Authors: Paul Finch
The Ethiopians, meanwhile, were still remonstrating with their mistress.
“It isn’t that simple,” she replied to them. “As long as Sebastian lives here, there’s a danger he’ll be discovered. You’ve seen the reaction of the people on the streets. They’re terrified; they’re like to do anything. First of all we must find a way to keep him properly penned.”
“That is agreed,” one of the servants replied. “And to help with this, those others who know about him must die. Mistress, it will save millions …”
Charles had heard enough. He took a couple of deep breaths, shook his cramped limbs to loosen them, then kicked the door open and dashed full pelt across the
parlour
.
In his peripheral vision he fancied Annabelle was in one of the armchairs, Nigel kneeling in front of her and Joseph standing to one side. But before any of them could react, he’d reached the elephant-gun, cocked it, spun around and fallen to one knee. The two blacks looked as astonished as their mistress, though fleetingly Charles was equally as dumbfounded as any of them. Both Ethiopians wore cloaks over their normal servant garb, but bewilderingly, they’d painted their faces with ritual stripes and were wearing bunches of earrings in each ear. In addition, Joseph’s normally crisp white shirt was sprayed scarlet all down its front.
“Bloody heathens!”
Charles finally stammered. “Planning to do for me as I slept, eh?”
Nigel, who at nearly seven feet was slightly the taller of the two, watched the big gun warily. “Captain, when one’s nation is in peril, one must act whichever way one can.”
“You don’t have that choice
any more
,” Charles replied.
Annabelle stood up. “Charles …” she began, but he cut her dead.
“Silence girl! From now on
it’s
‘Captain
Brabinger
’ to you.” Annabelle looked stung and also hurt, but Charles felt he’d seen enough of her pretend gentility. “This charade of
civilisation
has gone on long enough I think. I don’t know where that lunatic brother of yours is,
miss
, but he’s going to be caged, as he deserves to be. In case you’d forgotten, this is London in the nineteenth century – it’s no place for ill-bred savages like these two, or monstrous
abhorrences
born in jungle hells.”
As Charles ranted at his former fiancée, he didn’t at first notice Joseph sidling to the left, reaching for a long, slim object standing against a pot-plant. Only when the servant suddenly lunged for it and raised it above his head to throw it, did Charles spot it and
realise
what it was: an
armah
, an Ethiopian hunting-javelin; six feet long with a weighted head and a wide, flat blade of polished steel.
A deadly weapon, used since the days of Emperor
Gelawdewos
to bring down lions and leopards.
But sleek as the weapon was and as fast as Joseph could brandish it, Charles was already in position. He triggered his gun without hesitation.
In the small
parlour
, the
boom
was ear-shattering. Before Joseph could even loose the spear, he was hit in the upper torso and flung at least five feet backwards, crashing against a bureau, sending ornaments and photo-frames scattering. A second passed and the tall servant hung there as though crucified, his entire chest apparently imploded. Very slowly, he tumbled forward. The exit-wound between his shoulder blades was a red, raw
hole
the size of a dinner plate. As the smoke cleared, blood and bone could be seen to have spurted up the wall as high as the ceiling.
With a sibilant hiss, Nigel drew his machete. Charles hit the trigger again, just in case the colonel had reloaded, but it was useless. He stood up and flung the empty elephant-gun like a log, only for the mighty warrior to bat it aside with a flick of his wrist. Hurriedly, Charles scanned the room. There had to be another weapon – and there was. On the mantel he saw the six-chambered revolver that he himself had carried earlier. He dashed towards it. Nigel swiped out with the machete, but Charles ducked underneath, rolled across the carpet and then was up on his feet again. He grabbed the revolver, swung it round and pointed it straight at Nigel’s face. The servant had raised the machete for a second blow, but now hesitated.
Charles fired.
The shot struck Nigel just above the left eyebrow, exiting through the side of his skull in another deluge of blood and bone fragments.
The Ethiopian rocked on his feet. In a stiff, spasmodic motion, his hand unclasped and the bush-knife fell to the carpet. As he sank to his knees, he tried to speak, but the words were lost in a bloody froth that bubbled from his semi-
paralysed
mouth. They sounded like: “Millionth … millionth …”
His eyes rolled white and he
fell
face down on the granite hearth.
Charles stepped around him, the gun still in his hand. Annabelle was standing beside her armchair. She was staring at him white-faced, teeth clamped on her thumb as though to suppress a scream. But when she finally spoke, it was in a carefully modulated tone.
“You find it easy to kill Africans, don’t you, Charles?”
“If it’s necessary, yes.”
“Necessary?”
“On this occasion to save your brother.”
“To save him?”
She almost laughed.
“To take him to the Natural History Museum, where he can be cared for.”
“You mean dissected.”
“Annabelle!” Charles said. “The Natural History Museum is a humane institution. The gentlemen there are scientists. They’re not wantonly cruel to lesser creatures.”
“Indeed? Did you know that Colonel Thorpe made several trips in their employ?”
“Colonel Thorpe?”
“Do you think the creatures
he
brought back were humanely treated?”
