Green City in the Sun (11 page)

     As he walked away, a servant rushed to the boy with a washbowl and cloths, and the circle broke up. Grace said, "Brutality and cruelty aren't necessary.

     Sir James said, "It's the only language they understand. These people think kindness a weakness, and they despise weakness. Your brother did a strong thing, a manly thing, and because of it, they will respect him."

     Angry, Grace turned away and was startled to see a figure standing in the mist by the supply tent. Lady Rose stood as if frozen, her eyes two smudges on her pale face. "Go back inside, Rose," Grace said, taking her arm. "You're shivering."

     The champagne warmth was gone. The face had returned to cold ivory. "Remember your promise, Grace," Rose whispered. "He mustn't touch me. Valentine mustn't come near me...."

W
HAT HAD THE
C
HILDREN OF
M
UMBI DONE TO MAKE
N
GAI
angry? The Lord of Brightness had withheld the rains so that there was drought in Kikuyuland, and soon there would be famine, which would bring the evil spirits of sickness.

     Because the day was unseasonably hot, young Wachera sweated as she toiled in the forest. She was not alone in her work. A spear throw from her, elder Wachera was also bent over, collecting medicinal herbs and roots, her body creating music with its hundreds of bead necklaces, copper bracelets, and anklets.

     The two women were collecting lantana leaves and thorn tree bark. The former was used to stop bleeding; the latter, for stomach ailments. Elder Wachera had taught her granddaughter how to recognize these magic plants, how to collect and prepare them, and how to administer them. The process was exactly the same as it had been in their ancestors' time, when medicine women had gone into the forests and searched and collected, as these two were doing today. The grandmother had taught young Wachera
that the earth was the Great Mother and that from her sprang all that was good: food, water, medicines, even the copper that adorned their bodies. The Mother was to be revered, and that was why, as they worked, the two Wacheras chanted holy spells over the earth.

     Outwardly the grandmother appeared to be at peace. She was a graceful, elderly African woman modestly clad in soft goat hides, her head shaved and gleaming in the hot sun, her nimble brown fingers moving quickly through leaves and twigs, sorting, rejecting, plucking, her wise old eyes instantly recognizing good medicine from bad. Her sacred chants sounded like a song, a mindless hum that would make the casual observer think her a woman with not a care in the world, not a thing on her mind.

     But the truth was, elder Wachera's thoughts were running a complex course, examining and rooting out problems in the same way her fingers traveled through the plants: how to cure Gachiku's barrenness, which recipe to use for Wanjoro's love potion, preparations for the upcoming initiation rites, organizing the ceremony to call down the rain. In good times the God of Brightness was thanked and praised, but in bad, a path was beaten to the medicine woman's hut.

     Only that morning Lady Nyagudhii, the clan's pottery mistress, had come to complain that her pots were breaking, inexplicably. Wachera had produced her Bag of Questions and had thrown the divining sticks at the woman's feet. She had read in them that a taboo had been broken, that a
man
had visited Nyagudhii's molding place. Pottery making was strictly women's work because the First Woman was called Mumbi, which means "She Who Makes Pots." From start to finish the digging of the clay, the molding and drying, the burning of the pots, and lastly their marketing were solely in the hands of women. For a man to touch any material associated with this work, or for him to be present during any stage of its progress, was forbidden by Kikuyu law. The mysterious breakage of Nyagudhii's new pots could only mean that a man, either intentionally or unwittingly, had trespassed upon the taboo ground. Now a goat would have to be sacrificed at the sacred fig tree and the pottery work area be ritualistically cleansed.

     But the heaviest thought weighing upon Wachera's mind was the drought. What had caused it? How to propitiate Ngai and bring the rain?

     She looked at the meager collection in her basket: a few brittle leaves; grass as dry as straw. Their medicine would be weak, and sickness would again strike Kikuyuland. The soil beneath her bare feet was parched and dusty. The Great Mother seemed to gasp for water. Back in the village the maize plots had withered and dried, stored grain turned to powder, branches shed their leaves and drooped in sorrow. She thought again of the ceaseless work being done on the ridge overlooking the river. Great metal monsters pushed down trees and uprooted stumps; oxen drew giant metal claws which wounded the earth; the white man on his horse showed his whip to the sons of Mumbi as they toiled beneath the rainless sky like women! Wachera could hear the ancestors weeping.

     It had occurred to her that there might be a
thahu
upon her people.

     
Thahu
meant "badness" or "sinful thing." It was a curse that befouled the ground and the air;
thahu
could make a man sicken and die; it could destroy crops, render cows and ewes barren, make women dream bad dreams. The forest was populous with spirits and ghosts; the Children of Mumbi knew to watch their steps lest they offend a tree imp or the spirit in the river. They knew that devils clung to the black cloak of night and that the good manifestations of Ngai rode the wings of morning. There was magic everywhere, in every leaf and branch, in the cry of the weaverbird, in the mists that hid the God of Brightness. And because there was this second Unseen World with its own laws and punishments, the Children of Mumbi were careful to honor it. One never harvested the last tuber from the earth, or drained the well dry, or maliciously broke wood, or overturned a rock. If one transgressed against the spirit realm, one apologized or placated with an offering. But if someone were careless and gave offense without the proper apology, then
thahu
would result, and its scourge would fall upon the Children of Mumbi.

     But what had brought on the "bad thing"?

