Tussun made an impatient gesture. “That can wait.”
They met in the middle of the room, their arms round each other in a harsh embrace that all but drove the air out of both of them. “What is it that cannot wait?” Thomas demanded after a moment, holding him off at arm’s length.
“My father has returned to Egypt. He left Mecca four days ago for Yembo. He’ll have sailed by now.”
“But in the name of Allah the All Merciful, why? What has happened?”
“Napoleon has escaped from Elba —”
“That I know,” Thomas said. “But your father will scarcely be off back to Cairo in such haste for that cause alone.”
Tussun shook his head with impatient vehemence. “There’s more — the Capitan Pasha has sailed from Istanbul with almost the whole Ottoman fleet and many thousands of troops, and is believed to be making for Alexandria. It can only mean that those curs of the Sultan’s Divan have planned to seize Egypt back from him — from my father —while he and most of his army are in Arabia, campaigning on the Sultan’s behalf! This is our thanks for freeing the Holy Cities —”
“Tussun,” Thomas said, still gripping his shoulders. “Is there proof of all this?”
“The Fleet is under way, and heading for Alexandria. What else could be their purpose?”
Thomas could not think of any, and felt no particular surprise, having gained in the past few years some experience of Turkish intrigue and record for treachery.
“So —”Tussun was almost sobbing with fury against the Divan, and almost more, it seemed, against Muhammed Ali. “My father has abandoned his advance into the Najd, given orders to the High Shariff that half the Jiddah revenues are to be paid to him in Cairo for the use of his war-chest, instead of to me for the use of mine; and merely sent me a despatch informing me of his immediate return to Egypt and his reasons for it. He has given command of the Mecca, Teif and Terraba garrisons to Mustapha Bey without making it clear that he is subordinate to me, and has made no arrangements that I can hear of for me to receive any further money or supplies!”
It made surprising and almost sickening hearing; Thomas could not help feeling that there was a mistake, a misunderstanding, a failure of communications somewhere along the line. The Viceroy was a highly competent administrator, who would surely appreciate the dangers of leaving rival commanders in the Hijaz. Also, though he no doubt realised that Tussun did not have his elder brother’s abilities, there was no question but that Muhammed Ali loved his younger son best of all his children. Not likely, then, that he would depart for home, however great the need for haste, leaving the boy behind without supplies, gold for the war-chest, or even orders.
“You did not see him before he left?”
“No. Did I not tell you? Only the despatch to tell me of his going!”
“Easy now. Easy, my Brother.”
“I am not one of your horses!”
“Indeed I had noticed. None the less, calm down and listen to me — No. Listen!” His hands tightened on the other’s shoulders. “The threat of the Ottoman fleet attacking Alexandria gives him no alternative but to make all speed back, not even waiting to speak with you, or to make arrangements and give orders for the campaign. But he will attend to all that as and when he may. Probably there is a long despatch arrived at Jiddah before now, or already on its way on to Medina after you as fast as the courier can ride.”
Tussun had quietened, listening with his tawny gaze on Thomas’s face. He drew a long steady breath, and said quite quietly, “If the despatch does not come within the next few days it will not find me at Medina, nor anywhere in the Hijaz.”
“Why not?” Thomas demanded, his stomach tightening with the need to cope with whatever was coming next.
“Since I have been left to carry on the campaign as best I may, and since with no pay nor supplies coming in, I cannot afford to wait, I shall take the action I wanted to take immediately after Kulukh. I shall march into the Kassim and carry the war to ibn Saud’s threshold.”
Outside, the muezzin was calling to afternoon prayer.
*
Later, when Tussun had washed off the dust of his hard riding, after an evening meal eaten in constrained silence, because it had to be eaten in company with army officers and senior members of the Governor’s entourage, they betook themselves to the eastward-facing ramparts where they had talked before a few months earlier, one of the few places in Medina it was possible to talk safe from all possibility of listening ears, and there continued the discussion as though it had never been interrupted.
