She had Kadija with her; but would all be well? How if there was a bairn on the way? What harm could come to her, and he not there —
Someone reined in beside him, and Tussun’s voice said, “It will still be there when you come riding the other way, and so, I dare say, will she.”
The words were lightly spoken, but there was a raw, almost angry note in the voice that made Thomas turn quickly to look at his friend.
“You think I am a fool?”
“Any man is a fool who gets himself bound up in a woman’s hair, as you have done.”
Thomas looked into his face a moment. “I was not jealous at your wedding.”
“You had no need to be.”
“And two nights since, you were not jealous at mine. It was you who bade me take a wife and father sons.”
“That is a different matter. And two nights since, I had no need to be jealous.”
“Tussun, my brother, how are things changed since then?”
They sat their fidgeting horses and looked at each other.
“You know that as well as I do.” Tussun’s voice was no longer angry but young and tired and a little forlorn.
And Thomas did know. “Listen,” he said, “do you really think that the heart has room for only one love at a time? One day, assuredly, there will come a woman for you — aye, I know that the mother of your sons is not she. When she comes, and you hold her under your cloak, will you forget me?”
“No,” Tussun said after a moment. “Allah knows it. There is nothing, and no one, in all the world could make me forget my brother.”
“You see?” Thomas wheeled his horse, and leaned across to grasp his friend’s shoulder. “Come, or we shall lose the column.”
He was smiling a little, his eyes narrowed into the heat shimmer, as they rode down from the outcrop. “It is overlong since you and I last rode the desert ways together. Praise be to Allah! Life is good!”
He did not look back again before the first hill shoulder hid Medina from sight.
25
In the world outside, Bonaparte had marched on Moscow and failed, and made his terrible retreat, and Wellington had seized his chance to advance into Spain, winning a resounding victory at Salamanca.
And on the roof of the tall and tottering rooming house near the great Pilgrim Gate, where he had his quarters, Thomas who had received the news in a letter from Donald MacLeod many months earlier, wondered what part his old regiment had played in it all as he leaned on the parapet and looked out over Mecca in the fading light, then turned his thoughts to other matters. The autumn rains had come, and in Medina there would be greenness among the fig gardens, and the bitter orange trees in the Governor’s garden would be in flower. But in Mecca there was no greenness to be called up by the rains; it remained, as it had been when he first saw it, a dust-coloured city that seemed rooted, like an outcrop, among low dust-coloured hills.
It was hard to believe that there had been a city here before the Prophet was born; a city for him to be born in, and already holy in an older faith; holier, maybe, than it was now. But small and little known. The city had grown great purely on the Haj, the annual pilgrimage by which and for which it lived. Hence the broad processional streets, the many rooming houses, the huge caravanserais that made it also good for a garrison town.
Thomas’s mind ambled back over the months since he had ridden in with his four hundred picked sabres behind him, and gone up to the citadel to report to the Grand Shariff. The hot, parching months of the summer, the nights when he had slept up here on the roof for lack of air to breathe within the house; the desert mirage dancing in the noontide heat, while he struggled to keep morale and training from trickling away; to keep his men ready for what might happen, when there was no particular sign of anything happening at all, while the atmosphere of the Holy City ate into discipline and morale.
He had expected something of Mecca, despite the warnings of devout Muslim friends, a spiritual experience. He had found nothing but a run-to-seed city chafed threadbare by its Wahabi garrison, and with no thought in its head, now that it was free again, but what it could make out of the renewed pilgrim trade: cheap-jack souvenirs already beginning to appear in the souks, the prostitutes’ quarter humming in anticipation, the jumbled buildings of the Great Mosque freshly daubed with red and green paint to catch the eye. He had never felt as near in sympathy to the puritan Wahabis as he did in the Holy City of Mecca.
He did not even really know what he and his four hundred were supposed to be doing there; providing stiffening for the Shariff Ghalid’s troops, of course, in case of a Wahabi attack. But as to keeping any kind of eye on the Grand Shariff himself, they could make fairly sure that he did not actually open the gates and invite the black-robed ones inside; but as to whether or not he was carrying on any kind of correspondence with ibn Saud, or what ideas he harboured inside that narrow handsome head …
So the long summer had dragged by. And then two months ago, when the heat and drought had built up to their most intense and men had already begun to watch for Canopus with its distant promise of relief in the night sky, Muhammed Ali had landed at Jiddah with two regiments of infantry, while two thousand cavalry and much needed reinforcements for the camel train had come down by the land route to meet him there. The souk talk was that the Sultan in Istanbul had been flicking him on to finish off the Wahabis for some time, but that he had not been able to risk coming until Ibrahim Pasha, his son, had Upper Egypt firmly enough in hand. The souk talk also was that he was displeased that the campaign had become bogged down and made no further progress since the taking of Teif, and had come to take matters in hand himself.
Had he the remotest idea, Thomas wondered wearily, what campaigning in the hot season with half the wells dried up would actually be like?
