"If any people attack you, I will come with my soldiers, and for every man of you who dies, I will kill one of your enemies."
"Lord," said the messenger, none other than the king's son, "if we are dead, we care little who lives or dies. Now, I ask you, master, to send your soldiers with me, for our people are tired and timid."
"Be content," said Sanders, "that I have remitted your taxation—the palaver is finished."
The messenger returned to his dismal nation—Sanders at the time was never more than a day's journey from the Kiko—and a sick and weary people sat down in despair to await the realisation of their fears.
They might have waited throughout all eternity, for Bosambo was back in his own city, and had almost forgotten them, and Isisi and the Akasava, regarding them for some reason as Sanders' urglebes, would have no more thought of attacking them than they would have considered the possibility of attacking Sanders; and as for the N'gombi, they had had their lesson.
Thus matters stood when the Lulungo people, who live three days beyond the Akasava, came down the river looking for loot and trouble.
The Lulungo people are an unlovable race; "a crabbed, bitter, and a beastly people," Sanders once described them in his wrath.
For two years the Lulungo folk had lain quiet, then, like foraging and hungry dogs, they took the river trail—six canoes daubed with mud and rushes.
They found hospitality of a kind in the fishing villages, for the peaceable souls who lived therein fled at the first news of the visitation.
They came past the Ochori warily keeping to midstream. Time was when the Ochori would have supplied them with all their requirements, but nowadays these men of Bosambo's snapped viciously.