The Sky And The Forest (7 page)

Loa was a brave man, though his courage was indistinguishable from stupidity. As soon as he could he roused himself from his lassitude. His head reeled as he sat up, and the pain in it made him sick -- pain was something he hardly knew, and this great pain was a total novelty to him, but yet he strove to ignore it, for he had to go on fighting for his people. The fighting round him had ceased, and the noise of the struggle now centered higher up the street towards his own house. There was a grey faint light of dawn now, by which he could see the two dead bodies that lay beside him. The upturned face of one of them -- the man he had almost cloven in half when he struck him on the shoulder -- was far blacker than Loa's own chocolate complexion, and the tattooing on cheeks and forehead unlike anything Loa had ever seen before. The gaping mouth seemed to grin, and already there were flies gathering round it. All this Loa seemed to see without seeing. What he took note of was his axe lying there; he had to feel towards it before he could grasp it, for it was hard to focus his eyes. There was a knob-headed club, too, and for some reason he took that in his other hand. He got unsteadily on his legs, stepping clumsily over the other dead man, and went staggering up the street to do further battle for his people, axe in one hand, club in the other.

The raid had already achieved its main objectives. The men who had shown fight had been killed. A good many women and children, and a few men, had been secured as prisoners already, and were being driven in groups down to the far end of the street where they could be conveniently herded together. There were men and women and children hiding in the overgrown clearings round the town, and they could be dealt with next, those of them who could easily be caught.

Here came Pinga and half a dozen half-grown children, driven along by a couple of the black men, whose spears bore long broad heads of iron, and who carried in their left hands oval shields of hide. The guards raised a shout when they saw Loa reeling towards them, coated with blood and dust, and they came to meet him, while Pinga and the children fell into a wailing helpless group. Loa plunged forward on uncertain legs, but his enemies noted his massive frame and the bloody axe in his hand and came cautiously to the encounter, separating so as to attack him front and rear, and holding their shields before them, their spears poised either to thrust or to throw. For some seconds they circled. Loa sprang forward and struck, but the man he struck at evaded his blow, and Loa only just wheeled round in time, swinging his axe, to ward off the attack of the other. It could not have lasted much longer; a few more seconds and one or other of those spears would have been through him.

But down the street came a white-clothed leader, one of the “grey-faced” Arab half-castes, with at his heels a dozen Negro fighting men. The Arab took in the situation at a glance. He took note of Loa's sturdy bulk, and shouted to the spearmen not to kill him, while a sharp order to his own escort sent them to take him alive. Loa was ringed now by enemies, and he stood there, desperate, but with no thought of yielding entering his mind. The Arab saw his ferocious determination, the scowling brow, the lips crinkling back in a snarl to show the white teeth, and he put his hand to the pistol in his sash. But a noose of rope, dexterously thrown from behind, dropped over Loa's head and pinioned his arms. His frantic strength tore the rope from his captor's hands, but before he could free himself it had been seized again by others. They swung him round; he dropped axe and club, and someone reaching out caught him by the foot and brought him down with a crash. They threw themselves upon him, and they were experienced in securing refractory prisoners. Someone roped one of his wrists. He actually got to his feet, heaving off the half-dozen men who clung to him, but they brought him down again, flung their weight upon him, secured his other wrist, and bound the two together behind his back. Then they got to their feet, and looked down at him still lying in the dust, his wrists tied behind his back and the first rope with which he had been noosed still coiled round him. Loa glared up at them from where he lay. He saw the Arab looking down at him, the white clothes and the gay sash, the lean dark face with the coarse cruel lips -- a face unlike any he had ever seen before.

“Get up,” said the Arab.

Despite his queer accent the words were intelligible to Loa, but nobody had ever given Loa orders in his life, and he still had no intention of yielding.

“Get up,” said the Arab again.

Loa may have been too dazed, both by the turn of events and by his recent struggles, to obey or to reply. Yet even if he had not been he probably would have acted in the same way, with a stubborn obstinacy.

