Lords of the Nile

by Jonathan Spencer

  ‘By then,’ said Hazzard, ‘it will be too late for Egypt.’

  Hazzard went out, leaving Nelson and Melville’s betrayal behind him. Troubridge and Hardy joined him at the door.

  ‘William? What happened? You look like thunder.’

  ‘Come back, Sir Thomas,’ whispered Hazzard, feeling a rising despair, ‘that is all I ask. For the sake of this wretched place and these poor damned wretched people.’

  ‘We shall,’ insisted Hardy, ‘and I shall make some excuse, anything, and take Mutine to Valletta and get your men, damn it I shall.’

  ‘Then come back – make him,’ urged Hazzard. ‘Tell him…’ He wondered what indeed to tell him. ‘Tell him… I will have a tethered goat waiting. For his tigers.’

  ‘My dear fellow…’

  Hazzard left them and moved down the passage to the stairs, hearing the crew singing to an old squeezebox:

  …and if it’s a boy he shall fight for his king,

  And if it’s a girl, she shall wear the gold ring…

  When he reached his cabin, his hands trembled at the buttons of his red coat and he tore it off and threw it into the corner as if it burned him, contaminated him. He leaned his head on the plank wall, hoping it would somehow cool him in the endless heat. He put a hand to his chest, feeling through his shirt where the little figurine had once hung, left kindly for him by Ellie the housemaid, now lost, like Sarah, like everything, on Orient.

  Lewis. Swine. Nelson and his sealed orders. And what am I now, what am I? Destroyer of nations.

  Cook knocked and opened the door. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Damn them, Jory. Let them have their bloody war. Nelson’s as bad as the rest of them, yearning for nothing but battle and damn the consequences. Let them blow their trumpets and trample infants underfoot and burn the whole bloody world down—’

  Cook closed the door. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nelson’s leaving. Tomorrow.’

  Cook lowered his head, a nagging suspicion made real. ‘God’s teeth…’

  ‘North to Corfu or across to Cyprus or Acre or some such cock and bull, and damn Egypt by their lordships’ command, damn everyone by order of the bloody British Government.’

  ‘What about the thirty-odd-thousand Frogs and that flamin’ great fleet?’

  ‘Navy thinks they’ll find it if they sail round in circles long enough.’

  ‘And the men back on Malta?’

  ‘Nelson won’t even send a sloop to pick them up – nothing. “Can’t afford it, sir,” he said. Hardy says he’ll try with the Mutine, but God knows when, a fortnight, three weeks.’ Hazzard turned on Cook. ‘Haven’t I always said? God above, you taught me that much, Jory. Alone. It’s best. And look what’s happened to them, thanks to the Royal bloody Navy… Sarah, Cesár, that poor little whelp Wayland and the men…’ He muttered under his breath, ‘Damn you for bringing them to me…’

  ‘Me?’

  Hazzard lashed out at him, driven by his own self-hatred. ‘How did you talk old Jarvie into it, Jory? A half cripple like me with a gammy leg leading a jaunt across the high seas in a Spanish lugger? Admirals must have laughed themselves sick.’

  ‘It weren’t like that—’

  ‘At least Lewis can say they tried. They can tell a Sea Lord or two they had a go, wash their hands of the whole filthy affair. God damn them!’

  ‘And damn yourself, boy!’

  Hazzard looked at him. The big man’s face had suffused a deep brick-red.

  ‘Lord Jack jumped at your name, sir. He wanted you back afore ever anyone said a word. And he knew you, he told me – pig-headed, he said, bloody-minded and all. And that he wanted blokes just like that, ones who wouldn’t stop, just like you say, no matter come what. Well we got those blokes, and they’re behind us, and they’ll get here, too right they will. Then we done our bit, let Nellie and his buggers set this stinkin’ place alight from tip to tail, just like you want – so don’t you go damning them to me, no sir.’

  Cook jerked open the door and nearly left him but Hazzard shouted, ‘Stand still!’

  Cook was too old, too hard in the neck, to do anything but halt. He banged his foot down and came to attention, staring out into the passage.

  Hazzard looked at his back. Cook stood waiting.

  ‘How far could they be?’

