Chapter 16, Alexis's in Wonderland
By
UCSBdad
Disclaimer: More of the Castle I do not own. Rating: M, in places. Not this one, though. More of a K. Time: After Four of a Kind.
Chapter 16: The African Queen.
"Africa?" Castle said. "The land of warlords, failed states, blood diamonds and child soldiers? You're kidding." He shook his head. "Of course, you're not kidding. Why would I ever think you were kidding?"
Metford glowered at Castle from behind his desk. "If I may proceed?"
"Like we could stop you?" Kate murmured.
Metford did his best to smile. "We'll take a look at your transportation and then we'll get you your virus shots."
They followed him to the red square where sat a small, steel hulled boat. "The craft is fifty two feet long and is driven by a diesel engine which looks like a local steam engine. As with all of the transport we've provided for you, this is far more advanced than it would appear to the casual observer."
"What's with the mast?" Rodgers asked. "I don't see any sails."
"There's a crow's nest on top. The mast is for observation purposes only." Metford then droned on about the boat itself.
The only thing that interested Rodgers was the weapons suite the boat carried, two Maxim machine guns, mounted fore and aft with bolt action rifles, British Lee-Enfields, and automatic pistols, Colt M 1911A1s, for each of the crewmembers. In addition there were two Holland and Holland elephant guns, chambered for the .577 Nitro Express cartridge.
"Elephant guns?" Rodgers asked.
"Or maybe Tyrannosaurus Rex gun?" Castle asked sarcastically.
Metford nodded. "An elephant gun, if you will, or for rhinos, or hippos, or any of a number of large, powerful predators found in your own Africas." He smiled again, which always gave Castle the willies. "Shall we see about your virus shots?"
As usual, they sat on the boat and Rodgers went over what they had learned about their destination. "Again, no one earthshaking event that changed everything, just a million small changes that makes this Earth totally different from ours. In this case, Africa is still largely unexplored and un-colonized by Europeans. The British do hold the tip of southern Africa, the French have some of Algeria and Senegal, the Belgians have the mouth of the Congo River, and the Portuguese hold the coastline of Angola and Mozambique. The Italians and Germans are sniffing around Africa, but haven't made any claims yet. So, we'll be on the Nile all by ourselves.""
"All in all, the level of technology is about 1900 or so." Becks added.
"But the Nile itself is different." Castle noted. "Lake Tanganyika drains south into the Nile, making the river about a thousand miles longer. And the Sudd, the ginormous swamp in the southern Sudan, is even bigger and harder to cross than in our Earths. We'll be south of the swamp, but if we have to try to find a way north, we'll be in trouble."
"Volcanoes." Simone said softly.
"Of course they have volcanoes." Castle said. "And headhunters and cannibals and big, hungry prides of lions."
"And Alexis." Kate added, before Castle lost it.
He nodded. "And Alexis."
There was a flash of blue light and they found themselves on another Earth.
Rodgers fired up the engine and the headed up the Nile, a nice wide river at this point.
"We didn't name the boat." Castle suddenly said.
"Metford did it for us." Rodgers replied. "He must be an old movie buff. Were on the African Queen."
"Like the movie with Bogart and Katherine Hepburn?"
Rodgers nodded.
"At least we have enough Kates on board." Simone joked. No one laughed.
"Metford's people put a satellite up over this world. We have a really good map and recon photos from space. It looks like there's a fair sized city a maybe three or four days up the river. We'll head for there. If I was going to stay in this dump, I'd go to a city."
The first day was entirely uneventful. The second day was not.
"We have company." Castle called down from the crow's nest. "There's a whole tribe on the shore up ahead. A couple of hundred easily." He slid down a line to the deck.
Kate and Simone manned the forward machine gun and Becks and Rick took the rear gun.
Rodgers stood well out in the middle of the river, and watched the people on the shore through binoculars. "What the hell?"
"What is it?" Kate asked.
"We aren't the only white people around here. There are two on the bank, waving like crazy."
"Trap?" Simone suggested.
"We'll go find out. Keep the guns ready people." He turned the boat to the shore.
From fifty yards or so from shore they could see two men jumping up and down and yelling, "Haloooo! Over here!"
Rodgers felt the Queen touch bottom and killed the engine. "Hello, yourselves. Come aboard. This is as close as I can get."
Two bearded men, dressed worn, faded khaki splashed out to clamber aboard. The taller one held out his hand to Rodgers. "Malcolm Thorburn, your servant sir, of the Oxford African Expedition, now much reduced."
The shorter man cleared his throat.
