Burton gave a curt nod.
Forty minutes later, Pox returned.
“Message from Isabel Arundell. We are ready. Estimate a hundred and fifty thumb-sucking men fast approaching your position. You have an hour at most, chamber-pot lover. Be prepared.”
“You all understand what you must do?” he asked his friends.
They gave their grim assent, pushed pistols into their belts, slung rifles over their shoulders, and divided into two teams of four: Trounce, Swinburne, Krishnamurthy, and Mayson; and Burton, Honesty, Spencer, and Raghavendra. Pox huddled on the explorer's shoulder.
Burton addressed Said: “To thee falls responsibility for the porters and villagers. It is vital that they neither flee nor make a sound.”
“I understand.”
The king's agent and his companions moved out of the glade and along the path. The rain hammered against the leaves around them, hissing loudly, soaking through their clothing, making the ground squelch beneath their feet.
They followed the trail as it veered to the right, and traipsed on until they eventually reached the abandoned village, which was some considerable distance from the original clearing. The second glade was much bigger. There were twenty or so beehive huts in it, and a well-built palaver house. A massive fig tree spread over the central space.
“The first shot is yours,” Burton said to Trounce. “Judge it well. Don't be too eager.”
“Understood.”
Trounce led his team to the eastern edge of the village and they disappeared into the vegetation, following the path down the hill to the marshy ground where the rhinoceros carcass lay. Burton and the rest went in the opposite direction, cautiously proceeding along the trail toward the fields. Halfway along it, they left the path and pushed into the bushes and plants that crowded around the boles of the trees. Struggling through the roots and vines and thorns and branches, they made their way to the edge of the forest until, through the dripping verdure, they saw the cultivated land and the slave encampment.
The sun was low in the sky by now, and it turned the fringes of the passing clouds a radiant gold.
The rain stopped.
“It won't be long,” Burton said softly. “Spread out. Don't shoot until I do. And remember-keep moving.”
Honesty, Spencer, and Sadhvi Raghavendra slipped away.
Burton lay flat on his stomach and levelled his rifle, aiming at the slavers who were moving around their tents and captives.
He flicked a beetle from his cheek and crushed a leech that had attached to the back of his left hand.
Pox hopped from his shoulder to his head and mumbled, “Odious pig.”
The shadows lengthened.
A seemingly endless line of ants marched over the mulch just in front of him. They were carrying leaf fragments, dead wasps, and caterpillars.
He heard Honesty sneeze close by.
A rifle cracked in the near distance.
All of a sudden, gunfire erupted and echoed through the trees, the sound rising up from the base of the hill on the other side of the village. Burton knew what it meant: the Prussians were very close, and Trounce and his team had opened fire on them.
Sheltered behind the roots of trees, the police detective's team could take pot-shots at the hundred and fifty Prussians with impunity. Not only were they concealed but they were also on higher ground, while the pursuing party had to struggle through the marsh before ascending a slope that, while forested, was considerably more open than the uppermost part of the hill.
Trounce, Swinburne, Krishnamurthy, and Isabella Mayson would be silently and invisibly moving backward as they picked off the enemy, drawing the Prussians toward the village and away from the other clearing.
The noise of battle had reached the Arabs. Burton watched as they grabbed rifles and gestured at the forest. A large group of them started running toward where he and the others were hidden.
He took aim at a particularly large and ferocious-looking slaver and shot him through the heart.
Immediately, rifles banged loudly as Honesty, Spencer, and Raghavendra opened fire.
Burton downed two more of the slavers, then, as the other Arabs started shooting blindly into the undergrowth, he crawled backward and repositioned himself behind a tangle of mangrove roots from where he could see the beginning of the path to the village.
Bullets tore through the foliage but none came close to him. He put his rifle aside and pulled two six-shooters from his belt. Four Arabs ran into view. He mowed them down with well-placed shots then crawled away to reposition himself once again.
Slowly, in this fashion, Burton and his friends retreated toward the village.
The slavers followed, and though they sent bullet after bullet crashing into the trees, they didn't once find a target.
On the other side of the empty settlement, Trounce and his companions were performing exactly the same manoeuvre. They had slightly less luck-a bullet had ploughed through Krishnamurthy's forearm and another had scored the skin of Isabella Mayson's right cheek and taken off her earlobe-but the effect was the same: the Prussians were advancing toward the village.
After some minutes, Burton came closer to the end of the path where it opened into the clearing. He fired off three shots and wormed his way under a tamarind tree whose branches slumped all the way to the ground forming an enclosed space around the trunk, and here he found Herbert Spencer collapsed and motionless in the dirt.
A rifle cracked, tamarind leaves parted, and Thomas Honesty crawled in. He saw the bundle of Arabian robes and whispered: “Herbert! Dead?”
“He can't die,” Burton replied in a low voice. “He's clockwork. Fool that I am, I forgot to wind him up this morning-and the key is back with the supplies!”
“Manage without him. Almost there!”
“Let's get into position,” Burton said. “Stay low-things are about to get a lot hotter around here!”
He dropped onto his belly and-followed by the Scotland Yard man-wriggled out from beneath the tamarind, through thorny scrub, and into the shelter of a matted clump of tall grass. Using his elbows, he propelled himself forward until he reached the edge of the village clearing. Honesty crawled to his side. They watched the action from behind a small acacia bush. The police detective glanced at it and murmured, “Needs pruning, hard against the stem.”
Guns were discharging all around them, and they immediately saw that the thing they'd hoped for had come to pass. The slavers had entered the village from the west, while Trounce and his team had lured the Prussians into it from the east; and now the two groups, convinced that the other was the enemy, were blazing away at each other.
“Now we just lie low and wait it out,” Burton said.
Four of the plant vehicles he'd seen at Mzizima were slithering into view, and cries of horror went up from the Arabs, who aimed their matchlocks at the creatures and showered them with bullets. Burton plainly saw the men sitting in the blooms hit over and over, but they appeared unaffected, apart from one who took a shot to the forehead. He went limp, and his plant thrashed wildly before flopping into a quivering heap.
Over the course of the next few minutes, the two forces battled ferociously while the king's agent and his friends looked on from their hiding places in the surrounding vegetation. Then a slight lull in the hostilities occurred and a voice shouted from among the slavers: “We shall not submit to bandits!”
A Prussian, in the Arabic language, yelled back: “We are not bandits!”
“Then why attack us?”
“It was
“You lie!”
“Wait! Hold your fire! I would parley!”
“Damn it!” Burton said under his breath. “We can't let this happen, but if any of us shoots now, they'll realise a third party is present.”
“Is this trickery, son of Allah?” the Prussian shouted.
