King of Kings

by Wilbur Smith

  Rusty scooped water out of the sea with his hands and used it to clean the wound. A deep jagged gash running down Saffron’s arm appeared out of the gore. At once it refilled with blood. Rusty reached into his jacket and produced a stoppered half-pint bottle. He pulled the cork with his teeth and Amber caught the rough tang of whisky. He poured it liberally over the wound. Saffron twisted and keened, and the boat rocked.

  “Bandage,” Rusty said, and from somewhere in the shadows a bundle of clean strips was handed up to him. He quickly folded three into a pad and began to bind them around the wound. He drew the ties hard, the muscles in his jaw standing out as he did.

  “That should have woken her. Can you get the light closer, Patch?”

  “We have to get to the survivors,” the deck officer said. “Now.”

  “One more minute, fella,” Rusty said through clenched teeth. He touched Saffron’s scalp on the side of her head above the foul tear in her arm. “Whatever caught her arm hit her here too.”

  “Broken?” Patch said quietly.

  “Can’t tell. No fresh blood, though.” He looked up at Amber. “Miss B, that’s all we can do now. You hold her still as you can and quiet.”

  “I shall,” Amber said. “Thank you.” Over her sister’s shoulder she looked out onto the flickering nightmare. Yells and cries punctuated the darkness, the sound of men and women thrashing in water, glimpses of desperate faces lit by patches of flaming debris, bodies floating quietly by on the dark waters like autumn leaves fallen into a boating lake.

  •••

  The force of the explosion had flung Ryder out onto the deck. For a moment he lay sprawled on the polished teak boards, stunned. He shook his head hard in an attempt to reorder his senses. The boy had been blown from his shoulders. He reached for the child, who grabbed on to his forearm and looked up at him, wide-eyed with terror.

  Ryder felt the deck beginning to tilt under him almost at once. He scrambled into a crouch and launched himself forward, clinging on to the cold metal rail at the bow before it was out of reach, swinging the child’s entire weight upward in an arc that seemed to wrench his shoulder from its socket. The boy was frightened, but he was also quick and clever enough to see what he had to do. He hooked his leg and one arm over the same railing that Ryder was clinging to, pulling himself up and over it as the ship’s prow begin to climb into the air. Ryder dragged himself up next to him.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Tadesse,” the boy panted, staring behind him as passengers and crew who had not found a grip tumbled, shrieking, into the darkness and flames below.

  “Tadesse, we have to jump into the water now, and swim as far away as we can. Can you swim?”

  The boy nodded. “Yes, sir. I grew up by Lake Tana.”

  “We go now.” Ryder took the boy’s hand and, not giving either of them time to think about the fall or what waited for them below, Ryder pushed off hard from the railing and leaped into the darkness. They landed feet first, bent at the knee, breaking through the wall of the water’s surface and plunging down. Already Ryder could feel the pull of the great ship behind them. For a moment he was too stunned by the fall and the cold grasp of the sea to move his limbs. The darkness above him seemed unending. Then something struck him on his side. A hand gripped his ankle and he felt desperate fingers trying to climb his body, the weight dragging him down. He kicked out hard in the water and felt his foot connect. The grip was released. The pressure in his lungs was agony and lights burst behind his eyes but another force heaved him upward. He pushed hard, fighting the awful desire to open his mouth and suck down the water into his screaming lungs. One more kick and his head broke the surface. He gasped and spat, only then realizing he was still holding hands with the boy. Tadesse choked and coughed, pulling his hand out of Ryder’s so he could keep himself afloat. For a moment the world seemed to swing left and right as Ryder struggled to understand he was still alive. He spat out more seawater and looked about him, then pointed out into the darkness, at an angle away from the ship. The boy nodded and began to swim with strong, confident strokes. Ryder thanked his stars the boy could manage alone, then struck out after him. Behind him he heard a great groan of steel and splintering wood, then a roar as the ship finally pointed her bow to the stars and then plummeted downward. Ryder felt its weight hauling him back, and pushed hard. The muscles in his broad shoulders were burning as if they had caught fire, and his thighs felt cold and heavy as lead. He clamped his jaw and forced himself away from the drag of the ship. Then he felt the release; the ship had lost its hold on him.

