“A friend of mine, from the same regiment and captured at the same time. Donald MacLeod.”
“Another Scot?”
“Another Scot.”
“What became of him?”
“Ahmed Agha bought him as well as me from our Albanian captors. Donald for his skill as a surgeon, me because he thought I would make a suitable addition to his personal bodyguard.” Thomas heard his own voice speaking light and level as though of something that did not matter. It did matter. He wanted desperately to leave the words unsaid, but something deep within him insisted that there must be complete honesty, no glossing over, between himself and Tussun. “I am told that he paid a captain’s ransom for each of us,” he added for good measure.
There was a stillness except for the braying of the donkey. Then Tussun said: “Allah the All Merciful works in strange ways to bring about His will.”
“His will?”
“Do you not see, Thomas? Clearly it is the will of Allah that we two should be friends, and how else could we have come together?”
Thomas knew a sudden sense of added shine to a day that was already more shining than any he had known before, though he had a feeling that Tussun’s line of thought would not stand too close examination.
“You are thinking maybe that my friendship is costly, that you have lost many friends at El Hamed,” the boy said quickly and gravely, the harsh edges of his voice adding to the note of regret.
“Those friends I would have lost in any case,” Thomas said. “Thanks to the Mameluke cavalry.”
“Ah, those who broke their faith with you. That is why you do not like the look of Aziz?”
“Aziz?”
“My Mameluke companion of yesterday.”
Thomas laughed, and the mood of the moment which had strayed for a little into the shadows, came up into the light and air once more. “I thought it was rather that Aziz Bey did not like the look of me.”
“Oh that — Aziz is always jealous of my friends. He would like to be the only friend I have!”
In a while he sat up regretfully and reached for his scattered garments. “It begins to be time we were getting back to the rest.”
They pulled on their clothes in companionable silence, having already reached the stage at which two people can be together without always needing to talk to each other, and Thomas, the first to have finished, sat watching while Tussun, whose turban took longer to arrange than his own head cloth, settled the elaborate folds.
Then as Thomas drew his legs under him to rise, the Viceroy’s son, one hand on the lowest branch of the fig tree, reached down the other, laughing. “Hup! My brother!” he said in the tones of one encouraging a horse at a jump. And the next instant they stood side by side on the broad crest of the embankment.
They strolled off in the general direction in which they had left the rest of the hawking party, and they were still hand-in-hand.
Thomas was a little startled at the outset, but he had lived six months and more among men who habitually walked hand-in-hand with their closest friends, though he had never done so himself before, and after that first momentary surprise, it seemed to him the most natural thing in the world.
When they came out through the thicket of young sycamores in the lee of which they had left the hawking party, he did expect that they would part hands, but Tussun showed no signs of doing so, and to withdraw his own hand would be to deny his friend and the thing between them.
They walked forward with hands still linked into the midst of the party, under the interested gaze of half a dozen pairs of eyes, under the hot, jealous, angry stare of Aziz Bey of the Mameluke Guard.
7
Thomas stood in the midst of his new quarters, and looked about him, appreciative, but somewhat puzzled.
He had expected, once he was in Cairo, to find himself quartered with the Agha’s bodyguard; or if that, at such an early stage, was setting his sights too high, then in barracks somewhere in the city, or even left to share Colonel D’Esurier’s quarters for the night. Instead, he had been taken over by a most uncommunicative officer of some Albanian regiment or other and brought here, to these two rooms above what looked as though it had once been an armoury, followed by a porter carrying his worldly possessions in a pair of saddle bags. A grey-bearded army servant had unpacked for him, provided water for washing, and the inevitable strong black coffee, a tall swan-necked vase of over-sweet sherbet and a dish of dates; and salaaming deeply, abandoned him to his own devices.
And what was to happen next, he had not the remotest idea.
