Sandi, the King-Maker by Edgar Wallace

THERE was a man in the forests of Bubujal who called himself M'seru, and he was once a petty chief, being overlord of a community which numbered twenty men, thirty -- five goats and as many women. One night, cala cala -- which means "long ago", and stands equally for the passage of years or weeks -- a woman, his own sister, had come to him from the Great King's city, bearing weals of a flogging and marked on the forehead with three red bars which had a terrible significance.

For so are marked they who are doomed to go up to the cave of the Devil Woman of Limbi, there to be slain and eaten. How the sister of M'seru came to escape from the city and her fate, cannot be told. She had a lover, who afterwards went with bound hands and the sacrificial sword at his waist into the dark opening of the Devil Woman's cave, whence none had ever returned. Perhaps it was he who had rescued her from her husband's vengeance, for she was the second wife of the Old King, who was old even in those far-off days.