Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (33 page)

“Hmm. Led by Count Zeppelin, no doubt,” Burton muttered.

“He may be taking a different trail from us,” Isabel observed, “but at some point we're bound to clash.”

Swinburne bounded over, still overexcited, and moving as if he'd come down with a chronic case of St. Vitus's dance.

“My hat, Richard! I can't stop marvelling at it! We were outnumbered on both sides yet came out of it without a scratch, unless you count the five thousand three hundred and twenty-six that were inflicted by thorns and hungry insects!”

“You've counted them?” Isabel asked.

“My dear Al-Manat, it's a well-educated guess. I say, Richard, where the devil has Tom Honesty got to?”

Burton frowned. “He's not been seen?”

“Not by me, at least.”

“Algy, unpack some oil lamps, gather a few villagers, and search the vegetation over there—” He pointed to where he'd last seen the Scotland Yard man. “I hope I'm wrong, but he may have been hit.”

Swinburne raced off to organise the search party. Burton left Isabel and joined Trounce at the
bandani.
The detective was rummaging in a crate and pulling from it items of food, such as beef jerky and corn biscuits.

“I'm trying to find something decent for us to chow on,” he said. “I don't think the villagers will manage to feed everybody. I put Herbert over there. He still needs winding.”

Burton looked to where Trounce indicated and saw the clockwork man lying stiffly in the shadow of the woodpile. The king's agent suddenly reached out and gripped his friend's arm. “William! Who found him?”

“I did. He was in a hollow under a tree.”

“Like that?”

“Yes. What do you mean?”

“Look at him, man! He had Arabian robes covering his polymethylene suit. Where are they?”

“Perhaps they hindered his movement, so he took them off. Why is it important?”

Burton's jaw worked. For a moment, he found it impossible to speak. His legs felt as if they couldn't hold him, and he collapsed down onto a roll of cloth, sitting with one arm outstretched, still clutching Trounce.

“Bismillah! The bloody fool!” he whispered and looked up at his friend.

Trounce was shocked to see that the explorer's normally sullen eyes were filled with pain.

“What's happened?” he asked.

“Tom was next to me when the Prussians and Arabs started to powwow,” Burton explained huskily. “We were near Herbert, just a little way past him. The parley threatened to ruin our entire plan. The Arab who lost patience with the conflab and ran out shooting saved the day for us. Except—”

“Oh no!” Trounce gasped as the truth dawned.

“I think Tom may have crawled back to Herbert, taken his robes, put them on, and—”

“No!” Trounce repeated.

They gazed at each other, frozen in a moment of anguish, then Burton stood and said, “I'm going to check the bodies.”

“I'm coming with you.”

They borrowed a couple of horses from Isabel and, by the light of brands, guided their mounts along the path to the fields then galloped across the cultivated ground to where the dead had been laid out. Dismounting, they walked up and down the rows, examining the corpses. The Prussians were ignored, but each time either man came to a slaver, he bent and pulled back the cloth that covered the corpse's face.

“William,” Burton said quietly.

Trounce looked up from the man he'd just inspected and saw the explorer standing over a body. Burton's shoulders were hunched and his arms hung loosely.

Something like a sob escaped from the Scotland Yard man, and the world seemed to whirl dizzyingly around him as he staggered over to his friend's side and looked down at Thomas Manfred Honesty.

His fellow detective was wrapped in the robes—ragged and blood-stained—that he'd borrowed from Spencer. He'd been riddled with bullets and must have died instantly, but it was no consolation to Trounce, for the little man, who'd mocked him for nearly two decades over his belief in Spring Heeled Jack, had, in the past couple of years, become one of his best friends.

“He sacrificed himself to save us,” Burton whispered.

Trounce couldn't reply.

They buried Thomas Honesty the next morning, in the little glade to the north of the village.

Burton spoke of his friend's bravery, determination, and heroism.

Trounce talked hoarsely of Honesty's many years of police service, his exemplary record, his wife, and his fondness for gardening.

Krishnamurthy told of the respect the detective inspector had earned from the lower ranks in the force.

Swinburne stepped forward, placed a wreath of jungle flowers on the grave, and said:

“For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,
Take at my hands this garland, and farewell.”

Sister Raghavendra softly sang “Abide with Me,” then they filed back along the trail to the village, a subdued and saddened group.

