III
The next morning, a small sandstorm whipped up and careered down the valley, spooking the horses and causing general chaos as the first shafts of sunshine sparkled over the side of the mountains. It was the reveille they needed, and the monks of the Order decamped quickly.
Marco sat astride Richmond’s horse, glancing over to the caged Englishman who sat with his knees up by his ears, his hands bound with rope. His eyes were darkly ringed, leering and angry. There was no sadness in them, just malevolent contempt for all, and utter hatred each time he looked at Marco.
The boy flinched and turned away, not daring to stare back. Jericho rode up and patted him on the arm. ‘Do not worry yourself. He is harmless. See? Locked up in a cage like the animal he is.’
‘What will they do to him?’ Marco asked.
Jericho appeared enthusiastic. ‘If we can, we will take him back to Rome. There he will be interrogated and then perhaps hanged.’
Marco glanced at Richmond again, remembering the piles of corpses at the oasis, the flies buzzing in clouds around puddles of blood and the vultures feasting on the dead servants. The Englishman had done that. And who knows what he would have done to the brothers, or him, or even his uncle?
‘You are twice the hero, Marco,’ Jericho said, almost reading the boy’s mind. ‘Enjoy it. We are indebted to you.’
Marco nodded cautiously. He felt more queasy than heroic; a sense that his enemies were growing and there was no one to save him. His hands shook around the reins of his horse and he gripped them till his knuckles turned white; no one must notice he was terrified.
Thomas’s captivity had become a nuisance. It had taken much of the night, several wooden crates, a few of the scarce trees around the water, and many hands, both Arab and Italian, to build the cage. They had lost the use of the wagon and the monks were burdened with their additional weapons and ammunition, strapping them across their saddles or backs where they could. Sheikh Fahd had agreed to take the special gunpowder Engrin had sent them, roping the kegs to camels. They were strange animals, gangly and far from elegant, yet sturdy, and with far more strength than the horses. The camels could have trekked all day and night without rest.
While William spoke to Sheikh Fahd about the direction their army was to travel, Hisham rode up to Fahd and bowed. Words passed between the two men, and William sensed something wrong by the sudden rage in the sheikh’s expression. Fahd was furious. He gestured down the line of monks and Arabs to the tents that had yet to be dismantled. Sheikh Mazin’s tents.
‘What’s happened?’ William asked.
‘He will not come,’ Sheikh Fahd growled. ‘The coward is staying here.’
‘Mazin?’ William said and turned in his saddle. ‘Surely not . . .’
‘He says he is waiting for his cannon to catch up with him,’ Sheikh Fahd said, and spat on the ground. ‘Yet he is too cowardly to tell this to my face. He has lost the taste for battle. He has lost the belief of his own men. They look to his son, not to Mazin, and he knows this.’
‘Will his son join us?’
‘His son is not here, Captain Saxon. He is probably missing in the mountains,’ Sheikh Fahd said, waving his hands to the ridge behind them.
‘So we’ve lost the cannon and his six hundred men,’ William murmured. He blew out his cheeks. ‘That is a desperate blow, sir.’
‘We are Ayaida. We are Tarabin. And we are Aquila,’ Sheikh Fahd boasted proudly. ‘We do not need the Suwarka. We can crush the Rassis ourselves.’
William did not argue, but the loss of so many men was a severe setback. ‘I must tell my company,’ he said, trying to put a brave face on the news.
As he rode back to speak with Peruzo, William paused by the wagon and Richmond’s cage. Richmond took hold of the bars, the wood creaking just a little. Despite everyone’s efforts, the cage had been assembled quickly and given time it could be breached. Richmond had been under constant guard, and whenever he’d tried to pull hard on the bars, his hands had been whacked with the butt of a rifle until his fingers were black and blue. He had got the message quickly, but could find other ways of tormenting William.
‘Do you honestly think you can take the Hoard of Mhorrer?’ he hissed at him.
William shot him a cursory glance. ‘Of course,’ he smiled. ‘And we will succeed where you have failed.’
