King of Kings

by Wilbur Smith

  Amber stared down into the dust. The priest looked around the crowd, then spoke again.

  “This is a heavy day. Let us fast tonight. Let no fires be lit. Quiet the children and keep to your own houses. Offer your hunger to God and pray for the dead.”

  He lifted up his silver cross, the sign of his office, and most of the workers took a moment to kiss it and receive the priest’s blessing. No one protested about the ordained fast. It seemed they were all grateful, somehow, to shoulder a little of the pain.

  Dan was led into the church and the door barred behind him. The men and women began to drift to their own houses without looking at each other. Amber grabbed Saffron’s arm.

  “Saffy, this can’t happen,” she whispered.

  “What? Why not?” Saffron stared at her blankly. “The vote was taken. He killed Rusty and he would have killed Ryder. If they want someone to tie the knot in the rope, I’ll do it for them.”

  “But Saffy! Is this how we want the camp to begin? With a hanging? How can we be happy here if every time we look up there we see the place we hanged Dan? I want Rusty’s spirit watching over us, not Dan’s ghost!”

  Saffron pulled her arm away. “This isn’t a fairy tale, Amber. You don’t get happy ever after.”

  “Every penny this mine makes will be tainted with blood.”

  Saffron didn’t answer her, only turned away. Amber stood, trembling and alone, in front of the church. It was a moment before she realized that Tadesse was still waiting in the shade of the church’s overhanging reed roof.

  “What was the count, Tadesse?”

  “It is supposed to be secret, Miss Amber.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Seventy-five votes for exile and mercy. For his hanging, seventy-six,” Tadesse said. He was tracing imaginary patterns on the lime-washed wall of the church, not looking at her.

  “Which way did you vote, Tadesse?”

  He shrugged. “I am not yet sixteen or married, so I have no vote.”

  “But if you could have voted . . .”

  “For mercy . . .” He stopped drawing, flattened his palm on the church wall and looked up toward Rusty’s burial place. “But it is not mercy, so much, Miss Amber, as faith. Dan deserves to be punished and Mr. Patch was right. Mr. Dan could have asked for help, and he would have received that help. But I still think Mr. Dan is not evil. I have faith that if he were sent away he would grieve. He would suffer more for what he did and have to atone for it or go mad. That is a strange sort of mercy, but it is faith.”

  Amber joined him and leaned her back against the church wall. Evening was thickening around them, but it was strangely quiet. No crackle of fires and chatter, no smells of spiced bean stews or the rising sour tang of injera. Soon the light would fade.

  Amber spoke again. “I am not married. I did not get to vote either, Tadesse. And the two of us deserve a vote.”

  •••

  The church was not locked. Only one bar had been placed across the door to stop Dan escaping, and Amber was strong enough to lift it on her own. She slipped in and lit her hurricane lamp. Dan was kneeling in front of the altar, but she had disturbed his prayers opening the door and he was twisted around, shielding his eyes from the light, trying to see who had come in. She moved the light closer to her face so he could see her.

  “Miss Amber?”

  “Hush, Dan.”

  “I thought perhaps some of the people could not wait for dawn and were here to hang me now.”

  The church was small, not really big enough for the growing camp, but it was already loved. The walls and low ceiling were painted with scenes from the Bible and the traditional saints of Tigray, Madonnas and Christs with olive faces, a St. George in the regalia of one of Emperor John’s warriors slaying a surprised dragon with rippling emerald scales. The light from Amber’s lamp made them live and move. St. Christopher loomed and faded above them, the Christ child held casually on his shoulder.

  “No, Dan,” Amber said. “I have decided you should go free.”

  She lifted a bundle from her shoulder and handed it to him. He sat cross-legged on the floor and she watched while he examined its contents. His boots and coat, a water bottle and knife, a package of injera bread wrapped in cloth and one of the Courtneys’ last Maria Theresa dollars.

  “I should pay for what I have done, Miss Amber.”

