The Seventh Scroll (41 page)

As the aircraft rose vertically and turned northwards, Nicholas caught a glimpse of the passengers. Jake Helm sat in the front seat beside the pilot, and Colonel Nogo was in the seat behind him. They were both staring down into the river valley, but in seconds the helicopter lifted them away and the machine disappeared beyond the ridge, flying in the direction of the escarpment, and the sound of its engines dwindled into silence. Nicholas crawled out from beneath the boulder and pulled Royan to her feet.

"No more doubts. We know who we are dealing with now. That was Helm and No in the chopper. Helm 9 almost certainly laid the gelly, and Nogo probably led the men who hit our camp last night. Each of them doing the job he does best," Nicholas told her. "So that confirms it. Whoever owns Pegasus is the ugly behind all this. Helm and Nogo are merely the stooges."

"But Nogo is an officer in the Ethiopian army," she protested.

"Welcome to Africa." He did not smile as he said it.

"Here everything is for sale at a price, including government officials and army officers." Now he scowled so that the caked dust on his face was dislodged and filtered down in a fine powdering. "Now, however, our main concern is to get out of the gorge and back to civilization." He looked up the slope. The trail above them had been obliterated beneath the rock fall. "We can't get back that way," he told her, and took her hand. But when he lifted her to her feet she gasped and quickly shifted her weight to her right leg.

My knee!" Then she smiled bravely. "It will be all right.) However, she was limping heavily as they scrambled down to the rivet, terrified that their movements would set off another rock slide. They ended up waist'deep in the water under the bank.

Royan stood behind Nicholas and washed the blood and dust from the wound in his scalp. "Not too bad," she told him. "Doesn't need a stitch."

"I have a tube of Betadyne in my pack," he said. He fished it out, and she smeared the wound with the yellow brown ointment before binding it up with the Paisley bandana.

"That will do." She patted his shoulder.

"Thank the Lord for my burn-bag,'Nicholas remarked as he zipped it closed. "At least we have a few essentials with us. Now our next job is to look for any other survivors."

"Tamte!'she exclaimed.

They floundered along the bank. The river was clogged with loose rock and earth that had fallen from the cliff. In the deeper places they were forced in up to their armpits, and Nicholas carried his pack at arm's length above his head. The loose rock was treacherous, and gave way under them when they tried to scramble out of the water to search for the other members of the caravan.

They found the bodies of two of the monks, both of them crushed and halfburied. They did not even attempt to dig them free. One of the mules lay with one leg in the air and the rest of its body completely covered with broken rock. The pack that it had carried had burst open and the contents were scattered about. The rolled skin and trophies of the dik-dik had been churned into the muck. Nicholas rescued them and strapped them on to his burn-bag.

"More to carry,'Royan warned him.

"Only a pound or two, but worth it," he replied.

They made their way towards the point below the itail where they had last seen Tamre and Aly. But though they searched for almost an hour they found no sign of either of them. The slope above them was devastated: raw ravaged earth, great rocks shattered, bushes and trees uprooted and smashed to kindling.

Royan climbed as high as her injured leg enabled her, then cupped her hands around her mbuth and shouted, "Tamre I Tamre! Tamre!" The echoes took her cry and flung it from' all to valley wall.

"I think he is done for. The poor little devil has been buried,' Nicholas called up to her. "We have been at it an hour now. We cannot afford more time, if we are to get out ourselves. We will have to leave him." She ignored him and worked her way along the rockslide, loose scree rolling under her feet, and he could see that the knee was giving her pain.

"Tamre! Answer me," she called in Arabic. "Tamre!

Where are you?"

"Royan! That's enough. You are going to damage that knee even more. You are putting both of us at risk now.

Give it up!'

At that moment they both heard a soft groan from higher up the slope. Royan scrambled up towards the sound, slipping and sliding back almost as far as she climbed, but at last she gave a cry of horror. Nicholas dumped his pack and went up after her. When he reached her side, he too dropped to his knees.

