Toombo looks. ‘God makes fat birds and small birds, trees that are wide and trees that are thin, like wattle. He makes big kernels and little kernels. I am a big kernel. One does not argue with God.’
The theosophism defeats Otieno; he ignores the globular Jesuit slouching unperturbed under the manger, and turns again to me.
‘Perhaps you have seen this land, Beru?’
‘No.’ I shake my head.
But then I am not sure. My father has told me that I was four when I left England. Leicestershire. Conceivably it could be the land of milk and honey, but I do not remember it as such. I remember a ship that sailed interminably up the hill of the sea and never, never reached the top. I remember a place I was later taught to think of as Mombasa, but the name has not explained the memory. It is a simple memory made only of colours and shapes, of heat and trudging people and broad-leaved trees that looked cooler than they were. All the country I know is this country — these hills, familiar as an old wish, this veldt, this forest. Otieno knows as much.
‘I have never seen such a land, Otieno. Like you, I have read about it. I do not know where it is or what it means.’
‘That is a sad thing,’ says Otieno; ‘it sounds like a good land.’
Toombo rouses himself from the stable floor and shrugs. ‘Who would walk far for a kibuyu of milk and a hive of honey? Bees live in every tenth tree, and every cow has four teats. Let us talk of better things!’
But Coquette talks first of better things. She groans suddenly from the depth of her womb, and trembles. Otieno reaches at once for the hurricane lamp and swells the flame with a twist of his black fingers. Toombo opens the foaling-kit.
‘Now.’ Coquette says it with her eyes and with her wordless voice. ‘Now — perhaps now —
This is the moment, and the Promised Land is the forgotten one.
I kneel over the mare waiting for her foal to make its exit from oblivion. I wait for the first glimpse of the tiny hooves, the first sight of the sheath — the cloak it will wear for its great début.
It appears, and Coquette and I work together. Otieno at one of my shoulders, Toombo at the other. No one speaks because there is nothing to say.
But there are things to wonder.
Will this be a colt or a filly? Will it be sound and well-formed? Will its new heart be strong and stubborn enough to snap the tethers of nothingness that break so grudgingly? Will it breathe when it is meant to breathe? Will it have the anger to feed and to grow and to demand its needs?
I have my hands at last on the tiny legs, on the bag encasing them. It is a strong bag, transparent and sleek. Through it I see the diminutive hooves, pointed, soft as the flesh of sprouted seeds — impotent hooves, insolent in their urgency to tread the tough earth.
Gently, gently, but strong and steady, I coax the new life into the glow of the stable lamp, and the mare strains with all she has. I renew my grip, hand over hand, waiting for her muscles to surge with my pull. The nose — the head, the whole head — at last the foal itself, slips into my arms, and the silence that follows is sharp as the crack of a Dutchman’s whip — and as short.
‘Walihie!’ says Toombo.
Otieno smears sweat from under his eyes; Coquette sighs the last pain out of her.
I let the shining bag rest on the pad of trampled grass less than an instant, then break it, giving full freedom to the wobbly little head.
I watch the soft, mouse-coloured nostrils suck at their first taste of air. With care, I slip the whole bag away, tie the cord and cut it with the knife Otieno hands me. The old life of the mare and the new life of the foal for the last time run together in a quick christening of blood, and as I bathe the wound with disinfectant, I see that he is a colt.
He is a strong colt, hot in my hands and full of the tremor of living.
Coquette stirs. She knows now what birth is; she can cope with what she knows. She lurches to her feet without gracefulness or balance, and whinnies once — so this is mine! So this is what I have borne! Together we dry the babe.
When it is done, I stand up and turn to smile at Otieno. But it is not Otieno; it is not Toombo. My father stands beside me with the air of a man who has observed more than anyone suspected. This is a scene he has witnessed more times than he can remember; yet there is bright interest in his eyes — as if, after all these years, he has at last seen the birth of a foal!
He is not a short man nor a tall one; he is lean and tough as a riem. His eyes are dark and kind in a rugged face that can be gentle.
‘So there you are,’ he says — ‘a fine job of work and a fine colt. Shall I reward you or Coquette — or both?’
Toombo grins and Otieno respectfully scuffs the floor with his toes. I slip my arm through my father’s and together we look down on the awkward, angry little bundle, fighting already to gain his feet.
‘Render unto Cæsar,’ says my father; ‘you brought him to life. He shall be yours.’
A bank clerk handles pounds of gold — none of it his own — but if, one day, that fabulous faery everyone expects, but nobody ever meets, were to give him all this gold for himself — or even a part of it — he would be no less overjoyed because he had looked at it daily for years. He would know at once (if he hadn’t known it before) that this was what he had always wanted.
For years I had handled my father’s horses, fed them, ridden them, groomed them, and loved them. But I had never owned one.
Now I owned one. Without even the benefit of the good faery, but only because my father said so, I owned one for myself. The colt was to be mine, and no one could ever touch him, or ride him, or feed him, or nurse him — no one except myself.
I do not remember thanking my father; I suppose I did, for whatever words are worth. I remember that when the foaling-box was cleaned, the light turned down again, and Otieno left to watch over the newly born, I went out and walked with Buller beyond the stables and a little way down the path that used to lead to Arab Maina’s.