The Arab took from his sash a small whip. It was made from a single strip of hippopotamus hide, tapering from a convenient thickness for the hand at one end to the fineness of a knitting needle at the other. Flexible, hard, and imperishable, it was ideal for its purpose; a perfect example of mankind's ingenious inhumanity, in that so comparatively rare a material as hippopotamus hide should have been found by experiment to make the best whip for the whipping of men, and women. It was the dreaded kurbash; wherever the Arab culture penetrated in Africa it carried the kurbash with it -- fire and sword and the kurbash enforced Arab dominance over the more primitive races.

The Arab swung the kurbash slowly in his hand.

“Get up,” he said for the third time, and still Loa disobeyed.

The Arab struck suddenly and sharply, and Loa started with the pain. It was like sudden fire in his shoulder -- an instant acute agony and a lingering intense smarting.

“Get up,” said the Arab; now he made the thong of the kurbash whistle menacingly in the air.

He knew how to handle these dull-witted pagans who were even ignorant of the virtues of the hippopotamus hide until they were demonstrated. Now he struck again three times; it was like being touched three times with a hot iron, and Loa, in his sitting position with his hands bound behind him, fell over on his side as he started at the pain of it.

“Get up,” said the Arab, with another swinging cut delivered with the full force of his arm, and Loa, without knowing what he was doing, scrambled to his feet; the Arab slashed him again so that the startling pain made Loa leap clear off the ground.

“Next time do as I say,” said the Arab.

Bewildered, Loa tried to run, but one of the black spearmen caught the trailing rope that encircled his chest and arms and halted him, and the Arab, following him with three quick steps, struck him again and again, each time the pain being so unexpectedly great that Loa jumped into the air.

“Now go along,” said the Arab.

Loa stared about him with frantic disbelief. Pinga and the children were huddled together in a terrified group, terrified not merely at what was happening to them but even more at the sight of Loa treated in this way; that was the clearest proof of the end of their world. The faces of the black spearmen wore expressions of dull disinterest; they had so often seen unruly captives reduced to obedience with the kurbash; those who had caught his rope had done so as indifferently as if Loa had been a refractory billy goat. There was no aid in all the world, in all the world which an hour ago had been indisputably his own, in its entirety, where every object, living and dead, had been dedicated to his service. Now he was utterly alone in it, brought down from superhuman to subhuman in a moment of time. There was agony of mind and spirit in the realization, as far as realization went in that unhappy hour.

The spearmen were herding Pinga and the children down the street.

“Go along,” said the man who held Loa’s rope, and when Loa did not start immediately he reached forward with his spear to prick him with the point.

The gesture sufficed; Loa had learned the lesson of pain, and he started to walk before his captor down the street. At the far end everyone who had been caught was herded together, many men and very many women and children, naked black spearmen standing guard over them under the orders of a few white-clothed Arabs. At the sight of Loa there arose a thin wailing from the crowd, to see their god and king driven along at the end of a rope. Some of the people even fell down, instinctively, in the attitude of prostration as he approached. The Arab guards laughed at the spectacle, and one of them idly swung his whip with a crack upon the salient curves of a prostrate fat old woman so that she sprang up again with a startled cry, fingering herself in bewilderment. Loa looked round at the misery about him, and sorrow overcame him. Sorrow not merely at his own plight, at his own frightful deposition from divinity, but sorrow too at the plight of his people. Tears ran down his cheeks, and he stood there sobbing, his hands bound behind him so that he could not cover his face.

Many of the raiders were at work beating the overgrown clearings for fugitives; once or twice the loud bang of a musket shot could be heard, as the pursuers brought down a group of pursued for a warning to the rest to stop. Every now and then small groups of captives were brought in and added to the herd.

On the edge of the herd was one of the little people of the forest, with a rope round him, the end of it held by a spearman. It must have been he who had guided the raiders, for the wandering forest pygmies knew the paths and derived much of their food from the plantations of the townspeople. He was a bright-eyed little manikin, naked like all his people, watching with rapt curiosity the destruction of the vast town and the gathering together of this enormous mass of people. Seven hundred people, men, women, and children, had lived in Loa's town. A hundred had been killed, three hundred captured. Of those three hundred perhaps thirty would eventually survive the march across Africa for sale in the slave markets of the Nile valley, of Abyssinia, and of Arabia across the Red Sea.

