Captain Nemo

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Nemo and other half-healed victims rinsed and boiled rags for bandages, swept the floors, and removed bodies. Piles of corpses were stacked downwind from the hospital windows, and daily funeral pyres blazed high. Nightingale insisted that rapid disposal of cadavers and amputated limbs was crucial to prevent the spread of disease.

  Sitting at her wobbly, splintered desk, she wrote dozens of letters and pleas for supplies. She even sent notes via the new telegraph lines used by war correspondents and army commanders. When she insisted that her demands be transmitted back home, no telegraph operator dared to stand in her way. The nurses had sent the required documentation to the French commanders regarding Nemo’s injury—unfortunately, the old Napoleonic veterans had not even noticed the loss of a lone engineer. If he’d been killed on the battlefield at Balaclava, no letter of condolence would have been written, no death certificate signed. Caroline would never have known his fate. Forgotten, Nemo was content to remain here helping the nurses. . . .

  On November fourth, the Russians again attempted to break the siege, this time striking toward the village of Inkerman. The British, French, and Turks once again drove them back, but it was an expensive victory for a relatively minor battle.

  After the horrific fighting at Inkerman, wagons hauled bleeding men to the giant hospital barracks where there were no more beds. Nightingale appealed to the army commanders for supplies and assistance, but they refused to lend any of their troops. Nemo and a few volunteers worked harder, but he didn’t mind. The toil drove back boredom and made him forget the twinges of pain. In the midst of this chaos, a tall, lean man came in search of Nemo: the green-turbaned Turkish commander who had noticed him building siege towers.

  With a retinue of burly personal warriors, the haughty caliph marched through the hospital, asking questions until he tracked down the engineer. Florence Nightingale and her nurses were too occupied with emergency duties and triage to waste time with these Turks who, unlike their fellow countrymen, did not lift a finger to help in the frenzied emergency. The caliph discovered Nemo himself, however. Five armed guards stood behind him, dressed in white garments, with ceremonial sabers in their sashed belts and rifles over their shoulders. None of them seemed interested in the war or the politics.

  “You are the engineer?” the caliph said in passable French. He studied Nemo’s features. “I have come to take you away.”

  “I am busy.” Nemo continued tearing strips of cloth for bandages. “You have no right to command here, sir. I don’t even know who you are.”

  The Turk’s skin flushed darker, making the lightning bolt scar on his cheek stand out. “This is a British hospital. You are a French soldier. I have obtained papers to take you to your appropriate assignment.” The caliph held out a sheet of paper that was written in unintelligible Turkish.

  “I have work to do.” Nemo gestured around him. “Can’t you see all the wounded?”

  “They should have died on the battlefield.” The green-turbaned man jabbed a finger against Nemo’s bandaged ribs. “You have been deemed sufficiently healed and should no longer take up space in this hospital. You will come with me.”

  Florence Nightingale bustled in, her sweat-soaked hair in disarray, her gray dress spotted with blood. She hurried over, wearing a stern expression. “What do you want with this man, sir? I need him here.”

  “The engineer is to come away with me. The British Hospital Administrator has given orders that no French soldier may be tended here. British supplies are to be used only for British victims apparently. No French, or Sardinians, or apparently Turks.”

  “We’re supposed to be allies,” Nemo said, digging in his heels.

  “We’re supposed to be a hospital,” Nightingale snapped. “We tend the wounded without regard to which flag they salute. This man is too badly wounded to go back to the battlefield.”

  “Nevertheless,” the caliph said, squaring his shoulders. His bald guards put their hands on the hilts of their scimitars. “He does not belong here. It is simply a bureaucratic matter.”

  Florence Nightingale sagged. Like Nemo, she was all too familiar with the paperwork and ineptitude that characterized this entire war.

  “You have my guarantee he will receive the proper care and treatment,” the caliph said, his voice more pleasant. “But this man must come with me. I am a caliph—Caliph Robur.”

