Circling the Sun Read online

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. I was ravenous.

  “Your hair is wilder every time I see it.” She gently nudged the plate of biscuits in my direction. “It’s such a wonderful colour, though. A little like Coquette’s, actually.”

  That got me. “Do you think so?”

  She nodded. “I don’t suppose you’d let me brush it?”

  I was too out of sorts to enjoy sitting still and having my hair fussed over, but I let her do it. She had a silver-handled brush with beautiful soft white bristles that I always liked to run my fingers over. There was nothing feminine in our house any more, no silk or satin or perfume or jewellery or powder puffs. The brush was exotic. While Lady D worked, humming a little, I fell on the biscuits. Soon the plate was nothing but buttery crumbs.

  “Where’d you get that fierce-looking scar?” she asked.

  I looked down at the jagged worst of it poking from beneath the frayed hem of my short trousers—a long rippled wound that went halfway up my thigh. It did look pretty rough. “Wrestling totos.”

  “Totos or bushpigs?”

  “I trounced one of the Kip boys and threw him over my shoulder onto the ground. He was so embarrassed he waited for me in the forest and slashed out at me with his father’s knife.”

  “What?” She made an alarmed noise.

  “I had to go after him, didn’t I?” I couldn’t keep the pride out of my voice. “He looks far worse than I do now.”

  Lady D sighed into my hair. I knew she was concerned, but she didn’t say anything else for the moment, and so I gave myself up to the tug of the brush and the way it rubbed against my scalp. It felt so good I was half asleep when the men finally stood and shook hands. I jumped to my feet, nearly landing in Lady D’s lap. “She’s ours?” I asked, rushing at them.

  “Clutt bargains like a hyena,” D said, “just latches on and doesn’t let go. He nearly stole that mare from under me.” As he laughed, my father laughed, too, and clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Doesn’t Beryl look pretty?” Lady D asked. She came up behind me and rested one hand on the top of my head. “I wondered if I’d find a nest of titmice tangled up behind one of her ears.”

  Reddening, my father cleared his throat. “I’m not much of a nursemaid, I’m afraid.”

  “Nor should you be,” D barked in his defence. “The girl’s fine. Just look at her, Florence. She’s as strong as a mule.”

  “Ah, yes. We all of us want mules for daughters, don’t we?”

  The whole exchange was good-natured, and yet it gave me a strange topsy-turvy feeling. When we started for home again, an hour later, after the money and the details of Coquette’s delivery were sorted, I could tell my father was unsettled, too. We rode in silence as the red sun inched lower and lower in the flat sky. In the distance, a dust devil churned like a dervish, whirling into a patch of flame trees and unhousing a fat band of vultures. One flew past, his shadow crawling over us so slowly it made me shudder.

  “I’ll admit it all gets away from me sometimes,” my father said when the vulture had gone.

  I could guess at what he meant from the way Lady D had blanched at my scar and general upkeep. I knew “it all” meant me, his daughter.

  “I think we’re doing all right,” I said, and reached to pat Wee MacGregor’s neck. “I don’t want anything to be different.”

  He said nothing as the sun continued its descent. This close to the equator, we had almost no twilight. Day turned to night in minutes, but they were lovely ones. Around us the yellow grasses stretched and moved like the sea, sometimes dipping into antbear burrows and pig holes, or lifting towards the knuckled spires of termite mounds, but never truly ceasing. There was a powerful illusion that the bush didn’t end—that we could ride for years like this, carried by the grasses and the sense of distance, on and on for ever.

  When Coquette arrived, she was the darling of the farm. Since we didn’t have any horses with her golden colouring, all the totos wanted to be near her and to touch her. She seemed to glow and bring good luck, and for several months everything went smoothly as she settled in and my father began to think and scheme over which horse should service her for the best possible result. Breeding is the most serious of matters for a horseman. Even before I could read I knew that every thoroughbred could be traced back to three original Arabian and Oriental sires from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, paired with a handful of very specific English dams. The long line of genealogy was lovingly and painstakingly laid out in The General Stud Book. Over dinner we would open the book and consult from it, along with the thick black ledger that kept a record of our own bloodstock—the old and new testaments of our bible.