What horrified Thomas was that Tussun had it all coolly and carefully worked out. It was no mere impulse in the heat of the moment. Despite the speed and fury of his arrival from Jiddah, he had clearly given his plans detailed thought and come to a decision from which it would probably be impossible to shift him.
“I have a thousand Albanian infantry, three hundred Turkish cavalry and two hundred Jehaida irregular horse,” he was saying, counting them off on his fingers. “They should be here tomorrow. I have ordered up eight hundred infantry — about — from Yembo el Nakhl and Barr; they should be here in three days. This time I ask you to lend me only three hundred of your cavalry: a strongly held Medina is vital to the safety of the Hijaz. When they are all assembled I shall give them three days’ rest. Then I shall march on Aneiz and El Rass.”
“So,” Thomas said, when the level voice checked for a moment. “We are to advance with some two-and-half thousand men. We are to march across two hundred or more miles of mountain and desert, against a prince who brought ten times that number against us at Jedaida. Are you mad?”
“It is not so mad as it sounds.” Tussun’s eyes were beginning to brighten dangerously. “Can you not imagine the effect that our victory at Kulukh must have had on the northern tribes who have been held down under the rule of the Brotherhood all these years? The whole Kassim is ready to rise! With their help, and if Allah wills it as surely He must, we will strike at ibn Saud in his very heartland of the Najd, and we shall prevail!”
“It is still madness,” Thomas said.
“No, and no, and no! If we wait we shall lose all that we have gained in the hearts of the tribes through Kulukh. I told my father that, months ago, before he lost some of it by that butcher’s business before the gates of Mecca. There’s still enough support for us in the Kassim if we move fast; if we delay it will all drain away and we shall be too late.”
And Thomas recognised the truth of that. “Madness still. But I suppose if Alexander conquered an empire with three hundred … At least we shall be in familiar country.”
“Tho’mas, my Brother,” Tussun said steadily, “I said ‘I’, not ‘We’.”
“Oh no,” Thomas heard himself say. “If you go, I go, as before.”
“But it is not as it was before, with my father returned to Egypt … You must know that after Jedaida and Terraba, after those weeks in the Kassim, after the nearly eight years that we have been sword-brothers, there is no man in the world that I want to have riding with me as I want to have you. But you know also that you are the only man I can completely trust to hold Medina in the face of all odds.” He was frowning in concentration on what he had to say. “This city is the vital hinge by which hangs the safety of my force marching north-east, and the safety of the whole Hijaz to the south … You know as well as I do that my father might well have failed at Kulukh if we had not drawn off ibn Saud himself and a good third of his men to counter our advance from here. If Medina falls, I shall be cut off and destroyed, the Beni Harb will change sides again and all the Hijaz will be overrun. Tho’mas, we have freed the Holy Cities once, we cannot risk losing them again.”
Thomas had dropped his hands lightly from the other’s shoulders. He was silent a few moments, gazing out across the city to the hills north-eastwards, as he had gazed that evening in the winter that was past. Once again he was thinking how Tussun had changed. Hard sometimes even to glimpse the golden boy who had given
him his first hawking lesson in exchange for a thrust in tierce. Hard also to recognise the spoiled brat who had ordered his murder in a fit of drunken rage. ‘We have come a long way in nearly eight years,’ he thought. ‘I wonder if I seem as changed to him.’ This proposed march into the Kassim was as much a gamble as Napoleon’s landing from Elba. The tribes of the Kassim might still join him against the Wahabis. And if they did not? Tussun and his little army would be lost. But his arguments about Medina were unanswerable. Mustapha and his Albanians could not be relied on to hold out. If a large force from the Najd came westward, Mustapha would probably pull out, back to Mecca or even Jiddah, leaving Medina to be attacked without hope of relief. Ibn Saud would understand as clearly as Tussun that Medina was the key to the whole Hijaz. Thomas knew that none of the other commanders was as competent as he was to hold the second Holy City, with all that that entailed.
