In Loiyangalani the morning light crawls. The stars recede, but above Kulal there is no nascent burst of light, as the sky is clear and full long before the fire white eye opens, belated and hot, to an already driven land.
Earlier that morning, before sunrise, Nalantei could only wait, unable to rest, the dilute milk of her cleansing nearly dry against her shining skin, facing Kulal and the summit abode of Ngai, god of many mountains. The rituals of the morning complete, she lay in reluctance to motion as new voices came too soon, and she heard the high-pitched song of young Kioban, a contradiction to her own spirit. Kioban chirped like a dawn-bird following her mother, Partuala, who, in her second age, motherhood, in her life's anger of forgetting, unafraid of change — both daughter and mother unafraid, as ignorance and indifference are well partnered — was unmoved by the weight of palpable uncertainty which Nalantei felt as a binding cloak, cinched at her chest.
"Come, daughter," said Partuala. "Nalantei is waiting." Kioban's steps were a dance as she followed her mother.
"I am the masigiu tree," she said. "My roots will soothe her. I am the longososi too that she will have little pain. May I help her dress? Is she dressed?" Nalantei could not greet them as they crouched to enter the hut where she supported herself, leaning back on her hands, helpless to design the near minutes, impious to the women, even to her mother, Sienti, who rubbed her fingers together and turned to spit in impatience. Kioban stood as if bound before her friend, her eyes widening to the near darkness inside, to the muting of first light's rustle and song and to Nalantei, older by three years and in the sorcery of change, already draped in new goat skins, glistening in ocher and fat. Nalantei could sense the image — created from the magic of dust, smoke and morning mist within the hut — that Kioban would assess: the older girl, Nalantei herself, no longer the graceful companion and quiet consort but a form in metamorphosis, as near to destruction as to birth or rebirth. Nalantei was ashamed at being observed, of being earthbound and helpless in her colorful molting (this failure of freedom) and watched the younger girl's eyes grow in the voluble intensity of astonishment, knowing that she was observed through the same diffusion of sunlight that always begins behind Kulal, engulfing that broad expanse like a shroud, battling among the palm fronds of the hut, to find her own half closed restive eyelids . . . a weak speckled light, yet enough to summon the women, and wide-eyed Kioban with her questions.
"She is beautiful but strange," said Kioban. "Why is she strange?" Partuala guided her daughter closer.
"You know your friend. Nalantei has taken milk for the last time from her mother, and is dressed for the ceremonies. Is she not the shining moon in the new skins that I sewed for her? Is she not the image of worthiness?"
"But I want to know her again, I want to know her."
Nalantei was not moving but for her breath which was rapid and shallow like a small animal.
"Why is she so quiet? Is she afraid? I wish I might lie with her and also be pure in Ngai."
"What are you saying, child!" said Partuala. "Let her prepare. Remember that you are here by the dispensation of the elders, and may be sent away."
Other footsteps and voices approached, the words of little meaning, their presence and attention a mute message. The women were watching.
Nalantei was lucid, but resolved in her silence among the women, observing the quiet that she had practiced so well in recent weeks. Then, just as she closed her eyes against sight and the clamor of new voices, her mother's command was clear:
"Stand now," Sienti said, and Nalantei rose to find Kioban rising with her, standing nearer than either attending mother wished, as if to share Nalantei's day, to shine with her and reflect her color.
"It will be soon now," said Kioban. "They will not hurt you. They may not hurt you. Do not be afraid . . . it is always well. It will all be well." The older women were grateful for the lie from the child, a lie which they would not utter, the assurance in deception that they might wish to convey, but could not.
"Are you sad?" asked Kioban. Sienti realized in discomfort that Kioban's question was addressed to her, and that the child's eyes searched her for understanding. Sienti and Partuala might have laughed, but Kioban's focus, her child-dark stare, did not waver.
"It is not a time to be sad. A marriage is a time of joyfulness."
The women were watching. Coalescing and circling, their footsteps were like the delicate padding of cheetahs in the bush. The voices rose as an insinuation of forgotten pain and suppressed anger, the morning rustle and flow from which Nalantei could no longer hide. Sienti led her out where she stood, silently, as a presentation among the women, their voices audible to her as if she were not a being of sentiment, but an insensible image before them:
". . . Did she sleep? Has she had the milk?"
"I had forgotten how tall she has become."
"Do you see her eyes?"
"I had forgotten, but I was like her, once."
"He is gone, is he not? There was no question of that."
"And did you share your mat with another last night?"
"It is said that she has little skill in building and thatching and the mission has made her aloof and proud."
"What do you know of skills? She knows more than her age suggests."
"Her color is so good!"
"But she was so often alone, her nature is not so easily changed, or broken."
"Do you see her eyes?"
"Partuala, why is Kioban here? I know they were friends, but it is not permitted. Your daughter is not Ngaibartani and must wait with the other girls and join in the children's songs with the muran in the higher light, later this day, after the elder kills the ox."
