“Me, Sir?”
“As sponger, the thing is undoubtedly for you to do; the first time, anyway. If your supply dries up, others must take their turn.”
Grim laughter took the gun team, and the sponger, with outraged face, went aside and squatted, then turned back to his place, the sponge on its pole satisfactorily dripping.
“Nobly done, my brother,” Thomas said, watching the defile. The last of the cavalry had gone through, to form cover for the men below the spur to withdraw in their turn. The first thrust of the Wahabis must be allowed through, to be dealt with by the rest of the cavalry as best they could, if the gunfire was not to take as much toll of his own men as it did of the enemy; but after that …
“Pricker,” Thomas said, and the man holding the long slim spike thrust it down the vent to pierce the flannel cartridge.
Thomas chose his moment with precision, rose and stepped aside: “Fire.”
The man with the linstock leaned forward and applied it to the vent. There was a burst of flame and a crack and roar that seemed as though it must split the rocky hillsides. Hideous sounds came up from the defile; sounds that might have come from the mouth of Eblis; and as the smoke cleared a little Thomas saw through the wild almond branches, starry with their first fragile blossom, the bloody carnage in the narrows: men screaming and falling, men cut horribly in two. It never ceased to surprise and appal him, the damage that one seemingly slow-moving roundshot, even from a mere three-pounder, could cause in a close-packed mass of men.
They ran the gun forward again from its recoil, and resighted it. “Sponge,” Thomas ordered.
The sponger, still with an almost comical look of outrage, thrust it down the bore to quench any smouldering fragments.
“Cartridge.”
The loader thrust another cartridge into the muzzle and the sponge-man reversed his staff and rammed it home.
“Ball, load.” Somebody else’s head cloth, tightly rolled, went in to hold the round in place.
“Fire!”
And again the gout of flame and the hill-shaking crack; and the sounds from the defile as from the mouth of Eblis.
But by now the Wahabis had realised what was happening, and the long-barrelled jezails were returning fire, aiming for the gun flashes on the spur. And though the almond trees gave them a certain amount of cover, the air was full of the unforgettable whine of musket balls in flight as the bullets came round their ears.
“Keep down as much as you can!” Thomas shouted to his crew; and to the men standing guard, “Keep your carbines ready and watch the high ground: they may try to get round and come down on us from above.”
Presently the crack of a carbine and a satisfied grunt from behind told him that the precaution had not been needless.
But it was not only from behind and above that the danger came. With the reckless courage of desperation, men were swarming up the steep sides of the spur through the rocks and the wild almond trees, and in a dozen places along both sides of the spur hand-to-hand fighting was breaking out.
Amidst it all, working purposefully and steadily, Thomas and his crew continued to fight the gun; though ammunition was beginning to run low. The sponge man went down to a musket ball, and the firer, misjudging his position, was caught by the recoil and fell back clutching a broken arm; but each time another man stepped forward into his place, and the three pounder did not cease to fire. There were sharp-shooters now among the rocks up the far side of the ravine; notably one, higher than all the rest, unseen save for the fleeting glint of the sun on a jezail barrel and the repeated puff of smoke wisping away on the light hill wind, and for three men on the spur lying dead.
Thomas shouted to the best marksman among his troopers: “Harmid Zultan, shoot me that man.”
“Aywa, Sidi.” The man grinned with a flash of teeth, taking aim. But in the instant before he pulled the trigger, the whiplash crack and the puff of smoke came again, and he spun round and fell, drilled through the head.
“Hold fire!” Thomas ordered his crew. He crossed to where the trooper lay still twitching, with the back blown out of his head, and took up the fallen carbine, which by chance or the mercy of Allah had not discharged. He dropped to one knee and took careful aim, longing for the stock of his Baker rifle against his cheek. He drew a deep breath and held it, waiting. Again the sun glinted on a gun barrel, and for a splinter of time half a head appeared, made visible only by its own betraying shadow on the sun-scorched rock behind it. In that instant Thomas pulled the trigger. He felt the familiar kick of the carbine against his shoulder, and the shadow was gone from the sunlit rock, and in its place was a ragged blot of darkness that held even at that distance the vital throb of crimson.
