Circling the Sun Read Online Free PDF

she said matter-of-factly while my father made a dry, throttled sound deep in his throat and quickly left the house.
    Within a week she’d convinced my father that I needed to wear shoes. A few weeks more and I’d been trussed up in an English frock and hair ribbons instead of a
shuka,
and told not to eat with my hands. I was not to kill snakes or moles or birds with my
rungu,
or to take all my meals with Kibii and his family. I was not to hunt warthog or leopard with
arap
Maina but to have a proper education and learn the King’s English.
    “I’ve let you run too wild and you know it,” my father said when I went to him, asking to be left alone. “It’s all for your own good.”
    He
had
let me run, but it had been wonderful. These new restrictions amounted to a conventional life, and we’d never had anything of the sort.
    “Please…” I heard myself begin to whine, but then stopped short. I had never been a wheedling or complaining child, and my father wasn’t going to bend anyway. If I really
could
do something about Mrs. O, I would have to work it out on my own. I would show her I wasn’t a bit of cobweb in the corner, something to be wiped or straightened, but a rival worth her notice. I would learn her ways and habits, and track her closely until I knew what she was and how to best her, and what precisely it would take to steal my good life back.

C oquette was nearing her foaling date. She’d grown rounder and more barrel-like, the new life inside her pushing out against her flesh, those long limbs already trying to stretch and find their way. Somehow the effort of creation had dulled her golden coat. She looked tired and listless and rarely did more than nibble at the sheaves of lucerne I brought her.
    For me, the foal couldn’t come soon enough. Thinking about him was how I got through hours of Latin in pinching shoes. One night, I was fast asleep in my hut when I felt Buller rouse beside me. The grooms had come awake in their bunks. My father was awake, too. I recognized the timbre of his muffled voice and dressed quickly, thinking only of Coquette. She was twenty days early, which usually meant a weak or sickly foal, but it might not. My father would know what to do.
    Out in the yard, the glow from several hurricane lamps rinsed out through the cracks in the stable door. High overhead, ribbons of stars swirled like milk, and a sickle moon lay hard and bright on its side. The night insects seethed away in the forest and from everywhere, all around, but the stable was quiet. Much too quiet, I knew, before I even came close to Coquette’s box, but I couldn’t guess why until I saw my father stand up. He strode to meet me, stopping me in my tracks. “You’ll not want to see this, Beryl. Go back to bed.”
    “What’s happened?” My throat closed around the words.
    “Stillborn,” he said quietly.
    My heart fell, all my hopes silenced in an instant. Apollo wouldn’t stand on tottering legs like a new giraffe. He wouldn’t see the forest or the high escarpment, or race along the track with me bent over his shining neck. He wouldn’t know Green Hills for even a day. But my father had never shielded me from the tough lessons of farm life. I forced back my tears and pushed ahead.
    In the shadow-filled box, Coquette had dropped into one corner. On the ground behind her, the hay was matted where two grooms knelt, trying somehow to tidy up. The tiny foal was there, slick in part of its bag, but also wasn’t. Its eyes were gone and most of the facial muscles, the flesh eaten away in a jagged blackness. Its belly yawned open, the entrails devoured—which could only mean the giant siafu ants had come. They were black warriors with huge bodies, and they ate quickly and terribly, as one thing.
    “She foaled him so quietly no one heard her,” my father said, coming to put an arm around my shoulder. “He might have been dead already, I don’t know.”
    “Poor Coquette,” I said, turning into his shirt