Red Strangers
Page 4
Waseru was worsted, and he knew it. His child was ill; if the quarrel was not settled and the thahu exorcised, sickness would creep from the boy’s stomach into the tips of his fingers and toes, as the parasitic fig entwines itself around the trunk and branches of the forest tree and stifles it to death. Ndolia’s voice was unctuous, his face complacent. In his mind sleek, shiny-coated goats roamed to and fro, plucking insistently at the leaves of shrubs with their mobile leathery lips, crowding docilely into his huts at night—new goats, goats that would be his, goats that would bring more wealth and honour to his homestead.
A little before sunset Waseru threw down the stick representing the second fat ram with a gesture of mingled acquiescence and despair. He rose to his feet, rubbing the palm of his hand wearily over his face.
“I will bring the goats,” he said. His voice was low and he did not look towards Ndolia. “But the curse laid publicly upon me and upon my children must be publicly revoked.”
Ndolia could hardly resist a chuckle.
“Where the goats are, ill-feeling is not,” he replied. “I have no quarrel with a son-in-law who pays his just debts.”
He rose from his stool and walked majestically towards his huts, a knot of kinsmen following respectfully at his heels. A delicious smell of cooking beans and roasting sweet potatoes came out to greet them on the evening breeze. A group of young men stood by the gateway with gourds of milk in their hands.
“Come, brothers,” Ndolia said, “there is food awaiting you, and for the son of Mahenia there is meat boiling in the pot, and good, juicy sheep’s stomach.”
There was a roar of laughter at this sally, for boiled meat and sheep’s stomach were eaten only by women—never by men. Ndolia led the way through the fence’s narrow opening in high humour. It had been a profitable day.
But Waseru could not bring himself to stay another night in the hostile homestead. He was sick at heart, his eyes were sunken into his head with chagrin and despair. He did not know how he could get the goats. His father’s small flock would disappear like water in a cracked calabash if this cruel demand were met. And where else could goats be borrowed ? His was a small clan, and a poor one. His father’s only living brother had run away, long ago, into the forest, and become a hunter of game. Even the muramati, the senior member of the clan, was not rich.
Well, let the boy die, Waseru thought; and a moment later felt ashamed at such an evil thought. Besides, the question was not only one of Matu’s survival. Ndolia belonged to a strong clan, and his curse was potent; if the payment was refused, who could tell what magic would not be invoked ? Waseru would be seized with sickness, his wife would become barren, his offspring would wither like the plucked tendrils of shrubs. No, somehow the goats must be obtained, and Ndolia’s wrath appeased. Somehow a way would be found; for does not the young of the snake, he asked himself, bring itself up in a tree ?
5
A MARKET was held at Karatina every other day. It was centred about a giant fig-tree whose foliage was black as iron and thick as beeswax. Usually it overflowed from the pool of shade on to the flat, sunflooded grassland that surrounded the tree. To the north, in the early mornings, the jagged white teeth of Kerinyagga bit into the soft blue of the sky. Later in the day they were buried in fat clouds of mother-of-pearl, and only the massive shoulders of the mountain, wearing rain-forest like a cloak of fur, could be seen above the foothills. The great mountain reared itself so lightly, so unexpectedly, from the clouds that it might have sprung out of the earth but a moment ago; and it stood there with such resolute majesty that it might have existed since before the world was made. God looked down from his bed of changing clouds directly on to Karatina, and none doubted that he saw much of interest there; for, like all old and wise men, he found in the driving of a shrewd bargain a zest which no other spectacle could afford.
Early in the morning streams of women, their backs bent under heavy burdens of millet and plantains, sweet potatoes and yams, pots and lumps of iron, converged on Karatina from all sides. Before the sun was overhead the market ground was black with bargainers, and the air full of shrill clatter. The women sat in groups on the ground, their wares spread out beside them, while elders leant upon their staffs in the shade gossiping of lawsuits and live-stock. Warriors did not waste much time with markets, which were affairs of peace; but one or two young men from the council of warriors patrolled the ground, clubs in hand (spears were not allowed), fully prepared to seize a thief or check a quarrel.
