Burton whispered, “The devil. He’s inflicted upon me a mania for exploration.”
“Ha! Well, this time Old Nick took you to the brink of death. You were lucky you had one of the Sisterhood of Noble Benevolence with you.”
Sister Sadhvi Raghavendra. Her beautiful face blurred into Burton’s memory then swam away.
“It wasn’t luck,” he murmured. “Is she aboard? I want to see her.”
“She was here but half an hour ago. I’ll call her back if you wish it.”
Fragments. Broken recollections. Cascading water falling from the great lake—almost an inland sea—to begin its long journey to the Mediterranean. Standing on a hill overlooking it, his companion at his side.
Burton sucked in a deep, shuddering breath, feeling his eyes widen.
“John! My God! How is John?”
Oliphant looked puzzled. “John?”
“Lieutenant Speke.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know him. Half a mo! Do you mean the chap who was with you at Berbera back in ’fifty-five? The one who died?”
“Died?”
“I was in the Far East at the time, but if I remember the reports rightly, he took a spear meant for Lieutenant Stroyan. It pierced his heart and killed him outright. That was four years ago.”
“Four years?” Burton whispered. “But Speke and I discovered the source of the Nile.”
“The fever has you befuddled. As I say, Speke copped it during your initial foray into Africa. It was you, William Stroyan, George Herne, and Sister Raghavendra who solved the puzzle of the Nile. You’ll be remembered among the greatest of explorers. You’ve made history, sir.”
The information fell between Burton and the Other Burton and they fought over it. The Burton here, now—the real Burton, blast it!—knew the fact to be true. Lieutenant John Hanning Speke had been killed in 1855. The Other Burton disagreed.
That is not when he died.
It is. I was there. I saw it happen.
He died later.
No! He died defending Stroyan.
He sacrificed himself for you.
Get away from me! Leave me alone!
You need me, you dolt.
The argument melted into Burton’s overheated blood and raged through his body. He felt his limbs thrashing and heard a wail forced out of him. “I’ve made history, you say? I’ve made history?” He started to laugh and couldn’t stop. He didn’t know why it was funny, but it was.
Funny and agonising and terrifying.
I’ve made history.
Dimly, he felt Oliphant rise from the bed and—through tear-blurred eyes—watched him cross to the speaking tube beside the bureau. The young man pulled the device free, blew into it, and put it to his ear. After a brief wait, he placed the tube back against his mouth. “This is Oliphant. Can you have Sister Raghavendra sent to Captain Burton’s cabin? I think he’s having a seizure.” He clipped the tube back into its bracket, turned to face Burton, then raised his right hand and made an odd and complex gesture, as if writing a sigil in the air.
“You say you have a mania for exploration, Captain Burton, but to me, you appear to possess all the qualities of a fugitive.”
Burton tried to respond but his vocalisation emerged as an incomprehensible bark. Flecks of foam sprayed from his mouth. His muscles spasmed.
“Perhaps,” Oliphant continued, “you should consider the possibility that, when a man struggles to escape his fate, he is more likely to flee along the path that leads directly to it.”
Burton’s teeth chattered. The cabin skewed sideways, righted itself, and suddenly he could smell jasmine and Sister Raghavendra was there—tall and slim, with big brown eyes, lustrous black hair, and dusky skin burned almost black by the African sun. Eschewing—while she still could—the corsets, heavy dresses, and multiple petticoats of the civilised woman, she was wearing a simple, loose-fitting Indian smock.
She said, “Has he been at all lucid?”
Burton closed his eyes.
She’s here. You’re safe. You can sleep.
Oliphant’s voice: “Barely. He was in the midst of one of his delusions. It’s just as you told me. He appears to believe himself a divided identity—two persons, thwarting and opposing each other. Will he be all right?”
“Yes, Mr. Oliphant, he’ll be fine. It’s a normal reaction to the medicine I gave him. The stuff brings the malarial fever to a final crisis and burns it off with great rapidity. This will be his last attack. In an hour or two, he’ll fall into a deep sleep. By the time we arrive in London, he’ll be weak but fully recovered. Would you leave us, please? I’ll sit with him for an hour or so.”
“Certainly.”
The creak of the cabin door opening.
The bunk shifting as Sadhvi sat on the edge of it.
Her hand removing the flannel from his forehead.
Oliphant whispering, “As the crow flies, Captain Burton. As the crow flies.”
Oblivion.
Burton opened his eyes. He was alone. Thirst scratched at his throat but something else had yanked him from his sleep. He lay still and listened. The Orpheus thrummed beneath him, the noise of the airship’s eight engines so familiar he now equated their background rumble with silence.
There was nothing else.
He pushed the sheet back, struggled out of bed—Bismillah! So weak!—and tottered over to the basin where he gulped water from a jug.
The mirror had been waiting. Hesitantly, he scrutinised the fever-ravaged countenance he saw in it: the sun-scorched but yellow-tinged skin, still marked with insect bites; the broad brow, beaded with sweat; the angular cheeks, the left furrowed by a long, deep scar; and the wildly overgrown forked beard that ill-concealed a forward-thrusting, aggressive jaw. He peered into the intense eyes.
My own. Just my own reflected.
He sighed, poured water into the basin, splashed it over his face, then closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. Employing a Sufi technique, he withdrew awareness from his trembling legs, from the ague that gnawed at his bones, from every sense but the auditory.
A few minutes passed before it impinged upon his consciousness again, but—yes, there it was, extremely faint, a distant voice, chanting.
Chanting? Aboard the Orpheus?
He gave the mirror a second glance, muttered an imprecation, then crossed to a Saratoga trunk, opened its lid, lifted out the top tray, and retrieved a small bottle from one of the inner compartments.
The label read: Saltzmann’s Tincture.
Five years ago, when an inexplicable impulse had led him to first purchase the cure-all from a pharmacist named Mr. Shudders, his good friend and personal physician, John Steinhaueser, had warned him off the stuff. Its ingredients were a mystery, but the doctor was certain cocaine was principal among them. Burton wasn’t so sure. He knew well the effects of cocaine. Saltzmann’s offered something entirely different. It imparted the exhilarating sense that one’s life was ripe with endless options, as if all the possible consequences of actions taken were unveiled.
“Richard,” Steinhaueser had said, “it’s as insidious as opium and almost as addictive. You don’t know what it might be costing you. What if it permanently damages your senses? Avoid. Avoid at all cost.”
But Saltzmann’s Tincture had cured Burton of the various ailments he’d brought back from India, saved him from blindness during his pilgrimage to Mecca, kept malaria at bay throughout his ill-fated penetration of Berbera, and had—despite Sister Raghavendra’s seconding of Steinhaueser’s opinion—sustained him while he led the search for the source of the Nile. For sure, in the final days of the expedition, he’d succumbed to the fever that was currently burning through his veins, but it wasn’t half as bad as those experienced by the members of the Royal Geographical Society who scorned Saltzmann’s and relied, instead, upon quinine. Livingstone, for example, was very vocal in his opposition to it and suffered as a consequence. In his most recent dispatch, sent from a village near the headwaters of the Congo and received at Zanzibar four years ago, Livingstone had reported himself “terribly knocked up” and predicted that he’d never see civilisation again. If only I had my faith to sustain me, he’d written, but the terrible things I have witnessed in these wicked lands have stripped it from me. I am no better than a beast. He hadn’t been heard from since, and was now presumed dead.