by Wilbur Smith
“A gift from me. Have you read the works of Rumi?”
“I have not.”
“Ah, well, it is very beautiful. Better in Persian, of course, but the Arabic translation I have left you is a fair attempt. I think you have achieved great things, Penrod, but your anger has almost killed you. This is a book about compassion.”
This was the furthest Penrod had walked since he had broken into the Duke of Kendal’s house. He felt weak and was shivering, but he removed his arm from Farouk’s and did not reply. Farouk waited for a moment, then left without further comment. As soon as the door closed, Penrod sat down heavily on the bed.
Very well. He would serve until he was strong enough to walk back to Cairo. The lepers seemed well fed, and with proper food and exercise he should be healthy enough to leave in a week or so. His soul might be tattered and dark, but it was his own, and he did not want any man meddling with it.
•••
One of the young men who had tended Penrod during his illness came to fetch him at first light the next day. He was a bizarre-looking creature, the disease having taken his nose and three of the fingers from his right hand, but he made no attempt to hide his deformities. He chattered away in the Arabic of a street urchin, cheerfully describing his duties and the personalities of the other workers in the infirmary. Penrod learned a woman called Cleopatra ruled it, with a rod of iron, it seemed. This young man, Hamon, and two others worked under her, taking care of the regular rebandaging and cleaning of the sores and infected injuries of their fellow inmates. Penrod ignored most of what he heard, but after washing in the warm water Hamon brought, he shuffled over to the infirmary behind him. A neat queue of the sick and maimed was already waiting outside the doors.
They went inside. The infirmary itself consisted of two rooms: one where women were treated and the other for the men. Cleopatra was a sour, fleshy woman with heavy features, small eyes, a false foot of wood and leather, and no small talk. She sat in a large wicker armchair, which gave her a view into both rooms and the waiting area. From this position she sent the patients to one nursing station or another. Hamon showed Penrod his place, which consisted of a pair of stools and a cabinet containing a dozen pots of an astringent-smelling ointment. A bucket and bowl stood by for the washing of wounds, and a pile of bandages sat on top of the cabinet. The bandages were obviously used, but they had been boiled and pressed. Hamon explained that he was to sit with Penrod today and supervise his work. From tomorrow he would be on his own.
The doors were opened and Cleopatra greeted each arrival by name, asked about their health and then named the person who would dress their wounds. The first man who was sent to Penrod looked shocked when he saw a European waiting to tend to him and had a fierce whispered exchange with Cleopatra. The outcome was hardly in doubt. The man approached Penrod nervously and took a seat. Hamon managed to keep up a stream of conversation with the patient, while also instructing Penrod how to unwrap the ulceration on his shin and wash the flesh. The smell was not as bad as Penrod had anticipated, but it still turned his stomach. He washed, anointed and rebandaged his patient, and as soon as he had shuffled to the stone sink in the back of the room to empty his basin, another patient was sent to him. Hamon proved to be an able instructor and the morning passed quickly enough. In the afternoon, something one of the patients said reminded Penrod of a story he had heard on the back streets of Cairo and he shared it. The patient, an elderly man who had been a silk merchant before he began to show signs of the disease, was at first shocked into silence at hearing the foreigner speak Arabic with such easy fluency, but eventually he dared to ask Penrod some questions about where he had been in Egypt. Penrod told him a few of the places and this led to a fierce discussion about which were the best coffee shops in Alexandria, and where a traveler might expect to find a decent chess player. The discussion lasted longer than the bandaging. The merchant was driven off by Cleopatra when she noticed, and another patient was soon occupying the stool.
That evening Penrod ate in the dining hall. Hamon showed him where to fetch his food and where he might sit, then, thinking his duty done, Hamon went to sit with some other men of his own age. Penrod did not mind; he had no wish for company. Just as he finished his meal, however, the silk merchant appeared at his side, a board under his arm and a box of chess pieces in his healthy hand.
