Hal anchored off the beach in Mitsiwa roads and lowered the longboat. Reverently Daniel Fisher placed the Tabernacle of Mary on its floorboards. Judith Nazet, in full armour and war helmet, stood in the bows holding the hand of the little boy beside her. Hal took the tiller and ten seamen rowed them in through the low surf towards the beach.
Bishop Fasilides and fifty war captains waited for them on the red sands. Ten thousand warriors lined the cliffs above. As they recognized their general and their monarch, they began to cheer and the cheering swept away across the plain, until it was carried by fifty thousand voices to echo along the desert hills.
Those regiments that had lost heart and were already on the road back to the mountains and the far interior, believing themselves deserted by their General and their Emperor, heard the sound and turned back. Rank upon rank, column upon column, a mighty confluence, the hoofs of their horses raising a tall cloud of red dust, their weapons sparkling in the sunlight and their voices swelling the triumphant chorus, they came pouring back out of the hills.
Fasilides came forward to greet lyasu, as he stepped ashore, hand in hand with Judith. The fifty captains knelt in the sand, raised their swords and called down God's blessings upon him. Then they crowded forward and competed fiercely for the honour of bearing the Tabernacle of Mary upon their shoulders. Singing a battle hymn, they wound in procession up the cliff path.
Judith Nazet mounted her black stallion with its golden chest armour and its crest of ostrich feathers. She wheeled the horse and urged him, rearing and prancing, to where Hal stood at the water's edge.
"If the battle goes with us, the pagan will try to escape by sea. Visit the wrath and the vengeance of Almighty God upon him with your fair ship," she ordered. "If the battle goes against us, have the Golden Bough waiting here at this place to take the Emperor to safety."
"I will be here waiting for you, General Nazet." Hal looked up at her and tried to give the words a special emphasis.
She leaned down from the saddle and her eyes were dark and bright behind the steel nose-piece of her helmet, but he could not be sure whether the brightness was warrior ferocity or the tears of the lost lover.
"I will wish all the days of my life that it could have been otherwise, El Tazar." She straightened up, wheeled the stallion away and went up the cliff path. The Emperor Iyasu turned in Bishop Fasilides" arms and waved back at Hal. He called something in Geez, and his high, piping voice carried down faintly to where Hal stood at the water's edge, but he understood not a word of it.
He waved back and shouted, "You too, lad! You too!" The Golden Bough put out to sea and, beyond the fifty-fathom line with their heads bared in the stark African sunlight, they committed their dead to the sea. There were forty-three in those canvas shrouds, men of Wales and Devon and the mysterious lands along the Zambere River, all comrades now for ever.
Then Hal ran the ship back into the shallow protected waters where he put every man to work repairing the battle damage and recharging the powder magazine with the munitions that General Nazet sent out from the shore.
On the third morning he woke in the darkness to the sound of the guns. He went on deck immediately. Aboli was standing by the lee rail. "It has begun, Gundwane. The General has pitted her army against El Grang in the final battle."
They stood together at the rail and looked towards the dark shore, where the far hills were lit by the hellish flashes of the battlefield and a vast pall of dust and smoke climbed slowly into the windless sky and billowed out into the anvil shape of a tall tropical thunderhead.
"If El Grang is beaten, he will try to escape with all his army across the sea to Arabia," Hal told Ned Tyler and Aboli, as they listened to the ceaseless pandemonium of the cannon. "Weigh anchor and put the ship on a southerly course. We will go down to meet the fugitives as they try to escape from Adulis Bay."
It was past noon when the Golden Bough took up her station off the mouth of the bay and shortened sail. The sound of the guns never ceased and Hal climbed to the masthead and focused his telescope on the wide plain beyond Zulla where the two great hosts were locked in the death struggle.
Through the curtains of dust and smoke he could make out the tiny shapes of the horsemen as they charged and counter-charged, wraithlike in the dust of their own hoofs. He saw the long flashes of the great guns, pale red in the sunlight, and the snaking regiments of foot-soldiers winding through the red fog like dying serpents, their spearheads glistening like the reptiles" scales.
Slowly the battle rolled towards the shoreline and Hal saw a charge of cavalry sweep along the top of the cliffs and tear into a loose, untidy formation of infantry. The sabres rose and fell and the foot-soldiers scattered before them. Men began to hurl themselves from the cliffs into the sea below.
"Who are they?" Hal fretted. "Whose horses are those?" And then through the lens he made out the white cross of Ethiopia at the head of the mass of horsemen as they raced on towards Zutla.
"Nazet has beaten them," said Aboli. "El Grang's army is in rout!"
"Put a leadsman to take soundings, Mister Tyler. Take us in closer."
The Golden Bough glided silently into the mouth of the bay, cruising only a cable's length offshore. From the masthead Hal watched the dun clouds of war roll ponderously towards the beach, and the rabble of El Grang's defeated army streaming back before the Ethiopian cavalry squadrons.
They threw down their weapons and stumbled down to the water's edge to find any vessel to take them off, A motley armada of dhows of every size and condition, packed with fugitives, set out from the beaches around the blazing port of Zulla towards the opening of the bay.
"Sweet heavens!" laughed Big Daniel. "They are so thick upon the water that a man might cross from one side of the bay to the other over their crowded hulls without wetting his feet."
"Run out your guns, please, Master Daniel, and let us see if we can wet more than their feet for them," Hal ordered. The Golden Bough ploughed into this vast fleet and the little boats tried to flee, but she overhauled them effortlessly and her guns began to thunder. One after the other they were shattered and capsized, and their cargoes of exhausted, defeated troops hurled into the water. Their armour bore them down swiftly.
It was such a terrible massacre that the gunners no longer cheered as they ran out the guns, but served them in grim silence. Hal walked along the batteries, and spoke to them sternly. "I know how you feel, lads, but if you spare them now, you may have to fight them again tomorrow, and who can say that they will give you quarter if you ask for it then?"
He, also, was sickened by the slaughter, and longed for the setting of the sun, or any other chance to cease the carnage. That opportunity came from an unlooked-for direction.