Blood and Sand

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  This must be the greater part of ibn Saud’s cavalry, Thomas thought, with a kind of bitter pride as they swept towards each other. The young Tiger might easily have raised his full strength of camel men again since Kulukh, but it was unlikely that he could have done the same with his horsemen. If he and his two squadrons must die this morning, and it seemed extremely likely that they must — even an attempt to retreat before they had crossed the ridge would only have resulted in their being hunted down like beasts, and a foul death instead of a clean one — what a blow to Wahabi power they could strike, taking, if Allah willed it, twice their own number with them! Also it would almost certainly save Tussun, whatever the hole he had got himself into.

  There was an odd sense of ritual upon him; and it seemed upon the Wahabis also; for, half a mile apart, both commanders as by common consent, gave the order to halt. Across the level ground, as the sun cleared the skyline and light spilled down the eastern slopes, Wahabi and orthodox Muslim confronted each other, the last faint wind of the morning stirring their standards sideways before it died into the growing heat.

  Thomas felt as though he were two men, one numbed by the suddenness of disaster, one standing beside him, calmly weighing up the possibilities, giving orders in a voice which did not seem to be quite his, for the four troops to join up in close column, and for weary mounts to be changed for fresh ones. Then calling up his officers. There was one chance yet …

  “If it may be done, I will gain us half an hour or so of breathing space,” he said to the handful about him, who were also friends. “Partly to give ourselves and our horses time to gather our strength before we charge.” He saw the small east wind smile on their faces. “Partly because it may be that Tussun Pasha is even now coming up on the Wahabis’ rear.” The smile deepened at the thought of taking the ranks of the Brotherhood front and rear. “Wait here while I try for a parley, but do not let the men dismount or break ranks until — unless — you see me wave my arm. Now, Daud, Jassim, with me.” And without another word, the other two following, he wheeled his horse and rode towards the enemy line.

  There was a stirring in the centre of the Wahabi battle-mass, and out from under the black banner rode a tall man with two companions following after him, making his horse dance and caracole, wincing from bit and spur as he came.

  “Salaam aleikum,” Thomas called the customary greeting as they drew near.

  They reined in no more than a lance length apart. “I am Ibrahim Agha, Amir of Medina. By what name do they call you?”

  The other’s eyes held a kind of smouldering delight, “Men call me Abdullah ibn Saud, Lord of the Najd, among other things. It matters little what they call you, Oh heretic dog from another land, for in a little while you will be dead, and your followers with you, and we shall appoint a true believer as Amir of Medina in your place.”

  Thomas, never having come face-to-face with his old enemy of Jedaida, studied the dark, reckless hawk features with a detached interest, noting the small fleck of spittle at the corner of the mouth. What a thing was religious fervour. “Abdullah ibn Saud, we are here it seems by the will of Allah, to fight His battle, but to fight as brave men fight, not to insult each other. Now, in the belief that you are a man of honour, I lay before you this challenge; that you send two hundred and fifty of your best horsemen against us to fight man to man for the Glory of Allah — and then your next two hundred and fifty — and your next! Abdullah ibn Saud, do you dare to do that?”

  For a moment he thought Abdullah was actually going to accept the challenge, despite the muttered protests of his two companions. Then he shook his head. “We are not here to play games of chivalry, but to obey Allah’s word as to the cleansing of Islam from the infidel and the heretic.”

  It had been worth trying, but Thomas was not really surprised. “Then in the name of Allah the All Compassionate grant us the half of an hour that we may make the Last Meal in His name and pray before the fighting joins between us.” He saw his enemy hesitate, and pressed on. “Do you dare to deny us that which the Prophet himself instituted when he received the Divine Injunction before the raid of Dhat al Riga?” Another moment’s pause. “Do you fear that we shall run? Or that the hearts of your own men will grow small with half an hour of waiting?”

  “I fear neither of these things. Receive your half hour’s delay,” said Abdullah ibn Saud.

