Bones of the River - Edgar Wallace [57]
“This woman I took from an Ochori hut,” said Lujaga, “and one of my soldiers speared her. I have given him to death, but this woman must be saved, for she is very beautiful and I desire her for my house. Now, take her to your hut, Bobolara, and by your magic heal her, and in three and three days bring her to me full of love and in some respects as she is today.”
Bobolara had the girl carried to his hut and tended her wound, and in three days she had recovered her sanity, and Bobolara had learnt to pity which in all peoples is half way to love. On the sixth day the king sent his familiar, a small man called Ligi, to bring his bride to the great feast which he had prepared in the centre of the city. Here, before his hut, he had assembled his dancing girls and his warriors for the ceremony of betrothal. But Bobolara came alone.
“Where is the woman?” asked Lujaga.
“She is with her people,” said Bobolara calmly. “For, king, this woman does not belong to us, and I have set her free. I guided her myself through the forest by night.”
It was some time before Lujaga recovered from shock, and then he struck the man across the face with his whip.
“O dog,” he howled, “this night you shall live with ghosts! Take this man to the Little People!”
They seized Bobolara and carried him into the forest near the great anthills, and there they spread-eagled him out on the ground, naked as he was born, and from each anthill was laid a sweet and syrupy trail that would lead the Little People to the prostrate figure. And there they left him for the ants to take him, little by little, until nothing but his bones were left. In the morning, when they came to see what was left, they found him asleep. The ground was black with ants, but none had touched him. So they released Bobolara and brought him back to the king.
“Bend a sapling,” snarled Lujaga.
They pulled down a young tree with a rope and tied the free end to the neck of the man.
“Strike,” said Lujaga, and the executioner raised his curved knife to strike Bobolara’s head from the body.
Before the knife could fall the executioner had stumbled in a fit to the ground, and no one dared take up his knife when the king ordered.
“It is clear to me,” said the chief counsellor of the king in a troubled voice, “that Bobolara has a powerful ju-ju. Now, let him go, Lujaga, for I am afraid.”
Therefore was Bobolara permitted to live, for the king feared the temper of his people. Nevertheless, two nights later he sent his assassins to the hut of Bobolara.
“Bring back wet spears and I will make you chiefs of villages,” he said, but they brought their spears back clean, with the story of a demon that guarded the hut of the Healer, a demon with a blue face and an owl that radiated fire.
For another month the Healer was permitted to continue an untroubled existence. It is said that he raised the dead, but that is probably untrue. He made sick men well; he cured strange sicknesses; he eased women in their terrible pain.
Then a strange thing happened in the secret city. The second counsellor of the king died in pain. Bobolara saw the man and guessed the cause, for the second counsellor of the king was notoriously at enmity with his master.
Bobolara made many solitary journeys into the forest in search of rare herbs, for he had an instinct for beneficial properties. One day, after the death of the king’s second counsellor, he saw two men searching at the end of the swamp, where many crocodiles live and strange plants grow that are to be found in no other part of the country. Watching them idly, as they came toward him, bearing in their hands thick branches of a bush speckled red with berries, he recognised Lujaga and his familiar, and at the sight of him Lujaga’s face darkened.
“O Healer,” he said, “I see you.”
“I see you, lord,” said Bobolara. “Is the king a doctor that he gathers the little poison berries, that even the great ones of the swamp will not eat?”
“I gather them because they are magical, and keep away spirits and ghosts,” said the king glibly.