The Sky And The Forest (16 page)

And then Loa saw an instant of movement, so brief that his eyes were not quick enough to pick up any details, an instant of something showing and then disappearing, behind a tree. He looked at Lanu, and Lanu had seen it too. His knees were slightly bent so as to give him more purchase for the instant drawing of his bow. Then Loa saw another movement, this time a trifle more prolonged, sufficient for his eyes to register a pale brown figure moving from one tree to the next, and immediately later another flash of movement followed. A little bowman was coming diagonally across their front with all the precaution to be expected of a man who knew that there were enemies in the forest. He was unaware of their immediate presence, all the same, as his movements and his direction proved. It was impossible to guess his future course, whether Lanu would be able to get a clear shot at him or not. Loa knew that Lanu was ready to seize any opportunity; a glance back at Musini showed her standing like a statue. Whether she knew what was going on or not she was sensibly imitating her menfolk in making no movement at all, and as she stood she would remain invisible to the little man for a long time to come.

The little man came on to another tree; his next advance might expose him to an arrow from Lanu's bow. But it did not, for the pygmy chose instead -- by pure chance, obviously -- another route which kept a couple of trees in a direct line between him and Lanu. This time, as the little man paused before going forward again, Loa could see part of him quite plainly: the naked shoulder and left arm, the hand holding the bow, and the forearm protected against the bowstring by its bracer of wood. The faint breath of wind that was stealing through the forest was luckily blowing away from him -- the little people have keen noses, and Loa was sweating with excitement. Loa waited ready to spring. The distance was too great for him to charge yet, for the little man would hear him in plenty of time to draw his bow and send a poisoned arrow home. And when the little man hurried forward again no opportunity presented itself -- Loa would have had to pass round a tree to intercept him, and the delay might be fatal, as Loa decided. Now the little man was no more than twenty-five yards off, out of sight altogether again behind his tree. Loa could only know he was there without seeing him; he could only wait, poised, hardly able to believe that the little man could be ignorant of their proximity. Yet he was. He emerged from his tree to move on to the next, still not offering a clear shot for Lanu, and Loa hurled himself forward in one frightful leap. The little man heard Loa's first movement, and swung round, but he was far too late. A swinging blow from the flail struck the left hand that held the bow forward; the flail circled without losing its momentum and the next blow fell on the little man's head with its sparse peppercorn curls. After that it was like killing the snake, raining blow on blow on a body that writhed feebly at first and then lay quite still.

Lanu was beside Loa, dancing with excitement after his long restraint, but his good sense was displayed in the fact that while he still had an arrow on his bowstring he had not discharged it. He spurned the dead body with his naked foot, capering in triumph, but Loa turned upon him with a warning gesture, and he instantly fell silent again. They had made too much noise as it was, with an unknown number of enemies prowling through the forest in search of them. But if it was a line (as presumably it was) which was beating through the forest they had broken it by killing the little bowman; it was the moment to push boldly through. Loa beckoned his family after him and hurried forward with all the speed precaution allowed. It was Musini who lingered by the dead body to strip it of its poor plunder, the little bow and short arrows, and the small knife stuck in the waistband. Loa frowned at her, for he was afraid of the noise that these things might make carried in Musini's hands, but Musini ignored his disapproval. She stuck the knife into her own waistband, slung the bow on her shoulder, and followed her husband with an arrow in each hand.