Wanjeri went to Karatina in a bad humour, for her needs were many and her means small. She had no goatskins, pots or grain to offer, nor could her husband bring sheep’s fat or ochre. All she had was a honey-barrel that Waseru had made, as much firewood as she could carry, and some articles which she knew could be sold only by a trick: five skins of wild animals. The hair had been carefully scraped off with sharp-edged stones and the skin softened by rubbing with dung; the trick was to pass them off as goatskins. She had little hope that she would be able so to deceive any true Kikuyu, but there were always people from Ndia at the market, and people from Ndia were notoriously as slow in trade as they were crafty in magic.
6
SHE disposed of her honey-barrel early for a lump of red ochre and a sack of beans, and sold her firewood for a calabash of salt made from the ash of papyrus stalks. No one looked twice at her skins, but she did not worry; when the sun had passed its zenith and people began to leave the market, women whose produce was still unsold would think with weariness of the long walk home. Then was the time to drive a hard bargain. So she sat quietly, legs outstretched, in the fig-tree’s shade. Near her people were offering newly burnt pots, fat and round and pink as the palm of a baby’s hand; they were doing a brisk business with the women of Ndia. Farther off were the smiths, attracting the biggest crowds of all. They had a wide choice of goods to display: short, keen knives with wooden handles; tweezers for plucking hairs from the body; branding irons for burning clan-marks on cattle; rattles for warriors’ ankles; bells for goats and cows; and a great variety of chains, ear-rings, bangles for arms and ankles, and coils of finely-drawn wire so much desired by women.
The market was beginning to empty before two Ndia men paused to feel Wanjeri’s skins. She praised her wares, saying that she had worked for many days to make them soft and fine. One of the Ndia men, seeing the dikdik skins, asked if there had been an epidemic among her husband’s goats, since several kids had died. The men were well-greased with fat and red ochre so that their limbs glistened in the sun, but they had harsh, coarse accents and uncertain, awkward ways.
“My husband is very rich,” Wanjeri said carelessly. “He has many goats. I have sold the skins of the other kids that died.”
“The skins are too thin,” one of the men remarked.
“Thin! They should indeed be thin,” Wanjeri answered, “for I have worked for many days to attain the thinness so much desired in our country. Do you not know that it is the fashion to wear cloaks that are light and soft? These skins are of just the right weight to make aprons to hang from a virgin’s belt.”
“Then they would find favour with the young men, for they would be as easy to tear as that which they cover,” one of the Ndia remarked.
Both men laughed, and Wanjeri snatched away the skins in anger. These Ndia have no manners, she thought; whenever they speak it is an insult.
In the end they bought the skins, however, and called over a woman who paid for them with a woven sack of millet. The two bushbuck skins she sold to an Ndia woman for a large sack of sorghum and another of beans, with a small calabash of millet thrown in for good measure.
Here was their food until the moon had grown to fullness and dwindled again, she thought as she surveyed her purchases. If Waseru had been a good husband he would have given her a shamba near to his father’s that would have filled her granary each season; then there would have been no need to cheat Ndia oafs with the unclean pelts of wild beasts. It was now four seasons since
he had provided goatskins for a new dress. Hers was old and ragged, and no longer soft. Everyone could see that she was the wife of a poor man, and in the marketplace she was ashamed of her husband’s poverty.
The market dissolved slowly into divergent streams of women flowing from Karatina up the valleys towards the forest, and down the ridges towards the Sagana river. Those who had brought tobacco returned with firewood; the bearers of millet carried back pig-iron and yams suspended from their foreheads. Wanjeri plodded in silence along the red path that wound up the Ragati valley, sweating gently in the afternoon sun, her stiff cloak flapping against her bent and sturdy knees. She saw neither the ragged leaves of the bananas, nor the roundeyed children herding goats, nor the nests of weaver-birds hanging in the reeds by the river. In her mind’s eye glittered only the smooth coils of drawn-wire ear-rings and the round, rare, and entrancing blue beads that had tempted her so greatly in the market, but in vain.
