Blood and Sand

  Ahead of him above the sea of black-robed fighters, snarling faces and up-reared horses’ heads, rose a black Wahabi war banner, and guessing that Tussun would have seen and charged it, he crashed on in the same direction, slashing to right and left as he went, his dwindling company storming in the red wake he left behind him, until the last line of the black war host broke before him, the last man going down with head crushed under his mare’s trampling hooves as he broke through.

  There before him, by the Mercy of Allah, Tussun and two of the Arab troopers were still alive, their horses’ rumps backed together so that they faced outwards, fighting off six or seven of the enemy while the rest surged past.

  Zeid ibn Hussein was not one of them.

  Thomas drove in his heel again and again, urging his spent and stumbling mare towards them. A last flare of strength rose in him at finding Tussun still alive. With a savage back-hand blow he all but beheaded the Wahabi warrior whose spear-thrust would have been in another instant in Tussun’s flank. Another lance aimed at himself, he hacked apart together with the hand that held it. He was conscious that his remaining troopers had formed a half circle between him and the Wahabi torrent and were fighting off twice their own numbers. Mercifully the main force of the Wahabis and Beni Harb were flooding past, intent on booty. It made sense, something cool and oddly remote within himself knew that. Why waste time and lives on men still fighting hard when there were dead men and wounded for the plundering?

  Tussun saw him coming and let out a great joyful and desperate shout: “Tho’mas! Come, my brother, we have lost all but our honour and our swords, let us take as many as may be of these dogs with us, as we go down!”

  Ranging alongside him, Thomas shouted back: “We are not going down! We shall live to gain the victory another day! I tell you it is the Will of Allah that we cut our way out of here, and defeat the Wahabi dogs in His chosen time! Therefore come!” The surviving troopers were closing up in wedge formation once more behind him, as he wrenched his mare round, and riding knee to knee with his young commander, their blooded swords still busy, thrust through the Wahabi mass towards the palm groves beyond the mouth of the gorge.

  By good fortune or maybe by the Will of Allah, the enemy was now increasingly taken up with looting. Only ibn Saud’s picked bodyguard of two hundred horsemen and some of Prince Feisal’s guards, easily recognisable in their ring-mail shirts and nut-shaped helmets, were still hunting the wreckage of the Egyptian army to the south. The dust sank. The fighting for the pass was over.

  “Who would think to find so hot a courage in a Turkish Pasha?” Abdullah ibn Saud said later, reporting to his father. “And the other, his sword-brother, the one who comes from Scotland, to take service with the Turks! Would that he had taken service with us for he is the bravest of all our enemies — our men would not have disobeyed my orders and left the hunt to go after booty, had he been with them!”

  20

  On an evening towards the blistering mirage-haunted end of summer, Thomas and Tussun took their evening ride along the shore north of Yembo Port, their small escort headed by the indestructible Medhet, left at some distance behind. They had been racing their horses through the shallows, finding pleasure in the speed and the coolness of the flying spray. Now they rode more steadily, their shadows reaching inland across the sand, deep in talk on their way back.

  It was eight months since the defeat at Jedaida, since the night they had burned their camp and pulled back, leaving the war-chest and their four field guns and their dead in the enemy’s hands, but with the battered remains of their troops who had come in to the rallying bugles sounding through the dark. Thomas’s mind went back to wild-eyed riderless horses answering the familiar call, and he remembered, as he had remembered so often since, one of his own troopers coming in urgent search of him through the turmoil, telling him something that he did not hear clearly concerning Zeid ibn Hussein.

  “Zeid? He’s here? Where is he?” he had demanded in the beginning of relief.

  But the relief had been short-lived.

  “Nay. Not Zeid but his mare. She has returned —”

  “I come,” Thomas had said, already turning back with the man. It was hard to see what good he could do by coming, but there was some thought in him, a desperate hope that if he saw the mare for himself he would find that she was not Zeid’s after all — some mistake. There were many white mares in the Bedouin cavalry …

  But when he stood a little removed from the other horses in the lee of a camel-thorn hedge, the shadowy silver shape, trembling and distressed, who swung her head towards him as though in desperate hope for a moment that he was someone else, was Zeid’s mare and no one else’s.

