Testament

by David Gibbins

  Day by day the army behind them had progressed, inch by relentless inch, the ridges getting higher and the canyons deeper until finally, three hundred miles from the sea, they had reached the mountainous spur he was standing on now. He raised his telescope, training it on the entrance to the fortress. The crenellated mud–brick battlements seemed almost inconsequential set against the grandeur of the place, with sheer cliffs and vertiginous scree slopes dropping thousands of feet on all sides of the plateau except for the saddle in front of him. He had only ever seen anything like it at the ancient fortress of Masala in the Holy Land, another place where the besieging army of a mighty empire had forced an enemy into a desperate last stand, one from which escape was beyond all possibility.

  He looked down to where he could see the entrenched troops on the edge of the saddle, his engineer’s eye taking in all of the details. They were the vanguard of a force of nearly twelve thousand; among them were hundreds of mules from India and Egypt, dozens of camels from Arabia, still snorting and stamping from the noise of the battle, fifteen elephants, and the Armstrong guns that were shortly to be used to attempt a breach in the walls of the fortress. All of that had come grunting and bellowing and sweating from the sea, through sweltering days and freezing nights, through mountain passes that rose ever more precipitously until at the end there was only a narrow fissure above, barely wide enough to squeeze the elephants through. Even after they had reached the tablelands the rigors had not let up, as frequently they had been obliged to descend thousands of feet between the plateaus only to ascend again, pushing men and animals to the limits of physical endurance. And always there had been the nightmare of supply; they had found some grass and barley and meat and wood on the way, but not nearly sufficient, meaning that a continuous mule train of provisions was snaking behind them over the hundreds of arduous miles to and from the coast, making that same soul-destroying journey over and over again.

  The smell of the battlefield was beginning to permeate the air unpleasantly; the sulfurous reek of gunpowder had been replaced by a sickly-sweet odor that he knew would only grow stronger. It always astonished him how quickly bodies left on a battlefield began to decay. Already the vultures had begun to pick away at the corpses; another day in this heat and the stench would be intolerable. It had only been a few hours since General Napier’s disciplined infantry with their Snider–Enfields had lined up against the Abyssinians, pitting the latest breech-loading rifles capable of ten rounds per minute against shields and spears. It had all been over in a matter of minutes, leaving more than seven hundred of the enemy dead and many more wounded, the remainder having been driven back into the fortress at the point of the bayonet. With King Theodore’s force now so depleted, it had become feasible to think of an artillery barrage and a frontal assault using infantry, a tactic straight from medieval warfare that Wood had never imagined he would see being acted out for real in a place so far removed from civilization as this.

  The young sapper who had been struggling up the slope with the camera apparatus finally reached the ledge and dropped his burden, panting hard and sweating profusely. His skin was darkened by the sun and by the dust that seemed to penetrate every pore, finding its way into every conceivable part of the body, within and without. Wood offered him his water bottle, and the sapper took it gratefully, drinking deeply and then passing it back. “Excellent work, Jones,” Wood said. “Now let’s get the thing set up while the light’s still good.”

  “It’s too bloody hot, sir,” Jones said, sinking back against a rock. “And I can hardly breathe.”

  “It’s the altitude. We’re over ten thousand feet up. There’s about a quarter less oxygen in the air here than there is at sea level.”

  Jones gestured at the plateau ahead. “Down in the camp they say he’s got gold up there, tons of it—mad old King Theodore.”

  “We’re here to rescue missionaries, Jones, not to loot gold.”

  “Speak for yourself, sir, if you don’t mind me saying. I’m not leaving this godforsaken place without something for my troubles. Anyway, I didn’t join up to rescue missionaries, or anyone else.”

  “Why did you join up, Jones?”

  “Well, sir, I joined the sappers to learn stuff.” He gestured at the camera. “To learn photography, sir.”

  “Precisely. And now it’s time you put your learning to good use and set that thing up. I believe that in short order we’ll be called out for the final assault, and I want to get some pictures before that.”

  “Sir.” Jones struggled to his feet and began breaking down the crate with the camera and extending the tripod.

  Wood took up his telescope again, scrutinizing the plateau, and then lowered it and gazed at the battlefield. He thought about what Jones had said. They might just as well have been here to loot gold, given the absurdity of the real reason. The hostages had been taken by the Ethiopian king because his request to Queen Victoria for arms to defend his borders had gone unanswered: arms from the queen who had personally sent him a revolver as a present and had led him naïvely to believe that the weapons needed for his army would follow.

  There was no doubt that Theodore was a sadistic monster, given to acts of bestial cruelty. A week before, Wood and his sappers had come across several of the king’s native hostages, including the son and daughter of a local chieftain who had wavered in their loyalty and had their hands and feet chopped off and hung around their necks. They had been a pitiful sight, dumped provocatively in front of the British column, and Wood had shot them both out of mercy. Yet part of him felt slightly sorry for Theodore, perched up there in his eyrie with no chance of escape, with no hope of an honorable exit now, and with the scribbling newspaper journalists ensuring that his ignominy would soon be the talk of the world. They were here to save missionaries, unquestionably a humanitarian cause, even a noble one, yet they were really here to slap an ally on the wrist for flying too close to the sun, for being too cocky and for expecting Her Britannic Majesty to answer his call. Wood peered at the battlefield, seeing the dark haze that he knew was millions of flies beginning to swarm over the corpses. It was a slap on the wrist that had already cost over a thousand Abyssinian lives all told, with many more doubtless to join them rotting in the sun before this affair was over.

