Echoes From A Distant Land Part 55

'I knew him even before I knew he was my father.'

'Oh ... I see. Then ... why didn't you tell him about yourself?'

How could he answer? In the beginning he couldn't tell him because he disliked him. Now he couldn't tell him because he didn't want his father to think badly of him because of his members.h.i.+p of the Mau Mau.

'I'm ... not sure how.'

'But you must. It's wrong to let him go on not knowing he has a beautiful son in the world. Jelani, you simply must tell him.'

Jelani was annoyed by Dana's att.i.tude. She'd been in the country for less than a day and a.s.sumed she knew everything about his life.

'If it is so wrong, why did you not tell him yourself?' Immediately he'd said it, he regretted it.

Dana's face fell and she dropped her eyes. 'I didn't tell him, because I was afraid,' she said. She raised her eyes to him and reached across the table to take his hand in hers. 'I was weak and afraid, Jelani. And now I'm ashamed of what I did, not only to your father, but to you. I felt I had to choose between two paths; and I abandoned you. Can you ever forgive me? You deserved as much as I've been able to give Emerald. And I'm so, so sorry.'

Tears rolled down her cheeks and Jelani felt bad for what he'd said. He wanted to reach out to her. His hand travelled halfway across the table, but fell short of touching her shoulder. The dining room was too public for such things. Instead, he placed his hand on hers.

'Dana ... Mother ... I don't feel I've been abandoned. And I had a good childhood with my ... my parents.'

She looked at him and smiled gratefully.

'You want me to tell my father,' he continued. 'And one day I will, but I know he will also have questions - questions that only you can answer. So, maybe you should be the one to tell him.'

She stared at him, patted his hand and nodded. 'You're right,' she said.

Beth arrived late into Lari and went to the missionaries' small communal hut for supper. She found Deacon James and Chief Luka seated at a table taking tea. She joined them, hoping to discuss plans for her wedding day, but they were deep in conversation about recent events in Lari and the surrounding countryside.

They greeted her, then resumed their discussion.

'Do you remember the incident in the village down by the Morani stream?' Deacon James said, looking sideways at Beth. 'The young man who had his ... his private parts removed?'

'Yes.'

'Well, I spoke to his wife today.'

'Terrible, terrible,' the chief muttered, shaking his head.

Beth had heard the story as soon as she had returned to Lari. A young farmer was caught by a Mau Mau gang and castrated for refusing to take the oath. His wife found him before he bled to death.

'I called in all the people from his village,' the chief said. 'I thought they'd be safer here. But that was before the Home Guard left.'

'The Home Guard have gone?' Beth asked.

'Today. General Erskine said they're needed elsewhere.'

'But what about the Mau Mau?'

The elderly chief shrugged. 'We will have to rely on our own people to defend Lari.'

'Is that possible?'

He patted her hand and smiled. 'In my day it was the Maasai. Oh, you should have seen them. Oh-oh-oh ... But I will call the men together in the morning and make some arrangements. All will be well.'

Beth felt uneasy. The talk was that dozens of thugs had come from the forest in recent days.

'Oh, I'm too weary,' Chief Luka said. 'And my wives are waiting for me to join them to eat.'

Deacon James rose too.

Beth said she'd like to confirm the plans for the wedding day with him, but he said it was late and they could discuss it in the morning when Jelani arrived. He bid her good night.

Beth sipped her tea alone, thinking of the conversation she'd had with Jelani at the bus station. She admired his ability to see the better side of people and situations. But if he were to leave the security of the city and hear stories such as that of the young man in the nearby village, or see the fear in the eyes of the people in the bush, he might have different views of the Mau Mau.

She walked through the warm night towards her hut. There was hardly a stir; and the sound of the breeze that nightly rose from the hot floor of the Rift Valley to ruffle the highest branches of the podocarpus trees was absent too.

Even the dogs were at peace.

An old woman, shrouding her head in a colourful kanga, scurried among the huts. She was the only person Beth had seen since leaving the mission. People were fearful and remained indoors at night.

The distant shrill whistle of a night bird carried pure and clear in the still air. It found an answering call from across the forested hills above Lari.

At the door of her hut she paused. The Rift Valley breeze stirred into life. She was pleased. It would freshen the air and cool the night.

Above her, the tree canopy remained unchanged, yet the whisper, which was at a distance, was quite p.r.o.nounced.

She pulled the door closed behind her and, in bed, succ.u.mbed to the effects of the tiring bus trip from Nairobi to the upland forests.

