Only - the sheath was a man’s belly.
‘Mmpf!’
‘Arg!’
We both toppled over, rolling across the floor, blood streaming over us. For a moment, I didn’t know whether it was mine or his, then I felt him twitch under me, caught in his death throes. Above me, I heard yells and the trampling of feet, and I pulled in my head just in time. A boot stomped down where it had been a moment ago. Man after man jumped over me in the rush to storm the cave. I growled. I didn’t like men going over my head, whether metaphorically or literally.
‘Ouff!’ A boot hit me in the side, and all the air went out of me. Another boot hit. And other. ‘Ouch! Careful! Live one down here!’
Another boot hit.
‘This is all your fault!’ I growled at the man beneath me. ‘Couldn’t you have gotten out of my way in time?’
The corpse stared up at me with glassy eyes, not appearing in the mood to reply. Another boot hit me in the side, this time so hard that I rolled over and came to a stop with the dead bandit on top of me.
‘Yuck! Get off me!’
I pushed, but nothing happened. The corpse only lifted a few inches, then smacked back down on top of me. That made me angry. Really angry. I pushed again, with all my might, and the corpse slid off me and onto the floor, leaving me panting, with a bloodstained dagger clutched in my hands.
If only Aunt Brank could see me now…
Not too far way, a scream sounded. It tore me from my paralysis. Bloody hell! I had to get off this floor, or I would soon join my friend, the disgusting corpse, in the underworld!
Rolling around, I pushed myself to my feet and steadied myself against the cave wall. Quickly, I looked around the cave to see what was happening.
It was mayhem. Utter and complete mayhem. Throughout the cave, bandits and Mr Ambrose’s men were duelling with daggers, scimitars and sabres. Every now and again, a small explosion would light up the cave, and I knew that someone had thrown an explosive or dropped a lamp. The smells of sweat, blood and burning oil filled the room.
‘Him! Over there! Get him!’
My eyes flicked to the origin of Mr Ambrose’s voice. There he was, pointing to a big, bearded man, who, standing atop a ledge, seemed to be commanding the bandits. He was all the way across the cave, too far for Mr Ambrose or me to reach - but not for someone else.
‘Jita la'ī!’
With a bestial war cry, a huge figure darted out of a second cave entrance halfway across. I needed only a glance to recognize that massive mountain of a man, even without the beard. If his stature had left any doubt, the turban would have clinched it.
‘Karim!’ Mr Ambrose bellowed. ‘Get him! Get that man!’
The bodyguard’s eyes flicked from Mr Ambrose to the big Egyptian atop the ledge, who had to be the bandit leader. Karim’s face twisted into a fierce scowl. Roaring like a lion, he leaped forward, catching hold of the ledge and pulling himself up. The bandit leader’s eyes went wide, and he hurriedly stepped forward to tread on his approaching assailant’s fingers, but Karim was already up and storming forward. The Egyptian had just enough time to pull his scimitar free, before Karim brought down his own weapon.
Blood spewed up, and I hurriedly averted my eyes. But in the rest of the cave, the fight was just as vindictive. Mr Ambrose was duelling with two opponents at once, swinging his sabre with a deadly precision that spoke of years and years of experience. I looked down at my measly little dagger.
‘One of these days,’ I growled, ‘I’m going to beat him into showing me how to use a proper weapon!’
I heard footsteps approach from the right, and whirled around just in time to see someone rush towards me, a metallic glint in his hands. I moved instinctively, throwing myself to the ground and rolling over. The sabre pierced the air above me, and the man stumbled over me with a foul curse. Jumping up, I whirled around again and swung the dagger.
There was a wet thud, and the bandit went rigid. Slowly, he slid to the floor.
‘Well, well, well…’ I murmured, staring at the dagger in my hand. ‘Maybe this isn’t so bad after all.’
‘Hanem! What are you doing?’
Turning, I saw Youssef gaping down at me from an opening in the wall above me.
‘Stabbing people,’ I called up to him. ‘What does it look like?’
Muttering a curse, the Egyptian swung himself down. The rest of his men were right behind him, bloodstained but alive.
