Who Killed Piet Barol? Read online

  Piet Barol, entering the grove, experienced a sense of wonder so profound he could only lie down without a word. Observing his prostration, Ntsina felt he had done well to bring his new friend here—to a place no mlungu had ever seen. There was a time when trees of this kind had grown in their millions across Africa, but the steady march of Homo sapiens, these creatures’ consuming desires for wood and space and warfare, had destroyed them. Not these enduring members of an ancient race. These trees had withstood all the vagaries of two thousand years, and found in the villagers of Gwadana humble supplicants, who sensed the inviolability of beings so ancient, and celebrated it. The Great Founder had declared that the spirits of the Ancestors who had led him to save his cattles, and his people, resided in the distant canopies of these trees, and it was this fact, after almost an hour of silence, that Ntsina shared with Luvo, who said to Piet: “The ancestors of the villagers of Gwadana are worshipped here. It is a savage custom, but we must not blame them.”

  “These trees are the descendants of the Tree of Life, by his mating with a mortal tree,” said Ntsina. “They are half immortal. Tell him so.”

  Luvo did, with some embarrassment. Piet bowed his head.

  The Gwadanans had built wooden structures on poles, high enough above the floor not to disturb the forest elephants, and to Luvo’s joy he saw that he would not spend another night under the starry skies. He found the others’ wordlessness, and the lifting of his obligations as translator, profoundly relieving. He left them sitting in silence and swept out the largest hide, braving himself to remove the many spiders he found there. Growing on the edge of the clearing was a bush spangled with purple flowers that reminded him of the trumpets he had seen marching bands play in Cradock. He gathered some and put them in a flask, and surveyed his handiwork with pleasure. The question of what to eat arose. He longed to find something for their dinner, but did not trust himself. When the hide was ready, he saw that a hare had come to investigate their presence, and flung a rock at it, as he had seen Ntsina do, but the stone went wide and the creature leapt away.

  Neither Ntsina nor Piet experienced any hunger, and Luvo dared himself to leave the clearing, spurred by the rumbling of his belly. He found water and made porridge from the oatmeal they had brought from Cradock, and offered it to the others who smiled beatifically and shook their heads.

  And so they all went into the hide to sleep, side by side, and the rains came, and they were dry, and Luvo gave heartfelt thanks to God. And while the others snored he watched the elephants who arrived as the moon rose, and rubbed their trunks against one another, and mated, and caroused, and for the first time he felt that he was on a glorious adventure.

  —

  WHEN PIET WOKE the next morning, he had no idea where he was. He had slept so deeply that the journey to consciousness was slow. Above him was thatch, beneath him hard wood. He felt a new man, restored, refilled. He looked to his side and saw his companions, and the flowers Luvo had arranged, and the pleasant proportions of the hide. Slowly a recollection of the day before came to him, formless as a dream. When he moved he half expected his head to ache, as it did when he had over-drunk. But in fact he felt supple and strong.

  He emerged from the hide and jumped from the platform. The floor of the forest was springy and took his weight like a mattress. He saw where he was. And that some dreams of the day before had been real. In fact, in resplendent sobriety, the trees that marked an oval shape, their roots criss-crossing the ground, rising ten inches high in certain places, were even more magnificent than they had been in his hallucinations—because they alone, of all he had seen, preserved their scale. In silence he approached one. It was so tall, its proportions so elegant, that from a distance it might have looked slender. Up close, he saw that twenty men could not link arms around it. The bark curved in elegant swirls up the trunks, as though the men who first conceived Rococo pillars in Italian churches had drawn inspiration from them.

  A ravenous greed rose within him. He felt delirious at the possibilities of such a wood. An enchanted bed sprung into his head. The first piece he would make. A bed that celebrated the wonders of this land so far from the world he and Percy had known. He would make it all from a single piece of wood. With a tree this size, that would be possible. Not a single join, not a screw. A bed as magnificent as a sculpture carved from a solid marble block. He began to pace, and saw that the trunk’s diameter was twenty feet at least. It would be the longest, biggest bed in Johannesburg—how perfect for the man who was paying for it! But for Dotty he would also make it the most beautiful, and for himself.

  Over six and a half years in Cape Town, watching others give life to his designs, Piet had learned a great deal; built on the talent for drawing he had brought from Europe. His thirst for knowledge and excitement and challenge had seen him spend hundreds of hours in his workshop presided over by skilled Indian craftsmen, and he had learned something of the mysteries of wood. But he had never truly been tested.

  Now a challenge worthy of total acceptance had presented itself, and the means to make a piece of art like no other—which is the essence of a piece of art, that it should be a thing unto itself, he thought, imagining how his fame would spread like a veld fire. With Percy as his salesman, boasting of his new possessions, everyone would see his creations, and everyone would order. It was a calm knowledge, not a hope. He saw that with this wood he could lift himself forever from the ranks of toiling cabinetmakers who sold their wares to the newly affluent members of Europe’s lower middle classes, who had come to South Africa and now had houses to furnish. At last, he could make something with panache.

