by Wilbur Smith
David had taken the hands of his younger daughters to restrain them, and leant over the parapet to engage in a shouted conversation with someone in the courtyard of the consular palace below.
‘My dear General, do you think you might prevail on your gunners to return fire and take their attention off Mr Courtney’s boat?’ His tone was deferential.
Rebecca glanced down and saw that her father was speaking to the commanding officer of the Egyptian garrison defending the city. General ‘Chinese’ Gordon was a hero of the Empire, the victor of wars in every part of the world. In China his legendary ‘Ever Victorious Army’ had earned him the sobriquet. He had come out of his headquarters in the south wing of the palace with his red flowerpot fez on his head.
‘The order has already been sent to the gunners, sir.’ Gordon’s reply was crisp and assertive, edged with annoyance. He did not need to be reminded of his duty.
His voice carried clearly to where Rebecca stood. It was said that he could make himself heard without effort across a raging battlefield.
A few minutes later the Egyptian artillery, in their emplacements along the city waterfront, opened up a desultory fire. Their pieces were of small calibre and obsolete pattern, six-pounder Krupps mountain guns; their ammunition was ancient and in short supply, much given to misfiring. However, to one accustomed to the ineptitudes of the Egyptian garrison, their accuracy was surprising. A few clouds of black shrapnel smoke appeared in the clear sky directly over the Dervish batteries, for the gunners on both sides had been ranging each other’s positions during all the months since the beginning of the siege. The Dervish fire slackened noticeably. Still unscathed, the white steamer reached the confluence of the two rivers and the line of barges followed her as she turned sharply to starboard into the mouth of the Blue Nile and was almost immediately shielded by the buildings of the city from the guns on the west bank. Deprived of their prey the Dervish batteries fell silent.
‘Please may we go down to the wharf to welcome him?’ Saffron was dragging her father to the head of the staircase. ‘Come on, Becky, let’s go and meet your beau.’
As the family hurried through the neglected, sun-bleached gardens of the palace, they saw that General Gordon was also heading for the harbour, with a group of his Egyptian officers scampering behind him. Just beyond the gates a dead horse half blocked the alley. It had been lying there for ten days, killed by a stray Dervish shell. Its belly was swollen and its gaping wounds heaved with masses of white maggots. Flies hovered and buzzed over it in a dense blue cloud. Mingled with all the other smells of the besieged city the stench of rotting horseflesh was sulphurous. Each breath Rebecca drew seemed to catch in her throat and her stomach heaved. She fought back the nausea so that she did not disgrace herself and the dignity of her father’s office.
The twins vied with each other in a pantomime of disgust. ‘Poof!’ and ‘Stinky-woo!’ they cried, then doubled over to make realistic vomiting sounds, howling with delight at each other’s histrionics.
‘Be off with you, you little savages!’ David scowled at them and brandished his silver-mounted cane. They shrieked in mock alarm, then raced away in the direction of the harbour, leaping over piles of debris from shelled and burnt-out houses. Rebecca and David followed at their best pace, but before they had passed the customs house they encountered the city crowds moving in the same direction.
It was a solid river of humanity, of beggars and cripples, slaves and soldiers, rich women attended by their slaves and scantily clad Galla whores, mothers with infants strapped to their backs, dragging wailing brats by each hand, government officials and fat slave traders with diamond and gold rings on their fingers. All had one purpose: to discover what cargo the steamer carried, and whether she offered a faint promise of escape from the little hell that was Khartoum.
The twins were rapidly engulfed in the throng so David lifted Saffron on to his shoulders while Rebecca grasped Amber’s hand and they pushed their way forward. The crowds recognized the tall, imposing figure of the British consul and gave way to him. They reached the waterfront only a few minutes after General Gordon, who called to them to join him.
The Intrepid Ibis was cutting in across the stream and when she reached the quieter protected water half a cable’s length offshore she shed her tow lines and the four barges anchored in line astern, their bows facing into the strong current of the Blue Nile. Ryder Courtney placed armed guards on each barge to protect the cargoes against looting. Then he took the helm of the steamer and manoeuvred her towards the wharf.
