by Martin Dukes
“I still think you’re imagining it,” said Henry, opening the door and looking out along the corridor. “I’m sure they’re perfectly legit. What makes you think they’re after your bean?”
“They just are!” Alex told him grimly. “I’m telling you!”
“Well…” said Henry, closing the door and putting the bolt across. “You present a convincing argument.”
“I don’t know quite what they’re up to,” said Alex distractedly. “I’m worried they’re going to try to get me on my own and chop my head off. But then again they might want to spirit me off somewhere and do some kind of tests to see whether I’m what they’re looking for. Malcolm was saying they’re not sure yet. They probably just want to get me into Elysium and run some checks.” He frowned.
“Sounds scary,” said Henry. “On the other hand they must just pop your noggin off and check it out later. They can always chuck it in a skip if it doesn’t suit.”
“Great,” said Alex regarding him stonily. “Thanks for that thought.”
“Well, I just think you’re being totally alarmist over this,” said Henry backing off a little. “I thought you said this place was under observation. I doubt they could spirit you away without alarm bells ringing somewhere. Malcolm and his pals are probably just waiting for them to make a move before they pounce.” He made a vague pouncing movement with his hand. “And maybe you’re the bait in the trap – your bean anyway. Maybe you’re playing a vital role in some kind of battle royal being played out amongst angels. Kind of cool, eh?”
“You’re really not getting this, are you?” said Alex, running his hand over his head. “And how would you like your bonce to be like a bit of bait in a mousetrap, eh? How would that make you feel?”
“Cheesed off, I should think,” said Henry, starting to laugh at his own joke and then giving it up at the sight of Alex’s thunderous expression. “Oh, stop being such a worry wart,” he continued. “Anyway, just because these trader guys are white doesn’t mean they’re out to do you in.”
“You haven’t met them yet,” snarled Alex. “Then you’ll see.”
Alex’s worst fears were confirmed the next morning when he stepped out of their apartment on his way to his usual appointment with the Sultan. A quick glance along the passage revealed no occupation, but upon turning the corner that led down a flight of steps towards the Sultan’s apartments he found himself face to face with Garek and Shirman. Alex had been walking briskly, and although he pulled up sharply, his impetus carried him within arm’s length of the traders. A tremor of alarm passed through him and a concurrent twitch of momentary relaxation in the bowel regions.
Garek did not seem at all surprised, which gave him a clear advantage over Alex, who found himself momentarily incapable of speech.
“Well, well, well. If it isn’t Alex Truman,” said Garek through a broad grin. “Why such a hurry? And such a fine morning, is it not? I think we should have a little chat, you and I.” He moved smoothly into Alex’s path and Alex was conscious of Shirman moving into place to cut off his retreat route behind.
“How do you know my surname?” gulped Alex, glancing around him in the hope that other residents of the palace might be coming along. They weren’t. “Nobody here knows my surname.”
“Oh, they do,” said Garek. “They absolutely do. And we’ve been asking around.”
“Why?” asked Alex. “What’s it to you, anyway?”
Garek looked at his feet and laughed softly to himself, before raising his eyes to Alex’s once more.
“I’m surprised that you should have to ask me that question,” he observed with that infuriating smirk once more. “You are, after all, a very interesting individual. Very interesting indeed. Has anyone ever told you what a fascinating bone structure you have?”
He brought his hands up either side of Alex’s face. Alex found himself paralysed with terror, powerless to resist as the man passed his hands over his face and skull.
“Hey!” came a familiar, blissful, sweet voice from behind him – Henry’s. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Garek stepped away, Shirman falling into place at his side.
“Good morning, Master Henry,” he said, dipping slightly at the waist. “It seems that Alex and I have a common interest.”
“Yeah?” said Henry coming towards them. “And what’s that then?” He had his hand on his sword hilt and an expression of wary concern on his face.
