“There are said to be ancient manuscripts in the church too,” Wood said. “I just hope someone sensible gets in there first and keeps them from being destroyed.”
“Not that I’ll see any of it,” Jones said ruefully. “Not much call for a photographer in the first wave of the attack. Those are the lucky ones who’ll get their hands on the best of it. And I can tell you, not all of what they find is going to some drumhead auction, orders or no orders.”
Baigrie took out a pipe and tobacco; he packed it and lit it while contemplating the grim scene below. “You know, after the Mutiny, I thought I’d never see anything like this again. Indeed, I rather hoped I would not.”
“Where were you?” Wood asked.
“Central India Field Force, under Sir Hugh Rose.”
“Sagar Field Division, under Whitlock. I know what you mean.”
“I had a close friend in the Light Dragoons. We shared a tent on campaign. I was going to resign with him after the war and join him on his father’s sheep station in New Zealand to start a new life. In the event I never did; I stayed on in the Staff Corps. But I’d had enough of war.”
Stanley looked up from his notes. “Truth be told,” he said, “I never was much one for war either. I left Wales to find a new life in America, but by unfortunate timing I became settled in New Orleans just in time for our great national conflagration. I believe I have the unique distinction of having served in the Confederate Army, where I had my baptism of fire at Shiloh; in the Union Army, after being having been captured and turned; and then in the Union Navy, from which I am sorry to say I jumped ship. Indeed, I garnered no military glory whatsoever from any of those unhappy adventures. It was journalism that saved me, and then I found I had a taste for exploration.”
“I rather wanted to be an explorer too, and one thing this expedition has done is to give me a renewed taste for it,” Wood said. “During my next furlough I’m determined to go north into Afghanistan to follow the River Oxus to Lake Aral. I want to see if there are any traces left of Alexander the Great’s expedition.”
Baigrie pointed the stem of his pipe at Jones. “And what about you?”
“Me, sir? Sapper Jones might become Corporal Jones, and Corporal Jones might become Sergeant Jones. That is, if the loot in that fortress doesn’t make me King Jones.”
They all smiled, and Wood glanced up at the sky. “Look, the sun has that brown halo around it again, the corona.”
“Down in camp, they say it’s an omen of blood,” Jones said. “They say that King Theodore sees it too, and knows it signals his end.”
“It’s an atmospheric phenomenon, a result of the rising dust. The next time we have one of those terrific thunderstorms, it will go.”
“Or the next time we create a thunderstorm, you mean, tomorrow when we take that place.”
One of the local girls they used as messengers came running up the slope from the headquarters encampment and handed Wood a slip of paper. He read it, looked up and paused for a moment, then scribbled his name in acknowledgment and gave it back to her. He watched her run off, mesmerized as always by the long, effortless stride and the ability of the girls to run fast even at these altitudes without losing breath.
“Anything interesting?” Stanley asked.
“That was from Napier,” Wood replied. “Apparently there are no other engineer officers available to effect the breach. They don’t expect the Armstrong guns to punch their way through, and want a charge to be taken up. It looks like my lucky day. One photograph, and then I should report to headquarters.”
“Good luck to you,” Baigrie said. “Not worth coming all the way up here just to get killed.”
“Hear, hear,” Stanley said. “And bring me back a good story.”
Wood put his head under the black cloth that Jones had set up, adjusted the camera, and composed the scene. Shorn of sky and people the image looked bleak, elemental, with hardly any vegetation or other evidence of life. On the sides of the ravines rose high sandstone cliffs, scarped and water-worn, so different from the mountains on the frontier of India that he was used to; here, the weathering gave a certain sinuous beauty to the landscape, almost a voluptuousness, but it was fragile and ephemeral, the slopes and pathways liable to be swept away at any time by the torrential rains that beset this place. This was what he had wanted to photograph, not Magdala itself. He slotted in the holder containing the plate, removed the lens cover for three seconds, then replaced it and got out from under the hood, nodding at Jones to begin breaking the camera down.
He stared out at the encampment and the battlefield again, thinking of what lay ahead. From the outset this had been an engineers’ war, a war of logistics and transport, of construction and mapping and reconnaissance, as arduous as any they had ever experienced. They had built piers, roads and railways, and condensers by the sea for fresh water; they had triangulated, measured and photographed, had blown rock and spanned rivers and ravines. For the first time he had felt as if he had used everything he had been taught as a young officer, almost as if this campaign had been designed to parade the engineer’s skills. But what he had been asked to do now would be different, something that no amount of training could prepare him for. It was about inching forward, about finding his way up a redoubt under fire, about setting and blowing charges, with the bayonet and the revolver taking the place of the pick and the shovel.
He pulled out his own revolver from its holster, checking the cylinder, pleased that he had replaced the old cap-and-ball Adams that had served him through the Mutiny with a new cartridge version, harder-hitting and far faster to reload. One thing they had learned from the Mutiny was that men crazed by fanaticism were very hard to put down, would pick themselves up and keep coming. And the Abyssinians had more to them than that, an obstinate, suicidal courage that they had shown in the battle that morning, a courage that had kept them charging again and again against a murderous fire until hardly any were left standing.
Holstering the revolver, he knelt down and helped Jones pack up the camera, then put a hand on his shoulder. “Oh, and Jones.”
“Sir?”
“It looks as if you might get first pick at the loot after all. I’m going to need someone to help me carry up the charges, and then to cover me while I lay them. When was the last time you fixed a bayonet?”
17
Captain Wood shifted slightly to the right, wedging his body against the boulder at the edge of the precipice to stop himself from slipping any further down. He rested his revolver on a rock and pulled out his pocket watch, checking it and quickly resuming his position. It was a quarter to four in the afternoon; the main wave of the assault was due to begin at four. Before then the storming party was meant to have breached the thick timber doors and stone archway of the Koket-Bir, the entrance to the fortress, using the powder kegs that should have been brought up to him by now.
Already he and Jones had endured the initial British cannonade, a pulverizing salvo from the Armstrong guns and the eight-inch mortars on the saddle and the mountain guns and naval rocket battery on the ridge behind, the rounds bursting against the parapet and steep ground in front of them, showering him with rock fragments and leaving his ears ringing. Being put in charge of the reconnaissance party at the outset of the campaign had meant a pleasant alternative to the toil of joining the main expedition through the mountains, but in the past hour or so it seemed as if he and Jones were having their comeuppance, finding themselves at the sharp end of the assault against an extraordinary natural fortress and a deranged king who by now had no hope left and was bent only on his own destruction.