Blood and Sand Read online

  BLOOD AND SAND

  Rosemary Sutcliff

  © Rosemary Sutcliff 2014

  Rosemary Sutcliff has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 1987 by Hodder and Stoughton Limited.

  This edition published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2014.

  For Michael Starforth, who gave me the story of Thomas Keith in the first place and has been unstinting with his help and advice ever since.

  My grateful thanks also to the friends and strangers to whom I have turned for help and who have responded with book-lists, instructions for mining a city wall, memories of their own days in the desert or with irregular troops on various frontiers. A special thank you to Rosemary Booth for the words of ‘The Foster Brother’.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Part One - Egypt

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Part Two – Arabia

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Afterword

  Extract from Swords of Arabia by Anthony Litton

  Author’s Note

  Almost all the characters in Blood and Sand are historical and almost everything that happens in the book actually happened, even to that most unlikely ten-against-one Errol Flynn style fight on the turnpike stair. For only one section of Thomas’s life have I drawn entirely on my own imagination: the matter of his marriage. There is no record of his ever having had a wife, but then in the case of an orthodox Muslim marriage there most probably would be none. I felt that he deserved a happy marriage, no matter how brief, and so I gave him Anoud with my love.

  Part One - Egypt

  1

  In the swiftly gathering dusk, the lime-washed walls of El Hamed glimmered palely under the fronded darkness of its date palms. From the doorway of the headman’s house, now taken over by Colonel MacLeod as the headquarters of his motley command, light spilled out over the once jewel-bright Colours planted in their stands of lashed muskets before the threshold.

  Between the low wall of the village and the nearest of the irrigation channels the lights of the camp fires were beginning to strengthen. Camp fires of the 78th Highlanders and beyond them the 35th Foot and De Rolle’s Foot beyond again. The night of April 20th, 1807 and away southwards, masked by the tamarisk scrub and the slight lift in the land between, the Turkish forces gathered about their own camp fires, waited also for dawn and the fighting that dawn would bring.

  Round one of the fires, just below the village gateway and scarcely clear of the turbaned gravestones of the village dead, the best part of the Highlanders’ Grenadier company were gathered. They had eaten their evening meal and fallen to their own affairs and pastimes: here a little clump of heads bent together over a greasy pack of cards, there a man playing dice by himself, left hand against right; a man singing softly for his own ear and no one else’s, his gaze on the fire and his hands linked around his up-drawn knees, another doing his mending and yet another writing a letter with frowning concentration, leaning forward, the page tipped to catch the flame-light; one deep in conversation with a stray dog, the kind that always hung about an army camp; one who always suffered from religion on the eve of battle, reading his Bible. Most of the others silent or talking together idly as they readied their equipment for the morning. And among these, Donald MacLeod — no relation to his colonel — and Thomas Keith sat companionably together.

  Donald, an extremely large fair young man from the island of Lewis who combined the position of company drummer with that of medical orderly in the usual way of such matters, had stripped down his drum and was now reassembling and making it ready for tomorrow’s action.

  Beside him Thomas Keith, almost as long-limbed but of a much slighter build, was as dark as the other was fair, with an almost Spanish darkness inherited from a Highland foremother, though he himself was from Edinburgh; a bony-faced young man with harsh angles at cheek and jaw, a wide mouth that was surprisingly mobile despite the un-boyish straightness of the lips; light grey eyes, level-set, and black-fringed with lashes that would have been the envy of any girl.

  Just now, with a face of absorbed tenderness, he was cleaning his rifle.

  It was one of the new Baker rifles, a marksman’s weapon, normally only issued to certain regiments of the Light Brigade, and his possession of it, in place of one of the heavy muskets still issued to the Grenadier companies, testified to his skill as a shot, a skill which he had acquired to some extent even before he had run away to join the army three years ago.

  His hands busy with the rod and oily rag, his mind went back over those years to his seventeen-year-old self, to the scene in the parlour over his father’s shop on the night that had begun it all. The night his father had told him that, with Grandfather not two months cold in his grave, he had sold Broomrigg.

  Almost everything that he had and was, Thomas knew that he owed to his grandfather. Grandfather who at sixteen had been out with his father, following Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and had spent upwards of twenty exiled years in the French army, returning pardoned at last to marry the heiress of Broomrigg. Grandfather who out of the gathered skills of those exile years had taught him sword-play and the handling of firearms and better French than the visiting master at Leith Academy could do. Grandfather who had talked Father into apprenticing him to Mr Sempill, the gunsmith, instead of keeping him with his elder brother Jamie at the watchmaking. Grandfather who had taught him to ride on Flambeau.

  But Flambeau had gone with the rest. He would never ride the big bay again, feeling the living power between his knees, the demand and response as though he and the horse were one; never feel the thrusting velvet muzzle in the hollow of his apple-bearing hand; never go back to Broomrigg, walking the six miles there and the six miles back on Sundays and holidays that had lit the rest of the week for him.