‘The Effendi told you to stay safe!’
‘That’s what I’m doing,’ I told him, wiping the dagger on my burnous. ‘By killing all potentially unsafe people.’
He rolled his eyes, and waved at three of his men. ‘You three! Stay with her and guard her! If anything happens to her, the Effendi will have our heads on a platter! The rest of you, come with me!’
With that, he dashed off into the fray.
‘“If anything happens to her, the Effendi will have our heads”,’ I mimicked, scowling after him. As if Mr Ambrose cared one bit what happened to me! He was a cold, hard, feelingless, arrogant, infuriating…
Well, it didn’t really make much sense to finish the sentence. The list of bad adjectives would take up three good-sized pages.
‘Get them, men!’ I heard Youssef shout from not very far away. ‘Kill them all! This time, it’s an order!’
And I watched as they set upon the bandits. It only took minutes for the shift in the balance of power to show. Where before the fight had been slowly swaying back and forth, now the bandits were steadily being pushed back, until they were pressed in a line against the back of the cave. One after the other fell, staining the cave floor with his blood. No quarter was being given, and none was fool enough to ask. The bandits knew they had killed every single member of the caravans that had come through the desert. They knew what to expect in return.
It was a bloody business, and strangely, brutally beautiful. In another age, another place, this is what justice would have looked like. Today, it was revenge, pure, simple and unapologetic. Finally, the last bandit dropped to the ground, dead.
Well, nearly the last one.
‘Move, you piece of scum!’
Holding the man’s neck with one huge, muscled paw, Karim shoved the disarmed, battered and bleeding bandit leader down off the ledge. A fist in the back sent him stumbling forward towards Mr Ambrose, who stood, not even breathing hard, gazing down at the body of the last man he had killed as if he were looking at a rotting cockroach.
‘On your knees, worm!’
Giving the bandit leader another shove, Karim forced him down on his knees in front of Mr Ambrose and placed his sabre at the last surviving bandit’s neck.
‘One wrong move, scum, and you are dead!’
‘Your threats are meaningless!’ growled the prisoner. ‘You will kill me anyway!’
‘True.’ Bending forward, Karim hissed into his ear: ‘But if you’re not careful, I might just take my time and make your final moments very special.’ His scimitar grazed the man’s throat, drawing blood.
Mr Ambrose was still looking at the dead man at his feet. Slowly, he bent and gripped the corpse’s burnous. A quick flash of steel, and part of the burnous was in his hand, cut clean off. He used it to methodically wipe the blood off his sabre. Only when the weapon was pristinely clean did he turn towards the man Karim had in custody.
‘Your name is Radi?’
The man spat on the ground at Mr Ambrose’s feet. Mr Ambrose didn’t even blink. He motioned to Karim, who grabbed the man’s arms and twisted. A scream echoed through the cave. When it had subsided, Mr Ambrose repeated, his voice still as cold as ice: ‘Your name is Radi?’
‘Yes! Yes, it is, curse you!’
‘You are the leader of the men who have been attacking caravans?’
‘Yes.’
‘And on whose orders did you do this?’
The bandit laughed. It wasn’t a humour-filled laugh. ‘Him? What makes you think an old desert dog like me would k
now the name of a man like that?’
‘Then what does he look like?’
‘Tall. Blonde. A nose like hawk’s beak and eyes that can burn your soul away!’ He laughed again. ‘By all means, go after him! You haven’t seen what he’s capable of. He’ll cut you down like a thin little reed. You have no idea who you’re dealing with!’
‘On the contrary.’ Mr Ambrose cocked his head. ‘I know him better than anyone alive.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Oh yes.’ Mr Ambrose nodded. ‘And you are going to take a message for me. A message to my old friend, to your employer.’
Impossible hope flickered in the man’s eyes. ‘You’re going to send me to him? You’re going to let me live?’
‘No.’ With a movement so quick I almost missed it, Mr Ambrose raised his sabre, and let it swing down again. There was a thud, as metal met flesh, and another, softer, one, as the bandit leader’s severed head fell to the ground. Not even glancing at the corpse sprawled on the cave floor, Mr Ambrose wiped his blade again. ‘Leaving you alive would send quite the wrong message. Dead you’ll do fine.’
