A Spear of Summer Grass - By Deanna Raybourn Page 0,111
helping, Gideon. I’ve spent the last half an hour listing the ways I could make Gates suffer and you’ve said nothing.”
“It is not for me to speak.”
“Why not?”
“Such talk is poison. You must speak until you can speak no more. Then the poison is gone and you will be free of it.”
I lapsed into silence, but he was right, of course. I knew he wanted Gates to pay for what he’d done to Moses, but his way was different. He would rely upon the lion or the cobra to act on his behalf, perhaps at the direction of the laibon. A Masai revenge would be a subtle thing.
But something seemed different about him, a subtle shift in his mood, and I wondered if leaving the bush had overwhelmed him.
“I’m sorry I made you come for nothing,” I told him. “I thought it would be necessary, but I think it has upset you.”
“I am concerned, but not because of the city.”
“What, then?”
I turned in my seat and saw that his eyes were ringed with white. “Last night I killed the lioness who mated with the lion you killed, Delilah.”
“But, I don’t understand. What happened?”
“I had seen her many times since the day we hunted her mate. She always came quietly, low in the grass, but far away, and I was never near enough to throw my spear. Yesterday she came to the edge of the boma. She took one of the babu’s cows.”
“But how do you know it was her? Surely there are thousands of lionesses in the bush,” I argued, but Gideon was shaking his head pityingly.
“I know lions like you know dresses. You would not look at a purple dress and say it is the same as the blue one. This lioness was the mate. And I killed her.”
“Why didn’t you wait for Ryder? Or for me?”
“There was no time. She had already attacked once and would not leave the boma. The children were very frightened, and it was up to the morani to do their duty. My friend Samuel was very pleased to try to kill her, and he took up his spear to do this.”
“And he failed?”
He nodded. “His spear only grazed her flank. She turned, very angry, and charged him. I had to throw my spear. I wanted only to stop her, so someone else’s spear would be the one that took her life, but she turned again, and my spear struck her in the heart.”
“The tenth lion,” I said softly.
“And this is what I think about when I am silent. This will bring bad luck, Delilah, and it will be worse than the pinching man or the rougarou.”
I threw the greaseproof paper back into the basket and turned the engine over. I gunned the engine, leaving the dust of Nairobi behind us as we headed back into the bush.
20
The house was quiet that night without Dodo. We hadn’t been on good terms for a while, but I was always conscious of her, moving about, tidying and organising and patting things into place. Without her, I plumped cushions and changed the water in the flowers and dusted the picture frames myself. I even went outside and threw some toast for the tortoise, but it didn’t bother to visit me either. The chores killed a little time, but in the end I was forced to wind up the gramophone to break the silence. I put on my jazziest recordings and danced with my shadow until the machine wound down and it was time to go to bed. And before I slid under the mosquito netting, I looked at the calendar and counted down the number of days until I could reasonably return to Paris. It would be a matter of a few months and then I could leave Africa behind me. Africa with its beauty and its wildness and its two sets of laws, one for white men and one for blacks. Africa with its hot breath and its blood-warm rivers that ran like veins through its heart. Africa with its sudden sunrises and sunsets so swift that darkness fell like a mourning veil. I hated the place, I told myself sharply. I hated it as you can only hate something that is a part of yourself, long forgotten and unremembered. I hated it with the force of a child’s hate, unyielding and immovable. I hated it as I had never hated any place before.
And I cried long into the night at the thought of leaving her.