King of Kings

by Wilbur Smith

  It took ten minutes for the other guards to realize no one was at the main gate, and another ten to find the bodies of their comrades.

  •••

  The duke was summoned from the Gheziera Club at once. He arrived just after the search of both the house and grounds had been completed and the servants and guards were offering their stuttered reports to Carruthers. Kendal ignored the cluster of servants in the hall and went immediately into the study, with Carruthers at his heel.

  “The two men on the main gate were killed, Your Grace. Whoever did this replaced them with his own men. The bodies were cold, but the guards in the grounds had seen two men at their post only a moment before the alarm was raised. Nothing in the house is missing, nothing has been disturbed. I saw a man in Arab clothing fleeing from here, but as you see,” he gestured around the peaceful-looking study, “it seems nothing has been taken.”

  “Have you checked the safe?” Kendal asked quietly.

  Carruthers shook his head with a puzzled smile. “I can see no sign the thief even discovered it, and only you have the combination.”

  Kendal reached for the concealed catch and the secret door on the bookshelf swung open. Carruthers turned his back automatically as the duke spun the dial. Silence. He turned back and saw that, apart from a bundle of cotton wrappings, the safe was empty.

  “But that’s impossible,” Carruthers spluttered.

  “Apparently not, Carruthers,” the duke replied.

  “How could anyone . . . ?” Carruthers managed to stop himself. “Sir, I do not know precisely what was in the safe. Only that they were materials of vital importance.”

  “It contained enough to ruin me a dozen times over.” The duke took his silver cigarette case from his jacket, removed one of his black cigarettes and lit it before continuing. “I fear, Carruthers, I underestimated Penrod Ballantyne.”

  “But the man is an addict, a fop,” Carruthers protested. “He has not been seen for months. Why do you think it was him, sir?”

  The duke laughed softly. “Oh, just something in his eyes when we last met. Something I recognized from the mirror. I had thought he might attempt to assassinate me, and I took precautions, but I had not thought he would do this.” The duke’s tone was admiring. “And this is a great deal better than simply killing me.”

  “We shall turn Cairo upside down, find him and the missing documents before any harm can be done.”

  “You will not find him in time, Carruthers,” the duke said. “I would imagine the contents of the safe will find its way into the newspapers very quickly. No hope exists. It is over.”

  “I feel I have failed you, sir,” Carruthers said, his voice strangled.

  The duke turned away from the safe at last. “You have served me faithfully for many years, Carruthers. I do not blame you for this. I was outplayed. But perhaps you might do one last thing for me tonight.”

  “Anything.”

  “Thank you. Could you perhaps fetch my Batchelor shotgun from the gunroom?” The duke smiled and ground out his cigarette in his crystal ashtray.

  •••

  The contents of the safe kept Penrod, Yakub and Adnan occupied until the middle of the next day. As evening fell, a number of Adnan’s young friends went through the city with packages under their arms. One went to the British consulate building and refused to hand over his package to anyone but Sam Adams himself. Another went to the Sheridan Hotel, where a Venetian businessman and known intimate of the Italian royal family was staying. Another went to the telegraph office and sent two identical but lengthy messages to the editors of the New York Times and the Pall Mall Gazette. Extracts from the black ledgers were made into parcels and posted after them. The operators blinked as they tapped out the messages to the newspapers detailing the crimes and corruption of the duke, and whispered to each other about a crop of telegrams brought in by a liveried servant that morning to be sent to addresses across Europe and America. All had been signed Kendal and carried the same message: Burn everything and get out.

  More than a thousand miles away, Ryder Courtney watched as the kudu lifted his head, sniffing at the morning air, and the white chevron on his forehead flashed for a moment in the shadows. His corkscrew horns seemed a part of the curling network of acacia branches behind him and his soft gray pelt, with its darker slashed markings down his flanks, made him almost invisible. He was some sixty inches at the shoulder and five hundred pounds in weight, yet at the first breath of alarm he would be able to run faster than a stallion and leap for cover among the scrub as if he had wings.