He felt all at once rather like a lost dog. The past few weeks all the way down from Aswan, he had had the French colonel’s company; now, alone in these impersonal rooms that were sodden with age and yet did not feel as though they had ever been lived in by any man before him, he felt again, suddenly and sharply, the lack of Zeid ibn Hussein, and the loss of Bulbul, left behind at El Jizzan to be absorbed into the southern cavalry. He told himself firmly that he would very probably meet Zeid again sometime; and in the loss of the mare he was only suffering what every cavalryman suffered time and again; that at any rate he was now in the same city as Donald MacLeod; and that at some time, somebody, presumably Ahmed Agha or the captain of his bodyguard, or somebody, would send for him.
Meanwhile he might as well get to know his quarters.
Stone walled and stone floored, the chambers might, except for their spaciousness, have been monastic or prison cells, but the heavy door that opened on to the head of the circular stair was carved with traceries as perfect in their way as the gilded arabesques on the cover of his Koran, and it seemed that somebody had been at pains to make the place habitable, and even given it here and there an unexpected flash of beauty like the flash of colour on a jay’s wing. In the inner room soft rugs of wool and camel hair were spread on the sleeping mattress, and here in the outer chamber cushions and piled rugs made the customary divan along two sides and a zither with a delicately fretted rose lay among the divan cushions; while already for his especial benefit a low table had been set in the centre of the room, and pulled up square to it was a heavy oak chair with, of all things, a mermaid carved on its back, which might perhaps have come from the captain’s cabin of some merchant ship. His two books had been carefully set out in the exact centre of the table by the grey-bearded one, who clearly felt that to be a place of suitable dignity for the Koran and its companion. On one wall a silken carpet of Ispahan, golden as evening sunlight, softened the austerity of the raw stone, and on another, opposite the window, hung of all surprising things, a Scottish broad-sword, its silver basket-hilt lined with reddish velvet.
Thomas had seen it on first entering the room, but in the pressure of other things had scarcely taken in what it was. Now he crossed to it, took it down and carried it to the window, with a feeling of recognising suddenly a familiar face, touching suddenly a friend’s hand.
The window faced north over the crowding housetops towards the citadel on its high spur of rock, but the backwash of the evening sunlight showed him clearly every detail of the weapon in his hands. It had seen hard service; the black leather of the scabbard was scratched and scuffed, the velvet lining the basket hilt still showed its original crimson where the silver had protected it, but elsewhere was faded to the colour of spent rose petals or spilled wine. In one place close to the quillons there was a darker stain. Thomas drew it from its scabbard and stood watching the evening light spill like water up and down the blade. He made an experimental pass or two, and felt lovingly how the perfect balance brought the heavy blade up again almost of its own accord into his hand. Something was engraved close below the hilt. He turned it again to the evening light, and read on one side the name of an Edinburgh sword-smith, not Mr Sempill, and on the other, the name Colin MacKenzie.
Major Colin MacKenzie of his own regiment, killed at Rosetta three weeks before the fight at El Hamed. He remembered for a moment the grey-green eyes and sandy hair and big-boned humorous face of
the man who had carried that sword into action. He had not thought of him for close on a year, but now, for a passing wing-beat of time, felt again the pull of his own kind, of his roots behind him, caught again the swirl of the pipes as the line went forward, and wondered what he was doing here.
Eager footsteps sounded on the circular stair, the turn-pike, as he already called it in his own mind — and as he swung round the door crashed back and Tussun Bey appeared in the dark opening.
Tussun as usual blazing with life until the air about him seemed to crackle with it. “Tho’mas. Oh it is so good that you are here!” He strode into the room happily kicking the door to behind him. “The sword is good?”
Thomas tossed aside the scabbard and laid the naked sword on the table beside the Koran. “Salaam aleikum”, he should have said, but he forgot the proper greeting in sudden delight. “The sword is good,” he said, and next instant, half laughing, was staggering under the vehemence of Tussun’s embrace. A few moments later, the laughing and exclaiming done, they stood back and looked at each other, each with his hands still on the other’s shoulders.
