The Triumph of the Sun

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Look!’ shouted Jock, in consternation. It was a burden that would have taken the strength of five ordinary men, but the Nubian was carrying the main steam pipe from the Intrepid Ibis. Jock had laboured over this piece of machinery for months and now it was ready to reinstall in the steamer.

  The harpy screeched towards the blockhouse, ‘You think to escape the wrath of the Mahdi? You think to run away in your little steamer? We are going to throw this thing into the Nile. When the Mahdi comes, your white and leprous corpses will rot in the streets of Khartoum. Even vultures will not eat them.’ She drove the giant Nubian like an ox towards the gates.

  ‘Even he can never carry it to the river!’ Ryder exclaimed. But the harpy was now shouting for others to help him. A number were hurrying to his aid.

  ‘I give you my solemn oath that he is taking my steam pipe nowhere,’ Jock growled. He swung up the Martini-Henry, and the crash of the shot in the narrow confines of the room numbed their ears. The rifle kicked back, and the sweet stink of black powder smoke stung their nostrils.

  The Nubian had reached the gates. He was less than sixty yards from the rifle slit. The heavy lead bullet caught him just behind the ear and angled forward through his brain. In a pink cloud of wet tissue, it burst out through his right eye socket. He collapsed, with the weight of the steam-pipe chest pinning his corpse to the sunbaked clay.

  ‘You killed him,’ Ryder exclaimed in disbelief.

  ‘I aimed at him, didn’t I?’ Jock said brusquely. ‘Of course I damn well killed him.’ With his callused thumb he pushed another cartridge into the breech of the rifle. ‘And I’m going to kill anybody else who touches my engine.’

  In the yard there was an abrupt and breathless silence. The rioters had almost forgotten the presence of the white prisoners in the blockhouse. They stared at the huge half-naked corpse in awe.

  The harpy was the only one not bereft of the power of movement. She snatched an axe out of the hands of the man nearest to her and rushed at the length of pipe. One of the many duties of a Sudanese woman is to cut the firewood for her household. As the first stroke of the axe clanged against his steam pipe, Jock knew she was an expert. She swung the axe again, and hit exactly the same spot. Jock could see that she was aiming at one of his welds. The metal there would be annealed by the heat of his torch. Already it was buckling. Two or three blows like that and she would puncture and distort it. It might take days to repair the damage she had already done. If he didn’t do something to stop her she might inflict damage beyond repair.

  ‘We will have no more of that nonsense,’ he muttered.

  Ryder saw him lift the rifle again. ‘Don’t shoot!’ he shouted. ‘Jock, don’t shoot her.’

  ‘Too late!’ said Jock, without the least note of contrition in his voice, and again the Martini-Henry bucked and bellowed in his hands.

  The bullet caught the harpy full in the chest. It picked her off her feet and threw her against the wall. She hung there, her mouth wide open, but the scream was trapped for ever in her throat. Then she slid down the wall, leaving a long bright smear on the whitewash.

  The remaining rioters stared in consternation at the bodies of the two ringleaders. Retribution had come swiftly and unexpectedly. When would the next shot crash out, and who would fall? A wail of alarm went up, and they rushed for the gates.

  ‘Keep them on the run!’ Ryder had resigned himself to making the most of Jock’s precipitate action. He snatched up his own rifle and fired over the heads of the rioters. Within minutes the yard was empty, except for the harpy and her Nubian.

  Ryder opened the blockhouse door cautiously and called to Rebecca, ‘Keep Saffron in here with you until we know it’s safe for you to come out.’ With rifles loaded and held at high port, ready to get off a quick shot, the men swept the compound to make certain no danger still lurked. Jock hurried directly to his steam pipe and knelt beside it. He peered anxiously at the axe marks on the metal, removed the greasy and battered cap from his head and polished the marred surface tenderly, then he replaced his cap and studied the marks again. He sighed with relief. ‘Ain’t too much damage done.’ He picked up the whole pipe as easily as the Nubian had, and carried it lovingly back into his workshop.

