by John Harris
He was a funny little cuss, Beebe thought, puzzled as always by him. Pentecost – even the goddam name suited him! Vaguely prim, very correct, dainty, even the right overlay of religion that best suited his type of soldier – ‘Oh, Lord, if I be too busy this day to remember Thee, do not thou forget me.’
‘How about your wife?’ he asked. ‘What’ll she think if you have to stay?’
Pentecost smiled. ‘She’s a soldier’s daughter,’ he said. ‘She won’t argue.’ Though he wasn’t so sure about it when he considered it. Soldiers’ daughters weren’t so stiff-upper-lip as they had been, because they were a great deal better educated and more realistic these days.
‘I’d like to meet her,’ Beebe found himself saying.
‘I’ll see that you do, Mr Beebe,’ Pentecost said warmly. ‘When we get to the coast. She’s a pretty girl. You’d like her.’
Beebe found himself smiling and suddenly thought with surprise, goddammit, the sonofabitch’s twisting me round his little finger!
Pentecost seemed to sense his irritation and came to the point quickly. ‘Have you thought of your plans?’ he asked, and Beebe became blunt and brusque again, feeling he’d been led up the garden path.
‘They remain the same, I guess,’ he said shortly. ‘When I’m through I go.’
‘Have you considered getting a bit of a wriggle on? Despite the absence of orders, Mr Beebe, circumstances have changed and I thought you might prefer to go a little earlier than you originally planned.’
‘I guess I’ll go when I’ve finished.’ Beebe was still feeling that he’d been too ready to be friendly.
Pentecost smiled, undisturbed by his stubbornness. ‘As you wish, Mr Beebe,’ he said. ‘That seems to be that then. Perhaps when you’ve time, you’ll let me have it in writing. I should hate anyone to accuse me of keeping you here against your will. Or neglecting to get rid of you when I should.’
‘Aw, hell…!’ Beebe began angrily, but Pentecost looked up, a faint twisted smile on his face.
‘They might, Mr Beebe,’ he said.
He picked up his pen again and Beebe rose, aware somehow of a curious dissatisfaction with the interview. It had been his intention to run it his way, but it had been Pentecost who had kept the initiative all the time, despite his surly defiance.
He set off towards his own quarters still feeling faintly offended, then his cigarette began to burn his fingers and as he stopped to light a new one from the butt, he remembered Aziz and wondered what he was thinking about the new situation.
5
The coffee-hospitality was over. Thawab abu Tegeiga and his Deleimi were in a hurry. They were all young and most of them favoured shirts and trousers to the flowing robes of their elders, and Aziz stared at them with scorn on his thin features. Behind him in the shadows, the women chattering over their duties, the tinkling instruments and wailing flutes, the snake-charmers, the beggars and the dancers that always followed the camps went unheeded. Thawab had appeared at Addowara as the light went out of the hills, unasked and unwelcome, ignoring the green banner that stated it was Aziz’s territory.
A few of the older men with him still wore the dyed cloaks or the traditional headcloths of their tribe, but all of them were armed to the teeth with rifles and pistols. All in all, Aziz had to admit, they were a younger group than those who stood behind him – more up to date and more urgent.
At their head, in the firelight that caught the colours of a woven rug and the burnish of copper cooking utensils, stood a small dark-faced man with the icy eyes of a fanatic. He wore the red Tayur cloak and black headdress of the Deleimi nation. Aziz knew him well. Majid the Assassin he was known as, and he knew that if Thawab gave the word Majid would shoot him dead and be willing to pay the price of his crime with his life.
By his side, as though he sought his protection, Thawab himself waited, like a cat, sleek and comfortable, his face cheerful. But Aziz’s expression didn’t melt. Though Thawab was only thirty-five, he was already putting on flesh. He liked to indulge himself too much and, despite his religion, Aziz knew he drank whisky when no one was looking. He wore Italian suits and shirts away from Khusar and there was a hard-featured Egyptian belly-dancer in a house in Makhrash.
