And then they were through and among the camels. They stumbled beneath the first beasts’ legs, crouching down and slithering through the faeces and urine as they made their way forward. The din of battle was muffled for a few moments but then intensified as they came towards the other side and out into the melee again, dodging among screaming and shrieking men, hearing the thwack of blades on flesh, the whine and whistle of bullets and the thuds as they found their mark. Mayne slipped in a pool of blood and fell face to face with a British soldier lying on his back with a fearful wound to his head; his eyeballs had protruded from their sockets and burst, the liquid glistening like bloody tears on his face. ‘Water,’ the man croaked, reaching for him blindly. ‘Water.’ Before Mayne could think of acting, Charrière had heaved him up and dragged him on. A bullet nicked his arm and ricocheted into Charrière’s shoulder, lodging in the flesh. Charrière flicked the bullet away with his knife and then stood facing two dervishes who ran at them screaming, their spears levelled. He pulled the spear from the hands of one of them, reversed it and ran the man through until he was nearly embracing him, then pushed the body away as it went limp. Mayne drew his revolver and shot the other man, the gun jumping back in his hand as he fired; then he picked up a Martini-Henry rifle and slammed the butt into the man’s neck as he went down. A few yards ahead of him Charrière had found another sword and was slashing and stabbing, cutting a path through the mass of dervishes, allowing space for a British sergeant to order a ragged volley at point-blank range that dropped a dozen of them in one go. Mayne ran behind, crouching low, sensing the British soldiers on his left and the dervishes to the right, and the two sides closing together again behind him in the shrieks and yells of hand-to-hand fighting.
As they approached the far edge of the square, Mayne saw a huge man propped with his back against a rock, surrounded by dead dervishes, his tunic drenched with blood. He blinked, wiping the sweat from his eyes, and stared again. It was Burnaby. He had taken a fearful spear thrust to the neck, a gash wide enough to put a hand through that had somehow missed the jugular but had sliced deep into his windpipe. Above his thick thatch of dark hair the top of his skull had been sliced clean off by a sword, exposing his brain. His left arm was twisted horribly under his back, but with his right hand he was fumbling to load the massive four-barrelled howdah pistol on his chest, spilling the big .577 rifle cartridges out of a pouch on his belt. His eyes were strangely askew, but they flickered with recognition as Mayne came over to him. ‘I say, Mayne old chap.’ His voice sounded strange, reedy, and the gash in his throat frothed as he spoke. ‘Nearly took you for Johnny Arab in that attire. You couldn’t help me, could you? Trying to load this damned thing. I’m afraid that dervish bowled me over an awful crumpler.’
Mayne knelt down and reached for the cartridges. He and Burnaby had been to the same school, and that peculiar expression was one he had used himself countless times on the playing fields, holding his cricket bat with the wicket knocked out behind him. For a second it seemed a perfectly normal thing to say out here, where war for a man like Burnaby was simply a continuation of the contests of his youth. It was a thought that instantly evaporated when he looked again at Burnaby’s horrific wounds. He grasped the barrel of the pistol and dropped four cartridges into the breech, then snapped it shut and clamped Burnaby’s hand around the grip, putting his finger on the trigger. ‘I say, Mayne,’ said Burnaby, his voice weaker. ‘You couldn’t light me one of my cigarettes, could you? Really could do with it now.’ He seemed to be struggling for words, and Mayne knelt down. Burnaby’s voice was now little more than a whisper, and his neck was seeping bloody froth. ‘Listen here, Mayne. You know I work for Wilson too. I know your true mission. Watch your back. Don’t trust anyone. Anyone. Now, out of my way.’
Mayne had blocked out the battle for the last few seconds, but threw himself sideways just in time to see a half-naked dervish rush at them, his spear held high. Burnaby raised the pistol with a wobbly hand and fired. The round hit the dervish square in the face, blowing his head backwards in a haze of blood and brain. Burnaby suddenly jerked back and blood erupted from his nose. He had been hit in the forehead by a spent bullet that had caved in his sinuses and lodged in the bone of his forehead. The force of the blow had knocked him unconscious, and his head was lolling, his eyes half open and sightless and his breathing coming in terrible rasps. The bullet had been a small mercy, but not enough. There was only one thing Mayne could do for him now. As he pulled out his revolver, he saw a soldier who had detached himself from the melee and was hurtling towards him, bellowing for him to stop, his bayonet poised. Mayne remembered Burnaby’s comment about his desert attire; to the soldier he would look like a Mahdist about to finish off their beloved colonel. There was a shriek from in front, and another dervish came hurling forward. Mayne wrenched the howdah pistol from Burnaby’s hand and fired all three remaining barrels in quick succession, the massive recoil kicking the gun high above him each time. The rounds hit the dervish in the centre of his chest, blowing his heart out and leaving a hole large enough to see through. The man fell in a gory heap on Burnaby, whose eyes were now glazed over in death. Mayne sprang back to face the soldier, dropping the pistol and raising his Webley, but before he could aim it and shout a warning that he was British, the other man had tumbled backwards as a bullet struck him.