Two Arabs came along herding a dozen young men of the town, who were bearing on their shoulders the ivory tusks that had been stored in Loa’s house. They were a prized collection, of no intrinsic value at all -- no one in the town had ever thought of carving ivory -- but beyond price for sentimental reasons. Every pair was a memento of a notable occasion when an elephant had been taken in a pitfall, when the whole town had gone on a twenty-four hour orgy of meat eating, whose memory, and that of the feeling of triumph, gave pleasure for years afterwards. Every forest village -- although Loa did not know it -- had similar accumulations of ivory going back for centuries, and it was the existence of these hoards, as much as the chance of capturing slaves, which had lured the Arabs across Africa from Zanzibar and the Nile. But the sight of his lost collection moved Loa almost as much as the plight of his people; the tears ran down his cheeks and dropped upon his dusty chest.

Here came a spearman, limping awkwardly. A barbed arrow was stuck in the calf of his leg, and he was holding the end of it in his hand so that it would not trip him as he walked. He lay stoically still while one of the Arabs freed the barbs from the flesh with a knife and then cut deeply all round the small wound so that the blood ran in streams -- these raiders had had long acquaintance with the forest arrows. Loa looked down at the arrow as it lay on the ground. It was one of Soli's, he could see. So Soli had been alive and free at least until lately, and had taken some sort of revenge upon the raiders. The last batch of arrow poison had been of good strength, and probably had not yet grown too old. Definitely not; the wounded man as he sat there was looking round him in a bewildered fashion. He was babbling foolishly, pointing at nothing. Now his eyelids were drooping, and now he was laying himself down to sleep. Loa watched his death with savage enjoyment.

The nearest house suddenly caught fire and was rapidly consumed by the flames that ran up the dry wood; presumably some ember had been smouldering beside it for some time -- two other houses had burned earlier in the day, scattering burning brands. The fire spread to the next house, Huva's; the flames roared in the thatch of dry leaves, and the heat was noticeable even where they were.

Now there was a bustle and a stir among the raiders. Another party was arriving. First came a white-robed Arab with a dozen spearmen. And then emerged the head of a short column, and at the sight of the first people in it Loa caught his breath with horror. They were naked men, men like his own people, and they were linked together in pairs by long sticks whose forked ends were clasped about their necks. Loa remembered what Delli had said about those forked sticks. Each man bore a burden upon his head, and at a command from an Arab they all halted and dropped their bundles on the ground. Two of the bundles jangled loudly as they fell, and when they were opened they contained short lengths of iron chain; the first chains that Loa had ever seen, and he could not imagine their purpose. He-learned immediately. i

Others of the slaves carried between them bundles of forked sticks similar to those about their own necks. A man of authority among the spearmen -- he wore a bristling headdress and his face and body were scarred with fantastic tattooing -- picked up one of the sticks. They were five feet long and forked at both ends. He pointed to the two nearest young women.

“Come here,” he said.

He put a fork on the shoulders of one of them, and another man took a hammer and staples and one of the lengths of chain, and stapled the latter to the forked ends about the girl's neck, tightly so that she could just breathe with comfort. He clapped the other fork on the other girl's shoulders and stapled a chain to that, too. So the two girls were fastened to each other rigidly five feet apart, unable to touch each other, and yet free to move as long as they moved in unison. They could never run away through the forest bound together like that, and yet each was perfectly free to carry a bundle on her head, and any unwieldy package could be slung from the stick between them. Then he tore off the bark-cloth kilts from the girls so that they were naked, and then he turned to another pair.

“Come here,” he said.

He worked with the rapidity of long practice, fastening the captives in pairs, indifferent to their sexes, and stripping them all naked. He came to Indeharu, took one glance at his white hair, and rejected him, making him stand aside, to be joined by other old men and women in a separate group. Loa, when his turn came, found himself bound to Nessi, Ura's wife. Nessi was weeping bitterly, hugging her baby to her breast; they struck her to make her raise her head. When they had chained Loa into the fork they freed him from the ropes which bound him; he was helpless now to make any move without dragging Nessi with him, and the chain was close about his throat, threatening to strangle him if he made any move uncoordinated with hers.