Part 23 (1/2)

Sitting with other wounded men in the crowded hospital, Nemo ate a thin gruel, drank copious amounts of tea, and tended his own injury. The smelly air was heavy with the sounds of coughing, groaning men. The nurses couldn't possibly do enough to help their patients -- and given few resources, supplies, materials, or even personal vigor, Nemo could think of little he could do to help.

After his days aboard the Coralie Coralie, then living alone on the rugged island, and even during the balloon trip across Africa, Nemo had learned some first aid. As a healthy 26-year-old, his stamina worked to his advantage. Most of the other injured men had lived in trenches for months during the siege of Sevastopol, and were much worse off.

Soldiers in the infirmary rooms smoked cigarettes, a paper-wrapped form of tobacco that had recently come into fas.h.i.+on during the war. But the acrid smoke did little to mask the hospital's sour stench of sickness, chemicals, and death.

One night, the man with two splinted arms unexpectedly died from a blood clot. His one-legged companion wallowed in such deep depression that Nemo was convinced the man wanted his stump to fester with gangrene. The peripheral horrors of war continued to dismay him, and he did not understand why people had to do such things to each other.

When Nemo attempted to walk, he could feel the bones and skin knitting in his side. Since he was more mobile than most, he gave up his hard pallet to a more seriously injured soldier. Still, he limped around like Victor Hugo's famous hunchback. Every evening Florence Nightingale took her lamp and walked the halls of the huge barracks hospital, one floor after another, speaking softly to the wounded soldiers. She did it without complaining.

Nightingale's nurses were as devoted as she, and worked just as hard. The driven women took s.h.i.+fts sleeping for a few hours apiece, then continued their duties. The soldiers called them ”angels.” Indeed, the dark-dressed women were the only spot of brightness in the gloomy hospital.

Nemo and other half-healed victims rinsed and boiled rags for bandages, swept the floors, and removed bodies. Piles of corpses were stacked downwind from the hospital windows, and daily funeral pyres blazed high. Nightingale insisted that rapid disposal of cadavers and amputated limbs was crucial to prevent the spread of disease.

Sitting at her wobbly, splintered desk, she wrote dozens of letters and pleas for supplies. She even sent notes via the new telegraph lines used by war correspondents and army commanders. When she insisted that her demands be transmitted back home, no telegraph operator dared to stand in her way.

The nurses had sent the required doc.u.mentation to the French commanders regarding Nemo's injury -- unfortunately, the old Napoleonic veterans had not even noticed the loss of a lone engineer. If he'd been killed on the battlefield at Balaclava, no letter of condolence would have been written, no death certificate signed. Caroline would never have known his fate.

Forgotten, Nemo was content to remain here helping the nurses. . . .

On November fourth, the Russians again attempted to break the siege, this time striking toward the village of Inkerman. The British, French, and Turks once again drove them back, but it was an expensive victory for a relatively minor battle.

After the horrific fighting at Inkerman, wagons hauled bleeding men to the giant hospital barracks where there were no more beds. Nightingale appealed to the army commanders for supplies and a.s.sistance, but they refused to lend any of their troops. Nemo and a few volunteers worked harder, but he didn't mind. The toil drove back boredom and made him forget the twinges of pain.

In the midst of this chaos, a tall, lean man came in search of Nemo: the green-turbaned Turkish commander who had noticed him building siege towers. With a retinue of burly personal warriors, the haughty caliph marched through the hospital, asking questions until he tracked down the engineer.

Florence Nightingale and her nurses were too occupied with emergency duties and triage to waste time with these Turks who, unlike their fellow countrymen, did not lift a finger to help in the frenzied emergency. The caliph discovered Nemo himself, however. Five armed guards stood behind him, dressed in white garments, with ceremonial sabers in their sashed belts and rifles over their shoulders. None of them seemed interested in the war or the politics.

”You are the engineer?” the caliph said in pa.s.sable French. He studied Nemo's features. ”I have come to take you away.”

