Cry Wolf

by Wilbur Smith

  weariness of the spirit.

  "One thing I must mention to you, gentlemen. My father is a warrior in

  the old style. He does not know the meaning of fear, and he cannot

  imagine the effect of modern weapons especially the machine gun on

  massed foot soldiers. I trust you to restrain his exuberance." Jake

  remembered the bodies hanging like dirty laundry on the barbed wire of

  France, and felt the cold tickle run up his spine. Nobody spoke again

  until the car, still blazoned with its crimson crosses, drew up level

  with where they stood and they scrambled down the bank to meet it.

  Vicky's head appeared in the hatch. She must have found an opportunity

  to bathe, for her hair was newly washed and shiny and caught behind her

  head in a silk ribbon. The sun had bleached her hair to a whiter gold,

  but the peachy velvet of her complexion had been gilded by that same

  sun to a darker honey colour. Immediately Jake and Gareth moved

  forward, neither trusting the other to be alone with her for an

  instant.

  But she was brusque, and concerned only with the injured girl who was

  laid out on the floor of the cab on a hastily improvised bed of

  blankets and skins. Her leave-taking was off-hand and distracted while

  the Lij climbed in through the rear doors, and she pulled away again up

  the steep track followed by a squadron of the Prince's bodyguard

  looking like a gang of cut-throats on their shaggy mountain ponies,

  festooned with bandoliers of ammunition and hung with rifles and

  swords. They clattered away after the car, and Jake watched them out

  of sight. He felt a sense of deep unease that the girl should be up

  there in the mountains beyond any help that he could give her. He was

  staring after the car.

  "Put your mind back in your pants," Gareth advised him cynically.

  "You're gain" to need it for the Eyeties, now." from the foot of the

  gorge to the lip of the bowl of land in which stood the town of Sardi

  was a few dozen miles across the ground, but the track climbed five

  thousand feet and it took six hours of hard driving for Vicky to reach

  it.

  The Prince's labour gangs were working upon the track still, groups of

  dark men in mud-stained shairmias, hacking away at the steep banks and

  piles of boulders that blocked the narrow places. Twice these men had

  to rope up the car to drag and shove it over a particularly treacherous

  stretch with the torrent roaring in its bed a hundred feet below and

  the wheels of the car inches from the crumbling edge of the

  precipice.

  In the middle of the afternoon the sun passed behind the towering

  ramparts of stone leaving the gut of the gorge in deep shadow, and a

  clammy chill made Vicky shiver even as she wrestled with the controls

  of the heavy vehicle. The engine was running very unevenly, and

  back-firing explosively at the change of atmospheric pressure as they

  toiled upwards. Also Sara's condition seemed to be worsening rapidly.

  When Vicky stopped briefly to rest her aching arms and back muscles she

  found that Sara was running a raging fever, her skin was dry and baking

  hot and her dark eyes were glittering strangely. She cut short her

  rest and took the wheel again.

  The gorge narrowed dramatically, so the sky was a narrow ribbon of blue

  high above and the cliffs seemed almost to close jaws of granite upon

  the labouring car. Although it seemed impossible, the track turned

  even more steeply upwards so that the big back wheels spun and skidded,

  throwing out fist-sized stones like cannon balls and scattering the

  escort who followed closely.

  Then abruptly Vicky drove the car over the crest and came out through

  rocky portals into a wide, gently inclined bowl of open ground hemmed

  in completely by the mountain walls. Perhaps twenty miles across, the

  bowl was cultivated in patches, and scattered with groups of the round

  tukuL-, the thatch and daub huts of the peasant farmers.

  Domestic animals, goats and a few milk cows grazed along the course of

  the Sardi River where the grass was green and lush and thick forests of

  cedar trees found a precarious purchase along the rocky banks.

  The town itself was a gathering of brick-built and white, plastered

  buildings, whose roofs of galvanized corrugated iron caught the last

  probing rays of the sun as it came through the western pass.

  Here in the west, the mountains fell back, allowing a broad gentle

  incline to rise the last two thousand feet to the level of the plateau

  of the highlands. Down this slope, the narrow-gauge railway looped in

  a tight series of hairpins until it entered the town and ended in a

  huddle of sheds and stock pens.

  The Catholic mission station was situated beyond the town on the slopes

  of the western rise. It was a sadly dilapidated cluster of tin-roofed

  daub buildings, grouped around a church built of the same materials.

  The church was the only building that was freshly whitewashed. As they

  drove past the open doors, Vicky saw that the rows of rickety pews were

  empty, but that lighted candles burned upon the altar and there were

  fresh flowers in the vases.

  The church's emptiness and the sorry state of the buildings were a

  reflection of the massive power of the Coptic Church over this land and

  its people. There was very little encouragement given to the

  missionaries of any other faith, but this did not prevent the local

  inhabitants from taking advantage of the medical facilities offered by

  the mission.

