‘She will be in grave danger now the Italians have begun to invade, if she is there. I hope you do not have to employ the weapons which you have taken.’
‘So do I, Ras,’ Jardine replied, his hand running over the stock of his M32. Vince had his too, as well as enough ammunition for a decent engagement, and they still had their pistols. ‘Though I think the Italians would be very unwise to harm an elderly American matron.’
‘If they do, they will blame us and say it was done by the savages. The pity is, many will believe them.’
‘Would you have time to issue me with a safe conduct, sir, a message to the army commanders in the north to say I am a friend of your nation?’
‘That is a small request, Captain Jardine. Wait here.’
The ras re-entered the governor’s palace and was gone for some ten minutes, while all the while the lorry driver wasted precious fuel. Tempted to order him to switch off, Cal Jardine had to stop himself: it was not his place to give commands to these men. The ras reappeared with the requested laissez passer, signed by him, then embossed with a seal, and handed it over.
‘I have requested in the name of the emperor that you be given all assistance and that you are allowed to go where you wish. I have also added that you are a military man whose advice might be of use should you find yourself in an area of conflict.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
The final handshake was firm, the cloud of dust as the lorry drove off thick and choking, but not enough to stop the keening war cries of the Shewan warriors. They had barely departed when the next sound emerged, a klaxon-like braying of a car horn, designed to clear the crowded roadway.
‘Bloody Ada, a Roller!’ cried Vince.
The familiar stainless steel grille, topped with the eagle, the huge headlamps at either side, emerged from a throng of locals to pull up beside them. Behind the wheel was Tyler Alverson, waving over the windscreen of a silver Rolls-Royce Phantom Coupe. Corrie Littleton was in the passenger seat and there was a great deal of luggage strapped to the rear.
‘Where in the name of sweet Jesus did you get this?’ Jardine demanded.
‘A French coffee dealer had it,’ Alverson replied with a lopsided grin. ‘Thinks business will not be so good right now, so was keen to cash in, especially since Kassa commandeered his lorry, and every donkey in Harar is on the way to war, which leaves him no way of getting his coffee to the railhead even if it is harvested. My guess is he’s planning to skedaddle to Djibouti till he sees which way the wind blows.’
‘You bought it?’
‘With dollars, which speak louder to a Frenchman than thalers, Jardine. You coming?’
‘Vince?’
‘I ain’t never been in a Roller, guv, but I suppose you have.’
‘Weddings and funerals, Vince, that’s all.’
‘Both to be avoided,’ said Corrie Littleton.
‘Don’t build up your hopes of the former,’ Jardine replied, as he slung his kitbag into the back seat, Vince doing the same, both piled on top of the luggage already loaded. ‘Now, are you going to get out so Vince and I can get in?’
Both seated in the back, albeit cramped, it was Vince who called out to Tyler Alverson in a parody of a cut-glass upper-class accent that sounded very like Peter Lanchester. ‘Chop-chop, James, let’s get a move on, there’s a good chap.’
The route they needed to take led through the modern town of Dire Dawa, up into the highlands and Addis Ababa, but that was a place Tyler Alverson wanted to slip through on the very good grounds that, identified as a reporter, he could be held back from the front — he had no idea if that sanction was still in place — so it was Jardine who drove when they approached the capital, Vince in the passenger seat with his weapon prominent to keep trouble at bay, while the two Americans slunk down in the rear.
At night they set up tents and slept by the roadside, up with the lark and back on their way. The roads were crowded — thousands of the men and women of Ethiopia moving to repel the invaders — growing even more dense as more and more farmer-warriors and their wives and daughters joined the throng on the highway that led from Addis, down past Lake Tana, to the lines on the northern front.
The quartet was now part of a staggering mass movement of human bodies and animals, and not just donkeys. Oxen, either herded or pulling laden carts, mingled with sheep and goats, while spearmen dressed in that loose, white and ubiquitous cloak of the Ethiopian peasant bore, along with their weapons, baskets containing live fowl; their women carried water pots and bales of fodder high on their heads.
This was an army that carried its supplies on its back and they were cheerful, waving as they responded to the klaxon of the Rolls-Royce, and moving aside to let them through in what was, of necessity, a slow progress, even if the road was downhill the whole way. If he could not understand what was being said, Cal Jardine knew they were looking forward to the fight, but, given there were so few guns, it was the lack of weaponry that bothered him.
‘Spears, bows and arrows, Vince! I don’t know whether to be impressed or depressed.’ Jardine said this as yet another man close by the running board jabbed his spear in the air and treated the farangs to a stream of incomprehensible but happy anticipation. ‘How many of these poor sods will see their fields again?’
‘You tried to tell them, guv,’ Vince replied. ‘Don’t go getting upset because they won’t listen.’
It took the best part of three days to get to Gondar, where they heard De Bono’s forces had occupied the battlefield site of Adowa, though not by any kind of victory: the pullback from the border had let the Italians come on unopposed. The one person less comforted, once she found her mother was not in Gondar, was Corrie Littleton, something quickly established given the lady was well known.
She had spent much time in the Gondar forts and talking to local scholars but she had gone on to Aksum precisely because it was the next place the invaders would try to take, and she apparently wanted to make sure they respected the historical sites containing obelisks and ancient stelae, as well as any ancient documents.
Corrie Littleton did not have to say that was typical of her mother: the impression created by anyone who had met her was of a formidable matron who seemed to have no fear of taking on the entire invading army. There was no doubt she was in some danger, that made worse when it emerged the commander of the army of Tigray, Ras Seyoum, the man tasked with repelling De Bono, had no intention of defending the ancient capital city either.
‘We can’t just go charging up to the front lines without permission, quite apart from the fact that it’s bloody dangerous.’
If the tiled interior of the building in which they were accommodated, the only decent hotel in Gondar, was cool, she was not. ‘To hell with you, Jardine, I’ll get Tyler to let me take the car and I’ll go on my own.’
‘I said permission, idiot, which means you ask.’
‘Did my mother bother with that?’
‘Do be quiet,’ Jardine sighed, waving the pass from Ras Kassa, ‘while I go and be nice to the chaps at the local army headquarters.’
Her face lost its angry glare. ‘Sorry, Jardine, I’m worried.’
‘Wish me luck.’
‘That, and thanks.’
The local commander was a captain in a regular part of the Imperial Army, occupying a large house outside the walls of the old medieval city. The guards in their green uniforms were smart and punctilious in giving him a salute, while inside Jardine recognised that this was a building that could be quickly turned into an operational military HQ. There were numerous phones, unusual in this part of the world, desks and wall maps, which he spent some time studying while waiting to be seen. Naturally they were bereft of any military dispositions.