For most of the rest of the day, Burton and his fellows caught up with lost sleep. Not so William Trounce. He'd found a large flat stone on the slope beneath the village, and, borrowing a chisel-like tool from one of the locals, he set about carving an inscription into it, sitting alone, far enough away from the huts that his chipping and scraping wouldn't disturb his slumbering companions. It took him the better part of the day to complete it, and when it was done, he took it to the glade, placed it on the grave, and sat on the grass.

“I'm not sure I really understand it, old chap,” he murmured, “but apparently the whole Spring Heeled Jack business sent us all off in a different direction. None of us is doing what we were supposed to be doing, although I rather think I would have carried on as policemen no matter what.”

He rested a hand on the stone.

“Captain Burton says this history we're in isn't the only one, and, in any of the others, meddlers like Edward Oxford might be at work, and whenever they tamper with events, they cause new histories. Can you imagine that? All those different variations of you and me? The thing of it is, my friend, I hope—I really hope—that, somewhere, a Tom Honesty will be tending his garden well into old age.”

He sat for a few minutes more, then bent over and kissed the stone, stood, sighed, and walked away.

The tear he left behind trickled into the inscription, ran down the tail of the letter “y,” and settled around a seed in Swinburne's wreath.

Omne solum forti patria
.
(Every region is a strong man's home.)

–S
IR
R
ICHARD
F
RANCIS
B
URTON'S MOTTO

T
he clangour of the parade bell sounded and voices hollered:
“Aufwachen! Aufwachen!
”

In Barrack 5, Compound B, of Stalag IV at Ugogi, Sir Richard Francis Burton and his fellow prisoners of war dragged themselves wearily from their bunks, quickly put on their grey uniforms, and tumbled out onto the dusty parade ground, which was baking in the afternoon heat.

Obeying shouted orders, they arranged themselves into three rows, facing forward, blinking and screwing up their faces as the glare of the white sky burned the sleep out of their eyes.

“What now?” the man to Burton's right grumbled. “Surely they can't be sending us back to the pass already?”

“They'll work us to death as long as they get the blasted road built,” another man growled.

They were referring to the passage the prisoners had been carving through the Usagara Mountains. Burton and his fellows had originally been incarcerated at Stalag III, near Zungomero, on the other side of the range. From there, they'd been escorted out daily, in a chain gang, to work on the road. When the halfway point had been reached, three months ago, they'd been marched to this new POW camp at Ugogi to commence the second half of the route.

From his place midway along the second row, Burton looked up at the guard towers. The man-things in them, standing with their mounted seedpods trained on the prisoners, appeared rather more alert than usual.

Over to the left, the gates in the high barbed-wire fence surrounding the compound were swinging shut, and inside, a large plant had just drawn to a halt, squatting down on its roots. A group of German officers stepped out of the vehicle.

“Bloody hell!” a man gasped. “That's Lettow-Vorbeck!”

“Which one?” Burton asked.

“The small bloke with the wide-brimmed hat. What the hell is he doing here?”

Burton watched as the officer, with a swagger stick under his right arm and a leather briefcase in his left hand, met with Oberstleutnant Maximilian Metzger, the camp commandant. They conversed for a few minutes then marched over to the lined-up prisoners and started walking from one end of the first row to the other. They gave each man a cursory glance, reached the end of the line, then proceeded down the second row.

When they reached Burton, they stopped and Metzger said:
“Hier, Generalmajor! Hier ist der gesuchte Mann!”

Lettow-Vorbeck examined Burton's face. He pulled a photograph from his pocket, looked at it, and nodded.

“Sehr Gut gemacht! Bringen Sie ihn her!”

Metzger signalled to two rhino guards. They stamped over, took Burton by the elbows, and dragged him out of the line. He was taken across the parade ground, into the commandant's office, and pushed into a chair opposite a heavy desk. The guards stood to attention to either side of him.

Lettow-Vorbeck entered and barked:
“Lassen Sie uns allein!”

The guards clicked their heels and thudded out.

There was a clockwork fan revolving on the ceiling. Burton leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and allowed the air to wash over his face. He was weary to the bone.

“Do you know who I am?” Lettow-Vorbeck said, in strongly accented English.

Without opening his eyes, Burton replied: “Generalmajor Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. You command the German forces in East Africa.”

