Birds of Prey

While they waited for the servant to return, Hal made arrangements for his temporary absence from the Golden Bough. He decided to take only Aboli with him, and to leave command of the ship to Ned Tyler.

"Do not remain at anchor, for this is a lee shore, and you will be vulnerable if the Buzzard should find you here," he warned Ned. "Patrol well off the coast, and look upon every sail as that of an enemy. If you should encounter the Gull of Moray you are, under no circumstances, to offer battle. I shall return as swiftly as I am able. My signal will be a red Chinese rocket. When you see that, send a boat to pick me up from the shore."

Hal fretted out the rest of that day and night but at first light the masthead hailed the deck. "Small dhow coming out from the bay. Heading this way."

Hal heard the cry in his cabin and hurried on deck. Even without his telescope he recognized Fasilides" servant standing on the open deck of the small craft. He sent for the Bishop. When Fasilides came on deck he was showing the effects of the previous evening's tippling, but he and the servant spoke rapidly in the Geez language. He turned to Hal. "The Emperor and General Nazet are still at the monastery. Horses are waiting for us on the beach. We can be there by noon. My servant has brought clothing for you and your servant that will make you less conspicuous."

In his cabin Hal do

When he and Aboli came back on deck the crew gawked at them, and Fasilides nodded approval. "Now none will recognize you as a Frank."

The longboat deposited them on the beach below the cliffs, where an armed escort was waiting for them. The horses were Arabians with long flowing manes and tails, the large nostrils and fine eyes of the breed. The saddles were carved from a single block of wood and decorated with brass and silver, the saddle-cloths and reins stiff with metal-thread embroidery.

"It is a long ride to the monastery," Fasilides warned them. "We must waste no time."

They climbed the cliff path and came out onto the level ground that lay before Mitsiwa.

"This is the field of our victory!" Fasilides crowed, and stood in his stirrups to make a sweeping gesture that encompassed the grisly plain. Although the battle had taken place weeks before, the carrion birds still hovered over the field like a dark cloud, and the jackals and pariah dogs snarled over piles of bones and chewed at the sun blackened flesh that still clung to them. The flies were blue in the air like swarming bees. They crawled on Hal's face and tried to drink from his eyes and tickled his nostrils. Their white maggots swarmed and wriggled so thickly in the rotting corpses that they appeared to move as though they still lived.

The human scavengers were also at work across the wide battlefield, women and their children in long dusty robes, their mouths and noses covered against the stench. Each carried a basket to hold their gleanings of buttons, small coins, jewellery, daggers and the rings they tore from the skeletal fingers of the corpses.

"Ten thousand enemy dead!" Fasilides said triumphantly, and led them on a track that left the battlefield and skirted the walled town of Mitsiwa. "Nazet is too much a warrior to have our army bottled up behind those walls, he said. "From those heights Nazet commands the terrain." He pointed ahead to the first folds and peaks of the highlands.

Beyond the town on the open ground below the bleak hills the victorious army of Emperor Iyasu was encamped. It was a sprawling city of leather tents and hastily built huts and lean-tos of stone and thatch that stretched five leagues from the sea to the hills. The horses, camels and bullocks stood in great herds amongst the rude dwellings, and a cloud of shifting dust and blue smoke from the fires of dried dung blotted out the blue of the sky. The ammonia cal stink of the animal lines, the smoke and the stench of rubbish dumps rotting in the sun, the dunghills and the latrine pits, the ripe odour of carrion and unwashed humanity under the desert sun rivalled the effusions of the battlefield.

They passed squadrons of cavalry on magnificent chargers with trailing manes and proudly arched tail plumes. The riders were clad in weird armour and fanciful costume of rainbow colours. They were armed with bow and lance and long-barrelled jezails with curved and jewelled butts.

The artillery parks were scattered over a league of sand and rock, and there were hundreds of ca

Regiments of foot-soldiers marched and counter marched They had added to their own diverse and exotic uniforms the plunder of the battlefield so that no two men were dressed alike. Their shields and bucklers, were square, round and oblong, made from brass, wood or rawhide. Their faces were hawklike and dark, and their beards were silver as beach sand, or sable as the wings of the carrion crows that soared above the camp.

"Sixty thousand men," said Fasilides. "With the Tabernacle and Nazet at their head, no enemy can stand before them."

The whores and camp-followers who were not scavenging the battlefield were almost as numerous as the men. They tended the cooking fires or lolled in the sparse shade of the baggage wagons. The Somali women were tall and mysteriously veiled, the Galla girls bare-breasted an, bold-eyed. Some picked out Hal's virile broad-shouldered figure and shouted unintelligible invitations to him, making their meanings plain by the lewd gestures that accompanied them.

"No, Gundwane," Aboli muttered in his ear. "Do not even think about it, for the Galla circumcise their women. Where you might expect a moist and oleaginous welcome, you would find only a dry, scarred pit."

So dense was this array of men, women and beasts that their progress was reduced to a walk. When the faithful recognized the Bishop, they flocked to him and fell to their knees in the path of his horse to beg his blessing.