She also seemed more insistent than ever that I shouldn’t spend time with Kibii or any of the young men from the Kip village. “It was bad enough when you were children, but now…well, it’s not seemly.”
Seemly? “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”
“Emma’s right,” my father agreed. “It’s just not done.”
Though I continued to fight both of them on principle, the fact was I rarely saw Kibii now. When I came back to the farm from Nairobi, he began to walk three paces behind me when we went to the stables together for gallops.
“What are you up to?” I asked the first time I noticed him doing it.
“You are the memsahib. This is what’s proper.”
“I’m the same as I have been, you ninny. Stop it.”
But we were neither of us the same as before, and I felt that as clearly as I saw the changes in my body when I undressed at night, the rounding and lengthening of my new curves. Kibii’s arms and legs were muscled where they’d once been soft and boyish, and his face had hardened, too. I felt myself drawn to him, the polished look of his skin, and the strong length of his thigh beneath his shuka. He was beautiful, but when I tried to touch him casually, testing the waters, he flinched.
“Stop, Beru.”
“Why not? Aren’t you even a little curious?”
“Don’t be stupid. Do you want to get me killed?”
When he stormed off, I was left feeling stung and rejected, but deep down I knew he was right. Neither of our worlds would have permitted that sort of touch between us for a minute, and the situation could have quickly become terrible for both of us. But I missed Kibii. Things had once been so simple and good between us, when we weren’t afraid of anything, when we’d hunted in perfect lockstep. I remembered running for miles looking for an occupied warthog hole with arap Maina, and then stooping to crinkle paper outside the mouth of its den. This was what you did to call out the pig, the noise working to aggravate the animal in some way I didn’t understand but rarely saw fail. Kibii and I did everything arap Maina asked of us and came home with the body of a large boar slung between us like a fleshy hammock. The hair on its haunches was like crisp black wire. Its mouth was frozen and clenched in death, bearing an expression of stubbornness I admired. My end of the stick bit heavily into my hands and felt exactly right. This was what the pig weighed, what the day weighed.
My God, how I wanted to live like that again! I wanted to see arap Maina, to follow him soundlessly through jagged elephant grass, to laugh with Kibii lightly over anything or nothing. But he was nearly fifteen now. When his circumcision ceremony arrived, he would become the warrior he was always meant to be. In all the time I’d known him, he’d never stopped dreaming of and longing for that day, but somehow, as I’d listened to him over the years, I’d managed to ignore how the ceremony would take away the boy I knew for ever and also the fierce warrior girl who had loved him. It already had. Those children were gone.
In his stable office, my father folded his ledger and reached for a drink though he’d only recently finished his morning coffee. “You’re going to run Pegasus today?” he asked me.
“A mile and a quarter at half speed. His head’s been a little low. I thought I’d try the chain snaffle.”
“Good girl,” he said, but his eyes were flat and detached as I ran through the rest of the morning’s duties—which of the horses were on gallop day, which were resting or in tendon boots, the feed ordered, deliveries scheduled. Since I’d failed at boarding school, this was my life. He organized the breeding and ran the farm, and I was his head boy. I wanted to be indispensable, but I would settle for being useful.
The groom, Toombo, had brushed Pegasus’s coat to a lacquer and now boosted me into the saddle. At two, Pegasus was massive already—a notch more than seventeen hands. I was tall, too—nearly six foot now—but I felt like a leaf in the saddle.