by Wilbur Smith
Despite the rope round his neck he strode forward towards the edge of the dais as if he wished to address the Divine Mahdi, but the executioner pulled him up short. ‘No closer, thou foul beast, lest your blood soil the raiment of the Victorious One.’
‘The penalty for adultery is that the man suffer beheading,’ said the Mahdi, and his words were repeated and shouted across the wide enclosure. The executioner stepped up behind his victim and touched the back of his neck with the blade of the sword, marking his aim. Then he drew back and struck, and the blade fluted through the air. The girl at the stake screamed in despair as her lover’s head seemed to spring from his shoulders. He stood a moment longer as a bright stream fountained into the air, then cascaded over his torso. The Mahdi stepped back fastidiously but a single drop splashed the skirt of his white jibba. The dead man fell in an untidy tangle of limbs and his head rolled to the foot of the dais. The girl wailed and struggled with her bonds to reach him.
‘The penalty for the woman taken in adultery is that she be stoned,’ said the Mahdi.
The Khalifa Abdullahi rose from his cushion and went to the girl at the stake. With a strangely tender gesture he swept the hair back from her face and tied it behind her head, so that the believers could see her expression as she died. Then he paced back to the pile of stones that had been placed ready to hand. He selected one that fitted neatly into his hand and turned back to face the girl-child. ‘In the Name of Allah and the Divine Mahdi, may they have mercy on your soul.’
He hurled the stone with the strength and speed of a spearman, and it caught the girl in the eye. From where he sat Osman Atalan heard the rim of the socket crack. The eye popped out and hung by the vine of its nerve on her cheek, like some obscene fruit.
One after the other the khalifas, the emirs and the sheikhs came forward, took up a stone from the pile and threw it. By the time Osman Atalan took his turn the front of the girl’s skull had been crushed and she was hanging lifelessly against her bonds. Osman’s stone struck her shoulder but she did not move. They left her hanging there while the Mahdi finished delivering his sermon.
‘The Prophet, grace and eternal life be upon him, has said to me on many occasions that he who doubts that I am the true Mahdi is an apostate. He who opposes me is a renegade and an infidel. He who wages war against me shall perish from this life and be destroyed and obliterated in the next world. His property and his children shall become the property of Islam. My war against the Turks and the infidel is by the order of the Prophet. He has made me privy to many terrible secrets. The greatest of these is that all the countries of the Turks, the Franks and the infidels who defy me and who defy the word of Allah and his Prophet shall be subdued by the holy religion and law. They shall become as dust and fleas and small things who crawl in the darkness of night.’
When Osman Atalan returned to his tent in the palm grove beside the waters of the Nile and looked across at the fortress of the infidel, he felt exhausted in the flesh as though he had fought a mighty battle, but he was as triumphant in the spirit as though the victory had been granted to him by Allah and the Divine Mahdi. He sat on the precious carpet of silk from Samarkand and his wives brought him a gourd of sour milk. After he had drunk, his principal wife whispered to him, ‘There is one who awaits you, my lord.’
‘Let him come to me,’ Osman told her. When he came he was an old man but straight of limb with bright young eyes. ‘I see you, Master of the Pigeons,’ Osman greeted him, ‘and may the grace of Allah be with you.’
‘I see you, mighty emir, and I pray the Prophet to hold you to his heart.’ He proffered the grey pigeon he held gently against his breast.
Osman took the bird from him and stroked its head. It cooed softly, and he untied the silk thread that held a tiny roll of rice paper to its scaly red leg. He smoothed it against his thigh and as he read it he began to smile and the weariness slipped from his shoulders. Carefully he reread the last line of the tiny script on the note.
‘I have seen his face in the starlight. Verily, it is the Frank who escaped your wrath on the battlefield of El Obeid. The one who is known as Abadan Riji.’
‘Summon my aggagiers and place the saddle on Sweet Water. We ride for the north. Mine enemy has come.’ They scurried to do his bidding.
