The Sky And The Forest (12 page)

“Enough, Mother!” squealed Lanu. He was standing with his arrow half drawn, looking sharply to left and to right beside the dying Arab. “We must not wait.”

“Come, Lord, come, you,” said Musini.

As Nessi still stood bewildered Musini reached out her hand and took Nessi's, and turned to run through the forest, with Loa lumbering after her. Some of the other slaves made a move to follow them, but Lanu checked them.

“Back!” he shouted in his high voice, threatening them with his arrow. “Back!”

He drew away from the surging knot of slaves and then turned and ran at top speed after the others; Loa running over the spongy unequal ground with the yoke pounding on his shoulders, looked down to find Lanu running beside him. Lanu extended a hand to him, as Musini had done to Nessi, as if to drag his big bulk along after him. Somebody -- either Nessi or Loa -- tripped and stumbled, and the pair of them fell crashing to the ground, the yokes and chains lacerating their necks, the breath driven from their bodies.

“Come on, come on,” shrieked Lanu, dancing beside them.

They scrambled to their feet and Musini seized the bewildered Nessi's hand again and dragged her forward. They heard a shout far behind them -- muffled as it reached their ears through the trees -- and knew that pursuit had commenced.

“Run, oh, run!” pleaded Musini.

And so they ran through the forest, through the twilight, between the great friendly trunks of the trees. They came to a little brook flowing between wide marshy banks; the mud was halfway up their thighs as they made their way through. It slowed them, but it did not stop them, and, once across, they resumed their heart-breaking pace and kept it up until Nessi began to wail, little short sounds which were all her breathless condition allowed. Her pace slackened until they were obliged to stop and allow her to fall gasping on the ground. Loa fell too, his breath coming heavily, and his legs aching. Musini was content to squat beside him, while Lanu was still sufficiently fresh to make his way back, bow and arrow in hand, to peer through the trees so as to be able to give warning in case of pursuit.

After a few seconds Loa was able to raise his head, and his eyes met those of Musini beside him.

“Is it well with you, Lord?” she asked. She used the honorific mode of address -- which she had not used in the days when Loa was god and king -- and her wrinkled face bore a fond smile. She put out a hand and caressed Loa's sweating shoulder.

“It is well with me,” said Loa.

To Loa's credit Musini's affection took him by surprise.

His fall from divinity had left him with little belief in himself. People had served him when he was a god presumably because that was what he was. Now that he was a naked worthless slave he was surprised and touched that anyone, even skinny wrinkled Musini, should serve him and love him for himself alone.

“My face is bright at seeing you again, Lord,” said Musini, and there was some literal truth in the trite metaphor, as a glance at her showed.

A faint cry from the end of the glade forestalled Loa's reply; Lanu was running back to them and his gestures warned them of pursuit.

“We must run,” said Musini, getting to her feet. “Rise up, you.”

The last words were addressed to the gasping Nessi, and when the latter made no further response than a groan Musini kicked her in the ribs with her tough bare foot.

“Stand up!” shrieked Musini, and took Nessi by the hair to drag her to her feet. The axe swung in Musini's other hand, and she shot a glance at Loa. “Shall I cut off her head? Then we would not have to take her with us, Lord.”

“No, she bears one end of the pole,” said Loa -- a perfectly sound argument, although it is just possible that Loa was actuated by other motives than immediate expediency.

Lanu had reached them by now.

“Come on!” he squeaked.

Nessi had risen to her feet, perhaps as a result of Musini's grim suggestion, and Lanu took one of her hands, and Musini the other, and they began to run again, with weary legs moving stiffly at first, running and running, with a weariness that grew until it seemed impossible even once again to put one foot in front of the other, and when they could not run they walked, with steps that grew slower and shorter as the day went on, as the twilight of the forest deepened with the coming of night.

“Now we can rest at last,” said Musini in the end, when it was growing too dark to see even the ground under their feet.

They stopped, and Nessi settled what Loa was going to do by dropping flat to the ground where she stood, so that Loa was dragged down too. With the coming of darkness, there was no chance of the Arabs continuing their pursuit. He was safe and he was free.

