Blood and Sand Page 4

  But the light was too far gone for reading. If he wanted to read he must go down to the bug-infested cabin and call for a lamp to be lit. Well, there was all tomorrow for reading, and the day after; and the week after that . . .

  He sat on, the French translation of the Koran open on his knee, while the sky flamed to blazing crimson overhead traced with the long wavering skeins of wild duck flying over, and the river echoed back the colour like bright arterial blood flowing between banks that brimmed with indigo shadow.

  From the next village, across the water, came the plaintive wild-bird wail of the muezzin, and the crew of the felucca, for the fifth time that day, betook themselves to prayer …

  4

  Within its rough defences of mud-brick and camel-thorn, the fortified camp at the El Hamha oasis away beyond Aswan and the fourth cataract was more like an ordinary Bedouin encampment than any kind of army post. But there, with two squadrons of Arab irregular cavalry and an attached troop of Sudanese camel-men, Captain Zeid ibn Hussein was responsible for the so-called peace of almost a thousand square miles of desert west of the Nile and north of the ill-defined frontier, and for the safety of the caravans coming up from the south.

  Into this remote and self-contained world Thomas came ashore from the felucca a month and more after passing through Cairo. He had read the Koran through twice and got a few suras of it that seemed to hold especial potency for him off by heart. He had broken up a fight between his two guards, and added considerably to his store of Albanian and Arabic phrases and his knowledge of the habits of river birds. But he was still a little unsure at times that the whole thing was not some kind of dream.

  His position in his strange new world was an odd one. He was a trooper in a Bedouin cavalry regiment, his duties the same as those of any other trooper, but a trooper undergoing officer training and with certain privileges. Bulbul his beautiful chestnut mare was a personal loan from Ahmed Agha himself, and by the Agha’s orders he was receiving an hour-long Arabic lesson every day. He shared Zeid’s black goat’s-hair tent as though he were a fellow officer, sleeping in the western bay, the third bay, beyond the servants’ and cooking quarters, where in a household tent the women’s quarters would have been.

  The daily routine of the camp had opened to let him in, and closed over behind him. And in some ways it seemed to him that the transition was not much more than it would have been for any infantryman changing to any cavalry regiment, and he had been used to the ways of horses and horsemen since he was seven years old. In other ways it seemed strange almost past belief. It took him a while to learn to ride in the Arab manner, with no bit or snaffle, controlling Bulbul only by a rope from her braided woollen headstall in his left hand — all Arab horses carried their heads slightly to the left; and after his first lesson he understood why — beside the usual control of knees and voice and the sharp-cornered stirrups that could be used as spurs in time of need. But from the first lesson the mare herself was a joy to him; the power between his knees, the sense of one-ness, the willing response, all the joy of a woman, he thought; and did not even notice the fact that he was no longer shocked by the thought which would once have shocked him to the core. And once he had mastered, with her help, the art of riding her, the mounted sabre training of the long-shadowed mornings and evenings was a joy to him also.

  There was musket practice, shooting at straw targets, the butt of the jezail scorching the cheek, eyes reddened with the dust that veiled the target; mounted musket practice too, chaotic and noisy with shouting and the drum of hooves beside the crack of the discharge, firing from hip or shoulder with no time for steady aim. Picket duty came soon, and then his first desert patrol; five days out, with the water rationed and commissariat consisting of unleavened bread and a handful of dates evening and morning; days when the khamsin blew and the sky was bruise-coloured and the whole world seemed to sweat. And back in camp the relief of shade-trees and water; and the Arabic lessons generally in the evening with Zeid ibn Hussein.

  He was thankful that Bonaparte’s expedition of nine years before had made Egypt, if not into a French-speaking country, at least into a country in which a fair proportion of people had a few words of French, and some, the young Bedouin captain included, spoke it fluently. At least that meant that there was one other person at El Hamha he could talk to — and a couple more among the troopers with whom he could exchange a few words before he had to fall back on his own floundering attempts at Arabic. Without them he would have been cut off indeed, surrounded by men whose jokes he could not share, whose long stories round the evening fire of dried camel dung he could not follow, whose dark gaze he could not read.

