17. MURDER MOST FOUL!

The evil orange man isn't quite dead yet...

It was still early summer when Owongo and the rest of the tribes-people discovered that nothing is ever straight-forward in the affairs of man. It wasn’t then, it isn’t now and it probably never will be.

Several weeks had passed. Owongo Junior was contriving to sleep just about all of most nights, Mirumda was in bloom and the last that had been heard of Fart-fart was the simple fact that he had been pierced through one shoulder by a crude spear, which had stuck far enough into the tree to make his life painfully immobile and where optimistic theory suggested he’d probably die a lonely death. Maybe they should have killed him there and then, but it wasn’t in any of the people to take life without good cause and although this might have been borderline good cause they gave him the benefit of the doubt and left him to suffer whilst mulling over the reason why he was there.

The river was beginning to run low, the row of stepping-stones that had been placed in it by an unknown ancestor to connect the two river bank communities were well clear of the water level and the sun still beat down with the fierceness that was beginning to get irritating because of the amount of peeling skin in the community.

They went naked during the summer. They always had. It made sense: they had skin to protect them didn’t they? And anything more than skin would be a layer too much, wouldn’t it? But the truth of the matter was they were as subject to sunburn as those in the far, distant future would be, and it had the same unpleasant consequences, what with sores and peeling skin. Sappo had a salve that helped, made by her in the winter when she had nothing better to do, crafted from a rare collection of natural ingredients, details of which she kept carefully to herself because they included, to say the least, unpleasantly acquired greases. The more sensible residents of the River Bank kept out of direct sunlight as much as they could anyway, and suffered least of all … and Owongo was one of those.

And it was at this time that news came of Fart-fart.

He should have died, pinned to that tree as he had been, but somehow he had freed himself and taken the intervening weeks to nurse his wounded shoulder (which would give him pain for the rest of his life) and try to regain some of his old toxic confidence despite a serious infection which laid him extra low.

As he lay in a den vacated by a wolf who couldn’t stand the stink of his body and consequently found somewhere else to live, he slowly recovered. His mind went to all manner of things he would certainly do to his enemies, bitter things, cruel things, and all of them painful. And, unlike those enemies, he had death on his mind … and not just any old death but one infused with a mixture of extreme agony and enforced servitude. His mind was poisonous and so his thoughts were both as cruel as possible and as vile as his own mind. Even at his worst, when infection sent his temperature sky-high and he thought he was dying, he planned a bitter future for the River Bank folk.

Eventually he emerged from his isolated den, weak from hunger and thirst, and set about rebuilding himself. And it was while he was doing that, regaining some of his lost strength and stature, that he came upon the elderly Pipe-short with his woman Beth-with … and they, as you will recall, were Mirumda’s parents.

They were enjoying their later years. Mirumda was off their hands, they had no other chidlings at home and the summer was more balmy than any other that they could recall. Food was abundant and as they lived across the river on what future generations might describe as the “posh side” they were comfortably off. And on one particular day they took themselves off for a steady walk in the Old Forest, in part making for a natural orchard they knew of some distance from their home, where fruit was often in abundance. They knew it was too early in the year for it to be hanging in delicious clusters yet, but it was important for them to make sure all was well in the world.

And they crossed unwittingly into the area where Fart-fart was repairing his life. They weren’t expecting to see him because, like most people, they assumed he must have perished, pinned to a tree with a spear through him, long since.

Pipe-short was breezily explaining how the gods were protecting them from all sorts of bad things. He was going through a phase of doing that, rambling on about forces he invented on the spot and enthusing them into being with a confidence born of those approaching senility at a fair pace.

“The gods of the trees stop them falling on us,” he rumbled.

“That is so true,” sighed Beth-with, bored before he started. She wanted to discuss the latest styles of winter moleskins and not boring old things like gods that nobody believed in.

“And the gods of the mountains shade us when the sun grows too hot,” grinned Pipe-short, quite wrongly for two perfectly obvious reasons … the sun rose, at its fiercest, above the distant mountains and consequently those mountains shielded nobody from its ferocious heart and, to Beth-with, it seemed improbable that if there were gods they’d never do such a poor job, and anyway, what were clouds for?

And it was when they were so involved in this discourse and consequently taking precious little notice of anything else, that Fart-fart struck.

These were River Bank people and he knew what he wanted to do with them! He’d had weeks working it out, weeks of hunger, weeks of pain, weeks of delirious nightmares. And he was so hungry that on top of everything else he had planned he wanted to eat one of them. Yes, that’s what he’d do. He’d eat the woman. She would be weaker than the man, easier to slaughter and anyway the man would run away because, like all men he was a coward. And the woman, though possibly too old to be anything but tough, would certainly be nutritious and despite his ignorance of most things he knew he needed nutrition.

Fart-fart thought that the man would be a run-away coward because he was a man and he knew, deep down, that if he was anything he was a coward himself and would certainly run before fighting a losing battle.

It didn’t go Fart-fart’s orange way (the orange was fading but it was still just about evident) for one very obvious reason. The woman was tough, tougher than him, and the man was, despite assumptions, no coward. So in the briefest of struggles the woman battered Fart-fart until his head reeled and the man grabbed hold of his arm and wrenched his bad shoulder until the pain was almost unbelievable, and he had to weep and gnash his teeth.

The sight of Fart-fart weeping would have cheered both of them but for one thing.

In the struggle Fart-fart had drawn his blow-pipe from where he concealed it under his stinking skins (unlike the others he never went about naked), and by accident rather than design the dart inside it had tumbled out, fallen towards the ground and nicked Pipe-short on its way down.

And that dart was coated in one of the nastiest toxins known to man, extracted from a particularly venomous spider extracted by the orange horror and stored as a thick grease in a secret place known only to him.

No sooner had he felt its prick than Pipe-short knew his time was up. With a look of horror in his eyes he turned to his woman.

“Quick! Find Gondut! Tell him!” he gasped.

And in that same instant his horror-struck eyes closed and his heart ceased its toil and he was dead. As a dinosaur. As a very dead reptile from the Triassic era which, by then, was very long over.

“Oh Pipe-short!” wept Beth-with, “Oh my lovely man!”

And seeing what the foul Fart-fart had done she battered him as hard over his head as she could with her deerskin handbag before running like the wind, back the way they had come.

Which is why, and in a wild frenzy, she burst upon the placid scene at the river bank shouting “Murder! Murder! Murder most foul!” at the top of her voice until everyone stood up, and stared.

TO BE CONTINUED….

© Peter Rogerson 26.04.17