by Mike Bond
Sirius had risen overhead, a tiny, bitter moon, beside it Lepus the hare, caught between the hunter and his dog—maybe midnight, she decided; six hours to dawn.
Later the hiss of sandals broke a nightmare of Klaus dying because she would not make love. The Somali knelt beside her. It’s coming now, she thought, leg muscles tensing. If I had a knife I’d kill you. The man rose noiselessly and stepped away.
After a few minutes she raised her head enough to see above the camel saddle anchoring her wrists. One man was sitting still, his cloak a sallow pyramid between the desert and the stars thick as snow against the blackness of space. The other two lay beneath their burnooses. She drew up her knees, dragging the saddle attached to her ankles closer, the sand swishing—but the man in the cloak did not move—until she could reach the rawhide round her ankles. The boy had spit on the knots to tighten them; now they snapped her chilled fingernails like steel. She rested, tried again, rested, watching the march of stars towards dawn, found an end of rawhide and worked it backwards through a loop and into a second loop till the knot loosened and fell away. Still her ankles were tied. She found the second knot; it was easier.
Blood rushed stinging into her feet; she bit a flap of leather on one saddle to keep from crying out. Her toes were on fire. The leather tasted of camel hair and sweat. The pain grew bearable; with one foot she pulled closer a chunk of lava she had located earlier at the base of the overhang.
Clamping the lava between her ankles, she rubbed the rawhide binding her wrists against it. The lava fell behind her ankles and was difficult to move up again. The angle was wrong and the stone’s sharp edges sliced her skin instead of the cord. Back and forth she shoved her wrists over the stone, each time catching an edge of bone on the same razor curl of lava where long ago a volcanic bubble had burst, the rawhide sliding faster over the stone as her blood lubricated it, till one cord popped and the other slackened, pulse tingling her hands.
A camel snorted; she glanced back in terror but the sitting Somali had not moved. She crawled from the overhang along a steep rubbled slope whose dark lava seemed to suck up all the starlight; looking back she was startled by the grim scar her footsteps made on the dewy sand, but no one followed. She had a moment of pure terror at the thought of them awaking and finding her gone, of their anger and what they would do when they caught her. Her strength melted; she ached to collapse and give it all away, to die. She sneered at herself, then laughed that she should sneer. Afraid of angering men again, girl? You coward, girl. You coward.
At her back was a slope of black lava descending from the Huri Hills, to the west before her the starlit Chalbi, with its dark wound of the Ririba laga, and beyond it the sentinel Dukana. Overhead the stars rotated west, Sirius now halfway to the horizon—was it three o’clock already? There were only three more hours of night left in which to cross the Chalbi down into Ririba laga and up into the Dukana, whose talus would mask her tracks and whose jumbled outcrops might provide shelter. The first breeze before dawn, tasting of dew, came bringing with it the roar of a solitary lion. Is that how the woman of the jawbone died, two million years ago? And why she’d left no other bones?
She turned from the desert and ascended the loose volcanic slope, avoiding the sharpest rocks. When she was sure her trail was impossible to follow, she turned, soon descending again to step out on the desert a mile south of where she had first ascended. Gripping a sharp stone in each hand, she walked fast towards the black trace of the Ririba laga far out across the starry sand, looking back often, but no one pursued, glancing up at the stars as they slid inexorably westwards.
17
THROUGH THE DUSTY windscreen of the jolting Land Rover MacAdam watched the three empty petrol trucks bellow black smoke as they lumbered up the hill ahead. Boughs and creepers hung over the road and swayed when the trucks hit them. The Land Rover jerked and banged as Nehemiah steered it through and around the ruts and potholes; MacAdam held the bar beneath the seat to keep from bouncing. “It’s bloody well falling apart!” he yelled.
Nehemiah lifted his hands loosely from the steering wheel, letting it shimmy. “This’s a good one!” The Land Rover veered to the left.
MacAdam laughed. The panoramic purple Rift spread out below them as if the earth had cracked in half and they could see its distant other side. “I was talking about the road, not your vehicle.”
“No difference.”