"Yes, she shines but does not show herself to advantage. . . Do you see her eyes?"
"I was like her once, I remember . . ."
"Yes, he has gone, the two of them left, surely during the night: Lesanta, the one called Francis, and the other muran, Kimiti, both of them — weak speared with more courage in song than in action, our flaccid warriors."
"She is not so tall as slender, but her color is good."
"I was like her, long ago."
"Yes, in the last hour she stood with her mother, and took her last milk."
"It is not to any of us that a curse is due . . . do you hear?"
"I do not see her eyes."
"Did you hear the muran singing for our elder visitors? It was not the song of admiration and goodwill that they might have expected."
"I heard them at nightfall. I would laugh but that they sang so well. Let us curse the elders with our women's voices for all the good it does us. We will teach the warriors how to sing; we will teach them how to curse."
"Mother, you have done well with Nalantei. She is quiet and respectful and shines in her beauty like rain upon the face of a cow."
"I want to see her eyes, do you see her eyes?" Sienti finally spoke to them with the pride Nalantei had known in her own song and story but could not assume:
"This day our daughter will marry. The moon and the stars are true and the hour is right for her to become what we have become, and form the new bonds of clan and husband of a purified woman. I have held her as my child but she will no longer take milk from my cattle as from me. This woman, who is a mother, (Partuala) and the young teacher also, will hold her as sponsors. . . Where is that one?"
"I am here friend," said Nirolol, now called Teresa, who emerged from the assembled women.
"From this day, daughter, this mother who will hold your back, and the . . . mother-teacher who will hold your right leg, will be godmothers to you and your children. Do you understand?" Nalantei was assumed to have given assent as she met her mother's eyes but returned to the gentle vision of Teresa, who stepped forward with a leather cape draped over her left arm and a pair of new sandals in her right hand, her gifts to the one who would leave them in marriage. Nalantei felt her own face warming and the beginning of tears at the sight of the one woman who had stayed with her on days weighted with fear and confusion when her mother could not, who sang with her and held her without words through those motherless nights when she was like the school children in their blessing of the Mary statue — whose arms were stretched upward in her ever youthful sad beckoning, her belly flat, but without tears, silent in the death of her son, the Jesus, whose beard made him look older than she. It was proper that Teresa should hold her again in this rite of purity, and give her the shoes that would trail the dust of Loiyangalani to her new home.
Teresa waited for the preparations to be complete, and sat with some of the younger mothers near the hut. It was not that the fire burned newly to Teresa and the others in their new clan and home, but the shining knife was sensation too, as were the visible trappings of new ground ocher, and the seti sticks placed over the entranceway to Sienti's expanded hut as a sign, the knowledge that their song would soon begin, the ox would die and the muran come to sing and dance; these too they must remember, no matter how weak their convictions. Before them the visual harshness softened to their memories: the mother, the daughter, the milk and the fire — a local demarcation, a circle of odor and taste and song in that glint of the morning light that remained as a flicker within them.
They all agreed that it was done well. The old woman of the Ltorobo clan had arrived from Kulal exhausted from the heat, but with aged hauteur sharpened her knife well before the first light, the sound unmistakable to all who were near, the swiping regularity which the men so fully associated — not only with their own ritual circumcision in adolescence, but perhaps of a battle or a dance, spears and knives sharpened in the quest — that they lay awake frowning quietly in disgust at the persistent grinding of blade on stone, the labor of blacksmiths; and the women were made all but sick by the rhythm of metal on leather, that pulling and grasping in breath-worn determination like the haggard coital heaving of an old man . . . though familiar, at almost any other time an indifferent conjuring. They despised the old Ltorobo woman, the daughter of bee keepers and a descendant of the vanquished and dispersed Laikipiak Maasai of the previous century, corrupt of lineage and disdainful of true Nkanyit.
The pounding in Nalantei's chest was the smaller sphere to which she was resolved, as she considered her world from the larger, observing passionately. It was her life that flew hotly, her body poised for the attack to which she must submit, as she witnessed her thoughts too, from the larger sphere, her mind restraining her body, roiling in its circumvented flight. She felt herself lifted: a rough hand firmly, too firmly, held her right arm; other hands projected her head upward as her limp weight resisted — fingers pressed into her back with no warmth through the red ochered goat skins about her, and she was aloft; only the points of fingers touched her as the leather clothing fell away from her back, drawn to earth, hanging for a moment from coarse familiar fingers until released — and her feet were cold too as they touched the floor, as she must step, one step only, and balance on one foot to lean forward, bow to the opening of the hut (the larger sphere gone, pierced in her egress) and rise again among the eyes of the women. Nalantei moved a little, opening her eyes and closing them, finding no point of focus. Her jaw was set in tight motions of unarticulated song so that her cheeks bulged from clenched muscles and teeth beneath. As her body and spirit withered she felt the hands of Sienti and Partuala lifting her arms so that they extended upward as in supplication. They removed the goat cloak so that she stood naked before them all, resigned and silent in the grey mists of morning. For the second time that day the nkarau of milk, diluted with water from the spring, was brought forward and a few drops of liquid moistened her head and dripped down to one coiled copper earring and to the sheep skin at her feet. She felt the cold stiffness of the dry skins as she was lowered to sit, and her feet were cold too as new fingers clasped more warmly about the calf and knee of her right leg to hold her. Rougher fingers held her shoulders as she leaned back to the sacrifice beneath the first light of the sun.
