Ndolia was angry when he saw eight goats instead of seventeen, and even angrier when their blemishes were revealed to his experienced eye. A scrawnier, uglier lot of animals had never been seen, he exclaimed; they were forest rats rather than goats. Waseru defended them with passion, reciting the virtues of each one; and though Ndolia would have wished to reject them, or at least to argue all day, his kinsmen grew so impatient to broach the beer that he had to give way. He poured the beer into drinking-horns, spilt a little on the ground for his ancestors’ spirits, and handed the horns to his eldest son to be passed around the circle. His cunning face was impassive, but satisfaction gleamed in his avaricious eyes. Eight more goats—not such bad ones, although he would certainly never admit it—and a fat ram; nine more goats and another ram to come; good beer; and victory over a poor unhonoured clan. No doubt about it, God was good.
Next morning he and a group of men of his own clan and generation gathered in a circle under the tall fig-tree outside the compound. Ndolia lifted his arms towards Kerinyagga and solemnly retracted the curse that he had laid upon Waseru’s clan, crops and offspring. Then the fat ram was slain, and roasted, and a feast held to mark the end of the dispute.
6
THE purification of Matu took place outside Irumu’s homestead, on an open piece of pasture shaded by a clump of trees. Waseru drove a goat before him, an old and skinny animal that was likely to die before long in any case; its skin would be the mundu-mugu’s fee. Wanjeri followed with the baby on her back and Matu, spindle-legged and silent, trotted along behind.
Irumu scooped a shallow cup-shaped hole in the red earth with the point of his sword and in it laid two large banana leaves so as to make a basin. Waseru filled it with water from a gourd. Then he handed Irumu a small calabash of millet, the token payment without which no mundu-mugu could use his powers. Irumu sprinkled over the water a little powder which he tipped from three gourds, stoppered with cows’ tails, that he took from his magic bag.
“You thahu, go away, grow thin and disappear,” he chanted, “as this powder which I scatter on the water grows thin, spreads out, disappears. Now you must scatter away, you thahu, and grow thin, and dissolve like the clouds over Kerinyagga in the late afternoon.” He added from a smaller gourd a few drops of a thick liquid said to contain the fat of a lion, of a leopard and of an ostrich, mixed with castor oil and the ground-up roots of a shrub. Matu, solemn and scared, was led up to the basin and told to squat on his heels opposite Irumu. His scanty cloak loosely covered his small thin buttocks, and flapped about his projecting ribs. His bones looked as fragile as the legs of a bird.
The goat was brought. Irumu took up a knife, split its nose, and rubbed powdered lime into the incision with the palm of his hand. He seized the goat by the shoulders and walked it on its hindlegs around the basin, once in each direction, so that it dripped blood in a circle as it went. All the time he chanted loudly that the thahu was to leave the child, never to return. Then he squatted down, dipped the goat’s right forefoot in the water, and held it to Matu’s mouth. The boy sucked off the liquid and spat it out to his left; then sucked at the left hoof, and spat to his right. All the time Irumu chanted in a high thin voice: “Vomit out, vomit out; let the thahu be vomited out.”
The goat was taken behind Matu’s back and its bleeding nose thrust in turn under each armpit. He licked the nose and spat out the blood and medicine to left and right. “If the thahu comes from under the left arm, if it comes from under the right arm, let it be vomited out,” Irumu chanted. He lifted the goat on to Matu’s back and cried : “Let the thahu be like a load on the back that is cast off as I cast off this goat.” A boy who was looking on seized the animal’s hindlegs and stretched it on its back, while Irumu, grasping a knife, slit open its belly and pulled out part of the stomach. This he opened deftly and extracted a handful of the yellow-green, half-digested contents, which he threw into the basin. He peeled and sharpened a small stick and pinned the edges of the severed stomach neatly together with the skewer. Then he tucked the bulging stomach back into the body cavity of the struggling goat, dipped two twisted antelope horns that he drew from his bag into the dark-brown water, and held their tips to Matu’s mouth. The boy spat out the liquid many times, to right and left, while Irumu chanted faster and faster : “Vomit out, vomit out, let the thahu be vomited out,” until the words were rushing from his mouth like the waters of a river in flood.
