Bones of the River Read online

  He beckoned the watchful Abiboo. “Put this man in irons,” he said.

  Pinto Fernandez had been in many tight corners, and he was a man of considerable initiative. Before the sergeant’s hand fell on his arm, he jumped to the taffrail and leapt the four or five feet which separated the Zaire from the bank. Before the Houssa could raise his rifle, he had plunged into the bush, leaving behind, as a souvenir of his presence, a grey topper and the nearly gold-headed walking-stick, which he carried as part of the insignia of his respectability.

  He heard the sound of a shot and the whine and patter of a bullet as it flicked through the leaves of the trees, and sprinted along the narrow native track into the forest. He was no stranger to the wild lands, and had the bush instinct which led him unerringly to the broader native road that ran parallel with the river bank. In the early hours of the morning he came to a little clearing, and D’lama-m’popo, coming out of his hut, stood stock still at the startling apparition.

  “Oh master, I see you,” said D’lama respectfully.

  Pinto, who knew most of the dialects of the rivers, answered readily.

  “Give me food, man,” he said. “I am going on a long journey for Sandi. Also I want sleep, for I have walked through the forest, battling with wild beasts, all this night. And if any ask you about me you shall be silent, for it is Sandi’s desire that no man should know that I am hereabouts.”

  D’lama prepared a meal, brought water from the forest spring, and left his guest to sleep. That evening, Pinto was wakened by the entry of his host.

  “Man, Sandi wants you,” said D’lama, “for this is the talk amongst all the villagers, that a certain one was taken prisoner by Sandi and escaped, and the master has sent word that you must be taken.”

  “That is fool’s talk,” said Pinto. “You see I am a white man, wearing trousers.”

  D’lama surveyed him critically. “That is true, for you are not quite black,” he said. “Now, if you are a white man, then I have a wonderful thought in my head. For hereabouts lives a witch who talks with birds, and the birds told her that she should marry a white man, and after that the land should prosper.”

  “I am already married,” said Pinto hastily.

  “Who is not?” asked the crude D’lama. “Yet you shall marry her, and I will be silent. And no people live in this forest who talk – except the birds. If you say no; then I will take you to Sandi, and there is an end. But if you say you will marry, then I will bring this girl to you.”

  “Bring the woman,” said Pinto after a moment’s thought; but whatever plans he had formed were purposeless.

  “First I will tie you by the hands and feet,” said D’lama calmly, “lest when I am gone, an evil spirit comes into your heart and you run away.”

  And Pinto, protesting, allowed himself to be trussed, for D’lama-m’popo was a man of inches and terribly strong.

  The woman who talked with birds was in her old place beneath the nests of the weaver birds when D’lama arrived.

  “You are D’lama, the killer of old women,” she said, not looking round, “and a bird has told me that you have found a white man.”

  “That is true, Kobali,” said D’lama, in a sweat, “and as to the old woman, a tree fell upon her –”

  Kobali rose silently and led the way into the forest, D’lama following. After a while they came to the hut where Pinto lay, in some pain, and together they brought him out into the light of the moon, and the girl examined him critically whilst the bonds were being removed.

  “He is a white that is not black, and a black that is not white,” she said. “I think this man will do for me, for he seems very pretty.”

  Pinto’s hand rose mechanically to twirl his sparse moustache.

  * * *

  “I can’t really understand what happened to that fellow,” said Sanders. “He must have got in the track of a leopard.”

  “Or the leopard must have got on his,” suggested Hamilton. “By the way, what did he want with Bones?”

  But Sanders shook his head. He was a model of discretion, and Bones, in his many journeys up and down the river, never guessed that from behind the bush that fringed the river near the Isisi, dwelt one who, in happier circumstances, had described himself as Dom Gonsalez, and who possessed a very charming wife in the town of Funchal – or did possess her until she got tired of waiting, and contracted a morganatic marriage with the second officer of a banana boat out of Cadiz.