  At the far side of the room, a soldier shrieked in pain. Two nurses held him down while a battlefield surgeon did his best to saw off the man’s left leg, but the surgeon had trouble getting the serrated blade through the thick femur.

  The caliph looked at Nightingale. His black eyes were impenetrable, and he stroked the pointed beard on his narrow chin while the amputee continued screaming. “You do have wounded to tend to, nurse. Why are you questioning my legitimate orders?”

  In disgust, Nemo held up his hand to stop further argument. “I will go with him. It makes as much sense as the rest of this war.” Though troubled, Florence Nightingale seemed more concerned about the new arrivals. Nemo followed the Turk, limping slowly. He looked back at the busy nurses; already Nightingale had gone to work with the flood of new victims. . . .

  Caliph Robur had a cart and driver waiting outside, and the bald guards helped Nemo climb in. He saw no other legitimate Turkish soldiers, none of the brave but ragged fighters from the battlefield. These men seemed to follow their own law, with no regard for the overall battles. Without speaking to Nemo again, they mounted their prancing horses and set off from the hospital as another funeral pyre poured a column of greasy smoke into the sky.

  The cart jostled away from the Sevastopol fortress. Every bump in the road sent jarring pains through Nemo’s side. Weak as he was, he endured the rough ride. He did not know how he could be effective on the battlefield, even to perform the less physically challenging tasks of engineering.

  Instead, the caliph took him far from the battlefield, into an even worse situation. . . .

  VI

  Under cloudy skies, Robur’s escort led the wobbly cart far from French and British military trenches. They proceeded in silence across the rocky terrain on narrow, rugged roads. In pain, Nemo propped himself up to watch as they approached the battle lines held by Turkish forces, then went beyond the main camp to their own settlement. Many of the Ottoman soldiers slept on the ground beside smoky campfires built out of scrub brush.

  When he called out questions, demanding an explanation, the cart driver ignored him, as did the scimitar-carrying guards. Robur himself rode ahead out of earshot. He seemed aloof from the rest of the Turkish military. In the center of the sprawling camp, the caliph and his generals had erected large multicolored pavilions that bore clan markings. Deep in the heart of the broad encampment, the driver halted the cart in an open area surrounded by the caliph’s private tents, which blocked the view from outside. Nemo saw with sudden dread a line of well-armed guards—none of them wearing the uniform of the Turkish troops—standing around a fenced enclosure.

  The thirty men gathered inside the fence wore the uniforms of French, British, and Sardinian troops. “I am to be a prisoner of war, then?” Outraged, Nemo tried to stand up in the cart, but the pain in his ribs struck him like a bolt of lightning. “I am a French citizen. You have no right to hold me, or any of these men.”

  Caliph Robur rode over and gestured for his guards to “assist” Nemo in dismounting from the cart. The bald guards, though strong and well-armed, did not treat him with undue viciousness. Nemo considered struggling, but feared that he would rip open his wound again.

  Upon seeing his arrival, the other prisoners stirred. Most scowled in frustration, though a few of the French captives looked at him with barely restrained excitement.

  Robur stroked his pointed beard and turned his angular face from the camp prisoners toward Nemo. “You will remain here and recover, Engineer. I promise we shall treat you well. We have important work for you, far beyond this mere squabble among nations.”

  “But
why did you bring me here?”

  “Everything will be explained to you in time—when you need to know.”

  Dismissing him, Robur rode off as the guards hauled Nemo through an opening in the fence.

  Bound by their common predicament, the other prisoners welcomed him and introduced themselves, explaining their backgrounds and how they had come to be in Robur’s camp. Like Nemo, none of the prisoners understood why they were here. Each man had been taken under bureaucratic pretense, then abducted for some unknown purpose.

  An Englishman named Cyrus Harding was a professional boatbuilder by trade. Harding had square-cut brown hair and a large chin that sported a crater-sized dimple in the center. Though his flinty eyes watched his surroundings, Harding kept his mouth shut in a grim line unless he was forced to speak.

