Part 12
Of all the reluctant tribes, the Elivi were the most frankly so. Whilst all the others were covered with a network of rough roads--slovenly made, but roads none the less--Elivi stood a virgin patch of land two hundred miles square in the very heart of make-shift civilisation.
Bosambo might deal drastically with the enemy who stood outside his gate. It was a more delicate matter when he had to deal with a district tacitly rebellious, and this question of roads threatened to develop, unhappily.
He had sent spies into the land of the Elivi and this was the first man back.
"Now it seems to me," said Bosambo, half to himself, "that I have need of all my devils, for Ikifari is a bitter man, and his sons and his counsellors are of a mind with him."
He sent his headman to his guests with a message that for the whole day he would be deep in counsel with himself over this matter of ghosts; and when late in the evening the van of the Elivi force was sighted on the east of the village, Bosambo, seated in state in his magnificent palaver-house, adorned with such Christmas plates as came his way, awaited their arrival.
Limberi, the headman, went out to meet the disgruntled force.
"Chief," he said, "it is our lord's wish that you leave your spears outside the city."
"Limberi," said Ikifari, a hard man of forty, all wiry muscle and leanness, "we are people of your race and your brothers. Why should we leave our spears--we who are of the Ochori?"
"You do not come otherwise," said Limberi decisively. "For across the river are many enemies of our lord, and he loves you so much, that for his own protection, he desired your armed men--your spearmen and your swordsmen--to sit outside. Thus he will be confident and happy."
There was no more to be done than to obey.
Ikifari with his counsellors followed the headman to the palaver, and his insolence was notable.
"I speak for all Elivi," he said, without any ceremonious preliminaries. "We are an oppressed people, lord Bosambo, and our young men cry out with great voices against your cruelty."
"They shall cry louder," said Bosambo, and Ikifari, the chief, scowled.
"Lord," he said sullenly, "if it is true that Sandi loves you, he also loves us, and no man is so great in this land that he may stir a people to rebellion."
Bosambo knew this was true--knew it without the muttered approval of Ikifari's headmen. He ran his eye over the little party. They were all there--the malcontents. Tinif'si, the stout headman, M'kera and Calasari, the lesser chiefs; and there was in their minds a certain defiance which particularly exasperated Bosambo. He might punish one or two who set themselves up against his authority, but here was an organised rebellion. Punishment would mean fighting, and fighting would weaken his position with Sanders.
It was the moment to temporise.
Fortunately the devil deputation was not present. It was considered to be against all etiquette for men of another nation to be present at the domestic councils of their neighbours. Otherwise some doubt might have been born in the bosom of Emberi as to the efficacy of Bosambo's devils at this particular moment.
"And this I would say to you, lord," said Ikifari, and Bosambo knew that the crux of the situation would be revealed. "We Elivi are your dogs. You do not send for us to come to your great feasts, nor do you honour us in any way. But when there is fighting you call up our spears and our young men, and you send us abroad to be eaten up by your terrible enemies. Also," he went on, "when you choose your chiefs and counsellors to go pleasant journeys to such places where they are honoured and feasted, you send only men of the Ochori city."
It may be said here that from whatever source Bosambo derived his inspiration, he had certainly acquired royal habits which were foreign to his primitive people. Thus he would dispatch envoys and ambassadors on ceremonious visits bearing gifts and presents which they themselves provided and returning with richer presents which Bosambo acquired. It was, if the truth be told, a novel and pleasant method of extracting blackmail--pleasant because it gave Bosambo little trouble, and afforded his subordinates titillation of importance, and no one had arisen to complain save these unfortunate cities of Akasava--Isisi and N'gombi--which entertained his representatives.
"It is true I have never sent you," said Bosambo, "and my heart is sore at the thought that you should think evil of me because I have saved you all this trouble. For my heart is like water within me. Yet a moon since I sent Kill, my headman, bearing gifts to the king of the bush people, and they chopped him so that he died, and now I fear to send other messengers."
There was an unmistakable sneer on Ikifari's face.
