Pharaoh jh-7

by David Gibbins

  ‘My guide taught me some of the Beja language, Tu-Bedawi, and I know Arabic.’

  Kitchener’s eyes narrowed. ‘An Arabic speaker. You are well prepared.’

  ‘A war out here was always on the cards. I’m a surveyor, Kitchener, just like you. Learning the language is an essential tool of the trade. ’

  ‘And you have been preparing for this ever since Gordon first arrived in the Sudan a decade ago.’

  ‘I go where I am ordered.’

  ‘Tell me, Mayne, who do you really work for? It is not Wolseley, is it?’

  ‘The same as you. Queen and country.’

  Kitchener paused. ‘You will need Bishari camels. You had better find them before every last camel in lower Sudan is snapped up for Stewart’s desert column.’

  With that Kitchener swivelled and abruptly left. Mayne remained for a moment, thinking about what Kitchener had said: If any harm should befall Gordon, I will take a life for each hair on his head. It was heated, emotional, but it was a warning. He thought of Kitchener’s questions about Gordon’s artefacts. He had seen men of reason become irrationally secretive about a shared endeavour, and there was doubtless some trail of discovery that had enthused Gordon in his early days in the Sudan, and with which he had infected Kitchener. But there were now larger matters to hand, and he put the thought from his mind.

  He began to walk towards Charrière, remembering his assurance to Wilson that he had everything he needed. The box he had carried from the cataract was among his belongings. In it was a present his uncle had brought him from the American West: a beautiful Spencer rifle with a 34-inch barrel in 50-90 calibre, designed for long-range buffalo shooting. With custom-loaded cartridges using diamond-grade Curtis & Harvey powder, Mayne would be able to hit a man-sized target at over a thousand yards.

  From his reconnaissance he knew a place on the river just south of the second cataract that closely replicated the width and conditions of the Nile at their destination; he would go there tomorrow morning, alone. He needed to plan with the greatest of precision when the most accurate shooting was possible: just after dawn, when the air over the river was cool and settled and less likely to disrupt the flight of the bullet. He would need to adjust the Creedmore aperture sights for the range he had seen on the map that Kitchener had shown him. Afterwards he would disassemble the rifle and pack it tightly in its case, with the sights protected against the jolts of the trip ahead. The success or failure of the mission could depend on it.

  Mayne’s resolve hardened as he thought again of Gordon. They shared something in common, daunting tasks with little hope of rescue. For Mayne, to succeed was to do his job; to fail was unthinkable. He had always known this, and it was part of the draw. But this time the stakes were higher than they had ever been before. This was not just about one man and a standoff that had riveted the world; nor was it just about Egypt and the Suez Canal, or British prestige in the eyes of Russia or Germany or the Ottoman Empire. It was about something more terrifying than that, about the resurgence of a force from the desert that twelve hundred years before had swept to the very gates of Europe, that would do it again and this time know no bounds.

  He remembered the piece of paper Wilson had slipped him as they shook hands. He knew what it was already, but even so he felt his heart pound as he opened it and glanced down. It was a black spot, a smudge of ink, the oldest form of code. He looked up and stared at Charrière. It meant there was no coming back, for either of them.

  He crushed the paper in his hand and looked out towards the desert, his eyes narrowing against the dust and the setting sun. He thought about Kitchener’s warning. Sometimes vengeance was possible; sometimes not. That was another thing Wilson had seized on when he had recruited Mayne: the need of a young man to seek retribution, to find meaning and justice for his parents’ death when he knew it never could be found, when all that was left was a yearning to kill.

  He remembered Wolseley’s words. If Gordon chooses to stay, then his fate is no longer in your hands.

  Wolseley could not have known how wrong he was.

