West with the Night (12 page)

‘If only he lives through the night! If only he lives through the night!’

There is a hyena on a near hill who laughs at that, but it is a coward’s laugh. I sit with Buller and the dead boar under the thorn tree and watch the dark come closer.

The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening, I stroke the dog’s head and try to close my eyes, but of course I cannot. Something moves in the tall grass, making a sound like the swish of a woman’s skirt. The dog stirs feebly and the hyena on the hill laughs again.

I let Buller’s head rest on the turf, stand up, and pull my spear from the body of the boar. Somewhere to the left there is a sound, but I do not recognize it and I can see only dim shapes that are motionless.

I lean for a moment on my spear peering outward at what is nothing, and then turn toward my thorn tree.

‘Are you here, Lakwani?’

Arab Maina’s voice is cool as water on shaded rocks.

‘I am here, Maina.’

He is tall and naked and very dark beside me. His shuka is tied around his left forearm to allow his body freedom to run.

‘You are alone, and you have suffered, my child.’

‘I am all right, Maina, but I fear for Buller. I think he may die.’

Arab Maina kneels on the earth and runs his hands over Buller’s body. ‘He is badly hurt, Lakwani — very badly hurt — but do not grieve too much. I think your spear has saved him from death, and God will reward you for that. When the moon shines at midnight, we will carry him home.’

‘I am so happy that you have come, Maina.’

‘How is it Kosky dared to leave you alone? He has betrayed the trust I had in him!’

‘Do not be angry with Kosky. He is badly hurt. His thigh was ripped by the warthog.’

‘He is no child, Lakweit. He is a Murani, and he should have been more careful, knowing I was not there. After I recovered my spear, I turned back to find you. I followed the blood on the grass for miles — and then I followed Buller’s barking. If the direction of the wind had been wrong, you would still be alone. Kosky has the brains of the one-eyed hare!’

‘Ah-yey! What does it matter now, Maina? You are here, and I am not alone. But I am very cold.’

‘Lakwani, lie down and rest. I will keep watch until it is light enough for us to go. You are very tired. Your face has become thin.’

He cuts handfuls of grass with his sword and makes a pillow, and I lie down, clasping Buller in my arms. The dog is unconscious now and bleeding badly. His blood trickles over my khaki shorts and my thighs.

The distant roar of a waking lion rolls against the stillness of the night, and we listen. It is the voice of Africa bringing memories that do not exist in our minds or in our hearts — perhaps not even in our blood. It is out of time, but it is there, and it spans a chasm whose other side we cannot see.

A ripple of lightning plays across the horizon.

‘I think there will be a storm tonight, Maina.’

Arab Maina reaches out in the darkness and puts his hand on my forehead. ‘Relax, Lakwani, and I will tell you an amusing fable about the cunning little Hare.’

He begins very slowly and softly, ‘ The Hare was a thief … In the night he came to the manyatta … He lied to the Cow, and told her that her Calf would die if she moved … Then he stood up on his hind legs and began sucking the milk from the Cow’s milk bag … The other …’

But I am asleep.

B
ULLER WAS BROUGHT HOME
by moonlight. For a long time he lay still, seeing nothing but the earthen floor in front of his paws, until at last he could lift his head a little, and then he could walk. One day he sniffed at my spear, dipped in its sheath of black ostrich feathers, and waggled his forever expectant tail. But that was after the world had changed, and there was no more boar-hunting.

The world had changed without any reason that I could see. My father’s face had become more grave than it had ever been before, and the voices of the men he spoke with were sombre. There was a lot of head-shaking and talk about gloomy, schoolbookish places that had nothing to do with Africa.

A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. So, by nineteen-fifteen, the lights had not only gone out ‘all over Europe,’ but many of what few windows there were had begun darkening in East Africa.

War was different in the hinterland. It was a war of men rather than of weapons; tanks, planes, gas masks, and guns that threw shells twenty miles remained things of the future even after they were elsewhere blended with the past.

