under cover and churned the river mouth and lake surface into foam. You could barely hear yourself speak above the rattle of the downpour, but Uliba was laughing as she pointed to the stream and shouted: “Little Abai! Only a few miles farther now!”
I couldn’t make this out: the stream was flowing
At all events, when the hail stopped we crossed and came to the promontory of Zage, the site of a once- populous town now ruined and deserted, thanks to Theodore, who had looted and burned it months before—hence that stale stink of charred wood and desolation. It was half-hidden by trees at the base of the promontory, through which we passed to open ground where there were signs of a disused camp-site, and so came to a swampy tangle of roots, on the verge of the lake. Out on the water we could see a couple of fishing craft heading up in the direction of Adeena, and Uliba surveyed them frowning for a long moment before turning to follow the edge of the swamp away from the lake.
She paused again to point eastward to where, beyond the swampy ground, there was a small cluster of huts on the shore. “Baheerdar,” says she, smiling. “Remember? D’you think you could have found it?” I said I was glad I hadn’t had to try, and she led on again by the swamp, which was now flowing south, quite distinctly, and presently, when we’d pushed our way through marshy thickets buzzing with mosquitoes, and mounted a grassy rise, the swampy flow had become a stream between jungly banks. A mile or so farther on it was broadening into a river proper, shining ruddy in the sunset, and Uliba gave a great heaving sigh and stretched her arms high above her head.
“There it runs—the Great Abai! A few miles to the Silver Smoke, and not far beyond, the camp of my people.” She came to my side and put an arm about me, inviting an embrace. “Have we not trav elled well together,
I cried by gad hadn’t we just, and gave her a loving squeeze and a hearty kiss, telling her she was the queen of guides—while noting to myself that she was now talking of the camp of
I awoke suddenly with a hand gripping my arm and another over my mouth, and was about to lash out in panic when I realised they were Uliba’s hands, it was just on half-dawn, and she was hissing a warning in my ear.
“Still! Keep down!” She was out of her blanket, snaking away across the turf damp with dew, and I followed her with my innards turning over at this sudden alarm. “See—yonder, across the river!”
I followed her pointing finger, and froze where I lay. On the far side of the water, which was barely fifty yards broad at this point, a line of horsemen was emerging from the jungle, pricking down to the bank. They were lancers, forty or fifty of them, trim in white robes and turbans and breastplates, one or two with chain-mail shoulder guards, their leader wearing a steel casque and knight’s gauntlets and carrying a silver shield. They ranged along the bank, dismounting at his word of command to water their horses, their voices drifting across the misty surface.
More in desperation than hope I wondered if they might be Masteeat’s people, but Uliba shook her head impatiently and wormed her way backwards into the shelter of the bushes, dragging blanket and saddle-bag with her, and signing to me to do likewise.
“They are Theodore’s guardsmen, his household cavalry. That silver shield is carried only by nobles high in his service.” Her whisper was fierce but steady. “Those boats we saw last night, making towards Adeena—they must have been at Kourata, bearing word of us and where we were going!” She screwed her eyes shut in fury, clenching her fist. “God of gods, why did I not kill that loose-tongued fool!?”
“Hold on—how d’ye know they’re looking for us? You can’t be sure—”
“A silver shield abroad before dawn with picked troops of the Emperor? I can be sure they are not on manoeuvres! He would never leave such an elite to garrison Kourata when he is marching on Magdala! No, he will have sent them west the moment he learned (doubtless from Yando’s vermin!) that a British officer was coming south, plainly to enlist aid from Masteeat and the Wollo Gallas! They will have been scouring Begemder for us, and now those peasant scum at Adeena have given them our scent. And they are following it.”
Talking like a book, as usual, and keeping her head. She signed me to silence and crawled forward again, to a solitary bush, the braided head cocked to listen. After a moment she was back, her lips at my ear.
“They are looking for a place to cross, then they will sweep both banks downstream. And we must be the quarry; no ordinary fugi tive would be worth such a hunt.”
“Oh, God! What can we do?”
She smiled grimly. “Run!—away from the river, before they can cross. We can circle wide and come back to it, for we’ll be swifter afoot in jungle than they can be on horseback. If we can reach the Silver Smoke ahead of them we shall be safe, for they’ll venture no closer to Masteeat’s army than that.” A word of command sounded across the water; they were mounting up again. “But we’ve no time to lose. It is twenty miles through jungle to the falls.”
If you’ve never travelled in jungle you may be under a false impression, thanks to the tales of blowhards who’ll tell you how they’ve hacked their way through impenetrable undergrowth and been lucky to make two miles a day battling snakes and great hairy spiders. Well, such jungle does exist, and sufficiently hellish it is, as I should know who have gone my mile in Borneo and the Fly River country, but as a rule it ain’t so thick, and what you have to look out for is where you’re putting your feet. Even such good rain forest as the headwaters of the Blue Nile has its hazards, like sudden swamp and potholes and solid fallen trunks which crumble rottenly and drop you unexpected into the slime; by and large, though, it’s fair going, with more trees than thickets, and space to move in. I reckon Uliba and I made a good four miles an hour, which is faster than marching, and if it was hot work it wasn’t unbearable in the shade. I doubted if Theodore’s cavalry could do as well; with luck, when we circled back to the river, we’d be comfortably ahead of them, provided we kept up our pace.
Moving away from the river must have added two or three miles to our trek, but by sunset Uliba reckoned we had covered enough ground for the day; you don’t move in jungle after dark if you have any sense, so we camped among the banyans and acacias, not risking a fire but enjoying the rays of sundown gleaming through the groves, and the last chirping and calling of the millions of coloured birds in the branches overhead. It reminded me of the Madagascar forest, and you mayn’t believe it but I felt my eyes stinging at the memory of Elspeth blue-eyed and beautiful, smiling up at me with her golden hair tumbled about her head on the grass, her arms reaching up to me and those lovely lips parting… “My jo, my ain dear jo!”
Dear God, that had been more than twenty years ago, that strange idyll of joy and terror mingled, when we’d fled from Antan’ with Ranavalona’s Hovas on our trail… Theodore’s riders might be a fearsome crowd, and most professional by the look of them, but at least they were part-civilised, unlike those black monsters… Strange, though, how history repeated itself: here I was again, fleeing the forces of darkness through tropic forest in the company of beauteous tumble—not that Uliba could begin to compare in looks, style, deportment, vivacity, elegance, complexion, allure, voluptuousness, abandoned performance, erotic invention, or indeed in any way at all to my glorious Elspeth, at the thought of whom I was beginning to dribble… and whom I loved dearly and truly, I may say, and had seen only at brief ecstatic intervals in the past four weary years—no, five, dammit! It was too bad, and I missed her so, and God alone knew what she’d been up to while I was shirking shot and shell at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Yellow Tavern, Ford’s Theatre, and Queretaro, and look at me now, lachry mose in
