CHAPTER 5
BIKKOO, THE FRIEND OF OGO, WORKS A STRANGE MAGIC
Ogo, with the little rat-faced stranger in his arms, and a large lump of boar’s flesh slung across his back, stamped through the dark forest, this way, that way, wherever the stranger directed. He had perforce to stamp, his legs being weak with much travelling, and his load heavy. The noise made by his progress inspired him with fear, and with a kind of guilt, for it did violence both to his instinct and to his hunter’s habit. It seemed to him that the whole world of men must now be aware of his movements; from every side, in his fancy, suspicious eyes watched him. But all fears, though active, were subdued by his master-passion: he must have water. The taste of meat had sharpened his thirst; his throat was dry and burning; his head began sagging forward, with mouth open and hanging tongue. Sometimes he tottered for a step or two, and nearly fell; and then the man in his arms would gasp and clutch at him desperately. Ogo said nothing. He went on and on. Great bats zigzagged around him. He trod on darkness, a darkness that crackled or swished or squelched, a lurching billowy darkness, now up, now down. Bushes loomed suddenly in his path; roots clutched his feet; leafy boughs struck him with cold hands; and once a gigantic bird rose up screaming before him and beat its way into the sky with a sound like creaking timber. An evil spirit, a dire omen; but Ogo still went on. His thirst pressed forward, dragging the tired feet after it, the suffering mind, the burdened body. The pace became slower, and between one footfall and the next the sibilant quietude of the forest sang in his ears, and he could hear, with his mind’s eye could see, against this background of listening silence, the stealthy rustle of small things escaping his menace. Moonlight, a pale pervasive ghost, came trickling in, creating a world of misty sculpture and clear-cut shadows. The stranger, at first and for a long while silent, now chattered without ceasing in his small rusty voice. It was this way, this way. There was water, good water, and they would soon reach it and drink of it and feast together. Ogo was good. They were friends and would share the meat and drink. Ogo was good and Bikkoo was good. Very good both, and good friends. So ran the stranger’s talk: he was fast losing blood, and the grip of his fingers had weakened. At every second step Ogo felt a drop of liquid warmth spatter his own naked thigh and begin trickling down him. But he thought still of nothing but water. He did not waste himself in wondering how long the agony must continue. He was beyond hope and beyond despair. His mind was small and dim. Thirst filled him and he went dumbly on.
At last, and as it seemed abruptly, he came upon a dark river flowing through the forest with a gentle garrulousness. He stared in wonder; it was unexpected, almost incredible, being so much broader than any stream he had seen before. It was too broad for leaping, and too deep, he surmised, for wading. He laid his burden down in the lush grass of the river bank, and, stooping to the water with one hand clutching deep into the turf for support, he filled himself and slaked his fire. Everything became suddenly dark in his sight and swayed giddily about him. His eyes bulged; his body seemed ready to burst; there was thunder in his ears. He lay on his back in the grass, rolled over, writhed into a squatting posture, and vomited violently. After that he felt better and was ready for a meal. He glanced round for Bikkoo, who lay, a few strides distant, quite still and apparently sleeping. On his side Bikkoo lay, curled up, knees to chin; one arm, with open hand and wide-spread fingers, stiffly extended on the ground. He had not moved from the spot where Ogo had placed him. Ogo remembered the meat, which was still fastened across his back. He unslung it and fell to eating, and the night air soon began to seem less cold to him, though he would none the less have been glad of the shelter and the company that was now given to a strange woman, and gladder still, as the bright intentness of his eyes confessed when he thought of her, to be to that woman what Hawkon was, to be her lord and her mate, with Hawkon ousted and ashamed; but his musing mind did not dwell long on that past, which seemed so remote and unreal, for there were ten thousand things in the immediate world pressing for attention, the shadows and the silver, the trees, the grass, the river, the rustling night, the creeping presences, and the sharp eyes of the sky. These things, pouring on to his body, streaming in through ears and eyes and mouth and nostrils, made in his mind a pattern, which, changing as he stared, presently grew rich in promise of comfort; for the earth he lay on became a woman, vastly proportioned, between whose mountainous breasts he found shelter and satisfaction. He felt upon him the glow of her great gentle eyes, saw the smile of her tenderness filling the sky, until darkness wrapped him round, warm soft swaddling protective darkness, in which he lay, curled up and at peace, soothed by the rhythm of her heart, which was the heart of the world.