  “Yes. You should.” She drew her knees up to her chest and settled her shawl around her shoulders. “But it’s a big debt, Dan. It’ll take more than a night to pay for it.”

  He began to cry, covering his eyes. They were the stifled sobs of a man not used to weeping. Amber looked up at the saints watching her from the walls and wished they might give her some inspiration. They looked only quietly curious.

  “I think hanging you would kill the camp, Dan,” she said at last. “I do. It could be a fine place, but it doesn’t need blood on its foundations. I think mercy is a better sacrifice. I know you’d rather die. But you’d be cursing us. I want you to go. I don’t want your blood on Ryder’s hands, or on Saffron’s.”

  He still wouldn’t look at her, but she knew he was listening.

  “If you want to make some amends for what you have done to us, you’ll go. That is all.” She stood again and picked up the lamp. “And I can’t see Rusty liking it. Your hanging, I mean. Ryder is a bull, a lion. He charges at whatever is in front of him and that, at the moment, is you. Rusty thought three steps ahead. Always. I think he’d agree with me. But it’s your choice, Dan. Take it on your shoulders and do us a favor, or stay and be hanged and let your guilt poison this place.”

  She picked up the lamp and left, leaving the door unfastened behind her, then returned to her bed and slept.

  •••

  The shouts awoke Amber in the early light. She stumbled out of the hut and into the morning. A number of men, Ryder among them, were gathered at the church door. Ryder was yelling and the priest was trying to calm him.

  “What has happened?” Amber asked one of the women next to her. It was Selam, wife of one of Dan’s crew.

  “A miracle,” Selam said, half hiding her face under her white shawl, her voice slightly awestruck. “Or that is what the priest says. The church was closed up this morning, just as it should be, but Mr. Dan is gone.”

  Amber returned to her house and dressed properly, then climbed the slope to the east to see to her garden, taking a hunk of bread for breakfast with her. She had been alone for an hour, spacing out the strongest of the nut bushes she had managed to coax into some growth, when Ryder found her.

  “Amber!”

  She got slowly to her feet. The earth was dusty, desperate for rain, and clung to her skirts.

  “Ryder. What can I do for you?”

  He seized her shoulders and pushed her up against the trunk of the juniper tree that was shading her garden.

  “What have you done? How dare you? By what right?”

  The speed and violence shook her and the bark of the tree pressed into her back. She lifted her head and looked at him calmly. His handsome, friendly face was distorted with fury.

  “I took the chance to vote. Turned out it was the deciding one,” she told him.

  He raised his fist and for a second she thought he was going to hit her and she braced herself, but Ryder just diverted the blow and punched the tree instead, then shoved her away from him.

  “This was because you are angry you didn’t have a vote, Amber?” He spoke more quietly now. She looked at his knuckles. They were bleeding.

  “No. Not entirely. You know why I did it. This place has the chance to be something good. You don’t start something good with an execution.”

  He had frightened her, but she didn’t want him to see it. She crouched to the soil again and continued with her work, settling the seedling in its new home. A little sun, a little shade, a little water from one of her pools and this would take root and grow this time. It just needed to be done right.

  Ryder’s shado
w still lay over her. “Justice must be done,” he said, his voice thick.

  “This is justice, Ryder. And you know it.”

  He said nothing more but began to walk away from her down the slope. She patted the soil into place.

  “And I know he thinks that,” she spoke to the seedling. “Otherwise he would have put a guard on the door of the church.”

  •••

  Two days later, Ato Bru arrived with the new supply of quicksilver and Amber’s bundle of books. If Ato Bru noticed the tense atmosphere in the camp he ignored it, but he stayed only one night with them before beginning the return journey.

