‘Oh, he did, did he?’
Sooner or later, we were going to have a chat about that.
‘Yes! And I agree! With the bandits, we have one deadly danger to face already, we don’t need another! Now stay down!’
Bullets shot across the valley in deadly droves. From what I could see whenever I managed to raise my head long enough to catch a glimpse, the bandits were holding their own. Once, I saw Mr Ambrose at the other end of the line, commanding his men and shooting. But even his cold glare couldn’t drive the bandits away.
‘We aren’t winning, are we?’ I asked Youssef while he was reloading.
‘Have patience.’
‘That’s all very well for you to say! You’re not lying face-first in the dirt!’
‘You won’t have to lie down much longer! Look up!’
‘You just told me to stay down!’
‘Well, things are changing, Hanem. Look up!’
I did, just as the sound of more guns joined the cacophony of battle. Past all the smoke and shouting men and blazing guns, past everything up on the hills in the east, I saw riders appearing. A dozen? Two? No, soon there were more than that. They had to number at least a hundred, all sitting on camelback, and all shooting at our enemies.
‘What in God’s name is going on?’ I yelled over the noise of gunfire.
‘You didn’t think the explosives in the saddle bags were just a trap, did you?’ Youssef laughed. ‘The Effendi never does anything for just one reason. The explosion was a signal. More men have been following us ever since we left Alexandria, far enough away so nobody would notice, but close enough to hear a herd of exploding camels! I was slightly worried for a time that they had lost us in the sandstorm, but then the scouts made contact yesterday.’
‘He knew? He knew there were reinforcements, and he didn’t tell me?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going to kill him!’
‘Feel free to try, Hanem.’
As he spoke, more men started appearing to the west and the north. At a glance, I would have said they had to number at least three hundred. That bastard! That bloody, stone-faced, close-mouthed bastard!
Bandits were falling all over the place, shot in the back or in the sides. The ones left still alive cowered down in the sand, shooting wildly in all directions, their eyes wide with terror. For a supposedly timid caravan of traders, we were proving entirely too tough and nasty. Those who still had live camels underneath them kicked the animals into motion and darted towards the last few hills around the valley that were still free of attackers.
I scrambled to my feet.
‘Bloody hell! We can’t let them get away like that!’ I glared at Youssef. ‘Give me a gun!’
He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Hanem. I have my orders.’
Shooting him another glare, I bent down to pick up a good-sized pebble from the ground. ‘Good riddance!’ I hurled it after a retreating bandit. It squarely hit his camel on the rump. ‘Go bugger a banana!’
Only a few dozen yards away, I spotted Ambrose (the camel version), still loitering well away from the craters that had swallowed the fellow members of his species. The foxy old bugger! So he had survived, had he? Excellent! I started to run.
‘Hanem! Wait!’ a shout came from behind me. But I didn’t listen to Youssef. I wasn’t really in the mood to listen to anyone right now.
Just when I was about to swing myself up into Ambrose’s saddle, a rider on another camel shot past me. I only saw him in a blur, but there was no mistaking that black colour. All the other men wore the white burnous. And there was no mistaking his voice, either.
‘After them! Follow me, men!’
Cold. Hard. Commanding.
I pulled myself the rest of the way up into the saddle and urged Ambrose up and forward. It took me only moments to catch up to Mr Ambrose. When he glanced sideways at me, his face was still a kind of blur, constantly jerking around with the strange gait of the camel beneath him, but the ice in his eyes was clear enough.
‘I said follow me, men! In case I wasn’t clear enough, that didn’t include you!’
My eyes narrowed. ‘What do you want me to do? Stay back there?’ I jerked my hand at the empty desert behind us.
‘Yes. Right by that big rock.’ He waved dismissively at a sandstone formation. ‘We’ll come back when the bandits are dead.’
Blimey. He was actually serious.
‘Go to hell!’
‘The road to hell, I’m told, is paved with good intentions.’[28] He gave his camel a kick, urging the animal to go faster. ‘So it’s very unlikely I’ll ever find my way there.’
