Assegai

They halted in the blazing noon and found shade under the spreading branches of a giraffe thorn tree while they waited for Ishmael to catch up and prepare the midday meal. He was still half a mile away across the plain and his form wavered in the heat mirage. Loikot squatted in front of Leon and frowned, which signalled that he had something of importance to impart and that this was a conversation between men.

‘M’bogo, this is verily the truth that I will tell you,’ he began.

‘I am listening to you, Loikot. Speak and I will hear you,’ Leon assured him, and assumed an earnest expression to encourage him.

‘It is of no value to talk to those old men as you did two nights ago. Their minds are cooked to cassava porridge by the drinking of beer. They have forgotten how to track a beast. They hear nothing but the chatter of their wives. They see nothing beyond the walls of their manyatta. They can do nothing but count their cattle and fill their bellies.’

‘Such is the way of old men.’ Leon was acutely aware that, in Loikot’s eyes, he himself was probably on the brink of dotage.

‘If you want to know what is happening in all the world you must ask us.’

‘Tell me, Loikot, who do you mean by “us”?’

‘We are the guardians of the cattle, the chungaji. While the old men sit in the sun to drink beer and talk of mighty deeds from long ago, we the chungaji move through the land with the cattle. We see everything. We hear everything.’

‘But tell me, Loikot, how do you know what the other chungaji, who are many days’ march distant, see and hear?’

‘They are my brothers of the knife. Many of us are of the same circumcision year. We shared the initiation ceremonies.’

‘Is it possible that you are able to learn what the chungaji with their cattle on the plains beyond Kilimanjaro saw yesterday? They are ten days’ march away.’

‘It is possible,’ Loikot confirmed. ‘We speak to each other.’

Leon doubted this.

‘At sunset this evening I will speak to my brothers and you will hear it,’ Loikot offered, but before Leon could question him further they heard terrified screaming from out on the plain. Leon and Manyoro seized their rifles and jumped up. They stared out at Ishmael’s distant figure. He was in full flight towards them, holding his bundle on his head with both hands. Close behind him came a gigantic cock ostrich. With its long pink legs it was gaining on him swiftly. Even from this distance Leon could see that it displayed its full breeding plumage. Its body was the deepest onyx black and the puffs of feathers on its tail and wing-tips were brilliant white. Now every feather was fluffed up in rage. Its legs and beak were flushed scarlet with sexual frenzy. It was determined to kill to protect its breeding territory from the white-robed invader.

Leon led the two Masai to the rescue. They shouted and waved their arms wildly to distract the bird, but it ignored them and bore down remorselessly on Ishmael. When it got within striking distance it stretched out its long neck and pecked the kitchen bundle so viciously that he was knocked off his feet. He went down, sprawling in a cloud of dust. His bundle burst open and his cooking pots and crockery clattered and bounced around him. The ostrich leaped on top of him, kicking and clawing with both feet. It lowered its head to peck his arms and legs, and Ishmael squealed as the blood flowed from the wounds it inflicted.

Nimble as a hare, Loikot outran the two older men, shouting a challenge at the ostrich as he closed in. The bird jumped off Ishmael’s prostrate form and advanced menacingly towards Loikot. Its stubby wings were spread and it began its threat dance, stepping high, lifting and lowering its head menacingly, cawing an angry challenge.

Loikot pulled up and spread the tails of his cloak as though they were wings. Then he began a perfect imitation of the ostrich’s dance, using the same high steps and ritual head-bobbing. He was trying to provoke it to attack. Bird and boy circled each other.

The ostrich was being confronted on its own breeding ground and his outrage and affront at last overpowered even its instinct of survival. It rushed to the attack, head thrust out to the full reach of its long neck. It struck at Loikot’s face, but Loikot knew exactly how to deal with it, and Leon realized he must have done this many times before. Fearlessly the boy jumped to meet the huge bird and locked both hands around its neck just behind the head. Then he lifted both feet off the ground and swung his full weight on the ostrich’s neck, bearing its head down to the ground. The ostrich was pinned helplessly off-balance. It could not lift its head. It flopped around in a circle in an attempt to remain on its feet. Leon ran up and raised his rifle. He circled the mêlée to give himself a clear shot.

‘No! Effendi, no! Do not shoot,’ screamed Ishmael. ‘Leave this son of the great shaitan to me.’ On his hands and knees he was fumbling through the scattered debris of his kitchen utensils. At last he came to his feet clutching a gleaming carving knife in his right hand and raced to the struggling pair with his weapon held en garde.

‘Twist its head over!’ he shouted at Loikot. Now the bird’s throat was exposed and, with the skill of a master butcher, Ishmael drew the edge of the razor-sharp blade across it, slitting it neatly from side to side and cutting down to the ostrich’s vertebrae with a single stroke.

‘Let him go!’ Ishmael ordered, and Loikot released the bird. They jumped well clear of its flailing feet with their sharp talons. The ostrich bounded away but a long plume of blood shot high in the air from the open arteries in its throat. It lost direction and staggered in a circle, its long, scaly pink legs losing their driving force and its neck drooping like the stalk of a fading flower. It collapsed and lay struggling weakly to regain its feet, but regular jets of bright arterial blood continued to spurt on to the sun-baked earth.

‘Allah is great!’ Ishmael exulted, and pounced upon its still living carcass. ‘There is no other God but God!’ Neatly he slit open the bird’s belly and cut out the liver. ‘This creature is slain by my knife and I have sanctified its death in the name of God. I have drawn out its blood. I declare this meat halal.’ He held the liver aloft. ‘Behold the finest meat in all of creation. The liver of the ostrich taken from the living bird.’

