The Inheritors

by William Golding

  “No!"

  She was clutching the new one so fiercely that he was whimpering. The water still dropped from her face. She shut her eyes and opened her mouth and howled again high and long, Lok shook her in rage.

  “Ha is not gone! See!”

  He ran back to the overhang and pointed to the thorn bush, the rock and the print in the soil. Ha was every- where. Lok chattered at the old woman.

  “I have a picture of Ha. I will find him. How could Ha meet another? There is no other in the world!”

  Fa began to talk eagerly. Nil was sniffing noisily and listening.

  “If there is another then Ha has gone with him. Let Lok and Fa go!”

  The old woman made a gesture that stopped her.

  “Mai is very-sick and Ha has gone." She looked at each of them in turn. "Now there is only Lok."

  “I will find him."

  “..and Lok has many words and no pictures. There is no hope in Mai. Therefore let me speak."

  She squatted down ceremoniously by the steaming bag. Lok caught her eye and the pictures went from his head. The old woman began to speak with authority as Mai would have done were he not sick.

  “Without help Mai will die. Fa must take a present to the ice women and speak for him to Oa." Fa squatted by her.

  “What other man can this be? Is one alive who was dead? Is one come back from Oa's belly as it may be my baby that died in the cave by the sea?" Nil sniffed again.

  “Let Lok go and find him." The old woman rebuked her.

  “A woman for Oa and a man for the pictures in his head. Let Lok speak."

  Lok found himself laughing foolishly. He was at the head of the procession, not capering happily at the other end with Liku. The attention of the three women beat at him. He looked down and scratched one foot with the other. He shuffled round until his back was to them.

  “Speak, Lok!"

  He tried to fix his eyes on some point in the shadows that would draw him away and enable him to forget them. Half-seeing, he glimpsed the thorn bush leant against the rock. All at once the Ha-ness of Ha was with him in the overhang. An extreme excitement filled him. He began to chatter.

  “Ha has a mark here under the eye where the stick burned him. He smells...so! He speaks. There is the little patch of hair over his big toe!” He jumped round.

  “Ha has found another. See! Ha falls from the cliff that is a picture. Then the other comes running. He cries out to Mai: 'Ha has fallen in the water!' " Fa peered closely in his face.

  “The other did not come." The old woman had her by the wrist.

  “Then Ha did not fall. Go quickly, Lok. Find Ha and the other." Fa frowned.

  “Does the other know Mai?" Lok laughed again.

  “Everyone knows Mai!"

  Fa made a quick gesture at him, bidding him be silent. She put her fingers to her teeth and tugged at them. Nil was looking at each of them in turn not understanding what they said. Fa whipped the fingers out of her mouth and pointed one in the old woman's face.

  “Here is a picture. Someone is ..other. Not one of the people. He says to Ha: 'Come! Here is more food than I can eat.' Then Ha says!” Her voice faded away. Nil began to whimper.

  “Where is Ha?" The old woman answered her.

  “He has gone with the other man." Lok seized Nil and shook her a little.

  “They have changed words or shared a picture. Ha will tell us and I will go after him." He looked round at them. "People understand each other."

  The people considered this and shook their heads in agreement.

  Liku woke up and smiled round at them. The old woman began to busy herself in the overhang. She and Fa muttered together, they compared pieces of meat, hefted bones and came back to the stomach to argue. Nil sat by it, tearful and eating with a mechanical and listless persistence. The new one crawled slowly over her shoulder. He balanced for a moment, looked at the fire and then inserted himself under her hair. Then the old woman looked secretly at Lok so that even the mixed picture of Ha and another went out of his head and he stood first on one foot then the other. Liku came to the stomach and burnt her_ fingers. The old woman went on looking and at last Nil sniffed and spoke to him.

  “Have you a picture of Ha? A true picture?"

  The old woman picked up his thorn bush and handed it to him. She was mixed fire and moonlight and Lok's feet carried him out of the overhang.

  “I have a true picture."

