Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (46 page)

“Oof!” he piped.

The Wanyambo—those who weren't dead, unconscious, or in too much pain to notice—stared at him in astonishment. A metal man!

Burton tottered away from the Eugenicist creation, pulled what remained of his shirt off, and pressed the material against the deep laceration that angled up over his chest onto his left shoulder. He groaned with the pain of it, but, upon looking at the African warriors, saw that many had suffered much worse injuries.

He made his way over to Swinburne, who was crawling out from beneath the collapsed hut. Blood was streaming down the poet's face, dripping onto his clothing.

The king's agent called to Trounce, who was standing dazed. “William, are you hurt?”

“What? Huh, no.”

“Come and bandage Algy, would you?”

The Scotland Yard man dragged a hand over his face as if to clear his mind, nodded, then ran over to the horses, which were being held on the far side of the village by a woman who'd had the foresight and courage to stop them from stampeding away. Pox and Malady were huddled on the saddle of one. The parakeets had slept through the entire drama.

Trounce retrieved the medical kit and returned to the poet.

Burton, meanwhile, spoke to Spencer: “Are you all right, Herbert?”

“Battered, Boss. Dented an' scratched all over—but tickin' an' serviceable.”

Burton saw that the able-bodied among the Wanyambo had drawn together and were talking quietly, with many a gesture in Spencer's direction.

“I don't think our friends consider you a leper any more,” he said.

Sidi Bombay crawled out of the undergrowth. “Wow! Mr. Spencer is like the thing called
pocket watch
, which you gave me long and long ago and which one of my six wives stole!”

“Yes, he is, Bombay,” Burton agreed. “Can you explain that to the Wanyambo?”

“I shall try, though none of them has met my wives.”

While Bombay joined the surviving warriors, Burton checked the injuries of the fallen. Three were dead and five too seriously hurt to continue on to the Mountains of the Moon. That left twelve—which meant his forces and Speke's were about even.

Bombay rejoined him and explained: “Wow! I told them that, just as the bad
muzungo mbáyá
has bad magic, so the good
muzungo mbáyá
has good magic. And Mr. Spencer is good magic.”

“And they believed you?”

“Not at all. But they will continue with us to the mountains anyway.”

“Good.”

“They will not go into them, though, for the Wanyambo are afraid of the Chwezi, who you say don't exist.”

“Very well. Help me with these injured, then we'll regroup and go after Speke. It's high time he and I brought our feud to an end—whatever it takes to do so.”

Sidi Bombay stood motionless and gazed up at the mountains. He made clicking noises with his tongue.

Burton watched him, then stepped to his side and asked, “You are sure this is the route Speke took?”

Without moving, his eyes remaining glued to the scene ahead, Bombay answered: “Oh yes, this is it. Wow! It is an evil place. There is a bad feeling in the air, like when my wives stop speaking to me because I have come home drunk.”

“It's certainly quiet,” Burton replied. “An oppressive silence.”

“There are no birds in the trees.”

“There are two. We're having the devil of a time getting Pox and Malady down. Algy is climbing up to them.”

“Your friend is like a little monkey.”

“I'll be sure to tell him.”

“I do not like these mountains, Mr. Burton. The Chwezi live here. The Chwezi who don't exist, and who serve the Batembuzi.”

“And who are the Batembuzi?”

“They are the children of the gods who once ruled these lands. Long and long ago they disappeared into the underworld.”

“We have no choice but to go on, Bombay,” Burton said, “but you aren't obliged to accompany us. Do you want to remain here in the camp with the Wanyambo?”

“Wow! I want to, but I will not, because I have five wives and I expect you will pay me much more if I accompany you.”

“I thought you had six wives?”

“I am trying to forget number four.”

It was early in the morning. Two days had passed since the plant vehicle had attacked them. In that time they'd trekked across sodden and difficult terrain, and had at last reached the base of the Mountains of the Moon. They were now camped at the tree line.

A steep ravine lay ahead of them. Tall pointed rocks of a blueish hue stood like gateposts at the foot of the slope leading into it. According to Bombay, this was the path to the Temple of the Eye.

