Blood and Sand Read online

  He sat watching, his arms across his knees, as D’Esurier turned back the oiled linen. A little sand spilled out from between the folds, and the sword lay bare in its new master’s hands. He looked down at it a moment in silence, then drew the blade from its modern sheath with a breath of pleasure, and watched the lamplight play up and down the long straight steel. “Sa ha! This is a gift indeed!”

  “A Crusader sword?” Thomas suggested. “We had drawings in the workshop — I thought thirteenth century, maybe French?”

  Colonel D’Esurier was still examining the sword, his dark face alight with pleasure. “I believe you are right,” he said after a short while. “We in the West have learned to think that Saracen blades were always curved and Crusader blades alone were straight. As a matter of fact there are thirteenth-century illustrated manuscripts in the citadel library in Cairo showing both Mameluke and Berber askaris carrying long straight weapons.” They looked at each other across the glinting blade, the French gunnery officer and the Scottish armourer’s apprentice, linked by shared interest and expertise.

  “It is in the quillons that the true difference lies,” said D’Esurier. “The quillons which in a Saracen sword do no more than form shoulders to the blade, but projected further, as in this, give the European medieval hilt the semblance of a cross.”

  He slid the blade back into its sheath. It ran like oiled silk. “I learned the bare outlines of the fight from Captain Hussein while you were down at the horse-lines, and I shall not ask you for the more detailed story: doubtless I shall learn it in due course, but not, I think, from you, for I doubt if you have much skill in singing your own praises … At the risk of discourtesy, I thank you, Thomas, for your gift.”

  Thomas leaned to touch the second bundle. “This is the other man’s sabre. I should like to send it to Ahmed Agha. Zeid said that would be permissible — if you agree?”

  “Perfectly permissible. Ahmed Agha will no doubt appreciate the gesture — especially as I doubt if he receives many gifts save those made with the purchase of instant favours in view. But I did not think that you felt so much gratitude towards our Ahmed Bonaparte.”

  “Not before my months at El Hamha, no,” Thomas said simply.

  D’Esurier smiled, dandling the Crusader’s sword in his hands. “Ibrahim Pasha is sending a courier back to Cairo tomorrow, after he has heard Captain Hussein’s report; if you like, I can send the sabre with him, under cover, I think, of a letter from me … Alternatively, you may prefer to keep it among your baggage until we reach Cairo ourselves and you can present them personally.”

  Thomas heard all the sounds of the camp very clearly, but seemingly at a great distance. Within the narrow room it was so quiet that if the air had moved he would have heard the sand-wreaths stirring in the corners. “One way or another way,” Zeid had said, “I think your time with the Bedouin Horse is almost over.”

  “I am to go back to Cairo with you?” he said, as though it were quite a small matter.

  “Yes. I have two more forts to visit on the way back, but we should be there in five or six weeks.”

  “What has changed?” Thomas asked, much as he had asked it of Captain Zeid ibn Hussein. “Have the Viceroy’s orders concerning prisoners changed, that I no longer need to be kept a dark secret?”

  D’Esurier shrugged. “I think not. But Ahmed Agha fought well for him in the Delta, and he owes him something in gratitude. Also the Mamelukes are increasingly a threat and he cannot afford to alienate any of his anti-Mameluke generals. My guess is that the Agha chose his moment with care, reminded Muhammed Ali — oh very delicately — of these things, and contrived to come to a friendly understanding with him.”

  “But I should still be sent back with the other prisoners if I were to stand on my rights?” Thomas did not care for the feelings of being a parcel in the hands of other men. “Ah yes. But now it seems that question does not arise.”

  “No. I was forgetting that for the moment.”

  “Shall you miss your own army? Shall you miss Scotland? Your father?”

  “I suppose I must write to my father.”

  “I wonder which will grieve him the more, to believe, as he does now, that you were killed at El Hamed, or to know that you have taken service with the Ottoman Empire and that you have changed your Faith? If you tell him the one thing, you must tell him the whole.”

  Thomas was silent a long moment, staring at his own hands linked about his knees. Then he looked up. “I will not write,” he said.