In Jiddah, the Viceroy had been officially greeted by Tussun in his capacity as Pasha, and had then come to Mecca to be greeted by Shariff Ghalid in a splendid ceremony at the Great Mosque, in which both had sworn on the Koran, neither to take any action against the interests of the other. He had then set up his headquarters in the huge long-emptied school buildings alongside the mosque. And for the last six weeks or so the two leaders had been engaged in tortuous negotiations which seemed unlikely ever to be over.
Thomas’s guess was that neither of them trusted the other the length of a musket barrel, despite the splendid oath on the Koran; and while Muhammed Ali had more than a thousand troops excluding Thomas’s four hundred with him in the city, Ghalid, perched in his citadel on the hill, had half as many again, and twelve light-calibre guns. And so they sat and looked at each other, smiling courteously and stroking their beards. It was a situation, Thomas reckoned, much like an open powder keg, only requiring a spark to go up at any moment.
Aye well, it seemed likely that in one way or another, the thing was coming to its head. Hard otherwise to think why Muhammed Ali should suddenly have summoned his son to join their negotiations (remembering that as Governor of Jiddah, Tussun was technically the chief representative of the Sultan in the Hijaz and therefore not subject to anybody else’s orders at all). Thomas’s spirits lifted at the thought of Tussun’s coming in the next day or so; perhaps by and by they would even get a day’s hawking. It would be good to share a day’s hawking with Tussun again, if Allah willed it … The light was fading fast, clouds banking up along the mountains north-eastward; there would be more rain in the night, and the desert like Paradise in the morning.
On the point of turning away and going down to his evening meal, a fleck of movement on the track from Jiddah caught at his attention, and he checked, watching as three riders took shape, one riding ahead, the other two following a little behind in the manner of servants or an escort. Not really knowing why, he lingered, watching them as they drew nearer, riding hard to reach the gate before it was closed at dusk. And as he watched, it seemed to him even at that distance and in the fading light, that the leader had an odd likeness to Tussun. Maybe something i
n the way he sat his horse, maybe something in the carriage of his head … But the distance was still too great for sight to tell him these things — some intangible recognition of the heart …
‘Ach away! Don’t be a fool,’ he told himself. He had been thinking of Tussun and his imagination was playing tricks on him. Tussun Pasha, Governor of Jiddah, would scarcely come riding in at day’s end, garbed as a desert Arab and with an escort of two men. He shrugged and turned away, and went down to his supper and evening rounds of the great caravanserai just within the gate, where his cavalry were lodged and stabled.
Next morning a little short of noon, he returned from mounted sabre practice to find Medhet waiting for him in his quarters and big with news.
Tussun Pasha had ridden in, very early. He must have camped with his escort on one of the wells, rather than go through the complications of arriving after the gates were closed for the night. He had gone to the apartments made ready for him in his father’s headquarters, and within half an hour the Grand Shariff had gone, with eight lancers in golden turbans by way of escort, to visit him. Then something had happened, no one knew what, but something. It was said that the Grand Shariff had appeared at a courtyard window, and ordered his escort, waiting below, to return in peace to the citadel and wait for him there. Yes, assuredly something must have happened; but it could not have been anything dire, for, behold, one of Tussun Pasha’s men had been here but now, with word that Ibrahim Agha was to meet him at the Desert Gate after the noon prayer, bringing his best falcon. “He said that there are hubara for the taking, and the desert will smell sweeter than this city, after last night’s rain.”
Thomas sent for his second mare, and took up his hooded falcon from her perch in the corner of the room; he had only the one, having come to terms with the needful economies of a soldier with a wife to keep, his pay usually in arrears, and an aversion to augmenting it in the common way by accepting the odd bribe here and there. He refused Medhet’s plea to ride with him as his falconer, answered the call to prayer in the wide court of the caravanserai along with his groom and those of his men who happened to be there, praying, as he had done often enough before, beside his fidgeting mare and with Bathsheba sitting hooded on his leather hawking cuff, then mounted and clattered out, heading for the Desert Gate.
He found Tussun already there, his falconer with a couple of salukis behind him, and himself in a glowering temper. “You have kept me waiting,” he said accusingly, without any greeting.
“It was almost noon when I received your message,” Thomas said, unruffled. He had learned with the passing years not to be ruffled by Tussun’s moods unless they actually threatened murder, and sensed that the present anger was not in fact aimed at him. “I waited but to get my falcon and my horse, and to pray. Which of those things would you have had me leave undone?” He smiled into the other’s darkened and miserable face. “Salaam aleikum, it is good to see you again, my brother.”
Tussun seemed to force himself clear of his black mood for a moment to greet his friend. “And you. It is good to see you, Tho’mas.”
They embraced quickly, leaning from the saddle, but his arm round Tussun’s shoulders, Thomas felt rage and misery still vibrating in the younger man. This was something bad. Well, whatever it was, he would no doubt have heard all about it before they returned from their hawking.
They rode out through the gate together, the falconers following behind, past the wayside graves and the few sparse date palms, and took to the desert.
In the Wadi el Mahrat a few miles outside the city, the autumn rains had woken a faint green flush, the tiny brief-blooming mauve and yellow sand flowers among the rocks, and the camel thorn and threadbare acacia scrub was in leaf, and breathing up from the ground into their faces rose the incredible, heart-stopping incense of the desert after rain.
