Testament

by David Gibbins

  The officer told his sergeant to take a section of eight men across the plateau to the thatched building with the cross on top visible on the far side. They left on the double, Wood and Jones following some twenty meters behind. Wood’s heart sank when he saw what transpired once they reached the church; the officer had been right, of course. The soldiers immediately stacked their arms and went inside, ignoring the remonstrations of the sergeant, who was the only one to remain at the entrance. Jones passed his rifle to Wood, ran ahead and went inside as well. Already other soldiers were spreading out over the plateau with firebrands, lighting one thatched roof after another, the flames flickering and crackling and leaping out with the wind, igniting the adjacent buildings. Wood could see that there was no way the church could escape that holocaust either, regardless of General Napier’s orders, and that attempting to save it was going to be a lost cause. All he could do now was join the melee and try to rescue what he could.

  He reached the entrance, holstered his revolver and leaned Jones’s rifle against the others. Three soldiers came out carrying great handfuls of objects in gold and silver and brass: crosses and chalices, shields and crowns, vestments covered in filigree and gold. A boy stood at the entrance, weeping, seemingly not caring as the soldiers jostled him in their eagerness to get out with their booty. Wood ducked inside and immediately smelled smoke. Above him part of the thatch was already ablaze, spreading as he watched it. Some soldier had clearly been overzealous with his firebrand. He seized a handful of rolled manuscripts, passing them to another man, who rushed with them to the entrance, and then turned around looking for more. The smoke was billowing, catching in the back of his throat. One of the roof timbers crashed down on the altar, crushing a metal chest and spreading the fire to the rushes on the floor. He realized that Jones was nowhere to be seen, and then he saw that the soldiers were coming up with their booty from a hole in the ground, evidently some kind of crypt. He crouched down over it, and shouted, “Everyone out. The church is burning. Everyone out now!”

  Two soldiers came struggling up the rock-cut stairs, attempting to carry a large painted triptych between them but dropping it. Another timber came down from the ceiling, bringing with it the ornate bronze cross that had stood on the roof. One of the soldiers lunged for it, but immediately sprang back, clutching his burned hand, and staggered away to the entrance, helped by the other man. Jones appeared behind them, carrying scrolls that spilled from him as he struggled up the stairs. One of the scrolls was larger than the rest, and Wood grabbed it, pulling Jones up with his other hand and pushing him toward the entrance just as another beam came crashing down.

  They stumbled out into the open air, coughing, Wood still clutching the scroll and Jones a handful of others, all that he had managed to rescue. Wood picked up Jones’s rifle, the last remaining one outside the church, and pulled him farther away, well beyond the flames that were now licking off the roof. They came to a halt under a stunted acacia tree some twenty yards farther on, and both went down on their knees, coughing and catching their breath. Wood peered at the other man. “I never thought I’d say this, Jones, but I had expected you to go for the treasure, and instead you would appear to have done a selfless service for mankind.”

  Jones dropped his armful of scrolls on the ground and began counting them. “It’s not quite what it seems, sir, but thanks all the same. Yesterday evening at headquarters, when our role in the storming party became known, the archaeologist, Mr. Holmes, the one who often comes and talks to you, took me into his confidence and asked whether I would rescue scrolls for him, knowing that we would be among the first to come up here. He would have asked you, but he thought you might be constrained, sir. He promised to pay me straight up, no questions asked, five shillings per scroll, no need to put them in the kitty for the drumhead auction. Twenty scrolls here, that’s five pounds, sir, not bad for a hard day’s work, wouldn’t you say? He wants them for the British Museum.”

  Wood coughed, and shook his head. “Well I’m glad there’s something in it for you. It’s still a good deed you’ve done. God know how many of them have been lost in that conflagration.”

  Jones gathered up his load again and stood up. “I’ve got to be going now. Two fellows from the 33rd are ahead of me, taking the other scrolls I managed to get out before you arrived. I’ve promised them both a cut of the proceeds. None of the soldiers think the old parchment and vellum is of any value, so nobody should bother them as they go down. But I need to be there to give Mr. Holmes’s name should they be in any way harassed.”