“Is it well with you? Have they treated you well here? Have you all that you need?” the boy was demanding.
“All is well with me. But I shall be glad to know what happens next. Have you any idea when Ahmed Agha is likely to send for me?”
“Ahmed Agha will not send for you at all!” Tussun’s face lit with triumph. “I have talked with Ahmed Agha, and you are no man of his anymore!”
There was a small sharp silence, and then, “Meaning that I am yours now, Tussun Bey?” Thomas said slowly.
The backwash of the sunset was still flowing into the room, but it seemed to him that the gold was fallen from the air like shining dust. He had been right in thinking that everything would be different in the city.
“I trust my price was not too high?” he added. “All men say that the Agha parts with nothing except for gold or power.” He dropped his hands lightly away from the other’s shoulders.
“I did not mean to tell you that,” Tussun said. “The gold was nothing — I have plenty, my father is generous to his sons … Ah Thomas, do not look like that, so dark and far off — I thought you would be glad as I am!”
“Forgive me, Sir. It takes a while to grow used to a change of owners. Doubtless I shall feel proper gratitude later.”
Thomas watched the life and eagerness drain out of the boy’s face. ‘He doesn’t understand,’ he thought. ‘Oh God, he doesn’t understand. If it could have been Zeid …’ He turned away and stared blindly out of the narrow window at the saffron fringes of the sunset flying from the great dome of the citadel mosque. He was not at all sure that he understood himself. He had not felt like this about being bought by Ahmed Agha, how was it so different now?
“It was not you I bought, Tho’mas, it was your freedom — freedom for a friend,” said the young voice, now painfully level behind him. “I wanted you to help me train the two regiments my father has given me to command. You said yourself there was no proper training in the Turkish cavalry.” Then with a burst of misery, “But if it had been you I bought, would you not rather be mine than his?”
Thomas drew in his breath quickly, like a man in sudden pain, and let it go again with great care. “I expect so,” he said dully.
Tussun’s voice went on, stumbling a little now in its vehemence over the French tongue which, though he spoke it fluently, was not his own. “Have you forgotten the morning we went hawking from El Jizzan and I taught you how to fly at heron? It was good, that morning. I thought you would be as glad to be with me as I was to be with you — I would have chosen quarters for you close to my own, but I thought these above the old armoury would give you more freedom and told my people to make them comfortable.”
“Your orders have been well carried out,” Thomas said. “Was it you who thought of the zither?”
“No, that will have been Ali, my chamber-page, who can play the birds out of the reed beds, and thinks that all men must find the same pleasure in what pleases him. The sword was my idea. I thought that it would please you, a fine sword of your own people; but perhaps you will take it as an insult, because it was taken from one of your people killed in battle. I do not think that I know what pleases you any more.”
Thomas thought, ‘After all, what are we at loggerheads about? The boy doesn’t understand; and if the thing had been the other way over, would I not have paid in good Maria Theresa dollars to get him free of Ahmed Agha? Be angry with the circumstances; don’t take it out on the boy, you fool.’
“The sword is good,” he said. “Did I not say so?”
He turned from the window, smiling a little. “But among my people we believe that you must never give to a friend a sharp-edged gift without exacting payment — a pin or a farthing — otherwise it will cut the friendship; and you see the wisdom of that belief?” He thrust his hand into the folds of his waist-shawl and pulled out a slim leather pouch. He had received a trooper’s pay in the past months, and had generally contrived to keep something in reserve. He brought out the smallest coin it contained, a Turkish sequin.
He saw the anger and hurt go out of the boy’s face as he caught the tiny coin and tossed it up, a spinning fleck of gold in the reflected light of the sunset, then catching it, stowed it somewhere in his own waist-shawl.
*
At El Hamha the Bedouin cavalry had lived in its own solitude, with seldom any news of the outside world. But here in Cairo it was a different matter; news from the outside world seemed to blow in on every wind from the Delta.