  With this came another certainty: that he would make an inordinate amount of money. Enough even to pay these natives for the wood, since they seemed so attached to it.

  When Ntsina appeared, he embraced him, grinning widely. He could not wait, and shouted up to Luvo. When Luvo emerged, rubbing his eyes, he put his hand on Ntsina’s shoulder and said: “What must I do to have these trees?”

  Once it was made plain to Ntsina what Piet was asking, he was not so much offended as amused. “Tell the Strange One these trees are the homes of my ancestors,” he said to Luvo. “There can be no talk of his having them.”

  The matter-of-factness in Ntsina’s tone told Piet that this was not a preamble to negotiation, but a statement of fact. He did not press the point, but neither did he doubt for an instant that he would one day possess these trees. He could, if necessary, pay for new shrines to be built to the villagers’ ancestors—shrines closer to home and more convenient for worship. He had a quick imagination and trusted in his powers of persuasion. These conjured for him now a vision of a happy native tribe, delighted with their new shrines and the money they brought with them.

  As they ate porridge for breakfast, Piet decided not to trouble Ntsina further with his questions, since Ntsina was a junior man in the village. He would meet the Chief and win him round by any means necessary.

  —

  AT THIS MOMENT, the Chief of the village of Gwadana was also sitting down to breakfast in the large thatched rondavel called the King’s Place. The title was a courtesy one, since he was no king, but there also was truth in it—for no man’s word held more sway in Gwadana. Once a year he attended the gathering of the Princes at King William’s Town, and in his youth had been a strident critic of the many accommodations they had made with the British—who flattered them and gave them the guns that turned long-standing feuds into bloodbaths, while buying railway and telegraph concessions on the cheap.

  The Chief was not related to Gwadana’s Great Founder by blood, since Nosakhe’s grandfather had outlived all his male descendants and the idea of a woman Chief did not cross his mind. He was, instead, the son of the first man to join the trek through the forest. The transfer of power, agreed before the Great Founder’s death and ratified before every human in the village and all their male cattles, had been public and transparent; its emotional legacy was murkier. The Chief had grown
up in awe of the Great Founder’s granddaughter, Nosakhe. In the days after his circumcision, as he nursed his bleeding member in a lonely forest place, spirits seething round him in the pain, Nosakhe had appeared to him in a dream and banished them. He was grateful to her, but her power also frightened him. For the one person in Gwadana who ever considered the possibility of a woman as Chief was its Chief, who knew that Nosakhe Zini had personal capacities he lacked.

  From the day of this Chief’s elevation, he had never been addressed by any other name than his title. This acted as a constant, oppressive reminder of his responsibilities. He had striven to be a good Chief, knowing that he would never be a great one, but his speeches against the English at the Council of Princes had not won him friends among the appeasers, and he lacked the courage to continue a lonely fight. In Gwadana itself it was almost possible to believe that the Strange Ones were as unreal, as far-fetched, as their idea that a carpenter had saved the world.

  He had sired three sons and assured the succession. He had four wives, a modest number, but each had her own special qualities and he was satisfied—for there are four seasons in the year, and four wives in the bedroom is an elegant sufficiency. In his forty-eighth year, his second wife, Anella, had given birth to a daughter who was blind and had no left hand.

  The omen was a terrible one. Even as he beseeched Nosakhe to explain it, he wondered whether it was she who had caused it; whether beneath her dignity there lurked a slow-seething resentment that he should occupy the place of her grandfather. Nosakhe saw this plainly, and because it was partly true she did her best to reassure him. She would never desecrate her grandfather’s memory by contravening the settlement he had made, in full possession of his faculties, at the onset of his final illness.

  Nosakhe knew at once what must be done to children who are born blind or deformed. They are to be thrown from a cliff, to be eaten by birds. Left alive, they might become vessels for the reincarnation of Za-Ha-Rrell, who first introduced ambition and violence to the world, or Atamaraka, the Queen of Evil. Nosakhe was used to stating harsh truths, for the laws of the ancients are by no means always suited to tender delivery. But the way the Chief looked at his wife, and the way Anella looked at the child she had just given birth to—a tiny thing, hideous to all but her parents—these looks were so full of love that she could not bring herself to say what must be said.

  Nosakhe was steeped in the Knowledge and had a great store of precedents. She held the silence, her face betraying nothing as she ran through them. She failed to think of any grounds on which a deformed and blind child might be saved. This failure made her anxious. Her anxiety caused her brain to cloud. This was most unlike her. She lit mphepho and breathed its smoke and sank into a deep trance, aware that every eye in the village was upon her; sensitive to the vibrations of their tension. It came to her then that those who are blind are said to have the gift of Farsight, and those who are saved from death are spared for a special purpose. From these two facts she wrought an elegant solution: a child might be saved in such circumstances if she had the gift of seeing the future.

