Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  In one of the silences Attici motioned again. Atop a cliff on the other side of the gorge a prisoner was marched forward by a warrior. Everyone on both lines was watching, mesmerized by the scene.

  “The mokkadem,” one of the tirailleurs gasped. “He is still alive.”

  The prisoner was made to kneel. The leather hood was removed from his head. He blinked in the bright light and looked around, taking in the scene. He seemed to understand what was going to happen, and his serene voice of prayer could be heard over the distance. Behind him the Targui raised his great sword in the air, holding it with both hands above the mokkadeni’s head, then crashing it down in a massive blow. The holy man tumbled forward into the gorge. The other prisoners taken at Tadjenout were brought forward and forced to shout their names. They cried and shook their heads and cringed at the sword. They had suffered through hell, to get to this. One by one they were beheaded and pitched forward into the abyss.

  “My God,” said Dianous dumbly, finally aroused. He stood up and stepped forward, and turned to beckon to the men behind him. Others had also risen, horrified at the sight, the whole of the French force now stirred to attack. It was what Attici had been waiting for. From various places hidden among the rocks the Tuareg rifles that had been silent all day opened fire. Dianous fell, shot through the head. Brame died, and then Marjolet, trying to help him. Up and down the line Shamba fell, and some of the tirailleurs. The remaining French rifles returned fire furiously, with little effect. The Tuareg warriors were well hidden, and shrilled their success.

  Attici gloated, his final surprise complete.

  * * *

  The sun was setting behind dunes that shone like hills of gold. Rose-colored clouds filled the western sky, light wisps of cotton lit on fire by the sun. They were luminescent, bathing Amguid in an eerie dreamlike glow. It was the most beautiful sunset Paul had ever seen.

  He sat slumped over, drained. They had finished burying the dead in shallow graves. He had done Hakeem’s by himself, lifting the little body of his aide and setting it gently inside the rim of stones, taking care to face his head to the east in the way of Islam, then scooping on sand and dirt, and finally packing stones on top. Hakeem had been alive when the battle started, but sometime during the afternoon fever or poison had taken him unnoticed. Paul hadn’t known until he had come to give him water.

  After the battle he had crawled through the French positions, assessing their condition. In all, eighteen men had died, leaving thirty-three who were half-dead themselves. Paul felt intensely alone. Among the French only he and Pobeguin had survived, and Pobeguin was raving.

  It was all up to him now.

  Amguid had been quiet for hours. The Tuareg were still there, but refused to show themselves. They were scattered, waiting. Paul studied their positions, calculating distances and odds. Reluctantly he kept coming to the same conclusion. Their opportunity had passed, lost in cowardice and incompetence, in poison and the awful cunning of their opponents.

  “We cannot reach the well,” he dejectedly told El Madani.

  The old rifleman nodded. “I agree. I counted nearly fifty of the devils dead, but they are still five times our number. They have water and food. They can wait forever. We have to go around. We have to move on.”

  “What do you think they’ll do next?”

  El Madani thought about that. “I may be wrong, but I think they are finished with us, Lieutenant. They may send a few men after us to harass us, but this is the northern end of their country. They have no need to go farther. They have shown us the door. They are counting on the desert to continue their work. If some of us survive to see Wargla and tell the world what happened, so much the better for their cause.”

  “I expect they’re right about the desert.” Paul had no illusions about what they faced. It had been only three weeks since the massacre at Tadjenout, three weeks that seemed a lifetime, and they were not yet halfway to Wargla.

  “It is a shame to miss Amguid, w’allahi,” El Madani said wistfully. “I was looking forward to eating some of the fish.”

  Paul looked at him sharply. “There are no fish at Amguid, El Madani. Hakeem ranted that nonsense with me. Don’t you start now.” Paul knew he was lost if El Madani’s head started going.

  “Of course there are, Lieutenant. Why would I make up such a thing? I saw them myself on the way south. I thought everyone did. I can’t believe you missed them.”

  Paul stared hard into the tirailleur’s eyes. El Madani was telling the truth.

