Green City in the Sun Page 5

  He turned abruptly and looked at Grace as if having forgotten she was there. Then his face warmed into a smile, and he said, "Come, let me show you your small piece of Africa."

  A trail had been hacked through the forest from the hilltop to the ridge overlooking the river. Valentine brought his sister to the grassy edge, just a few yards from where her oxcarts were being unloaded, and pointed down to the flat banks of the Chania. "There's your land," he said, describing the boundaries with a sweep of his hand. "It begins up there, just beyond that clump of gum trees, and tumbles down here to the river. Thirty acres, set aside for you and God."

  Grace filled her eyes with the sight of the cedar trees, the brightly blooming snapdragons, the mauve and yellow orchids. It was paradise. And it was hers.

  I've come at last, Jeremy, whispered the secret voice of her heart. The place we dreamed of. I shall build it exactly as we planned, and I shall never leave it because, God willing, if you are still alive, you might find me here one day.

  "Is that down there yours, too, Val?" she asked, pointing to the area a hundred feet below her.

  "Yes, and wait till you hear the plans I have for it!"

  "But ... someone is living there." Grace counted seven little huts standing around an old fig tree.

  "They'll move. That's Chief Mathenge's family. His three wives and grandmother live there. They don't belong on this side of the river actually. You see, this whole area was set up as a buffer zone between the Masai and the Kikuyu in an effort to get them to stop fighting. It's sort of a no-man's-land. Neither tribe is allowed here."

  "But the white man is?"

  "Well, of course. Now those down there—it seems that some years back there was an epidemic of some sort across the river where the main tribe lives. This group broke off and came here to get away from the evil spirits or some such. Mathenge's promised me he'll herd them back across.

  Valentine turned to look at Rose. He saw her back on the hill, where she stood like a statue in the middle of the cleared land as if calmly waiting for her house to be built up around her. He walked toward her.

  "Valentine tells me that's your land."

  Grace looked up. Sir James had joined her. He had removed his pith helmet, and his dark brown hair was rumpled in the wind, glistening in places from occasional raindrops. "Yes," she said. "I'm going to build a hospital."

  "And bring the Word of God to the heathen?"

  She smiled. "Minister to the body, Sir James, and the spirit will follow."

  "Please, just James. We're in Africa now."

  Yes, she thought. Africa. Where gentlemen shake hands with ladies and an earl goes about with his shirt unbuttoned.

  "You've carved a big slice of work for yourself," Sir James was saying as he stood close to her, looking down into the wide ravine. "These people are plagued with malaria and influenza, yaws and parasites, and a host of diseases we don't even have names for!"

  "I shall do my best. I've brought medical books with me, and plenty of supplies."

  "I must warn you, they have their own medicine people, and they don't like the wazungu to interfere."

  "Wazungu?"

  "White folks. That family down there, for instance, in those huts 'round the fig tree. They're the family of a very powerful medicine woman who practically runs the clan that lives across the river."

  "I thought they had a chief."

  "They do, but it's his wife's grandmother, Wachera, who is the real power in these parts."

  "Thank you for telling me." Grace looked up into his attractive face. "Val told me about you in his letters. He said your ranch is eight miles north of here. I trust we shall become friends."

  "I've no doubt of it."

  A draft suddenly blew up from the river and swept Grace's sun helmet off her head. Sir James caught it, and as he handed it to her, he saw the glint of gold on her left hand. "Your brother didn't tell me you were engaged to be married."

  She looked down at the school ring that had been given to her by Jeremy the night before the ship was torpedoed. She had been rescued from the freezing waters and had wakened after a bout of pneumonia to find herself in a military hospital in Cairo. Lieutenant Junior Grade Jeremy Manning, she had been informed, was listed as missing.

