Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “I think, B’wana, that we should go to Richard Newland’s farm.”

  “Why, in God’s name?”

  “I still do not understand exactly the meaning of proof,” Libazo said, “but I often hear you talk of things that might have happened, and if these things actually did happen they would mean it is not proved that Gichinga Mbura killed the mission doctor.”

  “Yes?” Tolliver did not seem to have understood what Libazo was trying to say, but he had started to walk in the direction of the stable.

  “Sir. I thought of such a possibility. Yesterday, I went to Richard Newland’s farm to find out if this thing I imagined really did happen. I think it did, sir.”

  “Well, out with it then. What did you find out?”

  “The missionary’s son, sir, did not leave two days before the doctor died. His family say that he did, but he did not. The workers at the farm told me this. The hunting party did not leave until the morning of the death, sir.”

  Tolliver stopped and looked at Libazo. They were so much the same height that they were eye to eye. “You went to the Newland farm to ask that question?”

  “Yes, B’wana.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “By the train, sir. And I walked from the station.”

  For a moment, it seemed as if Tolliver was going to say that he didn’t believe Kwai. He was shaking his head as if to say no. “You can’t mean you think Otis McIntosh had something to do with his uncle’s death. He is just a boy.”

  “I believe he has fourteen years, sir. If he was a Maasai he would be ready for emorata. For circumcision.”

  Like all white men, Tolliver grimaced at the word. “Still.”

  “I was only thinking of what might be possible, sir. I understand that you want to make very sure that the only man who could have killed the doctor is Gichinga Mbura.”

  For the first time, but not for the last, Justin Tolliver realized that he trusted Kwai Libazo’s instincts more than he trusted those of any white man he knew.

  “You are right, then, Libazo, we must find out why there is a difference between what people are telling us about Otis McIntosh and the truth.”

  Kwai Libazo was happy with this decision, but when they collected Tolliver’s stallion and Kwai’s pony at the Afghan, Ali Khan’s stable, Tolliver turned not toward the road toward Chania Bridge and Richard Newland’s farm, but toward the Parklands section of the town. “There is a question I need to ask of Mrs. Buxton before we leave town,” he said.

  From time to time, he had taken to doing this, to explaining his actions to Kwai Libazo. A very surprising thing for a British man to do.

  * * *

  For the second time in the past week, Denys Finch Hatton was sitting on Vera McIntosh’s veranda, sipping tea. Vera’s mother had greeted the young man, but quickly excused herself, citing mission work to be done and leaving only the houseboy Njui to attend on her daughter. It did not escape Vera’s notice that her mother was willing to let her take a picnic alone with Justin Tolliver, but she was unwilling to leave her with Denys Finch Hatton here on the veranda.

  As usual, Finch Hatton’s conversation centered on the local peoples and their habits and any changes Vera had seen since the founding of the Protectorate and the recent influx of settlers. It was a subject that greatly interested Vera as well and that she discussed with relish, especially with one who seemed as sensitive to the problems the British were causing as Vera was. It would all have been quite delightful but for the fact that Finch Hatton’s presence made Vera so jumpy and unsure of herself.

  For one thing, her caller always seemed to be around when Tolliver arrived and his presence seemed to displease Tolliver very much. Not that Vera was expecting Captain Tolliver to call on an ordinary Monday, but she always hoped to see him. And when the rider appeared at the top of the ridge overlooking the mission an hour ago, she had thought from a distance that he might be Justin. Ever since Saturday, she had had this fantasy that he had come back and that he would kiss her on the back of her neck.

  But the rider turned out to be Finch Hatton, with his amazingly shiny eyes and bodily grace, and the fact that he focused so totally on her when she was speaking. He treated her as if she were some African wise woman, when she was nothing more than a girl who had been born here a few months after her missionary parents arrived, had been educated by her parents, and had none of his sophistication or verve. He had listened to her telling him about the camping places along the Uaso Nyiro River that she had visited last year, on safari, with her father and her brother. She had just told Finch Hatton how well she remembered the details of each place. When one was out in the wild, every detail remained forever vivid.