"Lord," he said, with asperity, "Kili was a foolish man and you hated him, for he had spoken evilly against you, stirring up your people. Therefore you sent him to the bushmen and he did not come back." He added significantly: "Now I tell you that if you send me to the bushmen I do not go."
Bosambo thought a moment.
"Now I see," he said, almost jovially, "that Ikifari, whom I love better than my own brother"--this was true--"is angry with me because I have not sent him on a journey. Now I shall show how much I love you, for I will send you all--each of you--as guests of my house, bearing my word to such great nations as the Akasava, the Isisi, the N'gombi; also to the people beyond the river, who are great and give large presents."
He saw the faces brighten, and seized the psychological moment.
"The palaver is finished," said Bosambo magnificently.
He ordered a feast to be made outside the city for his unwelcome guests, and summoned the devil delegates to his presence.
"My friends," he said, "I have given this matter of devils great thought, and since I desire to stand well with you and with your master, I have spent this night in company with six great devils, who are my best friends and who help me in all matters. Now I tell you this--which is known only to myself and to you, whom I trust--that to-day I send to your master six great spirits which inspire me."
There was a hush. The sense of responsibility, which comes to the nervous who are suddenly entrusted with the delivery of a ferocious bull, fell upon the men of the delegation.
"Lord, this is a great honour," said Emberi, "and our masters will send many more presents than your lordship has ever seen. But how may we take these devils with us, for we are fearful and are not used to their ways?"
Bosambo bowed his head graciously.
"That also filled my thoughts," he said, "and thus I have ordered it. I shall take six of my people--six counsellors and chiefs, who are to me as the sun and the flowers--and by magic I will place inside the heart of each chief and headman one great devil. You shall take these men with you, and you shall listen to all they say save this." He paused. "These devils love me, and they will greatly desire to return to my city and to my land, where they have been so long. Now I tell you that you must treat them kindly. Yet you must hold them, putting a guard about them, and keeping them in a secret place, so that Sandi may not find them and hear of them. And they will bring you fortune and prosperity and the courage of lions."
* * * * *
Sanders was coming up river to settle a woman palaver, when he came slap into a flotilla of such pretension and warlike appearance that he did not hesitate for one moment.
At a word, the canvas jackets were slipped from the Hotchkiss guns, and they were swung over the side. But there was no need for such preparations, as he discovered when Emberi's canoe came alongside.
"Tell me, Emberi," said Sanders, "what is this wonderful thing I see--that the Akasavas and the Isisi, and the N'gombi and the people of the lower forest sail together in love and harmony?"
"Lord," said Emberi proudly, "this is Bosambo's doing."
Sanders was all suspicion.
"Now I know that Bosambo is a clever man," he said, "yet I did not know that he was so great a character that he could bring together all men in peace, but rather the contrary."
"He has done this because of devils," said Emberi importantly. "Behold, there are certain things about which I must not speak to you, and this is one of them. So, Sandi, ask me no more, for I have sworn an oath."
Leaning over the steamer Sanders surveyed the flotilla. His keen eyes ranged the boat from stem to stern. He noted with interest the presence of one Ikifari, who was known to him. And Ikifari in a scarlet coat was a happy and satisfied man.
"O Ikifari," bantered Sanders, "what of my roads?"
The chief looked up. "Lord, they shall be made," he said, "though my young men die in the making. I go now to make a grand palaver for my friend and father Bosambo, for he trusts me above all men and has sent me to the Isisi."
Sanders knew something of Bosambo's idiosyncrasies, and nodded.
"When you come back," he said, "I will speak on the matter of these roads. Tell me now, my friend, how long do you stay with the Isisi?"
"Lord," said Ikifari, "I stay for the time of a moon. Afterwards I go back to the Ochori, bearing rich presents which my lord Bosambo has made me swear I will keep for myself."
"The space of a moon," repeated Sanders.
He turned to ring the engines "Ahead" and did not see Emberi's hand go up to cover a smile.
*CHAPTER XIII*
*GUNS IN THE AKASAVA*
"Thank God!" said the Houssa captain fervently, "there is no war in this country."
