The Sky And The Forest (24 page)

It was the time when the struggle for existence in the vegetable world in that clearing had reached its climax, when the saplings were stoutly grown and yet not large enough to kill by their shade the undergrowth which had first occupied the cleared space. The saplings grew thick, in desperate rivalry with each other, while all about them the shrubs and creepers competed with each other in a waist-deep tangle. Nor had the felled trees yet been reabsorbed into the forest; there were still trunks and branches sufficiently solid to halt a man, although one lichen-covered trunk onto which Loa climbed crumbled utterly to pieces under his feet -- honeycombed to rottenness by white ants, presumably. Sweating with the exertion and the close heat, Loa plunged on; the path could not be called defined in any sense, for there had not been enough coming and going of men or of game to make any impression on the rapid growth of the vegetation. Then he parted the last bush, and gazed out at the town.

It was all so different. There was a street, and there were houses, and the houses were built, as they always had been, of thick planks split by wedges from tree trunks, and roofed with a thatch of phrynia leaves. But it was not the same street, not the street that had so often appeared to Loa's mental vision in his fits of homesickness. The houses were on different sites, and there were not so many of them. At this end of the town, where Loa had lived, the forest had begun to encroach. Loa's own house, and Musini’s house, and the big multiple-house which had sheltered some of his wives, had all disappeared, their places partly taken by a few poor houses and partly by a mass of scrub and creeper which had already established itself on the vacant sites. Not merely was the town smaller, but its centre of gravity had apparently shifted towards the other end, towards the marshy brook and Litti's forge. Loa gulped as he gazed out, partly with excitement but mainly in a childlike disappointment that everything was not the same as he remembered it -- even though at one time he had been realist enough to remember the conflagration that had started in the town when he was a captive of the slave raiders. But it might as well be a different town, and not his home at all. Lanu had come up beside him and was staring out at the town too, and the changes that he noticed were having a sobering effect on him, judging by his silence and immobility. There were people walking about the town, and it was upon them that Loa turned his attention after his first sweeping glance. Here was a woman with a hand of bananas on her head. Loa was not sure that he remembered her; maybe it was some daughter of Gooma, the man who was so expert at cutting the hardwood wedges for plank splitting -- Gooma had a string of daughters. Over there a man with a bow in his hand came striding out of a house, and Loa knew him at once. It was Ura, Nessi's husband -- it was just as well Nessi was dead then, for living she would have been a tedious complication in any future settlement. Ura must have made his escape when the raiders attacked the town, as must all of these people. A woman emerged from the same house with a little child whom she laid in the shade of the eaves. That was Nadini, and she had been one of Loa's own wives -- he remembered her quite distinctly. So she was Ura's wife now. Loa boiled with indignation. He was not sure about how long he had been away, but judging by Musini's condition that child was not his; it must be Ura's. Loa came to some rapid but grim decisions regarding Ura's fate, and Nadini's, and the child's.

At the end of the town there were a good many people visible, and all of them were vaguely familiar to Loa. His memories were all jumbled and distorted now, what with his present stress of emotion and the intensity of his experiences since he had seen them last. There were some girls, laughing and joking as they bore wooden water jars on their heads on their way back from the brook. He could not put names to them.

“Let us go,” he said, aloud but to himself.

He took a fresh grip of his little axe and plunged out into the open, and Lanu and Musini followed him. Nadini caught sight of them emerging from the undergrowth; the naked man, lean and scarred, axe in hand; the almost full-grown boy, and the woman far gone in pregnancy. She stared at them with unbelieving eyes. One of the girls saw them and called the others' attention to them; one of them was surprised enough to allow her jar to fall from her head.

“It is Loa!'' cried Musini loudly behind him. “Loa, our Lord.”

She ran from behind him, clumsy because of her bulky condition, to go before him.

“It is Loa!” she cried again.