  Two hundred yards from him Ryder breathed softly, letting the great beast settle to his feeding again. The rifle he held was relatively new to him, an Italian Vetterli bought in Massowah. It had a tendency to pull right, which he was certain his own rifle, now rusting at the bottom of the Red Sea, would never had done, but today he felt as if he and this new model had reached an understanding. He breathed out once more and let his body relax, then squeezed the trigger. The sharp crack echoed through the valley, and the other kudu barked out their warnings and scattered into cover, but the great beast in Ryder’s sights only lifted its head to the sky one final time then collapsed. The boys who had come with Ryder to help carry his spoils let out great whoops of admiration and delight. Ato Asfaw, the chiqa shum, district headman and former soldier in the army of the emperor and Ryder’s friend, spoke to them sharply and cuffed the one closest to him.

  “What, children! Will you frighten the rest back to Adrigat? Will one beast feed all the mouths at Courtney Mine?”

  The boys were silenced, but could not help grinning at Ryder. He winked at them, then got to his feet and began walking across the meadow to where the kudu had fallen. The short rains had painted the plateau and valleys emerald green, and now, as the dew began to lift from the grasses, the wild flowers spread open their purple and yellow blossoms toward the sun.

  They found the kudu’s body in the broken shade. Ryder knelt beside it, pleased to see his shot had been exactly on target, hitting the flank cleanly in line with the animal’s heart. It had been dead before it hit the ground. In truth it was a large enough beast to have formed the centerpiece of the evening’s feast, but Ryder was enjoying the freedom and challenge of the hunt. He patted the still warm flank of the animal and smiled up at Ato Asfaw.

  “What say you, my friend? Shall we follow them a little further into the next gorge and see if we can get another?”

  Asfaw looked around the horizon, the crazy peaks and valleys of the landscape crimping the edge of the pale blue and cloudless sky.

  “Naturally,” he said. “The next shot is mine.”

  •••

  Five hours later they reached the top of the ridge and stopped for a moment to drink in the view of the camp. Asfaw put his hand on Ryder’s shoulder.

  “You have made progress, my friend.”

  “Some,” Ryder replied.

  The Courtney Mine and Camp were built on the lower slopes of a wide, steep-sided valley, which twisted and jackknifed through the mountains of east Tigray. The camp and mine were separated by the towering height of the Mother, the great outcrop of sedimentary and igneous rock that forced the river to move out of her way and where the silver strike had been discovered. If asked, Courtney would say the Mother was a local name, and so it was, but his few local workers had named it the day Dan first saw the size of the vein of ore and had thrown his weather-beaten slouch hat in the air, letting forth a stream of fluid American curses that had echoed around the valley. The one word the workers had picked out was “mother” and so the outcrop was named.

  From where Ryder watched, the workings of the mine were hidden. He looked down instead at the camp where his workers and their families lived. The traditional round, wattle and mud huts of the area, with their coned roofs of thatched reeds, still had a gleam of freshness to them, but they were few and scattered and half were still empty. Around them, struggling up the hillside and on the far side of the
river were the terraced fields where they grew their food: teff, beans and rye to the south, and on the eastern escarpments, Amber’s new fruit gardens. A thinly planted orchard was waiting to mature, with occasional straw beehives dotted between the saplings and clusters of fast-growing berries, gesho and nut bushes.

  Ryder’s sister-in-law had dragged the gardens into being by sheer force of will, bribing, cajoling and begging the wives of the mineworkers into helping her, then laboring alongside them. They took the water supply from a tributary of the main river, diverting and damming it in such a way it would neither be overwhelmed by flash floods in the sudden violent rains, nor starved in the long dry seasons. It had been a grueling process of trial and error, but at last it seemed as if her workings would hold and her weak saplings and thin bushes were beginning to thicken, take root and reach into the still blue air.