  “And then you need to retrieve the camera. I want to take some pictures of the entranceway and the revetments. It’s too late for much of value to be photographed inside the citadel, with everything going up in smoke, but we’ll do what we can.”

  “Sir. I’ll be at the bottom of the slope in an hour. Thank you, sir. I’ll send the money home to my poor mother in Bristol. She’ll be ever so grateful, she will.”

  “Right, Jones. I’ll look forward to the postcard. And mother or no mother, you’ll have to take your rifle, otherwise you really will be in trouble.”

  Jones looked at the rifle, then at the scrolls. He sighed, dropped the bundle of parchment, slung the rifle over his shoulder and laboriously gathered the scrolls up again, dropping one and nearly losing the rest as he stooped to retrieve it. Then he seemed to remember something. He stopped and turned. “Sir.”

  “What is it?”

  “That one you’ve got. The big one.”

  Wood looked at the scroll he had picked up. “I don’t think you’ve got space for it.”

  “Perhaps, sir, if you could, you might show it to Mr. Holmes? He might pay more for it, see, being bigger.”

  “Don’t push your luck, Jones. Remember, what you’re doing here is actually contravening General Napier’s orders. If anyone finds out, that drumhead auction will also be a drumhead court martial for one Sapper Jones, never to be Corporal Jones or Sergeant Jones, and certainly not King Jones. Now get on with it.”

  “Sir. Thank you, sir. Bottom of the slope, one hour.”

  Wood watched him hurry off down the path beside other soldiers struggling with their own loot, then looked at the scroll he had kept. He could immediately see that it was not in fact a scroll but some form of tapestry. He undid the leather cord and rolled it out, holding it up under the shade of the tree so that he could see the design more clearly. It was obviously very old, the colors faded, and was an impressive antiquity, showing a scene that was perhaps biblical: two men carrying a shrouded box between them the size of a seaman’s chest, another behind who looked patriarchal, with a braided black beard, and then behind him a cluster of horsemen, one with a lasso or whip and long hair.

  He looked up, seeing that the boy who had been at the entrance to the church was watching him, standing by the tree. Perhaps he was the son of the priest, someone who might know the significance of this scene. Perhaps, indeed, this might be one for Holmes, for the British Museum. Holmes had become something of a friend on the occasions over the last weeks when Wood had been able to come down from the forward party and spend time with the headquarters staff of the expedition. It was he who had inspired Wood to think of planning his own archaeological expedition into Central Asia, something that he now had firmly in mind for his next furlough, an expedition for once without the dismal context of war and death and destruction, but purely for knowledge and gratification and discovery.

  He turned from the boy and began to roll up the tapestry. As he did so, he saw the diminutive figure of Stanley coming up the path toward him, his pith helmet askew, clutching his notebook and pencil. “Mr. Stanley,” he said. “We meet again. You have seen the body of Theodore? He took his own life. I saw it myself.”

  Stanley was covered in dust and looked shaken, pale. “There is nothing redeeming in what has happened here. Nothing redeeming at all.”

  Wood thought for a moment, and gestured at Stanley’s notebook. “It will make a good sto
ry. Your readers will lap it up. That’s all.”

  The acrid smell of burning thatch was beginning to disguise the reek of squalor and death that had pervaded this place. Soon, once the regiments of the expedition had returned to their stations in India, the proceeds of all that loot would be squandered in the way of soldiers, in the brothels and taverns of Mhow and Nowshera and Peshawar, drained away as if it had never existed. Well before then, a few hours from now, the smoldering remains of Magdala would be quenched by the torrential rains of the late afternoon, and the place would appear cleansed, the memory of this day swept down the eroded channels of the hillsides, flushed down the ravines to the sea.

  Wood took out his handkerchief and rolled the tapestry inside, careful not to get any of it dirty. Looking down, he saw that his tunic was splattered with blood, and realized that it must have been Theodore’s. He squinted up at the sun, seeing the curious brown corona still there, ominous and looming, and remembered what Theodore had said about his greatest treasure, wondering what he had meant. He tucked the tapestry under his arm; at least he had managed to save something. He took one last look at the burning church, seeing the black smoke twisting and writhing up toward the corona, then nodded at Stanley and turned to go.