"Touch wood!" said Sanders, and the two men simultaneously reached out and laid solemn hands upon the handle of the coffee-pot, which was vulcanite.
If they had touched wood who knows what might have happened in the first place to Ofesi the chief of Mc-Canti?
Who knows what might have happened to the two smugglers of gold from the French territory?
The wife of Bikilini might have gone off with her lover, and Bikilini resigned and patient taken another to wife, and the death men of the Ofesi might never have gone forth upon their unamiable missions, or going forth have been drowned, or grown faint-hearted.
Anyway it is an indisputable fact that neither Sanders nor Captain Hamilton touched wood on the occasion.
And as to Bannister Fish----?
That singular man was a trader in questionable commodities, for he had not the nice sentiments which usually go with the composition of a white man.
Some say that he ran slaves from Angola to places where a black man or a black woman is worth a certain price; that he did this openly with the connivance of the Government of Portugal and made a tolerable fortune. He certainly bought more poached ivory than any man in Africa, and his crowning infamy up to date was the arming of a South Soudanese Mahdi--arms for employment against his fellow-countrymen.
There are certain manufacturers of small arms in the Midlands who will execute orders to any capacity, produce weapons modern or antiquated at a cost varying with the delicacy or mechanism of the weapon. They have no conscience, but have a hard struggle to pay dividends because there are other firms in Liege who run the same line of business, but produce at from 10 per cent. to 25 per cent. lower cost.
Mr. Bannister Fish, a thin, wiry man of thirty-four, as yellow as a guinea and with the temper of a fiend, was not popular on the coast, especially with officials. Fortunately Africa has many coasts, and since Africa in mass was Mr. Fish's hunting-ground, rather than any particular section, the coast men--as we know the coast--saw little of him.
It was Mr. Fish's boast that there was not twenty miles of coast line from Dakka to Capetown, and from Lourenco Marques to Suez, that had not contributed something of beauty to his lordly mansion on the top of Highgate Hill.
You will observe that he omits reference to the coast which encloses Cape Colony, and there is a reason. Cape Colony is immensely civilised, has stipendiary magistrates and a horrible breakwater where yellow-jacketed convicts labour for their sins, and Mr. Fish's sins were many. He tackled Sanders's territory in the same spirit as a racehorse breeder will start raising Pekingese poodles--not for the money he could make out of it, but as an amusing sideline.
He worked ruin on the edge of the Akasava country, operating from the adjoining foreign territories, and found an unholy joy in worrying Sanders, whom he had met once and most cordially disliked.
His dislike was intensified on the next occasion of their meeting, for Sanders, making a forced march across the Akasava, seized the caravan of Mr. Bannister Fish, burnt his stores out of hand, and submitted the plutocrat of Highgate Hill to the indignity of marching handcuffed to headquarters. Mr. Fish was tried by a divisional court and fined L500, or, as an alternative, awarded twelve months imprisonment with hard labour.
The fine was paid, and Mr. Fish went home saying horrible things about Mr. Commissioner Sanders, which I will not sully these fair pages by repeating.
Highgate Hill is a prosaic neighbourhood served by prosaic motor-buses, and not the place where one would imagine wholesale murder might be planned, yet from his domain in Highgate Mr. Fish issued certain instructions by telephone and cablegram, and at his word men went secretly into Sanders's territory looking for the likely man.
They found Ofesi, and Highgate spoke to the Akasava to some purpose.
In the month of February in a certain year Mr. Fish drove resplendently in his electric landau from Highgate to Waterloo. He arrived on the Akasava border seven weeks later no less angry with Sanders than he had ever been, and of a cheerful countenance because, being a millionaire, he could indulge in his hobbies, and his hobby was the annoyance of a far-away Commissioner who, at that precise moment was touching vulcanite and thinking it wood.
Ofesi, the son of Malaka, the son of G'nani, was predestined.
Thus it was predicted by the famous witch-doctor Komonobologo, of the Akasava.