“Let’s just say that we’d like to get to know Alex a little better, that’s all,” said Garek. “We are all guests in this splendid palace. We must rub along together, must we not? And you, Henry, you have pretensions to be a warrior, by all accounts. The Sultan has undertaken to inspect our wares once more, now that he is recovered. You may wish to come along. I’m sure Alex could arrange this for you. You might find it very interesting.”
“Yeah,” said Henry uncertainly, looking from Alex’s ashen features to Garek’s. “Maybe. I heard you’ve got some snazzy guns.”
“You heard right,” said Garek. “But I have business to attend to in the harbour. You must spare us, for now.” He and Shirman made to move off, but Garek paused for a moment, glancing back.
“I’m a very patient man, Alex,” he said. “A very patient man.”
Then he and Shirman strode off along the passage, Garek’s laughter echoing around the portico.
“What was that all about?” asked Henry, brows knitted.
“You really have to ask?” said Alex, shaking his head, taking deep breaths, trying to slow his heart rate. “Three words for you, Henry: ‘told’… ‘you’… ‘so’.”
“I’m a bit worried about Alex,” Henry told Tanya later. “I think he might have a point about these trader guys. He bumped into them earlier on and there was definitely something funny going on when I showed up a few minutes later. That Garek one actually had his hands on Alex’s head. Alex looked like he was going to… er…” He gestured vaguely. “White as a sheet, he was.”
“Poor Alex,” said Tanya with a shudder.
“So we’ve got him going around everywhere with Zulfiqar now, whenever he’s not with the Sultan.”
The two of them were sitting on a low wall at one end of the parade ground while watching Henry’s friends play cricket. The Sultan seemed to have abandoned his grand expedition now, even though he grew physically stronger every day. The scores of young noblemen whose military training had given such a clear focus to their lives in recent months found themselves suddenly without prospect of immediate employment. Sure, many of them still attended the military academy, but the training sessions seemed to have lost the fierce, earnest quality they once had with the prospect of real battle looming, and there were a number of absentees. There would undoubtedly be smaller raids and excursions against slavers, as there had been for years, but the Sultan’s grand expedition had captured the imagination of all and now the dream had been shattered. There was an atmosphere of deflated discontent amongst the young nobles and concern also that the Sultan was said to have emerged from his fever a changed man. It was said that he was prone to violent and irrational outbursts now, and there were rumours that he was planning to tap the wealth of their families to feed his own extravagance.
“What’s going to happen to us?” asked Tanya as Henry returned from fetching the ball and throwing it back to Amjad.
“I don’t know,” said Henry, settling himself on the wall once more. “You’re okay, aren’t you? There’s no one plotting to steal your noggin, is there? You and Kelly are kind of out of it now – up there with the other girls.”
“It’s not right though, is it?” said Tanya. “Kelly’s just like them now. She looks like them, dresses like them, makes herself up like them. She’s even started to talk like them. I hardly know who she is anymore. I just want things to be like they used to be.”
“You’re sounding like Alex,” Henry told her.
“I know I am. I’m thinking like him too,” said Tanya simply.
“Do you think she’ll ever lighten up on him? Kelly, I mean,” asked Henry after a brief, reflective silence.
“She hates him,” said Tanya. “At least she says she hates him. I’m not sure she really does though, not deep down. It’s still like all this…” she gestured around them, “… is a kind of dream or something. Not real. It was bad what Alex did, though,” she added, looking pensively into the middle distance. “Really nasty.”
“He didn’t mean for the guy to get himself drowned, though, did he?” said Henry loyally. “He just wanted him out of the picture. I think he’s really, you know, got it on for Kelly.”
“Yeah,” said Tanya with a nod. “I know. Kelly doesn’t get it, though. I think she’d stab him as soon as look at him.”
“Uh huh,” Henry concurred, frowning simultaneously. “I wonder what’s going to happen,” he said thoughtfully. “I can’t see a way through all this. I guess we really do need Malcolm to turn up like the fairy godmother to give us a few waves of his wand. Everything seems to be going pear-shaped.”