  After weeks of talking it through, it was decided that Referee would service Coquette when she came into season. He was a light chestnut Arab and compactly built at fifteen hands, with good hoofs, wide-open shoulder angles, and perfectly straight legs. He had a stride so even it seemed to eat up the ground in front of him effortlessly. We talked about the new foal a lot—the one that would come eleven months from the date of successful breeding, with his sire’s swiftness and his dam’s shimmering coat and graceful movements. He didn’t seem remotely imaginary to me. Our talking had already brought him to life.

  —

  One long, airless afternoon I was drumming up names for the foal and saying some out loud to Kibii as we sat under the wattle tree near the edge of the wide yard. Beyond the bluish ring of shade, the earth was like hammered metal and wicked as metal, too, or live cinders if you dared to walk on it. We’d spent the morning at gallops and then helping oil dozens of bridles, until our fingers cramped. Now we were drained but also restless, needled by the heat.

  “What about Jupiter, or Apollo?” I suggested.

  “He should be Jackal. This is a better name for a colt.”

  “Jackals are so ordinary.”

  “Jackals are clever.”

  Before I could correct him, a tower of smoke came chuffing into view.

  It was the noisy train from Nairobi, a dozen crude carriages that bumped so hard along the track you expected one to fly off or smash to pieces. Kibii twisted to look out over the slope. “Is your father expecting a horse?”

  I didn’t think my father was expecting anything, but we watched him come rushing out of the stable, smoothing his hair and tucking in the tails of his shirt. He squinted down the hill against the sun and then quickly made his way to our new Ford wagon and cranked the moody engine. Kibii and I didn’t ask if we could join him, just trotted over and began to climb into the back.

  “Not this time,” my father said, barely looking up from his task. “There won’t be room for everyone.”

  Everyone? “Are guests coming, then?”

  Without answering, he climbed behind the wheel and pulled away, pummelling us with clouds of rosy dust. Within the hour, we heard the buggy chugging back up the hill and caught glimpses of white. A dress. A hat with ribbons, and to-the-elbow gloves. This was a woman in the car, a beautiful one with a pile of glossy hair the colour of raven feathers, and a fancy lace-trimmed parasol that didn’t look as if it had seen a day in the bush.

  “Beryl, this is Mrs. Orchardson,” my father said as they stepped out of the buggy. Two large trunks towered behind in the boot. She wasn’t here for tea.

  “I’m so happy to finally meet you,” Mrs. Orchardson said, quickly looking me up and down.

  Finally? I think my mouth fell open and stayed like that for a good long minute.

  When we got inside the main house, Mrs. Orchardson looked around at everything with her hands resting lightly on her hips. Though my father had designed it simply, the place was solid, and a vast improvement from the hut it once was. But Mrs. Orchardson had never seen anything of that. She strode back and forth. There were cobwebs at all the windows, and the hearthstones were covered in layers of thick soot. The oilcloth on our table hadn’t been changed in years, not since my mother left. The narrow charcoal cooler we stored but
ter and cream in smelled rancid, like muck at the bottom of a pond. We’d grown used to it like everything else. The walls were hung with bits and bobs from hunting adventures—leopard pelts, lion skins, long, corkscrewing kudu horns, an ostrich egg the size and heft of a human skull. There was nothing fine or very posh in sight—but we’d been all right without niceties.

  “Mrs. Orchardson has agreed to be our housekeeper,” my father explained as she pinched off her gloves. “She’ll live here in the main house. There’s plenty of room.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling punched in the windpipe. There was a room that could be used for sleeping quarters, but it was filled with tack and paraffin and tins of food and any number of things we didn’t want to see or deal with. The room meant we didn’t really need a housekeeper. And where would guests stay now that this woman, who was not a guest, had come to change everything?