“If the thahu came through the arms, if it came through the feet, if it came through the navel, if it came through the anus, if it came through the roof of the hut, let it be vomited out. If it came from a woman, if the milk of woman fell upon him, let it be vomited out. If it came from the hut, if it came from the homestead, from the dung of a hyena left within the fence, let it be vomited out, let it dissolve like mist and go far away to the land of the Wakamba, beyond the mountain Kianjahé.”
A pause followed while Irumu squeezed the goat’s windpipe until the animal became limp and all but dead, peeled off its skin, and broke its legs. The longer a little life stayed with the goat, the longer would life also inhabit the patient’s body. He cut strips from the stomach, took out the heart, testes and eyes, and threw them all into the basin. From the rest of the stomach he cut two round discs, made a hole in the centre of each, and slipped them over his two horns so that they became like little ruffs; and then he hung a strip of intestine over Matu’s shoulders. Once again the horns were dipped into the liquid, in which the goat’s eyes floated like gelatinous islands in a dark lake thick with decaying weeds, and thrust their tips into Matu’s mouth for him to suck and spit. When this was done Irumu severed the strips of gut with a quick slash of the knife and carried them to the bush. Here he buried them in the undergrowth at the foot of a tree, and with them the thahu, which had passed into the intestine of the goat. The eyes were buried separately under another bush, looking upwards in a perpetual prayer that God might give wealth to Matu’s father. Now the thahu that caused Matu’s sickness had been driven out, but the gates of his body had still to be sealed against its return. This was done with three fresh medicines—a white chalk, a black ash, and a red powder—which Irumu mixed with spittle and smeared on to Matu’s nose, neck and navel, and between his toes.
When the meat of the sacrificial goat was roasted Waseru ate his portion with relish and a sense of peace that he had long lacked. Now that Matu was cleansed the boy’s health would return and he would grow strong. And no doubt Waseru’s own luck would change, too, so that he would be able to repay the heavy debt he owed his father.
7
WASERU and his family returned to their own shamba next morning. Already they had been too long away from the growing crops. When they entered the shade of the forest it was as though they had passed suddenly into nightfall. The white sunlight was stained a clear green, the air was soft and cool as mountain mists. Straight-boled trees stood motionless as long-legged cranes waiting patiently for the darting of a fish in the still pool at their feet; but all was movement and bustle in the world above. Long-tailed Colobus monkeys leaped in flashes of black and white, bending the creaking branches as they landed gently on the next-door tree; woodpigeons called in a melancholy cadence and plaintain-eaters emitted their loud unbirdlike croak. In crevices of the bark, in dark safe holes in the trunks, hunched furry hyraxes slept, betraying their presence to none. On the ground below small fragile-ankled dikdiks picked their way fastidiously among fallen twigs, their round, deep-purple eyes bright with vigilance, fearful of the sleeping leopard; bushbuck and the wary bongo drowsed in thickets, and the giant forest-hog slumbered with his tusks hung low, black as a shadow.
Muthengi hated the forest. It was lonely and dark, and full of ogres. He wanted the light, the laughter, the campanionship of cultivated ridges; the tinkle of goat-bells, the song of cultivators were sweet in his ears. But Matu lifted his head when they entered the shadows, and looked about him with pleasure. Outside the sun hurt his head and the incessant herding of g
oats tired his legs. Here was peace and freedom, and time to dream.
The distance to Waseru’s shamba was short, but the path was slippery and steep. Three elephants had used it the night before; a row of watery craters showed where their feet had trod. It was hard, slow going for burdened women; but Wanjeri braced her thick muscles and heaved herself and her heavy sacks out of the muddy pits. The family crossed the swift-flowing Ragati river by a felled log bridge, and saw a roughly built shelter and a small clearing above them on the slope of the hill. Unburnt logs lay across the ground like fallen warriors, and in the gap that their felling had left the sun streamed down on to the rich broken earth and on to the green leaves of the millet that was sprouting with vigour among the charred stumps.