They hurried from tree to tree, waiting to look and to listen, and then hastening on. They had just had the best possible lesson in the results of incautious movement, and they took it to heart. Loa saw a footprint in the soft earth beside a tree, and leaped aside instinctively as if it were a snake, but it was only a pygmy's footprint, as the small size and the high instep proved -- perhaps it had been made by the man he had just killed. At another moment Lanu held up his hand imperatively for them to stop, trying the air with his nostrils. The others imitated his behaviour. Faint upon the air was a scent of wood smoke, the tiniest trace of it. There was only the gentle air of wind through the forest, which must be carrying to their nostrils the smoke of the little people's cooking fires. The camp must be upwind in that direction, with the women and the little children and the old men; the line they had broken through was composed of the hunters. Loa swung round and headed off in a fresh direction, for he had no wish to come to the camp -- there might still be some hunters there. They crossed a broad lane trampled through the forest by a herd of elephants -- the air was redolent with the fresh droppings -- and pushed on without pause. They were hungry and thirsty, but there was neither time nor opportunity to gather food when from behind any tree the feathered death might come without warning. Later in the day came a storm, when Loa's brother the sky raved above the treetops, his face dark with rage, until within the forest everything was nearly as black as night, and streams of water poured down upon them, chilling their naked bodies and wetting their braided bowstrings until it would hardly be possible to send an arrow thirty yards.

They camped in misery, huddling together, all three of them, at the foot of a tree where the earth was not quite so damp, but they had hardly lain down when a terrible event brought them to their feet again. The sky had demonstrated his rage in a final access of mania. The roar of the thunder was accompanied by a flash of lightning which played all round them; they were deafened and blinded, and the thunder's roar was accompanied by a rending crash. The tree next to theirs had been smitten by the sky's lightning-axe, and had split from summit to bole. The paralyzed seconds which followed were punctuated by the sounds of wreckage falling. In the pitch-black night a great branch fell with a crash beside them, shaking the earth. Above them the blasted tree slowly tore through the spider web of creepers and crashed sideways down, shattering the branches of its neighbours, until it hung at an angle, unseen, over their heads, while the smaller fragments, falling from branch to branch, rained down all round them.

They clung to each other in terror, with Lanu howling loudly in the middle until Musini quieted him. Indeed the sky had been very angry with them, and they were lucky that he had missed his aim. Yet what had they done to rouse his anger thus? He was still very angry, for his ravings could still be heard overhead; at any moment he might return and deal another blow -- Loa clung to Musini at the thought of that. What could it be that had infuriated him so? What had they done differently from usual? Loa searched his memory and his conscience. They had killed the little man, but surely the sky would not be angry with his own brother for the killing of a mere forest pygmy, and yet -- was the sky his brother? The old habit of believing it, rudely shaken when the slavers captured him, had asserted itself again lately, but never with its old force, and now Loa's doubts returned redoubled. He might be--he probably was -- only one more inconsiderable ant creeping about among the trees. He thought of the dead body of the pygmy, lying in the abandon of sudden death, the red blood oozing from its wounds. The little people were malevolent magicians. Perhaps by spells and incantations they had roused the anger of the sky. Maybe his victim, after death, had ascended to the sky and himself clamoured for vengeance in a way that had admitted of no denial. Maybe he had returned and was creeping about even now in this utter blackness that surrounded them. Loa thought of the uncounted dead of the forest and the numberless ghosts -- why, even Nessi might be among them -- that might be stalking between the trees until terror overcame him and he howled as loudly as Lanu had, and he searched urgently for Musini's embrace, shaking with fright.

“Peace, peace. Lord,” said Musini soothingly.

Her hands stroked his shoulders and his spine and by their soothing touch moderated his terror. Such a little man that he had killed, a full two feet shorter than Loa's own massive bulk. The low growl of thunder, far distant now, that responded to this thought was in its way reassuring. The sky may have been angry, but his anger was clearly subsiding. He may have struck a mighty blow, but, when all was said and done, the blow had missed. He, Loa, was still alive. He had once been enslaved, but now at least he was free; a homeless wanderer in the forest, but free. The pygmy may have invoked the anger of the sky; but the pygmy was dead, and he was alive, with his flail ready to his hand to kill any other little magicians that might cross his path. He would not only kill them but he would eat them, roasting their bloody joints at a fire and champing them up with his teeth. A magician roasted and eaten and borne within his own belly could do him no harm -- the idea of it appealed to Loa's comic sense and set him off in a roar of laughter that startled Musini far more than his howlings had done, for she was a level-headed person and her husband's eccentric hysterias still occasionally took her by surprise.

