The Sky And The Forest (13 page)

They all four looked at each other.

“And now?” said Musini again.

Four human beings -- setting aside for the moment Loa's fictitious divinity -- in the immensity of the twilit forest; naked, their sole possessions the little axe and the bow which it had helped to shape. Their world of security with its solid past of tradition and seemingly changeless future had been destroyed, and this was the moment of their rebirth into a new world, as if they were babies without parents. Rain in thick heavy drops was falling about them from the dense screen of foliage overhead, monotonous and depressing. They were community dwellers, accustomed all their lives to living in the bustle of a town surrounded by their fellows; bred, moreover, for a hundred generations as community dwellers. The little people wandered in the forest migrating eternally in little groups each no larger than a family, but Loa and the others were not little people. In each person's mind, even in little Lanu's, there was the longing for a permanent settlement, for houses, and plantain groves. Their minds went back miserably to the past and returned empty and longing. All waited for someone else to speak, but Lanu and Musini and Nessi turned their eyes upon Loa. It was not inspiration that came upon him. He was voicing his own sentiments and those of everyone else when he spoke, the words torn from him by his inward yearnings.

“Let us go home,” he said.

“Home!” echoed Nessi in a fervent sigh.

“Home!” said Lanu with a skip of joy.

For a moment it seemed as if the twilight of the forest had lifted, as if the raindrops had ceased to fall about them. The futility of their existence had ended with the suggestion of a purpose, with a plan for the future. As they thought of home they thought of the sunlight blazing into the town's street, the cries of the children and the smoke of the cooking fires; that vision died out when they remembered what had happened to the town, and yet something remained to which their minds could cling. There would at least be the site of the clearing, overgrown by forest. The banana groves would not yet be overgrown. It was a place they knew, the place where they had spent their whole lives. More than that; the suggestion of going home provided them with an objective. Mere futile wandering in the forest had no appeal for them; home was a goal towards which they could struggle.

“So we will go home,” said Musini, nodding her head significantly, chewing the cud of internal calculations.

She did not have to say more to bring them all back to reality. They were lost in the forest; and they all knew what that meant. To go a mile into the forest -- in certain circumstances, to go a mere hundred yards -- without painstaking precautions meant being utterly lost, so that one direction seemed as good as any other. And they were separated from home by a march of many days' duration. In the forest they had no means of knowing north or south or east or west, and if they had, they still did not know whether home lay to north or to south or to east or to west of them. It was deep in the tradition of the town dweller never on any account to go into the forest beyond the well-known landmarks. And to all of them the forest was the world; they had no conception of any limits to it. Their minds could not conceive of any area that was not twilit by the shadow of vast trees, steamy hot, and dripped upon by torrential downpours of rain. So that not one of them had the faintest maddest hope -- or fear -- of ever breaking out of the forest by traveling long enough in the same direction. The world to them was made up of illimitable unknown forest with concealed in the midst of it a tiny patch of known, and therefore friendly and desirable, forest encircling their home.

A rush of feeling surged up in Loa's breast. Courage, it may have been; obstinacy, perhaps; desperation, possibly. He could think of nothing beyond the two alternatives, on the one hand of determining to make his way home, and on the other of wandering in futile fashion here in the forest to the end of his days. The first might be mad, unattainable, but at least it was preferable to the second.

“Yes, we will go home,” he said. “Home! We will find our way there.”

He abandoned himself to the utterly absurd: a fanatic preaching, an impossible crusade, sweeping his audience off their feet. He brandished clenched fists at the lowering forest above them and around them.

“Home!” he yelled again.

“Home!” yelled Lanu, waving his bow.

“Home!” said Nessi.

Musini turned upon her.

“And so before we start for home perhaps you will find us food?”