  “Why don’t you go out to the stables while we get settled here?” my father said in a tone that left no room for wriggling.

  “How nice, then,” Mrs. Orchardson said. “I’ll get the tea ready.”

  All the way across the yard, I fumed. The world was squeezing in on me, narrowing to the sudden fact of Mrs. Orchardson and what she might mean to do or be. When I returned, she had changed into a simple skirt and shirtwaist, and tied a clean white apron over the top. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. A lock of her silky hair fell over her forehead as she refilled my father’s cup, the kettle steaming in her hands. My father had settled into our one comfortable chair, his feet up on a low table. He was gazing at her familiarly.

  I blinked at them both. I hadn’t been gone an hour, and she had already taken over the room. The kettle was hers. She’d scrubbed the oilcloth. The cobwebs were gone and might have never existed at all. Nothing would need much coaxing or breaking in. Nothing seemed ready to resist her.

  —

  I was to call her Mrs. O, my father said. Over the coming days, she unpacked her steamer trunks and filled them again with things from the house—dusty hunting spoils, odd trinkets or bits of clothing my mother had left behind. It was all part of her plan to run a “tight ship”—two of her favourite words. She liked order and soap and the day sliced up into manageable portions. Mornings were for book learning.

  “I have to be at gallops,” I told her early on, feeling fully confident that my father would take my part.

  “They’ll make do without you for the time being, won’t they?” she said matter-of-factly while my father made a dry, throttled sound deep in his throat and quickly left the house.

  Within a week she’d convinced my father that I needed to wear shoes. A few weeks more and I’d been trussed up in an English frock and hair ribbons instead of a shuka, and told not to eat with my hands. I was not to kill snakes or moles or birds with my rungu, or to take all my meals with Kibii and his family. I was not to hunt warthog or leopard with arap Maina but to have a proper education and learn the King’s English.

  “I’ve let you run too wild and you know it,” my father said when I went to him, asking to be left alone. “It’s all for your own good.”

  He had let me run, but it had been wonderful. These new restrictions amounted to a conventional life, and we’d never had anything of the sort.

  “Please…” I heard myself begin to whine, but then stopped short. I had never been a wheedling or complaining child, and my father wasn’t going to bend anyway. If I really could do something about Mrs. O, I would have to work it out on my own. I would show her I wasn’t a bit of cobweb in the corner, something to be wiped or straightened, but a rival worth her notice. I would learn her ways and habits, and track her closely until I knew what she was and how to best her, and what precisely it would take to steal my good life back.

  Coquette was nearing her foaling date. She’d grown rounder and more barrel-like, the new life inside her pushing out against her flesh, those long limbs already trying to stretch and find their way. Somehow the effort of creation had dulled her golden coat. She looked tired and listless and rarely did more than nibble at the sheaves of lucerne I brought her.

  For me, the foal couldn’t come soon enough. Thinking about him was how I got through hours of Latin in pinching shoes. One night, I was fast asleep in my hut when I felt Buller rouse beside me. The grooms had come awake in their bunks. My father was awake, too. I recognized the timbre of his muffled voice and dressed quickly, thinking only of Coquette. She was twenty days early, which usually meant a weak or sickly foal, but it might not. My father would know what to do.

  Out in the yard, the glow from several hurricane lamps rinsed out through the cracks in the stable door. High overhead, ribbons of stars swirled like milk, and a sickle moon lay hard and bright on its side. The night insects seethed away in the forest and from everywhere, all around, but the stable was quiet. Much too quiet, I knew, before I even came close to Coquette’s box, but I couldn’t guess why until I saw my father stand up. He strode to meet me, stopping me in my tracks. “You’ll not want to see this, Beryl. Go back to bed.”

  “What’s happened?” My throat closed around the words.

  “Stillborn,” he said quietly.

