The Flame Trees of Thika (22 page)

On our return we found Alec waiting, and consulted him. He got on well with the Kikuyu and, probably because he was a bachelor and had no one else to talk to, generally knew more than our other neighbours of what was going on. Besides his native name of Bado Kwisha, he had a second one that he was not supposed to know: this was bwana dung-beetle, which did not sound complimentary but was not meant to be unkind. Alec claimed it as a tribute to his persistence, for nothing is more patient and resolute than a dung-beetle, which will push its little kneaded ball of muck along a rough, uphill path with infinite care and resolution; but Njombo told me that this was not the reason at all, but that when Alec sat on a pony - he was a clumsy horseman - he looked as if he was trying to push it along, and kicked his legs like the insect they had named him after. I tried hard to see the likeness, and never could, because the dung-beetle was so thickly armoured and spindly-legged, although I did see that Alec tried in an ungainly way to shove his pony forward.

‘There is only one man who can save Njombo,’ Alec said, ‘and that is Sammy; it was he who put on the spell, because he thinks it was Njombo’s magic that blew up his son; and he must take it off again.’

‘You make it sound like a mackintosh,’ Robin protested. ‘Sammy simply ignores what I say.’

‘Well, we must look for his Achilles heel. And that is easy, with a Masai.’

‘You mean his cattle.’

‘Of course. If you round them up and tell him that you’ll cut their throats unless Njombo recovers, or hand them over to Njombo’s father, I think your Sammy will very soon come to heel.’

Robin tried this, but it was not a success. His trouble was that he was never really convinced of his own authority. A little worm
gnawed away at the back of his mind: what shall I do if they refuse? How shall I make them obey me? To squash the worm, he assumed a very stern demeanour and spoke abruptly, like a sergeant on parade. This was most unlike his ordinary manner, which was dreamy and benign. It was extraordinary to watch the change; like a coin tossed in the air, he could show two absolutely different sides of his nature, and yet both were the same.

He summoned Sammy to his office in a corner of the store, smacked the table with his palm, and said:

‘Sammy, you are the headman and you have had a quarrel with Njombo which is very wicked. You are behaving not like a man who can read, but like a savage. Do you not understand that these Kikuyu customs are bad and old-fashioned? If Njombo dies, you will be a murderer.’

‘I do not understand what you are saying,’ Sammy stubbornly replied.

‘You will understand very quickly when I seize your cattle and shoot every one of them myself. Every one. I shall do this, Sammy. If by tomorrow evening you have not undone this thing, if Njombo does not begin to recover, that is what will happen. Every one of your beasts will die.’

Sammy glowered like a black mountain and his eyes rebelled, but he said nothing. While he was enraged, Robin’s threat did not convince him.

‘Very well: finish Njombo’s illness or your cattle die,’ Robin barked. ‘Go at once and arrange it. At once. That is all.’

Robin knew that, if he had the chance, Sammy would spirit his cattle away to a friend in the reserve, so he had them driven into the thorn-protected
boma
where our own oxen spent the night.

‘What shall I do if Sammy
doesn’t
de-witch Njombo?’ Robin wondered. ‘I can’t really kill sixteen head of cattle, and have the
D.C.
after me. I suppose all this is highly illegal.’

‘So is bewitching people; you could have Sammy run in.’

‘Oh, yes, run in! One has as good a chance of getting a conviction in a witchcraft case, as a mule has of winning the Derby.’

Tilly would not let me see Njombo who lay, she said, immobile in his dark hut, fading away like an old photograph. His ribs stuck out, his pulse was very feeble, and he scarcely seemed
to breathe. ‘He’s committing suicide by sheer will-power,’ she said. The hut in which he lay took on a mysterious and sinister character, as if set apart and charged with threatening powers. I kept approaching it nervously, expecting to detect a black presence hovering by the door, or ghostly shapes flitting in and out of the roof. It looked dead itself, lacking the faint blue film of smoke that always hung about the thatch of a hut full of life and people.

A
S
the day developed, everyone realized that nothing was being done to de-witch Njombo and that our bluff had failed. Robin got out his rifle and left it about in obvious places as a hint.

‘A lot of dead cattle won’t save Njombo,’ Tilly remarked. ‘I think that one of us ought to see Kupanya. Njombo is his relation, and surely he must have some authority.’