  PART 4

  16

  Near the wells of Abu Klea, Sudan, 17 January 1885

  Major Edward Mayne blinked hard, wiping his eyes as they watered, squinting in the intense sunlight and the dust. Two hours earlier, he had sat shivering under his blanket, watching the first streaks of dawn ignite the desert in shimmering patches of amber and then spread into a uniform orange-red haze. It had been like that every morning in the desert, as if the first reflected heat off the land caused the dust to rise, creating a miasma that the sun could then only penetrate diffusely; to be crossing the desert was to be submerged in it, to be at the whim of the eddies and tides of history that swept over it like the violent dust storm they had endured the day before. He had felt it since they had left Korti twelve days ago, a sense that they were moving deeper into a place where colour had become monochrome and the light dispersed and opaque, increasing his foreboding about what lay beyond the loop of the river over the rocky plateau ahead.

  He tried to stop himself shivering. He had still not shaken off the chill of the night, but it was becoming hot, uncomfortably so for the camels; they needed water badly. He knew that the wells ahead would be no more than trickles of muddy water at the bottom of pits in the ground, but it would be enough. He lay forward over the boulder and extended his telescope, jamming his elbows into cracks in the rock and peering through the eyepiece. The desert in this part of the Sudan was not like the dunes he had seen in Egypt; instead it was what the Arabs called goz, a vast undulating plain of low gravel ridges broken by jagged rocky outcrops, brown and grey and dull maroon. The occasional patches of desert grass and thorny scrub could seduce the unwary into thinking that the goz was more life-sustaining than the dunes of the Sahara, a dangerous illusion borne out by the bleached camel bones and half-mummified corpses they had seen poking out of shallow graves along the way. He had come to realise how so many who had descended this way from the north – the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Ottomans – had found themselves mired in this place, drawn in and then checked by some invisible force that enclosed and drained them, making return impossible. And now he was watching history repeat itself, following a modern army that seemed perilously close to foundering in this harsh land as so many had done before.

  He trained his telescope on the rise in the middle distance, perhaps two miles to the south. He had recognised Abu Klea from Kitchener’s sketches, the last watering place before the Nile; they had last seen the river ten days ago at Korti, before they began the trek across the desert that cut off the loop to the east. He panned to the right, to a dust cloud that hung over the slope, and saw the flash of polished steel, then a blur of camels’ legs and khaki tunics folding in and out of the haze. He and Charrière had followed Brigadier General Stewart’s desert column all the way from Korti, but this was the first time he had seen it in broad daylight. To the left of the column was Stewart’s zariba, a defensive encirclement of thorny scrub, camel saddles and commissariat boxes where the soldiers had bivouacked the night before; to the right, a mile or so away where the slope merged with the flat desert, lay the patch of green that marked the wells. Between his position and the column was a wasteland of rocky knolls and low ridges, with undulations that made it difficult to gauge distance. He estimated that the wells were four thousand yards away, almost due south, and that the dust cloud was a thousand yards nearer, precisely on the path that he and Charrière would need to follow to get to the Nile.

  He heard something in the far distance, and held his breath, listening. He had heard the same noise once before, at the cataracts on the Nile, when the jihadi tribesmen had shadowed the river column, taunting them. It was the sound of tom-toms, dervish drums, irregular, wild, rising to a climax and then tapering off again, relentless. It seemed to be coming from all directions, an unnerving feature of distant sounds in the desert; it reminded him of hearing noise when he had swum underwater, impo
ssible to locate and making it seem as if he were surrounded. But he knew it must be coming from a dervish force beyond the wells, the object of Stewart’s advance that morning.

  The Mahdist army might not yet be visible, but he knew they would be battle-ready. Kitchener had predicted that there would be a fight in the desert before they reached the Nile. That night there had been a crescent moon, and just before dawn the planet Venus had been visible on the horizon, omens the emirs always sought before unleashing war. But for Mayne, predicting battle was more than just a matter of augury and superstition. For more than a week now he had watched Stewart’s column trundle forward, excruciatingly slowly. They had marched by night, making more laboured progress than they would have done by day, exhausting both men and camels; both slept poorly in daylight, and the camels had less chance of foraging and finding water. When Stewart had reached the rocky crater of Jakdul and its wells at the midpoint of the desert route, he had lingered for days. To Mayne it was almost as if he were willing the enemy to meet him in the field, by giving ample time for spies to reach the Mahdi’s camp outside Khartoum and tell him of Stewart’s advance; the Ansar warriors would have been itching for a fight, forcing the Mahdi’s hand. This was truly a battle foretold. Mayne frowned, snapping shut the telescope. Getting to the Nile was going to take more time than he had bargained for, and with Gordon’s status in Khartoum more uncertain by the day, time was of the essence.