Picking up the speed with a protesting bleat, his camel shot forward. I urged Ambrose on to catch up again.
‘Why didn’t you tell me we had reinforcements? You could have let me know!’
‘Knowledge is power is time is money.’
‘So what?’
He gave me a look that clearly said he thought me very daft. ‘Meaning that if I shared knowledge, that would be tantamount to sharing power or money.’
‘Which you aren’t willing to do?’
‘Naturally. Especially not with you.’
My mouth dropped open.
‘I hate you!’
‘Indeed?’ Raising his gun, he fired a shot at the closest bandit. More shots sounded from right and left. Without my noticing, the rest of our party, and the reinforcements, had caught up. Somewhere I saw Youssef’s proud figure. Then I spotted Karim’s turban, towering over the heads of the others. Oh, how many others! The masses of men and camels around us seemed endless, streaming down the hills from three sides, hot on the bandits’ trail. I caught the eye of a bandit, looking around to see how close we were. His face paled, and a grin spread over mine. Grim satisfaction rose up in me, dispelling my anger for the moment.
‘We’re going to flatten those bastards, aren’t we?’
‘A slightly informal way of putting it. But, on the whole, you are correct.’
Another volley of gunfire went off, and several bandits dropped to the ground.
‘Yes!’ Not having a gun or a sabre, I thrust my fist into the air! ‘Yes! Get the bloody bastards!’
The men behind me gave a cheer, and the next volley went off, felling another six or seven bandits. The remaining bandits pulled out canes and began to beat their camels furiously, forcing them to go even faster.
‘Don’t lose sight of them!’ Mr Ambrose shouted a command. ‘We have to know where they’re going!’
‘Don’t worry, Effendi!’ Youssef shouted back. ‘Those are no racing camels! They cannot keep up that speed for long!’
And he was right. After only a few minutes, some of the bandits’ camels began to falter and stumble. They slowed and slowed, no matter how many blows their masters inflicted on their rumps. A cheer went up from our men.
‘Get them!’ Cries rose up. ‘Get them all!’ Rifles were raised, and another volley of gunfire thundered over the noise of the running camels. We were so close now, almost a dozen bandits fell to the ground, stricken. Out of all of them, only six were left now. ‘Get them!’ One of the men behind me shouted again. ‘Get them all! Fire!’
Mr Ambrose opened his mouth. ‘No! Don’t-’
His voice was cut off by the gunfire. Five bandits dropped to the ground, dead. A last shot sounded, and the very last bandit slid out of the saddle, hitting the ground with a thump. His camel continued for a few more paces, then slowly came to a halt and sank to its knees, exhausted.
The men cheered. Gunshots were fired into the air. More cheers rose up, and more and more - until someone noticed the expression on Mr Ambrose’s face. Well… if I was being honest, it wasn’t an expression, exactly. It rather was what you would get if you deepfroze an expression and sprinkled it with promises of wrath and violence. Slowly, the gunshots stopped and the cheers subsided. When everyone, including, me, Karim and the camels, was absolutely silent and cowering under the glare of our employer, Mr A
mbrose asked in a very cool, controlled voice: ‘Who fired that shot?’
The men looked at each other, dumbfounded. Then one raised his hand. ‘Um… Effendi? What shot?’
‘The last one! The one that killed the last bandit!’
‘Oh.’ The hand sank down again, apparently profoundly grateful it wasn’t attached to the guilty party. A few moments of deadly silence hung over the desert. Unbearably hot as it was, the desert air seemed suddenly ready to freeze. Finally, another hand, slightly trembling, rose from among the men. They parted like a bunch of chickens that had discovered a warthog in chicken costume among their number.
The man was of slightly less than average height, not dark-skinned enough to be an Arab - French or Spanish, maybe? - with a straight, rather short nose, and curly black hair that peeked out from under his headdress. At the moment, sweat was also trickling out from under there, down his forehead.
Mr Ambrose advanced towards him. His camel was slightly bigger than the other man’s, not to speak of himself. He towered over the man in the burnous.
‘Tell me,’ Mr Ambrose asked, his voice deceptively low and smooth, ‘what exactly were my orders?’
