Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

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  For John Norman Linder, dear friend and fellow traveler, who said, “Why don’t you write about that Africa that you are so in love with?”

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Place and Date Line

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Annamaria Alfieri

  About the Author

  Copyright

  “I am the Lord, thy God.

  Thou shalt not have strange gods before me.”

  Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one.

  —ISAK DINESEN, OUT OF AFRICA, 1937

  Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.—Out of Africa, new things always flow.

  —PLINY (AD 23–79)

  THE PROTECTORATE OF BRITISH EAST AFRICA

  1911

  1.

  They never went out in the dark because of the animals. But if she was ever to escape the boredom of life confined to the mission compound, tonight determination had to win out over terror.

  So, well before first light, she left her bedroom. The things she would need were packed and waiting for her in the Kikuyu village.

  She went barefoot through the back door of the house and into the kitchen yard. Once outside she slipped on her boots and tried to step lightly. She stole past the mission office and the school. The moonlight was dim, but adequate. Her eyes were good.

  All she wanted was a bit of adventure. To go on safari. She resented being kept at home while her brother, Otis, was allowed to go. She was nearly six years older, yet he had already gone more times than she. The Newlands had invited her as well as Otis, but her mother had refused to allow her leave. Her mother, who tried to control every minute of her time. Well, tomorrow morning she would tell Mr. and Mrs. Newland that Mother had changed her mind. By the time her parents discovered what she had done, they would have no way to bring her back.

  It was juvenile of her to be doing this. She was a grown woman, nearly twenty. But she would never have the chance to be an actual grownup, to make her own decisions. British rules of maidenhood did not allow for that.

  Otis was already at the Newland farm, set to go off into the wilderness in the morning. After much cajoling, he had agreed to help her slip away and join the safari party. “We will leave at dawn,” he had said before he went. “I will ask Mr. Newland to take us near the Kikuyu village, but you will have to be there and ready by six.”

  “That’s easy enough.”

  “What will you say if they catch you?”

  “I will go beforehand and put my rucksack and my rifle in Wangari’s hut. That way, if they see me up in the night, they will not suspect the truth.”

  “Okay,” he said, grave faced. “That’s a good plan.” She loved it that he pretended to be a man. He was such a serious boy.

  The chill of the wee hours made her wish for the jacket that was already at the bottom of her pack. She scanned the shadows for the slightest movement as she crossed the bare packed earth of the mission grounds, listening with her ears, with her skin, for any sound of danger. Hippos might have come up from the river to graze. They were deadly but not quiet. The cats were silent but unlikely to be hunting here now. They came often to look for water in the dry season, but not after the long rains, when the land was moist and the water holes all round about were full.

  Stupidly she thought of Tolliver. Whenever she moved from one place to another her thoughts always went to him, as if her bones and her blood vessels wanted her to move only in his direction, wherever else she was going. Tolliver, though, would never approve of her defying her parents. He was a proper Englishman. Men like him never expected a good girl to do anything but what she was told, even when she was an adult in every other way.

  The moonlight threw a weak shadow beneath the thorn tree growing in the sward that separated the stone hospital from the grass and wattle school. A rustling in the underbrush halted her steps and her breath. She was between the river and whatever that was in the shadows near the chapel. If it was a hippo, it might kill her with one snap of its powerful jaws just for blocking its way back to the water. Suddenly the night was full of sound. As many cicadas as there were stars, singing out near the hospital privies. The chilling cry of hyenas behind her, beyond the coffee groves. And then the long, deep, hollow vibration of a lion’s roar that sounded as if it came from the core of the earth. The cat’s night song did not frighten her. They made that noise when they mated. She thought of Justin Tolliver again but pushed her mind away from the mating call in her own blood.

  She stole toward the stable, with her eyes to her right where the rustling in the undergrowth had come from. When she heard nothing, she ran flat out until she came to the veranda of the hospital. The windows of the building were dark. Not even a candle burned in the wards. She slipped into the gloom at the near-side stone wall, panting a bit, more from fear than from running. She breathed deeply to calm her nerves. The noise of something moving came again, nearer now. She was about to back away to try to get inside the building before the animal reached her when she saw a person carrying a lantern, approaching around the far corner. It could only be Otis, come back to help her. But why would he bring the lamp? She held her breath not to shout and scold him.

  She crept in his direction.

  The figure carrying the lantern became clear.

  Vera gasped. “Mother!”

  “Vera?”

  “I— I—”

  “Go to your room and stop this nonsense.”

  “But, Mother…”

  “Immediately.”

  There was no disobeying her mother when she used that tone.

  * * *

  While, in the dark of night, Vera McIntosh returned to her bed, where she consoled herself with fantasies that involved kissing Justin Tolliver, the young man who was the object of her infatuation stood in the half-wrecked bar of the Masonic Hotel in Nairobi, his hands in the air and two revolvers aimed at his heart. His own weapon was still in the holster at his side. This was a tight spot where an assistant superintendent of police should never find himself, not even a neophyte like him. How he got here was as easy to explain as it was humiliating and exasperating.

