Bones of the River (9 page)

The man tapped his teeth with his knuckles. “Lord, this is a magic place. For here is the Tree of the World, and devils live in abundance, so that you cannot walk without treading on their tails. Now let us go on, for my men have fear in their stomachs.”

“Land me alone and my little tent,” said Terence, now thoroughly interested. “In the morning come for me.”

He went ashore on the flat beach and watched the hurried and fearful erection of his tent. They lit a fire for him (all in frantic haste) and paddled away.

Terence had brewed himself a cup of tea and was preparing a meal of canned chicken breast and biscuit, when, raising his eyes suddenly, he saw, standing in the light of the fire, a slim figure. For a second he was startled, and then: “I am M’mina of The Tree,” said the girl simply, “and I am a great friend of ghosts.”

“O woman, sit with me and eat,” said Terence, and she obeyed.

*  *  *

There is a tree in the Forest of Happy Dreams, which is in the Akasava country, that has stood from the beginning of time. It is the Tree of the World, and floated in the waters which, according to legend that is so splendidly confirmed by the Jeano-men, was the beginning of all substance. And to the bare roots of the tree came earth, and more earth, and rocks to keep the earth in its place, and mountains to hold the rocks, and so the world was made. It is a cedar of enormous height, which in itself is miraculous, for no other cedars grow in the Akasava. Its branches spread amazingly. Beneath, you may see the rotting stumps of other trees which in the course of hundreds of years have been cut down that the Tree of the World might grow. Some day, so the legend runs, that tree will wither, and on that day the world will begin to go back to the water. First the mountains will crumble and fall into the great river; then the rocks will go to dust, and lastly the earth will dissolve into water and there will be no more earth.

Near by the tree, in a large hut, lived Ogonobo, the Keeper of the Tree, a wise old man, reputedly friend of devils and in the fellowship of ju-jus.

So potent was the mystery of Ogonobo that even M’shimba M’shamba, most ruthless and disrespectful of all great spirits, spared his house on the night of the great wind, when villages and cities were levelled and great gum-trees were plucked up by the roots as though they were corn-stalks.

Yet for all his magic and aloofness, Ogonobo was no ascetic. He had taken to himself many wives, and each he had put away because none bore him children. Then he found a fisher girl of no great account and took her into his hut, and she gave him M’mina, a straight-backed, grave-eyed daughter. Some say one thing and some say another about this miracle of a daughter who came to Ogonobo in his old age. Such is the Akasava love for scandal. That his wife had many lovers is true, but what woman of the Akasava is without lovers? Do they not say, “This day I have married a woman who has three husbands” at every wedding feast? Be that as it may, M’mina was a fact, and when old Ogonobo sold his wife to a petty chief this M’mina became the supreme woman of his house, tended his small garden, crushed his corn and cooked for him.

Such men as saw her, hunters who strayed into the ghost forest led by their quarry, feared her. One brought a story that he had seen M’mina sitting on the ground surrounded by thousands of parrots that squawked and chattered to her. And another had seen her in the company of many little birds that came to her when she whistled. It is certain that M’mina was a great charmer of birds, and at her whistle even the fierce hawks stooped and came with a beating of wings to her feet. This was her own peculiar magic.

Incidentally the spirit of the forest came to her, and she communed with devils. One day she came to the old man, her father, and told him.

“Ogonobo,” she said, “I saw a little yellow devil sitting under the Tree of the World. He had red eyes, and from his knees grew two hands that pinched me as I passed.”

Ogonobo said nothing. He took a long and pliant length of hippo-hide, and he flogged her until he could flog her no more,

“Now, woman,” said he, “see no more devils.”

M’mina went through the days that followed as though nothing had happened. She slept in a small hut at the back of her father’s house, and one night, having a pain in his head, he went to call her that she might boil water for him. She was not on her bed, and, spying, he saw her slip from the forest in the dawn hour and go straight to her hut. He watched her three nights in succession, and every night she went away into the forest and came back with the dawn.

Then he spoke to her. “Woman,” he said, “if you have a lover, let him come to me. But if you go in the night to speak to devils, that is bad. For a lover can give you nothing but life, but devils bring trouble. Tell me now, M’mina, which is true?”