  Paul’s gaze shifted to Hakeem’s grave. It had been a little thing, perhaps, but he felt even worse than ever. You’ve changed and gone cruel, Hakeem had told him. He’d died angry at him, over some damned fish in the middle of the Sahara.

  * * *

  They left in the middle of the night, putting the weakest men on top of the remaining camels, everyone else struggling behind. They walked all through the night and the next day without food or water or a single stop. Every so often they saw the Tuareg, following, but the blue men stayed well out of range and left them alone. The second night they rested for an hour and then moved on. There was desperation in their pace, a race between their weak bodies and time and the desert.

  Paul tried to remember how far it was to Wargla. He couldn’t. Everything about the journey south ran together in his mind. He tried to talk whenever he could to El Madani, but talking stole moisture and energy. Pretty soon he contented himself with grunts, and then grunts seemed to cost too much and he could only shrug or nod.

  They found water after two days, or was it three, ghastly remnants of men crowding around a dirty little hole where in their hurry they took in as much sand as water. In the middle of the night four tirailleurs stole two of the camels and deserted, their tracks disappearing off to the north. Paul wanted to chase them, but there was no way. In frustration he fired his rifle in their direction, the bullet soaring off into sandy oblivion.

  They had one camel left. They killed and butchered it quickly. After that Pobeguin had to walk. His eyes were lost in dark circles. His body trembled, his muscles giving up. He was confused all the time, asking nonsensical questions. He was dying in bits.

  They dared not stop, for to stop was to die. To stop was to delay Wargla. Wargla was an obsession; Wargla was life. Hour after hour they walked, day after burning day on sand and gravel and granite. Each day bent their backs and shredded their feet a little more. They stumbled beneath the stars and the moon, past mountains and plateaus. They went two whole days through a stretch of desert where there was not the smallest trace of life – not a fly or a blade of grass, not a lizard or a bird.

  Paul found discipline almost impossible to maintain. There was nothing to say to lift the men’s spirits. Threats made no difference. The backs of his men had bent at Aïn El Kerma, and broken at Amguid. Now each man was engaged in a private struggle to survive the death march. There wasn’t enough food or water for them all. Inexorably, each man began fending for himself.

  Paul saw a lizard at the same time as two other men. It was sunning itself on a wide flat rock and seemed oblivious to their presence. They all charged at once, only to find that the little reptile had disappeared.

  “Idiots!” Paul shrieked at them. “If you’d let me catch it we’d have had something to eat!”

  “And which of us would have eaten?” It was a question without an answer.

  Paul rebuked himself for letting things slip but didn’t know how to fix them.

  Men died. They would slow and then drop, or, after a rest, not get up again. Sometimes no one noticed.

  They found grass on the lee side of a large dune. It was stiff and brittle but they ate it anyway, breaking it into little pieces that tore at raw throats like tiny spears. They ate belts and sandals, cutting the leather into little bits just big enough to chew. Their jaw muscles cramped and stopped working.

  El Madani caught a jerboa, a skimpy little mouse that hopped right in front of hi
m while he was resting. The old tirailleur got his hands around it and squeezed until it moved no more. He skinned it carefully and ate it raw. Another man found a snake just at dawn, a viper curled into a little ball beneath the sand, and had its head off before the cold sluggish thing could move. Flies swirled incessantly around faces and eyes. One landed on Paul’s tongue. He recoiled and began to spit it out, but then closed his mouth and swallowed. It stuck in his dry throat, where for long minutes he felt it moving before it went down. After that he tried to catch them with his hands.

  One morning a gazelle wandered into view. It was upwind and hadn’t picked up their scent. A dozen rifles slipped from a dozen shoulders and a hail of fire shattered the quiet. When the smoke cleared they could see the gazelle bounding off, frightened but unhurt.

  Late one day angry clouds gathered overhead, dark and violent and laced with lightning, but the storm they prayed for never came. The clouds thinned and passed into memory. They found a well that had sweet water. They stayed a whole day, unwilling to leave the precious liquid behind. Other wells along the way were sometimes dry, or yielded only brackish muck that served for water and filled their bags.