He laid the carbine down beside his dead trooper and turned back to the waiting gun crew. “Sponge —”
As though that shot had been some kind of signal, the defenders of the spur gathered themselves for one final and supreme effort. When it was over, and the swarming attack, flung back for the last time, fell away in defeat, and the last of the black powder smoke drifted away, the defile was like a butcher’s yard.
A jagged silence settled over the hills, broken only by the harsh cry of the wheeling vultures. On the spur among their own and the enemy dead, Thomas and his men stood to get their breath back.
The Egyptian troops would be well clear by now, and with the narrows past and the country opening up to them, the hunt would probably not come again in force, but content themselves with raids on the retreating column.
“Insh’ Allah, they will reach the wells before night,” one of the men said.
“Insh’ Allah, so shall we,” Thomas returned, looking round at them as a man may look at his brothers.
“What do we with the gun?”
“Nothing,” Thomas said regretfully. “Save make sure that it is not used again for a while. Slit up the cartridges and scatter the powder. There is little enough left; it is well the thing ended when it did.”
They scattered the black powder to the hill winds, and heaved the gun over the edge, watching it somersault down over the rocks, gun and carriage parting as they fell, to join the red and reeking mess below. They laid their own dead in a neat row, taking their arms and water bottles, and left them to the vultures along with the Wahabi slain. They bound up one another’s wounds as best they could with strips torn from their own clothing.
“Time we were on our way, my brothers,” Thomas said. They took a mouthful of water each, no more; they had a way to go yet, and maybe more fighting ahead of them before they reached the wells. They turned the gun camels loose, and headed like weary old men for the sheltered place where the scout and a couple of their comrades waited for them with the horses.
*
By the mercy of Allah, being across the tribal boundary and with the usual uncertainty in such matters, the wells were not held against them; and at evening, with what remained of the Terraba force bivouacked about the water behind hastily flung up defences of camel thorn, and the spent horses grazing under guard on the thin grass round about, Thomas and his commander stood together, looking back towards the hills that stood up dark against the eastern afterglow.
Tussun said with a glint of bitter laughter in his voice, “This is getting to be a habit with you.”
“What is?”
“How do you say it? — pulling my fat out of the fire. One day you will do it once too often.”
“I’d not be too sure I’ve done it this time — not yet,” Thomas told him. “We have a long march ahead of us before we see the roses of Teif again. And I doubt the Black Brotherhood will just sit back and watch — unless for the pleasure of seeing us starve. We are going to have to live off the country; and Allah knows it, this is an ill country for living off.”
“If we are driven to it we shall eat horseflesh,” Tussun said. “We shall get back to Teif … But the rear-guard work will fall to you and your squadrons, and we must keep some of the horses for that.”
&nbs
p; The laughter died out of his voice, and his hand on Thomas’s shoulder was shaking. “Not that getting back to Teif seems especially worthwhile. Nothing seems very much worthwhile, tonight.”
“That’s because you are tired,” Thomas said with masterly understatement.
“And you are not? Oh my Tho’mas, we are all tired — or dead. Well, let us admit it, we have had a tiring day.”
They moved off together to visit the weary pickets, making a careful way among dark bodies that slept where they had fallen, in the few hours respite that sleep could give them, before they took up again the long desperate struggle back to Teif.
28
In the open desert westward, the hills would be already beginning to parch in the growing heat of springtime, but up here in the high country around Teif there was still a silken sheen of green along the Wadis, and the myrrh and the tamarisk scrub and even the occasional grove of almond trees still gave shade among the rocks where the winter freshets had run. And Thomas, following the narrow hill track that would come down presently by a short-cut, to meet the pilgrim route from Medina, his small escort of three troopers behind him, felt the sense of quickening in the blood that came with the springtime among the hills of his boyhood, but which in the desert seemed to belong rather to the time after the autumn rains.
