Circling the Sun Read online

  How could I begin to answer? All around us, half-empty cupboards reminded me of the things that used to be there but weren’t any longer—four china teacups with gold-painted rims, a card game, amber beads clicking together on a necklace my mother had loved. Her absence was still so loud and so heavy, I ached with it, feeling hollow and lost. I didn’t know how to forget my mother any more than my father knew how he might comfort me. He pulled me—long limbed and a little dirty, as I always seemed to be—onto his lap, and we sat like that quietly for a while. From the edge of the forest, a group of hyraxes echoed shrieks of alarm. One of our greyhounds cocked a sleek ear and then settled back into his comfortable sleep by the fire. Finally my father sighed. He scooped me under my arms, grazed my drying tears with a quick kiss, and set me on my own two feet.

  Miwanzo is the word in Swahili for “beginnings.” But sometimes everything has to end first and the bottom drop out and every light fizzle and die before a proper beginning can come along. My mother’s going was like that for me, though I didn’t realize it straight away. For a long time, I could only feel confused and hurt and terribly sad. Were my parents still married? Did my mother love us or miss us? How could she have left me behind? I wasn’t ready to go to my father with these questions. He wasn’t all that soft as fathers go, and I didn’t know how to share such private and wounded feelings.

  Then something happened. In and beyond the Mau Forest on our land, several Kipsigis families lived in mud-and-wattle huts surrounded by high thorn bomas. Somehow they saw what I needed without my asking. One of the elders swept me up, murmuring a string of charmed words, and tying a cowrie shell ceremoniously to my waist. It swung on a leather thong and was meant to resemble the closed cowrie shell between my own legs and to ward off evil spirits. When a Kip girl was born, they did this. I was the white daughter of their white bwana, but something unnatural had happened that needed setting to rights. No African mother would ever have thought to abandon a child. I was healthy, you see, not maimed or weak. So they stamped out that first start and gave me another as Lakwet, meaning “very little girl.”

  I was thin and knock-kneed with unruly white-blonde hair, but my new name and place soon helped to toughen me. Running up and down our hill to the Kip village, my feet quickly turned to leather. Portions of our land that had frightened or intimidated me before became as familiar as the zebra skins that covered my bed. When the daylight bled away, I would climb under the skins and watch the houseboy pad soundlessly into my room on bare feet to light the hurricane lamp. Sometimes the sudden flare and hiss sent skinks in the hut walls flitting into hiding, the sound of them like sticks against straw. Then came the changing of the guard as the daylight insects—hornets and mason flies—tucked into mud nests in the rounded walls, and the crickets woke, sawing in a rhythm only they knew. I would wait an hour or more like this, watching shadows twist over the furniture in my room, all made of paraffin boxes and all the same until the shadows rounded and changed them. I listened until I couldn’t hear my father’s voice any more, and then I’d slip out of an open window into the inky dark to join my friend Kibii around a low spitting fire in his hut.

  Kibii’s mother and the other women drank a murky tea made of bark and nettles and spun out their tales of how everything had come to be. I learned most of my Swahili there, more and more eager for stories…how the hyena had got his limp and the chameleon his patience. How the wind and rain had once been men before they failed at some important task and were banished to the heavens. The women themselves were wizened and toothless, or supple as polished ebony, with long-muscled limbs under pale shukas. I loved them and their tales, but I wanted more to join Kibii and the other totos who were becoming warriors, young morani.

  The role of girls in the village was entirely domestic. I had a different position—a rare one, free from the traditional roles that governed Kibii’s family set and also my own. At least for the moment, the Kip elders allowed me to train with Kibii: to throw a spear and hunt warthogs, studying stealth as Kibii did from arap Maina, his father, who was head warrior in the village and also my ideal of strength and fearlessness. I was taught to fashion a bow and take down wood pigeons and waxwings and vivid blue starlings, and to snap a rhino-hide whip and wield a knotted wooden throwing club with deadly accuracy. I grew as tall as Kibii and then taller, running just as swiftly through the tall gold grasses, our feet floured with dust.

