THE LAST SAVANNA Read online

  EITHER you have power over your life or you’re its slave. If you’re its slave then your life has nothing and you become slave to a slave. On and on the generations, each new life deeper enslaved. That’s what Allah means by Hell.

  That’s where I’ll go if I let them kill Rashid without revenge, take my whitewoman. Warwar thought this in the voice of the elder he would become, an old man wounded in many wars and rich with plunder, his one hand still deadly with knife or gun, surrounded by his young laughing wives and grandchildren glossy as new bullocks in the sun.

  As the night paled he forced himself to approach the gully, near as he dared, smelt its smoldering dung and the whiteman’s sweaty hair and the sour odor of the whitewoman, but there was no sign or smell of the other whiteman who had fired the second gun, so Warwar withdrew till he was beyond view, lying on his back in agony as night gave way to day. He awoke from a strange dream of peace to the distant clack of camel hooves on stone, raised his eyes above his clutch of rocks to see a whiteman leading the whitewoman on a camel north up Gamud towards the ridge. He stood and aimed the rifle, but it was too far and the barrel would not stop shaking from being held across his stub arm, and he remembered the other whiteman and ducked quickly. The two whites with the camel cut left towards a saddle in the ridge, the sky dawning orange above them.

  Still he could not see or hear the other whiteman. Keeping low, he advanced to the edge of the gully. There were only the tracks of one whiteman in strange-toothed boots and the whitewoman in her flat rubber shoes and the prints of the camel. Perhaps the other whiteman has taken the male camel and gone a different way. Then it’s safe to drink.

  He ran to the water hole, glanced round; there was no danger; he ducked down it and drank.

  When he could drink no more he climbed out of the gully to watch the camel and two whites cross the saddle and swing right along Gamud’s northern shoulder. He returned and searched the gully but found no other tracks, nor any on the slopes nearby, then, slightly lower, in loose lava sand the imprint of an enormous lion paw, larger than a man’s head. Anew Warwar felt fear, and knowledge of his missing arm and the blood smell it made, and the fresher blood smell of his waist where the stone or bullet fragment had pierced it. The whiteman did this, he reminded himself. He who killed my clansman Rashid. He searched the rocky slope: there was no glimmer of Rashid’s cloak or the dark lump of his body—the lion had taken him off.

  He sat on a rock and traced in his mind the way the whites would go to reach the road: there was water only in one place, and once they drank that water they would go no further.

  He remembered the dream. Soraya had married someone else but one night came to lie with him and he grew full of love for her again, and said, “Why did you stone me, with the others?”

  “No one stoned you. That was just your dream. You’re loved by everyone.”

  He felt warm and satisfied, went down the water hole and drank himself full again. He urinated against the rock which had changed, the night before, from long-horned ancient antelope to leopard, then forced himself to drink again.

  Even though earthly life is but delusion Allah wishes us to act as if it’s real. Shouldering the rifle, Warwar began to ascend the mountain.

  41

  MACADAM WALKED SLEEPING, waking every few minutes to glance round, when the camel altered her pace at his side, or the ground shifted. In daylight the lion wouldn’t follow, nor was it likely he’d track them to attack tonight. Since last night Rebecca had remained aloof, as though he’d failed her in the deepest way, and he was no longer a person who mattered to her. But I never did, he reflected, dozing as he walked.

  He liked this exhaustion because it left him free: there was something in him too tired to fight back. He could admit there was a commonality he and she would never share, her alienation that he’d never breach, and the part of him that would reject this was too tired to defend her.

  I’d just be another Klaus on which to paint her disappointments, someone to blame because the world’s not as it seemed when she was fourteen. The world’s made sorrowful by too much thinking, too much wanting, like the Somalis killing elephants so the Japanese can carve their tusks into trinkets people buy because they want to do what’s done, because they’re blind men at the feast, believing what’s believed solely because others believe it, those who also never tried to see what’s true. A thousand generations, more, of lies. As if life’s a contest to be the most alike, the least alive.

  Dorothy never banished me from her heart like this one does, any moment she pleases retreating into her disenchantments. Dorothy never disgraced me by sullenly doing my will against her own; Dorothy doesn’t blame.