  It took Cook a moment. He turned. ‘They’re not on Malta no more, pound to a penny. Mr Wayland’s prob’ly got his shirt rigged on a cutter’s mainmast for a ruddy sail and be halfway here by now. E’en if they got to paddle with their bare hands.’ He shook his head. ‘Think that pup’d give up? Not on your life. And not on mine neither. Thinks the world on you. You taught him sword at the Academy, did you even notice? With your gammy leg and bad arm that near cut that Austrian champion to bits. Said he’d never seen the like. Ever since, he told me, all he ever wanted was to be like you.’

  Hazzard watched him. Over the years they had long passed the point of who owed whom, debts both imagined or paid now in distant memory, but still Cook would watch over him, to the moment of his own destruction if need be. Hazzard knew this very well, as he would for Cook. In this way they had stayed alive together longer than many others. Which is why Hazzard had not involved him when he fell into French hands in Valletta.

  Cook saw Hazzard’s scarred Bombay coat flung in the corner. He bent down, picked it up and began folding it. ‘And this is worth a damn sight more’n being chucked in a corner.’

  Hazzard thought of Masoud, alone and afraid among the crowd. Melville, Lewis, even Nelson, had abandoned him. Abandoned all of them to Bonaparte and thirty thousand battle-hardened troops.

  ‘They want to let them rot, Jory.’ Hazzard shook his head. ‘Lewis, Blake, the Admiralty. And Nelson’s letting them.’

  Hazzard and Cook would be the only shore-party from the British interceptor squadron – a squadron of some ten thousand men and a thousand guns. And the only aid coming to Egypt was two bedraggled marines.

  Cook nodded. ‘Don’t seem right now, does it, sir?’

  Thoughts of home, of his uncle the Reverend Hazzard, the parish church of St Jude.

  For St Jude, patron of Causes Lost.

  ‘No. Damn well doesn’t.’

  * * *

  Just before midnight a jolly boat was swung outboard from Vanguard’s port side and was lowered away, with two oarsmen and a coxswain, and two red-coated marines. The rowlocks rattled as the oarsmen shoved off from the darkened broadside, heading for the lights of Alexandria, dipping and swaying in the July heat.

  Hazzard looked back at Vanguard. Once, he would have associated a ship with home, safety, and felt a pang of departure – but this time it was different. He was no longer one of them and, he recognised, never would be again. He was glad of it.

  As they pulled away, a silhouetted figure came to the quarterdeck rail, standing apart from the others. It looked down, the shape unmistakable, cocked hat, right sleeve pinned up. Hazzard thought of that first voyage from England to Cadiz, with the abrasive Tomlinson of the Valiant, and that wave of a final farewell, despite their differences. Hazzard felt Cook watching him. He wondered if they would ever see Nelson or his ships again. The figure did not turn, nor wave, but merely watched, growing smaller and smaller as they pulled away.

  The tide carried them in, and they headed for the warehouses at the extreme edge of the western harbour basin. The twinkling lights of the citadel towers and minarets rose higher and higher as they drew near, turrets and domes glowing against a clear night sky.

  Torches burned on the quaysides, lighting the slow passage of a felucca sliding into port. Hazzard looked for Hammer’s sign but the long, sloping lateen sail of the felucca blotted out the shoreline. Hazzard held up a hand to the coxswain, who grew steadily more worried by the moment.

  ‘Sir, if we get spotted…’

  ‘Wait…’

  The felucca glided past at a crawl, and there, by two ramshackle buildings, he saw them.

  Twin tor
ches.

  ‘Bear to starboard,’ he said, and the coxswain pulled the tiller, swerving towards the shore. Hammer appeared out of the dark with Masoud. The oarsmen fended off a half-sunken post from a collapsed jetty, and the boat ground on the shore. Hazzard and Cook jumped out with their packs, shoving the boat back to open water. The young coxswain touched his cap, God be wi’ye, sir. Hazzard watched them row gratefully back to Vanguard with a sense of finality. Goodbye indeed.

  ‘Al-hamdulillah,’ said Masoud, breathless with gratitude. ‘Praise be to God you are here, Hazar-effendi,’ he said, overwhelmed, shaking their hands. ‘You came back… you both came back.’

  ‘Put these on,’ said Hammer, and gave them a set of clothes each, a long white galabeyyah shirt, a patterned kaftan and a dark split binish robe overtop. ‘You might want only the binish, and keep those famed red coats of yours underneath. They may prove useful.’

  ‘In this heat?’ said Cook. ‘You’re barking.’

  ‘In the heat of the desert sun, Mr Cook,’ replied Hammer, ‘the heaviest robes are the most prized.’