She waved her arms at Nadini and the girls, and went down in the proper attitude of respect, knees and elbows on the ground, face close to it, setting the example and then looking round to see if the other women were following it. They did not. Nadini leaned against the doorway of her house, her hand to her heart. The girls nudged each other and giggled in embarrassed fashion. It crossed Loa's mind that he could stop and remonstrate with them, but some consuming instinct within him said “Go on!” and he strode on down the street, forbearing to get involved in some undignified squabble before he should reach whatever vital situation was awaiting him at the far end. Musini scrambled to her feet again and once more ran grotesquely in front of him to herald his approach. On went Loa to the far end of the town, that end where in his day the riff raff, the lowborn, had dwelt with a lack of dignity only relieved by the presence of one or two respectable families such as that of Litti the worker in iron. Loa had always had a faint snobbish contempt for this end of the town.

There was a fair-sized group of people there which opened up and spread as Musini came up, lumbering and gasping.

“It is Loa!” cried Musini, again, once more going down in the attitude of abasement.

There were some cries of astonishment from the group, and someone started to his feet from where he had been sitting in the centre of it. It was Soli, once a leader of the low-class society who had frequented this end of the town. Loa knew him to be Soli, but the first thing Loa was really conscious of was the fact that the seat Soli had just quitted was a tripod, a distorted stool, very like the one he himself had always sat on to hear the counsels of his advisers and to give judgment in disputed cases. No one save Loa the son of Nasa (whose name no one save Loa could utter) might sit on a tripod stool of that sort. And hanging over Soli's shoulders was a leopard-skin cloak -- the garment, if not of gods, at least of princes. And in Soli's hand was a battle-axe which Loa instantly recognized as having once been his own -- his own ceremonial axe, presumably discovered amid the ruins after the departure of the slavers, and now desecrated by Soli's touch. Loa flamed with uncontrollable rage.

But if Loa was angry, so was Soli. His face was distorted with passion as he watched Loa approach.

“Kill him!” shrieked Soli, with a wave of his arm to the group around him.

“It is our Lord, our Lord Loa,” said Musini, raising her face from the ground.

The group stirred but made no decisive movement, save for Ura; out of the tail of his eye Loa was conscious that Ura was fumbling with bow and arrow. Loa's instincts came to his help, and he sprang forward with the little axe poised beside his shoulder, ready to strike. Soli could not have retreated before him even if his rage had allowed; that would have been defeat and death. He sprang to meet Loa, whirling the big axe round in a blow that would have cut Loa diagonally in half had it struck him, but Loa managed to wrench his body out of the way. Soli had a substantial covering of fat -- as Loa once had had, when his divinity was undisputed -- but he was still agile and sure on his feet as he had been when he was renowned as a dancer. He let the swing of the axe carry him round and away, so that he was facing Loa and out of his reach before Loa could spring in. They eyed each other momentarily, prepared to circle round each other. But Loa had at the back of his mind the bow and arrow that Ura was fumbling with; he could neither waste time nor stand clear so that Ura could have a free shot. Instinct still carried him along. He feinted to the right -- the natural direction for a right-handed man to take when armed with an axe -- and then instantly sprang to the left and struck again, and only Soli's quickness of foot saved him after the feint had deceived his eye. The big axe whistled past Loa's shoulder; the little axe made a deep scratch in the bulging flesh of Soli's right breast -- only Soli's supple twist at the hips prevented the blow from being fatal. As it was, the gash it left was six inches long and an inch deep at its deepest. A wordless cry broke from the crowd.

“Yaa-aa-aa,” cried the crowd, as the red blood poured in a broad stream down Soli's chest, red in the blinding sunlight, and vivid against the glistening brown of Soli's skin. Soli seemingly did not feel the wound; he brought his axe round backhanded before Loa could recover from his blow, and Loa had to retreat, with the big axe whirling before his eyes so rapidly that, with each swing close upon the swing before it, he had no time for a counterblow, but could only back and sidle away, an inch from death at every swing. He might have exhausted Soli's impetus in time, but the ground was too restricted. Retreating fast, he backed into a spectator who had not time to get out of the way, and bounced forward under the swing of the axe, crashing breast to breast against Soli. Instantly they locked together, their left hands grasping the wrists of the right hands that held the axes; breast against breast, hip against hip, they strained against each other.