  Farewell the streets of Edinburgh, indeed.

  Next morning, seated on fine rugs from the vice regal baggage train, in the audience chamber of the headquarters building, Captain Zeid ibn Hussein made his report to Ibrahim Pasha, the Viceroy’s elder son. He gave account of the frontier tribes, their strength in men, horses and camels, and of the strength and location of the frequently hostile Mameluke forces. He gave it as his careful opinion that the desert tribes would not ally themselves with the Mamelukes as a long-term thing, but that they might do it short-term if there was a clear material advantage to be gained. The only hope of keeping the Southern Province stable and relatively peaceful lay in dealing with the Mamelukes once and for all, and policing the province thereafter with men such as the Bedouin cavalry: men who knew the desert and the ways of the desert. Also in appointing a competent governor responsible directly to the Viceroy. All these things ibn Hussein believed strongly, and he laid them clearly before the Viceroy’s son, simply as a man who knew what he was talking about, to another who needed the same knowledge. And the short thick-set young pasha listened to him, clear, surprisingly blue eyes fixed on his face, occasionally putting in some probing question, for the most part silent. Not yet twenty, he was already showing promise of the brilliant administrator he was to become, and clearly he had learned the useful lesson that other men may be worth listening to.

  A little to one side, Colonel D’Esurier, who had been invited to be present, leant forward, occasionally asked a question of his own, generally relative to the fortification of some Mameluke-held strong point, but for the most part also remained silent.

  He saw a growing respect in the pasha’s intent blue gaze, and could read well enough what was going on behind it. The report probably told him not much more than he expected to hear, after the very thorough advance findings he must have sought — for he was meticulously thorough — before he came south; but knowing the Arab love of words and the twists and by-ways and embroidered ramification of words, he must have expected to spend days in drawing it out, sifting what was useful from what was not, and making his own evaluation. From Captain Zeid ibn Hussein, who in this one thing at least was not typical of his race, he was getting the kind of report, concise and well-reasoned, that Bonaparte might have expected from one of his junior officers. Colonel D’Esurier’s guess was that the Arab captain would not live out his days in command of a mud fort on the edge of nowhere.

  When the report was finished and the clerk taking it down had gathered up his writing materials and departed, the pasha clapped his hands for coffee and sherbet, and for the present turned the conversation to other things.

  “Now, what of this new acquisition of Ahmed Agha’s? You have him with you?”

  “I have him with me as ordered, as lieutenant of my escort,” Zeid said; there was regret in his tone. “The colonel tells me that he is to return with him to Cairo.”

  “You sound as though you did not like the plan.”

  Zeid spread his hands. “Not greatly. He should remain with us. He is not of the right stuff for the general’s bodyguard.”

  “Not enough of the courtier?”

  “I think he might do none so ill at that, if he set his mind to it. He is one who keeps his eyes open and learns by what he sees. But I think it will be a waste.”

  D’Esurier nodded. “He would not be wasted, you think, in the Egyptian army?”

  “He would rise high, I think. And now that he is of the True Faith —”
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  The pasha leaned forward. “Ah? He has embraced Islam?”

  “Not yet, Excellency, but he has told me that he wishes to take instruction.”

  Ibrahim Pasha fingered his fair beard; a curiously old man’s gesture. “I will not ask whether that is from conviction or from good sense. It will have been pointed out to him that the prospects in the Muslim army are better for a Muslim officer?”

  “I pointed it out to him myself,” Zeid said simply. “It held him back for many days.”

  “One would expect more sense from a Lowland Scot,” D’Esurier murmured. “They are reputed to be as hard-headed as my own people.”

  Ibrahim Pasha looked from one to the other, and his face broke into a grin that made him look for the moment no more than his nineteen years. “It seems he has two staunch friends in this new world of his. Presently I must meet this hard-headed Scot of yours, who is too good for Ahmed Agha’s bodyguard. Meanwhile —” He took up the slender brass coffee pot.

  At about the same time that morning, out on the practice ground with its fringe of dusty shade-trees, Thomas and the rest of the escort were at mounted sabre practice with the garrison cavalry.

