by Mark Hodder
Amid the perpetual whine and buzz of insects, Burton directed the construction of the camp. As soon as the first Rowtie was erected, Algernon Swinburne was carried by litter into it and made comfortable on a bunk.
“He's still unconscious,” Sister Raghavendra told the king's agent. “He lost a lot of blood and also took a nasty knock to the head, but he'll get over it. I have no doubt he'll be bouncing around again in due course. His durability is astonishing. I remember remarking upon it that time he was assaulted by Laurence Oliphant. Nevertheless, I should allow him a week of undisturbed bed rest.”
Burton shook his head. “I'm sorry, Sadhvi, but that won't be possible. We can't tarry here. We have to strike camp and start moving at the first glimmer of dawn tomorrow. But I'll assign porters to his stretcher. We'll carry Algy for as long as he needs.”
“Very well. I'll stay close to him.”
Said bin Salim had been appointed ras kafilah-or guide-to the expedition. Thankfully, despite sharing the same name, he was not the man who'd acted in that capacity during Burton's first exploration back in '57. That particular Said had caused nothing but trouble, whereas the current ras kafilah immediately demonstrated his worth by assigning tasks to the Wasawahili and ensuring they earned their pay. In this, his eight “bully boys,” as Trounce called them, were instrumental. With surprising rapidity, the camp was organised.
By the time the sun had set, two hundred and fifty horses and twenty mules were corralled at the southern end of the clearing; a semicircle of Rowtie tents had been erected at the northern end; the east side was crowded with beit sha'ar-Arabian goat-hair tents-occupied by the two hundred Daughters of Al-Manat; and the west side belonged to the porters, who sat or lay wrapped in blankets. Guards were posted, fires were lit, and chickens and vegetables and porridge were cooked and consumed.
The silence of the tropical night settled over the expedition, shattered now and then by the bellow of a bull-crocodile or the outre cry of a nocturnal heron. The atmosphere was stifling, the mosquitoes indefatigable.
Burton, his friends-with the exception of Swinburne-and Said had gathered in the main tent. The Englishmen wore light trousers and collarless shirts, unbuttoned at the neck and with sleeves rolled up. Isabella Mayson and Sister Raghavendra had donned summer dresses of a modest cut. Said and Isabel Arundell were in their Arabian robes. Herbert Spencer still wore his polymethylene suit but had wrapped around it the full robes of a Bedouin, his head completely concealed within a keffiyeh. He'd taken to walking with a staff, not only to compensate for his damaged leg, but also because it added to the impression that he was a leper-a disguise that caused the Wasawahili porters to give him a wide berth. Had they been aware of what really lay beneath those robes, superstitious dread would have caused them to desert in droves.
The group was sitting around a table upon which Burton had spread a large map. They examined it by the light of an oil lamp against which a repulsive moth was bumping.
“This was drawn up in 1844 by a French naval officer named Maizan,” Burton told them. “As you can see, I have added extensive corrections and annotations. We are here-” he pointed to a spot on the map, then to another, farther inland, “-and this is the village of Kuingani. And beyond that, here we have the village of Bomani, and here, Mkwaju. If you march at two and a half miles per hour and don't stop at the first two villages, you'll reach the third in about four and a half to five hours.”
Thomas Honesty shrugged. “Sounds too slow.”
“Don't underestimate the terrain,” Burton replied. “You'll find it hard going, and the pace I suggest won't be easy. And in addition to the difficulties of swamp and jungle, the hills that extend back from here, and which rise up along the length of the coast, belong to the Wamrima tribes. They are generally hostile and uncooperative.”
“Who wouldn't be, with slavers preying on them?” Isabella Mayson murmured.
“Quite so. My point is this: strike camp at the crack of dawn, press on as hard as you can, stay alert, and keep your weapons to hand. Don't take any nonsense from the villagers. They will undoubtedly try to charge you an extortionate tax for passing through their territory. They refer to it as hongo- meaning ‘tribute’-and they'll do everything possible to hamper your progress if they aren't satisfied with what they get. Pay only as Said advises-which will, anyway, be over the odds.”
