Blood and Sand

  Sulieman tipped back his head to look at her incredulously. “That is surely a dream, oh Flower of Joy. All men know how close to each other are your brother and this Scottish adventurer.”

  “That very closeness may well make it all the easier to do what you have it in your heart to do,” the Lady Nayli told him patiently. How stupid men could be. “Now listen: Certain windows of the garden pavilion in the house of Sheikh ibn Ishak look down into the fountain court, and anyone watching through them such a thing as the gathering of the bridegroom and his friends at a wedding feast may hear as well as see what goes on below …”

  *

  In his quarters above the armoury, Thomas sat at the table, absorbed in cleaning his double-barrelled pistol. Over the winter months he had begun collecting a few weapons, mostly in bad repair and needing his skill as an armourer to set them right, for the pleasure that the gunsmith’s apprentice in him derived from the process.

  The remains of his evening meal were on the table, left there by Abdul, who had set the meal and then gone off duty early, to join a nephew’s wedding feast. On the table also, in their usual places, the fine gold-work of the embossed covers catching the light of the candles in the three-branched brass candlestick, his Koran and the French translation of the Life of Ali ibn Talib. Presently, before he slept, he would read one or other of them for a while. He had tried once already that evening, but his mind would not concentrate on the written word, and he had turned to the skill of his hands instead, to hold his attention steady.

  The Sudan campaign had been brought to a successful conclusion with winter’s end, and earlier that evening Tussun, riding two days ahead of his brother and the main Egyptian force, had arrived back in Cairo. From the musket range out beyond the Kasr el Nil, Thomas had seen the dust-cloud of his arrival rising beyond the shade-trees on the river road; and almost, when he came off duty, he had gone up to the citadel palace to join him. Almost, but not quite. Probably Tussun would have to report to his father before he did anything else, after that he should go to his wife, or maybe his own family would absorb him for the rest of the evening. In any case, when he wanted Thomas he would send for him, or come looking himself. The old faint constraint that had lain like a shadow across his relationship with the Viceroy’s younger son ever since that first evening in Cairo was with him now; and he had turned away from the first warm impulse, and come back to his own quarters to eat a solitary meal and spend the evening cleaning his weapons and waiting in case the summons or Tussun himself should come.

  Had he but known it, Tussun, having had a bath and made his report to his father, having no desire to go anywhere near his wife, especially as she had not had enough consideration to become pregnant after all his wedding night prowess, was in his own quarters with Sulieman ibn Mansoor and a handful of Mameluke friends and supporters, being made sufficiently drunk by them under the pretext of washing the dust of the long ride out of his throat, and carefully pitched up into a state of hurt resentment against his friend Ibrahim Bey.

  Ibn Feisal had planted the first dart at exactly the right stage of the festivities, by expressing surprise and concern that Ibrahim Bey was not of their company.

  “One would have expected so close a friend to be the first to greet you on your return.”

  Tussun, who had expected the same thing, but would have gone to Thomas’s quarters himself if he had not been waylaid by his present bunch of boon companions, glowered into his wine cup and said nothing.

  Rashid took the amber mouthpiece of the hookah from between his lips and passed it to his left-hand neighbour, his eyes half closed as the smoke fronded upward. “Something must have detained him. Allah the All Compassionate grant that he is not ill.”

  The boy looked up quickly, anxiety for his friend reaching for a moment through the haze of wine. “I’ll send —”

  Sulieman ibn Mansoor leaned over to refill his cup. “No, no, be easy on that score — did I not see him with my own eyes after supper in the mess, laughing with that young lieutenant of the camel corps, on his way back to his quarters.”

  Tussun drained the wine in his cup. His face was flushing darkly and his eyes, no longer focusing very clearly, taking on a look of angry bewilderment. He said something thickly about not caring if Thomas laughed with all the camel boys in Cairo.