  And even if it’s too late for me and Dorothy, too many wrong turns too long ago to ever mend, why do I need or want to be with anyone? Sell the ranch, split it with Dorothy, buy a boat in Mombasa and sail the Indian Ocean, wherever the wind goes. Hike from Kashmir through Nepal to Sikkim and Bhutan, as I’ve always wanted—walk like crazy Grogan from Capetown to Cairo.

  Like the desert wind the world grew infinite with possibilities. Why live as if you have to do this, or that? When you die all the having disappears—why be prisoner of it now?

  “For two years I haven’t been able to forget her,” he’d said to Nehemiah that afternoon outside the barracks, before the broken piston rod, the desert, dead M’kele. “She intoxicates me.”

  “Hey, Mac, look into your Latin,” Nehemiah’d answered. “In-toxicates. Poison.”

  It’s easy to love someone who’s not there, you can make her what you want. Isn’t love slavery too? Why need anything at all?

  In the bitter little granite church on the bitter Cotswold heath, in driving wind and rain, he’d clutched his little coat round him and clamped shivering bare knees, bit his tongue when they sang, “Love like the golden daffodil is coming through the snow, Love like the golden daffodil is Lord of all I know.” Why, he’d wondered, be grateful for so little? When there’s so much more?

  Every death you make claims you, as every joy. I didn’t kill the lion and the lion went away. It was right not to shoot the prisoners. Have no enemies and no enemies will have you. “A man’s nothing without enemies,” dear M’kele’d say. That’s Maasai talk—I can’t live for you, M’kele.

  By late afternoon they rounded the shoulder of Gamud peak and their shadows stretched far ahead on the ground before them, the shelved rocks and distant vistas of the desert draining back the sun. Ahead MacAdam could see the tiny fork-branched outlines of two doum palms against the yellowed rock: this would be the spring marked on the map, last water until Faille.

  This was the desert’s edge; already there were more animals. A jackrabbit scurried through the scrub, tiny puffballs of dust hanging in the air behind it; he could see a single distant giraffe browsing the crown of an acacia, and occasionally the sinuous track of a snake or the hurried splay-footed prints of a honey badger. A long-tailed whydah fluttered over, dropped his wings to perch on a gnawed umbrella thorn and watch them pass. Nests of weavers hung like miniature Luo baskets from the umbrella thorn’s branches; sunbirds and barbets flashed their golden wings like reflections of the desert, and a pair of yellow-billed hornbills fluttered from a euphorbia.

  Soon the female hornbill will lay her eggs in a tree hollow and seal up the hole with mud and wattle, leaving only a tiny hole through which the male will feed her and the young until they’re old enough to fly. Over how many million years has this evolved? Now as Africa dies the last hornbills die also, and their different way of caring for each other dies as well.

  What goes through the male hornbill’s heart as he scours the desert all day for food to bring home to his family locked in their tree? What if he’s killed—what happens to them?

  Don’t those children grow best whose parents stay united? “Pookay olayoni oloyonisa osina,” the Maasai say, the best man is the boy who was eaten by trouble, but trouble comes to us all, without a parent’s desertion. What if
my father hadn’t died in the battle for Fourneax Woods? There’s no way it would have been better for Rebecca’s sons to leave their father and come with me; no matter how selfish and unimaginative Klaus is, he’s their father; it’s he, not I, who brought food to their closed-up nest.

  Nor can I pretend that Africa’s not lost—the hornbill, elephant, lion, hyena, sunbird, cheetah, and all the other thousands of species doomed by the plague of man. Africa, the Amazon, every wild place, nearly all vanished now, the last vestiges gone in my lifetime. And this has broken my heart for so long now, because I’ve loved the wild, loved animals, the forests, each tree and bush and river and hidden spring, those I know and those I’ll never see, each heath and wild shore and the herds of wildebeest and zebra far as the eye can see, and then beyond, then beyond that, outspanned beyond time—the magnificent multiplicity of earth reduced now to these few outposts, these last cornered survivors of rain forest and savanna to be eliminated in my days, before my sons are old.

