by Mike Bond
“North Horr,” she said, and when he did not understand, “Moyale,” naming the biggest Ethiopian town along the border, but he tossed his head up to one side, indicating that he did not know or did not want her to speak this way. Jabbing his right index finger into his cupped left hand, he nodded to show decision and swung his right hand in a circle that could have no meaning but this tent, this camp, our whole land. This was where she must stay.
“We’ll give you many shillings! A million shillings!”
This word, too, seemed to hold no interest for him. He steepled tall slender fingers before him as he spoke, as if showing her a lanceolate wound that only she could heal. His face was young but gnarled as baobab, his arms like supple ebony in the subtle light; his breath, as he came nearer, had the fragrance of milk and flowers. She kept trying to recoil and now her back was hard against the goatskin wall.
He called out and the two women came in moments later with a leather flap of goat grease which they rubbed on her face and arms, making them sting. As if flicking dust from a table, he waved them out. He stood and dropped his goatskin cloak, his enormous slender blackness heightened by firelight, held his fists together at his chest and ripped them apart, pointed at her blouse.
“No.” She realized he was dominating her by height and tried to stand, but the tent’s sloping side constrained her; to stand she must move next to him. She clapped her hands and pointed at the door: leave.
Shock followed by mirth struck his face. He reached out and tore her blouse down the middle, baring her breasts. As she dived past he grabbed her arm and knocked her down, fell on her and she snatched a thorn stick from the embers and drove its hot red tip into his neck. He yelled and jumped back and his hand came across the darkness and slapped like an axe against her face and the side of the tent came up and hit her as she fell. He lashed her wrists behind her against a side pole and stalked out.
WARWAR CAME DOWN THE CLIFF above the village from the rear, from high up the mountain. As he suspected there was no one watching on this side. The village was a semicircle of twenty goatskin huts against the mountain wall, camels sleeping in a thorn enclosure guarded by two dogs pacing in hunger, but it was almost dawn and the wind came up from the valley. Imagining each footstep he made to be as silent as a leopard hunting, a hungry leopard robbed of his prey, he crept from the mountain wall out to the first hut, listened for a moment, went to the second, third and fourth, till inside the fifth he heard her breathing, different from the others, and not asleep. Beside it was a man’s quiet respiration. He crouched to the open door and saw inside the glimmer of her shirt, a few coals smoldering heavily, a large sleeping shadow.
Moonlight cast a sallow path between the huts, sparkled on his cloak and seemed to make each motion louder. He ducked inside the hut, bent quietly over the sleeping man, angled his knife parallel to the man’s ribs and drove it deep into the heart; the man lurched and swung out his fist like a tree bough, knocking him down, and Warwar rolled up to knife him again but the man moaned and fell back, heels hammering the earth. Warwar clamped a bloody hand over Rebecca’s mouth. “Mama!” he whispered, “I’ve brought your hat!”
She twisted away and when he saw she was tied he cut her free. “If you stay they’ll kill you. Where’s the money?”
She scrambled over the Borani’s corpse and stood banging her head. “It wasn’t here, not with him.”
“Hurry! If they catch us they’ll torture us forever!”
With a panicked last glance at the dead man she followed Warwar between the other huts and up the mountain wall and along the ridge beneath the dimming stars. Behind them in the Borani camp the dogs began to howl.
21
NAIROBI’S FIRST LIGHTS were winking on as the plane climbed through seven thousand feet and swung north towards the dark wall of Mount Kenya above its dregs of cindery cloud. The port engine drummed steadily at 6500, flashing back occasional spurts of flame, but it had better compression and was a little cooler than the starboard side. MacAdam began to let himself hope it wouldn’t blow, that they’d reach Marsabit and that the engine wouldn’t snap the new rod when they took off from Marsabit with his squad and their guns and desert rations for two weeks.
The eastern savanna shifted from charcoal to deep purple; to the west a feverish orange moon sank into the Kiambu hills. The end of night, MacAdam thought, when the lion slinks into camp and clamps his jaws on your neck and carries you off with no one knowing. In fear of this we’ve killed all lions and now stupid cattle and egocentric goats graze the tall savanna to stones. In fear of this we create marriage and the ownership of women, so Rebecca could never come to me.
