West with the Night (14 page)

After a while the girl moved and then crawled out of the box and he pawed through the bedding to the earthen floor, tossing his head up and down, letting the anger run out of him.

But the girl was there again, in the stable, the next day. She cleaned it as she had cleaned it each other day and her touch on his body was the same, except there was a new firmness in it, and Camciscan knew, without knowing, that his strength, his anger, and his loneliness at last were challenged.

Nothing about the morning ride was different. The black men worked with the other horses and about the stables in their usual positions, with their usual movements. The large tree against which he had thrown the girl was still there making the same little pond of shade, bees criss-crossed the unresisting air like golden bullets, birds sang or just dipped in and out of the sky. Camciscan knew that the morning was slow with peacefulness. But he also knew that this thing would happen; he knew that his anger would come and would be met by the girl’s anger.

By then he understood, in his own way, that the girl loved him. Also he understood now why it was that when she had lain hurt in his box, he could not trample her with his hooves, nor allow any other living thing to touch her — and the reason for this frightened him.

They came to a level spot on the green hill and he stopped suddenly with sweat stinging his blood-bay neck and his blood-bay flanks. He stopped because this was the place.

The girl on his back spoke to him, but he did not move. He felt the anger again, and he did not move. For the first time her heels struck against his ribs, sharply, and he was motionless. He felt her hand relax the lines that held his head so that he was almost free. But she did not speak; she rapped him again with her heels, roughly, so that it hurt, and he whirled, baring his teeth, and tried to sink them into her leg.

The girl struck his muzzle with a whip, hard and without mercy, but he was startled by the act more than by the pain. The alchemy of his pride transformed the pain to anger that blinded him. He bit at her again and she struck again making the whip burn against his flesh. He whirled until their world was a cone of yellow dust, but she clung to his back, weightless, and lashed at him in tireless rhythm.

He reared upward, cutting the dust cloud with his hooves. Plunging, he kicked at her legs and felt the thin whip bite at his quarters, time after time, until they glowed with pain.

He knew that his bulk could crush her. He knew that if he reared high enough, he would fall backward, and this terrified him. But he was neither mastered by the girl nor by his terror. He reared until the ground fell away before him, and he saw only the sky, through bulging eyes, and inch by inch he went over, feeling the whip on his head, between his ears, against his neck. He began to fall, and the terror returned, and he fell.

When he knew that the girl was not caught under his weight, his anger left him as quickly as the wind had whisked the dust away. This was not reason, but it was so.

He got up, churning the air awkwardly, and the girl stood, watching him, still holding the lines and the whip, her straw-coloured hair matted with dust.

She came to him and touched the hurt places on his body and stroked his neck and his throat and the place between his eyes.

In a little time she vaulted again to his back and they went on along the familiar road, slowly, with no sound but the sound of his hooves.

Camciscan remained Camciscan. In relation to himself, nothing changed, nothing was different. If there were horses on the farm that whinnied at the approach of certain men or forsook their peculiar nobility for the common gifts of common creatures, he was not one.

He held a heritage of arrogance, and he cherished it. If he had yielded once to a will as stubborn as his own, even this had left no bruise upon his spirit. The girl had triumphed — but in so small a thing.

He still stood in the far corner of his stable each morning while she worked. Sometimes he still trembled, and once in the late evening when there was a storm outside and a nervous wind, she came and lay down in the clean bedding under his manger. He watched her while there was light, but when that failed, and she must surely have been asleep, he stepped closer, lowering his head a little, breathing warmly through widened nostrils, and sniffed at her.

She did not move, and he did not. For a moment he ruffled her hair with his soft muzzle. And then he lifted his head as high as he had ever held it and stood, with the girl at his feet, all through the storm. It did not seem a strong storm.

When morning came, she got up and looked at him and spoke to him. But he was in the farthest corner, where he always was, staring, not at her, but at the dawn, and at the warm clouds of his breath against the cold.