Tam-re was pinned down in the rubble. His face was barely recognizable. It was torn and lacerated, with half the skin ripped off. Royan had lifted his head into her lap, and was using her sleeve to wipe the filth out of his nostrils to allow him to breathe more freely. Blood was oozing from the corner of his mouth, and when he groaned again it welled up in a fresh flood. Royan dabbed at it, smearing it across his chin.

His lower body was buried, and Nicholas tried to clear the broken rock; but almost immediately he realized the futility of it. A lump of raw rock the size of a billiard table lay across him. It weighed many tons, and must certainly have crushed his spine and pelvis. No single man would be able to move that massive weight unaided. Even if it were ossible, the grinding action of any movement would inevitably aggravate the terrible injuries that Tamre had already sustained.

"Do something, icky," Royan whispered. "We have to do something for him."

Nicholas looked at her and shook his head. Royan's eyes flooded with tears, and they broke over her lower lids and scattered like raindrops into Tamre's upturned face, diluting the blood to the pink of ros6 wine.

"We can't just sit here and let him die," she Protested, and at the sound of her voice Tamre opened his eyes and looked into her face.

He smiled through the blood, and that smile lit his dusty, broken face.

"Ummee!" he whispered. "You are my mother. You are so kind. I love you, my mother."

The words were bitten off and a spasm stiffened his body. His face contorted with agony and he gave a soft, strangled cry, and then slumped. The rigidity went out of his shoulders and his head rolled to one side. Royan sat for long time holding his head and weeping softly, but bitterly, until Nicholas touched her hand and said EentIv. "He is dead, Royan." She nodded. "I know. He held on just long enough to say goodbye to me." He let her mourn a little longer, and then he told her softly, "We must go, my dear."

"You are right. But it is so hard to leave him here. He never had anybody. He was so alone. He called me mother.

I think he truly loved me."

"I know he did," Nicholas assured her, lifting the boy's dead head from her lap and helping her to her feet. "Go wait for me. I will cover him the best I can." down an Nicholas crossed Tamre's hands upon his chest, and folded his fingers around the silver crucifix that hung around his neck. Then he piled loose rock carefully over him, covering his head so that the crows and vultures could not reach him.

He slid down to where she waited in the water, and slung his pack over one shoulder.

"We must go on," he told Royan.

She wiped away the tears with the back of her hand and nodded. "I am ready now."

They waded upstream, pushing hard against the current. The rock-slide had blocked half the river bed and the waters squeezed through the gap that was left. When at last they reached the point on the bank above the avalanche, they climbed out of the river and picked their way up the steep bank until at last they could crawl out on to the intact section of the pathway.

They took a moment to recover and looked back. The river below the rockslide was running red-brown with mud. Even if the monks at the monastery downstream had not heard the explosions, they would be alarmed by that flood of discoloured water and would come to investigate. They would find the bodies and take them down for decent burial. That thought comforted Royan a little as they struck out along the trail, with two days' hard travel still ahead of them.

Royan was limping heavily now, but each time Nichoto help her she brushed his hand away. "I am all right. It's just a bit stiff." She would not allow him to inspect the knee, but kept on stubbornly along the trail ahead of him.

They marched mostly in silence for the rest of that day. Nicholas respected her grief and was grateful for her reticence. This ability to be quiet and yet not give out a sense of alienation and withdrawal to those around her was one of the qualities he admired in her. They spoke briefly late that afternoon while they paused to rest beside the path.

"The only consolation is that now Pegasus will believe that we are safely buried under the rock-slide and they won't bother to come looking for us again. We can push on without wasting time scouting the trail ahead," Nicholas told her.

They camped that night below the escarpment, just before the path began the climb up the vertical wall.

Nicholas led her well off the path, into a heavily wooded gully, and built a small screened fire that could not be seen from the trail.

Here at last she relented and allowed him to examine her knee. It was bruised and swollen, and hot to the touch.

"You shouldn't be walking on this," he told her.

"Do I have any option?" she asked, and he had no reply. He wetted his bandana from the water bottle and bound up her leg As tightly as he dared without cutting Off the circulation. Then he found a phial of Brufen in his burn-bag and made her take two of these anti, inflaminatories.

