Bones of the River (17 page)

Men lie with a certain transparent simplicity in the lands that border the Great River. Their falsehoods are easily detected, and are less falsehoods than inventions, being so elaborated and painted in such primitive colours that no man is deceived.

For they lie as children lie, about remarkable things and happenings that could not be: such as two-headed dogs that spit smoke, and trees that walk about, and little bees that fall in love with beautiful maidens. If they lie for safety or business purposes, they do so haltingly or sullenly, as the circumstances command, and are to be brought to the frank truth with a sharp word.

Such a liar as Lujaga, the petty chief of the Inner N’gombi, was a rarity, and he was one of three men who, in twenty years, completely deceived Mr Commissioner Sanders.

And talking of liars…

“There’s a lot about you, Bones,” said Hamilton, “that reminds me of the Isisi.”

“Dear old officer,” murmured Bones reproachfully, “why compare a jolly old comrade to the indigenous native?”

“I was thinking more particularly of your interesting contribution to the
Guildford Times
,” said Hamilton.

He was sitting on the verandah after tiffin, smoking a lazy cigar, and as he stretched out his arm, he picked up from the floor a newspaper that had come by the mail. Bones glanced at the title and shuffled his big feet uncomfortably.

“Dear old officer,” he pleaded, “if you’re going to spring on me a little flight of fancy, a jolly old
jeu d’esprit
, so to speak–”

“I have been reading your account of how you chased the wild okapi through the forest,” said Hamilton relentlessly, “and how, when it was at bay, it turned and snarled at you. The okapi doesn’t live in this country anyway, and if he did he wouldn’t snarl. He would neigh or he would bray. Possibly he would bray, recognising you as a man and a brother, but he would not snarl or, as you suggest, show his fangs. He hasn’t any fangs to show, though I dare say he could pick up a few in his travels if he had the mind of a collector.”

Sanders strolled out at that moment and stood, an interested listener, in the doorway.

“Listen to this,” said Hamilton.

“Dear old Ham,” begged the agitated Bones, “why pursue the jolly old subject?”

“Listen to this,” said the remorseless Hamilton.

“‘As the okapi swung round and faced me I reached for my rifle! It was not there! My terrified native bearer had bolted! I was alone in the jungle with a fierce okapi! He leapt at my throat! I dodged him! In that moment all my past life swam before my eyes! Whipping out my revolver, I fired at him twice! He fell lifeless at my feet!’”

Hamilton glared over the top of the paper. “Liar!” he said simply.

“Dear old sceptical superior,” said Bones, speaking with a certain dignity, “you seem to forget the colourless lives that the jolly old Guildfordians live. As a matter of fact, they wrote and asked me to give them a little story of adventure for their Christmas number.”

“That makes it more understandable,” said Hamilton. “You tried to write a fairy story. Well, you succeeded. But you’re showing up the service, Bones. An officer in these territories ought at least to know that the okapi is something between a donkey and a zebra, and that he wouldn’t show fight even to a mouse.”

He picked up another newspaper.

“Who sends you these infernal things?” asked Bones irritably. “Bless my jolly old life,” he added a little incoherently, “is there nothing sacred, nothing private? Can’t a fellow–”

“There’s nothing sacred about the twopence I paid for this newspaper,” said Hamilton. He opened the pages with exasperating leisure, and Bones writhed. “Here is the second part of the serial. I won’t read it all. It is headed” – he glanced at the top of the column – “A Fight with Vampires.”

“Don’t let’s have any unpleasantness,” said Bones, but Hamilton was not to be denied.

“This is the bit I like best”

“‘At night I was awakened–’

“By the way, they’ve corrected your spelling, I observe –

“‘ – by a shrill, whistling sound and a sense of keen pain in my toe. Looking up, I saw a huge, shadowy shape floating at the foot of my bed. It was a vampire! Not daring to move, I watched, fascinated, the hideous animal–’”

“I should have said ‘bird,’” murmured Bones, “or perhaps ‘reptile’.”

“Or ‘fish’,” suggested Hamilton. “But don’t interrupt.

“‘Its baleful eyes were fixed on me like two green moons! I reached out my hand stealthily–’”

“I hope they’ve only put two l’s in ‘stealthily,’” said Bones with a cough.

“‘I reached out my hand stealthily,’”
Hamilton went on,
‘“and seized a pistol that lay on the bedside table! It was not loaded! What should I do? With all my strength I hurled myself upon the dreadful insect–’”

It was Sanders’ long chuckle of delight which interrupted the reading. “Bones, you’re really wonderful,” he said, as he came forward and pulled up a chair. “I presume it was our visit to the Isle of Bats which inspired that classic.”

In the Middle River, four days’ steaming from headquarters, is a long island where the bats live by day, hanging in huge clusters, not by the thousand but by the million; and Bones and he had spent an eerie evening watching these things of the night wake to life.

“The question is,” said Hamilton as he folded the paper, “is or is not a man who writes that kind of stuff a natural liar; and has or has not Bones the Isisi mind?”

“The Isisi mind is the mind of a poet, Bones,” said Sanders, “and if I were you I’d plead guilty. Whilst on the subject of gay deceivers, may I mention that I shall want you to go up into the Inner N’gombi tomorrow perhaps – perhaps not for a week or so? There is a brand new cult come into being, and one Bobolara is its prophet.”

Hamilton looked up quickly. “Leopards?”

Sanders shook his head. “Not Leopards this time. It is something with a little witch doctorery in it, and I want it checked before it goes any farther. A healer of healers is amongst us, and he has made his appearance, of all places in the world, in the Inner N’gombi.”

There was a time when the Inner N’gombi were a thorn in the flesh of administration. Loyal to none, responsible only to themselves, they took toll of their neighbours with freedom and violence. There had been a hanging or two, a few beatings, a chief deposed to the Village of Irons, a headman hunted into the bush, a village or two burnt, before Lujaga, son of Lofuru, had been elevated to the chieftain’s rank, and thereafter all trouble had ceased. It is true that his neighbours complained of midnight raids upon their property; a few women had disappeared from the Ochori; and Bosambo had carried his spears to the border. But Lujaga, summoned to palaver, had given a very frank explanation.

“Lord,” he said, “my people are a haughty and warlike people, who have never been yoked. And there are little chiefs who call me king in a small voice, and call themselves master loudly. The Ochori women were taken by a small chief, who carried them into the forest. My young men are at this moment trailing him.”

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 and bleeding from a wound in the back.

“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.