     
Thahu
was the most powerful force on earth, the Kikuyu knew, and to call down a curse on a clan member was worse than committing murder. People who perpetrated
thahu
were burnt alive on a woodpile, and those who were the victims of
thahu
had little hope of relief. Elder Wachera had seen a member of her own family run mad with insanity after a man, jealous of her uncle's large goat herd, had put a
thahu
on him. Wachera had been a
little girl and had witnessed the complex ritual of the witch doctor as he had tried to lift the curse. But to no avail. The
thahu
was stronger than human medicine; once invoked, a curse was rarely broken; that was why the Children of Mumbi did not take curses lightly.

     When their search for medicine was exhausted, the two women then gathered firewood, tying dried sticks into enormous bundles and hoisting them onto their backs and attaching them by straps across their foreheads. The loads were so heavy that the grandmother and granddaughter were bent nearly double, their faces pointing to the ground. With the elder in the lead, balancing her burden with the practice of seventy years, the two trudged the dusty track back to the village, which lay many spear throws away, a distance which the white man called five miles.

     As she walked, young Wachera thought about her husband. Would Mathenge come to the village tonight? She had last seen him when third wife had given birth. By Kikuyu law the husband could not see the baby until he had given his wife a goat. Mathenge had come, so tall and slender in his single red blanket knotted over one shoulder. He no longer carried a spear because white man's law now forbade warriors to do so; in its place he carried a walking stick, which made him look important.

     In the course of her daily work—fetching water from distant pockets in the dried-up river, harvesting puny onions and withered maize cobs from her garden, milking the goats, curing the hides, sweeping the huts, repairing the roof— Wachera had espied her husband up on the ridge. He often sat in the shade of a tree talking with other Kikuyu men; sometimes she heard him laugh with the white man. And when he did come home, he would sit in his bachelor's hut, where women were forbidden to enter, and regale his brothers and male cousins with talk of the
mzungu's
new shamba.

     Wachera's curiosity about the strangers was growing. She had paused on several occasions in her work to watch the strange
mzunga
who was erecting a mysterious structure downriver. It was but four posts with a thatch roof. And the white woman wore baffling attire. Not an inch of flesh was open to the air and sun; she appeared to be bound up, like a baby in its sling, with only her black skirt being loose and dragging in the dirt. Impractical clothing, the Kikuyu woman thought, for such hot weather.

     The
mzunga
gave orders to the men who worked for her, members of Wachera's own clan, men who had once been warriors but who were now building a white woman's hut and calling her Memsaab Daktari, "Mistress Doctor."

     Wachera wondered what age-group the
daktari
belonged to. Her own age-group was called Kithingithia because they had been initiated in the year of the Swelling Sickness, which the white men called "flu" and said had occurred in 1910. Since they appeared to be close in age, Wachera wondered if the
daktari
had been circumcised in the same year. And if so, did that make them sisters in blood?

     The memsaab further puzzled Wachera in that she was clearly one of the white man's wives and yet she had no babies. All the village commented on how wealthy Bwana Lordy must be, considering the size of the shamba he was clearing, and that he had no fewer than seven wives. The Kikuyu did not know that their tally took in Lord Treverton's sister, his wife's personal maid, Mona's nanny, two parlormaids, a seamstress, and a cook, all brought out from England. So many wives, the Africans declared, but only one
toto
, one baby, among them. And not a belly on any of the women! Were the wives barren? Why didn't he sell them back to their fathers? Such useless creatures. Surely there was bad luck here. Bwana Lordy would be wise to find another witch doctor.

     One thing puzzled young Wachera even more about the new bwana. She knew that there had been a big war between two
wazungu
tribes and that it had lasted eight harvests. Bwana Lordy had come back from the war to erect his cloth huts and drive metal monsters to clear the forest. And now his wives had come; most likely some of them were women captured in raids during the war. But ... where was the cattle? What kind of warrior returned from war
without
the enemy's cattle?

     Finally Wachera's thoughts moved away from the white man and returned to her husband.

     How could she get him to come back to her? Even though the harvest was meager and the goats skinny, Wachera would prepare for him a feast. She would give him the last of her good beer and be uncomplaining and submissive. If only he would come! She considered asking her grandmother
for a love potion to give secretly to Mathenge but knew that the elder had more important things to deal with.

     There was going to be a rain sacrifice at the sacred fig tree.

     Wachera remembered the last time such a ceremony had been conducted because she had been chosen to take part in it. Only clean and blameless members of the clan could participate: elders who had outlived their worldly desires and thought only of the spiritual; women who were past childbearing and were therefore no longer perpetrators of lust; and children under the age of eight because they were pure in heart and untainted by sin.

     The ceremony had taken place at the foot of the very fig tree which was the heart of Wachera's little village. It was reckoned to be a very ancient tree and had proved its blessedness by saving the family from sickness and hunger in the year Wachera Moved Across the River. Young Wachera had no doubt that when the rain ceremony was conducted this time, the ancestors who lived in the venerated fig tree would send the rain.

     The two women reached the river and followed its trickling bed toward their village on the north bank. When they came through the trees, elder Wachera let out a cry. A gigantic iron monster with a man riding its back was pushing down third wife's hut.

     Elder Wachera shouted to the man riding the monster, a Masai in khaki shorts who dismissed the old woman but eyed the young one with interest. As the iron beast chuffed and belched and ground the hut beneath its feet, the grandmother placed herself in its path until the Masai driver halted the animal and stilled its roar.

     "What are you doing?" she demanded.

     He replied first in Masai, then in Swahili, and finally in English, none of which the two women understood. Then he said, "Mathenge," and gestured up to the ridge.

     There the tall and handsome warrior stood looking down. At his side, also watching, stood the white bwana.