Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (43 page)

“I'm all right,” Burton croaked, but, to his horror, he suddenly found himself weeping.

“It's the shock, so it is,” Wilde said. “A dash of brandy will put you right. Pour generously, Bertie, the captain probably hasn't tasted the good stuff for a long while.”

“I haven't—I haven't tasted it at all since—since Dut'humi,” Burton said, his voice weak and quavering.

Wells passed him a glass but Burton's hand was shaking so violently that Wilde had to put his own around it and guide the drink to the explorer's mouth. Burton gulped, coughed, took a deep shuddering breath, and sat back.

“Quips,” he said. “It's really you.”

“It is, too, Captain. Are you feeling a little more steady now?”

“Yes. My apologies. I think—I never—I never expected to find a little piece of home in this hellish world.”

Wilde chuckled and looked down at himself. “Not so little any more, I fear.” He addressed Herbert Wells: “Bertie, you'd best be getting off—we don't have much time. The devil himself will be snapping at our heels soon enough, so he will.”

Wells nodded. “Richard,” he said, “I'm going to prepare our escape. All being well, I'll see you within a couple of hours.”

“Escape?”

Wilde said, “Are you fit to take a walk? I'll explain as we go.”

“Yes.” Burton drained his glass and stood up. “By ‘the devil himself,’ I assume you mean Crowley.”

The three men moved to the door and started down the stairs.

“That I do, Captain.”

They reached the lower hallway. Wells opened the street door and peered out. The three Tommies were waiting by the car. The little war correspondent nodded to Burton and Wilde and slipped out into the mist, closing the portal behind him.

Wilde gestured to the opening in the side wall. “Into the basement, if you please, Captain.”

Burton stepped through and started down the wooden stairs he found beyond. “I don't understand Crowley and all this mediumistic business, Quips. The only evidence I've seen of it is the Germans occasionally manipulating the weather.”

“When the Hun destroyed London, they killed most of our best mediums, which is horribly ironic, do you not think? Here we are. Wait a moment.”

The stairs had ended in a large basement, which was filled with old furniture and tea chests. Wilde crossed to a heavy armoire standing against the far wall.

“Ironic?” Burton asked.

“Yes, because our clairvoyants didn't predict it! As a matter of fact, we now think their opposite numbers, on the German side, may have perfected some sort of mediumistic blanket that can render things undetectable.”

“Such as the approaching A-Bomb, for instance?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Ah-ha! That's got it!”

Wilde had been fiddling with something behind the big wooden unit. Now the whole thing slid smoothly aside, revealing the entrance to a passage. He turned and grinned at Burton. “Do y'know, I became the captain of a rotorship thanks to you? Do you remember old Nathaniel Lawless? A fine gentleman!”

“I remember him very clearly, and I agree.”

“After you wangled me the job on the poor old
Orpheus
, Lawless would never settle for another cabin boy. He sponsored my training, helped me rise through the ranks, and, before you know it, I was given captaincy of HMA
Audacious.
A lovely vessel, so she was, but the war had broken out by then and she was put to fiendish use. I soon found that I was losing myself in the mesmeric brutality of battle. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it's looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. It took me a few years, I must confess, to realise that vulgarity.”

He indicated that Burton should follow and disappeared into the secret passage.

“So I had myself drummed out of the Air Force.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Through what they call ‘conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman.’ I inspired the wrath of a certain Colonel Queensberry, and he rather gleefully put his proverbial boot to my backside. It caused a bit of a stir at the time, I can tell you.”

“And afterward you became a newspaper man?”

“Aye, I did that—going back to my roots, as you might say—and I wound up in Tabora.”

The passage made a sharp turn to the right. As they continued on, Burton looked at the small lights that, strung along a long wire, gave illumination. “How do these work?” he asked, pointing at one.

“Electricity.”

“Ah! Like I saw on the
Britannia!
Was it Isambard who mastered the technique?”

“Good Lord!” Wilde cried out. “Brunel! I haven't thought of him in years! What a genius he was!”

“And for all his faults, loved by the public,” Burton noted.