“I found them!” Swinburne announced as he shinned down the trunk of the Red Stinkwood tree into which the parakeets had vanished the night before. “They've nested in a hollow—and Pox has laid an egg!”

“By Jove!” Trounce exclaimed. “And what did the happy parents-to-be have to say on the matter?”

Swinburne jumped to the ground. “Pox called me a fumbling toad-gobbler, and Malady told me to sod off.”

Burton moved away from Bombay and over to his friends. “It looks like this expedition has had a happy ending for one of our little family, anyway,” he said. “Come on, let's leave them to it and get ourselves moving.”

“I've divided what's left of the supplies into light packs,” Trounce advised. “What equipment remains, we'll have to leave here.”

Swinburne, looking up into the branches he'd just vacated, shook his head. “Why would they want to live in a place like this?” he asked. “There are no other birds.”

“P'raps they likes their privacy,” Herbert Spencer suggested.

“Maybe they need the space so they can begin a dynasty,” Trounce offered.

The poet sighed. “I shall miss the foul-mouthed little blighters.”

They hefted their bags, took up their spears, and started to scrabble up steep loose shale, sending rivulets of stone clattering down behind them.

Sir Richard Francis Burton, Algernon Swinburne, William Trounce, Herbert Spencer—with his discoloured, scratched, and dented body unencumbered by robes or polymethylene—and Sidi Bombay entered the Mountains of the Moon, and more than one of them had a question on his mind.

How many of us will come back?

“-the sombre range
Virginal, ne'er by foot of man profaned,
Where rise Nile's fountains, if such fountains be.”

–J
OSÉ
B
ASILIO DA
G
AMA
,
O U
RUGUAY
, C
ANTO
V

B
urton and Wells drew their harvestmen to a halt at the top of an incline and turned the vehicles to face the way they'd come. Beneath the mechanised spiders' feet, poppies grew in abundance. The red flowers weaved away in an irregular line, disappearing into the hazy distance, back toward the dirty grey smudge that marked the position of Tabora.

High overhead, looking enormous even though it was flying at a very high altitude, the
L.59 Zeppelin
drifted closer to the city.

It was a remarkable craft—a vegetable thing, like a gargantuan pointed cigar with ruffled seams on its sides. All along this join, oval bean-like growths swelled outward, and even from afar, it was apparent that they'd been hollowed out and fitted with portholes.

A giant purple flower grew from the rear of the vessel, similar in appearance to a tulip. Its petals were opening and closing, throbbing like a pulsing heart, driving the ship through the air.

“It's magnificent,” Wells said. “And utterly horrible.”

“Horrible because we know what it's carrying,” Burton replied. “I wonder how big an area the A-Bomb will destroy? Surely the spores will drift?”

“Perhaps they're potent for only a few minutes,” Wells mused. “But even if the effects are of short duration and confined to the city, thousands of people are going to die. There simply hasn't been time for everyone to get out. Look! Those dots rising up from Tabora—that's a squadron of hornets!”

“We need a rotorship.”

“There are none. Our last was brought down more than a year ago.”

The hornets—twelve of them—raced across the shrinking distance between the city and the German vessel. As they neared the bomb carrier, they exploded one after the other and fell to the earth trailing smoke behind them.

“No!” Wells shrilled. “What the hell happened?”

“There!” Burton pointed. “See the trails of vapour curving out from the
Zeppelin?
The Germans must have some sort of manoeuvrable shells.”

“By heavens, Richard. Has it reached Tabora already? I can't tell.”

“Any time now,” Burton replied. “Be prepared to—”

Without warning, the sun erupted from the ground beneath the city. A blinding light blazed outward, and though Burton squeezed his eyes shut in an instant and clapped his hands over them, still he could see it. He heard Wells scream.

“Bertie, are you all right?” he yelled.

Wells groaned. “Yes. I think—I think it's passed.”

Burton, realising that his friend was right, lowered his hands and opened his eyes. Wherever he looked, he saw a ball of fire.

“The damned after-image has blinded me,” he said.

“Me too.”

They sat with hands held to faces, waiting for their retinas to recover.