  “She must have heard the bugles and she came,” someone said.

  By the light of the burning camp he saw the shallow gash in her flank and the broad track of blood all down her shoulder with no wound to account for it.

  “Put her with the reserve,” Thomas said. “She’s in no state to carry a rider,” and his voice cracked with the dryness of his throat. He fondled her for a moment, laid his cheek against hers as Zeid had been used to do, then turned and went his way about the myriad other things that must be seen to before there was time for grieving — if ever there was time for grieving again …

  At first it had looked as though none of the infantry had escaped, except by changing sides, but eventually, in one way and another, the rags of half the army had straggled back to Yembo, although only the cavalry had brought off their arms and equipment; and here in Yembo they had been pent up ever since.

  As soon as word of Jedaida had reached Mecca, the Grand Shariff had openly joined the Wahabis with all his forces, and the war seemed over. But the bulk of the Beni Jehaine had remained loyal to their pledge to Tussun. They had, in fact, mustered all the men they could spare and sent to warn Abdullah ibn Saud and the Beni Harb that they would resist any advance on Yembo.

  “And that,” Tussun had said, “is what is called being true to one’s gold-rimmed spectacles.”

  It seemed that the warning must have given Abdullah ibn Saud seriously to think. Certainly the Beni Jehaine combined with what yet remained of the Egyptian expeditionary force could prove a dangerous obstacle, while even if he reached Yembo he was unlikely to be able to breach the old Mameluke fortifications since he had no guns except the four light field-pieces captured at Jedaida, and no man trained to handle them.

  At all events the swarming Wahabi attacks which they had feared had not come. Tussun had been given the time he desperately needed to pull the troops together again, build up their shattered morale and get them back into some kind of fighting order; while Thomas, with a reconstituted regiment of Bedouin cavalry, had been stationed at Yembo el Nakhl as a forward post to let their friends the Jehaine see that they were not proposing to hide safe behind a living screen of the tribes while playing no part themselves in the defence of Jehaine territory.

  As soon as he had received his son’s report of the Jedaida disaster, the Viceroy, with his usual competence and speed of action, had started again from the beginning. With an end to the Mameluke troubles, and his elder son’s business-like success as Governor of Upper Egypt, his country’s finances were already improving, and soon fresh supplies of gold, arms and ammunition were reaching Yembo Port in a steady flow, to be followed by reinforcements: three infantry regiments, and with them Ahmed Bonaparte to take over the position of second in command.

  Thomas, though he was grateful to the Turkish Agha for the loan of a fine horse and even, in an odd unwilling way, for having bought him in the first place, had no liking for the man himself, quite apart from his reputation for cruelty and the unsavoury practices of his private life, and did not relish the prospect of serving under him. But he fully realised that Ahmed was a brilliant soldier of long experience, and one of the few aghas (Umar and Salan had been shipped back to Egypt in something very like disgrace) on whom Muhammed Ali believed he could completely rely in a tricky s
ituation. And he did wish that his friends and supporters would not be so sure that he must be feeling jealous and slighted that the Turkish general and not himself was to be Tussun’s chief of staff in the forthcoming campaign, and would not try so hard to offer loyalty and consolation.

  “You yourself have made me the khasnadar, the treasurer of this expedition,” he said, laughing, in answer to a fresh outburst from Tussun. “I could scarcely play both parts, and, if we were to change places, I do not think that Ahmed Bonaparte would make as good a khasnadar, as I do.”

  “That is assuredly true, my brother. I have heard it said that Ibrahim Agha is the first incorruptible khasnadar there has been in a score of years.”

  Thomas smiled ahead between his horse’s ears, “Because I have refused a bribe here and there?”

  “Maybe because you have contrived not to make enemies in the refusing.”