Thorburn blushed under his tan. "And of course my companion, Corporal Jones, French Foreign Legion."
The five nodded knowing they had seen Jones before under a different name.
"And a foine day it is, sor." Jones said, in a thick Irish brogue.
"Is this a joint Anglo-French expedition?" Kate asked.
Thorburn swept off his hat. "Egads! A lady! Out here?"
"By me soul." Jones said. "Three ladies."
"Mrs. Castle, Mrs. Rodgers, my wife, and Mrs. Renoir."
Rodgers went through their cover stories, first about he and Rick being twins separated shortly after birth and marrying twins, who had a sister, and that they were searching for a lost American expedition.
"I had no idea there was an American expedition in Africa." Thorburn said.
"A small one. Too small, I'm afraid. And your expedition? Or expeditions?"
"Alas, I'm afraid the Oxford Expedition was too small as well. Between the fevers, the natives and the animals, there's just me and Fraser. Poor chap has the fever, but he seems to be getting better."
"So the Corporal wasn't with you?"
"No, sor." Jones replied. "Oi was in a battalion de marche of the Legion. Trying to get to the headwaters of the Nile we were. We wuz in a bit o' a scrap wi' some slavers from the Soudan a week or so back. Me an' private Schiller an' Private Mohammed got cut off, ye see. An' then we met up wi' the perfesser here. The natives ha' been takin' care o' us on account o' we drove off the slavers, but they ain't got much to spare."
"We're headed south, so why don't you join us."
"Suits me right well, sor." Jones said and hopped off the boat. He returned with the others, and their weapons and equipment. Schiller was a skinny youngster, blond and Germanic to the core. Fraser was emaciated and could just barely walk. Mohammed was a large and smiling black man, but looked like he had lost weight recently. He wasn't a Legionnaire, but one of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, locally recruited African troops. Rodgers noted that between them they had three French Lebel rifles, two British Lee-Enfields and several pistols. He wondered how much ammo they had. And food.
The locals seemed to be happy to see their guests leave, so they did so rapidly.
Jones stood waving at them as they headed up stream. "Nice folks, but short of food. Them slavers will be back soon, too. Wouldn't care to be in their boots when they do."
"An Irishman named Jones, Corporal?" Castle asked.
The Irishman laughed. "Back in Derry I'm known as Kevin Ryan, but I got into a ruction wi' an Orangeman an' takin' a sea voyage seemed a good idea. Oi ended up in France wi' no word o' French an' no work. The Legion seemed like a good idea. But," The Corporal looked around him. "This is no Ireland."
They discovered that Schiller spoke no English nor did Mohammed, but Fraser spoke enough for all of the rest of them. Fraser had been to Africa twice before, searching for the headwaters of the Nile, while Thorburn had never been away from England before.
Fraser relaxed in the back of the Queen and talked about his prior trips to Africa. To avoid the swamps of the Sudd, they had gone overland from Zanzibar until they hit the Nile and assembled a small steamer that they'd had portaged to the river. Alas, the steamer had hit a rock about two months prior, sinking along with most of their supplies and three of their companions.
"But we've traveled further up the Nile than anyone else. That'll be something to tell the Royal Geographic Society when we get back. And Frobisher can sit in Oxford and study his ancient maps and bleat all he wants about the headwaters of the Nile being a giant lake closer to Capetown than Cairo. Nonsense. Arrant nonsense. Why, we may even find that lost city that Frobisher says is just a legend."
Castle, remembering the city shown on the orbital photos, perked up. "Lost city? Is there a lost city somewhere around here?"
Fraser shrugged. "Rumors, old boy. Oh, Cairo or Zanzibar are full of chaps who met an Arab who met a Masai who met a chap who met another chap who met another and so on and so forth, who told them all about a fabulous lost city, full of gold and jewels, just waiting to be picked up."
"Gold, sor?" Jones said, a bit of greed tinging his voice. "Just waitin' to be picked up like? Is it true?"
Fraser laughed. "If it was, the natives would have picked it clean centuries ago. The locals know the value of gold, they know it very well. But, finding the remains of a city would make our names, eh, Thorburn?"
Thorburn nodded. "Getting back to England will make my name as far as I'm concerned."
"So, there's no proof of any such city?" Simone asked.
Fraser shrugged. "Oxford has a copy of a letter written in 1592 by a Portuguese Don, Don Paulo Vargas. He claimed he'd crossed Africa from Mozambique to Angola, taking four years to do so and found a city filled with white people in Central Africa. The letter's genuine, but those old boys loved to tell tall tales about unicorns, men with one leg, Amazons and such. I'd forget about dreams of riches, Corporal. That's nothing but an old African legend."
