Who Killed Piet Barol? Page 8

  When they did return they were covered in mud, and Piet was in a terrible temper. As they reached the wagon, his rage turned to laughter. He laughed and laughed.

  “Tell our friend he was right,” he said. “We have offended his ancestors. This is no more than we deserve.”

  And he took off his sopping clothes and wrapped himself in a blanket and lay on the wagon floor, very grateful for its tarpaulin.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, they left the wagon with the villagers of Idutywa and purchased two bottles of brandy. Piet refused to leave the barter goods he had brought behind, and this compelled Luvo to inform him, regretfully, that the Gwadanans did not approve of European junk.

  When this was translated for Piet he felt rather excited than otherwise, and began to imagine the stories he would tell in the bar of the Mount Nelson Hotel. The trinkets had, indeed, been cheap, and he relinquished them. Even if they were stolen it would be no great loss. The black men watching saw a cloud pass over the white man’s face, and presumed that he was too lazy to contemplate the walk ahead. But in fact Piet was thinking of the fellows at the Mount Nelson, with whom he had sunk cocktails and played tennis, on jovial terms, for six and a half years. Which of them would not return from a European War?

  “Tell me what I need to do to get on the good side of his ancestors,” said Piet to Luvo.

  The ceremony of propitiation has three objects: to alert the spirits of the Gwadanan Ancestors to the arrival of guests in their forest, to invite them to a feast, and to ensure that they leave it in high spirits. This required a quantity of brandy to be poured into the ground at the forest’s edge. What is not poured into the ground must go into the mouths of the hosts, with the result that when Ntsina finally invited Piet and Luvo over the threshold of the forest, as was fitting for the great-great-grandson of Gwadana’s Great Founder, all three were feeling rather merry.

  “Tell him I am grateful to his ancestors for their graciousness,” said Piet.

  “The Strange One says thank you,” said Luvo to Ntsina.

  “Welcome to the forest of Gwadana,” said Ntsina.

  The green ahead was infinitely variegated. Piet’s faith in his star soared. Trinkets or no trinkets, he had never yet failed to make people like him when he sincerely tried. He did not doubt that he would succeed now, and that he had useful helpers for the undertaking. That morning, buying brandy, Luvo had taken him aside and told him that Ntsina would never steal from him again. All in all, it was rather better to have got that out of the way at the beginning, than to enter a dark wood without trusting one’s companions.

  “Shush,” said Ntsina as they passed beneath the canopy. “It is Marimba, the Goddess who leads all in singing. The trees sing with Her.”

  As Piet stepped into the cool darkness of the canopy floor, moisture pricking his skin, he stopped to listen. Above and all around them, millions upon millions of leaves rustled as warm air rose through them. The more he listened, the more he heard. He could have sworn the forest was almost silent from the road, but in it—listening to it—he heard infinity in the sound of the leaves.

  “Follow me,” said Ntsina. “And I will show you some secrets. Do not be afraid of the leopards.”

  This admonition spoiled Luvo’s equilibrium. He watched, warily, as Piet and Ntsina strode forward. The smells of the forest were intoxicatingly complex: mud and leaves and fungi and flowers and droppings and bark and pools where fishes leapt through shafts of sunshine. Piet felt drunk on them, but it was a drunkenness that left him energetic, his senses alive. They found a stream and followed it. “He says that all the little streams lead to one large stream, and that leads all the way to the village,” said Luvo, translating. Ntsina led them into a tunnel of green, lit by green light filtered through the touching leaves above. “I am going to find you a welcome,” he said.

  He left Piet and Luvo by the stream and went off. After months in Johannesburg, taking orders, Ntsina was in a mood to impress the Strange One with his own powers. It required a high degree of skill to find a nest of the stingless bees. Once one had, heroics were possible without grave risk—but he could not listen properly with the others there.