  Fa gave him food quickly from the stomach, food so hot that he had to juggle with it. He looked doubtfully at them and wandered to the corner. Out of the firelight everything was black and silver, black island, rocks and trees carved cleanly out of the sky and silver river with a flashing light rippling back and forth along the lip of the fall. All at once the night was very lonely and the picture of Ha would not come back into his head. He glanced at the overhang to find the picture. It was a flickering hollow in the cliff at the top of the terrace with a curving line of black at the bottom where the earth rose and hid the fire. He could see Fa and the old woman crouched together and they held a bundle of meat between them. He edged out of sight round the corner and the sound of the fall swelled to meet him. He grounded his thorn bush and squatted to eat his food. It was tender and hot and good. He no longer felt the desperate pain of hunger but only zest, so that the food could be enjoyed and not bolted. He held it close to his face and inspected the pallid surface where the moonlight lay more sleekly than on the water. He forgot the overhang and Ha. He became Lok's belly. As he sat above the thunderous fall with the dim expanses of water-riddled forest before him his face shone with grease and serene happiness. To-night was colder than last night though he made no comparisons. There was a diamond glitter in the mist of the fall that was due only to the brightness of the moon but it looked like ice. The wind had died away and the only beings that moved were the hanging ferns that were tugged by the water. He watched the island without seeing it and attended to the sweetness over his tongue, the full clucking swallow and the tightness of his skin.

  At last the meat was finished. He cleaned his face with hi? hands and his teeth with one of the points from the thorn bush. He remembered Ha again and the overhang and the old woman and stood up quickly. He began to use his nose consciously, crouching sideways and sniffing at the rock. The smells were very complex and his nose did not seem to be clever. He knew why that was and lowered himself head downward till he felt the water with his lips. He drank then cleared out his mouth. He clambered back and crouched on the worn rock. Rain had smoothed it but the close passage by the corner was worn down by the innumerable passings of men like himself. He stood for a while over the monstrous booming of the fall and attended to his nose. The scents were a pattern in space and time. Here, by his shoulder, was the freshest scent of Nil's hand on the rock. Below it was a company of smells, smells of the people as they had passed this way yesterday, smells of sweat and milk and the sour smell of Mai in his pain. Lok sorted and discarded these and settled on the last smell of Ha. Each smell was accompanied by a picture more vivid than memory, a sort of living but qualified presence, so that now Ha was alive again. He settled the picture of Ha in his head, intending to keep it there so that he would not forget.

  He was standing crouched, holding the thorn bush in one hand. Then slowly he lifted it, took it with both hands. The knuckles paled and he took a cautious step back. There was something else. It was not noticeable when all the people were considered together, but sort and eliminate them and it remained, a smell without a picture. Now that he noticed, it was heavy by the corner. Someone had stood there, his hand on the rock, leaning, peering round at the terrace and the overhang. Without thinking, Lok understood the blank amazement in Nil's face. He began to move forward along the cliff, slowly at first, then running till he was flitting across the rock- face. A confusion of pictures flickered through his head as he ran: here was Nil, bewildered, frightened, here the other, here came Ha, moving fast. Lok turned and ran back. On that platform where
he himself had so inexplicably fallen, the scent of Ha broke off as if the cliff ended.

  Lok leaned out and looked down. He could see the weed-tails waving under the brilliance of the river. He felt the sounds of mourning about to break from his throat and clapped a hand over his mouth. The weed- tails waved, the river rolled a tide of twisted silver along the dark shore of the island. There came to him a picture of Ha struggling in the water, borne by the current to- wards the sea. Lok began to track along the rock, following the scent of Ha and the other down towards the forest. He passed the bushes where Ha had found berries for Liku, withered berries, and he still lived there, caught in the bushes. The palm of his hand had pulled along the twigs, forcing the berries off them. He was alive in Lok's head, but backwards, moving through time towards their spring coming from the sea. Lok bounded down the slope between the rocks and under the trees of the forest. The moon that shone so brightly on the river was broken here by the high buds and motionless branches. The tree trunks made great bars of darkness but when he moved between them the moon dropped a net of light over him. Here was Ha and his excitement. Here he went towards the river. There, by the abandoned pile of wood was the patch where Nil had waited patiently till her feet made prints that were black now in a splash of light. Here she had followed Ha, puzzled, worried. The mingling tracks ran back up the rocks towards the cliff.

