They could see the fire too; or rather they could see the reflection of the fire and a flicker. The light made the rest of the island impenetrable dark and clouded their night sight so that they were slower. The fire was much bigger than before and thÈ lighted patch was surrounded with a fringe of new leaves that were pale green as though there was some sort of sunlight behind them. The people were making a rhythmic noise like the beat of a heart. Fa stood up in front of Lok so that she became a densely black shape.
The trees were tall at this end of the island and in the centre the bushes were spaced so that there was room to move among them. Lok followed her until they were standing with bent knees and toes flexed for flight behind one of the bushes at the very edge of the firelight. They could just see over into the patch of open ground that the people had chosen. There were too many things to see at once. To begin with, the trees had reorganized themselves. They had crouched down and woven their branches closely so that they made caverns of darkness on either side of the fire. The new people sat on the ground between Lok and the light and no two heads were the same shape. They were pulled out sideways into horns, or spired like a pine tree or were round and huge. Beyond the fire he could see the ends of the pile of logs that was waiting to be burnt and for all their weight the light seemed to make them move.
Then, incredibly, a rutting stag belled by the trunks. The noise was harsh and furious, full of pain and desire. It was the voice of the greatest of all stags and the world was not wide enough for him. Fa and Lok gripped each other and stared at the logs without a picture. The new people bent so that their shapes changed and the heads were hidden. The stag appeared. He moved springily on his two hind legs and his forelegs were stretched out side- ways. His antlered head was among the leaves of the trees, he was looking up, past the new people, past Fa and Lok, and it swayed from side to side. The stag began to turn and they saw that his tail was dead and flapped against the pale, hairless legs. He had hands.
In one of the caverns they heard the new one mew. Lok jumped up and down behind the bush.
“Liku!" Fa had him by the mouth and was holding him still. The stag stopped dancing. They heard Liku calling.
“Here I am, Lok. Here I am!"
There was a sudden clamour of the laugh-noise, dive and twist and scribble of bird-noise, all voices, shouting, a woman screaming. The fire gave a sudden hiss and white steam shot out of it while the light dulled. The new people were flitting to and fro. There was anger and fear.
“Liku."
The stag was swaying violently in the dim light. Fa was tugging at Lok and muttering at him. The people were coming with sticks, bent and straight.
“Quickly!" A man was beating savagely at the bush to the tight. Lok swung back his arm.
“The food is for Liku!"
He hurled it into the clearing. The lump fell by the stag's feet. Lok had just time to see the stag bend towards it in the steam and then he was stumbling while Fa pulled him. The clamour of the new people was sinking into a purposeful series of shouts, questions and answers, orders, burning branches were racing through the clearing, so that fans of spring foliage leapt into being and disappeared. Lok put down his head and thrust against the soft earth with his feet. There was a hiss as of suddenly indrawn breath close over his head. Fa and Lok swerved among the bushes and slowed. They began to perform their miracle of sensitive ingenuity with the brambles and branches; but this time Lok caught desperation from Fa and her hard breathing. They hurled themselves along and the torches flared under the trees behind them. They heard the new people calling to each other and making a great noise in the undergrowth. Then a single voice cried out loudly. The crashing stopped. Fa scrabbled at the wet rocks.
“Quickly! Quickly!"
He could just hear her for all the thunder of the glittering skeins of water. Obediently he followed her, astonished at her speed, but with no picture in his head unless it was the meaningless one of the stag dancing.
Fa threw herself over the lip of the cliff and lay down on her shadow. Lok waited. She gasped at him.
“Where are they?"
Lok peered down at the island but she interrupted him.
“Are they climbing?"
Half-way down the cliff a root was swaying slowly from the tug that she had given it but the rest of the cliff was motionless, looking at the moon.
“No!"
They were silent for a time. Lok noticed the noise of the water again and as he did so the noise became some- thing so loud that he could not speak through it. He wondered idly whether they had shared pictures or spoken with their mouths and then he examined the feeling of heaviness in his head and body. There was no doubt at all. The feeling was connected with Liku. He yawned, wiped his eye-hollows with his fingers and licked his lips. Fa got to her feet. ó
“Come!"
They trotted between the birches over the island, jumped from stone to stone. The log had gathered others so that they lay close together, more than the fingers of a hand they were, and tangled with all the drifting stuff of this side of the river. The water was spurting between them and flowering over. It was as broad a trail as the one through the forest. They reached the terrace easily and stood without speech.
There was a scuffling noise coming from the overhang. They ran quickly and the grey hyenas fled away. The moon shone clear into the overhang so that even the recesses were lighted and the only dark thing was the hole where Mai had been buried. They knelt and swept back the dirt, the ashes and bones over the part of his body they could see. Now the earth did not rise in a hump but was level with the topmost hearth again. Still without speech they rolled a stone and made Mai safe. Fa muttered.