  His superior officer—District Superintendent of Police Jodrell—was off on home leave in England, making Tolliver answerable directly to Britain’s top man in this sector—District Commissioner Cranford.

  When Tolliver was called to the hotel to take control of two drunken Europeans who were tearing up the place, he brought with him a squad of his best askaris—African policemen who could be counted on to be brave and dutiful, including the best of the lot, Kwai Libazo.

  But as they jogged at doubletime through the unpaved streets of the ramshackle young town, carrying flaming torches to light their way, Tolliver knew he was in danger of i
ncurring D.C. Cranford’s wrath. He was about to make the unforgivable mistake of using African policemen against Europeans. Cranford had the strongest opinions of such matters. So Tolliver had left his squad outside the corrugated iron and wood hotel and entered the bar alone. Unfortunately, he had failed to draw his pistol before he did so. Perhaps if he had not been exhausted from doing double work for days now, including fighting a fire last night in an Indian shop on Victoria Street, or if he had cared less about what Cranford thought and more about his own skin, he would not have let these louts get the advantage of him. As it was, he was completely at their mercy, unless the askaris outside came to his aid. But why would they if they had no idea how muddle-headed he had been?

  “You are being damned fools,” he said with more bravado than his predicament warranted. “If you interfere with a police officer in the execution of his duty, you are risking many years of hard imprisonment. If you hurt me, you will be up before a firing squad.”

  “Bloody hell, we will,” the bigger man said with a laugh. “Listen, you puppy, on the count of three you are turning tail outta here or you’ll be picking lead outta your legs.”

  Tolliver gave them what he hoped looked like a careless, indulgent smile. “I am not leaving without putting the two of you under arrest. If you come with me peacefully, I’ll not charge you with resisting.” He took a quick step forward thinking that it might intimidate them.

  The smaller of the two, a red-haired bloke with a vicious sneer, jammed his pistol into Tolliver’s stomach and said, “Stop right there or it’s the graveyard for you.”

  “If you shoot me, you will be joining me there,” Tolliver said. He thought to add that the sound of a shot from inside the bar would bring in the squadron of policemen he had left guarding the entrance. But it suddenly occurred to him that all he had to do was get one of these drunks to fire a shot—not at him—but at something. Help would storm into the room forthwith.

  He raised his hands higher and pulled himself up to his full height, so that he towered over the sly, little man. “How do I know that gun is loaded?” he asked.

  “Easy,” his assailant said. “See that whiskey bottle on the shelf?”

  “Certainly,” Tolliver said, as nonchalantly as he could. It was impossible to miss since it was the only one still standing. All the others, along with just about anything breakable in the bar, had been smashed to pieces before Tolliver arrived and lay littering the floor.

  The man turned his pistol away from Tolliver and without taking aim, shot the top off the bottle. His big companion looked away to see the result, and in a flash Tolliver had his pistol out and leveled at them.

  In two heartbeats, Kwai Libazo was smashing through the door, his rifle at the ready.

  “That was some excellent shooting,” Tolliver said as he relieved the bigger man of his weapon.

  The other askaris were piling into the room.

  “Libazo, handcuff these men and march them to the station.” Tolliver knew when he gave that order that Cranford would disapprove. But he’d already almost gotten himself killed trying to appease Cranford, with his British ideas about keeping the natives in their place. Given the choice between death and the D.C.’s disfavor, he would take the latter, no matter how displeasing it would be.

  2.

  Two days later, as the sun rose, three dozen Kikuyu workers set out from their village to walk the mile and a half to their work in the coffee fields at the Scottish Mission. They were clad in shukas—cloths tied at the shoulder—of an orange-brown that matched almost exactly the soil beneath their bare feet. They moved along in silence, some not thinking of anything much at all, but some pondering but not speaking of the strange fact that this land on which their forebears had lived practically since the dawn of man now belonged to representatives of a foreign god. The women among them were past resenting that they were required to work for the privilege of farming the land of their ancestors. The men were more inclined to be resentful, since before the coming of the white men, they had not had to do fieldwork at all. Women did that. Men watched and remained at the ready to take up their warriors’ shields and spears and defend their cattle, goats, sons, and women from attacks by other tribes.

  The pairs of men who walked at the head and behind the column carried spears, like true defenders. But they watched, not for invading Maasai, but for jackals or leopards. All manner of predators might be out at this hour, hunting in the woods that separated their village from the white man’s buildings. Such dangers were unlikely, since there were plenty of antelope and zebra, predators’ prey, on the plains below these hills. Still, the guardsmen scanned the deep shade beneath the trees on either side of their path. Those in front held up their hands from time to time, if they heard noises that could mean danger. After a few seconds of intense listening, they gave the signal to proceed. More than a few of the farmworkers thought this action was for effect, to make the guards look and feel important. In the nearly twenty years of this mission’s existence no farmworker had been attacked by an animal on this path.