For a moment, everything in the cave was still and silent as a grave. Even the blood seemed to stop dripping for a moment. I looked around. Men were staring at Mr Ambrose, the expressions on their faces inscrutable. I guess even if you were a mercenary, or whatever most of these men called their profession, you didn’t see someone decapitated in cold blood every day. Some part of me wondered whether I shouldn’t feel horrified. After all, the man had been defenceless. But then, so had the hundreds of caravan merchants he had killed.
Putting away my dagger, I stepped forward and marched over to Mr Ambrose. Without asking, I slid my hand into his - the one that was still holding the sabre - and squeezed.
He glanced down at me, coolly. ‘Why are you applying pressure to my fingers?’
‘It’s a thing some people like to do. It’s called “comforting”.’
His fingers opened slightly, letting me in, and squeezing back. Then, seeming to realize what he was doing, he hurriedly let go.
‘Well, cease it immediately,’ he ordered. ‘It is a waste of valuable time.’
I couldn’t help smiling, just a little.
In that very moment, a shrill whistle sounded through the cave. Everybody whirled around, bringing up their rifles to where the sound had come from.
‘Stop!’ Youssef shouted. ‘Stop! It’s one of my men!’
And indeed, up in the high tunnel entrance from which Youssef’s troops had come, I could see an anxious face, clearly not an enemy.
‘I posted him up there to warn us if any more bandits came down the tunnel,’ Youssef explained. ‘We didn’t know if any of them might still have been outside somewhere.’
‘A reasonable idea.’ Mr Ambrose nodded, then gestured at the lookout. ‘And? What did you see? Report!’
‘Men, Effendi. A lot of armed men!’
‘Bandits?’
‘I don’t think so, Effendi. They are wearing uniforms in red, blue and white!’
Red? That had to be the English! I knew that French uniforms contained a lot of blue, and the white had to be the Egyptians. They’d know how to dress sensibly for the desert.
‘Can we get out back through the gorge without them seeing us?’ Mr Ambrose demanded.
‘No, Effendi. They are already in the gorge and marching towards the valley outside the cave.’ The man hesitated. ‘But there is another tunnel forking off from this one. It’s very narrow, but big enough for a man to crawl through, and I see light at the end. I think it comes out at the back of the mountain.’
‘Another way out?’ I frowned, disbelieving. ‘Why didn’t the bandits use it, then?’
‘If it’s as narrow as he says, they would have had to leave their plunder and supplies behind,’ Mr Ambrose dismissed my objection. ‘No sane man would put his life above his money.’
I exchanged a look with Youssef. Mr Ambrose and we probably had different views of what a sane man was. But who knew, perhaps the bandit leader had shared his opinion?
‘Karim, get up there!’ Without hesitation, the Mohammedan followed Mr Ambrose’s command. Leaning down out of the hole, the man up in the tunnel grabbed him by the hands and pulled. With some effort, he managed to pull the bodyguard’s huge form up far enough for him to grab the edge and pull himself up the rest of the way. The two of them up there were not able to fit side by side into the tunnel at the same time, so the lookout scrambled back into the passage.
‘Go down the tunnel!’ Mr Ambrose ordered Karim. ‘When you’ve gone through with no problem, we’ll know it’s large enough for the rest of us. Give us a signal, and we’ll know it’s safe to follow.’
Karim did his best to bow without ramming his head against the floor in the narrow space. ‘As you command, Sahib.’
Minutes of tense silence followed. When Karim’s shout of ‘Follow!’ finally came, we breathed out a collective sigh of relief. All of us except Mr Ambrose, of course. He would never waste breath in such a pointless manner.
‘Move!’ He gestured to the men to start climbing up. They rushed past him, one after the other being pulled up to the hole. Not one was tall enough to reach it by himself. When Youssef was about to go past, he stopped in his tracks.
‘What about you, Effendi? You should go before me.’
‘On the contrary. I am in charge. I should go last.’
