Bones of the River - Edgar Wallace [42]
So he became more powerful in the land than chiefs and headmen, and even the little kings came to him secretly and took away with them the messes he brewed. For kings have enemies.
About Fobolo’s huts grew the huts of his kinsmen, and of stray fishermen who, having no village of their own, were drawn into communion by the magnet of Fobolo’s greatness.
Fobolo was gaunt and tall and greedy. Wealth bred in him a desire for wealth. Though his deeply dug stores were filled with ivory teeth and rubber, and under the floor of his hut were many thousands of brass rods, and salt and other treasures were stacked tight in his huts, he sought new means of profit.
On a cold, clear morning, when only the stars were hot in the sky, a woman in the house of the Akasava king went shivering into the open with a blanket about her shoulders. She knelt before the dead fire and blew at the ashes until the air was filled with snowy specks, and when she had coaxed the fire to a proper redness and had set a pot upon it and filled that pot with water and corn, she went to carry food to the king’s dogs. They did not greet her with thin yelps, nor tear frantically at their grass-walled compound at the sound of her feet.
There was a silence that was strange and alarming. As she stood peering into the void, the stars went out in the sky and the sun shot up and she saw in the light the dogs were gone, and went, coughing and sobbing in terror, to the king’s hut.
“O shameful and ugly woman,” said the king, naked and blinking in the light to which he had been called, “did I not give to your care my fine dogs, and now they are gone?”
“Lord,” she whimpered, “last night I gave them water and dried fish, and they were happy, one putting out his tongue at me, and all moving their tails from side to side, which is the way dogs speak.”
Ten minutes later a well-beaten woman howled her misery, and the lokalis of the city were drumming the news of the great steal.
It would seem that N’Kema the king was not the only loser. For the chief of the Isisi village, which lay on the other bank of the river, came paddling furiously to the Akasava beach and stalked into the presence of the king.
“Lord king, there is sorrow in my stomach that I should tell you this: last night came your young men to my village and took from me two beautiful fat dogs that were ready for the marriage feast of my own son. And these dogs were each worth five and five bags of salt.”
Forcibly and with violence did the king deny the charge.
“It seems, little chief that, having stolen my dogs, you come to me with a lie that your dogs are taken. If I had lived in the days of my fathers before Sandi came, I would cut out your tongue and give your body to the ghosts. But now I will go to Sandi and tell him, and he shall put iron rings and chains on your legs according to his law.”
Sanders at that time was on the Zaire, making a tour of inspection, and to him they went and with them four smaller chiefs of the neighbourhood who had suffered loss. And small comfort they received.
A few months later, the youngest wife of N’Kema was seen by his favourite daughter, Militi, who was the apple of the king’s eye, speaking with a lover in the forest. And Militi carried word to her father, hating the woman who had replaced her mother in favouritism.
“This woman of yours has a quiet man,” she said, and told him things that a woman of fourteen would not have understood had she been white.
N’Kema took his youngest wife by the nape of her neck and flogged her with a strip of hippohide – which hurts.
In his absence on a hunting trip, the wife found her way through the hidden river and came to Fobolo’s village.
“I see you, wife of N’Kema, the king,” greeted Fobolo, standing on the beach as she landed.
“I see you, Fobolo: I have a riddle for you.”
“No man understands riddles better than I,