They ate kebabs of ostrich liver and belly fat grilled over the coals of the camel-thorn acacia. Then, bellies filled, they slept for an hour in the shade. When they awoke the breeze, which had died away at noon, rose again and blew steadily across the wide steppe. They shouldered rifles and packs and went with the wind until the sun was no more than a hand’s spread above the horizon.

‘We must go to that hilltop,’ Loikot told Leon, pointing to a pimple of volcanic rock that stood out directly in their path, highlighted in the ruddy glow of the setting sun. The boy scrambled ahead to the summit and stared down the valley. Shaded blue with distance three enormous bastions of rock thrust up towards the southern sky. ‘Loolmassin, the mountain of the gods.’ Loikot pointed out the most westerly peak as Leon came up beside him. Then he turned to the east and the two larger peaks. ‘Meru and Kilimanjaro, the home of the clouds. Those mountains are in the land that the Bula Matari call their own but which has belonged to my people since the beginning time.’ The peaks were more than a hundred miles on the far side of the border, deep inside German East Africa.

Awed into silence, Leon watched the sunlight sparkle on the snowfields of Kilimanjaro’s rounded summit, then turned back to the long trail of smoke drifting from the volcanic crater of Loolmassin. He wondered if there was a more magnificent spectacle in all the world.

‘Now I will speak to my brothers of the chungaji. Hear me!’ Loikot announced. He filled his lungs, cupped his hands around his mouth and let out a high-pitched sing-song wail, startling Leon. The volume and pitch were so penetrating that, instinctively, he covered his ears. Three times Loikot called, then sat down beside Leon and wrapped his shuka around his shoulders. ‘There is a manyatta beyond the river.’ He pointed out the darker line of trees that marked the riverbed.

Leon calculated that it was several miles away. ‘Will they hear you at such a distance?’

‘You will see,’ Loikot told him. ‘The wind has dropped and the air is still and cool. When I call with my special voice it will carry that far and even further.’ They waited. Below them, a small herd of kudu moved through the thorn scrub. Three graceful grey cows led the bull, with his fringed dewlap and spreading corkscrew horns. Their shapes were ethereal as drifts of smoke as they vanished silently into the scrub.

‘Do you still think they heard you?’ Leon asked.

The boy did not deign to answer immediately, but chewed for a while on the root of the tinga bush that the Masai used to whiten their teeth. Then he spat out the wad of pith and gave Leon a flash of his sparkling smile. ‘They have heard me,’ he said, ‘but they are climbing to a high place from which to reply.’ They lapsed into silence again.

At the foot of the hillock Ishmael had lit a small fire and was brewing tea in a small smoke-blackened kettle. Leon watched him thirstily.

‘Listen!’ said Loikot, and threw back his cloak as he sprang to his feet.

Leon heard it then, coming from the direction of the river. It sounded like a faint echo of Loikot’s original call. Loikot cocked his head to follow it, then cupped his hands and sent his high, sing-song cry ringing back across the plain. He listened again to the reply, and the exchange went on until it was almost dark.

‘It is finished. We have spoken,’ he declared at last, and led the way down the hill to where Ishmael had set up camp for the night. He handed a large enamel mug of tea to Leon as he settled down beside the fire. While they ate their dinner of ostrich steaks and stiff cakes of yellow maize-meal porridge, Loikot relayed to Leon the gossip he had learned from his long conversation with the chungaji beyond the river.

‘Two nights ago a lion killed one of their cattle, a fine black bull with good horns. This morning the morani followed the lion with their spears and surrounded it. When it charged, it chose Singidi as its victim and went for him. He killed it with a single thrust so has won great honour. Now he can place his spear outside the door of any woman in Masailand.’ Loikot thought about this for a moment. ‘One day I will do that, and then the girls will no longer laugh at me and call me baby,’ he said wistfully.

‘Bless your randy little dreams,’ Leon said in English, then switched to Maa. ‘What else did you hear?’ Loikot began a recitation that went on for several minutes, a catalogue of births, marriages, lost cattle and other such matters. ‘Did you ask if any white men are travelling at the moment in Masailand? Any Bula Matari soldiers with askari?’

‘The German commissioner from Arusha is on tour with six askari. They are marching down the valley towards Monduli. There are no other soldiers in the valley.’

‘Any other white men?’

‘Two German hunters with their women and wagons are camped in the Meto Hills. They have killed many buffalo and dried their meat.’

The Meto Hills were at least eighty miles away, and Leon was amazed at how much information the boy had gathered from across such a wide area. He had read the old hunters’ accounts of the Masai grapevine, but he had not set much store by them. This network must cover the entire Masai country. He smiled into his mug: Uncle Penrod now had his eyes along the border. ‘What about elephant? Did you ask your brethren if they had seen any big bulls in this area?’

‘There are many elephant, but mostly cows and calves. At this season the bulls are up in the mountains or over the escarpment in the craters of Ngorongoro and Empakaai. But that is common knowledge.’

‘Are there are no bulls at all in the valley?’

‘The chungaji saw one near Namanga, a very large bull, but that was many days ago and no one has seen him since. They think he might have gone into the Nyiri desert where there is no grazing for the cattle so none of my people are there.’

‘We must follow the wind,’ said Manyoro.

‘Or you must learn to sing sweetly for us,’ Leon suggested.