  Someone reached towards the long-necked jug to fill his cup yet again, but Sulieman made a tiny gesture, staying him; it would not do if the boy fell asleep without having reached the needed state of bloodthirstiness first.

  “It is possible, of course,” a fourth man put in smoothly, “that he is ashamed to face you, after the evil thing that he has said concerning your honour.”

  There was a moment’s charged silence. They were all watching Tussun’s face. No one noticed (no one had troubled to notice his presence all along) as Tussun’s small personal page raised a suddenly alerted head from where he had been huddled half asleep in the shadows.

  Tussun seemed to get his words together with difficulty: “Tho’mas has been speaking ill of me? Tho’mas?”

  The four exchanged glances and shifted uneasily. The silence dragged on. It was broken by Tussun shouting thickly. “What has he said? Tell me? You shall tell me!”

  Ibn Feisal said gravely, turning to Sulieman as to the leader of the party, “My brother, I think that too much has been said for the matter to be left now, hanging like an unravelled sleeve. You must tell Tussun Bey all that we had hoped in our concern for his happiness, to leave untold.”

  And Sulieman, with a great show of unwillingness, but taking up in sad acceptance the task laid upon him, turned to face the drunk and angry and suddenly frightened boy, bending his head over his joined hands in a gesture of humble obeisance, “Remember then, my Lord, that it was for your happiness that we would have remained silent, and it is for your honour that we speak now. The Scotsman who you have befriended has always made a mock of you behind your back. Aye, and not only behind your back, but to your face as well. Do you not remember how, even at your wedding feast, when the mating cats cried out among the branches of the shade-trees of your father-in-law’s garden, he laughed and said that the very fiends of Eblis had come to show you how the thing was done?”

  For a moment there was a doubtful expression on Tussun’s face, as though, far back through the fumes of wine, memory was trying to tell him that it had not been Thomas who had uttered that jibe. Sulieman saw the look and hurried on. “And when you assured him that you knew how it was done — you who are the heart’s delight of half the Houses of Joy in Cairo — did he not say to you that this was different, this was for the making of sons — as though all that had gone before had been but love-play and maybe evil practices?”

  “Or as though you needed to be reminded of your duties as the Viceroy’s son,” put in ibn Feisal.

  Rashid slipped in his own sting, in the guise of consolation. “When there is a son in your house, Allah the All Compassionate grant it soon, he will no longer be able to put it about that you are no true man, and be forced to eat his words like so much dung.”

  “He said that?” Tussun was staggering to his feet, steadying himself with a hand on the wall niche beside him. His hand encountered the slender vase of late roses that stood there, and he snatched it up and flung it at the opposite wall where it just missed the crouching page and smashed into a ruin of shards and water and mangled flowers. “I’ll kill him —!”

  The whole scene dissolved into chaos, through which the four men surrounding the raging Tussun continued with their deadly baiting. At the end, the boy in the shadows slipped off unseen, and made his way out by the side door much used for the night-time comings and goings of Tussun’s household and companions. The guards, used to such comings and goings, let him through, and he set off, half sobbing as he ran, into the teeming city night.

  *

  Thomas laid aside the ramrod and oily rag, and squinted down first the left and then the right barrels of the pistol he had been w
orking on for an hour or more. Not a speck of rust or used powder marred the inside of either as the light of the candles struck up the prism-bright tubes. He snapped the breech shut and laid the pistol down on the table before him.

  Almost as he did so, a small sharp fleck of sound came from the direction of the window. He turned his head towards it, alert and listening, and a few moments later it came again; the sound of a thrown pebble against the window shutter. Not Tussun, he had the other key, and if he had lost it would have come thundering on the armoury door and probably shouting. There was something furtive about this signal, secrecy, possibly danger …

  Thomas got up, blew out the candles and crossed to the window just as a third pebble struck against the shutter and rattled down the ancient carving. He slipped back the bolt and eased the shutter open an inch or so, sighting one-eyed through the narrow space.