A strong wind hit them.

“Shockwave!” Wells exclaimed.

“No! It's going in the wrong direction,” Burton noted, puzzled.

They looked up, blinking, vision returning.

A dense yellow mass of Destroying Angel spores was bubbling up from where the city stood—and as the two men watched, the billowing substance slowly revolved, as if around a central axis.

“The wind!” Wells said. “It's the blasted Hun weathermen! They're keeping that damned mushroom cloud in check, concentrating it in the city, preventing it from drifting!”

Burton moaned: “Quips! Poor Quips! Bismillah, Bertie! How many have just died?”

“Tens of thousands,” Wells said, and his voice was suddenly deep and oily and unpleasant. “But I am not one of them.”

Burton looked at the little war correspondent and was shocked to see that every visible part of his eyes had turned entirely black. There was a terrible menacing quality about them, and Burton couldn't tear his own away.

Wells gestured at the dying city.

“The generals are eager to locate a safe haven,” he said, “so, regrettably, the SS
Britannia
is rolling in an easterly direction and will soon turn south, whereas you, I see, are heading north. Why is that, Private Frank Baker? Hah! No! That won't do! That won't do at all! Let us call you by another name. Let us call you Sir—Richard—Francis—Burton.” He enunciated Burton's name slowly, emphasising each syllable, as if to drive home the point that he knew the explorer's true identity.

“Bertie?” Burton asked, uncertainly.

“Obviously not! Tell me, how did you do it?”

“How did I do what? Who are you?”

“Control the lurchers—make them open up a route through the besieging German forces?”

“Crowley?”

“Yes, yes! Now answer the question!”

“I didn't.”

“What? You didn't control them? Then who—or what—did?”

“I have no idea. What do you want, Colonel?”

“I have seven black diamonds, Sir Richard, the fragments of the South American Eye of Nāga. There is much about them I do not understand.” The black eyes glittered. The king's agent felt them penetrating his soul. “For example, you, sir, who should be three decades dead—your metaphorical fingerprints are all over them. Are they somehow responsible for transporting you from your time to mine?”

Burton didn't respond.

Wells—Crowley—regarded him silently.

The wind gusted past them.

“I shall tell you a secret, Sir Richard Francis Burton—something that, were it known by the generals aboard this ship, would prompt my immediate execution.”

“What?”

“I am in contact with Kaiser Nietzsche.”

“You're a collaborator?”

“Not in the sense you mean it. The German emperor and myself share a talent for clairvoyance. We've both detected through the diamonds that other realities exist, and that other versions of ourselves inhabit them. We want to know more. Your presence here appears to have some bearing on the matter.” Wells gave an elaborate shrug and his oleaginous voice took on a carefree airiness. “But here we are: you fleeing in one direction and me fleeing in the other. Very inconvenient! I really should do away with this Wells fellow. He acted against me. But I shall allow him to live, for I sense that he's a vital ingredient in the shape of things to come.”

“Crowley,” Burton said. “Nietzsche dropped a bomb on you.”

Wells emitted a thick chuckle. “Ah! So you doubt his commitment to me? Do not concern yourself. He gave me fair warning, and it was preordained that I would get away.”

“You knew Tabora would be destroyed? You allowed all those people to die? Your countrymen?”

“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people. The end of the British Empire was long overdue. I merely bowed to the inevitable.”

“In the name of Allah, what kind of man are you?”

“Allah? Don't be ridiculous. And as for what I am, perhaps the embodiment of the Rakes, who, if I remember rightly, prospered in your age.”

“You're an abomination!”

“I'm an individual who shares with Nietzsche the desire to create a superior species of man.”

For the first time since he'd taken possession of Wells, Crowley took his eyes from Burton. He looked at the yellow cloud enveloping Tabora.

“Multiple futures,” he said. “Different histories. Maybe some of them don't end like this. I should like to visit them.” He returned his dreadful gaze to the explorer. “Perhaps we'll get it right in one of them, hey?”

He made Wells stretch and groan.

