by Wilbur Smith
Amber ran a few paces down the alley, then turned and crept back to the entrance of the redoubt. She watched Penrod disappear into the darkness. “I am sick and tired of being treated like a baby,” she whispered. She hesitated only a moment before she followed him.
She moved quietly and self-effacingly along the back of the parapet so as not to attract the attention of the troopers who were manning the firing embrasures. They are all too busy to worry about me, she thought. Her confidence swelled, and she hurried forward to look for Penrod. What if he needs me? I will be no use sitting in my bedroom at the palace. She saw his tall figure just ahead.
Penrod was already standing at the parapet that overlooked the beach. The straw-filled decoys had been dragged away and now live riflemen leant on the firing sills, peering down upon the dark beach. He had his drawn sword in his right hand. Amber felt a prickle of pride. He is so brave and noble, she thought. She found a place to hide in a corner of the rear wall and sank down behind it. From here she could watch over him. A tight, brittle silence held all the men at the firing wall.
Suddenly Amber realized how few of them were spread out thinly along the wall, twenty paces between them. These men did not seem enough to stop the hordes of the Dervish.
Then a man close to where Amber knelt whispered so softly that she could barely catch the words. “Here they come.” His voice quavered with fear. The breech-block of his Martini-Henry snicked as he chambered a round. He lifted the weapon to his shoulder, but before he could press the trigger an open hand slapped across his face.
As he reeled sideways Penrod seized him by his collar and spoke close to his ear: “Fire before my command, and I will have you blown from the cannon’s mouth,” he promised. Al-Faroque’s execution had left a deep impression on all the Egyptians who had witnessed it. Penrod pushed the man back to his position and they waited.
Then Penrod drew breath sharply. The first Dervish boat glided in towards the beach below. As it touched the sand a dark horde of Ansar clambered out into the waist-deep water and waded on to the narrow strip of mud below the walls. They carried their swords at shoulder height and moved with barely a sound. From the dark waters behind them appeared a flotilla of small dhows and feluccas, each packed with a mass of men.
“Hold your fire!” Penrod strode back and forth along the parapet, keeping his puny force under control with his savage whisper. The feluccas and dhows kept coming in until the beach was packed with hundreds of Ansar. There was not room for all of them on firm ground and the ones in the rear were still waist deep in the river. Those in front began to rip down the barricade that blocked the entrance to the drainage creek.
“Steady now! Steady!” Penrod exhorted them.
Part of the barricade crashed down and the Dervish swarmed through. Their war cry went up: “There is no God but God!”
“Volley fire!” Penrod shouted and the rifles crashed out. The Dervish rushed on through the hail of bullets. Then the first rockets soared into the night sky, and the masses of Dervish swarmed like columns of ants in the weird greenish light. The riflemen fired down into them but there were so many that the bullets had little effect. When the front ranks reached the harbour wall they clambered up it, the rear ranks shoving from below. As they came over the top the defenders thrust with the bayonets.
Penrod strode along the wall, firing his new Webley pistol point blank into their bearded faces. In his right hand he carried his sabre and when the revolver was empty he slashed and hacked with the blade. The dead and wounded Ansar toppled back on to their comrades, who were climbing up behind them. The Egyptian line was too flimsy to hold them in check much longer: all along the top of the wall knots of Dervish were gaining footholds. Their two-handed crusader blades hissed through the air with the sound of bats’ wings. One of the Egyptians reeled back from the parapet with his right arm sliced off cleanly above the elbow. His blood was inky black in the light of the rockets.
“Back!” shouted Penrod. “Fall back to the second line!” Even in her own terror, Amber was startled by how clearly his voice carried above the uproar. His men formed quickly into a skirmishing line, bayonets facing outwards, and they retreated backwards along the top of the wall. For a terrible moment Amber thought she would be left behind, but she sprang up and ran like a startled hare. Instinctively she knew that the Gatling emplacement was the strongest point of the defence, and headed for it.
