“Tho’mas,” she said, “I am here.”
*
Later in the day, having despatched Medhet to see about the return of the camels, Thomas brought his wife, followed by Kadija and a caravanserai porter with the bundles, to the three rooms above the goldsmith’s shop.
The rooms were by themselves on the rooftops, and reached by an outside stair from the small courtyard garden behind the house. Roses were coming into bud in tall jars in the courtyard; the heavy scented, many-petalled crimson roses of Damascus. And at sight of them, Anoud let out a small soft cry of delight.
“Oh how beautiful! How beautiful! I did not know that there could be so many roses!”
“Teif is famous for its roses,” Thomas said.
She had stopped to smell one of the half-open flowers, lifting back her veil, and cupping her mutilated hand under the heavy velvet head. She let it swing back and looked up at him. “Does my Lord think — it is not our garden, I know — but does my Lord think that I may take one? Just one bud? There are so many coming —”
Thomas, with a sudden boyish sense of pride in his own forethought, said, “I have already spoken on the matter with the goldsmith Ali Karim, and by his leave you may pick one rose every day for as long as the roses last,” and forbore to mention how much this arrangement had added to the rent.
He picked a carefully chosen flower, darkest of the dark, and as yet only half unfurled, and gave it into her hand. He had a sudden foolish desire to kiss it first, but Kadija and the impatient porter were both watching. If they had not been, he could have kissed Anoud herself.
Not long now … He smiled at her, a smile of content with the present moment, and happy anticipation of moments to come, and turned and went up the rickety outside stair, warmly aware of her footsteps behind him.
The coffee pot and the fretted lamp were unpacked, the familiar cushions and coverlets spread on the divan, and as the days went by the three rooms over the goldsmith’s shop began to take on a look of home, the rose of the day in its blue and white vase in a wall niche, Thomas’s beloved broadsword propped in a corner.
Thomas himself was to and fro between Teif and Mecca in the wake of the Viceroy; and Anoud had moved, without his really noticing it, into a different place in his life. When he left her at Medina, two days after their marriage, he had not forgotten her, never for an instant forgotten her, but she had stepped back a little, become something beautiful and remote. In Teif she was growing into him, becoming a part of him that did not need to be remembered any more than one needs to remember about breathing.
He had returned from a three-day patrol and was sitting with her one evening in the outer chamber, with the stair-head door open, for the spring was turning towards summer and even up here in the hills the heat of the day was beginning to linger fiercely into the evening.
He was trying to teach her to sing, not very successfully, though with much laughter. The girl’s speaking voice was soft, almost throaty, but in singing it took on the high nasal tone of her breed that went ill with the old Scots air, while the Western scale of seven notes was strange to her and made the tune hard to capture.
Mount and go,
Mount and make you ready
O mount and go,
And be the Captain’s Lady.
“No,” Thomas said, “bring it down. Not from the back of your nose, from down here, as you speak. Think of a rock-dove. Your voice is so soft when you speak, Anoud, now listen —”
She laughed and willing as a child eager to please tried again, following him as he sang, her gaze on his face, the little frown line between her brows deepening in concentration. “Tell me again, the meaning of the words,” she said, when they arrived more or less together at the end.
But before he could do so, a new sound caught at Thomas’s ear: someone whistling in the courtyard below:
Oh I would ride the wide world over
A thousand leagues an’ three —
There could be only one man to whistle that tune in that place.
Thomas sprang up and crossed to the door. The sky was yellow as a lantern behind the roofs of Teif, the garden full of crowding shadows among which the Pasha of Jiddah lounged at the foot of the stair, tucking a rose into the rakish folds of his turban.
“Tussun!” Thomas went three at a time down the steps and they embraced at the bottom.
“You have picked tomorrow’s rose!” Thomas accused him. “We are only allowed one a day and there are not many left.”
“Count it as part of your hospitality to a guest.”
Thomas held him off at arms’ length to look at him. “Oh, it is good to see you, Allah knows it, even with a stolen rose in your bonnet! What brings you up this way?”
“I had to talk over certain plans with my father, and being here, I come to visit my brother. Is it granted that I come up?”
“Give me but a moment to warn Anoud,” Thomas said, turning back to the stair.
“I did not know that you had her here with you until the goldsmith told me.”
“When it seemed likely that I should be here a while, I sent for her. And she packed the coffee pot and came, like a good soldier’s wife.”
The outer chamber was empty, all signs of a woman having been there hastily snatched up and carried away to leave it a man’s majlis.
He called down to Tussun, who came bounding up the stair to join him. In the doorway he checked, looking about him, then back to Thomas: “Where is Anoud? I thought I heard the two of you up here.”
“Which is why you gave warning of your approach.”
“One must be on the safe side,” Tussun said. “Does she keep closely to the old ways, then?”
“The women of Arabia are not the women of Albania or the Viceroy’s family.”
“No, I know that. But will she not come back? — I will not seek to tear off her yashmak.”
Thomas laughed. “I will do what I may. Sit, and be welcome meanwhile.” And he went into the inner room, closing the door behind him.