  What had he thought would happen to Broomrigg after Grandfather went out of it to lie beside Grandmother and her kin under the kirkyard yews? He had never truly thought about it. The farm had always been there, the old pear tree by the gable end, the babble of lambs from the February fold. It had seemed that it always would be there, an integral part of life itself.

  To his father, the sale had seemed quite a small thing; but to Thomas it had been the end of the world.

  It had been in the small sleepless hours of the following night that he had known quite suddenly that he was going for a soldier.

  There had been nothing to hold him back; neither his father nor Jamie would be much grieved by his going; there were a couple of school friends he should be sorry not to see again, and Jenny Cochrane the apothecary’s niece … nothing that would not mend soon enough.

  It had been quite easy, for with Bonaparte’s “Army of England” massed at Boulogne with their invasion barges ready and the new alliance with Spain that was to gain him control of the Channel long enough to ship them over, the militia was being called out and new regiments formed the length and breadth of the kingdom, including a new battalion of the 78th Highlanders recruiting at Perth.

  He had written two letters that night, one to his father conscien
tiously trying to explain the unexplainable, the other to Mr Sempill apologising for breaking his indentures, and left them lying where Leezy, the old servant, would find them in the morning. Then, with his scanty savings in his pocket, he had climbed out of the window and set out on the long walk to Perth in the chill summer rain.

  He had done well in the 78th, his gunsmith’s training standing him in good stead, so that he had gained the position of battalion armourer — not that there had been much competition — even before the regiment had been ordered overseas.

  They had had their baptism of fire at Maida in Calabria, as part of a small force landed in southern Italy against French troops already there, the first time that Bonaparte’s crack troops had been defeated by British infantry. Then had come Egypt.

  Why the Egyptian expedition nobody had seemed very clear, certainly nobody in the rank and file of the 2nd Battalion 78th Highland Regiment, but seemingly it had something to do with the failure of some British bombardment of Constantinople on behalf of the Russians against whom the Turks had closed the Dardanelles. Something also to do with discouraging the French and Ottoman Empires from joining forces; though it seemed to Private Thomas Keith just as unclear why invading one of its territories and mopping up the Viceroy and his troops should discourage the Sultan and his Sublime Porte in Constantinople, in the very heart of that Empire, from joining forces with whoever they chose.

  It was not much more than a month since the British had landed and taken Alexandria. Twice since then, the second time only a few days ago, they had tried to storm Rosetta, the gateway to the cornlands of the Delta. Twice they had been driven off with heavy losses by the Turkish and Albanian troops of the Viceroy’s army. The second attempt Thomas knew about only by confused hearsay, for ten days ago three companies of the 2nd Battalion, together with five of De Rolle’s and the 35th, all as usual under strength, had been detached and sent off four miles further east, with the task of holding the village of El Hamed and the two-mile stretch of reeds and tamarisk-scrub between the Nile and Lake Edko. Eight hundred of them against three times as many of the enemy. But, of course, there were the anti-Turkish Mamelukes camped further upriver; if you counted in their promised cavalry support, that would improve the odds quite a lot. It was a pity the Mamelukes had such a highly coloured reputation for faith-breaking …

  Thomas returned to sudden awareness of the other men about the fire. Jock Patterson with the usual stray dog, Willie Moffat with the letter he always wrote to his wife and left behind with the baggage train, the fitful interweaving of sounds that made up the voice of the camp and out beyond, in the full darkness that had come down while he was not looking, the lost-soul crying of the jackals.

  “Was it a good dream?” asked the soft Highland voice beside him. “I was thinking that if you are to polish that stock much more, the thing would be polished away entirely.”

  “Good in parts.” Thomas grinned and laid aside his oily rag. “Do you mind the night before Maida?”

  Donald had got his drum together again and his fingers did not check in their careful adjustment of the pigskin buffs that tightened and tuned the drumskin. “I mind the night before Maida well enough,” he said, and then: “The odds were stacked against us that time, too.”

  *

  The sun was just shaking clear of the shallow lift of land eastwards, and the irrigation ditches which veined the whole countryside were beginning to give back a shining pallor to the growing brightness of the sky; the scene had taken on edge and substance and the shadows of men and bushes lay long-fingered across the land as the British force advanced into action. And for Thomas at least, the queasy coldness in the belly that had been with him through the dark hours and turned the hard tack of the morning issue into sawdust in his mouth, had given way to an odd eager expectancy. He was aware of all things with an etched sharpness that was almost painful: the new light splintering on belt clasp and musket barrel, the heavy flick forward of his kilt against the back of his knees with every step, the company Colours away to his left up-reared against the brightening sky above the roll and rattle of Donald’s drum and the skirl of the pipes playing “Hielan’ Laddie”. High overhead the kites quartering the morning emptiness on tilted, motionless wings.

  Most of all, from his position on the extreme right flank, the post of most danger and most honour, usually bestowed on the Grenadiers in any battle line, he was aware of empty ground away to the right, stretching towards Lake Edko where surely — surely to God! — the Mameluke cavalry should have come in to their support by now!

