In the yard, the morning was as clear as glass—the same as the last ten or twenty or a hundred mornings. We passed under the large wattle tree where a pair of grey-whiskered vervets chattered from one of the lower branches. They looked like two old men with their leathery black hands and thin, disappointed faces. They’d come down from the forest or escarpment looking for water, but our cisterns had run desperately low, and we had none to offer.
Over the hill, the dirt track stretched down and away through broadly terraced fields. In better days, our crops had spread around us in every direction, rich and green. When you walked through the chest-high maize, your foot would sink into the moist earth up to your ankle. Now the leaves curled and cracked. The mill still ran continuously, grinding posho that then waited in canvas bags to honour our contracts. Grain-filled rail carriages still streamed away from our station at Kampi ya Moto towards Nairobi, but no one was getting rich from any of it. My father had borrowed against chits at high interest and then borrowed more. The rupee was plummeting like a grouse full of bird shot. Where it was now, no one really knew. The creditors seemed constantly to change their minds, and my father’s debts slid up and down a ladder almost daily. But our horses had to eat. They needed crimped oats, bran, boiled barley—not bleached patches of lucerne. My father had built his bloodstock from love and gut instinct and the thick black studbook with lists of names going all the way back to sires like magnificent princes. These were the finest horses there were. He wasn’t going to let anyone or anything take an inch more without a fight, not after he had worked so hard.
When Pegasus and I reached the open track, we paused and settled, getting our bearings, then I opened him up. He charged out like a coiled spring, lengthening along the flat grade, thrusting through the rhythms of his stride—fast and perfect, close to flying.
I had foaled him myself when I was fourteen and home for a spring holiday—watching Coquette’s trembling labour and overjoyed that I could be there for it. Coquette had delivered healthy foals every few years since the terrible birth of Apollo and the coming of the siafu ants, but I still didn’t want to leave her side for a moment and took to sleeping in her loose box for the last few weeks. When the foal finally came, I broke open the slick, translucent birth sac with my hands and gently tugged him by his small perfect front hoofs into the loose straw bed. I nearly shook with happiness and relief. It was the first time I’d ever been midwife on my own, and there’d been no mishaps. My father had trusted me and didn’t come into the stable at all until dawn as I held Pegasus in my arms, a bundle of wet heat and bony folded limbs.
“Well done,” he said from the stable door. He seemed to know that even the dusty tip of his boot in the loose box would lessen what I’d carried off without him. “You brought him to life. I suppose he’s yours now.”
“Mine?” I’d never owned anything or thought I should—happily grooming, handling, feeding, and worrying over my father’s animals for years. But somehow this miraculous animal belonged to me: a bit of grace I hadn’t even known I was desperate for.
When Pegasus and I finished our run, we made for home the long way, around the northern perimeter of the valley where it furled out in an unbroken sweep. A neighbour had recently snapped up the adjoining parcel, and I saw signs of him now. Newly set fence posts stood as straight as matchsticks where there’d been only open land and unmarred emptiness. I traced the line they made and soon reached the farmer, hatless and barrel-chested, with a spool of wire over his shoulder. He was stringing it with a hammer and claw and staples, the muscles of his arms going taut as he drew the wire hard against the post and secured it. He didn’t stop working until Pegasus and I stood five feet from him. Then he smiled up at me, his collar dark with fresh perspiration. “You’re trampling my pasture.”
I knew he was joking—there was no pasture yet, or much of anything finished—but I could tell it would all be marvellous one day. You could see it in the way he’d set the posts so well. “I can’t believe your house is up,” I said. He’d made it look more suited for town than the bush, with a shingle roof instead of thatch and real glass at the windows.
“It’s nothing like your father’s place.” He’d already guessed who I was then. Shielding his eyes with the back of his arm, he squinted up at me. “I met him years ago, when I was laid up near here with the Madras volunteers.”
“You were wounded?”
“Dysentery, actually. My whole troop had it. Loads of men died.”
“That sounds awful.”
“It was.” The smallest hint of a Scottish brogue rolled from behind his tongue. “But there were a few pleasures. One day some of us went off hunting down in the Rongai Valley, and you were there. A good-looking native boy was with you, too, and you were both crack shots.” He smiled, flashing neat square teeth. “You don’t remember me.”
I scanned his face—the squared-off jaw and strong chin and cornflower-blue eyes—looking for something familiar. “Sorry,” I finally admitted. “There were so many soldiers around then.”
“You’ve grown up.”