  As the ragtag column reached the edge of the plantation, the workers picked up hoes from a shed at the edge of the field and spread out between the rows of fragrant flowering coffee bushes. The long rains had come early and been very good this year. The lushness of the fields pleased the Kikuyu, though they had no use for the product that their labor would yield. During this time of the cycle, their job of work was to keep down the weeds that wanted to strangle the crop.

  A scream pierced the silence.

  It came from a place about midway between the stone hospital building and the river. An alarm such as one might expect from a woman attacked by a cobra, but it came from a man.

  Several hundred yards away, in her bedroom in the missionary’s house at the crest of the hill, Vera McIntosh was trying to hold on to a beautiful dream. She was waltzing with Justin Tolliver, who danced in that athletic way of his. In her dream, neither of them wore gloves. He held her right hand gently in his left. The white drill cloth of his tropical dress uniform felt smooth under her left palm. The song was not in the rather oom-pah-pah style of the usual King’s African Rifles Band at the Nairobi Club, but the sweet strains of a full orchestra such as she had danced to at balls in Glasgow. That music had been one of the few compensations of her most recent visit to her maternal grandmother. In her sleep, Vera danced on tiptoes that barely touched the floor. Then the violins, from farther and farther away, began to make a screeching sound. Vera tried to put her arms around Tolliver’s neck. And suddenly she was awake.

  The screams were coming from down the hill. From the fields. And there were shouts at the front door. “Reverend Sahib!” And banging. She threw open the mosquito netting and pulled on a robe. The long hall outside her bedroom led to the noise. At the entrance, her father and Njui, their houseboy, were opening the door. She could not make out what the people on the veranda were saying. Her father groaned.

  Her mother called from her bedroom door. “What has happened?”

  “I don’t know, Mother. I will find out.” She ran back to her room, dressed quickly, and without even a splash of water on her face or a pause to lace up her boots, she ran out.

  A knot of workers, whose shaved heads barely showed above the coffee plants, moved around, their arms raised in fright. She saw her father’s pith helmet and the battered brown hat of Joe Morley, the farm manager. Vera ran to them.

  “Father?”

  “Stay back, lass.”

  She disobeyed, circled the knot of people, and pushed through the Kikuyu, who opened a path for her. A gasp shook her chest. Her uncle Josiah lay facedown between the rows. Dew clung to his khaki trousers as it did to the dark leaves of the plants. His left arm was half under his body, oddly askew. A native spear stood straight up in the middle of his back. His tan jacket had a slight stain of red-brown where the point of the spear had entered.

  Her father was at her side. He put his arm over her shoulders.

&
nbsp; “He’s dead,” she said. She had meant it as a question, but it came out as a statement, though she could hardly believe it.

  Her father drew her to him and turned her head, shielding her eyes from the sight. “Ay,” he said. “We’ll have to tell your mother.” He turned to Joe Morley. “You’ll have to send someone to notify the police. Move the body into the hospital.”

  “You’ll have to help me,” Joe said. “None of this lot will touch a dead body.”

  It was a taboo Vera knew well. She had known the Kikuyu to burn a hut where a woman had died in childbirth. They never touched a dead person.

  Joe Morley moved toward her uncle’s head. He picked up Josiah Pennyman’s hat, which had fallen off and lay beside his corpse. Her uncle’s dark hair shone in the early morning sunlight.

  Her father moved toward the dead man’s feet. “Let’s get it over with,” he said and bent to lift the legs.

  “I’ll go to my mother,” Vera said.

  “No, lassie.” Her father’s voice was strangely commanding. “I will tell her. I will be there in a moment. Get yourself a cup of tea, my girl. You’re as pale as the coffee blossoms.”

  And the world is as bitter as their perfume, she thought. Her uncle was dead. He, the pride of her granny. The handsome, brilliant doctor. Someone everyone seemed to like and admire. Vera felt a tinge of guilt, realizing that she had doubted how wonderful he was. In truth, though he was a member of her small family, living in close proximity, she hardly knew him. And now he was dead. And she was supposed to be extremely sorry. And she was, even though he never took the least interest in her.

  She went to the kitchen and asked Njui to make a pot of tea. In a little while, she heard her father coming in, his tread heavier than usual, and his knock on her mother’s door. “My lass,” he said softly. It was hard for Vera to think of her mother as anyone’s lass.

  * * *

  Later that morning, in the newly constructed Government House in Nairobi, Kwai Libazo stood with his back to the dark paneling of the district commissioner’s office, trying to seem inanimate, but listening carefully to what B’wana Cranford was saying to Assistant District Superintendent Tolliver. If Libazo had been naked and closed his eyes and mouth, he would have been nearly invisible, his skin so exactly matched the color of the wood behind him. As it was, the khaki of his uniform shorts and shirt, the blue-black of his puttees, and the dark orange shade of his leather sandals gave him away. His red fez was the brightest thing in the room, except for the British flag that stood behind District Commissioner Cranford.