Golden Lion. Wilbur Smith

      Two small boys ran ahead of their mother and grandmother along the water’s edge, squealing with excitement every time they discovered anything deposited upon it by the sea, no matter how trifling and insignificant.

      ‘There is another one,’ cried the eldest in Somali. He pointed ahead to where a ship’s wooden spar was washed ashore, trailing a long sheet of torn canvas. It was attached to the body of a white man who had lashed himself to the spar with a twist of hempen rope whilst he still lived. Now the two boys stood over his carcass laughing.

      ‘The birds have pecked out one of his eyes,’ shouted the eldest boy.

      ‘And the fish have bitten off one of his arms,’ his little brother gloated, not to be outdone. A shred of torn sail canvas, obviously applied by the man while still alive, was knotted around the stump of his amputated arm as a tourniquet, and his clothing had been scorched by fire. It hung off his gaunt frame in tatters.

      ‘Look!’ screeched the elder boy. ‘Look at the buckle on his sword-belt. It must be made of gold or silver. We will be rich.’ He knelt beside the body and tugged at the metal buckle. At which the dead man groaned hollowly and rolled his head to glare at the boys with his one good eye. Both children screamed with horror, and the elder released his grip on the sword-belt and sprang to his feet. They rushed back to their mother and clung to her skirts whimpering and whining with terror.

      The mother ran to examine the booty, dragging the children along with her on her skirts. The grandmother hobbled along behind them. Her daughter dropped to her knees beside the body and she slapped the man’s face hard. He groaned again.

      ‘Zinky is right. The Ferengi is still alive.’ She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out the sickle with which she cut the grass to feed her chickens.

      ‘What are you going to do?’ Her mother panted from her run.

      ‘I am going to cut his throat, of course.’ The woman took hold of a handful of the man’s sodden hair and pulled his head back to expose his throat. ‘We don’t want to have to argue with him about who owns the belt and buckle.’ She laid the curved blade against the side of his neck, and the man coughed weakly but did not resist.

      ‘Wait!’ ordered the grandmother sharply. ‘I have seen that buckle before when I was in Djibouti with your father. This man is a great Ferengi Lord. He owns his own ship. He has great wealth. If we save his life he will be grateful and he might give us a gold coin, or even two!’

      Her daughter looked dubious, and considered the proposition for a while, still holding the sickle blade to his throat. ‘What about his beautiful metal buckle of great value?’

      ‘We will keep it, naturally.’ Her mother was exasperated with her daughter’s lack of acuity. ‘If he ever asks for it we will tell him we have never seen it.’ Her daughter removed the sickle blade from the man’s throat.

      ‘So what do we do with him now?’

      ‘We take him to the doctor in the village.’

      ‘How?’

      ‘We lay him on his back on this strip of lembu.’ She indicated the canvas strip wrapped around the spar. ‘And you and I pull him.’ She turned to regard her grandchildren sternly. ‘The boys will help us, of course.’

      In his head the man was screaming. But his vocal cords were so parched and cracked and ravaged by smoke and flame that the only sound that emerged was a reedy, tremulous wheezing, as pitiful as the air escaping from a pair of broken bellows.

      There had been a time, barely a month or two ago, when he had set his face to the storm and grinned with savage glee as the wind and sea-spray hurled themselves against his weather-beaten countenance. Yet now the warm, jasmine-scented breeze that barely wafted into the room through the open windows felt to him like thorns being dragged across the pitiful tatters of his skin. He was consumed by pain, scourged by it, and though the doctor lifting the bandages from his face was doing his best to work with the most consummate delicacy, each additional inch of exposure stabbed him with another needle-sharp stiletto of pure, concentrated agony. And with every infliction came a new, unwanted memory of battle: the searing heat and brightness of the flame; the deafening roar of gunfire and burning wood; the crushing impact of timber against his bones.

      ‘I am sorry, but there is nothing else to be done,’ the doctor murmured, though the man to whom he spoke did not understand much Arabic. The doctor’s beard was thin and silvery and there were deeply lined, sallow pouches beneath his eyes. He had practised his craft for the best part of fifty years and acquired an air of wisdom and venerability that calmed and reassured most of the patients in his care. But this man was different. His injuries were so severe that he should not be alive at all, let alone sitting virtually upright in bed. His one arm had been amputated, only Allah the merciful knew how. His ribcage on that same side of his body resembled the side of a barrel that had been stove in by a battleaxe. Much of his skin was still scorched and blistered and the scent of the flowers that grew in such profusion beneath the open window was lost in the roast-pork odour of burned flesh and the sickening stench of pus and putrefaction that his body now exuded.

      The fire had claimed his extremities. Two of the fingers on his remaining hand had been reduced to stumps of blackened bone that the doctor had also sawn off, along with six of the man’s ten toes. He had lost his left eye, pecked out by sea vultures. The lid of the other eye had all but burnt away so that he now stared out at the world with a cold, unblinking intensity. But vision was not the worst of his losses; the patient’s manhood had been reduced to little more than a charred stump of shiny, livid scar tissue. When – or more likely if – he ever rose from his sickbed, he would have to squat like a woman to urinate. If he wished to satisfy a lover, the only means available to him would be his mouth, but the chances of anyone being willing to let this particular maw anywhere near her body, even if being paid to do so, were very remote indeed.

      It could only be by the will of God that the man had survived. The doctor sighed to himself and shook his head as he regarded the devastation revealed when the bandages were unwound. No,