  She would never give up the hope of someday finding him. Their shipboard love had been brief but intense, the sort of romance that war creates, compressing years into minutes. And she refused to believe he was dead. No one, not even Valentine or Rose, knew of the messages Grace had left for Jeremy in the past year, starting in Egypt when she had entrusted a letter with the Colonial Office. She had left subsequent notes in Italy, France, the length of England. Coming to Africa, she had left word of her whereabouts at Port Said, Suez, Mombasa, and, lastly, the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. She dropped the letters like a trail of breadcrumbs, hoping that Jeremy had somehow survived, had been rescued, and was alive at this moment, searching for her....

  "My fiancé was lost at sea during the war," she said quietly.

  Sir James saw the awkward flutter of her hands, the attempt to cover, protect the ring, and he checked the impulse to offer her a comforting arm. "My sister's a doctor," Valentine had told him. "But she's not as mannish as some." James was incredulous. Surely this soft-spoken woman with gentle, pleasing features and an endearing smile was not the same one who had written such large and brave letters to her brother. The plans Grace had described for her hospital had been painted in bold, sweeping strokes; she had sounded almost Amazonian. Sir James had not quite known what to expect, but certainly not this attractive young woman with enchanting eyes.

  Back on the hilltop, buffeted by the rising wind, Lord Treverton strode toward his wife with a searching look. Why the devil didn't she answer him?

  "Rose?" he said again, louder.

  She was staring in the direction of an unusual cluster of gum trees down the rear slope of the hill. They were incongruous with the surrounding forest of chestnuts and cedars; there appeared to be a clearing in the heart of them, a protected glade perhaps, a place where one could be safe.

  This new world frightened Rose. It was so wild, so primitive. Where were the ladies who would be calling on her? Where were the other houses? Valentine had written that the Donald ranch was eight miles away. Rose had pictured a country lane and pleasant Sunday drives. But there was no road, just a dirt track cutting through a land of naked savages and dangerous beasts. Rose was afraid of the Africans. She had never met a person of color before. On the train she had shied away from the smiling stewards; in Nairobi she had left Grace to deal with the native staff.

  But Lady Rose did so want to be useful in this new land. She desperately wanted to make Valentine proud of her. She despised her own frailty, her inability to charge into life as her sister-in-law did. During the war Rose had timidly suggested she might join the Volunteer Aid Detachment and nurse wounded soldiers. But Valentine would not hear of it. So instead, she had rolled bandages in her parlor and had knitted scarves for the men in the trenches.

  She had come to the Dark Continent in the hope that African life would make her more substantial, that the demands of settler life would erect a steel framework within her soft shell. She had once thought that marrying Valentine would color in her transparent places, but instead, she seemed only to fade beside the brilliance of his glory. And then she had thought. Pioneering woman. Rose liked the sound of that; it tolled like a cast-iron bell. It meant a woman who brought civilization to the bush, a woman who set standards and who led the way. Rose had also placed her hopes in motherhood, which sounded so firm, so important. She would be solid at last, in British East Africa, and people would no longer look through her.

  "Rose?" Valentine said, drawing near.

  Valentine, I love you so! I wish I could make you proud of me. I'm sorry the baby wasn't a boy.

  "Darling? Are you all right?"

  He would try again for a son, and the thought of it made Rose shudder. Their love for each other was
so beautiful, why did Valentine have to spoil it with that messy bedroom business? "Those gum trees," she murmured. "Don't cut them down, please, dearest."

  "Why not?"

  "They feel ... special somehow."

  "Very well, they're yours."

  He studied her. Rose was so pale and thin she looked as if the wind would carry her away. Then he remembered her ordeal on the train. "Darling," he said, stepping close to her to shield her with his body, "you're not well yet. You need to get your strength back. Wait till you see the camp. We have a proper cook, and we always dress for dinner. And the house will be wonderful, you'll see. Just as soon as the seedlings have been transplanted, we'll start building."

  He laid a hand on her shoulder and felt her stiffen.