The Protectorate fought a frontier war with frontier weapons; it was still dressed in frontier clothes.

Boers, Somalis, Nandi, Kikuyu, Kavirondo, and settlers of all nationalities went to battle, when the Empire called, in what they had on their backs when they left the plough, the singiri, or the forest. They rode mules or they walked. They carried guns if they had guns — some brought nothing more lethal than bush knives. They converged on Nairobi and stood in the streets or gathered before Nairobi House, looking at best like revolutionists, but not like soldiers of the Crown.

They wore hats, bandannas, jackets of home-cured hide, shukas, shorts, boots or no boots, and it didn’t matter. Altogether it made a uniform — not for a man, but for a body of men. Each contributed to the distinguished style and colour of a regiment that had had its predecessors once in America, but had not, in this war, a counterpart.

They had come to fight, and they stayed and fought — some because they could read and understand what they read, some because they had listened to other men, and some because they were told that this, in the name of civilization — a White Man’s God more tangible than most — was their new duty.

I never heard the ruffle of drums in those days or saw many flags dragging precise platoons behind them. I saw men leave their work at the mills, and there were teams of oxen on the farm without their masters.

The farm lived, but its voice was a whisper. It produced, but not with the lusty ease it had before. There was less gusto, but Kibii and I did what children do when there are things abroad too big to understand; we stayed close to each other and played games that made no noise.

Kibii was a little Nandi boy, younger than I, but we had many things in common. We gained a bond that was forged in the war and which we would have done without; but for me, years later in another hemisphere, it exists yet, as it must for him — still in Africa.

A messenger came to the farm with a story to tell. It was not a story that meant much as stories went in those days. It was about how the war progressed in German East Africa and about a tall young man who was killed in it.

I suppose he was no taller than most who were killed there and no better. It was an ordinary story, but Kibii and I, who knew him well, thought there was no story like it, or one as sad, and we think so now.

The young man tied his shuka on his shoulder one day and took his shield and his spear and went to war. He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all.

But they gave him a gun, so he left the spear and the shield behind him and took the courage, and went where they sent him because they said this was his duty and he believed in duty. He believed in duty and in the kind of justice that he knew, and in all the things that were of the earth — like the voice of the forest, the right of a lion to kill a buck, the right of a buck to eat grass, and the right of a man to fight. He believed in many wives, young as he was, and in the telling of stories by the shade of the singiri.

He took the gun and held it the way they had told him to hold it, and walked where they told him to walk, smiling a little and looking for another man to fight.

He was shot and killed by the other man, who also believed in duty, and he was buried where he fell. It was so simple and so unimportant.

But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii’s father and my most special friend. Arab Maina died on the field of action in the service of the King. But some said it was because he had forsaken his spear.

‘When I am circumcised and become a Murani,’ Kibii said, ‘and drink blood and curdled milk like a man, instead of ugali and nettles, like a woman, I will find whoever it was that killed my father and put my spear in his heart.’

‘You are very selfish, Kibii,’ I said. ‘I can jump as high as you can, and play all our games just as well. I can throw a spear almost as far. We will find him together and put both our spears in his heart.’

The days that marked the war went on like the ticking of a clock that had no face and showed no time. After a while it was difficult to remember what it had been like before, or the remembrance had been brought to mind so often that it was tarnished and dull, like a trinket not worth looking at. Kibii and I began living again, from hour to hour.

He still spoke of his forthcoming circumcision as one might speak of the prospect of being born again — better born and with brand-new hopes. ‘When I am a Murani …’ he would boast. But when he said it he always looked smaller than he really was, closer still to a little boy than to a man.

So, while he waited for his new birth and I, being only a girl, just waited to grow up, we played our old games and took increasing interest in the work with the horses my father had assigned to us.

The games we played were Nandi games because I knew no others and there was no white child, except myself, anywhere near Njoro, though there may have been some Boer children in the small colony about two hundred miles away on the Uasin Gishu Plateau.

