Buch lesen: «Golden Lion»

They were no longer men. They were the detritus of war cast up by the Indian Ocean upon the red sands of the African continent. Most of their bodies were torn by grape shot or hacked by the keen-edged weapons of their adversaries. Others had drowned and the gas in their swollen bellies as they rotted had lifted them to the surface again like cork bungs. There the carrion-eating seabirds and the sharks had feasted upon them. Finally a very few of them had been washed through the breaking surf onto the beaches, where the human predators waited to pick them over once again.

Two small boys ran ahead of their mother and grandmother along the water’s edge, squealing with excitement every time they discovered anything deposited upon it by the sea, no matter how trifling and insignificant.

‘There is another one,’ cried the eldest in Somali. He pointed ahead to where a ship’s wooden spar was washed ashore, trailing a long sheet of torn canvas. It was attached to the body of a white man who had lashed himself to the spar with a twist of hempen rope whilst he still lived. Now the two boys stood over his carcass laughing.

‘The birds have pecked out one of his eyes,’ shouted the eldest boy.

‘And the fish have bitten off one of his arms,’ his little brother gloated, not to be outdone. A shred of torn sail canvas, obviously applied by the man while still alive, was knotted around the stump of his amputated arm as a tourniquet, and his clothing had been scorched by fire. It hung off his gaunt frame in tatters.

‘Look!’ screeched the elder boy. ‘Look at the buckle on his sword-belt. It must be made of gold or silver. We will be rich.’ He knelt beside the body and tugged at the metal buckle. At which the dead man groaned hollowly and rolled his head to glare at the boys with his one good eye. Both children screamed with horror, and the elder released his grip on the sword-belt and sprang to his feet. They rushed back to their mother and clung to her skirts whimpering and whining with terror.

The mother ran to examine the booty, dragging the children along with her on her skirts. The grandmother hobbled along behind them. Her daughter dropped to her knees beside the body and she slapped the man’s face hard. He groaned again.

‘Zinky is right. The Ferengi is still alive.’ She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out the sickle with which she cut the grass to feed her chickens.

‘What are you going to do?’ Her mother panted from her run.

‘I am going to cut his throat, of course.’ The woman took hold of a handful of the man’s sodden hair and pulled his head back to expose his throat. ‘We don’t want to have to argue with him about who owns the belt and buckle.’ She laid the curved blade against the side of his neck, and the man coughed weakly but did not resist.

‘Wait!’ ordered the grandmother sharply. ‘I have seen that buckle before when I was in Djibouti with your father. This man is a great Ferengi Lord. He owns his own ship. He has great wealth. If we save his life he will be grateful and he might give us a gold coin, or even two!’

Her daughter looked dubious, and considered the proposition for a while, still holding the sickle blade to his throat. ‘What about his beautiful metal buckle of great value?’

‘We will keep it, naturally.’ Her mother was exasperated with her daughter’s lack of acuity. ‘If he ever asks for it we will tell him we have never seen it.’ Her daughter removed the sickle blade from the man’s throat.

‘So what do we do with him now?’

‘We take him to the doctor in the village.’

‘How?’

‘We lay him on his back on this strip of lembu.’ She indicated the canvas strip wrapped around the spar. ‘And you and I pull him.’ She turned to regard her grandchildren sternly. ‘The boys will help us, of course.’

In his head the man was screaming. But his vocal cords were so parched and cracked and ravaged by smoke and flame that the only sound that emerged was a reedy, tremulous wheezing, as pitiful as the air escaping from a pair of broken bellows.

There had been a time, barely a month or two ago, when he had set his face to the storm and grinned with savage glee as the wind and sea-spray hurled themselves against his weather-beaten countenance. Yet now the warm, jasmine-scented breeze that barely wafted into the room through the open windows felt to him like thorns being dragged across the pitiful tatters of his skin. He was consumed by pain, scourged by it, and though the doctor lifting the bandages from his face was doing his best to work with the most consummate delicacy, each additional inch of exposure stabbed him with another needle-sharp stiletto of pure, concentrated agony. And with every infliction came a new, unwanted memory of battle: the searing heat and brightness of the flame; the deafening roar of gunfire and burning wood; the crushing impact of timber against his bones.