For it would appear that on the night that Ofesi came squealing into the world, there were certain solar manifestations such as an eclipse of the moon and prodigious shooting of stars, which Komonobologo translated favourably to the clucking, sobbing and shrill whimpering morsel of whitey-brown humanity.
Thus Ofesi was to rule all peoples as far as the sun shone (some three hundred miles in all directions according to local calculations), and he should not suffer ignominious death at the hand of any man.
Ofesi (literally "the Born-Lucky") should be mighty in counsel and in war; should shake the earth with the tread of his legions; might risk and gain, never risk and lose; was the favoured of ju-jus and ghosts; and would have many sons.
The hollow-eyed woman stretched on the floor of the hut spoke faintly of her happiness, the baby with greedy mouth satisfying the beast in him said nothing, being too much occupied with his natural and instinctive desires.
Such prophecies are common, and some come to nothing. Some, for no apparent reason, stick fest to the recipients.
Ofesi--his destiny--was of the sticking kind.
When Sanders took up his duties on the river, Ofesi was a lank and awkward youth of whom his fellows stood in awe.
Sanders was in awe of nobody. He listened quietly to the recital of portents, omens, and the like, and when it was finished, he delivered a little homily on the fallibility of human things and the extraordinarily high death-rate which existed amongst those misguided people who walked outside the rigid circle of the land.
Ofesi had neighbours more hearty than Sanders, and by these he was accepted as something on account of the total wonder which the years would produce.
So Ofesi grew and flourished, doing much mischief in his way, which was neither innocent nor boyish, and the friendly hand which is upraised to small boys all the world over never fell sharply upon his well-covered nerves, because Ofesi was predestined and immune.
In course of time he was appointed by the then king of the Akasava to the chieftainship of the village of Mi-lanti, and the city of the Akasava breathed a sigh of relief to see his canoe go round the bend of the river out of sight.
No report of the chief's minor misdoings came to Sanders because this legend of destiny carried to all the nations save and except one.
It is said that Ofesi received more homage and held a more regal court in his tiny principality than did the king his master; that N'gombi, Isisi, and the tribes about sent him presents doubly precious, and that he had a household of sixty wives, all contributed by his devotees. It was also said that he made the intoxicating distributions of Mr. Fish possible, but Sanders had no proof of this.
He raided his friends impartially, did all manner of unpleasant things, terrorised the river from the Lesser Isisi to the edge of the Ochori, and the fishermen watching his war canoes creeping stealthily through the night would say: "Let no man see the lord Ofesi; lest in the days to come he remember and blind us."
Whether from sheer cunning or from the intuitive faculty which is a part of genius, Ofesi grew to stout manhood without once violating the border line of the Ochori.
Until upon a day----
Sanders came in great haste one wet April night when the clouds hung so low over the river that you might have touched them with a fishing-rod.
It was a night of billowing mists, of drenching cloud bursts, of loud cracking thunders and the flicker-flacker of lightning so incessant that only the darkness counted as interval.
Yet, against the swollen stream, drenched to the skin, his wet face set to the stinging rain and the white rod of his searchlight piercing such gloom as there was, Sanders came as fast as stern wheel could revolve for the Akasava land.
He came up to the village of Mi-lanti in the wild grey of a stormy dawn, and such of the huts as the flooding waters of the heavens had spared stood isolated sentinels amidst smoking ruins.
He landed tired and immensely angry, and found many dead men and one or two who thought they were dead. They told him a doleful story of rapine and murder, of an innocent village set upon by the Ochori and taken in its defencelessness. "That is a lie," said Sanders promptly, "for you have stockades, built to the west of the village and your dead are all painted as men paint themselves who prepare long for war. Also the Ochori--such as I have seen--are not so painted, which tells me that they came in haste against a warring people."
The wounded man turned his tired face to Sanders.
"It is my faith," he said, in the conventional terminology of his tribe, "that you have eyes like a big cat."
Sanders attended to his injuries and left him and his pitiful fellows in a dry hut. Then he went to look for Bosambo, and found him sitting patiently ten miles up the river. He sat before a steep hill of rock and undergrowth. At the top of the hill was the chief of the village of Mi-lanti, and with him were such of his fighting men as were not at the moment in a happier world.
