Assegai

‘No. Not the woman you are thinking of. She is just one woman among many others.’

The question was out before he could check himself: ‘How do you know about her?’ Then he answered himself: ‘Of course. You were there. And you know many things.’

She chuckled, and they were silent for a long while. It was a warm, comforting silence. He felt a strange bond with her, a closeness as though she were truly his mother.

‘I do not like what I am doing with my life now,’ he said at last. He had not thought about it until this moment, but as he said it, he knew it was the truth.

‘Because you are a soldier you are not able to do what your heart tells you,’ she agreed. ‘You must do as the old men order.’

‘You understand,’ he said. ‘I dislike hunting down and killing people I do not even know.’

‘Do you want me to point the way for you, M’bogo?’

‘I have come to trust you. I need your guidance.’

She was silent again for so long that he was about to speak. Then he saw that her eyes were wide open but rolled back in her head so that in the firelight only the whites were exposed. She was rocking rhythmically on her haunches and after a while she began to speak, but her voice had changed to a low, grating monotone. ‘There are two men. Neither is your father, but both will be more than your father,’ she said. ‘There is another road. You must follow the road of the great grey men who are not men.’ She drew a long, wheezing, asthmatic breath. ‘Learn the secret ways of the wild creatures, and other men will honour you for that knowledge and understanding. You will walk with mighty men of power, and they will count you their equal. There will be many women, but only one woman who will be many women. She will come to you from the clouds. Like them she will show you many faces.’ She broke off and made a strangling noise at the back of her throat. With supernatural chill he realized that she was in the struggles of divination. At last she shook herself violently and blinked. Her eyes rolled forward so that he could look into their dark centres as she focused on his face. ‘Hearken to what I told you, my son,’ she said softly. ‘The time for you to choose will soon be upon you.’

‘I did not understand what you were telling me.’

‘In time it will become clear to you,’ she assured him. ‘When you need me I will always be here. I am not your mother, but I have become more than your mother.’

‘You speak in riddles, Mama,’ he said, and she smiled a fond but enigmatic smile.

In the morning Manyoro regained consciousness but he was very weak and confused. He tried to sit up but did not have the strength to do so. He gazed at them blearily. ‘What has happened? What place is this?’ Then he recognized his mother. ‘Mama, is it truly you? I thought it was a dream. I have been dreaming.’

‘You are safe in my manyatta on Lonsonyo Mountain,’ she told him. ‘We removed the Nandi arrow from your leg.’

‘The arrow? Yes, I remember . . . The Nandi?’

The slave girls brought him a bowl of ox blood and milk, which he drank greedily, spilling some down his chest. He lay back gasping. Then, for the first time, he noticed Leon squatting in the gloom of the hut. ‘Bwana!’ This time he managed to sit up. ‘You are with me still?’

‘I am here.’ Leon went to him quietly.

‘How long? How many days since we left Niombi?’

‘Seven.’

‘Headquarters in Nairobi will think you are dead or that you have deserted.’ He gripped Leon’s shirt and shook it agitatedly. ‘You must report to Headquarters, Bwana. You must not neglect your duty for me.’

‘We will go back to Nairobi when you are ready to march.’

‘No, Bwana, no. You must go at once. You know that the major is not your friend. He will make trouble for you. You must go at once, and I will follow you when I am able.’

‘Manyoro is right,’ Lusima intervened. ‘You can do no more here. You must go to your chief in Nairobi.’ Leon had lost track of time, but now he realized with a guilty shock that it must be more than three weeks since he had had contact with his battalion headquarters. ‘Loikot will guide you to the railway line. He knows that part of the country well. Go with him,’ Lusima urged him.

‘I will,’ he agreed, and stood up. There were no preparations he needed to make for the journey. He had no weapons or baggage, and hardly any clothing other than his ragged khaki.

Lusima provided him with a Masai shuka. ‘It is the best protection I can give you. It will shield you from sun and cold. The Nandi fear the red shuka – even the lions flee from it.’

‘Lions also?’ Leon suppressed a smile.

‘You will see.’ She returned his smile.

He and Loikot left within an hour of making the decision. During the rains of the previous season the boy had herded his father’s cattle as far north as the railway and knew the land well.

Leon’s feet had healed just sufficiently for him to lace on his boots. Limping gingerly he followed Loikot down the mountain towards the great plain below. At the foot he paused to relace his boots. When he straightened again he looked up and saw the tiny but unmistakable silhouette of Lusima standing on the lip of the cliff. He lifted one arm in farewell, but she did not acknowledge the gesture. Instead she turned and disappeared from his sight.

As his feet healed and hardened he was able to increase his speed and hurry after Loikot. The boy covered the ground with the long, flowing stride characteristic of his people. As he went he kept up a ru

The plain over which they were travelling abounded with living creatures. Loikot ignored the herds of smaller antelope that skittered around them, but remarked on anything of more significance. By this time, with his sharp ear for language, Leon had picked up enough Maa to follow the boy’s chatter with little difficulty.

They had carried no food with them when they left Lonsonyo Mountain and Leon had been puzzled as to how they would subsist, but he need not have worried: Loikot provided a strange variety of sustenance, which included small birds and their eggs, locusts and other insects, wild fruit and roots, a spurfowl, which he knocked out of the air with his staff as it flushed on noisy wings from under his feet, and a large monitor lizard that he pursued across the veld for half a mile before he beat it to death. The lizard’s flesh tasted like chicken, and there was enough to feed them for three days, although by then the carcass had been colonized by swarms of iridescent blue flies and their fat white offspring.

Leon and Loikot slept each night beside a small fire, covered with their shukas against the chill, and started again while the morning star was still high and bright in the dawn sky. On the third morning the sun was still below the horizon and the light poor when Loikot stopped dead and pointed in the direction of a flat-topped acacia tree only fifty yards away. ‘Ho, you killer of cattle, I greet you,’ he cried.

‘Who is it?’ Leon demanded.

‘Do you not see him? Open your eyes, M’bogo.’ Loikot pointed with his staff. Only then did Leon make out two small black tufts in the brown grass between them and the tree. One flicked and the whole picture sprang into focus. Leon was staring at an enormous male lion, crouching flat in the grass and watching them with implacable yellow eyes. The tell-tale tufts were the black tips of its round ears.

‘Sweet God!’ Leon took a step back.

Loikot laughed. ‘He knows I am Masai. He will run if I challenge him.’ He brandished his staff. ‘Hey, Old One, the day of my testing will soon come. I will meet you then, and we shall see which is the best of us.’ He was referring to his ritual trial of courage. Before he could be counted a man and have the right to plant his spear at the door of any woman who caught his fancy, the young morani must confront his lion face to face and kill him with his broad-bladed assegai.