Bones of the River Page 8

  “Lord,” said Bosambo, “I sent no such book, nor have I seen Dhoti. And because of things I heard, I sent my spies into the Akasava and they did not come back. I myself would have gone, but my young and cunning listeners told me that Ofaba waited to seize me, and his canoes watched the river. So, lord, I came secretly.”

  Sanders fingered his chin, his face set and hard.

  “Get steam in the Zaire, Hamilton. I leave for the Upper River just as soon as you are ready. I shall want ten soldiers and a rope.”

  * * *

  In the deepest jungle of the Forest of Dreams, and in a secret place between two marshes was a hut, and stretched on a bed of skins before the door lay a young man. He was yellow of face, unshaven, gaunt. The fever which comes to white men in this forest of illusions was on him, and his teeth chattered dismally. Nevertheless, he smiled, and his eyes lit up as the girl came from a belt of trees, carrying in her arms a large and steaming pot.

  “By jove, M’mina, I am glad to see you,” he said in English, as he reached out and took her hand.

  “My husband and my lover,” she murmured, fondling the thin fingers between her palms, “I do not understand you when you speak with that tongue. I have brought you food, and I have spoken with the devils that you shall get well.”

  Terence chuckled weakly. “The grey birds have not come?” he asked.

  “One will come soon – my spirit tells me,” she said, squatting on the ground by the side of him.

  He dropped his arm on her shoulder and looked fondly down into the round and comely face.

  “There is no woman like you in the world, M’mina. You are the most wonderful of all. And I will take you across the black water, and you shall be a great lady.”

  “Lord, I will stay here, and you also,” she said calmly; “for I knew when I saw you first, that you were the husband that the ghosts had whispered to me about.”

  He was looking at her raptly. “O woman,” he said in Bomongo, “you are very beautiful.” And then he stopped, for her eyes were searching the heavens. Suddenly she sprang up, and, pursing her lips, sent forth a long trill of melody. It was less a whistle than a high vocal note, and though it was not loud, the swift bird that was crossing the patch of sky checked, wheeled and came in narrowing circles lower and lower, till it dropped at her feet. She stooped, picked up the grey pigeon and smoothed its plumage. Then, with fingers deft with practice, she took the tissue paper that was fastened about the leg by a rubber band and gave it to the man.

  He peered down at the Arabic characters. “It is from Sandi to Bosambo,” he said, “and he says all is well.”

  She nodded. “Then this little bird may go,” she answered; “and my lord need not write any message to deceive the fat man of the Ochori. Lord, I fear this man, and have spoken with Ofaba that he may be killed.”

  Terence Doughty fell back on his pillow and closed his eyes.

  “You’re a wonderful girl,” he murmured in English, and she tried to repeat the words. “Clever girl…what a splendid mind you must have!”

  She stooped and covered him with a skin rug, and then, at the sound of footsteps, she turned quickly. A lean man in white duck was crossing the clearing, and behind him she saw the glint of steel and the red tarbosh of soldiers.

  “O Sandi,” she greeted him without embarrassment, “so you have found me and my husband.”

  “And three little graves, M’mina,” said Sanders quietly. “Now you shall answer to me for your life.”

  She shook her head. “You will not kill me, Sandi, because that is not your way. In all time you have never hanged any woman from the high tree, and I think I shall live, because I am well loved by certain devils and ghosts, and my ju-ju is strong for me. Also for this man.”

  Terence was staring up at Sanders, a frown on his emaciated face.

  “’Morning,” he said, a little resentfully. “You know my wife?”

  “I know her very well,” said Sanders softly.

  “Hope you didn’t mind my fooling round with your messages,” said Doughty. “By the way, I’ve at last got the Bomongo word for…” His voice sank into a drowsy murmur. Mr Terence Doughty did not wholly recover consciousness until he was halfway on the voyage to England, and then he woke as from a bad dream. In that dream there figured a strange and gracious figure, which he could not identify or remember. All his life, even when he was comfortably and respectably married, there hovered in the background of his mind the illusion of a greater happiness which he had once experienced.