They stopped on a small island the next day to cut wood for their engine. The engine appeared to be a conventional, for that era, a steam engine and not a modern diesel, but the engine could convert the wood into a form of ethanol that the diesel could use.
"Company coming. Hurry back." Kate called down from the crow's nest. Castle, Jones and Thorburn, who had been cutting wood, grabbed their axes and ran for the boat. Coming towards them they could see a large war canoe, made from a single hollowed out tree, filled with some fifty spearmen. The men shouted and waved their spears.
"Should I give them a burst?" asked Kate, now back at the bow Maxim.
"Fire in the water in front of them and try to warn them off. "Rodgers replied.
Before Kate could fire, nature took a hand. A baby hippo rose from the river bed and bumped the canoe. One of the spearmen slashed at him, bringing the mother, a ton and a half of angry momma, slamming into the canoe, capsizing it and throwing the men into the water. The momma hippo attacked the men in the water which attracted the attention of crocodiles on the river banks. Only one man escaped by swimming quickly to the island. He took one look at the boat and ran in the other direction.
"I didn't know hippos could do that." Rodgers said. "Be that aggressive, I mean."
"They're very aggressive." Castle told him. "If anyone sees a hippo coming towards us, open fire."
"Research?" Kate asked.
He shook his head. "Field trip to the Bronx Zoo in the seventh grade."
They had to shoot a few crocodiles that had swum to the island, but they managed to get a good load of wood and continued their journey upstream.
On the morning of the fourth day an old African legend appeared.
"Deck!" Simone called from the crow's nest. I can see around the next bend. There's a ship waiting for us. Some kind of a… what do you call those ships with all the oars?"
"A galley?" Castle called back.
"Right. That's what it is."
They came around the bend, to find the galley waiting for them.
"What do we do now?" Castle asked.
"They're not shooting at us, or anything. I say we go talk to them." Rodgers said.
"In what language?"
"I know a bit of the local languages." Fraser volunteered. "If all else fails, we can mime what we want to say, or something."
Rodgers noticed that while the Englishmen were interested in talking, the French had quietly picked up their rifles and fixed their bayonets.
"Easy, Corporal." Rodgers said.
The Queen stopped about fifty yards from the galley and anchored. Soon, a group of men gathered at the galley's railing to stare down at them.
"Fraser," Castle said, "you may have to revise some of your ideas. Those guys are Caucasians, no doubt about it. And I imagine if you tried to pick up any loose gold or jewels, you'd get a spear in you." The original gawkers had been joined by a dozen or more men in chain mail, carrying spears.
After a hurried conversation by the men on the galley, a small boat was lowered and went to the Queen. Onto her deck stepped three men wearing togas. One, grey haired and dignified was fairly obviously in charge. If he was the brains, the other two had the look of muscle. Young, bulky and very suspicious. The older man said something that Castle didn't understand.
To everyone's surprise, Fraser answered him and had a short conversation before he turned to the Queen's crew. "By God! They speak Latin! A strange sort of Latin, but I can understand them. They want us to follow them to their city. A city. A lost city in Africa. We've found it!"
"I saw the movie." Castle muttered.
"Easy, babe. " Kate said, sliding her arm around him.
The older man was introduced as Marcus Tulio Antonius. His bodyguards weren't identified. After a brief chat, he decided to remain on the Queen as he had never seen a ship that would move with neither sails nor oars. Antonius and Fraser, now joined by Thorburn who also spoke Latin, talked for hours. Finally Fraser told everyone what he had learned.
"These people are descendants of Marc Anthony's legions. After Marc Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by Octavian, the first Roman Emperor, most of Marc Antony's legions were disbanded or incorporated into Octavian's forces. But some, with their families, fled down the Nile. These are their descendants. This is magnificent." Fraser and Thorburn went back to chatting with Antonius.
The Queen soon out ran the galley, but in only a few hours found themselves approaching Rome, as the ancient fugitives had christened their new city.
"No seven hills." Castle said. "But they have a nice city wall and what look to be fine marble buildings. This is probably what Rome looked like two millennia ago."
"Have you been to Rome?" Kate asked.
He nodded. "I'll take you sometime. It's a very romantic city." Castle grimaced when he realized what he said.
"Meredith or Gina?" Kate asked. "Or someone else?"
"No one nearly as important as you are. No one I could possibly have loved as much as you."
"Nice save, Writer Boy."
"Writer Man."
