by Mark Hodder
“Who's Kitchener?” Burton asked.
“One of the military bigwigs. Or was. No one knows whether he's dead or alive. Damn this leg! And damn this heat. In fact, damn Africa and all that goes with it! I'm sorry, we'll have to slow down a little.” Wells stopped, and, balancing himself on his crutches, struck a match and lit a cigarette. He took a pull at it then held it out to Burton.
“Thanks, Bertie, but I'll pass. My fondness for cheap cigars doesn't plummet to such depths. Besides, it would ruin the taste of my toffee.”
“You have toffee?”
“I scrounged it from the ambulance driver. Four pieces. I'd offer you two but I fear they'd be wasted after that tobacco stick.”
“You swine!”
Burton grinned.
“And don't do that with your ugly mug,” Wells advised. “It makes you look monstrously Mephistophelian.”
“You remind me of someone.”
“Who?”
“I don't recall.”
They set off again, the war correspondent swinging himself along on his crutches.
Burton said, “Remind me again why we're attacking Tanga.”
“Firstly,” Wells replied, “because we're trying to regain all the ports; secondly, because we want to raid German supplies; and thirdly, and most importantly, because it's believed the commander of the Schutztruppe, Generalmajor Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, is holed up there, and we would dearly love to deprive him of his existence. The man is a veritable demon. He has a military mind to rival that of Napoleon Bonaparte!”
By the time they reached the first of the Kaltenberg cottages, both men were sweating profusely. “Do you remember snow?” Wells muttered as they moved out from beneath the acacias and into the village. “What I wouldn't give for a toboggan ride down a hill with a tumble at the bottom.” He stopped and said quietly, “Richard.”
Burton followed his companion's gaze and saw, in a passageway between two cottages, the body of an Askari in British uniform. They approached and examined the corpse. A laceration curved diagonally across the African's face, the skin to either side of it swollen and puckered.
“That's a lurcher sting,” Wells observed. “He's recently dead, I'd say.”
“This was a bad idea, Bertie. We should have stayed with the column.”
Wells shook his head. “It's the job of a war correspondent to watch and report, Richard. When we reach the other end of the village, you'll find that it offers an unparalleled view across Tanga. We'll see far more from here than we would if we were in the thick of it. Not to mention the fact that we'll stand a better chance of staying alive.”
The silence was suddenly broken by a rasping susurration, similar to the sound of a locust, but shockingly loud and menacing.
“Hum. I might be wrong,” Wells added, his eyes widening. “Where did that noise come from?”
“I don't know.”
They stepped out of the passage and immediately saw a lurcher flopping out of one of the cottages they'd just passed. It was a hideous thing-a tangle of thorny tentacles and thrashing tendrils. From its middle, a red, fleshy, and pulsating bloom curled outward. Extending from within this, two very long spine-covered stalks rose into the air. They were rubbing together-a horribly frantic motion-producing the high-pitched ratcheting sound. The wriggling plant rolled forward on a knot of squirming white roots-and it moved fast.
“We've got to get out of here!” Burton cried out. “Drop your crutches, Bertie! I'm going to carry you!”
“But-”
Wells got no further. Burton kicked the crutches away, bent, and hoisted the shorter man up onto his shoulder. He started to run, heavy-footed.
“Bloody hell!” he gasped. “This is a lot easier with Algy!”
“Who?”
“Um. Algy. Bismillah! That's who you put me in mind of! How in blazes could I have forgotten him?”
“I don't know and right now I don't care. Run!”
Burton pumped his legs, felt his thigh muscles burning, and heard the lurcher rapidly drawing closer behind him.
“It's on us!” Wells yelled.
The famous explorer glimpsed a house door standing ajar. He veered toward it and bowled through, dropping Wells and banging the portal shut behind him. The lurcher slammed into it with terrific force, causing the frame to splinter around the lock. Burton quickly slid the bolts at the top and bottom into place. Thorns ripped at the wood outside.