“Let us play,” he said simply, and set up the game. They were evenly matched, but Penrod was exhausted, and at the fatal moment he missed the silk merchant’s trap and it was sprung.
“You must sleep, John,” the merchant said in Arabic. “But I am glad to find such an opponent here. I play with Teacher Farouk, but he is often engaged.”
Penrod helped put the pieces back into their case. They were beautifully carved, the castles covered in vines, the queen represented by a rose in full bloom. “Teacher Farouk? Yes, I was told he is a Sufi master.”
The silk merchant sighed. “A man of many talents. I would give what this disease took from me again to only possess half of them. But I thank Allah for his many blessings. I was angry when I discovered my illness. It cost me my business, my family. But now I thank Allah for guiding me, in his mercy, to Farouk. I am a better man, better able to love the world now, even though it rejects me. I learned I must give up everything I had, willingly, to allow true grace to enter me. Now I am far richer than ever I was.”
Penrod laughed. “Well, I have nothing. Does that make me blessed?”
“You are proud, John. Suppose you were told that Farouk suggested I play with you. That I try and offer you a little healing. Does your pride hiss like a cat? I think it does. I think you expected Farouk himself to try and help you. You meant to reject that help, of course, but you expected it to be offered by Farouk. You are an important Englishman, after all.”
Penrod realized the silk merchant was right. Even sick and destitute as he was, he had expected to be treated with certain deference. The knowledge surprised and puzzled him. He was not a man used to introspection, but he knew he had always accepted the best of everything as nothing less than his due. He felt an uncomfortable itch in his heart, asking himself why he had regarded Amber as his right. He had never asked himself if he deserved her. When she had leveled that gun at him and told him he did not, he had been angry. That anger had sent him to Agatha, then it had turned into bitterness and guilt and opium. It had made him ruin himself, gladly ruin himself, to destroy the Duke of Kendal.
He cleared his throat. “So Farouk wishes to break my pride, does he?”
“Oh, my friend, you are not a horse! No, John. We wish to give you a great gift to temper your pride: compassion.” Penrod snorted and the merchant smiled. “It will make you stronger, not weaker, and you will learn how to control your pride and your anger in the future. These are the tools we shall put into your hands. How you use them will be your choice.”
As he spoke, it seemed he had torn a small hole in the dark veil that covered Penrod’s soul. He did not see the blinding light of holy revelation behind it, however, only confusion, and somewhere in that confusion the faintest breath of hope.
Penrod stood up from the table and looked around him at the men and women of the colony.
“Shall we play again tomorrow?”
The silk merchant lifted his hand. “Inshallah.”
The rains in the highlands of Ethiopia had been mercurial and ill-tempered that year. Sudden raging downpours that threatened to overwhelm Courtney Camp and Mine were followed by days of suffocating heat, so that when it rained again, the soil was washed away rather than refreshed. Amber spent her time repairing the dams around her gardens—urgent, back-breaking work that left her half crazed with exhaustion. She had chosen the wife of one of Patch’s best foundry men to help her, but even with Belito at her side it was a desperate struggle. Seedlings were washed away and replanted as lightning crackled over the sky. The river was sluggish one moment and a torrent the next. Very few travelers passed through the valley and their suppli
es of pepper and salt dwindled alarmingly.
Twice the mine was flooded, the second time filling so quickly one man was drowned before he could reach the surface. It was a painful loss. Ryder learned quickly, reading and rereading the pages Amber had prepared for him, but the process of salting the ore was delicate. Sometimes the reactions on the patio went too fast and hot, at others the pulp was so diluted with rain they stopped entirely. In late September they lost half of their remaining quicksilver when the torrents of water coming off the mountainside washed away the foundations of the store.
Then the rains stopped and the earth began to bloom. Patch went to Massowah again and, on Saffron’s instructions, bought more quicksilver with the last funds from her London bank. He asked Amber if she wanted to come with him again, but she refused. Her work in the garden had tied her to the soil and those few minutes sitting on the Cairo steamer seemed like a dream now. She needed to see the fruits of her labor before she left Tigray.
