and -- I do not want to go in there.”

That thoroughly nettled Loa.

“You are a little fool, as Musini said,” he declared, testily.

It irritated him that someone should display such marked antipathy because he had been divining -- divination was one of his natural functions. The girl might as well be frightened because he breathed, or because he had two eyes. It made a personal matter of it, and changed his lack of sympathy to more active annoyance; the girl sensed all this, and her teeth chattered with fear. Paralyzed, she ceased to pull away from him, and stood unresisting.

“Enough has been said,” said Loa, with decision.

He dragged her roughly over the threshold, into the greater darkness within. Her active terror renewed itself there, as she thought of the idol and the bunch of feathers close beside her, and she screamed. Loa had his hands upon her now, and the touch of her flesh was rousing in him instincts which overmastered any remaining reasonableness surviving his previous irritation.

Musini wished to extinguish the fire. It had not rained all day, and in that wooden village there was danger in leaving a fire unattended during the night. She had assembled some of the other women, and they had filled wooden pitchers with water and brought them to the fire. Pitcher after pitcher was emptied upon the embers, at first with sharp hissing and sputtering, and in the darkness the heavy steam which arose brought its wet smell to their nostrils. By the time Musini's turn came and she emptied her pitcher the embers were sufficiently quenched for there to be almost no reaction, and there was hardly a sound save the splash of the water on the dead fire. And inside the house the screams had ceased.

Musini looked at the dark mass of the house, almost invisible in the darkness, before she took her way back to her own house. It was not the first time by any means, and by no means would it be the last, that she had brought a young new wife over to Loa's house, most of them trembling and frightened. It was beyond her capacity to wish that she did not have to do this; the conception of human love was something she knew almost nothing about, and the idea of a personal love for Loa the god never occurred to her. She may have noticed that these events upset her and disturbed her, made her sharp-tongued and self-assertive, but even if she did she did not make all the possible deductions from the fact. It was so long since she had become the mother of Lanu her son; men had many wives when they could afford to buy them, and Loa of right had all he desired. She did not know that she wished he did not desire them.

Delli's fantastic story of the strange people with magic weapons and unnecessary clothing, who had raided her town and carried off the inhabitants, was on its way to being forgotten, like Delli. Had the life of the town proceeded undisturbed for another thousand years, as it had done for the last thousand years, some small fragments of the tale might have survived, imbedded in the lore of the town like fossils in a sedimentary stratum, in the same way as there lingered the memory of the family of gorillas which had wandered into the town thirty years back and which had been slain after a bloody battle. There were still occasional allusions to Delli's story in the gossip of the town; it was still a comparatively fresh joke to shout out “Bang bang!” in imitation of her. But nobody thought of making any deductions from her story; still less did it rouse any feeling of apprehension. The only raiders the town knew about from its own experience, the only enemies that existed, were the little people of the forest. They were a pestilential nuisance in the persistence with which they stole plantains and manioc, and the poisoned skewers and pitfalls with which they beset the forest paths made excursions into the forest dangerous, but all that was part of experience and tradition. Nobody else had ever raided the town, and nobody ever would. Such a thing might well happen to outlandish people with outlandish speech like Delli's, but it could not happen to the town, which was really the world -- anything outside it was unreal and of quite doubtful existence.

So that at nights the town lay quiet and unapprehensive. No one dreamed of setting a guard; no one ever lay down to sleep with any doubts as to the morrow. Certainly Loa did not. He was secure not merely in the unchanging present, but also in his knowledge of his own divinity. His lack of imagination about guns and slave raiders might well be excused. He did not know -- he could not know -- of their existence. He was even unaware that there were parts of the world where the trees did not grow so densely as to cut off the light from the surface of the earth. Two warnings like Delli's, the arrival of another refugee, and he might have come to believe in the necessity for taking precautions, even at the vast sacrifice of some of his belief in his divine nature. But a single, isolated instance was not, and could not be, enough to make him realize the danger approaching the town -- all this aside from the fact that he and his inexperienced people could probably never have displayed enough imagination to devise efficient military precautions.

In the Central African forest there often comes a chilly hour before dawn, when the temperature drops to that of a hot summer's day in England. The insect pests grow somnolent, evaporation is easier, and a man who has lain naked through the night, and who has spent almost all his life in an atmosphere like that of a Turkish bath, may reach gratefully for a cover and pull it over him, only half awake, and then fall into an hour of the most restful sleep granted him. Loa had done exactly that, and he was more deeply asleep than he had been during the whole night, when the slave raiders launched their attack. They came from the far end of the town, across the marshy stream beside Litti's ironworks, where there were no overgrown clearings to impede their advance, and they were halfway up the street before the alarm was given.

Loa heard the first screams and cries in his sleep, and muttered a protest against them, turning over angrily, but the musket shots woke him fully. He sat up on his bed listening to the turmoil down the street. Another musket shot echoed in the darkness, and there was no mistaking it. Loa remembered Delli's “bang bang,” and a torrent of recollections poured into his brain. The grey-faced men with clothes on, the killings and the fighting . . . His ceremonial battle-axe lay as always beside the bed, and he seized it and sprang to his feet; the girl who had shared his bed was whimpering with fear in the darkness. He paid her no attention, but rushed madly out of the house and down the street.

Even outside it was still dark. Loa saw an orange spurt of flame and heard the report of a musket halfway down the street whence the screams were coming. He had no fear, not even of the guns; his rage at this intrusion carried him in furious haste down the street. Women and children were running past him in the opposite direction, most of them screaming; one of them cannoned into his legs and almost brought him down, but he managed to keep his feet and hurried on. The last house in the street was on fire, and by the light thrown by the flames he could see a group of men gathered round the doorway of another house. People were running out of the door, and as they emerged they were struck down. Loa came yelling up to the group before they were aware of their danger. He swung his axe with all the strength of both arms; the edge of the blade came down on a man's shoulder and clove deep into his body, smashing him to the ground. With another yell Loa whirled the axe again. Someone raised his arm in a futile attempt to guard himself; the axe cut through the forearm as though it had not been there and then shattered the skull. But even while he was dealing the blow someone hit him with a club. It was like an explosion inside his head. He staggered, stupefied but not quite unconscious. Before him there was a white-clothed figure at which he struck, but the man guarded himself with his gun barrel and the axe blade glanced off. Somebody struck him a frightful blow with a club on his left side; the breath came out of his body in a groan, and the pain was atrocious. He reeled, and his arms had no strength to raise his axe again. There was another blow on his head. Orange flames and white clothing wheeled in circles round him and his knees could not sustain him. He fell on all fours and yet still strove to rise, but he could not. Strive as he would, he could not even stay on hands and knees, but collapsed limply face downward, with only a trace of consciousness left him. There was stamping and screaming all round him, as he vaguely knew, but the dreadful pain he was suffering occupied most of his attention, while before his closed eyes circled tangled shapes and colours which effectually prevented him from thinking.