  Playing for every instant of time that might bring Tussun and his force up with them, Thomas pulled out his Edinburgh watch from the folds of his waist-shawl. The time was two minutes past seven. He showed it to the enemy leader. “Your watch agrees with mine?”

  “Well enough, I make no doubt.”

  “I go now to join my men. We shall follow the instructions of the Prophet, peace be to Him. At two minutes past the half hour, stand ready to receive our charge.”

  “We will stand ready, Ibrahim Agha, one-time Amir of Medina.” For an instant something that was almost a smile lit behind the dark face. An odd thing is liking between men. Thomas answered it, then wheeled his mare and flinging up a hand, cantered back to his men.

  By the time he reached them, they had dismounted, but were standing still in their troop formation, each man holding his horse. They looked at him, each face carrying an unspoken question. “I have gained us something under half an hour, to eat, rest and pray,” he said.

  A few moments later, standing on a couple of ammunition boxes, where every man of his squadrons could see him and hear his words, he spoke to them for the last time:

  “My comrades-in-arms, you who are my friends and my brothers, in less than half an hour we shall charge the Wahabi war host, and unless it should come to pass by some miracle that Tussun Pasha is close behind them, we shall charge them alone, and in so doing, pass by the shortest, but also the surest way to Paradise.” Was he so sure? He who often felt as though he were fallen between two faiths? But whatever his own doubts, they were not for passing on to the men now listening to him, the men he must lead to death with all the belief in their cause, all the heightening of the heart that he could put into them. “We fight in the name of the Prophet, against those who have trampled down his people and desecrated his tomb; therefore let each of us set our hearts to sending four, even five of these heretics to Eblis, before we ourselves come to the gates of Paradise. We can do this thing, for are we not the very flower of fighting men? Our names will go down in song wherever men sing of past splendours; for today, few as we are, we shall save the Holy Land.”

  He came down to practicalities: “Now we make the Prayer before Action, as the Prophet ordered it. No. 1 squadron will pray and then rest for ten minutes, while No. 2 squadron eat their morning dates standing, sword in hand. Then No. 2 will pray while No. 1 eats and stands guard.” There was little time for more, for he must not erode the last few precious moments, but one thing more had to be said. “As for myself, who came among you as a stranger from a strange land, no man has ever been happier in his friends, no man has ever been prouder of the troops he led. I am honoured that I make this last charge in your company. The mercy of Allah the All Compassionate be with us all! Now pray.”

  They tossed up their weapons, saluting him with a shout so great that it startled the distant Wahabis and the high-cruising vultures in the sky.

  Thomas sprang down from his makeshift platform and went a little aside with his officers. He took out his dates and began to eat, joined by the rest of them. One could give and receive the final orders just as well with one’s mouth full, and so save time. “My friends, as I have already said, it is for us to account for as many of the Wahabi cavalry as may be, before we ourselves go down. Therefore ignore the camel men and concentrate on the horse. This is clearly part of the host that has cut Tussun off, but he must surely be alive, or they would have boasted of his death. If we can cripple a good proportion of their cavalry, he should be able to cut his way free.” He spat out the date stones into the sand. “I shall lead the centre, in wedge formation, straight for Abdulla
h’s standard. You, Hassan and you, Anwar, will follow close for two hundred yards, as though we are charging together as one double squadron. But when the bugle changes from the canter to the charge, you will peel off your troops respectively left and right and charge their cavalry wings.

  “Remind your men that we must strike the enemy as three tightly clenched fists, as we have trained to do, over the years. If we hold formation, knee to knee, we shall drive deep into them and kill far more than if we hit them loose and flying like a banner.”

  Around them the men who had been praying were standing up and drawing their swords, while the rest made their ritual ablutions in the sand and set themselves in order for prayer.

  “There is one thing more,” Thomas said. “We must send word of what has happened back to Medina, that Mustapha may know and bring up a force to Tussun’s relief, or to meet and cover him if he succeeds in fighting his way through. One of you must ride back, and ride alone! If I send an escort, the Wahabis will think it worth pursuing, whereas one man, even if they see him, they may not trouble about.” Suddenly, unexpectedly even to himself, he grinned: “If a group gallop off, the Wahabis will tell all Arabia that half of us fled in terror before the action.”