  He was gazing out over the fields of fading coffee blossoms, across the river to the hills in the distance. “It’s strange,” he said. “From far away it looks all of a piece, but then when you are in it, especially if you see one of the rare animals, a leopard or a cheetah particularly, it becomes so distinct in your memory.” His voice was beautiful. His accent perfect, but it carried none of the self-importance that she often heard in the voices of many Englishmen. They made her feel out of place. Instead, he made her important, but somehow feeling important made her even more nervous, a discomfort that redoubled when he brought up Captain Tolliver’s name.

  “Tolliver has arrested the witch doctor.”

  “Yes, I know.” She was suddenly on her guard. What would she say to him if he asked her a question she did not want to answer, about how her uncle had made an enemy of Gichinga?

  “How has your father dealt with the presence of the Kikuyu and their medicine man? Converting the natives must have been hard given their beliefs in their witch doctor’s powers.”

  “My father is a joyful Christian, Mr. Finch Hatton. His favorite quote from the Bible is from the Psalms: ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness.’”

  Finch Hatton’s bright eyes danced with glee. “Not very Scottish of him.” He didn’t seem in the least worried that he might have insulted her heritage.

  Loving her father as she did, she could not take umbrage. She thought the same of him—that he was not at all like the dour clergymen she had met in Glasgow. “His grandfather on his mother’s side was an Anglo-Irish bishop. He was named Berkeley as it happened. I think he might have also been somewhere in Berkeley Cole’s family tree. Anyway, the medicine man’s most powerful weapon is the fear he can engender with his curses. My father’s is to have his flock experience the joy of loving Jesus. He thinks joy can drive out fear.”

  Finch Hatton’s bright blue glance left the sunbathed landscape and looked into her face. He seemed pained when he said, “I wish that were true.”

  She stood his piercing gaze as long as she could and looked down at her heavy boots, that her father insisted she always wear to ward off snakebite. Her father was not entirely immune to fear himself. “I wish that, too. But my father has made a number of converts. I think it is because he is so kind. I am sure if people love Jesus it’s because they have grown to love my father.” She knew she loved her father better than she loved the Lord. She was supposed to think that wrong, and she would never say it. Not to her father and not to Finch Hatton.

  “Speaking of powerful weapons,” Denys said, “I understand that the evidence against the native priest is a spear, and that there is some question of it being a Maasai weapon because of its shape.”

  That Finch Hatton, who had no connection to the deceased or to the police, knew this startled Vera. She did not know why, but she thought it ought to be a secret. She began to feel resentful that he knew it.

  He laughed that rich, liquid laugh of his. His eyes danced. “You must not be so surprised. You were born here; you have to know full well that there are not that many people here and to a man, gossip is almost as important to them as making a profit from what they do.”

  She was just enough put out by his glee in all of this to snap back. “You sp
eak as if only the Europeans are people. And maybe only the men. There are actually quite a lot of people here, and the Africans don’t all gossip all the time.”

  He put his hands together and bowed his head and spoke contritely. “Point well taken. I do wonder about that assumption though, about who might have used that weapon and why. Is it true that you can tell what tribe made the spear by looking at it.”

  “Yes,” she said, not entirely mollified. “Actually, the local ironworkers can tell which blacksmith made which implement, in much the same way you can tell a Rembrandt from a Rubens.”

  “Is there a blacksmith nearby?”

  She pointed to their right. “Just beyond those woods. At the edge of the Kikuyu village.”

  “I’d like to see that.” He leapt to his feet. “Take me to see it, please.”

  She rose slowly. “I will speak to my mother.”

  “Yes, of course.” He remained standing while she left the veranda.

  Once inside, she quickly found her mother in her workroom near the rear door, teaching three Kikuyu girls to make European dresses for themselves. Fearful of being roped into that effort, Vera quickly asked permission to take Denys Finch Hatton to visit the Kikuyu village. “Do not worry, Mother. I am not at all interested in him,” she quickly added.