  Almost fifty patients squatted along the length of the veranda that ran

  the full length of the clinic, and they looked up with minimal interest

  as Vicky parked the armoured car below them.

  The doctor was a heavily built man, with short bowed legs and a thick

  neck. His hair was cropped close to the round skull and was silvery

  white, and his eyes were a pale blue. He spoke no English, and he

  acknowledged Vicky with a glance and a grunt, transferring all his

  attention to Sara. When two of his assistants rolled her carefully on

  to a stretcher and carried her up on to the veranda, Vicky would have

  followed but the Lij restrained her.

  "She is in the best hands and we have work to do." The telegraph

  office at the railway station was closed and locked, but in answer to

  the Prince's shouts the station master came hurrying anxiously down the

  track. He recognized Mikhael immediately.

  The process of tapping out Vicky's despatch on the telegraph was a

  long, laborious business, almost beyond the ability of the station

  master whose previous transmissions had seldom exceeded a dozen words

  at a time. He frowned and muttered to himself as he worked, and Vicky

  wondered in what mangled state her masterpiece of the journalistic art

  would reach her editor's desk in New York. The Prince had left her and

  gone off with his escort to the official government residence on the

  outskirts of the village, and it was after nine o'clock before the

  station master had sent the last of Vicky's despatch a total of almost

  five thousand words and Vicky found that her legs were unsteady
and her

  brain woolly with fatigue when she went out into the utter darkness of

  the mountain night. There were no stars, for the night mists had

  filled the basin and swirled in the headlights as Vicky groped her way

  through the village and at last found the government residence.

  It was a large sprawling complex of buildings with wide verandas,

  whitewashed and iron-roofed, standing in a grove of dark-foliaged cosa

  flora trees from which the bats screeched and fluttered to dive upon

  the insects that swarmed in the light from the windows of the main

  building.

  Vicky halted the car in front of the largest building and found herself

  surrounded by silent but watchful throngs of dark men, all of them

  heavily armed like the Harari she knew, but these were a different

  people. She did not know why, but she was sure of it.

  There were many others camped in the grove. She could see their fires

  and hear the stamp and snort of their tethered horses, the voices of

  the women and the laughter of the men.

  The throng opened for her and she crossed the veranda and entered the

  large room which was crowded with many men, and lit by the smoky

  paraffin lamps that hung from the ceiling. The room stank of male

  sweat, tobacco and the hot spicy aroma of food and tej.

  A hostile silence fell as she entered, and Vicky stood uncertainly on

  the threshold, scrutinized by a hundred dark suspicious eyes, until Lij

  Mikhael rose from where he sat at the far end of the room.

  "Miss Camberwell." He took her hand. "I was beginning to worry about

  you. Did you send your despatch?" He led her across the room and

  seated her beside him, before he indicated the man who sat opposite

  him.

  "This is Ras Kullah of the Gallas," he said, and despite her weariness,

  Vicky studied him with interest.

  Her first impression was identical to that she had received from the

  men amongst the cosa flora trees outside in the darkness. There was a

  veiled hostility, a coldness of the spirit about the man, almost

  reptilian aura about the dark unblinking eyes.

  He was a young man, still in his twenties, but his face and body were

  bloated by disease or debauchery so that there was a soft jelly-like

  look to his flesh. The skin was a pale creamy colour, unhealthy and

  clammy, as though it had never been exposed to sunlight. His lips were

  full and petulant, a startling cherry red in colour that ill suited the

  pale tones of his skin.

  He watched Vicky, when the Prince introduced her, with the same dead

  expression in his eyes, but gave no acknowledgement though the flat

  snakelike eyes moved slowly over her body, like loathsome hands,

  dwelling and lingering on her breasts and her legs, before moving back

  to Lij Mikhael's face.

  The pudgy, swollen hands lifted a buck-horn pipe to the dark cherry

  lips and Ras Kullah drew deeply upon it holding the smoke in his lungs

  before exhaling slowly.

  When Vicky smelled the smoke, she knew the reason for the dead eyes in

  the Ras's puffy face.

  "You have not eaten all day," said Lij Mikhael, and gave instructions

  for food to be brought to Vicky. "You will excuse me now, Miss

  Camberwell, the Ras speaks no English and our negotiations are still at

  an early stage. I have ordered a room made ready where you may rest as

  soon as you have eaten. We shall be talking all the night," the Lij

  smiled briefly, "and saying very little, for a blood feud of a hundred

  years is what we are talking around." He turned back to the Ras.

  The hot, spicy food warmed and filled the cold hollow place in the pit

  of Vicky's stomach, and a mug of fiery tej made her choke and gasp, but

  then lifted her spirits and revived her journalist's curiosity so that

  she could look again with interest at what was happening around her.

  The interminable discussion went on between the two men, cautious

  plodding negotiations between implacable luctantly drawn together by a

  greater danger and enemies, a more powerful adversary.