  There was a dry laugh in appreciation of this.

  He looked round him from face to face, seeing flat refusal on them all, until he came to one on which the refusal sat like open mutiny. “Medhet, will you ride for me to Medina?”

  “No,” Medhet said.

  “If I order you?”

  “How will you make me obey? Whatever your orders, once the charge is begun, who shall stop me from riding with it?”

  There was a murmur of agreement from the other officers.

  “No one,” Thomas said. “That is why I do not order, but ask you as a friend.” He gathered in the rest with a quick glance. They had to share in this; they had to hear, and Medhet had to know that they heard. “I ask a greater courage than I ask of myself or the rest of us. It is easy for us to charge swiftly and gloriously to death among dear comrades; you may have to die slowly and horribly — and alone.”

  Treating the matter as settled, he embraced the others, quickly and warmly, one by one; and then as they turned away to join their troops on guard or at prayer, turned back to the one of whom he was asking the harder thing. “Don’t look at me like that, Medhet.”

  “That was not fair,” Medhet said. “I could have disobeyed your order.”

  “I know,” Thomas said. “Which as you know, is why I asked. There is another thing that I have to ask of you; that if you get through, you will do what you may for Anoud and the babe that will most like have been born by now. There is money laid by, and Mustapha has my instructions concerning her, and Tussun, if he ever wins back to Medina will befriend her; but it is you, my oldest friend, who I am depending on.”

  “What I can do, that I will — if I also win back to Medina.” His voice was dried out and husky with emotion.

  “So. Then take my Lulwa, she has not been ridden this morning, and whichever is the more rested of your own horses. Take food and a goatskin of water, a second carbine —” He pulled the Governor’s ring from his finger and pushed it on to Medhet’s hand. “This must not fall to the Wahabis.”

  “All these things I will take,” Medhet said; and then: “They have been good, these eight years since El Hamed.”

  “I would not change them for all the years of a long life.” Thomas kissed him, held him close a moment, noses touching, eye smiling into eye. “Tell Anoud that I sent all my love, Tussun also, if you see him again. You know that it is yours for all time. Now go, and the blessing of Allah go with you.”

  He turned away, pulling out the heavy silver watch. He had just five minutes left for his own prayer. He made the ritual ablutions in the sand and took his place between Daud and Jassim Khan.

  He did not even notice the odd jumble of his praying, for it seemed as it had done that other time in the desert beyond El Hamha, that he had reached the place where all things and all faiths were one in the hollowed hand of God. “Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Master of the Day of Judgment. Guide us into the path of thy Blessed — Oh God, I thank Thee, I have loved and been loved, I have served with and commanded men. Receive my soul O Lord.”

  On the sand before him he had set the silver watch. The hands showed less than two minutes left. Tussun and his troops had not arrived, and it was time to be moving. Allah would forgive him for being brief.

  He got to his feet, and mounted his horse, which Daud brought for him along with his own, and took his place at the head of the V-formation, bugler and standard-bearer swinging into the saddle on either side. At a little distance the spare horses were picketed, to be taken by the victors afterward. “Jassim, your father will be a proud man when he hears of this day’s work,” he said to the young standard bearer; and to Daud ibn Hussein: “Your brother waits to greet you. Use sword and bugle as you did at Jedaida, you are a man now and may kill twice as many as you did then! Now sound the ‘Advance’!”

  He reached over his shoulder and drew the great broad-sword that had been his beloved companion through so many fights. “Follow me!”

  The clear bugle notes tore into the morning; the squadrons broke forward from a stand to a trot, then into a canter. Thomas raised the blade above his head and brought it down, catching the sun in its dazzling arc: “Oh my brothers, charge! For Ali ibn Talib!”

  “Ali ibn Talib!” Two hundred and fifty voices roared behind him.

  “Allahu akba!”

  “Allahu akba!”