  Her mother’s brown eyes looked disbelieving, as if Vera had said something patently impossible. “You may go. Stick to the path.”

  “Of course.” Vera took her rifle from the rack on the wall of her father’s study and pocketed a few shells. She felt vaguely unfaithful to Justin Tolliver as she walked onto the lawn with Denys Finch Hatton. “Perhaps you should take a rifle, too. At this hour the woods are usually safe, but—”

  He was already trotting toward the stable to fetch his weapon from the holster on his horse.

  The path was empty. The Kikuyu workers were gathered in the shade of the coffee plants taking their midmorning rest. Denys, to Vera’s delight, seemed content to leave off their conversation and walk in silence, listening only to the chirping of the insects and the chattering of little gray monkeys in the trees. The path, which ran between the coffee field and the cow pasture on one side and the woods on the other, was only partly shaded this close to midday. It cooled considerably once it plunged into the forest.

  Vera was admiring the flowering creepers hanging from tall trees and glistening here and there in pools of sunlight, when suddenly something more beautiful caught her eye. She put out her left arm to stop Finch Hatton and then moved her index finger to her lips. She pointed up at a rain tree a few yards into the woods.

  Finch Hatton took a quick, nearly soundless deep breath. About twenty feet from the ground, on a horizontal limb, a leopard was resting. The skin, bones, and gnawed carcass of a bushbuck hung over the limb between him and the trunk. His eyes were half closed. The handsome animal, which might have been deadly under other circumstances, was obviously sated from his early morning kill and not interested in anything but napping and digesting. Still, after admiring its beauty for a brief while, Vera, never taking her eyes from him, backed along the path. Denys, his rifle at the ready, followed her example.

  “How did you notice him?” Finch Hatton asked when they had gotten far enough away. “He was practically invisible with his spots in the dappled light.”

  “His tail hanging down,” Vera said. “You learn. When you have done it often enough, your eyes get used to what they are seeing. They seem to do it on their own, without your trying.”

  Finch Hatton shouldered his rifle. “I think that some people have a talent for it. You must.”

  Though his compliment gave her a glow, she said, “In a place like this, a person wouldn’t live very long if he completely lacked that skill.”

  “I hope I have it. I want to stay here.” He said that with a passion she sometimes heard from British people who seemed to love Africa as much as she did, even though, or perhaps because they were born and raised up there in the chill north.

  “Why did you come here in the first place?”

  “I am a second son,” he said. “I did not want to give my life over to the pursuit of an heiress.” He laughed as if it were a joke. She stopped and looked at him to see if it really was.

  His expression was completely jocular. “Not really. Doing that was never anything I seriously considered. I may have been born to it, but the sort of life I’d have had in England did not appeal. I needed something more. I thought I would find what I wanted here.”

  “And did you?”

  His beatific smile dawned on his face. “Yes, I think I have.”

  If this had been a conversation between two characters in the novels Vera’s granny sent her every Christmas, his words might have been the prelude to a proposal of marriage. But Finch Hatton was not looking at her when he talked of what he was looking for. His bright eyes scanned the trees and flowers of the forest and the ribbon of blue sky above them on the path. His arm swept an arc. “I did not know until I arrived here that this is what I wanted—a place where life can be forever new.”

  “I am glad you can see it for what it is.” She turned and pointed to a narrow path that forked off from the main way to the village. “The blacksmith is down this way.”

  They went quickly through a little corner of the forest, wary on the odd chance that a lion might be out looking for breakfast. Pink-blooming African daphnes surrounded their way, turning the scent of this forest from spice to sweet perfume. They emerged into an open area that smelled only of smoke and hot metal. There stood the smithy next to a hollow dug into the ground, lined with clay, and topped with a cone-shaped furnace. Vera pointed at it. “That is where he smelts his ore.”