  So, he thought darkly. It was going to begin again. His nights alone in bed, when he was driven mad by desire for his own wife, and then his taking her, closing his eyes to the look on her face. Rose would lie there afterward like a wounded deer, silently reproaching him with her violated body, driving him to undeserved feelings of guilt. He had thought she would come around in time, that she would learn to enjoy their lovemaking; instead, she seemed to grow to dislike it more each time, and he had no idea what to do.

  "Come along, darling," he said. "Let's join the others."

  Rose went first to Mrs. Pembroke and took the baby from her. Cradling Mona between her ermine muff and the soft fur of her coat, Rose followed her husband to the grassy slope where the others stood talking.

  From this overlook Rose could see, a hundred feet below her, a cluster of huts on the wide, flat riverbank. A little girl tended a small herd of goats; a pregnant woman milked a cow; there were other women in the little vegetable plots, preparing for planting. What a delightful scene, Rose thought.

  "You'll never guess what I plan to do with that bit of ground," Valentine said. "That's where the polo field is going to be."

  "Oh, Val!" Grace laughed. "You won't be happy until you've turned Africa into another England!"

  "Is there room for a polo field?" asked Sir James.

  "Those huts will have to go, of course, and that fig tree will have to be pulled up."

  They fell silent and listened to the light rain begin to patter in the foliage around them. Each pictured the great coffee plantation that was going to fill the valley and the hospital Grace was going to build down by the river. Lady Rose, holding her baby in the warmth and dryness of her ermine coat, stared down at the native village.

  A figure, a young woman wearing hides and great necklaces of beads, came out of one of the huts. She crossed the compound, and Rose saw that she carried a baby in a sling on her back. The African woman stopped suddenly, as if she sensed being watched, and looked up. High on the ridge above her an apparition in white was looking down.

  The two women stared at each other for what seemed like a long time.

  4

  W

  HEN THE YOUNG WOMAN ENTERED THE HUT, SHE SAID respectfully, "Ne nie Wachera, ""It is I, Wachera," and handed her grandmother the gourd of sugarcane beer.

  Before she drank, the older woman poured a few drops of beer onto the dirt floor for the ancestors, then said, "Today I will tell you of the time when women ruled the world and the men were our slaves."

  They sat in the watery light that came through the open doorway, there being no windows in the mud and cow dung walls of the round hut, and listened to the rain patter on the papyrus thatch roof. Following Kikuyu tradition, the elder Wachera was passing the legacy of her ancestors on to her son's eldest daughter, and they had been at it for many days. The instruction had begun with lessons in magic and the healing ways because the grandmother was the clan's medicine woman and midwife; she was also the keeper of the ancestors and guardian of the tribe's history. One day the girl, a young wife carrying her first child on her back, would also become these.

  While she listened to her grandmother's words, recited in the smoky air of the hut as former grandmothers had done all the generations back, young Wachera wrestled with impatience. She wanted to ask a question, but it was unthinkable to interrupt an elder. She wanted to ask about the white spirit on the hill.

  The old woman's voice was dusty with age; she spoke in chanting fashion, her body swaying, causing the great loops of beads on either side of her shaved head to rattle softly. Every so often she leaned forward to stir the soup simmering on the fire. "Today we call our husbands 'lord and master' after Kikuyu custom," she said to her granddaughter. "We are owned by men; we are their possessions to do with as they please. But always remember, my son's daughter, that our people call themselves the Children of Mumbi, the First Woman, and that the nine clans of the Kikuyu are named for the nine daughters of Mumbi. This is to remind us that we women were powerful once and that there was an age in the mists when we ruled and the men feared us."

  While the young woman listened and committed every word to memory, her hands worked quickly and nimbly on a new basket. Her husband, Mathenge, had brought her the bark of the mogio shrub, but then he had promptly left, for it was taboo for a man to engage in basket weaving.

  Young Wachera was proud of her husband. He was one of the new "chiefs" recently appointed by the white men. It was not the Kikuyu way to have chiefs—the clans were governed by councils of elders—but the wazungu saw a need, for some reason beyond Wachera's comprehension, to appoint individual Kikuyu chiefs over their own people. Mathenge had been chosen because he had once been a famous warrior and had fought in many battles with the Masai. That was before the white man said the Kikuyu and Masai must no longer fight.