Anoud, with Kadija’s help, was setting out the ceremonial array of pots and little brass cups, all the cherished impedimenta of coffee making. She looked up, smiling. “Your brother is come, and Kadija shall bring you coffee.”
“Anoud,” Thomas said, “Will you not come yourself, and sit with us a while?”
There was a long silence, then she looked up from the gazelle-skin coffee bag in her hand. “The women of your people, they are not hidden? Not veiled, you tell me?”
“They are not veiled, and they sit down to eat and talk with men. But they are not Muslim,” Thomas said, putting the thing fairly.
She was silent again. “And Tussun Pasha?” she said at last. “How is it with the women of his kin, who are of the Faith?”
“They go veiled in the street and on formal occasions, but I have eaten with his mother, and his sister, unveiled.”
“It is difficult, this matter of two worlds,” said Anoud; and then: “I am of the Faith, but I am your woman and your world is mine. What would you have me do?”
He put his hands on her shoulders, feeling them tense a little under his touch. “I would have you come back into the majlis and sit with me and with Tussun, my brother, because you are the two people in the world whom I love.”
“My Lord’s brother is my brother also,” said Anoud. “I will come.”
She did not even replace her yashmak, but merely drew the folds of her veil loosely across the lower part of her face, giving the suggestion rather than the fact of concealment, and, bidding Kadija to bring in the brass tray, followed him back into the outer room.
Tussun, seated cross-legged on the divan, bowed to her over his joined hands, careful not to look too straightly into her face: “Salaam aleikum, may your day be white, Lady.”
“May your day be as milk, oh Brother of my Lord,” she returned the greeting, and sank down into the shadowed corner of the room.
Kadija like a moving black mountain set the tray with
its coffee-making clutter down beside the hearth, breathing, as always, soft and heavy as a cow.
“Bring the lamp,” Anoud bade her. “The light begins to fade.”
She departed, and after a short time came scuffing back with the lamp, which she placed in one of the wall niches. Then she finally withdrew, disapproval in every line of her surging black rump.
Meanwhile, Thomas was arranging the coffee pots in the customary row beside the hearth, shaking fresh roasted coffee beans into the bowl, beginning to crush them with the brass pestle. In the cities most men of the rank and position that he had attained to had the coffee brought ready-made; but Thomas stuck to the old way, the desert way, and as the host and tent-master himself carried out the whole process for his guest.
Neither Tussun nor Anoud spoke while he wielded the pestle. To do so would have been as ill-mannered as to speak while someone was playing the lute, and Thomas, taking something of the pleasure in his performance that a musician might have done, wove the quick bright arabesque of sound with its cross-rhythms and grace-notes, as Zeid ibn Hussein had taught him in those first months of his desert training. He never crushed the coffee beans without thinking of Zeid. But this evening the memory came for the first time without grief. “He was a good friend to have had. Allah’s Peace be with him …” He bent all his skill to ringing the pestle and mortar as Zeid would have approved: to make something perfect for the passing moment. And as he did so his own moment of clear joy awoke in him, and the thought — he did much of his thinking in Arabic these days — ‘Surely by the Grace and Mercy of Allah, I am the richest of men! I have Tussun to ride out with, and Anoud to come home to; Tussun’s shoulder to brace against mine in time of battle, and Anoud’s arms to cradle me in the night.’
A sense of wholeness opened like a flower within him and spread out to include in its unity the quiet chamber and the three of them together in the dappled lamplight. It is seldom given to mortal man to be happy and to know he is happy, not in some regretted past or hoped for future, but now. And when it is, he must walk softly, lest the Gods grow jealous …
The small shining moment passed as swiftly as it had come, and he saw that the water in the pot was rising to the boil, and the coffee beans were sufficiently crushed. He tipped them carefully into the water and added the cardamom seeds from their small embroidered bag, and their aromatic scent filled the chamber.
With the fragrance of the bubbling coffee wafting about them, it was once again the time for talk.
Tussun said abruptly, “Have you heard the news?”
“I am but now returned from three days’ patrol. What news would that be?”
“Saud ibn Saud is dead.”
It took a moment for the words to penetrate. The Tiger of Arabia seemed always to have been there, and it had seemed as though he would be there as long as the desert sandstorms blew. “He was killed? How did it come about?” Thomas said.
“No, he died in his sleeping rug like a mere mortal man: Of the fever that comes with the springtime.”
“How are the mighty fallen,” Thomas said. “Who will take the leadership after him? Abdullah, I suppose.” He thought of the smoke-spitting rocks of Jedaida, and the black-robed Wahabi flood. “Will that be to our advantage do you think?”
“Only time can make that clear,” Tussun said, soberly. “He has all the old Tiger’s courage and daring. I wonder if he has the other qualities he needs. They say Saud’s last words to him were to bid him give battle always in the mountains, never to come down against us into open country.”
“Which sounds — if it be true — as though his father also had his doubts …”
Anoud, who had been listening with silent attention, entered the conversation for the first time. “My father used to say that neither of Saud’s sons had his strength or his judgment, or his” — she hesitated a moment over the word — “his political skill. My father said that if the old Tiger died before he had made all things secure, the day would surely come, by Allah’s mercy, when the Najd as well as the Hijaz would be free of the Black Brotherhood.”
