Glade and Ivory Ch. 03

It was here that Glade saw many others of her tribe who were also shackled under the tall trees. They were sullen and weeping and huddled together. Around them was the first artificial construction Glade had ever seen. At first she thought it was a natural if peculiar feature of the forest. A row of sticks were penned around the miserable prisoners and between each stick was a lattice of cord and branches, stripped, Glade noticed with dismay, from the nearby trees. The spirits of the forest must be appalled and she was sure that they would visit their vengeance on these disrespectful intruders.

Alas, there was no incidence of divine intervention during the next few days while she was cooped in shared misery amongst the many other prisoners from her tribe. They were kept in silence that was enforced by their captors who rained brutal blows on anyone whose wails or moans was deemed too annoying.

It was during these days that Glade got a more complete view of the motives behind her capture. Every morning, just before the sun rose, the black warriors went together in a contingent led, she was shocked to realise, by one or two slaves from her own tribe who were now as shaved and bald as their captors. Like all the other slaves they had been beaten into servitude by brutality and fear. Glade recognized that their choices were stark—obedience or savage death—but she still regarded them as traitors for having collaborated with these black monsters.

At the end of the day, not long after the sun had descended, the warriors and their slaves returned with another group of brutalised, traumatised and thoroughly unhappy captives who were then pushed into the pen that was never made more spacious to accommodate the greater crush of bodies.

Only a few black warriors remained with the camp during these excursions. Their task was as much to guard the many slaves—who were despondently engaged in mundane chores—as it was to oversee their captives who, trussed as they were, could make little attempt to escape. The slaves' duties included those of shaving and feeding the prisoners which were attended to at the same time. A few slaves would enter the pen and select those captives whose hair was deemed to have grown sufficiently and who would then be unshackled from his or her fellows and taken away. After not very long, the captive would return: the body totally denuded of hair but the belly fuller.

Glade was initially so blinded by her grief for her mother and lost comrades that she didn't notice how much she was consumed by hunger. She moaned and wept with her fellows, who huddled together to ask "Why? Why? Why?" Why had they been treated so brutally? Why had the forest spirits so deserted them? What had they done to deserve such punishment? After a while, her hunger was such that she hoped and hoped that she would be one of those dragged away from the pen. She dragged her fingers over her pate, willing the blue stubble to grow long enough to now attract the slaves' attention as they periodically wandered though the cowering bodies in the pen.

When her time came Glade was dragged away by two slaves. One had skin almost as dark as the black warriors, but had thicker lips and a longer nose. The other's skin was as light brown as hers, but with a squashed nose and small ears. She wondered whether she would be ravished, but although the slaves weren't especially gentle to her they weren't nearly as gratuitously cruel as the black warriors.

The shaving was less painful than the first time. The slaves scraped sharp flints over her pate, her crotch and under her armpits. If a longer hair remained from the first depilation this was plucked out by the darker man's tapering fingers. The whole process took very little time and then she was allowed to eat a mush of cooked tubers, fruit and grasses. It was far less than she would normally eat during a day in the forest, but it was enough to hold at bay the hunger that gnawed inside her.

She also learnt from the other captives how much their story was much the same as for her clan.

"We offered the black monsters hospitality and welcome, and in return they murdered my father and one of my sisters," moaned a boy much the same age as Glade, who sat beside her and whose penis she stroked in a friendly manner although she had no intention of having sex with him. The hunger and the pain she still felt between her legs made her disinclined. In any case, she couldn't imagine that the guards who beat up anyone whose moans were too loud would tolerate any exchange of affection between the prisoners, however much custom might demand it.

The boy spoke in a dialect that suggested he came from a part of the forest far from where her people normally wandered, but at least he could be understood. This was not so for the slaves and black warriors who Glade learnt from her whispered conversations didn't understand a word she and her people spoke. This notion was yet another revelation to her. She'd never suspected that there was ever more than one language in the world and now she was surrounded by people who spoke many other languages. And each language was as incomprehensible to a speaker of another language as it was to any one of her tribe.

"There is a story I heard from one of the slaves who comes from our tribe," said a woman who was amongst the first to be captured nearly a moon ago. "Once there was one language and one tribe, but the people climbed the trees to commune with the spirits of the sky and they were punished for their presumption by becoming many different tribes speaking many different languages."

"Do you believe that?" Ivory asked, as Glade helped her to her feet after they had crouched down so long to dig for truffles in the soil.

"Of course not," laughed Glade. "Why would the spirits of the sky, who have so much of it to themselves, be in the slightest bit perturbed? People speak different languages because they live apart from each other. Each tribe has its distinct language and sometimes more than one. It's like how they dress differently from each other and worship different spirits. It's just the way it is and how it has always been."

"Since the beginning?" asked Ivory.

"If there was a beginning, yes, I'm sure they did."

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It was eventually time for Ivory and Glade to return to the village although there was much more that could be foraged from the forest. It was essential to be back before nightfall when two women in the middle of the open steppe could fall easy prey to a lion or bear.

Glade's earlier rest in the forest in the pen similarly came to an end after little more than half a moon. The black warriors had gathered enough captives and there was now little space left in the pen to accommodate them. Their huddled bodies pressed against each other: the conjoined sweat yet further worsening their distress.

It was the time in the morning when the black warriors normally gathered together to set off, whooping and laughing, on their excursions into the dark forest to inflict more misery on Glade's tribe. Today there was no such gathering. The prisoners were dragged out of the pen, shackled together by cord, and then led on a procession which was at first a blessed relief from their confinement and soon became an ordeal of many days' march through the forest.

"I believed the world was one enormous forest," Glade told Ivory as they trudged across the mammoth steppes and carried what they had foraged in their deerskin bags. "I didn't know that further to the North there are massive cliffs of ice and plains of mammoth. I didn't know that there was a world that held oceans, deserts, mountains or caves. All I knew was forest. And not one person from my tribe knew otherwise. So it came as a complete shock to us when several days later we walked out the forest."

"Is the forest so very big?"

"As big as the mammoth steppes," said Glade. "It was so big that our roving never took us to the forest edge. A new fear gripped us when we realised that the approaching break in the forest didn't herald a river or a clearing, but was in fact the very end of our world. And when we emerged, blinking and trembling, into a world where there was no tree above our heads and ahead of us was open tree-spotted savannah, we believed that we had entered another world altogether. I was not alone in wishing every day for the rest of our journey that we should return to the comfort of the forest that sheltered us from the cruel sun. But alas that was not to be."

The sunlight that shone on them was more intense than Glade thought light could ever be. She blinked and stumbled in the blinding glare that was reflected off the yellow and orange grassland. The sky above was a huge expanse of blue, not broken at all by a canopy of leaves. Ahead was nothing but a vast intimidating expanse of space. Glade was not alone in her tears and sorrow at being plunged into this terrifying ocean of openness.

"Did you ever return to the forest?" asked Ivory.

Glade sighed long and deep.

"I didn't know it then, nor could I really comprehend it, but I was never ever to return home again."