“Well?” Thomas said as the silence lengthened.
“Well — my father having celebrated the days of the Haj with due splendour for all men to see, is now about to launch his campaign into the Najd.” Tussun pulled his gaze back from the eastward mountains and turned, resting one arm along the breastwork: “How many men can you give me, Tho’mas, to add to those I have brought from the coast?”
“For what purpose does he need them?” Thomas asked with caution. “And for how long? I cannot strip Medina of its garrison indefinitely.”
“My father would have me advance to Henakiah with as large a force as may be, loudly giving it out, in the manner of the big-mouthed Turks, that I intend to capture El Rass and Aneiz.”
“A feint, I take it?”
“Surely. A diversion to draw off as many of the Wahabis as may be, while my father with the rest of our forces advances on Kulukh. We are not to get drawn into any action, if it can be avoided, but hold them in play in the mountains for as long as there is need. No more than a month, maybe much less.”
Thomas did a quick reckoning-up in his head, reviewing, unit by unit, the troops at his command. “One regiment Albanian cavalry,” he said after a few moments, “two hundred of my own irregulars, seven hundred in all — seven hundred and one, counting myself.” He grinned.
So within three days Mustapha Bey was once again deputy governor of Medina; and Thomas and Tussun with their little army were heading into the mountains. And if, in her chamber with the hyacinth tiles in its wall-niches, Anoud wept her heart out, she did not do it until they were well away, and so Thomas did not see her tears.
On a night upward of three weeks later, in the mountains a day’s march north of El Rass, he was thinking of her and the bairn who was still part of her, as he came down the wild goat track from visiting the last vedette on his late night rounds. It was generally in his few moments of solitude, and at the day’s end that his deep and almost unconscious awareness of her surfaced into conscious thought, in the cold cloak-wrapped moments before sleep that he turned to her as a traveller turning home … Away below him, a score of camp fires and the torches at the ends of the horse- and camel-lines spangled the broad plateau, where they had bivouacked to wait for word from the scouts. The diversion had done its work well. Weeks of the deadly game of hare and hounds with Abdullah ibn Saud, a kind of marsh-light mountain warfare in which they contrived to avoid being once brought to action. Abdullah, for once badly served by his scouts, had been led to believe that their thrust was the real thing and their force much larger than it was, and had come north into the Kassim by forced marches, with ten thousand men (around a third of his army), leaving his brother Feisal with the rest to confront Muhammed Ali in the south. The colossal cheek of the enterprise was enough to take the breath away.
But two days ago they had lost contact. The Wahabi leader had appeared simply to melt into the mountains, and it was for word of him that they waited now.
It was extremely worrying, and Thomas worried accordingly. Could it mean that Ibn Saud had awoken to the true situation, and simply dropped them like a dead mouse and returned south to re-join his brother? Could it mean that he was lying up somewhere in ambush …? There was not much to be done until the scouts returned, and certainly little purpose to be served by racking one’s brains until they lost their thinking edge and went stale. Thomas, hunching his sheepskin-lined fariva more closely round him against the thin wind that harped along the ridges, allowed his mind to go wandering back to Anoud.
The track levelled for a few paces, rounded a jagged rock buttress and then fell away more steeply towards the plateau. And below him, darkly blotted against the camp fires, a figure was climbing up towards him silently, as one learns to move in the mountains. Thomas’s hand went to the pistol in his waist-shawl. But in the same instant a pebble turned under the climber’s foot and went rattling into the abyss beside the track, and the figure cursed in Tussun’s voice. Thomas’s hand fell away from his pistol.
“You should not whistle in the dark in enemy country,” Tussun said, breathless and reproving, when they came together a few moments later. “It helped me to find you, but it could have helped a sniper too.”
“Was I whistling?” Thomas said. “I did not know. What brings you seeking me? Has a scout come in? Is there news?”
“No scout, no news, but you have been over long, and it was — it is — drawing on to the time for prayers. Too dark to tell a black thread from a white one. It is right for a man to pray in company with other men, not alone with the rocks and the empty spaces.”
And almost in the same instant, as though his words had been timed, from the camp below them, infinitely small and clear in the vastness of the mountains, rose the call to prayer.
Side by side on the goat track, their faces turned as near as they could judge towards Mecca, the two young men prayed together, kneeling, standing, bending to the ground, making the familiar ritual movements, speaking quietly the familiar words:
“Glory be to thee, Oh Allah, Blessed is Thy name. Exalted is Thy Majesty. Praise be to the Lord of the Worlds, the merciful, the compassionate …” The final exchanged greeting. “Peace be with you, and the Mercy of Allah.”
The silence of the high hills came back.
They did not continue at once on their way back to the camp but, as though by common consent, the thing unspoken between them, lingered, half sitting half leaning, in the little bay where the rocks fell back a few feet and made a shelter against the thin chill wind. Below them the comfortable man-made freckling of camp fires, and, beyond, the world dropping away into a black intensity of nothingness out of which the peaks of the next range rose into sight. There was no moon yet, but the sky was full of stars, and the wheeling winter constellations were enough to touch their crests with a bloom, a kind of dew of light. Enough also to call a faint spark here and there from the hoar frost on the rocks against which the two men leaned. Thomas touched the rock surface at his side, and sensed with exquisite clarity the faint electric prickling of the frost melting under his fingers. He seemed to have one less skin than usual, tonight, as he felt sometimes with Anoud; as few skins as a bairn to come between him and the living universe to dull the touch of its splendours and griefs. He put out his other hand and met Tussun’s warm clasp.