Antonius spoke to Fraser who turned to the others. "He wants to take us to meet their queen. Her name is Cleopatra." Fraser and Antonius spoke briefly. "Apparently all of their Queens are named Cleopatra and all the kings are named Ptolemy. Fascinating."
They attracted quite a crowd of followers as they walked through the city. After they had gone a block, their way was blocked by the idle curious. Eventually a detachment of palace guards showed up to push everyone back so that the procession could continue.
When they arrived at the palace they hardly noticed it. What they did notice was the redhead waiting for them in the middle of a mob of ladies in waiting and other hangers on.
"Alexis?" Rick said. She was wearing more make up than he was sure she'd ever worn, plus more jewelry than he'd ever seen and a diaphanous silk gown that revealed way too much of her for his peace of mind, but it was Alexis.
"I'm called Cleopatra now, Daddy." She said in English. Then she looked over his shoulder and saw Rodgers and two Kates. "Who the hell are you?"
As quickly as he could, Castle explained what had happened. Fraser and Thorburn looked shocked and Jones looked puzzled.
"An alternate universe?" Alexis said, nodding. "I thought that might be the case. Nothing else made sense."
"You know about alternate universes? From your dad?" Castle asked, hoping this was the right Alexis.
"Duh! Not likely. Professor Sandborn at Stanford has some theories about there being alternate universes. I took a class from him and read his book."
"How did you end up here? As Cleopatra?" Rodgers put in.
"Two idiots grabbed me on my way back to my apartment and then there was this flash of light and here we were. Said idiots apparently weren't supposed to come to the middle of nowhere in Africa and while they were arguing about who was to blame, they got attacked by crocodiles. I ran. I hadn't gone a hundred yards before I ran into the locals."
"Yeah, but how did you become a queen so soon?" Simone asked.
"The local dynasty is inbred as all hell. They only marry their relatives to keep the kingship in the family, so to speak. But, they haven't been able to give birth to any girl children, and very few males. When I showed up, wading out of the Nile, they decided I was a gift from the gods and made me Queen Cleopatra. The rest is history as they say."
"How can you be Cleopatra when you're redheaded and fair?" Becks asked. "You're not Egyptian. And you don't speak Latin."
"Neither was Cleopatra." Castle said. "Alexander the Great, a Greek, or Macedonian, if you prefer, conquered Egypt and when he died, one of his generals, named Ptolemy, grabbed it. So the original Cleopatra, who was Cleopatra VII, by the way, was a Greek and was thought to be a redhead. And I had four years of Latin in high school. I'm very good with Languages."
"Besides, the locals were getting desperate." Alexis said. "They probably would have declared me to be the gift of the gods and Queen Cleopatra no matter what I looked like."
"Great. Now we can get out of here." Castle said.
"There's one problem. You're black friend." Alexis said quietly. "The local Romans have been fighting the African tribes here for two thousand years. Any African who they capture goes to the arena."
"The arena? You mean like gladiators?"
"I mean exactly like gladiators." Alexis confirmed.
Castle looked around, but Private Mohammed was gone.
Alexis invited them inside and ordered food for everyone. While they ate, they tried to decide what to do about Mohammed.
Jones was adamant that they not let Muhammed die. "The legion don't leave anyone behind, ever. We even recover our dead." Schiller, apparently agreed, but as he spoke no English and none of them spoke German, it was hard to say.
Fraser and Thorburn only wanted to stay in Rome and learn all that they could, figuring that sooner or later an expedition would come along.
None of the Queen's original crew wanted to leave Mohammed behind, but their job was to rescue Alexis after all. They could do that by just taking her hand and asking for a recall.
"Which will probably get the rest of them killed." Castle muttered to Kate.
"There is a possible way out." Alexis suddenly said.
"What?" Five people said in unison.
"The Roman generals like to pit Africans armed with their own weapons against gladiators armed with Roman weapons. If we can get him a rifle, he should survive, initially at least. What will happen after that, I don't know. They may try to shoot him full of arrows from a distance or something."
Rodgers smiled. "I think I have an idea."
With Alexis' help, Mohammed was given an unloaded Lebel rifle with the bayonet affixed, which they managed to convince the Romans at the arena was a spear. Jones provided Mohammed with all of the 8mm ammunition they had for the rifle, some seventy five rounds.
After spending a very worried night, the five friends had breakfast with Alexis and then went off to the arena.
"Try to keep your breakfast down." Alexis warned them as they arrived at the queen's private box, the best seat in the house. "These things are bloody. Bloodier than I ever imagined."
Kate shrugged. "Becks and I were homicide cops, Castle has been my partner for years, Rodgers was a soldier and Simone lived on a fairly violent Earth. I think we'll be okay."
