Idol

By Chris Norton

After a warm, clear morning, the weather started to go bad.

The sky was still vague, after all, not so characteristic of the dry season in the tropics - where the sun looks like a bubble of white shining so close that it can reach by hand. A dull blue was rolling over the clearing, and distant hooting of thunder blew air.

Sitting in front of his hut, Gvana watched the paler sun. It did not hurt his small, as if dim, eyes, barely separating himself from the gray-blue armor plates, which tightly covered the triangular, seemingly non-permanent head. He knew that the good months had come to an end, when his vitilineous body had fresh radiant food every day. The bad weather started. May he at least for a short time want to see the clouds of the sky from the clouds, when it flows over the clearing around midday, not covered by trees!

Gvana waved his broad, fleshy tail, as if he wanted to shake off the dust and the intrusive insects, and whatever else hindered him from absorbing the luminous food while he was still sipping from the sky.

 At the sight of the three little chocolate-brown people stopped their work, staring reverently at their patron. - Maybe he has a wish - Immediately, they returned to sealing the hut. They even went inside it (which they did rarely and with some dread) to make sure that the light did not peep through several layers of mongongo leaves woven from large leaves. There will be rains, but no drop of water dares to penetrate. Taboo!

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Royal Hawaiian Press
• Release date: Nov 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393504955

Book preview

Idol

By Chris Norton

All material contained herein is

Copyright © Chris Norton 2019 All rights reserved.

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Published in English with permission.

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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-947228-99-3

ePub: ISBN: 978-1-947228-96-2

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Written by Chris Norton

Published by Royal Hawaiian Press

Cover art by Tyrone Roshantha

Publishing Assistance: Balasubramanian Nambi

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For more works by this author, please visit:

www.royalhawaiianpress.com

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Version Number 1.00

Chapter 1

Yggdrasil

I

n the heart of the Congolese forest, in the place once admired by Stanley, time flowed as always, meticulously measured days long like nights. Huge trees grew up their age, and, banging with a thud, they gave way to the new green plants.

After a warm, clear morning, the weather started to go bad. The sky was still vague, after all, not so characteristic of the dry season in the tropics - where the sun looks like a bubble of white shining so close that it can reach by hand. A dull blue was rolling over the clearing, and distant hooting of thunder blew air.

Sitting in front of his hut, Gvana watched the paler sun. It did not hurt his small, as if dim, eyes, barely separating himself from the gray-blue armor plates, which tightly covered the triangular, seemingly non-permanent head. He knew that the good months had come to an end, when his vitiliginous body had fresh radiant food every day. The bad weather started. May he at least for a short time want to see the clouds of the sky, when it flows over the clearing around midday, not covered by trees! Gvana waved his broad, fleshy tail, as if he wanted to shake off the dust and the intrusive insects, and whatever else hindered him from absorbing the luminous food while he was still sipping from the sky.

At the sight of the three little chocolate-brown people stopped their work, staring reverently at their patron. Maybe he has a wish. Immediately, they returned to sealing the hut. They even went inside it (which they did rarely and with some dread) to make sure that the light did not peep through several layers of mongongo leaves woven from large leaves. There will be rains, but no drop of water dares to penetrate. Taboo!

Pygmies are used to the presence of a stranger from the stellar distance, who stuck in this place how deep their memory reached, the memory of their fathers and grandfathers. They did not joke (as their kinsmen from other hunting groups) that people from villages, or blacks, have idols - because they had their own idol, a living tangible, certainly more divine than those. So, they limited the range of wandering in the forest so as not to lose the vigilant relationship with the Holy Glade. Gvana needed to look after his hut and they needed his presence. Before his eyes, they were born and died for several generations.

Gvana's guardians and admirers were the only faction of the Pygmies, not surprising why the Negroes are divided into tribes. How could they not themselves be considered a different strain of nature, since their ancestor, living, eternal like this cheerful glade in the backwoods of the infinite wilderness of the world - so completely grown with their forest existence. In fact, the being grew with him. It was he who created the Pygmies - and this lass bubbling with greenery, which lends a damp refreshing, a kind mother-wild beast full of animals, mushrooms, berries, various honeybees, and pure streams - he also created them exclusively for them. He did not need it himself: he was the son of the Sun, he derived his power and glory and immortality from the brilliant sunshine.