He said something to the guide in Arabic. Said looked at Krishnamurthy and addressed him in fluent Hindustani: “I speak thy tongue, sir.”
“Ah, good, that's excellent!” Krishnamurthy responded.
Burton continued: “When you reach Mkwaju, rest and eat, but be ready to move on at a moment's notice. If everything goes to plan, by the time we catch up with you, it'll be the hottest part of the day. Despite that, we'll have to start moving again. I want to reach Nzasa, here-” He tapped another mark on the map. “That's another three-and-a-half-hour march. By the time we get there, I'm pretty sure we'll be too done in to go any farther, and the day's rains will be on their way, so this is where we'll camp for the night.”
They talked for a little while longer, then Burton stood, stretched, and fished a cigar from his pocket. He addressed Isabel Arundell and William Trounce: “It's a new moon tonight, so we'll be operating by starlight alone. Isabel, when your women are done with their evening prayers, please begin your preparations. William, come have a smoke with me. The rest of you: bed-that's an order!”
“I'll work on me book, Boss,” Herbert Spencer said. “Sleep is another pleasure I'm denied nowadays, but it ain't all bad-my First Principles of Philosophy is comin' on a treat!”
They bade each other goodnight.
Burton and Trounce stepped outside, lit up, and strolled slowly around the camp, sending plumes of blue tobacco smoke into the heavy air. It did nothing to drive away the mosquitoes. Trounce slapped at one that was attacking his forearm. “Bloody things!”
“They gather especially around swampy ground,” Burton told him. “The places where miasmic gases cause malaria. The areas where the mosquitoes are thickest are the same areas where you're most likely to succumb.”
“How long before I do?”
“The seasoning fever usually sets in fairly quickly. A fortnight at most, old chap, then you'll be sweating it out and gibbering like a loon for a month. I'm afraid it's inevitable.”
Trounce grunted. “I hope Sadhvi is as good a nurse as you say she is!”
They watched Isabel's women saddling their horses, then discarded their cigar stubs, walked back to the main tent, and retrieved their shoulder bags and rifles.
“All right,” said Burton. “Let's get on with it.”
Ten minutes later, the two men were riding at Isabel's side and leading two hundred mounted Amazons up the hill. When they reached its brow, Trounce pulled his horse around-like Honesty and Krishnamurthy, he'd learned to ride during their trek through Arabia-and looked down at the camp. It seemed a tiny island, hemmed in on three sides by riotous vegetation, with the Indian Ocean glittering in the starlight beyond, and, behind him, the endless expanse of unexplored Africa.
“I feel that we're up against impossible odds,” he said to Burton.
The king's agent replied, “We probably are.”
Mzizima village was five miles south of the camp. Originally, it had been composed of thatch-roofed beehive huts and a bandani-a wall-less palaver house, just a thatched roof standing upon six vertical beams-which were all positioned in an orderless cluster around an open central space. Surrounding the village, amid cocoa, mango, and pawpaw trees, there had been fields of rice, holcus, sugarcane, and peas, separated by clumps of basil and sage. This cultivated land stretched to the edge of a mangrove forest in the south, to the hills in the west, and to a small natural bay on the coast.
In the distant past, the Wamrima inhabitants had been farmers of the land and fishers of the sea, but the slave trade had made lying, thieving, shirking, and evasiveness the tools of survival, reducing a once-prosperous
village to a clump of hovels occupied by men and women who, in the knowledge that life could be literally or metaphorically taken from them at any moment, did not bother to apply themselves to the business of living.
And now the Prussians had come.
It was four o'clock in the morning. Sir Richard Francis Burton was lying on his stomach at the top of a bushy ridge to the north and was using the field glasses he'd retrieved from the Orpheus to spy upon the settlement. Only a few of its original structures remained-the palaver house being one of them-and in their place wood-built barracks of a distinctly European design had been erected. There were six of these, plus six more half-built, and beyond them a sea of tents that spread out into the once-cultivated fields. The canvas dwellings were especially numerous farther to the south, where man groves had obviously been chopped and burned away. More half-erected wooden buildings were visible there, too.
