by Wilbur Smith
The word flashed through the alleys and souks, and was shouted from the rooftops and minarets. As it spread, a sombre, funereal mood descended on the city of Khartoum. Whispering dolefully as they came together, the inhabitants hurried to find a vantage-point from which they could gaze across the river and behold their fate.
Ryder Courtney was in the workshop in his compound behind the hospital and the red mud walls of Fort Burri when a servant brought him a note from David Benbrook, scribbled on a torn sheet of consular paper. Since first light that morning Ryder had been working with Jock McCrump on the repairs to the Intrepid this. When they had disconnected the punctured steam piping they discovered more damage than they had first suspected. Some of the metal fragments had been carried into the cylinders and had scored the liners. It was surprising that they had been able to make the return trip to the harbour.
“Damn good job I didnae let you go tearing away at full throttle,” Jock muttered morosely. “We would have had a right ballocks if I had.”
They had been obliged to sway the heavy engine out of the this’s hull on to the stone jetty. Then they transported it to the compound by ox-wagon, taking a circuitous route to avoid the narrow alleyways. They had been working on it for the last ten days, and the repairs were almost completed. Ryder wiped his hands on a ball of cotton waste, then glanced through the note. He handed it to Jock. “Do you want to come and watch the Lord Mayor’s show?”
Jock grunted. With long tongs he lifted a glowing sheet of metal from the forge and carried it to the anvil. “Like as not we’ll be having a gutful of that worthy Oriental gentleman Osman bloody Atalan without running out to stare at him now.” He hefted the heavy blacksmith’s hammer and began to pound the metal to shape. He ignored Ryder as he plunged it into a trough of water. It cooled in a hissing cloud of steam and Jock measured it critically. He was shaping a patch for one of the shell holes in this’s hull. He was not satisfied with the result, and whistled tunelessly as he returned it to the forge. Ryder grinned and went out to the stables for his horse.
He crossed the canal on the earthen causeway, and rode through the scurrying crowds to the gates of the consular palace. He hoped to avoid running into General Gordon, and was pleased to see his unmistakable khaki-uniformed silhouette on the upper parapet of Mukran Fort with half a dozen members of his Egyptian staff gathered around him. Each man had either a telescope or a pair of field-glasses focused on the north bank of the Blue Nile, so Ryder was able to ride past the fort and reach the consulate without drawing their attention. He handed his horse over to one of the syces at the gate of the stableyard and strode through the barren gardens to the legation entrance of the palace. The sentries recognized him at once and saluted him as he entered the main foyer.
An Egyptian secretary came hurrying to meet him. Like everyone else he wore a nervous, worried expression. “The consul is on top of the watchtower, Mr. Courtney,” the man told him. “He asked you to be good enough to join him there.”
When Ryder stepped out on to the balcony the Benbrook family did not notice him immediately. They were grouped around the big telescope on its tripod. Amber was taking her turn, standing on a cane-backed chair to reach the eyepiece. Then Saffron looked round and let out a squeak of delight. “Ryder!” She ran to seize his arm. “You must come and see. It’s so exciting.”
Ryder glanced at Rebecca, and felt a tightening in the pit of his stomach. She showed no ill effects from their recent curtailed voyage downstream. On the contrary, she looked cool, even under the layers of green georgette petticoats that ballooned out over her crinoline. There was a bright yellow ribbon around the crown of her straw hat, and her hair was arranged in ringlets over her shoulders. It caught the sunlight.
“Don’t let that child pester you, Mr. Courtney.” She gave him a demure smile. “She has been in an overbearing mood since breakfast.”
“Overbearing means regal and queenly,” said Saffron, smugly.
“It does not.” Amber looked back at her from the telescope. “It means bumptious and insufferable.”
“Peace be unto both of you.” Ryder chuckled. “Sisterly love is a beautiful thing.”
“Glad you could come,” David called to him. “Sorry to tear you away from your work, but this is worth a look. You have had enough of the telescope, Amber. Let Mr. Courtney have a turn.”
Ryder stepped up to the parapet, but before he stooped to the eyepiece he stared out across the river. It was an extraordinary spectacle: as far as he could see the land seemed to be on fire. It took a moment to realize that this was not smoke that gave the sky a dun, fuming aspect, but the dust cloud thrown up by a vast moving mass of living things, human and animal, that stretched away to the eastern horizon.