“This door won't keep it out for long. Are you all right?”
“I landed on my leg,” Wells groaned.
Burton helped the war correspondent to his feet. “Let's get upstairs. God, my head! I was just knocked sideways by memories!”
He gave support to his friend and they made their way up and through to the front bedroom. The other upper chamber was given over to storage.
The din of hammering tentacles continued below. Burton was breathing heavily. He lowered Wells onto a bed, then staggered back and leaned against a wall, pressing the palms of his hands into his eyes.
“Algernon,” he whispered, and when he looked up, there were tears on his cheeks.
“What is it?” the shorter man asked.
Burton didn't answer. He was looking beyond his companion, at a dressing table mirror, and the face that stared back from it was that of a total stranger. It was all he could see. He fell into its black, despair-filled eyes and was overwhelmed by such a powerful sense of loss that his mind began to fracture.
“Richard!” Wells snapped. “Hey!”
The room sucked back into focus.
“Where am I?” Burton gasped. He felt hollow and disassociated.
Wordlessly, Wells pointed at the window.
After drawing a shuddering breath, Burton crossed to it, but he quickly stepped back when he saw thorny vines crawling over the glass.
“Manipulated and accelerated evolution,” the war correspondent observed. “Another of the Eugenicists' ill-conceived monstrosities. That thing was once a man in a vehicle. Look at the damned thing now! So who's this Algy person?”
“Algernon Swinburne.”
“The poet? Yes, of course, you knew him, didn't you?”
“He is-was-my assistant.”
“Really? In what?”
“I have no idea. But I recall fleeing from a fire with him slung over my shoulder.”
“Fire is what we need now. It's the only way we'll destroy the lurcher. Step a little farther back from the window, Richard. The stalks are strong enough to break through the glass.”
Burton hastily retreated. He looked around the room at the furniture, the pictures, and the ornaments. Everything was crawling with ants and cockroaches. Even this fact stirred buried recollections. The name “Rigby” rose into his awareness then sank away again.
Wells said, “My leg is hurting like hell.”
“Stay here while I have a poke about in the other room,” Burton responded. He went out onto the landing and into the chamber beyond. Wells sat and massaged his right thigh.
A loud crack sounded from below as the front door split under the lurcher's continued assault.
Burton came back in.
“Any luck?” Wells asked.
“A whole bottle of it.” Burton held up a wide-necked container. “Turpentine.”
Wells pulled something from his jacket pocket. “And a box of four whole matches. Yours for the price of two pieces of toffee.”
“Deal.”
Burton crossed to the window and, after putting the bottle on the floor, used both hands to slide the sash up. It squealed loudly and jammed, with less than a foot of it open.
“Look out!” Wells shouted.
The explorer staggered back as two flailing stalks came smashing through the glass and wood, showering splinters over both men. The spiny appendages coiled and slashed around the room, gouging the furniture and ripping long gashes across the walls.
Wells, acting without thinking, threw himself back onto the bed, clutched the th
in mattress, and rolled, wrapping it around himself. He lunged upright and dived at the window, letting out an agonised scream as pain knifed through his wounded leg. He landed across the stalks, pinning them to the floor. They bucked under him and curled back, slapping against the bedding, shredding it.
“Quick, man! I can't hold it!”
Burton sprang at the bottle, which was rolling over the floorboards, scooped it up, and untwisted the cap. Unable to get past Wells to stand directly in front of the window, he stuck his arm through it from the side and poured the turpentine, praying to Allah that it would land on the target.
“The lucifers, Bertie!”
“I dropped the bloody things!”
A ragged length of the mattress's cotton cover was ripped away exposing the horsehair stuffing beneath. The material flew into the air as one of the stalks whipped up and back down, thumping across the correspondent's body.
Burton, having spotted the matchbox lying on the floor, scrambled across the room. He crawled and rolled on broken glass.
“Have you got them?” Wells yelled.
“Yes!”
Snatching up the length of torn material, Burton reeled back to the front wall, thudded against it, and slid into a crouch beside the window.