She reached it well ahead of Penrod and his men, and scrambled to the top of the wall of sandbags. As she hung there, someone grabbed her arm from the far side and dragged her over. She fell on top of her rescuer. He smelt of rotten fish heads, and glared at her with a horrific squint, his face green in the light of the flares. “Nazeera will kill you with her bare hands if she finds out you are here.” He pushed her roughly into the dugout in the back wall, just as Penrod led his men back in a rush.
“Gatling gunner! Open fire!” P,enrod had selected the man on the crank handle of the gun for his strength and stamina. Sergeant Khaled was a colossal black man from one of the Nubian tribes of upper Egypt. Men like him made the finest soldiers in all the army of the Khedive. He bobbed up and down like a marionette as he worked. The brightly burnished barrels spun, like the revolving spokes of a chariot wheel. The flickering glare of muzzle flashes lit the parapet as brightly as a stage.
With a sound like a giant ripping up a roll of heavy canvas, a continuous stream of bullets tore into the ranks of Ansar as they swarmed forward. The heavy lead bullets slogged into living flesh, and the ricochets screamed off the stone parapets, almost drowning the clamour of the Dervish force. Traversing back and forth the Gatling scythed them down, piling heaps of corpses along the front of the wall. Those who followed scrambled over them and grabbed at the barrels of the rifles that aimed at them through the embrasures, trying to tear the smoking weapons from the hands of the defenders on the far side of the wall. The soldiers thrust at them with their bayonets, screaming with battle rage, and the Dervish screamed back at the agony of the steel slicing deeply into their bodies. Then the barrels of the Gatling swung back and blew them away, like the khamsin wind. The last of the Dervish tumbled off the revetment, and lay in huddles or dragged themselves through the black slick of the creek bed.
Sergeant Khaled straightened up and the gun fell silent. His black face was split with a white and ferocious grin, and his barrel chest ran with rivers of sweat that gleamed in the green light of the flares.
“Reload!” Penrod shouted, as he filled the chambers of his own revolver from the loops on his belt. “Get ready for the next wave.”
The loaders came running up with the ammunition buckets, and the shiny copper-cased cartridges cascaded into the Gatling hopper. Other ammunition boys ran along the parapet, doling out paper packets of Boxer-Henry ammunition to the riflemen. The water-carriers followed them, squirting water from the nozzles of the skins directly into the parched mouths of the soldiers.
“Be ready for them. They are not beaten. They will come back through the creek again.” Penrod moved down the parapet, talking to the men. The trooper whose arm had been hacked off had died from loss of blood. They laid his body against the rear wall and covered him with a blanket. Penrod started back towards the Gatling to bolster the courage of Sergeant Khaled and his gunners, but as he passed the doorway to his dugout he saw a small white face staring out at him. “Amber! I thought you had gone.”
Now that she was discovered she decided to brazen it out. “I knew you didn’t mean to send me away. Anyway, it’s too late now. I have to stay.”
He was about to debate this point with her, but from the depths of the creek bed rose the dread chorus of Dervish war cries. The hordes poured back in a flood that filled the creek from side to side.
Penrod drew the Webley from the holster on his belt and broke it open to check that it was fully reloaded. He snapped the breech closed. “I know you can use this. I have seen you practising with your father.” He thrust the weapon, butt first, i
nto her hands. “Get back into the dugout. Climb under the bed. Stay there until this is over. Shoot anybody who touches you. This time do as you’re told. Go!” He ran back to the parapet.
Two hundred Egyptian riflemen did not wait for his command to reopen fire. The volleys crashed down into the creek bed, and the Gatling ripped and rattled, a stream of spent cartridge cases spilling into a glistening mound on the floor of the redoubt beneath its carriage. A succession of coloured flares burst high above the arena, illuminating with garish light the Dervish struggling upwards through the reeking, mud. Their ranks were so closely packed that every bullet must strike. Surely mortal men must break under such punishment, yet they came on, clambering over the torn and twitching corpses of their comrades, their multi-coloured jib has plastered with reeking black mud, never wavering, each man trying to fight his way to the front rank of the attack, scornful of death, eager to seek it out in the smoking muzzles of the guns.