  The camel hobbled beside him grunted and belched, emitting an odour so foul it made Mayne’s eyes smart again. It shifted on its forelegs and stared in the direction of the wells, chewing its cud. The bags of dura wheat slung over its back were nearly empty, and its hump was sagging. Both of their camels had traversed the Bayuda desert many times and knew exactly where they were, that the oasis ahead contained expanses of desert grass they could graze on as well as the puddles of muddy groundwater where they could slake their thirst. They had hobbled the camels the evening before to prevent them from wandering off on their own, and that night they had been restless. Mayne felt his own cracked lips, and was beginning to sympathise. Their breakfast of lime juice and biscuit had still not allayed the chill of the night, and he was looking forward to getting on the move again.

  A figure materialised beside him, silent as ever. Over the past days Charrière’s skin had darkened with the sun and the dust, accentuating the deep grooves that scored his cheeks and forehead. The desert of the Sudan must seem a world away from the rivers and forests of Canada where he had been brought up, but he had relished the challenge to his tracking and survival skills. He tossed back the Arab robe he wore over his woollen trousers and checked shirt, took out a hunk of dried meat from a pouch on his belt and cut off a strip, passing it over. Mayne had acquired a taste for the jerky carried by the voyageurs on the Red River expedition fifteen years before; this time it was camel rather than moose meat, but he took it gratefully. Charrière cut himself a piece and the two men chewed and sucked for a few minutes without talking. Then Charrière raised the depleted water skin that had been hanging from his shoulder, letting a trickle pour into his mouth before passing it to Mayne, who did the same, taking only a mouthful, knowing that the wells ahead were under dervish control and the tepid water might be their last for some time. They had been warned about thirst blindness, and he had wondered about the wavering images he had been seeing on the horizon the day before, whether they were mirages of the desert or tricks of the mind, or both. Today he would need all the clarity he could muster. He took another swig, leaving a few mouthfuls as a reserve, then passed the skin back. Charrière plugged and reslung it, then pointed ahead, his voice slow and deliberate, with its distinctive French-Canadian accent. ‘That is no longer an army on the march.’

  Mayne looked out again. ‘About a quarter of an hour ago they began to form a square. They’ve dismounted and corralled the camels inside. They’ve only just left the zariba where they spent the night, so it’s too early for them to be setting up camp again. You can see the glint of steel where they’ve fixed bayonets. They must be able to see something closer to the wells that we can’t.’

  Charrière squinted at the low hills behind the wells, then slid off the rock and lay splayed in the dust beside the camels, his ear to the ground. ‘We may not be able to see it,’ he said, ‘but I can hear it. There is a pounding, a great pounding of human feet, many thousands of them. And something else I can hear in the air too, a beating sound, like a thousand drums.’

  Mayne shut his eyes for a moment. The soldiers in the square were not just preparing for a skirmish, to repel a suicidal attack by a few jihadi horsemen like those that had beset them since they had entered the desert. What they could hear and see ahead of them now was barely imaginable, terrifying, a storm from the south, the edge of a sweeping darkness that would stir up an atavistic fear in the hearts of men whose crusader ancestors had faced it eight hundred years ago when they had come to reclaim the Holy Land. Mayne remembered how the tom-toms had so terrified the Egyptian soldiers with the river column on the Nile; he hoped the British would have more resolve than the Egyptian fellahin, men with an ancestral fear of warriors from the south. But what the men in the square must be able to see now would shake anyone, a mass advancing from the horizon against which victory might seem inconceivable.

  Charrière picked up the telescope and peered through it. ‘I can see puffs of rifle fire near the square. Mahdist sharpshooters must have come up among the rocks. These folds and gullies in the desert will provide them with cover.’