“Lord, I go to see devils and one who is greater than all. For he lives in a tree and fire comes from his eyes when he speaks, and one day he will take me into his hut and we shall be happy.”

Ogonobo went in search of his thong, and this time the flogging was severe.

“You shall bring no sons of devils into my house, woman,” said Ogonobo breathlessly, for he was an old man.

M’mina got up from the floor, rubbing her whealed thighs. Her dark, grave eyes searched the old man’s face, and she said: “This night your arm shall die.”

“This day my arm is strong,” said Ogonobo, and thrashed her again. In this primitive manner did he wage war against the illusions which solitude and a too prolonged austerity might bring to an imaginative mind.

He was sitting before his hut eating his dinner as the sun was setting, and M’mina was crushing corn in a big stone pestle. As the sun touched the trees, the bowl fell from Ogonobo’s hand, and when he tried to pick it up his right arm refused to obey. From shoulder to fingertip he was paralysed.

“Woman, come here,” he said, and the girl obeyed, standing before him, silent and watchful.

“My arm is dead, as you promised. Now I see that you are a great witch, and I am afraid. Touch my arm and make it well.”

As she bent down to perform this service, his well hand shot out, and he caught her swiftly by the throat and threw her backward over his knees.

“It is better that I have one arm than none,” he said, “or no arms than that I be dead. I am too old to live in fear of death; therefore, M’mina, my daughter, you go quickly to the Place of Ghosts.”

She lay unstruggling as the pressure of his sinewy fingers increased, and when it seemed to him that she was resigned to death, with a strength that he had not guessed, she flung herself free from him and fled into the hut. He rose a little awkwardly and followed. As he stooped to enter the low door, she struck at him twice with the long- handled N’gombi axe that he kept to trim away the tree. Ogonobo coughed thickly and went down on to his knees, clutching with his one hand at the doorway’s edge.

“Death,” said M’mina, and brought the keen edge to his unprotected neck with all her power…

When she had buried him and had cleaned away the mess, she went back to her corn, and, carrying the pestle into the hut, lay down on her bed and slept. And she sat in Ogonobo’s place and said magic words to the tree, and held communion with ghosts of all colours.

One day she went on a journey into the city of the king and stood before his house, and Ofaba, the king, who had heard of her, came out.

“I see you, M’mina, daughter of Ogonobo, the Keeper of the Tree. Where is your father?”

“Lord, he is dead, and his mystery is mine. And I sit in the Forest of Dreams and many pleasant devils make love to me. One I shall marry soon, and on that night M’shimba M’shamba shall come to my hut and sing my marriage song.”

Ofaba shivered and spat. “How did Ogonobo die, woman?” he asked. “One of my young men when hunting saw blood on the leaves.”

“A devil killed him with a great axe that was bigger than the Tree of the World. And I fought with the devil by my magic, and he is dead too. And I cut him into pieces, and one of his legs I threw into the Little River, and it overflowed, as all men know.”

That the Little River had overflown Ofaba knew. The rains had been heavy, but the Little River had never overflown before. Here, then, was an explanation more in harmony with Ofaba’s known predilection for the mysterious and the magical.

“This I came to tell you, lord,” she said. “Also that I had a dream, and in this dream I saw Bosambo of the Ochori, who was on his knees before you, Ofaba, and you put your foot on his neck, and said ‘Wa,’ and Bosambo shook with fear.”

Ofaba himself trembled with something that was not fear, for she had dreamt his dream. This he did not tell her, sending her away with presents, and by certain wonderful acts confirming her in her office.

It is a saying in the Akasava country, that the child of the eaten moon is a great glutton, and Ofaba M’lama, the son of B’suri, King of the Akasava and paramount lord of the Ten Little Rivers, was so born. For the moon was at its last quarter when he came squealing into the world, and B’suri, looking up at the fading crescent, said, having a grievance: “This child will eat. Let him eat the Ochori.”

A wise saying, so frequently repeated to Ofaba, long after he had taken B’suri’s stool of office and his great silver medal of chieftainship; long after B’suri had been paddled stark to the middle island where dead men lie in shallow graves.

