Glade and Ivory Ch. 02

"That's wrong!" exclaimed a scandalised Ivory. "When people are in distress, they should be treated with reverence."

"Rubbish!" Glade retorted. "People just want to hear unusual sounds. The meaning is irrelevant. It only helps them insofar as it's what they expect to hear. That's why I always ask them to give me a lock of hair. I've got no use for it but it makes the ceremony seem more important."

"Do youreallycure people when they're ill?"

"Usually yes. Not always. I know I'm doing no good when a person wants a prayer for fecundity or to ward off wolves. But it makes people feel better and it keeps me well fed."

Glade told Ivory many stories. Some were fascinating insights into foreign lands populated by strange animals such as giraffes, ibexes, hairless elephants, hippopotami and zebra. Often these were stories of hunting and quests. There were stories about people who lived by the sea and hunted dolphins. There were stories about villages made from mud in grasslands where animals roamed under a hot sun in large numbers as in the Mammoth Steppes. Some stories featured strange beings that Glade had never seen. These included one of a giant man with a single eye in the centre of the forehead, of small people with tiny butterfly-like wings, huge flying reptiles and beings that were half human and half some other animal.

"Do such beings exist?" Ivory wondered.

"I don't know. But there are so many strange things in the world that maybe they do."

Ivory was told more about Glade's childhood home. This was a subject Glade returned to often, sometimes with a glimmer of a tear in her dark brown eyes. It was as utterly alien to Ivory as the tales of flying horses or ostriches or gorillas. She had always been frightened of the forest. They were terrifying places of tall trees and howling wolves. She couldn't believe that the dense rain forests of the South were at all as paradisial as Glade made them seem.

"Does it raineveryday?" asked Ivory for whom rain was not always welcome.

"Every day," Glade assented. "But it's a warm rain and the forest soon dries. It's nothing like the gales and blizzards of the North."

"So, why if the tropical forest is so wonderful, don't you live there still?" asked Ivory.

"Because the world I once knew no longer exists. The forest is still there. Perhaps it will last forever. How can people destroy a forest armed only with stones, bones and spears? It's just not possible. Not even a single tree can be felled without the aid of fire. But the tribe that lived there, my tribe, no longer exists."

"Why is that?"

"First there was the sickness. A plague spread through the clan and killed one person in five. It killed my father and one of my sisters. It was horrific and alarming. A person would sweat and shit and vomit and then die. There was no cure. We knew of disease, of course. Who doesn't? Mostly they were contracted when our travels took us to swamp land where insects are as thick in the air as they are on the ground. But this illness was new and terrible and came not long after we met another clan that had already suffered from its ravages."

Somehow, all the clans of the Forest People were plagued by illness and there was no explanation for it. Perhaps it reflected the tree spirits' wrath at the lack of respect shown them and so it was decided that the trees should be honoured with redoubled reverence. It soon became obvious though that however many gifts were offered to the trees and however much the men masturbated on them, the plague did not abate. The Forest People were fearful that the sprits had deserted them. Encounters with other tribes were no longer occasions of delight as they were now associated with the dread of a fresh bout of contagion. These fears were compounded by the increasing realisation that such encounters had become much less frequent.

"What was the cause of the plague?" Ivory wondered.

"I don't know," admitted Glade. "I also became ill, but fortunately I recovered. Those days of suffering had been the worst days of my life so far. But much worse was yet to come."

It was a day that started as every day began. As always the clan—now less than twenty in number—awoke with the first rays of the sun and began their day of making love, foraging for food and tending the fire. Then they began to roam, as wholly randomly as always, but one that followed landmarks familiar from earlier excursions.

A cackle of excited monkeys and the squawk of startled birds might have warned them that they were not alone in the forest, but this wasn't usually much concern to a tribe who knew well how to guard themselves against leopards or wolves.

It was Tarsier, a girl in the first bloom of sexual maturity, who first saw the strange men in the forest and alerted everyone. The clan approached the shadowy figures that were marching in the gloom of the forest with some apprehension but not really fear. And strange these men most certainly were.

As they approached Glade could see that the men had much darker skin than the Forest People. Indeed their skin was almost entirely black. It was as black as the sky at night. They were well camouflaged against the dark shadows of the forest. Their strangeness wasn't confined only to their skin colour, which made Glade wonder whether these were people at all but spirits made corporeal. Their heads were totally bare of hair as so too were their groins. Their pubes were somehow the more naked for there being no hair. That the men wore no clothes didn't trouble Glade's clan. In fact, no one suspected that such a thing as clothing even existed. What was far more peculiar was the total absence of hair.

There were a few moments of uneasy silence while the Forest People attempted to make sense of the unusual sight of a disciplined line of black men standing ahead of them. Tarsier shivered as she studied their unfamiliar unsmiling faces, while Glade took the young girl's hand in hers. The line of tall men curved threateningly around the clan. Their skin glistened from the sheen of sweat that was testament of a rapid march through the forest. They carried spears that unlike those of the forest-people were tipped with well-knapped stones secured at the tip by cord.

As one of the older men, it was Flying Squirrel who took the initiative to address these strangers. He walked up to the man in the centre of the line who seemed to be the one most in authority. The notion of status was a novel concept to Glade's tribe. They had no notion that any man could ever be in any sense less than equal to his fellows.

"We welcome you and hope that we may share the bounty of the forests with our new friends," Flying Squirrel said.

There was no response from the man he addressed. He didn't move his head but his eyes followed Flying Squirrel warily. His eyes shone very brightly on a black face and that combined with his shaved eyebrows made it seem that he was constantly startled.

Flying Squirrel repeated his welcome and proffered his wide-open arms as an additional gesture of welcome. He expected, as everyone did, that the stranger and his companions would break into a grin and respond to Flying Squirrel's welcome by embracing him. Then the two bands could exchange tales and food. When the women appeared, as they surely must, hidden perhaps in the darkness of the forest canopy, there would be the orgy of sexual abandon that Glade normally associated with chance encounters in the forest. Glade already had her eyes on the black men's penises which she was sure would fit comfortably inside her. At least one man had a fully erect penis. No doubt, Glade thought, this was in the anticipation of a friendly fuck.

The man Flying Squirrel addressed began to speak. This was also very peculiar. Glade had no concept that there were people in the world who didn't speak the same language as her. Although there were Forest People who spoke with a distinct dialect, it was another thing for a language to be as wholly incomprehensible as the words this man spoke. Or were they words at all? To Glade's ears they sounded like the bark of a deer or the grunt of a boar or the snarl of a leopard. Whatever he was saying, the words he used seemed harsh and unfriendly.

Flying Squirrel didn't understand the reply any more than anyone else. He repeated his welcome word for word. He then walked right up to the man to whom he'd spoken and made to grasp his penis. This was the traditional friendly greeting amongst the Forest People.

And it was then that Glade and her clan knew for certain that this was not a friendly encounter.

For many years later, Glade rehearsed in her mind the exact sequence of events. She remembered them in slow motion, but at the time when they happened they were sudden, unannounced and unexpected. Flying Squirrel was angrily pulled off by one of the black man's companions before his hand could grasp the penis in greeting and a stone-tipped spear was plunged into his stomach. There then followed a frenzy of violent activity, much like when a deer is slaughtered, but not this time accompanied by reverential prayers to the tree spirits. Spear after spear was thrust into Flying Squirrel's bleeding body as his limbs twitched their last. And the frenzy continued well after it was obvious to the horrified Forest People that he was dead.

This was not only the first time that Glade had seen anyone being killed but the first time she had ever experienced naked hostility of any kind.