One of the games was jumping, because the Nandi said that a boy or a man must be able to jump as high as himself to be any good at all, and Kibii and I were determined to be good. When I left Njoro, at last, I could still jump higher than my head. I could wrestle too, the Nandi way, because Kibii taught me all the holds and the various tricks and how to pick another toto up over my head and throw him to the ground.

Among my galaxy of scars is one which an ungallant Nandi boy, whom I had bested in a wrestling bout, made with his father’s sword. He waited until he caught me walking alone one day about two miles from the farm, and then he rushed from behind a thorn tree swinging the weapon like a demented Turk. I had a knobkerrie in my hand at the time and I caught him behind the ear with it in the fight that followed, but not before he had slashed my leg above the knee as deeply as his sword would go.

There were quiet days when Kibii and I played, all during the long afternoons, a game that took me months to learn and, having forgotten it, I could never learn again. I remember only that we used the little poisonous yellow sodom apples for counters and a series of round holes in the ground for our board, and that the mental arithmetic required was more than I have since used in twenty years. We would play it in the shade of the wattle trees, or, after finishing our work with the horses, down behind the walls of the stables, sitting cross-legged over the smooth yellow balls like diminutive practitioners of black magic, waiting for a Sign. I had a small allowance of rupees from my father and Kibii had a salary of sorts. We gambled like fiends with this largesse, but neither of us established the roots of a fortune with our winnings, though a few of the coins of the realm were worn thinner.

You couldn’t live in Africa and not hunt. Kibii taught me how to shoot with a bow and arrow, and when we found we could shoot wood-pigeons and blue starlings and waxbills, by way of practice, we decided on bigger things. Kibii had a daring plan, but it didn’t work. We invaded the Mau Forest one day and haunted its church-like aisles and recesses until we found a Wandorobo huntsman, a wizened little man barely taller than a bush-buck, and begged him for poison for our arrows. Kibii was furious when the Wandorobo wisely refused on the grounds that we were too young to tamper with such things, and we crept out of the forest again just before dark — as non-poisonous as we had entered it.

‘When I am a Murani …!’ Kibii said with impotent ferocity. ‘Just wait until I am a Murani …!’

On nights when there was a full moon we would sometimes go to the Kikuyu ingomas, which were tribal dances held usually behind a tall ridge on Delamere’s Equator Ranch. As a Nandi, Kibii had only a generous tolerance for the Kikuyu dances, though, when pressed, he admitted that the singing was good.

The Kikuyu are more like the Kavirondo in their way of living than like the Masai or the Nandi. But physically they are the least impressive of all. It may be because they are primarily agriculturists, and generations of looking to the earth for their livelihood have dulled what fire there might once have been in their eyes and what will to excel might have been in their hearts. They have lost inspiration for beauty. They are a hard-working people; from the viewpoint of Empire, a docile and therefore a useful people. Their character is constant, even strong, but it is lustreless.

The flippancy of the Kikuyu dances always shocked Kibii. The emotional ones, he thought, seemed carnal — and the purely spiritual ones lacked dignity. But I think his impatience was touched with tribal vanity.

At any rate, there were few Kikuyu ingomas whose audiences did not include Kibii, the critic, and myself.

When the edge of the moon cut into the night and the flat, grassy meadow behind the ridge on Equator Ranch was light enough to receive the shadows of moving bodies, the dancers formed in a ring. The heads of the girls were shaved smooth and the heads of the young men were resplendent in long plaits of hair decorated with coloured feathers. The young men wore rattles of metal on their legs, shaped like cowrie shells, and the skins of serval-cats swayed and dangled from their buttocks. They wore the black-and-white tails of Colobus monkeys and made them writhe like snakes when the dance was on. They sang in voices that were so much a part of Africa, so quick to blend with the night and the tranquil veldt and the labyrinths of forest that made their background, that the music seemed without sound. It was like a voice upon another voice, each of the same timbre.