I thought about the new colt, Otieno’s Promised Land, how big the world must be, and then about the colt again. What shall I name him?
Who doesn’t look upward when searching for a name? Looking upward, what is there but the sky to see? And seeing it, how can the name or the hope be earthbound? Was there a horse named Pegasus that flew? Was there a horse with wings?
Yes, once there was — once, long ago, there was. And now there is again.
BOOK THREE
XI
My Trail is North
SOMEBODY WITH A FLAIR for small cynicism once said, ‘We live and do not learn.’ But I have learned some things.
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are buried deep — leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.
I left the farm at Njoro almost the slowest way, and I never saw it again.
I would have turned back — Pegasus who carried me would have turned back, because even he had woven three years of memory to hold him there. But our world was gone like a scrap in the wind, and there wasn’t any turning.
It all happened because those amiable gods who most times walked together, or at least agreed on larger things, fell out and neglected to send any rain.
What does a fall of rain, a single fall of rain, mean in anybody’s life? What does it matter if this month there is none, if the sky is as clear as the song of a boy, and the sun shines and people walk in it and the world is yellow with it? What does a week matter, and who is so dour as to welcome a storm?
Look at a seed in the palm of a farmer’s hand. It can be blown away with a puff of breath and that is the end of it. But it holds three lives — its own, that of the man
who may feed on its increase, and that of the man who lives by its culture. If the seed die, these men will not, but they may not live as they always had. They may be affected because the seed is dead; they may change, they may put their faith in other things.
All the seeds died one year at Njoro and on all the farms around Njoro, on the low fields, on the slopes of the hills, on the square plots carved out of the forests, on the great farms and on the farms built with no more than a plough and a hope. The seeds died because they were not nourished, they were starved for rain.
The sky was as clear as a window one morning. It was so the next morning, and the next, and on every morning that followed until it was hard to remember how rain felt, or how a field looked, green, and moist with life so that a naked foot sank into it. All the things that grew paused in their growing, leaves curled, and each creature turned his back on the sun.
Perhaps somewhere — in London, in Bombay, in Boston — a newspaper carried a single line (on a lesser page); ‘Drought Threatens British East Africa.’ Perhaps someone read it and looked upward, hoping his own skies, that day, were as clear as ours, or considered that drought on the farthest rim of Africa was hardly news.
It may not have been. It is hardly news when a man you have never seen and never will loses a year’s labour, or ten years’ labour, or even a life’s labour in a patch of ground too far away to imagine.
But when I left Njoro, it was all too close to be easily forgotten. The rain feeds the seed, and the seed the mill. When the rain stops, the mill wheels stop — or, if they continue to turn, they grind despair for the man who owns them.
My father owned them. In the time that preceded the drought he had signed contracts with the Government and with individuals, committing himself to the delivery of hundreds of tons of flour and meal — at a fixed price and at a fixed date. If the essence of successful business is not to receive three times what you give, then it is at least not to receive less than you give. I learned the tyranny of figures before I knew the value of a pound. I learned why my father sat so long and so late and so fruitlessly over the scribbled pages, the open inkpot, and the sniggering lampwicks; you could not buy maize at twenty rupees a bag, grind it to meal, then sell the meal at ten rupees. Or at least you could (if you honoured your own word), but you saw your substance run out of the hoppers with every cupful of the stuff you milled.
For many months the same long chain of loaded wagons dragged over the road from Kampi ya Moto to the farm at Njoro. They were filled with the same grain they had brought for years, but it was not new grain. It was not fresh grain prodigally harvested, gleaned from the fields with shouts and sweat. It was hoarded grain or grain combed from niggard patches; it brought the highest price the oldest settlers with the oldest stories could remember.
My father bought it, bringing it from wherever it could be found, and where he spent a rupee, he lost two. The mill wheels turned, the flour spouted into yawning bags and each was sewn shut with a part of the farm sealed within it.
There were men who thought my father a little mad. Contracts had been evaded before, hadn’t they? Wasn’t God responsible for drought?
Yes, and for a number of other things, my father thought, including lack of drought. But he held that God was reasonably innocent in the matter of a signed contract.
One day, a string of freight cars left the mill siding behind a triumphant little engine. The last of the flour had been milled; all the contracts had been honoured from the first word to the last solemn scratch of ink. The engine made the farthest turn. It hooted once, cast a smudge on the immaculate horizon, and disappeared. It carried with it most of my youth — my father’s title to the farm, the buildings, the stables, and all the horses, except just one — the one with wings.
‘Now,’ said my father, ‘we have to think.’ And so we thought.
We sat for an hour in his little study and he spoke to me more seriously than he ever had done before. His arm lay across the big black book that was closed now and he told me many things I had never known — and some that I had known. He was going to Peru — an untrammelled country like this one, yet a country that loved horses and needed men who understood them. He wanted me to come, but the choice was mine; at seventeen years and several months, I was not a child. I could think; I could act with reason.
Did he consider me expert enough to train Thoroughbreds professionally?
He did, but there was much to learn.