  My heart fell, all my hopes silenced in an instant. Apollo wouldn’t stand on tottering legs like a new giraffe. He wouldn’t see the forest or the high escarpment, or race along the track with me bent over his shining neck. He wouldn’t know Green Hills for even a day. But my father had never shielded me from the tough lessons of farm life. I forced back my tears and pushed ahead.

  In the shadow-filled box, Coquette had dropped into one corner. On the ground behind her, the hay was matted where two grooms knelt, trying somehow to tidy up. The tiny foal was there, slick in part of its bag, but also wasn’t. Its eyes were gone and most of the facial muscles, the flesh eaten away in a jagged blackness. Its belly yawned open, the entrails devoured—which could only mean the giant siafu ants had come. They were black warriors with huge bodies, and they ate quickly and terribly, as one thing.

  “She foaled him so quietly no one heard her,” my father said, coming to put an arm around my shoulder. “He might have been dead already, I don’t know.”

  “Poor Coquette,” I said, turning into his shirt and pushing my forehead against the bones of his chest.

  “She’s sound,” he said. “She’ll be all right.”

  But how could she be? Her foal was gone. The ants hadn’t touched anything else, either—just made for this one soft and helpless thing and then disappeared into the night. Why? I thought again and again, as if there really were someone who could answer me.

  —

  The next morning, I couldn’t stand even the thought of lessons and fled the house, out past the paddocks to a narrow path that twisted steeply down the hill. When I reached the Kip village my lungs burned and my bare legs were covered with welts from the thornbushes and elephant grass—but I already felt better for being there. I always had, even when I was too young to lift the latch on the fence. The thornbushes that knitted the fence together were as high as the shoulders of large oxen and kept everything protected from the dangers of the bush—the low-lying huts and prized oxen, the shaggy bleating goats and blackened cooking pots over licking flames, and children.

  That afternoon, a string of totos were playing a training game with bows and arrows, kneeling in the hammered dust, each trying to get closest to a target made of tied-together leaves. Kibii was at the centre of the line, and though his black eyes glanced towards me with curiosity, he went on with the game while I squatted down nearby. Most of the totos were very good with a still target. The arrows were fashioned out of whittled twigs with barbed points that stuck fast when they reached their target, as they were meant to. I watched them, wishing, as I’d done so many times before, that I’d been born a Kip. Not one of the girls, with their endless cooking duties or their burdens of baskets, water, food stores, babies. The women did all the carrying and the hoeing, the weaving and ploughing. They cared for the animals, too,
while the warriors hunted or prepared for the hunt, oiling their limbs with rendered fat, plucking small hairs off their chests with tweezers kept in pouches around their necks. These totos kneeling on the ground would one day aim not at gourds but bushpig, steenbok, lion. What could be more thrilling?

  When everyone had mastered one level, one of the older totos took another smaller target, also made of leaves but rolled into a round gourd shape, and pitched it into the air away from his body. The arrows flew—some landing but most not. There were gibes and ridicule for those who missed most disastrously, but no one gave up. Again and again, the youth pitched the gourd into the air, the totos releasing their arrows, until everyone had succeeded. Only then was the game finished.

  When Kibii finally trotted over and sat beside me, I told him what had happened to the foal. He was still holding his curved bow and handful of slender arrows. He pushed the tip of one into the stiff earth and said, “The siafu are a plague.”

  “What good are they? What god would make such a thing?”

  “It’s not for us to know,” he said with a gentle shrug.

  “We do wonder, though.” I looked at him and swallowed once, hard, feeling certain that I wasn’t going to cry here, not in front of Kibii, and glad for it. Softness and helplessness got you nothing in this place. Tears only emptied you out. I stood up and straightened my shoulders and then convinced Kibii he should let me have a try with his bow.

  —

  My father had said Mrs. O would be our housekeeper, but even from the first day she behaved like something more. Like his wife, or like my mother. She had opinions about everything, and most particularly my stubbornness. Within a few months she had had enough of trying to be my governess. My father was going to hire one from town. “Emma shouldn’t have to struggle to keep you at your desk, Beryl,” he told me. “It’s not fair.”