Who Killed Piet Barol?

by Richard Mason

  He laid the blankets on the bed, three deep. They were not as soft as a mattress, but they would do. He put a sheet over them, and another over that one. He plumped the pillows as vigorously as any maid at a grand hotel. The afternoon was growing languid, the light beginning to fade. He went to fetch Stacey, and on an impulse flung her over his shoulder and carried her across the clearing. It was some time since she had permitted such playful impudence, and despite herself she laughed. There was no one to see them, after all.

  He put her down in the workshop. He was standing very close to her. Their smells reached places deep within them, beyond anger. When he kissed her neck, she did not resist. He closed the workshop door. It was dark, all at once, and he lit two lamps. The dancing light brought out the enchantments of the bed, and Stacey crawled into it with a feeling approaching wonder. Piet took off his shirt. He was much more attractive than Frank Albemarle, and she was glad not to have given that gentleman any reason to hope for more than her sincere thanks.

  “The forest has made you strong,” she said.

  “It’s made me happy.”

  He took off his trousers and went to her. Her dress opened at the front and he undid the buttons slowly, kissing as he went. She had the delightful sensation that many hours stretched ahead of them and raised her hips as he slid the muslin over them.

  “When you said you had something to tell me…” She smiled, shyly. “I thought perhaps you had taken a lover while I was away.”

  “Never, my darling.”

  She hugged him tightly. “Most handsome men are rascals.”

  “Not me.”

  She put her nose in the space between his neck and his shoulder, where his smell was sweetest. It connected her with the happiest moments of her past. He felt the tension drain from her. Her body became heavy and malleable in his arms. He unloosed her brassiere and pulled it off. He ran his tongue towards her left nipple, and her skin puckered. He felt that the moment had come to ask a great favour.

  “Will you forgive me for honouring my promise to my Bantu friends? It is your money as much as mine. I should have consulted you. I’m sorry.” He ran his lips over her nipple and she gasped. He pulled away and looked deep into her eyes. “But if I break my word to them…I will not be able to think well of myself.”

  She said nothing. He moved downwards, his beard sending ripples over her stomach. He did not take her underthings off, but slid his tongue round them. When he found his object, a sensation was unleashed in Stacey that banished all thoughts of the future.

  “Say you will.” Piet was grinning mischievously. “If you do, I will show you how much better I am than Percy Shabrill, in so many ways.”

  She could not help herself. The yearning to be free of her resentment of him was powerful. She did the sums in her head. He had been foolish, certainly, and impulsive. But with the orders she already had, and the free supply of excellent wood, and the new efficiencies of Frank Albemarle, they would hardly be destitute. Quite the reverse. “Very well,” she said. “On one condition.”

  “Anything.”

  “The cheques you write them are the last you ever write. After that, all expenditure goes through me.”

  “I give you my word.”

  He pulled her drawers off.

  “Pour me a cocktail before you begin.”

  The effort it cost him to stop was very pleasing to her. “Mint and lemon?”

  “Yes please.”

  He got up, dressed and went outside.

  —

  THE LEOPARD LAY in the shade of a lime tree, conscious of the vultures. How undignified. That they should circle him, waiting for starvation to do its grisly work! He, who had once been lord of a thousand trees. He thought of the bats. They would be leaving their cave soon. The sun was already long past the midpoint of the heavens. It might not be so very hard to catch one. He had long since learned to bear the humiliation of such humble meals and glanced at the rock face across the river. The effort to climb it seemed insuperable. Even the thought of blood could not inspire him to attempt it. He thought of the many vicious battles he had won against other leopards. Too late he understood that the only fitting fate for an alpha is to die in conflict. His hips ached. Arthritis had long made leaping dangerous. His old injury sent a quiver of pain through his left hind leg. There was an anthill not far distant. He knew there were creatures, quite large creatures, who lived off ants. Could he…But no. He had a shard of dignity still, and besides the ants stung. He raised himself gingerly and padded to the stream. He drank his fill—because a stomach filled with water is better than an empty one. He washed his face in the water, then stopped, rigid.

  A creature was walking towards him, singing.

  The song Bela sang was the song all Gwadanan children learn—a song extolling the feats of the Great Founder and the people who thought for themselves. It is a song of praise and she drew courage from it, but as she came closer to the Ancestor Grove she fell silent. The light had been golden and romantic. Now it was sinking. They were on the cusp of night. She thought of the noises she had heard, and the light she had seen, and she began to doubt the wisdom of setting off alone on this mission so fraught with perils. She repented her failure to confide her plans in her grandmother-in-law, whose spells of protection were so potent.

  There was a stream running by the path, and she went to it, and prayed earnestly that the Water should carry news of her to Nosakhe. She put these wishes on a leaf, and placed it in the stream, and the current bore it quickly away, towards her home.

  She advanced. A hundred trees from the grove, she began to see evidence of heavenly violence. Trees were missing—hacked away at their stumps, used as spears, perhaps, for giants. She left the path and began to wander through the wood. Albemarle’s men had not been tidy, and Bela found all manner of strange things that have no place in a forest: tins with serrated edges decorated with pictures of smiling Strange Ones, a matchbox and several sheets of newspaper. She did not touch them, for she knew that the most innocent objects can have powerful magic. Her heart beat painfully fast.