There is food to be found in the forest, enough to support life if one is content to live like a bird, not from day to day but from hour to hour, with almost every waking moment devoted to the search. Funguses grow in the leaf-mould and on the trunks of decaying trees -- from the true mushroom, clean and delicious but rare, to the watery toadstools, foul-smelling but brilliantly coloured, a mouthful of which means death. Intermediate between them come other species of varying degrees of nutritive value and toxicity, all to be noted by a sharp eye when wandering in the forest. There are white ants, not formidable like their black and red cousins, but harmless, with pulpy bodies that offer a good deal of nutriment when eaten alive, but it takes many, many white ants to make a meal, and it is usually a matter of pure good fortune to open up one of the tunnelled channels along which white ants circulate. If a great number can be caught they can be crushed into a paste which will endure for a couple of days without rotting, making a ration that can be saved for an emergency, but at the price of some of the nutritive qualities being lost with the pressed-out juices. There are snakes and frogs; on rare occasions a good archer can bring down a bird or even, more rarely, a monkey. To secure a forest antelope the forest wanderer must cease for a time to be a wanderer. He must dig a pitfall in a game-track and plant a poisoned stake in it and wait maybe for days before an antelope falls into it -- it will never happen at all if he does his work clumsily so that the antelope's instincts are aroused and he leaps aside from the too obvious danger. In the same way, if the wanderer has time to spare he can -- as the pygmies do -- plant poisoned skewers in the track, or a concealed bent bow in the undergrowth with an arrow on the string and a trigger device that can be tripped by a strand of creeper across the path; the same device can actuate a deadfall -- a log armed with a poisoned stake hung up precariously in the branches above.

The fruits of the forest are doled out by nature with a sparing hand; they are infinite in their variety but sparse in their occurrence; the vast trees which fight their way through to light and air and life leave small chance for fruit-bearing trees to live. Yet some of the vines bear fruit, and it is possible to drag the flexible stems down, tearing them from their hold on the trunks, until the fruit is in reach. The amoma bears a watery fruit with a bitter kernel -- either is of some use to fill an empty belly. A giant species of acacia bears pods of beans with indigestible skins yet which nevertheless can be bruised and pounded and cooked into food. There are wild plums -- tart, leathery things -- which can be found where soil conditions do not allow the trees to grow so tall; wild mangoes, woody and untempting; phrynia; even some of the bamboos which grow in the marshy spots bear berries which can be eaten and will support life.

With all these things Loa and the others had some sort of acquaintance, largely acquired when young; wandering as infants on the edge of the clearing the ceaseless appetite of childhood had been gratified between meals by the gleanings of the forest. Loa knew less about them than any of the others, for he had had a pampered childhood as a god almost from birth. One thing he did know, and that was that it was not by standing still that food was to be found in the forest.

“Food?” he said to Musini in reply to her remark to Nessi. “We shall find it as we go along.”

He took the little axe from her hand and picked up the pole which had so recently joined him to Nessi. A few blows and a jerk parted one fork from the stem. The links of chain dangled from the other fork and made a clumsy, flail-like weapon, but a weapon, nevertheless. He brandished it with a feeling of satisfaction and gave back the axe to Musini.

“Let us go,” he said.

“Which way. Lord?” asked Musini instantly, and Loa stared round down the twilit avenues between the trees with some uncertainty.

“It was this way that we came,” said Lanu. “You can see the tracks. That leads to the path you were following with the grey-faced men.”

“That is the way we shall go,” said Loa. “They will have gone far onward by the time we reach the path again.”

And with that, with so little ceremony, they began their vast and precarious journey. It was as well that Lanu had made his explanation regarding the tracks, for Loa's unskilled eye could see nothing on the monotonous leaf-mould. Even Lanu's sharp eyes were put to a severe test, as the profuse rains at dawn had gone far to obliterate the heavy traces they had left in their flight from the slavers. Lanu went in front, his bow and arrow ready for instant action; the others spread out behind him, looking about them as they walked, seeking something -- anything -- that would relieve in small measure the pangs of hunger that afflicted them the moment they admitted to themselves that they were hungry. Musini found a cluster of fine white mushrooms, and she brought the largest to Loa. It was wonderful to set one's teeth in the firm white flesh, to taste the keen pungent flavour of the raw mushroom, to swallow it down into a stomach that complained bitterly of being empty. Other finds of Musini's she shared with Lanu. Nessi plodded along by herself; what she found went into her own stomach.

They came to the boggy stream which they had crossed yesterday in their flight; the leaf-mould under their feet grew less and less resilient, and water oozed out of it as they trod; soon Lanu turned back towards them in despair.

“I do not know where we went,” he said pathetically. “I can see no more.”

He had been proud to guide them up to this moment, and now he was pitifully aware of his shortcomings, no longer a pert young man, but a child again. And once more they all looked at Loa, while round them the silent forest waited for his decision.