"It feels better already," she told him.

They shared the last bar of survival -rations from his pack, sitting hunched up over the fire and talking quietly, still subdued and shaken by their experiences.

"What will happen when we reach the top?" Royan asked. "Will the trucks still be parked where we left them?

Will the men that Boris left to guard them still be there?

What will happen if we run into the men from Pegasus again?"

"I can't give you any answers. We will just have to face each problem as it comes up."

"One thing I am looking forward to when we reach Addis Ababa - reporting the massacre of Tamre and the others to the Ethiopian police. I want Helm and his gang to pay for what they have done."

He was quiet for a while before he replied. "I don't know if that is the wisest thing to do," he ventured at last.

"What do you mean? We. were witnesses to murder.

We cannot let them get away with it."

"Just remember that we want to return to Ethiopia. If we make a huge fuss now, we will have the entire valley swarming with troops and police. It may put an end to our further attempts to solve Taita's riddle, and to trace the tomb of Marnose."

"I hadn't thought of that," she said thoughtfully. "But still, it was murder, and Tamre-'

"I know, I know," he soothed her. "But there are more certain ways of wreaking vengeance on Pegasus than trying to turn them over to Ethiopian justice. Consider for the moment the fact that Nogo is working with Helm. We saw him in the helicopter. If Pegasus have an army colonel in their pay, who else is working for them? The police? The head of the army? Members of the cabinet? We just don't know at this stage."

"I hadn't thought about that either," she admitted.

"Let's begin to think African from here on, and take a leaf out of Taita's scrolls. Like him we must be devious and cunning. We don't go rushing in shouting accusations. If we could just sneak out of the country, leaving everybody to believe that we are buried under the avalanche, that might be ideal. It would make our return to the gorge that much easier. Unfortunately I don't think we will be able to get away with that. But from now on, we should be as cagey and careful as circumstances permit." She stared into the dancing flames for a long while, then sighed and asked, "You said there is a better vengeance to he had on Pegasus. What did you have in mind?"

"Why, simply whisking Marnose's treasure out from under their noses." She laughed for the first time that long cruel day. "You are right, of course. Whoever owns Pegasus wants it desperately enough to kill for it. We must hope that depriving him of it will hurt him almost as badly as he has hurt us."

Both of them were so tired that it was already half-light'when they woke the next morning.

As soon as Royan tried to stand she groaned and sank back. He went to her immediately, and she made no protest when he placed her bare leg across his lap.

He unwrapped the bandana, and frowned as he saw the knee. It was nearly twice its normal girth, and the bruising was plum and ripe grape. He wet the bandana again, and rewrapped the knee. He made her take the last two Brufen from the phial, and then helped her to her feet.

"How does it feel?" he asked anxiously, and she hobbled a few paces and smiled at him bravely.

"It will be all right as soon as I walk the stiffness out of it, I' sure." He looked up the escarpment. So close in under the wall, the height was foreshortened, but he recalled every tortuous step of the way. It had taken them a full day to come down.

"Of course it will." He smiled encouragement at her, and took her arm.

"Lean on me. It'll be a stroll in the park.

They toiled upwards all that morning. The trail seemed to rise more steeply with every pace they took. She never complained, but she was ashen pate and sweating with the pain. By midday they had not yet reached the waterfall, and Nicholas made her stop to rest. They had nothing to eat, but she drank thirstily from the water bottle. He did not try to ration her, but limited himself to a single mouthful.

When she tried to rise, and go on, she gasped and staggered so violently that she might have fallen if he had not steadied her.

"Damn! Damn! Damn!" she swore bitterly. "It's stiffened up on me."

"Never mind," he said cheerfully, and stripped his bumbag of all but the most crucial items of equipment. He kept the dik-dik skin, however, rolling it into a tight ball and stuffing it into the bag. Then he rebuckled it around his waist, and grinned at her cheerfully. "Skinny little thing like you. Hop on my back."