Patch returned more quickly than they expected. An uneasy truce was holding between the Ethiopian Emperor John and the Italians on the coast, which made acquiring the mercury simpler, and now Patch knew his way around the city and its people too.
At the feast of St. John the rains stopped, and by Christmas the camp’s storage bins were filling slowly with grains, nuts and peas. The children enjoyed first precious fruits from Amber’s trees.
Amber worked in the gardens or the kitchen huts with the other women and became involved in their lives and hopes. Patch had long been eyeing the eldest daughter of one of his senior foremen with shy admiration. The girl, Marta, knew it and was flattered. She liked Patch. She was afraid, however, of throwing herself away on a man with a ruined face and no cattle. Amber became confidante to them both. She taught Marta English as they worked together grinding grain, and Patch made an effort to learn more Amharic than the words of command and praise he found necessary at the mine. Then Amber found him teaching Marta and her brother to play poker before the evening meal one night, and realized that she had nothing more to do in that matter.
•••
They were making slow progress with the recovery of the silver from the ore, and then, just after the New Year, they had their first success.
The day the first ingot of silver was cast, the whole camp went to see it emerge from the furnace and be poured. Tesfaye and Alem struck it out of the mold and it hit the red dust of the ground outside the furnace house with a hard thump. The crowd sighed. It looked dirty and black, a lump of charcoal. But Ryder picked it up the moment it was cool enough to handle and, in spite of Saffron’s little mew of distress, started to polish it with one corner of his last good shirt. The crowd watched, then laughed when he held it up. Below the covering of ash the glint of pure silver was clear to all.
The bar was passed through the crowd, each man and woman rubbing it a little, some because they wanted to see more of that rich luster, others because they thought it lucky. By the time it had gone through the hands of every man, woman and child in the camp, it glowed. Amber was one of the last to hold it. Its weight astonished her. She rubbed it with the corner of her skirt, then handed it back to her brother-in-law.
“Congratulations, Ryder,” she said.
He managed to nod at her.
She wondered if he had heard the same rumors she had, of a white man turned monk living in one of the high monasteries. She hoped the rumors were true, that it was Dan, and that he remembered them in his prayers.
•••
The short rains came and went. One ingot became two, and then five. Ryder calculated what each one had cost him and shuddered. They must find a way to improve the yield without using so much quicksilver.
Patch married Marta and the celebrations were lavish, though Saffron worried her husband’s cheer was forced. The children put on a performance of The Betrothed, and this time the hero wore an eyepatch.
A week after the wedding, Amber was working at her sister’s side, helping to make injera, closely supervised by the elder women of the camp, Selma and Tena. As they spread the batter over the skillet and watched it bubble, Saffron suddenly hissed with a sharp discomfort and stood up. Amber flicked and folded the bread into the basket waiting for it, then got up too. Selma sniffed at Amber’s work and took her place by the fire.
“Saffy? What is it, darling?” Amber looked hard into her twin’s face. The curls of her hair seemed different, and something about the curve of her cheek had changed. “You’re pregnant.”
Saffron wrinkled her nose. “Yes, I rather think I am.”
Amber laughed with pleasure, and Selma and Tena turned to see what was happening.
“Mr. Ryder has mined for treasures and brought riches among us,” Amber said in Amharic, with a sly glance at Saffron’s belly.
The women caught both meanings at once and showered congratulations on them: for Saffron’s child and for Amber’s quick and clever tongue.
•••
Amber’s verse traveled around the camp with the news that Ryder was going to be a father again. Within a quarter of an hour Ryder came charging into the camp and swept his wife off her feet, spinning her around to the applause of the women. When he set her down, he beckoned Amber toward him and grinned.
“Mined for treasures, is it, Amber? You have become a witty witch since I first met you.”
She made an elaborate curtsy to him and, as she stood again, he grabbed her around the wrist, pulled her toward him, then kissed the top of her head.