‘Failed! Pah!’ Richmond laughed, and pointed at the rows of tents. ‘I see some of your friends are not following you. Scared by the Rassis, are they? They should be, William. The Rassis will slaughter your pitiful little band of savages. Your defeat is but delayed.’
‘I care not for your opinion,’ William replied. ‘You are, after all, locked in a cage. You’re our prisoner, Thomas Richmond.’
‘For now, William, for now,’ the Englishman said slyly.
William smiled. ‘If you refer to your servant, Hammid . . . He has renounced you and serves Allah, not Count Ordrane.’
Richmond fell suddenly quiet. ‘Hammid would not turn.’
‘Oh but he has,’ William replied quickly and leant over to him. ‘He was afraid of you, you know. But now he prefers the company of good men.’
‘And you consider yourself good, do you, William?’ Richmond growled and clung to the bars of the cage, rocking it slightly. ‘I saw you when you tortured that woman at Bastet. I saw your expression. You hungered for her pain. You were elated when she burned to ash under the rising sun. Is that a mark of a good man? You and I are not so different. We are both soldiers of Light and Shadow. Burning in our guilt. We are alike.’
William felt stung by the accusation. He turned away.
‘I speak the truth, do I not?’ Richmond said and laughed.
‘Tell me, Thomas, why did you turn traitor against your fellow man?’
Richmond sat back and regarded William well. ‘Death, Captain Saxon. Just death. I saw everyone I knew and loved die of old age or disease. When I realized that our life on this world is nothing more than the time it takes for a candle to burn, I knew it was far too short. I wanted more.’
William said nothing.
‘You think you are so righteous, but you’re blind,’ Richmond continued. ‘There is no Heaven. There is no right hand of God. Just the Void. Immortality is the only eternal existence there is, and men will fight for that. Men like you and me.’
‘Not me,’ William countered. ‘I believe you have only one lifetime, and you do what you must within that. You have wasted yours, Thomas Richmond. And I will make sure you will never claim your prize. You will never – never – be immortal.’
Richmond gritted his teeth and smiled thinly. ‘We will see. We will see.’
William rode angrily away, galloping to where Marco and Peruzo sat, behind Sheikh Fahd’s riders.
‘Is something amiss with our allies?’ Peruzo asked, gesturing to Mazin’s men, who were standing by their tents and watching as the rest of the army packed and mounted.
‘The Suwarka are coming no further,’ William said sadly.
Peruzo nodded. He looked almost philosophical.
‘You don’t seem too concerned,’ William remarked.
‘You didn’t see the Suwarka in action, Captain,’ Peruzo replied. ‘They were a shambles. I swear they tripped each other up in their haste to climb the mountain. They would only get in our way.’
William laughed. ‘Very well, then perhaps it is no great loss . . .’ he said, but his words trailed away as Thomas Richmond began taunting him from the wagon.
‘Ignore him, Captain,’ Peruzo advised. ‘He spreads only lies.’
‘It is worth the irritation,’ William replied. ‘He has information on the vampyres and the Rassis. If we can get that information, I can stand to lose Mazin and his men.’
‘And you really believe Hammid will help us do that?’ Peruzo said.
William’s deal with Hammid had been clarified earlier that morning: if the Arab could learn the truth about the Rassis Cult and where the kafala army intended
to attack, then he would free Hammid, for whatever time he had. It was a bargain the weak little man had little choice but to make – execution the only alternative. Still, while the Arab had readily agreed, William did not completely trust the switch of loyalties and remained cautious, ensuring that several of Sheikh Galal’s men were nearby at all times.
‘Everything is a risk, Lieutenant,’ William replied. ‘From letting Hammid loose, to riding into the Valley of Fire with fewer men than we started out with. I cannot say what might happen today, whether we face victory or defeat. But this is our fate, and bitter or sweet, we play it to the end.’
The long column of Bedouins and monks began to move out and William held up his hand and then lowered it, pointing the way. The brothers spurred into a trot and began riding out of the oasis towards the mountains of the south-east, the wagon rattling at the rear, the Suwarka uneasy spectators as their allies left them.
Richmond looked out of his makeshift cage, his fingers at the bars, pulling gradually and gradually until the first one creaked and groaned loose.