Waseru paused a moment at the foot of the hill to look at it with satisfaction in his heart. It was the work of his hands. Soon the millet would fill the ear. There had been rain, and the earth was moist beneath his feet, the sun on his shoulder warmer than glowing embers. Now surely God would be good, and the crops heavy. “Truly, the soil is fat,” he thought, “as fat as the tail of a ram ready for the feast.” But he could not show arrogance by voicing such thoughts aloud. He spat and said to his wife: “Now come, and store the food, and go quickly to work with your hoe in the shamba, for the weeds will have grown high in your absence and there is much to be done.”
“Ee, you talk always of work,” she replied.
She jerked the load farther forward on her shoulders and plodded with bent knees up the slope to her forest home.
CHAPTER IV
The Forest Shamba
1
BIRDS came in twittering excited clouds, later in the season, to peck ripening millet out of the ear. Waseru built a platform in the centre of the shamba and one of the boys was always on duty there, hurling stones from a leather sling on his arm and shouting until his voice grew hoarse. Many fat woodpigeons came, strutting arrogantly in their green-and-grey plumage; and big dark-blue starlings, gleaming like metal in the sun; and small unobtrusive waxbills with delicate red beaks, who fluttered like fastidious bees among the stiff fingers of the ripening crop.
Muthengi and Matu resorted to cunning as well as to direct attack. From the moist banks of the river they plucked fruits of the glossy-leaved mwerere bush, and these they cut open with a knife. The centre of the fruit was filled with a thick white latex. Into this they dipped sticks, twisting the glutinous latex round and round the points, and then they placed the sticky-ended twigs in bushes and trees all around the shamba. Sometimes a bird would settle on a stick, and then its feet would become hopelessly trapped. There it would flutter, beating its small wings against the air and bursting its throat with frantic screeches, until gradually its wing-beats slackened, a film spread over its eyes, and thirst and starvation put out the spark of life.
At night there were other enemies to be repulsed. By the side of the platform Waseru built a little shelter of branches. Here he shivered, night after night, his club by his side, guarding his crop against the ravages of wild pigs and porcupines. He would wake in the stillness of midnight to see the moon, pale as a shield, behind the moving branches of trees, and to hear a faint rustling in the millet. Sometimes a soft, contented grunt betrayed the presence of a pig digging out the roots of the precious crop with its tusks and trampling the millet-heads underfoot. Waseru would dart out of his shelter with a shout that echoed through the silent trees and hurl his club swiftly at the sound. Then there would be a snort, the tattoo of stampeding feet, and a dark streak of waving millet-heads across the lonely moon-flooded field.
Sometimes he would prowl along the edges of the shamba, a cold moon-shadow flickering mistily by his side, to scare away the silent soft-coated bushbuck and the mild-eyed dikdiks that came to nibble at the grain. The bushbuck, when they felt the earth shake under his footfall, would stand like black rocks among the white-stalked millet, their heads thrown back and their twisted horns pointing to the moon; and then in a single bound they would vanish into the shadows and become dissolved in night.
Strange rustles came sometimes from behind the threatening forest wall that hemmed in the little shamba, a wall beyond which no moonlight penetrated. The sound of the ears of millet singing very softly to each other as they swayed like dancers to the music of a gentle wind was reassuring to Waseru. The millet was his, and he knew its language. Soon it would be singing lightly to him in the moonlight, “I am ripe, I am ready, deliver me now of my children, for they are heavy within me,” and he would know that the ears cried for the knife. But beyond the leafy wall were things that spoke soundless language, things that crawled in darkness and were foes of men. The forest itself was an enemy, and sheltered enemies; there were ogres in it, and evil spirits, and—it was said—a monster that sucked the blood of men.
The wind-rippled sea on which the two boys gazed down every day from their platform changed from green to pale brown and then to gold; and when the moon began to wane it was ripe for harvest. To cut the heads with a knife and carry them to the homestead was woman’s work; but since the shamba was a large one, Waseru worked side by side with his wife and told Muthengi to help also. Muthengi said nothing, but in his heart he resented the order. Because Wanjeri had no daughters and Waseru no unmarried sisters, he had to perform many women’s tasks that were undignified for boys—carrying water, for instance, and firewood, even stirring the gruel when Wanjeri was busy elsewhere.
