By and by it came to him that he could not stand here indefinitely glooming at his friend’s wedding like a jealous lover. He pushed off from the column against which he was still leaning, and shouldered his way forward into the thick of the central group around the bridegroom.
As he did so an eldritch shrieking tore the night apart; a sound rising hideous above the cheerful uproar, which would have raised the hair on the back of his neck, if he had not known it for what it was: the demon love song of a pair of mating cats somewhere on the roof top. There was a burst of laughter, followed by a listening pause, as the sounds of hideous ecstasy rose to the stars.
“There you are!” someone cried out thickly. “Greatly are you favoured, Oh Tussun, on your wedding night, the very friends of Eblis have come to show you how the thing is done!”
And looking about for the jester, Thomas saw that it was Mustapha Bey, commander of one of the Albanian infantry regiments, and, according to Tussun, one day in all likelihood to be husband to the Lady Nayli, if long drawn family negotiations did not break down on the question of the dowry. Easy enough to pick him out; a big man built like a bull and as magnificently moustached almost as the Viceroy himself and considerably older than most of those around him, who stood now hands on hips and head tipped back to bellow with laughter at his own sally in a way which Thomas could not feel it merited.
“I know how it is done!” Tussun was saying, half angry, half laughing also. He was not drunk, at least not as drunk as Thomas had known him before now, but he was certainly not as sober as strict observance of Islamic law should have kept him. He swung round on Thomas, appealing from one friend to another in a way that showed him not completely sure of himself. “The Daughters of Delight at the House of the Two Pigeons can testify to that, eh, Tho’mas, my brother? Allah be praised, we can show them — you and I —”
Thomas tried to steady him up, without letting his own Presbyterian roots show too clearly. “Allah be praised indeed,” he agreed wholeheartedly, but his eyes were straight and warning as they met his friend’s, “yet remember that this is a different matter from the House of the Two Pigeons, Oh friend of my heart — this is for the making of sons.”
The sense of watching eyes and listening ears was still with him; and the moment he had said it, he wished it unsaid. It was hard to see what possible harm could come of the words, whoever overheard them. Yet the hair stirred a little on the back of his neck, and he wished them unspoken.
13
The days that followed were dreich ones for Thomas left solitary in Cairo. Occasionally, when he had an hour to spare, he would have his horse out and ride in the desert, but the desert seemed to hide its face from him. He had not much taste for dancing girls, except in Tussun’s company, and had no wish to catch the pox. Even his falcon was deep in moult. There was nothing to do but work, and he worked like a demon to make sure that if he himself might not go south, the relief troops when they went up to join Ibrahim Pasha should be as well trained as a mortal training officer could make them.
On an evening upward of a month after Tussun’s wedding he was walking back from the Kasr el Nil barracks where he had been sweating his guts out all day over a bunch of new recruits who had no idea how to use their weapons. But his mind had gone back several days to the meeting with Donald that he had hoped for; a hurried meeting snatched on Donald’s part from sorting out and repacking the medical supplies whose late arrival had kept him hanging about in Alexandria. Half an hour maybe, after the year and more since they had last seen each other, spent sitting on the steps of the French Hospital’s inner court, with a handful of dates between them to take the place of an evening meal that neither of them had had time for.
They had shared the dates meticulously between them, looking at each other and taking pleasure in the sight, exchanged the surface news of the time since their parting, but at least in the beginning, feeling themselves too like strangers to risk anything at a deeper level, for the year between had wrought changes in them both.
“So here you are in a fair way to becoming a famous surgeon,” Thomas had said at last, his tongue falling of its own accord into the familiar lowland Scots.
And the Lewis man replied in the more stately tongue of the Highlands and Islands: “Aye, it may be so, one day … it may be so … And here are you, training officer to the Viceroy, no less.”
“An’ stuck here in Cairo like a stranded fish, wi’ the drums beating an’ the pipes skirling away to the south,” said Thomas with a fine mixture of metaphor. “In that you have the better fortune of us two.”