IV
At midday they travelled up the pass between two mountains, making slow progress as the road grew ever more narrow until they were but two horses abreast. Sheikh Fahd had sent Hisham and several other riders ahead of them to plot their way, while the monks watched the walls of the mountains for signs of an ambush. After the attack the evening before, he would not take any chances from here on.
At the top of the ridge, the road ran steeply downhill, splitting into two, one wide and one narrow. The wide road went left and fell steeper, then bent and ran roughly level to rejoin the narrow road that forked right and slanted down the slope. Peruzo pointed it out to William and looked back at the carriage. ‘The wagon is too wide for the narrow road,’ he said to him.
William stood up in the saddle, watching as Sheikh Fahd’s riders walked their horses gradually down the narrow road, none opting for the wider one.
‘Do they know something we don’t?’ William said to his lieutenant.
‘The wider road has no cover,’ Peruzo replied and gestured to the range of boulders that formed a wall flanking the narrower path that slanted more shallowly down from the ridge.
‘Cover or not, the wagon can’t make it,’ William said. ‘And we can’t wait much longer to decide. The other sheikhs are impatient.’
Peruzo nodded, noting the hundreds of restless riders still climbing up the pass behind them, a few beginning to make loud noises of complaint behind the wagon.
‘Send the horses down the right, and the wagon to the left,’ William said, and trotted down the narrow road with Marco. Halfway down he dismounted and tied up his horse by a boulder and one of the few bushes that dared to grow in the wastes. Marco was about to do likewise when William shook his head and pointed him down the track. Grumbling, Marco rode on reluctantly, leaving his uncle to stand in the shadow of the rocks.
William felt uneasy. He wasn’t sure whether it was Richmond’s words, or if something was not quite right with the way the road forked. He walked out of the shadows, slipping between two of the brothers’ horses as they trotted past, and clambered along to the wider path where rocks and scree piled up in jagged hills. As William looked about he noticed the rocks were not weathered and the vegetation underneath was moist where stems had broken. There were plenty of plants there, as there were at the side of the narrow track, and it was the roots of these plants that often held the loose soil and rock together. Yet as William reached down to touch the broken branch of one bush he found it was sticky like the others, with little dust upon it. This had not happened months or weeks ago, but very recently.
A rock-fall? William thought. He looked over to their wagon moving slowly past the rocks, its wheels creaking along the dusty floor, feet away from the steep drop of the slope to its left. And then William knew – he just knew – his error.
‘A trap,’ he murmured, but his lips barely uttered the words. With his legs refusing to go forward, he managed to draw enough strength to bellow: ‘HALT! IT’S A TRAP!’
The brothers on the wagon did not hear him, and only the monks who had been riding behind William did. They stared quickly over to the wagon as it continued to roll serenely down the road without a care, almost as though their captain had lost his sanity and was just yelling madly through the clouds of dust to a danger that did not exist.
And then came a rushing and a trembling, as if some force was sucking out the world beneath them, and the wagon was consumed by an enormous ball of dust. William clambered over the rocks towards the wide road as another boom trembled through the ground.
He jumped to the road, stumbling back as a fissure a foot wide ran towards him and split the road in two. The shock wave knocked him flat, and he rolled away as chunks of earth and rock tumbled into the ever-widening crack in the earth. Another tremor blew a gust of dust over him; it stung his eyes.
Disoriented, coughing and spluttering, William headed blindly for the cries of distress from horse and man. He crawled on his knees, rock fragments cutting his palms, till he came to the lip of the fissure. Here sat the teetering wagon, with only the roots of dead vegetation keeping the ground from crumbling away to send it plummeting into the chasm below.
Brother Michael was hanging from the edge of the fissure, having leapt from the driver’s seat. There was no sign of the second driver, Brother Eric.
‘Hang on!’ William yelled as he lunged for the monk’s arm. He gripped it tight and began pulling.
‘I’m slipping!’ shouted Brother Michael, but William clung on and heaved with all his might. Now as the dust cloud dispersed he could see the wagon . . . And its cargo. Thomas Richmond was crouched in his prison, his hand through a gap where one of the bars had come loose. He was not looking for escape at that moment, but down into the chasm that opened beneath him.
