by Seth Hunter
‘So what does His Eminence suggest?’ put in Tully, ‘that we give ourselves up now?’
‘No. He says we should defend ourselves to the best of our ability, while he and his men ride for help.’
‘Be damned to that,’ Nathan cried indignantly. ‘We paid him to provide us with an escort, not to make off at the first hint of trouble. We even shared our rabbits with him.’
‘Hares,’ Spiridion corrected him. ‘I put that to him – if a little more tactfully. But he insists it is the only chance of saving our lives.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘I am not normally of a trusting nature, but on this occasion I think we have no alternative.’
‘So we must fend for ourselves,’ said Tully, already looking about him to see how this might best be achieved.
The watchtower was clearly the most defensible position available to them. It had stout stone walls, with slots for firing from, four storeys, and a single means of access, the only drawback being the absence of a door. To remedy this deficiency, the sheik supplied them with a number of woolsacks – part of the cargo he was carrying to Baghdad – which his men helped to pile up in the doorway, leaving two gaps to fire through. Nathan derived some small comfort from the discovery that the wool came from England. It was possible even that it originated in his native county, though it would have been too much of a coincidence if it had been supplied from his father’s sheep.
The sheik also left them most of the water which, carefully conserved, might last two or three days – always assuming they lived that long – and they retained one of the horses – Nathan having resolved that if all seemed lost, one of them should attempt to break out with Nelson’s precious despatches.
The one thing they were not short of was weapons. They had the dozen muskets supplied them by the armourer aboard the Vanguard, with twice as many pistols, a wicked array of pikes, swords, daggers and tomahawks, half a dozen grenades – and, of course, the two Nock guns. Nathan gave one of these to Mr Banjo and kept the other for himself, though he was apprehensive at the prospect of using it, given its reputation for breaking shoulders. ‘We will guard the doorway,’ he assured him. There being no other firing points on the ground floor, the others were positioned at the various loopholes on the spiral stair, each supplied with three muskets and six pistols, all primed and loaded. Then they settled down to wait.
As the day advanced, the heat grew ever more intense. The pony, tethered in a corner of the ground floor, gave voice to her distress. They gave her some water and took a little for themselves. No one was hungry, not even Nathan, but as the afternoon wore on they ate some dates and a little flatbread, moistened in water, just to keep their strength up.
It was almost dusk when the attack came. Nathan was sitting on the stair with Tully, on each side of the loophole. The sun had dropped below the buildings of the citadel, and they were watching the shadows lengthening across the courtyard when there was a sound not unlike the cry of the muezzin. A moment later, without any further warning, a great horde of men came charging through the gateway, yelling their savage battle cries.
Tully snatched up his musket while Nathan leapt down the spiral stairway to stand beside George Banjo at the barricade. Banjo was there already and as Nathan reached his side he discharged all seven barrels. The report was deafening. Even Banjo, massive as he was, reeled back with the force of the recoil. The mare went mad with fear, rearing and kicking in her makeshift stall. Nathan applied his eye to the gap in the barricade. The blast had cut a swathe through the ranks of charging men, and the attack appeared to have come to a halt. There were no more than five or six men down, out of at least ten times that number, but the fact that the defenders possessed such a weapon was clearly discouraging. Instead of pressing on with their attack, they were hanging back and firing towards the tower with their muskets. But Nathan’s companions were keeping up a steady rate of fire from the loopholes, and with brutal effect. Before long, there were at least a dozen corpses stretched upon the ground, and the rate of fire clearly gave an impression that there were far more than five men in the tower.
Nathan could no longer delay his own contribution. He thrust the Nock gun through the gap provided for him, brought the stock into his shoulder, winced in expectation, and pressed the trigger. He had taken the precaution of padding out his shoulder with wool, but it still felt as if he had been kicked by a mule. He was hurled flat on his back, shocked and deafened by the report, the gun still in his hands and the interior of the tower filled with black smoke and the frantic screams of the mare. Nathan felt his numbed shoulder, but nothing seemed to be broken or dislocated, and he picked himself up and rejoined Mr Banjo at the barricade, clawing a pistol from his belt. But there was no need of it. The attackers were in full flight, leaving a score of dead and wounded lying on the bloodied stones of the gateway.