Longonot Crater, vast and jagged as a mountain of the moon, blocked the western sky. “Still a damn shame,” MacAdam added, not meaning specifically the road that he and Nehemiah both remembered as much better before black independence, but Kenya itself that was falling apart, and he and Nehemiah seemed powerless to arrest it, no matter how much they talked or tried to change it.
“Some people are doing OK,” Nehemiah said.
“Like you?”
“I don’t need much money.”
“M’Bole?”
“He’s just one of many Ministers. You know that.”
The car whammed into a rut, stabbing pain across MacAdam’s injured chest. “He should fix some bloody roads.”
“He’s tending to his cows.”
“His Swiss cows.”
“Maybe some are in the Bahamas. The Channel Islands.”
“Anywhere the feed’s good.”
The land so far below was speckled with long-shadowed umbrella trees, its grass burnished by late sun. “You should’ve shot the captives,” Nehemiah said.
MacAdam felt exasperation, remembered his feeling in the Matthews Range, that Nehemiah would understand. Now there seemed no way to explain. “I felt so alive. I owed my life to one of them, who held his fire when he could have killed me.”
Nehemiah was indifferent. “The sentence for poaching’s death. So now they’ll just be shot in Nairobi, and I’m in trouble with M’Bole.”
“Even a little time’s better than none, when you’re about to be shot.” But in this jangling dirty vehicle, with the golden Rift spread out below, the battle in the Matthews Range seemed unreal; even the scar-faced scared youth pointing his rifle at MacAdam’s chest. “Let me take the heat tomorrow, from M’Bole.”
“He’ll chew on me, then knife you in the back. And your prisoners will still get shot.”
The road leveled, widened through conifer plantations, barefoot children herding cattle along the shoulders, bare huts beneath banana trees, flashes of cheap fabric like flags of poverty; a goat ran on a tether, a kid stumbling at her teats, trying to suck. Boys at the roadside held out rabbits by their ears, to sell.
A matatu passed the other way, its windows crammed with faces, five men hanging out the back and more huddled among potato sacks on the roof, the words “Imagine Time” stenciled in white letters across the top of the windshield. Again MacAdam felt the absolute futility of it all, the haphazard unreality. “I missed a man, five shots, up in the Matthews Range,” he said. “The one who didn’t shoot me. He was running away. M’kele killed him.”
“So he said.”
“What else d’he say?”
“That you missed that man on purpose. And that he’s going to use his Ranger pay to buy himself a new wife.”
“How many’s he got now?”
“He got three, four. But says he needs a young one, to warm him up again. Otherwise he be getting too old.”
“Like me—”
“You just think you’re going soft.”
“I don’t want to shoot at people anymore.”
“As I said, what’s the difference—”
“I don’t care. I won’t do it.’ MacAdam glared at a leopard-striped tour van with pale tourists dozing at its windows.
“You wiped out a whole team of poachers! You didn’t lose a man—”
“I lost Kuria.”
“He’s not dead. He’ll heal.”
“Not walk.”
“Many Maasai walk with a stick. A Meru can learn also.”
MacAdam shook his head. “We took out seve
n poachers but three more got away, with the tusks. You know it won’t stop till every elephant is dead. The problem’s Africa—the world wants copper so Africa rips open its belly. The world wants diamonds so Africa sends its young men down mines to die for them. People want ivory and colobus skins and oil and slaves so Africa plunders herself for them!”
“The world wants game parks, too, Mac, full of animals. But I don’t give a damn what the world wants—I care what I want.”
The road had narrowed, clogged with early evening trucks and buses winding down through the poor patchwork farms and shredded jungle of the N’gong Hills; Nairobi’s lights poured out over the valleys below like diamonds spilled from a basket. “I think I once believed,” MacAdam said, “that I was better than most people, because I’d known what I’d wanted and got it. But it turned out I hadn’t even known what I wanted…”
“Who does?”
Once more MacAdam had a sense of not belonging, alien, unable to explain. If he couldn’t explain it to Nehemiah, how could he to himself? “It’s walking on nothing—” It felt like something wrung out of him, once he’d said it he’d go free. “There’s no reason, no real reason, for anything I do.”