  Saffron had supervised the building of the huts and barracks. She, Ryder and Leon had one; Dan, Patch and Rusty bunked together; and Amber and Tadesse had a two-room hut close to Ryder’s family. Each evening, when Ryder returned from the mine along the river, he would find his wife covered in mud and pale with the work. She’d offer him a glass from their precious store of whisky and talk about construction methods, where materials should be fetched from and how the local people arranged their homes, until he fell asleep to the low music of her talk. At some point, it seemed, he’d agreed to have a small church built in the camp and a priest appointed to it. The first he knew of it was when he came home at dusk to discover Saffron had managed to acquire soap, and made him use it. An hour later he was presiding over a modest welcome feast for their new priest, offering roast kid and the fiery honey wine, tej, to a young man who seemed as bemused as Ryder was. Saffron, though, was convinced. A priest at the camp would bring luck, and the local people who regarded mine-working as beneath them or, worse, tainted with bad luck and the suspicion of witchcraft would change their minds.

  Traders were occasionally persuaded to journey out from Adrigat to bring seed, leather, nails and needles, and Amber and Saffron gave each one a princely welcome, hoping they would tell favorable stories of Courtney Mine in the surrounding villages and slowly infuse into the women and children a fierce independent pride. The men worked harder and more willingly. Ato Asfaw was right, they had made progress, but it was slow and hard-fought-for, and the memory of the fortune in equipment sunk to the bottom of the Red Sea made Ryder grit his teeth in rage and regret.

  Looking down on the camp, Ryder could see preparations for this evening’s celebrations were advancing and his wife was at the center of them. A bonfire was being built in the center of the square and woven straw mats laid around it. Amber was standing behind one of the worker’s wives, helping her plait her thick black hair into a series of intricate braids, while Saffron was carrying firewood to the pit. He saw her turn and say something to one of the women grinding outside her house and heard an answering laugh. One of the oldest girls was looking after the youngest children by the river. They were building towers from pebbles. Ryder could see his chubby-limbed son among them, reaching forward to grab at the stones and laughing as they clattered and fell. Saffron had spotted Ryder and was waving, then pointing toward the fire pit. As she did the rest of the hunting party joined Ryder and Asfaw on the crest of the escarpment. The boys were in pairs and each pair carried a long pole across their shoulders from which was slung the cooling body of a fat dik-dik, the small deer-like creatures who foraged in the mountains. The oldest boys had the honor of carrying the kudu. Saffron lifted her hands and applauded when she saw it. Ryder bowed.

  “Will you come and eat with us, Asfaw?” Ryder asked.

  The older man hesitated, then shook his head. They made their farewells and Ryder watched him stride off, swinging his walking stick, and felt a familiar sting of resentment. The farmers dotted around the district would still not come to Courtney Mine. They were a conservative, deeply traditional people, convinced that those who worked with metal were infected with the evil eye. Anyone who worked at the mine was regarded with the same suspicion. Ryder was forced to travel from market to market, cajoling and bargaining for his workers. Eventually news of the camp and the strange work available in it brought curious families from across the region. Some were workers in metal or earthenware, some had inherited only poor land, others had to hand over most of their crops to the church, so when they heard the stories, they came from their scattered compounds to investigate and many stayed. They liked Ryder and though the work in the mine was hard, the promised pay was good and the village comfortable. The metalworkers built small furnaces. The men who had been farmers took up pickaxes, shovels and wheelbarrows.

  Ryder was proud of the work so far, but one problem remained. Though Courtney Camp was now slowly, painfully establishing itself on the high slopes, Courtney Mine produced only the thinnest trickle of saleable ore. The wealth locked up in the slopes was beyond question, but they needed quicksilver to release it, and quicksilver they did not have. Until today.

  •••

  Amber was happy that the preparations for the party were well underway, so she decided to take the path down to the riverbank and spend some time with her nephew.