They reloaded the guns, but there was no further attack. They calmed the poor animal, and gave it some water, then drank sparingly themselves. Night fell. Nathan climbed up to Tully’s level on the stair and peered out through the loophole. The citadel was in darkness. He could see very little, but he could hear the moans and groans of the wounded. Then, as it grew darker, he saw shadowy figures moving stealthily among them. He let them be – and after a while, the cries ceased.
The moon rose, and the stars came out. The only sound they heard now was the distant howling of jackals from across the desert.
They ate some more dates and bread, and made beds for themselves on the spare woolsacks left by their escort. Nathan took the first watch with Blunt, climbing the tower to the loophole nearest the top, which gave him a view over the city walls and across the surrounding desert. He could see the flickering fires of the brigand camp to the east, but no other lights. Just a great expanse of blackness stretching for many miles in every direction. He could hear the jackals again, but closer now. Probably in the city itself, smelling death. He had no expectation of the sheik returning, or of any outside help. Nor did he have much hope of surviving. The only reason the brigands had not pressed home the attack was because they did not have to. All they had to do was wait; the sun would do the rest.
Death inevitably occupied much of his thoughts during the night. He felt its presence, like a black, hooded figure on the stair. As if it had followed him across the desert, for all his life, in fact, and found him at last. Or else had been waiting for him here. A grim recruiting officer for the army of ghosts that roamed the haunted citadel.
He saw plenty of ghosts that night. Ghosts of men he had sent to their deaths in far-off places, in the chops of the Channel and among the islands of the Caribbean, in all those distant seas, sliding the dead into their watery grave with a few cold words of comfort from the Book of Common Prayer. Young boys of eleven or twelve, and hardened old seadogs. And the others, who would soon join them: Spiridion and Banjo, Blunt and Tully. His companions through all eternity. Mea culpa, as the Papists rebuked themselves, mea maxima culpa. He felt most guilty for Tully, who had followed him through thick and thin across three continents, sharing his victories and his defeats, only to be led here, to die among the old ruins and the jackals and the scorpions.
It was barely six years ago since they had first met, on the old Nereus, chasing smugglers in the English Channel. Tully was a Channel Islander, the son of a fisherman from Guernsey, but his mother had been a seigneur’s daughter who had fallen in love beneath her station and had been cast out for it. She had died in childbirth, and the family had taken the boy in and brought him up as a gentleman. But when he was of an age to choose, he had gone back to the life his father led, fishing and smuggling, until he was taken by a King’s ship and given the choice of transportation or serving His Majesty. He was a master’s mate when Nathan met him, for he had a talent for maths and navigation, and what with that and the manners of a gentleman, he had advanced rapidly in his new profession.
Despite the differences in their rank, Nathan had never felt so clos
e to anyone in his life. No one of the same sex and age, at least. Perhaps it was because they were both outsiders. Though Nathan was the son of an admiral and the heiress of a shipping dynasty, he had been born in New York, and his mother, for all her family wealth, was as much a rebel and a reprobate as any smuggler or runaway.
And now they would die together.
He wondered if anyone would find their bodies. He doubted it. The jackals would have them. Though he supposed the brigands might pack them up and cart them off – or their heads at least – to show to their French paymasters to claim the rest of their reward, and the French might give them a half-decent burial; they might even notify Mr Abbott in Aleppo so that he could send news of their demise to England.
