Meji called a halt under an arch of Chaga-growth like a vault in a medieval cathedral. He had a report on his earjack.
“Menengai has been attacked.”
Everyone started talking asking question, jabbering. Meji held up his hand.
“They were Africans. Someone had provided them with Chaga-proof equipment, and weapons. They had badges on their uniforms: KLA.”
“Kenyan Liberation Army,” the quiet one, Naomi said.
“We have enemies,” the clever one, Hamid said. “The Kenyan Government still claims jurisdiction over the Chaga. Every so often, they remind us who’s in charge. They want to keep us on the run, stop us getting established. They’re nothing but contras with western money and guns and advisers.”
“And Menengai?” I asked. Meji shook his head.
“Most High is bringing the survivors to Ol Punyata.”
I looked at Ten.
“Most High?”
She nodded.
We met up with Most High under the dark canopy of the Great Wall. It was an appropriately somber place for the meeting: the smooth soaring trunks of the trees; the canopy of leaves, held out like hands, a kilometer over our heads; the splashes of light that fell through the gaps to the forest floor; survivors and travelers, dwarfed by it all. Medieval peasants must have felt like this, awestruck in their own cathedrals.
It’s an odd experience, meeting someone you’ve heard of in a story. You want to say, I’ve heard about you, you haven’t heard about me, you’re nothing like I imagined. You check them out to make sure they’re playing true to their character. His story was simple and grim.
A village, waking, going about its normal business, people meeting and greeting, walking and talking, gossiping and idling, talking the news, taking coffee. Then, voices; strange voices, and shots, and people looking up wondering, What is going on here? and while they are caught wondering, strangers running at them, running through, strangers with guns, shooting at anything in front of them, not asking questions, not looking or listening, shooting and running on. Shooting, and burning. Bodies left where they lay, homes like blossoming flowers going up in gobs of flame. Through, back, and out. Gone. As fast, as off-hand as that. Ten minutes, and Menengai was a morgue. Most High told it as casually as it had been committed, but I saw his knuckles whiten as he gripped his staff.
To people like me, who come from a peaceful, ordered society, violence like that is unimaginable.
I’ve seen fights and they scared me, but I’ve never experienced the kind of violence Most High was describing, where people’s pure intent is to kill other people. I could see the survivors-dirty, tired, scared, very quiet-but I couldn’t see what had been done to them. So I couldn’t really believe it. And though I’d hidden up there on the hill from the helicopter, I couldn’t believe it would have opened up those big gatlings on me, and I couldn’t believe now that the people who attacked Menengai, this Kenyan Liberation Army, whose only purpose was to kill Chaga-folk and destroy their lives, were out there somewhere, probably being resupplied by airdrop, reloading, and going in search of new targets. It seemed wrong in a place as silent and holy as this…like a snake in the garden.
Meji and Ten believed it. As soon as we could, they moved us on and out.
“Where now?” I asked Ten.
She looked uncertain.
“East. The Black Simbas have a number of settlements on Kirinyaga. They’ll defend them.”
“How far?”
“Three days?”
“That woman back there, Hope. She won’t be able to go on very much longer.” I had been speaking to her, she was heavily pregnant. Eight months, I reckoned. She had no English, and I had Aid-Agency Swahili, but she appreciated my company, and I found her big belly a confirmation that life was strong, life went on.
“I know,” Ten said. She might wear the gear and carry the staff and have a gun at her hip, but she was facing decisions that told her, forcefully, You’re still in your teens, little warrior.
We wound between the colossal buttressed roots of the roof-trees. The globes on the tops of the staffs gave off a soft yellow light-bioluminescence, Ten told me.
We followed the bobbing lights through the dark, dripping wall-forest. The land rose, slowly and steadily.
I fell back to walk with Hope. We talked. It passed the time. The Great Wall gave way abruptly to an ecosystem of fungi. Red toadstools towered over my head, puff-balls dusted me with yellow spores, trumpetlike chanterelles dripped water from their cups, clusters of pin-head mushrooms glowed white like corpses. I saw monkeys, watching from the canopy.
We were high now, climbing up ridges like the fingers of a splayed out hand. Hope told me how her husband had been killed in the raid on Menengai. I did not know what to say. Then she asked me my story. I told it in my bad Swahili. The staffs led us higher.
“Ten.”
We were taking an evening meal break. That was one thing about the Chaga, you could never go hungry.
Reach out, and anything you touched would be edible. Ten had taught me that if you buried your shit, a good- tasting tuber would have grown in the morning. I hadn’t had the courage yet to try it. For an alien invasion, the Chaga seemed remarkably considerate of human needs.
“I think Hope’s a lot further on than we thought.”
Ten shook her head.
“Ten, if she starts, will you stop?”
She hesitated a moment.
“Okay. We will stop.”
She struggled for two days, down into a valley, through terribly tough terrain of great spheres of giraffe- patterned moss, then up, into higher country than any we had attempted before.
“Ten, where are we?” I asked. The Chaga had changed our geography, made all our maps obsolete. We navigated by compass, and major, geophysical landmarks.
“We’ve passed through the Nyandarua Valley, now we’re going up the east side of the Aberdares.”
The line of survivors became strung out. Naomi and I struggled at the rear with the old and the women with children, and Hope. We fought our way up that hillside, but Hope was flagging, failing.
“I think…I feel…” she said, hand on her belly.
“Call Ten on that thing,” I ordered Naomi. She spoke into her mouthpiece.
“No reply.”
“She what?”
“There is no reply.”
I ran. Hands, knees, belly, whatever way I could, I made it up that ridge, as fast as I could. Over the summit the terrain changed, as suddenly as Chaga landscapes do, from the moss maze to a plantation of regularly spaced trees shaped like enormous ears of wheat.
Ten was a hundred meters downslope. She stood like a statue among the wheat trees. Her staff was planted firmly on the ground. She did not acknowledge me when I called her name. I ran down through the trees to her.
“Ten, Hope can’t go on. We have to stop.”
“No!” Ten shouted. She did not look at me, she stared down through the rows of trees.
“Ten!” I seized her, spun her round. Her face was frantic, terrified, tearful, joyful, as if in this grove of alien plants was something familiar and absolutely agonizing. “Ten! You promised!”
“Shone! Shone! I know where I am! I know where this is! That is the pass, and that is where the road went, this is the valley, that is the river, and down there, is Gichichi!” She looked back up to the pass, called to the figures on the tree-line. “Most High! Gichichi! This is Gichichi! We are home!”
She took off. She held her staff in her hand like a hunter’s spear, she leaped rocks and fallen trunks, she hurdled streams and run-offs; bounding down through the trees. I was after her like a shot but I couldn’t hope to keep up. I found Ten standing in an open space where a falling wheat-tree had brought others down like dominoes. Her staff was thrust deep into the earth. I didn’t interrupt. I didn’t say a word. I knew I was witnessing something holy.
She went down on her knees. She closed her eyes. She pressed her hands to the soil. And I saw dark lines, like