  A small, dapper figure, not in uniform but wearing a pith helmet and a Colt revolver on his belt, came and stood beside Wood, notebook in hand, surveying the battlefield. “That’s quite a sight,” he said, his accent a curious mixture of Welsh and American. “I haven’t seen anything like that since the Battle of Shiloh in ’62, during the Civil War.”

  “Well, Mr. Stanley, you should be able to add your own memories of the sensations of war to your description, and make a fine account for the newspapers.”

  Wood remembered other battles he himself had seen, ten years ago in India during the Mutiny. The sickly-sweet smell had brought back images of horror, of women and children butchered, of fighting without mercy, of mutineers hanged and blown from the guns. He remembered not just the carnage of war but how shockingly quickly the veneer of civilization had fallen away: how the women who had come out from England, the memsahibs, those who had tried to create a fantasy of Wimbledon or Kew in the sweltering cantonments, had become hardly recognizable as human beings, tattered, begrimed, emaciated, their countenances lost in the settled vacancy of insanity. He remembered how the stench of the unwashed mingled with that of the corpses, the flies swarming around the living and the dead alike, a pestilence from Beelzebub himself.

  No matter what the cause, no matter what the trigger that drove men to war, the outcome was always the same. Ten years ago, it had been a terrifying breakdown in order that had swept across a continent, seemingly unassailable, merciless; here it was the ludicrous business of a few missionaries taken hostage, and the delusions of a pitiful king. But looking at the battlefield now, Wood saw little that was different from the scenes of ten years ago: the same hideous wounds, the same rage and anguish, the sa
me smell of fear and adrenalin, the same baying for blood long after the reason for war had been forgotten in the exhaustion and the scrabble for survival.

  Another man joined them from the slope, an officer Wood recognized from General Napier’s staff but did not know personally; a soldier labored up behind him carrying a large sketchpad, a folding chair and a satchel. “Baigrie, Bombay Staff Corps,” the officer said, proffering his hand. “I’ve seen you and your men often enough ahead of us, but I don’t think we’ve met. Wood, isn’t it?”

  They shook hands, and Wood gestured at the soldier’s load. “I’ve seen you at your watercolors before. I understand that the Illustrated London News has taken them, and I offer my congratulations. It seems that you and I and Mr. Stanley are all of a mind being on this ledge and recording our impressions of this place, though my photographs are of a more prosaic nature, I fear, as part of an archive for the School of Military Engineering.”

  “Have you tried developing pictures out here?”

  “Tried, but failed. A damned nuisance really. One of them was a picture I took two months ago at Annesley Bay before the main force had disembarked, while my company was employed building landing stages across those infernal salt flats. Right out at the edge while sinking a beam we discovered the frame and planks of a wreck, a very old one I believe, with a painted eye on the bow and alphabetic symbols incised into the timbers that I think were Phoenician. Some of the timbers had already been pulled up and reused by my sappers in the revetments, and what was left will, I fear, by now also have been destroyed, for the same purpose.”

  “You have an interest in antiquities?”

  “I traveled on leave to Jerusalem and widely in Palestine last year.”

  “Then you’ll know what they’re saying about this place.” Baigrie nodded his head toward the fortress. “About the treasury of King Theodore.”

  Jones had been listening intently. “Here you go, sir. I told you. Gold.”

  “Sapper Jones here has a particular interest in filling his pockets with loot,” Wood said.

  “As do two thousand other British and Indian troops encamped below. After what they’ve been through, they feel they deserve a bonus.”

  “Too right, sir,” Jones said. “A bonus. For all my efforts.”

  “You’ll get nothing if you don’t set that camera up before sundown.”

  “Sir.”

  Baigrie watched as his batman opened out the tripod canvas chair and the satchel, laying out his brushes and paints. “What they’re saying,” he continued, “is that his treasures include ancient antiquities of the Israelites, brought here by the lost tribes of the Exodus as they fled the Babylonians after the sack of Jerusalem.”

  “Soldiers’ rumors, no doubt,” Wood said.

  “Napier had a local chieftain in his camp last night, one of those who have been helpful to us. He had a priest with him who said there’s a tapestry in the church at Magdala depicting a procession coming ashore carrying the Ark of the Covenant. He claims that the tapestry is exceedingly old, older even than the ancient Christian kingdom of Axum.”

  “We don’t want some old bit of cloth,” Jones grumbled. “We want gold.”

  “I think we’ll all get our share,” Baigrie said. “Napier has told everyone to pool what they find, and then he’s going to hold a drumhead auction. The proceeds will be spread about the entire expedition according to rank.”

  “There are said to be ancient manuscripts in the church too,” Wood said. “I just hope someone sensible gets in there first and keeps them from being destroyed.”