  Sitting in the Village of Irons, in that portion reserved for the women who had worked evilly against the Government, M’mina often said to her fellows in durance: “Sandi has taken my man, but my soul and spirit and ghost is with him always, and my devil shall whisper in his ear: ‘M’mina waits for you in the Forest of Dreams.’”

  Which in a sense was perfectly true, though Terence Doughty would have been shocked if he could have identified the woman who flitted through his thoughts and was the foundation of many dreams…

  Once he woke with a cry, and his wife asked him if he was ill.

  “No, no… I was thinking…a nice gel… I wonder who she was?”

  His wife smiled. She was wise enough never to probe into the past, but sometimes she wondered who that nice gel was.

  THE BRASS BEDSTEAD

  There is no tribe on the river that has not its most secret mystery. In the course of the years, Mr Commissioner Sanders had acquired a working knowledge of hundreds, yet was well aware that he had but touched the fringe of multitudes. For within every mystery is yet another. He knew that within the pods of a specie of wild pea there dwelt a beneficent spirit called “Cha”, that brought luck and prosperity, but that if the pea was split into four and given to four people, one would die within a moon, but he did not learn for years that if one of the four quarters remained green, there would be no fish in the river for the space of nine moons.

  Every plant and flowering tree had its peculiar familiar, good or bad, and once he had been brought a hundred and fifty miles to a great palaver, and all because a mealy stalk had produced only one cob – which was a sign of coming pestilence. Sometimes a peculiar potent would not appear at all and a hundred thousand men and women would sit and shiver their apprehension, whilst search parties would go forth and seek it.

  In the end Sanders evolved a formula. At headquarters was a squat concrete house, built at the time of a serious war to store ammunition. The magazine was still employed for that purpose, but Sanders found it a new use. It became a repository of ju-jus. When M’shimba M’shamba (which is another name for a small typhoon) did not put in an appearance, and the Isisi and N’gombi people met in solemn conclave to discuss what evil had been done that the great green spirit did not walk abroad, Sanders came.

  “Have no fear, for M’shimba stays with me in my Ghost House, being very weary.”

  When the famous Tree of the World was uprooted in a storm and swept out of sight down the river, Sanders could reassure a trembling people.

  “This great tree Is. It lives in my strange House of Ghosts, and none other shall see it. There it sits making good magic for the Isisi.”

  Bones came to be custodian of the Ghost House by natural processes. Finding that certain credit attached to the position, he claimed it for his own, and when the lower river folk lost their ju-ju (maliciously conveyed on to the Zaire by a native workman and concealed in the engine furnace) Bones assumed responsibility.

  “This fine ju-ju came to my Ghost House, and there he lives, and every morning I speak to him and he speaks to me.”

  “Lord, we should like to see our beautiful ju-ju, for he was made wonderfully out of a magic tree by our fathers,” said one of the troubled elders.

  “Him you may see,” said Bones significantly, “but if you look upon the other ghosts who live with him, your eyes will fall out.”

  They decided to leave the ju-ju to his tender care.

  The plan worked exceeding
ly well until Bosambo fell out with the Akasava.

  Bosambo, Paramount Chief of the Ochori, best-eared of all chiefs, had an elementary but effective system of justice. For him no frontiers existed, no sovereignty was sacred, though he rigidly enforced the restrictions of frontier and the holiness of the Ochori territory upon others. There came into the forest land at the extreme southern edge of his land a party of Akasava huntsmen in search of game, and these with a lordly indifference to the inviolability of his territority, speared and shot without so much as “by your leave.”

  They were in search of the small monkeys with white whiskers, which are considered a delicacy by the epicureans of the Akasava, and are found nowhere else than in the southern Ochori. They are killed with arrows, to the heads of which a yard of native rope is attached. When the monkey is hit, the barbed arrowhead falls off, and the rope and shaft becoming entangled in the small branches of the trees in which the little people live, they are easily caught and despatched.

  Now the people of the Ochori do not eat monkeys. They capture them and train them into domestic pets, so that you cannot pass through an Ochori village without seeing little white-whiskered figures squatting contentedly on the roof of the huts, engaged mainly in an everlasting hunt for fleas.