“That buffalo make a big dent in your chest. Get it fixed, then see how you feel.”
Irritated, MacAdam started to say, “It started long before this,” then stopped. He didn’t care—it didn’t matter when it had started or what it was. And he felt a traitor to Nehemiah’s simpler vision, like a man who pretends to celebrate with his friends while in his mouth he tastes only ashes. He thought of the shattered butterfly in the Matthews Range.
“Like M’kele, Mac, you should get yourself another wife.”
“I got plenty of trouble with one.”
“That’s because she’s just one.”
MacAdam laughed and the laugh made his chest hurt. Thinking of laughter causing pain made him laugh again, hurting more. “You’re full of shit.”
“So don’t you be!”
“Even full of shit I’m straighter than you.”
“Try it out, before you make conclusions.”
“You should speak.”
“It’s when you have one you need another one. Not when you don’t.”
Downtown Nairobi had already thinned out, at 8:30, broad Uhuru Highway the color of weak mercurochrome beneath far-spaced halogen lights, its houses, shacks and factories peeping out with startled tarnished faces. Nehemiah downshifted and slowed for the barracks. “When’s Dottie coming back?”
“She hasn’t said.”
“You should take a few days off. Even in Nairobi.”
MacAdam shook his head, realized Nehemiah couldn’t see him in the dark. “I’ll get stitched up, see how I feel.”
Nehemiah parked at Battalion HQ and walked with MacAdam between the buildings to the hospital. “Your number two wife, Mac—”
“There isn’t going to be one.”
“Get yourself a Maasai girl.”
The battalion doctor cut the bandages with which M’kele had bound MacAdam’s injury in the Matthews Range, soaked them with ether until they pulled away without tearing too much of the caked black skin beneath. MacAdam watched as if his body belonged to someone else while the doctor severed the dead flesh with scissors and pulled back the edges of the wound. “Broke your ribs.”
“How many?”
“Six or seven.” The doctor’s curly hair was grizzled by the lamplight as he bent over MacAdam’s splintered ribs to remove bits of bone and dead flesh with tweezers and wads of cotton soaked in ether. The needle seemed dull; the doctor forced it through the skin, tugging the black thread after it. The pain was severe and the doctor made little effort to lessen it, but to MacAdam it was as if the pain was happening to someone else for whom he felt no pity.
“You were lucky.” The doctor wrapped the wound in wide white gauze. “Plenty people get stomped by buffalo—worse than a truck.” He seemed to disapprove, of MacAdam’s carelessness, perhaps, in encountering a buffalo, or of a white man’s intrusion into tribal conflicts old as human Africa. “If he’d swung his horn a little closer you’d be dead.”
“The soldier Kuria Ikole,” MacAdam said, “that they flew down from Wamba—you see him?”
“They take him right to Nairobi General.” The doctor yanked tight the last stitch.
“He’s going to walk?”
“Not on two legs.”
MacAdam sat on his thin concave bed in the officers’ quarters, a small room with a sink beside the window, a thin coarse towel hanging from a steel bar on either side of the sink, the linoleum smelling of carnuba, the window panes of ammonia, dust blurring the color photograph of the President that hung like a crucifix over the headboard. He closed his eyes and had a sudden vision of this room, of a skeleton, its friendly jaw and head cocked in inquiry. Then he saw this skeleton from the rear as it hunched sitting on the bed, spine curved, and saw the sink and hanging towels beyond. How banal, he thought. That’s not all I am. And the skeleton lifted its shoulders in a lonely shiver just as he did, straightened its spine so he could see its splintered ribs, reached out and knocked on wood.
18
SHE HEARD IT COMING up behind her but in the darkness could not see it. She stumbled, gashed a knee, kept running. Shale scattered, a footfall in front made her stop, breath thundering, hearing nothing. Before her the downslope of Dukana ridge looked out on a world of sand and stars with no place to hide.
