The High Flyer by Nicholas Shakespeare

Author:Nicholas Shakespeare [Nicholas Shakespeare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2009-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

5

Senator Zamora had arrived late at the Tercio Museum.

“Pablo, I’m sorry,” he said, excited. He had been walking on Playa Benitez.

“Did you find the conger eel?” asked Pablo, sitting above him on the wall.

“I did not,” said Senator Zamora. He had been monitoring the shoreline for oil. “But I did find – this!” Triumphantly, he held up a small and spiky object coated in tar.

“What is it?”

“A murex brandaris!” From such a shell the Phoenicians had extracted their dye, the exact shade of his purple cardigan. He raised his fist to Cadiz. The evidence, if not yet irrefutable, was mounting.

Pablo, unimpressed, jumped off the wall. He wanted to hear about his great-grandfather’s death.

Senator Zamora replaced the shell in his pocket. He waited for his grandson to pick himself up. Over Pablo’s head he caught sight of Wavery and Silkleigh. The two men were walking up Paseo Colon.

“Señor Wavery!” said Senator Zamora, thinking if he had been the Consul General he would have been only too delighted for an excuse to extricate himself from his frightful compatriot. He grasped Wavery’s arm. “I am taking the boy to see my father’s relics. If you have a moment . . . ”

“Chance of a lifetime, old soul,” said Silkleigh, cheerfully.

Wavery gratefully allowed Zamora to escort him into the museum.

They stood in an empty room, before a flat glass cabinet. Mindful of the sign SILENCIO, Zamora bent over the glass and in a low voice told his small audience about the man who had worn the uniform displayed there.

Now he was here, Wavery was curious about the man whose portrait, without his later double chin, bloomed everywhere in the city. Pablo less so. There had been no competition for Hercules as subject for one of his two holiday tasks. But the choice of the Tercio’s history in Abyla had been emphatically his grandfather’s. Zamora had lured him to the Tercio Museum with the promise of several ice creams afterwards. “And four rides on the rocking horse,” said Pablo, whose preferred vision of the Tercio was the rout caused every week by the bread delivery. “Yes, yes, child. That too.”

Zamora described his father’s end, asphyxiated by dust in a valley behind Abyla, in a garrison besieged by Abdel Akbar. “His battle cry was viva la muerte! He was one of the Death-Betrothed. He made war against the shadows. He was a hero, child.”

Lieutenant Zamora had been the garrison commander. He respected his enemy. The Moors were not women with beards. Soon Abdel Akbar’s army would descend on Abyla. The garrison was all that stood between them.

Abdel Akbar, the dropsical gallows bird from the mountains beyond, had smelled the weakness of the men who defended Abyla. Among Lieutenant Zamora’s garrison he had smelled it in the Colour Sergeant who had done everything in his power to avoid another tour of duty. One night Abdel Akbar’s men squirmed over the blockhouse wall and carried him away.

Sun found the Sergeant’s body by the gate, his empty stomach filled with straw and amethyst.

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