But as always when he rode that way, his mind went back to the ragged remains of an army retreating along it from Terraba, close on three months before. They had struggled back to Teif, those of them who finally made it, little more than a third of the infantry that had set out, about half the cavalry. Odd that, when you thought of it, since the cavalry had borne the brunt of the rear-guard fighting, the whole way back. What a waste of lives, and Terraba still to be taken. And His Excellency Muhammed Ali had not been pleased. Slightly mollified, yes, by the increased reputation for valour which his son and his son’s cavalry commander had brought back with them from that hideous retreat, but pleased, no. Tussun had found this unjust and unreasonable, especially when one considered that the disaster stemmed from the Viceroy’s own breach of faith with the High Shariff. But Thomas could sympathise with him. For himself, he found that the knowledge that one had kindled a blaze of reputation, even among the enemy, was not much consolation for having lost more than half one’s men in doing it.
He blinked, and shook his head, as though to shake out from it the image of weary and blood-stained ghosts lurching along the way.
One thing about the Viceroy, he was as resilient as a catapult thong. He had set about bringing up reinforcements and fresh water supplies, and gone on consolidating his position in the Hijaz. Having failed to drive the Wahabis from Terraba he had turned to a naval attack on Quinfunduh further down the coast, which, although now isolated in Ottoman-held territory, was still in Wahabi hands; and which, if taken, could provide a land base for a further drive into the southern interior. Also, Thomas guessed, a possible gateway to the Yemen with its highly profitable coffee trade. Well, it would make a change from tobacco.
Tussun had hoped to be put in command of the all-Albanian force; but the Viceroy had given that to one Zam Aglou, renowned for his blood-lust and skill in piracy. Zam, so said the report, had captured two small ships supplying the garrison with arms and ammunition, and turned their guns on the mud brick fort, which had fallen after a desperate resistance, during which Zam Aglou had offered a bounty of two hundred piastres per Wahabi head or pair of ears.
Thomas remembered his own and Tussun’s dealing with Ahmed Bonaparte after the taking of Medina, and wondered if they had been over nice, but rather thought not. The thought of those heads and ears stuck in his gorge though he had not heard of any displeasure on the Viceroy’s part.
Meanwhile, Tussun was back in his pashalik of Jiddah, and making sure that it remained in the right hands to act as his father’s supply base, and he, Thomas, was here kicking his heels between Teif and Mecca in command of Muhammed Ali’s elite cavalry corps, with no prospect of being sent anywhere else in the near future.
Not much more than a year ago, that would have irked him intolerably, but there had been changes in his world since then … When it became clear that the present pattern of things was likely to continue for a while, he had asked permission of Muhammed Ali, taken three rooms over a goldsmith’s shop behind the Mecca Gate caravanserai and sent Medhet off to fetch Anoud and Kadija.
That morning advance riders had announced the nearing of the spring trade caravan from Medina, and he had handed over for the day to his second-in-command, and ridden out to meet it.
The track rounded a sheer buttress of the hillside, and there below him, winding its way between the great rocks of the defile, was the caravan route. Nothing to be seen of the caravan as yet, but away beyond the hill spur that hid its further reaches from sight, a cloud of dust was rising.
She might not be with this caravan at all, he had only been able to give her very short notice, Thomas warned himself. On the other hand, she might. He touched his heel lightly to his mare’s flank, urging her forward, and was off and away down the boulder-strewn slope, the troopers behind him. A swallowtail butterfly fanning its enamelled wings on a rock beside the way, roused as the horses’ shadows swept over it, and fluttered up and across his path like a moment of joy given outward seeming. Thomas went weaving his mare down between the rocks at a speed which made his troopers shrug and glance aside at one another, grinning, then turn their attention to the task of keeping up with him without breaking either their own or their horses’ necks. The head of the caravan was coming into sight as Thomas reached the level ground and reined in. He could hear the beat of the camel bells, a bronze sound, a brown sound with a kind of bloom on it. Keeping to the side of the broad, scarcely defined track, he rode on to meet it.
