Читать книгу The Sky and the Forest - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 10

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Loa squatted in his house close to the open door. It was a dark night, and the darkness inside the house was hardly relieved at all by the glow of the fire which his women had, at his command, lighted outside the door. Uledi was dead of the sleeping sickness, and Loa had to determine who it was had ended her life. For this purpose darkness was necessary, darkness and flickering firelight. Loa had taken the bones—the half-dozen slender ribs—from their usual resting place at the base of the grotesquely carved wooden figure that stood against the far wall. He had set a rough hewn table, of dark wood and with short legs, in front of him so that the firelight flickered over it, and he had laid the bones upon it. All round him there was a hushed silence, for the women knew what he was doing. They were frightened as well as awed. In one of the huts close by, a child began to cry in the night, but the wailing was instantly stilled as the child’s mother caught her infant to her breast.

Loa looked up at the dark sky, and at the same time laid the bones in a bundle across his palm. Without looking down, he put the ends of the bones on the table and withdrew his hand so that they fell with a clatter on the wood—some woman within earshot, crouching in her house, heard that clatter and moaned softly with fear and apprehension. Still without looking down Loa put his forefinger among the bones and stirred them gently, just a little. Then at last he looked down at the pattern the bones had made. In the flickering firelight the bones were faintly visible against the dark wood. The pattern told him nothing at first, not even when he rested his forearms on his knees and his brow on his hands and peered down at them for a long time. Loa remembered Vira’s hint that Soli was Uledi’s mother’s brother’s son. Uledi had owned a knob of pure iron which hung on a string round her neck. She was the principal shareholder in an iron cooking pot with tripod legs—a miracle of workmanship and convenience. Such things might well tempt her principal heir, and yet there was no hint of Soli’s features in the pattern the bones had assumed. It reminded him more of the gable end of Huva’s house, and yet there was no conviction about the likeness. He pressed his brow against his hands unavailingly; the bones lay uncommunicative, nor could he feel any stirrings of his spirit.

Having sat for so long he raised his eyes again to the dark sky, as black as the black treetops that ringed the town so closely. He gathered the bones up into his hand again, laid them on the table with his palm flat upon them, and then spread them by a twist of his hand. He stirred them again with his finger and then slowly transferred his gaze to them. The fire was glowing red, and the white bones reflected the color. Then one of the logs in the fire fell down, and a little flame sprang up, dancing among the embers. Now the bones began to move, shifting on the table, and Loa felt his knowledge and his power surging up within him. That was a serpent undulating in the shadow, a little venomous snake with red eyes. And these were the rocks at the river’s edge, and there was the broad river. The lowering sun was reflected in red from its whole surface. There! Someone had thrown an immense stone into the river, breaking the reflection into a thousand concentric rings. First they spread, and then they contracted and were swallowed up in a dark spot in the middle. The dark spot opened. Was that a flower expanding in the center of it? A flower? A flower, perhaps, but that was Uledi herself within the opening petals—Uledi in her convulsions with the foam on her lips. She turned over on her side and reached out frantically to the full extent of her right arm. She was reaching for—what was that? What was that which evaded her grasp? Something which scuttled for concealment among the shadows over there. Was it Soli, running as he had run for the protection of the crowd before Loa’s ax? Loa groaned with the anguished effort of trying to see. Somebody looked back at him over his shoulder for a moment from the shadows; white teeth and white eyeballs. That flashing grin was like Lanu’s. It could not be Lanu, not his little son. No, it was a devil’s face, now that it showed more clearly, a devil’s face, frantic with malignant rage. The most frightful passions played over it, the way waves of combustion played over the glowing charcoal of Litti’s furnace fire. The bared teeth champed, the eyeballs filled with blood. It was utterly terrifying. Loa swayed as he squatted. The flame died abruptly in the fire, and as darkness leaped at him he was momentarily conscious of the cold chill of the sweat in which he was bathed. Then his head sank onto the table.

