“I called Jean-Paul,” he said. “I gave him my resignation.”
Two days later, we set out for the Chaga. We went by matatu. It was a school holiday, the Peugeot Services were busy with children on their way back to their families. They made a lot of noise and energy. They looked out of the corners of their eyes at us and bent together to whisper. Sean noticed this.
“They’re talking about you,” Sean said.
“They know what I am, what I do.”
One of the schoolgirls, in a black and white uniform, understood our English. She fixed Sean a look. “She is a warrior,” she told him. “She is giving us our nation back.”
We left most of the children in Kapsabet to change onto other matatus; ours drove on into the heart of the Nandi Hills. It was a high, green rolling country, in some ways like Sean’s England. I asked the driver to stop just past a metal cross that marked some old road death.
“What now?” Sean said. He sat on the small pack I had told him was all he could take.
“Now, we wait. They won’t be long.”
Twenty cars went up the muddy red road, two trucks, a country bus and medical convoy went down. Then they came out of the darkness between the trees on the other side of the road like dreams out of sleep: Meji, Naomi and Hamid. They beckoned; behind them came men, women, children, entire families, from babes in arms to old men; twenty citizens, appearing one by one out of the dark, looking nervously up and down the straight red road, then crossing to the other side.
I fived with Meji, he looked Sean up and down.
“This is the one?”
“This is Sean.”
“I had expected something, um… “
“Whiter?”
He laughed. He shook hands with Sean and introduced himself. Then Meji took a tube out of his pocket and covered Sean in spray. Sean jumped back, choking.
“Stay there, unless you want your clothes to fall off you when you get inside,” I said.
Naomi translated this for the others. They found it very funny. When he had immunized Sean’s clothes, Meji sprayed his bag.
“Now, we walk,” I told Sean.
We spent the night in the Chief’s house in the village of Senghalo. He was the last station on our railroad. I know from my Dust Girl days you need as good people on the outside as the inside. Folk came from all around to see the black Englishman. Although he found being looked at intimidating, Sean managed to tell his story. I translated. At the end the crowd outside the Chief’s house burst into spontaneous applause and finger-clicks.
“Aye, Tendeleo, how can I compete?” Meji half-joked with me.
I slept fitfully that night, troubled by the sound of aircraft moving under the edge of the storm.
“Is it me?” Sean said.
“No, not you. Go back to sleep.”
Sunlight through the bamboo wall woke us. While Sean washed outside in the bright, cold morning, watched by children curious to see if the black went all the way down, Chief and I tuned his shortwave to the UN frequencies. There was a lot of chatter in Klingon. You Americans think we don’t understand Star Trek?
“They’ve been tipped off,” Chief said. We fetched the equipment from his souterrain. Sean watched Hamid, Naomi, Meji and I put on the communicators. He said nothing as the black-green knob of cha-plastic grew around the back of my head, into my ear, and sent a tendril to my lips. He picked up my staff.
“Can I?”
“It won’t bite you.”
He looked closely at the fist-sized ball of amber at its head, and the skeleton outline of a sphere embedded in it.
“It’s a buckyball,” I said. “The symbol of our power.”
He passed it to me without comment. We unwrapped our guns, cleaned them, checked them and set off. We walked east that day along the ridges of the Nandi Hills, through ruined fields and abandoned villages. Helicopter engines were our constant companions. Sometimes we glimpsed them through the leaf cover, tiny in the sky like black mosquitoes. The old people and the mothers looked afraid. I did not want them to see how nervous they were making me. I called my colleagues apart.
“They’re getting closer.”
Hamid nodded. He was a quiet, thin twenty-two-year-old Ethiopian skin, goatee, a political science graduate from the university of Nairobi.
“We choose a different path every time,” he said. “They can’t know this.”
“Someone’s selling us,” Meji said.
“Wouldn’t matter. We pick one at random.”
“Unless they’re covering them all.”