“That is correct.
Sehr gut.
So.”

Burton heard a chair scrape on the floor and creak as the other man sat down. There was a soft thump—the briefcase being swung up onto the desk—and a click as it was opened.

“I have here a file in which you feature with some considerable prominence.”

Burton didn't respond. He was hungry and thirsty, but most of all he needed to sleep.

“Private Frank Baker, captured on the western slopes of the Dut'humi Hills two years ago. You were alone—a refugee from the failed British assault on the Tanganyika Railway.”

There was a long moment of silence. Burton had still not opened his eyes. He thought about Bertie Wells and the night they'd slept in the open, beside Thomas Honesty's grave. The temperature had plummeted after sunset, and during the hours of darkness both of them developed a fever. Burton's dreams had been filled with violence; with scenes of Prussians and Arabians slaughtering each other—and he'd woken up soaked with dew, filled with memories, and cursing himself. How could he have forgotten there was a village nearby? Just along the trail!

Wells was in the grip of hallucinations, which—to judge from his babbling monologues—involved insects crawling out of the moon, invisible madmen, and three-legged harvestmen. With what little strength remained to him, Burton had hauled the war correspondent to his feet and dragged him along an overgrown trail that eventually opened into another clearing where a decrepit village stood. Its menfolk were long gone—conscripted—and the remaining villagers were elderly and half-starved. Burton left Wells with them while he went to hunt game.

But he'd become the prey. Three lurchers had blundered out of the undergrowth and pursued him across boggy ground and into thick jungle. It was peculiar; he felt certain they could have caught him, but instead they appeared to be herding him along.

One of them sprouted poppies as it floundered after him.

By the time he'd eluded them, he was lost and in the grip of malaria.

The Germans found him unconscious at the side of a trail. Since then, he'd spent nearly two years in the Stalag III POW camp before his recent transfer to Ugogi.

Large parts of his memory had returned. He knew he was the king's agent. He was aware that Algernon Swinburne, William Trounce, Thomas Honesty, Maneesh Krishnamurthy, Herbert Spencer, Sister Raghavendra, Isabella Mayson, and Isabel Arundell had travelled to Africa with him. But he didn't know why, what had become of them, or how he'd been transported into the future.

He'd been here for four years. Four years!

Why? For what purpose?

“Why?” Lettow-Vorbeck said.

Burton opened his eyes and met those of the generalmajor. Behind the officer's head, pencil-thin shafts of light shone through the slats of the window shutter. Motes of dust entered them, blazed, then vanished into the shade. Against this illumination, Lettow-Vorbeck's features were very dark—almost silhouetted—but by some quirk, his eyes shone with an almost feral intensity.

“Why what?”

“Why are you British so destructive? Do you not believe in evolution?”

“Evolution? What do you mean?”

The officer drummed the fingers of his right hand on the desktop.

“The Greater German Empire seeks to advance the human species. We wish to liberate every man and every woman from slavery so that each can fulfil his or her greatest potential. So each can become an
Übermensch.
Perhaps this translates as ‘Over Man,’
ja?”

Burton gave a snort of disdain. “I don't think your Askaris feel particularly liberated.”

“Nein. Nein.
And it is the fault of your people. We are forced to employ the Africans to oppose British assaults on the infrastructure we are building here. Were it not for your people, Africa would have atmospheric railways and well-developed cities by now. And Europe would be a paradise, where trivial jobs and the necessities of survival are taken care of by plant life, leaving the human species free to explore its best potentials. Instead, we must assign our resources on both continents to resisting your vandalism.”

Burton's breath whistled from between his teeth. “It's always the same,” he said. “A madman creates a plan for the future of humanity, and, in unleashing it, causes untold suffering. Generalmajor, do I really need to point out that your vegetation is proliferating without check, or that while many individuals may be capable of advancing themselves, most are content to be well fed and sheltered and wish for little more?”

Lettow-Vorbeck nodded thoughtfully.
“Es trifft zu
, what you say of our plants. But that situation will be corrected once hostilities cease. As for your suggestion that the populace is not willing or able to evolve—I cannot agree. It is typical British thinking, for you built your Empire on the premise that an educated and privileged minority should benefit from the labours of a downtrodden majority.”