"Lord, this is true," said Bosambo, "that this dog attacked my river villages and put my men to death and my women to service. So I came down against him, for it is written in the Sura of the Djinn that no man shall live to laugh at his own evil."
"There will be a palaver," said Sanders briefly, and bade the crestfallen chief, Ofesi, to come down and stack his spears. Since it is not in the nature of the native man to speak the truth when his skin is in peril, it goes without saying that both sides lied fearfully, and Sanders, sifting the truth, knew which side lied the least.
"Ofesi," he said, at the end of much weariness of listening, "what do you say that I shall not hang you?"
Ofesi, a short, thick man with a faint beard, looked up and down, left and right for inspiration. "Lord," he said after a while, "this you know, that all my life I have been a good man--and it is said that I have a high destiny, and shall not die by cruelty."
"'Man is eternal whilst he lives,'" quoted Sanders, "'yet man dies sooner or later.'"
Ofesi stared round at Bosambo, and Bosambo was guilty of an indiscretion--possibly the greatest indiscretion of his life. In the presence of his master, and filled with the exultation and virtuous righteousness which come to the palpably innocent in the face of trial, he said in English, shaking his head the while reprovingly:
"Oh, you dam' naughty devil!"
Sanders had condemned the man to death in his heart; had mentally chosen the tree on which the marauding chief should swing when Bosambo spoke.
Sanders had an immense idea as to the sanctity of life in one sense. He had killed many by rope with seeming indifference, and, indeed, he never allowed the question of a man's life or death to influence him one way or the other when an end was in view.
He would watch with unwavering eyes the breath choke out of a swaying body, yet there must be a certain ritual of decency, of fitness, of decorum in such matters, or his delicate sense of justice was outraged.
Bosambo's words, grotesque, uncalled for, wholly absurd, saved the life of Ofesi the chief.
For a moment Sanders's lips twitched irresponsibly, then he turned with a snarl upon the discomfited chief of the Ochori.
"Back to your land, you monkey man!" he snapped; "this man has offended against the land--yet he shall live, for he is a fool. I know a greater one!"
He sent Ofesi back to his village to build up what his folly had overthrown.
"Remember, Ofesi," he said, "I give you back your life, though you deserve death: and I do this because it comes to me suddenly that you are a child as Bosambo is a child. Now, I will come back to you with the early spring, and if you have deserved well of me you shall be rewarded with your liberty; and if you have done ill to me, you shall go to the Village of Irons or to a worse place."
Back at headquarters Sanders told a sympathetic captain of Houssas the story.
"It was horribly weak of course," he said; "but, somehow, when that ass Bosambo let rip his infernal English I couldn't hang a sparrow."
"Might have brought this Ofesi person down to the village," said the captain thoughtfully. "He's got an extraordinary reputation."
Sanders sat on the edge of the table, his hands thrust into his breeches pockets.
"I thought of that, too, and it affected me. You see, there was just a fear in my mind that I was being influenced on the wrong side by this fellow's talk of destiny--that I was being, in fact, a little malicious."
The Houssa skipper snapped his cigarette case and looked thoughtful.
"I'll get another company down from headquarters," he said.
"You might ask for a machine-gun section also," said Sanders. "I've got it in my bones that there's going to be trouble."
A week later the upper river saw many strange faces. Isolated fishermen came from nowhere in particular to pursue their mild calling in strange waters.
They built their huts in unfrequented patches of forest, and you might pass up and down a stretch of the beach without knowing that hut was modestly concealed in the thick bush at the back.
Also they went about their business at night with fishing spear and light canoe tacking across river and up river, moving without sound in the shadows of the bank, approaching villages and cities with remarkable circumspection.
They were strange fishermen indeed, for they fished with pigeons. In every canoe the birds drowsed in a wicker-work cage, little red labels about their legs on which even an untutored spy might make a rude but significant mark with the aid of an indelible pencil.
Sanders took no risks.
He summoned Ahmed Ali, the chief of his secret men.