  Kibii and I often went out walking into the dark, past the freshly scythed grass that marked the edge of our farm and the damp higher grasses that brushed wetness up to our hips, past the Green Hill and the edge of the forest, which took us in and in. There were leopards there at night. I’d seen my father bait them with a goat while we crouched on top of the water tank for safety, the goat beginning to quake when it smelled the cat, my father zeroing his rifle and hoping he didn’t miss. There was danger everywhere, but we knew all the night sounds and their messages, cicadas and tree frogs, the fat, ratlike hyraxes, which were actually the distant relatives of elephants. Sometimes we heard the elephants themselves crashing through brush in the distance, though they dreaded the scent of horses and didn’t come too near unless provoked. Snakes in holes vibrated. Snakes in trees could swing down and cut the air like rope or make only the lowest rub of smooth belly against smooth-grained mahogany.

  For years there were these perfect nights with Kibii, and long slow afternoons made for hunting or for riding, and somehow—with machetes and ropes and feet and human salt—the wilderness gave way to proper fields. My father planted maize and wheat, and they flourished. With the money he made, he found and bought two abandoned steam engines. Bolted down, they became the beating heart of our gristmill, and Green Hills the most vital artery in Njoro. Soon, if you stood on our hill and looked out past the terraced fields and head-high maize, you could see a line of flat oxen-drawn wagons bringing grain to our mill. The mill ran without stopping, and the number of our workers doubled and then tripled, Kikuyu, Kavirondo, Nandi, and Kipsigis men, and Dutchmen, too, cracking their whips to drive the oxen. The iron sheds came down, and a stable went up, then several more, the newly built loose boxes filling with cut hay and the finest thoroughbreds in Africa, my father told me, or anywhere in the world.

  I still thought about Mother and Dickie sometimes when I lay in bed before sleep, listening to the night noises push in from every direction, a constant, seething sound. They never sent letters, at least not to me, so trying to picture their life was a trial. Our old house had been sold. Wherever they had finally settled, the stars and trees would be very different from what we had in Njoro. The rain would be, too, and the feel and the colour of the sun in the afternoons. All the afternoons of all the months we were apart.

  Gradually it became harder to remember my mother’s face, things she had said to me, days we had shared. But there were many days ahead of me. They spread out further than I could see or wish for, the way the plain did all the way to the broken bowl of Menengai, or to Kenya’s hard blue peak. It was safer to keep looking forward—to move my mother to the far edge of my mind where she couldn’t hurt me any more, or to imagine, when I did think of her, that her going had been necessary. A kind of forging or honing, my first essential test as Lakwet.

  This was certain: I belonged on the farm and in the bush. I was part of the thorn trees and the high jutting escarpment, the bruised-looking hills thick with vegetation; the deep folds between the hills, and the high cornlike grasses. I had come alive here, as if I’d been given a second birth, and a truer one. This was my home, and though one day it would all trickle through my fingers like so much red dust, for as long as childhood lasted it was a heaven fitted exactly to me. A place I knew by heart. The one place in the world I’d been made for.

  The stable bell clanged, breaking open the stillness. The lazy roosters woke and the dusty geese, the houseboys and grooms, gardeners and herdsmen. I had my own mud-and-daub hut, a little apart from my father’s, which I shared with my ugly and loyal
mixed-breed dog, Buller. He whined at the sound of the bell, stretching from his nest at the foot of my bed, and then looped his square head under my arm and against my side so that I felt his cool nose and the wrinkled half-moons of scars on the top of his head. There was a thick, lumpy knot where his right ear had been before a leopard had crept into my hut and tried to drag him into the night. Buller had ripped open the leopard’s throat and limped home covered in their mingled blood, looking like a hero but also nearly dead. My father and I nursed him back to health, and though he’d never been particularly handsome before, he was grizzled and half-deaf now. We loved him better for it because the leopard hadn’t begun to break his spirit.