‘To, um, get them all? All the bandits, Sir?’
‘No. If you think back closely, you will remember that was what you men shouted. I want to know what my orders were.’
‘Oh… um… well, Sir, I…’
‘Since you are having difficulties with your memory, I’ll tell you. My orders were, verbatim, “Don’t lose sight of them! We have to know where they’re going!”.’
For a moment, heavy silence descended over the landscape again. Then, Mr Ambrose leaned forward until only a few inches separated his cold, hard face from that of his employee. ‘Tell me: how exactly are we going to “not lose sight of them”, how are we going to find out “where they are going”, when they are all dead?’
‘Um… well… I…’
‘Do not be shy. I would be most interested to hear your opinion.’
‘Well… I…I don’t know, Sir.’
Shooting up, Mr Ambrose’s fist clamped around the smaller man’s throat and lifted him clean off the saddle. He dangled in the air, a few inches above the leather, fighting for breath.
‘Neither do I!’ Mr Ambrose hissed. ‘Congratulations! I have crossed two oceans, survived explosions, assassins and the desert - not one of those things has been able to stop me from getting my revenge! And you have succeeded where all those things failed. Just a stupid little man who couldn’t follow orders! What do you have to say for yourself?’
‘Grrk! Grak! Rrrm!’
It seemed to me that with Mr Ambrose’s hand clamped around his throat, the man didn’t have much to say for himself, nor was it likely he would ever speak again if Mr Ambrose didn’t let go. My dear employer didn’t appear to have noticed that fact, though.
I cleared my throat. He didn’t notice that, either. He was far too focused on the object of his ice-cold rage.
‘Do you realize we will never find the rest of them, now?’ he demanded, his voice like shards of ice piercing the skin.
‘The rest of them?’ The words were out of my mouth before I knew it. He turned just slightly to look at me. ‘You think there are more bandits than the ones we killed, Sir?’
‘Of course! The number of attacks on my caravans and the size of the raiding parties leave no other possibility. This was just one of three or four groups! The rest of them are still safe back in the bandits’ hideout, wherever that is! And thanks to this gentleman-’ He shook his victim like a ragdoll, eliciting more gagging noises, ‘we will never find its location!’
Eyes glittering icily, Mr Ambrose glared up at the man. ‘I wonder what would be a fitting punishment for you…’
‘Rrrg! Mm Nnmh!’
‘Silence! You have lost the right to speak!’
‘Nhh Rmmgk!’
‘Silence, I said! You will be sacked, of course… Maybe I should abandon you here. Or maybe I’ll drag you before a magistrate, and have you held responsible for ruining this expedition. You can work off the cost in the next thirty years in some dusty coal mine. How would you like that?’
‘Nnnmm!’
The man’s face was turning blue now. I looked away, not particularly charmed by the sight. My eyes happened to stray into the direction where the camels of the bandits had stopped to rest.
They were no longer there.
Frowning, I looked around and spotted them a few dozen yards away. They weren’t resting anymore. True, they were moving slowly, but they were moving. And what’s more, they all seemed to be headed in more or less the same general direction.
‘Or a quarry!’ I heard Mr Ambrose from behind me. ‘How would you like to slave in a quarry for the rest of your life?’
‘Nmm! Nmm, pllsss!’
I cleared my throat again. ‘Um… Rick?’
‘Don’t interrupt!’ he snapped at me without looking. Then he returned to his prey. ‘No, a quarry is too good for you! You might actually get to breathe fresh air! No, I’ll put you in a match factory, where you will breath poisonous sulphur fumes until your lungs give up and…’
The camels were moving away faster now. ‘Rick! I really think you should…’
‘I said don’t interrupt!’
They were definitely moving as a group, and they were almost over the first hill already! Almost out of sight!
‘But I really think you should look at this!’
‘What is it?’ Exasperated, Mr Ambrose turned around. When I pointed, he followed my outstretched arm with his gaze.
‘Yes? A few camels walking over a hill. So what?’