Could I ever hope for a trainer’s licence under English Jockey Club rules?
I could — but nothing succeeded like success.
I knew too little of Africa to leave it, and what I knew I loved too much. Peru was a name — a smudge of purple on a schoolbook map. I could put my finger on Peru, but my feet were on the earth of Africa. There were trains in Africa, there were some roads, there were towns like Nairobi, there were schools and bright lights and telegraph. There were men who said they had explored Africa; they had written books about it. But I knew the truth. I knew that, for myself, the country had not yet been found; it was unknown. It had just barely been dreamed.
‘Go to Molo,’ said my father. ‘There are stables at Molo that you could use. Remember that you are still just a girl and do not expect too much — there are a few owners here and there who will give you horses to train. After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work.’
A Spartan thread held through my father’s counsel, then as now.
The trail ran north to Molo; at night it ran straight to the stars. It ran up the side of the Mau Escarpment until at ten thousand feet it found the plateau and rested there, and some of the stars burned beneath its edge. In the morning the plateau was higher than the sun. Even the day climbed the trail to Molo. I climbed it with all that I owned.
I had two saddlebags, and Pegasus. The saddlebags held the pony’s rug, his brush, a blacksmith’s knife, six pounds of crushed oats, and a thermometer as a precaution against Horse Sickness. For me the bags held pajamas, slacks, a shirt, toothbrush, and comb. I never owned less, nor can I be sure that I ever needed more.
We left before dawn, so that when the hills again took shape Njoro was gone, disappeared with the last impotent scowl of night. The farm was gone — its whirling mills, its fields and paddocks, its wagons and its roaring Dutchmen. Otieno and Toombo were gone, my new mirror, my new hut with the cedar shingles — all these were behind me, not like part of a life, but like a whole life lived and ended.
How completely ended! — for Buller too, bearing the scars of all his battles, holding still in his great dead heart the sealed memory of his own joys and mine, the smells he knew, the paths, the little games, those vanquished warthogs, the soundless stalking of a leopard’s paws — he too had lived a life and it was ended. He lay behind me, buried deep by the path to the valley where we hunted. There were rocks over him that I had lifted and carried there and piled in a clumsy pyramid and left without a name or epitaph.
For what can be said of a dog? What can be said of Buller — a dog like any other, except only to me? Can one repeat again those self-soothing and pompous phrases: this noble beast? — this paragon of comrades? — this friend of man?
How would the shade of Buller, eager, arrogant, swaggering still under the cool light of some propitious moon, regard such sighing sentiments except to tilt once more his forever insatiable nose, open a bit wider the eye that always drooped a little, and say: ‘In the name of my father, and my father’s father, and of every good dog that ever killed a cat, or stole a haunch, or bit a farm boy! — could this be me?’
Rest you, Buller. No hyena that ever howled the hills nor any jackal cringing in the night will paw the rocks that mark you. There is respect for a heart like yours, and if its beating stop, the spirit lives to guard the ways you wandered.
My trail is north. It is thin and it curls against the slopes of the Mau like the thong of a whip. The new sun falls across it in a jumble of golden bars that lie on the earth or lean against
the trees that edge the forest. The trees are tall juniper and strong cedars straining to the sky on straight shafts, thick, and rough with greying bark. Grey lichen clings in clotted mops from their high crests, defeating the day, and olive trees and wayward vines and lesser things that grow huddle safe from the hard hot light under the barrier of their stalwart brothers.
I ride my father’s gift, my horse with wings, my Pegasus with the dark bold eyes, the brown coat that shines, the long mane that flows like a black silk banner on the lance of a knight.
But I am no knight. I am no knight that would earn the greeting of any other save perhaps of that fabulous and pathetic one who quested the by-paths of a distant and more ancient Spain. I am clothed in work slacks, a coloured shirt, leather moccasins, and an old felt hat, broad-brimmed and weather-weary. I ride long-stirruped, my idle hand deep in a pocket.
Giant bush-pigs bolt across my way, disturbed at their morning forage; monkeys shriek and gibber in the twisting branches; butterflies, bright, fantastic, homeless as chips on a wave, dart and soar from every leaf. A bongo, rarest of all antelope, flees through the forest, leaping high, plunging his red and white-striped coat deep in a thicket — away from my curious eyes.
The path is steep and never straight, but the clean, firm legs of Pegasus measure it with easy contempt. If his wings are fantasy, his worth is not. He never trudges, he never jolts; he is as smooth as silence.
This is silence. This ride through the boisterous birth of a forest day is silent for me. The birds sing, but they have no song that I can hear; the scamper of a bush-buck at my elbow is the whisking of a ghost through a phantom wood.
I think, I ponder, I recall a hundred things — little things, foolish things that come to me without reason and fade again —
Kima the baboon, the big baboon that loved my father but hated me; Kima’s grimaces, his threats, his chain in the courtyard; the morning he escaped to trap me against the wall of a hut, digging his teeth into my arm, clawing at my eyes, screaming his jealous hatred until, with childish courage born of terror, I killed him dead, using a knobkerrie and frantic hands and sobbing fury — and ever afterward denied the guilt.
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