But something moved into the stillness and instantly the forest crowded back. Bikkoo had raised himself on one elbow and was staring at Ogo. His face was shadowed, but there was no doubt of his staring. Ogo, without moving, watched him. What next? Slowly, with pain, Bikkoo began dragging himself across the grass. Ogo stood up.
‘Huh?’
‘Very good friends,’ said Bikkoo.
Ogo grunted thoughtfully. He was rested, and but that it was still night he was satisfied. He had taken meat and drink, and there was more to take when he wanted it. The hidden purpose of his first setting out was forgotten. Now and again it had flashed into consciousness, but for the most part it did its work in secret. At the moment he had no intentions of any kind. He was aware of no desires. Had he been alone he would have stayed where he was, idle, with his larder at hand, until roused from this comfortable lethargy by some want or whim. Bikkoo’s presence prevented that. Bikkoo was a stranger and a problem. With Bikkoo he was instinctively watchful and alert: not with the alertness of hostility, for he judged the man to be helpless against him, but in a spirit of candid curiosity. Bikkoo was a stranger, different from the men Ogo knew. He looked different and was different: everything about him was odd and exciting. Instead of a wolf’s pelt he wore round his middle a broad band of plaited grasses. Now would you believe it? His eyes, too, were somehow different from those of the Koor family; his nose was sharper; his brow broader. And, most astonishing of all, he had lived among alien people under an alien law, had never been inside the Koor squat. Small wonder that Ogo stared, noting with radiant excitement and satisfaction every detail of his queerness. Bikkoo, with equal frankness, stared back. It was an exhilarating experience for both of them. They grinned at each other with wide wondering grins. The tension of the night’s terror was relieved. Ogo offered a piece of the meat, and Bikkoo received it eagerly, set his teeth into it, and laughed his appreciation. In the act of eating he was funnier and more different than ever. Ogo was delighted with him.
After eating together they became a little talkative, finding that they possessed more words in common than had at first appeared, and these words went limping along supported on the crutches of a highly expressive and intelligible sign-language. Was Bikkoo going back to his tribe? He was not. Where was Bikkoo’s tribe? It was somewhere: it was over there or over there. Was it a big tribe, and had they plenty of women? What kind of squats did they live in? Were the devils of the sky pleased with them? . . . There seemed no end to Ogo’s inquisitiveness, once the subject was started. He was ready to talk of his own people, and so would have been puzzled by Bikkoo’s reticence had he noticed it; but he did not notice it, his real interest being in Bikkoo himself, not in Bikkoo’s unseen relations. To have inferred the existence of a Bikkoo tribe at all was a powerful feat, the leap of an exceptionally active mind: to dwell long on the idea, to give it body and detail, would have carried Ogo unnaturally far from the here and now, the world of immediate wants and satisfactions, in which he was most at home. But he asked one other question. ‘Men hunting. Kill big beast. You belong to them?’ He patted the meat that lay between them on the grass. For it was, after all, not Bikkoo alone, but Bikkoo in conjunction with those earlier events, the hunt and the kill, that had suggested to Ogo the existence of a foreign tribe and set his fancy groping for a picture of its way of life. Or had these things only given shape to a nebula that had been already in his mind; and was there, among his small crowding thoughts, one thought that without his knowledge took command of the others, pushing them this way and that, persuading, cajoling, grouping and drilling them, and urging them forward, with itself borne high in their midst, till the brain should no longer be able to endure their organised pressure but must release them, one host single in aim, back into the heart whence they had come as a crazy rabble, back into the blood, the glands, the nerves, the sinews, the whole physical man, and so into action? His question about the women of Bikkoo’s tribe had been but one of many, and put without any conscious ulterior motive; nor had he listened with anxiety for the answer. As to those hunting men, Bikkoo shook his head and his face was empty of guile. He had evidently seen and heard nothing of the hunt. ‘My people bad people,’ he confided. ‘Not go back. They kill me.’ He had run away. He was outcast. Ogo, liking him, both as an amusing novelty and because they had each rendered the other a service, believed without question that the tribe, not Bikkoo himself, was to blame for his having run away, though this idea, that in any conflict between tribe and individual the tribe as a whole could be ‘bad’ and the individual ‘good,’ was the most astonishing heresy that had ever been presented to him. To Ogo, ‘good’ was what the law of Koor ordained. Sometimes it happened to be also what he himself wanted, but in general he was inclined towards being ‘bad.’ Fear of Koor and the terrible gods of Koor checked his unlawful inclinations, however, often before he became aware of them: his mind, as well as his body, was in thrall. Had it occurred to him that Bikkoo, being outcast, was perhaps taboo, a source of infinite danger, he would have been crazy with fear, would have gone through his whole small repertory of self-protective magic and exhausted himself in prayers of propitiation and in the performance of cleansing ritual. But no such doubts entered his mind. He was happy and friendly and well fed. His only conscious wish was that the night would quickly pass. In the intervals of chattering with Bikkoo he remembered the innumerable demons that infest darkness. Their shapes loomed hideous in his mind’s eye. He shuddered, recalling the face of the man he had killed. He wanted to mention this matter to his companion, wanted to halve his fears by sharing them; but he knew better than to attempt that, for to talk of demons in their own neighbourhood is to increase their malignity and power. So whenever a pang assailed him he did no more than stretch out his hand, and touch Bikkoo, and grin wistfully. And Bikkoo, seeming glad of these shy contacts, would grin back and say: ‘Very good friends, huh?’ He seemed to have quite forgotten his injured leg, but was reminded of it sharply enough when he tried to get up from the ground. Bikkoo in pain was an immensely funny sight to Ogo. When he fell moaning to the ground Ogo laughed with pleasure in the diverting sight. It was the best joke in the world. But he came to his help none the less, hoisting him up carefully, and lending him a shoulder to lean on. In this he rendered service to himself as well as to Bikkoo, for he was anxious not to be left alone and feared that this strange little man, an inscrutable creature, might take it into his head to run off by himself. After repeated trial and failure Bikkoo found himself able to walk, with Ogo’s help: and together they moved away, keeping close to the river. Ogo was excited and curious. Where was he being led? ‘Bikkoo’s boat,’ answered Bikkoo again and again: an answer that Ogo could make nothing of, for he had never heard that word before; but presently they came upon the boat itself, and very cunningly hidden it was, afloat in a tiny natural kink in the river’s serpentine body, and hidden from sight by a low drooping tree, a thick canopy, whose nether leaves, trailing the water, were tugged gently and without avail by the tide. Ogo was at some pains to see the boat, and when he saw it he did not understand. He saw a long dark shape, a log of which a substantial part had been hacked away, scooped out, by untold labour with an axe. What did it mean? He did not understand, but he was so near understanding that his eyes sparkled anew with excitement. ‘Bikkoo’s boat,’ said Bikkoo again, and abandoning the support of Ogo’s shoulder he seized an overhanging branch, swung lightly for a moment, and dropped, Ogo uttered little wondering cries, and stared at the miracle, half-afraid. Bikkoo sat in the boat; the boat still lay on the surface of the water. It was clearly magic. ‘Come,’ said Bikkoo. ‘Ogo come too. Bring meat. Very good friends.’ Ogo, clutching the meat to his breast, stared down at the man in the boat. In this little bay the river’s flux was hardly perceptible: there was only a gentle lap-lapping against the boat’s sides. The overhanging tree cast a dark shadow, in which the boat and Bikkoo made a shadow darker still; but beyond, where Ogo’s glance travelled through gaps in the boughs, flakes of moonlight lay on the lithe water. It was magic. It was wizardry. Was it a magic he could learn, or would he invite the curse of the unseen if he went further with this wizard? This way and that he looked, drawn and repelled by the adventure that offered itself. But his indecision lasted no more than an instant, and now he was in the boat, having ventured the perilous leap, and he uttered a squeal to find it move, as though alive, under the impact. Bikkoo with a big bladed stick pushing off from the bank, Ogo swayed where he stood, tumbled backwards into the bottom of the boat, and shut his eyes in terror. He felt wet leaves lingeringly stroke his face, as the boat from its dark bower moved into mid-stream.