They climbed the cliff path and came out onto the level ground that lay before Mitsiwa.
"This is the field of our victory!" Fasilides crowed, and stood in his stirrups to make a sweeping gesture that encompassed the grisly plain. Although the battle had taken place weeks before, the carrion birds still hovered over the field like a dark cloud, and the jackals and pariah dogs snarled over piles of bones and chewed at the sun blackened flesh that still clung to them. The flies were blue in the air like swarming bees. They crawled on Hal's face and tried to drink from his eyes and tickled his nostrils. Their white maggots swarmed and wriggled so thickly in the rotting corpses that they appeared to move as though they still lived.
The human scavengers were also at work across the wide battlefield, women and their children in long dusty robes, their mouths and noses covered against the stench. Each carried a basket to hold their gleanings of buttons, small coins, jewellery, daggers and the rings they tore from the skeletal fingers of the corpses.
"Ten thousand enemy dead!" Fasilides said triumphantly, and led them on a track that left the battlefield and skirted the walled town of Mitsiwa. "Nazet is too much a warrior to have our army bottled up behind those walls, he said. "From those heights Nazet commands the terrain." He pointed ahead to the first folds and peaks of the highlands.
Beyond the town on the open ground below the bleak hills the victorious army of Emperor Iyasu was encamped. It was a sprawling city of leather tents and hastily built huts and lean-tos of stone and thatch that stretched five leagues from the sea to the hills. The horses, camels and bullocks stood in great herds amongst the rude dwellings, and a cloud of shifting dust and blue smoke from the fires of dried dung blotted out the blue of the sky. The ammonia cal stink of the animal lines, the smoke and the stench of rubbish dumps rotting in the sun, the dunghills and the latrine pits, the ripe odour of carrion and unwashed humanity under the desert sun rivalled the effusions of the battlefield.
They passed squadrons of cavalry on magnificent chargers with trailing manes and proudly arched tail plumes. The riders were clad in weird armour and fanciful costume of rainbow colours. They were armed with bow and lance and long-barrelled jezails with curved and jewelled butts.
The artillery parks were scattered over a league of sand and rock, and there were hundreds of cannon. Some of the colossal siege guns were shaped like dolphins and dragons on carriages drawn by a hundred bullocks each. The ammunition wagons, loaded with kegs of black powder were drawn up in massed squares.
Regiments of foot-soldiers marched and counter marched They had added to their own diverse and exotic uniforms the plunder of the battlefield so that no two men were dressed alike. Their shields and bucklers, were square, round and oblong, made from brass, wood or rawhide. Their faces were hawklike and dark, and their beards were silver as beach sand, or sable as the wings of the carrion crows that soared above the camp.
"Sixty thousand men," said Fasilides. "With the Tabernacle and Nazet at their head, no enemy can stand before them."
The whores and camp-followers who were not scavenging the battlefield were almost as numerous as the men. They tended the cooking fires or lolled in the sparse shade of the baggage wagons. The Somali women were tall and mysteriously veiled, the Galla girls bare-breasted an, bold-eyed. Some picked out Hal's virile broad-shouldered figure and shouted unintelligible invitations to him, making their meanings plain by the lewd gestures that accompanied them.
"No, Gundwane," Aboli muttered in his ear. "Do not even think about it, for the Galla circumcise their women. Where you might expect a moist and oleaginous welcome, you would find only a dry, scarred pit."
So dense was this array of men, women and beasts that their progress was reduced to a walk. When the faithful recognized the Bishop, they flocked to him and fell to their knees in the path of his horse to beg his blessing.
At last they forged their way out of this morass of humanity, and spurred up the steep track into the hills. Fasilides led them at a gallop, his robes swirling about his wiry figure and his beard streaming out over his shoulder. At the crest he reined in his steed and pointed to the south. "There!" he cried. "There is Adulis Bay, and there before the port of Zulla lies the army of Islam." Hal shaded his eyes against the desert glare, and saw that the dun cloud of smoke and dust was shot through with sparks of reflected sunlight from the artillery trains and the weapons of another vast army.
"How many men does El Grang command in his legions?" "That was my mission when you found me to find the answer to that question from our spies."
"How many, then?" Hal persisted, and Fasilides laughed. "The answer to that question is for the ears of General Nazet alone" he said, and spurred his horse. They climbed higher along the rough track, and came up onto the next ridge.
"There!" Fasilides pointed ahead. "There stands the monastery of St. Luke."
It clung to a rugged hill top. The walls were high and their harsh square outline unrelieved by ornament, column or architrave. One of the Bishop's outriders blew a blast on a ram's horn, and the single massive wooden gate swung open before them. They galloped through into the courtyard, and dismounted before the keep. Grooms ran forward to take their horses and lead them away.
"This way!" Fasilides ordered, and strode through a narrow doorway into the warren of passageways and staircases beyond. Their boots clattered on the stone paving and echoed in the corridors and smoky halls.
Abruptly they found themselves in a dark, cavernous chapel, whose domed ceiling was lost in the gloom high overhead. Hundreds of flickering candles and the glow from suspended incense burners illuminated the hanging tapestries of saints and martyrs, the tattered banners of the monastic orders and the painted and bejewelled icons.
Fasilides knelt at the altar, on which stood a silver Coptic cross, six feet tall. Hal knelt beside him but Aboli stood behind them, his arms folded over his chest.
"God of our fathers, Lord of hosts!" the Bishop prayed, in Latin for Hal's benefit. "We give thanks for your bounty and for the mighty victory over the pagan which you have vouchsafed us. We commend this your servant, Henry Courtney, to your care. May he prosper in the service of the one true God, and may his arms prevail against the unbelievers."
Hal had barely time to complete his genuflections and his amens before the Bishop was up and away again, leading him to a smaller shrine off the nave.
"Wait here!" he said. He went directly to the vividly coloured woollen wall-hanging behind the smaller altar and drew it aside to reveal a low, narrow doorway. Then he stooped through the opening and disappeared.
When Hal looked around the shrine, he saw that it was more richly furnished than the bleak, gloomy chapel. The small altar was covered with foil of yellow metal that might have been brass but which shone like pure gold in the candle-light. The cross was decorated with large coloured stones. Perhaps these were merely glass, but it seemed to Hal that they had the lustre of emerald, ruby and diamond. The shelves that rose to the vaulted roof were loaded with offerings from wealthy and noble penitents and supplicants. Some must have stood untouched for centuries for they were thickly coated with dust and cobwebs so that their true nature was hidden. Five monks in grubby, ragged habits knelt at prayer before the statue of a black-featured Virgin Mary with a little black Jesus in her arms. They did not look up from their devotions at his intrusion.