“Do not be thinking, Thomas Dhu, that I do not know how I come to be a man of Ibrahim Pasha’s under the Viceroy.”
So Ibrahim Pasha had told him …
And now he, Donald, had told something else. “The friends that Allah bestows on him,” he had said; and with the significance of the word hanging in the air between them, they looked at each other in silence, one-time Catholic, and one-time Presbyterian. Thomas had heard through Colonel D’Esurier of his friend’s conversion to Islam not long after his own. But in their interchanged letters, and through this evening until now, the thing had remained an area of silence between them, of questions that could not be asked for fear of trespass. Now it seemed that the silence was dissolved. No question asked, yet the answer might be given freely, in friendship.
Thomas said, “Zeid ibn Hussein said to me once in the early days, that a Christian might serve in the armies of the Ottoman Empire, at least in some countries — here in Egypt — but that he wouldna’ rise to the higher ranks. And at the time I was wishing that he hadna’ thrust that knowledge upon me, for it made me afeart that if I chose Islam, it might be for the wrong reason. So for a while an’ a while I was torn this way an’ that. But in the end I had no choice to make after all, for it came to me — ‘twas one evening when I had gone out alone into the desert — that there is but the one God, and tis only the names men give Him an’ the roads they take to reach Him that are different.” He checked for a moment, wondering if he was talking complete nonsense, and indecently self-exposing nonsense at that. But he had gone too far to break off now. “There was a moment of One-ness. One-ness in a’things … I lost it afterward. But the memory was enough.”
Donald was watching a small iridescent beetle. He watched it until it disappeared down a crack at the side of the steps before he looked up. “Then it is I that must envy you. For me there was no moment of One-ness; only the knowledge that I had it within me to be a healer beyond the common run, but not in my own world, nor even as a Christian here in Cairo. So I made the choice for that reason, and that reason only.”
“I think that Allah the All Compassionate might well find the reason good enough,” Thomas said gently.
The moment passed, and he took one of the three remaining dates and asked for news of Medhet.
Medhet, it seemed, was doing well, with already a lieutenancy in one of the Viceroy’s newly formed Albanian regiments, but had been sent off with a detachment for guard duty in the Port Suez shipyards and so would also be missing the campaign in the south.
“So I have a companion in misfortune,” Thomas had said. “That willna’ please the laddie.”
“It is in my mind that there will be another war for both of you in a while an’ a while,” Donald had returned, much as Colonel D’Esurier had done, but with a rueful kindness in place of the dry and detached amusement with which the Frenchman had offered his consolation.
And they had eaten the last of the dates and a few moments later had gone out together to answer the muezzin’s nasal call to prayer.
Thomas, on his way back now from the Kasr el Nil, stepped aside to make way for a camel with a vast swaying load of clover that all but blocked the narrow street and, as he did so, a small voice sounded at his elbow.
“Effendi, the Lady my mistress is at the old palace of Fatamid. The time lies heavy on her hands and she begs that you will visit her there an hour after evening pr
ayer tonight and sing her more of your Scottish songs.”
He turned, just in time to see a boy, one of the softly rounded, sharp-eyed boys gelded for service in the women’s quarters, melt like a shadow into the shifting crowd, and walked the rest of the way back to the armoury deep in thought, and no more aware of the crowds in the streets than if they also had been shadows.
The Viceroy had several residences, both official and private, scattered throughout the city and its suburbs, and the ladies of his household often betook themselves to one or another of the crumbling garden-set palaces to escape the imprisoning splendours of the citadel. So there was nothing unlikely in the Lady Nayli — the message could be from no one else — being in the Palace of Fatamid. Certainly there was nothing unlikely in her being bored there. But there was something very odd indeed about the secret summons, and as always in anything that had to do with the Viceroy’s daughter there was a faint sense of danger to quicken the pulse. Also there seemed to be the whisper of warmth and human contact in his own need …
Even so, he would probably have sent his desolated excuses if it had not been for the thing that happened next.