T
HE BLACK BOOK LIES
on my father’s desk, thick and important. Its covers are a little bent; the weight of his fingers and mine have curled back its pages, but they are not yellow. The handwriting is bold — in places it is even proud as when he has inscribed such names as these: ‘Little Miller — Ormolu — Véronique.’ They are all Thoroughbred mares out of stock old as boulders on an English hill.

The name ‘Coquette’ is inscribed more soberly, with no flourish — almost with doubt. It is as if here is a girl, pretty as any, but brought by marriage into a family of respectability beyond her birth or farthest hopes.

The brief career of Coquette is, in fact, ever so slightly chequered; her background, while not obscure, suggests something less than the dazzling gentility of her stable-mates. Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy. Coquette is Abyssinian. She is small and golden yellow with a pure white mane and tail.

Coquette was smuggled out of Abyssinia because Abyssinians do not permit good native mares to leave their country. I do not remember who did the smuggling, but I suppose my father condoned it, in effect, when he bought her. He must have done it with one eye shut and the other on the sweet, tidy lines of her vigorous body.

My father was, and is, a law-abiding citizen of the realm, but if ever he wanders off the path of righteousness, it will not be gold or silver that enticed him, but, more likely, I think, the irresistible contours of a fine but elusive horse.

A lovely horse is always an experience to him. It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words. He has always talked about horses, but he has never unravelled his love of them in a skein of commonplace adjectives. At seventy, in competition with the crack trainers of South Africa, his name heads the list of winners in the high-stake racing centre of Durban. In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parent.

He came out of Sandhurst with such a ponderous knowledge of Greek and Latin that it would have submerged a lesser man. He might have gone down like a swimmer in the sea struggling with an Alexandrian tablet under each arm, but he never let his education get the better of him. He won what prizes there were translating Ovid and Æschylus, and then took up steeplechasing until he became one of the finest amateur riders in England. He took chances on horses and on Africa; he never regretted the losses, nor boasted about the wins.

He sometimes dreamed over the thick black book — almost as I am dreaming now, now that the names are just names, and the great-grandchildren of those elegant dams and sterling sires are dispersed, like a broken family.

But all great characters come back to life if you call them — even great horses.

Coquette, in her way, was great. She won races, though she never set the world agog, but she gave me my first foal.

It all goes back to the thick black book. And that is a long way back.

It lies there, dustless, because it is too much touched, and I am grown a little now and charged with duties inflexible as a drill sergeant’s, but more pleasant. I have a corporal in Kibii, but he is often away from the farm these days, engaged in new and enigmatic offices.

My personal staff still numbers two — lean Otieno and fat, fat Toombo.

It is a morning in November. Some places in the world are grey as a northern sea in November, and colder. Some are silver with ice. But not Njoro. In November, Njoro and all the Highlands await their ration of warm soft rain tendered regularly by one or another of the Native Gods — Kikuyu, Masai, Kavirondo — or by the White Man’s God, or perhaps by all known Gods, working amiably together. November is a month of benison and birth.

I open the black book and run my finger down one of its freshest pages. I come to Coquette.

The book says:

COQUETTE

Eleven months for a mare. Bred to Referee — small, perfect, gallant as a warrior, smooth as a coin — Coquette is due to foal in a matter of days. I close the book and call for Toombo.

He comes — rather, he appears; he is a visitation in ebony. Nothing in this world of extremes is blacker than Toombo, nothing is rounder than his belly, nothing is broader than his smile. Toombo is the good jinn — the one that never got locked in the pot. He suddenly fills the doorway as if he had been set into it like a polished stone into a trinket.

‘Do you want me, Beru — or is it Otieno?’

No matter how many times the name Beryl goes in the Native or Indian ear, it emerges from the lips — Beru. No English word is so smooth that the tongue trained to Swahili cannot make it smoother.

