with it!” cries she. “He will throw it in Yando’s face!” She didn’t add “Wouldn’t you?” possibly because she thought the question superfluous.
Once over the ridge we came in sight of the citadel, and it didn’t look any less sinister on second viewing, perched high on a rocky outcrop with a drop of hundreds of feet to the valley below. We reached it in half an hour, and I became aware that it was two towers joined together, six storeys high judging from the window spaces, the farther tower actually projecting out over the void beneath. It was a steep climb to the main door, and before we reached it the womenfolk of the tower were hurrying down to us, full of chatter and alarm, clamouring their questions at Uliba, but sparing a glance for the handsome stranger with the interesting whiskers. I’m not unused to female attention, as you know, but I don’t recall more brazen preening and ogling than I got from Uliba-Wark’s domestics. Plainly they were no strangers to the hayloft and the long grass.
One reason for their shameless glad-eyeing soon became apparent: Uliba-Wark’s stronghold proved to be almost entirely devoid of men, the few there were being either grey-bearded dotards or small boys. Presumably the young ones were away at the civil wars, as conscripts or mercenaries, but I never found out, on account of not speaking the lingo. It’s a damned bore, as you know, for you stand like a tailor’s dummy while the world prattles about you, and worse for me, I think, because I’m used to slinging the bat (* Speak the language (Army slang, from Hind.).) wherever I am.
They’re mighty strange places, these Abyssinian castles, not unlike our Border peels, with rooms piled on each other like so many boxes connected by stairs that are no better than ladders. Since from what Uliba had said we might have to withstand a siege, I was relieved to find that the main door was a massive affair which it would have taken artillery to breach, and the adobe walls were feet thick, with narrow windows well above ground level, offering a good field of fire. With my Joslyn and fifty rounds I could give a warm reception to anyone toiling up the path to our eyrie.
If I’d had any doubts about Uliba-Wark’s importance, they would have been dispelled by the respect amounting to reverence with which she was treated. They fairly grovelled to her, not only the slaves, who made up half the citadel’s residents, but the free women and the two elderly men who seemed to act as stewards or chamberlains. She delivered a brisk speech to the assembled staff in the great ground-floor hall which seemed to be used as a common room, but what she said was Amharic to me, except at the point where she indicated me, and the whole gang turned in my direction and bowed. When she’d dismissed them I was con ducted to an airy chamber on the third floor, bone clean and well if sparsely furnished with a good
To my disappointment I was attended by the village idiot super vised by a stout dragon with a moustache who must have been the only Plain Jane in the place, for the dollymops who’d been on hand at our arrival had been typical Ab, which is to say they’d ranged from comely to ravishing. I wondered if Uliba had decided I’d be safer with a fat crone; if so, it wasn’t a bad omen.
Not having had a wink of sleep since our bivouac at Ad Abaga the night before last, I slept the day through, and it was evening when I was summoned to a spacious apartment on the second floor and had my first taste of formal Ab dining. What is the norm, I can’t say, because on later occasions I’ve lounged on cushions on the floor, and sat up at a table like a Christian, but Chez Uliba we reclined on
If you suppose, by the way, that I am unduly susceptible, you should read the recollections of J. A. St John, Esq., who travelled in Abyssinia in the 1840s and appears to have spent most of his time goggling at boobies, on which he was obviously an authority. He has drooling descriptions of slave-girls, and a most scholarly passage in which he compares Ethiopian juggs to Egyptian ones, and finds the former “more finely shaped and better placed'; the negro bosom he discounts as having a tendency to droop, which suggests to me that he never got the length of Zululand or Dahomey where the ladies give glorious meaning to the term double-breasted. That by the way. I admire the female form myself, but J. A. St John needed a course of cold baths if you ask me. [29]
To resume. The meal consisted of two kinds of beef, the cooked variety which was roasted black with peppers, and the raw stuff which they call
The two chamberlain chaps shared our nuncheon, as did two of the females, tawny languid ladies who weren’t domestics but more like companions to the mistress of the house, for they talked to her on equal terms, were well dressed and decked with costume jew ellery, and plainly thought no small beer of themselves. But then all Ab women do, with cause; the waitresses, whom I spent the time admiring because Uliba didn’t bother to translate the table talk for my benefit, showed no embarrassment at being looked at, the saucy little dears. Uliba, by the way, had discarded her tunic in favour of an exquisite saffron robe which looked like silk, worn toga-fashion with one bare shoulder and two huge hooped golden earrings under her braids.
Just as the meal was ending there was a commotion in the room below, with female voices raised in anger, and presently one of the maids brought up the ladder-stair a girl who was the peachiest thing I’d seen so far, even in that company. She was tawnier than most, but with a long lovely Egyptian face and huge eyes which at the moment were disfigured by weeping. In fact, she seemed torn between grief and rage, sobbing into her cupped hands one moment, shaking her fists and raging the next, to the scandal of the women attendants and the wrath of the elders, all of whom contributed to the row, so that it was bedlam until Uliba snapped them into silence.
She spoke sharply to the weeping girl, who answered sullenly at first, then furiously, stamping and giving Uliba what sounded like dog’s abuse, to which she responded with an icy anger which changed the beauty’s tune altogether, for she flung herself down by Uliba’s
I was all agog to know what had ailed the girl. Uliba was still snarling in Amharic as she disposed herself on her
“I told her he had stayed to front Yando’s fighters of his own free choice, and the insolent bitch swore that you should have stayed also, but she supposed that you had supplanted Sarafa in my bed, and so were precious to me!” She banged her cup down, angry and merry together. “Ha! And then, because it is not known whether Sarafa is dead or taken, she falls to pleading with me to bargain with Yando for his life.
I agreed that discipline below stairs had gone to the devil these days. “So she wasn’t Sarafa’s wife, then, just his bit o’ black velvet?”
“His concubine, once—as though that gave her the right to rail at me!” She soothed herself with a sip of
What struck me, of course, was that the grieving tart had assumed that I was Uliba’s latest mount. Natural enough, perhaps, but it prompted a disquieting thought. What with all the to-do of ambush and flight, I’d given no thought to the part I was meant to be playing, and hadn’t even had the chance to remove my whiskers or take the first steps in transforming myself into Khasim Tamwar.
“Does she know who I am—what I am? Do the rest of them, those two old files, or the women?”
“To them you are an Indian traveller. So I have told them, and why should they not believe it? They have never seen an Englishman before. It is when we go south, among the knowing folk, that your disguise must be complete.”
“And when will we go?”
“Perhaps the day after tomorrow, if there is no sign of Yando. That will give time to change the hair on your