  For that reason, for his own sake as well as out of gratitude to Zeid who, he realised, was having to take the hour of the daily lesson out of his own scant off-duty times, he set himself almost fiercely to the task of learning Arabic, forcing himself to talk to the other men and not fear to make a fool of himself. And indeed he made surprising progress.

  “Show me your hand,” Zeid said to him one evening, and when he held it out, set his own alongside it, the long dark Arab hand whose slender shape made the grip of most Arab swords too narrow for comfort to a Western swordsman.

  “You see? We both have it, the long fourth finger.”

  And when Thomas looked up questioningly, “Do they not say among your people, that the man with a long fourth finger has the gift for other men’s tongues?”

  The evening meal was over, and the daily lesson, which generally took place over coffee in the captain’s tent, was over also. But the long-drawn-out ritual of coffee-making and drinking was still going on. Across the shallow fire pit with its low fire of brushwood and dried camel dung, with its array of four brass coffee pots, three hearth-blackened, one brightly polished, but all with their parts to play, the shallow bowl in which the beans had been roasted, the mortar in which they had been pounded and the bag of cardamom seeds, the two looked at each other, cool northern grey into eyes of dark warmth with the sun behind them. “For each tongue I have had — I have — a good teacher,” Thomas said.

  Zeid took up the coffee pot and leaned forward to pour, for the third time, about a mouthful of the strong black liquid into the small engraved brass cup which the young Scot held, as custom and good manners demanded, between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He had been learning other things than the Arabic tongue since coming to El Hamha. “May you have teachers as good when you come to learn Turkish in the service of Ahmed Bonaparte,” said Zeid. He poured into his own cup and set the pot down. “It is a sad pity. You will be wasted among the general’s pretty boys. Here with the Bedouin cavalry you would not be wasted, but among your own kind. You shoot like a Bedu, a short while longer and you will ride like one also. But I think that you will never have much skill in the intrigues and the jockeying for place and power that goes on in a great man’s following.”

  Thomas thought again of Colonel D’Esurier’s promise that Ahmed Agha might try bribery when the time came but would not actually keep him against his will if he demanded repatriation with the rest of his kind. But he did not say anything, even to the young Bedouin captain whom he was beginning to look on as a friend. Maybe the less he said to anyone on the subject, the better.

  “That would mean a change of overlords,” he said, partly to steer the talk away from the danger point, partly out of genuine interest. “What kind of man is he, the Viceroy?”

  Zeid ibn Hussein laughed softly. “Muhammed Ali? How should I know? I command two troops of his Bedouin Irregular Horse, I do not walk in his private garden.”

  Thomas took a sip of the bitter black coffee — not even in the parlour of an Edinburgh merchant’s genteel lady, he had long since discovered, was the ritual of good manners as complex and unyielding as in the black tents of the Bedu — “No, but you must have heard things, formed your own opinion. A good man or a bad one? I have heard both.”

  “You are very young, my brother; give it a few more
years, and when you are my age you will have learned of the many shades that lie between day and night. The Viceroy is of the day and the night and the dusk-colour that comes between. He is not of the common run. How else would an Albanian tobacco merchant turned adventurer come to be Viceroy of Egypt? He is strong — too strong for the liking of the Sultan and the Sublime Porte at Istanbul, who, so I have heard it said, are beginning to regret that ever they recognised him as Viceroy, two years ago, fearing that he is too strong for them, backed as he is by Albanian troops. Trouble may come of that one day … It is said that they have tried to stop more Albanians coming in to his following; but it is said also that His Excellency continues to smuggle in another shipload every month or so.”

  His hand went to the coffee pot again, but Thomas gave his cup the slight sideways shake which indicated that he had had enough. “It is surprising that the Viceroy rests his strength so completely on the Albanians. From the little of them that I saw in the Delta, they seemed brave enough, but half-trained and very ill disciplined.”