They managed to keep their breakfasts down, but they hardly enjoyed the spectacle. First, a group of Roman criminals was sent into the arena. They had obviously been beaten up and starved before they were sent in and they had no weapons. A half a dozen starving lions were then let loose into the arena. The men ran madly around, looking for an escape when there was no escape. One by one they were all killed by the lions until only one man was left. The lions, now no longer hungry, ignored him as he cowered against the wall of the arena. The crowd began booing, which didn't seem to bother the lions in the least.
"Will they let this one live?" Castle asked.
Alexis turned to one of her handmaidens sitting beside her and raised an interrogative eyebrow.
"No, Your Majesty. This man is a bandit and a murderer. He must die. The arena officials are conferring now.
After a few minutes, an archer stood on top of the arena wall and fired an arrow into the man's leg. He screamed and then screamed again when he saw what had been let loose in the arena. A pack of hyenas ran out, sniffed the air, saw the lions feeding and decided on easier prey. The hyenas were feeding on his corpse in minutes. Once the men had been eaten, heavily armored horses and riders drove the animals back under the arena to their cages.
"The animals have been doing this for a long time." Alexis said quietly. "They know if they go back quietly, they'll get fed again soon enough."
Castle was staring at his feet. "I saw a bullfight once and I thought that was bad, but this…."
Kate took his hand. "Stay calm. We have to be ready."
The next fight was between humans, but Mohammed wasn't involved. Two dozen Africans armed with short stabbing spears with only a hide shield for protection faced an equal number of gladiators. The gladiators had chain mail hauberks that covered them from neck to knee, helmets and a large, round shield. They were armed with a long spear, a sword and a dagger.
Apparently the Africans knew what to expect and had made a plan. While the gladiators were in a loose skirmish line, the Africans bunched together. Three of them immediately rushed one gladiator while the others attacked the remaining Romans. The single gladiator tried to move back to the safety of his comrades, but was always blocked by one or more Africans. Within a half a minute he had been wounded in his shield arm and then slashed across the face. The other gladiators made a concerted rush for him, but one African pushed the man's shield aside, and stabbed him in the neck. As blood poured out of the wounded man, the crowd screamed in rage and the remaining gladiators methodically butchered their remaining enemies.
All of the Africans died for the death of one Roman and the wounding of two others.
"I sure as hell hope this works. The crowd is out for blood now." Rodgers said.
Luckily, Mohammed wasn't next. Alexis explained that while food sellers moved through the crowd, providing lunch for anyone who hadn't brought their own, a single rider armed with a lance, fought a Cape Buffalo. The horse and rider were obviously well trained and had done this many times. By the time lunch was over, the buffalo was dead.
The crowd was in a much better mood when Muhammed and two dozen Africans were led out to face a similar force of gladiators. Mohammed looked up, found his friends and waved. They waved back, causing a stir in the crowd.
As the gladiators began moving from the other end of the arena, Mohammed took careful aim and shot the nearest one. The slug punched through his shield, his chain mail and out his back. Every few seconds, there was a shot and another dead gladiator. The other warriors began advancing on the Romans who fell back. After firing ten rounds, Mohammed had to reload, a slow process with the Lebel which had to be loaded one round at a time. But by this time the gladiators were in no mood to charge anyone, but began running to the jeers of the crowd. Mohammed killed most of the gladiators, but got help from the other Africans.
As the crowd looked on in stunned silence, Fraser rose to speak in Latin. He told the crowd that there were other people moving into Africa to whom the weapon they had just seen was a mere toy. To demonstrate, Rodgers and Rick hauled a Maxim gun from the back of the Queens box seats where they had hidden it the night before. They fired a long burst into the sand of the arena, not hitting anyone but impressing the whole audience.
Alexis, in her role as Queen Cleopatra, rose and told the crowd that what Fraser had said was true and that they had best make friends with all of the strangers who had arrived in the boat that moved with neither sails nor oars. While some of the strangers remained in Rome to teach the army new ways, she would go on a diplomatic mission with the rest of the strangers to find friends in the outside world.
"Do you think this is going to work?" Castle asked the next day as the original crew of the African Queen boarded the boat.
"It has a good chance of keeping the Romans from getting forcibly incorporated in someone else's empire. Their metallurgy is good enough to make flintlock muskets and making gunpowder is easy. You need is ten percent sulfur, fifteen percent charcoal and, seventy five percent potassium nitrate. I hope that whoever they run into convinces them to drop slavery and those barbaric games."
"But we'll never know." Castle said glumly.