  The party to be held this evening was an important celebration. Yesterday Rusty had returned from the coast, waving his cap above his head and yelling out his news like a schoolboy. Against all the odds he had arranged for a fresh supply of quicksilver to be delivered to Massowah in iron flasks, then managed to get that precious cargo from the port up into the highlands by mule. Ryder had told him flat out that it would be impossible, that they must content themselves with roasting and smelting the ore for a year at least, but Rusty could not be dissuaded. He knew—he could tell by the feel of the ore in his hands—that if he only had quicksilver and copper sulfate, he could draw a steady stream of silver from the mountain. He continued to plan, drawing designs and labeled diagrams in his notebook. Dan supervised the roasting and smelting of the best grade ore, but produced little. Ryder spent hours with the metalworkers he had recruited, with Dan and Patch bent over kilns and furnaces, but again and again their efforts failed. Quicksilver, Rusty insisted. They must have quicksilver and that was it.

  The men argued. Dan thought Rusty was being pig-headed, and said so. Ryder said he did not have more capital to risk. Patch settled the fight. It turned out he had yet to spend a penny of the joining fee and advance wages Ryder had given him. He threw down the leather pouch at the feet of his friends.

  “How much quicksilver can you get for that?”

  So began Rusty’s great quest. He spent weeks kicking his heels in Massowah, and became such a fixture in the telegraphist’s office, finding suppliers and arranging delivery, that they gave him his own stool. Tensions between Emperor John and the Italian government meant that the wires mostly hummed with diplomatic cables, but any time the operator had a moment to pause and look up, Rusty would pounce on him, all dogged enthusiasm, with a fist full of messages in one hand and a box of the operator’s favorite cigars in the other.

  Ryder had greeted him like a brother on his return and declared a feast for the following day. Together they stacked the flasks of quicksilver in the store, and eager to see what they’d brought, filled the storage tank. The iron flasks were sent to the metalworkers on the hill to be turned into a dozen other necessities.

  Amber was about to cross the pebbled shore to where the toddlers were being entertained when she noticed Dan sitting in the shade of a fig tree. It was strange to see him unoccupied. Like the rest of the men, he worked, ate and slept, nothing more. She had thought he would be with Patch. Now Rusty had returned in triumph they would begin building the processing works, and that needed careful planning and intense study of Rusty’s designs. Then all the ore they had struggled to dig out of the earth over the past months would at last start paying them back for their efforts.

  Dan was clutching what looked like a letter and staring out at the children playing among t
he pebbles. Amber would have called out to him, made some comment about Ryder’s success on the hunt and the quality of the feast to come, but something about the way he sat staring at the children made her hesitate.

  He noticed her anyway and stood up quickly. After giving her the briefest of nods, he walked away from her toward the mine. He was already around the bend in the river before Amber noticed he had dropped something. She went to retrieve it. It was a photograph of a woman and child, done up into a sort of postcard. The woman was handsome, perhaps in her thirties, and the boy, a pretty lad looking stiff and uncomfortable in a little suit with a tight collar, was around ten years old.

  Amber turned it over in her hands. The studio had printed their own name on the back, Hamiltons of San Francisco, and the names of the sitters. Mrs. Gloria Martin and her son James. Then, in a rather shaky hand, someone had written “we depend on you.”

  Amber’s first impulse was to run after Dan and return it, but he had never in all their months together mentioned this woman or child. She decided it must be a private matter, so called out to the older girl watching the infants on the shore.

  “Arsema!” She turned, smiled and came to Amber’s side. “Ato Dan dropped this on the shore. Will you run after him and give it to him?”

  She took it with a nod and set off after the American at a steady lope, while Amber went to take her place among the children. Her nephew gurgled with pleasure at the sight of her and held up his arms to her.

  •••

  Late that night Rusty stumbled along the shallows of the river with his torch held high, cursing when he missed a step, then grinning into the shadows again. Mr. Ryder Courtney, a man he had come to respect greatly, had made a speech in his honor at the feast and proclaimed him the savior of Courtney Mine. He was prouder of himself than he had ever been in his life, and happier. A job of work lay ahead, no doubt, but he knew now, knew as sure as his own name was Rusty Tompkins, he would succeed and the mine would make them all rich.