"May Ngai bless you, may Ngai bring you peace." The women stood watching, each with a full knowledge of the event as the Ltorobo woman leaned myopically toward Nalantei's body; she moved her knife slowly with the rhythm of an artist, deliberately, as her mouth moved in a corresponding rhythm. Nalantei lay silent and nearly motionless, her legs outstretched, her eyes glazed as in a trance, her breath shallow and quick as her heart raced heavily to changing images. There might be pain, but it was deeper than a knife's measure. Her heart struck louder than a broken song, though she was silent, and her head filled with a rage of voices, each with a color and an odor, beating . . . it might have been a drum, like those that the mission children heard, intoned by one child graced by the priest, the white Laibon, that regular but imperfect rhythm in a child's hands, an entreaty beat in joyfulness which she knew — as they marched, singing down the aisle at church — the drum's entreaty to the orphaned ones, sponsored to the mission, grown to smile and return a smile, and a boy in black skins who was transformed to the call of a kudu horn and became her warrior. She closed her eyes, but she could see: There was the blasphemy in her longed-for happiness and guilt in her body's disposition to love. Yet if it might be, she would sin, and sin again, even to the death that stones bring, without redemption; she would endure until her moon's night was new. And there was a face, not the boy, but a man, arms wrought to hold her, familiar but silent; but did he smile as he held her? She knew that the strange time was near, when, upon the final cut of the knife and her release into womanhood, a man may come, according to custom, swift and strong, who acts in secret and alone to kill his ox before her hut and make a marriage. The ox dies, and in its thick and darkening blood the marriage is made beyond the refutation of the elders. Was he sleeping and unaware, did he laugh like the boy, near her but forgetting? The face resolved into the fire of sunrise, a taunting hope behind her crimson eyelids, and she knew him. The image was her father, Perean, the eyes severe but saddened, he who could do nothing, so cruel, so distant . . .
In answer to Nalantei's silence, one woman frowned, "What does this girl know of pain to be so proud? Let her give birth first and then act the young warrior. Are we to bow to this great moment of courage as to a boy warrior who sings the Lebarta? She will have her time. Let her lose a child as my mother did, as her mother Sienti herself has, then let her be so proud." After a few moments the old woman poured the dilute milk again over the small knife and softly touched the forehead of her charge, who started just noticeably to the touch and focused her eyes. Nalantei caught for a moment a vision of age that had a certain tenderness, a face that was worn and lined with sun-drawn furrows but held no malevolence, or indeed pity. In the sharply defined bones of the Ltorobo woman's face and the brightness of her focus, Nalantei saw an image of beauty not lost to years. She closed her eyes again.
As the old woman rose, Sienti said, "It is done, daughter," and the women turned away, silent in contemplation for moments only. Nalantei moved a little, and blinked. As she looked about, almost expectantly, the image of the Ltorobo woman which she sought was gone. Nalantei remained estranged from her body as the spirits all retreated — boy, man, and age.
Was she like a boy as the women said, who yearns for the freedom of the muran? Or was she a woman in forced consent, beyond the perceptions of a child who must follow in misery's footsteps because there is no other path — with the acquiescence of the feral captive that only awaits release, quietly attending that liberation may come, must come? — a woman's consent to follow an unfamiliar print to an unknown land, without reason but that the elders, whose grim eyes peer beneath their strange hats, command as earthly lords, for it is their way and therefore hers, following the will of Ngai.
If she had the courage of a young muran, why was there no song, no Lebarta of pride and celebration to which a father would rise as to a boy in black? There was no gift of a cow — no gift and no joy. Her eyes burned in the absence of her father, Perean, her champion.
The woman all agreed that it was done well, even in those short minutes passing where her blood dropped steadily upon the lamb skin beneath her — this pure blood, and the other.
The clamor about her had been the holiday as she who waited was the cause, material and final, the object but not the form. The elders were near but would not yet approach, and there would be no secret man, no special drama. The boy her warrior, Francis, was gone, and her father had not yet appeared. Returned to the hut, she lay in a curl. Soon other women, wives and mothers, would gather near her unprotected sphere; she might be a cat for whom sleep is essence, noted and accepted, or a dying goat, for their affective speech — that which was quick was now meat, no kick, no jump, eyes clouded without dissent, silent but for her short breath and her active eyes, cloaked from their purpose.
The women were watching. It was their time, before the muran came to dance, before the feast and the elders' evening rites.
~~