“To be sure! To be sure! Ah, what a delight it must be to be a Technologist! So much more romantic than being the editor of a newspaper! I can assure you that popularity is the one insult I have never suffered. But to answer your question: yes, he mastered electricity—in 1863, as it happens.”

They hurried on, with Wilde panting and puffing as he propelled his bulk forward.

“Where are we going, Quips?”

“All in good time, Captain.”

Burton began to wonder if the tunnel spanned the entire city.

“So the mediums,” he said. “They were killed when London fell?”

“So they were. And we had no more of them until 1907, when Crowley came to the fore. In recent years he's focused his talents on defending this city, which is why the Germans have never managed to conquer it.”

“Surely, then, he should be regarded as a hero? Why is it that no one seems to have a good word to say of him?”

Wilde shrugged. “That's a difficult one. There's just something about him. He's sinister. People suspect that he has some sort of hidden agenda. Here we are.”

They'd reached a door. Wilde knocked on it, the same arrhythmic sequence Wells had used earlier. It was opened by a seven-foot-tall Askari—obviously of the Masai race—who whispered, “You'll have to be quick. There's some sort of flap on. They're going to move the prisoner.”

Wilde muttered an acknowledgement. He and Burton stepped into what appeared to be a records room, followed the soldier out of it into a brightly lit corridor, and ran a short distance along it until they came to a cell door. However, when it was unlocked and opened, the room behind it proved to be not a cell at all but a very large and luxurious chamber, decorated in the English style, with Jacobean furniture and paintings on its papered walls.

In its middle, there was a metal frame with a wizened little man—naked but for a cloth wrapped around his loins—suspended upright inside it. He was held in place by thin metal cables that appeared to have been bolted straight through his parchment-like skin into the bones beneath. His flesh was a network of long surgical scars and he was horribly contorted, his arms and legs twisted out of shape, their joints swollen and gnarled, and his spine curved unnaturally to one side. His finger-and toenails were more than two feet long and had grown into irregular spirals. Bizarrely, they were varnished black.

Large glass bulbs also hung from the frame, and were connected to the figure by tubes through which pink liquid was pumping. Each one held an organ: a throbbing heart, pulsating lungs, things that quivered and twitched.

Burton saw all this in a single glance, then his eyes rested on the man's face and he couldn't look away.

It was Palmerston.

Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, was bald, and the skin of his face was stretched so tightly that it rendered him almost featureless. But despite the eyes being mere slits, the nose a jagged hole, and the mouth a horribly wide frog-like gash; despite that the ears had been replaced by two brass forward-pointing hearing trumpets, riveted directly into the sides of his skull; despite all this, it was plainly Palmerston.

The old man's eyes glittered as he watched his visitors enter.

Wilde closed the door and stepped to one side of it. He gently pushed Burton forward. The king's agent approached and stopped in front of the man who'd once been prime minister. He tried to think of something to say, but all that came out was: “Hello.”

Just above Palmerston's head, an accordion-like apparatus suddenly jerked then expanded with a wheeze. It gave a number of rapid clicks, expelled a puff of steam, then contracted and emitted a sound like a gurgling drain. Words bubbled out of it.

“You filthy traitorous bastard!”

Burton recoiled in shock. “What?”

“You backstabbing quisling!”

The explorer turned to Wilde. “Did you bring me here to be maligned?”

“Please allow him a moment to get it out of his system, Captain. It's been pent up for half a century.”

“Prussian spy! Treasonous snake! You dirty collaborator!”

“I have no idea what he's talking about. Is he sane?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“How old is he?

“A hundred and thirty-four.”

“You never bloody told me!” Palmerston gurgled.

“Have you finally run out of insults, Pam?” Burton asked.

“Lord Palmerston
, you insolent cur! You never told me!”

“Told you what?”

The misshapen figure squirmed and stretched spasmodically.

Wilde said, “Calm yourself, please, Lord Palmerston. We don't have time for tantrums.”

The ex-prime minister went limp. He glared at Burton with sulphurous hatred. The accordion-thing shook and rattled and groaned, expanded, blew out more steam, and squeezed shut.