  When he was twelve trees distant, they were lost to him. He took in the clearing, focusing on precise details, for there are many clearings in a forest, and one can lose oneself forever if one does not. He closed his eyes and said a prayer of thanks to his ancestors for saving him. A wind swept over him, caressing him, and above him the leaves swelled into a deafening chorus: the friendly welcome of a voice stronger than the Universe and older than Time. He abandoned himself to it. Felt the sound make his soul tingle. He thought he might drown, felt dizzy, almost wanted to vomit. The trees got louder and louder, and then he opened his eyes, and focused on a single leaf, as his grandmother had taught him, observing what made it unique. When he had done this to four leaves, creating neural pathways that would release exact memories of this day in the deliriums of dementia sixty years later, he heard the low, consistent, unmistakable hum of the stingless bees.

  Like a panther stalking his prey, he followed the sound. His eyes examined in advance every patch of turf his feet touched, lest he disturb a sleeping snake or a colony of ants. He had known the forest since a baby, and his nervous system fired the primal powers of hearing, seeing, sensing. His grandmother had taught him that it is possible to be quite safe in a forest. But inattention is the difference between life and death. “Death, in any case,” she used to say, sitting on the stone slab outside her kitchen hut, “is the object of Life. Our only lesson is this: to learn how to die.”

  The first time she had told him that, aged six, three days after his mother had died, he had turned to Nosakhe and clutched her legs and said: “Don’t ever die, Grandmother. Promise me you will never die.” And she had been so touched, so unexpectedly moved and charmed, that she had not found the strength to answer him.

  Ntsina stalked the bees mercilessly, every nerve aflame. It is natural for a young man to take pleasure in treating his friends. Natural, too, that he feels twice the pleasure if he can also impress them. He shouted the names of his companions, and when they appeared, Luvo ill at ease and trying not to show it, he said: “Be watching.”

  Ntsina climbed a few branches, since no magician wants to be seen too close, and punched his fist through the bark of the tree. Like a volcano, the bees erupted. Piet shouted. Luvo backed away. Ntsina was covered in black bees. “Tell the Strange One I have a magic power of taming bees!” he shouted, and lifted out three honeycombs, to howls of hysteria from their owners. He dropped the combs onto Luvo, who caught them with distaste and was revolted by the stickiness of the honey on his hands.

  They ate the honeycombs on the far side of a bigger stream. Stingless bees do not like to cross water, and had declined to pursue them. Piet was truly impressed. Ntsina knew this, and swaggered. He was not used to swaggering, but something about the way the white man did it was alluring, and he enjoyed outshining Piet in an act of valour.

  Piet had never eaten honey taken from a hive. He had a gift for savouring the present. While Luvo wondered how he would get the sticky mess off his hands, and watched warily for snakes, Piet held the honeycomb in both hands (Ntsina had given him the biggest) and consciously sank his teeth into it. The resistance of the wax was irresistible, the sweetness beyond it breathtaking—rich and heady, infused with the subtle taste of the Mopani tree in which the honey had been lovingly made.

  He ate and ate and ate and ate.

  For several seconds, the forest shimmered before him. Then bam! The sugar reached his bloodstream and a surge of invincible energy soared through him. “Come on!” he cried. He seized his pack, and Luvo’s (Luvo had been struggling rather sullenly with it), and stormed away up the stream, in the direction of the Unknown.

  —

  THEY CAMPED in a glade of tall, thin trees. Only one was thick enough for furniture, and it was hollow. They had walked all day through dense forest, and
it was very pleasant to throw their packs down and rest their heads upon them. They had strayed some distance from the river, in search of a space big enough for their tent. But the prospect of a further struggle with that piece of unsatisfactory equipment was not enticing to Piet Barol. “It’s a fine night,” he said. “Yesterday’s storm cleared the air. Let’s sleep under the trees.”

  “That is a sensible idea,” said Ntsina when Luvo had translated it, rather despondently—for he did not wish to seem a coward but had begun to yearn for a dry bed. “It is foolish to sleep in a tent in a forest.”

  “Why? What if it rains?”

  “If it rains, the trees will shelter us. But if we are in a tent how can we spot the leopard or the jackal that comes snooping? This is not a pleasure garden.”