  The lop-sided moon was high in a glimmering sky, and looking down, he saw a small figure sitting astride the curtain wall that enclosed the armoury from the narrow street. The pale blur of a face was turned up toward his, and even before the whisper came he recognised Tussun’s young page.

  It was a hoarse whisper of desperate urgency. “Ibrahim Bey —”

  “Ali! What’s amiss?”

  “Ibrahim Bey. I come to warn you — Sulieman ibn Mansoor — Khalid ibn Feisal and their friends — they are your enemies —”

  Thomas opened the shutter a little wider. “You tell me what I know already. Why this haste in the night?”

  “They have made my master drunk and told him evil and untrue things that have blackened his mind towards you.”

  “What things?”

  “Does it matter? They have spoken poison — it has to do with his marriage night. They have told him you are spreading it abroad that he cannot beget a son. That among other things, and all the while giving him more wine, and — and you know what he is like when there is too much wine in him. He has given Sulieman his own key to the armoury and bidden him to take ten men and come here to kill you for your treachery.”

  Thomas simply did not believe it at first. Even remembering Tussun’s marriage night and the sense that he had had of eyes and ears beyond the window frets, he did not believe it. “You have half heard something and got it wrong,” he said. “Or it was a jest. Your master and I are friends and brothers; and even drunk —”

  “No jest.” The boy was almost weeping in his desperate urgency. “He bade them bring him your head for proof that it was done. Oh Ibrahim Bey — it is because he loves you. You must run away quickly and hide until his wrath is passed and he remembers how much he loves you …”

  And suddenly Thomas did believe. With a cold sick certainty, he believed. He heard his own voice asking with surprising calm, “How long before they come?”

  “In about an hour — after the midnight guard-change.”

  “They take their time.”

  “They hope to catch you sleeping.”

  “Ten men to kill one sleeping. They pay me a compliment worth the having,” Thomas said.

  “Hurry! Oh hurry!”

  “There is plenty of time — and for you, go back to your master’s quarters, and pretend later that you have slept in some corner and know nothing of all this.”

  “I can help you. I know the dark places of the city —”

  “I make no doubt of it,” Thomas said levelly, “And so do I, away with you now, back to Tussun’s quarters. The mantle of Allah cover you from harm.”

  “But —”

  “Go!”

  There was an instant’s complete stillness, and then Ali swung his leg back across the wall and dropped from sight into the blackness of the street.

  The first thing Thomas did when he was gone was to go down the turnpike stair and check that the small deep-set door at the foot of it was indeed locked. The men coming out of the night had the second key — his mind shied away from thinking who had given it to them — so it would not even delay their entrance; but he knew that lock, it was beginning to be in need of oiling — he had been meaning to oil it himself, but by the mercy of Allah he had neglected it in the pressure of other matters — it would give him warning of their arrival.

  He closed and securely re-barred the shutters, then turning back to the table in darkness that was like black velvet against his eyes, felt for and found the tinder box among the clutter of weapons and oily rags, and relit the candles.

  Then he began to prime and load the double-barrelled pistol. What he chiefly felt that moment was grief more than anything else; and a kind of numbness, as though he had taken a crack on the head which made it hard to think. To make ready his firearms was something that his hands could do with meticulous care and accuracy without any help from his head at all.

  “You know what he’s like when there is too much wine in him,” Ali had said. “It is because he loves you,” Ali had said.

  He loaded and made ready his pair of French duelling pistols and long vicious-looking horse pistol, and laid them to hand on the table. So much for the firearms. His British rifle hung above his bed in the sleeping chambers, but it would be useless on the turnpike. He picked up his beloved broadsword with the faded crimson velvet lining the basket hilt. Earlier that evening he had been burnishing and oiling the blade, but he unsheathed it now, reading again the name of its dead first owner, seeing the light of the candles run like water along the silken steel. He felt the familiar balance, the way the hilt settled like a sentient thing into his hand and became as it were a part of himself. He had not thought, when Tussun gave it him, that he would use it to fight for his life against men sent to kill him by Tussun himself.