“What was the tune you were whistling?” Tussun asked in a little while.
“I told you — I did not know that I was whistling.”
“It was the tune you were trying to teach Anoud the day in Teif when you said I had picked tomorrow’s rose. A sad tune.”
Thomas’s mind went back to the three rooms over the goldsmith’s shop, and showed him Anoud’s intent face as she tried to follow the unfamiliar notes. He smiled in the darkness, and made another melted fingerprint on the rock beside him. “It will have been ‘The Captain’s Lady’. Yes, a sad tune, not a sad song, though.”
“Are you sad, Tho’mas?”
“No, I was thinking of Anoud, and I suppose the song came into my mind.”
“Do you think of her very often?”
“Sometimes,” Thomas said. “I don’t need to think of her. She is part of me as you are part of me.”
“I used to be jealous of her,” Tussun said thoughtfully, after a few moments.
“Not now?”
“No. Not now … Was Anoud ever jealous of me?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “If she was, she hid it better than you did. But certainly she had as much cause to be — and as little.”
“Sometimes I think it must be hard to be a woman. There is so much that they cannot know, so much that they cannot share.” There was a deep content in Tussun’s tone.
‘What an extraordinary naked conversation this is,’ Thomas thought. ‘As naked as the mountains themselves. Couldn’t hold it in any other place, at any other time …’
Aloud he said only, “They have been good, these weeks in the high hills.”
Tussun shifted i
nto a more comfortable position. “When I — if I live to be old and grey-bearded and sitting in the shade while my son’s sons ride out to war, I shall remember them, taste them again on my tongue, and the taste will be good.”
“For me also,” Thomas said.
They sat in silence a short while, unwilling to let the present moment slip into the past, all the same.
“You told me once something out of your sacred book before you came to the Koran,” Tussun said at last. “Of a prince and a shepherd — Daud and Jon’a’than?”
“Yes.”
“What became of them?”
“Daud, the shepherd, became a King.”
“And Jon’a’than?”
“He was killed in battle, and his enemies hung his body on the walls of their stronghold.” Beyond the mountains the sky was beginning to take on a faint snail-shine of light, where presently the moon would rise. “And when Daud learned of it, he went through the ranks of the enemy, none able to stop him, and cut down Jonathan’s body and brought it away,” Thomas said, not even aware that he was adapting the story to suit his own needs.
Tussun, who rode his feelings more loosely than the Scot, said, “I would do that for you, Tho’mas, my Brother,” and then: “Would you do that for me?”
“Yes,” Thomas said, and was startled by what he heard in his own voice.
He pushed off from the rock wall. “It’s time we were getting back to camp. Added to which it’s cursed cold up here, and I have no wish to be found frozen solid as one of those rocks in the morning.”
They went on down the steep track. The fires drew nearer, soon they could catch the waft of burning thorn scrub and camel dung on the mountain air, and the sounds of the camp came up to meet them.
A messenger had come in, brought by one of the scouts, while they were away. The man sat waiting for them beside the commander’s fire, his face in the flame-light grey with the exhaustion of hard riding. He delved into his pouch when they came towards him and produced a packet sealed with the Viceroy’s seal.
He touched it to his forehead. “From His Excellency your father Muhammed Ali.”
Tussun took it, broke the seal and unfolded the crackling sheet, from which the Viceroy’s own black slashing handwriting sprang up in the firelight.
Leaning to catch the leaping light, Tussun read in silence. And Thomas, watching him, thought that the callant had learned to shutter his face as he could never have done in the early days of their friendship. He saw the tawny eyes widen a little, then narrow again in concentration, and that was all. When he came to the end, Tussun refolded the paper and thrust it into the folds of his waist-shawl. “My father writes that he has taken Kulukh, and is now moving on Terraba — May Allah protect him against witchcraft.”
He ordered food to be brought and, sitting down cross-legged, turned to the messenger. “While you eat, you shall tell me the details of the action, which are lacking from my father’s letter.”
The remains of goat’s meat stew was brought, and rice and arak, and the man told, between ravenous mouthfuls of food and drink.
Feisal with his twenty thousand Wahabis had begun well, it seemed, taking up a strong defensive position along the range of hills strung between Kulukh and the village of Bissel. He could not easily be attacked there, yet Muhammed Ali could not by-pass him and advance into Najd without sacrificing his lines of communication.
“But truly, I think this suited your honourable father well, for he will surely have had no mind to move forward into the Najd without first breaking the power of the Brotherhood.”