  “Not that I’ll see any of it,” Jones said ruefully. “Not much call for a photographer in the first wave of the attack. Those are the lucky ones who’ll get their hands on the best of it. And I can tell you, not all of what they find is going to some drumhead auction, orders or no orders.”

  Baigrie took out a pipe and tobacco; he packed it and lit it while contemplating the grim scene below. “You know, after the Mutiny, I thought I’d never see anything like this again. Indeed, I rather hoped I would not.”

  “Where were you?” Wood asked.

  “Central India Field Force, under Sir Hugh Rose.”

  “Sagar Field Division, under Whitlock. I know what you mean.”

  “I had a close friend in the Light Dragoons. We shared a tent on campaign. I was going to resign with him after the war and join him on his father’s sheep station in New Zealand to start a new life. In the event I never did; I stayed on in the Staff Corps. But I’d had enough of war.”

  Stanley looked up from his notes. “Truth be told,” he said, “I never was much one for war either. I left Wales to find a new life in America, but by unfortunate timing I became settled in New Orleans just in time for our great national conflagration. I believe I have the unique distinction of having served in the Confederate Army, where I had my baptism of fire at Shiloh; in the Union Army, after being having been captured and turned; and then in the Union Navy, from which I am sorry to say I jumped ship. Indeed, I garnered no military glory whatsoever from any of those unhappy adventures. It was journalism that saved me, and then I found I had a taste for exploration.”

  “I rather wanted to be an explorer too, and one thing this expedition has done is to give me a renewed taste for it,” Wood said. “During my next furlough I’m determined to go north into Afghanistan to follow the River Oxus to Lake Aral. I want to see if there are any traces left of Alexander the Great’s expedition.”

  Baigrie pointed the stem of his pipe at Jones. “And what about you?”

  “Me, sir? Sapper Jones might become Corporal Jones, and Corporal Jones might become Sergeant Jones. That is, if the loot in that fortress doesn’t make me King Jones.”

  They all smiled, and Wood glanced up at the sky. “Look, the sun has that brown halo around it again, the corona.”

  “Down in camp, they say it’s an omen of blood,” Jones said. “They say that King Theodore sees it too, and knows it signals his end.”

  “It’s an atmospheric phenomenon, a result of the rising dust. The next time we have one of those terrific thunderstorms, it will go.”

  “Or the next time we create a thunderstorm, you mean, tomorrow when we take that place.”

  One of the local girls they used as messengers came running up the slope from the headquarters encampment and handed Wood a slip of paper. He read it, looked up and paused for a moment, then scribbled his name in acknowledgment and gave it back to her. He watched her run off, mesmerized as always by the long, effortless stride and the ability of the girls to run fast even at these altitudes without losing breath.

  “Anything interesting?” Stanley asked.

  “That was from Napier,” Wood replied. “Apparently there are no other engineer officers available to effect the breach. They don’t expect the Armstrong guns to punch their way through, and want a charge to be taken up. It looks like my lucky day. One photograph, and then I should report to headquarters.”

  “Good luck to you,” Baigrie said. “Not worth coming all the way up here just to get killed.”

  “Hear, hear,” Stanley said. “And bring me back a good story.”

  Wood put his head under the black cloth that Jones had set up, adjusted the camera, and composed the scene. Shorn of sky and people the image looked bleak, elemental, with hardly any vegetation or other evidence of life. On the sides of the ravines rose high sandstone cliffs, scarped and water-worn, so different from the mountains on the frontier of India that he was used to; here, the weathering gave a certain sinuous beauty to the landscape, almost a voluptuousness, but it was fragile and ephemeral, the slopes and pathways liable to be swept away at any time by the torrential rains that beset this place. This was what he had wanted to photograph, not Magdala itself. He slotted in the holder containing the plate, removed the lens cover for three seconds, then replaced it and got out from under the hood, nodding at Jones to begin breaking the camera down.

  He stared out at the encamp
ment and the battlefield again, thinking of what lay ahead. From the outset this had been an engineers’ war, a war of logistics and transport, of construction and mapping and reconnaissance, as arduous as any they had ever experienced. They had built piers, roads and railways, and condensers by the sea for fresh water; they had triangulated, measured and photographed, had blown rock and spanned rivers and ravines. For the first time he had felt as if he had used everything he had been taught as a young officer, almost as if this campaign had been designed to parade the engineer’s skills. But what he had been asked to do now would be different, something that no amount of training could prepare him for. It was about inching forward, about finding his way up a redoubt under fire, about setting and blowing charges, with the bayonet and the revolver taking the place of the pick and the shovel.

  He pulled out his own revolver from its holster, checking the cylinder, pleased that he had replaced the old cap-and-ball Adams that had served him through the Mutiny with a new cartridge version, harder-hitting and far faster to reload. One thing they had learned from the Mutiny was that men crazed by fanaticism were very hard to put down, would pick themselves up and keep coming. And the Abyssinians had more to them than that, an obstinate, suicidal courage that they had shown in the battle that morning, a courage that had kept them charging again and again against a murderous fire until hardly any were left standing.