Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by Gibbins, David

  ‘If Gordon is pushed, which way will his pendulum swing?’

  ‘You mean has he built his own crucifix, is he standing on a holy rock reaching out to Allah?’

  ‘Either way he is flying very close to the sun.’

  Kitchener squinted at the reddening orb on the horizon. ‘That’s easily done in the desert. You can forgive a man out here for thinking like a pharaoh.’

  ‘Or like a Mahdi.’

  Kitchener pursed his lips. ‘As Christians we have been more savage to those within our faith who do not follow our path than we have been with the infidel. The Mahdi is playing the same game. He has persuaded his followers that the Turkish Muslims are unbelievers because they do not follow the jihad. He knows that in future the jihad will gain strength from this war with moderate Islam. And he knows perfectly well that the true Ansar, his most fanatical followers, only number a small minority now among his army, and that the majority are tribesmen who have been swept up for reasons other than faith. The basis for their fervour in battle is to be sought deep within the history of the desert itself. To keep that fervour stoked, the Mahdi must satisfy the warrior urge for blood, and keep them wanting more. It is a precarious edifice, with weaknesses that one day we might exploit to turn the tide.’

  ‘Yet not in this campaign.’

  ‘Each battle for the Mahdi has a parallel in the battles that the Prophet Muhammad fought twelve hundred years ago. As his power develops, the Mahdi is able to shape his own history so that it becomes even more similar. His ultimate aim is to restore the caliphate as he believed Muhammad envisaged it, to discard modern progress and take the world back twelve hundred years.’

  ‘Using Remington rifles and Krupps field guns.’

  ‘Means, not ends. Necessary evils to counter the weapons of the unbelievers. All will be discarded when the jihad is over, and the blade and spear will rule supreme again.’

  ‘Do you think Gordon sympathises with this view of history?’

  ‘Gordon stands apart from history. But like the Mahdi, he inhabits the world of the foundation of our religion. His time in Jerusalem three years ago was a spiritual journey back to the final days of Christ. And since first arriving in the Sudan ten years ago he has been absorbed by the world of the Old Testament, the time of Moses and Pharaoh and the Exodus from Egypt. He believes that Akhenaten was the pharaoh of the Bible and that Moses received his vision of one God from him. He believes that the vision came to Akhenaten somewhere out here, in the desert.’

  ‘Those relief carvings I saw, of Akhenaten and the sun-disc,’ Mayne murmured. ‘That’s why you were so interested in them. Have you seen something similar in the desert?’

  Kitchener gave him a stony stare. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I know Gordon was searching for images of Akhenaten, and excavated sites in the desert with Heinrich Schliemann during his first period as governor general. My Dongolese guide worked as an interpreter for Gordon before joining me, and his last act before leaving Khartoum was to load crates of antiquities and artefacts on to the steamer Abbas for its voyage to safety. Among them was a stone slab which Gordon had insisted be double-crated and cushioned in cloth. My guide knew of my interest in the ruins and inscriptions we passed in the desert, and he drew me a sketch of the slab showing hieroglyphics and radiating lines like those of the Aten sun-disc.’

  Kitchener’s eyes bored into him. ‘Can you reproduce it for me?’

  Mayne shook his head. ‘It was a sketch made with a stick in the sand.’

  ‘You say this slab came from Khartoum?’

  ‘Gordon himself supervised the loading. Whether it was from Khartoum or from one of Gordon’s expeditions, I do not know.’

  Kitchener shook his head, knitting his brow. ‘If he had made such a find earlier, he would have told me. This must be a recent discovery, very recent.’

  ‘Why would he have thought to tell you? Surely there were far more pressing concerns than antiquities and archaeology.’

  Kitchener’s eyes were ablaze. ‘Nothing more pressing, I can assure you.’

  ‘My guide had left the steamer before Colonel Stewart was murdered, but he watched from the far bank as dervishes swarmed over the wreck and dived into the water. They brought up all the crates they could and prised them open, but threw everything back. He thought they were searching for gold and had no interest in the artefacts.’

  ‘The stone slab?’ Kitchener demanded.

  Mayne shook his head. ‘Apparently it was hidden beneath the boiler, where Gordon insisted it be concealed. It seemed to be his prize possession. My guide saw nothing like that raised before the wreck slipped into deeper water.’

  ‘So it is still there,’ Kitchener said quietly, more to himself than to Mayne.

  ‘In the river Nile near Abbas Kortas, close to the west bank, so under the Mahdi’s control, I fear. If you’re thinking of attempting to recover the steamer and Gordon’s belongings, that will have to wait until you are able to lead your army of reconquest into the Sudan.’

  ‘It is an artefact of the utmost importance,’ Kitchener murmured.

  Mayne gazed at him. ‘What is going on? Who else knows about this?’

  Kitchener stared at him intently. ‘It is a discovery that is the concern of the highest echelons of power. All I will say is this. Many who support Gordon regard Prime Minister Gladstone as a malign force; but do not do so. He has a great interest in Gordon’s discoveries in the desert. He has taken a gamble with Gordon, one of which Wolseley has no knowledge. For months Gladstone pulled every string to prevent Gordon being reappointed to the Sudan; he was working against what he saw as Gordon’s self-destructiveness. But then Gordon went in private to see Gladstone to tell him about something archaeological he needed to find in the desert that he had come close to tracking down during his previous period in the Sudan, an ancient Egyptian temple. He took me and Colonel Wilson into his confidence. Gladstone was won over by his zeal, and agreed with great trepidation to let him go.’

  ‘And yet he is at loggerheads with Gordon in public.’

  ‘Gordon did not keep his end of the bargain. He should have left Khartoum as soon as he had located the inscription, but he did not.’

  ‘This discovery must have been a pretty large prize.’

  Kitchener stared at him, began to speak but then thought better of it. He straightened up and tucked the map case under his arm. ‘If you reach Gordon, he may choose to reveal more. If you do not reach him, then there is no value in you knowing.’

  ‘I need every point of sympathy with the man and his motivations if I am to persuade him to leave.’

  ‘If that is truly your purpose.’

  ‘I follow Lord Wolseley’s orders. You know what those were.’

  Kitchener grunted. ‘Do you speak the language?’

  ‘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, impossible 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.’