CHAPTER III
The Purification
1
THE company of other boys was more sweet to Muthengi than the curdled milk which was the food of men, and which he was sometimes allowed to taste. Because he wassturdy and strong, boys of his own age seldom dared to challenge him; and many of those who were older were circumcised, and herded goats no longer. So Muthengi, without close rivalry, became a leader. It was he who planned raids on the boys of neighbouring clans and divided the small force into fighting units like a warriors’ band. Each member carried a spear and a club, both of wood and roughly fashioned, and a painted shield of bark.
Such games held little interest for the younger brother Matu. He was small and timid, with a belly as swollen as the bellows of a forge and limbs as spindly as the legs of a crane. His tongue was as sluggish as Muthengi’s was quick. He was too young, or too feeble, to herd goats; all day during his father’s absence he went with his mother to her cousin’s shamba, where the women worked. There he would wander listlessly under the shade of the banana trees, or sit by himself under the tall survivors of the forest that stood in lonely clumps among the bush and millet, and listen to the soft monotonous fluting of the gai-ky-ngu. Sometimes he would take a small knife and squat beside his mother, helping her to dig out weeds. They grew in such profusion that it seemed as if the earth was a gigantic honeycomb, in which the soft fine soil was honey and the tough weed-roots were the comb. When he grew tired and listless Wanjeri would straighten her back and take him down to the sugar-cane plantation by the water, and there cut him a long stick, as thick as his arm, to chew. The juice, sweeter than honey and colder than a mountain stream, trickled deliciously down his small throat, and its strength flowed into his feet and fingers.
2
THE women weeded, for the most part, in silence. Farther down the hillside one of Mahenia’s nephews was clearing a patch of bush, breaking the root-bound sod with a heavy digging-stick of fire-hardened wood. He had called a number of his nearby kinsmen to help. They came in the dress always worn for cultivation: a belt made from a single banana-frond, with other fronds crossed over each shoulder and a small leaf wrapped around the head.
Often, as they worked, they broke into song. One man, the leader, raised his voice out of the silence in a high strong chant. Before the last phrase was finished the others opened their throats to echo his theme in a resounding chorus. As they sang together, their red shining arms lifted the sticks and stabbed the earth and turned the sod, their glistening shoulders rolled to the rhythm, their throats vibrated like a singing bird’s. The smooth rippling movements of their limbs, the vigorous chant, the rise and fall of the digging-sticks merged into a living unity; the song was as much a part of the breaking of the sod as the sharp bite of the stick, or the muscles that moved beneath the skin of the men’s shoulders like fish swimming under water.
SONG OF THE CULTIVATORS
You who woke up early at dawn, who woke you ?
When we woke we found that the grass was growing.
Mother, you are short as a knife-haft, yet you
Cook for the workers.
You girls, you who weed in the garden, weed a
While, then turn your eyes to the sky—what hide you ?
What lies hidden, what do you look for, oh you
Girls who are weeding ?
Men who dig beyond the swift river, we will
Shoot our arrows over the water, for your
Knives make sounds like knives of the women; you are
Weaker than women.
Men who dwell across the broad valley, once you
Sold a sheep whose penis was like a man’s, and
So we hurl these pebbles against you, now we
Stone you with pebbles.
When you meet a man with a sore leg, bring him;
I will follow him by the flies that cluster
On the sores that cover him, find him when he
Loses the pathway.
When you meet a girl who has sore eyes, bring her;
She was told no man would desire her sore-eyed,
None will lie with maidens with sore eyes, she will
Stay with me always.
