The Sky And The Forest Page 7

  They had reached the temporary base of the slave raiders, a central point where they had established themselves so as to be able to strike out in all directions and sweep up every community within thirty or forty miles. Here a long wide rocky beach ran down to the water's edge covered with only sparse vegetation. A town of many houses stood above it; the townspeople were now either slaves or dead and the raiders lived in their houses. On the rocky beach was gathered all the accumulated plunder -- the captives and the ivory. More than a thousand human beings were there, moving about with a certain amount of freedom; what freedom there was, when they were chained two by two, neck and neck, in the forked sticks. Loa looked with dull amazement at this immense number of people; drawn up on the beach was a row of canoes, vast things, and he stared with fearful interest at yet another just coming in to the landing place propelled by a dozen glittering paddles.

  “This way,” said the Arab.

  This was the central dump of the ivory captures. More than a hundred tusks lay together on the ground here, unguarded, for in Central Africa ivory had no more than a sentimental value -- that mass represented a fortune only when borne on men's shoulders a thousand miles to Zanzibar or twice that distance to Cairo.

  “Put it down here,” said the Arab.

  Loa allowed the tusk to slide out of the slings to the ground. The relief of being free of the weight of it was unbelievable.

  “Go over there and get your food.”

  The Arab turned away without evincing any more interest in them. His final gesture had indicated a thicker nucleus in the mass of people on the beach.

  “Let us go there,” said Loa to Nessi.

  The grammatical construction he used was unusual to him; self-analysis of course was something quite foreign to him and he took no note of what he was saying. He spoke as one equal to another, not with the complex construction of a superior to an inferior. The physical fact of being chained to one end of a pole while Nessi was chained to the other seemed to make this method of speech inevitable. Nessi began to pick her way towards the little crowd, Loa plunging along after her. Because of the rocky irregularities of the beach they jarred each other's necks as they went along; they passed many other people, all similarly confined in forked poles, all of them as naked as Loa and Nessi. Some were wandering aimlessly, some were squatting or lying on the ground, the individuals in each pair rigidly five feet apart from each other. Among the crowd the situation was more complicated, for the people and their poles were liable to entangle themselves by aimless movements. The focus of the crowd was a wooden trough, beside which stood a couple of white-clothed Arabs and two spearmen. Most of the people were standing dumbly eyeing the trough, not speaking, merely looking. Nessi wound her way through the crowd; the pole behind her bumped against people as she did so; Loa was too weary and numb to make more than a slight attempt to keep it clear. Arriving at the edge of the cleared space round the trough Nessi hesitated, but one of the Arabs singled her out immediately as one who had not already had her ration and beckoned her forward. She approached the trough with Loa behind her.

  “Fill your hands,” said the Arab, making the gesture of getting a double handful.

  At the bottom of the trough there was a thin layer of cooked tapioca, and Nessi filled her hands with it. As she did so she realized that she was hungry, and she bent her head to eat, while Loa behind her fumed with sudden hunger -- it was twenty-four hours since he had last eaten, and he had fought a battle and made a long march during that time. His restless movements reminded Nessi of his existence at the other end of the pole, and she wheeled aside to allow him to come up to the trough. He scraped himself a double handful of the glutinous starch. The second Arab standing by, a man of more aquiline features, noticed his iron collar and bracelets.

  “Here,” he called to Loa, beckoning with a gesture of authority.

