Bones of the River - Edgar Wallace [56]
Similarly, when six canoes of the Upper Isisi had vanished en route to headquarters, carrying the rubber which formed their contribution to the revenue, Lujaga had been quick to detect the culprits. He came personally to the end of the river with more than half of the stolen property.
“I bring no heads,” he said significantly, “for it is your will, Sandi, that there shall be no killing. But when thieves fight for spears, shall we clap our hands and laugh? There are bad men in the forest by the river, and these went out and held up the Isisi canoes, killing the paddlers. Now, what is your will?”
Proof after proof of Lujaga’s honesty came to Sanders. Once, the first news of a raid on the Isisi came from Lujaga himself and with it two men captured by the king’s soldiers – silent, pained men, who did not speak because their tongues had been cut out, a fault to which Lujaga had frankly confessed.
“Fighting men have their ways, lord,” he said. “I cannot hold my young men in the heat of battle, for they are savages, but the men who did this have been whipped and burnt.”
He paid his taxes regularly; his villages that fringed the river – for, though his territory in the main lay in the inner forest, it extended to the banks of the water – were models of order and cleanliness. His spies brought invaluable news from the frontier, and he made no complaints against his neighbours.
“Lujaga is a model chief,” said Sanders, not once but many times, and he showed him certain favours, such as remitting portions of his taxation and giving to him hunting rights within the no-man’s-land that ran to the borders of the French terrritory.
Only one man had ever attempted to undermine Sanders’ faith in the chief and that man was Bosambo, king of the Ochori. Bosambo trusted few and respected nobody. One day he came to the headquarters with a long story of raids, of forest rights violated, of women and goats that had disappeared from a frontier village, and Sanders listened patiently, putting in his discounts at various stages of the narrative, and in the end, gave judgment.
“News of this shall go to the Lujaga,” he said. “The chief will find the men who did this, and your women and goats shall come back to you.”
“All?” said the sceptical Bosambo. “Lord, I do not doubt that Lujaga will return one woman in three and one goat in six, for that is his way. All the rest you will find in the compounds of his secret city. For this man is a liar.”
“Who is not?” asked Sanders, and there the palaver ended.
They called the city of the king “secret” because it was tucked away in the heart of a dense wood twelve hours from running water, and therefore hard to come by. In his secret city lived Bobolara, the Healer, one who was known beyond the confines of his own territory. He was a tall man of singular beauty and character, and as a child he had performed many miracles, for he had rubbed sick men on the back and they had recovered; and he had taken away terrible headaches by twisting the neck of the sufferer in a peculiar and mysterious way. When a tree fell upon a woodman and put out his shoulder, and a palaver of the village elders had condemned the man to death, because the misshapen are never tolerated, Bobolara had by his magic twisted the shoulder back into its place, so that in a week the woodman was about his business again.
He lived in a little hut at the far end of the main village street, and was accounted peculiar in that he had neither wife nor love affair. When he walked past the huts on an evening, he glanced neither to the right nor to the left, and no married woman turned her guilty eyes upon him.
The king Lujaga knew him by name, and one turbulent and stormy night had sent a messenger to his hut, bidding him come. Bobolara came to the king’s great hut, and beheld a girl lying on the floor of the hut, moaning her terror, half mad with fright