  He trod water and looked around him again. “Tadesse!” he croaked. It was a calm night, the sea became quickly still, yet he got a mouthful of salt water and darkness nevertheless. The chill clamped its fingers around his chest. “Tadesse!”

  “Here.”

  The boy appeared out of the moonlight next to him.

  “Can you see a boat?”

  To the left and right of them debris blown from the ship was flaming, blinding them in the darkness.

  “Sir, move!” Tadesse was pointing.

  Just in time Ryder saw a lifeboat scything fast toward them across the water. It was ablaze; great gouts of dirty fire were all it carried. Ryder and Tadesse swam one, two, three strokes to get out of its path. It went by them, still driven by some devilish momentum from the explosion and sinking of the ship. Half hung over the side were a pair of burning bodies, already nothing but black, twisted silhouettes in the flames. Ryder caught the stench of burning flesh and felt the sickness rise in his throat. The heat singed his eyes, turning the night white, then it carried on past them, bearing its grotesque crew remorselessly on. Ryder blinked and swiped the seawater from his eyes. Behind was a light—not raging fire, but a lantern held high, and he heard a voice. Not a scream of pain or fear, but someone calling for survivors. Some of the lifeboats had got away then, and now were coming back.

  “Sir?” Tadesse called him.

  Ryder willed his limbs to move once more and he began to swim alongside the boy toward the lantern and voice.

  Arms reached for them.

  “The boy first.”

  Once Tadesse had been swung onboard, Ryder took the grip offered him and was hauled out of the water. The lifeboat was full and low in the water, but no one panicked. Someone put a blanket over his shoulders, someone else offered him a bottle and he felt the rough caress of cheap brandy. He wiped the water from his eyes and looked toward the lantern. It was being held aloft by the Indian man he had last seen in the corridor urging passengers out onto the deck. How long ago was that? Twenty minutes at most. He was scanning the water looking for the living, and when he spotted someone still moving in the water, he told the men at the oars which way to pull. God bless the Indian civil service, Ryder thought, and he yanked the blanket around him again as a fit of shivering ran through his body.

  •••

  It was still pitch black when the Romeo, a steamer out of Aden, came upon the site of the explosion. She seemed to materialize out of the night like a ghost. Within minutes the air was full of the rattle of oars and the calls of rescuers as she let down her own lifeboats to gather survivors from the waters. Rope ladders unfurled down her side and soon her decks were filling up with those reclaimed from the sea.

  As they came under her lee, Ryder began to strain his eyes into the pre-dawn dark looking for any sign of his wife. Two other lifeboats reached the bottom of the ladder at the same time as theirs. Both were half empty, and neither contained his wife. He felt his chest growing tight with fear. Above them, a net was lowered to lift those too injured to climb. Tadesse clambered up the ladder ahead of Ryder. He was halfway up, following the boy, when he heard a cry and looked up into Amber’s face, peering over the rail.

  “Oh, Ryder! Thank God! Come quickly.”

  He scrambled through the crowds on the deck until he reached the small party of his friends. They had found a spot by the great funnel. His wife lay between
them on a bed of blankets, with his employees’ coats over her. She was white as snow, even through her tanned skin. Rusty handed the baby awkwardly to Amber, who bounced him against her shoulder. He was fractious and crying. Ryder dropped to his knees by his wife, a terror he had never known before turning his thoughts thick and heavy. He put his hand to her throat and felt her pulse, weak and rapid, but he could feel it, and he thanked God as it fluttered under his fingertip.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “Something from the explosion struck her. Shoulder and head,” Rusty said quietly. “We’ve stopped the bleeding, but she hasn’t woken.”

  Ryder had not even noticed Tadesse had followed him. The boy dropped to his knees and began gently to touch Saffron’s skull with his long, delicate fingers.

  “What are you doing, son?” Ryder whispered.

  “My family were healers,” he replied. “I can help.” He looked up. “Does anyone have a needle?”