Even at such a distance there was a low reverberation in the air, like the muted hum of the beehive, or the murmur of the sea on a windless day. It was the sound of braying donkeys, lowing herds, fat-tailed sheep and thousands of hoofs, marching feet, the creaking of camel burdens and the squeal of axles. It was the clatter of giraffe-hide war shields, of spears and blades rattling in their scabbards, the rumble of the gun-carriages and the ammunition train.
Then, more clearly, he heard the trumpeting of the ombeyas, the Sudanese battle trumpets carved from a single ivory tusk. The warlike call of these instruments carried an immense distance in the desert airs. Underlying it was the throbbing bass beat of hundreds of huge copper drums. Each emir rode at the head of his tribe with his drummers, trumpeters and banner-bearers preceding him. He was closely surrounded by his mulazemin, his bodyguards, his brothers and blood-brothers, and his aggagiers. Though they rode united now by the holy jihad of the Divine Mahdi most of these tribes carried their centuries-old blood feuds, and none trusted another.
The banners were of rainbow hues, embroidered with texts from the Koran, and exaltations to Allah. Some were so large that it took three or four men to hold them aloft, rippling and snapping in the hot desert breeze. The banners and the harlequin-patched jib has of the warriors made a gorgeous show against the drab landscape.
“How many do you estimate there are?” David asked, as though he was speaking about the race-day crowd on Epsom Down.
“The devil alone knows.” Ryder shook his head doubtfully. “From here, we can’t see the end of them.”
“Fifty thousand, would you hazard?”
“More,” said Ryder. “Maybe many more.”
“Can you make out the entourage of Osman Atalan?”
“He will be in the van, naturally.” Ryder placed his eye to the telescope and trained it forward. He picked out the scarlet and black banners. “There is the devil himself. Right at the forefront!”
“I thought you said you had never before laid eyes upon him,” David said.
“No introduction necessary. That’s him, I tell you.”
In all that hubbub and bustle the slim figure on the cream-coloured horse was unmistakable for its dignity and presence.
At that moment there was a sudden commotion among the vast congregation on the far bank. Through the telescope Ryder saw Osman rise in the stirrups and brandish his broadsword. The front ranks of his mulazemin broke into a furious charge, and he led them straight at a small group of horsemen that rode to meet them from the direction of Omdurman. As the masses of cavalry and camels dashed forward they discharged volleys of joyous gunfire into the air. The blue smoke mingled with the dust cloud and the spearheads and sword blades twinkled like stars in the murk.
“Who is that they are riding to meet?” David asked sharply.
Through the lens Ryder concentrated on the small group of horsemen, and exclaimed as he recognized the green turbans of the two leading horsemen. “Damme, if it’s not the Divine Mahdi himself and his khalifa, the mighty Abdullahi.” Ryder tried to make his tone sardonic and pejorative, but no one was deceived.
“With that merry band of cut-throats sitting across it, the road to the north is firmly closed.” Although David said it breezily, th
ere was a shadow in his eyes as he looked to his three daughters. “There is no longer any escape from this wretched place.” Any retort that Ryder could make would have been famous, and they watched in silence the meeting of the men who held the fate of the city and all its inhabitants in their bloody hands.
With bared sword and his long plait thumping against his back, Osman Atalan charged straight at the mounted figure of the Mahdi. The prophet of Allah saw him coming in a whirlwind of dust, to the deafening bray of the war horns and the pounding of drums. He reined in his white stallion. Khalifa Abdullahi stopped his horse a few paces behind his master, and they waited for the emir to come on.
Osman brought Sweet Water to a plunging, skidding halt and shook his broadsword in the Mahdi’s face. “For God and his Prophet!” he screamed. The blade that had slain men and elephants in their hundreds was now only a finger’s breadth from the Mahdi’s eyes.
The Mahdi sat unmoved with that serene smile on his lips and the falja showing between them.
