He could hear a new scream, over the first one, and he knew it was coming from his own lips as he saw the fire again. This time it was right in front of him. This time it was real. There was a man standing beside it, holding up the panga with which he was skinning a bushbuck. The warrior saw the blade gleaming in the firelight. He stopped, panting. No one must be allowed to see him, to know he had passed this way. The man had stepped back, staring at him in alarm. A hunter. He had been chopping brushwood, making a fire to protect himself from the wild animals, but now he was facing a more dangerous enemy. A short spear lay on the ground beside him. Terrified, he bent to pick it up as the warrior sprang at him, snarling, his knife making the first slash.

In the distance, the pack of hyenas yipped and chuckled, and called out the news to one another. There was blood. Soon there would be feasting. As first light broke over the landscape they moved in, and the air was filled with the sound of their growling and squabbling, with the snapping of jaws and the crunching of bone as they buried their muzzles in the fresh carcass.

Chapter 1

Kenya, July 1957

The school bell rang, but the girl stayed where she was, halfway down the drive. Sooner or later she would be missed. In trouble again. But maybe the car would turn in through the gates before they realised she wasn’t there, and then everything would be all right. She had been watching for it all morning from the classroom window, until she was reprimanded. After study she had slipped away down the avenue, stationing herself out of sight of the school buildings. It was a bright afternoon, with high clouds riding in a washed-blue sky after yesterday’s downpour. Perhaps the rain and the muddy roads had made the going slow.

Sarah Mackay fixed her gaze on the band of murram road, the red soil still damp. Around her the boundary of blue gum trees rocked and shivered in conversation with the wind. She loved these high, silver-barked sentinels of the plateau, growing up here at 7,000 feet above sea level. At night they whispered and sighed to her as she lay in her narrow dormitory bed, imagining herself at the coast, at home in Mombasa, almost five hundred miles away.