  “Why should I? I have nothing against a fair price for a fair service or for those who feel like it. So long as the bargain be fairly kept.” At least they were steering away from the subject of the new second in command.

  “So long as the bargain is fairly kept …” Tussun said thoughtfully. “Thomas, you have talked friendship with the tribes all those long waiting months, winning over even the Beni Harb for the time being, so that we may hope for an open road when we march for Medina with the autumn rains. Do you believe that their bargains will be fairly kept?”

  “I think so. But make no mistake, it is gold and nothing but gold and the hope of more that has bought Shariff Ghalid’s solemn promise, yet again, to come to our side in the hour that we free Medina.” Thomas heeled his mare into a canter. “And the rains cannot be long now. Oh, but it will be good to be on the move again, before the sap dries in us and we grow old and shrivelled, pent here under the guns of Yembo!”

  The shadows were blending into one another as pool runs into pool before the rising tide, though on the tawny crests of the mountains eastward the last of the sunlight still lingered. In the first of the melon fields as they came towards it, a little group of men were gathered, staring all one way towards some point in the crystal luminance of sky above the southern horizon. Someone pointed and cried out, high and triumphant: “Praise be to Allah, Canopus is in the sky!”

  Canopus, the Messenger of the Rains. Maybe still a month away, but still, the Messenger of the Rains.

  *

  On an evening upward of two months later, the watch fires of the Egyptian army were spread like the golden eyes in a peacock’s train about the south-western side of the Holy City.

  They had met with little resistance on the march; they had passed through Jedaida as though it were a field gateway, save that field gateways are not generally littered with the bones of men and horses picked clean and dragged apart by jackal and vulture. Only at Badr there had been a brush with local tribesmen in which Tussun had come by a sword gash above the left knee, cracking the bone; not deep, and so long as no threads from the cloth of his loose breeks had been carried into the wound, not dangerous, said the army surgeons (but Thomas wished that Donald had been with them instead of left behind in Cairo). But there was no doubt that for the next week or two he could not ride and would be better without even the lurching of a camel litter, so he had been left behind with one of the surgeons and his own personal troops, while Ahmed Bonaparte had taken over the command and Thomas, for the time being, was back in his old position as chief of staff.

  From the slightly raised ground at the end of the camel lines, he could look out across the gently undulating plain filmed with sparse green by the past autumn rains, to the city’s walls rising among its famous fig gardens and groves of fronded palms, and see rising above the ramparts, to catch the last of the evening light, the slender minarets and great green dome that marked the Prophet’s last resting place. Even the Wahabis had not quite dared to pull that down.

  He had wondered, through the long waiting months in Yembo, through the slow gruelling march, what he would feel when he drank in his first sight of the Holy City. He felt a kind of stillness deep within himself; otherwise nothing that he would not have felt before any strong town that must be taken, any captive city that must be freed. In the last level sunlight that sent his shadow reaching out before him, he gazed with narrowed eyes at the scars that the day’s bombardment, fallen silent now, had left on the walls. Only surface scars. He had not thought that the light Turkish field guns would have much effect on such walls, and he had been right. But heavier pieces, even if the Viceroy had sent them, would have been beyond the power of men and camels to haul or carry along the old pilgrim route.

  He turned, the thick dark folds of his scarlet-braided fariva swinging behind him, and began to make his way back, a familiar figure followed by many eyes, through the crowded camp and the acrid reek of brushwood and camel-dung cooking fires, to the commander’s great black tent crouching in the midst of it all.

  The sentries before the tent opening parted spears to let him through. Inside, the low flames on the coffee hearth fluttered and keeled sideways in the draught. The lanterns had already been lit and hung from the tent poles, and by their light Ahmed Agha, with a bottle of wine at his elbow, was writing on an upturned ammunition box, while an orderly stood by to take the finished despatches. He looked up as Thomas entered, nodded to him to wait, and returned to his writing.