  Ryder walked over to the two corpses. The harpy was sitting with her back against the wall. Her eyes and her mouth were open and her expression was faintly quizzical. He prodded her with the toe of his boot. She flopped on to her face and lay still. He could have fitted his clenched fist into the deep dark bullet-hole between her shoulder-blades. He did not need to examine the Nubian. His head lay in a puddle of his own brains.

  ‘I don’t approve, but that was not bad shooting, Jock,’ he muttered, then called to Bacheet, ‘Dump them in the river. The crocodiles will take care of them. No need to report this. Gordon Pasha is a busy man. We don’t want to give him more to worry about than he already has.’ He waited until Bacheet and his Arabs had dragged the bodies out of the yard and through the gates that led to the canal. Then he went back to the blockhouse and opened the door. ‘All is safe. You may come out.’

  Saffron rushed past him and darted to the menagerie gates. Old Ali lay curled beside the gatepost. He had been her friend. He had loved the animals as much as she did, and he had taught her how to care for them. She knelt beside his body. In the months since the beginning of the siege she had been exposed to death in many of its most hideous forms, but now she gagged as she looked at her friend’s body. The rioters had battered his head until it was shapeless, no longer recognizable as human.

  ‘Poor Ali,’ she whispered. ‘You died for your animals. God will love you for that.’ She found his bloodsoaked turban and covered his face. ‘Go in peace,’ she said in Arabic.

  She left him and went on into the menagerie. There she stopped again. She gazed around at the devastation and her knees went weak under her. Every cage had been smashed open and every one of the animals was gone. Clouds of blue flies hummed over puddles of their blood that were drying and caking in the desert sun. With an effort, Saffron steeled herself and went on down the rows of empty cages.

  ‘Lucy!’ She called as she went, and she imitated the chittering sound that was the monkey’s special recognition call. ‘Billy! Billy, baby, where are you?’ She reached Lucy’s cage. The door had been torn off, and the cage was deserted. She stood before it, grieving. She had been so young when her mother died that she could barely remember it but she knew she had not felt as bereaved as she did now.

  ‘They couldn’t have done this. It’s so cruel.’ She knew that if she stood there longer she would start to blubber and her father would be ashamed of her. There was only one other place in the menagerie to search. She went to the feed shed at the far end of the enclosure.

  ‘Lucy!’ she called. ‘Billy, where are you, my baby?’ She peered into the gloom.

  ‘Billy!’ She made the chittering monkey sound, and a tiny dark shape shot out from behind a pile of straw. With a single bound it landed on her hip, climbed on to her shoulder and chittered softly in reply to her call.

  ‘Billy!’ whispered Saffron. ‘You’re safe!’ She sank to the floor and hugged the small furry body to her chest. Despite everything her father had told her, she began to cry and could not stop.

  Before sunrise the next morning, just after the mission bells had sounded the end of curfew, Ryder heard feminine voices in the yard, followed by the slamming of the door to the green-cake shed. He wiped the lather from the blade of his razor on to his wash-rag, and made one last pass from the bulge of his Adam’s apple to the point of his jaw. He examined his cleanshaven image in the hand mirror, and grunted with resignation. Despite the kiss of the razor, his jaw was still blue. Not everybody can have whiskers like the pretty soldier-boy. He folded his razor, laid it carefully in the velvet slot in its fitted leather case and closed the lid. Then he left his private quarters in the blockhouse, and went out into the yard.

  He glanced at the gate to the menagerie, and felt the s
urge of fresh anger and grief for the wanton slaughter of his animals. He could not yet bring himself to go into the enclosure. At least Bacheet had removed old Ali’s body and buried it before yesterday’s sunset, in accordance with the law of Islam.

  Now Bacheet and his men were collecting tusks from where they were piled against the inner wall, and carrying them back to the warehouse. Ryder called Bacheet to him, and they went to inspect the main gates. There was nothing left of them but a few charred planks. ‘We will have to abandon everything in the outer stockade,’ Ryder decided. ‘We will move into the inner fortifications. The gates are solid and strong. We can defend them.’ He left Bacheet to carry out those orders.

