The wind wafted over the ridge from the precipice below, bringing with it a sickening stench of decay. Wood leaned over and glanced down the vertiginous slope, seeing the sprawled cascade of bodies at the base of the ravine, hundreds of them, all without hands or feet. The day before, Theodore in a rage had ordered all of his Abyssinian captives to be mutilated and thrown over the cliff from the plateau. Several of the corpses had already bloated in the heat and split open, the source of the terrible smell. He pulled out his pocket telescope and peered at a ledge about a hundred yards ahead, above a sheer drop at least three times that. Among the twisted, swollen limbs he had seen movement, someone still alive. He thought of taking Jones’s rifle and finishing the poor devil off, as he had done the two pitiful wretches on the road a week earlier, but to do so would risk revealing their position to Theodore’s few remaining marksmen on the ramparts above. The time for mercy was now over, to victim and perpetrator alike. All he wanted now was to see this day over and the enemy destroyed.
“What are we doing here, sir?” Jones said, ducking as a bullet whizzed by. “I mean, why are we trying to take this place?”
“For God’s sake, man, this is hardly the time,” Wood exclaimed, peering over the boulder and spotting the man with the musket on the parapet. Here, give me your rifle.”
Jones passed it over and lay back against the rock, looking up at the sky. “I mean, old Theodore released the European hostages yesterday. That’s what we came here for, isn’t it? And it looks as if the Abyssinian hostages are all done for… or rather it smells that way. It positively reeks. If you ask me, sir, it’s time to pack our bags and go home.”
“That’s a change of tune. Yesterday it was all talk of loot.”
“That was before they started shooting at me.”
A musket ball ricocheted off a boulder beside them, and Jones ducked down, his hands covering his helmet. Wood opened the breech cover of the rifle, checked there was a round in the chamber and snapped it shut again, then slowly brought the muzzle to the side of the boulder until it was facing the parapet. With the bayonet fixed it was going to be difficult to shoot accurately, but the parapet was near enough to give it a try. He pulled back the hammer, curled his finger round the trigger and waited, knowing that the marksman had an old muzzle loader that took him at least a minute to reload. On cue a few seconds later the man reappeared, poking his barrel above the parapet. Wood aimed quickly and fired, the kick of the rifle pushing him down the slope. He saw the man lurch forward, blood spilling from his chest, and then hang head-down over the parapet with his arms dangling, his musket clattering to the rocks below and discharging. The smoke from the rifle wafted back over Wood, pleasantly sulfurous after the ghastly odor from below. He pulled himself up and handed it back to Jones. “That’s your job from now on. You’re supposed to be here to provide covering fire.”
“Sir.” Jones fumbled with the cartridge box on his belt, and Wood turned around on his back, staring down the slope at the troops marshaling for the assault. The expedition had an overwhelming force of arms, but even so they had been lucky. The battle on the saddle the day before had swept away the finest of Theodore’s warriors, and most of his artillery had been abandoned on the retreat up the slope. Had he chosen not to meet the British in open battle but instead to occupy and fortify one of the rocky ridges further back along the escarpment, he could have poured down a murderous fire and inflicted many more casualties.
The Abyssinians had shown extraordinary bravery, but Theodore was no tactician. The fortress looming above Wood now should have been impregnable, but the Abyssinian defense had been fatally weakened by the loss of most of Theodore’s muskets and rifles on the saddle below. He had never faced a European army in battle before, and he had expended too much in pomp and show, all that was usually needed to subdue his recalcitrant chieftains. Somewhere up there was his greatest folly of all, a mortar of monstrous dimensions named Sevastopol, dragged all the way up here from the plains to the north. Even if his gunners could manhandle the half-ton ball into the muzzle, the quantity of powder needed to propel it any meaningful distance would blow the gun to smithereens. It was the farcical side of his madness, though at the moment any thought of that was subsumed by the murderous cruelty revealed by the horror spread across the ravine below.
Wood watched as the regiment chosen for the assault, the 33rd Foot, formed up below, seven hundred men in ten companies, with those on the flanks in skirmishing order, all with bayonets fixed, wearing the khaki uniforms and white pith helmets that had been an innovation on this campaign, far preferable to the old red battle order. Ahead of them he saw the storming party making their way up the slope, some thirty men of the 33rd alongside turbaned Indians of his own regiment, the Madras Sappers and Miners. A few minutes later, the officer of engineers accompanying the party scrambled up to his position, panting and dripping with sweat.
“Le Mesurier, Bombay Sappers,” he said breathlessly. “I’ve got bad news, I’m afraid. The girl carrying the message to bring up the powder kegs and scaling ladders was shot down by one of Theodore’s muskets. We’re simply not going to have them in time for the assault.”
“For God’s sake.” Wood snorted in anger, but then remembered the girl he had watched yesterday bringing the message from General Napier; he hoped she was not the one who had been hit.
Another officer joined them, a subaltern of the 33rd, and Wood could see the rest of the storming party spread out among the rocks just below them, awaiting orders. He turned to the two officers and pointed up at the parapet. “Do you see beyond where that body’s hanging, about ten yards to the right? A tall man might stand on that outcrop of bedrock below the wall and pull himself up, or push a small man above him. There’s a rather nasty-looking thorn and stake hedge on top of the wall, but I think it could be done. If we’re not going to be able to blow our way through the gate, then this might be our only way up.”
The infantry officer followed his gaze, and nodded. “I think I’ve got just the men for the job.” He turned and whistled. “Private Bergin and Drummer Magner. Up here, at the double.”
Two soldiers detached themselves from behind the rocks and scrambled up the slope, falling back against the boulder beside Wood with their rifles at the ready. One man was very tall, the other very short. The tall man crinkled up his nose. “That’s a God-almighty stench, sir, if you don’t mind me mentioning it,” he said in a rich Irish brogue.
“That it is,” the other man said, his accent equally thick, his free hand over his nose. “Positively disgusting, it is.”
“Well the sooner you get on with the job I’ve got for you, the quicker you’ll get away from it,” the officer said. “You see that low point in the parapet ahead? We’re going to storm it. You, Bergin, are going to stand on the rock, and you, Magner, are going to stand on his shoulders. How sharp are your bayonets?”
“Razor-sharp, sir. We ground them yesterday evening.”
“Good. Because you’re going to need them to cut through that hedge on the top. Understood? There’ll be a medal in this for you if we get through.”
Both men looked distinctly unenthusiastic. “Sir.”
The officer spoke quickly to a sergeant who had come up behind him. The sergeant saluted and slid back down the slope, and the remainder of the party began moving up from their positions. The officer turned back to Wood. “Half of my men and all of the sappers are going to the gateway as originally planned, to try to find a way around it. From here it looks as if it’s been blocked from behind by a mass of boulders, so your gunpowder might not have done much good anyway. The rest of my party is forming up here. I’m assuming that you and your sapper will be joining us?”