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 lowlying 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.”
I felt heat prickle along the tops of my ears. “I don’t need a governess. I’ll do the lessons.”