The salukis were unleashed, and in a short while put up a hubara from a clump of acacia bushes. Tussun unhooded his falcon and flew her in pursuit. She made her kill cleanly, and was retrieved from where she squatted mantled over her prey and glaring at the falconers as they came up, with a mad marigold eye. Thomas’s bird took the next quarry. And after that Tussun’s bird missed her kill, though she returned sulkily to the lure.
“Change birds,” Thomas thought. “You’ll ruin that bird if she misses her next kill.”
And as though the urgency of the unspoken message had reached him, Tussun shouted to the falconers for his second bird. “Bulchis is off her game today.” But when she was brought, he took her impatiently from her handler, so that she was startled and bated from his fist, to hang for a moment screaming, head down from her jesses. Tussun righted her, but before he could get her properly settled, the saluki put up another bird; and Tussun, in too much haste, unhooded her and flung her free. The falcon, thoroughly startled and quite unprepared, took off, hung for a few moments with heavily beating wings, while she made some kind of attempt to get her bearings, then made for the quarry just too late. The inevitable happened; the hubara plunging into the acacia scrub, scattering twigs and leaves, with a crash as of a high diver breaking the water, while the saker missing her kill, veered aside and up, to sit, ruffled and glaring, on the branch of a terebinth tree.
Now she would be the very devil to get back.
Tussun rounded on the falconer, who was already uncoiling the lure: “Get her back, thou incompetent son of a she-camel!”
Thomas was settling his own saker, trying to keep her isolated from the tensions around her. Tussun’s falconers, calling and whistling softly, were advancing on the terebinth tree. The saker waited until they were close beneath her, then stooped from the branch. For an instant it looked as though she were coming to the swinging lure, but in the last moment she swerved up again and was off in a new direction, her jesses streaming behind her. Tussun made a strangled sound in his throat that was almost a sob of fury.
The thing might go on the rest of the daylight hours, until by Allah’s mercy they could wear her out and take her sleeping. If they failed in that, she would end somewhere tangled by her jesses, carrion for the kites in her turn.
Tussun was cursing already; he wrenched his horse round and made to go after them.
“No! Leave be!” Thomas bade him. “If you go after her in this mood no one will ever get her back.”
Tussun swallowed, and seemed by a great effort to get a grip on himself. He dismounted, Thomas with him, and they turned aside into the sparse shade of the thorn scrub, leading the horses with them. The whistling and calling died into the distance, and only the thin hum of insects hung like gauze on the still air.
“Now,” Thomas said. “What’s amiss?”
“What should be amiss?”
Thomas’s met the other’s hot and angry gaze. “I don’t know. But I have never known you mis-fly a falcon since you gave me my first hawking lesson. Nor have I ever known you to insult your servants for something that was your fault and none of theirs.”
“You will hear most of it soon enough anyway, and you will think the worse of me.”
“So — tell me yourself, and it may be that I shall not think so much the worse of you as I should if I heard it from another.”
The drone of insects among the scrub seemed to grow very loud.
“I have broken faith,” Tussun said in a rush. “I have broken the laws of hospitality. I am dishonoured among the tribes.”
“I think,” Thomas said very gently, “that you should tell me the whole story, beginning at the beginning and ending at the end. That way it may be that we shall both understand what it is that you are talking about.”
And standing with his arm over his horse’s neck, Tussun told:
“My father sent word to me at Jiddah to come to him with a full Governor’s escort of a hundred men, for he had need of me. So I came. Two days since, one of the merchant-kind joined us as we made camp for the night, and brought me word from my father that the next night — last night — we should camp on the wells an hour�
��s march short of Mecca: and I, with only two of my men, should ride on in the guise of merchants, entering the city at dusk, only just before the gates were closed. One would meet me at the gate and lead me to my father.”
Thomas remembered the three figures on the road.
“So I came to my father,” Tussun said. “He told me that he had a firman from the Sultan, empowering him to retain the High Shariff Ghalid, or to depose him, as he thought fit. He showed it to me. He told me that he had decided to depose him. He told me that he could not trust Ghalid; he could not forget how Ghalid did not join me according to his promise, at the outset of the campaign, and the alliance that he made last year with the Wahabis at Badr. He said he could not risk making his own advance into Najd if Ghalid was behind him, liable to change sides again, cutting him off from the Red Sea and the lines of communication and retreat.”
“All of which is true,” Thomas said, as the younger man broke off again.
“I know. I said to him: ‘Oh, my Father, I see the soundness of these reasons. Now, therefore, do with him what it seems to you must be done; it is no concern of mine.’ I was glad that it was no concern of mine. But I wondered — a little — why he had sent for me. He said ‘You are not bound by the oath between us, sworn on the Koran; and here in the Hijaz, it is you, the Governor of Jiddah, and not I, who are the direct representative of the Sultan. The matter is for you to handle.’”
“And so you made the arrest,” Thomas said into the heart of the next silence. And then: “You were not bound by your father’s oath on the Koran.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“Tell on.”
“Ghalid had to be got down from the citadel and into my father’s headquarters with a small enough escort for him to be taken without fighting — Tho’mas, you see that?”
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