“How will they feed the new one without milk?"
Then they were holding on to each other, breast against breast. The rocks round them were like any other rocks; the firelight had died out of them. The two pressed them- selves against each other, they clung, searching for a centre, they fell, still clinging face to face. The fire of their bodies lit, and they strained towards it.
SEVEN
Fa pushed him to one side. They stood up together and looked round the overhang. The bleak air of first dawn poured round them. Fa went into a recess and came back with an almost meatless bone and some scraps that the hyenas had not been able to reach. The people were red again, copper red and sandy for the blue and grey of the night had left them. They said nothing but picked away and shared the scraps with a passion of pity for each other. Presently they wiped their hands on their thighs and went down to the water and drank. Then still without speaking or sharing a picture they turned to the left and went to the corner round which lay the cliff. Fa stopped.
“I do not want to see."
Together they turned and looked at the empty overhang.
“I will take fire when it falls from the sky or wakes among the heather."
Lok considered the picture of fire. Otherwise there was an emptiness in his head and only the tidal feeling, deep and sure, was noticeable inside him. He began to walk towards the logs at the other end of the terrace. Fa caught him by the wrist.
“We shall not go again on the island."
Lok faced her, his hands up.
“There must be food found for Liku. So that she will be strong when she comes back."
Fa looked deeply at him and there were things in her face that he could not understand. He took a step sideways shrugged, gesticulated. He stopped and waited anxiously.
“No!"
She held him by the wrist and lugged him. He resisted, talking all the time. He did not know what he said. She stopped pulling and faced him again.
“You will be killed."
There was a pause. Lok looked at her, then at the island. He scratched his left cheek. Fa came close.
“I shall have children that do not die in the cave by the sea. There will be a fire."
“Liku will have children when she is a woman." She let go of his wrist again.
“Lis
ten. Do not speak. The new people took the log and Mai died. Ha was on the cliff and a new man was on the cliff. Ha died. The new people came to the over- hang. Nil and the old woman died."
The light was much stronger behind her. There was a fleck of red in the sky over her head. She grew in his sight. She was the woman. Lok shook his head at her, humbly. Her words had made the feeling rise.
“When the new people bring Liku back I shall be glad."
Fa made a high, angry sound, she took a step to the water and came back again. She grabbed him by his shoulders.
“How can they give the new one milk? Does a stag give milk? And what if they do not bring back Liku?"
He answered humbly out of an empty head.
“I do not see this picture."
She left him in her anger, turned away and stood with a hand on the corner where the cliff began. He could see how she was bristling and how the muscles of her shoulder twitched. She was bent, leaning forward, right hand on right knee. He heard her mutter at him with her back still turned.
“You have fewer pictures than the new one."
Lok put the heels of his hands in his eyes and pressed so that spokes of light flashed in them like the river.
“There has not been a night."
That was real. Where the night should have been was a greyness. Not only his ears and his nose had been awake after they had lain together, but with Lok inside them, watching the feeling rise and ebb and rise. There was stuffed inside the bones of his head the white flock of the autumn creepers, their seeds were in his nose, making him yawn and sneeze. He put his hands apart and blinked at where Fa had been. Now she was backed on this side of the rock and peering round it at the river. Her hand beckoned.
The log was out again. It was near the island and the same two bone faces were sitting at either end. They were digging the water and the log was sidling across the river. When it was near the bank and the swarming bushes it straightened into the current and the men stopped digging. They were looking closely at the clear patch by the water where the dead tree was. Lok could see how one turned and spoke to the other. Fa touched his hand.
“They are looking for something."
The log drifted gently downstream with the current and the sun was rising. The farther reaches of the river burst into flame, so that for a time the forest on either side was dark by contrast. The indefinable attraction of the new people pushed the flock out of Lok's head. He forgot to blink.
The log was smaller, drifting down away from the fall. When it turned askew, the man in the back would dig again and the log would point straight at Lok's eyes. Always, the two men looked sideways at the bank. Fa muttered:
“There is another log."
The bushes by the island shore were shaking busily. They parted for a moment and now that he knew where to look Lok could see the end of another log hidden close in. A man thrust his head and shoulders through the green leaves and waved an arm angrily. The two men in the log began to dig quickly until it had moved right up to where the man waved opposite the dead tree. Now they were no longer looking at the dead tree but at the man, and nodding their heads at him. The log brought them to him and nosed under the bushes.
Curiosity overcame Lok; he began to run towards the new way on to the island so excitedly that Fa shared his picture. She got him again, and grabbed him.
“No! No!" Lok jabbered. Fa shouted at him.
“I say 'No!' " She pointed at the overhang.
“What did you say? Fa has many pictures !” At last he was silent and waiting for her. She spoke solemnly.
