Bones of the River - Edgar Wallace [19]
Two days after a missionary had formally baptised N’shimba, Sanders came, and in view of all the silent village, pressed a small rubber stamp on the squirming baby’s forehead. It was the stamp that Sanders used when he sent microscope slides to the School of Tropic Medicines for examination, and it said: “Fragile: open carefully.”
In a sense it was an appropriate inscription.
“People, I have put my ju-ju upon this child,” said Sanders, addressing the multitude. “Presently it will fade and go away, because by my magic it will eat into his bones and into his young heart. But because my magic is so fearful, I shall know who laid his hand upon this small one, and I shall come swiftly with my soldiers and my gun that says ‘ha-ha-ha.’”
Such was the potency of the charm that, after many years, a slightly mad woman who struck the child, died in great agony the same night.
All this happened cala cala, in the days when Sanders was mapping out the destinies of five contentious nations. From time to time he saw the boy, and discovered in him nothing remarkable, except that he was a little sulky, and, according to his father, given to long silences and to solitary walks. He knew none of his own kind; neither played with boys nor spoke frankly to girls. They said that he was looking for the black egg, and certainly N’shimba climbed many trees without profit.
Then one day, N’shimba, squatting about the family fire before the hut, propounded a riddle.
“I caught a young leopard and put him in the fine little house, where once I had kept many birds. Did my leopard sing or fly or make ‘chip-chip’ noises?”
“Boy, you are foolish,” said his unimaginative father, “for you have caught no leopard and you have no fine house where birds are kept.”
“That is my mystery,” said N’shimba, and, rising, walked away to the forest and was not seen for three days. When he returned, he brought with him a young girl of the Inner lsisi.
“This is my wife,” he said.
The father said nothing, for the boy was sixteen and of a marrying age. The new wife, on the contrary, said much.
“I do not want this man, your son,” she said frankly. “I am a great dancer, and my price is ten bundles of ten malakos in ten heaps ten times ten repeated. A man of my people would give as much salt as would fill a hut if I would be his wife, yet your son comes to me and takes me and gives nothing to my father nor to me. And when I turned from him, he struck me down. Here is the mark.”
The mark was horridly patent, and N’shimba’s father was troubled and sought his son.
“Why have you taken this woman?” he asked. “Presently her father will come and demand her price. And Sandi will come and give judgment against me. Let her go, for, even if you are married to her, what does it matter? Is there not a saying that ‘Women marry many times but have one husband’?”
“I am that man,” said N’shimba. “As to Sandi, I am the child of his spirit, as all people know, and I take what I need.”
That evening he beat his new wife, and her father, arriving in wrath to make the best of a bad bargain, was also beaten to his shame.
“Who is N’shimba?” asked Captain Hamilton curiously when the news came to headquarters, and Sanders, a thoughtful, troubled man, explained.
“It wouldn’t worry me at all, but the young devil has used the slogan of the old N’shimba, ‘I take what I need’ – and that is a very bad sign. One whisper of black eggs and I will take N’shimba and hang him.”
He sent a warning, and marked down N’shimba in his diary as one to be interviewed when he next went north. Then one day there came into existence the Blood Friends of Young Hearts.
In native territories, secret societies are born in a night, and with them their inspired ritual. From what brain they come, none knows. The manner of their dissolution