  Lok remembered Ha in the river. He began to run, keeping as near the bank as he could. He came to the open patch where the dead tree stood and ran down to the water. Bushes grew out of the water and hung over it. The branches trailing in the current made it visible by combing moon out of the blackness. Lok began to call out.

  “Ha! Where are you."

  The river did not answer. Lok called again and waited while the picture of Ha became dim and disappeared so that he understood that Ha had gone. Then there came a cry from the island. Lok shouted again and jumped up and down. But as he jumped he began to feel that Ha's voice had not called. This was a different voice; not the voice of the people. It was the voice of other. Suddenly he was filled with excitement. It was of desperate importance that he should see this man whom he smelt and heard. He ran round the clearing, aimlessly, crying out at the top of his voice. Then the smell of other came to him from the damp earth and he followed it away from the river towards the slope up to the mountain. He followed it, bent, flickering under the moon. The smell curved away from the river under the trees and came to the tumbled rocks and bushes. Here was possible danger, cats or wolves or even the great foxes, red as Lok himself, that the spring hunger made savage. But the trail of other was simple and not even crossed by an animal's scent. It kept away from the path up to the overhang, preferring for choice the beds of gullies rather than the steeper rocks at the side. The other had paused here and there, had paused unaccountably long, his feet turned back. Once where the going was smooth and steep the other had walked backwards for more steps than there were fingers in a hand. He had turned again and started to run up the gully, and his feet had kicked up earth, or rather forced it out wherever they had fallen on a patch. He had paused again, climbed the side of the gully, lain for a while at the lip. There built up in Lok's head a picture of the man, not by reasoned deduction but because in every place the scent told him do this! As the smell of cat would evoke in him a cat-stealth of avoidance and a cat- snarl ; as the sight of Mai tottering up the slope had made the people parody him, so now the scent turned Lok into the thing that had gone before him. He was beginning to know the other without understanding how it was that he knew. Lok-other crouched at the lip of the cliff and stared across the rocks of the mountain. He threw him- self forward and was running with legs and back bent. He threw himself into the shadow of a rock, snarling and waiting. He moved cautiously forward, he got down on hands and knees, crawled forward slowly and looked over the edge of the cliff into the river-filled gap.

  He was looking down at the overhang. The rock projected above it and he could not see any of the people; but from under the rock a semicircle of ruddy light danced on the terrace, diminishing outward till it was in- distinguishable from the moonlight. A little smoke was pouring up and drifting away through the gap. Lok- other began to edge down the rock from ledge to ledge. As he approached the overhang itself he went even more slowly and pressed his body flat against the rock. He pushed himself forward, leaned out and looked down. At once his eye was dazzled by a tongue of flame from the fire; he was Lok again, at home with the people, and the other was gone. Lok stayed where he was, looking blankly at the earth and stones and the sane, comfortable terrace. Fa spoke just beneath him. They were strange words and

  meant nothing to him. Fa appeared, carrying a bundle and trotted away along the terrace to the dizzy suggestion of a path that led up to the ice women. The old woman came out, looked after her, then turned back under the rock. Lok heard wood scrape, then a shower of sparks floated upwards past his face and the firelight on the terrace spread more widely and began to dance.

