The Keepers of the King's Peace by Edgar Wallace (most read book in the world .TXT) 📗

the caste. Three lateral cuts on either cheek was the mark of the M'gimi—wounds made, upon the warrior's initiation to the order, with the razor-edged blade of a killing-spear. They lived apart in three camps to the number of six thousand men, and for five years from the hour of their initiation they neither married nor courted. The M'gimi turned their backs to women, and did not suffer their presence in their camps. And if any man departed from this austere rule he was taken to the Breaking Tree, his four limbs were fractured, and he was hoisted to the lower branches, between which a litter was swung, and his regiment sat beneath the tree neither eating, drinking nor sleeping until he died. Sometimes this was a matter of days. As for the woman who had tempted his eye and his tongue, she was a witness.

Thus the M'gimi preserved their traditions of austerity. They were famous walkers and jumpers. They threw heavy spears and fought great sham-fights, and they did every violent exercise save till the ground.

This was the sum and substance of the complaint which had at last come to a head.

S'gono, the spokesman of The Diggers, was a headman of the inner lands, and spoke with bitter prejudice, since his own son had been rejected by the M'gimi captains as being unworthy.

"Shall we men dig and sow for such as these?" [Pg 177]he asked. "Now give a judgment, King! Every moon we must take the best of our fruit and the finest of our fish. Also so many goats and so much salt, and it is swallowed up."

"Yet if I send them away," said the king, "how shall I protect this land against the warriors of the Akasava and the evil men of the swamp? Also of the Ochori, who are four days' march across good ground?"

"Lord King," said S'gono, "are there no M'gimi amongst us who have passed from the camp and have their women and their children? May not these take the spear again? And are not we M'joro folk men? By my life! I will raise as many spears from The Diggers and captain them with M'joro men—this I could do between the moons and none would say that you were not protected. For we are men as bold as they."

The king saw that the M'gimi party was in the minority. Moreover, he had little sympathy with the warrior caste, for his beginnings were basely rooted in the soil, and two of his sons had no more than scraped into the M'gimi.

"This thing shall be done," said the king, and the roar of approval which swept up the little hillock on which he sat was his reward.

Sanders, learning something of these doings, had come in haste, moving across the Lower Akasava by a short cut, risking the chagrin of certain chiefs and friends who would be shocked and mortified by his apparent lack of courtesy in [Pg 178]missing the ceremonious call which was their due.

But his business was very urgent, otherwise he would not have travelled by Nobolama—The-River-that-comes-and-goes.

He was fortunate in that he found deep water for the Wiggle as far as the edge of this pleasant land. A two days' trek through the forest brought him to the great city of Morjaba. In all the Territories there was no such city as this, for it stretched for miles on either hand, and indeed was one of the most densely populated towns within a radius of five hundred miles.

S'kobi came waddling to meet his governor with maize, plucked in haste from the gardens he passed, and salt, grabbed at the first news of Sanders's arrival, in his big hands. These he extended as he puffed to where Sanders sat at the edge of the city.

"Lord," he wheezed, "none came with news of this great honour, or my young men would have met you, and my maidens would have danced the road flat with their feet. Take!"

Sanders extended both palms and received the tribute of salt and corn, and solemnly handed the crushed mess to his orderly.

"O S'kobi," he said, "I came swiftly to make a secret palaver with you, and my time is short."

"Lord, I am your man," said S'kobi, and signalled his councillors and elder men to a distance.

Sanders was in some difficulty to find a beginning.

[Pg 179]"You know, S'kobi, that I love your people as my children," he said, "for they are good folk who are faithful to government and do ill to none."

"Wa!" said S'kobi.

"Also you know that spearmen and warriors I do not love, for spears are war and warriors are great lovers of fighting."

"Lord, you speak the truth," said the other, nodding, "therefore in this land I will have made a law that there shall be no spears, save those which sleep in the shadow of my hut. Now well I know why you have come to make this palaver, for you have heard with your beautiful long ears that I have sent away my fighting regiments."

Sanders nodded.

"You speak truly, my friend," he said, and S'kobi beamed.

"Six times a thousand spears I had—and, lord, spears grow no corn. Rather are they terrible eaters. And now I have sent them to their villages, and at the next moon they should have burnt their fine war-knives, but for a certain happening. We folk of Morjaba have no enemies, and we do good to all. Moreover, lord, as you know, we have amongst us many folk of the Isisi, of the Akasava and the N'gombi, also men from the Great King's land beyond the High Rocks, and the little folk from The-Land-beyond-the-Swamp. Therefore, who shall attack us since we have kinsmen of all amongst us?"

[Pg 180]Sanders regarded the jovial king with a sad little smile.

"Have I done well by all men?" he asked quietly. "Have I not governed the land so that punishment comes swiftly to those who break the law? Yet, S'kobi, do not the Akasava and the Isisi, the N'gombi and the Lower River folk take their spears against me? Now I tell you this which I have discovered. In all beasts great and little there are mothers who have young ones and fathers who fight that none shall harass the mother."

"Lord, this is the way of life," said S'kobi.