  Loa stared at him stupidly, but the Arab was not a man to tolerate a moment's hesitation in obedience to an order. With a malignant snarl on his face he repeated words and gesture, and Loa went up to him, dragging Nessi behind him. The Arab reached out and struck him on the mouth with his fist; Loa staggered, dropping most of his tapioca. He winced as the Arab reached out his hand again, but this time all that happened was that his head was roughly jerked back so that his collar could be examined. A mere glance was sufficient to reveal it as base metal, and half a glance sufficed for the bracelets. The Arab turned his back and gave Loa no more notice, and almost instinctively Loa turned to refill his hands at the trough. There were some other late-comers already being fed there, and a warning cry from the guardian of the trough checked Loa in his stride. That Arab had a whip in his hand, and Loa knew whips. But he was hungry. There was a little tapioca still in his hands and he licked at it; two swallows and it was gone. He edged forward again, but the whip whistled in the air and he drew back. Another late arrival was scraping up the very last of the tapioca from the trough. Then the Arab guard swung his whip again in a wide gesture, driving the lingering couples away; before his whip they withdrew reluctantly, bumping each other with their poles.

  Here came a whole group of the Arab raiders, white-clothed, muskets in their hands, striding down towards the river. They took their places at the water's edge, and spread mats before themselves. They made strange sounds, and strange gestures, dipping their hands in the running water, prostrating themselves with their backs turned to the hidden sun now far behind the trees across the river. Night was beginning to fall; the eastern sky towards which the Arabs were kneeling was already dark.

  “I am weary,” said Nessi, sitting down; she had had experience enough now with pole and chain to do so cautiously, and with due regard to Loa -- a tug at his throat meant a tug at her own.

  “I too,” said Loa, squatting down as well.

  Five feet apart they sat in the gathering darkness. And then Nessi began to weep. She wept out of weariness, she wept for her dead child, for her lost liberty, out of terror for the future and regret for the past. Her wailing rose thin on the heavy evening air, and her example was infectious. Another woman near began to wail, and then another and another so that the sound spread down the riverbank. Some man shouted his sorrows in a raucous dialect, the hard, clipped words punctuating the wailing. Another man echoed the cry in a cruder rhythm. Now the whole encampment throbbed with the misery of Africa. Loa could tell, by the dragging of the pole in the darkness, that Nessi as she sat was swaying her body backwards and forwards in time with her weeping; she was dissolving in an ecstasy of unhappiness, and so were the others, and their misery was dissipating itself in hysteria.

  Loa might have been carried away in the flood; he might have joined the shouting wailing chorus, to sob until he fell asleep like a drunken man, had not his own unhappiness been beyond hysteria. But he had lost more than anyone else there, unless, as was possible, some other local god had also been enslaved. In the darkness Loa's face bore an expression of puzzled thought. So hard was he trying to think that he remained uninfected by the rhythm around him. For until today Loa had been a god ever since he could remember. When he was seven years old -- eighteen years ago -- a strange sickness, a mysterious magic, had descended upon the town. Almost everyone had suffered from it, and nearly everyone who suffered from it had died. Nasa, Loa's father, had died. Pustules had formed to cover his body, and he had shouted words that had no meaning, and then he had died, quickly. His brothers had died, his wives and his children had died. In every house more people had died than lived, and in some houses everyone died. Loa himself had sickened; he bore on his forehead and on other parts of his body the hollow marks, greyish in the chocolate-brown skin, of the pustules which had formed there. But Loa had lived through it, lived to find himself the sole survivor of the house of Nasa, a god unquestioned. Upon him had devolved the duty of seeing that Nasa and Nasa's fathers before him were supplied with attendants consonant with their dignity.

  It was he who had to recall the errant moon from the arms of the riv
er, it was he who had to ascertain, by virtue of his divine powers, who were the miscreants of the town, and it was he who, by his mere existence, had to ensure the prosperity and happiness of his people. The few surviving old people -- Indeharu, whose skull had been beaten in that morning by a knobbed club, was the last of them -- had been able to tell Loa about all this when he was a child. And the younger women had borne children, and the immature had reached maturity and become fathers and mothers. The young men who had taken wives lately had been born after the sickness, and their wives long after, and they had never known any other god than Loa; they knew of the dread majesty of Nasa, whose name none but Loa might pronounce, and they saw people sent to serve him and his majestic predecessors, and the knowledge increased their awe. They knew that Loa was brother to the sky and the forest, that the moon was his sister and the sun his brother.