Not that his sex life troubled Aziz much. He had a girl himself in his tent in the village, a Hassi from Gara, one of the mountain villages, a wild creature whom he kept for his old age, for dalliance, not for love. He dressed her in a Hejri cloak of blue brocade held by a jewelled haik pin, bangles and necklaces of gold coins and gold and silver baubles, and an elaborate bead headdress with a medallion between the eyebrows. It hid the hair and the ears but, when worn with little else but a filigree necklace and Berber earrings, could always excite the old man. She was anointed with perfumed oil and painted her toe nails and finger nails on his orders, and he had decided that when he moved back to Makhash she would go with him.
But everyone knew about her, as they did not know about Thawab’s Egyptian. Thawab was soft-centred, a hypocrite, with ice in his veins, condemning all things Western while enjoying them himself, wearing his battledress to impress and not because he went into battle.
Thawab liked to laugh when he wasn’t occupied with plans, short, strong, fair-skinned, and popular, and his people thought him a farseeing man. Aziz didn’t. Neither did he trust him. He considered him insincere and ambitious and knew he made friends arbitrarily and was full of caprice. Even the simple humour that his followers noticed was false because always, even as he was careful not to stir Aziz to too much anger, he watched out of the corner of his eye for the opportunity that would give him political leadership of the Khusar peoples.
‘My young men,’ he was saying, ‘tell me that Aziz el Beidawi has allowed himself to be tricked by his blond young friend from the fort.’
Aziz said nothing. He knew Thawab’s men had been down in Hahdhdhah for some time, listening and watching, and he knew they made remarks about his friendship with Pentecost, comparing the young Englishman with the Circassian boys who had pleased him in his youth.
‘They tell me,’ Thawab continued, ‘that the English Government has had second thoughts on their treaty with Tafas.’
‘I have heard this, too,’ Aziz replied warily.
‘They tell me they will uphold the treaty after all. You have been telling us that the Englishman promised you they were to leave Toweida land.’
‘The Englishman promised me nothing,’ Aziz growled, despite his reputation fanatically faithful to those he considered his friends. ‘He is a paid soldier, a mercenary, who must do what he is told.’
Thawab’s mouth twisted with disdain. ‘It is odd that the Lord Aziz treats with a mere mercenary,’ he said.
Aziz’s scimitar of a nose went up. ‘There are some mercenaries I would rather treat with than great chieftains,’ he growled.
It was a sharp dig and Thawab knew it was directed at him. He decided not to respond in kind.
‘We were promised Toweida,’ he said. ‘If we are not given it, my young men insist that we take it.’
‘And will Thawab be in the forefront of the attack?’ Aziz asked slyly, knowing perfectly well that it had never been Thawab’s habit to expose himself much.
Thawab smiled, but it wasn’t a friendly smile. ‘Soon the Dayi men will be here, with Ghalim, my cousin. They will join my Tayur and the Hawassi, their allies. There will be enough of us to defeat the wishes of Aziz.’ He moved restlessly inside his clothes. He seemed to be summoning his courage. ‘My young men tell me that Aziz grows too old to lead the Hejri,’ he went on. ‘And that when a man talks with the enemy instead of destroying him, he has reached the age when he should retire to his lands and grow cucumbers.’
Aziz’s hand reached for the rifle. ‘Thawab is eager to dispute my strength?’ he asked quietly.
Thawab smiled. ‘I am not eager,’ he admitted. ‘I am reporting what my young men say. My cousin Ghalim tells me that the Dayi think the same way.’
‘You
r cousin Ghalim is in your pocket. He is Thawab’s tongue. When your young men stand up to me face to face and tell me they are more capable of leading than I am, when your silken skin has as many scars on it as mine has, then I will step down. Until then I am the leader of the Khusar peoples.’
‘Thou art an old fool, Aziz,’ Thawab said softly.
Aziz rose slowly to his feet but Thawab was already moving away, and Aziz was aware of the clear hostility in the eyes of his followers. There was a murmuring behind him, too, that told him that there were some even among the Hejri men who felt like Thawab and believed they would even now be cheated of the Toweida Plain.
Thawab turned and spoke over his shoulder. ‘Thou art an old fool, Aziz,’ he said again, more confidently. ‘My father told me so. “Take no notice of Aziz,” he said. “Leave him in the forefront of battle and he is happy, but don’t trust him with the cares of the council. He has not the head for it.”’