Osman spun Sweet Water round and galloped away. His bodyguard and banner-bearers followed him at the same wild gallop, firing their Martini-Henry rifles into the air. At a distance of three hundred paces Osman rallied his men and they regrouped at his back. He lifted his sword high, and again they charged in a serried phalanx, straight at the two lone figures. At the last instant Osman pulled up the mare so violently that she came down on her haunches.
“La il aha ill allah There is but one God!” he yelled. “Muhammad Rasul Allah! Muhammad is the prophet of God!”
Five times the horsemen retreated and five times they charged back. At the fifth charge Muhammad Ahmed, the Divine Mahdi, raised his right hand and said softly, “Allah kariml God is generous.”
Immediately Osman threw himself from Sweet Water’s back and kissed the Mahdi’s sandal led foot in the stirrup. This was an act of the utmost humility, a rendering up of one man’s soul to another. The Mahdi smiled down at him tenderly. He emanated a peculiar perfume, a mixture of sandalwood and attar of roses, known as the Breath of the Mahdi. “I am pleased that you have come to join my array and the jihad against the Turk and the infidel. Rise up, Osman Atalan. You are assured of my favour. You may enter with me into the city of Allah, Omdurman.”
On the flat roof of his house, the Mahdi sat cross-legged on a low angareb, a couch covered with a silk prayer rug and strewn with cushions. There was a screen of reed matting over the terrace to shield them from the sun, but the sides were open to the cooling breeze off the river and to provide a view across the wide expanse of the Victoria Nile to the city of Khartoum. The ugly square blockhouse of Mukran Fort dominated the de fences of the besieged city. Emir Osman Atalan sat facing him, and a slave maid knelt before him with a dish of water on which floated a few oleander petals. Osman dipped water from it and made the ritual ablutions, then dismissed the woman with a wave. Another lovely Galla slave girl placed between them a silver tray that bore three jewelled long-stemmed silver cups: chalices looted from the Roman Catholic cathedral in El Obeid.
“Refresh yourself, Osman Atalan. You have travelled far,” the Mahdi invited him.
Osman made an elegant gesture of refusal. ‘I thank you for your hospitality, but I have eaten and drunk with the dawn and I will not eat again until the setting of the sun.”
The Mahdi nodded. He knew of the emir’s frugality. He was well aware of the peculiar religious enlightenment and the sense of dedicated purpose brought on by fasting and denial of the appetite. The memories of his sojourn on Abbas Island were as fresh as if it had taken place the previous day, and not three years before. He lifted a silver cup to his lips, displaying for an instant the gap between his front teeth, sign of his divinity. Of course, he never drank alcohol but he was partial to a drink made from date syrup and ground ginger.
Once he had been lean and hard as this fierce desert warrior, but he was no longer a solitary hermit. He was the spiritual leader of a nation, chosen by God. Once he had been a barefoot ascetic who had denied himself all sensual pleasures. Not long ago it had been boasted through all the Sudan that Muhammad Ahmed had never known a woman’s body. He was virgin no longer and his harem contained the first fruits of all his mighty victories. His was first choice of the captured women. Every sheikh and emir brought him gifts of the most lovely young girls in their territory, and it was a political imperative that he accept their largesse. The numbers of his wives and concubines already exceeded a thousand, and increased each day. His women fascinated him. He spent half his days among them.
They were dazzled by his appearance, his height and grace, his fine features, the winged birthmark and the angelic smile that disguised all his emotions. They loved his perfume and the gap between his teeth. They were intoxicated by his wealth and power: his treasury, the Beit el Mai, held gold, jewels and millions in specie, the spoils of his conquests and the sack of the principal cities of the Nile. The women sang, “The Mahdi is the sun of our sky, and the water of our Nile.”
Now he set aside the silver cup and held out his hand. One of the waiting girls knelt to offer him a scented silk cloth with which to dab the sticky syrup from his lips.
Behind the Mahdi, on another cushioned angareb, sat the Khalifa Abdullahi. He was a handsome man with chiselled features and a nose like the beak of an eagle, but his skin was dappled, like a leopard’s, with the scars of smallpox. His nature was also that of the leopard, predatory and cruel. Emir Osman Atalan feared no man or beast, except these two men who sat before him now. These he feared with all his heart.
The Mahdi lifted one gracefully shaped hand and pointed across the river. Even with the naked eye they were able to make out the solitary figure on the parapets of the Mukran Fort.