Nathan felt a sudden vicarious grief for the grief of his parents, for he knew they both loved him, and he loved them. For all the quarrels between them. His mother and father had lived apart for many years now, and it had never particularly bothered him, but the last time he was home in Sussex, his father had told him he planned to obtain a divorce and marry the daughter of one of his neighbours. Nathan knew the girl well – rather too well, in fact. Her name was Frances Wyndham and she was the natural daughter of Lord Egremont, one of the biggest landowners in the county. A boisterous girl, rather too horsy to be considered handsome, but with a fine seat and an outstanding bosom. Once, while the rest of the hunt was otherwise engaged, she and Nathan had enjoyed what was described in hunting terms as a ‘tussle’ in Windover Wood. There had never been much more to it than that, but you did not really want your father marrying a woman your own age, particularly not when you had enjoyed a tussle with her in Windover Wood. Besides, there was his mother to be considered. Divorce was always a messy business, much reported in the press. All their dirty linen aired in public, and, God knew, there was enough of it: his mother had enjoyed a host of liaisons over the years and kept a number of young men as pets, though she called them her protégés. All in all, they were a disreputable couple. Still, he would have liked to have written to them before he died. Not that he had much to say to them, except to say how much he loved them.
And to ask them to look after Sara and her boy.
That was the other business he would regret – not having settled the business with Sara. Sara de la Tour d’Auvergne, the woman he should have married.
They had met in Paris, when he was on a confidential mission for William Pitt in the first year of the war. She had married into one of the noblest families in France, but she kept that quiet, or as quiet as she could, for it was a time when even a minor title could mean a ride to the guillotine. Her husband, a much older man, had died in exile with the French court in Koblenz, and when Nathan met her, she was living quietly in Paris with her young son, Alex. She used her maiden name of Seton, which was sufficiently obscure to evade the attentions of the authorities, though her father had been a noble of the sword, a Scottish soldier in the service of the King of France.
Sara. Nathan gazed out over the desert, his head filled with memories of another time and another place. Paris at the time of the Terror. The tumbrels rolling down the rue d’Honoré. The studio of Jean-Baptiste Regnault in the same street where Sara had trained as an artist. The house in the rue Jacob where they had first made love.
And now she was in England, living with William Godwin, the widower of her best friend Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died in childbirth.
Nathan did not know if they were living as man and wife, or if she was his housekeeper, looking after Mary’s child. It hardly seemed to matter now; she was so far out of his reach. But he would have liked to have written to her, too. Or to turn up at her door and feel her arms about his neck, her lips pressed upon his, and her body, the lovely, soft warmth of her – all the old clichés. And that other old cliché, that dark, hooded figure on the stair, smiling and waiting, as patient as only Death can be.
Dawn came as it had at Aleppo, a creeping back of the darkness into the cracks, like the scorpions and the other creatures of the night. The yellow fingers creeping across the earthen floors, as if taking the measure of the day, and then the sun itself, heaving its old, fierce face over the walls to take a look. And the sky a bright mockery of hope.
The brigands had taken up their positions during the night, working their way into the ruins, and they kept up a spasmodic fire through the long, broiling day. It was impossible to do more than sneak the occasional, brief glance through the loopholes or the gap in the barricade. But the fire from the guns was nothing to the fire in the heavens. It was probably cooler in the tower than it was outside, but it was hot enough. Nathan felt as if the life was draining from him, that he was in his tomb already. And perhaps he was.
At night, he thought, they would make a gap in the barricade and he would send Tully off on the pony. And if he refused to go, as well he might, he would send Blunt. He was the lightest of them by far and a good rider, even with his sprained wrist. If they left it any longer, the beast would be past running. He doubted if they would make it, but he had to try, though a part of him thought, why bother? The French would either march on India or they would not. It was Bonaparte’s fate that would determine it, not his. And perhaps even Bonaparte was as much a plaything of the gods.
He did not expect another attack. Not in daylight, at least. But about halfway through the afternoon, the rate of firing suddenly increased. At least a hundred men must have been shooting at them from the surrounding buildings. Bullets were smashing into the stones and through the loopholes, screaming off the walls. They were even coming in through the gaps in the woolsacks, forcing Nathan and Tully to crouch down with their Nock guns and hope the men above would be able to give them warning of an attack. But no warning was given. The first Nathan knew of it was when a musket barrel was thrust through the gap above his head and fired into the interior. He grabbed a hold of it and wrenched it away. Banjo was similarly employed, roaring in impotent fury at the attackers. Hands were pulling away at the sacks. The barricade was being dismantled before their eyes.