  “Well observed, O General,” said Zeid, with a hint of silken mockery. “But they are the only infantry in Egypt with any discipline at all. The Turkish regiments are all cavalry; so are the Mamelukes — magnificent light cavalry when they happen to feel like fighting, useless when they do not. And the native farming folk, the fellahin, have been so long barred from carrying weapons by Mameluke tradition, that they have become meek and without mettle, nothing but tillers of the land and growers of pumpkins.”

  “Tell me about the Mamelukes,” Thomas said. “Who are they? What are they? I have heard things here and there, but I do not understand.”

  “So, I will tell you of the Mamelukes, and you shall understand. Because the fellahin were not fighting men, even from before the rise of Islam, the caliphs of many hundred years ago needed to buy soldiers from other lands. There have always been merchants who handle the trade, buying twelve-year-old boys from the wild horse country away beyond the sea that I believe is called the Caspian. Girls too, at times, for wives and concubines, though the Mamelukes are not above carrying off girls from the Nile villages when the mood takes them. They come of a hardy people, perfect natural riders; and the Mameluke nobles who buy them train them in the use of sword and bow — firearms they consider beneath them —as though they were their own sons, and give them their freedom when they are of an age to bear arms.”

  “But if they have wives, do they not have sons of their own?”

  “Yes, but only those brought in as slaves can rise to high rank among them.”

  Thomas began to doubt very much if Zeid’s explanation was going to make him understand much better than he did before.

  Zeid saw his bewilderment and smiled. “It is the custom,” he said as though that explained all things. “But in our world a freed slave is still bound by unbreakable ties of loyalty to the man who brought him up. Him, he is prepared to die for, as he is for whoever he takes service with after his old master’s death, but he owes no loyalty to the State or to the rest of the army. Only to his own leader. So — as it happens with warriors brought in to fight for a country that chooses not to fight for itself — they grew strong; too strong. Yet it is said — I do not know the truth of it — that in their day they were great princes in the land. I do know that five hundred of them were personal bodyguard to Saladin. Now, they are still strong, but they have taken to fighting one another and so fallen apart into three camps: those who count themselves as friends of the Turks, those who would cast in their lot with the English, those who stand for an Egypt free of all outside rule save their own. If they could join spears they might be great again, instead of only dangerous; but they cannot, knowing one another for faithless dogs. Yet even so, before long I think, the Viceroy will send troops against them here in the south, and even over into the Sudan, for the longer they are left to swarm, the greater will the danger of them grow.”

  “That makes good hearing,” Thomas said, looking into the low fire. “You do not need to tell me of their faithlessness. If they had kept faith with us at El Hamed most of my friends would not be still out here — what the kites and jackals have left of them.”

  “Nay, I had not forgotten.” Zeid got up and slung on the heavy bandoleer, and reached down his jezail from where it hung on the nearest tent pole. In a short while he would be making his late rounds of the camp. “Before long, also, I think the Viceroy will seek to raise troops for a first time from among the fellahin; for the present all the native-bred troops that he can count on are our three regiments of Bedouin Irregular Cavalry.” He hitched at his sword-belt. “We are raw with our newness, the birth-blood still on our faces. Not much better disciplined than the Albanians as yet, maybe; but unlike the fellahin, the peasants of the green Nile Valley, we of the desert have always been warriors. Now we learn to be soldiers, which is altogether a different and maybe a harder thing.”

  “The 78th was a new regiment three years ago — all our honours still to win,” Thomas said bitterly, thinking of El Hamed.

  Zeid sketched a half-mocking gesture of salute, “We be brothers, you and I.” He crossed to the open side of the tent, and stood looking out. “It is too dark to see the difference between a white thread and a black,” he said, quoting the Prophet’s decree as to the proper time for the last prayer of the day; and a few moments later, as though in response to his words, the long-drawn wailing call to prayer reached them from El Hamha village, and he moved out into the darkness freckled with camp fires and shifting shadows. It was allowable to pray alone if need be, but better in company, and Captain Zeid ibn Hussein had gone to share the last prayer of the day with his men.