“Yaa-aa-aa,” cried the crowd.

Loa put his left heel behind Soli's right to trip him up, but Soli bent his body and swung with all his strength, heaving Loa round so that both his feet almost left the ground, but he clung on, dragging Soli with him so that they swung together in an ungainly dance.

Musini, still on her knees, was watching intently; as they circled her she shot out one hand, swift as a striking snake, and caught Soli's ankle for one brief moment. It was only for a moment before Soli's momentum carried him out of her grip, but it was just long enough to put him off his balance. He nearly fell, and his grip on Loa's right wrist was weakened with the effort of keeping his footing. Loa tore his hand free. He had no time to strike with the edge of the axe, but he stabbed upwards and sideways with the head of it, hitting Soli below the left ear.

“Yaa -- aa -- aa,” howled the crowd.

Soli weakened, so that Loa could swing him away from him by his hold on Soli's right wrist, and could then strike with all his strength at Soli's head with the edge. Soli flung up his left arm to protect himself, and the keen little axe bit deep into Soli's forearm just below the elbow, nearly severing it so that the limb dangled uselessly and the blood spouted in a vivid scarlet jet against the sunshine. Yet even then Soli kept his feet. Loa had released his right hand, and Soli braced himself and swung his axe back, the effort spattering Loa with blood from the severed arteries. Loa circled out of harm's way, ready to spring in again, but the drain upon Soli's strength was too great. He looked stupidly down at his dangling forearm, and at the blood which poured from it, and then his body sagged and he stumbled forward on his knees, his leopard-skin cloak still over his shoulders. The nape of his neck was a clear target, and Loa struck at it, quick and hard.

“Yaa-aa,” murmured the crowd, hushed and subdued.

Loa looked about him, the drops of blood clotting on his chest.

“It is Loa, our Lord,” said Musini, on her knees.

“Loa!” said the crowd, and they went down on their knees too, their faces to the dust. Even Ura, with his bow in one hand and his arrow in the other, and with a clear shot at last open to him, went down on his knees along with the rest. Nadini and the water-carrying girls, who had drawn close to see the fight, fell slowly prostrate. Only Loa remained on his feet, and Lanu, who stood grinning in the sunlight, legs straddled wide. Loa's eyes met his, and they smiled at each other in utter accord.

Loa took his eyes from Lanu's and looked about him at the grovelling crowd. He ruled these people again, at least at the moment. He was tired, and he wiped the streaming sweat from his face with his forearm, but, tired though he was, he knew that much was demanded of him on the instant. He might be a god and king again, but he was a god who had only recently fought for his life under the eyes of these very people -- a god, in other words, who might soon be thought mortal if he did not act at once in a godlike manner. There was no logic about the way Loa thought regarding all this; indeed, there was very little thought involved. Most of what he did was done on the spur of the moment, but it was enough to prove that he had profited by his experiences.

He stalked over to the tripod stool and sat himself upon it, the little axe across his knees,

“You may stand,” he announced to the cowering multitude, and they slowly got to their feet.

Loa looked round at them. He could not count them, but his eye told him roughly how much the slavers' raid had diminished their numbers. More than half of the population of the town had been captured or killed by them. There were some new babies, and more, obviously, still to come, so that the population would soon increase and presumably build itself up again to its natural figure. The thought of babies brought his mind back abruptly to Ura and Nadini -- Ura, who had had the inordinate presumption to take one of Loa's wives, and who had tried to draw an arrow during Loa's fight with Soli. Loa was in no doubt about who was the intended target for that arrow. He looked round the crowd again more searchingly, to select men who would be sure to do his bidding; that was a strange state of mind for Loa, accustomed to instant and utter obedience in his town. He had never had any need for an inner court circle, for a Praetorian Guard, before this. There had never been any possibility of division; loyalty and devotion to him had been equal and universal, but that was not the case now -- the proof of that lay at his feet at that very moment. Ura, standing somewhere behind his shoulder, would certainly object to what Loa had in mind.