“Tomorrow, with the first light, we shall release you from this chain and yoke. Lord,” said Musini.

She put out her hands in the darkness and felt for Loa's chafed neck. The touch was marvellously soothing; Loa found himself stroking Musini's skinny arms.

“I am hungry,” said Nessi, suddenly. “Oh, I am very hungry. I wish I could eat.”

“Shut that howling mouth,” said Musini. She was utterly scandalized, as her tone showed, by the familiarity of Nessi's manner of address.

“But I am hungry,” protested Nessi.

“Hungry you are and hungry you will remain,” was all the sympathy Musini had to offer. “There is nothing to eat now. There have been many days when Lanu and I have eaten nothing.”

“There is nothing to eat?” asked Loa. With this turn of the conversation he was now sleepily conscious of the hunger that possessed him.

“For you, Lord, there is this,” said Musini.

She fumbled in the darkness, presumably in the little bag which hung from her neck between her breasts, and then she found Loa's hand and pressed something into it.

“What is this?” he asked.

“White ants, Lord, all we have. I gathered them this morning.”

White ants lived in little tunnels in dead trees, harmless creatures enough, quite unlike their ferocious red and black brothers. Their bodies were succulent, and could be eaten by hungry people; but these ants had been long dead, crushed into a paste by Musini's fingers and carried all day in her little bag. There was only a couple of mouthfuls of them anyway; Loa chewed the bitter unsatisfying stuff and swallowed it down with a fleeting regret for the double handful of tapioca which had been served out to him that morning.

“It is hard to gather food in the forest,” said Lanu.

“That is so,” agreed Musini. “Yet has Lanu been clever. He has been like a man. Lord. It was Lanu who made the bow and the arrows. Lanu is our worthy son.”

“It was I who killed the grey-faced man,” said Lanu. “Did you see him fall? My arrow was in his throat, where I had aimed it. It was I who made the poison. I used the creeper juice. I made it as I had seen Tiri the son of Minu make it.”

“It was well done, son,” said Loa. “And how was it you came to escape when first the Arabs came to the town?”

They told him between them, Musini and Lanu, of their adventures on the day of the raid and since then. They had fled into the clearing at the first alarm, together, for Lanu had been sleeping in his mother's house. Lanu had snatched up and borne with him his little ceremonial axe, his latest present from his father, and it had stood them in good stead. Without it they would have been nearly helpless in the forest, but with it they had the power that edged steel conveys. Lanu had shaped and trimmed the bow; Musini had braided the bowstring from the flexible creeper fibres. They had followed the slave caravan from camp to camp, living on what they could gather in the forest. With vigilance and precaution they had escaped the snares of the little people, although twice arrows aimed at them had narrowly missed one or other of them. Every day at some time or other they had seen Loa, far more often than he had seen them, and by continual watching they had made themselves familiar with the Arabs' methods, so that eventually they had planned the rescue and carried it out successfully.

“That was well done indeed, my son,” said Loa.

There were the strangest feelings inside him at that moment, the oddest misgivings. Lanu was a clever little boy, but it could not have been Lanu who was responsible for all this. Lanu could not have displayed the singleness of purpose, the resolution and the ingenuity which had resulted in his rescue. Lanu might have loved his father, but -- Loa's newfound humility asserted itself -- it was incredible that he would have gone through all that risk and labour to rescue him except at the instance of his mother. It must have been Musini who did the planning and who showed the resolution. It must have been Musini's devotion which had kept them to the task. An odd state of affairs indeed, when women should thus display initiative and determination; there was something unnatural and disturbing in the thought of it.