  Paul hurt everywhere, his body a collection of blisters and burns and scrapes that ran together in seamless agony. Each step aggravated something on his foot or inside his thighs or under his arms or in his crotch. His feet were raw, the leather of his soles finally gone. Only the thoughts of revenge that consumed him made it possible to keep putting one foot in front of another.

  They came upon the body of a camel, mummified by the desert air. Its skin was dried and stretched tight over its gaunt frame, its eye sockets frozen in a timeless stare of death. They fell to their knees and cut it into strips, knives hacking and sawing through the desiccated body as if it were shoe leather. What had been flesh was now powder. They mixed it with water into a paste and drank it eagerly. With bare hands they pulled the skeleton apart, the bones snapping like dry twigs, and ground them with rocks and boot heels until they had more powder to mix with the water, and they drank that too. They grunted while they worked and ate, like animals.

  The wind picked up and blew at them from the north. It was stronger than before, and they struggled against it. El Madani watched the sky and waved at Paul to look.

  “We need to keep together,” he whispered hoarsely, each word painful. “Storm. Big.”

  For an afternoon the wind stayed steady, throwing a river of sand at them that rose only a few feet off the ground. Above that level the air was clear. On camels they would have been above it, but as it was it assaulted them, finding eyes and ears and noses and throats and cuts, burning and blasting and sucking away what precious little sanity they could cling to. They covered themselves with bits of cloth. The wind grew stronger, shrieking, the sand rising like a fog until it blocked the sun, the storm gathering strength until they had to stop because they could walk no more, could not see their way or fight the wind.

  Without shelter, they collapsed where they stood and huddled alone under the raging storm, the sand pouring like liquid over their backs and collecting in great drifts like driven snow. Paul tried to shout at El Madani but his voice was lost in the noise. He couldn’t see anyone or anything but the wall of sand. He took off his shirt and lay flat on his belly and tried to make a tent for his head, a little space where he could breathe. It was dark and suffocating beneath it. For the first time since the Hoggar he was desperately afraid. He thought of the stories he’d heard of the great storms of the Sahara, storms in which entire caravans, even armies had been lost, swallowed whole by the desert. Suffocated and buried and forgotten.

  The storm raged through the night and all the next day and that night as well. It was hard to tell night from day; it was always dark. Whenever he thought the gale could grow no stronger it would, the wind shrieking at him like a thousand djenoums, making him frantic for its end. He had lost his water bag and had nothing to drink. He had not slept for two days and nights and knew he could take it no more. He called out for Floop and cried for his mother. He talked to his father. He had never done that, but now he mumbled and groaned and babbled at his dead father, berating him for leaving, begging him to come back, to help.

  Twice his hand felt for the pistol at his belt, his fingers closing over the handle. The first time he pulled his hand away, empty. The second time the gun came up next to his head. Laboriously he turned it around in the cramped space until it faced him. He put the barrel in his mouth, until he could taste the promise of its sweet release. So close, so close now. His finger closed over the trigger and he shut his eyes and his nose flared and he took a deep breath.

  He cried out in pain. He couldn’t do it.

  Oh God please let it end, please please, if you’ll just let it end I will believe again, I will recant the blasphemies and the doubts and the heresies and be a good Catholic until the day I die.

  But there was no end, not for long hours, not until the early morning of the third day when the winds began to subside. He refused to believe it at first, thinking the desert was playing another of its cruel tricks, but gradually the noise abated and the air cleared, and the dawn came pink and glorious to a new day.

  The men roused themselves slowly, stirring from their beds of sand. Not everyone got up. Some had died in the storm, suffocated or claimed by madness or thirst or hunger or by their own hand. Legs and arms and ends of turbans poked up through the sand to mark their places. No one had the desire to dig them up to find out how they’d died. They were already buried.

