“He would sell his own mother… and quite probably has. And if I am kin, and half-royal, still, I had the poor taste to wed a Christian. No, he would surely have sold me—and you. A white eunuch would be a novelty in Arabia.”
I almost fell over. “A white… I ain’t a bloody eunuch!”
“You would have been if they had seen us. Did you not mark the baubles which decorated their lances? Those were the genitals of prisoners and enemies.”
A discouraging tidbit of information, you’ll allow, and if I’d seen the remotest chance of a flight to safety, or even known where the hell I was, I might well have turned tail on the spot, Napier or no Napier. But being entirely out of reckoning, I’d no choice but to follow on, trusting to luck and consoling myself that there are worse travelling companions than a long-legged expert savage who’s taken a passionate fancy to you. That’s the best of memory, when terrors and hardships no longer matter, and I can look back and still see her reclining by the stream, dabbling her toes as she anoints those sleek limbs with her cosmetic oil until they gleam like bronze in the firelight, humming softly as she plaits her braids, and lying back smiling with her head on her little wooden pillow, holding out a hand to me.
But if that first week had its idyllic moments, they ended when we crossed the Takazy and rode south into a new and horrible world. I’ve seen more war-scarred country than I care to remember, from the shattered ruin of the Summer Palace and the corpse-choked waters of the Sutlej to the putrid mud of the Crimea and the scorched highway blazed by Sherman from Atlanta to the sea, but what lay before us now was beyond description. Even the war of the Taipings, the blood iest in human history, which seemed to carpet China with dead in heaps of countless thousands, was no more frightful than the charnel-house that Theodore had made in Lasta and Gondar and Begemder.
From the river down to Lake Tana is more than a hundred and twenty miles, and I doubt if we saw more than a score of living things in all that distance, bar vultures, hyenas, scorpions, and white ants, or a building whole and standing except for some of the flat-roofed stone houses which the better-off inhabit. Of the normal round thatched homes of the populace, there wasn’t one; every village and farm was a cold charred ruin in a vast graveyard where skeletons human and animal lay in the rubble. The fields and plain had been swept clean of people and their beasts; in the wooded valleys of the high country even the birds seemed to have gone, and we rode in an eerie silence. I dare say there were folk living in Micara and Sokar, small towns to which we gave a wide berth, as we did to the few
“Most of them are dead,” says Uliba. “This was rebel country, remember, and it is not Theodore’s way to spare any who resist him, man, woman or child. If we have seen none of Gobayzy’s troops it can mean only that they have gone south after Theodore—and doubtless the banditti have gone also, for what is left to steal in Lasta?” We had reined in on the outskirts of yet another ruined village, beside a little walled enclosure filled with a great pile of bones, many of them plainly belonging to infants. I ain’t over-queasy, as you know, but the thought of how they’d come to be there turned my stomach. Uliba viewed them dispassionately.
“Thus Theodore wins the love of his people. You see now why Habesh rejoices in your British invasion; whether it deleivers your ca ptives or not, it will surely destroy him.”
Amen to that, thinks I. Until that moment I’d given little enough thought to this monster of an emperor and the atrocities he’d com mitted on his own people. You hear folk like Napier and Speedy talk of them, but it means nothing—and then you see ’em at point-blank, and can’t conceive of such wickedness. Until you come to Gondar, that is, and find yourself contemplating Hell on earth.
It lay about a hundred miles below the Takazy, and was once the capital of Abyssinia, a metropolis of forty- four churches and a great royal palace, standing on a hill from which there was a magnificent prospect of Lake Tana, forty miles away. For generations it had housed wealthy Muslim merchants and a revered priesthood, a magnet for traders from Egypt and the Soudan and the southern lakes, a city peaceful, flourishing, and rich—which was its undoing. Theodore had taxed it exorbitantly, virtually holding it to ransom, and not unnaturally the city fathers had tended to sympathise with the rebels fleeing the Emperor’s vengeance, and give them shelter.
This much Uliba told me as we came down towards it on the fifth day after crossing the river; I wondered if it would be safe to venture close to such a busy centre, and she laughed on a bitter note.