‘Up the stairs,’ yelled Nathan, and they fell back, taking their guns with them.
Tully was on his way down, the others close behind.
‘They are too close to the walls to fire on them,’ said Tully. ‘And we have used all the grenades.’
They waited there, all five of them, with their guns levelled as the gap widened. Bright spears of sunlight pierced the gloom of the tower. The mare screamed and plunged in her makeshift stall.
‘One volley,’ Nathan said, ‘and then a charge.’
They might hold them off for quite a while on the stairs, but Nathan’s fear was that they would light a fire and throw the woolsacks on. Better to die fighting, hand to hand, than choke to death on a black cloud of burning English wool.
But then the gap stopped widening. The hands disappeared. And there was gunfire. Even more gunfire than before.
Nathan peered through the loophole. The courtyard was empty, save for the dead and the dying. He ran up to the top of the tower and looked out over the desert.
The surviving brigands were in full retreat pursued by a small army of mounted men. There must have been at least 500 of them, on camels and on horses. And at their head, on his racing camel, was Rashid the Magnificent, his sword stretched out before him and his standard bearer at his side, with the great silk flag streaming in the wind.
‘There is but one God and Mohammed is His Prophet.’
Part Two
The Malabar Patrol
Chapter Nine
The Good Little Bay
The brig came out of the dark skies to the west, running before the wind. There was a battle raging out to sea, but it was a battle of gods not of men: a distant flash of lightning, a rippling roll of thunder. The sky ahead was brighter, but it was a misty, eerie light, as of sunshine after rain. Off the larboard bow there was an island – Old Woman’s Island, it was marked on the charts – with a lighthouse on a small promontory, and as the brig came up
a little into the wind, more islands began to emerge from the haze: so many that they gave the impression of one great landmass of rolling hills, densely forested, but as if sculptured into the shape of birds and animals so that Nathan’s first impression was of some exotic topiary in an English country garden. But no English garden could boast such foliage, such tropic display of palm and peepul and other trees for which he had no name – and among them such buildings – such turrets and towers with conical roofs, battlements, flags, blockhouses and palisades … They seemed to have arrived in fairyland, or to have been transported back into the medieval past. For a moment, Nathan thought of Venice, that misty, magical city in its muddy lagoon, but a more exotic Venice, a Venice in the jungle, set about with palm trees and creepers, garlanded with jacaranda and oleander and laburnum. Then the brig rounded a small headland and a different forest appeared – a forest of masts and yards, bare poles, square and triangular sails, so many they bewild ered the eye, and, beyond them, a more familiar waterfront – severe, square-jawed, almost brutal – a massive fort, brist ling with guns, a colossal custom’s house and a long line of solid, stone warehouses – a waterfront that had eschewed the baroque for the businesslike, a city of trade, like Venice, but a city of the future, not the past. Bombay. Journey’s end.
It was the tenth day of October, sixty-one days since he had left Abukir.
Other cities appeared through the mist of his memory. Scanderoon and Aleppo, and Baghdad, where the crowds had cheered them as they rode through the streets, hailing them as victors over the French, the common enemy who had dared violate the sanctity of their fellow Mohammedans in Egypt; and where the pasha had presented Nathan with a handsome pelisse and, more practically, a boat to take them down the Tigris to Bassara.
And Bassara itself, on the Persian Gulf, a more melancholy stopover, where he had taken leave of Spiridion Foresti and George Banjo, for Spiridion was heading back to Egypt on business of his own, and doubtless of Nelson’s. He would not say which route he was taking, but Nathan suspected it was by way of Suez. Spiridion’s last words to him had been: ‘Look out for yourself – and look out for Caterina.’