  Loa had never had reason to doubt any of this himself. What he wanted was his; he owned the whole world, which meant his town. The forest round it, with its little people and its vague hints of other peoples, was merely a setting for the town, a chaos in which his world hung suspended, and a chaos, moreover, which was his own brother. He knew of the effectiveness of his powers of divination as positively as he knew that hair grew on the top of his head. There had never been in his mind the least doubt about his divinity, and of course there had never been the least threat to it. He had never been aware of any limitations encompassing himself because he had never sought any. A world of a continuous sufficiency of food, of an almost complete absence of danger, a world of no ambitions and no disappointments, was not a world favourable to metaphysical speculation. A red ant could bite him, although he was a god; this was a world in which red ants could bite gods, and it was not a world in which one inquired into the relative natures of red ants and gods.

  This was true only up to this morning, and now everything was different. Loa sat with his fellow captives wailing round him, trying to fit his new self into this new world, while his mind, utterly unused to logic, was weighted down in addition by the grave handicap of a clumsy language. His clubbings of the morning had kept him somewhat dazed until now, but their effect was wearing off at the same time as hunger was stimulating his thoughts. Although he did not join in the rhythmic wailings about him, he yet heard them, and they worked upon him.

  His genuine sorrow at the destruction of the town moved him inexpressibly, and he knew now that hunger could gnaw at his divinity, and that knobkerries could smite it and hippopotamus-hide whips could cut into it. Yet it was not easy for the habits of thought of a lifetime to be discarded. Having almost come to grips with reality Loa turned a little lightheaded, thanks largely to hunger and the beat of the rhythmic wailing on his brain. It was his brother the sky who had betrayed him; he had always distrusted the sky, and now his distrust was justified and his perspicacity demonstrated. The sky had extended help to his enemies; it was by the aid of the sky, encamped as they were under its protection, that they had been able to enslave him. A little deliriously Loa vowed vengeance on his treacherous brother. He would degrade the sky, he would kill the sky, he would pay back these sufferings of his tenfold. In the midst of these wild thoughts came the memory of his glimpse of Lanu in the forest. Lanu would avenge him if he did not avenge himself. Lanu would continue the line of his divinity. Although Loa kept silent, he was soon as ecstatic and delirious with emotion as Nessi or any other slave about him. When the fit passed he was both drained and weary, like the others, and like the others he sank into an exhausted sleep, lying motionless under the dark sky with a thousand fellow unfortunates. The mosquitoes and the ants -- the myriad insects of Africa -- could not break into his comatose slumber, nor could the rocky earth beneath him. He lay like a corpse, and so did Nessi, so that neither of them disturbed the other with tugs at the stick that held them together.

  That was a strange bond between them, uniting them and yet keeping them apart. They could never be nearer than five feet to each other, and yet never farther, never out of sight, and yet never within reach. When Loa woke in the dark dawn, he inevitably awoke Nessi. She gave a sharp cry.

  “Ura,” she said, “where are you?”

  Ura was the name of her husband, one of the best of the young hunters. Nessi put her hand up to her neck and the touch of the fork and chain recalled to her the events of yesterday which she had thought momentarily a dream.

  “Oh,” she wailed. “Ah -- ee -- ai -- “

  Then she remembered who it was who lay beside her, and she looked round in the gathering light.

  “Lord,” she said, “is it indeed you?”

  “It is indeed I,” said Loa.

  He was using again the language of a god, and Nessi was addressing him in the language of a remote inferior.

  “Lord, what will they do with me?”

  “You will bear burdens for them,” said Loa, hesitatingly.

  It was not an easy question to answer in any event. The conception of slavery had quite died out in Loa's little community. And Loa found it hard to imagine the existence of other communities, or of distances greater than a day's march. But with a prodigious effort of his imagination he was just able to picture the possibility that the slavers, coveting the ivory tusks, had come a long way for them, and needed bearers to carry them back to their town in a far part of the forest. To mere mortals, he knew, wives were desirable property, something to be coveted, but if any slaver intended to take Nessi as a wife he had shown small disposition to do so as yet.

