Glade and Ivory Ch. 12

What was most disturbing to Glade was the news carried with the arrival of a group of four Forest People and a baby Knight that they'd taken into their care. They emerged one day from the forest with one of them nursing a spear wound in the chest from which she later died. Their story was that they had succeeded rather more by chance than design in finding their way back to the ancestral forest. At first they were delighted with what they found. Naturally they paid homage to the trees that had once been their saviours. However, they soon found that the vacuum left by the enslaved Forest People was now filled by another tribe who didn't venerate the tree spirits and weren't at all welcoming. In fact, rather more Forest People had found their way back to the ancestral forest than those who'd managed to flee from it. They'd been hunted down and slaughtered as if they were game by the forest's new residents. And like animals of the forest, they were devoured in cannibalistic orgies. This troubled the villagers just as much as the massacre of the Knights.

"They're nothing more than beasts!" exclaimed Orchid, the woman who was later to die. "They desecrated the trees. They stripped them of their fruit and deliberately started fires to burn them down so that they could build wooden villages in the clearings. They killed the sacred gorillas and murdered even pregnant antelope. Our home is no longer our home. It is a place of brutality and murder."

"Where did these people come from?" wondered Macaque.

"I don't know," Orchid said. "But they are not true people of the forest. They know only how to ravage and lay waste. They destroy and don't allow the spirits to recover. They pay homage to mysterious deities whose faces they carve into the trunks of living trees. They are short, stout people with flat faces and skin halfway in hue between ours and the Knights'. The men have sheaths in which they secure their penises so that they seem to have mighty pricks as long as an arm. They pierce their cheeks and ears with sharpened bone. They are devils."

Glade discovered more about the new inhabitants of her beloved forest. Until then, she believed that the only true evil in the world was that unleashed by the Knights. Now she understood that there were other evils. Perhaps the world contained more evil than good. Perhaps her new village was a rare island of tolerance and goodwill in an evil world.

"And was it?" wondered Ivory.

"No," said Glade firmly. "Most people in the world are like your tribe. You're neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Even amongst the mostly good, there can be evil. As you know, amongst those who are evil, such as the Knights, there are those like Dignity and Venerable who can be good and honourable. Perhaps there are some who are good amongst the devils that conquered my forest. But where there is most evil, it is that much harder for good to survive."

Ivory was unconvinced by Glade's plea for tolerance.

"The cannibals who invaded your forest deserve to be roasted alive on spits as they no doubt did the rightful inhabitants who returned there," she said.