Kenyatta has requested an audience with him daily since he learned that he has been denied any visitors, and finally it is granted.
The black man with the gray beard is brought, in chains, to the commander's office. The commander sits at his desk, fanning himself in a futile attempt to gain some slight degree of comfort in the hot, still air.
"You wished to see me?" he demands.
"I wish to know why I have not been allowed to have any visitors," says Kenyatta.
"We're not about to let them report on their missions to you, or receive new orders," says the commander.
"I don't know what you are talking about," says Kenyatta.
"I'm talking about your goddamned Mau Mau, and the massacre they committed at Lari!" yells the commander, pounding the desk with a fist. "We're not going to let you black heathens get away with this, and when we catch Deedan Kimathi-and we will-I will take great pleasure in incarcerating him in the cell next to yours. I won't even care about your exchanging information with him, since you're both going to be here until you rot!"
And with that, Kenyatta is escorted back to his cell.
"What happened at Lari?" he asks his guard.
"You ought to know. You were in charge of it."
"I am a prisoner who is not even in charge of his own life. How can I possibly know what happened?"
"What happened is that your savages went out and butchered ninety-three loyal Kikuyu in the town on Lari," says the guard. "Chopped them to bits."
"Loyal Kikuyu," repeats Kenyatta.
"That's right."
"Loyal to who?"
The guard curses and shoves the black man into his cell.
Kenyatta knows what will come next. It will not happen to him. He's probably safer in his cell than any of the Mau Mau are in their hideouts. But the British cannot tolerate this. They will strike back, and in force. He has to get word to his people, to warn them-but how is he to do so when he is allowed no visitors?
He begins smoking, begging an occasional cigarette from the guards. One day, months later, a guard gives him two, and he thanks him profusely, lights one, and explains that he's keeping the second one for the evening. Then, when the guards have changed, he unwraps the cigarette and scrawls You must get me out of here! in Swahili on the paper. He doesn't dare write it in English for fear the guards may find it, and by the same token he can't write it in Kikuyu for he is sure that the prison doesn't employ any members of the Kikuyu tribe now that they are at war with each other.
Day in and day out he stands by his window, watching and waiting with the patience of a leopard. Finally, almost two weeks after he has written his message and carefully folded it up, a black groundskeeper is trimming the bushes near his window. The man is a Samburu, and the Samburu and Kikuyu have never been allies, but he has no choice other than to hope the man realizes that the British are the blood enemy of both races. He coughs to catch the man's attention, then tosses the folded note out through the bars.
The Samburu picks it up, unfolds it, stares at it.
Can you even read? wonders Kenyatta. And if you can, will you take it to my people, or to the guards?
The Samburu stares expressionlessly at him for a long moment, then walks away.
Kenyatta waits, and waits, and waits some more. He has not seen the Samburu again, and he has been given nothing else to write on. Burning day follows freezing night, and he tries futilely to exercise in his nine-by-seven-foot universe. He begs for tidbits of information, but the guards have been instructed not to speak to him. He thinks it has been two years since James Thuku passed him the note, but he could be wrong: it could be eighteen months, it could even be three years. It is hard enough to keep his sanity without worrying about the passage of time.
And then one night he hears it: the sound of bare feet on the uneven ground outside his window. There are more sounds, sounds he cannot identify, then a crash! and a thud!, and suddenly four Kikuyu men, their faces painted for war, are in his cell, helping him to his feet. One of them strips off his prison clothes and wraps him in a red kikoi. Another brings his trademark flyswatter, a third his leopardskin cap. They gently help him walk out the door.
"Where is your car?" asks Kenyatta, looking around. "I am too weak to walk all the way to Kikuyuland."
"A car would be searched, Burning Spear," says one of them. "We have brought an ox wagon. You will hide in the back, under a pile of blankets and skins."
"Skins?" says Kenyatta, frowning. "The British will stop you, and once they see the skins, they will search the wagon."
Another warrior smiles. "The British are too busy fighting for their lives, Burning Spear. The Nandi or the Wakamba will stop us, and if we let them take the skins, they will look no further."
And it is as the warrior has predicted.
Kenyatta asks them not to announce that he is free. He will go to his village, regain some of his strength, some of the weight he has lost, and try to learn what has been happening.
"I do not know if we can spare you that long, Burning Spear," says one of the warriors. "The war does not go well."
"Of course it doesn't," says Kenyatta.
"They bomb the holy mountain daily, and some fifteen thousand of us are captives in the camps along Langata Road."
"Are you surprised?" asks Kenyatta.
"Did not you yourself tell us that we could not lose, that freedom was within our grasp?"
"It was. I only hope that Mau Mau has not pissed it away for all time to come."
They stare at the old man, dumbfounded, and then at each other, and their expressions seem to say, Can this be the Burning Spear we have worshipped all these years? What have the British done to him?
Deedan Kimathi stands with his back to the cave wall, high in the Aberdere Mountains, and faces the assembled warriors. They are truly a ragtag army, not half a dozen pairs of shoes between them, most armed only with spears and clubs.
If I only had a real army, he thinks. If only we had the weapons the British have.
Still, he is prepared to fight to the bitter end with what he has, and he has pinpointed the one way in which they might still defeat the British who are crawling all over the Aberdares and the holy mountain of Kirinyaga itself.
"We have suffered minor defeats," he says, shrugging off an increasing number of military disasters in a sentence fragment, "but now the time has come to assert ourselves."
"How?" asks General China. (Kimathi tries not to wince at the ridiculous names his generals have chosen for themselves.) "Every day the British planes drop bombs on us. Even the elephants and the buffalo have deserted the holy mountain. If we have proved anything, it is that we cannot fight them with sticks and stones."
"We will fight them with a weapon they are unprepared to deal with," says Kimathi with all the confidence he can project. "We will fight them with a weapon they do not have in their arsenal." He sees stirrings of interest in his audience. "We will fight them with barbarism and savagery."
"We already have," says General China. "And what good has it done?"
"This time will be different," promises Kimathi. "We will attack their women and their children, we will make Nairobi itself a place of unspeakable horror, we will kill and torture and mutilate, and against such an onslaught even the British will have to concede defeat and go home."
"Nairobi?" asks a dubious voice.
"Wherever they think they are safe, wherever they hide their most precious possessions-their women and their children and their elderly. We have been making a mistake. They brought them all in from the farms to the city, and yet we continued to attack the farms. This is our land, and we do not have to fight by British rules. They bring an army to the White Highlands, and we have met them in battle with spears against rifles. We have learned our lesson. We must go where their army isn't, must do our killing when there is no chance of retribution. When they finally realize that we are slaughtering them in Nairobi and move their army there, we will attack them in Mombasa, and when they come to Mombasa, they will find we are butchering their children in Lamu and Naivasha."