“Far fewer than before!” returned Burton. “Algy had it right—the more they waste, the better.”
“Perhaps not such a waste,” Swinburne said. “They're purposely trying to keep us pinned down, which suggests to me that some of them have gone on ahead.”
Burton called: “William! Can you make it over here?”
“Watch me!” came the response.
Trounce leaped into view and sprinted across the intervening space, weaving from side to side as spears started to rain around him. He swept up three of the packs as he passed them, dragging them along, then, batting a falling shaft aside, hit the ground and slid into shelter in a cloud of dust.
“Phew! Am I in one piece?”
“Not a single perforation as far as I can see. How do you fancy a little bit more of that?”
The Scotland Yard man handed over the packs for Swinburne to check. “I don't much. My legs are still afire with damned sores. What's the plan?”
“We'll dart from cover to cover and keep moving. Don't so much as pause for breath in the open or you'll end up a pincushion!”
“Right you are.”
The king's agent looked over at Sidi Bombay's body. Another death. Another friend lost. Another part of his world ripped out of him.
He wondered how much more of it he could take.
There was no option but to leave the African where he lay. Perhaps there'd be an opportunity to bury him later, if animals didn't get to the corpse first.
Trounce watched Swinburne reorganising the contents of the three bags, fitting it all into one pack. “What do we have?” he asked.
“Not a lot!” the poet replied. “One intact water bottle, a dented sextant, Herbert's key, an oil lamp, a box of lucifers, the field glasses from the Orpheus, and a small stock of food that looks as if it's been trampled by a herd of elephants.”
“What took a hundred and twenty men to carry at the start of the expedition now takes one!” Burton muttered. “Throw away the sextant, and let's get on with it.”
He took the bag, slung it over his shoulder, and pointed at fallen rocks farther up and to either side of the faint trail that wound through the middle of the crevasse. “William, you leg it to the base of the cliff, there. Algy, you dive beneath the overhang, there. And Herbert, you make for that boulder, there. I'm going to try for the rock at the bend in the trail—do you see it? From there, I'll survey the next stretch and call instructions to you. All ready? Good. Get set! Go!”
The three men—and one clockwork device—burst out of cover and dashed toward the locations the explorer had indicated. Spears started to fall, their points shattering as they landed.
Swinburne dived into cover first.
Burton was next, though his allotted position was farthest away.
Trounce stumbled when a rebounding shaft cracked painfully against the side of his face but made it without any more serious injury.
Herbert Spencer fared less well. Hampered by his damaged leg, his run was more of a fast shuffle, and three spears hit him. The first bounced from his shoulder with a loud chime.
“Ow! Bleedin' heck!” he piped
The second ploughed a furrow down his back.
“Aagh! They've got me!”
The third sliced through his left ankle, leaving his foot dragging behind him, attached by a single thin cable.
“Cripes! That's agony!” he hooted, falling into the shadow of the large boulder Burton had assigned to him.
“Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” he said, and, reaching down, he tore the foot off completely and held it up so the others could see it. “Look at this!” he cried. “Me bloomin' foot's been chopped off!”
“Can you still walk, Herbert?” Burton called.
“Yus, after a fashion. But that ain't the point, is it?”
“What is the point?” Swinburne asked from his nearby position.
“That me bleedin' foot's come off, lad!”
“I'm sure Brunel will have you polished and repaired in no time at all after we get back to Blighty,” Swinburne responded. “There's no need to worry.”
“You're still missin' the point. Me foot's come off. It hurts!”
Burton, who'd identified points of cover among the rocks ahead, shouted instructions back to them.
They ran.
Herbert Spencer hobbled along, scraping his stump over the hard ground. A spear clunked into his hip and stuck there.
“Yow!” he cried. He yanked it out and threw it aside.
Another clanged off his head.
“Bloody hell! Bloody hell!”
He reached the sidewall, where it bulged outward, and collapsed into its shadow. He lay there, groaning.
“Herbert,” Swinburne called. “For the umpteenth time: it's all in your mind! You can't feel pain!”
“Ready for more dodging?” Burton called.
“Wait a moment!” Trounce shouted. A spear tip had scooped a furrow across his thigh and blood was flowing freely. He tore off one of his shirtsleeves and used it to bind the wound. “All set!”
Another mad dash, more spears—but far fewer this time—and they reached the space beneath a leaning slab without further injury.
“They must have stolen every spear from every village they pillaged,” Swinburne noted. “Either that or they have a portable pointy-stick factory with them.”
A wailing scream suddenly echoed and a body thumped into the gorge near to where they squatted. It was a white man, blond-haired and blue-eyed and dead. An arrow, striped red and black, was sticking out of his chest.
Shouts and screams sounded from above.
“They're being attacked!” Burton exclaimed.
“Who by?” Swinburne asked.
“Let's not dally to ponder that! Come on!”
They dashed out of their hiding place—the king's agent giving support to Trounce, and Swinburne to Spencer—and hurried along the cleft, leaving the embattled Prussians behind.
After they'd traversed perhaps two miles, the ground angled steeply upward. It was tough going.
Burton's stomach rumbled. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose.
He tried to remember what it felt like to sit in his old saddlebag armchair by the fire in his study.
“We're gettin' close, Boss,” Spencer announced. “I can feel the Eye's presence.”
The group struggled on through the fissure. By mid-afternoon, its walls had opened out and they emerged onto a low summit. The temperature plummeted, and suddenly they were shivering. The low mountains and hills they'd trekked through humped away to the rear; to either side, a long ridge zigzagged away to rising snow-covered peaks, which jaggedly heaped into the distance; and ahead, a long slope of crumpled strata plunged steeply downward and was split by a second shadowy crevasse.
Footing became precarious now; the ground was very uneven, with patches of loose slate-like rock that slipped from beneath their feet and rattled away down the incline.
They reached the fracture in the mountain's side and entered it. Darkness closed around them. Sheer rock faces soared up to the left and right, reaching such a height that the sky was reduced to nothing but a thin line of serrated blue.
They stopped for a moment while Burton rummaged in the pack for the oil lamp. Its glass was broken but it was functional. He struck a lucifer, put it to the wick, and moved on, illuminating the cracks and irregularities in their path.
“That's rummy!” Swinburne muttered. “No echoes!”
It was true: their footsteps and voices, the knocks and scrapes of displaced stones—every sound was sucked into an overwhelming silence.
The eerie atmosphere increased as the party moved ever deeper into the gloom.
“If Speke went on ahead while the Prussians tried to stick us with spears, then surely we must be hot on his heels by now,” Trounce whispered.
Burton clenched his jaw and fists.
After a while, they found themselves catching swift movements from the corners of their eyes—indistinct things flitting through the shadows—but when they looked, there was nothing to see.
The thread of sky was so far away that the darkness was almost complete. Burton raised his lamp. It illuminated men, naked but for loincloths and necklaces of human finger bones, standing dark and motionless against the cliffs to either side. Their faces were scored by networks of scars, making their skin resemble the segmented hide of reptiles; they were holding bows fitted with red-and-black-striped arrows, and their eyes were fixed on Herbert Spencer.