‘But Effendi…’
‘That is an order, Youssef! Move, I said!’
Reluctantly, Youssef let himself be pulled up into the tunnel. We had about half the men safely on their way, when I thought I heard something.
‘Stop!’ I raised my hand.
Everyone froze.
‘In case you have forgotten,’ Mr Ambrose told me with a cold glare, ‘I am the one in charge here. Move, men!’
‘Just stop and listen for a moment! Do you hear that?’
We all listened, and then we heard it: The thud, thud, thud of marching feet, coming down the big tunnel.
‘As I said,’ Mr Ambrose repeated, his voice even colder and harder. ‘Move! Now!’
Everyone started running. Men almost ripped their arms out of their sockets trying to lift the ones behind them up as fast as possible. More and more men scrambled up the wall towards freedom, and all the while, the sound of marching feet came closer and closer. Finally, there were only two people down there.
‘You first,’ Mr Ambrose told me in a voice that brooked no argument.
Well, frankly, I didn’t give a damn[30] what his voice brooked or did not brook!
‘No! You go first!’
‘I gave you an order!’
‘And I don’t bloody care! Look at these!’ I lifted my arms, then gestured at his tall form. ‘I’m flattered that you think so highly of my strength, but do you honestly think I’ll be able to lift you up there?’
‘You won’t need to. He will.’ Mr Ambrose gestured to the man waiting at the hole in the wall, his hands outstretched.
‘Once I’m up there, he won’t be able to get around me! The space is too narrow!’
‘He could… I could…’ Mr Ambrose trailed off. His eyes flicked from me to the hole in the wall and back again. ‘I can’t leave you down here to be the last one! You have to go first!’
‘Why? Because I’m a girl?’ I put my fists on my hips. ‘This isn’t the right time to be a chauvinist! Get your stony butt up there right now!’
‘Watch your language!’
‘And you stop wasting time!’
That did it. Faced with the truth of the terrible accusation of wasting even one precious moment that was equal to power and money, Mr Ambrose whirled and ran towards the tunnel opening. Just a foot or two away from the wall, he jumped. The man up in the tunnel grunted as he grabbed hold of his hands and pulled. Mr Ambrose wasn’t nearly as bulky as Karim, but as I knew first hand, he had quite a lot of muscle hidden under that tight black tailcoat of his. It took several moments
for him to be pulled high enough so he could grab hold of the stone edge and swing himself into the tunnel.
All the while, I stood, transfixed, listening to the approaching sound of marching feet. They were much closer now. It sounded as if they were just around the bend.
The man who had helped Mr Ambrose scrambled off up the tunnel. Mr Ambrose himself turned and held out his arm.
‘Move! Take my hand!’
I was already running, when suddenly, there was burst of sound behind me: the stomping of feet, the scrape of metal on metal, the squeak of hard leather - the soldiers had entered the cave!
‘Hey, you there!’ I heard a shout from behind me. ‘You there, in the burnous! Stop!’
I didn’t stop. I sped up, focusing all my energy on reaching Mr Ambrose’s outstretched hand.
Just a few more seconds, I prayed. A few more seconds, that’s all…
‘Stop or we’ll shoot!’
I froze.
‘Put your hands over your head and turn around!’
Slowly, I lifted my hands until they rested on top of my head. Looking up at Mr Ambrose, I hissed: ‘Go! They might not have seen you yet!’
He said nothing. But his hard, hungry gaze yelled no for him so loud it almost hurt my ears.
‘Go! If they catch you, they’ll kill you! I’ll be all right. I’m…’ I swallowed back bile before saying it out loud: ‘I’m a lady. They won’t harm a lady.’
‘Turn around, I said!’ bellowed the voice behind me, much closer now.
I threw one last, desperate, pleading look at Mr Ambrose. ‘Please! Leave! For me!’ Then, without waiting to see what he would do, I turned to face the British Army officer who was pointing his gun at me. He was a young man, tall and muscular, with shoulder-long mahogany hair and a roguish speck of a beard on his chin. Besides being quite handsome, he also happened to be quite familiar.