‘By God’s grace we do not need to search the length and breadth of the Monassir Desert,’ he told Hassan Ben Nader and al-Noor, who stood outside the tent with him while they waited for the grooms to bring their horses. ‘We know when and where he crossed the loop, and there is only one place to which he can be headed.’
‘It is two hundred and fifty miles from where he crossed to where he aims to reach the river here opposite Khartoum,’ said al-Noor.
‘We know he is a tough warrior for we all saw him at El Obeid. He will travel fast,’ said Hassan Ben Nader. ‘He will murder his camels.’
Osman nodded in agreement. He knew the type of man he was hunting. Hassan was right: this one would have no qualms about riding his camels to death. ‘Three days, four at most, and like a little fish he will swim into our net.’ The groom brought Sweet Water to him and she whinnied when she recognized Osman. He fondled her head and gave her a dhurra cake to crunch while he checked her bridle and girth. ‘He will keep well away from the bank of the river until he is ready to cross.’ Osman was thinking aloud with the mind of the chase. ‘Will he cross south of Omdurman or to the north?’ he mused, as he came back to the mare’s head, and before any of his companions could speak he answered himself: ‘He would not cross to the north, for as soon as he entered the water the current would push him back and away from the city. He must cross to the south so that the flow of the Bahr El Abiad,’ he used the Arabic name for the White Nile, ‘will carry him down to Khartoum.’
A man coughed and shuffled his feet in the dust. Osman glanced at him. Only one of his aggagiers would dare question his words. He turned to the most trusted of his men. ‘Speak, Noor. Let your wisdom delight us like the singing of the heavenly cherubim.’
‘It comes to me that this Frank is as wily as a desert jackal. He may reason as you have just done and, knowing your mind, decide to do the opposite. He may choose to cross far to the north, then swing wide towards the mountains and cross the Bahr El Abiad rather than the Bahr El Azrak.’
Osman shook his head. ‘As you have said, he is no fool and he knows the lie of the land. He also knows that the danger for him will not be in the empty desert but on the rivers where our tribes are concentrated. You think he will choose to cross two rivers rather than one? No, he will cross the Bahr El Abiad to the south of the city. That is where we will wait for him.’
He swung up easily into the saddle, and his aggagiers followed his example. ‘We move south.’
They rode into the cool of the evening, and a long veil of red dust spread behind them. Osman Atalan was in the van, with Sweet Water striding out in a flowing canter. They had covered only a few miles when he reined in the mare, and stood in the stirrups to survey the terrain ahead. The tops of the palm trees that marked the course of the river were just visible on the left, but on the right stretched the great void of the Monassir, which after two thousand miles would give way to the infinite wastes of the Sahara.
Osman swung down from the mare’s back and squatted at her head. Immediately his aggagiers did the same. ‘Abadan Riji will circle out wide to the west to keep well clear of the river until he is ready to make the crossing. Then he will come out of the wilderness, and in the night try to slip through our lines. We will lay our net thus and thus.’ He sketched out the lines of his pickets in the dust and they nodded their agreement and understanding as they watched. ‘Noor, you will take your men and ride thus and thus. You, Hassan Ben Nader, will ride thus. I shall be here in the centre.’
Penrod drove the camels at a pace that not even the hardiest men and beasts could keep up for long. They covered the ground at eight miles an hour, and kept it up for eighteen hours without rest, but it taxed even their en
durance to the limit. Both men were also exhausted when he called the first halt. They rested for four hours by his pocket watch, but when they tried to rouse the camels to go on the oldest and weakest refused to come to his feet. Penrod shot him where he lay. They distributed the water that the dead beast was carrying among the other camels, then mounted up and went on at the same pace.
When they reached the end of the next eighteen-hour stage of the march Penrod calculated that they had roughly another ninety to one hundred miles to go to reach the Nile ten miles south of Khartoum. Yakub agreed with this estimate, although his calculations were based on different criteria. They had broken the back of the journey, but it had cost them dear. Thirty-six hours’ hard going, and only four hours of rest. When they tried to feed them, the camels refused to eat their meagre ration of dhurra.