In the afternoon we began to dip down towards the Rift Valley and terminum. As we wound our way down the old hunters’ paths, muddy and slippery from recent rain, the helicopter came swooping in across the hillside. We scrambled for cover. It turned and made another pass, so low I could see the light glint from the pilot’s heads-up visor.
“They’re playing with us,” Hamid said. “They can blow us right off this hill any time they want.”
“How?” Naomi asked. She said only what was necessary, and when.
“I think I know,” Sean said. He had been listening a little away. He slithered down to join us as the helicopter beat over the hillside again, flailing the leaves, showering us with dirt and twigs. “This.” He tapped my forearm. “If I could find you, they can find you.”
I pulled up my sleeve. The Judas chip seemed to throb under my skin, like poison.
“Hold my wrist,” I said to Sean. “Whatever happens, don’t let it slip.”
Before he could say a word, I pulled my knife. These things must be done fast. If you once stop to think, you will never do it. Make sure you have it straight. You won’t get another go. A stab down with the tip, a short pull, a twist, and the traitor thing was on the ground, greasy with my blood. It hurt. It hurt very much, but the blood had staunched, the wound was already closing.
“I’ll just have to make sure not to lose you again,” Sean said.
Very quietly, very silently, we formed up the team and one by one slipped down the hillside, out from under the eyes of the helicopter. For all I know, the stupid thing is up there still, keeping vigil over a dead chip. We slept under the sky that night, close together for warmth and on the third day we came to Tinderet and the edge of the Chaga.
Ten had been leading us a cracking pace, as if she were impatient to put Kenya behind us. Since mid-morning, we had been making our way up a long, slow hill. I’d done some hill-walking, I was fit for it, but the young ones and the women with babies found it tough going. When I called for a halt, I saw a moment of anger cross Ten’s face. As soon as she could, we upped packs and moved on. I tried to catch up with her, but Ten moved steadily ahead of me until, just below the summit, she was almost running.
“Shone!” she shouted back. “Come with me!”
She ran up through the thinning trees to the summit. I followed, went bounding down a slight dip, and suddenly, the trees opened and I was on the edge.
The ground fell away at my feet into the Rift Valley, green on green on green, sweeping to the valley floor where the patterns of the abandoned fields could still be made out in the patchwork of yellows and buffs and earth tones. Perspective blurred the colours—I could see at least fifty miles—until, suddenly, breathtakingly, they changed. Browns and dry-land beiges blended into burgundies and rust reds, were shot through with veins of purple and white, then exploded into chaos, like a bed of flowers of every conceivable colour, a jumble of shapes and colours like a mad coral reef, like a box of kiddie’s plastic toys spilled out on a Chinese rug. It strained the eyes, it hurt the brain. I followed it back, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. A sheer wall, deep red, rose abruptly out of the chaotic landscape, straight up, almost as high as the escarpment I was standing on. It was not a solid wall, it looked to me to be made up of pillars or, I thought, tree trunks. They must have been of titanic size to be visible from this distance. They opened into an unbroken, flat crimson canopy. In the further
distance, the flat roof became a jumble of dark greens, broken by what I can only describe as small mesas, like the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming or the old volcanoes in Puy de Dome. But these glittered in the sun like glass. Beyond them, the landscape was striped like a tiger, yellow and dark brown, and formations like capsizing icebergs, pure white, lifted out of it. And beyond that, I lost the detail, but the colours went on and on, all the way to the horizon.
I don’t know how long I stood, looking at the Chaga. I lost all sense of time. I became aware at some point that Ten was standing beside me. She did not try to move me on, or speak. She knew that the Chaga was one of these things that must just be experienced before it can be interpreted. One by one the others joined us. We stood in a row along the bluffs, looking at our new home.
Then we started down the path to the valley below.
Half an hour down the escarpment, Meji up front called a halt.
“What is it?” I asked Ten. She touched her fingers to her communicator, a half-eggshell of living plastic unfolded from the headset and pressed itself to her right eye.
“This is not good,” she said. “Smoke, from Menengai.”