‘I am sorry, but there is nothing else to be done,’ the doctor murmured, though the man to whom he spoke did not understand much Arabic. The doctor’s beard was thin and silvery and there were deeply lined, sallow pouches beneath his eyes. He had practised his craft for the best part of fifty years and acquired an air of wisdom and venerability that calmed and reassured most of the patients in his care. But this man was different. His injuries were so severe that he should not be alive at all, let alone sitting virtually upright in bed. His one arm had been amputated, only Allah the merciful knew how. His ribcage on that same side of his body resembled the side of a barrel that had been stove in by a battleaxe. Much of his skin was still scorched and blistered and the scent of the flowers that grew in such profusion beneath the open window was lost in the roast-pork odour of burned flesh and the sickening stench of pus and putrefaction that his body now exuded.

The fire had claimed his extremities. Two of the fingers on his remaining hand had been reduced to stumps of blackened bone that the doctor had also sawn off, along with six of the man’s ten toes. He had lost his left eye, pecked out by sea vultures. The lid of the other eye had all but burnt away so that he now stared out at the world with a cold, unblinking intensity. But vision was not the worst of his losses; the patient’s manhood had been reduced to little more than a charred stump of shiny, livid scar tissue. When – or more likely if – he ever rose from his sickbed, he would have to squat like a woman to urinate. If he wished to satisfy a lover, the only means available to him would be his mouth, but the chances of anyone being willing to let this particular maw anywhere near her body, even if being paid to do so, were very remote indeed.

It could only be by the will of God that the man had survived. The doctor sighed to himself and shook his head as he regarded the devastation revealed when the bandages were unwound. No, such an atrocity could not possibly be the work of Allah, the almighty and most merciful. This must be the handiwork of Shaitan, the devil himself, and the monster before him was surely no better than a fiend in human form.

It would be the matter of a moment for the doctor to snuff out this satanic being that had once been a man, and by so doing prevent the horrors that it would surely inflict if left free to roam the world. His medicine contained a sweet, syrupy tincture that would dull the pain by which the man was plainly wracked before sending him to sleep and then, with the softness of a woman’s touch, stopping his heart for ever. But the Maharajah Sadiq Khan Jahan himself had sent word from Ethiopia commanding that this man of all men should be taken to the maharajah’s personal residence in Zanzibar and there be treated with particular care.

It was surely, Jahan had observed, an act of divine providence that anyone had survived a burning by fire, the amputation of one arm, the loss of one eye, drowning in water and a roasting by the sun in the hours or days before he had been found by local children, cast up on the beach.

His patient’s survival, the doctor was therefore informed, would be rewarded with unbounded generosity, but his death would be punished with correspondingly great severity. There had been many times in his long career when the doctor had discreetly put suffering patients out of their misery, but this was most assuredly not one of them. The man would live. The doctor would make absolutely certain of that.

The man could not so much see as sense a glimmer of light, and with every orbit of the doctor’s hand around his head, and every layer of bandage that was removed, the light grew less dim. Now he became aware that the glow seemed to be reaching him through his right eye only. The left one was blind but he could still feel its presence as it fell prey to the most damnable itching sensation. He tried to blink, but only his right eyelid responded. He raised his left hand to rub his eye, but his hand was not there. He had, for a second, forgotten that his left arm was long gone. Reminded of it, he was conscious that the stump was also itching. He raised his right arm, but his hand was caught in a strong, dry, bony grip and he heard the doctor’s voice again. He could not understand a word of what was said, but the general meaning was clear enough: don’t even think about it.

He felt a cool compress being held to his eyes, soothing the itching somewhat. As it was removed, slowly, slowly his vision returned to him. He saw a window and beyond it the blue of the sky. An elderly Arab in white robes and a turban was bending over him, unwinding the bandage with one hand and gathering it with the other. Two hands, ten fingers: how strange to look upon them with such envy.

There was someone else in the room, a much younger man standing beyond the doctor. He had the look of the East Indies in the delicacy of his face and the tint of his skin, but his white cotton shirt was cut in a European style and tucked into breeches and hose. There was white blood in there somewhere, too, for the man in the bed could see that the Asiatic brown of the young man’s complexion was diluted by a pale pinkish tinge.

Now he looked at him and tried to say, ‘Do you speak English?’