“Ho hum, Sir Richard! Ho hum! I've been here long enough. It's not comfortable. Has he told you how his leg is perpetually paining him? I don't know how he can bear it. Anyway, I'll say farewell. We shall meet again, sir; in this world or another version of it; maybe in your time, maybe in mine, maybe in another. But we shall meet again. And when we do—”

Wells smiled wickedly. The expression lingered, then the black faded from his eyes, they slipped up into his head, and he fell sideways from his saddle to the ground.

Burton hurriedly dismounted and threw himself down beside his friend.

“Bertie! Bertie!”

The war correspondent rolled onto his side and vomited. He curled into a fetal position and moaned. “He was in my head. The filth, Richard! The filth of the man! He's the Beast personified!”

“Has he gone? Is he watching us?”

“He's gone. But he's going to come after you. Wherever—
whenever
—you are—he's coming after you!”

Burton helped Wells to sit up. The smaller man wiped his mouth and looked at the far-off mushroom cloud, and the flying machine shrinking to the south.

“It's finished,” he said. “The Germans probably think they've won, but they're wrong. Everything is ending. This world is done for.”

Burton could think of nothing to say, except: “I'm sorry, Bertie.”

Wells stood, swayed slightly, and reached up to the stirrup of his harvestman.

“Let's get back on the trail. I want to find out where these poppies are leading us.”

They clambered back into their saddles and turned their vehicles, sending them scuttling over the savannah.

For two days, they steered their harvestmen over what, to Burton, was eerily familiar territory.

He felt detached. All the connections to this world, formed over the past five years, were unfastening. Change was coming to him, of that he was certain, but he didn't know how.

Change, or, perhaps, restoration.

The Mountains of the Moon.

His destiny lay there.

Maybe it always had.

The trail of poppies led to those peaks, that was obvious even before the snow-capped summits rose over the horizon. He saw them, jagged and white, seeming to hover in the air above the blood-red base of the mountains.

“Red!” he exclaimed. “I remember this view—but the mountains were green!”

“That might have been true in the 1860s,” Wells replied, “but the Blood Jungle has grown since then.”

They raced over the empty landscape. Where there had once been villages, there were none. Were there had once been herds of antelope and zebra, there was nothing. Where fields had been cultivated, there was now rampant undergrowth.

Increasingly, they saw lurchers. The ungainly plants were shuffling over the hills and through the valleys with an unnerving air of sentience that prompted Wells to ask: “What are the damned things up to, Richard?”

“I know what you mean,” the explorer replied. “They look purposeful, don't they? Do you remember the one that attacked us at Tanga? See how differently they move now! The mindless thrashing has been replaced by shudders and ticks, as if they're operating under some sort of restraint.”

With so much of his memory restored, Burton recognised that the lurchers were the same species of plant as the vehicles the Prussians had used back in 1863—the same but horribly different, for there were no men enfolded in their fleshy petals—which meant, if there was something still controlling them, it wasn't necessarily human.

As they drew closer to the mountains, the vegetation grew thicker and wilder. Its flowers and fruits took on a reddish hue, deepening the farther they travelled, until blood-coloured blooms and berries and globular dew-dripping swellings of indiscriminate form surrounded them. The poppies guided the steam-driven spiders straight into the humid tangle, and, astonishingly, the chaotic verdure parted in front of them to allow their passage.

Shafts of light angled through the trees. Lianas drooped and looped and dangled. The air was heavy with scent, one minute perfumed, the next pungent with the stench of maggoty meat, then delightful again. Fat bees droned lazily through it. Dragonflies and butterflies flitted hither and thither. Seeds floated past on feathery wings. And in the canopy overhead, thousands upon thousands of parakeets squawked and screeched and cackled and whistled and cursed and insulted.

Burton started to laugh and couldn't stop.

Wells, who was at that point leading the way, looked back, raised his eyebrows, and asked: “What the heck has got into you?”

“Pox!” Burton cried out. “Pox and Malady! Ye gods! How many eggs did that confounded bird lay? Hah!” He raised his face to the sky and bellowed: “Pox! Pox! Pox!” then bent forward and was suddenly wracked by violent sobs, for too many memories were returning, and he knew for sure that he was going back, and he recalled what to.