”I am busy.” Nemo continued tearing strips of cloth for bandages. ”You have no right to command here, sir. I don't even know who you are.”

The Turk's skin flushed darker, making the lightning bolt scar on his cheek stand out. ”This is a British hospital. You are a French soldier. I have obtained papers to take you to your appropriate a.s.signment.” The caliph held out a sheet of paper that was written in unintelligible Turkish.

”I have work to do.” Nemo gestured around him. ”Can't you see all the wounded?”

”They should have died on the battlefield.” The green-turbaned man jabbed a finger against Nemo's bandaged ribs. ”You have been deemed sufficiently healed and should no longer take up s.p.a.ce in this hospital. You will come with me.”

Florence Nightingale bustled in, her sweat-soaked hair in disarray, her gray dress spotted with blood. She hurried over, wearing a stern expression. ”What do you want with this man, sir? I need him here.”

”The engineer is to come away with me. The British Hospital Administrator has given orders that no French soldier may be tended here. British supplies are to be used only for British victims apparently. No French, or Sardinians, or apparently Turks.”

”We're supposed to be allies,” Nemo said, digging in his heels.

”We're supposed to be a hospital hospital,” Nightingale snapped. ”We tend the wounded without regard to which flag they salute. This man is too badly wounded to go back to the battlefield.”

”Nevertheless,” the caliph said, squaring his shoulders. His bald guards put their hands on the hilts of their scimitars. ”He does not belong here. It is simply a bureaucratic matter.”

Florence Nightingale sagged. Like Nemo, she was all too familiar with the paperwork and inept.i.tude that characterized this entire war.

”You have my guarantee he will receive the proper care and treatment,” the caliph said, his voice more pleasant. ”But this man must come with me. I am a caliph -- Caliph Robur.”

At the far side of the room, a soldier shrieked in pain. Two nurses held him down while a battlefield surgeon did his best to saw off the man's left leg, but the surgeon had trouble getting the serrated blade through the thick femur.

The caliph looked at Nightingale. His black eyes were impenetrable, and he stroked the pointed beard on his narrow chin while the amputee continued screaming. ”You do do have wounded to tend to, nurse. Why are you questioning my legitimate orders?” have wounded to tend to, nurse. Why are you questioning my legitimate orders?”

In disgust, Nemo held up his hand to stop further argument. ”I will go with him. It makes as much sense as the rest of this war.” Though troubled, Florence Nightingale seemed more concerned about the new arrivals. Nemo followed the Turk, limping slowly. He looked back at the busy nurses; already Nightingale had gone to work with the flood of new victims. . . .

Caliph Robur had a cart and driver waiting outside, and the bald guards helped Nemo climb in. He saw no other legitimate Turkish soldiers, none of the brave but ragged fighters from the battlefield. These men seemed to follow their own law, with no regard for the overall battles. Without speaking to Nemo again, they mounted their prancing horses and set off from the hospital as another funeral pyre poured a column of greasy smoke into the sky.

The cart jostled away from the Sevastopol fortress. Every b.u.mp in the road sent jarring pains through Nemo's side. Weak as he was, he endured the rough ride. He did not know how he could be effective on the battlefield, even to perform the less physically challenging tasks of engineering.

Instead, the caliph took him far from the battlefield, into an even worse situation. . . .

vi

Under cloudy skies, Robur's escort led the wobbly cart far from French and British military trenches. They proceeded in silence across the rocky terrain on narrow, rugged roads. In pain, Nemo propped himself up to watch as they approached the battle lines held by Turkish forces, then went beyond the main camp to their own settlement. Many of the Ottoman soldiers slept on the ground beside smoky campfires built out of scrub brush.

When he called out questions, demanding an explanation, the cart driver ignored him, as did the scimitar-carrying guards. Robur himself rode ahead out of earshot. He seemed aloof from the rest of the Turkish military.