  THE LAKE OF THE DEVIL

  M’suru, an Akasava chief of some importance, was hunting one day on the wrong side of the Ochori frontier when there appeared, at a most unpropitious moment, a man called Mabidini, who was something that was neither ranger nor hunter, yet was a little of each, for he watched the frontiers for his lord Bosambo, and poached skins secretly in the Akasava country.

  He was a young man, and, by the standards which are set by the women of the Upper River, handsome; and these qualities made his subsequent offence the more unforgivable, for M’suru was middle-aged and fat and past the attractive period of life, so that only the women he bought were his, and nobody did anything for love of him. Mabidini, on the contrary, crooked his finger, and where was the marriage bond?

  Inauspicious the moment, for M’suru was skinning a great water buck, and his four huntsmen had the skin stretched for salting.

  “O ko!” said Mabidini. “This is bad news for Boambo my chief! No man hunts in this wood but he.”

  M’sura wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the back of the hand that held the skinning knife.

  “Who sees, knows,” he said significantly. “You shall have the fore-part of this meat for your pot.”

  But Mabidini desired neither flesh nor skin, and the word went to Bosambo, and eventually to Mr Commissioner Sanders, and M’suru paid ten bags of salt by way of fine. Worse than this, he became the mock of such as Mabidini, a man without a village, who dwelt in a hut in the very heart of the wood and had no people.

  One night six strange warriors slipped into the forest, and, taking Mabidini from his hut, they flogged him with skin whips, and burnt his toes so that he hobbled for months. That his assailants were Akasava he did not doubt; he would sooner have believed that he was dead than that M’suru did not instigate the outrage.

  One day Bosambo sent for him. “Mabidini, I have spoken with Sandi, who is my own brother, and he says there can be no palaver over this matter of your beating, because none knows, and M’suru, who knows, lies,” he said. “They say of M’suru that he has a magic spear and therefore is very powerful. Also he has a new wife whom he bought for ten thousand brass rods. You are a lonely man, and it seems that, if men attack you in the night, such a spear would save you from having your toes burnt. For your wife would alarm you, and the spear would be under your bed.”

  “Lord, I have no wife,” said Mabidini, who was no more dense than any man of the Ochori.

  “Nor spear,” said Bosambo.

  So Mabidini took a canoe and drifted down to within a mile or two of the village where his enemy dwelt, and one day he saw, walking in the forest, a girl who cried and rubbed the weals on her shoulders. He knew her to be M’suru’s wife and spoke to her. At first she was frightened…

  Night fell suddenly on the village of Kolobafa and was welcomed by the third wife of M’suru, for there was a deficiency in her household equipment which her lord, with his fox-eyes, would have seen instantly. As it was, he came home too tired and hungry to be suspicious, and, having had his fill sitting solitary before the little fire that smouldered in front of the hut, he nodded and dozed until the chill of the night sent him in a daze of sleep to find his skin bed. The third (and newest) wife, whose name was Kimi, sat aloof, watching in an agony of apprehension, and when he had gone into the hut clasped her bare sides with such force that she ached.

  But no bull-roar of fury proclaimed the discovery of his loss, and, creeping to the side of the hut, she listened, heard his snores and crept back.

  She en
joyed a hut of her own, and the jealous elder wife, brooding in the dark doorway of the hut she shared with the ousted second, saw Kimi steal away through the village street, and called shrilly to her companion, for, if she hated the second wife, she hated Kimi worst, and in such a crisis lesser enemies have the appearance of friends.

  “Kimi has gone to the river to see her lover. Let us wake M’suru and tell him.”

  The second wife thrust her blunt head over the stout shoulder that filled the doorway, and peered after the vanishing girl.

  “M’suru sends his spears at night to the N’gombi man, who sharpens them on a stone. If we wake M’suru with a foolish story he will beat us.”

  “She carried no spears,” said the first wife, contemptuously. “You are afraid.” Suddenly a thought struck her. “If she carries any spear, it will be the Spear of the Ghost!”

