weariness of the spirit.
"One thing I must mention to you, gentlemen. My father is a warrior in
the old style. He does not know the meaning of fear, and he cannot
imagine the effect of modern weapons especially the machine gun on
massed foot soldiers. I trust you to restrain his exuberance." Jake
remembered the bodies hanging like dirty laundry on the barbed wire of
France, and felt the cold tickle run up his spine. Nobody spoke again
until the car, still blazoned with its crimson crosses, drew up level
with where they stood and they scrambled down the bank to meet it.
Vicky's head appeared in the hatch. She must have found an opportunity
to bathe, for her hair was newly washed and shiny and caught behind her
head in a silk ribbon. The sun had bleached her hair to a whiter gold,
but the peachy velvet of her complexion had been gilded by that same
sun to a darker honey colour. Immediately Jake and Gareth moved
forward, neither trusting the other to be alone with her for an
instant.
But she was brusque, and concerned only with the injured girl who was
laid out on the floor of the cab on a hastily improvised bed of
blankets and skins. Her leave-taking was off-hand and distracted while
the Lij climbed in through the rear doors, and she pulled away again up
the steep track followed by a squadron of the Prince's bodyguard
looking like a gang of cut-throats on their shaggy mountain ponies,
festooned with bandoliers of ammunition and hung with rifles and
swords. They clattered away after the car, and Jake watched them out
of sight. He felt a sense of deep unease that the girl should be up
there in the mountains beyond any help that he could give her. He was
staring after the car.
"Put your mind back in your pants," Gareth advised him cynically.
"You're gain" to need it for the Eyeties, now." from the foot of the
gorge to the lip of the bowl of land in which stood the town of Sardi
was a few dozen miles across the ground, but the track climbed five
thousand feet and it took six hours of hard driving for Vicky to reach
it.
The Prince's labour gangs were working upon the track still, groups of
dark men in mud-stained shairmias, hacking away at the steep banks and
piles of boulders that blocked the narrow places. Twice these men had
to rope up the car to drag and shove it over a particularly treacherous
stretch with the torrent roaring in its bed a hundred feet below and
the wheels of the car inches from the crumbling edge of the
precipice.
In the middle of the afternoon the sun passed behind the towering
ramparts of stone leaving the gut of the gorge in deep shadow, and a
clammy chill made Vicky shiver even as she wrestled with the controls
of the heavy vehicle. The engine was running very unevenly, and
back-firing explosively at the change of atmospheric pressure as they
toiled upwards. Also Sara's condition seemed to be worsening rapidly.
When Vicky stopped briefly to rest her aching arms and back muscles she
found that Sara was running a raging fever, her skin was dry and baking
hot and her dark eyes were glittering strangely. She cut short her
rest and took the wheel again.
The gorge narrowed dramatically, so the sky was a narrow ribbon of blue
high above and the cliffs seemed almost to close jaws of granite upon
the labouring car. Although it seemed impossible, the track turned
even more steeply upwards so that the big back wheels spun and skidded,
throwing out fist-sized stones like cannon balls and scattering the
escort who followed closely.
Then abruptly Vicky drove the car over the crest and came out through
rocky portals into a wide, gently inclined bowl of open ground hemmed
in completely by the mountain walls. Perhaps twenty miles across, the
bowl was cultivated in patches, and scattered with groups of the round
tukuL-, the thatch and daub huts of the peasant farmers.
Domestic animals, goats and a few milk cows grazed along the course of
the Sardi River where the grass was green and lush and thick forests of
cedar trees found a precarious purchase along the rocky banks.
The town itself was a gathering of brick-built and white, plastered
probing rays of the sun as it came through the western pass.
Here in the west, the mountains fell back, allowing a broad gentle
incline to rise the last two thousand feet to the level of the plateau
of the highlands. Down this slope, the narrow-gauge railway looped in
a tight series of hairpins until it entered the town and ended in a
huddle of sheds and stock pens.
The Catholic mission station was situated beyond the town on the slopes
of the western rise. It was a sadly dilapidated cluster of tin-roofed
daub buildings, grouped around a church built of the same materials.
The church was the only building that was freshly whitewashed. As they
drove past the open doors, Vicky saw that the rows of rickety pews were
empty, but that lighted candles burned upon the altar and there were
fresh flowers in the vases.
The church's emptiness and the sorry state of the buildings were a
reflection of the massive power of the Coptic Church over this land and
its people. There was very little encouragement given to the
missionaries of any other faith, but this did not prevent the local
inhabitants from taking advantage of the medical facilities offered by
the mission.
Almost fifty patients squatted along the length of the veranda that ran
the full length of the clinic, and they looked up with minimal interest
as Vicky parked the armoured car below them.