Once the six camels were couched Penrod went to each waterskin and lifted it to judge the remaining contents. Then he pondered over the equation of weights and distances and the condition of each beast. He decided on a deliberate gamble. He explained it to Yakub, who sighed, picked his nose and lifted the skirts of his galabiyya to scratch his crotch, all symptoms of doubt. But in the end he nodded lugubriously, not trusting himself to voice approval.
They selected the two strongest camels and took them out of sight of the other four weaker animals. They watered them from the skins they carried, pouring the sweet water into leather buckets. The animals’ thirst seemed unquenchable, and they sucked down bucketful after bucketful. They drank almost thirty gallons each. The change in their condition was startlingly swift. They rested them another hour, then fed them all the rations of dhurra that their companions had refused. The two chosen beasts devoured it gluttonously. Now they were strong and alert again. The resilience of these extraordinary creatures never failed to amaze Penrod.
When the four hours of rest ended they led the two camels back to where the other four lay listlessly. They forced the used-up animals to their feet. Now when they began the next stage of the journey the two pampered animals carried nothing but their saddles. Between them the exhausted camels carried all the remaining water and equipment as well as the two riders. One collapsed after three more gruelling hours. Penrod shot it. He and Yakub drank as much of the water from its skins as their bellies would hold. Then they shared the rest between their two strong beasts.
They pushed on at the same pace, but within another ten miles the remaining two weaker beasts went down in quick succession. Half-way up the slip-face of a low dune one fell as though shot through the brain, and half an hour later the other groaned and its back legs gave way. It knelt to die and closed the thick double rows of lashes over its swimming eyes. Penrod stood over it with the Webley in his hand. ‘Thank you, old girl. I hope your next journey is less arduous.’ And he put her out of her misery.
They allowed the surviving camels to drink what they could of the water, then drank themselves. What remained they loaded up. The two camels were strong and willing. Yakub stood beside them, and studied the terrain that lay ahead, the outline of the dunes and the shape of the distant hills. ‘Eight hours to the river,’ he estimated.
‘If my backside lasts that long,’ Penrod lamented, as he climbed into the saddle. He ached in every nerve and muscle, and his eyeballs felt raw and abraded by the sand and the glare of sunlight. He abandoned himself to the pacing gait of the beast under him, the legs on each side swinging in unison, so that he pitched and rolled in the saddle. The desolate landscape fell away behind them, and the dunes and bare hills were so monotonously similar that at times he had the illusion they were making no progress but repeating the same journey endlessly.
Still clinging to the saddle, he slipped into a dark, leaden sleep. He slid sideways and almost fell off, but Yakub rode up alongside him and shook him awake. He lifted his head guiltily, and looked at the height of the sun. They had been riding for only two hours.
‘Six more to go.’ He felt lightheaded, and knew that at any moment sleep would overtake him again. He slipped to the ground and ran beside his camels’ head until the sweat stung his eyes. Then he mounted up again and followed Yakub through the shimmering wasteland. Twice more he had to dismount and run to keep himself awake. Then he felt the camel under him change its pace. At the same time Yakub shouted, ‘They have smelt the river.’
Penrod pushed up alongside his camel. ‘How far?’
‘An hour, perhaps a little longer, before it will be safe for us to turn eastwards and head straight towards the river.’
The hour passed slowly, but the camels paced on steadily until they saw another low ridge of blue shale appear out of the heat haze ahead. To Penrod it seemed identical to hundreds of others they had passed since they had crossed the loop, but Yakub laughed and pointed at it: ‘This place I know!’ He turned his camel’s head and the beast quickened its pace. The sun was half-way towards the western horizon, and their shadows flitted ahead over the barren earth.
They came up over the ridge, and Penrod stared ahead eagerly for a glimpse of greenery. The wasteland was unrelieved and unrelenting. Yakub was undismayed, and shook his lank curls in the hot wind, as the camels ran on across the plain.
Ahead another low shale bank seemed to rise no more than head high above the level ground. Yakub brandished his goad and leered across at Penrod with a satanic squint. ‘Place your trust in Yakub, the master of the sands. Brave Yakub sees the land as a vulture from on high. Wise Yakub knows the secret places and the hidden pathways.’