  There was a shocked “huh!” from the second wife, for the Spear of the Ghost had come to M’suru from his father, and from his father’s father, and from countless generations of fathers. It was a short killing spear, endowed with magical qualities. By its potency M’suru could perform miracles. The broad blade dipped into the river brought back the fish which, for some reason, had deserted the known spearing places; carried into the forest, its magic peopled the woods with prey; but its greatest property was this: if a man were lost in the deep forest he had but to balance the spear on his fingertip and the blade pointed unerringly to safety.

  It had many other qualities, curious and awe-inspiring. Thus, all other spears leapt toward the king spear, and could not be drawn away except by great force.

  Even the elder wife of M’suru could not screw her courage into waking her lord. It was not until the chief of Kolobafa came out blinking into the daylight and bellowed for his wife, that the loss was discovered. For lost indeed was the magic spear!

  Mr Commissioner Sanders was holding a palaver by the Crocodile’s Pool over a matter of belated taxation, and M’suru, in full panoply, attended to lay before him his great complaint.

  “Lord,” he said, “a terrible misfortune has come upon me and my people. My wife had a lover, whose name is Mabidini, a man of the Ochori tribe and well known to you because he swore falsely against me. Because this woman loved him, she went to him when I slept, taking the Spear of the Ghost, which, as your lordship knows, is the most holy spear in the world, and there is none other like it. Therefore I come to you for leave to carry my spears into the Ochori country.”

  “O ko,” said Sanders sardonically, “what manner of man are you that you set yourself up to punish? For it seems that I am nothing in this land, and M’suru, a little chief of the Akasava, can take my place. As for your spear, it is made of a certain iron which I know well.”

  He called for his orderly, gave an order in Arabic, and Abiboo went away, to return with a small steel magnet.

  “Look well at this, M’suru; for if your spear is magic, so then is this little thing that is shaped like the bend of the lost river that runs to Bura-Ladi.”

  Sanders took the spear from the chief’s hand and put the magnet against it.

  “Now pull your spear,” he said, and it required a jerk to break the weapon from the magnet’s influence.

  “There shall be no killing and no carrying of spears, M’suru,” he said. “It seems to me that already you know the Ochori country so well that your young warriors can find their paths in the dark! When I go back to my fine house by the sea I will have another spear made for you, and it will be called the Spear of Sanders, and you shall hold it for me and my king. As to the woman, if she has a lover, you may put her away according to the law. I shall return when the moon is new, and you shall bring the matter before me. The palaver is finished.”

  M’suru, in no way satisfied, went back to his village and called together the elder men and such friends as he had – which were few, for he was a notoriously severe man and in no sense popular.

  “In two days from now Sandi will go back to his fine house by the river, and his spies will go with him; for it is well known that in the days which follow the palavers the spies do not watch, for all people fear Sandi. Therefore, send your young spearmen to me in the first hour of the night, and I will lead you to the hut of Mabidini, and we will take the spear which belongs to me, and such goats and women as we may find.”

  The way to the hut was a long one, for the Ochori territory throws into the Akasava a deep, knife-shaped peninsula, and a true peninsula in the sense that it is bordered by a river which has no appearance except in the wet season. And this has to be avoided. There is water enough at all times, but the rank grass grows quickly, and here all manner of strange, aqueous beasts have their dwellings. This river, F’giri, runs to that deep, still lake which is called Kafa-guri – literally, “the hole in the world.”

  On the fourth day M’suru fetched up at the deserted hut of his enemy, and learnt by inquiry from a wandering bushman that Mabidini had gone eastward to the silent lake.

  “This man is not afraid, because he has my spear, which is very powerful against ghosts,” said M’suru when he heard the news and followed, for the secret river was in flood. But his warriors did not know his objective.

  * * *

  “I don’t like the look of Bones,” said Hamilton, glowering under the rim of his topee at the figure which was approaching the residency with long strides.

  Sanders knocked the ash from his cheroot and smiled.

  “The impression I have is that you never have been enamoured of Bones’ personal appearance,” he said.