But the laughter was a more cheerful and reassuring symptom than howlings of terror. All three of them gradually subsided into sleep as the rain ceased, despite their fright and the wet and the hunger, and when daylight came there was something oddly cheering in the sight of the shattered branches all round them, and the huge tree hanging almost directly over their heads -- the whole top of it, and a portion of the trunk, while the rest of the trunk was split and rent nearly to the ground. In truth the sky had dealt a mighty blow and had missed. It was even possible that Loa's brother the forest had come to their rescue, for was not the treetop sustained by the creepers and branches of the rest of the forest?

All the same, the forest might not really be their friend, for with their awakening came the realization that they were utterly lost. Today there was no friendly stream at hand to give them the comfort -- even perhaps the false comfort -- of a sense of direction. Their wide detour of yesterday, forced upon them by their encounter with the little people, had taken them far away from it, and in which direction it now lay was more than any of them could guess. All the glades of the forest looked alike to them, and they could not tell by which one they had arrived the night before in the darkness of the storm, and the deluges of rain had washed away all hope of recognizing their trails.

“Which way. Lord?” asked Musini; her ignorance led her to address him with the honorific, instead of as any wife might speak to any other husband.

“I will tell you,'‘ said Loa, heavily.

Really he had no notion at all, but admitting it would be of no help to anyone, and certainly not to himself. He squatted down and pressed his fists into his eye-sockets in the old gesture. It helped him to shut out distracting influences; for that matter it helped to stop him from thinking sensibly, so that his instincts and his subconscious memory were allowed full play. In the inner recesses of his mind calculations took place without his knowledge or volition, estimates of how far, and in what directions, they had gone in their circuit round the little people. Something was stirring in his brain when he stood up again and peered round him. So slight was the trend of the ground about them, as far as they could see through the trees, that no cool, thinking mind could have noticed any at all, but all Loa's physical sensitiveness was active. He had not thought at all -- he had not even made the simple deduction that downhill would lead to water -- but he could tell which was the way, and he could point to the right direction. He wanted to go downhill, and he knew which was downhill.

“Come,” he said, and he started off, so that the others had to collect their poor impedimenta and hasten after him.

The thought that was in Loa's mind as he led the way was quite irrelevant; he was thinking that if Nessi were still with them this would be just the moment for her to say that she was hungry, and his recollection of her peevishness went far to reconcile him to losing her. For Musini never complained, bearing hardship and danger without a word -- Loa was thinking idly at this moment about how poorly Nessi would have come through the ordeal of yesterday -- and Lanu was a hard-bitten veteran. It was Musini and Lanu who contributed the whole sum of their small knowledge of how to live in the forest. It was Lanu who knew how to make a bow, Musini who knew how to braid bowstrings. Loa did not even yet know which creeper it was whose juice made arrow-poison. Musini had the domestic knowledge, which was of great use; Lanu, thanks to his boy's experiences in a childhood spent wandering about and around the town, and his observation of what men did, knew of the other arts. But Lanu's cheerful endurance of hardship, his fatalist carelessness about the future, his manual skill and ingenuity were qualities beyond all price. All that Loa could contribute to the partnership was his physical strength and his mind, which thought quickly after his recent experiences; and, above all, the fact that he was Loa, the born god, accustomed to lead and to be obeyed, with a natural assurance that might command confidence or at least blind faith.

Confidence and faith were put to the test during the next several days, for it was not that day nor the next that they came back to the stream. The forest undulates very slightly; it is to be presumed that Loa led his party on a course far from straight, while the necessity for seeking food naturally made their progress slow. They were hungry all the time -- hardly sustained by funguses and white ants -- white ants took long to collect and were not at all sustaining. The forest fruits did not even cheat their stomachs, but rather mocked them. They saw traces of the little people here and there, which keyed them up and set them peering fiercely about them, and not only because of the danger. The little people were meat, meat on two legs. Loa's starving stomach yearned for a pygmy, and he longed to meet one alone in the forest -- away from his fellows-- so that he and Lanu could kill him and make a fire on the spot to cook him. But chance brought no little men their way.