In the center of the sprawling camp, the caliph and his generals had erected large multicolored pavilions that bore clan markings. Deep in the heart of the broad encampment, the driver halted the cart in an open area surrounded by the caliph's private tents, which blocked the view from outside. Nemo saw with sudden dread a line of well-armed guards -- none of them wearing the uniform of the Turkish troops -- standing around a fenced enclosure.

The thirty men gathered inside the fence wore the uniforms of French, British, and Sardinian troops. ”I am to be a prisoner of war, then?” Outraged, Nemo tried to stand up in the cart, but the pain in his ribs struck him like a bolt of lightning. ”I am a French citizen. You have no right to hold me, or any of these men.”

Caliph Robur rode over and gestured for his guards to ”a.s.sist” Nemo in dismounting from the cart. The bald guards, though strong and well-armed, did not treat him with undue viciousness. Nemo considered struggling, but feared that he would rip open his wound again.

Upon seeing his arrival, the other prisoners stirred. Most scowled in frustration, though a few of the French captives looked at him with barely restrained excitement.

Robur stroked his pointed beard and turned his angular face from the camp prisoners toward Nemo. ”You will remain here and recover, Engineer. I promise we shall treat you well. We have important work for you, far beyond this mere squabble among nations.”

”But why did you bring me here?”

”Everything will be explained to you in time -- when you need to know.” Dismissing him, Robur rode off as the guards hauled Nemo through an opening in the fence.

Bound by their common predicament, the other prisoners welcomed him and introduced themselves, explaining their backgrounds and how they had come to be in Robur's camp. Like Nemo, none of the prisoners understood why they were here. Each man had been taken under bureaucratic pretense, then abducted for some unknown purpose.

An Englishman named Cyrus Harding was a professional boatbuilder by trade. Harding had square-cut brown hair and a large chin that sported a crater-sized dimple in the center. Though his flinty eyes watched his surroundings, Harding kept his mouth shut in a grim line unless he was forced to speak.

Conseil, a mousy man from Ma.r.s.eilles, had been brought to the Crimea as a meteorologist meteorologist, of all things. Months earlier, after storms in the Black Sea had severely damaged the French fleet, Conseil had been a.s.signed to collect regular weather reports from the war zone, which he then telegraphed to a central station. The meteorologist had an amusing habit of withdrawing his simian head in a cringe. His eyes were wide and round, as if on the verge of popping out of his head; he kept his gray-brown hair sc.r.a.ped close to his skull, but when it grew longer, the short strands stood out like bristles on an old brush.

Liedenbrock, an odd member of the group, claimed to be Sardinian but spoke with a strong German accent. Trained as a metallurgist in Salzburg, he had found work with industrial investors in Sardinia. Unfortunately, he had gambled away all his money, lost his home and his mistress, and would have gone to prison -- unless he volunteered to join the Sardinian forces in the Crimea. Liedenbrock was rail thin with a curly fuzz of gray hair like a cloud that had settled on his cranium. His heavy brow extended like a shelf over brown eyes, casting his face into shadow.

Some of the other prisoners had worked as craftsmen or mechanics, others as lathe-turners and gla.s.smakers. What could Robur possibly want with an outcast metallurgist, a timid weather scientist, a stoic boatbuilder -- and himself? None of the men were officers or important political prisoners . . . few even had families or obligations back in their home countries. The caliph seemed to have chosen the least least significant men as hostages from the battlefield. Nemo thought no one would even notice their disappearance. . . . significant men as hostages from the battlefield. Nemo thought no one would even notice their disappearance. . . .

After his initial anger, he studied the camp objectively. Knowing the hospital conditions he had just endured, and having experienced daily life in military camps, he noted with surprise that Robur's war prisoners were treated better than most troops in the Crimea. The men had gra.s.s bedding and awnings to protect them from the sun. They received regular meals, usually lamb or goat stew; at other times they ate fresh vegetables, olives, bread, and wine. In fact, they ate better than the loyal Ottoman troops fighting on the siege lines.