  "In the mists," the aged voice was saying, "the women ruled the Children of Mumbi, and one day the men became jealous. They met secretly in the forest to discuss a way to overthrow the domination of women. But the women were cunning, the men knew, and would not be easily vanquished. Then the men remembered that there was a period when women were vulnerable, and that was in their pregnancy. So the men decided that their revolt would be successful if launched when the majority of the women were pregnant."

  Young Wachera had heard this story many times. The men had conspired to impregnate all the women of the tribe, and then, months later, when many of their wives and sisters and daughters were heavy with pregnancy, they had launched their attack. And they had been triumphant in overthrowing the old matriarchal laws and setting themselves up as lords over the subjugated women.

  If there was bitterness in the old woman's heart over this ignominious history, she never betrayed it, because of the tribal code of etiquette and manners: Kikuyu women were brought up to be docile and shy and uncomplaining.

  It was because of this upbringing that young Wachera had never questioned the wisdom of her husband's decision to work with the white man or her brothers' choice to run north with their shields and spears to seek employment on the white man's cattle shamba. Indeed, the wives of those few Kikuyu men who had gone to work for the white man were now envied in the village because their husbands brought home sacks of flour and sugar and a much coveted cloth called americani. Thus were the two Wacheras wealthy because of Mathenge; they owned more goats than any other women in the clan.

  Wachera missed her husband terribly now that he was the "headman" on the white man's shamba. She had fallen in love with Mathenge Kabiru because of his flute playing. During the season when the millet was ripe and had to be protected from birds, the young men would go through the fields playing their bamboo flutes, and Mathenge, tall for a Kikuyu because of Masai ancestry, and handsome in his shuka and long, braided hair, had traveled through villages, delighting the people with his melodies. But Mathenge's flute was silent now because white man's duties called him away.

  "It is time now," the grandmother said as she stirred the banana soup, "for you to hear the story of your famous ancestress, the great Lady Wairimu, who was taken as a slave by white men."

  The Kikuyu had no form of writing, and therefore, their history was an oral tradition. From early age every
child was taught the lists of generations and was called upon to recite them. Young Wachera knew the history of her family all the way back to the First Woman. "The earliest generation was called the Ndemi Generation," she would say, "because they were unruly and waged war; their children were called the Mathathi Generation because they lived in caves; their children were called the Maina Generation because they danced the Kikuyu songs; after these came the Mwangi Generation, so called because they wandered ...." And years were counted not in numbers but by descriptive names so that when the grandmother said that Lady Wairimu had lived during the Murima wa Ngai, "the trembling sickness of heavenly origin," Wachera knew to place her ancestress in the year of the malaria epidemic five generations back.

  She listened in breathless wonder to the heroic account of how Wairimu, having been stolen from her husband and taken in chains to a "great field of water on which giant huts floated," had escaped from the white slavers and made her way back to Kikuyuland, fighting lions and subsisting on the boiled stumps of banana shoots. It was Wairimu who had first told the Children of Mumbi about a race of men with skin the color of turnips, and that was how the word muthungu came to mean "white man," because in those days it meant "strange and inexplicable."

  Young Wachera remembered when she had first seen a mzungu. It had been two harvests ago, while she was still pregnant with her son. The white man had come into the village, and the women had run in terror, Wachera fleeing into her grandmother's hut. But Mathenge had been unafraid. He had gone forward and spit on the ground in greeting. While the women had watched from their hiding places, the two men had conducted a strange business which involved the receiving of beads and americani on Mathenge's part and in return his pressing his thumb to what looked like a large white leaf. Later, around the fire and drinking sugarcane beer, he had told Wachera and the other two women he owned about something called a "land sale" and a "deed" which he had marked with his thumb.