“We shall go down into the forest. For food. We shall watch them across the river."
They ran down the slope away from the river, keeping the rocks between them and the new people. In the skirts of the forest there was food; bulbs that just showed a point of green, grubs and shoots, fungi, the tender inside of some kinds of bark. The meat of the doe was still in them and they were not hungry as the people counted hunger. They could eat, where there was food; but without it they could go for to-day easily and for to-morrow if they had to. For this reason there was no urgency in their searching so that presently the enchantment of the new people drew them again to the bushes at the edge of the water. They stood, toes gripped in the mire, and listened for the new people through the noise of the fall. An early fly buzzed at Lok's nose. The air was warm and the sun softly bright so that he yawned again. Then he heard the new people making their bird-noises of conversation and a number of other unexplained sounds, bumps and creakings. Fa sneaked to the edge of the clearing by the dead tree and lay on 4he earth.
There was nothing to be seen across the water, yet the bumps and creaks continued.
“Fa. Climb the dead trunk, to see."
She turned her face and looked at him doubtfully. All at once he realized that she was going to say no, was going to insist that they went away from the new people and put a great gap of time between them and Liku; and this became a knowledge that was unbearable. He sneaked quickly forward on all fours and ran up the concealed side of the dead tree. In a moment he was burrowing through the shock-head among the dusty, dark, sour-smelling ivy leaves. He had hardly lifted his last limb into the hollow top before Fa's head broke through behind him.
The top of the tree was empty like a great acorn cup. It was white, soft wood that gave and moulded to their weight and was full of food. The ivy spread upwards and downwards in a dark tangle so that they might have been sitting in a bush on the ground. The other trees over- topped them but there was open sky towards the river and the green drifts of the island. Parting the leaves cautiously as if he were looking for eggs, Lok found that he could make a hole no bigger than the eye-part of his face; and though the edges of the hole moved a little he could see the river and the other banks, all the brighter for the dark green leaves round the hole, as though he had cupped his hands and was looking through them. On his left Fa was making herself a lookout, and the edge of the cup even gave her something to rest her elbows on. The heavy feeling sank in Lok as it always did when he had the new people to watch. He sagged luxuriously. Then suddenly they forgot everything else and were very still.
The log was sliding out of the bushes by the island. The two men were digging carefully and the log was turning. It did not point at Lok and Fa but upstream, though it began to move across river towards them. There were many new things in the hollow of the log; shapes like rocks and bulging skins. There were all kinds of stick, from long poles without leaves or branches to sprays of withering green. The log came close.
At last they saw the new people face to face and in sunlight. They were incomprehensibly strange. Their hair was black and grew in the most unexpected ways. The bone-face in the front of the log had a pine-tree of hair that stood straight up so that his head, already too long, was drawn out as though something were pulling it up- ward without mercy. The other bone-face had hair in a huge bush that stood out on all sides like the ivy on the dead tree.
There was hair growing thickly over their bodies about the waist, the belly and the upper part of the leg so that this part of them was thicker than the rest. Yet Lok did not look immediately at their bodies; he was far too absorbed in the stuff round their eyes. A piece of white bone was placed under them, fitting close, and where the broad nostrils should have shown were narrow slits and between them the bone was drawn out to a point. Under that was another slit over the mouth, and their voices came fluttering through it. There was a little dark hair jutting out under the slit. The eyes of the face that peered through all this bone were dark and busy. There were eyebrows above them, thinner than the mouth or the nostrils, black, curving out and up so that the men looked menacing and wasp-like. Lines of teeth and seashells hung round their necks, over grey, furry skin. Over the eyebrows the bone bulged up and swept back to be hidden under the hair. As the log came closer, Lok could see that the colour was not really bone white and shining but duller. It was more the colour of the big fungi, the ears th
at the people ate, and something like them in texture. Their legs and arms were stick-thin so that the joints were like the nodes in a twig.
Now that Lok was looking almost into the log he saw that it was much broader than before; or rather that it
was the two logs moving side by side. There were more bundles and curious shapes in this log and a man lay among them on his side. His body and bone was like the others but his hair grew on his head in a mass of sharp points that glistened and looked hard as the points on a chestnut case. He was doing something to one of the sharp twigs and his curved stick lay beside him.
The logs sidled right into the bank. The man at the back, Lok thought of him as Pine-tree... spoke softly. Bush laid down his wooden leaf and caught hold of the grass of the bank. Chestnut-head took his curved stick and twig and stole across the logs until he was crouched on the earth itself. Lok and Fa were almost directly above him. They could smell his individual scent, a seasmell, meat-smell, fearsome and exciting. He was so close that any moment he might wind them for all he was below them and Lok inhibited his own scent in sudden fear, though he did not know what he did. He reduced his breathing till it was the merest surface and the very leaves were more lively.
The Inheritors Page 11