  “Will it be far. Lord?” asked Nessi.

  “Very far.”

  “How far. Lord?” persisted Nessi, with a child's need for exactitude.

  “Many nights, many days,” said Loa, his imagination making a fantastic leap to such a wild idea.

  “But you. Lord, you?” said Nessi.

  She was only a mortal and such things might happen to her within the limits of insane possibility, but now she remembered again that Loa was chained in the other fork of her pole, and of course nothing like that could happen to him.

  “Doubtless I shall come too.”

  The equatorial dawn had fully broken by now, and the overcast sky was shining its light down upon them. Nessi looked at Loa, thinking hard. He was as naked as she was, as naked as all the other slaves about her. He had no leopard-skin cloak, and the only reminder of his former greatness was his iron collar and bracelets. And they were talking familiarly together, Nessi with him, and he had just admitted the possibility of being driven like a goat across the country with the others. Her world was a mad place. And people were no longer putting their faces into the dirt for him, and yet were suffering no apparent harm. Ah, that was the point. No apparent harm; but without doubt Loa would summon his secret powers and rend these slave raiders apart when he decided to do so. At the moment he was actuated by motives for delay incomprehensible to mere mortals -- a conclusion that satisfied her vague wonderings. Except that she had a lingering wish that Loa's whim for being in temporary subjection had not involved the killing of her baby yesterday.

  “Look, Lord,” said Nessi. “There is food.”

  A full wooden trough had been carried down, and already a mob of slaves were milling round it.

  “Let us go there,” said Loa, suddenly remembering that he was desperately hungry.

  A double handful of tapioca; that was what he got for himself at the trough, and this time he saw to it that he dropped none. He was careful that the pole moving from side to side under his nose in response to Nessi's movements did not interfere with his feeding. Pushing round them to get to the trough were many people from his town, mingled with many more whom he had never seen before. It was significant that already the one sort paid him scarcely more attention than the other. They frequently failed to recognize him, chained as he was to Nessi, and when they did it was sometimes with a startled cry and sometimes with nothing more than recognition, so that Loa knew they knew who he was. Chains and nakedness and misery were levelling them all. And
Loa's own personal reaction was not too consistent. Sometimes he was sunk in despair, but sometimes his natural curiosity and interest in the world would break through his depression and his bewilderment. Some kind of selection had gone into his breeding. Some ancestor of his must have been markedly different from his fellows to be accepted as king and god, and the qualities had not been bred out in ensuing generations, for from a mass of people of the royal blood only one received deification, and each god in turn had his choice of the women as a vehicle to continue the royal line. So that even on that first day of captivity by the river, Loa's wits were coming back to normal and beginning to exercise themselves on what he saw.

  It was clear that the river and the sky had betrayed him; the raiders had a fleet of canoes with which they could cover great distances and strike without warning. The night before they attacked the town they had undoubtedly made use of canoes to drop down the river, presumably as far as the rocks from which he was accustomed to summon his sister the moon. He saw a flotilla come back with a few slaves, but with the canoes crammed to the gunwales with food, the result of some raid on another town, he supposed. It was obvious that the problem of supplying the large mass of people encamped by the river was a serious one, and could only be solved by ceaseless raids upon the surrounding country. Moreover, this source of supply would exhaust itself in time; and when that time came, the only resource would be for the party to move on, either into some fresh area, or homewards. That was a brilliant piece of deduction on the part of Loa, uneducated as he was; but in one respect Loa was well equipped -- between childhood and the present day he had had some thorough administrative experience, for in his town when all was said and done he had been ultimately responsible for the economic working of the life of the place, down to the smallest detail. The duties had not been onerous, in the absence of any difficulties regarding food or population, but they had opened up channels of thought in his brain which were available for the passage of these new notions.