“Everyone says there’s something wrong with the moons too,” said Tanya. “They’re too close together, or something, and there might be an eclipse. People are talking all sorts of nonsense about what’ll happen if there’s an eclipse.”
She shuddered, plucking at a small, straggling plant that was trying to grow between the stones of the top of the wall. “Bad stuff,” she finished lamely.
“You can come back and stay with us, if you like,” said Henry, giving her hand a friendly squeeze.
“I can’t. You know, I can’t,” she said, glancing up at him with small, sad eyes from beneath her fringe of blonde hair. “I’ve got to stay with Kelly. I just wish Will was back.”
“What, because he’d know what to do?” said Henry with an ironic laugh.
“No. I just wish he was back, that’s all,” said Tanya, regarding him with mild reproach.
Chapter Twelve
Will wished he was back, too. He and Zoroaster seemed to have ridden the length and breadth of Zanjd, in search of anyone who could shed more light on the mystery of the worm. At last, on the very northern fringe of Zanjd, where the cultivated lands gave way to malarial swamps at the mouth of a great river, they came to the small town of Tanga. By this time Will felt he could have easily written a guidebook for the use of travellers coming to Zanjd, although his first recommendation would have been avoid at all costs. Tanga would have been awarded two stars in the system he had begun to work out in his head. It was somewhat smellier than the drier desert fringe towns inland, but it did have a choice of three inns and a busy marketplace where fish and local produce might be obtained, by anyone with a relaxed attitude to hygiene. In the manner to which Will had become thoroughly accustomed, a rusting iron cage at the edge of the town held the bleached bones of someone who had fallen foul of the country’s criminal code. The townsfolk were no more dirty, ugly or malnourished than elsewhere in Zanjd, and a fine stuccoed mansion on one side of the central square showed that the governor was a person of some consequence. In short it was a perfectly ordinary town full of perfectly ordinary people – with one exception.
Muhammed bin Salem could not, by any interpretation of the word, be described as ordinary. He was a retired trader and traveller with one arm, one leg, one eye and a reputation for eccentricity. The explorer and adventurer had given up his travels because he was, in his own words, “Tired of being incrementally destroyed by my enemies.” Muhammed dwelt in a modest house on the edge of the town. Here, an elderly black servant with an impressive array of facial piercings was all that obviously set him apart from his neighbours.
Apart from being difficult and cantankerous, Zoroaster was also careful with the pennies, so it was the proprietor of the cheapest of the three inns in town who tipped them off about Muhammed bin Salem.
“Forgive me for interrupting,” he said as Will and Zoroaster were eating a simple meal together on the evening of their arrival. “I believe I overheard you say that you were hoping to speak to travellers in town.”
“Indeed,” said Zoroaster, looking up from his plate.
Will, who would have preferred a rich and complex meal, and who had shed more than a few pounds in the last month or so, continued to prospect gloomily for bits of chicken amongst the gritty rice on his plate.
“Well, the most famous explorer in the whole of East Africa dwells not a mile from here,” continued the innkeeper, wiping his hands on the front of a greasy apron. “For a small consideration I could introduce you.”
“A small consideration?” said Zoroaster warily, reaching for his purse. “How small, exactly?”
“That should do nicely,” said the innkeeper, licking his lips as a silver dinar rolled out onto the table top before Zoroaster, cursing, could trap it.
And so, an hour later, Zoroaster and Will found themselves sitting on a rug with an explorer, whilst the elderly servant distributed tiny cups of mint tea. The walls of his reception room were hung about with various exotic textiles as well as a number of hunting guns and the heads of several animals that had had the misfortune to be caught in front of them.
“Oh, yes, I have travelled in the furthest west,” said Muhammed setting down his cup. “And I know of the creatures that you refer to – these worms. And I was lucky to escape with my life.”
He indicated the black patch that covered his empty left eye socket. “One of the little beasts cost me this. “Oh, yes,” he said grimly. “Few who enter that strange and terrible land ever come back to tell the tale.”
