Thomas flung away from the window and paced about the room, then returned, and stood leaning his forehead against the splintered remains of the fretted shutter, and listening to the ugly sounds from the streets. There was nothing he could do about what was going on. He could not order out his own troops, turning one part of the Egyptian army against another. That would be unthinkable — as unthinkable as it was to bide here, listening to the sounds from over the wall and letting them go by as though they were just something blowing on the wind.
In two or three days, by the Mercy of Allah, Tussun would be here — if only he could have been here tonight …
Somewhere not far off a woman screamed, like a hare with a stoat after it. A hideous sound that went on and on, tearing the night apart, and then was lost in the general tumult. Thomas turned again from the window, and caught up from the sleeping place the old weather-faded burnous he had been using as a bed covering and flung it round his shoulders. Crossing to the outer room he shouted to the orderly who had just brought in fresh water, “I am going out, I may be a while.”
And went striding down the stairway and out through the side postern, automatically making sure as he went that his sword sat loose in its scabbard. He did not know what he was going to do; but with the second-in-command of the expeditionary force hidden under the anonymity of a shepherd’s burnous he might be able to do something, cool one hot head. Save one soft-bellied citizen. “Allah, All Merciful, All Compassionate, let there be something!” he prayed.
Because if there was not, he would carry the voice of Medina’s agony, Medina being raped, in his head until his dying day.
22
He was out in the street and heading towards the distant turmoil. It seemed to be the northern quarter that they were looting, the living quarter of well-to-do merchants and the like, which in the nature of things would yield the richest harvest; but small bodies of looters had split off from the rest and were busy in all quarters on their own account. Torchlight flared at the ends of streets, shadows were running. Thomas shot out an arm and laid hold of one of them, and had his sabre-point to the man’s throat before he knew what was happening. “What means this evil in the streets?”
The man stared wildly in the low moonlight. “No evil! We do but punish those who threw in their lot with the Wahabi dogs!”
The evening’s work, it seemed, had come a long way and turned a few corners since the Albanians had been called out to hunt down the ringleaders of that morning’s massacre of the Wahabi garrison. Thomas flung the man aside and strode on.
He had not very far to go before he came upon the thing that Allah the All Merciful had for him to do.
At the corner of a narrow street he came upon a knot of Albanians with a flaring torch gathered round something they had penned in a doorway. Their savage glee, their throaty shouts and high laughter, something in their whole aspect made him think of boys tormenting a terrified cat with an old tin dipper tied to its tail, and he pushed into their midst.
Pressed back against the door stood a woman in the usual black street-going abba, or what remained of it, for it had been torn half off, revealing the gleam of tulip-striped silk beneath. They had torn off her veil and yashmak and her hair hung loose and tousled about her face that showed curd-white in the torchlight. Her eyes, widened in terror, found and clung to his face as he came, as though he were someone she had known would come, but who was almost too late. She twisted away from a hand that reached for her breast, screaming to him, “Effendi! Help me!”
Thomas had emerged in the forefront of the throng. He made no show of using even the flat of the naked blade in his hand, but the torchlight played on the bright steel. “Let the woman alone,” he ordered.
There was a splurge of laughter, and one of the men returned, “She’s only a brothel girl. If you want one, go and find her sister.”
“She is no such thing,” Thomas spoke with the voice of authority. “I know the Daughters of Delight as well as any of you! Get back.”
“It is Ibrahim Agha!” someone said.
“It is. And Ibrahim Agha bids you in the name of Allah to take yourselves back to your quarters before he has time to recognise your faces and remember them afterwards!” He felt the laughter grow less sure and the savage purpose slacken. Getting between them and the girl and careful not to turn his face from theirs, he reached back and gathered her into the curve of his arm, dragging her hard against him. It was no moment for the niceties. “Come,” he said, “I will take you home.”
“I have no home,” the girl said, and he sensed rather than saw her snatch a horrified glance back towards the red glow of a house burning at the far end of the street.
“These men?” Thomas asked.
“No, others. We sought to escape, but they killed my father — the servants ran away …”
Thomas was already thrusting their way out of the small group now turned sullen and unsure of themselves. Someone shouted after him that Ibrahim Agha was not above stealing other men’s quarry rather than hunt for his own; that the Agha knew a girl worth the taking when he saw one … He felt the girl grow rigid in the curve of his arm. “Do not be afraid,” he said quickly. “No harm shall come to you — no dishonour.” And a moment later, as he realised that it was weakness and not fear of him that was making her stiffen and stumble and grow so heavy, “Are you hurt?”
“Only a little,” she said. “But I bleed.”
“Hold up. It is not far, but if I have to carry you I shall have no hand free for my sword if we should need it.”