“Over the ridge yonder we shall see great Gondar on its hill,” says she, “and you can see how busy are its folk.”
We topped the ridge, and sure enough there was a distant rise crowned with buildings, some of ’em imposing adobe and stone structures, so far as I could tell from far off, but the lower slopes were covered in the burned ruins of thousands of the thatched houses of the common folk. There was an odd smell in the air, not the foulness of corruption, but more like an aftermath of decay, musty and stale. There was no sign of life on the hill, or on the plain below it, which was empty save for rows of upright objects that I took at first to be leafless trees, until we rode down to them, and I saw they were great crosses, hundreds of them to the edge of the city. And at the foot of each cross was a little pile of whitened bones, except for a few crosses on which were twisted blackened shapes that had once been human, preserved by some freak of the weather like so many withered mummies.
I could only sit and stare in disbelief, aware that Uliba was watching me with an expression of amused curiosity, resting easy in her saddle with one foot cocked up on the crupper. I dare say I was a sight to see, open- mouthed and appalled, asking myself such futile questions as what kind of creature could have done such a thing, and when, and above all, in God’s name, why?
Don’t misunderstand me. As I’ve said, I was inured to mass slaughter, and barbarous cruelty: when you’ve seen the mounds of Taiping dead, or the ghastly harvest of an Apache raid, you don’t gag or faint. But you can be stricken speechless at the sight of a mass carnage that has been conceived and designed and executed with meticulous care—no wild hot-blooded massacre, but a planned methodical operation, with hundreds of timber baulks cut and gath ered and fashioned into crosses, hundreds of victims condemned and marshalled and nailed or bound, hundreds of crucifixes reared and planted by hundreds of executioners, hundreds of tortured voices screaming—and whoever had ordered this must have nodded approval and commended it with a “Well done, men, a good day’s work', as he turned away from the ghastly sight and sounds and rode off to see what cook was preparing for supper.
Or perhaps he had given orders to crucify the population, and been miles away when his troops did the business.
“Oh, no,” says Uliba. “You may be sure that Theodore directed this in person. He would inspect every cross, every hanging body; he may even have driven home nails himself. That is his way, when the devil fit is on him.”
“He’s mad, then. Stark raving bloody insane!” I was thinking of other charming monarchs I had known, like Ranavalona with her death-pits, and that noble savage Gezo of Dahomey bouncing about on his throne fairly slobbering with glee as his Amazons sliced up his victims with cleavers. Plainly Theodore was from the same stable. It’s enough to make you turn republican.
Uliba shrugged. “Mad, perhaps. Or merely Abyssinian. Oh, you think of us as a fierce warlike people who love to fight—and we are, and you understand and admire that because it is in your nature also. But do you understand the joy of killing for its own sake? The delight in blood and the agony of the dying?” She shook her head. “From all I have heard, that is not in the British nature.”
You should see a Newgate scragging, you poor ignorant abor igine, thinks I. Or Flashy breaking de Gautet’s toes and pitching him into the Jotunschlucht with a merry jest, capital fun, and a deed after your own heart, sultana, you who gloated so joyfully over Yando’s performance on the flying trapeze. But sadistic spite in paying off a personal score is one thing; torturing to death an entire population whom you don’t even know, and whose only offence is that their civic rulers gave shelter to a parcel of rebels, is rather different.
It hadn’t properly sunk in, when Uliba had spoken of Theodore’s sparing no man, woman, or child, but it did now, as we rode through that ghastly forest of the dead which even the vultures had abandoned, and mounted the slope through the blackened ruins of Gondar city. Eerie silence hung over it like a shroud, and the stench of burned timber was overpowering, even though the fire had been dead for months. I’d have passed the infernal place by, not only for its foulness but because there might be enemies lurking, but Uliba, who seemed indifferent to the horrors we’d seen, brushed my fears aside.
“Only ghosts live in Gondar since Theodore destroyed it, more than a year ago. The peasants call it accursed, and even the outlaw bands avoid it.” She turned in her saddle to look back over the charred rubble to the rows of