“I have heard that there are mountains beyond the desert,” said Zoroaster.
“Indeed there are,” said Muhammed. “High mountains that it took me many weeks to cross. Frostbite cost me three toes there. But when at last I stood upon a high eminence and gazed out over the far west I wondered if any man had ever looked upon it before. It seemed an age since last I stumbled across human habitation, and now all I could see was a vast carpet of trees stretching as far as my eye could see. How far into the west the vast forest stretched I was unable to judge, but I was struck when I descended into those woods that all the trees were of a single species, a kind I have encountered only rarely before.”
“The ironwood tree,” suggested Will and Zoroaster in unison.
“Yes, a curious tree indeed, for only that tree can sustain the worm that dwells in such profusion amongst its leaves and branches.”
“And how did you come to lose your eye?” asked Zoroaster, setting down his cup and stroking moisture from his moustache.
“Well, you might think that the worms are sedentary little fellows, that they spend their lives on a single branch on a single tree,” said Muhammed. “But they are not.” He shook his head. “Oh, no, indeed, as I found out to my cost. They can exude a slender thread of some silk-like material from their hindquarters, and when there is a wind they launch themselves into the air and the thread, acting like a sail for their inconsiderable bulk, carries them safely to the neighbouring tree. I have seen them travel a very prodigious distance. And each tree harbours an uncountable host of the creatures. I was walking in a grove of such trees when a breeze dislodged a cloud of worms and one struck me in the eye.”
“Oh my god!” said Will. “Weren’t you paralysed?”
“I had the presence of mind to throw myself in a nearby pool and extinguished the fire of the worm before it could inject its venom. Even so, I was hard pressed to pluck others from my turban and shoulders before they could cause me further injury.”
Will shuddered. He could imagine the torment that Muhammed had felt with the worm fire in his ruined eye socket. Silence fell around them as each dwelt on this prospect.
“You may imagine that I tarried no longer in that land,” said Muhammed at last. “And that I hurried back into the mountains away from those cursed trees and thanked God for the brisk easterly breeze that blew upon my face. Verily it is a cursed land. I saw there no living creature, save the
worm.”
Zoroaster and Will regarded each other uneasily. Neither had conceived of the worm in quite such fearsome terms. Zoroaster reached into his bag and brought out a piece of paper on which he had copied down the inscription above the worm tower’s entrance door.
“I am told that you can read Swahili,” he said, passing it across to Muhammed. “Can you tell us what this says?”
Muhammed spoke to his servant in some language Will didn’t understand and the fellow brought him a magnifying glass with which the explorer studied the paper, holding it to the light of an oil lamp.
“This is indeed Swahili, but of a particularly archaic kind. This worm tower was built by Elimu in the twelfth year of his reign,” he read. “Where did you find this?”
“There is an ancient tower in a place called Tattash, on the eastern fringe of the desert. I believe it is called the Tower of Bilimwezi.”
“Oh, yes,” said Muhammed, setting down the paper. “That is a Swahili name, also, is it not? The Tower of Two Moons. I have heard of it.”
“The Tower of Two Moons,” repeated Will, round eyed.
“What?” He found that both Zoroaster and Muhammed were regarding him stonily. “I don’t know,” he said awkwardly with a shrug. “I mean, why’s it called that? It’s got to mean something, hasn’t it?”
“It is an ancient place with an ancient name,” said Zoroaster. “How are we to interpret its meaning today?”
“I don’t know,” said Will, thumbing his glasses up his nose. “I just think it might be important, that’s all.”
The Sultan’s resolve to part his richer subjects from some of their wealth caused a tremor of anxiety and disapproval to pass through the palace. There were mutterings of discontent at many a private gathering, and much comment passed about the change that had come over the Sultan. It was observed that he had become dangerously unpredictable in his moods and in his behaviour. There were some who said that such a situation could not be tolerated. There could be only one logical conclusion to such an outcome.