  Beside him Daud was sounding the Charge — Charge —Charge —

  As they broke into a headlong gallop the Wahabi battle-front under streaming banners came plunging forward to meet them.

  Thomas was aware of the green banner of Medina streaming back on the wind of their going. Above the yelling of the Wahabis as the space between them narrowed, he was shouting, unaware that what he shouted above the wild cries of his Arab cavalry, out of some ancient darkness that beat within his own blood, was the battle cry of the 78th Highlanders: “Cuidich ‘n Righ! Cuidich ‘n Righ!”

  He was away like an arrow for the place where the black banners of the Wahabis marked their centre. The two side troops, following his orders, had peeled off right and left a long time ago — it seemed a long time ago, but time meant nothing any more.

  “Cuidich ‘n Righ!”

  There was less than a hundred yards now between the flying arrowhead of cavalry and the huge disorderly mass of the Wahabi battle front that swelled darkly on his sight. He singled out the first of the enemy for his sword.

  The Egyptian squadrons, yelling like fiends, were travelling at twice the speed of the enemy when they struck the Wahabi ranks.

  “Cuidich ‘n Righ! Allahu Akba! To the Gates of Paradise, oh Muslims! Follow me, follow me home!”

  *

  Medhet had got clear under cover of the dust-cloud, and was riding like a man possessed on the first stage of his solitary way back to Medina. Three hundred miles. Presently he would ease his pace, use sense and judgment in the husbanding of his horse’s strength and his own; since if he died on the journey, Thomas would have denied him the last charge in vain. But for the moment he rode as if Shaitan himself were after him. And the one thing, as it seemed, that kept his heart from breaking within him, was not that he must get through to summon help for Tussun, but that Tho’mas had set Anoud in his care, had called him his oldest friend and said that he was relying on him. He slowed to a less mad pace, and turned his horses’ heads into the hills, making sure that his pistol was in his waist-shawl, the extra carbine across his saddle.

  *

  But three hundred miles away in the Governor’s Palace in Medina a little group of servants had come running, and were gathered wailing at the foot of the outside stairway that led up to the roof of the women’s quarters.

  And in their midst Anoud lay crump
led among the twisted folds of her sleeping shift, that slender neck of hers bent sideways at an unnatural angle, her grey eyes wide and sightless, staring up past them into the morning sky and the pigeons wheeling overhead.

  Closest beside her, Kadija squatted, swaying to and fro on her vast haunches. “Aiee! Aiee! If I had not let her sleep on! But she slept so badly, and what sleep she had broken by ill dreams, these past moons — and with the babe overdue … She was asleep and I let her be; and then it must have been that another of her dreams came upon her, and she sprang up and ran out of the pavilion crying out his name as though she heard him calling, ‘Tho’mas! Tho’mas’ — I tried to catch her but she was too quick for me, and she missed her footing at the head of the stair, with the weight of the child — Aiee Aiee! Allah’s pity upon women.”

  One of the harem eunuchs, squatting beside her, burst into frightened tears. “The Amir will have our heads when he comes back —”

  Kadija rounded on him: “Quiet, fool! What matter for thy worthless head? Or mine? But he will not come back. She knew. They will sing songs about him, they will call him The Bravest of the Brave. He will have all the things men care about. But he will not come back.”

  She bent across Anoud’s body as though to shield her from something. Again she said, “Allah’s pity upon all women.”

  *

  The fighting was over, and on the fringe of the spent battlefield Abdullah ibn Saud stood looking about him, while the surgeon knotted the bandage-strip about his upper arm to stop the bleeding from a deep sword-cut.

  “Another victory like that, and we shall lose Najd,” he said to his second-in-command leaning wearily on his sword close by.

  “The Egyptian force is dead to a man,” said the other, between triumph and regret.

  “So are more than three times as many of our own horsemen.”

  One of the Brotherhood came running, his hand and the hem of his burnous juicy as though with ripe mulberries. “We have found Ibrahim Agha lying over yonder. Do we take his head?”