A young German knight, Eberhardt von Steltzenberg, danced himself into a frenzy and opened his heart to a nefarious force.
The rhythm grew faster and faster. The crowd shouted louder and louder. The drummers beat harder and harder.
The witch doctor suddenly stood stock-still. Sensing a spiritual climax he threw an arm up into the air.
‘Silence!’ he bellowed, and the drummers and musicians stopped.
The crowd gave a great groan as though winded by a blow. A sorrowful sound; as if coughed up out of the recesses of their souls.
The silence was overwhelming. It pressed itself into their heads. Men cried out and fell down on their knees.
Abba Athanasius called out to the drummers, in a quiet voice, ‘Softly,’ and they began a gentle rhythm.
As they played, the black priest picked a large metal censer off the ground. It was made of three heavy iron chains attached to the rim of a metal pan. A lid with holes in it slid down the chains to cover the pan. Abba Athanasius flung the container into the fire and scooped it out, brimming over with hot coals.
As he was doing this, a gang of huge Nubian men pushed their way in through the crowd. They were naked as bulls, faces as powerful and impassive as cliffs.
Four of them were holding staves with solid metal ends, which they used to push the crowd aside. Behind them came a man lugging a narrow iron bucket, and two more carrying a heavy chest between them. Another four held the poles of a litter supporting a three-foot-long lump of rock like black glass. The Nubian Deathstone. The men staggered under its weight.
It was so dark and shiny that it seemed to have a light inside it, as if it knew something.
They pushed their way through the worshippers. When they came into the clearing they set the litter down. The priest leaped onto it, straddling the Deathstone, silhouetted in the light of the fire. His hands grasped the shaft of a sledgehammer and swung it up over his head. With a cry he brought down a swingeing blow on the stone.
The sound rang out and a lump the size of a fist split off. The priest scrambled to pick it up. He held the rock above his head to show to the devotees. They groaned like cattle.
Abba Athanasius flung the lump into the metal mortar that the Nubians had brought with them. The men with poles arranged themselves around it and began to pound the rock to powder with their metal staves, just like the women in their home villages pounded cassava. They drove the heavy poles down so that they thudded in a constant rhythm.
As they worked, the priest threw open the chest; using a trowel he heaped incense from it into the censer. Lumps of myrrh produced a cloud of sweet fragrance. Other spices threw up puffs of white smoke. Finally he poured in trowels of opium resin.
When the rock was ground to powder the priest stood up on the litter and raised the heavy mortar above his head. A Nubian held the censer up to him by its chains. Abba Athanasius bent down and carefully poured the fine black crystal powder onto the pile of ingredients and then slid the cover down the chains and over the pan.
Black smoke poured out of holes in the lid. The huge monk took hold of the chains and whirled the censer around his head, sending out clouds of sparks into the night whilst he chanted prayers.
He gestured to the crowd to kneel and made his way around the rings of worshippers with the censer, dispensing a strange benediction. As he moved along the lines of kneeling figures he held the chain so that the pan passed underneath each bowed head. Evil, black clouds of narcotic smoke poured out, and each worshipper took a deep inhalation.
Eberhardt kneeled and stared at the Deathstone. Its gleaming black depths mesmerised him; he could feel it reaching out to him, pulling him into its mystery.
What was its secret knowledge?
Where had it come from?
What was it saying to him?
He knew he had to find its source, hidden somewhere in the heart of Africa. It would be his purpose in life.
He heard the priest coming along the row. The young knight had been shaken by the worship; his broad shoulders trembled with each breath. He bowed his head as the priest neared; his long, brown hair fell around his face. Nervously he brushed it back behind his ears. The huge man was mumbling some blessing in a language that he did not understand, over and over again as he walked slowly along.
Eberhardt could see the red glow of the censer out of the corner of his eye and prepared himself.
The first whiff of smoke caught at his nose, intensely fragrant. He forced himself to take a huge gulp of it as it passed under him.
Hot, noxious vapour filled his throat and bronchioles. He felt a seizure in his respiratory tract under the powerful chemical assault.
His throat burned and convulsed. He could not breathe. The strong opiate hit his brain as the black miasma of the Deathstone worked its way into his body and being.
Darkness invaded his heart.
He felt both lifted up and cast down, overawed and appalled. He had been invested by something profound yet terrible.
He clutched at his throat but no air came in. He passed out and fell face down on the ground.
‘Alexander, this is your father.’
The upper-class growl was slurred by drink.
His father’s use of Alex’s full name was a danger signal. He was in a fighting mood, when the frustrations in his life boiled over and he picked fights with those closest to him to displace his anger.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Alex was at his desk in his family’s house in Fulham. He did a quick mental calculation: it was after lunchtime so his father must be drunk. He could picture him now, wearing his old tweed suit, sitting in his worn armchair in the drawing room of Akerley, the family house in Herefordshire, where he lived alone, looking out of the big bay window over the parkland.
Sir Nicholas Devereux was an ex-cavalry officer and an alcoholic. The Devereux had been loyal servants of the Crown since Guy D’Evreux had fought for the Conqueror at Hastings. There had been one of the family serving in the Household Division every year since Waterloo — until Alex left without a son to replace him. Membership of the family might have its privileges but it came with its burdens as well.
Alex knew where his father’s problems stemmed from: the source of all known evil — his grandmother. She was an intelligent, strong-minded woman trapped by social convention in the role of an aristocratic adornment. Her talents had turned sour and she took to displacing her personal disappointments on others, dismembering their characters with a cold sadism. Her acidic remarks had been fired at her son from the end of the long dining-room table for years, and had knocked his confidence to bits, driving him to drink and then to taking out his frustration violently on his wife. She had told Alex later that the first time he had beaten her had been on their wedding night.
Alex sometimes wondered if he was next in line for this legacy. Whether he would simply repeat the pattern of negative behaviour, transmitted down through the generations in a cycle of anger and destruction. The Devereux might be an ancient, landed family but the poison and the privilege seemed to go hand in hand.
However, it was one thing to understand his father’s problems, another entirely to deal with them. Alex’s upbringing had been a painful one, surrounded by the conflict between the Devereux’s supposed noble grandeur and wealth, and the crappy reality of the life around him — his father’s drinking bouts and his attacks on Alex’s mother. He remembered the fear that gripped him and his younger sister, Georgina, when the fights erupted. The two of them used to run off to a barn to hide until they guessed that their father