Mark Hodder - Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

“I'll work on me book, Boss,” Herbert Spencer said. “Sleep is another pleasure I'm denied nowadays, but it ain't all bad-my First Principles of Philosophy is comin' on a treat!”

They bade each other goodnight.

Burton and Trounce stepped outside, lit up, and strolled slowly around the camp, sending plumes of blue tobacco smoke into the heavy air. It did nothing to drive away the mosquitoes. Trounce slapped at one that was attacking his forearm. “Bloody things!”

“They gather especially around swampy ground,” Burton told him. “The places where miasmic gases cause malaria. The areas where the mosquitoes are thickest are the same areas where you're most likely to succumb.”

“How long before I do?”

“The seasoning fever usually sets in fairly quickly. A fortnight at most, old chap, then you'll be sweating it out and gibbering like a loon for a month. I'm afraid it's inevitable.”

Trounce grunted. “I hope Sadhvi is as good a nurse as you say she is!”

They watched Isabel's women saddling their horses, then discarded their cigar stubs, walked back to the main tent, and retrieved their shoulder bags and rifles.

“All right,” said Burton. “Let's get on with it.”

Ten minutes later, the two men were riding at Isabel's side and leading two hundred mounted Amazons up the hill. When they reached its brow, Trounce pulled his horse around-like Honesty and Krishnamurthy, he'd learned to ride during their trek through Arabia-and looked down at the camp. It seemed a tiny island, hemmed in on three sides by riotous vegetation, with the Indian Ocean glittering in the starlight beyond, and, behind him, the endless expanse of unexplored Africa.

“I feel that we're up against impossible odds,” he said to Burton.

The king's agent replied, “We probably are.”

Mzizima village was five miles south of the camp. Originally, it had been composed of thatch-roofed beehive huts and a bandani -a wall-less palaver house, just a thatched roof standing upon six vertical beams-which were all positioned in an orderless cluster around an open central space. Surrounding the village, amid cocoa, mango, and pawpaw trees, there had been fields of rice, holcus, sugarcane, and peas, separated by clumps of basil and sage. This cultivated land stretched to the edge of a mangrove forest in the south, to the hills in the west, and to a small natural bay on the coast.

In the distant past, the Wamrima inhabitants had been farmers of the land and fishers of the sea, but the slave trade had made lying, thieving, shirking, and evasiveness the tools of survival, reducing a once-prosperous village to a clump of hovels occupied by men and women who, in the knowledge that life could be literally or metaphorically taken from them at any moment, did not bother to apply themselves to the business of living.

And now the Prussians had come.

It was four o'clock in the morning. Sir Richard Francis Burton was lying on his stomach at the top of a bushy ridge to the north and was using the field glasses he'd retrieved from the Orpheus to spy upon the settlement. Only a few of its original structures remained-the palaver house being one of them-and in their place wood-built barracks of a distinctly European design had been erected. There were six of these, plus six more half-built, and beyond them a sea of tents that spread out into the once-cultivated fields. The canvas dwellings were especially numerous farther to the south, where man groves had obviously been chopped and burned away. More half-erected wooden buildings were visible there, too.

“It looks like they're planning a permanent camp here,” Trounce whispered. “Building a village a little to the south of the original one.”

Burton grunted an agreement.

By the bright light of the stars, he could see that his stolen supplies were stacked up in the bandani. One of his harvestman vehicles squatted beside the structure. The other one was closer to his and Trounce's position, standing motionless at the outer edge of the tented area just in front of the ridge, obviously left there by its driver. A guard was standing beside it, with a rifle over his shoulder and a pipe in his mouth.

Mzizima was silent, with only a few men on patrol. Of the Wamrima, there was no sign, and Burton felt certain that the villagers had either been pressed into service as lackeys or killed.

“What the bloody hell is that?” Trounce hissed, pointing to the other side of the encampment.

Burton focused his glasses on the thing that flopped along there. Even before he caught a clear view of it, its shadowy shape caused him to shudder. Then it floundered into an area of silvery luminescence and he saw that it was a huge plant, propelling itself along on thick white roots. To Burton's astonishment, there was a man sitting in the thing, cocooned in a fleshy bloom and surrounded by flailing tendrils. He appeared to be steering the plant by thought alone, for there were coiling threadlike appendages embedded into the skin of his scalp, and when he moved his head, the grotesque vehicle turned in the direction he was looking.

“There are others,” Trounce said. “They're patrolling the outer perimeter.”

A few minutes later, it became apparent why.

One of the plants suddenly lunged forward and grabbed at something. A man, screaming wildly, was yanked out of the undergrowth and hoisted into the air. It was a Wamrima native, obviously trying to escape, and now he paid the price. Held aloft by creepers entangled around his wrists, he was mercilessly whipped by the plant's spine-encrusted limbs until his naked back was streaming blood, then he was cast back into the camp-sent spinning through the air to land in a heap between tents, where he lay insensible.

“This complicates matters,” Burton said.

“Should we call it off?”

“No. We'll need those supplies if we're to catch up with Speke. He's got a tremendous lead on us, but if we have all our resources, we can cut straight through all the circumstances that will slow him down.”

“What circumstances?”

“Mainly the obstructions the natives will throw in his path. I'm counting on his incompetence as an expedition leader, inability to communicate in any language other than English, and the fact that, believing us blown up on the Orpheus , he has no idea we're on his tail.”

Fifteen minutes later, Pox swooped out of the sky and landed on Burton's shoulder.

“Message from Isabel Arundell!” the parakeet announced.

“Shhh!” Burton hissed, but it was an instruction the bird didn't understand.

“In position, you lumpish clotpole. Awaiting the word. Message ends.”

“The guard by the harvestman is looking this way,” Trounce said softly.

“Message to Isabel Arundell,” Burton whispered. “Consider the word received. Beware. There are Eugenicist plants. Message ends.”

Pox gave a squawk and flew away.

“It's all right,” Trounce said. “He just saw Pox. Probably thinks it's nothing but a noisy jungle bird. He's giving his attention back to his pipe.”

“I think it's time to take care of him, anyway,” Burton said.

He pulled his spine-shooter from its holster.

Steadying the cactus gun on his left forearm, he took careful aim and gently squeezed the nodule that functioned as a trigger. With a soft phut! , the pistol fired.

Seven spines thudded into the guard's chest. He looked down at them, muttered, “Was sind diese?” then crumpled to the ground.

“Quietly now,” Burton hissed. “To the outer tents. Stay low.”

The two men slipped over the brow of the ridge and slithered silently down to the perimeter of the camp. They crouched in the dark shadow of a tent and waited.