“It looks like they're planning a permanent camp here,” Trounce whispered. “Building a village a little to the south of the original one.”
Burton grunted an agreement.
By the bright light of the stars, he could see that his stolen supplies were stacked up in the bandani. One of his harvestman vehicles squatted beside the structure. The other one was closer to his and Trounce's position, standing motionless at the outer edge of the tented area just in front of the ridge, obviously left there by its driver. A guard was standing beside it, with a rifle over his shoulder and a pipe in his mouth.
Mzizima was silent, with only a few men on patrol. Of the Wamrima, there was no sign, and Burton felt certain that the villagers had either been pressed into service as lackeys or killed.
“What the bloody hell is that?” Trounce hissed, pointing to the other side of the encampment.
Burton focused his glasses on the thing that flopped along there. Even before he caught a clear view of it, its shadowy shape caused him to shudder. Then it floundered into an area of silvery luminescence and he saw that it was a huge plant, propelling itself along on thick white roots. To Burton's astonishment, there was a man sitting in the thing, cocooned in a fleshy bloom and surrounded by flailing tendrils. He appeared to be steering the plant by thought alone, for there were coiling threadlike appendages embedded into the skin of his scalp, and when he moved his head, the grotesque vehicle turned in the direction he was looking.
“There are others,” Trounce said. “They're patrolling the outer perimeter.”
A few minutes later, it became apparent why.
One of the plants suddenly lunged forward and grabbed at something. A man, screaming wildly, was yanked out of the undergrowth and hoisted into the air. It was a Wamrima native, obviously trying to escape, and now he paid the price. Held aloft by creepers entangled around his wrists, he was mercilessly whipped by the plant's spine-encrusted limbs until his naked back was streaming blood, then he was cast back into the camp-sent spinning through the air to land in a heap between tents, where he lay insensible.
“This complicates matters,” Burton said.
“Should we call it off?”
“No. We'll need those supplies if we're to catch up with Speke. He's got a tremendous lead on us, but if we have all our resources, we can cut straight through all the circumstances that will slow him down.”
“What circumstances?”
“Mainly the obstructions the natives will throw in his path. I'm counting on his incompetence as an expedition leader, inability to communicate in any language other than English, and the fact that, believing us blown up on the Orpheus, he has no idea we're on his tail.”
Fifteen minutes later, Pox swooped out of the sky and landed on Burton's shoulder.
“Message from Isabel Arundell!” the parakeet announced.
“Shhh!” Burton hissed, but it was an instruction the bird didn't understand.
“In position, you lumpish clotpole. Awaiting the word. Message ends.”
“The guard by the harvestman is looking this way,” Trounce said softly.
“Message to Isabel Arundell,” Burton whispered. “Consider the word received. Beware. There are Eugenicist plants. Message ends.”
Pox gave a squawk and flew away.
“It's all right,” Trounce said. “He just saw Pox. Probably thinks it's nothing but a noisy jungle bird. He's giving his attention back to his pipe.”
“I think it's time to take care of him, anyway,” Burton said.
He pulled his spine-shooter from its holster.
Steadying the cactus gun on his left forearm, he took careful aim and gently squeezed the nodule that functioned as a trigger. With a soft phut!, the pistol fired.
Seven spines thudded into the guard's chest. He looked down at them, muttered, “Was sind diese?” then crumpled to the ground.
“Quietly now,” Burton hissed. “To the outer tents. Stay low.”
The two men slipped over the brow of the ridge and slithered silently down to the perimeter of the camp. They crouched in the dark shadow of a tent and waited.
When it happened, it did so with such suddenness that even Burton and Trounce, who were expecting it, were taken by surprise. One minute there was nothing but the sound of snoring men under canvas, the next the night was rent by rifle fire, the pounding of horses' hooves, and the ululation of women.
The Daughters of Al-Manat came thundering over the crest of the hill on the northwestern border of the camp, and even before a warning shout could be raised by the guards, they had stampeded over tents, set burning brands to three of the barracks, and wheeled their horses and raced back up the hill and out of sight.