‘Sammy married his daughter,’ Robin pointed out. ‘That was what started all this trouble, I suppose.’

‘If Njombo dies, we can report the case and make things awkward for him with the Government. At any rate we can try.’

Robin did not like to leave the farm with so much tension in the air, so Hereward offered to escort Tilly, and I was allowed to go with them. We set off in the heat of the afternoon up the red path to Kupanya’s, Hereward spruce and upright in a perfectly cut pair of breeches and shining boots on a well-bred, lively polo-pony, and myself jogging behind on Moyale, who had by now grown fat and wilful, and put his ears back and shook his head when I pummelled his ribs with my heels to urge him on.

Hereward took a forthright view of our troubles. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Robin’s too lenient with these fellows. As for Sammy, I’d put him down and give him twenty-five and that would be an end of the trouble.’

‘It would also be an end of Njombo,’ Tilly pointed out.

‘That’s a lot of stuff and nonsense, if you ask me. He’s been poisoned, that’s the long and short of it. You aren’t on guard
over the fellow day and night, you don’t know who’s creeping in there filling him up with some revolting brew. By George, the trouble you go to over your boys! It isn’t every woman who’s willing to take on the jobs that you do. Robin’s a lucky man.’

Tilly reddened, muttered something about Robin having a lot to put up with, and urged her pony into a trot, so that Hereward had to drop behind in single file. It was the time of day when heat presses down upon the earth and squeezes out the energy, when men idle in the shade like trout lying nose-to-current on the bed of a stream, when even doves can barely muster the desire to coo. Women sat straight-legged under bushes, their pangas beside them, suckling their infants, even flies were drowsy and settled again and again on the ponies’ faces and on our hands and arms, ignoring our flaps and twitches. Rains were brewing; the air was stifling and heavy, distant ridges looked as sharp and hard as if they had been cut out of cardboard.

Kupanya’s group of huts was deserted, except by one or two naked children and an old crone, her face as crinkled as a walnut, plaiting a corn-bag with crabbed fingers. One had a sense of watching eyes, yet Hereward’s calls received no answer.

‘Should have brought a hunting-horn,’ he remarked. ‘That would have fetched ’em out.’

A child scurried from hut to hut, a woman put her head out of a door and withdrew it, a sense arose of slowly awakening activity. At last, after an even longer pause, Kupanya emerged from a hut as reluctantly as a very tight cork drawn from the neck of a bottle; he looked bleary-eyed and was clad only in a blanket he was still adjusting over one shoulder. When he expected us, he dressed up in his monkeyskin
kaross
and looked imposing. In dishabille he looked imposing in a different way: strong, well-muscled, agile, his healthy skin shining like the barrel of a well-kept rifle. It was easy to believe that not so long ago he had slain Masai, raided cattle, and danced with his body garishly painted, with rattles on his ankles and feathers in his pigtailed hair.

Hereward explained our mission in his barking voice and poor Swahili, as if giving orders on parade. The chief listened with a heavy afternoon face and briefly answered:

‘Njombo - I do not know this man.’

‘Do not give me lies! He is one of your own relations.’

‘If he has left my land to work for Europeans he is not mine, but theirs.’

‘Whether he is yours or ours does not matter,’ Tilly said. ‘Listen carefully. Someone is trying to kill Njombo with medicine. If this does not stop at once, today, or at any rate by tomorrow morning, we shall tell the
D.C.
that you have allowed it. And then the
D.C.
will send askaris to arrest you. He will put you in jail and fine you hundreds of goats, and take away the staff of the chief. And he will give that staff to another. That is the plain truth. And here is our warning. If the magic has not been taken off Njombo by noon tomorrow, the
D.C.
will know about it before the sun sets.’

Kupanya stood for a while in silence with his eyes on the ground, and a look as heavy as the thunderstorm we could feel mounting up just beyond the horizon. The air was motionless, the flies clung, and when a goat picked its way across the compound, the little puffs of red dust that its feet created hung there and drifted back on to the ground as slowly as thistledown.

‘I do not understand these words,’ Kupanya said at last. ‘All this has nothing to do with me. If the
D.C.
wishes to come, I am ready for him.’