On the evening of the twenty-sixth of March 1953 - the same day that Erskine removed his company of the King's African Rifles from Lari - a skittish breeze sent a flurry of dust devils along the quiet streets of Naivasha towards the police barracks. The town was home to a permanent contingent of the Kenyan Police Force and sundry members of the military. As well as the barracks, the police had several substantial administrative buildings surrounded by a patchy barbed-wire fence.

A sentry sat in the guard tower overlooking the compound, his rifle propped against one of the tower's posts and his head resting uncomfortably against another. It was approaching nine o'clock, two hours into his s.h.i.+ft, and he was already bored and sleepy. None of the police took the watch seriously. They all knew the Mau Mau had kept to the fringes of the forest, never daring to poke their heads out to risk confronting the Kenyan Police. And Naivasha would be almost the last place they would dare attack.

A clattering sound interrupted his musing, followed by a dog's furious barking. He yawned and, rising from his chair, peered into the shadows at the edge of the flood-lit perimeter. He couldn't quite see the dog, but knew it could not be more than twenty paces into the darkness, beyond his vision. It was making a terrible din and he was about to yell at it to shut up, when it suddenly stopped.

He raised his hand to s.h.i.+eld his gaze from the light in the tower above him, which had intruded into his peripheral vision. At that moment there was a savage blow to the side of his neck. It knocked his head sideways into the guardhouse post.

He cursed, but the words came bubbling from his throat. When his hand came from the place where he'd felt the blow, it was black with blood. He tried to scream in horror, but again the sound was drowned before it could pa.s.s his lips. Now the shadows under the lights were alive with movement. He took a step towards his weapon, but his legs turned into rubber and he couldn't raise his arm to reach the rifle. He fell to the floor.

Shouts, screams of pain and shots shattered the night.

Eighty Mau Mau soldiers, many wearing the new badge proclaiming the battle cry Blood and Fire, drove boldly from the Naivasha police station armoury with rifles, sub-machine guns, and a truckload of ammunition. With them were one hundred and seventy-three Mau Mau prisoners they'd released from the detention centre.

They escaped up the Nairobi road in stolen vehicles and high spirits, long before the four platoons of Lancas.h.i.+re Fusiliers billeted elsewhere in the town could reach the police station. Their destination, less than thirty miles away on the escarpment overlooking the Great Rift Valley, was the village of Lari, where they would meet the three thousand Mau Mau fighters who surrounded it.

Beth awoke from a deep sleep: something very strange was happening.

The night breeze was a roar - a howling rage.

She pulled on her s.h.i.+ft and pushed open her door. There were flickering lights in the branches. People were everywhere - running and screaming.

Three men appeared from the darkness.

They were Kikuyu, but screamed terrible insults at her. Traitor. Wh.o.r.e.

They swarmed onto her, and pushed her back into her hut.

She fought them.

They tore her s.h.i.+ft away.

CHAPTER 59.

Jelani waited outside the Norfolk in the dim light of dawn with the engine of the union's Ford still running. He'd warned Emerald they had an early start, and she'd promised to be on time. She arrived a few minutes late, a camera bag slung over her shoulder, full of apologies.

He drove quickly through the quiet streets of Westlands. It was Friday, but they were early enough to avoid the traffic.

On the highway they chatted about the day ahead. Emerald said she wanted to shoot plenty of portraits of Lari people going about their daily ch.o.r.es.

'You will see many people, many things,' he said. 'Old women feeding the chickens, the boys tending the goats. If we're not too late, we'll see the women milking the home cow for the totos' breakfast.'

A police car hurtled by on the narrow road, siren blaring.

'Ai-ya,' Jelani said. 'He's in a hurry.'

A few minutes later, a military vehicle marked with a red cross overtook them in Uplands, bouncing over the speed b.u.mps.

A tinge of apprehension entered Jelani's mind.

A few miles before Lari the road was crowded with vehicles. People were gathered into tight huddles and there were no children in their colourful school uniforms making their way along the roads.

When they turned the last bend before Lari, and they could see the smoke curling above the trees, Jelani felt the cold hand of fear clutch at his heart.

Emerald had to run to keep up with Jelani, who hurried among the remains of burned huts. She'd already seen several covered bodies lying on the ground amid smouldering ruins. Many old women were wailing and tearing at their face and hair. Mothers hugged little ones to them, rocking and weeping. Farm animals lay disembowelled in black pools of blood; some still twitched in their death throes in the dusty earth. The sickening stench of death was everywhere.

Jelani stopped to exchange urgent words with one old man, then hurried on. A milking cow, disembowelled and crippled, lay in a pool of entrails as it panted its life away. A man stood alone, staring at the still smouldering ruins of his house. They pa.s.sed a mother weeping over the mutilated body of the child in her arms. Emerald fought back a wave of nausea.