Mayne turned and ran forward, slipping over the gore from a man’s abdomen and driving his right knee painfully into the ground, then picked himself up and leapt over the stacked wooden crates that formed the edge of the zariba. He saw Charrière waiting, then glanced back, hearing his own rasping breath, the pounding and ringing in his ears, the shrill whistling he experienced after gunfire. Hearing those things, he realised that something was different. The shooting and shrieking had stopped. And then he saw a most incredible sight. The dervishes had turned and begun to walk silently out of the billowing gun smoke in the direction they had come, their spears and swords held down. The ferocious energy that had propelled their advance had suddenly been expended, and the British had stood their ground. He was astonished by the dignity of their departure, by its utter disjunction from the savagery of a few moments before; it was as if they were mere tribesmen again, no more than people passing through, a timeless imprint of humanity in the desert that made the battle seem just a passing storm. The last of them disappeared out of sight, and for a moment the British troops slumped and exhausted in the zariba seemed agape with disbelief, stunned into immobility. It had been less than fifteen minutes since the dervish charge had begun. Fifteen minutes.
Then there was a rippling noise, a ragged cheer that quickly became a snarling frenzy of rage. The soldiers picked themselves up and surged forward, hacking and stabbing at the fallen dervishes, yelling profanities in voices hoarse with gunpowder and adrenalin and thirst. Mayne heard the crack of rifle fire, and the sliding and crunching of bayonets in bodies. They had seen dervishes feign death and leap up with knives, and they were taking no chances. Ever since Hicks’ army had been annihilated, they had known they would be given no quarter in defeat, and now they were doling out the same in return. It was war unchanged from the days of the first jihad over a thousand years before, war without morality. Mayne saw a soldier bayonet a dead dervish over and over again in the face, bellowing maniacally. Another was on his knees bashing a head to pulp with a rock, his arms drenched with blood like a butcher’s. An officer appeared, waving his revolver and trying to restore order, but Mayne knew he would be able to do nothing until the bloodlust had run its course.
He sat alongside Charrière behind a rock. They were outside the zariba now, but it was safer to hide until the officers had regained control and there was less risk of being mistaken for dervishes and shot. The officers would want to capture any surviving dervishes, yet would probably be unwilling to give chase until they were certain that the enemy was routed. Mayne and Charrière would have to rely on their speed to escape once they had revealed themselves. Mayne lay cl
ose to the earth, panting hard, regaining his breath. His sense of smell was returning, and he recoiled from it: the acrid sulphurous reek of black powder, the sickly latrine stench of spilled bowels, the coppery odour of blood, the smell on his own body of sweat and fear and adrenalin. He caught a whiff of roasting flesh, and saw a dervish a few feet away who had been shot at point-blank range, the powder burns encircling the wound and wisps of smoke rising from the hole. The smoke of battle was clearing now, and he sensed sunlight through the haze. He heard a bugle and the shouted orders of the sergeants and corporals, ordering the men to re-form the square in case of fresh attack. He stared back at the ground. The earth was cracked and blackened, parched as it always had been, the dark patches of blood already sopped up by the dust. The desert was beginning to absorb the residue of battle even before the frenzy of killing had died away.
He listened hard. He realised that the background sound had gone, the chanting, the drumbeat, the pounding of feet; the dervish army had abandoned the wells and was retreating. Soon the soldiers he could now see standing and moving about slowly in the swirling dust would snap back to reality; the square would consolidate, and the advance would be ordered. But for the moment they were caught by the shock of battle, as dazed as he was. Colour was returning, gradually, as if he were looking at an old-fashioned daguerreotype, where the iodine and mercury had created a maroon monochrome but the artist had touched it up with crude streaks of colour to give a semblance of reality.
Mayne looked at his hands, blackened by the greasy grime of gunpowder, and felt the throbbing bruise on his neck where the bullet had struck him before they had entered the square. He stood up and looked around him, trying to calm his breathing. He saw blood and brains spattered on faces, and the cracked lips of dying men, their bodies no longer producing saliva, their tongues swollen and off-white with mucus. One man missing the top of his head convulsed and juddered, and then went still. A soldier lying on dead comrades pulled a spear from his own neck, as he did so releasing a gush of arterial blood that pumped out of him like a geyser, his face whitening as his body drained. He fell back, alabaster among the grey. Another who had been too close to the muzzle blast of the screw gun was lying obscenely exposed with his clothes blown off, his skin lacerated in a crazy pattern like a pavement. It was the first time Mayne had registered the instant aftermath of battle. Ten minutes ago these men had all been alive, and the shocking speed of their deaths seemed to leave a lingering aura over them, like the warmth on a fresh corpse; but he knew that with each rasping final breath that aura would dissipate and the colours would go, sucked into the desert and extinguished by the burning heat of the sun, leaving only a monochrome image of desiccation and decay.
He remembered something his Dongolese guide Shaytan had told him at the cataracts, about the wind created by a desert battle: that if you listened hard enough, you could hear the distant shrieks and sighs of banshees who performed a wild dance in the sky high above the fight, mocking both the victors and the vanquished. He remembered the carving of the desert battle he had seen in the underground chamber beside the cataract: the Egyptian soldiers advancing hieratically, Akhenaten at their head, then their bodies splayed below, the vast disc of the sun and its rays dominating all. Had Akhenaten sensed this too? Had he fought battles against an enemy from the south where the desert seemed the only victor, where the sun seemed to eclipse all? Had he turned back to Egypt, bringing with him a new God and a belief that the power of the Aten might release men from conflict that could only ever give the illusion of victory?
