Golden Lion. Wilbur Smith

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.’

      

The battle had swept back and forth across the Kebassa Plateau of north-east Ethiopia, from soon after dawn until the dying light of day. Now its clamour had died down, replaced