It was several minutes before he roused himself, cramped and almost shivering. There was a foul taste in his mouth, and his legs were weak as he stood up. The bones, when he gathered them together, were cold and lifeless to his touch. And yet he had only to close his eyes to see again that frightful face. Somebody inhuman, of supreme malignancy, had poisoned Uledi. Loa’s simple theology recognized the possibility of the existence of devils, but there was no profound lore about them. The major catastrophes of nature passed his world by; his people never knew famine, or droughts, or frost, or earthquake. There was no need in consequence to postulate the existence of evil forces in the world, working against the happiness of mankind. The little people in the forest, with their poisoned arrows and their pitfalls, were human enough; no man could attribute supernatural qualities to men and women whom he not infrequently killed and ate. And disease—sleeping sickness, malaria, typhoid, smallpox and all the other plagues that kept the population constant and stagnant—was simply not recognized as such. Loa knew of no dread Four Horsemen, and his complex language with its limited vocabulary effectively restrained him from ever venturing into theological speculations. Besides, he knew himself to be god; it was not a question of belief or conviction, but one of simple knowledge. He called his wayward sister the moon out of the river every month, and she came. The sky and the forest and the river were his brothers. Nasa his father had been a god before him, and still was a god, leading somewhere else the same life he had led here, attended by his wives, regulating when necessary the simple affairs of his people, and possibly—no one could be quite sure—eating meat rather more often than he had down here.

But there were devils in the world, as Loa vaguely knew. He had heard a story of some, a family of three devils, like men but covered with hair like monkeys, who had once come to the town, before even the time of his father Nasa, and who had torn men and women into fragments before succumbing to the rain of poisoned arrows directed at them. It was a devil something like this, judging by what he had seen among the bones, who had been responsible for the poisoning of Uledi. The little that Loa knew about devils chiefly concerned their aimless ferocity, so there was nothing surprising in the fact that one of them should have poisoned Uledi, who had never done him any harm or even set eyes on him as far as Loa knew. The matter was satisfactorily settled, then, and Loa could announce on the morrow how Uledi had come to die. If he had seen anything else among the bones—if the gable end of Huva’s house had stood out more clearly and for a longer time, if he had seen Soli’s face, or if the bones had arranged themselves in the pattern of somebody’s scar-tattooing, it would have been different. There would have been a human miscreant to denounce. The circumstances of the moment would dictate the procedure to follow after that; if the accused were not well liked, or if his (or her) motive were at all obvious, he would be instantly speared or strangled or clubbed or beheaded, but if he protested with sufficient vehemence or eloquence he might be given a further chance. There were beans that grew in the forest; Indeharu knew about them. They would be steeped in water, and the accused would have to drink the water. Usually he suffered pains and sickness, and frequently he died. If he lived, it was a proof that he had not really intended to kill his victim, but on the contrary had done it by accident or without the intention of actually causing death. The ordeal would be considered a sufficient lesson to him and the case could be dismissed with a caution.

Loa’s strength was coming back to him. His legs could carry him easily now. He walked into the darkness of his house, finding his way with the ease of a lifetime’s experience, and set the bones back in their proper place beside the wooden figure which symbolized something a little vague in Loa’s existence. The half-dozen skulls nailed to the wall—relics of bygone days and of distinguished individuals—showed up faintly white, just sufficiently to permit him to see where he stood. The elephants’ tusks, treasured mementoes of the few occasions when elephants had fallen into the town’s pitfalls, stood in the farther corner, beyond the bed. A whole precious leopardskin had been consumed to provide the leather strips that crisscrossed the bed’s framework, and another skin lay on it. No other bed like it existed in the town; it raised the occupant above the earth and the myriad insect plagues to be found there, it was cool and springy and comfortable. That was the whole furniture of the house except for the few other symbols that hung on the walls—even Loa was not quite sure what most of them implied. The dried snakeskins, the bunch of feathers, had something to do with his royal divinity. Because of that, he thought little about them, although they struck terror into mere humans.

Loa came back to the doorway of his house.

“Musini!” he called. “Bring the girl to me.”