The Prussian guards barely got a shot off, so panicked were they at this unexpected onslaught.
“Wir wurden angegriffen! Wir wurden angegriffen!” they bellowed. “Verteidigt das Lager!”
Men blundered out of the burning buildings, came running out of the others, and emerged from the tents, rubbing their eyes and peering around in confusion. Gunfire banged and flashed from the summit of the hill. Many of the soldiers fell to the ground with bullets in them.
Snatching up their rifles, the Prussians raced to meet the attacking forces. Burton grabbed Trounce by the arm and pointed to the Eugenicist plant vehicles. They, too, were lumbering to the northwesternmost part of the settlement.
The gunfire from one particular area of the hills intensified. The Prussians returned it, shooting blind. While their attention was thus engaged, twenty riders burst out of the verdure a little farther to the south, dashed across an overgrown field, and put torches to two of the plant creatures. Burton could barely repress a cheer when the starlight revealed that Isabel Arundell was the leader of this cavalry charge. She held a pistol in one hand and a spear in the other, and, expertly controlling her mount with her knees, she sent her charge leaping across tents to another of the Eugenicist creations. Plunging her spear into the densest part of it, she reared her horse away from its lashing tendrils, brought her pistol to bear, and shot the plant's driver through the head. She barked a command, galloped away with her band following, and disappeared into the darkness.
The part of Mzizima closest to Burton and Trounce was almost entirely abandoned now.
“Let's move,” Burton urged. “We have to get this done before the southern part of the camp joins the fray.” He and Trounce crept forward until they reached the nearest of the two harvestmen. The explorer reached up to where he expected to find a small hatch in the machine's belly. In London, harvestmen were primarily employed to transport goods, which they carried in netting suspended from their bellies. It had been his intention to reclaim the two vehicles, load them up with the supplies, and walk them away while the Prussians were distracted. He now encountered a serious setback.
“Damn!” he said. “They've removed the confounded net! It's been replaced by a bracket. Looks like they intend to fix something else to the underside of the body.”
“How will we transport our stuff?” Trounce asked.
“I don't know. Let's get to i
t first. Speed is of the essence!”
They ran forward, unnoticed amid the confusion.
One of the barracks, consumed by flames, collapsed, sending out a shower of sparks. Men yelled. Rifles cracked.
Pox fluttered onto Burton's shoulder.
“Message from Isabel churlish bladder-prodder Arundell. Hurry up, you foot-licker! Message ends.”
The second harvester, standing beside the bandani, was intact. Burton pulled down its net and spread it out.
“Start loading it. As many crates as you can. Ignore the specie-it's the equipment we need.”
“Was machen Sie hier?” a voice demanded.
Burton whirled, raised his spine-shooter, and shot the inquisitor down.
“Message to Isabel Arundell,” he said. “We're loading the equipment now. There's only one harvestman. Maximum distraction, if you please. Message ends.”
Pox departed.
Moments later, the Daughters of Al-Manat came pelting back down the hill with guns blazing. As they engaged at close quarters with the Prussians, Burton and Trounce lifted crate after crate from the bandani into the netting. At one point, the king's agent sensed movement at the periphery of his vision, looked up, and noted ten or twelve Africans running up the slope of the ridge and disappearing into the undergrowth.
“Good for you!” he grunted.
Two more soldiers noticed the Englishmen and both went down with venomous cactus spines in them.
“That's as much as she can take,” Burton panted. They'd loaded about a third of the stolen supplies. “Get into her, stay low, and drive back the way we came. If I haven't caught up with you by the time you reach the sand spit, wait for me there.”
William Trounce uttered an acknowledgement, climbed the rungs on one of the harvestman's legs, and settled into the driver's seat. He started the engine. Its roar was drowned out by the gunfire, but as the harvestman stalked away, with its loaded net swinging underneath and Burton running in its wake, its trail of steam was noticed and three of the Prussian plant vehicles started to converge on it.