  Piet lay with his head on his pack. The sickness that comes from gorging on honey until your stomach is stretched to its limits, and then continuing to gorge, is by no means a pleasant sort of sickness. His mind spinning from the sugar, his tongue searching for more of the mysterious, infinitely smooth elixir, given texture by stray pieces of bark or the crunchy body of a dead bee, his insulin levels spiraling, he got a thundering headache and was consumed by a sudden, unconquerable exhaustion.

  “Tell Ntsina to lay out a fire,” he said.

  There was a small patch of sunlight close by, and he moved to it, and lay down with his face at its centre. He closed his eyes, unaware how many eyes were trained upon his warm, fleshy body, oozing sweat and smells of such deliciousness that insects more than a thousand trees away came to investigate and further away than that an ageing leopard, who was sleeping, twitched his nose and dreamed of an impala kill.

  The patch of sunlight faded as soon as Piet fell into a sugar-induced coma, his senses shut down. He was much closer to the hollow tree than the spot Ntsina had chosen, which was judiciously equidistant from all obstacles that might preclude a clear line of sight. Piet would not have fallen asleep so easily had he known that the occupant of the hole in the hollow tree was a five-metre-long female rock python who weighed fifteen times what he did. This python had noted with alarm the settling of three strange apes in the clearing of which she was used to being undisputed sovereign. Each noonday she lay in the sun, warming herself to the point of near expiration before returning to the tree, coiling round her eggs and incubating them. Her nostrils twitched as one of the apes came closer. He did not smell like a young one, and yet only the youngest, least-experienced creatures ever ventured near her fortress. The python’s tongue flicked. Her four thousand muscles contracted. But the creature outside fell silent, and stopped moving.

  “Go and break that big branch up. It will burn nicely,” said Ntsina. And as Luvo approached it warily, for he had never done such a thing before and did not trust his physical strength: “Check there is not a snake behind it.”

  “Stop talking about snakes.” Luvo moved towards the hollow tree, stepping over Piet’s recumbent body. The fact that the Strange One was not going to assist in setting up the camp put him in a bad mood. He was not quite careful as he stepped over Piet, and kicked his foot. It produced no response whatever. He skirted the hollow tree, deep evolutionary instincts warning him against advancing further towards a dark space in an unknown forest, and checked the rotting log Ntsina had pointed out. There did not seem to be a snake behind it. He dragged it away from the hollow tree, and the python—who had risen half a metre—lay down again, her temper disturbed. She felt that these apes, knowing so little of the hierarchies of the forest, were sure to do mischief to it—for a forest’s orders of precedence are sanctioned by Time itself, and not to be meddled with.

  What Luvo did not know was that Ntsina had given him a task he knew would be easy for him to accomplish. In fact, he was giving him the first assignment his grandmother had ever given him: breaking a rotting branch into firewood. At the age of six, it had made him feel tremendously powerful, and that imagination of power had been the first stirring towards the physical strength of his manhood. Luvo kicked the log, doubtfully, and it splintered apart with gratifying cracks. He could not but feel proud of the ease with which he had damaged something so seemingly solid. He glanced over at Ntsina, who was watching him. This time he kicked the log as hard as he could, and that was the end of it. He gathered the pieces and carried them to the middle of the clearing, dragging the jagged edges against Piet’s calves, provoking a twitch but not more.

  “I can see you are going to be useful in the forest,” said Ntsina.

  There was nothing in life that gave Luvo so much pleasure as feeling useful. They made the fire and set up camp in companionable silence. Piet had bought a great deal of biltong in Cradock—squishy, salty, hung kudu meat, dripping fat and deliciousness. It was a wonderful complement to the honey. They ate a great deal of it. “What about wild animals?” asked Luvo, as Ntsina drew the blankets tightly round them.

  “Animals do not like human beings. They have learned not to seek us out.”

  This was quite true of many of the more highly sentient animals—the forest elephants, for example, who had embarked already on a long diversion to avoid coming anywhere near the creatures who in their language were signified by a low hum, at a pitch far beyond human perception, a sound that meant danger and a callousness that offended the elephants—for elephants, though turbulent, especially the young bulls, are not callous. It was not true of the forest’s insects, who arrived in great numbers to feast on the sweet blood of Homo sapiens.