  Thomas remained behind in the tent, looking into the sinking fire. He heard the rough-edged musical wailing that was the voice of the camp at prayer, and beyond it the jink of harness from the picket lines and the bubbling snarl of a disturbed camel, and somewhere far off the desolate hair-lifting cry of jackal in the outer night. He was used now to the feeling of being shut out, but familiarity did not seem to make it any easier; rather the other way in fact, as time passed and he drew closer in other ways to the men he lived among. He had thought at first that it was only because they did not speak each other’s language; and that, the simple raw need of humankind to communicate with humankind, more than any long fourth finger, had made him quick to pick up the tongue of the men around him. But now that he could obey orders without a pause for frantic translation in his head, now that he could follow the gist of a long-winded campfire story and exchange insults with Ali Zim of the camel train, he still had the sense of being shut out; and had it most strongly when the call to prayer sounded across the camp.

  Nobody made the slightest attempt to thrust Islam upon him. Zeid, who beside his language lessons, had taught him Arab table manners and patches of highly coloured Egyptian history, and would discuss with him all things under Heaven from the secrets of horse-breeding to the fancy rhythms of the pestle to be used in coffee grinding and the relative price of whores in Thebes and Aswan, maintained a courteous silence on all matters that had to do with religion, and drew a veil behind his eyes if ever the subject came up.

  Yet the Bedouin troopers spoke and presumably thought of Allah and His Prophet constantly, and not in the casually blasphemous spirit of the 78th. They seemed to live in Islam far more consciously than most Scots or English lived in Christianity. He remembered Colonel D’Esurier likening the Muslims to Spanish Catholics. He was an Unbeliever, and that was the real strangeness, the real barrier between them. Not very much of a Believer, even in his own faith, he realised suddenly; maybe the gulf was not between two faiths so much as between the all-pervasiveness of one and the reservations of the other …

  Long before he left his father’s house on that long walk to Perth to enlist, he had known that his God was not his father’s God, not the stern Presbyterian God, for ever accusing, for ever having to be begged for forgiveness of Sin, the crushing sin of being mortal man. He
did not know who or what his God was; maybe that was something he was going to find out in this strange new life.

  Yet what faith he officially had, was the faith of his own people, and to abandon it would be disloyalty. He shifted abruptly, slamming an open palm on his knee. Who was asking him to abandon it?

  But he envied the men out there, gathered with their faces towards Mecca through the darkness that was too thick to tell a black thread from a white. He envied them sore.

  *

  A few mornings later, Thomas woke with the first green light of dawn glimmering beyond the looped-back tent curtains, to distant shouting and a scattering of shots from the western edge of the camp. Still only half awake, he plunged up from his mattress, and not waiting to pull on his abba over the thobe and loose ankle-clipping drawers in which he had lain down to sleep, caught up the combined bandoleer and sword-belt lying ready to his hand, and flung it on over his shoulder. As he did so, Zeid appeared an instant in the tent opening. “Get some clothes on, and your head cloth, the sun will soon be up. Then down to the horse-lines.” And he was gone.

  “What’s happening?” Thomas called, but got no answer. He reached for his pistol, checked that it was loaded, and thrust it into his waist-shawl, felt frenziedly for his head cloth and camel-cord headband, and dashed out, completing his ready-making as he went. By the time he reached the horse-lines he was wearing head cloth and camel-cords somewhat over one eye, and retying his waist-shawl as he ran, to make his pistol more secure.

  Shadows were making for the horse-lines from all quarters. His Sudanese askari, half-naked, was there before him and had finished saddling up. The captain’s groom was cutting the grey horse free as Zeid vaulted into the saddle. Thomas set his hands on Bulbul’s withers, and next instant was in the saddle also, and feeling for the stirrups and head cord as his man cut the tether. He urged the mare round beside the captain’s grey. “What’s happening?” he demanded again.