  On either side Ras sat two young women, pale sloe-eyed creatures, with

  noble regular features and thick dark hair frizzled out into a stiff

  round bush that caught the light of the lanterns and glowed along the

  periphery like a luminous halo. They sat impassively showing no

  emotion, even when the Ras fondled one or the other of them with the

  absent-minded caress that he might have bestowed on a lap dog.

  Only once, as he took a fat round breast in one plump soft paw and

  squeezed it, the girl winced slightly and Vicky seeing the crimson

  linen of her blouse dampened in a wet dark patch at the nipple realized

  that the girl's breast was heavy with milk.

  Vicky's artificial sense of well-being was fast fading now, sinking

  once again under the weight of her weariness, and lulled by the food in

  her belly, the thick smoky atmosphere and the hypnotic cadence of the

  Amharic language. She was on the point of excusing herself from the

  Lij and leaving when there was a disturbance outside the room, and the

  shrill angry cries of a voice creaking with age and indi nation The

  room was immediately electric with a charged feeling of expectation,

  and Ras Kullah looked up and called out querulously.

  A youth of perhaps nineteen years of age was dragged into the room and

  held by two armed guards in the centre of the hastily cleared space

  before Ras Kullah. His arms were bound with rawhide that cut deeply

  into the flesh of his wrists, and his face was wet and shiny with the

  sweat of fear, while his eyes rolled wildly in their sockets.

  He was followed by a shrieking crone, a wizened baboon like figure,

  swathed in a voluminous black sham mastiff with filth and greenish with

  age. Repeatedly she attempted to attack the captive youth, clawing at

  his face with bony hooked fingers, her toothless old mouth opened in a

  dark pink-lined pit as she leaped and cavorted before the terrified

  youth, trying again and again to reach him, while the two guys pushed

  her away with c ee gu aw and playful blows, never relinquishing their

  grip on their prisoner.

  The Ras leaned forward to watch this play with awakening interest, his

  dark dull eyes taking on a sparkle of anticipation as he asked a

  question, and the crone flew to him and flung herself full-length

  before him.

  She began to bleat out a long high-pitched plea, attempting at the same

  time to grasp and kiss the Ras's feet. The Ras giggled with

  anticipation, kicking away the old woman's hands and occasionally

  asking a question that was answered either by the guards or the

  grovelling crone.

  "Miss Camberwell whispered the Prince. "I suggest that you leave now.

  This will not be pleasant to watch."

  "What is it?" Vicky demanded, her professional instincts roused. "What

  are they doing?" "The woman accuses the youth of murdering her son.

  The guards are her witnesses and the Ras is trying the case.

  He will give judgement in a moment, and the sentence will be carried

  out immediately."

  Here? "Vicky looked startled.

  "Yes,
Miss Camberwell. I urge you to leave. The punishment will be

  biblical, from the Old Testament which is the centre of the Coptic

  faith. It will be a tooth for a tooth." Vicky hesitated to take the

  Prince's advice, all human experience was her field no matter how

  bizarre, and suddenly it was too late.

  Laughingly, the Ras thrust the old woman away again with a kick to the

  chest that sent her sprawling across the beaten earth floor and he

  called a peremptory command to the guards who held the accused youth.

  Flapping like a maimed black crow upon the floor, the crone set up a

  wailing shriek of triumph as she heard the verdict, and she tried to

  regain her feet. The guards guffawed again and began to strip away the

  condemned man's clothing, tearing it from his body until he stood

  completely naked except for his bonds.

  The crowded room now buzzed with excitement at the coming

  entertainment, and the doorway and windows were packed with those who

  had come in from the encampment amongst the cosa flora trees. Even the

  two impassive madonnas who flanked the Ras had become animated, leaning

  forward to chatter softly to each other, smiling secretly as their

  dark-moon eyes shone and the full swollen breasts swung heavily under

  the thin material of their blouses.

  The doomed youth was whimpering softly, his head turning back and

  forth, as though seeking escape, his naked body slim and finely muscled

  with dark amber skin that, glowed in the lamplight, and his arms bound

  tightly behind his back. His legs were long and the muscles looked

  hard and beautifully sculptured, and the dark bush of curls in his

  groin was dense and crisp-looking. His thick circumcised penis hung

  limply, seeming to epitomize the man's despair.

  Vicky tried to tear her eyes away, ashamed to look upon a human being

  stripped thus of all dignity, but the spectacle was mesmeric.

  The old woman hopped and flapped in front of the captive, her wrinkled

  brown features contorted in an expression of utter malice and she

  opened her toothless mouth and spat into his face. The spittle ran

  down his cheek and dripped on to his chest.

  "Please leave now," Lij Mikhael urged Vicky, and she tried to rise, but

  it seemed that her legs would not respond.

  One of the Galla warriors sitting opposite Vicky drew the narrow-bladed

  dagger from the tooled leather sheath on his hip. The handle was