As he finished speaking, Thawab turned quickly. A few of his young men waited behind, in case any of Aziz’s men tried to avenge the insult, then they too turned and left.
Aziz stared at the empty door of the tent, his eyes hot, his mind seething with rage, his breast hollow with the anger that was consuming him. Despite what he had said to Thawab he had not heard of the change of attitude in England and he resented the fact that he had received the news in this way from Thawab. He felt he had been made to look a fool. His face began to work and he found he was shaking with passion. He saw his followers edging away.
‘Get me my horse,’ he shouted in an explosion of rage. ‘Get – me – my – horse!’
6
‘Sir—’ Pentecost sat bolt upright in bed as he felt Fox’s hand shaking his shoulder ‘—His Nibs is here again.’
Pentecost drew a deep breath. He had been expecting this for days. ‘Aziz?’
‘The man himself, sir. Sitting there, with his boys, in the darkness. You can just see ’em from the tower.’
Pentecost paused for a moment, then he nodded. This one was going to be tricky, he told himself. ‘I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘Have you told Mr Lack and Mr Minto?’
‘Do you want me to, sir?’
‘I think you’d better. And turn out the chaps.’
Fox stared at him. ‘You going out there, sir?’ he asked.
Pentecost had stripped off his pyjama jacket now and Fox studied his slender frame. ‘Why not?’ Pentecost said.
Fox stared at him for a second and was aware of a great feeling of affection for this young man whom he treated vaguely as a cleverer younger brother. He was well aware of the tension that had been growing around Hahdhdhah since the Prime Minister’s speech.
‘If you like, sir,’ he volunteered impulsively, ‘I’ll come with you. Make a bit of a show. Best bib and tucker and so on. Bags of swank.’
Pentecost turned to look at him. His body was ashen in the light of the lamp because, since his fair skin burned easily, he never dared sit in the sun without his shirt like the other men in the fort. In the middle of his face, his nose glowed redly.
‘Would you, Jim?’ he said softly. ‘Would you do that?’
The way he said it twisted Fox’s heart. He was no sentimentalist but he trusted Pentecost and at that moment he seemed desperately lonely. He nodded.
‘Yes, I would, sir, if you wanted me to.’
Pentecost smiled. ‘Thank you, Jim,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you cared.’
Fox grinned and the frail sentimental moment passed easily because of Pentecost’s facetiousness, when it might easily have left them awkward and wondering what next to say.
‘All the same,’ Pentecost said, ‘I’m going to refuse your offer despite the thought behind it. It’s me and Aziz. It always has been and that’s the way it’s got to stay. If he saw anyone with me, he’d have to bring someone, too. Face! Anything you can do, I can do better. You know the way they think. And that would prevent him speaking freely.’
‘I understand, sir.’
‘He’d have to be diplomatic. He’d have to remember that everything he said would be carried back to the Hejri and, probably, held against him later. After all, he’s only their leader because he’s the toughest or the craftiest. If they could quote his words at him, he might find himself in a sticky situation. And I suspect he’s probably already in a sticky situation. Just as we probably are.’
When Fox had gone, Pentecost finished dressing and shaving, taking care to be precise. As he stared at himself in the mirror he wished he were a more martial figure. There had been no gilt’s for a long time now, and the hills had seemed more silent than ever, and they had been aware of hostile eyes among the tradesmen who arrived to sell their wares in the fortress. He suspected that everyone, and especially Aziz, was waiting to see what would happen at Hahdhdhah. They had read the signs and now Aziz had come down personally to find out the truth.
They were both out on a limb, he decided. He, on account of a stubborn old man in Khaswe who was insisting on sticking to the last full stop and comma of his treaty with the British because he could see no sense in giving up territory; Aziz, because he was being jockeyed by Thawab and had to produce the goods he had promised.
Pentecost sighed, suddenly aware that they couldn’t both win.
He finished bucking on his belt and walked out into the morning light. Lack was standing near the gate with Minto, and they both looked a little nervous. Faizan and Zaid Ghalib were watching them, with Int-Zaids Hussein, Mohamed and Suleiman standing behind them. Beebe was there, too, swarthy and bear-like, a faint cynical stare on his face.