  Mounted practice over, and Bulbul led away to the horse-lines by one of the askaris, Thomas, having no other call on his time for the moment, while Zeid was away, had started a bout of sabre play with Othman al Malik, the best swordsman among the escort after himself, while a lounging cluster of their fellows looked on. The sun was rising higher, the thin shade under the tamarisk and acacia trees growing short. It was still early in the year, but so far south, the heat was already fierce, the beaten earth of the practice ground beginning to dance on the sight like a midge cloud. Both Thomas and his opponent had flung off their abbas and tucked back their head cloths into the black camelhair head-cords to let the air get to their necks and ears. But Thomas could feel the sun stinging on his shoulders through the rough cotton of his shirt, and the sweat crawling like insects down the valleys of his body.

  Then in the concentration of the swordplay he forgot everything else.

  The bout did not last long, in the growing heat, but it was quick and fierce while it lasted. Finally Othman, whose strokes had for some moments been growing less sure, stumbled to avoid a particularly dangerous thrust, slipped in the fine dry dust and landed on one knee.

  Thomas, his own breath coming quickly and the sun-whitened world pulsing a little on his sight, lowered his blade and half leant on it, thereby signifying to his gasping opponent with a swordsman’s courtesy that he also had had enough. The man grinned, wiping the sweat from his face with the back of his forearm; and as he did so, Thomas saw his gaze go out and up across his shoulder to something, someone, beyond.

  “Bravo! That was a bout well played,” said a voice behind him in the same instant. A young voice, warmly vital, rough at the edges in the way of a boy’s voice that has broken not so long ago into a man’s, and speaking French with an appalling Albanian accent.

  And turning quickly, Thomas found himself looking up past the neck and shoulder of a raking chestnut mare into the face of her rider. He was probably not more than a couple of years older than Medhet, a short thick-set stripling, lion-coloured as to skin and eyes and the tawny hair that showed in front of his left ear, where the gold-fringed swathings of his turban had been pushed somewhat rakishly askew. Everything about him seemed to be worn at a rakish angle, as though he had flung everything on in a hurry, to be off about something exciting, and he sat his fidgeting chestnut with casual ease, faintly askew in the saddle.

  Something in the boy’s own aspect, and the way the crowd had parted without protest to yield him and his half-dozen companions a ringside view, something in the aspect, midway between cronies and bodyguard, of the half-dozen, told Thomas instantly that he was looking at Tussun, the Viceroy’s younger son. He had heard that the boy had come up with his brother Ibrahim Pasha, eager to see for himself the desert outposts and the men of his father’s new Bedouin regiments.

  “You are the Scottish soldier they told me about,” said Tussun Bey.

  “I am, Sir.” Thomas was not sure of the correct show of deference. In the end he made a grave inclination of the head, then brought his gaze up again to the boy’s vivid and imperious face.

  “They said you were the best swordsman in Upper Egypt. Teach me that thrust in tierce.”

  “Gladly, if you wish it, Sir.”

  “Now.” Tussun was just about to swing down from the high silver-worked saddle.

  Thomas shook his head, smiling. “Not now. It is too far into the heat of the day, and I am over weary to do full justice to my sword or yours. This evening, if you wish.”

  “I wish it now.” The boy’s chin jutted a little, but he had checked his movement to dismount.

  “We shall both do better in the cool of the evening,” Thomas said.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “No,” said Thomas, truthfully, “but I think that you are Tussun Bey.”

  They remained looking at each other, the heat-filled silence spreading out from them like the ripples when a fish jumps in a pool. There was a certain half-pleasurable apprehension among the onlookers waiting to see what would happen next. Thomas gathered that the Viceroy’s second son was not used to not getting his own way on all occasions, and wondered for an instant if he might be landing himself in serious trouble, but wondered it only somewhere at the back of his mind; the rest of his awareness was entirely taken up with the boy on the chestnut mare, who seemed to focus the sunlight in his own being.