  “She must be thrown from the cliff,” she said. “Unless she has the gift of Farsight. I will call it on her, and we must wait to see if the seed I plant ever grows.”

  Anella, sobbing in gratitude and fear, fell to the ground. It was the Chief who said: “How long must we wait, mother?” He called Nosakhe mother, even though she was but five years older than he.

  This was not Nosakhe’s decision to make. She left the King’s Place and stood under the Tree of Justice, calling for a sign. Eight gulls swooped low overhead. She read this as the verdict of the Goddess Ma and went inside.

  “The gift must manifest by her eighth year,” she said.

  “And what if she has no such gift when she is eight years old, mother?”

  “Then she must be thrown from the cliffs by the cave of Nomikhonto the first full moon of her ninth year.” There was no more Nosakhe could do than this, but in the ceremony of the planting of the seed of Farsight, she gave all that was best in her.

  —

  THEY CALLED THE BLIND, deformed child Nonikwe, after the hunchback in the ancient legends who was, despite all this, a Blessed One. It was a strange thing for a man with three strapping sons, but nevertheless the truth of it was that the Chief came to love this little girl to distraction, and so did his four wives and her strong older brothers. They called her Noni for short, and though she did not grow into a striking beauty, she grew markedly less hideous to look at, and wore her deformed arm in a sling made of embroidered linen that hid the absent hand. Her staring eyes frightened the village children, and her mother taught her to keep her eyelids closed. This did not mean that she saw nothing. Her interior world was radiant with colour, and included a map of the village and its homesteads so eerily detailed that she was able to go wherever she wished, almost as other children could.

  This facility gave her parents hope. She was a clumsy toddler, but by the age of four she could run around the King’s Place, and then around the village, almost as well as those who could see. This made them proud, and dimmed their fears that she might never manifest a gift. Noni developed a reputation for being a person who could find things. Indeed, by knowing the regular movements and eccentricities of those closest to her she was often able to locate a misplaced cattle stock. Each time she did so, word was sent to Nosakhe, who absorbed the information gravely until one day, exasperated at having her afternoon nap disturbed to be told that Noni had found her brother’s second-best spear, which all thought lost, she was obliged to remind the Chief that finding lost objects, though undoubtedly useful (she had the skill herself) was by no means the same thing as the gift of Farsight.

  “Those with Farsight speak of what will happen, before it happens,” she said. “It grows from within and cannot be taught.” And then, because she saw the anguish this caused Noni’s parents: “Do not worry. She has four more years.”

  These four years became three, and then two; and on the morning Piet Barol first glimpsed an Ancestor Tree, Noni was seven years, six months and three days old. Her Elders had coaxed all sorts of prophecies from her, in hysterical secrecy lest they turn out to be inaccurate; and they had turned out to be wrong as often as not, and in the end she had begun to cry every time anyone asked her a question about the future, and they saw that their eagerness for the gift to develop was inhibiting it.

  Noni herself did not know what her fate was to be should she pass her eighth birthday without demonstrating the gift of Farsight. She sensed the deep love of her family, and its eminence meant that she was elevated above being a figure of fun for the village children. She was a happy child, and a great cuddler. In the absence of sight, her senses of touch and hearing and smell were heightened. She had an ear for the way people spoke, was capable of isolating the distinct registers of a lie and a truth.

  She went with her elder brothers to make sacrifices to their ancestors at the full moon, and was at ease in the forest. It was on one such journey that she stopped them, some distance from the grove of the Ancestor Trees, and said: “Ntsina of the Zini clan is there, and two strangers. One of them is a Strange One.”

  —

  NTSINA HAD FONDLY IMAGINED his entry to the village in the company of a white man with the money to buy radios, and had any other person surprised him in the forest he would have been disappointed. But Kagiso the Chief’s son was the bosom friend of his boyhood, and his older brothers had initiated him into many a young man’s mystery.

  Kagiso saw Ntsina from beyond the edge of the clearing and felt a pang of joy. Noni was right. Ntsina was there. So were two strangers, one of whom was indeed a Strange One. Surely this was a glimmer of Farsight? It doubled his rapture at seeing his friend, and heightened his urgency to return and tell his parents.

  To Noni, the Strange One’s voice was a blazing colour that sighted people might call “red”—though “red” did little justice to the undulating blaze Noni saw. She hea
rd happiness in it as he said “I am sorry not to speak your language better.” The sounds he made had unfamiliar shapes, but she could understand this sentence—alone of all the sounds the Strange One made. She was used to deference, being the beloved daughter of a Chief. She stepped forward boldly and touched the Strange One, and at once the shapeless mass of colour became distinct, resolved itself to her astonishment into the contours of a man. She had been taught that Strange Ones are descended from a star, and the explanation of what a star was had led her to expect a different shape.