  She drew Denys to the open-sided shed under which Muturi Embu, the blacksmith, stood. He was taking a red glowing lump of iron out of the fire with tongs and placing it on a stone before him. He was of short stature, like most of the Kikuyu tribesmen, but very powerful in his upper body. He wore a dark stained cloth tied around his waist that covered him to his ankles and a cowhide apron over his chest. The brown skin of his arms glowed with sweat. Behind him, on the single wall of his shed, hung all manner of spear blades, swords, arrowheads, hoes, knives, axes, and the razors that the Kikuyu, both men and women, used to shave their heads.

  Vera greeted him in his language. He bowed to her without letting go of his tongs or saying more than “Antiriri, wimwega.”

  “Antiriri,” Vera answered. “I am well.” She asked after his wives and children and told him Finch Hatton’s name.

  “I suppose,” Denys said, “that he works out here away from the village to avoid the danger of the fire.”

  Vera could not suppress a giggle. “There is fire in or near every single hut in the village. No, he is here because the Kikuyu consider the blacksmith unclean, so he must stay away from the others. Smiths cannot marry except within their group.”

  “Like the lower castes in India? I didn’t know that happened here. Ask him if I can look at the spearheads.” It was one of the things Vera liked very much about Finch Hatton. Most white settlers would not have asked permission of a native to do anything. They had not asked permission to move into their country and take it over. They always assumed they had a perfect right to take whatever they wanted. But Finch Hatton was not like that.

  When he gained the blacksmith’s assent, he carefully took down a spearhead. Vera went to his side and explained to him what about its design made it recognizable as Kikuyu. And how a Maasai spear would be different.

  “Ask him if he would make me a Maasai spearhead.”

  Vera did not like the question but she asked it, and Muturi Embu responded exactly as she expected him to and more respectfully than Finch Hatton deserved. “He says that he will be happy to make a spearhead for you in his design, but if the B’wana wants a Maasai spear, he must go to the Maasai blacksmith to get it. Given the traditional enmity between the Kikuyu and the Maasai, I think he finds the question a bit—” She didn’t
have the nerve to say “disrespectful.”

  “I asked,” Finch Hatton said, “because I wondered if the Kikuyu witch doctor could have easily gotten his hands on a Kikuyu spear that looked Maasai.”

  Vera wondered at this. Was Finch Hatton trying to solve the crime? The way Justin Tolliver frowned whenever he saw Denys, he was sure to see such an attempt as meddling. But then she did a little meddling of her own and asked Muturi Embu if and how a Kikuyu might come into possession of a Maasai spear.

  “We have taken their spears in battles in the past,” the blacksmith told her, “but never as many as they take of ours. But we blacksmiths melt them down and remake them into other things. We would never ever fight with one another’s spears or swords. The sword of one’s enemy kills one’s brother.”

  “So there are no Maasai spears among the Kikuyu?” She had thought this was the case, but she wanted to hear the blacksmith say it.

  “There are traders, who travel all around from the Lake Nam Lolwe—which you call Victoria—all the way to the coast that trade in what the blacksmiths of all the tribes make. There have always been these people. My grandfather spoke of his grandfather trading with them. If a person wants to get a Maasai spear, he can find one.”

  “Could Gichinga Mbura have gotten one from a trader?”

  Muturi Embu put down his work. “Mbura is too proud a man to have killed the Scottish doctor that way. If he had killed him with a spear, any spear, all would have seen that he was afraid of the white doctor’s magic.”

  Once Vera explained what he had said to Finch Hatton, they both saw that this was a much more plausible reason to consider the witch doctor innocent than was the rigmarole about the Maasai spear. She thought she had better tell this to Captain Tolliver. Then, Muturi Embu said something that overrode all that.

  “I myself have had Maasai swords and spears from the traders. Since the white man came, I have always been able to trade unusual iron things for goods that please my wives. There are white men who always want to trade for Maasai spears, especially old ones. I think because the Maasai are such fierce warriors that these men think their spears will make them strong, too. I had one during the long rains this year. I have never seen one like it—it had a design on the blade like this.” He drew a line in the air with his forefinger.