  18

  Magdala, central Ethiopia (formerly Abyssinia), present day

  A little over twenty-four hours after leaving Louise in the nursing home, Jack stood on the plateau of Magdala in the central Ethiopian highlands, the site of King Theodore’s last stand against the British in 1868. Earlier in the afternoon he had scoured the saddle in front of the plateau for evidence of the battle, finding three corroded Snider–Enfield cartridges where the British line had stood their ground; further up the slope he had discovered the broken tip of a bayonet where the Abyssinians had been forced back by the British charge.

  It was a beautiful summer day, the plateau and the ravines green with the vegetation that had not yet sprouted in the month of the 1868 siege, making it difficult to marry what he had seen with the bleak landscape in the photographs taken by the Royal Engineers just before the assault. But what had brought home the reality of the siege for him was the seven-ton bronze monster in front of him now, the mortar that Theodore had dubbed Sevastopol after the Crimean War battle of the previous decade. It had never been fired, and had remained on the plateau ever since, half buried and nearly forgotten. It was a reminder that Theodore, too, had engaged in a Herculean undertaking to get here, dragging this behemoth all the way into the mountains, cutting the road ahead of him as he struggled to reach Magdala before the British arrived. Reading the accounts from 1868, it had almost seemed as if some supernatural force had been attempting to prevent both sides from reaching the plateau, but having been here now himself and experienced the terrain, Jack knew that this was no more than the overwhelming challenge posed by nature, a catalog of physical obstacles that would make retracing either expedition a monumental enterprise even today.

  “Jack. The Patriarch is ready to see you now.” A lean, wiry man wearing a shirt with the IMU logo over the breast pocket came up to him carrying the large picture-frame-sized package that Jack had brought with him from England. Zaheed was IMU’s representative in the Horn of Africa, an archaeologist trained in Britain who had worked in Egypt with Maurice and Aysha, excavated extensively at the ancient site of Axum in Ethiopia, and recently relocated to Mogadishu to help get the Somali national museum back on its feet after years of civil war. Jack had only met him briefly before, but had warmed to him greatly on their two-hour helicopter flight from Addis Ababa into the mountains that morning. He was earnest and enthusiastic, with a deep-rooted love of his country and many contacts that had facilitated not only this encounter at Magdala but also the next stage in the trip, one that should see them meet up with Costas at Mogadishu airport that evening and then travel on to the Somali naval headquarters the next day. It was a tight schedule, with Deep Explorer now approaching Somali territorial waters, but the chance presence of the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia at Magdala on a routine visit had meant that this was an opportunity not to be missed, particularly given the extraordinary item in the package that Jack had been able to bring with him.

  He took a final photo of the mortar, focusing on the founder’s mark near the breech. The verdigris on the bronze made him think of the incredible image Maurice had sent him of Lanowski with the Ba’al sculpture at the bottom of the trench at Carthage, something that Jack had been unable to get out of his mind since they had spoken on the phone outside the nursing home; the gorilla skin was even more astonishing. Then he put his camera away in the old khaki bag that he had slung over his shoulder and followed Zaheed along the path toward the church.

  He was thrilled that there had been time to trace Captain Wood’s movements in the final hours of the assault on that day in 1868. While Zaheed had hurried ahead to announce their arrival to the Patriarch, Jack had followed his path more slowly, making his way from the ledge where the helicopter had landed across the battlefield and up the boulder-strewn track, beside the precipice where the executed Abyssinian hostages had been found. At the ruined entranceway, the Koket-Bir, he had passed the place where Private Bergin and Gunner Magner had won their Victoria Crosses, the walls still pocked with bullet holes, and on the plateau itself he had found the stone that marked the spot where Theodore had shot himself and the British had cremated his body after pillaging all they could from his citadel and its churches.