The sheer savagery surrounding her was enough to stir a primeval fear within her - a feeling of being far away from the world she knew and trusted - and she was also aware she was the only white face in the village, and therefore a prime target should the Mau Mau return.

She pulled her camera out and started to snap shots. Somehow the view through the camera lens tempered the savagery surrounding her. She kept an eye on Jelani as he hurried on ahead, but became consumed by the images in the viewfinder. When she next looked for him, he was gone.

She ran in the direction he'd been heading and caught a glimpse of him as he dashed through the charred remains of a what might have been a school and church.

'Jelani!' she yelled into the eerie silence. 'Jelani!'

He was gone, and there was no one about. She feared that whatever tragedy that had fallen on the village might return. She fought back her rising panic, and ran on, more fearful now that she was alone.

She saw him then, crouching inside the doorway of a hut that was largely intact.

She ran to it.

The door of the hut was broken open and she quickly peered into the dim interior. There was nothing spared in what must have been a mammoth struggle. Then she realised Jelani was cradling the naked body of a young woman to his chest. His head was pressed into her shoulder and she couldn't see his face, but his body shuddered in the painful convulsions of utter misery.

When Emerald saw the condition of the corpse she quickly turned aside and vomited.

Jelani could see what had happened: the door broken from its hinges by the forceful entry of one or more men, the heavy bedside lamp broken as Beth tried to defend herself, the chair smashed in the confusion of bodies, the torn and discarded cotton s.h.i.+ft, the bruised and b.l.o.o.d.y and finally mutilated body, left where they'd used her.

The Mau Mau's gruesome tactics were plain to see. Beth's once beautiful body had been sliced open from v.u.l.v.a to throat, exposing her organs between the puckered edges of raw flesh. Her face, so often composed in a gentle smile, was now frozen for all time in an expression of absolute horror.

Savagery was the weapon they used to cower innocent people into terrified submission. Now he understood why the oathing ceremony had become so b.e.s.t.i.a.l: it was meant to dehumanise a man to the point where nothing - not the vilest act or most wicked sin - was too evil. The Mau Mau's indoctrination could entice the beast from the darkest depths of even the most decent man's soul. And here was the proof, if ever he needed it, of how vile that beast could be.

He felt Emerald's touch on his shoulder, drawing him away with her words and her insistent hand.

'Jelani,' she said. 'There's nothing we can do here. Leave it to the police. Let's go.'

'No, I can't,' he sobbed. 'I have to ... I have to ... do something.'

But he could think of nothing he could do. What was there now but an empty gulf where life and love had so recently been?

'I have to tell Beth's family,' he said, clutching at the one thing that came to mind.

'Not now. You can't do that while you're in this state.'

'But ...' His eyes were drawn back to Beth's broken body, and the agonising stab of sadness pierced him again. He clutched at his gut.

'Come on, Jelani. Come away from this,' Emerald whispered.

Like a sleepwalker he obeyed, pausing to first remove his bloodied s.h.i.+rt and drape it ineffectively over Beth's body.

He turned towards Emerald and saw her distress in her misted green eyes. He buried his face in her shoulder and wept.

Sam received a call from a contact at police headquarters and immediately drove to Lari.

The stink of burned flesh hung in the smoke haze when he climbed out of the car. He thought he was prepared for the worst, but anyone would have been shocked at the savagery that had fallen on the village the previous night. The b.l.o.o.d.y hand of the Mau Mau was everywhere to be seen. Police and medics moved among the devastation, removing bodies and triaging the injured.

Sam felt sick in the stomach. The extent of death and destruction was well beyond all previous Mau Mau atrocities. These had consisted of mainly isolated attacks - no more than small skirmishes using primitive weapons. Here was evidence of a large, well-equipped, and coordinated force. This was obviously intended to show the loyalist Kikuyu what was in store for them should they continue to defy the Mau Mau - and to prove to the white population, and the administration, their ability to strike at will.

Sam had considered Erskine's plans to deploy heavy bombers to attack the Mau Mau's jungle strongholds as unnecessary and heavy-handed. He now had to reconsider. Surrounding him was evidence that the rebels were not only cruel and ruthless, they were a formidable and determined force.

The first deployment of the Lincoln bombers was scheduled for the twenty-ninth of March - in just two days' time. It was fortuitous: it would send a quick reply to the Mau Mau that the administration was also serious about winning.

As he wandered through what remained of the village, trying to find his bearings amid the desolation, he noticed the young union organiser, Jelani Karura. He appeared distraught and was in an animated conversation with a young white woman. She was so strangely out of place in that bleak scene, with her soiled white slacks and floral cotton top, it drew him towards them.

'Is everything all right here?' he asked.