  In the farmyard, in the cool morning air, Kibii was waiting for me. I was eleven and he a little younger, and we had both become part of the oiled machinery of the farm. There were other white children nearby who went to school in Nairobi or sometimes back in England, but my father never mentioned that I might do anything like that. The stable was my classroom. Morning gallops started not long after dawn. I was there without fail, and so was Kibii. As I approached the stable now, he shot up into the air as if his legs were coiled springs. I’d been practising that sort of jump for years and could manage to go as high as Kibii, but to have the edge in competition, I knew I should do as little as possible. Kibii would jump and jump, outdoing himself, and grow tired. Then I would take my turn and outshine him.

  “When I become a moran,” Kibii said, “I’ll drink bull’s blood and curdled milk instead of nettles like a woman, and then I will have the speed of an antelope.”

  “I could be a great warrior,” I told him.

  Kibii had an open and handsome face, and his teeth flashed as he laughed, as if this were the funniest thing he’d ever heard. When we were very young, he’d been happy to let me join his world, maybe because he felt it was all play-acting. I was a girl, and a white one at that, after all. But more and more lately, I felt him becoming sceptical and disapproving of me, as if he were waiting for me to give up trying to compete with him and accept that our paths would soon be very different ones. I had no such intention.

  “If I had the right training I could,” I insisted. “I could do it in secret.”

  “Where is the glory in that? No one would know your deeds belonged to you.”

  “I would.”

  He laughed again and turned towards the stable door. “Who will we gallop today?”

  “Daddy and I are off to Delamere’s to look at a brood mare.”

  “I will hunt,” he replied. “Then we shall see who comes back with the better story.”

  —

  When Wee MacGregor and my father’s hack, Balmy, were saddled and ready, we set off into the morning sun. For a time, Kibii’s challenge clouded my thoughts, but then the distance and the day took over. Dust billowed around us, creeping under our loose-tied handkerchiefs and into our noses and mouths. It was fine and silty, red as ochre or the brush-tailed fox, and it was always with us. So were the chiggers that were like flecks of red pepper, clinging to everything and holding on. You couldn’t think about the chiggers because you couldn’t do anything about them. You couldn’t think about the biting white ants that moved in menacing ribbons over the plains, or the vipers or the sun, which sometimes pulsed so brightly it seemed to want to flatten you or eat you alive. You couldn’t because these things were part of the country itself and made it what it was.

  Three miles on we came to a small gully where the red mud had dried and cracked in a system of parched veins. A moulded clay bridge stood at the centre, looking pointless without water running on either side, and also like the backbone of some huge animal that had died there. We’d been relying on the water for our horses. Maybe there was water further along, or maybe not. To distract us both from the problem my father began to talk about Delamere’s brood mare. He hadn’t seen her yet, but that didn’t stop him from winding her neatly up into his hopes for our bloodstock. He was always thinking of the next foal and how it might change our lives—and because he was, I was, too.

  “She’s Abyssinian, but Delamere says she’s got speed and good sense.”

  Mostly my father was interested in thoroughbreds, but occasionally you could find a gem in more common places, and he knew this. “What’s her colouring?” I wanted to know. That was always my first question.

  “She’s a pale gold palomino, with a blonde mane and tail. Coquette’s her name.”

  “Coquette,” I repeated, liking the sharp edges of the word without knowing what it meant. “That sounds right.”

  “Does it?” He laughed. “I suppose we’ll see.”

  —

  Lord Delamere was D to me and to anyone who knew him well. He was one of the colony’s first important settlers and had an unswerving sense for which bit of land would be most fertile. He seemed to want to take over the entire continent and make it all work for him. No one was more ambitious than D or more headstrong or blunt about the things he loved (land, the Masai people, freedom, money). He was driven to make whatever he touched or tried a success. When the risks were great and the chances were dim, well then, so much the better.