As soon as he was within earshot the twins screeched a welcome: ‘Ryder! It’s us! Did you bring a present?’ He heard them above the hubbub of the crowd, and had soon spotted Saffron perched on her father’s shoulders. He removed the cheroot from his mouth, flicked it overboard into the river, then reached for the cord of the boat’s whistle, sent a singing blast of steam high into the air and blew Saffron a kiss.
She dissolved into giggles and wriggled like a puppy. ‘Isn’t he the most dashing beau in the world?’ She glanced at her elder sister.
Rebecca ignored her, but Ryder’s eyes turned to her next and he lifted the hat off his dense dark curls, sleeked with his sweat. His face and arms were tanned to the colour of polished teak by the desert sun, except for the band of creamy skin just below his hairline where his hat had protected it. Rebecca smiled back and bobbed a curtsy. Saffron was right: he really was rather handsome, especially when he smiled, she thought, but there were crinkles at the corners of his eyes. He’s so old, she thought. He must be every day of thirty.
‘I think he’s sweet on you.’ Amber gave her serious opinion.
‘Don’t you dare start that infernal nonsense, Mademoiselle,’ Rebecca warned her.
‘Infernal nonsense, Mademoiselle,’ Amber repeated softly – and rehearsed the words to use against Saffron at the first opportunity.
Out on the river Ryder Courtney was giving his full attention to the steamer as he brought her into her mooring. He swung her nose into the current and held her there with a deft touch on the throttle, then eased the wheel over and let her drift sideways across the stream until her steel side kissed the matting fenders that hung down the side of the wharf. His crew tossed the mooring lines to the men on the jetty, who seized the ends and made her fast. Ryder rang the telegraph to the boiler room, and Jock McCrump stuck his head through the engine-room hatch. His face was streaked with black grease. ‘Aye, skipper?’
‘Keep a head of steam in the boiler, Jock. Never know when we might need to run for it.’
‘Aye, skipper. I want none of them stinking savages as shipmates.’ Jock wiped the grease from his huge calloused hands on a wad of cotton waste.
‘You have the con,’ Ryder told him, and vaulted over the ship’s rail to the jetty. He strode towards where General Gordon waited for him with his staff, but he had not gone a dozen paces before the crowd closed round him and he was trapped like a fish in a net.
A struggling knot of Egyptians and other Arabs surrounded him, grabbing at his clothing. ‘Effendi, please, Effendi, I have ten children and four wives. Give us safe passage on your fine ship,’ they pleaded, in Arabic and broken English. They thrust wads of banknotes into his face. ‘A hundred Egyptian pounds. It is all I have. Take it, Effendi, and my prayers for your long life will go up to Allah.’
‘Gold sovereigns of your queen!’ another bid, and clinked the canvas bag he held like a tambourine.
Women pulled off their jewellery – heavy gold bracelets, rings and necklaces with sparkling stones. ‘Me and my baby. Take us with you, great lord.’ They thrust their infants at him, tiny squealing wretches, hollow-cheeked with starvation, some covered with the lesions and open sores of scurvy, their loincloths stained tobacco-yellow with the liquid faeces of cholera. They shoved and wrestled with each other to reach him. One woman was knocked to her knees and dropped her infant under the feet of the surging crowd. Its howls became weaker as they trampled it. Finally a nail-
shod sandal crushed the eggshell skull and the child was abruptly silent and lay still, an abandoned doll, in the dust.
Ryder Courtney gave a bellow of rage and laid about him with clenched fists. He knocked down a fat Turkish merchant with a single blow to the jaw, then dropped his shoulder and charged into the ruck of struggling humanity. They scattered to let him pass, but some doubled back towards the Intrepid Ibis, and tried to scramble across to her deck.
Jock McCrump was at the rail to meet them with a monkey wrench in his fist and five of his crew at his back, armed with boat-hooks and fire axes. Jock cracked the skull of the first man who tried to board and he fell into the narrow strip of water between the ship and the stone wharf, then disappeared beneath the surface. He did not rise again.
Ryder realized the danger and tried to get back to his ship, but even he could not cleave his way through the close pack of bodies.