Both men looked at her in surprise, and she seemed to become suddenly aware of herself. She drew the folds of her veil more closely over her face, and said in a hurried whisper, “Let my Lord forgive me. My father sometimes talked to me as though I were a son.”
“We will hope that your father was right,” Thomas said, smiling at her.
And Tussun looked at her directly for the first time. “Your father was fortunate in his daughter,” he said, speaking as easily as though she had indeed been a son.
The coffee was ready for the long-drawn process of pouring it from pot to pot until it reached the little brass cups that stood waiting. There were only two. Thomas glanced at Anoud, a question in his eyes. She gave an infinitesimal shake of the head, and drew her veil closer over the lower part of her face; and he did not press the matter. It was enough that she had come to sit with them while they drank coffee and ate the dates stuffed with almonds in the blue and white bowl; enough that she had spoken in front of Tussun, and as composedly, almost, as the Vicereine could have done; that for love of him she was coming, by little and little, out of her enclosed world into his. Presently there would be more talk between him and Tussun, more speculation as to the outcome of the Tiger’s death. For the moment it was enough that they should drink coffee in Anoud’s quiet presence, and be together, all three of them together.
Tussun leaned forward to take one of the little brass cups and hold it for filling. And as he did so, three glowing petals dropped from tomorrow’s rose in his turban — he must have picked one that was already overblown — and fell with a faint rustle to the floor.
29
News of the Wahabi leader’s death did something to raise the morale of the Egyptian army, which at the time was uncomfortably low, partly owing to their pay being even more than usually in arrears. But the next piece of news brought it crashing down again.
The Quinfunduh expedition had ended in disaster. The Albanians had wasted the water supply within the walls, and though they had manned the wells that existed some miles outside the town, they had not fortified them. So a month after their capture from the Wahabis, several thousand of the Black Brotherhood came down upon them, routing the well-guards, recapturing what was now the only water supply. In the fortress, Zam Aglou had exploded the magazine and taken to the ships, abandoning many of his own men, some four hundred horses and as many camels and all the captured guns.
The ships had reached Jiddah, but they were unwatered and unprovisioned and many more were dead before they made landfall. Zam Aglou’s own vessel did not reach Jiddah at all; but he had not, it was thought, suffered shipwreck but merely decided that it might be healthier to return to his old trade of freelance piracy.
The hot summer months crawled by, filled for the most part, for Thomas, by long desert patrols to keep the reopened trade routes safe for the passing caravans, while Tussun, stuck sweltering in Jiddah and Yembo, held the ports secure for the steady inflow of troops and supplies, guns and cavalry-horses from Lower Egypt.
For Muhammed Ali was once again making good his losses and building up his forces for the new campaign that all men knew would start as soon as the Haj was over.
“But first the Haj. This year we shall celebrate the Haj as befits the most sacred occasion in the Muslim year,” said Muhammed Ali walking one evening in the palace garden refreshed by the first autumn rains, “To the Glory of Allah the All Merciful, and for the raising of morale among the army and throughout the Hijaz.”
He was in the habit of commanding the company of one or other of his senior officers or officials on these evening strolls, and tonight it was Thomas’s turn.
“After so many years under Wahabi oppression, all men must be shown how great a thing it is that the Hijaz is free again to receive pilgrims to the Holy Places.”
Thomas was silent, wondering whether the Viceroy had forgotten that the Haj had arrived and been c
elebrated, though admittedly in somewhat lean fashion, last year.
Muhammed Ali glanced round at him as they walked, brushing a clove carnation against his full bearded lips; and laughed, seeming to read the unspoken thought in the disconcerting way that he sometimes had. “Last year’s Haj was but a beginning, a poor timid thing — a few pilgrims, two meagre caravans scarce worthy of the name.”
“But maybe it was all the more valiant and beautiful in the sight of Allah for that very reason,” Thomas said.
The Viceroy nodded. “Maybe, maybe. But Allah knows also (and Muhammed His Prophet) the hearts and the needs of fighting men …” His gaze travelled reflectively up the slender dark streak of a cypress against the translucence of the evening sky. “And of the desert people, and of the merchants with gold in their saddle bags. This year the Haj will return to its old splendour. For the first time in ten years the Damascus caravan is on its way. And pilgrims from Istanbul and Asia Minor are already arrived at Port Suez. This year the Haj will bring the trade that it was used to bring to the Holy Cities.”
Thomas had known His Excellency the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt long enough not to be in the least surprised at this view of the revived Haj not so much in terms of spiritual regeneration, as of trade and propaganda. There was a good deal of sense in it, he supposed, for a man in the Viceroy’s position.
“This year, also, there is no doubt that many will go on from Mecca to visit Medina and pray at the Prophet’s tomb according to the old custom.” The Viceroy looked round at him again. “You will take as many of the Arab cavalry as you deem necessary and act as escort for this further pilgrimage.”
Thomas’s mind went to Anoud and the arrangements to be made; the usual complications of life for a soldier with family ties. “And afterwards? I return to Teif or Mecca?”