  Cook had drawn a new uniform jacket from Vanguard but had removed the sleeves, as he used to in India on shore operations, leaving only shirtsleeves and a brass-buttoned and bastion-laced red jerkin – other than his white sailing ducks and boots, the robes covered the big marine completely.

  Hazzard pulled the magnificent binish surcoat over his Bombay jacket, the scarlet sleeves protruding from just below the elbow, his white breeches and tall boots giving him the look of a wealthy Ottoman – and the robe covered an old ’96 Pattern Navy sword obtained from the arms locker on Vanguard. Settling it on his hip, he thought of De la Vega and the espada ropera, lost on the Orient to Derrien.

  Hammer examined the ensemble. ‘It will do, and may serve to confuse, and therefore impress.’

  Masoud helped them with a keffiyah headdress, producing a large folded triangle of thick white fabric. ‘The shemagh,’ he said, and positioned it on Hazzard’s head, settling the knotted circlet of a black rope iqal on top and tucking up the end of the white cloth to cover his throat and chest. ‘It was of my father,’ he said. Cook wrapped and tucked his into a turban out of long habit from India. Masoud showed them how to tie the draped lengths of the shemagh over the face. ‘For the sun, Cook-effendi,’ he said.

  ‘This neck don’t get no redder,’ muttered Cook.

  Soon they were hurrying through the empty torchlit streets, their only company the occasional burst of Turkish or Greek chatter from an open widow, applause at a game as they passed by, the occasional group clustered round an open fire, a small cauldron and coffee-pot rattling on the coals.

  From his previous brief visits Hazzard knew the harbour and foreshore area but had little knowledge of the winding lanes into the city. They passed along parched dirt roads lined with tall European-style houses crushed tightly together, rows of slum plaster dwellings and stables, rank and sour, heaps of rubbish in the alleys. Humped shapes of derelict sleeping Arabs lay in the lee of stone walls still warm from the sun, rats running in the undergrowth of spear-bladed palms and bush.

  They reached a small cobbled yard behind one of the gatehouses in the city walls. Lamps burned in the windows and they could hear the murmur of voices, an argument, then sudden laughter, the sound then fading. A man appeared from the shadows and Hammer joined him.

  Hazzard waited. The light caught a polished surface in the dull stonework of the wall. There, among the irregular lines of mortar, was a small tablet of inscribed hieroglyphs, a half moon, a stylised serpent, two feathers. The masons had used the ancient stele in the blockwork of the wall. Further down, another, covered in tight, swooping cursive characters. Hazzard touched them with his fingers.

  Egypt.

  Five thousand years of history. Maybe more. How did we come to be in this place?

  The arc of the sky glimmered cool and indigo, heavy with soft stars. Hazzard looked out at the emptiness beyond the gates. The landscape sloped down and away, forming drab hillocks of scrub and dark sand, the distant desert to the southwest a dead flat line, almost white in the unearthly glow of starlight.

  Cook stood silent beside him. Together they had looked out over the Indian Karnataka, the plateau of Decca, and the mountains of Jaipur in much the same way.

  ‘Pilgrims in a heathen land, sir,’ the sergeant rumbled.

  ‘And we are the heathen.’

  ‘Ain’t it always.’

  Hammer beckoned them to come quickly and the keeper let them through a low door in the large studded gate. It closed and locked quickly behind them, an iron bar swinging into place.

  They hurried along the deserted road ahead, winding their way through the spreading wasteland. After half a mile they saw several men waiting with horses in the darkness of a thicket of palms and stunted trees.

  ‘Awlad ’Ali,’ said Masoud. ‘An ancient people, the largest in these lands. Shepherds, traders… bandits, warriors. Descended from the Blemi. In many ways, they have been in Egypt as long as the old gods.’ Masoud was an educated Alexandrian, and seemed uncomfortable at the prospect of dealing with such men. He summed up his feelings in one word: ‘Bedu.’

  Hazzard had heard accounts of the Bedouin, the desert tribes whose territories stretched as far as their caravans could trade, or other tribes could contest – how they could ride fifty miles of desert in a day and stop for water only once, in a landscape that would consume anyone else, European, Persian or Turk.

  He could see six horses and two men in dark robes. They wore black keffiyah headdresses, held in place by thick iqal rope circlets on the crown. A bandolier of cartridge pouches, a pair of pistols each, on one saddle a carbine and on the other a long Turkish musket. At their hips swung swords curved as gracefully as a crescent moon.