But there was a line at the foot of the wall across which even their courage could not carry them. The Gatling stopped them there, as though they had reached a wall of glass, building up taller piles of dead men. Wave after wave of warriors came on to add their own corpses to the growing heaps. Swiftly the creek was transformed into a ghastly charnel house. Then, as the attack wavered, the Gatling fire ceased.
“Captain! Stoppage!” Sergeant Khaled yelled. “The gun is jammed.” As the import of those words struck the Egyptian troopers, horror dawned on their faces in the light of the flares. As the full extent of this disaster struck them their fire dwindled, stammered, and fell silent. Even the Ansar in the creek were caught up in the spell. A weird and unnatural quiet fell over the battlefield, broken only by the groans and cries of the wounded. It lasted but a few seconds.
Then a single voice spoke. “La il aha ill allah There is but one God!” It was a voice Penrod recognized. He looked down into the grisly creek bed and saw Osman Atalan in die first rank of the Dervish horde. Their eyes locked. Then the battle cry went up from hundreds of throats and the attack swept forward again. As though the wall of glass that had contained them was shattered, they clawed their way up the steep, treacherous bank of the creek towards the redoubt.
The heads of the Egyptian riflemen turned as they looked back to find a line of retreat. Penrod knew that gesture well. He had seen it before, on the terrible day when the square broke at El Obeid. It was the prelude to flight and rout. “I will kill the first man who breaks,” he shouted, but one ignored him.
As he turned to run, Penrod stepped forward and thrust for his belly. The long blade of his sabre slipped in as though it had been greased, and the point sliced out through the back of the man’s khaki tunic. He dropped to his knees, and clasped the blade of the sabre with his bare hands. Penrod pulled out the razor-sharp steel between his victim’s fingers, severing skin and flesh and sinew. The man screamed and toppled backwards.
“Stand your ground, and keep firing.” Penrod held high his blood-wet blade. “Or sing the same song as this cowardly creature.” They turned back to the firing embrasures and poured their volleys down into the mass of Dervish clambering up towards them.
Sergeant Khaled was hammering on the breech mechanism of the silent Gatling with his bare fists, leaving the skin of his knuckles on the sharp metal edges. Penrod grabbed his shoulder and pulled him aside. By the light of the flares he saw the crushed cartridge case jammed in the jaws of one of the six cam-operated bolts. It was a number-three stoppage, the most difficult to clear. There was a trick to it that Penrod had learnt from hard experience. He snatched the bayonet from the sheath on Sergeant Khaled’s belt and, with the point of the blade, worked to prise open the jaws of the bolt.
The Dervish came up the walls, climbing like squirrels up the trunk of an oak. The Martini-Henry rifles fell silent as the attackers wriggled through the embrasures and grappled hand to hand with those Egyptians who had stood their ground. The Gatling’s bolt was still jammed solidly. Penrod glanced up: at that moment the fate of the city and all its inhabitants hung on him.
One of the many myths that had built up around the image of General Chinese Gordon was that his voice could carry above the din of any battlefield. Penrod heard it now in the uproar of this inevitable disaster. “Number-two gun, open fire.” Penrod had never expected to welcome those harsh and hectoring tones. They carried clearly across from the secondary emplacement that Penrod had built in anticipation of just such a moment as this. His knees went weak with relief. Then he braced himself, and turned his mind back to the jammed gun.
Waiting, sleepless, on the glacis of the hospital fortifications, Gordon had heard the opening volleys of the battle, and seen the rocket flares sailing up from the harbour into the night sky. He had roused his gunners. They limbered up the second Gatling and ran it through the alleyways and byways of the city. It took them eight and a half minutes to reach the harbour and unlimber the Gatling in the empty emplacement that had been prepared for it. True to his nature, Gordon had timed them. He nodded approval and thrust the hunter back into his pocket.
“Number-two gun, open fire,” he grated, and the monstrous thunder of the six rotating barrels smothered the frenzied war cries of the Dervish. A moving sheet of fire swept relentlessly across the revetment, of the creek. From this angle he caught them in left flank and rear. His fire tumbled them off the walls like ripe apples from a wind-shaken tree. Most lost their weapons in the fall. Those who rose to their feet again were hurled forward by the press of bodies still surging up the creek, and were trapped against the footwall of the fortifications.