He felt her brace herself for a valiant effort, and strode on, half taking her weight, his sword ready in his hand, through the torch-flickering and uneasy ways, with the wild-dog turmoil fading behind them but still menacing in their ears. Keeping to the black sides of the streets where the light of the moon did not yet reach, he brought her back safe to the Governor’s Palace. The guards on the small side-gate from the fig garden never kept over-careful watch, and now were off on their own affairs, and they passed through unchallenged into the peace of the ruined garden-court. Thomas slammed his sword home into its sheath and swept up the girl, who by now was almost a dead weight, into his arms. A few moments later he was climbing the turnpike stair, kicking open the door of his quarters, coming to a halt in the lamp-lit outer chamber, with a sense of having reached a small island of quiet in the midst of storm-tossed seas.
Jassim, who had been sleeping in a corner, stumbled to his feet, blinking. “What have you there, Ibrahim Agha?”
“What does it look like? A girl. The streets are in a turmoil, they have burned down her home …”
Thomas crossed the outer chamber and gained his own sleeping quarters, and laid her down on the cushioned divan. “Bring the lamp closer; she’s wounded —”
“We should not look at her,” Jassim Khan protested. “It is for a woman —”
“Meanwhile she’s bleeding,” Thomas snapped.
The boy brought the lamp closer, keeping his face averted. He had been well brought up. “Is she a brothel girl? If not, her father —”
“She is not a brothel girl,” Thomas said for the second time. “And it seems she has no father to trouble about her life less than her honour. Any brothers we will deal with as best we may when the time comes.”
In the pool of light the girl lay very still, her eyes closed, her narrow face grey-white in the tangle of her dark hair that was harsh and vital as a horse’s mane. Thomas took one look and then turned his gaze quickly and carefully away. She would not have left her face bare to him had she been conscious, and to look into it, after that first involuntary glance, would have been to outrage the custom of her world, which had been his world for five years now. He turned his attention to finding where she was hurt. It was not hard; her left hand was twisted in a fold of her torn abba, and the black cloth which could not show a stain, showed juicy in the lamplight as though it contained ripe mulberries.
Very carefully, he untangled the s
opping folds and laid them back. Jassim drew in his breath with a hiss, as the hand was laid bare. The fourth finger and the top of the percussion were sheared off by a slanting sword-cut, the top joint of the third finger hanging by a strip of skin. She must have flung her hand up instinctively to ward either herself or someone else from the blade.
“Put the lamp down here beside me,” Thomas said. “Set water over the fire to warm. Bring towels and clean linen and the flask of arak — oh, and my muslin turban-scarf.”
“The one with the gold fringe?” Jassim sounded shocked.
“If that comes first to hand.”
“Won’t your shirt be enough?”
“For bandage linen, yes, the other is for her to cover her face from us. Quickly now.”
And as the orderly rose and crossed to the camel bag in the corner, he pushed back his sleeves and drew the Somali knife from his waist-shawl. The sooner she was rid of that bit of dangling flesh, the better; and Allah knew how little chance there would be of getting a hakim, even one of the army medics, through the streets that night.
It was only a moment’s work to cut through the thread of skin, and then he set to cutting away the blood-sodden folds of black cloth and gathering them together with the pathetic remains of what had lately been a living fingertip — the nail was still perfect, beautifully shaped and well cared for, its untouched perfection suddenly twisted at his guts — and dropped them into the bowl that Jassim brought for them, to be carried away and burned. The blood which had almost ceased to flow only increased a little with the severing of that final filament; he staunched it with one of the rough linen towels, and began to bathe and clean up the mutilated hand.
“Tear me some strips for bandages,” he said. “But first cover her face lest she awake and find herself unveiled before strangers.”
Jassim, who seemed by now to have come to terms with the unorthodox situation, had indeed brought the agha’s best turban-scarf, one that Tussun had given him, and squatting down beside him, arranged it with a kind of grudging gentleness to cover her hair with soft folds, drawing the end across her lower face and straightening the gold fringe with meticulous care on the cushion beside her head. Then he turned himself to tearing up Thomas’s spare shirt into bandage strips, the sharp sound of tearing linen ripping asunder the quiet of the room that had seemed so withdrawn from the city’s turmoil.
Having bathed away the blood which by now was only oozing, Thomas reached for the flask of arak which Jassim had set beside him. He had rigidly obeyed the Prophet’s ruling on alcohol since the day that he had become a Muslim; but, remembering Donald MacLeod and his wound-cleansing techniques, he had always carried a flask of the stuff with him in his saddle bags on campaign. Now, having bidden Jassim to pour away the blood-stained water, he splashed a little of the fiery liquid into the bowl and taking the girl’s hand dipped the oozing finger stumps into it.
He had expected the knife-work would bring her back to consciousness, but it seemed that the confusion of pain in the mangled hand had been too great to take account of the few moments of added pain. But the bite of raw spirit on raw flesh (Thomas remembered his own hour) was another matter. The hand that had been lax and unresisting in his suddenly flinched and fluttered, then returned to stillness, but this time a tense and rigid stillness that came of conscious will.
His eyes flicked to the girl’s face, and saw hers wide open above the folds of fine muslin; eyes of the surprisingly light grey that he had seen before, though not often, among the tribes, looking up at him in bewilderment from under slender black brows with a frown-line pencilled deep between.