Light raced across the savanna, pockets of brush standing out like the dark spots on a lion cub’s belly when it rolls in the grass for its mother to lick it. Nothing so lovely as a lioness’ love for her cubs, or the gazelle’s for her fawn that the lioness will kill to feed her cubs. Nothing so lovely as holding you, Rebecca, naked all night in the Blue Posts at Thika, with the bedbugs biting and the twin cascades crashing beyond the flimsy walls, or holding you for a moment in a Grevillia Grove cloakroom while the maid waited outside with your raincoat, or in a corridor somewhere, the black and white tiled floor like a chessboard on which we never learned the moves.
Outside the window the savanna grew tamed by light; against the plexiglass MacAdam saw himself as a man defeated by his self-deceptions, his squarish face and bold chin a parody of resolution; see, he taunted himself, how the faults and fissures grow, the stress of joyless time? He was the man who’d kept it all inside, where it had rotted, poisoned him. He’d become the man of stone he’d always tried to be, right from the day his mother had sat weeping into her hands on the sofa, “Your Daddy’s gone, my poor darling. Oh God, Jesus, Daddy’s gone…” And he’d been tough where she had not, hadn’t he? His mother’s tears, her print silk dress, the sofa fabric blue and gold, the patient parlor plants—they never went away, he could call them up at will. They came in the night, unbidden as the memory of Rebecca’s small strong white hands clenching his, of her soft taut voice— “Oh God, I love you, Ian! But I can’t go with you. I can’t, I can’t!” He shifted from his reflection and that made his ribs throb as if broken anew; he could not breathe against the pain, wanted to rip off the wide bandages imprisoning his chest.
All grew dark; Mount Kenya had shut off the newly risen sun, its sweeping cloud forests wrapped in bands of mist, the podocarpus canopies far below like urchins on the ocean floor. Beyond the plane’s wing, their velvet luster darkened by the shadowed light, the bamboo forests of the mountain’s middle heights oscillated like sea grass; above them the grass and lobelia slopes, chunked with bare rock like ruined ramparts, ascended into steepening barren battlements, till far higher, tall above the wing, soared the icy peaks named by the first white climbers in honor of three Maasai wise men, Batian, Nelion, Lenana.
“What’s it mean, in Maasai,” he said to the pilot, “when a woman tells you ‘Meitalah elipoh oltunani ilkejek aare— A man can’t cross two rivers’?”
Simon relaxed back into the headrest, his grin showing the standard Maasai gap between upper front teeth. “What you been trying, Captain? Steal another man’s wife?”
“What’s it mean?”
“The woman’s saying when a man takes a married woman, some day she’ll leave him too.” Simon switched off the dash and running lights, donned his sunglasses from their case clipped inside his breast pocket. “But this woman’s already dead, isn’t she, Captain?”
Like an enraged eye the red arc of the sun climbed over the eastern desert—the Somali desert. Already this sun was pouring its wrath into the blue Indian ocean where swordfish and marlin cruised like silver-blue attenuated warheads in their green-gold depths; the sun chromed the wing like a sailfish soaring far above these jade forests of the Nyambeni Hills, bleeding their red soil scars of human erosion. To the west lay the Mukogodo jungle and far, far beyond it the Laikipia plateau, and so far awa
y he could only imagine it in the clear African dawn was his ranch, the place where he and Dottie had lived too long. Now it seemed she too depended on the clarity of his imagination.
Much further north the distant smudge of the Matthews Range hunched like the backbone of a slain prehistoric beast, where he had died and been given new life by the scar-faced Somali. But he had not protected his protector, and the Somali had died from M’kele’s bullets and if MacAdam did not return quickly the Somali’s brother would be shot in the Nairobi penitentiary. Even further north was the Losai Desert, then N’doto Forest, the uncountable wastes of Kaisut Desert, then Marsabit’s mountains and clear crystal lakes, then the great deserts—the Dida Galgalu, the Koroli, the endless Chalbi, and unconscionably beyond them the blue-black Ethiopian escarpment.