Lettow-Vorbeck suddenly slapped his hand down on the thick dossier that lay before him. “So!
Lassen Sie uns auf den Punkt kommen!
No more—what is the expression?—beating around the bush?” He put his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers in front of his face.
“Ich kenne die Wahrheit.
Your name is not Frank Baker. You are Sir Richard Francis Burton. You were born in the year 1821. You died in the year 1890. And you were sent to the year 1914 from the year 1863.
Es ist ein auβerordentlicher Umstand! Unglaublich!”

Burton sat bolt upright. His exhaustion fell away.

Lettow-Vorbeck gave a slight smile, his teeth white in the shadow of his face.
“Sehr gut. Sehr gut
, Herr Burton. I have your full attention now. You will listen to me,
ja?
I have a story to tell you. But first a question: do you possess
die telepathischen Fähigkeiten?”

“Mediumistic abilities? No.”

“Nor I. Hah! It is a misfortune! I should like them! You are aware,
ja
, that many people do? In increasing numbers, it appears. Your Colonel Crowley has his people—and they are strong—while we Germans have our weathermen, and, of course, the Kaiser himself, who is the greatest
Gedankenleser
—medium—of them all.”

Burton's right eyebrow rose slightly. “Nietzsche styles himself emperor now, does he?”

“Es ist angebracht, dass!”

A large fly buzzed lazily around Lettow-Vorbeck's head and landed on the desk. The German picked up the dossier and whacked it down onto the insect. He flicked the flattened corpse onto the floor and resumed his former position.

“And in
Russland
, there was Grigori Rasputin, also a great
Gedankenleser
, who, as you may know, died of—how do you say
Hirnblutung?”

“Brain haemorrhage,” Burton answered.

“So.
Ja.
Thank you. He died of that two years ago. It is him my story concerns.”

Burton remained silent.

Lettow-Vorbeck pointed a finger down at the report lying in front of him.

“This dossier was entrusted to me by Kaiser Nietzsche himself. It contains information that no other man is aware of—just he and I—and now I will tell you.”

Still Burton said nothing.

“Thirteen years ago, after we were forced to destroy your nation's capital city, our troops discovered a number of black diamonds beneath the rubble of the Tower of London. They were the seven fragments of the Cambodian Eye of Nāga, and the seven of the African Eye. We know this because documents concerning them were also found, and, in these documents, another Eye—from South America, and also in seven pieces—was described. Of it, though, there was no sign. You know of what I speak,
ja?”

“I'm aware of the Eyes of Nāga, Generalmajor,” Burton said, “but I can't help you. I don't know where the South American stones are.”

“That is not why you are here. We have already located them: our people have sensed their presence in Tabora—your last stronghold. We will recover them when we drive you from that place.”

“So far, I believe, you've not been very successful in that endeavour.”

“Ich kann es nicht verleugnen!
The South American stones are being used to protect the city, Herr Burton, but the
Heereswaffenamt
—our Army Ordnance people—have a solution to that. A final solution! It will be put into operation soon and Tabora will be destroyed. But let us not stray from the subject—we must talk of the other Eyes,
ja?
For many decades, even before the Great War commenced, your people committed mediumistic acts of sabotage against German industry. When it was discovered that the diamonds were the tools your
Gedankenleser
had used to perpetrate their crimes, Bismarck passed them to Nietzsche, that he might employ them to—what is the word?—
accentuate
the talents of our own people. Nietzsche kept the Cambodian stones but sent the African ones to Rasputin, and the two men used the power of the Eyes to secure an alliance between Germany and Russland. Then, in 1914, Nietzsche overthrew Bismarck and Rasputin deposed the Tsar.”

“Two traitors betraying their leaders,” Burton said scornfully.

“Two visionaries,” Lettow-Vorbeck countered, “committed to creating a better world.”

Shouts penetrated the office from outside. The prisoners were being rounded up and marched out of the camp, on their way into the Usagara Mountains to continue work on the road.

Burton asked, “What has any of this to do with me?”

“We shall come to that. Nietzsche took control of the Greater German Empire, but before Rasputin could do similar in Russland, he died of the
Hirnblutung.
German agents retrieved the African stones and returned them to Nietzsche. Now we come to the interesting part of the story, for our emperor had spent considerable time probing the Cambodian fragments and he'd detected in them a remnant intelligence.”