Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

  The powerful man sitting at the desk was entirely gray, his clothing, his hair, his skin, his eyes. It occurred to Libazo that his grandfather, who had not lived ever to see a man so white, would have thought him a medicine man who had painted himself completely, even the pupils of his eyes, instead of just streaking his chest and cheeks with ash paste.

  “So,” Cranford was saying, “I am glad you were able to subdue those oafs last night. I understand the predicament you were in, but I have already had several complaints about the unseemly sight of handcuffed Europeans being marched to jail by natives with rifles. We cannot have this, my boy.”

  The district commissioner always called his white underlings “my boy.” The blacks, he addressed just as “boy,” if he spoke to them at all. The “my boy” in question was Libazo’s commanding officer, who stood at attention facing Cranford across the desk, his khaki clothing unrumpled despite the stifling heat. The effort of the toto standing next to the Union Jack and pulling a cord to operate the punkah fan overhead was having no effect whatsoever on the temperature of the office.

  Libazo focused intently. His captain had been a soldier before he was a policeman, and it showed in his posture and in his respect for his superior. These were things Libazo understood, as would any warrior tribesman. Not that Libazo had been admitted to the rank of warrior in any tribe.

  Tolliver leaned slightly forward. “It is a circumstance we will find more and more difficult to avoid, sir, given the paucity of European policemen and the recent influx of undesirable white men. I cannot see—” A sharp knock at the door interrupted.

  “Come,” the district commissioner commanded.

  Stocky, bow-legged Sergeant Hobson of the King’s African Rifles came in and saluted. His small blue eyes were wide, his forehead sweatier than usual. “A runner has just come. There has been a killing,” he said. “The doctor at the Scottish Mission hospital has been murdered by a native.”

  D.C. Cranford leapt to his feet. “Bloody savages!” His face had turned a shade of red almost as bright as that in the flag behind him.

  Kwai Libazo remained wooden, stiff. He held his breath not to allow his chest to heave. The tribe that lived near the Scottish Mission were Kikuyu, his mother’s people. His people. No matter the facts of the case, this would hurt them.

  Captain Tolliver’s fists clenched. He turned to the sergeant, who stood at attention with his head thrown slightly back, his back hair shiny with sweat. Tolliver had barely changed his position, but his body was suddenly energized. To Kwai Libazo it seemed as if Justin Tolliver already knew something about what was going on at the Scottish Mission. “Was anyone else hurt at the mission?”

  Hobson glanced to D.C. Cranford and back to Tolliver with quizzical eyes. “No. The runner said everyone else was safe.”

  Tolliver let out his breath and unclenched his fists.

  Libazo felt no such relief at the news that the mission family was otherwise safe. The hospital there was known far and wide, to the settlers and to the tribes. The doctor was the best in the district. He had cured Libazo’s baby cousin who had rolled into a fire in the night and been badly burned. His death at the hands of a tribesman was a very dangerous thing.

  Cranford sank back into his chair and shook his head as if he were trying to settle its contents. “Bloody savages.” This time he growled the words. “Get out there immediately, my boy. Find the bastard, and we’ll do for him.”

  Tolliver had started to inch toward the door before the order came. Sergeant Hobson opened it. Tolliver turned to his superior. “Sir,” he said, “I will need to take Libazo here with me. Request permission to mount him on a pony for speed’s sake.”

  Libazo did not move, even to blink his eyes. The D.C. flashed his habitual look of disapproval, ever ready when anyone proposed to ignore any protocol, especially one that blurred the distinction between the people he called the natives, who had lived in this land forever, and the British, who had so lately begun to flow in and act as if it really belonged to them.

  The expectant look on Tolliver’s face did not change in the too-long period it took Cranford to relent. “If you must,” the district commissioner said at last.

  “Follow me, Libazo,” Tolliver ordered as he marched out the door that Sergeant Hobson still held by its brass knob.

  Only then did Kwai Libazo let his muscles come to life and his tall, slender body to move. His mind was troubled by where these events would take him, but his bones and his muscles longed to race there on a steed.

  * * *

  Even as he spurred Bosworth, his chestnut stallion, toward a tragedy, A.D.S. Justin Tolliver could not help but be impressed by the beauty of the land they traversed. The long rains had been plentiful that year, and the area around them was rich with grasses and exotic wild flowers. As he and Kwai Libazo crested the last hill, the sun had nearly reached its zenith. They looked upon the Mission of the Church of Scotland. On that April morning, in a verdant valley beside a meandering river, the coffee fields that stretched just below them were in flower, acre upon acre of white blossoms against dark green leaves. Cattle grazed on the far hillside. Though Tolliver was troubled at the thought of how Vera McIntosh was reacting to her uncle’s death, the vista lifted his heart. Something in his soul, his spirit, seemed to be expanding here in Africa. It was not what he had anticipated when he first traveled to South Africa with his Yorkshire regiment in 1909, the year the British colonies in the south were united. He had come to this continent a young lieutenant intent on doing his duty as an Englishman. He never expected his loyalties to change. England was his home. That “sceptered isle … earth of majesty” was where his heart was meant to belong. Back there, he had been a second son without prospects, and one itching for adventure, disinclined to settle down and marry a girl of means—his father’s phrase, one he loathed, but one that his sort of life in England dictated.