  Messengers brought news of the invasion, and Bosambo left hurriedly for the south, taking with him fifty spearmen. They came upon the Akasava hunting party sitting about a fire over which shrivelled monkey-meat was roasting.

  What followed need not be described in these pure pages; Bosambo had no right to brand the poachers with red-hot spear blades, and certainly his treatment did not err on the side of delicacy.

  Ten days later, the weary hunting party came to the Akasava city and carried their grievances.

  “Lord king, this Bosambo beat us and put hot irons upon us, so that we must sleep on our faces and cannot sit because of the cruel pain. And when we spoke of our king, he made horrible faces.”

  Here was a cause for war, but the crops were not in, so the king sent his eldest men to Sanders. There was a palaver, and Sandi gave judgment.

  “If a man walks into the lair of a leopard, shall he come to me and say, ‘I am scratched’? For the leopards have their place, and the hunter has his. And if a man put his hand into a cooking-pot, shall he kill the woman at the fire because his hand is burnt? There is a place for the hand and a place for the boiling meat. Now, I give you this riddle. How can a man be burnt if he does not go to the fire? Let no man of the Akasava hunt in the forests of the Ochori. As to the lord chief Bosambo, I will make a palaver with him.”

  “Lord,” said one of the injured hunters, “we are shamed before our wives, and we cannot sit down.”

  “Stand,” said Sanders laconically; “and as to your wives, this is a wise saying of the Akasava: ‘No man turns his face to the sun or his back to his wife.’ The palaver is finished.”

  He saw Bosambo in the privacy of his hut, and the interview was brief.

  “Bosambo, you shall neither maim nor kill, nor shall you put other people to shame. If these men hunt in your forest, do you not fish in their waters? They tell me, too, that you take your spears to the Akasava country and clear their woods of meat. This is my word, that you shall not again go into their hunting-grounds, until they come to yours.”

  “Oh ko!” said Bosambo in dismay; for the taboo which had been put upon him was the last he desired.

  Bosambo had an affection for a kind of wild duck that could only be trapped in the Akasava marshes, and the deprivation was a serious one.

  “Lord,” he said, “I have repented in my heart, being a Christian, the same as you, and being well acquainted with Marki, Luki and Johnny, and other English lords. Let the Akasava come to my forest, and I will go to their lands to catch little birds. For, lord, I did not hurt these Akasava men, merely burning them in play, thinking they would laugh.”

  Sanders did not smile. “Men do not laugh when they are so burnt,” he said, and refused to lift the embargo.

  “If they come to you, you may go to them,” he said at parting.

  For the greater part of three months Bosambo was Tempter. He withdrew his spies from the forest, he sent secret word to the Akasava king, inviting him to great hunts; he conveyed taunts and threats calculated to arouse all that was warlike in his bosom, but the Akasava king rejected the overtures and returned insult for insult. And Bosambo brooded on roast duck and grew morose.

  Then on a day Sanders had a message from one of his spies who kept a watchful eye upon the people of the Akasava. And there was need for watchfulness, apart from the trouble with Bosambo, for it had been a year of record crops, and when the crops are plentiful and goats multiply in the Akasava country, and men grow rich in a season, and are relieved for the moment of the strain which judiciously applied taxation and the stubbornness of the soil impose, their minds turn to spears, and to the ancient stories of Akasava valour which the old men tell and the young maidens sing. And they are apt, in their pride, to look around for new enemies, or to furbish old grievances. For this is the way of all peoples, primitive or civilised, that prosperity and idleness are the foundations of all mischief.