  Somewhere beyond the low ridge ahead of them there leapt up suddenly the distant challenge of Turkish trumpets, and across the bush-grown crest their own scouts were falling back.

  The British ranks were being extended as they advanced in an attempt to avoid being outflanked on that unprotected right, drawing out long and thin like a piece of fraying rope, even before the moment when they saw the lines of Turkish horsemen waiting for them and filling, it seemed, the whole low skyline from east to west. They advanced steadily, holding their fire in stubborn obedience to their orders, though they themselves were coming under fire now from the Albanian infantry.

  Keep moving. Keep station —

  The clarity of that earlier moment was gone, and Thomas’s memory of the El Hamed action remained ever after extremely hazy. He had a confused impression of the two battle lines rolling together and the battle shout of the 78th — “Cuidich’n Righ! Cuidich’n Righ!” — and the high Turkish yell seeming to beat together in the swirling clouds of dust and powder-smoke around them; the rattle of their own unleashed musketry at last and the screams of stricken men and horses … and then the knowledge that they had ceased to advance, and were surging to and fro over the same ground in all the ugly chaos of close combat.

  He never knew how long it lasted or quite how it came to an end, but a time came — it might have been a minute or many hours later — when the British had broken off and were in retreat.

  Ever afterwards he was to remember as through that haze of dust and gun smoke, the Grenadiers pulling back on that exposed right flank, unsupported when they should have been covered by the Mameluke cavalry, contriving somehow to maintain contact with the companies of the 35th on their left, keeping the mass of Turkish horsemen in check. The familiar wicked kick of the rifle against his shoulder. Load-aim-fire, load-aim-fire, load while retiring — kneel — aim — fire …

  Out of the drifting dust cloud the Albanian infantry were swarming up from the cover of the irrigation dykes to their right and rear, while the jagged turmoil of a moving fight boiled up from their left. They were an island now, cut off and surrounded, men dropping every moment beneath the bitter hail of musket fire. They were making their last stand in the midst of scrubby harvest land and the reapers were closing in …

  From the crest of an irrigation dyke which the tattered remnant of the Grenadiers had taken and were holding as though it were a fortress, Thomas, still firing steadily through the choking waves of smoke, glimpsed for a few moments the blurred figure of Colonel MacLeod sitting his horse on the crest of the ridge and looking about him as though taking stock of the situation, as though maybe even now looking for some belated sign of the promised Mameluke support. Then a fresh wave of Albanians surged into view and the solitary figure in their path went down.

  After that there was only smoking chaos, the smell of blood and filth and burned powder; Willie Moffat falling beside him with half his head shot away, and somewhere in the midst of it all the scream of the pipes still playing “Hielan’ Laddie”.

  And then something that was not so much pain as a sense of enormous shock as though he had been kicked just below the left hip by a mule. He was down on his face in the mess of Willie’s blood and brains. He managed to struggle to his elbow and get in one more shot. But the time for shooting was over; his ears were full of the nearing hoof-drum of the Turkish cavalry and all around him men were fixing bayonets. The chaos began to s
wim and darken as the battle rolled over him.

  2

  Thomas lay on his back on the old camel rug, his arms folded behind his head and stared up at the thatch above him, and considered the situation. He had had plenty of time to consider the situation during the couple of days since he had emerged from the scorching fog of fever resulting from his wound, and there was nothing else to do but watch the spread-fingered, swivel-eyed chameleon on the mud wall, set there to keep down the flies, and the light change from morning to evening, from dancing heat-haze of noon to blue velvet of night, beyond the doorway of the village headman’s house, no longer British army headquarters, where he’d been brought when the fighting was over.

  There were only eleven survivors of the Grenadier company. Of thirty-six officers and seven hundred and eighty men detached to El Hamed, not one had got away to re-join the main body of the expeditionary force. He had those facts clear in his mind, having gathered them at one time or another from Donald MacLeod; Donald sullenly grieving for the loss of his drum, but mercifully restored to possession of a few tools of the surgeon’s trade, who had got the musket ball out of his thigh and spent agonising hours probing for bone splinters and any threads from his kilt that might have been carried into the wound to infect it and cause gangrene. Donald MacLeod who had then nursed him like a lassie through the wound-fever that had almost inevitably followed.

  What he was not clear about — what neither of them was clear about — was why they had been separated from the rest of their kind and left here in the headman’s house in El Hamed while the rest were sent back to Cairo as prisoners of war. He knew only that it was by command of Ahmed Agha, the Turkish general in command of El Hamed. The man’s face, fleshily handsome, the eyes in it dark and prominent like black grapes, had drifted in and out through the pain and fever-fog of the first days, looking down at him consideringly from under the elaborate folds of gold-fringed turban, speaking to him in good French which he had done his best, gathering his confused and aching wits together, to answer in French as good, though he could not now remember a word of what they had said. The first time seemed to have been on the edge of a dyke with the ugly smells and sounds of a spent battlefield all about them, other times here in the headman’s house. Several times, he had come, Donald said.