Wells was suddenly sent spinning into the air as the long stalks jerked violently and slid from the room.
The battering noises ceased.
Burton, with a puzzled expression, stood and cautiously peered out of the window. The stalks were nowhere in sight. Carefully, he leaned out and looked down.
The lurcher was below, quivering and jerking as if in the grip of a seizure.
“What's happened to it?” he murmured.
He pulled a match from the box, struck it, put the flame to the torn cotton, and dropped the burning cloth onto the plant, which immediately exploded into flames.
As he watched, the fire turned from blue to yellow and started to belch thick black smoke.
He turned and started to speak but realised that Wells was unconscious.
“Bertie, are you all right?”
The war correspondent shifted and groaned.
Pulling away the tattered mattress, Burton helped his companion to sit upright. Wells's uniform was ripped and bloodstained.
“You're bleeding, Bertie.”
“Nothing serious,” his friend croaked. “So are you. Is it dead?”
“Yes. It was odd, though. The thing appeared to lose control of itself just before I set fire to it. Let's get out of here.”
They limped from the bedroom and down the stairs, pulled open the wrecked front door, and tumbled out onto the street.
The lurcher had already been reduced to a twitching bonfire.
“Wait here,” Burton said. “I'll get your crutches.”
He retrieved them from outside the alley farther down the road and returned.
“You did exactly what he would have done,” he said, handing over the sticks.
“Who?”
“Algernon Swinburne. He's the most fearless man I've ever known.”
“That's where the comparison fails, then. I was scared out of my wits.”
“You're a good chap, Bertie.”
CHAPTER 4
Disaster!
1 Six-inch sextant. 1 Four-inch sextant. 1 Mercurial horizon. 1 Prismatic compass. 2 Pocket chronometers. 3 Thermometers to 212°. 3 Ditto smaller, in cylindrical brass cases. 2 Casella's apparatus for measuring heights by the boiling point: steam and 1 for water. 1 Book, having its pages divided into half-inch squares for mapping. Memorandum-books. 1 Nautical Almanac. 1 Thomson's Lunar Tables. 1 Galton's Art of Travel. 1 Admiralty Manual. 1 Tables of Logarithms. Hints to Travellers by the Royal Geographical Society.
— FROM BURTON'S INVENTORY NOTES, AFRICAN EXPEDITION, 1863
The Orpheus was over southern France by the time Sir Richard Francis Burton woke up. After two nights in a row with virtually no sleep, he'd been oblivious for the first hours of the voyage.
Now he stood on the observation deck, enjoying the view and feeling an immense sense of release. Departure always lifted his spirits, and as the shackles and restraints of civilisation fell away, he was giving himself up to that which he liked best: the lure and promise of the unknown.
Algernon Swinburne entered and joined him at the window.
“What ho! What ho! And what ho again! But you missed a top nosh-up at lunch, Richard!”
“I've been dead to the world, Algy. What have you been doing, apart from lining your stomach, that is?”
“I've been looking for that little imp Willy Cornish, but it seems our funnel scrubbers are already crawling about in the pipes.”
“Sweltering work, I imagine. He'll emerge eventually. No doubt you'll catch up with him later.”
“I suppose. I say, there's a bit of a flap on with Mr. Gooch and his people.”
“Why so?”
“The four stern engines have gone wonky. I think it's something to do with the doo-dah forcing the thingamajig to bang against the wotsitsname. There's not much poetry in engineering, is there?”
“Not a lot. Are you quite all right?”
“I'm fine. No, I'm not. Oh, blast it, I don't know, Richard.”
“Thinking about Tom?”
Swinburne heaved a sigh. “Yes. They'll be burying him this afternoon.”
The poet reached into his jacket and pulled out Apollo's gold-tipped arrow. He examined its point. “We didn't catch his killer, and we're going to be away for such a long time that we probably never will.”
“Don't be so sure. I found out last night that Otto Steinruck is actually Count von Zeppelin.”