His words were not heard. His voice was barely a whisper. The man gestured with his broken claw of a right hand for the young half-caste to come closer. He did so, very clearly having to fight to keep a look of utter revulsion from breaking out across his face as the sight before him grew ever closer and clearer.

‘Do you speak English?’ the man in the bed repeated.

‘Yes, sir, I do.’

‘Then tell that mangy Arab …’ He stopped to drag some air into his chest, grimacing as it rasped his smoke- and flame-ravaged lungs. ‘… Tae stop being so bloody lily-livered wi’ my bandages.’ Another breath was followed by a short, sharp gasp of pain. ‘… And just pull the buggers off.’

The words were translated and the pace of removal was greatly increased. The doctor’s touch was rougher now as he ceased to bother with any niceties. Evidently the translation had been a literal one.

The pain merely increased, but now the man on the bed was starting to take a perverse pleasure in his own agony. He had determined that this was a force – no different from the wind or the sea – that he could take on and master. He would not be beaten by it. He waited until the last scrap of rank, fetid fabric, sticky with blood and raw skin, had been torn from his head and then said, ‘Tell him to fetch me a mirror.’

The young man’s eyes widened. He spoke to the doctor who shook his head and started jabbering at a much faster pace and higher pitch. The young man was clearly doing his best to reason with him. Eventually, he shrugged his shoulders, waved his hands in a gesture of exasperated defeat and turned back to the bed. ‘He says he will not do it, sir.’

‘What’s your name, boy?’ the wounded man asked.

‘Althuda, sir.’

‘Well, Althuda, tell that stubborn bastard that I am the personal acquaintance, no, the brother-in-arms of Ahmed El Grang, the King of the Omanis, and also of the Maharajah Sadiq Khan Jahan, younger brother of the Great Mogul himself. Tell him that both men value the service I have done them and would be mightily offended if they knew that some scraggy old sawbones was refusing tae do as I asked. Then tell him, for the second time, tae fetch me a damn mirror.’

The man slumped back on his cushions, exhausted by his diatribe and watched as his words were conveyed to the doctor, whose attitude was now magically transformed. He bowed, he scraped, he grovelled and then he raced across the room with remarkable speed for one so apparently ancient and returned, rather more slowly, with a large oval looking glass in a brightly coloured mosaic frame. It was a heavy piece and the doctor required Althuda’s assistance to hold it over the bed at such an angle that the patient could examine his own appearance.

For a moment the man in the bed was shocked by what he saw. The iris of his sightless eye was a dead lifeless blue, surrounded by a ball of raw, bloodshot white. The cheek beneath it had been burned so badly that a hole the size of a woman’s fist had been burned in it and his jaw and teeth were clearly visible in a gross display of the skull beneath the skin. His hair had all been scorched off save for one small ginger tuft that sprouted just above his right ear, and the skin of his scalp was barely visible beneath all the scabs and sores that marred it. He looked like a corpse that had been a good week or two in the ground. But that, he thought to himself, was exactly how he should look, for he wasn’t really alive any more. He had once possessed an enormous gusto for life. He plunged into his pleasures, be they drinking, fucking, gambling, fighting or grasping whatever he could get his hands on. All that had been taken from him now. His body was a ruin and his heart was as cold as the grave. Yet all was not lost. There was a force within him that he could feel rising up to replace all his old lusts and impulses. It was as powerful as a mighty river in full spate but it ran with bile rather than water. For this was a flood of anger, bitterness, hatred and, above all, an overwhelming desire for revenge against the man who had reduced him to this ruinous state.

The man fixed Althuda with his one good eye and said, ‘I asked you your name, but do you know mine?’

‘No, sir.’

A skeletal grimace spread across the man’s face in a ghastly parody of a smile. ‘Then I will tell you. I am Angus Cochran. I’m a proud Scotsman and my title is Earl of Cumbrae.’

Althuda’s eyes widened in horrified recognition. ‘You’re … You’re the one men call the Buzzard,’ he gasped.

‘Aye, that I am. And if you know that, perhaps you’ve also heard of the man who did this tae me, a cocky English laddie by the name of Hal Courtney. Oh, yes, I can see that rings a bell all right, doesn’t it, boy?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well let me tell you this, then. I’m going tae find Courtney, no matter how long it takes me, or how far I have tae go. I’m going to bring him down. And I am going tae wet my beak with his blood.’