  ‘When you see volley fire from the square, then you know the Mahdi army is attacking,’ Mayne replied. He turned over and sank back against the rock, forgetting for a moment the chill and the hunger and thirst, retracing the brief for his mission. He and Charrière had left General Wolseley’s base at Korti dressed as Arabs and riding the best camels that could be found for them, shadowing Stewart’s desert column. The column had been sent south across the Bayuda desert towards Metemma on the Nile, a direct route of 176 miles that cut off the wide loop of the river to the east. Once at Metemma, it was to meet up with General Earle’s river column and a small vanguard under Colonel Wilson would embark in the river steamers that had been sent there by Gordon from Khartoum, 98 miles to the south. The plan then was either breathtakingly audacious, or astonishingly naïve. The arrival of a few dozen British redcoats would cow the enemy, who would disappear back into the desert. Khartoum would be relieved, and Gordon saved. The expedition would be the greatest triumph of British arms since Queen Victoria had come to the throne.

  Mayne knew that the chances weighed astronomically against any of this coming to fruition, not least the time factor: Gordon had issued a last plea for help weeks before, and already Stewart’s column had lingered for ten days longer than was necessary at the wells of Jakdul in the middle of the desert. The chances of the river column reaching Metemma before February were vanishingly small, with the falling level of the Nile at this time of year making the cataracts more treacherous by the hour. Yet Mayne’s own mission to get to Gordon just before the steamers arrived at Khartoum depended on Gordon knowing that the relief expedition had reached Metemma, and that rescue for himself and his people was possible; only then, Mayne knew, would he stand any chance of convincing him to leave. It had meant dogging the tails of the desert column, waiting until now, with the Nile less than twenty-five miles ahead, when the arrival of Stewart’s force at Metemma within two days seemed a fair certainty; he and Charrière could then bypass the column and make their way to Khartoum to reach it just ahead of the steamers and the relief force.

  Following the column had hardly required Charrière’s tracking skills. More than a thousand British soldiers mounted on camels and horses, a thousand more camels carrying disassembled mountain guns, a Gardner machine gun, ammunition and supplies, and the usual trail of followers and servants had created a veritable dust storm visible for miles. The enemy would have known about it even before the force had departed Korti. The
question in Mayne’s mind for days now had not been whether the Mahdi would detach a force from the besieging army at Khartoum to confront Stewart, but when. This morning he had the answer. The Mahdi had ample forces at his disposal, at least 250,000 men according to Kitchener, an army growing daily as the local tribesmen lost faith in British resolve and threw in their lot with the jihad. Mayne could only hope that the detachment of a large force would show that the Mahdi had not yet decided to take Khartoum by storm, but that he would starve the city into submission; that might give Mayne a better chance of reaching Gordon in time. Or it could mean that Khartoum had already fallen and that the entire Mahdi army had been released to move north. If so, his mission was over and the survival of Stewart’s force, of Mayne himself and of Charrière, would be hanging in the balance, with Egypt itself the next to fall as the Ansar surged north.

  He remembered Charrière’s morning foray, and peered at him. ‘Are we still being followed?’

  The other man nodded. ‘The same distance behind each day. I circled back to find their tracks. They bivouacked last night behind that ridge visible back along the trail on the horizon. Four men, with camels.’

  Mayne grunted, pursing his lips. Charrière had spotted them on the first night after leaving Korti, but to begin with Mayne had thought little of it; the desert track was well used and local tribesman plied it even in times of war. But the four men had remained behind them for the full ten days it had taken Stewart to leave Jakdul, and he had become suspicious. They were not simply waiting their turn to use the wells, as Stewart’s men would have let local tribesmen through and there would have been no need for them to remain concealed. They must either be brigands or Mahdist spies, or both. It had been impossible to be stealthy with two snorting and kicking camels under them, and the tribesmen of the desert were as adept at tracking as Charrière was. But Mayne wanted to shake them soon, once they had left the exposed wasteland of the desert route. Kitchener’s map had shown an area of dense mimosa and acacia scrub in the final miles of the journey towards the Nile, beyond Abu Klea; that was where Mayne planned to leave the camels and make their move.