  For the last half an hour he had heard the hammering of metal on the anvil coming from Jock’s workshop, but now there was silence. He crossed to the workshop and looked in at the door. Jock McCrump had just lit the blue acetylene flame of his welding torch and was lowering the smoked-glass goggles over his eyes. He looked up at Ryder. ‘Old vixen could swing an axe like a lumberjack, and she packed a punch like John L. Sullivan hisself. It’s going to take couple or three days to fix this. Now make yourself scarce.’ He bent over the damaged pipe and played the flame on to the gash in the metal.

  ‘In one of our bloody moods today, are we?’

  ‘Ain’t nothing to laugh and dance about. You should have let me shoot her before she did this.’

  Ryder chuckled. They had been together a long time and knew each other’s foibles. He left Jock to get on with it and went to the green-cake shed. Nazeera and all three Benbrook sisters were there. They were wearing the working aprons and gloves they had made for themselves, and they were trying to restore order to the devastated kitchen.

  ‘Good morning, Ryder.’ Rebecca smiled at him. Ryder was taken aback by the warmth of her greeting and because she was still using his first name.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Benbrook.’

  ‘I would be obliged if in future you would address me by my Christian name. After the way you protected my sister and me yesterday, we need no longer stand on ceremony.’

  ‘What little I could do for you was only my duty.’

  ‘I was particularly pleased that you were so restrained in your use of force. A lesser man might have turned the riot into a massacre. You have the humanity to realize that those poor people had been driven to excess by the terrible dilemma in which they are caught up. However, I would like to express my sympathy for the grievous losses you have suffered.’

  Saffron had been listening to her elder sister impatiently. She was not pleased by this new warmth between Rebecca and Ryder. She told me she despised him, but now she’s cooing at him like a dove, she thought. ‘You should have shot all of them, not just two,’ she said sourly. ‘Then we might have saved Lucy.’

  ‘At least Billy seems none the worse.’ Saffron’s severe expression softened and Ryder took immediate advantage. ‘How are you going to feed him? He isn’t weaned yet,’ he enquired solicitously.

  ‘Nazeera has found a woman who lost her new baby from cholera. We’re paying her to feed Billy and he guzzles her milk like a little pig,’ Saffron replied.

  Rebecca blushed. ‘I am sure Ryder does not want to hear all the gruesome details,’ she told her little sister primly.

  ‘Then he should not have asked,’ Saffron replied reasonably. ‘Anyway, everybody knows how babies are fed, so why are you turning red, Becky?’

  Ryder looked around for an avenue of escape, and found one. ‘Good morning, Amber. You missed all the excitement yesterday.’

  But Saffron did not want to relinquish Ryder’s attention to yet another sister. ‘Don’t mind her,’ she said. ‘She has been grumpy since Captain Ballantyne went away.’ Before Amber could protest she went on blithely, ‘All the Sudanese women have run away. They won’t come back to work here. They have been threatened by bad men in the town who say that we are doing the Devil’s work by making green-cake.’

  Ryder looked at Rebecca with concern. ‘Is this true?’

  ‘I am afraid it is. They were too terrified to come to tell us themselves. But one went to Nazeera. Even then she was taking a grave risk. She says that the Dervish sympathizers in the city have discovered how valuable the green-cake is to our survival, and they are trying to stop us making it. That female creature and the Nubian wrestler who led the riot against you were Mahdists.’

  ‘That explains a great deal.’ Ryder nodded. ‘But what do you plan to do?’

  ‘We will go on alone,’ Rebecca replied simply.

  ‘Just the three of you?’

  ‘Four, with Nazeera. She is not afraid. We Benbrooks don’t give up that easily. We have found two cauldrons that were not smashed and our first batch of green-cake will be ready by this evening.’

  ‘Pulping the vegetation is hard work,’ he protested.

  ‘In which case you should let us get on with it, Ryder,’ Rebecca told him. ‘Why don’t you go and help Mr McCrump?’

  ‘A man knows when he is not wanted in the kitchen.’ Ryder tipped the brim of his hat and hurried back to the workshop.

  A little after noon Jock pushed the welding goggles to the top of his head and smiled for the first time that day. ‘Well, skipper, that’s about the best I can do. Maybe she’ll hold up without blowing out under pressure and giving us another steam bath. We can only pray to the Almighty.’