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? We follow them! We don’t need the bandits to be alive. Their camels will lead us back to their hideout.’
‘This is no time for ridiculous jokes!’
‘I’m not joking!’
Turning his head slightly, Mr Ambrose pierced me with his gaze. ‘Let me be clear… You want me to follow a group of beasts that smell like the doormat in front of a sewer entrance and look like the fury version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame into the desert, without knowing for certain that they are, in fact, heading anywhere specific?’
Swallowing, I held his gaze. ‘Yes.’
‘And this wild idea is based on…’
‘Call it female intuition.’
Mr Ambrose muttered something too low for me to hear. From the look in his eyes, though, I gathered it was something not very complimentary about female intuition in general and the people who had them in particular. Meanwhile, he was still holding his victim up by the throat. The man’s eyes had begun to roll in a rather unhealthy-looking manner.
‘Excuse me, Effendi, but she does actually have a point,’ came unexpected help from Youssef. ‘Camels are herd animals. If there are more bandits as you say, they are sure to have more camels, and they will probably belong to the same heard as these ones.’ He gestured to the bandits’ camels that were almost out of sight by now. ‘A riderless camel’s first instinct, apart from spitting you in the eye, is always to find its way back to the herd.’
‘Gnnk!’ the man on the end of Mr Ambrose’s arm pleaded, adding his support for the idea. ‘Lnnk! Rrgg!’
Mr Ambrose sat absolutely still for a moment. His eyes flicked between me and the disappearing camels.
‘You really believe this will work, Youssef?’ he asked, finally.
‘Yes, Effendi. It certainly cannot hurt to try.’
‘All right.’ Mr Ambrose opened his hand. Gasping for breath, his victim slammed back into the saddle. ‘We’ve wasted enough time! Let’s go!’ And he drove his camel forward.
We didn’t have to ride long. After only about half an hour, we reached a broad plain of dirt and sand, stretching out in front of us. At the end of the plain, a rocky cliffside rose up out of the ground, its impenetrable wall broken only by one single gorge, right in the middle. The camels were heading directly towards it.
Even f
rom this distance, we heard surprised shouts out of the gorge as the first riderless camel entered. Then, muzzle flashes lit up the shadowy gorge, and the shouts were abruptly replaced by gunfire.
‘We’ve been seen!’ Karim roared. ‘Men! Weapons out!’
What? I thought they already had their weapons out! Everyone had a rifle in his hand. But, at Karim’s order, they threw open their saddlebags and removed other objects that looked far more sinister. Some round, some cylindrical, but far too large for an ordinary rifle. All were made of dark, shiny metal the look of which sent a shiver down my back.
A shiver of excitement!
The gunshots in the distance had ceased. I guess whoever had shot had realized by now that we were still out of range. But, to judge by the look on Mr Ambrose’s face, that would soon change. We were going into battle! And I didn’t intend to sit back idly!
‘Give me that,’ I told one of the men who had exchanged his rifle for a new weapon, pointing to the rifle. After all, he didn’t need it anymore, did he?
The man hesitated, his eyes flitting to Mr Ambrose.
‘Absolutely not!’ my dear employer snapped. ‘Have you lost your mind?’
‘No, it’s still in my head, just as usual.’
‘You don’t even know how to shoot!’
‘It’s never too late to learn, is it?’ Grabbing the rifle, I pulled it from the man’s unresisting hands. ‘Where do you put the bullets in?’
‘You’re insane!’ Mr Ambrose hissed. ‘Put that down at once!’
‘No!’
‘You won’t need it anyway! You’re staying here!’
‘In your dreams!’
Driving his camel forward, he was suddenly beside me, his hand reaching up. But other than with that poor man earlier, he didn’t grab my throat. He grabbed my chin, pulling me towards him. ‘In my dreams,’ he told me, his voice still as hard and cold as an iceberg, ‘more interesting things happen. Things that involve the two of us.’
I swallowed. Just this once, with his dark, sea-coloured eyes boring into mine, I had no words.
‘Stay here!’ he ordered.
I shook my head.
Youssef’s camel skidded to halt beside us.