William faltered. He had Brother Michael before him, but he wanted to save Thomas as well. For too long he hesitated, and Brother Michael’s hand slipped. But not before another hand was there and took hold of Michael’s sleeve. It was Peruzo, timely as ever, hauling up the monk as William grabbed his other hand. They pulled him swiftly to lie gasping at the edge of the road.
William scrambled back towards the wagon. It was swinging slowly to the left, and gradually edging itself from the nest of roots that held it above the great drop below. The roots groaned; the wagon shifted again.
‘Thomas!’ William shouted.
The English merchant looked up. William could see he was terrified.
‘For God’s sake man, don’t move a muscle,’ William shouted and tried for a foothold below the edge.
Thomas watched William’s heroics and looked down again at the chasm.
Peruzo was yelling, begging his captain not to go.
‘I have to,’ William shouted back and coughed on dust. ‘We need him. He can help us.’
Thomas watched as William inched along a chunk of rock that had stubbornly refused to fall into the chasm, but now it was starting to loosen.
‘What are you doing, William?’ Thomas said candidly, His body quite still as the wagon juddered a little more. The roots were beginning to part.
‘Give me your hand,’ William replied. ‘Reach out a little further.’
Thomas looked at William’s outstretched arm. It was barely a few inches from his, and for a moment he thought he might be able to touch the captain’s hand. He loosened another bar, but the effort shifted the wagon further and there was a desperate tearing sound.
‘Quickly, Thomas!’ William yelled. ‘My hand! My hand!’
Thomas put out his hand and then withdrew it. ‘What future do I have with you, William?’ he said. ‘If I survive the Valley of Fire, I will certainly be tortured and executed in Rome.’
William stared in dismay. ‘Dammit man. Reach for my hand, before it’s too late.’
Thomas looked at William, then to Peruzo and back at the chasm.
‘Please!’ William implor
ed.
Thomas looked down in horror as the fabric of the wagon began to groan. He turned back to William and flung out his arms.
It was too late.
The roots tore free at that moment. The wagon seemed to hang for an age, before it canted and fell, tumbling down into the chasm below. For a single heartbeat, William had seen Thomas look up in regret and utter terror as he fell – an expression not easily forgotten.
The wagon hit the side of the chasm, to explode in a spray of rock, dust and shivered timber. The cage disappeared. Thomas disappeared. Fragments kept falling and falling.
‘Thomas,’ William murmured, sadly.
Peruzo reached down, ashen-faced, and pulled William up. ‘You could have been killed.’
‘It was a risk worth taking,’ William replied. ‘Richmond knew so much. What a waste.’
‘Brother Eric is dead,’ Peruzo said angrily . ‘He had the reins looped around his hands. Michael said the horses pulled him down when the harness broke.’
William hung his head. ‘Damn them, Peruzo. Damn those bastards.’
‘Who?’ Peruzo replied.
‘The Rassis, of course,’ William said and got to his feet. ‘The Rassis did this. Look at it, Peruzo. They dug a trap under the road.’
Peruzo stared into the clearing clouds of dust and saw the rocks piled up almost a hundred feet down. As the air cleared the wagon appeared, smashed to pieces and strewn across the slope.
‘The wagon is gone’ the lieutenant said.
‘So is the Englishman,’ Brother Michael added.
‘No one could have survived the fall, Captain,’ Peruzo told him.
‘We should find his body . . .’ William suggested.
‘Do we have the time?’ Peruzo replied.
William sagged, conceding. ‘No. You’re right.’
Peruzo looked at the monk by his side, his face dripping blood from a cut, and smeared with dust and sweat. ‘Are you injured?’ the lieutenant asked.
Brother Michael shook his head, still dazed from the rock-fall. ‘Ride with one of the brothers,’ Peruzo told him and patted the solemn monk on the shoulder. ‘We can mourn the loss of Brother Eric later. Can’t we, Captain?’
The Hoard of Mhorrer Page 37