  Wood’s diary had remained unopened since it had been brought back to England by Jack’s great-great-grandfather in the 1880s, and discovering it in the family archive had been a huge excitement. After reading it, Jack had pieced together what he could of Wood’s life in the years after Abyssinia, up to his sudden death from cholera in 1879; he had been particularly fascinated to read Wood’s book on the expedition he had undertaken in 1875 with the Russian Prince Constantin down the River Oxus to Lake Aral, making archaeological discoveries on the way that Jack intended to follow up when he had time. The box in the archive contained one other extraordinary item, something that had stunned Jack when he had first unrolled it. He had taken it straight to the IMU conservation department and had received it back from them stabilized and framed just before leaving for his flight. It was that item that had made the presence of the Patriarch here so opportune, and that made Jack’s pulse quicken as he followed Zaheed toward the circular thatched building with the cross on it at the western end of the plateau.

  “He knows who you are, and is up to speed on IMU,” Zaheed said. “He has a doctorate in theology from the Sorbonne and speaks English better than I do. He will quickly get down to business.”

  Zaheed opened the hanging curtain at the entrance and ushered Jack in. Sitting on a low chair in the center of the church was an elderly Ethiopian wearing a white robe and skullcap, with an elaborate metal cross hanging from his neck. On his right side was a low table, and behind him stood another man in white, evidently his assistant. The Patriarch raised his hand and Jack strode over to shake it.

  “Dr. Howard. I apologize for staying seated. I greatly relish doing the rounds of these remote churches once a year, but I am not the spring gazelle I once was.”

  Jack sat on the stool that had been placed in front of the Patriarch, and Zaheed pulled up another and sat alongside. “This is a very peaceful church,” Jack said. “I like the simplicity.”

  “It is not exactly Westminster Abbey. Most of what was once here is now gone. The original church was destroyed when the British took Magdala in 1868.”

  “Before flying out here, Zaheed drove me past the Church of our Lady Mary of Zion, and the Chapel of the Tablet.”

  “Are you going to ask me whether you can see the Ark of the Covenant? Is that really why you are here? Then you would disappoint me.”

  Jack shook his head. “I have no justification for seeing the Ark. How could I, when for millions of believers the time of revelation is not yet here? To see it, to touch it wi
th my hands, would be a marvelous thing, but to do so would be a travesty against those for whom the continuing concealment of the Ark, the mystery of it, is what gives them hope.”

  The Patriarch’s eyes twinkled. “Then you are not like other archaeologists who have come asking me this question.”

  “Because most of them are not archaeologists. Most are treasure-seekers, chancers, looking for a best-selling book and a media sensation. To be an archaeologist you have to see that artifacts such as the Ark have a transcendent quality, a meaning greater than their physical presence. And knowing that to reveal an artifact to the world might shatter that meaning, as an archaeologist you have to be able to stop, to draw a line in the sand.”

  “And yet as an archaeologist you are driven by the quest.”

  “The quest to find the truth, to discover what happened. My line in the sand stops in front of the Chapel of the Tablet.”

  “Then I think we might have an understanding, Dr. Howard.”

  “Zaheed has filled you in on the background of why I’m here, the diary of the British officer who was present at the siege of Magdala in 1868. I now wish to make a gift, to the Ethiopian Church and to the people of Ethiopia, of something that was taken from this place on that day.”

  Jack nodded to Zaheed, who passed him the package. Jack withdrew a framed picture about two feet square and held it up for the Patriarch to see. “This was found with the officer’s diary. He made a note that he intended on his eventual return to England to pass it on to Richard Rivington Holmes, later Sir Richard, the British Museum curator who accompanied the Abyssinia expedition, and this would perhaps have happened had Wood not died suddenly of cholera in Bangalore in 1879. In the lower right corner is a note in his hand saying it was taken from the church at Magdala—this very church—on the day of the final assault, the thirteenth of April 1868.”

  The Patriarch stared at the picture, and then gestured for his assistant to come over. The two men talked excitedly in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, gesturing at the frame, and then the Patriarch turned to Jack. “This is an astonishing rediscovery for us. Do you know what it is?”