Ofaba needed little to remind him that the Akasava hated the Ochori, because that was traditional.
Cala cala
, which means “Years ago,” the Ochori had been the slave tribe, a debased and fearful people who, at the first hint of danger, ran away into the woods with their wives and children and such goats as they could grab. Sometimes they left their wives behind, but there is no record of their having gone entirely goatless.

So it was that, what any nation needed, they took from the Ochori, and if the taking was bloodless, no strong word went down to the ear of Mr Commissioner Sanders, who sat between sea and river in a large thatched house and gave judgment impartially. But there came to the Ochori a certain man from the Kroo Coast, an escaped convict, one Bosambo, who, by the employment of questionable methods, had secured his election to the kingship. And with his coming there had arisen a new spirit in the Ochori, so that when the Akasava or the Isisi raided their lands, they were met by locked shields and a phalanx of spears, and there was a killing or two.

Ofaba was now a man of twenty-three, and in the year when M’mina became the Keeper of the Tree, the harvests of the Akasava failed, for no especial or understandable reason. Ofaba and his wise men gathered in secret council, and in the dark hours of the night they took from his bed a youth who was silly with sleeping sickness, and, carrying him into the woods, they cut his throat with the razor edge of Ofaba’s hunting spear, and sprinkled his blood on that old and sacred tree which had stood from the beginning of time.

M’mina watched the ceremony from the door of her hut, and when it was over came forth.

“I see you, Ofaba, also this man whom you have killed because your crops have failed. Now, I have talked with my husband, who comes to me every night in the shape of a bat, and he says that the crops have failed because of Bosambo, the chief man of the Ochori. That day you bring him to me, that day shall the crops grow and the game come back to the forest. For I will make a great magic with Bosambo that will be wonderful to see. You shall make an end to Bosambo, as I have made to his spies. Come.”

Bewildered, the king followed her through the dark forest and came to the beach. Here, hidden by bushes, were three graves.

“O woman!” he gasped. “What evil have you done? For if Sandi knows–”

“Shall Sandi know the blooding of the tree?” she asked significantly, and Ofaba sweated. “Now, I tell you that when Bosambo himself comes, as he will, you shall bring him here. and be happy.”

*  *  *

At headquarters, Mr Commissioner Sanders was in a peculiarly complacent frame of mind. For two months there had been no sign or sound of trouble in his territory. Mr Terence Doughty, that fastidious grammarian, had passed to the French territory (Bosambo had sent a long message by pigeon post announcing his passage); the crops, with the exception of the Akasava mealie crop, had been good. Taxation was being voluntarily liquidated.

“In fact, everything is almost too good to be true,” he said one evening as they sat in the cool of the verandah.

That night he was wakened from a sound sleep by a hullaballoo that brought him to the open, revolver in hand. A knot of men were struggling noisily somewhere in the darkness, and Hamilton, who joined him, offered an explanation.

“One of my infernal Houssas,” he swore. “Where these devils get gin from, heaven knows – Bones!”

Bones answered from the darkness. “Naughty old thief trying to get into the residency, Ham, old thing–”

Five minutes later a dishevelled Bones in pyjamas and mosquito boots came to report.

“Chucked him in the guard-room,” he said. “By gad, if I hadn’t seen him you might have been robbed, dear old excellency – murdered, dear old Ham. If this isn’t worth a special report and a DSO, then there’s no justice on this wicked old earth.”

“Did you spot him?” asked Hamilton incredulously.

“I didn’t exactly spot him, sir and brother officer,” said Bones with care. “In theory I did, old captain. Ahmet saw him sneaking across the square, and of course I was on the spot in two shakes of a duck’s jolly old rudder.”

Sergeant Ahmet supplemented the information. He had seen the marauder and had leapt at him.

“When we wakened my lord Tibbetti, he ordered the bad man to prison.”

“What do you mean – ‘wakened’?” demanded Bones indignantly. “O Ahmet, was I not there – did I not–?”

“Why ask this unfortunate man to perjure himself?” demanded Hamilton. “Go back to bed, Phyllis; you’re losing your beauty sleep.”

The buglers were sounding reveille, and the brown-legged guard stood rigidly before the guardhouse, their rifles at the slope, their expressionless brown faces strained and intense, looking at nothingness.