And it was disturbing in a different way to think of Musini's devotion. In the time of his divinity, Loa would have thought nothing of someone running risks to help him or even to contribute slightly to his comfort; but since that time Loa had been in contact with a new reality. It was not a god whom Musini had rescued -- Loa faced the fact squarely -- but a slave, a slave in bonds, a worthless chattel. It could not have been from religious conviction that Musini had exerted herself thus. It was Loa the man and not Loa the god whom she had rescued. There must be a personal tie. All this was terribly difficult to work out in Loa's untrained brain and with his limited vocabulary Loa, the man with forty wives, knew almost nothing of love until now. He was facing something nearly as new as what he faced when he first felt doubts about being a god. It called for a fresh orientation of himself. Thanks to his recent experiences, Loa found difficulty in swallowing the undoubted fact that Musini must love him for himself alone. He could not take it sublimely for granted. His exhausted brain grappled feebly with all these astonishing developments, with the new phenomenon of love, with the concept of women being capable of decisive action, and then it shrank back exhausted from the encounter.

“I am thirsty as well as hungry,” said Nessi.

She was voicing everyone's sentiments, but that did not help her.

“Did I not say shut that mouth?” snapped Musini. “Let us sleep, for we are weary.”

The blackest possible night was round them, the darkness of night in the forest, when the hand could not be seen before the face. Beneath them the leaf mould was soggy and damp; around them the stifling hot moist air was not stirred by the slightest breeze. Nessi had petulantly flung herself prone at Musini's rebuke, with a jerk at the pole which had forced Loa to change his position. He tried to settle himself again; Musini's arms found him and pillowed his head upon her shoulder regardless of the discomfort the yoke and chain brought her. They slept in a huddled group, bitten by insects, with the sweat running irritatingly over their naked skins until the chill of dawn crept through the trees, momentarily bringing a coolness that was pleasant until it broke through their sleep to set them shivering and huddling even closer together.

In the grey twilight it was Musini who proposed the first move of the day.

“Now let us take off this yoke from your neck, Lord,” she said. “Lanu, come and see what must be done.”

The yoke was of tough elastic wood; the few links of chain were stoutly attached by staples driven deep into the ends. Lanu tugged at them, as Loa had often done, and equally unavailingly.

“You must cut through the wood, son,” suggested Loa.

It was not so easy to do with an axe, although with a knife it would have been comparatively simple. Loa could be of no help; all he could do was to sit as still as he could on the ground while Lanu chipped away at the end of the yoke, with Musini holding it steady in desperate anxiety that expressed itself in fierce curses at Nessi at the other end of the yoke lest she should move. Lanu removed chip after chip; the edge of the axe found a crack in the end of the pole and enabled him to lever off a larger chip still. Eventually both limbs of one of the staples were exposed over most of their length.

“Try to pull that out now,” said Lanu, speaking as one man speaks to another.

Loa put one hand to the chain and one to the yoke, tugging with all the strength the awkward position allowed. The veins stood out on his forehead; he tugged and he tugged, and suddenly the staple flew out. Loa dropped chain and yoke, and stepped out, free of his bonds. It was a strange sensation. He could look at Nessi, still held at her end; he could look at her from different angles, and at different distances, and he could step hither and thither without any thought for her. The feel of his free neck and shoulders was almost unnatural. He danced in his sense of freedom and Lanu danced with him. A great wave of paternal affection surged up in Loa. Lanu was no little boy now; recent events had made a man of him, child though he was, but Loa loved him. Nessi was watching them, waiting her turn to be set free.

“Now we can go,” said Musini.

She must have forgotten the fact that Nessi was still fastened in her end of the pole; it was only a momentary incident, but it seemed as if Musini intended that she and Loa and Lanu should strike off now through the forest, leaving Nessi to trail the yoke after her until overtaken by inevitable death from starvation or at the hands of the little people. But Loa and Lanu had turned and addressed themselves to the task of freeing Nessi at the moment Musini spoke, so that the implications of the words passed unnoticed. They chipped away at the yoke until a long pull by Loa tore out the staple, and yoke and chain fell to the ground.

“It is gone!” said Nessi, breathing relief.

She knelt and embraced Loa's knees in thankfulness; it was an immediate change in her demeanour. Yesterday they were fellow slaves, sharing the utter equality of the yoke. Today the memories of Loa's divinity came flooding back, and Nessi grovelled before him as different as could be imagined from the peevish wench whom he had to placate in the slavers' camp.

“That is well,” said Musini grimly. She had picked up the little axe and was swinging it idly in her hand. “And now?”