“I sent you to Africa to find the Eye of Nāga. You succeeded in your mission but you neglected to report that, in the course of retrieving it, you'd visited the future!”

“Sir,” Burton replied. “You must understand: you're berating me for something that, from my point of view, I haven't done yet.”

“You saw this damned war. You saw that the Germans were running rampant over the entire globe. You saw that the British Empire had been reduced to this one small enclave. Yet you purposely kept it from me! You were working for the Prussians all along!”

“No, I was not.”

“Then why?”

“How can I possibly account for decisions I haven't yet made?”

“Traitor!”

Burton looked at Oscar Wilde and gave a helpless shrug.

Wilde stepped forward. “Gentlemen, let us get straight to the point. Captain, if I might explain—Lord Palmerston is blamed by the majority of Britishers for the woeful position we find ourselves in.”

“Yes, Bertie Wells expressed such a sentiment.”

“Indeed. Fortunately, Bertie has acted counter to his views on the matter out of loyalty to me, for I, along with a few others, am of the opinion that Lord Palmerston only ever had the best interests of the Empire in mind when he made the decisions that led to this war.”

Burton looked at the monstrosity hanging in the frame and murmured, “I don't disagree. But, Quips, those ‘best interests’ were envisioned according to the manner in which he comprehended the influences at play: the political landscape; the perceived shape of society and culture; the advice of his ministers; and so forth. In my opinion, his judgement of those things was erroneous in the extreme, and so too, inevitably, were his decisions.”

Palmerston emitted a spiteful hiss.

Wilde nodded. “A fair statement, but is it not the case that the manner in which a man apprehends the present is shaped by his past?”

“Then where does the responsibility for his decisions lay? With Time itself? If so, then you're proposing that Palmerston is a victim of Fate.”

“I am. Furthermore, I submit that you are, too. So perhaps you should stop striving to understand what is happening and, instead, simply allow it to play out however it will. You've just learned that you'll return to the past, which, I'm sure, is very welcome news indeed. Bertie is currently making arrangements to ensure that you get out of Tabora. When you do so, I suggest that you placidly follow whatever sequence of events leads you home.”

Burton was suddenly filled with longing. How he missed Mrs. Angell, his comfortable old saddlebag armchair, his library, even Mr. Grub, the street vendor, whose pitch was on the corner of Montagu Place!

“Captain,” Wilde continued, “just as Lord Palmerston made his decisions according to how the past taught him to gauge the state of affairs, so, too, will you. In 1863, you'll determine—you
did
determine—not to reveal that you had survived for a number of years in a war-torn future where you witnessed the death of the British Empire. Our history books, such as they are, don't reveal anything that casts light on why you took this course of action. Biographies written about you don't even mention that you were the king's agent, for that was a state secret. They say the second half of your life was lived quietly, indulging in scholarly pursuits. This is only partially true. What really happened is that you exiled yourself to Trieste, on the northeastern coast of Italy, from there to watch the seeds of war sprouting. You died in that city in 1890, ten years before the Greater German Empire invaded its neighbouring countries.”

Sir Richard Francis Burton moistened his lips with his tongue. He raised his hand and put his fingertips to the deep and jagged scar on his left cheek, the one made by a Somali spear back in '55.

“Am I to take it that you're blaming me for the war?” he asked huskily.

“Yes!” Palmerston gurgled.

“No, not at all,” Wilde corrected. “People are wrong to condemn Lord Palmerston, and Lord Palmerston is wrong to condemn you. You do not represent the evils of this world, Captain Burton—you represent hope.”

“Because you think I can alter history?”

“Indeed so. Lord Palmerston and I were already aware that Crowley had, in 1914, detected an aberrant presence in Africa. When Bertie Wells told me—about eighteen months ago—that he'd met you, we realised what that aberration was and how it—you—could be employed to change everything.”

“So whatever the circumstances I find when I return to 1863, you want me to somehow suppress the reactions that my own past has instilled in me, ignore what I consider to be my better judgement, and—” he turned to face Palmerston,“—and tell you everything I've seen here during the past five years?”