  Cala cala, which means long ago, the N’gombi people, who were wonderful workers of iron, had stolen a bedstead of solid brass, bequeathed to the king of the Akasava by a misguided missionary, who in turn had received it from as misguided a patron. And this bedstead of brass was an object of veneration and awe for twenty years; and then, in a little war which raged for the space of three moons between the Akasava and the N’gombi, the Akasava city had been taken and sacked, and the bed of brass had gone across the river into the depths of the forest, and there, by cunning N’gombi hands, had reappeared in the shape of bowls and rings and fine-drawn wire of fabulous value. For any object of metal is an irresistible attraction to the craftsmen of the forest – did not Sanders himself lose a steel anvil from the lower deck of the Zaire? The story of how ten men swam across the river, carrying that weight of metal, is a legend of N’gombi.

  The true city of these people is situated two days’ march in the forest; and hither, one fine morning, came messengers from the king of the Akasava – four haughty men, wearing feathers in their hair and leopard skins about their middle, and each man carrying a new shield and a bunch of bright killing spears, which the N’gombi eyed with professional interest.

  “O king, I see you,” said the chief envoy, one M’guru. “I am from your master, the king and lord of the Akasava, who, as you know, are the greatest people in these lands, being feared even by Sandi because of their valour and wonderful courage.”

  “I have heard of such people,” said the king of the N’gombi, “though I have never seen them, except the spearers of fish who live by the riverside.”

  This was designed and accepted as a deadly insult, for the Akasava are great fish-eaters, and the N’gombi do not eat fish at all, preferring frogs and snakes (as the slander goes).

  “My king will bring his people to see you,” said the envoy significantly. “And this he will do soon, if you do not return to us the bedstead you stole cala cala, and which my king desires.”

  The king of the N’gombi was smoking a long-stemmed pipe with a tiny bowl, and the rancid scent of the native tobacco was an offence to the nose of the Akasava messenger.

  “Am I M’shimba M’shamba, that I can bring from nothing something?” he asked. “As to your bedstead, it is not! Nor will it ever be again. Take this word to the little king of the Akasava, that I am M’shulu-M’shulu, son of B’faro, son of M’labo, son of E’goro, who put the Akasava city to the flames and carried away the bedstead which was his by right. That I, this man who speaks, will meet the Akasava, and many will run quickly home, and they will run with the happiest, for they will be alive. This palaver is finished.”

  All this the embassy carried back to the Akasava, and the lokalis beat, the young men danced joyously, as young men will when the madness of war comes to a people: and then,
when secret preparations had been completed, and all was in readiness, an Akasava man, walking through the forest by the river, saw a foreigner throw a pigeon into the air, and the man was brought to the king of the Akasava, and a council of war was held. The prisoner was brought, bound, before the king.

  “O man,” said he, “you are a spy of Sandi’s, and I think you have been speaking evilly of my people. Therefore you must die.”

  The Kano boy accepted the sentence philosophically. “Lord king,” he said, “I have a great ju-ju in a little basket. Let me speak to him before I die, and I will speak well of you to the ghosts of the mountains.”

  They brought him the basket and the pigeon it contained, and he fondled it for five minutes, and none saw him slip into the red band about the pigeon’s leg a scrap of paper no larger than a man’s thumb. Then, before they could realise what was happening, the pigeon had been flung into the air and was flying, with long, steady strokes and ever widening circles, higher and higher, until it was beyond the reach of the arrows that the young men shot.

  Six young warriors carried Ali, the Kano boy, into the forest. Bending down a young sapling, they fastened a rope to the top, the other end fastened in a noose about the spy’s neck. His feet were pinioned to the ground, so that he was stretched almost to choking by the upward tug of the tree. The king himself struck off the head with a curved N’gombi knife, and that was the end of Ali the spy.

  Three days passed in a final preparation, and on the morning of the fourth the king of the Akasava assembled his fighting men by the riverside; their war-painted canoes blackened the beach, their spears glittered beautifully in the sun.

  “O people,” said the king, exalted to madness, “we go now to make an end of the N’gombi…”

  His speech was nearing its peroration – for he was a notorious talker – when the white nose of the Zaire came round the wooded headland that hides the course of the river from sight.

  “This is real war,” said the king, and hardly had he spoken before a white puff of smoke came from the little steamer; there was a whine, a crashing explosion, and all that remained of the haughty king of the Akasava was an ugly mess upon the beach – it was a most fortunate shot.