Wilbur Smith - Golden Lion

‘What’s your name, boy?’ the wounded man asked.

‘Althuda, sir.’

‘Well, Althuda, tell that stubborn bastard that I am the personal acquaintance, no, the brother-in-arms of Ahmed El Grang, the King of the Omanis, and also of the Maharajah Sadiq Khan Jahan, younger brother of the Great Mogul himself. Tell him that both men value the service I have done them and would be mightily offended if they knew that some scraggy old sawbones was refusing tae do as I asked. Then tell him, for the second time, tae fetch me a damn mirror.’

The man slumped back on his cushions, exhausted by his diatribe and watched as his words were conveyed to the doctor, whose attitude was now magically transformed. He bowed, he scraped, he grovelled and then he raced across the room with remarkable speed for one so apparently ancient and returned, rather more slowly, with a large oval looking glass in a brightly coloured mosaic frame. It was a heavy piece and the doctor required Althuda’s assistance to hold it over the bed at such an angle that the patient could examine his own appearance.

For a moment the man in the bed was shocked by what he saw. The iris of his sightless eye was a dead lifeless blue, surrounded by a ball of raw, bloodshot white. The cheek beneath it had been burned so badly that a hole the size of a woman’s fist had been burned in it and his jaw and teeth were clearly visible in a gross display of the skull beneath the skin. His hair had all been scorched off save for one small ginger tuft that sprouted just above his right ear, and the skin of his scalp was barely visible beneath all the scabs and sores that marred it. He looked like a corpse that had been a good week or two in the ground. But that, he thought to himself, was exactly how he should look, for he wasn’t really alive any more. He had once possessed an enormous gusto for life. He plunged into his pleasures, be they drinking, fucking, gambling, fighting or grasping whatever he could get his hands on. All that had been taken from him now. His body was a ruin and his heart was as cold as the grave. Yet all was not lost. There was a force within him that he could feel rising up to replace all his old lusts and impulses. It was as powerful as a mighty river in full spate but it ran with bile rather than water. For this was a flood of anger, bitterness, hatred and, above all, an overwhelming desire for revenge against the man who had reduced him to this ruinous state.

The man fixed Althuda with his one good eye and said, ‘I asked you your name, but do you know mine?’

‘No, sir.’

A skeletal grimace spread across the man’s face in a ghastly parody of a smile. ‘Then I will tell you. I am Angus Cochran. I’m a proud Scotsman and my title is Earl of Cumbrae.’

Althuda’s eyes widened in horrified recognition. ‘You’re … You’re the one men call the Buzzard,’ he gasped.

‘Aye, that I am. And if you know that, perhaps you’ve also heard of the man who did this tae me, a cocky English laddie by the name of Hal Courtney. Oh, yes, I can see that rings a bell all right, doesn’t it, boy?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well let me tell you this, then. I’m going tae find Courtney, no matter how long it takes me, or how far I have tae go. I’m going to bring him down. And I am going tae wet my beak with his blood.’

The battle had swept back and forth across the Kebassa Plateau of north-east Ethiopia, from soon after dawn until the dying light of day. Now its clamour had died down, replaced with the triumphant whoops of the victors, the desperate pleas for mercy from their defeated enemies and the piteous cries of the wounded begging for water or, if their ends were close at hand, their mothers. An army of Christian Ethiopians had inflicted a third overwhelming defeat on the Muslim host that had been raised at the behest of the Great Mogul himself to invade their land. The first two had proved to be false dawns and any sense of security they had engendered had swiftly proven to be unwarranted. But this victory was so complete as to put the matter beyond dispute. The enemy’s forces were routed on land and any ships bearing reinforcements and supplies that had dared to attempt the crossing of the Red Sea from Aden to the Eritrean coast had swiftly been sunk by the vessel that commanded those waters single-handed, an English frigate named the Golden Bough. The vessel had been commissioned to sail in pursuit of financial gain. Now her captain led her in the service of freedom and the preservation of the most important religious relic in Ethiopia and indeed all Christendom: the Tabernacle itself, in which the Jews had carried the tablets of stone, brought down by Moses from Mount Zion and where the Holy Grail itself was now said to reside.

A large tent had been erected behind the Ethiopian lines. A company of warriors clad in steel helmets and breastplates stood guard at its entrance. Inside it was hung with precious tapestries illustrating scenes from the life of Christ. They were woven from silks whose colours shone like jewels in the flickering light of a dozen burning torches and a myriad candles, while the halos around the Saviour’s head gleamed with threads of pure gold.

In the middle of the tent stood a large table on which a model of the battlefield and the surrounding countryside had been built. Hills were shown in exact topographical detail; streams, rivers, lakes were picked out in blue, as was one edge of the model, for that represented the sea itself. Exquisitely carved ivory figurines of foot soldiers, horsemen and cannons represented the units of infantry, cavalry and artillery that had been arrayed on either side. At the start of the day they had been arranged in a perfect copy of the two armies’ orders of battle, but now most of the figures representing the Arab forces had been knocked over or removed entirely from the table.

The atmosphere in the tent was subdued. A tall, imposing figure in ecclesiastical robes was deep in conversation with a knot of senior officers. His grey beard flowed down almost to his knees, and his chest was as bedecked with golden crosses and chains of rosary beads as it was with medals and insignias of rank. The low murmur of the men’s voices was in stark contrast to the high-pitched squeals of excitement and delight coming from the vicinity of the table. ‘Bang! Bang! Take that!’ a small boy was shouting. In his hand he held a model of an Ethiopian cavalry man, mounted on a mighty stallion, and he was sweeping it back and forth across one corner of the table, knocking down any Arab figures that had somehow been left standing after the battle.

Then a guard opened the flap at the tent’s entrance and in walked a soldier whose white linen tunic worn over a shirt of chain mail seemed designed more to emphasize the wearer’s slim, willowy physique than to offer any serious protection.

‘General Nazet!’ shouted the little boy, dropping his toy soldier and racing across the carpeted floor to hurl himself at the soldier’s steel-clad legs, on which wet, scarlet splashes of enemy blood still glinted. He then hugged them as tightly as if he were snuggling against his mother’s soft, yielding bosom.

The general removed a plumed helmet to reveal a bushy head of tightly packed black curls. With a quick shake of the head they sprung to life, forming a circle whose unlikely resemblance to one of the halos on the nearby tapestries was only enhanced by the golden glow of the candles. There was no sign of the sweat and filth of battle on the general’s smooth, amber skin, narrow, almost delicate nose and fine-boned, hairless jawline; no hint of stress or exhaustion in the soft, low voice that said, ‘Your Majesty, I have the honour of informing you that your army’s victory is complete. The enemy is vanquished and his forces are in retreat.’