  Conseil, a mousy man from Marseilles, had been brought to the Crimea as a meteorologist, of all things. Months earlier, after storms in the Black Sea had severely damaged the French fleet, Conseil had been assigned to collect regular weather reports from the war zone, which he then telegraphed to a central station. The meteorologist had an amusing habit of withdrawing his simian head in a cringe. His eyes were wide and round, as if on the verge of popping out of his head; he kept his gray-brown hair scraped close to his skull, but when it grew longer, the short strands stood out like bristles on an old brush.

  Liedenbrock, an odd member of the group, claimed to be Sardinian but spoke with a strong German accent. Trained as a metallurgist in Salzburg, he had found work with industrial investors in Sardinia. Unfortunately, he had gambled away all his money, lost his home and his mistress, and would have gone to prison—unless he volunteered to join the Sardinian forces in the Crimea. Liedenbrock was rail thin with a curly fuzz of gray hair like a cloud that had settled on his cranium. His heavy brow extended like a shelf over brown eyes, casting his face into shadow.

  Some of the other prisoners had worked as craftsmen or mechanics, others as lathe-turners and glassmakers. What could Robur possibly want with an outcast metallurgist, a timid weather scientist, a stoic boatbuilder—and himself? None of the men were officers or important political prisoners . . . few even had families or obligations back in their home countries. The caliph seemed to have chosen the least significant men as hostages from the battlefield. Nemo thought no one would even notice their disappearance. . . .

  After his initial anger, he studied the camp objectively. Knowing the hospital conditions he had just endured, and having experienced daily life in military camps, he noted with surprise that Robur’s war prisoners were treated better than most troops in the Crimea. The men had grass bedding and awnings to protect them from the sun. They received regular meals, usually lamb or goat stew; at other times they ate fresh vegetables, olives, bread, and wine. In fact, they ate better than the loyal Ottoman troops fighting on the siege lines.

  For days as he pondered the problem, he circulated among the captives, learning their names and their situations. As a point of survival, Nemo had long ago learned to assess available resources—and these men and their diverse skills comprised his only resources in this strange situation.

  The quietude was marred only by the constant presence of mounted guards who rode the camp perimeter. Glowering bald guards stood with scimitars drawn and spoke not a word, not even in their own language.

  Over the next two weeks, Nemo ate, and rested, and recovered, regaining strength to fight, if necessary. He tended the other prisoners as best he could, using first aid he’d learned from Florence Nightingale. Even under such good conditions, though, three of the injured conscripts died.

  Liedenbrock clung to the fence and raged at the guards. “Ach! You are inhumans. Why are you not taking these men to doctors?” But Nemo realized the wounded prisoners would have died in any case. In fact, he suspected the men had lived longer here than they might have in the overcrowded hospital.

  “No, no,” Conseil mumbled in misery. “None of us will leave this place alive.”

  Caliph Robur rode in, not deigning to get down from his horse. He stared them all to silence with his black eyes. “We will now begin a rigorous regimen of exercise. Your rations will be increased, and you will also be required to develop greater endurance.”

  “Why?” Nemo said, stepping forward. “Explain why we are here.”

  “Aye, we deserve some manner of explanation,” Cyrus Harding said, startling them with his words, which he usually kept to himself. The boatbuilder’s nostrils flared as he spoke.

  One of the guards snatched out a long whip, but Robur raised his hand to forestall any brutality. “These men are free to ask questions. We chose them because of their inquisitive minds.” He gazed down at Nemo and gave him a thin smile. “However, Engineer, I am not yet at liberty to provide answers.”

  “Ach! We would rather be back on the battlefield,” Liedenbrock snapped.

  “No, no,” Conseil said with a vigorous shake of his head. “No, we wouldn’t.”

  Raising his green-turbaned head high, Robur rode out of the fenced circle. After he departed, the guards forced the prisoners into a routine of calisthenics to tone up their muscles. Aching and sore, they repeated the activities the next day, and the next. Their increased rations barely compensated for the extra work. Even though Conseil seemed ready to drop from exhaustion, he somehow managed to keep up.