As it came into closer view, the long ragged string of men and beasts seemed to spool out from the fold of the hills as though it would go on for ever. The tall disdainful camels, ridden or carrying their great loads of bales and boxes, swaying forward, the merchants and traders mounted or trudging on foot, the dark robed fierce-eyed horsemen of the caravan guard. Save for the bells and the occasional shout, there was a surprising lack of sound. Thomas was always surprised at how silently a caravan moved, save for the twice-daily chaos of getting under way or falling out for the night. The first camels were level with him now, rocking by, the great bulbous feet coming down and spreading, velvet-silent with a little puff of dust at each step, snakelike necks swaying against the sky. Thomas turned in beside the leading rider. “Salaam aleikum. Are you captain of the caravan?”
The man looked down at him from his swaying perch, out of bright dark eyes that seemed full of desert distances behind the folds of his head cloth which he had pulled across his face, the authority of each man recognising the authority of the other.
“Effendi, I am the captain of the caravan.”
“Have you women with you?”
“It depends who asks, and for what purpose.”
“I am Ibrahim Agha of Muhammed Ali’s cavalry force in Teif. The woman I seek is mine.”
“How should I know who and what and the ownership of the curtain-hidden ones in my caravan?” The man jerked his head backwards. “There are women gathered together in the mid-part of the line. Go you and ask among them.”
Thomas flung up his hand in acceptance and salute, wheeled his mare, and, while his troopers fell back a little, began to ride down the caravan, his eyes narrowed into the honey-coloured haze of sunlit dust through which beasts and human figures loomed towards him. Some way down the line, he came upon the women’s litters all together, box shaped or gondola shaped and set crosswise, so that taking camel and litter as one entity, the gondolas in particular made him suddenly think of enormous and rather ramshackle dragonflies. Idiotically, he hoped that Anoud would be in a dragonfly and not in a box. And for the moment he was cold-afraid that she might not be in any of them. He knew that all had been well with her a short while ago; every official messenge
r between Mecca and Medina had carried letters written, or to be read by, the professional in the souk. But something could have happened since the last letter. Again, he knew, as he had known it years before when Tussun went off campaigning in the Sudan while he was left in Cairo, the fear of loss that is one of the prices of love …
And then he saw Medhet riding beside one of the dragonfly litters; Medhet waving like a palm tree in a high wind, and making his horse dance and rear.
A few moments later they had come together. “I have brought her!” Medhet said. “Am I not the best, the very prince of all messengers and couriers?”
“You are indeed!” Thomas told him. “Ride on now and tell the captain of the caravan that I am taking the lady and her maid back to Teif. There is no need that she should go first to Mecca and then have the long ride on.”
And as his young aide-de-camp disappeared in a triumphant cloud of dust, he found himself riding alongside an elderly she-camel with an expression of weary distaste for the world and all its doings, led by an old man who looked as though he had been created out of the same stuff as the desert itself. He was looking up, seeing for the moment only a camel litter framed of the usual pomegranate wood and covered with coloured shawls like all the rest, but with a sheen of enchantment about it because it sheltered Anoud.
He was suddenly and unexpectedly shy. They had had so little time to come to know each other, and even that little had been almost a year ago. And he scarcely liked to call out to her before the camel men. She must have heard his voice and know that he was there. But the litter might have been empty for all the sound or sign there was of any movement within. Maybe she was shy too.
He raised himself in his stirrups to come as near as might be to the litter swaying to and fro above him, and said very softly, “Anoud, I am here.”
The nearest of the curtaining shawls stirred a little, then was lifted back, and he was looking up into the interior of the litter glowing with sunlight filtered through the coloured stuffs; looking up at the shapeless black figure sitting among the stowed bundles of her worldly goods, who might have been anybody, or nobody at all. Only the light grey eyes looking down at him from over her yashmak were Anoud’s, and nobody else’s in the world, and the hand she reached to him, leaning forward and down, a right hand, narrow but strong, that might have been a boy’s, was Anoud’s too.
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