  And for what? For mindless teeming humankind choking in its smog-bound anxious cities, this mass which follows itself around in circles, doing what it tells itself to do and what it can’t help doing. For the fools who bring medicine to Africa without birth control, like giving a patient a drug which makes him feel good while poisoning his future. For the automobile, the newest tyrant to which poor man is vassal, that kills his cities, strips the land, poisons the very air and future so now even the poor climate is withered, the world becomes a desert and the desert turns to Hell.

  Humans in their groping inessential cruelty seemed not evil but subjects of an infinite condolence. He smiled up at her, appreciating the beauty of the slanting sun against her hair. I could share her with a thousand men, share her with all life. Nothing would matter. “I don’t care. I’m free.”

  “Of me?”

  “Of you, too. But I was thinking of how I’ve loved Africa, the whole earth, and ached because I knew it’s lost, and now I don’t ache anymore, because I accept it’s truly lost and there’s nothing I can do.”

  “What if I’m madly in love with you and follow you everywhere?”

  “You’re never madly in love with anyone. You won’t let yourself, Rebecca. I’ve been happier with you, more myself than I’ve ever been before. But being myself, seeing myself, I see that it can’t be.”

  She rode in silence, as if there were a transparent wall between them and nothing he had said had reached her, or if she were not really there, a two-dimensional celluloid image projected beside him.

  “When I almost died,” she said, “and the woman of the jawbone brought me to the geb tree, I thought that I could live alone. Then Warwar saved me from the leopard, then from the Borani, then from the other Somali, from thirst. Then you’ve come all this way to bring me back, and your friend M’kele died—all this was one person giving to another. I’ve realized it was possible,’ she added after a while, ‘that if we had a long time, together, I could learn to give myself to you.”

  His heart wrenched. Have I been rejecting so I wouldn’t be rejected? Could we be together, all our lives? He reached up to take her hand; his motion alarmed her camel and it snapped back at his face, his glasses flying off, crunched beneath the camel’s hoof. “Bloody hell!” he yelled, forgetting the sense of peace he’d been feeling. The glasses were crushed; he tossed them away and glanced around, eyes stunned and unreliable. “It won’t matter now. Soon we’ll reach the spring. We’ll get water there and keep moving. If we go all night we’ll be in Faille by noon.”

  FROM THE SHOULDER of Gamud Warwar watched the tiny camel and two whites inch across the golden savanna, their long shadows cast before them, the deeper shadows of the western hills slinking up behind them.

  He was exhausted by his fast direct climb over the peak, which had allowed him to travel only a third of the distance the whites had come, in the same time; yet he felt energized and elated by the coolness of the heights and the vast panorama over which he ruled like an eagle, as God must see the world.

  He rested briefly, checking the rifle to ensure that the magazine was properly connected and a cartridge seated in the chamber and the sights clean and the ejection mechanism working. He was pleased at how well already his single arm did the work of two; as he maneuvered the rifle across his knees he had barely noticed now the absence of a second hand. Yes, I have severed that which was unclean; now nothing mars me. She who was my white sister has cast her lot with he who tried to kill me; she also I shall sunder. God had brought me over the mountain to destroy His enemies; He will not fail me now.

  BONE CHIPS were scattered by the doum palms, reminding MacAdam that our greatest needs entail our greatest dangers. There were tracks of several antelope since the storm; they had barely drunk. The spring, small and eroded under its ledge of stone, seemed hardly to have profited from the rain. “How much in the canteens?” he called.

  “Two full ones and a bit.”

  “We’ll drink them then refill them.” Roping the camel to a palm trunk, he knelt and dipped his bush hat into the water and held it to the camel. She sniffed the water, curled her white-pink, bristled lips to bare her yellow teeth, huffed and craned away.

  “She drank a lot this morning,” Rebecca said. “She won’t be thirsty now for several days.”

  MacAdam wet a finger and raised it to his lips. “It’s brackish, that’s all. The other was sweeter.”

  She handed him a canteen. “Let’s drink all we have and refill the canteens. We’ll drink this brackish stuff tomorrow, if we need it, before we get to Faille.”