  Nemo helped the mousy man whenever possible. “We must bide our time, Conseil. Do this for you, not for him. We still don’t know what Robur wants.” He moved from prisoner to prisoner, passing the same angry message in an attempt to maintain morale.

  Over the course of a week, the exercises became more strenuous, and Nemo felt himself returning to full vigor. Given the monotony of prison camp life, he even began to look forward to the daily workout.

  When the weather grew colder with the onset of hard winter, the caliph ordered all prisoners to stand in ranks inside the encampment as he rode in to inspect them. The stallion tossed his head, but Robur clamped his legs and squeezed the mount into submission, guiding it past his carefully selected captives. He found nothing to disappoint him and returned to his starting point without saying a word.

  Then he spoke to the captain of his private guards in Turkish. By now, Nemo had picked up enough of the words to understand, though he did not let the enemy realize this. “They are ready. Tomorrow we leave.”

  The next morning the prisoners heard distant gunshots, bugles of command, and military charges. The standard Turkish troops had all left their camp and rushed off to the main battle, leaving Robur’s camp to themselves.

  “Ach! They are fighting another battle at Sevastopol,” Liedenbrock said, furrowing his broad brow. Nemo nodded. Stony-faced, Cyrus Harding just stared into the distance, imagining the unseen battlefield.

  With the major armies occupied with the fighting, Caliph Robur and his guards surrounded their prisoners. They marched the men past the colorful pavilions, beyond the now-empty camp of Turkish soldiers and smoldering cook fires. Next, the men began trudging across country toward the Crimean Mountains and the coast.

  Nemo’s feet grew sore, but he drove back any thought of complaint with a dour resistance. Encouraged by his comrades, Conseil staggered along, muttering unintelligible complaints. When the little man stumbled, Cyrus Harding draped the French meteorologist’s arm over his shoulders and helped him to keep going. . . .

  In two days the ragtag group reached the gravelly shoreline, where the Black Sea spread out in front of them, calm and dark. White clouds rode in the sky, distant storms that would pass far to the south.

  Far from the busy anchorage of Sevastopol—and prying eyes—a large and low-slung Turkish dhow had anchored off the rugged shore. There, no one but a few fishermen and farmers would see its triangular lateen sails or the armed men waiting on board like corsairs.

  At dusk, longboats came ashore and took the twenty-seven prisoners out to the dhow. The guards and sailors helped them aboard, seating the captives on benches
under flapping shades and striped awnings. Liedenbrock said in disgust. “Ach! We are being converted into miserable galley slaves. We will be forced to row across the sea.”

  “No, no, no,” Conseil said, his eyes round. “We can’t do that!”

  Nemo shook his head and spoke with harsh assurance. “Caliph Robur would not have spent so much effort on us if he meant to use us for such a menial job.” He drew his dark eyebrows together as stormy thoughts continued to kindle his temper. “He’s got something else in mind for us.”

  “Wish I knew what the crazy bloke wanted,” Harding said gruffly. He found a spot to sit, hunched down against the low-slung boat’s poop deck, and scowled in silence.

  Instead of being asked to row, they were all given water and extra rations after the long march. The dhow raised anchor and sailed into the night across the rippling Black Sea. . . .

  Next morning the triangle-sailed ship was far from land as it crossed the water. Nemo looked at the sun and tried to determine their course, drawing on the knowledge of maps in his mind. Conseil commented on the weather, relieved that the storms had passed far to the north of them; Cyrus Harding remarked on the construction of the dhow, rapping the deck boards with his knuckles and studying the way the prow of the Arabian boat cut the water. Within days they had crossed the Black Sea and reached the narrow Bosporus Straits. Without stopping, they glided past Constantinople, where huge mosques with gilded domes and pointed minarets towered over the waterway. The dhow crossed the shallow Sea of Marmara to the Dardanelles, where the Trojan War had been fought more than three thousand years earlier.