“I will tell you which way we shall go,” said Loa -- he said it to comfort Lanu more than for any other reason, for he had no plan in his mind at that moment.

He looked round him at the silent trees, at the glades opening up around him. He could not think while he looked at them, and so he pressed his fists against his eyes as a stimulus to thought, pressed them firmly in as he used to do when he was a god and had a decision to make. The turning lights before his eyes were not disturbing like those silent glades. His mind grappled with the problem, to bear it down by sheer strength like an unpractised giant overpowering a skilled lightweight wrestler. Seeping through this bog was a little river, a childish version of the big river wherein his sister the moon was wont to hide herself. The superstitions of his lifetime warred with the hard logic inculcated by his recent experiences, for his first tendency was to think of the little stream as being endowed with human likes and dislikes, as being likely to wander here and there in accordance with its own whim, stopping if it saw fit, going on or going back if it saw fit. But he made himself realize that rivers run eternally in the same way, that some unchangeable law made them do so, just as water would always run out of a tilted bowl. A weak mortal -- or an unguided god, for Loa was not quite ready to admit his mortality to himself -- might wander in the forest in a thousand directions with no definition of route at all. But a stream must flow from somewhere to somewhere. It at least had a unity of purpose a human could not display.

“Where is the water?” he asked of Lanu, taking his hands from his eyes.

“It is here, my father,” said Lanu.

“Lord,” interposed Musini, correcting him.

“No,” said Loa. “We are men together, and I am father of Lanu.”

Lanu's delighted grin was ample reward for the condescension the fondness of Loa's heart had evoked. They plodded through the mud to where the little stream lay between its flat banks; the trees met above it, and all about them their black and naked roots twined over the mud. Loa plucked a fragment of bark from a tree trunk and dropped it into the centre of the stream while the others breathlessly awaited his decision. The current here was hardly perceptible, but very slowly the bit of bark moved with the water relative to the bank; Loa was watching it as intently as he had ever watched the heaped rib bones in the firelight. He noted the motion, and looked downstream to where the little river lost itself to view amid the trees.

“That is the way we shall go,” he said.

He said it with all his natural authority; he made no attempt to analyse the motives that had brought about this decision. Enough confidence in his powers still lingered with him for him to feel that whatever he might be guided to do must be right. And he was sustained in his confidence by the reception given to his decision by the others. They were lost in the forest, uneasy, aimless, and their misgivings had returned with redoubled force when Lanu had lost the track. It was intensely reassuring to them for someone to set them on the move again in accordance with some definite plan, any plan, especially when they could feel that Loa's supernatural powers would ensure that it was a good plan. It raised them from depression to something better than resignation, and started them again upon their vast journey with new strength.

There were advantages and disadvantages about following the course of the sluggish stream through the forest. The marshy nature of the soil altered the prevailing character of the trees; they were not quite so monstrous, so that the smaller species had a chance of survival; there were wood beans and amoma to be found, and the marshes contained numbers of bullfrogs, big creatures, which could be caught if the four wanderers formed a wide circle, hip-deep in the ooze. The thighs of a dozen frogs, torn from the wretched creatures while they were still alive, and eaten raw, would have constituted a fair meal even for a man of Loa's vast appetite, but they unfortunately never caught even a dozen between them. But if the problem of food was rendered easier, the problem of travel was rendered harder. Inexplicably here and there the forest would yield altogether to growth of another sort, to belts of small trees and tangled undergrowth. The change would at first be imperceptible; the undergrowth would close round them insidiously like some wary enemy, and they would recognize the nature of the country too late to turn back, too late even to turn aside, for the extent of the belt on either hand could not be guessed at. Then there would be nothing to do save to plunge forward, stooping under, climbing over, hacking a path when necessary, gratefully following a game-track when one presented itself for a few yards, in an atmosphere yet more steamy and still than among the tall trees, and far more noticeable because of the increased physical exertion necessary to make progress. Even where the vegetation was far too thick for the sky to be seen, they plunged along through suffocating twilight until at last the slow disappearance of undergrowth, an increase in the height of the trees, and eventually the welcome feeling of leaf-mould underfoot, told them that they were through the obstacle. In these struggles Loa, axe in hand, would lead, with Nessi following him and Lanu following her and Musini bringing up the rear.