He turned slowly from the breastwork, and the high hills of the Kassim.
During the next seven days Thomas worked as Tussun’s supply officer throughout all the hours that Allah sent, and at each of the five times a day he prayed for some word from the Viceroy to halt his son’s wild plan. But no word came; and on the seventh day, Tussun’s expeditionary force was ready to march.
Thomas had ridden out with Tussun to the head of the column drawn up beyond the East Gate of the city, and now they sat their horses together, drawn a little aside into the tiger-striped shade of the date palms, in the last moments before the march. It was early morning, but already the heat danced like a midge cloud ahead of them, and every movement of the horses’ feet raised a small puff of dust. In the rear the camels grumbled and snarled, somewhere a horse flung up its head and whinnied along the line. The good people of Medina who had come out to see them off called blessings and farewells and obscene jests; somewhere down the line a child got among the horses’ hooves and was removed screaming. And over all the scene shimmered and churred the voices of the cicadas.
Thomas had been reminding his friend, for maybe the dozenth time, there being nothing else of all the things that needed saying that it was possible to say, of the necessity for keeping effective flank and rear guards.
Tussun smiled at him with none of the impatience he would normally have shown. “I will remember all that I have learned from you, my brother; even, if need be, that lunge in tierce.”
An officer rode up to report the column ready to move off.
The time had come.
“I will hold Medina for you while the breath is in me,” Thomas said quickly. “But if the time comes when your need is more urgent than the city’s, then in Allah’s name send for me, and Medina must fend for itself. I’ll come.”
“A thousand leagues an’ three.” Tussun’s face cracked into a grin that was still a boy’s, after all.
“A thousand leagues an’ three.” Thomas echoed the words and the grin.
They embraced, hard and fierce and quick, leaning from the saddle, then wheeled their horses apart.
Thomas reined back his dancing mount, while the other took his place at the column head under the black and golden wing of his personal standard.
The bugler put the bugle to his lips and sounded for the march, and the liquid throb of the kettle drums was added to the sound of hooves and the jingle of accoutrements as the head of the column rolled forward on the track that ran north-eastward into the mountains.
Thomas flung up his hand in a last salute: “Allahu akba!”
From the head of the column a young triumphant voice with a strong Albanian accent shouted back to him. Almost at once the figure at the head of the advance guard was lost, hidden by the ranks of cavalry trotting after, and by the dust-cloud that began almost at once to rise. But for a while the black and gold standard rose clear above the dust, and he watched it into the distance and the heat shimmer.
The infantry followed, the main guard, and the camel train with the guns, the rear-guard after a gap. He sat there watching as they passed, the bobbing heads of the horses, the high-held turbaned heads of the men.
The look of high hope was on them, a bloom like the dew on grass before the blistering sun sucks it up. The last of the rear-guard passed, and the rolling dust cloud swallowed them from view. Then, with a word to his small escort, Thomas touched heel to his horse’s flank, and headed back towards the city gates.
Suddenly he realised that for the past half hour he had forgotten Anoud. Anoud with the cool grey eyes and the small head set on the long slender neck like a flower on its stem, and the belly swollen like a watermelon with the bairn which should be born within the month. It was not merely that he had not thought of her. As he had told Tussun, he did not need to think of her, she was a part of him. But for that half hour or so, she had ceased to exist in his world at all. Now his love for her twinged to the quick within him, mixed with a kind of compassion. Tussun was right, it must be hard to be a woman.
32
The first news came surprisingly soon, only thirteen days after the little army had marched out, when a Beni Sobh horseman arrived back at Medina with a despatch — more of a racy private letter, in actual fact — and Thomas, reading it, seemed to catch the tones of Tussun’s voice behind the hastily written words in the commander’s own hand.
On reaching Henakiah, more than a quarter of the way to El Rass, he had been joined by upward of four hundred horsemen of the Mitair tribe and a hundred of the Beni Ali, bringing their numbers up to almost three thousand; and had not Tussun said that the whole of the Kassim would rise to join him?