He had a new wife whom he had only acquired that day: Pinga, daughter of Gumi. Loa heard a low wail of terror, cut short by Musini’s urgent whispering. Musini as an old woman of twenty-five had small patience for the whims of a girl of fourteen.

“I bring her, Loa,” said Musini, loudly.

Two dark figures appeared in the faint glow of the dying fire; Loa could just distinguish the girl’s slight form as Musini pushed her forward with her hand on her shoulder. The girl hung back and wailed again.

“Go on, you little fool,” said Musini brusquely, giving her a final shove.

Pinga’s timid steps brought her within Loa’s reach as he stood in the shadow of the doorway. He reached out and took her wrist, but at his touch she cried out and tried to pull away from him.

“Idiot!” said Musini’s disgusted voice from outside by the fire, but after her first startled movement Pinga stood still except for the tremblings that shook her. Loa, his hand still grasping her wrist, could feel her quivering. He displayed remarkable patience.

“Why not come to me?” he asked.

“I am frightened.”

“You are frightened of me?”

“Of you, Lord, of course. But it is not that. I am frightened of this house—of this house.”

The terrors of the god’s house presented themselves to her more violently as she thought of them, and she began to drag back from his grasp again.

“Do not be frightened,” said Loa. “There is nothing here to hurt you.”

“And it is what you have been doing, Lord. What you have been doing this short time past.”

Loa was at a loss for a moment. It was very hard for him to realize the effect of the abject terror which lay over the town when it was known that he was at work identifying a criminal; it was something he was aware of theoretically, but he had never known terror himself and was no judge in consequence of what it did to other people. And his house, the house with the skulls, and snakeskins, and the bunch of feathers, and the carved idol, was his home as he had always known it. He could have small sympathy for those of his people who would, literally, rather die than cross its awful threshold.

“That should not frighten you,” he said.

“But it does, Lord. My belly tells me I am afraid. You have been here with the dead. You have been finding out about things, and—and—I do not want to go in there.”

That thoroughly nettled Loa.

“You are a little fool, as Musini said,” he declared, testily.

It irritated him that someone should display such marked antipathy because he had been divining—divination was one of his natural functions. The girl might as well be frightened because he breathed, or because he had two eyes. It made a personal matter of it, and changed his lack of sympathy to more active annoyance; the girl sensed all this, and her teeth chattered with fear. Paralyzed, she ceased to pull away from him, and stood unresisting.

“Enough has been said,” said Loa, with decision.

He dragged her roughly over the threshold, into the greater darkness within. Her active terror renewed itself there, as she thought of the idol and the bunch of feathers close beside her, and she screamed. Loa had his hands upon her now, and the touch of her flesh was rousing in him instincts which overmastered any remaining reasonableness surviving his previous irritation.

Musini wished to extinguish the fire. It had not rained all day, and in that wooden village there was danger in leaving a fire unattended during the night. She had assembled some of the other women, and they had filled wooden pitchers with water and brought them to the fire. Pitcher after pitcher was emptied upon the embers, at first with sharp hissing and sputtering, and in the darkness the heavy steam which arose brought its wet smell to their nostrils. By the time Musini’s turn came and she emptied her pitcher the embers were sufficiently quenched for there to be almost no reaction, and there was hardly a sound save the splash of the water on the dead fire. And inside the house the screams had ceased.

Musini looked at the dark mass of the house, almost invisible visible own house. It was not the first time by any means, and by no means would it be the last, that she had brought a young new wife over to Loa’s house, most of them trembling and frightened. It was beyond her capacity to wish that she did not have to do this; the conception of human love was something she knew almost nothing about, and the idea of a personal love for Loa the god never occurred to her. She may have noticed that these events upset her and disturbed her, made her sharp-tongued and self-assertive, but even if she did she did not make all the possible deductions from the fact. It was so long since she had become the mother of Lanu her son; men had many wives when they could afford to buy them, and Loa of right had all he desired. She did not know that she wished he did not desire them.