2
THE time had come, Waseru decided, to build a proper house; and for this, beer must be brewed. He owned no cane plantations, but honey made a stronger brew than sugar juice. Before the rains he had fixed several barrels in the forks of trees. Now, when the pale purple, sweet-scented blossoms of the muthakwa bush were beginning to fade, was the honey-gathering season. Waseru called on his half-brother Ngarariga and two of his companions to help; and one evening, when the sun was low in the sky, they set out with leather pouches slung over their shoulders.
The forest was too dense to penetrate except along paths made by elephants. Soon they came to an ageing tree with a hollow cavity in its trunk. The men gazed up into the tangled branches until they were satisfied that many small black specks, like dust-motes in a sunbeam, were darting to and fro against the blue sky.
Working swiftly and silently, they pulled and hacked at tough, twisted lianas dangling from the tree tops like long whiskers from the beard of the sun, and wound several tendrils together into a rope. Ngarariga, who was young and agile, fastened a strip of liana to his ankles, hugged the tree with both arms, and levered his body upwards with his manacled feet. It was a trick the Kikuyu had learned many generations ago from the Agumba, the pit-dwelling dwarfs. He tied the liana rope to a branch and descended, and the party waited until nightfall for the bees to go to sleep. Grey-eyed dusk came swiftly as a leopard from the thicket; his icy breath chilled the flesh of the waiting men. They drew their skin cloaks around their knees and watched the shadows dissolve and then the early stars spring out of a soft blue sky, like white flowers of forest creepers opening in the thickets. When the stars had grown hard and brilliant behind the roof of leaves and the air was cold as a rock beneath a waterfall, Waseru took his fire-sticks and some dried grass from his leather pouch and spun the hard stick against the soft between the palms of his hands. Soon a spark flew out and took root in the little pile of sawdust that the stick had ground out of the soft wood; and in a moment small flames were dancing in the brushwood. Ngarariga made and lit a torch of sticks and led the way up the liana rope into the tree. Waseru followed, his leather bag over his shoulder.
The bees’ retreat was in a hollow of the trunk. Ngarariga thrust his burning torch deep into the tree’s heart and thick, acrid smoke curled into the crannies of the wood. The bees rose suddenly out of the trunk in a body, with a communal scream of anger and dismay. They fled into the smokeless air above, too taken aback to assault the men who clung like hyraxes to the tree. Ngarariga held the torch aloft while Waseru plunged his
arm into the cavity and scooped handful after handful of thick, glutinous honey into his leather bag. When the store was exhausted the two slid down to the ground, unstung, well satisfied with the harvest of the bees.
3
THE building of a hut was not a task that could be performed by one man’s family alone. The help of clansmen and neighbours was expected and freely given. Three days before the appointed time, on the first day of the new moon, a number of Waseru’s relatives arrived in a party to cut poles for the walls and roof. Next day a long file of women wound up the path with loads of reeds for thatch on their backs. By the third day Wanjeri had ground a quantity of millet, and honey-beer had been well fermented in two big gourds. When all was ready she went down to her father-in-law’s homestead and pulled from the roof of her cousin’s hut—which had been hers—a handful of thatch from above the door, and another from the back. This she carried home and put on one side, ready to fix into the new roof next day.
The young men arrived early, singing light-hearted songs about each other’s love affairs; the married men, who followed after, talked and joked with more restraint, and worked with greater concentration. When all was ready Waseru stepped forward and drew a circle on the ground to mark the circumference of the walls. Then, taking an axe in one hand and a calabash of uncooked millet gruel in the other, he walked around the circle, chopping at the ground with the axe, and pouring libations of gruel into the shallow furrow. As he went he prayed aloud to the spirits of his ancestors to bless the house and to bring him good fortune.
Then the building began. Holes were dug for the wall-posts, and nineteen stout poles with forked tops were planted firmly in them. In the meantime another group of men was at work on the framework of the roof, lashing branches to a hoop of twisted wands at one end and to a stout axial stake at the other. A skeleton roof shaped like a big convolvulus blossom grew under their hands in a few hours. The spaces between the poles of the wall were filled by roughly hewn planks cemented by clay; the roof was lifted on and secured; and before noon the framework of the hut stood ready for thatching.
Red Strangers Page 6