“We’re here to rescue missionaries, Jones, not to loot gold.”
“Speak for yourself, sir, if you don’t mind me saying. I’m not leaving this godforsaken place without something for my troubles. Anyway, I didn’t join up to rescue missionaries, or anyone else.”
“Why did you join up, Jones?”
“Well, sir, I joined the sappers to learn stuff.” He gestured at the camera. “To learn photography, sir.”
“Precisely. And now it’s time you put your learning to good use and set that thing up. I believe that in short order we’ll be called out for the final assault, and I want to get some pictures before that.”
“Sir.” Jones struggled to his feet and began breaking down the crate with the camera and extending the tripod.
Wood took up his telescope again, scrutinizing the plateau, and then lowered it and gazed at the battlefield. He thought about what Jones had said. They might just as well have been here to loot gold, given the absurdity of the real reason. The hostages had been taken by the Ethiopian king because his request to Queen Victoria for arms to defend his borders had gone unanswered: arms from the queen who had personally sent him a revolver as a present and had led him naïvely to believe that the weapons needed for his army would follow.
There was no doubt that Theodore was a sadistic monster, given to acts of bestial cruelty. A week before, Wood and his sappers had come across several of the king’s native hostages, including the son and daughter of a local chieftain who had wavered in their loyalty and had their hands and feet chopped off and hung around their necks. They had been a pitiful sight, dumped provocatively in front of the British column, and Wood had shot them both out of mercy. Yet part of him felt slightly sorry for Theodore, perched up there in his eyrie with no chance of escape, with no hope of an honorable exit now, and with the scribbling newspaper journalists ensuring that his ignominy would soon be the talk of the world. They were here to save missionaries, unquestionably a humanitarian cause, even a noble one, yet they were really here to slap an ally on the wrist for flying too close to the sun, for being too cocky and for expecting Her Britannic Majesty to answer his call. Wood peered at the battlefield, seeing the dark haze that he knew was millions of flies beginning to swarm over the corpses. It was a slap on the wrist that had already cost over a thousand Abyssinian lives all told, with many more doubtless to join them rotting in the sun before this affair was over.
A small, dapper figure, not in uniform but wearing a pith helmet and a Colt revolver on his belt, came and stood beside Wood, notebook in hand, surveying the battlefield. “That’s quite a sight,” he said, his accent a curious mixture of Welsh and American. “I haven’t seen anything like that since the Battle of Shiloh in ’62, during the Civil War.”
“Well, Mr. Stanley, you should be able to add your own memories of the sensations of war to your description, and make a fine account for the newspapers.”
Wood remembered other battles he himself had seen, ten years ago in India during the Mutiny. The sickly-sweet smell had brought back images of horror, of women and children butchered, of fighting without mercy, of mutineers hanged and blown from the guns. He remembered not just the carnage of war but how shockingly quickly the veneer of civilization had fallen away: how the women who had come out from England, the memsahibs, those who had tried to create a fantasy of Wimbledon or Kew in the sweltering cantonments, had become hardly recognizable as human beings, tattered, begrimed, emaciated, their countenances lost in the settled vacancy of insanity. He remembered how the stench of the unwashed mingled with that of the corpses, the flies swarming around the living and the dead alike, a pestilence from Beelzebub himself.
No matter what the cause, no matter what the trigger that drove men to war, the outcome was always the same. Ten years ago, it had been a terrifying breakdown in order that had swept across a continent, seemingly unassailable, merciless; here it was the ludicrous business of a few missionaries taken hostage, and the delusions of a pitiful king. But looking at the battlefield now, Wood saw little that was different from the scenes of ten years ago: the same hideous wounds, the same rage and anguish, the same smell of fear and adrenalin, the same baying for blood long after the reason for war had been forgotten in the exhaustion and the scrabble for survival.
Another man joined them from the slope, an officer Wood recognized from General Napier’s staff but did not know personally; a soldier labored up behind him carrying a large sketchpad, a folding chair and a satchel. “Baigrie, Bombay Staff Corps,” the officer said, proffering his hand. “I’ve seen you and your men often enough ahead of us, but I don’t think we’ve met. Wood, isn’t it?”
They shook hands, and Wood gestured at the soldier’s load. “I’ve seen you at your watercolors before. I understand that the Illustrated London News has taken them, and I offer my congratulations. It seems that you and I and Mr. Stanley are all of a mind being on this ledge and recording our impressions of this place, though my photographs are of a more prosaic nature, I fear, as part of an archive for the School of Military Engineering.”
“Have you tried developing pictures out here?”
“Tried, but failed. A damned nuisance really. One of them was a picture I took two months ago at Annesley Bay before the main force had disembarked, while my company was employed building landing stages across those infernal salt flats. Right out at the edge while sinking a beam we discovered the frame and planks of a wreck, a very old one I believe, with a painted eye on the bow and alphabetic symbols incised into the timbers that I think were Phoenician. Some of the timbers had already been pulled up and reused by my sappers in the revetments, and what was left will, I fear, by now also have been destroyed, for the same purpose.”
“You have an interest in antiquities?”
“I traveled on leave to Jerusalem and widely in Palestine last year.”
“Then you’ll know what they’re saying about this place.” Baigrie nodded his head toward the fortress. “About the treasury of King Theodore.”
Jones had been listening intently. “Here you go, sir. I told you. Gold.”
“Sapper Jones here has a particular interest in filling his pockets with loot,” Wood said.
“As do two thousand other British and Indian troops encamped below. After what they’ve been through, they feel they deserve a bonus.”
“Too right, sir,” Jones said. “A bonus. For all my efforts.”
“You’ll get nothing if you don’t set that camera up before sundown.”
“Sir.”
Baigrie watched as his batman opened out the tripod canvas chair and the satchel, laying out his brushes and paints. “What they’re saying,” he continued, “is that his treasures include ancient antiquities of the Israelites, brought here by the lost tribes of the Exodus as they fled the Babylonians after the sack of Jerusalem.”
“Soldiers’ rumors, no doubt,” Wood said.
“Napier had a local chieftain in his camp last night, one of those who have been helpful to us. He had a priest with him who said there’s a tapestry in the church at Magdala depicting a procession coming ashore carrying the Ark of the Covenant. He claims that the tapestry is exceedingly old, older even than the ancient Christian kingdom of Axum.”
“We don’t want some old bit of cloth,” Jones grumbled. “We want gold.”
“I think we’ll all get our share,” Baigrie said. “Napier has told everyone to pool what they find, and then he’s going to hold a drumhead auction. The proceeds will be spread about the entire expedition according to rank.”