  The grove of the Ancestor Trees is a shady place, but all Bela could see ahead was the golden light of sunset. She hid behind a bush and peered through its branches. She heard a twitching in the undergrowth and turned, terrified that the creature might have found her. But there was nothing there. She left the bush and crept forward, to another, larger one. Peering through its leaves, she could not credit her own eyes.

  The Ancestor Grove had disappeared.

  She looked for the tree where her Ancestors lived. She was not there. Nor were her sister trees. She said a prayer to her Ancestors. Where were they? She dashed across a piece of empty ground and hid behind a termite mound on the edge of the clearing. From here nothing was hidden. The earth was gashed and wounded. The hides she knew were still there—the only detail that confirmed she was in the right place. She looked for Ntsina—for anybody. The clearing was empty. She waited, in case dark creatures were resting in one of the gashes of the earth. Nothing stirred. She considered running back to the village, getting help—but this would waste too much time, and it was clear that Ntsina’s need of her was urgent.

  Nothing in Bela’s cossetted life had prepared her for the courage it required to walk onto the battlefield. As she rose to her full height and took the fifteen steps from where she hid to the grove, she crossed the threshold from youth to maturity. For some, this takes years. For others, it happens in one significant moment. Bela was one of these. She walked into the grove, as if consciously entering a nightmare. All around were signs of terrible violence. To see the limbs of the trees! Left in the clearing, untended! She picked up a branch, and caressed it. There were strange new structures dotted among the hides. They were as odd as if they came from another world, with none of the gracious curves of the Xhosa hut.

  She knew that the Ancestor Trees are descendants of the Tree of Life, born of His mating with a mortal tree. For a moment she had the wild hope th
at they had not been vanquished. Perhaps they had retreated, gone to another place in the forest, taking their roots with them. But the quantity of small branches on the ground cast doubt on that hope, as did the sap that oozed from them. They were bleeding, and ants were feasting on their carcasses.

  The loss of the trees caused her such anguish that she forgot to be terrified of the monster, or the wicked queen, or the wizard Albamaah. She jumped across a trench, and made her way into the centre of the clearing. Every nerve was sparking, and when she heard the clack of wood on wood she jumped half out of her skin.

  The Strange One was there.

  They looked at one another.

  Piet Barol did not look as Bela remembered him. He had a beard, and was pale no longer. There was a wildness about him. She could well believe that Dark Magic had taken hold of him. Where was the queen? Where were her fiends?

  “Bela,” said Piet. “Welcome.”

  But his tone did not support the greeting.

  “You’ve walked a long way,” he said.

  Something was very wrong. It took Bela a moment to identify what it was: the Strange One was speaking to her in her own tongue. There could be no clearer evidence that he was in the control of a dark witch. He smiled at her, and the baring of his teeth was terrifying.

  “Where is Ntsina?”

  “He’s not far. Would you—like to wait for him?” The Strange One moved towards her. A wide trench lay between them. His blue eyes were mesmerizing. He was focused wholly on her. Bela felt herself lulled by those eyes, by that smile. It is well known that when demons possess a human being they have ways of sending others into trances. She forced herself to look away.

  “Where are the trees?” She picked up a branch, weighted with foliage. “Stop where you are.”

  The Strange One did not stop. “Would you like a drink? You must be thirsty.”

  “Where are the trees?”

  Their eyes met, and she read fear in his. At this moment, he leapt across the trench. Bela screamed and stepped back. The earth gave way and she fell. She scrambled to her feet.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the Strange One was saying. “I am your friend.”

  Now she ran. She tore across the clearing, leaping the trenches, clinging tight to the Ancestor Tree branch. She would need this evidence to rouse the village. Piet thought quickly. He had no truck, no wagon, no means of escaping with his wife and child. No way to take the bed until Albemarle came back. Habituation had made him used to the destruction of the sacred grove. Now he saw it as Bela must see it, and its savage aspect struck him forcefully. He thought of the Chief, of the big men in the village. If they knew…

  For the first time he realized he might lose his life in this undertaking, and the lives of those he loved. “Come back!” he shouted. “Ntsina is freed from his spell. He asks you to wait for him!”

  But she could hear desperation in his voice, and it made her run faster.

  Many moons living at the top of a steep escarpment had made an athlete of Bela, whose youth had been as indolent as a Xhosa’s can be. Fear now deepened her resources. Her senses sharpened. Her eyes saw the ruts in the path, the jutting roots. Her feet leapt over them and landed surely. She became conscious of nothing but the beating of blood in her head and the need to run as fast as she could—towards the village and its reinforcements.

  Piet faced a choice between retreat and advance. He did his calculations. If Bela outpaced him, he might have eight hours before the men she summoned arrived. This was nowhere near long enough to get Stacey and Arthur out of the forest. He must make her wait for Ntsina to return. They would find some story she would believe.

  He began to run, powered by the thought of all he held dear: his wife and child, defenceless in the clearing; the life that lay ahead of them, in the world beyond. He thought of the bed. He could not abandon it.