  They loaded the drive shaft and steam pipe into a Scotch cart and covered them with a tarpaulin to hide them from the eyes of Dervish agents while they moved them through the streets. No draught animals remained in the city. They had all died of starvation or been eaten. Ryder joined Jock, Bacheet and the Arabs in the shafts of the cart and they trundled it down to where the Intrepid Ibis lay at the wharf. By lantern light they worked on in the engine room long after dark. When even Jock was overtaken by exhaustion they stretched out on the Ibis’s steel deck plates and snatched a few hours’ sleep.

  They woke again at dawn. The food bag was almost empty, but Ryder ordered Bacheet to dole out a few dates and scraps of smoked fish for breakfast. Then they went back to work in the engine room. In the middle of the morning Saffron and Amber came down to the harbour. They had two small loaves of freshly made green-cake hidden in Saffron’s paintbox.

  ‘We put them there because we did not want anyone to know what we were doing. This is our first batch,’ Saffron announced, with pride. She held up her hands, ‘Look!’ Amber followed her example.

  Ryder saw the blisters in their palms. ‘My two heroines.’

  There were only a few mouthfuls for each of the men, but it was enough to boost their flagging energy. Saffron and Amber sat with Ryder on the edge of the deck, their legs hanging over the side, and watched him eat. He was touched by the womanly satisfaction that they showed, even at their age, to be feeding a man. They watched each piece go into his mouth just as his mother had so many years ago.

  ‘I am sorry, but that’s all,’ Saffron said, as he finished. ‘We’ll make some more tomorrow.’

  ‘It was delicious,’ he replied. ‘The best batch yet.’

  Saffron looked pleased. She pulled her knees up to her chin, and sat hugging her long skinny legs. ‘It makes me sick to think of all those horrible Dervish eating their heads off over there.’ She stood up reluctantly and brushed down her skirts. ‘Come on, Amber. We must get back or Becky will give us the sharp edge of her tongue.’

  Long after the twins had gone, and the men were struggling to manoeuvre the long drive shaft into its chocks in the confines of the engine room, Ryder pondered Saffron’s casual remark.

  It was mid-afternoon when Jock announced at last that he was cautiously optimistic that this time the engine might perform as God and its makers had intended. He and his crew fired up the boiler, and while they were waiting for a head of steam to build up, Ryder shared one of his last remaining cigars with the Scotsman. They leant together on the bridge rail, both tired and subdued.

  Ryder took a long deep draw
on the cigar and passed it to Jock. ‘The Mahdi has a hundred thousand men camped on the other side of the river. Tell me, Jock, how do you suppose he is feeding them?’ he asked.

  Jock held the smoke in his lungs until his face turned puce. At last he exhaled explosively. ‘Well, first off they have thousands of head of stock that they’ve plundered,’ he said. ‘But I reckon he must be bringing dhurra downriver from Abyssinia.’

  ‘In dhows?’

  ‘Of course. How else?’

  ‘At night?’ Ryder persisted.

  ‘Of course. On a moonlit night you can see the sails. Lot of traffic on the river at night.’

  ‘Jock McCrump, I want you to get this old tub of ours working under a full head of steam by tomorrow evening at the latest. Earlier than that, if you like.’

  Jock stared at him suspiciously, and then he grinned. His teeth were as ragged and uneven as those of an ancient tiger shark. ‘If I didn’t know you better, skipper, I’d think you were up to something.’

  There were no clouds in the desert sky to provide a canvas on which the setting sun could paint its setting. The great red orb dropped like a stone below the horizon and almost immediately the night came down upon the heat-drugged land. Ryder waited until he could no longer make out the opposite bank of the river, then gave orders to Bacheet to cast off.

  With his engine telegraph at ‘dead slow ahead’, he eased the Intrepid Ibis out through the harbour entrance and into the main stream of the river. As soon as he felt the tug of the current he turned the bows into it and rang down to Jock for ‘half ahead’. They pushed up against the flow of the river and Ryder listened anxiously to the beat of the engine. He could feel the hull quivering under his feet, but there were no rough vibrations. He held her at that speed until they had rounded the first bend of the Blue Nile and a long deep glide of the river lay ahead.