The stable bell clanged, breaking open the stillness. The lazy roosters woke and the dusty geese, the houseboys and grooms, gardeners and herdsmen. I had my own mud-and-daub hut, a little apart from my father’s, which I shared with my ugly and loyal mixed-breed dog, Buller. He whined at the sound of the bell, stretching from his nest at the foot of my bed, and then looped his square head under my arm and against my side so that I felt his cool nose and the wrinkled half-moons of scars on the top of his head. There was a thick, lumpy knot where his right ear had been before a leopard had crept into my hut and tried to drag him into the night. Buller had ripped open the leopard’s throat and limped home covered in their mingled blood, looking like a hero but also nearly dead. My father and I nursed him back to health, and though he’d never been particularly handsome before, he was grizzled and half-deaf now. We loved him better for it because the leopard hadn’t begun to break his spirit.
In the farmyard, in the cool morning air, Kibii was waiting for me. I was eleven and he a little younger, and we had both become part of the oiled machinery of the farm. There were other white children nearby who went to school in Nairobi or sometimes back in England, but my father never mentioned that I might do anything like that. The stable was my classroom. Morning gallops started not long after dawn. I was there without fail, and so was Kibii. As I approached the stable now, he shot up into the air as if his legs were coiled springs. I’d been practising that sort of jump for years and could manage to go as high as Kibii, but to have the edge in competition, I knew I should do as little as possible. Kibii would jump and jump, outdoing himself, and grow tired. Then I would take my turn and outshine him.
“When I become a moran,” Kibii said, “I’ll drink bull’s blood and curdled milk instead of nettles like a woman, and then I will have the speed of an antelope.”
“I could be a great warrior,” I told him.
Kibii had an open and handsome face, and his teeth flashed as he laughed, as if this were the funniest thing he’d ever heard. When we were very young, he’d been happy to let me join his world, maybe because he felt it was all play-acting. I was a girl, and a white one at that, after all. But more and more lately, I felt him becoming sceptical and disapproving of me, as if he were waiting for me to give up trying to compete with him and accept that our paths would soon be very different ones. I had no such intention.
“If I had the right training I could,” I insisted. “I could do it in secret.”
“Where is the glory in that? No one would know your deeds belonged to you.”
“I would.”
He laughed again and turned towards the stable door. “Who will we gallop today?”
“Daddy and I are off to Delamere’s to look at a brood mare.”
“I will hunt,” he replied. “Then we shall see who comes back with the better story.”
—
When Wee MacGregor and my father’s hack, Balmy, were saddled and ready, we set off into the morning sun. For a time, Kibii’s challenge clouded my thoughts, but then the distance and the day took over. Dust billowed around us, creeping under our loose-tied handkerchiefs and into our noses and mouths. It was fine and silty, red as ochre or the brush-tailed fox, and it was always with us. So were the chiggers that were like flecks of red pepper, clinging to everything and holding on. You couldn’t think about the chiggers because you couldn’t do anything about them. You couldn’t think about the biting white ants that moved in menacing ribbons over the plains, or the vipers or the sun, which sometimes pulsed so brightly it seemed to want to flatten you or eat you alive. You couldn’t because these things were part of the country itself and made it what it was.
Three miles on we came to a small gully where the red mud had dried and cracked in a system of parched veins. A moulded clay bridge stood at the centre, looking pointless without water running on either side, and also like the backbone of some huge animal that had died there. We’d been relying on the water for our horses. Maybe there was water further along, or maybe not. To distract us both from the problem my father began to talk about Delamere’s brood mare. He hadn’t seen her yet, but that didn’t stop him from winding her neatly up into his hopes for our bloodstock. He was always thinking of the next foal and how it might change our lives—and because he was, I was, too.
“She’s Abyssinian, but Delamere says she’s got speed and good sense.”
Mostly my father was interested in thoroughbreds, but occasionally you could find a gem in more common places, and he knew this. “What’s her colouring?” I wanted to know. That was always my first question.
“She’s a pale gold palomino, with a blonde mane and tail. Coquette’s her name.”
“Coquette,” I repeated, liking the sharp edges of the word without knowing what it meant. “That sounds right.”
“Does it?” He laughed. “I suppose we’ll see.”
—