  He told good stories, his hands and shoulders moving so wildly that his untrimmed red hair slashed back and forth across his forehead. When he was a young man, he’d walked two thousand miles through the Somali desert with one ill-tempered camel for company and found himself here, in the highlands. He fell instantly in love with the place. When he went back to England to drum up the funds to settle here, he’d met and married Florence, the spirited daughter of the Earl of Enniskillen. “She’d no idea I would drag her here by the hair one day,” he liked to say.

  “As if you could drag me,” Lady D often answered, her eyes playful. “We both know it’s typically the other way around.”

  After our tired hacks finally got the water they’d earned, the Delameres walked us out to the small paddock where Coquette was at pasture with a few other brood mares and a handful of foals. She was the prettiest to look at by far, compact and flaxen, with a sloping neck and well-made chest. Her legs narrowed into shapely fetlocks and pasterns. As we watched, she pitched her head and swung round to look at us straight on, as if she were daring us to find her less than perfect.

  “She’s beautiful,” I breathed.

  “Aye, and she knows it,” D said cheerfully. He was thick bodied and always seemed to be sweating, though he was generally cheerful about this, too. He swatted at the salty trickle along his temple with a blue cotton handkerchief while my father bent through the slats of the fence to get a closer look.

  I rarely saw a horse startle or run from my father, and Coquette was no exception. She seemed to sense immediately that he was in command of the situation and of her, too, though she didn’t belong to him yet. She shook her ears once, and blew air at him out of her velvety nostrils, but held still as he examined her, running his hands along her crown and muzzle, and then more slowly fingering her withers and spine, looking for any bump or sway. Over her loin and rump he slowed again, his fingers doing their work. He was like a blind man feeling along each of her lovely back legs, the gaskins and stifle joints, hocks and cannons. I kept waiting for him to straighten or for his face to cloud over, but the examination went silently on, and I grew more and more hopeful. By the time he’d finished and stood facing her, his hands grazing over her forelock, I could barely stand the suspense. If he couldn’t love her now, after she’d passed all of his tests, it was going to break my heart.

  “Why are you parting with her then?” he asked D without taking his eyes off Coquette.

  “Money, naturally,” D said with a small snort.

  “You know how he is,” Lady D said. “The new obsession always chases out the old. Now he’s on to wheat, and most of the horses will have to go.”

  Please please say yes, I thought in a fierce running string.

  “Wheat, is it now?” my father asked, and then he turned away and strode back towards the fence,
saying to Lady D, “I don’t suppose you have anything cool to drink?”

  I wanted to fling myself at Coquette’s knees, to grab a handful of her pale mane and swing up over her back and ride away into the hills on my own—or home with her, latching her up in a hidden stall and guarding her with my life. She already had my heart, and she’d won my father over, too—I knew it—but he wasn’t ever spontaneous. He kept his emotions locked away behind a wall, which made him a wonderful negotiator. He and D would be at this for the rest of the day now, sorting out the terms without stating anything directly, each carefully guarding what it would mean for him to win, or lose. I found it all maddening, but there was nothing to be done but make our way to the house where the men settled themselves at the table with rye whisky and lemonade and began to talk without talking and bargain without bargaining. I threw myself down on the carpet in front of the hearth and sulked.

  Though the Delameres had more land and at least as many workers at Equator Ranch as we did at Green Hills, D hadn’t made many improvements to their own living quarters, two large mud rondavels with beaten-earth flooring, rough windows, and burlap curtains for doors. Still, Lady D had filled the place with nice things that had been in her family for hundreds of years, she’d told me—a heavy mahogany four-poster bed with a richly embroidered quilt, pictures framed in gilt, a long mahogany table with eight matching chairs, and a hand-bound atlas that I loved to pore over whenever I visited. That day I was too anxious to look at maps and could only lie on the carpet and click my dusty heels together, biting my lip and wishing the men would get on with it.

  Finally, Lady D came over and sat near me, settling her white cotton skirt out in front of her and leaning back on her hands. She wasn’t ever fussy or prim, and I adored that about her. “I have some nice biscuits if you’d like.”