The doctor was a heavily built man, with short bowed legs and a thick
neck. His hair was cropped close to the round skull and was silvery
white, and his eyes were a pale blue. He spoke no English, and he
acknowledged Vicky with a glance and a grunt, transferring all his
attention to Sara. When two of his assistants rolled her carefully on
to a stretcher and carried her up on to the veranda, Vicky would have
followed but the Lij restrained her.
"She is in the best hands and we have work to do." The telegraph
office at the railway station was closed and locked, but in answer to
the Prince's shouts the station master came hurrying anxiously down the
track. He recognized Mikhael immediately.
The process of tapping out Vicky's despatch on the telegraph was a
long, laborious business, almost beyond the ability of the station
master whose previous transmissions had seldom exceeded a dozen words
at a time. He frowned and muttered to himself as he worked, and Vicky
wondered in what mangled state her masterpiece of the journalistic art
would reach her editor's desk in New York. The Prince had left her and
gone off with his escort to the official government residence on the
outskirts of the village, and it was after nine o'clock before the
station master had sent the last of Vicky's despatch a total of almost
five thousand words and Vicky found that her legs were unsteady
and her
brain woolly with fatigue when she went out into the utter darkness of
the mountain night. There were no stars, for the night mists had
filled the basin and swirled in the headlights as Vicky groped her way
through the village and at last found the government residence.
It was a large sprawling complex of buildings with wide verandas,
whitewashed and iron-roofed, standing in a grove of dark-foliaged cosa
flora trees from which the bats screeched and fluttered to dive upon
the insects that swarmed in the light from the windows of the main
building.
Vicky halted the car in front of the largest building and found herself
surrounded by silent but watchful throngs of dark men, all of them
heavily armed like the Harari she knew, but these were a different
people. She did not know why, but she was sure of it.
There were many others camped in the grove. She could see their fires
and hear the stamp and snort of their tethered horses, the voices of
the women and the laughter of the men.
The throng opened for her and she crossed the veranda and entered the
large room which was crowded with many men, and lit by the smoky
paraffin lamps that hung from the ceiling. The room stank of male
sweat, tobacco and the hot spicy aroma of food and tej.
A hostile silence fell as she entered, and Vicky stood uncertainly on
the threshold, scrutinized by a hundred dark suspicious eyes, until Lij
Mikhael rose from where he sat at the far end of the room.
"Miss Camberwell." He took her hand. "I was beginning to worry about
you. Did you send your despatch?" He led her across the room and
seated her beside him, before he indicated the man who sat opposite
him.
"This is Ras Kullah of the Gallas," he said, and despite her weariness,
Vicky studied him with interest.
Her first impression was identical to that she had received from the
men amongst the cosa flora trees outside in the darkness. There was a
veiled hostility, a coldness of the spirit about the man, almost
reptilian aura about the dark unblinking eyes.
He was a young man, still in his twenties, but his face and body were
bloated by disease or debauchery so that there was a soft jelly-like
look to his flesh. The skin was a pale creamy colour, unhealthy and
clammy, as though it had never been exposed to sunlight. His lips were
full and petulant, a startling cherry red in colour that ill suited the
pale tones of his skin.
He watched Vicky, when the Prince introduced her, with the same dead
expression in his eyes, but gave no acknowledgement though the flat
snakelike eyes moved slowly over her body, like loathsome hands,
dwelling and lingering on her breasts and her legs, before moving back
to Lij Mikhael's face.
The pudgy, swollen hands lifted a buck-horn pipe to the dark cherry
lips and Ras Kullah drew deeply upon it holding the smoke in his lungs
before exhaling slowly.
When Vicky smelled the smoke, she knew the reason for the dead eyes in
the Ras's puffy face.
"You have not eaten all day," said Lij Mikhael, and gave instructions
for food to be brought to Vicky. "You will excuse me now, Miss
Camberwell, the Ras speaks no English and our negotiations are still at
an early stage. I have ordered a room made ready where you may rest as
soon as you have eaten. We shall be talking all the night," the Lij
smiled briefly, "and saying very little, for a blood feud of a hundred
years is what we are talking around." He turned back to the Ras.
The hot, spicy food warmed and filled the cold hollow place in the pit
of Vicky's stomach, and a mug of fiery tej made her choke and gasp, but
then lifted her spirits and revived her journalist's curiosity so that
she could look again with interest at what was happening around her.
The interminable discussion went on between the two men, cautious
plodding negotiations between implacable luctantly drawn together by a
greater danger and enemies, a more powerful adversary.