  Amber set to work translating the books she bought with steady diligence, her grammar and dictionary by her side. She had learned some Italian as a schoolgirl. A rumor had reached her family that her father would be posted to Rome, but then the government asked him instead to take up the fatal posting in Khartoum and her education in Arabic began. After escaping the harem of Osman Atalan, she learned that Penrod spoke fluent Italian and loved that country, so she had tried to learn a little more herself during her stay in Europe. She couldn’t help thinking of him as she sank into the language again now. Still the books on mining and amalgamation gave her headaches. Each afternoon she wrote out her translations and handed them to Ryder. He still was not speaking to her properly, but he managed to thank her, and one evening forgot he was angry with her long enough to say they would have wasted half of the new quicksilver without her work.

  In the evenings she studied her novel and, as her Italian improved, she started reading chapters aloud to anyone who wished to listen, translating into Amharic as she went. Before long the whole camp was entranced by the adventures of the star-crossed lovers and the dastardly forces ranged against them. Amber’s heart ached as she read, and a careful observer might have noticed the hero ended up looking rather more like Penrod in her translation than the Italian original, but the story united them and the children could be heard rehearsing their favorite scenes together as they watched the goats on the flanks of the hills. Amber was whispering lines to herself as she finished her planting in her high garden, enjoying the music of the words on her lips when she felt a cold, heavy drop land on her neck. She sat back and looked out across the valley. A sudden tumble of clouds were rearing up like a wave across the vast sky. The rains were coming. She prayed they would be ready.

  Lucio Angelo Carlo Zola was not the first man who came to Cairo looking for Penrod Ballantyne in the months that followed the fall of the Duke of Kendal. Rumors linking the mysterious British intelligence officer and the duke had reached the courts of Europe very quickly. The European royal families had reacted with embarrassment and relief when the images were returned to them, then, when they realized they were to be blackmailed no more, they had all become curious as to who their anonymous savior was. The name Penrod Ballantyne was soon being whispered in the corridors of power in Rome, Berlin and London, but the name was, at first, all they had. After some discreet inquiries, heads of state across Europe were presented with neat typescripts of their agents’ discoveries. These covered the schooling and family of the former major, and full, occasionally florid, accounts of his selfless bravery on the battlefield of El Obeid and his heroism carrying information in and out of Khartoum during the siege of 1884. They all included a summary of known events in Cairo: the engagement with the young writer Amber Benbrook, its end, and Penrod’s affair with the unfortunate Lady Agatha. But at the moment of Agatha’s death, all certain knowledge ceased. One London agent discovered that Penrod Ballantyne’s account at Coutts bank had been drained. The heads of the European states looked toward Cairo and wondered. The French and German governments sent their best intelligence officers to the city, but they returned bemused and empty-handed. The city of rumors had greeted them with silence.

  Lucio, however, had one great advantage over his German and French counterparts. He knew Penrod Ballantyne personally. Lucio had spent some time in school in England and had shared a study with the dashing young man. They had discovered a mutual love of fencing and spent many hours practicing with the short blade while their fellows went looking for women in the nearest town. When Penrod had decided against going up to Oxford, he had visited Lucio in Italy, and they had spent a summer in fierce competition hunting in the hills above Florence and sharpening their skills with the sword. Lucio had seen his friend’s almost magical ability to absorb another language at first hand. Penrod had scarcely a dozen words of Italian when he arrived, but when he left four months later, he could charm secrets from a gamekeeper or a duchess in their native tongue, and could discuss horseflesh or international politics with a fluency that would make anyone believe him a native, born and bred, were it not for his blond hair and blue eyes. More than one of Lucio’s female cousins lapsed into Latin after an evening in his company, repeating the words of Pope Gregory when he met the blond English slaves in the market of Rome: non Angli, sed Angeli—they are not English, but angels.

  However, the two men had not seen or spoken to each other for at least ten years. While Penrod earned his medals, Lucio devoted himself to the needs of his own country and king. His work earned him less public renown, but was just as dangerous as Penrod’s at times. He was among the first to know that the material the Duke of Kendal had held on the king’s brother had been returned. He read the file of Penrod’s career before it was passed to the king and stood in the Royal Chamber while the king read it himself.

  “He wants nothing?”

  “It would seem not, Your Highness,” Lucio replied.