Thomas frowned, and uneasiness stirred within him, the Mitair and the Beni Ali of the north-east were not the whole of the Kassim. Furthermore they had never given allegiance to the Wahabi, but being completely nomadic, moving between western Kassim and northern Hijaz had contrived always to avoid subjugation by the black-robed Brotherhood.
The next few lines were more encouraging:
We had the good fortune to meet a party of the Beni Ali just come south from Ghat, and learned from them that a caravan of more than a thousand camels — Syrians, and stronger than the Arabian breed, and destined for ibn Saud — would be reaching El Rass two days later, and would pasture there, a couple of miles beyond the city, for one night on their way through to Diriyah. So I left our Beni Ali guides and the Turkish cavalry to form a screen for the infantry and the camel train, and pushed on with the Egyptian cavalry and two hundred of your Jehaine allies, two forced marches; you couldn’t see us for our dust-cloud! We reached the oasis, and attacked an hour before morning prayer, just as the caravan was being marshalled. The Wahabi escort was taken utterly by surprise, and we killed or captured every man! By the time the folk of El Rass sent out a party to investigate, the rest of our cavalry was coming up. So here we are, the masters of more than a thousand splendid camels, for which ibn Saud has already paid! I will get the spare beasts back to you as and when I can.
For the past six days we have been surrounding El Rass.
‘What with?’ Thomas almost groaned. ‘About four hundred horsemen by my reckoning. Oh God!’
It was a bluff, of course, but now the infantry and the camel train have come up, and we are as strong as the defenders, if not stronger; and I send this off to you, knowing that you will be clucking like a mother hen if you do not soon hear from me. I have great hopes that the El Rass sheikhs will join me in the next few days, now that they see how strong we are and what sure hope we have of victory …
The exhausted messenger, questioned by Thomas after he had eaten, but before he rested, took a somewhat different view of the situation. “If the sheikhs do not join forces with us, I do not see what the next move can be. Also it would have been well if we had actually seen El Rass during our thrust into the hills last winter; the walls are twenty feet high and the scouts have it that they are sixteen feet thick in places, and I do not think our six pounders will make much impression on them.”
*
Thomas lay on his back and looked up at
the stars of high summer through the broad-fingered vine leaves. Mid-June.
In Scotland it would be hardly dark at all. Here the dark was long and heavy; too hot to sleep within doors. So he had had a tent-curtain slung across two sides of the vine arbour on the roof of the women’s quarters, making it into a small makeshift pavilion for Anoud, now breathing deeply and quietly beside him.
The faint waft of air that had no coolness in it, stirred the leaves and died away again into the distant voice and hoof-beat and dog-bark stir of the city waking to a new day. Soon the stars would be paling. It was past the hour of morning prayer. Generally he did not come back to bed after morning prayer, but today there was nothing that needed his attention for an hour or so yet, and the night had been a disturbed one. The bairn was due, maybe even overdue by a day or so. He knew that it was so sometimes with a first child; and Anoud was too tired and heavy and uncomfortable for easy sleeping. She had begun to have evil dreams, too; earlier in the night she had woken crying his name, and lain, shivering in his arms and unable or unwilling to tell him what she had dreamed, for a long time before she had drifted off to sleep again. She had not roused at the call to prayer, and he had left her sleeping, sure that Allah would make allowances for a woman who was about the exhausting business of bringing new life into the world. And after praying in the courtyard with the men of the household, he had returned to lie quiet beside her for a little while.
But now he was not able to capture the quiet of the hour before prayer, and his thoughts, worn ragged with anxiety, had gone back to Tussun before the strong walls of El Rass. How was it with him? What was happening? Surely soon there must be news? It was a fortnight since that last word had come. He had written a hurried reply full of military advice. Other things as well; he could not remember now what they had been, those other things, and the messenger, fed and rested and mounted on a fresh horse, had departed once more, trailing his own dust-cloud behind him.