For Donald’s news of Medhet had been out of date and when, still deep in thought, he rounded the corner where the street began to run uphill towards the citadel, and turned in through the narrow deep-set entrance to the old armoury, his orderly was waiting for him comfortably camped out at the head of the turnpike stair, with news that he had a visitor.
It was a moment before Thomas recognised the tall stripling in Albanian uniform standing with the evening light behind him, for Medhet had shot skywards in the past months, but there could be no mistaking the urchin’s grin that split his face in two as he flung himself open-armed across the room.
“Tho’mas! — Ibrahim Bey!”
“Thomas will do well enough,” Thomas said, laughing and holding him off like an over-exuberant puppy. “Eh, Medhet, it is good to see you! But what are you doing here? I heard you were guarding the Suez shipyards single-handed!”
Medhet wriggled with delight. “I and a few more, until a few days since. But now — nay, I do not know how or why, nor do I care — we are ordered south to re-join the regiment and our place in Suez is taken by a Turkish detachment.”
“And so you came to visit me in the passing,” Thomas said, “and truly my heart is full fain to see you again after this long while!”
Medhet sobered. “It is good to see you also, Tho’mas, but — it is not for that alone that I am come. It is to ask of you a great thing.”
Thomas would have asked if it could not wait until after supper, but clearly the matter was too urgent for any waiting. “Ask then,” he said.
“It is that you apply for me — that I may transfer from my regiment to serve under you.”
Thomas felt uncomfortably jolted beneath the ribs. “There are few things in this world that would seem to me more good,” he said. “Allah knows it and maybe there will be another time. But if you come to serve under me now, you will altogether miss this Sudanese campaign, and I do not think that is what you have in mind.”
He saw the boy’s eager face cloud with bewilderment and forced himself to clarify the situation without delay. “Have you not heard that I am remaining here in Cairo as training officer to the new intake?”
“I heard,” Medhet said. “But I did not — I do not believe.”
“Believe,” Thomas told him. “It is true.”
“But I do not understand — you do not wish this to be the way of it?”
“I do not wish this to be the way of it, no.”
“Then if you tell them —”
Thomas, his hands on the boy’s shoulders, shook him gently. “Listen, if you were to go to your commanding officer and say: ‘I do not like the orders that you have given me. I wish to do this and I do not wish to do that’ — how much difference do you suppose it would make to the orders you have been given?”
“But that is different. I — I am nothing, the least among all the officers in the Egyptian army. But you are a great man —”
“Even generals cannot write their own orders,” Thomas told him. “You are not a child, you are an officer in the Egyptian army. You must understand these things …”
He felt something — a flame of eager hopefulness — die out of Medhet under his hands; saw the bitter disappointment in the boy’s eyes and realised that it was not only for a shining plan that had come to nothing, but for the loss of a hero who had failed to live up to his herohood.
Medhet drew back from under the hands on his shoulder. “I will learn, maybe, to understand. I must go now, Ibrahim Bey.”
“Supper will be almost ready,” Thomas said. “Stay and eat with me.”
The other shook his head. “I must go and eat with my fellows.”
“So be it, then. May Allah the All Merciful spread his cloak about you.”
“And about you,” Medhet said in a tight, dry voice and turned to the door.
It had all come and passed and ended so quickly that, for a long moment after the boy was gone, none of it seemed quite real. But the sensation of bruising and loss that it left behind was real enough. And so was the change that it brought about in his plans for the evening.
“The young one does not stay to eat?” said his orderly who had witnessed the joyful moment of reunion, reappearing in the inner doorway.
“The young one does not stay to eat,” Thomas agreed.
“So, then I pour the hot water.”
Thomas stripped off and scrubbed himself free of the day’s sweat-caked dust, got into fresh garments and ate his solitary evening meal while the last gold faded from the window embrasure and the smoky light of the lamps in the wall niches began to bite.