  “So French of you—the best wine first.”

  “This is no marriage feast.”

  Her words stung but he told himself soon he would be free, glancing up at the peak all dark-silvery and crimson with sunset, seeing there a flash of wing or something white among the rocks—a beisa oryx, maybe; without his glasses he couldn’t be sure. Maybe he should shoot it and they’d have something to eat. But no, he would not shoot it, wouldn’t kill a creature in the wild again; once more he felt at peace and finished drinking the canteen she’d given him, no longer mindful of her retort but looking out across the northern peneplain to the imagined locus of a town called Faille, where all this would end. Dear M’kele, if we’d only caught them on the Ewaso N’giro.

  “Years from now,” he said, “do you suppose we’ll look back on this with longing?”

  She knelt to fill her empty canteen, “Not I.” She tied the canteen to her camel saddle.

  The sunlight was fading from the land and rising up the eastern peaks; its shadow brought a cool breeze from the north; far above an eagle circled, crying. It must be he I saw, he thought, among the rocks.

  “God, I’ll always miss this,” he said. “No matter how far I go. I’ll miss M’kele and always grieve his death, and Kuria, whom you don’t know—I’ll miss you…” Seeing her now in the peak’s reflected light he knew how much he loved her but that she was lost to him, lost forever, and was glad, saw the sunset and was glad. “No matter where I go, I’d like to always—”

  He had thought the words already, “live like this,” but never said them, never thought again, for Warwar’s bullet traveling at three thousand feet per second took all his thoughts away in a moment of infinite pain, smashed them into pulp which it sprayed upon the rocks, her face, the doum palms, the camel, and the noise and her scream and camel braying all were one; he was dead upon the ground as she held him, weeping for what would never be.

  When she saw the boy killer walking down the slope she had the sudden recognition of enormous sin: I’ve brought this down upon us. I am the death of love. For eternity I will escape and be recaptured and everyone I love will die for me. She scrambled over MacAdam and ran into the desert.

  Warwar lowered Ibrahim’s rifle on a rock and aimed between the whitewoman’s shoulders as she ran, smiling to think she was even too stupid to cut back and forth evasively—even the gazelle knows that. The thought of her stupidity made his
body want her and he did not fire—there was no reason to, really; with the camel he would catch her easily. He slung his rifle over his back, descended to the spring, glanced at MacAdam’s body and the wide dark pool it made, inspected the two rifles. He turned and kicked MacAdam. “Assassin of Rashid, trickster who made it seem there were two of you when there was but one! God has punished you!”

  He loved this time the best, when daylight lifted from the land. In the distance the whitewoman’s pale form shifted and diminished in day’s last rising heat; he glanced at the empty canteens by the spring. Fools. He crossed to the camel, untied the canteen from the saddle and drank it down, feeling its bitterness soak into his cells. God’s greatest gift to man is water. He untied the camel then suddenly sat still holding the camel’s sisal reins. For a moment now he would rest before he chased her down, here in the soft chanting of the palm leaves.

  Dark’s silk curtain fell across the land. She walked steadily and fast. In the nothingness was no one. The boy killer did not come; the stars moved slowly on their appointed rounds. Whatever truths the universe held were of no significance to humans.

  There was no sound but the crunch of her feet against the desert floor. Ahead of her the Great Bear wheeled slowly in a circle, his tail caught in the trap of the north star.

  By midmorning she could see a distant plume of golden dust move from west to east across the land: the Addis road, Faille. She glanced back at Gamud somber in the sunlight; no one followed. She beat down a fierce exuberance. It did not matter if she lived or died, but if she lived she would live it to the bone.

  BARING HIS TEETH at the distant smell of soldiers and camels coming northwards, the old lion swerved east as he crossed the invisible line the white men had drawn, over a century ago in London, between the places they called “Ethiopia” and “Kenya”. With the long steady lope of a great cat he shifted uphill among the deeper stones then south across the eroded empty plains, where in his youth the tall grass had waved and the antelope had filled the land to its horizons, and across the wide savannas countless lion prides had sung to one another from the hilltops.