The first time had been so rushed, her not wanting it, her disheveled blouse and slacks left tousled on the stairs, her eyes wide as she held him back yet still wanting him, and he’d known if this was the only moment of his life, so be it. She had opened, filling up with him till they were one, made of her emptiness and his need, her blue eyes focused in his forever, her perfect small breasts one with his chest and the illusion of time was gone, only feeling, sensing, holding, and the heat of sex washed in the joy of love.
“We mustn’t do this ever again.” On her side, elbows at her ribs, hands clenched against his chest, she had refused to look into his eyes.
“It’s all that matters to me now, this. For the rest of my life.”
“I feel so ashamed,” she’d said.
“It didn’t feel good?”
“Good? God no. It felt beyond anything I could ever say.”
He’d nuzzled her hair that smelled like acacia honey mixed with the scent of her vagina from his hand. “How can you stop what feels like that?”
WARWAR CLIMBED A PINNACLE of rock but nowhere behind them on the gun-blue panorama of desert rock could he see the Borani. Below him the whitewoman sat disconsolately; through her torn blouse he could see her breast like a ripe fruit and it made his body ache and his mouth dry. “No one follows,” he called, running down. “Let’s go!”
His hand round hers was wiry and enfeebling, as if exerting a magnetism that robbed her of her strength. It was cool and dry against her warm sweat and she wondered if that disgusted him. But his thoughts seemed enclosed in his black skull, with no link to hers. There was no point in asking herself if she had done right to come with him, for had she argued he’d have killed her, and had she stayed the Borani would have killed her far more painfully. But was it wise now to try to escape this boy killer with his wide smile and iron grip, to snatch his rifle and point it at him? Or better to stay with the Somalis and hope for rescue or ransom, with the Borani now hunting them down? Would she elude the Borani alone? Wasn’t she safer with the Somalis, who knew the desert and had camels for milk and could travel faster?
Ahead in a niche of rocks she saw Ibrahim and Rashid. Ibrahim rose suddenly, his face so wild with anger she feared he’d shoot her down. He whacked her aside with his rifle butt, yelling at the boy killer who raised both palms in incredulous innocence as Ibrahim gesticulated at the ridge in new-bright sun and Rashid came running with the two camels, mounted one, his arm like a spring yanking her up behind him. Ibrahim leaped on the other camel, pulled up the boy, and kicked it into a run as the dark outline of the first Borani crested the ridge.
BELOW THE TILTING WING ragtag Marsabit huddled between its cedared slopes and wind-rippled turquoise gofs. Simon overflew the field one time to chase off a herd of gazelle. When they landed, M’kele, Darius and Gideon—still with his one star-shaped broken eyeglass, MacAdam noted—were already waiting. M’kele had rousted the guard to unlock the fuel tanks and refill the Cessna; the yellow plastic cup filled with coffee which Darius offered seemed to MacAdam a drug—its bitter taste, and the sharp desert air, the tang of cedars and dry soil, of avgas and the hot new oil in the rebuilt engine and the warming aluminum paint of the Cessna, all seemed the current of the universe pumping through him. Yet all was wasted, he told himself, if she was dead.
EACH TIME Warwar looked back from the rear of Ibrahim’s bounding camel it seemed the black-caped riflemen were larger; now he could make out individual riders; already one had reined in and dismounted to fire, his bullets whanging and whining among the rocks. With his right hand Rashid reached behind the whitewoman to whip his camel faster; they rode up a bouldered slope with traces of grass among the flashing stones, on their left a soaring basalt cliff from which a cloud of vultures scrambled, their cries like drowning men. Ibrahim spun his camel round and leaped down, waving at the others to spread out among the rocks. He shot the lead Borani from the saddle and killed the second rider’s camel, then the man as he ran for shelter, then the first camel as it trotted tossing its head. Now the Borani had no rocks to hide in and they pulled back, waving their rifles and screaming, some dropping downslope to come round from below. Ibrahim snatched his camel’s reins and motioned the whitewoman up. “Now we’ll see if you’re a man,” he yelled at Warwar. “Stay and keep them back till we cross the ridge!”