‘Give him m-my love,’ Minto said facetiously in a voice that was unexpectedly high-pitched. He cleared his throat. ‘If he’s come to ask us for cocktails, tell him I’ve got a date.’
‘I hope to God he’s not brought any more gifts,’ Lack grumbled. ‘You’re not having my electric razor for the old bastard.’
Beebe’s eyes flickered between them. All Lack’s big talk washed over his head as though it were meaningless gibberish, and Minto he regarded as a boy still wet behind the ears. Pentecost he wasn’t so sure of, but the chaffing still seemed stupid. They’d probably be calling silly remarks to each other, he thought, as Aziz’s tommy gunners blew them to shreds.
He watched as Pentecost adjusted his uniform.
‘Got your popgun?’ Lack asked.
‘No.’ Pentecost gave him a wry smile. ‘I’ll chance it without.’
‘Tell him we still appear to be leaving on the twenty-first, and have no hostile intentions,’ Lack went on. ‘Tell him I have no hostile intentions, in fact, towards anyone.’
Pentecost’s mood changed and he straightened himself abruptly. He glanced round. A group of Dharwas and a few of the Civil Guards who had appeared for the ‘inspection’ he had ordered were watching him, their eyes wide in their dark faces. The gate opened slowly.
‘After you, Cecil! It’s all yours!’
Beebe watched from the rampart as Pentecost walked slowly across the dusty patch of ground towards the waiting line of horsemen. This I’ve seen before, he thought on television. John Wayne. Walking out to meet the Indians. It just isn’t real. It just doesn’t happen. It was too corny to be true. Anybody who could get on with the murderous old rogue beyond the rocks could get on with tarantulas.
As he halted by the group of boulders which had become their meeting place, Pentecost saw Aziz clap spurs to his horse. As it leapt away from the man carrying the green banner and halted beside him, Aziz made no attempt to climb from the saddle.
‘I come in anger, Bin T’Khass,’ he shouted, his thin face drawn. ‘I come aware of treachery!’
Pentecost stared up at him, keeping his face expressionless. ‘There has been no treachery on my part, Aziz,’ he said mildly. ‘Though I am aware that Khusar men watch me in the village of Hahdhdhah.’
For a moment there was silence as Aziz’s tragic eyes rested on his face. ‘Thawab’s spies,’ he said contemptuously, then
he went on loudly, his voice bitter with reproach. ‘My young men tell me,’ he said loudly, ‘that your Ministers do not intend to act with honesty.’
Pentecost remained calm. ‘I have heard nothing, Aziz,’ he said quietly.
Aziz stared at him, his eyes flashing. ‘Cannot your Queen remove these men?’ he demanded more quietly.
When he had set off down the scree slopes of the Urbidas to the plains, his brain had been full of the worms of rage, but now, faced with Pentecost’s calmness and transparent honesty, he was unable to say the things he had wanted to say and found himself seeking to blame someone else. ‘Cannot your Queen remove them?’ he asked again.
‘My Queen doesn’t do that sort of thing, Aziz.’
‘Then why is she Queen?’ Aziz shouted. ‘You should have a king! Men should not be ruled by a woman! They are no good at ruling!’
‘She doesn’t rule, Aziz,’ Pentecost explained.
‘Then why–?’ Aziz frowned and dropped the subject. ‘Thou hast lied to me, Bin T’Khass,’ he said harshly.
‘I have not lied,’ Pentecost pointed out. ‘I told thee the facts. These facts still exist.’
‘My young men tell me the English intend to uphold the treaty they made with Tafas el Taif and that the soldiers will not leave the fort.’
‘I have heard nothing about staying, Aziz,’ Pentecost persisted, raising his voice to make himself heard through the older man’s anger.
‘It is a bad treaty,’ Aziz snorted, still trying not very successfully to be ill-tempered in front of Pentecost’s friendliness. ‘No man in Khalit wants it. They wish to rule themselves, not to be ruled by the British.’
‘The British don’t rule Khalit,’ Pentecost pointed out. ‘They simply support the Sultan under the treaty.’
Aziz’s head jerked. ‘The Sultan is no longer popular,’ he said. ‘Like us, the Khaliti wish to elect their own leaders. The days of hereditary government are done.’