  “We are in his debt. I would not want him to think us ungrateful. Make the attempt.”

  “Majesty,” Lucio replied and backed out of the audience chamber. He left for Cairo that evening.

  Lucio spoke no Arabic, but as well as his personal connection with Penrod, he had another advantage over the other agents who came to the city looking for him. The Italians and their forebears had been in Egypt for a millennium. They were a community of merchants and artisans, and though most lived in the Venetian Quarter of the city and kept their Christian faith, many had adopted the dress and customs of the Egyptians. They knew the city as intimately as any Cairene, and understood the unspoken languages and rhythms of the street.

  It still took Lucio a month to find Penrod. He learned first about Yakub, then Adnan. Then he began to watch. His superiors might have expected him, on discovering where Penrod was, to go to him at once. But he did not. Instead Lucio returned to his hotel and spent the evening in deep thought, considering how the gratitude of his king could be best expressed in the circumstances. By dawn he had decided. The arrangements took a further week.

  •••

  Penrod Ballantyne never spoke again in his life about the events of the evening of August 15, 1888. He would claim later to have only the vaguest recollection of them. In truth, he remembered them only too well. Bringing down the duke had cost him his fortune. He had taken a room in his old friend Yakub’s poorest boarding house and waited for the opium to kill him. He knew it might take years, but hazed and cocooned by the drug, time had very little meaning for him. The destruction of the duke had brought him satisfaction, but no peace. The distress and frustration of Yakub and Adnan did not touch him. He grew thin, thought of Amber, and waited only for his body to fail.

  That evening he drifted between dreaming and waking, deep in his intoxication. Slowly he became aware of an unfamiliar presence in the room. An Egyptian dressed in Western clothes. He raised his head from the cushion on which he reclined.

  “I know you,” he said. His voice cracked with lack of use.

  “We met once at the Duke of Kendal’s house,” the Egyptian said. “My name is Farouk al-Rahmi and I have been sent to fetch you from hell.”

  “I have grown accustomed to it. Leave me here.”

  “No,” the Egyptian said simply and smiled.

  The attack came from behind. A cloth was held across Penrod’s face and he smelled
the powerful aroma of chloroform.

  “Forgive me, effendi,” he heard Yakub’s voice say. “But for the sake of my own soul, this must be done.”

  •••

  Penrod awoke in a bare, whitewashed room. It seemed unbearably bright. He tried to cover his eyes but found that his wrists were tied. He remembered the bed on which Agatha had died and how she had been chained to it. His limbs were already twisting with cramp, the harbinger of the agony of opium withdrawal. He moved his head slightly. A young man in a dove gray suit was sitting in an armchair next to his bed. He was reading. On seeing that Penrod had opened his eyes, he closed his book and set it aside.

  “Ah, my friend. You are awake.”

  “Lucio? What in God’s name are you doing here?”

  The Italian smiled. “I came to tell you that you have been awarded the Order of the King’s Guardians of Rome. It’s terribly prestigious. A small token from a grateful monarch. But then I realized perhaps we could thank you in a more . . . material way.”

  “Release me at once.”

  Lucio settled himself in his chair and took up his book again. “You know I shall not. Our esteemed doctor is attending to his other patients at the moment. Would you like me to read to you as you wait? No? Well, I am going to anyway. I thought, given the day we are likely to have, Dante would be appropriate.”

  “I will kill you when I am free.”

  “I shall take that as a sign you are unhappy with me, rather than with my choice of reading material. Now, let us begin at the beginning.” He cleared his throat and began to read. The medieval Italian verses rolled through the air, shimmering like oil on water.

  “When I had journeyed halfway through my life, I found myself in a deep forest, for I had lost my true way . . .”

  A wave of nausea struck Penrod and at the same time the cramp in his limbs intensified. The pain was sudden and white-hot. He felt his body buckle and he pulled against his restraints.

  Lucio carried on reading. “It was hardly less bitter than death . . .”

  Penrod felt himself disappear under the agony and began to scream.