She gave a small startled cry as the surprise of her own pain struck her, then fumbled up her sound hand and found the careful fold of muslin across her face.
“Lie still,” Thomas said. “There is no need for fear.”
“The soldiers — my father —”
“I will go back when I have bound your hand, and discover what is to be found out about your father.”
“There is nothing more to be found out; the soldiers killed him,” she said, her voice dull and the words faintly slurred, as though her tongue were stiff in her mouth. “Ayee! my hand is in the fire —”
“No, but it is hurt. Soon the pain will ease.” Thomas set aside the bowl and took the linen strip which Jassim held out to him, and began careful bandaging.
The grey eyes were still on his face, searching, with somewhere at the back of them the look of a wild thing ready to bolt. “What is this place? How came I here?”
“I brought you here. The street is not a good place to be tonight. This is a place where you are safe. Lie still and the Peace of Allah be with you.”
He finished his bandaging, knotted off the strip of linen, and got up, holding his own stained hands well away from himself. There was blood on his burnous too, but that would be nothing strange in the streets tonight, and it would serve until he got back. “I leave her in your care, knowing that I can trust you,” he said to the boy. “Let her sleep if she can. Give her a drink if she asks; watch her well, and if the blood starts to come through, add more bindings, but do not undo what I have done. We will get a hakim to her in the morning. Also a woman to be with her — as old and ugly as possible. Bar the door after me and let no one in until I return.”
He went out, hearing the door bar dropped into place behind him; and down the curling stair and along what remained of the elegant colonnade, checking to rinse the half dried blood from his hands in the water that still trickled grudgingly into an old fountain basin; then plunged back into the crowding city ways, heading for the place where he had come upon the girl.
The tumult in the streets was subsiding; he heard horses’ hooves, and at a cross way a small knot of Turkish cavalry swept across the street and on down the chasm of the narrow way opposite, in the direction from which the main uproar still came. He heard shouted orders. Ahmed Agha must have decided that the pillage had gone far enough and it was time to use his undeniable powers of discipline.
He reached the place he was heading for; it was empty now, and at the far end of the street the roof of the burning house had fallen in and the flames were sinking in the chambers nearest to the street. In the entrance, lit by the flames that still streamed upward from the inner part of the house, a man lay in a black pool of blood with his head half hacked from his shoulder, his empty eyes of a startlingly pale grey, staring up at the cold uncaring moon.
When Thomas got back to his quarters, after a pre-dawn visit to his own troops, unsettled and straining at the leash in the camp outside the walls, and a few hurried words with his fellow cavalry colonels as to the night’s happenings, the girl was sunk deep in the sleep of shock and exhaustion. He slept what remained of the night in his outer room, with Jassim curled in the corner. And the next time he spoke with her, her hand had been re-dressed by one of the army surgeons, and Jassim had found an old woman of great hideousness among those in the commander’s kitchen, who squatted on guard like a vast and benevolent black toad in the corner of the inner chamber.
The girl had drunk some milk — the part empty cup was still beside her — and pulled herself up to sit propped with cushions against the wall. Thomas’s turban scarf still covered her hair and was drawn across her face, and above it her eyes, filled with questioning, seemed to be waiting for him as he came in. The stillness of shock was still with her and seemed to fill the room; a strangely impersonal room now that everything of his had been carried out of it.
He came and squatted on his heels before her, palms together, head bowed a moment in formal greeting, “Salaam aleikum, Lady, how is it with you?”
“It is well enough with me,” she said; and then: “I have remembered now, how I came to be here. I have remembered the streets.”
“Better if you could have been spared that memory,” Thomas said.
“I owe you my life, Effendi. More than my life.”
Thomas said, “I also; there is a thing that I owe to
you. If Allah had not granted it to me to save something out of last night’s evil, I should never again have been free of the sights and sounds of last night in the streets.” He hesitated. “I went back to your house, to look for your father. The flames had not touched him, but — I am sorry — there was nothing to be done.”
“I know,” she said, “I saw the blow fall. They cried out that it was because they knew that he had sold goods and horses to the Wahabi, but I think it was because they knew that he had gold.”
“Allah’s pity upon you,” Thomas said. “Have you brothers? Any other kin?”
She shook her head. “My father came out of a far-off tribe to take my mother for his wife. There was blood feud between their tribes, and her people cast her out. She died when I was young, and my father was a strange man and took no second wife, and I am all the sons and all the daughters of my father’s house.”
She spoke calmly, with a kind of quiet desolation, but also with precision, not asking for pity, but seeking only to explain to him her exact position.
Something in the manner as well as the words jolted him under the heart. “Then do you count me for your brother, for as long as you have need of one,” he said.
For a moment she regarded him in stillness, head up, then bent it a little sideways. Something in the angle, something also in her tone when she answered, suggested also that her voice when not dulled by grief and shock might be beautiful. “By what name shall I know my brother?”
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