“There is Gordon Pasha, the son incarnate of Satan,” said the Mahdi.
“I will bring his head to you before the beginning of Ramadan,” said his khalifa.
“Unless the infidel reaches him before you do,” suggested the Mahdi, and his voice was soft and pleasant to hear. He turned to Osman. “Our scouts report to us that the infidel army is at last on the move. They are sailing southwards in a flotilla of steamers along the river to rescue our enemy from my vengeance.”
“At the beginning they will move at the pace of the chameleon.” The khalifa endorsed his master’s report. “However, once they pass through the cataracts and reach the bend of the river at Abu Hamed, they will have the north wind behind their boats and the current will abate. The speed of their advance will increase six-fold. They will reach Khartoum before Low Nile, and we cannot assault the city before the river falls and exposes Gordon Pasha’s de fences
“You must send half of your army northwards under your most trustworthy sheikhs and stop the infidels on the river before they reach Abu Klea. Then you must annihilate them, just as you destroyed the armies of Baker Pasha and Hicks Pasha.” The Mahdi stared into Osman’s face, and Osman’s spirits stirred. “Will you deliver to me my enemy, Osman Atalan?”
“Holy One, I will give him into your hands,” Osman replied. “In God’s Name and with the blessing of Allah, I will deliver to you that city and all those within.” The three warriors of God gazed across the Nile like hunting cheetahs surveying herds of grazing gazelle upon the plains.
Captain Penrod Ballantyne had been waiting in the antechamber of Her Britannic Majesty’s consulate in Cairo for forty-eight minutes. He checked the time on the clock above the door to the inner office of the consul general. On the left-hand side of the massive carved door hung a life-sized portrait of Queen Victoria as she had been on her wedding day, pure and pretty with the bloom of youth still on her and the crown of Empire on her head, On the opposite side of the door there was a matching portrait of her consort, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, handsome and marvellously bewhiskered.
Penrod Ballantyne shot a glance at himself in the gilt-framed ceiling-high mirror that adorned the side wall of the antechamber and, with satisfaction, noted his own likeness to the young Prince Conso
rt, now long dead while Penrod was young and vital. The captain’s epaulettes on his shoulders and the frogging of his uniform jacket were bright new gold. His riding boots were polished to a glassy sheen, and the fine glove leather creased around his ankles like the bellows of an accordion. His cavalry sabre hung down along the scarlet side stripe of his riding breeches. He wore his dolman slung over one shoulder and clasped at his throat with a gold chain, and carried his Hussar’s bearskin busby under his right arm. On his left breast he wore the purple watered silk with the bronze cross inscribed “For Valour’, which had been cast from the Russian guns captured at Sebastopol. There was no higher military decoration in the Empire.
Sir Evelyn Baring’s secretary came in. “The consul general will see you now.”
Penrod had been standing to preserve the pristine appearance of his uniform creases at the elbows, down the back of his tunic and at the knees of his breeches were unsightly. He replaced the tall busby on his head, glancing in the mirror to make certain it was centred low on his eyebrows with the chain across the chin, then marched through the carved doors into the inner office.
Sir Evelyn Baring was seated at his desk, reading from a sheaf of despatches in front of him. Penrod came to attention and saluted. Baring beckoned him in without glancing at him. The secretary closed the door.
Sir Evelyn Baring was officially the agent of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government in Egypt, and her consul general in Cairo with plenipotentiary powers. In truth he was the viceroy, who ruled the ruler of Egypt. Since the Khedive had been saved from the mobs of rebellion by the British Army and the fleet of the Royal Navy in Alexandria harbour, Egypt had become, in all but name, a British protectorate.
The Khedive Tawfig Pasha was a weak youth and no match for a man like Baring and the mighty Empire he represented. He had been forced to abdicate all his powers, and in return the British had given him and his people the peace and prosperity they had not known since the age of Pharaoh Ptolemy. Sir Evelyn Baring possessed one of the most brilliant minds in the colonial service. The Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and his cabinet were aware of and highly appreciative of his qualities. However, towards his underlings, his manner was patronizing and condescending. Behind his back they called him “Sir Over Bearing’.