"It is the way of the Bigger Life," said Sanders, "and greatly the way of man-life. For the women bring children to the land and the men sit with their spears ready to fight all who would injure their women. And so long as life lasts, S'kobi, the women will bear and the men will guard; it is the way of Nature, and you shall not take from men the desire for slaughter until you have dried from the hearts of women the yearning for children."

"Lord," said S'kobi, a fat man and easily puzzled, "what shall be the answer to this strange riddle you set me?"

"Only this," said Sanders rising, "I wish peace in this land, but there can be no peace between the leopard who has teeth and claws and the rabbit who has neither tooth nor claw. Does the leopard fight the lion or the lion the leopard? They live [Pg 181]in peace, for each is terrible in his way, and each fears the other. I tell you this, that you live in love with your neighbours not because of your kindness, but because of your spears. Call them back to your city, S'kobi."

The chief's large face wrinkled in a frown.

"Lord," he said, "that cannot be, for these men have marched away from my country to find a people who will feed them, for they are too proud to dig the ground."

"Oh, damn!" said Sanders in despair, and went back the way he came, feeling singularly helpless.

The Odyssey of the discarded army of the Morjaba has yet to be written. Paradoxically enough, its primary mission was a peaceful one, and when it found first the frontiers of the Akasava and then the river borders of the Isisi closed against it, it turned to the north in an endeavour to find service under the Great King, beyond the mountains. Here it was repulsed and its pacific intentions doubted. The M'gimi formed a camp a day's march from the Ochori border, and were on the thin line which separates unemployment from anarchy when Bosambo, Chief of the Ochori, who had learnt of their presence, came upon the scene.

Bosambo was a born politician. He had the sense of opportunity and that strange haze of hopeful but indefinite purpose which is the foundation of the successful poet and statesman, [Pg 182]but which, when unsuccessfully developed, is described as "temperament."

Bones, paying a business call upon the Ochori, found a new township grown up on the forest side of the city. He also discovered evidence of discontent in Bosambo's harassed people, who had been called upon to provide fish and meal for the greater part of six thousand men who were too proud to work.

"Master," said Bosambo, "I have often desired such an army as this, for my Ochori fighters are few. Now, lord, with these men I can hold the Upper River for your King, and Sandi and none dare speak against him. Thus would N'poloyani, who is your good friend, have done."

"But who shall feed these men, Bosambo?" demanded Bones hastily.

"All things are with God," replied Bosambo piously.

Bones collected all the available information upon the matter and took it back to headquarters.

"H'm," said Sanders when he had concluded his recital, "if it were any other man but Bosambo ... you would require another battalion, Hamilton."

"But what has Bosambo done?" asked Patricia Hamilton, admitted to the council.

"He is being Napoleonic," said Sanders, with a glance at the youthful authority on military history, and Bones squirmed and made strange noises. "We will see how it works out. How [Pg 183]on earth is he going to feed them, Bones?"

"Exactly the question I asked, sir an' Excellency," said Bones in triumph. "'Why, you silly old ass——'"

"I beg your pardon!" exclaimed the startled Sanders.

"That is what I said to Bosambo, sir," explained Bones hastily. "'Why, you silly old ass,' I said, 'how are you going to grub 'em?' 'Lord Bones,' said Bosambo, 'that's the jolly old problem that I'm workin' out.'"

How Bosambo worked out his problem may be gathered.

"There is some talk of an Akasava rising," said Sanders at breakfast one morning. "I don't know why this should be, for my information is that the Akasava folk are fairly placid."

"Where does the news come from, sir?" asked Hamilton.

"From the Isisi king—he's in a devil of a funk, and has begged Bosambo to send him help."

That help was forthcoming in the shape of Bosambo's new army, which arrived on the outskirts of the Isisi city and sat in idleness for a month, at the end of which time the people of the Isisi represented to their king that they would, on the whole, prefer war to a peace which put them on half rations in order that six thousand proud warriors might live on the fat of the land.

The M'gimi warriors marched back to the Ochori, each man carrying a month's supply of [Pg 184]maize and salt, wrung from the resentful peasants of the Isisi.

Three weeks after, Bosambo sent an envoy to the King of the Akasava.

"Let no man know this, Gubara, lest it come to the ears of Sandi, and you, who are very innocent, be wrongly blamed," said the envoy solemnly. "Thus says Bosambo: It has come to my ears that the N'gombi are secretly arming and will very soon send a forest of spears against the Akasava. Say this to Gubara, that because my stomach is filled with sorrow I will help him. Because I am very powerful, because of my friendship with Bonesi and his cousin, N'poloyani, who is also married to Bonesi's aunt, I have a great army which I will send to the Akasava, and when the N'gombi hear of this they will send away their spears and there will be peace."

The Akasava chief, a nervous man with the memory of all the discomforts which follow tribal wars, eagerly assented. For two months Bosambo's army sat down like a cloud of locusts and ate the Akasava to a condition bordering upon famine.

At the end of that time they marched to the N'gombi country, news having been brought by Bosambo's messengers that the Great King was crossing the western mountains with a terrible army to seize the N'gombi forests. How long this novel method of provisioning his army might have continued may only be guessed, for in the midst of Bosambo's plans for maintaining an [Pg 185]army at the