“Menengai?”
“Where we’re going. Meji is trying to raise them on the radio.”
I looked over Ten’s head to Meji, one hand held to his ear, looking around him. He looked worried.
“And?”
“Nothing.”
“And what do we do?”
“We go on.”
We descended through microclimates. The valley floor was fifteen degrees hotter than the cool, damp Nandi Hills. We toiled across brush and overgrown scrub, along abandoned roads, through deserted villages. The warriors held their weapons at the slope. Ten regularly scanned the sky with her all-seeing eye. Now even I could see the smoke, blowing towards us on a wind from the east, and smell it. It smelled like burned spices. I could make out Meji trying to call up Menengai. Radio silence.
In the early afternoon, we crossed terminum. You can see these things clearly from a distance. At ground level, they creep up on you. I was walking through tough valley grasses and thorn scrub when I noticed lines of blue moss between the roots. Oddly regular lines of moss, that bent and forked at exactly one hundred and twenty degrees, and joined up into hexagons. I froze. Twenty metres ahead of me, Ten stood in one world… I stood in another.
“Even if you do nothing, it will still come to you,” she said. I looked down. The blue lines were inching towards my toes. “Come on.” Ten reached out her hand. I took it, and she led me across. Within two minutes walk, the scrub and grass had given way entirely to Chaga vegetation. For the rest of the afternoon we moved through the destroying zone. Trees crashed around us, shrubs were devoured from the roots down, grasses fell apart and dissolved; fungus fingers and coral fans pushed up on either side, bubbles blew around my head. I walked through it untouched like a man in a furnace.
Meji called a halt under an arch of Chaga-growth like a vault in a medieval cathedral. He had a report on his earjack.
“Menengai has been attacked.”
Everyone started talking, asking questions, jabbering. Meji held up his hand.
“They were Africans. Someone had provided them with Chaga-proof equipment, and weapons. They had badges on their uniforms: KLA.”
“Kenyan Liberation Army,” the quiet one, Naomi, said.
“We have enemies,” the clever one, Hamid, said. “The Kenyan Government still claims jurisdiction over the Chaga. Every so often, they remind us who’s in charge. They want to keep us on the run, stop us getting established. They’re nothing but contras with western money and guns and advisers.”
“And Menengai?” I asked. Meji shook his head.
“Most High is bringing the survivors to Ol Punyata.”
I looked at Ten.
“Most High?”
She nodded.
We met up with Most High under the dark canopy of the Great Wall. It was an appropriately sombre place for the meeting: the smooth soaring trunks of the trees; the canopy of leaves, held out like hands, a kilometre over our heads; the splashes of light that fell through the gaps to the forest floor; survivors and travellers, dwarfed by it all. Medieval peasants must have felt like this, awestruck in their own cathedrals.
It’s an odd experience, meeting someone you’ve heard of in a story. You want to say, I’ve heard about you, you haven’t heard about me, you’re nothing like I imagined. You check them out to make sure they’re playing true to their character. His story was simple and grim.
A village, waking, going about its normal business, people meeting and greeting, walking and talking, gossiping and idling, talking the news, taking coffee. Then, voices; strange voices, and shots, and people looking up wondering, What is going on here? and while they are caught wondering, strangers running at them, running through, strangers with guns, shooting at anything in front of them, not asking questions, not looking or listening, shooting and running on. Shooting, and burning. Bodies left where they lay, homes like blossoming flowers going up in gobs of flame. Through, back, and out. Gone. As fast, as off-hand as that. Ten minutes, and Menengai was a morgue. Most High told it as casually as it had been committed, but I saw his knuckles whiten as he gripped his staff.
To people like me, who come from a peaceful, ordered society, violence like that is unimaginable.