On either side Ras sat two young women, pale sloe-eyed creatures, with
noble regular features and thick dark hair frizzled out into a stiff
round bush that caught the light of the lanterns and glowed along the
periphery like a luminous halo. They sat impassively showing no
emotion, even when the Ras fondled one or the other of them with the
absent-minded caress that he might have bestowed on a lap dog.
Only once, as he took a fat round breast in one plump soft paw and
squeezed it, the girl winced slightly and Vicky seeing the crimson
linen of her blouse dampened in a wet dark patch at the nipple realized
that the girl's breast was heavy with milk.
Vicky's artificial sense of well-being was fast fading now, sinking
once again under the weight of her weariness, and lulled by the food in
her belly, the thick smoky atmosphere and the hypnotic cadence of the
Amharic language. She was on the point of excusing herself from the
Lij and leaving when there was a disturbance outside the room, and the
shrill angry cries of a voice creaking with age and indi nation The
room was immediately electric with a charged feeling of expectation,
and Ras Kullah looked up and called out querulously.
A youth of perhaps nineteen years of age was dragged into the room and
held by two armed guards in the centre of the hastily cleared space
before Ras Kullah. His arms were bound with rawhide that cut deeply
into the flesh of his wrists, and his face was wet and shiny with the
sweat of fear, while his eyes rolled wildly in their sockets.
He was followed by a shrieking crone, a wizened baboon like figure,
swathed in a voluminous black sham mastiff with filth and greenish with
age. Repeatedly she attempted to attack the captive youth, clawing at
his face with bony hooked fingers, her toothless old mouth opened in a
dark pink-lined pit as she leaped and cavorted before the terrified
youth, trying again and again to reach him, while the two guys pushed
her away with c ee gu aw and playful blows, never relinquishing their
grip on their prisoner.
The Ras leaned forward to watch this play with awakening interest, his
dark dull eyes taking on a sparkle of anticipation as he asked a
question, and the crone flew to him and flung herself full-length
before him.
She began to bleat out a long high-pitched plea, attempting at the same
time to grasp and kiss the Ras's feet. The Ras giggled with
anticipation, kicking away the old woman's hands and occasionally
asking a question that was answered either by the guards or the
grovelling crone.
"Miss Camberwell whispered the Prince. "I suggest that you leave now.
This will not be pleasant to watch."
"What is it?" Vicky demanded, her professional instincts roused. "What
are they doing?" "The woman accuses the youth of murdering her son.
The guards are her witnesses and the Ras is trying the case.
He will give judgement in a moment, and the sentence will be carried
out immediately."
Here? "Vicky looked startled.
"Yes,
Miss Camberwell. I urge you to leave. The punishment will be
biblical, from the Old Testament which is the centre of the Coptic
faith. It will be a tooth for a tooth." Vicky hesitated to take the
Prince's advice, all human experience was her field no matter how
bizarre, and suddenly it was too late.
Laughingly, the Ras thrust the old woman away again with a kick to the
chest that sent her sprawling across the beaten earth floor and he
called a peremptory command to the guards who held the accused youth.
Flapping like a maimed black crow upon the floor, the crone set up a
wailing shriek of triumph as she heard the verdict, and she tried to
regain her feet. The guards guffawed again and began to strip away the
condemned man's clothing, tearing it from his body until he stood
completely naked except for his bonds.
The crowded room now buzzed with excitement at the coming
entertainment, and the doorway and windows were packed with those who
had come in from the encampment amongst the cosa flora trees. Even the
two impassive madonnas who flanked the Ras had become animated, leaning
forward to chatter softly to each other, smiling secretly as their
dark-moon eyes shone and the full swollen breasts swung heavily under
the thin material of their blouses.
The doomed youth was whimpering softly, his head turning back and
forth, as though seeking escape, his naked body slim and finely muscled
with dark amber skin that, glowed in the lamplight, and his arms bound
tightly behind his back. His legs were long and the muscles looked
hard and beautifully sculptured, and the dark bush of curls in his
groin was dense and crisp-looking. His thick circumcised penis hung
limply, seeming to epitomize the man's despair.
Vicky tried to tear her eyes away, ashamed to look upon a human being
stripped thus of all dignity, but the spectacle was mesmeric.
The old woman hopped and flapped in front of the captive, her wrinkled
brown features contorted in an expression of utter malice and she
opened her toothless mouth and spat into his face. The spittle ran
down his cheek and dripped on to his chest.
"Please leave now," Lij Mikhael urged Vicky, and she tried to rise, but
it seemed that her legs would not respond.
One of the Galla warriors sitting opposite Vicky drew the narrow-bladed
dagger from the tooled leather sheath on his hip. The handle was