  For a long moment still, they remained unmoving, hot tawny gaze and cool grey meeting and locked, while the frown gathered between the princeling’s amber brows. Then suddenly it was gone, and his face lit with a smile that could charm the heart out of any woman.

  “It shall be as you say, Thomas Effendi. This evening you will teach me the thrust in tierce, and tomorrow morning I will show you how to fly a falcon.”

  The companion sitting his horse closest on Tussun’s right, straightened a little in his saddle. A man maybe in his early twenties wearing Mameluke dress — Tussun was renowned for his unorthodox choice of friends — and with the blue eyes and fair skin of his kind. Now those eyes which had been lazy in the sunshine were narrowed and attentive, flicking from the Scots mercenary to the Viceroy’s son and back again.

  But neither Tussun nor Thomas were aware of him, nor, for the moment, of the rest of the watching crowd, nor of the shade-trees nor the sun overhead, having other and stranger things to think about.

  *

  They were sprawled side by side on the embankment wringing the Nile water out of their hair and drying off in the sun that dappled through the broad-leaved fig branches overhead before pulling on their clothes again.

  The fencing lesson had duly taken place last evening, the lesson in falconry this morning and the memory was still present and vivid with Thomas of the moment when the borrowed salukis had flushed the heron from the reeds, and she had leapt upwards in swift spiral flight and he and Tussun had both loosed their falcons after her in the same instant. Thomas had flown a saker before now, during his time at El Hamed, but chiefly at desert hare, never before at heron, and he remembered, with all the potent clarity of a first time, the quarry climbing desperately the blue circles of the upper air, striving for the needful height to use the dagger bill that was her only weapon, and behind her the falcons with deadly power and purpose mounting steadily on her trail. He could hear again the thin chime of the hawk bells as they climbed, see again through eyes narrowed into the sun-glare, the chase sweeping up and up into height beyond height of burning blue, until at last Tussun’s falcon overtopped the quarry and stooped, avoiding the despairing dagger-thrust of her beak, and made his kill. A puff of feathers drifting out of the sky, as hunter and hunted dropped together into the reeds and hounds and men closed in …

  The lesson over and the day’s heat growing fierce, they had left the rest of the hawking party
to their own devices in the shade of a thicket of young sycamores, and strolled upriver until they had come upon a half-dead fig tree growing with its feet almost in the shimmering fringes of the inundation. Away beyond, on the usual patch of slightly higher ground, a dilapidated village rose above the usual smoke-coloured drift of irises among its leaning gravestones. No sound to break the noonday save for the braying somewhere of a tethered donkey and the deep hum of insects that might have been the voice of the heat itself.

  Tussun, lying now with his still damp hair clinging about his neck, seemed half asleep. For Thomas, sitting with hands linked round up-drawn knees, and watching the movements of a small water bird among the reeds, the passing hour seemed something not to be wasted in even half-sleep. Presently, all too soon, the day would be over and there might not be another like it in all his life. Tomorrow he was leaving with Colonel D’Esurier on the slow journey, broken by pauses to inspect gun emplacements, down river to Cairo. Tussun and his brother would remain here a few days longer, but travelling without the constant halts would be in Cairo well ahead of them. Tussun and he might meet again there, but in the city everything would be different.

  He was aware of an abrupt movement beside him and when he looked round the boy had come up to his elbow and was looking with concerned interest at the entry scar of the musket ball just below his, Thomas’s, hip. It would fade and turn silvery by and by, but now it was still purplish and had the indefinable look of being tight and sore.

  “That was at El Hamed?” Tussun said.

  “Yes.”

  “Ssss,” the boy sucked in his breath between his teeth. “It must have been a sharp hurt in its time.”

  “Sharp enough,” Thomas agreed. “But I had a good surgeon. In a year it will be small enough — almost — to cover with the ball of my thumb.”

  Tussun put out a slim brown hand, and with the unselfconscious ease of old friendship, set his own thumb lightly over the puckered and livid place. “In a year, maybe,” he said judicially, “assuredly there is a way to go yet.” And then: “Who was he, this good surgeon? A Turk? Not one of our Albanian army leeches, I think.”