The Sky And The Forest Page 9

  Musini! Loa had hardly thought about her since the raiding of the village. He knew she was not a prisoner, and he had no reason to believe she was dead. He knew, or he almost knew, in his half-delirious state, that Lanu his son was free, and the obvious assumption was that Musini was free too. Musini had had some narrow escapes. She would have been sent to serve his ancestors if it had not been for the opportune arrival of the woman Delli, to whose tales of the raiders they should have paid more attention, instead of promptly sacrificing her as they did. Musini; his first wife, the mother of his son, aging now, yet full of fire and personality surprising in a woman well past twenty years of age. Perhaps he never would have sent her to serve his ancestors, even if Delli had not come, even if she had always continued her disturbing behaviour. Nessi was saying something to him as she plodded on in front of him, but he paid little attention, so preoccupied was he with his thoughts of Musini. There was Musini over there, just visible through the trees, and a boy by her side -- Lanu. It was all so matter-of-course that for a moment Loa did not realize the startling implications of what he saw. Musini stepped out from behind a tree and waved an arm. Musini without a doubt -- Loa stared at her so hard that he did not pay attention to his footing; he stumbled over a root and with difficulty saved himself from falling.

  “I am choked,” said Nessi, peevishly, when she recovered from the jerk of the chain against her throat. “Cannot you walk with more care?”

  It sounded as she were addressing her husband rather than the god Loa, but Loa had no ears for her. Already the few steps he had taken had changed all the lines of visibility between the trees of the forest; he was already doubtful about just where he had seen Musini, and he could see nothing now either of her or of Lanu. Loa's heart, working hard because of the heat and the exertions of his body, was now pumping harder than ever, seeming to fill his breast so that he could not inflate his lungs. He stumbled again.

  “What is the matter with you?” snapped Nessi. “That is the second time you have choked me.”

  The complaining voice pierced through Loa's preoccupation.

  “May hairy devils pull off your arms and legs,” he said.

  The god Loa had never used or contemplated using curses; in the old days he had ridden as serenely above such earthly things as his sister the moon had ridden serenely above the clouds -- the expression he had just used he had overheard at some time or other and stored in his subconscious memory, and now it had come from his lips like the words used by a gently nurtured woman of our day under an anaesthetic.

  “And may red ants burrow into your belly,” retorted Nessi.

  Presumably all the way along the line of slaves there were violent quarrels--no couple could spend days tied at opposite ends of a stick without quarrelling, unless they were utterly sunk in apathy. Loa did not continue this unseemly exchange of ill wishes; even if he had known any more curses he was too busy trying to look over his right shoulder for Lanu and Musini again. But the path he was following wound about with nothing to call attention to its windings, and the fact that he had first seen them over his right shoulder did not mean at all that they were in that relative direction now.

  “Oh, walk more steadily,” nagged Nessi. “I am so weary. The pole chafes my shoulders.”

  Loa paid no attention, and the exasperated Nessi reached up with her hands and took hold of the ends of the fork and gave them a maddening tug, so that the chain at Loa's end rasped violently against the nape of his neck.

  “Do not do that!” he said, roused once more to awareness of his surroundings,

  “I will do it! I want to do it!” said Nessi. “You make my way hard for me, and I shall make yours hard for you.”

  And with that she tugged at the yoke again, exasperating

  Loa so that he in his turn took hold of the pole and shook it, battering Nessi's fork against the back of her head.

  “You hurt me!” shrieked Nessi, but that was just what Loa wanted to do. He thought darkly for a moment of twisting the pole and strangling Nessi as she stood, until he realized that he could not do that without strangling himself. So he made his neck muscles rigid and contented himself with poking Nessi in the back of the neck with the fork. A frightful pain across his shoulders made him stop; the Arab had come up beside them and was cutting at them with his whip.

  “Not that!” snarled the Arab.

  He gave Loa two more cuts for good measure and then transferred his attentions to Nessi. She screamed as the kurbash bit into her thighs -- her back was screened by the tusk slung from the pole. Loa heard the screams and saw the angry welts appear on her thighs, with intense satisfaction.

  “Now go on in peace,” said the Arab, with a stupid misuse of a forest idiom, but his meaning was clear enough. They went on, with Nessi weeping and wailing over her sorrows, and Loa more and more irritated by her.

  In the late afternoon the march came to an end, in the main street of a deserted village. Here there was none of the ample space which had been available at the original encampment. Instead the slaves were herded into the street and packed tight, filling the whole area between the two rows of houses. Loa found himself jostled and surrounded by strange men and women, some of the latter with footsore children running at their sides. A babel of sound went up around him, accompanied by the stench of sweating bodies.

  “Is this their town?” asked Nessi, bewildered, through the din.

  “I do not know,” said Loa, but Nessi had not waited for a reply. She cast herself upon the ground completely exhausted, and so did the other slaves -- poles, arms, legs, and bundles all jumbled together.

