Iron Blood

Before the forest. Before the oath. Before the fire there had to be the theft - and the hundred separate peoples who each fought it alone.

They came with a Bible in one hand and took the land with the other. They came with surveyors and soldiers and a perfect confidence that a country full of peoples was an empty country waiting to be claimed. And one by one - the spear-people of the western hills, the cattle-people of the great plains, the grove-people of the coast, the land-people of the central ridges - they were broken, each on its own front, in its own tongue, alone.

A spiritual leader is murdered at a peace meeting he was promised was safe. A people is marched south along a road that kills their cattle one by one, until a girl of fourteen pours water she cannot spare into the dust and decides that a people who can still grieve are a people not yet conquered. An old woman of the coast watches soldiers burn her sacred grove - but moves the centre of her people into their own chests, where no fire can reach it. A proud man of the ridges loses his land to a single word - vacant - and learns to wear a metal tag at his neck like a tagged animal.

Each of them fights. Each of them loses. And each of them, in losing, keeps one thing the conquerors can never take: the decision to remember, and to hand the remembering forward.

Across seventy years and a dozen peoples, the keepers carry the fire through the dark - through two World Wars, a massacre in the city, the long years of enduring - until, on the edge of a forest in 1952, all the separate fires are gathered at last into a single flame. And four generations later, a young woman named Serea stands in tear gas outside a burning parliament and feels, without knowing why, that she has done this before.

She has. They all have. Many Fires, One Flame is the origin of the Iron Blood: The Unbroken Fire trilogy - the story of how a hundred conquered peoples, broken one front at a time, slowly became the one country that could not be broken at all. The old generation fought on tribal fronts and lost divided. Their grandchildren, born of all of them and divided by none, finally fight as one.

Some kingdoms fall. This one remembers. They can take the wood. They cannot take the decision.

A historical novel of colonial Kenya and the generation that finally rose as one - inspired by the real peoples and events of the long struggle for freedom, told through invented characters who stand in the long shadow of those who were real.