  Slow anger began to rise within him, mingling with the grief, not driving it out. Oh yes, he realised that the thing was not of Tussun’s making in the first place. It was the skilled work of other men goading him in all his weakest places, until they got from him the order that would save their necks after the thing they planned was done. He remembered again that sense of someone watching, listening, behind the window fret, and wondered if the Lady Nayli also was taking a hand. “You know what he is like when there is too much wine in him” … “It is because he loves you”. He knew all that, but deep down within him something denied his reasoned understandings. “Brother of mine, if the thing were the other way over, however drunk I was, whatever poison they poured into me, I would have trusted you — I would have trusted you!” Whatever the bond between them, for himself he would have called it friendship, Tussun had called it love; maybe it was the same thing; Tussun had broken faith with it, and him.

  He laid the great broadsword down naked on the table, positioning it with care so that his hand could find it instantly in the dark.

  It was at that instant that he realised exactly what he was doing. That having been given an hour’s warning, plenty of time to run for it and hide in some dark corner of the city until Tussun’s rage had cooled, as it certainly would once he was sober, even fling himself on the Vicereine’s mercy to save him a second time, he was calmly preparing to stay and fight for his life against odds of ten to one.

  And he was not even at all sure why, except that his gorge rose at the thought of the two alternatives.

  He closed the chamber door to a two-inch gap. Sulieman and his pack would probably have a lantern, but from the circular stair in anything but full daylight it would look to be shut.

  He stuck the double-barrelled pistol and the duelling pair together with the straight bladed Somali knife into his tightly bound waist-shawl, wry and inappropriate laughter suddenly twinging in him at the thought of the fairground sideshow figure he must cut, bristling with such a ludicrous assortment of weapons. He cleared the oily rags and other armourer’s clutter from the table and thrust all into the farthest corner of the room along with his crimson leather slippers. If it came to fighting on the stairs he would do better barefoot. Lastly he took down from the wall his cavalry sabre, shorter and lighter, with its curved Damascus blade which mi
ght be better for use in the narrow space of doorway or stair-head than the great broadsword.

  Then he knelt and turned himself as well as he could judge towards Mecca, and prayed, first according to the custom of the Muslim faith, and then — his teacher had assured him in the early days of his instruction, that it was permissible — in the words, familiar since his earliest childhood, of the Lord’s Prayer.

  Our Father which art in Heaven,

  Hallowed be Thy name.

  Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done …

  Thy will be done — The Will of Allah — Into thy hands, oh Lord …

  He got up, and for the second time doused the candles. Then he sat himself down beside the narrow crack of the door, his back against the wall, his eyes wide open into the pitch dark, to wait. Presently, as his eyes grew used to the darkness, he began to make out a faint line of grey light at one edge of the window shutter. He heard the faint seashell whisper of the blood in his own ears, felt the beat of his own heart, a little quicker than usual, but not much. From time to time he moved, careful not to grow stiff.

  He had no idea how long a time he waited, before it came, faintly up the stairway, too faintly to have wakened him if he had been unwarned and asleep, the sound of a key being turned in an ill-oiled lock.

  15

  Thomas got up, taking the light sabre between his teeth — more and more the fairground raree-show — and drew the double-barrelled pistol from his cummerbund, cocking it in the instant that he did so.

  For a few quickened heartbeats of time the silence settled again, seeming to press on his ears as the darkness pressed on his eyes; then, as he strained to pierce it, came the faintest creak of a heavy door being stealthily urged back; another pause, and then a whisper of sound too faint to be called footsteps. And sighting one-eyed through the door crack Thomas saw the darkness lessen before a dim fore-wash of light spreading up from below along the outer curve of the staircase well. He had guessed that they would bring a shielded lantern for silence on the stairs and light to work by if the chambers were in darkness.