I’ve seen fights and they scared me, but I’ve never experienced the kind of violence Most High was describing, where people’s pure intent is to kill other people. I could see the survivors—dirty, tired, scared, very quiet—but I couldn’t see what had been done to them. So I couldn’t really believe it. And though I’d hidden up there on the hill from the helicopter, I couldn’t believe it would have opened up those big gatlings on me, and I couldn’t believe now that the people who attacked Menengai, this Kenyan Liberation Army, whose only purpose was to kill Chaga-folk and destroy their lives, were out there somewhere, probably being resupplied by airdrop, reloading, and going in search of new targets. It seemed wrong in a place as silent and holy as this… like a snake in the garden.
Meji and Ten believed it. As soon as we could, they moved us on and out.
“Where now?” I asked Ten.
She looked uncertain.
“East. The Black Simbas have a number of settlements on Kirinyaga. They’ll defend them.”
“How far?”
“Three days?”
“That woman back there, Hope. She won’t be able to go on very much longer.” I had been speaking to her, she was heavily pregnant. Eight months, I reckoned. She had no English, and I had Aid-Agency Swahili, but she appreciated my company, and I found her big belly a confirmation that life was strong, life went on.
“I know,” Ten said. She might wear the gear and carry the staff and have a gun at her hip, but she was facing decisions that told her, forcefully, You’re still in your teens, little warrior.
We wound between the colossal buttressed roots of the roof-trees. The globes on the tops of the staffs gave off a soft yellow light—bioluminescence, Ten told me.
We followed the bobbing lights through the dark, dripping wall-forest. The land rose, slowly and steadily. I fell back to walk with Hope. We talked. It passed the time. The Great Wall gave way abruptly to an ecosystem of fungi. Red toadstools towered over my head, puff-balls dusted me with yellow spores, trumpet-like chanterelles dripped water from their cups, clusters of pin-head mushrooms glowed white like corpses. I saw monkeys, watching from the canopy.
We were high now, climbing up ridges like the fingers of a splayed-out hand. Hope told me how her husband had been killed in the raid on Menengai. I did not know what to say. Then she asked me my story. I told it in my bad Swahili. The staffs led us higher.
“Ten.”
We were taking an evening meal break. That was one thing about the Chaga, you could never go hungry. Reach out, and anything you touched would be edible. Ten had taught me that if you buried your shit, a good-tas
ting tuber would have grown in the morning. I hadn’t had the courage yet to try it. For an alien invasion, the Chaga seemed remarkably considerate of human needs.
“I think Hope’s a lot further on than we thought.”
Ten shook her head.
“Ten, if she starts, will you stop?”
She hesitated a moment.
“OK. We will stop.”
She struggled for two days, down into a valley, through terribly tough terrain of great spheres of giraffe-patterned moss, then up, into higher country than any we had attempted before.
“Ten, where are we?” I asked. The Chaga had changed our geography, made all our maps obsolete. We navigated by compass and major, geophysical landmarks.
“We’ve passed through the Nyandarua Valley, now we’re going up the east side of the Aberdares.”
The line of survivors became strung out. Naomi and I struggled at the rear with the old and the women with children, and Hope. We fought our way up that hillside, but Hope was flagging, failing.
“I think… I feel… “ she said, hand on her belly.
“Call Ten on that thing,” I ordered Naomi. She spoke into her mouthpiece.
“No reply.”
“She what?”
“There is no reply.”
I ran. Hands, knees, belly, whatever way I could, I made it up that ridge, as fast as I could. Over the summit the terrain changed, as suddenly as Chaga landscapes do, from the moss maze to a plantation of regularly spaced trees shaped like enormous ears of wheat.
Ten was a hundred metres downslope. She stood like a statue among the wheat-trees. Her staff was planted firmly on the ground. She did not acknowledge me when I called her name. I ran down through the trees to her.
“Ten, Hope can’t go on. We have to stop.”
“No!” Ten shouted. She did not look at me, she stared down through the rows of trees.
“Ten!” I seized her, spun her round. Her face was frantic, terrified, tearful, joyful, as if in this grove of alien plants was something familiar and absolutely agonizing. “Ten! You promised!”
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