“I suppose I’ll have to stop being angry with you now, al-Zahra.”
She looked up and felt a burst of affection for him, a sudden blossoming after long-awaited rain. Then she saw something over his shoulder and frowned. Ryder caught the change in her expression and followed her gaze. High on the plateau above them they could see the silhouette of a man. He held the long spear of a warrior upright in his right hand, and the outline of the traditional round shield on his left arm was clear. Then, as they watched, the man crumpled to the ground.
“Ryder?” Saffron said.
“Tadesse, come with me. Saffy, get Geriel and Maki. Tell them to prepare a stretcher and follow.”
Before he had even finished giving his orders, Ryder was racing up the track that led upward to the place where the warrior had fallen.
Ryder recognized the young man when they were within five yards. Tadesse, scrabbling up the path like a goat behind him, recognized him too.
“It is Iyasu! Son of Asfaw.”
Ryder did not speak but kneeled on the dry ground and supported the fallen warrior’s head, then tried to give him water from the leather bottle he always carried at his waist. The man’s eyes fluttered open for a moment, then closed again. It was a miracle he had been able to stand at all. His robes were ragged and hard with blood; a great slash across his muscled chest looked to Ryder like the wound of a dervish blade. Someone had bandaged it roughly, but the binding had come loose. Another deep wound was visible on the outside of Iyasu’s thigh. Ryder moved the man’s leather shield aside and hissed. Iyasu’s left hand had been severed. The stump was crudely wrapped and stank of rotting flesh. The bandages were black and stiff with dried pus.
Tadesse had made his own inventory of the man’s injuries. He sucked air between his teeth.
“I can do nothing here. We should be able to carry him to camp without the wounds breaking open again. Then we can clean and treat him in camp. Why has he come alone? What has happened, that a warrior wanders by himself so far?”
Iyasu groaned and stirred. Ryder could hear the sound of Geriel and Maki approaching up the steep path. He tried to remember how old this boy was—twenty, perhaps? He was an athlete and the pride of his village, gone to win glory in the army of the emperor.
“Iyasu, you are at Courtney Camp. We shall look after you and send for your father. You have my word. What happened?” Ryder asked.
His eyes opened again, huge and dark. Ryder knew that look: these were the eyes of a
man replaying horrors in his own mind rather than seeing what was in front of him.
“Mr. Ryder, he is dead. Emperor John, the King of Kings, is dead.”
They carried Iyasu carefully into the village, into Ryder’s own hut, and laid him on a wooden pallet by the open fire. As soon as Ryder had sent the fastest runner in the village to take the news of Iyasu’s return to his father, he joined Tadesse at the injured man’s side.
The darkness had fallen swiftly. Ryder held a hurricane lamp above Iyasu as Tadesse worked, examining the wounds and carefully suturing those on the warrior’s chest and thigh. Iyasu had not regained consciousness.
“How long do you believe it will take Ato Asfaw to reach us?” Tadesse asked.
Ryder calculated quickly. Asfaw’s village was three miles away—not far for an old warrior like himself—but it was rough ground. If he were at home. He had many duties as headman of his parish that took him often to outlying hamlets and markets.
“Some hours yet, Tadesse.”
The boy sat back on his heels. “You must make a choice. The wrist is infected, Mr. Ryder. If I do nothing but try and ease his pain, he will live till dawn. If we do the other thing—cut off the arm high up where the infection has not yet reached—we must do it now, at once. The shock of it might kill him, but if he survives it he might live yet to be an old man.”
Ryder looked down at Iyasu, so strong and so near death.
“What are his chances?” he asked.
“What is that thing I have seen you do?” Tadesse said, squinting up at him. “Throw a coin in the air. It is like that.”
Ryder tried to imagine his own infant son grown into a man, a man injured and suffering like this. What would Ryder want done if strangers were standing around his son’s bed? For a moment, like a dream, he saw Leon as a man, as a soldier of Iyasu’s age, lying on an earth floor and in the care of others. The answer was clear.