  A middle-aged woman with an infant on her lap, who was watching from a foot or two away, put her hand in her coat and brought out a felt needle-holder. She passed it over to them without a word. Ryder noticed it was embroidered in green letters: With happy memories of Ireland.

  Tadesse opened it carefully, then pulled out the thinnest of the steel needles it contained. He examined it in the dawn light, then put it between his lips, sucking it carefully. Then he bent over Saffron again.

  “You had better know what you’re doing,” Ryder growled.

  “I do.” Tadesse didn’t look up, but probed carefully with his fingers behind Saffron’s right ear at the edge of her skull. He nodded to himself and pushed her hair away, then very gently at first, then with a little more pressure, pushed the needle into the spot he had found. He shifted its position slightly, then Ryder saw the muscles around his neck and shoulders relax, and he pulled the needle out. A trickle of watery blood ran across Saffron’s neck and chin. Tadesse patted away the liquid with his sleeve, then cleaned the needle and returned it to the case. “She’ll wake now.” He touched her cheek with his knuckles and, as if in answer, her eyes fluttered open.

  “Tadesse, I owe you my life,” Ryder said.

  “Ryder? You are here at last,” Saffron murmured. “Where is Leon?”

  “He’s here, Saffy. Amber too. We are all safe.” He stroked her forehead with infinite care.

  “Good. What happened, Ryder? Why did the ship blow up?”

  “I don’t know, my darling.” She seemed content, and her eyes closed again. Ryder looked quickly at Tadesse.

  “Better you let her sleep, sir,” the boy said. “She must stay quiet for a while, to let her head heal. But she may sleep now. I shall watch.”

  Ryder settled himself on the deck and closed his eyes as exhaustion washed over him. He looked at the boy again, studying him more carefully. His skin was very dark, but his features were almost European. He was perhaps older than Ryder had thought at first, but he couldn’t be more than twelve years old. He shivered slightly as the dawn air chilled his damp cotton shirt and knee-length trousers. Ryder took the blanket from his own shoulders and put it over the boy’s. Tadesse thanked him without looking away from his patient.

  Amber was having trouble with her nephew. He stretched his limbs out and yelled at the breaking dawn. Saffron stirred in her sleep and Tadesse frowned at the baby. Ryder reached up to take him from his sister-in-law, but though Leon stopped crying for long enough to peer at his father for a moment, he soon started up again.

  “He’s hungry,” the woman who had given them the needle said. Tadesse offered her back the green felt case. “Don’t think I fancy having the one you stuck in that wee girl’s head, son,” she said, eyeing it suspiciously.

  Tadesse removed the needle and threaded it into his shirt, then closed the case and handed it to her.

  “Thank you.” She turned to Ryder. “And while I’m doing your family favors, how about you hand that baby over? I’m still nursing my youngest, and that little devil could do with learning to share.”

  Ryder laid his son in her arms, and she turned away slightly and began fiddling with the buttons at her breast. The engineers coughed and looked out to sea, and the woman rearranged her shawl over her shoulder and baby Leon.

  “That’s the idea, treasure,” she said to him. The crying stopped at once and the woman began to sing a lullaby to him, very softly. Ryder put his hand over that of his sleeping wife and saw that she was smiling again.

  Rusty risked glancing back and, seeing all was decent, pulled his pack of cards from his pocket and started dealing cards to Patch and Dan. Amber was sitting cross-legged on the deck, staring out as the sun began to climb. Ryder looked around him. It was a strange moment of peace. For a second he thought of what he had lost, the fortune in equipment and goods that had gone down with the ship, then he stopped himself. Time enough for a reckoning later. At least, he thought wryly, he no longer needed to work out how to get all that heavy mining gear to the mountains. Rusty paused in his dealing to hand Ryder a cheroot and his matches. Ryder lit up and drew deep. The Abyssinian boy settled himself in the shade where he could also watch over Saffron’s sleep.

  “Tadesse,” Ryder said, “do you speak the languages of Tigray?”

  “Yes. It is my mother’s country.”

  “We are traveling that way. Would you like to join my family?”

  The boy stared slowly around the group, then squinted at Ryder sideways.

  “What is your name?”