‘The
D.C.
will not come,’ Tilly retorted. ‘He will send askaris to take you away with bracelets on your wrists. Have you not heard that the Governor has said there must be no more bad magic? So now you must put a stop to this affair. You have till noon tomorrow; and if Njombo dies first, the
D.C.
will know that you have murdered him.’

With this parting shot, Tilly sprang on to her mount and we rode off without waiting for protests or denials.

‘You handled that splendidly,’ Hereward said with enthusiasm. ‘By George, I wouldn’t like to come up against the rough edge of your tongue!’

‘I only hope he doesn’t call our bluff,’ Tilly replied quickly, for she disliked compliments, and might not have been sure whether this was one or not. ‘If we do send to the
D.C.
he’d probably do nothing at all, at any rate for several weeks.’

‘You’ve got the chief rattled, my dear.’

‘There’s going to be a thunderstorm.’

It was extraordinary how quickly a huge black cloud had
appeared from nowhere and filled the sky. The air grew blacker and more sinister and the ridges crouched beneath a lurid, leaden light as if waiting for the crack of doom when the earth would spew up its dead. A cold wind shook the trees like a vicious cavalcade of ghostly horsemen riding the air, and then a fork of lightning lit the whole scene with an unreal whiteness, as if a crack in the surface of reality had for an instant revealed an underworld full of hidden devils and advancing doom. Trees bent before the onslaught and perhaps dug their roots into the ground.

The crash that followed brought our ponies to a halt, quivering all over. We slid off them and held tightly to their bridles. The whole air was electrified, explosive, and black. Huge raindrops came down as cold as ice and with a personal malignance: It felt as if they wanted to tear the clothes off our bodies; the drops splashed over our feet and the next flash of lightning blinded us, and for several moments everything was invisible and yet full of painful light.

‘The bananas,’ Hereward shouted, and started to run with his pony plunging beside him. We were near a stream between two ridges, and banana-trees with their arching fronds grew beside it, dropping over the water. The storm burst fully as we reached the banana clump. The air was filled with fury, as if a wild, colossal monster was setting on the earth with tooth and claw to tear it to shreds. The banana fronds were quite unable to offer shelter, they were whipped about like shreds of rag. We huddled together with the quivering ponies and in a few moments were drenched to the skin. It was terrifying, yet there was something splendid and invigorating about the raging wall of icy water assailing us, a grey wall that blotted out all vision, and the roaring of the wind, and the crashing and cracking and reverberating of the thunder, and the violence of lightning flashes that split the sky. It was all so purposeful, the fury did not seem wanton, but directed - at whom? Not at ourselves, huddling by the stream, we were too small and insignificant, but it was hard not to believe, as the Kikuyu did, that God himself was in a fury and was raging through the storm, and that the lightning was the flashing of his sword as he lunged at the devils who had offended him.

The storm rolled down the valley, leaving us cold and soaking
wet, but exhilarated and thankful. The thunder was still loud, but the wind slackened and the water-wall thinned out into heavy drops. The ponies began to toss their heads and dance about in thick, chocolate-brown mud.

‘That was a near thing,’ Hereward said in a stiff voice. ‘I don’t want to see lightning as close as that again. Are you all right, Tilly?’

‘You can see I am,’ Tilly replied crossly, thereby showing that she, too, had been badly frightened.

‘I’d never have forgiven myself if anything had happened to you.’

‘It would hardly have been your fault, Hereward. And it would have happened to us all.’

‘Well, there are many worse ends. I sometimes think it would be the best way out for me.’

‘What nonsense!’ Tilly cried, trying to tighten one of Lucifer’s girths. ‘Why should you wish to get out of anything? You have everything you want.’

‘I am glad I have given that impression.’ Hereward sounded anything but glad, in fact rather offended, yet determined to forgive the offender. ‘I think most men would include his wife’s affection among the things he wants.’

‘Are you trying to say that Lettice…’

‘I may be a fool of a soldier, but I’m not blind as a bat.’

‘Oh, come off it, Hereward…. I wish you’d help me with this girth.’

Hereward, his moustache at the bristle, responded with agility, slipping a hand over Tilly’s as he reached for the wet leather and obliging her to wriggle it free.