  An hour later, with evening at hand, there was an eddy in the crowd. Two slaves were walking through the press with a feeding trough on their shoulders; they were escorted by a group of Arabs and mercenaries who slashed right and left with sticks and whips to restrain the eager mob. A double handful of cooked plantain each; it called for many troughs to supply even that moderate ration, but they were correspondingly quickly emptied, and brought round again filled with water. The slaves drank from them like animals; and then, hunger and thirst to some extent allayed, they could lie down again, in their own and in each others' filth, to sleep, higgledy-piggledy, like animals, with heads pillowed on bosoms or thighs; and when it rained, as it did twice during the night, trying (as well as poles and chains and loads permitted) to huddle together closer. Around them, during the hours of darkness, a few of the raiders kept guard.

  CHAPTER 8

  It was still dark when the slaves on the fringe of the crowd were roused next day; it was hardly after dawn when it was Nessi's and Loa's turn to move off after them. There was a running stream at which they could kneel to drink, at the end of the village, and there were troughs of food prepared from which they could each take their double handful to eat as they walked along -- Loa had to rest his hands on the pole so as to eat out of them. The same endless march, the same heat and weariness and misery. The torment of flies and mosquitoes; the hurried mouthfuls of water snatched as they forded the streams. The whip of the Arabs, the sticks of their mercenaries. The same march, the same torments, the same whips, day following day, until the day of deliverance. No slave counted the days.

  The man beside whom Loa had slept had entertained him for a brief while with an account of something he had seen the previous day -- he talked freely to Loa, whom he was addressing in ignorance of his status. (It might not have been different had he known.) During the march this man had seen a forest antelope, bewildered at the passage of so many men and women, dashing between the trees and then coming to a startled full stop. An Arab was close beside Loa's informant. He had put his gun to his shoulder -- the man's pantomime was vivid -- and then boom! The antelope had fallen down dead. Dead, quite dead, with the blood running from his side and his mouth. Dead, killed at a distance no arrow could be impelled over, killed by the bang and the puff of strange-smelling smoke. The memory of the story gave Loa something to think about as he plodded along beh
ind Nessi. It was a strange power these grey-faced men had. With the bow and the poisoned arrow Loa had been familiar all his life, of course. And he had killed men with an unseen force -- more than once he had told them that he was at enmity with them, and that had been enough to make those men waste away and die. But forest antelopes, like parrots and monkeys and red ants, were not subject to his power. Even a man took long days to die. He did not fall bleeding as that forest antelope had done, according to the narrator -- as the men had done that Delli had told about. Loa knew the limitations on his powers; these men could do something he could not do. It was a disturbing thought; if they were only men, then what was he?

  Here, at a point where the trail made a sharp bend, was an Arab, standing with the stream of slaves flowing past him as he supervised the march with his kurbash flicking in his hand. At sight of him Loa took care to pick his steps carefully, so as not to stumble and invite a blow -- he had learned much during these dreadful days. And as he approached he heard the high-pitched twang of a bowstring. He did not see the flight of the missile, but he was instantly conscious of when it reached its mark. He saw it strike, hitting the Arab just below the jaw, where face and neck meet; Loa was within a few yards of the Arab when it happened. The Arab did not stagger; he put up his hand with surprise and took hold of the barbed arrow as it hung down on his shoulder from his face. Some red blood -- only a few drops -- dripped from the wound. The Arab swung round to see who had attacked him, reaching at the same time for the gun which hung by a strap over his shoulder. But he was unsteady on his feet now; his knees bent under him, and although he braced himself up for a moment they gave way again, and he fell on his face moving only feebly as Nessi and Loa reached him. Arrow poison works fast, when injected into the trunk of the body rather than in a limb, and fastest of all in the blood vessels of the neck. Two people came leaping across the glade to where Nessi and Loa stood by the body. One was little Lanu, his left hand grasping his three-foot bow and an arrow; his right hand held yet another arrow with the bowstring in the notch, ready to draw and loose. And with him ran Musini, naked, with her long breasts swinging in front of her; in her hand she bore Lanu's ceremonial battle-axe, the little axe which Litti the smith had made for him at Loa's special request. The bright edge gleamed in the twilight of the forest. Musini’s eyes met Loa's. She momentarily clapped her hand to her forehead in salutation, but she allowed no ceremonial to delay her in the course of action she had planned. She hacked with her axe at the creepers which suspended the load from the pole; they were tough and did not part easily, but Musini slashed away with all the considerable strength of her skinny arms until the elephant's tusk fell to the ground, relieving Loa and Nessi of its considerable weight. No word had yet been spoken. Musini now turned the edge of the axe against the pole which connected the two prisoners. Twice she hacked at it, but it was of a tough elastic wood with a hard surface; it bent under her blows and the axe rebounded from it having made hardly a dent.

  “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.