At great length and in great detail, for weary though he was the Arab passion for long-winded detail had not deserted him, the messenger recounted for them the names and strength of units involved, from the Hijaz irregular cavalry to the two batteries of light field guns. He told of the time-honoured ruse by which, on the second day, the Viceroy had lured Feisal from the hills into open country against what all men knew to be the death-bed orders of the Old Tiger — a ruse of pretended flight which made Thomas, listening intently, think suddenly of history lessons at Leith Academy, and King Harold’s housecarls lured into breaking ranks at Hastings. It was one of the few bits of English history he had learned there.
Even then, said the messenger, it had been a close-fought thing, the Wahabis fighting bravely and stubbornly until, in the end, under repeated charges of the heavy cavalry and the artillery on the flanks, the main part of Feisal’s army broke; and after that, thanks be to Allah, the end was sure.
“When your father saw the Wahabis in full retreat,” said the man, reaching the triumphant climax of his story, “he offered a bounty of six dollars a head. There was a pile of — ah, more than five thousand before his tent, when I rode away.”
A short while later, Tussun having summoned his senior officers, he and Thomas faced each other in the light of the lantern in the commander’s tent in the brief interval before their arrival.
“Well, and what are our orders?” Thomas asked.
“I am to take my troopers and re-join my father as swiftly as may be,” Tussun said. “You are to take yours and return to Medina.”
The weeks in the Kassim were over.
31
By the time the next news reached Medina, Terraba had fallen, Ghalia’s magic having presumably failed her, and the Turks had looted the town; another force had been ordered off to Quinfunduh to finish the rout of the southern Wahabis, and Muhammed Ali was free to advance into the Najd — when his army should be in fit condition to do so. The losses at Kulukh and before Terraba had been crushingly heavy. Despite which, the Viceroy sent news of his victory triumphantly back to Cairo and to the Sultan. Then he awarded himself a kind of Roman Triumph, in the course of which twelve of the three hundred Wahabis who had yielded to him under promise of quarter were impaled before the gates of Mecca. An error of judgment, which lost him the support of many of his remaining allies among the tribes.
Thomas, hearing in Medina, could only hope with a friend’s anxiety for the honour of friend that Tussun who had not of course been able to re-join his father and the remnant of the main army before their return to Mecca, had been clear of that Holy City again and away back to Jiddah before it happened.
The months passed, taken up for Thomas with the day-to-day business of the government of Medina, while Muhammed Ali in Mecca reorganised his forces yet again, and Tussun yet again kept Jiddah open and functioning as a supply base for his father.
It was a kind of uneasy threshold-time before the reopening of the campaign.
In early May, with the shadows growing short and the mirage already beginning to shimmer across the open country, news reached Medina from beyond the borders of the Muslim world. Napoleon Bonaparte had escaped from Elba, and landed to an enthusiastic welcome in France. The Bourbon garrisons had rallied to him as one man. France and Britain were at war again.
“Does your heart tell you that it is your war?” Anoud asked her husband, sitting under the fig trees in the Governor’s garden.
“No. But I think it might become my war. Almost anything might happen. If the British reoccupy Sicily — if the Russians find a pretext for attacking the Turks —”
Suddenly the future that seemed to belong to Arabia and the struggle against the Wahabis, but to Arabia most of all, lost substance in his mind and began to melt and form and re-form like the rolling mirage.
Meanwhile Medina must still be governed …
Only a few days later Thomas was conscientiously sitting in on a law case. It was a very complicated case between the Beni Harb and the Beni Sobh involving the return of a dowry after a divorce, the disputed ownership of a small herd of camels, and echoes of a blood feud of the previous century. The arguments grew more and more tortuous, the heat in the forecourt of the mosque was intolerable, and Thomas had a headache thudding dully behind his eyes. But the cadi, the judge, had invited his help in unravelling it, and so he sat on and on and on, striving to keep track of the ar
guments and think of some solution which would bring justice without further bloodshed.
But he was not fated to hear the case out to its conclusion. In the midst of a seemingly endless stream of irrelevant reminiscences from the oldest and most prosy of the Sobh sheikhs, a faint ruffle of movement drew his attention to the street entrance, and he saw one of his own officers standing there deep in urgent speech with one of the Guard. Even as he looked, the guard stepped back, and the captain came quickly towards him through the crowded court and stooped to speak in his ear.
“I beg you forgive me for interrupting the hearing, Sir. Tussun Pasha has just ridden in, and demands to speak with you instantly.”
“I come.” Thomas spoke his excuses as quietly into the cadi’s ear, and without interrupting the aged sheikh in his flow, got up, bowed to the court, and followed the messenger out into the street.
“What’s amiss, Hassan?” he asked.
The captain shook his head. “I do not know; but he arrived riding like a madman, with less than a score of his bodyguard with him. There are more troops following on behind, I gather; but whatever it is, it is something that will not await the normal rate of march.”
Tussun was in the Governor’s private majlis, flinging to and fro from door to window and back again like something in a cage too small for it. He swung round at the sound of Thomas’s step on the threshold, revealing a face white with dust — but he was caked white with journey dust from head to foot — haggard and angry eyed.
“Where were you?” he demanded.
“Hearing a case in court,” Thomas said. “I came as soon as Hassan brought me word that you were here. Have they not fed you? Is anyone bringing warm water?”