‘Jock, take her off and anchor with the barges!’ he shouted.
Jock heard him above the uproar and waved the wrench in acknowledgement. He jumped to the bridge and gave a terse order to his crew. They did not waste time unmooring, but severed the lines to the shore with a few accurate strokes of the axes. The Intrepid Ibis swung her bows into the current, but before she had steerage way more of the refugees attempted to jump across the gap. Four fell short and were whipped away downstream by the racing current. One grabbed hold of the ship’s rail and dangled down her side, trying to lift himself aboard, imploring the crew above him for mercy.
Bacheet, the Arab boatswain, stepped to the rail above him and, with a single swing of his axe, neatly lopped off the four fingers of the man’s right hand. They fell to the steel deck like brown pork sausages. His victim shrieked and dropped into the river. Bacheet kicked the fingers over the side, wiped his blade on the skirt of his robe, then went to break out the bow anchor from its locker forward. Jock turned the steamboat out across the current, and ran out to anchor at the head of the line of barges.
A wail of despair went up from the crowd, but Ryder glowered at them, fists clenched. They had learnt exactly what that gesture presaged, and backed away from him. In the meantime General Gordon had ordered a squad of his soldiers to break up the riot. They advanced in a line with their bayonets fixed and used their rifle butts to club down any who stood in their way. The crowd broke before them, and disappeared into the narrow alleys of the city. They left the dead baby, with its bleeding mother wailing over it, and half a dozen moaning rioters sitting, stunned, in puddles of their own blood. The Turk who Ryder had floored lay quiescent on his back, snoring loudly.
Ryder looked about for David and his daughters, but the consul had shown the good sense to get his family away to the safety of the palace at the first sign of rioting. He felt a lift of relief. Then he saw General Gordon coming towards him, stepping through the litter and bodies. ‘Good afternoon, General.’
‘How do you do, Mr Courtney? I am pleased to welcome you. I hope you had a pleasant voyage.’
‘Very enjoyable, sir. We made good passage through the Sud. The channel is well scoured out at this season. No necessity to kedge our way through.’ Neither deigned to remark on the gauntlet that the steamboat had run through the Dervish batteries, or the riot that had welcomed it to the city.
‘You are heavily laden, sir?’ Gordon, who was fully six inches shorter, looked up at Ryder with those remarkable eyes. They were the steely blue of the noonday sky above the desert. Few men who looked into them could forget them. They were hypnotic, compelling, the outward sign of Gordon’s iron faith in himself and his God.
Ryder understood the import of the question instantly. ‘I have fifteen hundred sacks of dhurra sorghum in my barges, each bag of ten cantars weight.’ A cantar was an Arabic measure, approximating a hundredweight.
Gordon’s eyes sparkled like cut sapphires, and he slapped his cane against his thigh. ‘Well done indeed, sir. The garrison and the entire population are already on extremely short commons. Your cargo might well see us through until the relief column from Cairo can reach us.’
Ryder Courtney blinked with surprise at such an optimistic estimate. There were close to thirty thousand souls trapped in the city. Even on starvation rations that multitude would devour a hundred sacks a day. The latest news they had received before the Dervish cut the telegraph line to the north was that the relief column was still assembling in the delta and would not be ready to begin the journey southwards for several weeks more. Even then they had more than a thousand miles to travel to Khartoum. On the way they must navigate the cataracts and traverse the Mother of Stones, that terrible wilderness. Then they must fight their way through the Dervish hordes who guarded the long marches along the banks of the Nile before they could reach the city and raise the siege. Fifteen hundred sacks of dhurra was not nearly enough to sustain the inhabitants of Khartoum indefinitely. Then he realized that Gordon’s optimism was his best armour. A man such as he could never allow himself to face the hopelessness of their plight and give in to despair.
He nodded his agreement. ‘Do I have your permission to begin sales of the grain, General?’ The city was under martial law. No distribution of food was allowed without Gordon’s personal sanction.