Sometimes it brought Thomas a stab of homesickness for his own world, his own kind, but for the most part it seemed to come from a great distance or another life. His days, now that he was official training officer to Tussun’s two regiments, were fuller than they had ever been before. For not only did he have the task of trying to instil into the wild Turkish cavalry some idea of discipline and co-ordination and the skills of their trade, but finding that most of their weaponry was in a shocking state, he had to deal with that also, frequently with his own hands, when it was something that the regimental armourers could not handle, even under his instructions. At such times he remembered with gratitude his old master in the shop in Leith Wynd.
Daily, also, he was taking instruction in the Islamic faith from a much respected teacher produced for him by Colonel D’Esurier; a little old man brown and wrinkled and only dimly discernible under an enormous turban, the green turban of a Haji, for he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in his youth, long before the holy cities fell to the fanatical Wahabis and the pilgrimages ceased.
And as the weeks went by and the heat mounted, he was becoming more and more familiar with Cairo itself, the city whose life formed a shifting and glinting, shadowed and furtive tapestry into which his days were woven; coming to know it from the citadel to the narrow twisting alleyways of the old city further west, where it was not wise to go alone; through the crooked canyons of the bazaars, smelling of amber and incense, spices and camel dung and things nameless and infinitely worse, and the throat-catching metallic smitch of the coppersmiths; where awnings rigged between rooftops four and five storeys overhead kept out the sun and air. From the oasis and Greek ruins of Heliopolis across the river to the desert beyond the pyramids of Giza and Helwan, where he and Tussun rode hawking from time to time. He knew the barracks, of course, the great Kasr el Nil that had housed the first Mameluke regiments when the world was young. He knew the official houses that fringed the wide spaces of the maidans; and the plunging and snarling chaos of the camel market; and the harlots’ quarters down by the Nile bank, where the windows were as discreetly fretted as anywhere else in the city, but the girls sat shamelessly unveiled in the doorways, touting for custom with hennaed palms and soft sing-song voices. Tussun at seventeen had told him which houses he could go to without fear of the pox. He knew the cool arcades of the hospital where he had been told that Donald MacLeod might be foun
d, but Donald was not there, having been swept off into the Delta only a few days before, in the service of Ahmed Agha, whose man he still was. Ah well, there would come other times.
He had been presented to the Viceroy, and spoken to graciously yet again about his very tenuous kinship with Frederick the Great’s two brothers, and done his best to satisfy Muhammed Ali’s shrewd cross-examination on the battle training of the British infantry of the line, without giving away anything that should not be given away to a foreign power and one that had lately been an enemy.
He had been received into the Faith of Islam, at a ceremony which, together with the celebrations afterwards, had been enjoyed by Tussun and the rest of those present, including several of his fellow officers, considerably more than by Thomas himself. He had gone to it proudly and reverently, as a boy to his rite of passage; but beside the pain of the ritual operation, had found it humiliating, as a grown man, to undergo circumcision beneath the gaze of other men. A thing very far removed from the moment of spiritual awareness in the desert that had been his true moment of conversion, his Light on the road to Damascus. And after, there had been three days of fever and a penis so inflamed and swollen that to sit a horse or even walk had been misery for several more.
But that was in the past, and he was Ibrahim now, Ibrahim Effendi, by way of courtesy, never to be called Thomas again save by Tussun and Zeid, Medhet and Colonel D’Esurier, and one other into whose face he had not yet looked.
On an evening in late April, more than a year since he had been taken prisoner, a still evening with the mirage shimmering over the practice maidan, so that the trees on the far side of it seemed to be standing above their own reflections in water, Thomas returned to the blessed coolness of his own quarters to find Tussun, who as owner of the old armoury had his own key, sprawled on the divan picking dry skin from between his toes with deep concentration, his crimson Turkish slippers lying in opposite corners of the room.