When the evening call to prayer sounded across the city, he went downstairs and crossed the narrow street to the nearby mosque according to his usual custom. Prayers over, he returned to his quarters and sat for a while, turning over in his mind familiar Scottish airs that might please the Lady Nayli, whistling a snatch of this tune and that and gazing with narrowed eyes into the flame of the small lamp on the table. Then, flinging on over his decent clothes the anonymity of the old brown burnous that he had bought second-hand for rough wear, departed again for the town, heading for the Fatamid quarter and leaving his orderly to look after him with an old man’s amusement at the ways of the young, but also with a trace of anxiety.
A lopsided melon-coloured moon was rising as he passed out through the narrow courtyard door and dropped downhill into the city which was touched by its soft, gauzy light as by a kind of enchantment. But as it swam higher the enchantment faded and the light grew colder and more sharp-edged, until by the time he reached the Fatamid quarter the narrow ways had become black canyons below the blank white moon-fire of the upper storeys far overhead, and the daytime bustle of the streets had changed to a furtive flitting. Only the smells, Thomas thought, remained much the same.
He had, not surprisingly, a strong suspicion that the Viceroy’s daughter probably had something in mind for her evening’s entertainment that went well beyond listening to Scottish ballads, but he deliberately closed his mind to that thought, because if he allowed himself to think it, he would be all kinds of fool as well as a faithless friend, to be answering the summons at all. A courteously worded note of excuse, accompanying a small charming gift — a singing bird in a cage, maybe — costing more than he could afford, of course, should have been his answer. It would have been if he had not been so bored himself, so lonely, so bitterly out at elbows with life; if he could have forgotten the rueful sympathy in Donald’s kindly gaze and the worse thing, the unbearably worse thing, in Medhet’s eyes.
Thomas narrowly avoided falling over a sleeping beggar curled up in a doorway, and began to be growingly aware of the light pressure of the Somali dagger thrust into the silken folds of his waist-shawl. There was always the possibility, of course, that the summons had not come from the Lady Nayli at all, b
ut was a trap of some sort. He had enemies, he knew, particularly among the Mameluke officers who had not forgiven him the death of Aziz Bey, so he walked in the middle of the narrow way, keeping a quick eye open for shadows, and kept that cool awareness of the small dagger in his waist-shawl.
After the teeming heat of the city, the Fatamid quarter seemed a place where Cairo relaxed and drew breath. Old and magnificent mosques and tombs and palaces crumbling into picturesque dilapidation under a kindly moon that concealed every hint of their daytime squalor, sudden open spaces fringed with shade-trees, shadows of cypress and oleander on white walls, a flittering of bats from an unseen garden; faint and far off the sounds and smells of the great river.
Thomas rounded the corner of the wall enclosing the old Fatamid palace, and saw the long street face of the building, sugar-white under the moon, windowless throughout its whole length, unmarked save for a small deep-set doorway a third of the way along, and the shadows of a couple of cypress trees. He made towards the door, wondering what he was supposed to do when he reached it, and prepared to beat on the timbers and shout for admittance in the usual way and enter as publicly as though with a fanfare of trumpets. But before he reached it a small postern door opened in the shadow of one of the cypresses and a woman’s voice whispered: “This way, Effendi — come —”
And a hand plucked at the folds of his burnous.
Then he was standing in pitch darkness with the door closed behind him and his hand going instinctively for his dagger. But the next instant a heavy curtain was lifted back and again the voice said: “Come,” and he ducked through into the light of a lamp burning in a wall niche in some kind of side chamber that had no obvious reason unless it was a store room. The woman, muffled in the usual black folds, took down the lamp and flapped ahead of him like some great dark moth, and he followed through room after room only half seen in passing, then out again into the moonlight of an arcaded garden-court where lamplight made dim spangled patterns through fretted windows high overhead and on the far side an arched passage let them through into the main garden, the paradise of the old palace.