  “I’m not referring to his general homeliness,” said Hamilton. “My concentrated antipathy is directed to the particular Bones who is at present visible to the naked eye. I dislike Bones when he struts,” he growled, “because when he struts he is pleased with himself, and when Bones is pleased with himself it is time for all modest men to take cover. Good morning, Bones. Why the smirk?”

  Bones saluted jerkily. He had a habit of bringing up his hand and allowing it to quiver – no other word describes the motion – within half an inch of the helmet.

  “I wish to heaven you’d learn to salute properly,” snapped Hamilton. “I’d give you two hours’ saluting drill for two pins!”

  “But, dear old officer, this is the very latest,” said Bones calmly, and repeated the action. “I saw a stunning old sergeant of the Guards do it. What is good enough for the jolly old Grenadiers is good enough for poor old Bones. I think you said ‘smirk’?”

  He put his hand up to his ear as though he was anxious not to lose a word.

  “Stand to attention, you insubordinate hound,” said Hamilton. “And if you’re deaf you’d better report and see a – a–”

  “Oculist is the word you want, dear old Ham – oculist, from the word ‘hark,’ sometimes pronounced ‘harkulist.’”

  “You seem pleased with yourself, Bones,” interposed Sanders hastily.

  “Not so much pleased, dear old excellency,” said Bones, “as what you might describe as grateified.”

  “You mean gratified,” said Hamilton.

  “Great, grateful, grateified,” retorted Bones reproachfully. “Dear old thing, you’re all wrong this morning. What’s the matter with you? Jolly old liver out of condition?”

  He pulled up a chair, sat down, and, resting his chin on his palms, glared across to him.

  “Have you ever thought, dear old officer,” he asked in the hollow voice he invariably assumed when he became profound, “that here we are, living in this strange and almost wild country! We know this place, we know the river – it is water; we know the land – it is land; we know the dinky old flora and the jolly old fauna, and yet we are perhaps ignorant of the very longitude and latitude of, so to speak, our jolly old native home!”

  He stopped, inserted his monocle, and glared triumphantly at the dazed Hamilton.

  “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “Has it occurred to you, dear old thing, that we should not be
here if it were not for the brave and intrepid souls who, so to speak, have blazed a path through the jolly old wilderness?”

  Hamilton looked at Sanders in alarm. “Have you any quinine, sir?” he asked.

  “No, no, dear old medical one, I am not suffering from fever; I am, in fact, non compos mentis, to employ a Latin phrase.”

  “That is what I’m suggesting,” said Hamilton.

  “Has it ever occurred to you – ?” Bones went on, but Hamilton stopped him.

  “The thing that is occurring to me at the moment is that you’ve been drinking, Bones.”

  “Me, sir?” said the indignant Bones. “That’s an actionable statement, dear old officer. As a scientist, I–”

  “Oh, you’re a scientist, are you? Knew there was something queer about you. What branch of science is suffering from your malignant association?”

  Bones smiled tolerantly. “I was merely pointing out, dear old member of the jolly old public, that if it hadn’t been for our explorers – Livingstone, Stanley – in fact, dear old thing, I’ve been elected a Member of the Royal Geographical Society.”

  He drew back in his chair to watch the effect.

  “That is fine, Bones,” said Sanders. “I congratulate you. How did you become a member?”

  “By paying a guinea or two,” said the scornful Hamilton. “Anybody can become a member if he pays his subscription.”

  “You’re wrong, my boy,” said Bones. “I wrote a dinky little article on the etymological peculiarities of native tribes; in other words, the difference between one set of native johnnies and another set of native johnnies.”

  “Good Lord!” gasped Hamilton. “Did you call it ‘etymological’?”

  “Naturally,” said Bones calmly. “There is no other word.”

  Captain Hamilton’s face was a study. “Etymology,” he said gently, “is that branch of grammar which deals with the derivation of words, you poor fish! The word you were labouring after was ‘ethnology.’ Did you call it etymology?”