  The sound of the chase of the hairless apes caught the curiosity of the forest. The thud of their feet cleared the snakes that lay ahead, emerging from their burrows as the sun sank. The hyenas and jackals, the leopards and vultures, stopped what they were doing and listened closely. The activation of his deepest evolutionary instincts over-rode the weakness of malnourishment in the leopard who had stolen Piet’s biltong. His ears slicked back. He lost consciousness of the pain in his gammy leg as he lowered himself to the ground, moving with the sleekness of old. The apes were getting closer.

  Piet accelerated. Bela might have greater endurance, but his legs were longer. Stride for stride he must beat her. He broke into a sprint. He was not wearing shoes, and the soles of his feet were not toughened as hers were, but adrenaline anaesthetized the pain of the rocks and sharp twigs. It did not prevent their punctures from wounding, nor the wounds from bleeding, and now the smell of the blood of a hairless ape began to twist deliciously through the air of the forest.

  Eighty trees distant, a family of hyenas were grooming one another. The youngest female had an acute sense of smell. It was she who first caught the tempting notes of blood, and at once her siblings and parents stopped their licking and lifted their noses, twitching, to the breeze.

  Piet gained on Bela. He threw into his pursuit every ounce of physical power he possessed. He had no clear idea what he would do when he reached her; only that he must detain her until Ntsina returned. But his work in the forest had made him strong, not swift. He was not gaining quickly enough, and he could not sustain this burst of speed for long. As he ran, he ransacked his memory for any detail that might help him.

  Words had always been Piet Barol’s way. He thought of the stories he had listened to at the campfire. He saw Bela’s face in the clearing, her horror at the devastation; heard her ask the unanswerable question: “Where are the trees?” Now a memory came to him, of his first morning in the grove, and what Ntsina had told him. He stopped running. He needed his breath for the loudest shout of his life. “The Tree of Life wounded is. The Ancestor Trees tending their father they are.” He bellowed it. He knew the word order wasn’t right, and panic took him deeper than before into the intricacies of the language. “They need you. They have given me the gift of your tongue to tell you.” The words ricocheted down the avenue of trees.

  Bela stopped.

  “The future of your village depends on you!”

  She turned. He was at a safe distance. Her lungs bent her double, clamouring for air.

  Piet stayed still, lest a sudden movement set her off again. “The creature has wounded the Tree of Life. Ntsina is with Him, and His children, the trees of your Ancestors.” He saw he had her attention. “They need—he needs—the Tree of Life will die without—a woman’s care.”

  She was looking at him intently, trying to discern the nature of the magic in his eyes. She knew from her own experience that wicked demons can be beaten. The Strange One had been her husband’s friend. Had Nosakhe been right, after all, to spare him?

  “Please believe me.” Piet spoke with total sincerity.

  When the female hairless ape bent low, showing him the back of her neck, the hair on the leopard’s spine stood erect. His tail twitched. He had delayed once before with these strange beasts, and lost his chance of a good meal.

  “If the Goddess speaks through you, tell me the name of my grandfather,” said Bela.

  As she spoke, her eyes trained on Piet, conscious of nothing but his eyes, the leopard leapt. His force knocked her sideways, onto the ground. He weighed barely half what he had weighed in his prime, but it was enough to throw his prey off balance. Bela’s scream made the hyenas run faster. The youngest could not resist a whine of victory. Like a benediction, the leopard brought his front paw over Bela’s face and sliced through her right eyeball. With his other paw, he cut through her skirt of eland hide. He had long since abandoned all hope that one day, just once before he died, he would know the thrill of his claws driving through ripe, living flesh. He, for whom bats had become a delicacy, who must be grateful for the cast-offs of other kills, the anuses and front hoofs,
knew again the delirium of slaughter. Bela’s buttocks were exquisitely tender. Much larger and fatter than the haunches of an impala, with none of the hairs that got stuck in his teeth. He tore them open, and the blood flowed warm and fragrant. His left paw moved to her breasts. His claws sliced through this flesh, even softer than her rump. His prey was wriggling and screaming, heightening his ecstasy.

  “Help me!! Help me, Strange One!”

  Bela was still strong. With a mighty kick she knocked the leopard away from her. “Help me!”

  Piet watched. The leopard was old and mangy. He charged him, clapping his hands. The leopard looked up. Their eyes met. The beast bared his fangs. Piet stopped. If he had a gun…or even a stick…But the only stick to hand was the branch of the Ancestor Tree Bela had been holding, and it was very close to the leopard, too close to be reached with safety. The instant became infinite. Piet’s eyes scanned the forest for a weapon. But as they did a small, insistent voice noted the severity of Bela’s wounds, the likelihood that she would die even if he risked his life to save her. And then, more faintly still, the fact that her death would dissolve a great threat to all he held dear.

  The leopard turned away from Piet and bit hard into Bela’s face. His teeth punctured her jaw and her chin and met again through her tongue.

  Piet watched as Bela turned to him, blood pouring from her right eye and her cheek, from her breasts and her buttocks. She was screaming, but she could no longer form words. Only one eye could see, and this eye connected with his, and he saw that she saw that he was standing still.