  “Ryder Courtney. You just saved my wife, Saffron.” He named the other members of their party, pointing them out with the glowing end of his cheroot. “Well?”

  Tadesse shook his head. “I went to Cairo in service of a white man, Mr. Ryder. He lost his money at cards and left me there. I thank you for carrying me from the ship, but I shall serve my own people now.”

  “As you wish,” Ryder said. “I shall be in Massowah for some days if you change your mind.”

  At first Penrod thought the rapping on the door was part of his dream of distant gunfire. Then he thought it was simply Lady Agatha’s servants, keen to make sure they did not catch their mistress on her hands and knees, her delicious pink buttocks lifted and trembling while Penrod took her hard from behind. Once they were sure of that, they would clear the debris of last night’s debauchery and then be gone again in silence. But the rapping didn’t stop and he opened his eyes. Of course, they had returned to his own house last night. Penrod had suffered deprivation without complaint when traveling across the desert. He could sleep on rock as soundly as on silk and dine off flatbread and gruel as well as pheasant from his brother’s estate in Scotland and foie gras imported directly from Paris. When luxury was available, however, Penrod had the means and the taste to enjoy the best, and his own servants were as discreet and efficient as Agatha’s.

  “Go away,” he called out. At first he thought he’d been obeyed, but instead the door squeaked as it was inched open and a small face peered around at him. The eyes widened as they took in the sleeping form of Agatha. She was quite naked, lying on her back, arms thrown wide. The swell of her large milk-white breasts would have made Rubens choke with eagerness. Penrod made no attempt to cover her.

  “What do you want, Adnan?” He had seen the boy once or twice in the months since their encounter in the bazaar. Yakub had obviously found work for him of one sort or another—the boy looked better dressed and better fed than he had before. He stepped into the room and with a visible wrench tore his eyes away from Lady Agatha and looked at Penrod instead. Luckily for him, Agatha snorted in her sleep and turned away. Perhaps not so lucky, as now Adnan had to resist the temptation to stare at her peach of an arse.

  “Speak, boy, or get out of here.” Penrod’s head throbbed. He had never had a hangover before in his life, but since Agatha had introduced him to opium, his mornings were becoming heavier and more clouded.

  The boy stepped forward. He held out a newspaper, which Penrod snatched from him. Th
e front-page story described the arrival in Massowah of the steamer Romeo, carrying the survivors of a terrible maritime disaster. The editor was sorry to tell his readers that the boilers of the steamship Iona had exploded in the dead of night, and the resulting loss of life had been terrible. Penrod knew perfectly well this was the ship that Amber was taking into Abyssinia with that tradesman Courtney. Not that he had made any inquires himself, but his fellow officers at the club always seemed to find a way to let him know any news of Amber and those associated with her. He had been informed of the success of the stage version of Slaves of the Mahdi, the outrageous praise lavished on Saffron’s paintings and the birth of Leon Courtney. It did not matter that he had seen none of them since that day in Shepheard’s; each fragment of gossip had eaten into his soul like acid.

  He did not move or breathe. Adnan began talking.

  “My master, the wise and brave Yakub, your loyal companion through many adventures, sends you greetings, and wishes to let you know that out of the great love he bears for you, he lowered himself so far as to speak with the mercenary and untrustworthy oaf Bacheet, slave and follower of Ryder Courtney, and inquire of the fate of al-Zahra, who was once dear to you. Although this Bacheet offered my master grievous insults, my master insisted on knowing all that the perfidious monster had to tell. Bacheet has received a telegram from Massowah. Al-Zahra is well and survived the disaster uninjured. Her sister was wounded but will, inshallah, recover swiftly, and Mr. Courtney and his son escaped without injury. Your loyal Yakub has no wish to trouble you, or suggest you may still have any love for al-Zahra, but out of his love for you he offers this crumb of news in case it may be of any interest to you.”

  All this came tumbling out in one fluid, rehearsed speech and at a great rate. Penrod could imagine Yakub making the boy practice and repeat it. He could even imagine Yakub’s stately address to Bacheet in the coffee shop they both frequented, and where for the most part they took great pleasure in refusing to acknowledge each other’s existence.