Bones of the River - Edgar Wallace [81]
Inauspicious the moment, for M’suru was skinning a great water buck, and his four huntsmen had the skin stretched for salting.
“O ko!” said Mabidini. “This is bad news for Boambo my chief! No man hunts in this wood but he.”
M’sura wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the back of the hand that held the skinning knife.
“Who sees, knows,” he said significantly. “You shall have the fore-part of this meat for your pot.”
But Mabidini desired neither flesh nor skin, and the word went to Bosambo, and eventually to Mr Commissioner Sanders, and M’suru paid ten bags of salt by way of fine. Worse than this, he became the mock of such as Mabidini, a man without a village, who dwelt in a hut in the very heart of the wood and had no people.
One night six strange warriors slipped into the forest, and, taking Mabidini from his hut, they flogged him with skin whips, and burnt his toes so that he hobbled for months. That his assailants were Akasava he did not doubt; he would sooner have believed that he was dead than that M’suru did not instigate the outrage.
One day Bosambo sent for him. “Mabidini, I have spoken with Sandi, who is my own brother, and he says there can be no palaver over this matter of your beating, because none knows, and M’suru, who knows, lies,” he said. “They say of M’suru that he has a magic spear and therefore is very powerful. Also he has a new wife whom he bought for ten thousand brass rods. You are a lonely man, and it seems that, if men attack you in the night, such a spear would save you from having your toes burnt. For your wife would alarm you, and the spear would be under your bed.”
“Lord, I have no wife,” said Mabidini, who was no more dense than any man of the Ochori.
“Nor spear,” said Bosambo.
So Mabidini took a canoe and drifted down to within a mile or two of the village where his enemy dwelt, and one day he saw, walking in the forest, a girl who cried and rubbed the weals on her shoulders. He knew her to be M’suru’s wife and spoke to her. At first she was frightened…
Night fell suddenly on the village of Kolobafa and was welcomed by the third wife of M’suru, for there was a deficiency in her household equipment which her lord, with his fox-eyes, would have seen instantly. As it was, he came home too tired and hungry to be suspicious, and, having had his fill sitting solitary before the little fire that smouldered in front of the hut, he nodded and dozed until the chill of the night sent him in a daze of sleep to find his skin bed. The third (and newest) wife, whose name was Kimi, sat aloof, watching in an agony of apprehension, and when he had gone into the hut clasped her bare sides with such force that she ached.
But no bull-roar of fury proclaimed the discovery of his loss, and, creeping to the side of the hut, she listened, heard his snores and crept back.
She enjoyed a hut of her own, and the jealous elder wife, brooding in the dark doorway of the hut she shared with the ousted second, saw Kimi steal away through the village street, and called shrilly to her companion, for, if she hated the second wife, she hated Kimi worst, and in such a crisis lesser enemies have the appearance of friends.
“Kimi has gone to the river to see her lover. Let us wake M’suru and tell him.”
The second wife thrust her blunt head over the stout shoulder that filled the doorway, and peered after the vanishing girl.
“M’suru sends his spears at night to the N’gombi man, who sharpens them on a stone. If we wake M’suru with a foolish story he will beat us.”
“She carried no spears,” said the first wife, contemptuously. “You are afraid.” Suddenly a thought struck her. “If she carries any spear, it will be the Spear of the Ghost!”
There was a shocked “huh!” from the second wife, for the Spear of the Ghost had come to M’suru from his father, and from his father’s father, and from countless generations of fathers. It was a short killing spear, endowed with magical qualities. By its potency M’suru could