  Ntsina was oblivious to them, having been taught that he must offer these tastes of himself as a contribution to the livelihood of the forest; that to do so hardened a man, and called protection upon him from larger predators whose bite was far worse.

  Luvo hated them. Their noise drove him mad. He tried to pray, but the little whitewashed church of the Mission School seemed very far away; curiously unreal, irrelevant, in this chapel of trees.

  —

  THE LEOPARD WHOSE DREAMS had been disturbed by the far-off scent of hairy apes moved gingerly out of a cave, having eaten three bats who had chosen a dangerous perch. The fact offended his leopardly pride. He had sired eighty-two cubs, been lord of the territory of a thousand trees. To be dining on bats was a humiliation. He had not caught an impala for three winters. He had almost forgotten their taste—but not the luscious pluck as his claw sliced into plump, moist flesh.

  He sauntered down the cliff, the muscles of his haunches flowing with the elegance of old. He could not even get in on kills three days dead—the hyenas whose grandparents had dreaded him now flaunted his authority and kept him from all but the occasional anus. The anus of a wildebeest is not an appetizing recollection, and his nose twitched. As it did, he caught a different smell—the smell of a fire, but a small one, by no means a conflagration like those so often caused by the fire that came from the sky. And beyond that, an intriguing smell—of moist, fat kudu meat that has been hung in a dark place for a long time (a method of preparation dear to him, who still had the gourmand tastes of the alpha male). And near the kudu meat a baboon—but not a baboon, an ape with no hair, or very little. He turned his path in the direction of the scent and came to a river. He hesitated, because he knew what it was to cross this river. Then he sprang across the water, landing heavily—for his back left leg was lame. The belligerent scent of the male who had replaced the leopard who had replaced him as the lord of a thousand trees confronted him. He ignored it. He was mesmerized by the smell of the hairless apes, for within it was a piece of information his nose could decode with total confidence: they had no idea that he was moving towards them.

  —

  LUVO, WATCHING NTSINA’S FACE, lit by firelight, decided that he was not handsome. His nose was too big, the space between his eyes too large. Luvo had been brought up on European ideals of physical beauty. In all the art the Rankes had shown him, in all the flickering slides showing masterpieces by the great mlungus across the sea—Titian in Venice and Renoir in Paris; he knew their names,
their dates, their cities—not one face looked like Ntsina’s. And yet…The strangeness of the forest had an unexpected effect on Luvo: it made him less self-conscious. His companions were fast asleep and would not wake. No one else might possibly see him now. He felt the freedom of solitude, he who had known no worlds but that of farm and school and the Shabrill household, each of which was jammed with people and their observations and their gossiping.

  There were parts of Luvo’s nature he devoted great energies to keeping beyond the suspicion of any other living being. In this space, lit by this light, with the leaves rustling above him, he was less fearful of them. He had moved closer to the fire and freed himself of assaulting insects; its heat sharpened his thoughts. He leaned towards Ntsina’s sleeping head. Ntsina’s smell, as the young ladies of Gwadana knew, was very sweet. He had caught it when they slept side by side on the Shabrills’ concrete floor, but he had never allowed himself to luxuriate in it. Tonight he bent down and inhaled at the nape of his friend’s neck, and was met by a scent that made every part of him feel grateful to be alive. His erection was instantaneous and solid as a tree root. But what was entrancing about Ntsina’s smell was not only the muskiness of a strong man who has had a day of intense exertion, but a vulnerability, a gentleness, that made Luvo feel light-headed.

  He closed his eyes, inhaling. Felt the blood rush to his head, himself teetering on a cliff he would never jump off. He was careful not to let his nose come into contact with Ntsina’s skin, but he ranged up and down his back, and over his collarbone. Then he opened his eyes and saw a leopard on the other side of the fire, its eyes huge and dazzled.

  “Wake, brother, wake.” Luvo touched Ntsina’s shoulder. Ntsina did not stir so he scratched his neck, and when Ntsina said “What is wrong?” he said: “There is a leopard over there.”