The Sky And The Forest by C.S. Forester

walking at this moment with the pole diagonally across their course, with Nessi on Loa's left front. By this arrangement it was more convenient to talk, and the pole was not such a nuisance as it was if they walked side by side.
    “They are indeed different,” agreed Loa.
    Nessi had pointed to two armed men lounging by the entrance to the village; they were dark brown rather than the deep black of the spearmen, and they carried shields of plaited reeds, and short stout bows with a few arrows whose heads were wrapped in leaves -- poisoned arrows, therefore -- altogether, in colour and weapons, resembling the men of Loa's town rather than the strange barbarians who had captured them. But they were just as hostile.
    “Go away!” shouted one of them as they approached, and, when Nessi and Loa still advanced, he put an arrow on his bowstring menacingly.
    “Go away!” he repeated, levelling the arrow with every intention of drawing and loosing.
    ““We must turn aside,” said Loa.
    From where they stood they could just look up the street. Naked black women were moving about it on domestic duties, carrying wooden jars of water and so on, and they caught a glimpse of a white-robed Arab. Then Loa led Nessi along the top of the slope, high above the river. On their left hand were the old village clearings, the usual wild tangle of stumps and creepers, so dense that even a single agile man would have difficulty in picking his way through; a yoked couple could never do it. Strangulation or a broken neck would be the fate of one or both of them before they had penetrated ten yards -- there was no escape in this direction. At the far end of the clearing the rocky slope had narrowed down to a few yards, and there the forest began, with the path by which they had come. Here lounged two more men with shields and bows. There was no word in Loa's limited vocabulary for “sentries.” He had to think of them by the elaborate circumlocution of “men who wait to stop other people passing,” but at least that exactly described them.
    “Turn back,” said one of them as Loa and Nessi drew near.
    He was as ready to shoot as had been his colleague at the other end of the clearing, and the whole width of the gap, from where the clearing ended to the water's edge, was no more than fifty yards. Moreover, the spaces between the trees, Loa saw, were closed by a double row of pointed stakes, leaving only the path free. There was no way of escape this way, either. They were on the water's edge here, where the river ran, golden-brown, its otherwise smooth surface disturbed here and there by the ripples and eddies of its progress. Far out, a huge tree was being carried rapidly down, now and again turning over and round, raising fresh branches and roots towards the sky as it went. Loa saw the gaunt limbs raised in silent and unavailing appeal to the sky, and he was shaken by fresh emotion. He was as helpless as that tree-trunk.
    “May you die!” he suddenly shouted at the sentries.
    He shook his fist at them in rage. “May the bowels of your children rot! May -- “
    “Oh, let us run away,” said Nessi, for one of the sentries was coming towards them menacingly. “Come!”
    Nessi tried to run, and when the pull of the chain choked her she put her hands up to it to hold it clear of her windpipe and plunged forward, dragging Loa with her.
    “Oh, quickly!” said Nessi.
    Her panic infected Loa, and they ran back to lose themselves among the crowded couples along the water's edge, the chains of the yoke dragging at their necks when the irregularities of the ground made them diverge or converge a little.
     

CHAPTER 7
     
    It was a strange bond between them, was that yoke. It held Loa and Nessi together and yet it kept them apart. They could not even touch each other with outstretched fingertips, and yet neither of them could move a yard without not merely the consent but the co-operation of the other. They could never be out of each other's