  Just within the looped-back entrance, Thomas waited. There was a scent hanging in the air, floating like oil on water above the usual mingling of goat’s hair, tobacco smoke and sweat and the raw Greek wine. It reminded him of the various Houses of Delight that he had visited with Tussun from time to time in Yembo. Beyond the heavy folds curtaining off the next bay, which in a Bedouin tent would have been the women’s quarters, something moved, the movement ending in a high-pitched squeal. Thomas wondered idly how many perfumed and painted boys the commander had in there. At least two, by the sound of it.

  He watched the man writing at the makeshift table, seeing in the lantern light the fleshily handsome face; the cruelty at the corners of the mouth not quite hidden by the curled moustache; the small capable hands that could almost have been a woman’s. A flicker of physical revulsion woke in him as it always did when he found himself near to Ahmed Bonaparte. At least, he thought, the man was no more than half drunk, as was fairly usual with him. If the stories about him were true, it was only in victory, or at least when the fighting was over, that he celebrated with the full drunkenness which unleashed the more unpleasant side of his character.

  The commander finished his page, scrawled his flamboyant signature across the foot of it, sanded, folded and sealed it with the usual blob of brown beeswax, and the red onyx that hung on a chain round his neck.

  “More bull’s blood,” he said to the orderly. And when the man had brought another bottle and set it in place of the empty one, and finally departed with the despatches, he sat back and turned his full and slightly bloodshot gaze upon Thomas:

  “Well?”

  “With the guns we can bring to bear, we can keep up the bombardment for months without breaching the walls,” Thomas said.

  The other nodded, as one receiving the answer that he expects. “And we cannot afford a long siege. Nor, if the scouts have made true report and we outnumber the Wahabi garrison by less than two to one, can we afford to get held up in a long struggle for strongly defended gateways, with consequent heavy losses.”

  “I should judge that once we are inside, many of the Medinans will join forces with us and so bring up our numbers,” Thomas said. “Unless of course the scouts’ reports are out of date, and ibn Saud had already sent in reinforcements before we got there.”

  The commander set the tips of his jewelled fingers together and looked at them, focusing with care. “I believe that we may discount that possibility. The Tiger of Arabia is not one to waste men or effort. The walls of Medina City are stronger than light gunfire, and the citadel is virtually impregnable. There is already a garrison of some t
wo and a half thousand of his picked troops. He will, I judge, be confident of Medina’s ability to hold out. He will be sure that, after a few of our assaults have been beaten back, the Beni Harb will change sides again, and we shall be hopelessly trapped.” He looked up again into Thomas’s face. “Ibrahim Agha, have you any experience of mines?”

  *

  At four o’clock in the morning, the high call of the muezzin floating down from the minarets of Medina woke the faithful to prayer. In the besieged city and the camp of the besiegers alike, men woke as much of themselves as need be — life-long usage had taught them how much that was — and gathered in the streets or mosques or the spaces between the tents, to make the ritual prostrations and intone the prayers that sanctified the start of the day. And among the sheltering fig gardens on the north of the city and in the long carefully propped tunnel that passed beneath the wall itself, men prayed silently and without movement, hoping that Allah would accept the prayer so, since the silence was for the freeing of His Holy City.

  “Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, the Merciful, the Master of the Day of Judgment. Guide us into the path of the Blessed …”

  Three days and nights they had been driving the tunnel: now it was finished, the powder kegs stacked at its inmost end, no longer visible in the faint glint of the hooded lantern, for the false wall of stones and rubble that they had built to contain and concentrate the blast. Through the chink left in the wall, the slow match led in like a small deadly serpent, a whip-snake entering its hole.

  The devout wailing of the morning prayer reached the three men crouching in the tunnel. And after the prayer was silent they waited still, Thomas holding his watch close to the gleam of light that made dim tensed masks of their sweating faces. They should be able to hear when the diversionary attack came on the southern gate, but sound could play odd tricks in such a dog-hole, and it was best to time the thing as well. The long moments dragged by; and then they heard it, a distant surf of sound across the city that was the voice of the attack and the answering voice of the Wahabis hurling themselves to the defence.