  Lok sat back and stood up slowly. His head was empty. He had no pictures. Along the terrace Fa had left the flat rock and earth and had started to climb. The old woman came out of the overhang, ran down to the river and came back with a double handful of water. She was so close that Lok could see the drops that fell from her fingers and the twin fires reflected in her eyes. She passed under the rock and he knew that she had not seen him. All at once Lok was frightened because she had not seen him. The old woman knew so much; yet she had not seen him. He was cut off and no longer one of the people; as though his communion with the other had changed him he was different from them and they could not see him. He had no words to formulate these thoughts but he felt his difference and invisibility as a cold wind that blew on his skin. The other had tugged at the strings that bound him to Fa and Mai and Liku and the rest of the people. The strings were not the ornament of life but its substance. If they broke, a man would die. AH at once he was hungry for someone's eyes to meet his and recognize him. He turned to run along the ledges and drop down to the overhang; but here was the scent of other again. No longer viciously a part of Lok, its strangeness and power drew him. He followed the scent along the ledges that lay above the terrace until it led to the place where the terrace petered out by the water and the way to the ice women lay above him.

  The scattered rocks of the island swept in here and broke up the current not the length of many men away. The scent went down to the water and Lok went with it. He stood, shivering slightly at the loneliness of the water and looking at the nearer rock. A picture began to form in his head of the leap that had cleared this gap to land the other on the rock, and then, leap by leap over the deadly water to the dark island. The moon was caught round the rocks and they were outlined. As he watched, one of the farther rocks began to change shape. At one side a small bump elongated then disappeared quickly. The top of the rock swelled, the hump fined off at the base and elongated again then halved its height. Then it was gone.

  Lok stood and let the pictures come and go in his head. One was a picture of a cave bear that he had once seen rear itself out of the rock and heard roar like the sea. Lok did not know much more about the bear than that because after the bear had roared the people had run for most of a day. This thing, this black changing shape, had something of the bear's slow movement in it. He screwed up his eyes and peered at the rock to see if it would change again. There was a single birch tree that overtopped the other trees on the island, and was now picked out against the moon-drenched sky. It was very thick at the base, un- duly thick, and as Lok watched, impossibly thick. The blob of darkness seemed to coagulate round the stem like a drop of blood on a stick. It lengthened, thickened again, lengthened. It moved up the birch tree with sloth- like deliberation, it hung in the air high above the island and the fall. It made no noise and at last hung motionless. Lok cried out at the top of his voice; but either the creature was deaf or the ponderous fall erased the words that he said.

  “Where is Ha?"
>
  The creature did not move. A little wind pushed through the gap and the top of the birch swayed, its arc made wide and sedate by the black weight that clung to it. The hair rose on Lok's body and some of the unease of the mountainside returned to him. He felt the need for the protection of human beings, yet memory of the old woman who had not seen him kept him from the over- hang. He stayed therefore while the lump swung down the birch tree and vanished into the anonymous shadows that made up this part of the island. Then the lump appeared again, changing shape over the farthest rock. In a panic Lok scrambled in the moonlight at the side of the mountain. Before he could see a clear picture in his head he was scrambling up the suggestion of a track where Fa had gone. He paused when he was as high above the gap-water as a tree is tall and looked down. The creature was visible for an instant as it leapt from rock to rock. Lok shivered and set himself to climb.

  This rock did not lean back; it stretched up, becoming steeper as it went and in places sheer. He came to a kind of slit in the cliff and water was falling from it to slide along and dive into the gap. This water was so cold that it bit him when a drop splashed on his face. He could smell Fa and meat on the rock and climbed into the slit. This led straight upward, with a slice of moony sky at the top. The rock was slippery with water and sought to be rid of him. The scent of Fa led him on. When he reached the place where the sky was, he found that the slit became a wide gully that appeared to lead straight into the mountain. He looked down and the river was thin in the gap and everything changed in shape. He wanted Fa more than ever and ducked into the gully. Behind him and across the gap the mountains were horns of ice that shone. He could hear Fa only a little way in front of him and cried out. She came back fast down the gully, leaping on the stones where the water clattered. Boulders grated by her feet and the noise rebounded from the cliffs so that she sounded like a whole party of people. Then she was close to him, her face convulsed with rage and fear.