  After more than a year in Cape Town and Johannesburg, he had been reluctant to go back where his only choice was to find a girl with money who would have him. When he heard of the wonderful hunting, the richness of game to be had, the ease of life in the new British East African Protectorate, he had taken only a brief sojourn in England, and then come here to seek a change—here where living was cheap and opportunities abounded—to serve the Empire and to see what he might make of it all. Once his fortune was made, he had expected to take it home and rejoin society there, not as a poor sap on the lookout for a large dowry, but with money of his own, so that he would be able to let his heart, not his banker, choose his wife.

  He had not expected this land to grow on him so. Nor had he thought a missionary’s daughter would also find a place in his affections. But now, down somewhere among the picturesque buildings in this irresistible landscape was the niece of the dead man. His attraction to Vera McIntosh was another thing it would be better to resist.

  He banged his heels into the flanks of the stallion that was, if he admitted it, one of the only truly loyal companions he had found in British East Africa. The horse skirted a hole filled with water from the recent rains.

  “Careful here,” he called to Kwai Libazo, behind him on a pony. The last thing Tolliver needed was for Libazo to lame the animal. Cranford was already in a difficult enough mood.

  “I see it, B’wana,” Libazo said.

  “I have told you to call me sir.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was not a hint of irony in Libazo’s tone. Tolliver did not understand why he disliked the term the natives always used when speaking to European settlers. But it rubbed him the wrong way. He liked Libazo. Perhaps it was their matching stature. Perhaps it was the innate elegance of the man. Libazo was only half Kikuyu. He was half Maasai, which accounted for his being six feet two and straight as a rod.

  The native policeman’s face always remained impassive, as if he little cared what happened, but the other night’s enterprise in the Masonic Hotel was typical of Tolliver’s experience of the man. Libazo coul
d be counted to do the right and the intelligent thing. Whether they were sent to pick up the pieces after a drunken brawl or to fight a fire in the Arab trader’s stores, Libazo’s eyes often revealed that his thoughts tracked along with Tolliver’s. The askari worked side by side with Justin, always on point for whatever came up, but he never revealed that his thinking ran ahead of Tolliver’s. As it must have from time to time, considering Tolliver’s relative inexperience and the native’s superior knowledge of the territory and the people who inhabited it, even many of the white ones. Libazo’s deference was only proper, of course, but it must have taken something for him to give it.

  They dismounted at the stable near the house workers’ huts. A toto ran up and took the reins and walked the horses into the shade.

  “Wait here and water the horses,” Tolliver ordered Libazo and walked toward the mission office, passing the McIntosh family’s stone house on the way. He looked straight ahead, all the while worrying about what he would say to Vera about her and her family’s terrible loss and wondering if she was looking out through the gauze curtains as he went by.

  Before he reached the office, her father, Reverend Clement McIntosh, shouted to him from the veranda of the house. “Captain Tolliver.” He always addressed Justin by the rank he had held in the army. It was a sign of respect that few British men accorded a young nobleman who had had the bad judgment to join the police force. And it endeared the Scot to him.

  McIntosh beckoned with a sad smile. His ordinarily jolly, florid face was pale and troubled, as was to be expected.

  Tolliver took the Scottish priest’s offered hand. “I am so sorry for your loss. I will do everything I can to apprehend the culprit.”

  “A terrible business. Terrible.” The reverend’s chin sunk to his chest and he shook his head. His Scottish burr somehow made the word “terrible” sound worse than it otherwise would have. He sighed deeply and indicated a wicker chair beside a small white table laid with a lace cloth and teacups. He rang a little silver bell.

  Glad of something to quench his thirst after the nearly hour’s ride from Nairobi and for tea to brace him up for the ordeal ahead, Tolliver took the chair, which creaked when he sat.

  “I hope the ride was not too long and hot,” the reverend said, as if Tolliver had arrived for a social call.

  With relief, Tolliver continued in that vein, knowing it could not be long before the business he had come to conduct would destroy any semblance of normalcy. “Not at all. The panorama from the crest of the hill is stunning on this lovely day.”

  “The Lord’s rains have blessed the farmer this year,” McIntosh said. Like all British missionaries, he had come to this land to fight slavery and to convert the heathens, but like all the clergy that Tolliver had met here in the Protectorate or in England for that matter, he showed as much enthusiasm for his plantation and his herd of cattle as he did for his flock of native converts.

  A door opened behind Tolliver. Expecting a native in a white robe and red fez, he nudged his cup toward the approaching sound, but when he turned he found Vera carrying a tray. He jumped to his feet and overturned his chair in the process. His face heated up. It mortified him that at the age of twenty-three he could still blush to near purple just because of an awkward moment.

  She looked up at him. The rims of her eyes were the color he was sure she saw on his cheeks. He took the tray from her and set it on the table. “Miss McIntosh, I am so sorry about your loss.”

  She blinked her eyes and for a moment he was afraid she would burst into tears. But she poured the tea instead and asked, “Have you seen the body?”

