Circling the Sun by Paula McLain Read Free Book Online

kind of current. “What am I meant for then?”
    “How wonderful that question is, Beru.” He smiled mysteriously. “And as you did not die on this day, you have more time in which to answer it.”
    —
    I stayed with the Elkingtons for several weeks, while Mrs. Elkington brought me nice food on a bamboo tray—candied ginger, devilled eggs, and chilled juices. She had her kitchen
toto
busy making me fresh cakes every day, as if that would somehow make up for what Paddy had done—and for the fact of him now, roaring sullenly and sometimes monstrously from a wooden pen behind the main paddock.
    They’d finally caught him four days after he escaped and brought him back bound. When Mrs. Elkington told me he was behind bars, it was meant to reassure me, but it also turned my stomach. I had tempted Paddy by running in front of his nose, and now he was suffering for doing something that was natural for him. It was my fault—but there was also the matter, when I lay in my narrow bed at the Elkingtons’, of Paddy’s howling. I clamped my hands over my ears, relieved that he was locked away. Relieved and also sick about it. Safe and also guilty.
    When I could finally travel by cart to Nairobi, and then home to Njoro by train, it was as though I’d finally been released from a prison of my own. One made of Paddy’s awful noises. But I didn’t truly stop thinking about Paddy or dreaming terrible dreams about him until I was able to tell Kibii what had happened. He and some of the other
totos
sat as still as posts while I drew every detail out, my story growing longer and more harrowing, and me growing braver, steelier, a hero or warrior instead of something that had been hunted and only narrowly rescued.
    Every Kipsigis
moran
in training had to hunt and kill a lion in order to earn his spear. If he failed, he would live in shame. If he succeeded, nothing could be more magnificent. Beautiful women would sing his name, and his deed would pass into history, in verses his own children would learn and act out in games. I had always been wildly jealous that Kibii could look forward to so much daring and glory, and couldn’t help but feel a little satisfied, now, that I had survived something he hadn’t yet faced. And the truth was, no matter how I embellished or shaped the story of what had happened with Paddy, it
had
happened, and I had lived to tell the tale. That alone had a powerful effect on me. I felt slightly invincible, that I could come through nearly anything my world might throw at me, but of course I had no idea what lay in store.
    —
    “Emma and I think you should go to school in Nairobi,” my father said a few weeks after I had returned home from the Elkingtons’. His tented fingers rested on the dinner table.
    I jerked up to look at him. “Why not another governess?”
    “You can’t run wild for ever. You need schooling.”
    “I can learn here at the farm. I won’t fight any more, I promise.”
    “It’s not safe here for you, don’t you see?” Mrs. O said from her chair. Her untouched tableware gleamed, mirroring back chips of red light from the hurricane lamp, and it struck me all at once that all of this was happening because I had never found a way to properly best her. I had grown used to her ways. I’d been distracted by foals and gallops and hunting games with Kibii. But she hadn’t grown used to me.
    “If you mean Paddy, that should never have happened.”
    “Of
course
it shouldn’t have!” Her violet eyes narrowed. “But it did. You seem to think you’re invulnerable, running around half naked with those boys, out in the bush where anything could get you.
Anything.
You’re a child, though no one around here seems to know it.”
    I clenched my fists and brought them down hard on the edge of the table. I yelled all sorts of things and pushed away my plate and sent my tableware clattering to the floor. “You can’t force me to go,” I finally cried, my throat hoarse, my face hot and