“Back! Go back! It is over,” shouted those in the forefront.
“Forward!” screamed those coming up from the beach, “For God and His Ever Victorious Mahdi!” The creek became a massive log-jam of bodies packed so tightly that even the dead were held upright by their comrades.
Penrod could not witness all this taking place while he struggled with the jammed bolt. At last he forced the point of the bayonet behind the lug of the cam and hammered on the hilt with his palm. He ignored the pain, and shouted at Sergeant Khaled, “Back up the crank!” Khaled heaved anti-clockwise on the handle, taking the pressure off the cam and suddenly the lug flew back, with a clanging force that would have taken off Penrod’s thumb, had he not jerked it away. The crushed and deformed cartridge case flew clear. As Khaled released the handle, the next round dropped from the hopper and was fed smoothly into the breech. The bolt cocked with a sweet, almost musical clank.
“Number-one gun cocked and ready, Sergeant.” Penrod slapped Khaled on the shoulder. “Commence firing!” Khaled stooped to the crank, and Penrod himself took hold of the twin traverse handles and depressed the barrels so they were aimed down into the struggling confusion of mud-smeared Ansar. The gun jumped, hammered and shook in Penrod’s hands.
Not even the bravest could withstand the combined fire of the two Gatlings. It rolled them back until they jammed in the portal of the drain tunnel, then decimated their ranks, piling their bodies like faggots of firewood on that narrow strip of beach. As the survivors staggered through the shallows towards the boats, the bullets kicked foam from the surface around them. When at last they clambered aboard, the heavy bullets splintered the deck timbers and struck down the crew cowering within the hulls. Their blood dribbled out of the bullet-holes and trickled down the outside of the hulls, like claret spilt from the goblet of a drunkard.
With their cargoes of broken bodies on the decks, the dhows steered back across the river in the first flush of day. As the last pulled out of the bight of the harbour the Gatlings ceased their dreadful clangour.
The timid silence of the dawn was marred only by the lamentations of the new widows across the river on the Omdurman bank.
Penrod stepped back from the Gatling, whose barrels glowed as though they had been heated in a blacksmith’s forge. He looked around him like someone awakening from nightmare. He was not surprised to find Yakub at his side. “I saw Osman Atalan in t
he front rank of the enemy host,” he told him.
“I saw him also, lord.”
“If he is still on this bank of the river, we must find him,” Penrod ordered. “If he is alive, I want him. If he is dead, his head shall be sent to the Ever Victorious Mahdi. It may discourage him and his Ansar from another attack on the city.”
Before he left the redoubt Penrod called to Sergeant Khaled, “See to our wounded. Get them to the hospital.” He knew how futile that would be. Both the Egyptian doctors had deserted from Gordon’s regiment months ago, but not before they had stolen and sold all the medical supplies. At the hospital building a few old Arab midwives still treated the wounded with herbs and traditional potions. He had heard that Rebecca Benbrook had tried to teach some of the Sudanese women how to take care of the wounded in a more orthodox fashion, but he knew that she had no medical training. She could do little more than attempt to staunch bleeding, and make sure the wounded had clean boiled water to drink, and extra rations of dhurra and green-cake.
Before the words were out of his mouth he heard a scream. He glanced in the direction it had come from and saw a woman dressed in black robes bending over a wounded Dervish. The Arab and Nubian women of the city had an instinct for death and loot. The first were arriving even before the crows and the vultures.
The wounded Dervish wriggled and writhed as the woman prodded him into position with the point of her little dagger. Then, with an expert stroke that started in his throat under the ear and raked forward, she opened both his carotid and jugular arteries and hopped back so the blood would not soak her skirts. Long ago Penrod had learnt not to interfere in this type of business. Arab women were worse than the men, and this one had made no attempt to conceal what she was about. He turned away. “Sergeant, I need prisoners for questioning. Save as many as you can.” Then he jerked his head to Yakub. “Come, All-seeing Yakub. Let us seek the Emir Osman Atalan. The last I saw of him, he was on the beach trying to rally his men as they ran for the boats.”