“What? What? The spy?”
“Yes. I'll be very surprised if his and our paths don't cross again in due course.”
Swinburne's face took on a ferocious expression. “Good!” he snarled. “Good!” He held up the arrow and, in a melodramatic tone, declared: “This is the arrow of justice! I shall carry it with me until Tom Bendyshe is avenged!”
Burton patted his friend's shoulder.
They stood and watched the scenery slipping by far below. Ahead, France's south coast was visible.
Swinburne said, “I think I'll go and do some work.”
“Atalanta in Calydon?”
“No. I've started a little something entitled ‘A Lamentation.’”
“In memoriam?”
“I'm not entirely sure. It might concern another matter entirely. It's hard to tell. It's coming out of here-” he tapped the middle of his chest, “rather than here-” he put a finger to his head. “Maybe it'll make more sense to me when it's finished.”
With that, he left the observation deck.
Burton's fathomless eyes fixed on the line of ocean at the horizon.
“Poems the poet cannot quite grasp. Dreams the dreamer cannot decipher. Mystery upon mystery. And still the Weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man. Weaving the unpatterned dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan.”
An hour passed, during which time he stood, motionless, lost in thought.
“Sir Richard,” came a voice from behind him. He turned and saw Captain Lawless. “Do you feel a vibration beneath your feet?”
“I do,” Burton answered. “Something to do with the stern engines?”
“Ah, you've heard. They're operating out of alignment with the forward engines and pushing us too hard. If we can't regulate our speed, we'll complete our voyage considerably ahead of schedule but in doing so the ship will have shaken herself half to pieces and won't be fit for the return journey. I don't much fancy being stuck in Zanzibar. I'm on my way down to engineering to see whether Mr. Gooch can cast some light on the matter. Would you care to accompany me?”
Burton nodded, and, minutes later, they found Daniel Gooch in an engineering compartment behind the furnace room. He'd removed a large metal panel from the floor and was on his knees, peering into the exposed machinery beneath. When he heard the two men app
roaching, he looked up and said, “There's a bearing cradle missing.”
“A what?” Burton asked.
“A bearing cradle. It's a metal ring, twelve inches in diameter, housing a cog mechanism and greased ball bearings. It's an essential component in the system that synchronises the engines. There are four bearing cradles on the ship, each governing four of the flight shafts. The one for the stern engines has gone. Someone has removed it.”
“Are you suggesting we've been sabotaged, Mr. Gooch?” Lawless asked.
“Yes, sir. I am.”
“By someone on board?”
“That's very likely the case, sir.”
Nathaniel Lawless's pale-grey eyes narrowed. He clenched his fists and addressed Burton. “I don't like the idea that one of my crew is a rogue, Sir Richard. Nor do I understand it. Why would anyone wish to interfere with your expedition?”
Burton clicked his teeth together. He glanced at Gooch, who got to his feet and stood with his metal arms poised over his shoulders, then turned back to Lawless. “How much do you know about my mission, Captain?”
“Only that you intend to discover the source of the River Nile. I've been instructed by Mr. Brunel to deliver you and your supplies to Zanzibar. I understand that the government has funded the entire undertaking. Is there something more?”
“There is.”
“Then I ask you to tell me. You can count on my discretion. Mr. Gooch, would you leave us, please?”
“It's all right, Captain,” Gooch said. “You have authority over me on this ship but, as a Technologist, I hold a more senior position and happen to know the details. I apologise for having kept them from you, but our superiors felt that certain aspects of this expedition should remain hush-hush.”
Lawless looked from one man to the other. “That's all well and good, but if the Orpheus is in danger, I have the right to know why.”
“Agreed,” Burton said. “The truth, sir, is that while I hope to finally identify the source of the Nile, it is only a secondary consideration. The priority is to locate and retrieve a black diamond, known as the Eye of Naga. In this endeavour, I am almost certainly opposed by a Prussian spy named Zeppelin.”