Gvana saw him with his own eyes - these are just other hunting groups of the Pygmies, nomadic in the jungle. They came - looked at the inhuman face of the god with a bit of astonishment, a little with the fear of something extremely foreign, even giving off a peculiar fragrance - and they kept going. They did not return to see it again, did not make pilgrimages to someone else, though a pygmy idol - for which he was not a hunting meat, and his divinity professed worshiping the mother jungle, offering thanksgiving with dancing, singing and the Holy Call of molimo trumpets.

Reaching the villages on the extensive clearing, where for the tribute of meat or honey they took from their Bakpar - the black patrons carried the hand crafted products, through the forest bush beyond their home world; and though the blacks were used to myth making, Pygmies favored them for the clever joke of the people of the forest - this one story was too urgent to remind them of the tone of relations, to lighten it.

Such a way of chatter about nurtured by Pygmies living idol from Holy Clearing leaked beyond the subcontinent of trees. Getting out of the forest's wilderness, on the roads of all African migrations they were colorfully legendary - before they left the Black Land, to excite the imagination of the globetrotters, sensation hunters, and adventurers.  Gvana thought the whole Earth was a forest.

He gazed at the wall of this green orgy with the inversion of red, orange and white vividness, with the splendor of becoming - where the rapid growth, renewed, heel, and gloss of strength go better with spreading up and down, with the weaker forms being weaker or better adapted to fight for light, for moisture, for grafting roots into the soil or into the tissue of another plant.

Just after landing, this green madness of abundance was the most moving impression of a cosmic newcomer. That is why he could not have imagined that this surf of life would give away vast areas of land, leaving the steppe, desert or bare verses alone. It is true that everything under some similar figure existed in his homeland, but saturated with moderation and calmness. Here, nature has been ruled by different rules. On Cyrkoli lacked the conditions for such a debauchery of life as a tropical forest.

Right next to the hut Lagarth saw the rocks with terraces falling towards the river. However, they too got stuck in this stormy plant vegetation. They did not miss the bread trees and small-leaved myrtles, and related to peas and lupins, various species of papilionaceous grow here to record giant giants. The narrow fissures squeezed the fans of woody ferns, lots of growing perennials, and more modest herbs. Even the large stone blocks were invisible from the grapevines, rattan, and numerous lianas, which strung thick as an arm or climbed on nearby trunks, or a tangle of columns and fringes hanging from branches, mingled with aerial roots, with drooping stalks of leaves or orchid flowers.

Gvana could not imagine the fields of cultivated land, though he had heard that people had cut down the scraps of the forest somewhere further and planted edible plants or grazed tame animals. In his mind, he would try it on his clearing: one or the other, only artificially cleaned of trees.

He did not suspect the existence of oceans. Like Kant, who, having spent a long life in Königsberg, apparently never convinced himself that his city lies on the sea Lagarth, who knows no more water than rains falling in front of the hut, did not descend over Ituri for a hundred years: he was measured by the very vision of water abundance.

More-than-immediate business was keeping his sharp mind from year to year, from the decade to the decade. He had completed the preliminary chapter of his inquiries a long time ago. No one in the Pygmies would have believed that their divine idol had once been as dignified as they were used to seeing it – in front of the hut during the weather and in its interior during the rainy season. At the time Gvana was mowing everywhere, he was a tracker of things, phenomena and events. Well-prepared, he could absorb incomparably more experiences, make observations and experiments than the most ambitious terrestrial researcher.

Looking at a psychosis lying motionless in a semi-simple posture, with the lower legs curled up shorter than the front legs - it could easily be considered a slow creature like a turtle. Meanwhile, with his barrel-shaped, tightly armored trunk, with a pointed head at the front, and a thick cylindrical tail at the rear, four meters long and almost two hundred kilograms of weight, Gvana did not gallop, but he could outrun any Pygmy out of a trot. He never did it because he did not have to, and sport was completely foreign to him.

He had landed in a place that seemed typical of the entire globe one hundred years earlier. The picture was not like anything he had seen in his homeland. The visibility did not reach with a stone throw. A thick forest surrounded him from everywhere. Gvana understood that he came into contact with something that in the life of planets he knew from cosmographic deduction: a way of understanding the Universe, raised by his native culture to the heights of virtuosity. The visitor knew, and before that, that such a cluster of plants could be thick enough not to let the solar ray pass.

But what else to know and what to see. He analyzed every detail, touched the tips of tentacles with herbs, mushrooms, tree trunks and overgrown branches, smelling the surroundings with the opening of the taste tube from the hidden under the carapace of the mouth and aimed at the selected leaf, flower or fruit.

At a certain distance, the ship he had flown in was shoved into a