  * * *

  For two more days they walked, withered sticks of men whose steps grew increasingly unsteady. A flock of crows appeared and followed them like a black shadow of death. The birds were big and hideous. They cawed and danced on the sand, taunting the men through beaks drawn back as if they were smiling. The tirailleurs tried to shoot them but the crows just hopped back.

  Djemel, the noseless camel driver, died beside the well of Gassi Touil. He had seemed all right the night before, but in the morning he had just not gotten up. His little body was curled up around the sack he used for collecting camel dung. They threw some sand over him and placed a few stones. Another tomb in a ritual that had become routine.

  Paul noticed more conversation than usual that morning. Normally when the men weren’t walking they collapsed in silence where they stopped, too spent to talk. When they walked they ranged out over large areas, looking for something to eat. Now, getting ready to leave, some huddled together in little groups. He noticed a few of them staring, but they looked away quickly. If he came near they stopped talking. Something was going on. He would ask El Madani about it.

  Before they had walked very far Belkasem dropped back. Paul saw him away in the distance. He had turned and was walking back to the well, his sword draped over his shoulders like a harness, as usual.

  He walked over to join El Madani. “Where is Belkasem going?”

  El Madani shrugged. “To perdition.”

  “We are already there,” Paul whispered hoarsely, glad for what he thought was levity from the old tirailleur. “Why would he want more?”

  “Maybe he’s hunting. I don’t know.” He didn’t want to talk. He avoided Paul’s eyes.

  They had stopped to rest at midday before Belkasem caught up with them. He struggled under a heavy load wrapped in dirty rags. He walked up to where Paul sat and dropped a bundle of meat. Paul looked at him in amazement.

  “Take some, Lieutenant,” Belkasem said eagerly. “I thought I saw it, back by the well. That is why I returned, to see. Hamdullilah, I was right! Allah has blessed us at last with good fortune. A great mountain sheep!”

  Paul blinked, staring at what was on the ground. His brain stirred slowly in the heat. It took him a long time to comprehend. The realization swept over him at last. It was no mountain sheep. He recoiled in horror and rolled away in fear. He needed to vomit but there was nothing in his stomach. He got to his knees. He coughed and choked and tried to
spit.

  He rose and staggered toward Belkasem. The cook regarded him warily, the colonel’s sword still in his hand. He would use it on the lieutenant. His eyes promised he would.

  “What have you done? How could you? Oh sweet Jesus, Belkasem. If you touch another man, dead or alive, I will kill you. Oh God, oh God, forgive him, forgive us all. Bury it, Belkasem. Bury it now.”

  The butcher shook his head. He bent over to pick it up. “If you will not eat, others will.” Paul’s boot lashed out and caught Belkasem in the temple. He collapsed next to the flesh.

  “Bury it, I said! Bury it!” He was looking at the other tirailleurs, but no one moved to obey. Paul fired his pistol in the air. Men flinched but remained in their places.

  El Madani walked up to him. Paul looked at him through eyes wild with horror. El Madani gently touched his shoulder.

  “It is not the best thing now, Lieutenant, to bury it. It is the best thing now, to eat it. What has been done is done, and will not be changed. He was already dead.”

  “No! I cannot allow it! I will not!” Paul pushed him, but El Madani stood firm and caught him by the arm. Paul would have shot him, but he had been through much with this man. El Madani was not the enemy. El Madani was a rock.

  “We will die if we do not eat, Lieutenant. Where is the wisdom in that? Have we come so far, only to die here?”

  “Not this way, Madani, not this way!” Paul collapsed to his knees, his voice a choked sob. He tried to push sand over the meat, to cover it up, but two of the tirailleurs stood and dragged it back out of the way. He looked from one set of eyes to another, and saw their resolve. They were against him in this, all of them.

  Even El Madani.

  Paul looked to Pobeguin for support. The Breton was shaken. The poison had never cleared from his brain. He was physically exhausted, near death himself. His expression was vacant, giving only the faintest hint that he understood what was happening. He looked at Paul and at El Madani and at the pile of meat on the ground. A tear formed in his eye and rolled down his dusty cheek. Then he nodded slowly.