  “Vera!” her father exclaimed. “Captain Tolliver will think…” He didn’t finish.

  She put down the teapot none too gently. “Well, isn’t that why he came?” She took the third chair at the table while Tolliver righted his own and sat on it, trying not to blush again as it let out a sound like an injured cat and threatened to collapse under him.

  “Let the man have his tea in peace for a moment, gal.”

  She gave her father a rather wan smile. “Captain, I believe you take it with cream and sugar.” She did not wait for a reply before she took the tongs, dropped in two lumps, poured in cream from a blue and white china pitcher, and offered the cup, looking right into his eyes.

  Tolliver took it from her hands. They were small and beautiful and had disappeared into his when they had waltzed at the Nairobi Club, when they had both been wearing gloves. He resisted drinking the tea in one long draught, as his mother had warned him never to do in company.

  He did not want to send Vera away, but he also thought it quite inappropriate to talk about a murder in the presence of a young lady. She had, however, brought it up herself, and given the extreme gravity of such an act of violence as had occurred, there was a great deal of urgency in this matter. She might have information or insights that would be helpful to his inquiries. Those who disapproved of his choice of a profession were right about one thing: Sometimes the behavior of a gentleman and that of a policeman were mutually exclusive. “Perhaps Miss McIntosh is right, and if she will forgive us for speaking of such an unseemly matter in her presence, it might be best to get on with it.”

  Her father looked decidedly reluctant, but nodded his assent.

  Tolliver drained his cup and drew his noisy chair forward. “Please tell me, Reverend, what you know about the discovery of Dr. Pennyman’s body. The runner who came to Government House could not give us any details except for the fact that it—um, he was found at early light facedown in the coffee field with a native spear in his back.”

  “Yes, that is correct. The workers take to the fields just after dawn to get on with their work before the sun is too strong. They always have some stalwart native laddies with spears with them, in case there are night-prowling animals that might be in the groves, and they make a great noise to warn off any creatures lurking there. When their usual chanting turned to screams and shouts, I thought it might have been a hyena or even a lion. But when I got there, I saw it was Josiah.” He looked away and blinked.

  While her father was talking Vera had taken Tolliver’s cup and refilled it from the china teapot and placed it in front of him. He gave her a fleeting smile of thanks and took a sip while he waited for her father to recover himself. Her pretty face was calm. Enigmatic girl that she was, she was holding her own against her grief. Perhaps D.C. Cranford was right about Vera, that having been born here and nursed by a Kikuyu woman, she was bred without the true delicacy of an English maiden.

  “Forgive me, Reverend, but I must ask—please describe exactly what you saw with as many precise details as you can remember.”

  McIntosh coughed and took a long breath. “He was lying facedown, as if he had been speared whilst running away, and died instantly. One arm was underneath the body, the other was bent at the elbow. The spear was sticking straight up from the middle of his back.” His head shook, more like a shudder than a negation of what he was saying. “The spear shaft threw a shadow, like a sun dial’s.”

  Vera made a tiny noise.

  Her father threw her a quizzical glance and stood up. “Perhaps, my dear, you should spare yourself this.”

  She stood, too, but made no move to leave them.

  Tolliver rose. “Perhaps your father is right, Miss McIntosh.”

  They were all standing now. Her dark eyes pierced him with a troubled glance. “Yes. Excuse me. I will go to my mother. I do wish to speak to you before you leave, Captain.”

  Tolliver assented with a slight bow, and he watched her disappear through the green painted door of the house. The speed and determination in her gait made her small, slight frame seem strong and lithe as she moved, but light, as if she might as well hover over the ground as walk upon it. Tolliver pressed his lips together. Her flight from the subject of murder told him that she had not been as composed as she seemed on the surface. Somewhere in that African-born graceful figure lurked a real English—no, a Scottish girl, af
ter all.

  * * *

  Vera’s step slowed once she was out of Tolliver’s disturbing sight and he out of hers. She had done her best to act the demure young lady in front of him, but she was sure she had done a bad job of it. Every time he turned that blue glance of his on her, she saw something in it that looked like shock, or at least like surprise. Never did she see attraction, much less affection. Every part of her was disturbed: by the discovery of her uncle’s body, by her mother’s outpouring of grief, the most emotional state she had ever seen in her mother, and even in the face of all that, more so by Justin Tolliver’s presence. Who, what, how, everything he was overwhelmed her. Even his rosy lips and blushes, which were not supposed to impress a girl. Her father used the word “virile” to describe men he admired—like that other newcomer Denys Finch Hatton. People had used it when they talked about her dead uncle. She had never really understood the word. “Manly,” her mother had said it meant. Tolliver was broad shouldered and tall. She came up only to his chin. And athletic. He had proved that even in the way he waltzed. Maybe it was his virility that disturbed her so. He seemed walking proof that a manly man could blush and have lips the color of strawberries. And now he was crossing the compound to examine her uncle’s dead body.

  She backed away from the window, slipped down the corridor, and knocked lightly on her mother’s bedroom door. “Mother,” she said barely above a whisper, half desiring, half dreading intimacy with her mother that she used to imagine would make her feel loved.