‘I want both of you, Toombo. The day for Coquette is very near. We must begin the watch.’

Toombo’s grin spreads over his wide face like a ripple in a pond. To him, birth and success are synonymous; the hatching of a hen’s egg is a triumph, or even the bursting of a seed. Toombo’s own birth is the major success of his life. He grins until there is no more room for both the grin and his eyes, so his eyes disappear. He turns and shuffles through the doorway and I hear his deep voice bawling for Otieno.

The missionaries have already pitched their tents in the Kavirondo country, which is Otieno’s home. They have jousted with the old black gods and even unhorsed a few. They have traded a tangible Bible for a handful of intangible superstitions — the Kavirondo mind is fertile ground.

Otieno’s Bible (translated into Jaluo, which he reads) has made him both a Christian and a night-owl. Night after night he sits in the yellow circle of his hurricane lamp and squints over the pages. He is indefatigable, sleepless, dependable as daylight — and half a mystic. I let him undertake, with Toombo, the night-watch in Coquette’s box, knowing that he never nods.

He accepts the duty with pious gravity — as indeed he should. Tall and sombre-eyed, he stands where Toombo stood. If it were not morning, and if there were no work to be done, and if it were not my father’s study, Otieno would sheepishly stroke the calf of his black leg with the sole of his black foot and tell me the story of Lot’s wife.

‘I have been reading in the Book,’ he would begin, ‘about a strange happening …’

But something more common, though perhaps as strange, is near its happening, and Otieno leaves and I close the black book and follow him down to the stables.

Ah, Coquette! How could a creature deserving such a gay name have become so dowdy? Once she was small and pert and golden, but now she is plain and shapeless with the weight of her foal. Her thin pasterns are bent with it until her fetlocks seem ready to touch the ground; her hooves are of lead. She has seen so much — the savage hills and plains of Abyssinia, all that wild and deep country on the way to Njoro, all those different people, those different races, those different rocks and trees. Coquette has seen the world, but the bright, wise eyes are not now so bright. Soon they will be wiser.

Her foaling-box is ready. Her body-brush, her dandy-brush, and her kitamba are there. Her coat is still no other colour than gold, her mane and her tail are still white silk. The gold is tarnished; the silk lacks lustre. Coquette looks at me as she enters the box — to wait, and wait.

All of us there — Toombo, Otieno, and myself — know the secret. We know what Coquette is waiting for, but she does not. None of us can tell her.

Toombo and Otieno begin their nightly watch. And the time goes slowly.

But there are other things. Everything else goes on as it always has. Nothing is more common than birth; a million creatures are born in the time it takes to turn this page, and another million die. The symbolism is commonplace; countless dreamers have played countless tunes upon the mystery, but horse-breeders are realists and every farmer is a midwife. There is no time for mystery. There is only time for patience and care, and hope that what is born is worthy and good.

I do not know why most foals are born at night, but most of them are. This one is.

Nineteen long days pass, and on the evening of the twentieth, I make the rounds of the stables, as usual, ending at Coquette’s foaling-box. Buller is at my heels. Otieno The Vigilant is there — and Toombo The Rotund.

The hurricane lamp has already been lighted inside the foaling-box. It is a large box, large as a room, with walls of cedar planking milled on the farm. The floor is earthen, covered with deep grass bedding gathered fresh from the pastures; the smell of a mowed field is gathered with it.

Coquette stands heavily under the gentle glow of the lamp, her evening feed not finished. Creating new life within her, she is herself almost lifeless. She lowers her head as if it were not the exquisitely fashioned head that it is, but an ugly and tiresome burden. She nibbles at a single leaf of lucerne, too small to be tasted, then shambles on sluggish feet across the box. To her all things are poignantly lacking — but she is incapable of desiring anything.

Otieno sighs. Toombo’s face beams back at the hurricane lamp, matching its glow with his glow. Outside the box, Buller challenges the oncoming night with a softly warning growl.