Warwar looked past Ibrahim’s pointed hand, along the cliff. Below it the rolling slope was strewn with boulders; at its far end the cliff crested in a ridge of shattered rock leading westwards to the high black Selach peaks. “I’ll die,” he shouted.
“Not if you’re clever, nestling. This is how one becomes a man. I’ve done it more than once.” Ibrahim leaped on his camel and snatched the whitewoman’s arm round him. “Meet us at the bottom of the canyon on the back side of Dibandiba. Don’t let them follow!” He galloped off, calling, “Flee before we reach the ridge and you’re a condemned man. By all our laws and yours!”
22
FAR AS MacAdam could see down across Dida Galgalu Desert there was never a bush, a tree, a manyatta, camel, or man to break the bleakness, so it seemed the plane stood still, for neither the black pitted rippling stone below nor the seared azure of the sky above seemed ever to alter. The sun had climbed higher, tilting its poisonous essence steeper down upon the earth, a raw white flawless ingot hotter than any human hell. MacAdam tried to turn in his seat without twisting his ribs. “Thank you all for coming.”
Gideon shrugged. “Blood’s got no need of friendship.” It was the Kikuyu adage that links within the clan are stronger than those outside it, but his meaning was we the clan of all Kenyans, even MacAdam, the whiteman.
“If it gets tight, I don’t want any of you leaving cover, crossing open ground—”
“In the desert,” M’kele said, “it’s all open ground.”
THE FIRST BULLET hit the rock beside Warwar’s head, deafening him. He could not hear where the other shots were coming from and squirmed further back among the boulders, then ran along the covered edge of slope, against the cliff. He glanced over and ducked back, seeing nothing. Nor could he see Rebecca, Ibrahim and Rashid—by now they must have crossed the ridge. Trying to hold his rifle steady he fired at a flash of black downslope and ducked as a bullet then another smacked overhead, shaking the rock under his belly. His ears were ringing like bells on the bridles of a herd of camels, like their hooves on stone, and like a man sliding off a cliff edge Warwar felt life slipping from him. Not daring to stay, not daring to run, he waited in terror for the bullet that did not come, the first that would not miss.
WHEN THEY REACHED the ridge Rebecca could hear the crack of shots and wanted to go back to Warwar. Then she realized what she was thinking and almost laughed in horror. Rashid’s camel, for which Ibrahim had been waiting, sprayed her with its spittle as it galloped past and Ibrahim and Rebecca chased after it; before them expanded the whole nether regions of the earth, a blue, black plateau so vast as to hide the edges of the globe within it, a land of cracked crust and shearing canyons, endless. There seemed no way the Borani could find them in such a place, and nowhere they could hide.
MACADAM woke with M’kele bent between him and the pilot, map in hand, as
they discussed in Maasai their course over a wide box canyon running northwards, the plane slowing, downdrifting, north-northwest, down to two hundred feet above the rocky rushing desert, till the canyon narrowed and deepened as though faulted to the center of the earth. Suddenly, between a dry laga and its sheaf of sand an expanse of commiphora scrub, there was the smear of an extinct fire and two Land Rovers tiny as matchbox toys, one with a shattered windshield flashing in the sun. He felt the revulsion of one who has happened on a ghastly accident, who then with horror understands he is the next of kin.
Simon climbed three hundred feet to altitude two thousand, flew in slow circles wider and wider, then northwards towards the distant purple Ethiopian escarpment blocking the sky like the wall of a prison where once you step inside never can you leave. But nowhere below or out across to the far black horizons was there any trace of man.
WARWAR SCRAMBLED upslope between the boulders and the cliff, hugging the ground against the bullets that did not come, at first daring to hope the Borani would not chase him, then fearing they were playing with him, only to shoot him easily from some vantage he had not perceived. But still there were no shots, no black-caped figures rising grimly before him. With his terror deepened by hope, he gained the ridge and looked out on the bleak stony world, gathered in his breath, slung his rifle over his shoulder and turned to run down the north side of the ridge. With a lurch, as if his stomach had been struck, he saw a line of Borani riding towards him, still out of range, but cutting off his retreat toward Dibandiba.