The Amulet of Power - Mike Resnick [9]
“No,” he said. “It is not in Mareish’s tomb. I’ve looked there.”
“Well, this is all very interesting, whether true or a fairy tale, but it doesn’t explain why people are trying to kill me.”
“Hear me out,” said Mason. “They’re after you because they think you’ve got the Amulet.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!” Lara protested. “It’s a Sudanese artifact. Why in the world would they think that it’s here in Egypt?”
“Because Chinese Gordon was smarter than anyone gave him credit for.”
“Chinese Gordon?” she repeated. There was something familiar about that name. . . . Then she had it. “Are you talking about General Charles Gordon?”
“You are feeling better,” said Mason with a smile. “Gordon made his reputation by winning a series of absolutely brilliant battles in China in 1863 and 1864, and got his nickname there, too. Chinese Gordon, the Englishman who was the equivalent of any ten Chinese generals—or so they liked to say.”
“I’ve read about him,” said Lara. “He was one of the great Victorian heroes. After China they sent him to the Sudan, and he single-handedly ended slavery there. He was probably more popular than anyone in England except Queen Victoria herself.”
“With people who didn’t know him, anyway,” said Mason. “He was a hardheaded, totally undisciplined sort, always ignoring his orders. The only reason he wasn’t mustered out was because he succeeded spectacularly every time he disobeyed his superiors.” He paused. “They even made a motion picture about him. Huge budget. Of course they hired an American, Charlton Heston, to portray him, but then what can you expect from Hollywood?”
“Okay, we’re talking about the same General Gordon, the one who died at the fall of Khartoum,” said Lara. “That was in 1885, well over a century ago. What does it have to do with me?”
“I’m coming to that,” said Mason. “Eat your melon and be patient.”
“I’m not much better at taking orders than Gordon was,” she shot back. “I’ll eat when I’m ready to.”
“I thought you were starving.”
“Just keep talking.”
He shrugged. “Where was I?”
“The fall of Khartoum.”
“No,” he corrected her. “Earlier than that. There was a Sudanese warrior, a holy man known as the Mahdi—the Expected One. I think Sir Laurence Olivier played him in the movie. Typical Hollywood, eh? Anyway, we sent an army against him, and he led them deeper and deeper into the desert and eventually destroyed them, down to the very last man. It was one of the worst defeats in our history.”
“I know. That’s when the government decided to send Gordon back to the Sudan.”
“Well, yes and no. We were putting down uprisings in South Africa and all over the world, and the government didn’t want yet another war. But they couldn’t just wash their hands of it, not with an entire army dead in the desert and the public demanding action. So they hit upon sending their greatest hero—Gordon, of course—to the Sudan. But because they didn’t want a war, they sent him with just a couple officers and nothing else: no army, no money, no artillery. He was to go there, putter around for a while, and come home, and then the government could mollify the people by saying, in essence, ‘Well, if Gordon couldn’t solve the situation, then it obviously can’t be solved.’ “
She nodded. “But it didn’t work out that way.”
Mason smiled. “Gordon disobeyed his orders, as always. Even though the Mahdi commanded an army of more than a million men, Gordon put together a battalion of ragtag desert warriors, paid them out of his own personal fortune, and actually defeated the Mahdi at Omdurman.”
“I know about the fall of Khartoum—every British student learns about it,” said Lara. “But I never heard of Omdurman.”
“Most people haven’t,” replied Mason. “Omdurman is just across the Nile from Khartoum. Outnumbered twenty to one, Gordon managed to wrest a victory from the jaws of almost certain defeat. Military scholars think it was a brilliant job of soldiering.” He paused for a long moment. “The truth was much stranger.”
“In what way?”
“The Mahdi was not the simple illiterate most people