Oh you girl who walks on the path, stand silent—
Let me greet you, lest you be greeted by the
Lazy man who eats of the herb that lazy
Mothers will pluck him.
Man who wanders far from the gardens, tell me,
We were friends, oh wanderer, why then did you
Break our friendship ? Can you remember now my
Name, the hard worker ?
I have taken life, but you must not ask me
Who is dead; the thing that I killed lies here, my
Knife has slain it, here in the shamba; now my
Mother will praise me.
Behind the diggers followed the women, breaking heavy clods with clubs, and pounding the soil into a coarse tilth. As the day grew hotter the rhythm slackened. When the sun was overhead the song ceased and the diggers, moist with sweat, worked slowly and with frequent rests. Before the shadows had grown to the length of a man they ceased work altogether and lounged until nightfall under the trees, smacking their lips over soured millet gruel and curdled milk, and talking of the prodigious amount of work they had performed.
3
AFTER nightfall Matu clung always to his mother, and stayed with her in the women’s huts. He was frightened of the strange dim shapes that lay over the grass in the night-time, of the hoot of the owl, of the spirits that came out of the ground, and of the distant voices of young men raised in laughter and song. While his father was away he was frightened, too, of the company of men in the thingira, of their wisdom and deep laughter, and of the shame that would fall on him if he offended these grave, all-powerful persons who governed the country and owned its wealth: the very rulers of the earth itself, and all that it supported.
But the soft talk of the women often bored him; and after the meal, hot and savoury from the cooking-pot, he would sometimes ask his mother to tell a story. Then, if she was in a good humour, she would recount some fable that she remembered from her own childhood. Matu would listen enthralled, especially if it concerned a very cunning squirrel, of whose adventures he never tired. In his career this squirrel experienced many setbacks, but never one to which his wit and ingenuity were unequal.
One day the squirrel stole a small he-goat and concealed it in a granary. But the store was full of good food and the goat ate until it became so fat that it could not possibly get out of the door. The squirrel, in great distress, went to seek advice from his friends. His first appeal was to the hyena.
“I should be delighted to come to your assistance,” the hyena said.
“Thank you,” the squirrel replied, “but before you help me, tell me what you will say to the he-goat when you are getting it out of the granary.”
“I will say ‘ow-u-ow,’ ” the hyena answered, and he howled loudly.
“No, that’s no good at all,” the squirrel said. “My go
at would only be very frightened.”
He ran off to the forest to find the bushbuck, to whom he told the story.
“Certainly,” the bushbuck said politely. “I will help with pleasure.”
“Before you do so,” the squirrel asked, “tell me what you will say to my goat when you are setting him free.”
“I shall say ‘kya, kya, kya,’ ” the bushbuck answered, and barked sharply.
“That will not do at all,” the squirrel said; and he ran off to find the porcupine. But the porcupine proposed to rattle his quills and stamp; and the Colobus monkey could only cry like a baby; and the elephant made a terrifying noise with his trunk; and the reedbuck whistled harshly like a boy; and the wild pig merely snorted.
But at last the squirrel met the leopard, a very cunning animal, who had a far more intelligent suggestion.
“I will say to the goat …” the leopard began; and then he whistled blandly and clucked his tongue.
The squirrel was delighted, and took the leopard to the granary to free the goat. But the leopard went inside and killed the goat by breaking its neck.
“Oh, what have you done? You have killed my beautiful fat he-goat!” the squirrel cried in bitter distress.
“Indeed my sorrow is great,” the leopard said. “I killed it by mistake, because my claws are so big and sharp. Do not grieve, however, we will roast the goat and eat it.”
So the leopard asked the squirrel to find a fire and bring back a burning log. The squirrel, however, was suspicious, and in a short while he returned to say that he could not find a fire. The leopard volunteered to look, and when he had gone the squirrel quickly cut up the meat and hid it in a tree. When the leopard returned and asked for a share of the meat, the squirrel refused; and so the leopard had to go away hungry, and very angry.