He remembered crouching beside Burnaby, an event that seemed impossibly long ago, and Burnaby’s whispered warning to him: watch your back. He looked at Charrière, sword still in his hand, the blood congealing on his arm where he had prised out the bullet. He could barely think of his thirst. They would both need water, soon. There was no chance now of reaching the wells of Abu Klea, which would soon be under British control; they could not risk being seized and questioned. It would have to be the Nile, more than twenty miles off. They had to hope to find another source on the way if they were to have any chance of surviving the marathon run that now lay ahead of them.
He remembered their pursuers. Had that been the purpose of Burnaby’s warning? He looked beyond Charrière to where the clearing smoke had revealed the rocky knoll to the east, the rising ground that had provided a defensive position for the British encampment overnight. That was the direction their pursuers would have taken if they had decided to outflank the battlefield and regain the track to the Nile on the other side. More likely they would be lingering in the valley, waiting for the British to march down to the wells, intent on picking over the battlefield and checking the dead so they could tell their paymaster that their job had been done for them. But it would only be a matter of time before they realised that Mayne and Charrière had survived, and that with camels they had the advantage of speed. Mayne knew it was essential that the two of them cover the open ground on the way to the shrub and mimosa forest before their pursuers regained their trail. The forest would be a maze of danger and dead-end passages in the dark, and they needed to get as far through it as they could while it was still daylight.
And there was added urgency. The dervishes who had melted away from the battle would soon pass word of their defeat to the Mahdi himself, which might lead him to order the final assault on the city, losing Mayne precious time in his attempt to reach Gordon before it was overwhelmed. Abu Klea would show the Mahdi that the British were a force to be reckoned with, that they were superior to the Egyptian army he had terrorised and routed two years before. If the British were to stay in the Sudan, the jihad would not be the walkover his early successes had promised. But the victory might ultimately be a hollow one. The Mahdi knew that the British were there under duress, and that if he were to order the assault on Khartoum now, to remove Gordon from any hope of rescue, they would abandon the Sudan and withdraw to Egypt. He knew they were not present in numbers sufficient to defeat his main force in a set-piece battle; yet if word of Abu Klea were to reach tribesmen of wavering loyalties, it might tilt them towards the British, whilest the news might cause the garrison at Khartoum to redouble their resolve to stand firm, thinking that a British force was finally on its way to defeat the Mahdist army and relieve the city.
Mayne stared in the direction of the Nile to the south, seeing only the haze of an approaching dust storm on the horizon, and below that the undulating rocky plain that extended to the dark smudge marking the beginning of the tangled mass of shrub. He could see no sign of humanity, no flickering lights, no crumbled ruins, not even the camel trail that must lie somewhere in the folds of the ground ahead. He felt as if by passing through the battle he had entered a darker place, a shadowland, a world beyond knowledge where even the pharaohs had feared to tread. This was the land that Gordon had made his own, and it was only here that his motivations could be understood. He swallowed hard, trying to rid his throat of the taste of battle, then twisted round to look one last time. There was no sign of their pursuers, for now. He nodded to Charrière, who dropped the sword and sheathed his knife. Mayne holstered his revolver and grasped the wrapped rifle that was still on his back, knowing that the instant they stood up in their Arab gear they could still fall prey to a trigger-happy British soldier. They crouched forward, readying to leap up and run.
A bugle sounded, and he heard the stomping noise of soldiers falling in. Now was their chance. All eyes would be down the slope towards the retreating Mahdist forces, and the wells where the soldiers and their camels would be desperate to slake their thirst.
They needed to move fast. Mayne put his hand forward to signal Charrière. He tensed, his heart pounding.
They began to run.
PART 5
19
Near Kemna, on the Nile, Sudan, present day
The Toyota bounced and jolted along the track towards the Nile, through growths of desert grass and plots of vegetables and fruit trees encl
osed by low mud-brick walls. They were approaching the site of the wreck of the Abbas, some sixty kilometres south of the Semna cataract along the Nile towards Khartoum. The surrounding land was more low-lying than at Semna, more suited to agriculture, and every available area of sandy soil had been turned to arable. The track ran beside an irrigation channel that extended over a kilometre from the river; ahead of them on the bank they could see a pair of pivoting shaduf water-raising devices, the oldest and simplest equipment for getting water from the river into the channels, used since early antiquity. Two scruffy boys who had been operating the devices left them and ran up to the Toyota as it sped by, chasing it through the cloud of dust they left behind. Ibrahim turned to Jack and pointed at the window. ‘Keep it wound up,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a good place. When we get out, watch your pockets.’
Jack glanced at Costas in the back seat, and then kept his eyes glued ahead as they tore down the final few hundred metres of the track, coming to a skidding halt only a few cars’ lengths from the water’s edge. ‘Thanks, Ibrahim,’ he said.
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