‘Sir, I cannot allow you to distribute the provisions. The population of my city is starving.’ Ryder noted Gordon’s use of the possessive. ‘If you were to sell them they would be hoarded by wealthy merchants to the detriment of the poor. There will be equal rations for all. I will oversee the distribution. I have no choice but to commandeer your entire cargo of grain. I will, of course, pay you a fair price for it.’
For a moment Ryder stared at him, speechless. Then he found his voice. ‘A fair price, General?’
‘At the end of the last harvest the price of dhurra in the souks of this city was six shillings a sack. It was a fair price, and still is, sir.’
‘At the end of the last harvest there was no war and no siege,’ Ryder retorted. ‘General, six shillings does not take into account the extortionate price I was forced to pay. Nor does it compensate me for the difficulties I experienced in transporting the sorghum and the fair profit to which I am entitled.’
‘I am certain, Mr Courtney, that six shillings will return you a handsome profit.’ Gordon stared at him hard. ‘This city is under martial law, sir, and profiteering and hoarding are both capital crimes.’
Ryder knew that the threat was not an idle one. He had seen many men flogged or summarily executed for any dereliction of their duty, or defiance of this little man’s decrees. Gordon unbuttoned the breast pocket of his uniform jacket and brought out his notebook. He scribbled in it swiftly, tore out the sheet and passed it to Ryder. ‘That is my personal promissory note for the sum of four hundred and fifty Egyptian pounds. It is payable at the treasury of the Khedive in Cairo,’ he said briskly. The Khedive was the ruler of Egypt. ‘What is the rest of your cargo, Mr Courtney?’
‘Ivory, live wild birds and animals,’ Ryder replied bitterly.
‘Those you may offload into your godown. At this stage I have no interest in them, although later it may be necessary to slaughter the animals to provide meat for the populace. How soon can you have your steamer and the barges ready to depart, sir?’
‘Depart, General?’ Ryder turned pale under his tan: he had sensed what was about to happen.
‘I am commandeering your vessels for the transport of refugees downriver,’ Gordon explained. ‘You may requisition what cordwood you need to fuel your boilers. I will reimburse you for the voyage at the rate of two pounds per passenger. I estimate you might take five hundred women, children and heads of families. I will personally review the needs of each and decide who is to have priority.’
‘You will pay me with another note, General?’ Ryder asked, with veiled irony.
‘Precisely, Mr Courtney. You will wait at Metemma until the relief force reaches you. My own steamers are already there. Your famed skill as a river pilot will be much in demand in the passage of
the Shabluka Gorge, Mr Courtney.’
Chinese Gordon despised what he looked upon as greed and the worship of Mammon. When the Khedive of Egypt had offered him a salary of ten thousand pounds to undertake this most perilous assignment of evacuating the Sudan, Gordon had insisted that this be reduced to two thousand. He had his own perception of duty to his fellow men and his God. ‘Please bring your barges alongside the jetty and my troops will guard them while they are offloaded, and the dhurra is taken to the customs warehouse. Major al-Faroque, of my staff, will be in command of the operation.’ Gordon nodded to the Egyptian officer at his side, who saluted Ryder perfunctorily. Al-Faroque had soulful dark eyes, and smelt powerfully of hair pomade. ‘And now you must excuse me, sir. I have much to attend to.’
As the official hostess to Her Britannic Majesty’s consul general to the Sudan, Rebecca was responsible for the running of the palace household. This evening, under her supervision, the servants had laid the dinner table on the terrace that overlooked the Blue Nile so that David’s guests might enjoy the breeze off the river. At sunset the servants would light braziers of eucalyptus branches and leaves. The smoke would keep the mosquitoes at bay. The entertainment would be provided with the compliments of General Gordon. Every evening the military band played and there was a fireworks display: General Gordon intended the show to take the minds of Khartoum’s population off the rigours and hardships of the siege.
Rebecca had planned a splendid table. The consular silver and glassware had been polished to dazzling brilliance and the linen bleached white as an angel’s wing. Unfortunately the meal would not be of comparable quality. They would start with a soup of blackjack weeds and rose hips from the ruins of the palace garden. This would be followed by a pâté of boiled palm-tree pith and stoneground dhurra, but the pièce de résistance was supreme of pelican.