“Annabelle, listen …”
“I’m sorry, Charles.” She was shaking her head. “A few moments ago, Nigel tried to explain to you why he’d made the choices he had. And you told him, and then proved to him, that he no longer had any choices at all. I’m now telling you the same thing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There are different kinds of lesser creatures, Charles. But you’ve learned that too late.”
And only now did Charles
realise
that over the last few seconds, several drops of fluid had been landing on his right cheek. He glanced up.
Sebastian was clinging upside-down to the ceiling. He’d dispensed with his last vestige of human clothing, and was now to be seen in his full green,
exoskeletal
glory. Even as Charles stared up at it, the locust-being turned its head and regarded him with its complex, globular eyes. Then it detached itself.
Charles raised the revolver, pumping the trigger hard. But the revolver was empty.
Claws hooked and wings outspread, the god descended.
As the end of our time neared, it was written unto many stones, most readily in that ancient land of apostate kings, the Distant East, that Man would spill a tide of blood unlike any known since that scourge of tribes, Attila. Eager to partake of this feast, the godless things that swim in dark and unseen places …
Childeric
AD 1099
Jerusalem, the navel of the world, the sacred city of Christians, Jews and Moslems alike, might have been worth the wearying journey to reach it had its alleys not swarmed with flies, its squares and courts not
lain
under a vast litter of the hacked, mutilated and dead.
In any normal time, the sight of the sun – a ball of orange flame high on the rugged flanks of Mount Zion, or shimmering through the green canopies of lemon and fig trees in the lush gardens of Gethsemane – might stop the surliest man in his tracks and make him draw breath.
But now that sun was lost in a haze of acrid smoke, and the sky, the little of it visible, fluttering with ravens.
“They said the Church of the
Sepulchre
was once destroyed,” the boy muttered.
“By the mad Caliph Al-Hakim.
But that it was raised to glory again by a Viking …
Harald
Hardraada
, in the pay of Byzantium. I thought it would be an astounding place to visit.”
“It was, Ulf,” the man replied. “Didn’t you feel that?”
They’d both of them been inside that great and holy place, been witness in person to its many
coloured
marbles and rich murals. But the boy was shocked that even there the people of the city had failed to find sanctuary from the crusader army, and, almost as one, had fallen beneath a flailing storm of blades and mattocks.
Even there
, on that very site where Jesus himself had lain entombed, a hideous slaughter had been wreaked. For both man and boy, now tired and bedraggled and sated with battle, it was discomforting to think about that. They rode in silence, drawing steadily away from the city, their horses picking a careful path over a once-fertile, now-trampled plain. Where pomegranate and
aubergine
had grown in irrigated rows, only char remained; where lines of canes once earmarked the melon and spinach plantations, now there was an immense
smouldering
refuse.
“
Thurstan
,” the boy said, his face pale, streaked with dirt, “I wanted to drink the sacred waters of Siloam.”
“I know.”
“I wanted to walk the pavements laid by
Hadrianus
.”
At first
Thurstan
made no reply. He didn’t want to imagine what was happening on those ornate footways now – two days after the fighting had finished. Both of them could still hear the smashing of furniture and rending of cloth, the shrieks of rapine and carnage, the riotous drunken laughter, the sickening
chunk
of axe-blade in skull.
“Warfare is Hell, lad,” the knight finally said.
“Wherever it occurs.”
“But
Thurstan
… there were very few of them soldiers.”
“There were soldiers enough.”
Thurstan
could vividly picture the sky filled with blazing arrows as siege-engines crowded against the walls, the streams of burning pitch from the high stone towers, then the wild melees on the ramparts and down in the passages between the leaning clay tenements – the screams and curses and slashing blades. Oh, there’d been soldiers. Of course, in the way of all Infidel armies those soldiers had fought virtually to the last man, yet when that last man had fallen the furious assault had gone on unabated.
And we thought
them
barbarians,
Thurstan
considered.
“They weren’t even all of them Saracens,” Ulf said. “I saw Jews, Greeks …”
“Impossible to tell,” the knight replied curtly. In the red mist of his memory, his sweeping
longsword
clove a variety of faces, yet all were nut-brown, hook-nosed,
thickly
-bearded. There were no racial differences in this God-forsaken region.
“Especially in the heat of battle.”
“Or massacre,” the boy said.
“Enough talking.
It won’t help to brood. What we’re doing now is
good
.”
Up ahead, beside a natural water course and a clump of spiny cactus, a small troop of men waited. Some were mounted, some on foot, though like Ulf and
Thurstan
, all were girt in slashed, bloody hauberks or thick leather harness now rent and dusty. Many had cast off their helms, loosing lank mats of sweaty hair, or had ripped the cloth crosses from the shoulders of their smoke-grimed cloaks. What few banners they bore trailed the barren ground or hung in shreds. So dirty and dejected were the men, it was impossible to tell knight from
serjeant
-at-arms,
banneret
from bowman. As the newcomers arrived, a silent passage cleared and Ramon la Hors, Knight-Commander of
Cerne
, was revealed, seated by the water, head bowed. Ulf dismounted and hurried forward to embrace him. “Ramon …
thank
God!
”