A short while later, D blustered in, kicking off dust and talking to himself. “My favourite girls,” he cheered.
“Beryl’s had a bit of a day,” Lady D warned him. “She’s going to go off to school soon, in Nairobi.”
“Ah.” He settled himself gruffly in a chair opposite me. “I wondered when that would come up. You’ll be grand at it, girl. Really you will. I’ve always said you were as sharp as a tack.”
“I’m not so sure.” I made a half-hearted attempt to finish my tea, which had grown cold.
“Swear you’ll come and see us whenever you can. You have a home here, too. You always will.”
When I said goodbye, Lady D walked me out to the stable and put her hands on my shoulders. “There’s no girl quite like you, Beryl, and you’re going to do well in Nairobi. You’ll do well anywhere.”
—
It was nearly dark when I reached the farm, and the mountains were an inky blue and seemed to shrink and flatten against the distance. Wee MacGregor crested our hill, bringing us to the edge of the paddock, and I saw Kibii heading off towards the path to his village. I thought of calling out to him, but I’d had enough difficult talking for one day, and didn’t know how to tell him I would be leaving soon. I didn’t know how to say goodbye.
Over the next two and a half years I did my best at school—though my best was hardly up to scratch. I ran away half-a-dozen times, once hiding in a pig hole for three days. Another time I sparked a rebellion that had most of the school bolting onto the plains after me on their bicycles. That got me sacked, finally. My father met my train looking cross but also relieved, as if he understood that sending me away was never going to work.
But the farm wasn’t at all the place I had left. The world wasn’t the same, actually, and the war had made certain of that. We had heard all the biggest bits of news at school, about the archduke’s assassination, about Kaiser Wilhelm and how nations we’d scarcely heard of had banded together to fight one another. For British East Africa, war meant stopping the land-greedy Germans from taking everything we believed was rightfully ours. Large portions of the protectorate had become battlefields, and men everywhere—Boers and Nandis and white settlers, Kavirondo and Kipsigis warriors—had left their ploughs and mills and shambas to join the King’s African Rifles. Even arap Maina had gone off to fight. During one of my school holidays, Kibii and I stood together at the top of our hill to watch him march off to join his regiment. He held his spear high in one hand and his buffalo-hide shield in the other, and carried himself straight and proud as he walked down the dirt track. He was sent hundreds of miles away, to the border of German East Africa, and handed a rifle in place of his spear. He didn’t know how to use a gun, but of course he would master it. He was the bravest and most self-assured warrior I knew, and I was sure he’d come home with stories, and perhaps enough gold to buy a new wife.
But before the end of that summer holiday, a messenger came running onto our farm one afternoon, and he told us what had happened so far away. Arap Maina had fought as bravely as he could, but he had died in that distant place and was buried where he fell, without his tribe or family to honour him. Kibii’s face revealed nothing when we heard the news, but he stopped eating and grew thin and angry. I didn’t know how to comfort him or what to think. Arap Maina hadn’t even seemed mortal, and now he was gone.
“We should find the man who killed your father and plunge a spear into his heart,” I told him.
“It’s my duty to do this, the moment I become a moran.”
“I’ll come with you,” I told him. I had loved arap Maina like my own father and was ready to go anywhere and do anything to avenge his death.
“You are only a girl, Lakwet.”
“I’m not afraid. I can throw a spear as far as you can.”
“It’s not possible. Your father would never part with you.”
“I won’t tell him then. I’ve run away before.”
“Your words are selfish. Your father loves you, and he is alive.”