‘If he is wrong brave Yakub will have need of a new neck, for I will break the one on which he balances his thick skull,’ Penrod called back.
Yakub cackled and pushed his mount into a cumbersome gallop. He reached the top of the bank fifty paces ahead of Penrod, stopped and pointed ahead dramatically.
On the horizon they saw a line of palm trees stretched across the landscape, but it was difficult to judge the distance in the flat, uncertain light. The bunches of palm fronds on each long bole reminded Penrod of the ornate hairstyles of the Hadendowa warriors. He estimated that it was under two miles to the nearest grove.
‘Get the camels down,’ he ordered, and jumped to the ground. Surprisingly he felt strong and alert. At first sight of the Nile the weariness of the journey seemed to have left him. They took the camels behind the ridge and couched them out of sight from the river plain.
‘In which direction lies Khartoum?’ Penrod asked.
Without hesitation Yakub pointed to the left. ‘You can see the smoke from the cooking fires of Omdurman.’
It was so faint on the horizon that Penrod had taken it for dust or river haze, but now he saw that Yakub was right. ‘So we are at least five miles upstream of Khartoum,’ he observed. They had reached the precise position he had aimed for.
He went forward cautiously and squatted on the high ground with the field-glasses. He saw at once that he had overestimated the distance to the riverbank. It was probably closer to one mile than two. There was no cover on the river plain, which was flat and featureless. It seemed that there was some cultivation under the palm trees, for he made out a line of darker green below the untidy fronds. ‘Probably dhurra fields,’ he muttered, ‘but no sign of a village.’ Again he checked the height of the sun. Two hours until dark. Should they make a run for the river before sunset, or wait for darkness? He felt impatience building in him, but he held it in check. While he considered the choice he kept the binoculars to his eyes. The riverbank could be far beyond the first trees of the grove, or it might be right there at the edge.
Movement caught his eye and he concentrated on it. A faint shading of pale dust was rising from among the palms. It was moving from left to right, in the opposite direction of Omdurman. Perhaps it was a caravan, he thought, following the road along the riverbank. But then he realized it was moving too fast. Riders, he decided, camels or horsemen. Suddenly the dustcloud stopped moving, hung for a few minutes at the same point, then gradually settled. They have halted in the gro
ve, right between us and the riverbank. Whoever they were they had made the decision for him. Now he had no alternative but to wait for darkness. He went back to where Yakub sat with the camels. ‘Mounted men on the riverbank. We’ll have to wait for darkness when we can sneak past them.’
‘How many?’
‘I’m not certain. A large band. Judging by the dust there are maybe twenty or so.’ There was little water left in the skins, no more than a few gallons. With the river in sight they could afford to be profligate so they drank their fill. By this time it was slimy with green algae and had taken on the taste of the crudely tanned leather, but Penrod drank it with relish. What they could not consume they gave to the camels.
Then they inflated the empty skins. This was a laborious job: they held each skin between their knees and blew into the nozzle, holding it closed between breaths by clamping a hand over the opening. When each skin was full and tight they stoppered it. Then they strapped them to the backs of the kneeling camels. All was ready for the river crossing, and Yakub looked at Penrod. ‘Yakub the tireless will keep watch while you rest. I will wake you at the setting of the sun.’
Penrod opened his mouth to refuse the offer, then recognized the sense of it. The elation was wearing off, and he realized that, without sleep, he was nearly at the end of his tether. He knew, too, that Yakub was almost indefatigable. He handed him the field-glasses without protest, stretched out on the shady side of his camel, wrapped his scarf round his head and was almost instantly asleep.
‘Effendi.’ Yakub shook him awake. His voice was a hoarse whisper. With a single glance at his face Penrod knew that there was trouble. Yakub’s squint was hideous, one eye fixed on Penrod’s face but the other roved and rolled.
As Penrod sat up his right hand closed on the butt of the Webley. ‘What is it?’