  ‘As-salamu aleikum,’ said Hammer and Masoud.

  The Bedouin replied with a courteous bow. ‘Wa aleikum as-salam, wa rahmatu Allah wa barakatuh, ya Hamar-effendi,’ he said with even greater blessing, and Hammer returned the bow. There were three others behind, servants or possibly slaves, thought Hazzard, holding the horses and waiting.

  ‘Brothers Izzam and Alahum of the al-Kalbi,’ Hammer said to Hazzard. The Bedouin bowed again as Hammer introduced Hazzard and Cook.

  Izzam looked perplexed. ‘Hazar?’

  Masoud translated it literally. ‘Khatar.’

  Risk.Danger.

  ‘Aha…!’ They liked the names, and smiled broadly up at Cook, a full head taller. ‘Ku’q?’

  Cook glowered down at him. ‘That’s right, mush.’

  Alahum said something and laughed softly and Izzam’s face lit up, ‘Ah!’ He spoke to Masoud.

  Masoud interpreted, ‘He asks if, truly, you are English, and if so, are you a lord and is he your servant?’

  ‘Not bloody likely,’ muttered Cook.

  Hazzard showed his red sleeve. ‘We are English, yes, and seek your help.’ Then Hazzard said, ‘Shokran. Nahnu momtannoun, al-hamdulillah.’ Thank you. We are grateful, God be praised.

  Cook smiled down at their surprise. ‘You should hear him do the Khanboli in Madras.’

  ‘You speak the tongue of the Arabs?’ asked Masoud, astonished.

  ‘Only a few words, Masoud. Qalilanaan.’ A little.

  The Bedouin laughed, and Izzam spoke and bowed. ‘Then God is truly great,’ translated Masoud, and bowed as well. They readied the horses and Cook took the reins of a bay stallion. The horses were smaller than Hazzard had expected, with powerful legs and broad muzzles and wide, flared nostrils, each decked in ornamental tassels and leather tack.

  Hammer murmured, ‘These are pure-breed Arabians, Herr Hazzard. Will Herr Cook… be all right?’

  Cook took the saddle in one step. ‘I’ve rode with the Nabobs, sir, on Maratha ponies, so don’t you fret.’

  Alahum asked, ‘Darb al-Hujjaj?’

  Masoud rapped something off quickly in the negative but they simply shrugged and smiled. He translated, angry with the
m, ‘The pilgrim’s road, he asks. He wants to take you to Jerusalem of all places, so he can charge you more money.’

  Hazzard shook his head. ‘No. Al-Qahira.’ Cairo.

  Hammer watched them carefully and said, ‘Al Murad Bey.’

  Their confident laughter stopped.

  ‘Murad…?’ said Alahum, in sober confirmation.

  Izzam mounted his horse, more business-like. ‘Al-Qahira. Insha’allah.’

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Cook.

  ‘He made a brief prayer,’ said Hammer. ‘God willing.’

  Murad

  The six rode south through the night, crossing Maryut, the dried inland sea Hazzard had seen from the Mutine, the waters of the adjacent Lake Maadiyeh held back by no more than a sea-dyke topped by a canal – Alexandria’s access to the distant Nile. The ground shone white, the remnants of ancient salts glowing against the luminous deeps of the sky.

  They did not take the route to Damanhur, a natural first halt on the road to Cairo, Hammer explained, with food markets and water, but rather swung southwest into the chilled scrublands of the desert, to avoid stray Mamluks and other Bedu. As they rode, Hazzard pictured Nelson setting sail and disappearing over the horizon, Blake, Lewis and Melville sitting smug in their offices – while Bonaparte urged on his invasion fleet with no one to stop him. Hazzard wanted to drive the horses hard.

  They maintained a light canter, breaking only once, the Arabian horses imbued with a stamina unknown in his experience – he grew wearier of the thudding rhythm than they did, and he was left gasping. But before the sun crept over the horizon, they had covered nearly 40 miles of their 130-mile journey.

  As the sun appeared, broad and red in the east, the cold of the night evaporated, swift as a waking dream. The Bedu urged on the pace before the sun climbed higher, when they knew their guests would be forced to slow and rest. By ten, Hazzard felt the light itself become a palpable force, pushing down on the crown of his head, driving them into their saddles, into the very earth. They slowed, riding through low, dry grasses and tortured brush, the sun climbing ever higher, their fatigue suffocating.