The chunk of pockmarked lava in her hand was heavy, cold. She felt a shift in the air as the predator skirted her, was aware of the wind like water on her skin and the immanence of every molecule and moment, the imminence of death. The hideous hissing of footsteps and her harsh whispering breath were the same and only sound. Sure she would die, she ran downhill over rubble, sand and splintered rock towards the desert and the far, darker core of Kore laga snaking across it like a crack to the center of the earth. The noise leaped at her and she fell screaming, hands raised to claw. But it was only a horrible great bustard, wide leathery wings flapping up out of the canyon and round a cliff above her head and she smelled it now as she ran, the stink of rotting flesh the bustard had been eating, and in that stench of death she could smell her own. Then the paws came pouncing down behind her and she ran faster with death coming faster to catch her heels, but it was only falling sand and pebbles and she collapsed, utterly without breath or strength or hope, against a wall of rock, wanting death to come quickly without pain or recognition. Still death did not come. The land grew silent till against the silver glinting sand she could hear the passage of the stars. Faraway a leopard barked that high, dissatisfied deep roar it cuts off so sharply, as if its annoyance is too great to express, can only be appeased.
The rock wall was cold and sharp against her back. Below her the crabbed and rugged tumbled rock gave way to dunes that lapped this shore of the Dukana and rose and fell across the farflung desert. She could taste water on the wind, hear it splash the rocks and flutter on the sand, hush down these runnels and crevices of ancient melted stone. The wind cooled, bringing the metallic taste of night-damp sand and the wails of hyenas gathering to the south. She craved to stay by this rock wall that felt so good against her back, but it would not dissuade the leopard or hyenas, and once day came here she knew the sun would kill her quickly. She could no longer really remember if there existed such an absolute as water, no longer place the cause of this horrid, burning, exhausted dry flesh, this swollen throat sucking moisture from her lungs. Like someone who cannot swim wading deep into the sea, she left the wall of rock and, watching constantly around and behind her, walked out on the sand, the chunk of lava clenched like a knife, the horizon rising round her and shutting off the stars.
The sand rustled underfoot like galaxies of broken glass; a snake snapped at her from a boulder; jackals chattered like mad children. She got to her feet, fell, and stood again. She knew she had been walking along the Seine at night, the song of nightingales and owls i
n the leaves; a barge had come upriver, a smell of baking bread on the wind driving her crazy with hunger, but she could not understand where it came from. The barge passed, its cabin lights glowing on a line of wash that fluttered from amidships; through the barge’s kitchen window she could see a husky woman bent over her stove, and realized the woman had been baking bread, but there was no way to reach this woman, no way to swim out into the Seine after this boat so quickly ascending, its wake lapping in condolence among the shoreline willows, the predawn wind hissing over the sand.
It was as easy as putting one foot in front of the other. But yesterday whose tracks had she discovered stumbling haphazardly before her? Her own—she’d put one foot before the other till they brought her in a big circle back to herself.
The land darkened once again before her, descending into Kore laga’s great serpentine pit, the hyenas calling faster now as they circled the foot of the Dukana and came loping towards her. She looked round frantically for something to climb, raised her hands as if to climb up to the stars, then ran down the laga’s steep cascading sands. The sound of something leaped down behind her, and knowing she’d die she ran harder, gasping with terror, to the bottom of the laga and glanced up but there were only the stars so high and narrowly framed above, the laga’s deep slit imprisoned by cliffs of sand, a dead end where a leopard would come padding on soft toes and grinning its huge jaws, where hyenas could corner her, laughing and ripping flesh. She scrambled up the other slope, tumbled down again in sand and boulders and grappled her way up once more, earth crumbling and sliding beneath her, as if she were attempting to climb an avalanche, and feeling every instant on her back the ghastly grip of leopard’s claws, the hyena’s fangs. But here was solid rock, there a slowly slipping piece of ledge she shoved past, fear driving her like a terrorized animal up the slick impossible slope of sliding sand, the leopard’s breath hot on the small of her back. But the leopard did not pounce and the slope lessened then leveled, opening to the stars, and she spun round gasping, and nothing was behind her but the laga gaping blackly and all around a sea of sand drowning the stars.