The Triumph of the Sun

by Wilbur Smith

  He cut Penrod high in the left shoulder. It was a light wound, and Osman was losing blood more heavily. Each fresh attack was less fiery, each recovery after the thrust just a little slower. Penrod let him expend himself, holding him off and waiting his moment. He watched Osman’s eyes.

  During the entire bout Osman had not gone for Penrod’s hip. Penrod knew from experience that it was his favourite and most deadly stroke with which he had crippled innumerable enemies. At last Penrod offered it to him, turning his lower body into Osman’s natural line.

  Osman went for the opening, and once he was committed Penrod turned back so the razor edge slit the cloth of his jodhpurs but did not break the skin. Osman was fully extended and could not recover quickly enough.

  Penrod hit him. His thrust split the sternum at the base of Osman’s ribs and went on to transfix him cleanly as a fish on a skewer. Penrod felt his steel grate on his opponent’s spinal column.

  Osman froze, and Penrod stepped in close. He seized his opponent’s sword wrist to prevent a last thrust. Their faces were only inches apart. Penrod’s eyes were hard and cold. Osman’s were dark with bitter rage, but slowly they became opaque as stones. The sword dropped from his hand. His legs buckled, but Penrod held his weight on the sabre. Osman opened his lips to speak, but a snake of dark blood trickled from the corner of his mouth and crawled down his chin.

  Penrod relaxed his wrist and let him slide off the blade. He fell at Penrod’s feet, and lay still upon his back with his arms spread wide.

  As Penrod stepped back a woman screamed. He looked up. He became aware for the first time of the small group of Arab women and children huddled in the doorway of the mosque. He recognized the little ones as those who had run to hide as he rode up. But he knew none of the women.

  ‘Nazeera!’ It was Yakub’s voice. He saw one of the women react, and then he recognized her. Nazeera held two children against her legs. One was the ugly copper-haired boy, and the other an exquisite little girl, a few years younger than the boy. Both children were weeping and trying to break out of Nazeera’s grip, but she held them fast.

  Then an Arab woman left the group and came slowly down the steps towards him. She moved like a sleep-walker, and her eyes were fastened on the dead man at his feet. There was something dreadfully familiar about her. Instinctively Penrod backed away, still staring at her in fascination. Then he exclaimed, ‘Rebecca!’

  ‘No,’ the stranger replied in English. ‘Rebecca died long ago.’ Her face was a pitiful travesty of that of the lovely young woman he had once known. She knelt beside Osman and picked up his sword. Then she looked up into Penrod’s face. Her eyes were old and hopeless. ‘Look after my children,’ she said. ‘You owe me that at least, Penrod Ballantyne.’

  Before he understood what she intended and could move to prevent her, she reversed the sword. She placed the pommel on the hard ground and the point under her bottom ribs and fell forward upon it with all her weight. The length of the blade disappeared into her body, and she collapsed on top of Osman Atalan.

  The children screamed, broke from Nazeera’s grip, rushed down the steps and threw themselves on to the bodies of their parents. They wailed and shrieked. It was a dreadful sound that cut to the core of Penrod’s being.

  He sheathed his sabre, turned away and walked away towards the palm grove. As he passed Yakub he said, ‘Bury Osman Atalan. Do not mutilate his body or take his head. Bury al-Jamal beside him. Nazeera and the children will come with us. They will ride my camel. I will ride al-Buq. When all is ready call me.’

  He went into the grove and found a fallen palm trunk on which to sit. He was very tired, and the cut on his shoulder throbbed. He opened his tunic and folded his handkerchief over the wound.

  The two children, the boy and the girl, must be Rebecca’s, he realized. What will become of them? Then he remembered Amber and Saffron. They have two aunts who will fight over them. He smiled sadly. Of course, they will have Rebecca’s share of the trust fund, and they have Nazeera. They will lack for nothing.

  Within the hour Yakub came to call him. On the way back to the mosque they stopped beside the newly filled double grave. ‘Do you think she loved him, Yakub?’

  ‘She was a Muslim wife,’ Yakub replied. ‘Of course she loved him. In God’s eyes, she had no choice.’

  They mounted up. Nazeera had the two children with her on the camel, and Yakub rode beside her. Penrod was on the stallion, and led them back to Omdurman.

  Ahmed Habib abd Atalan, the son of Rebecca and Osman Atalan, became uglier as he grew older, but he was very clever. He attended Cairo University where he studied law. He fell in with a group of politically active fellow students, who were violently opposed to the British occupation of their country. He devoted the rest of his life to the same jihad against that hated nation and Empire as his father. He was a German supporter during both world wars and spied for Erwin Rommel in the second. He was an active member of the Revolutionary Command Council in the bloodless coup that ousted the Egyptian King Farouk, the British puppet.

  Rebecca’s daughter Kahruba remained small but she became more beautiful with every year that passed. At an early age she discovered in herself an extraordinary talent for dancing and acting. For twenty years she burned bright as a meteor across the stages of all the great theatres of Europe. With her wild, free spirit, she became a legend in her own lifetime. Her lovers, both men and women, were legion. Finally she married a French industrialist, who manufactured motor-cars, and they lived together in regal state and pomp in their palatial mansion in Deauville.

  The Khalifat Abdullahi escaped from Omdurman, but Penrod Ballantyne and his Camel Corps pursued him relentlessly for more than a year. In the end he deigned to run no further. With his wives and devotees around him he sat on a silk carpet in the centre of his camp in the remote wilderness. When the troops rushed in he offered no further resistance. They shot him dead where he sat.

  The tomb of the Mahdi was razed to the ground. His remains were exhumed, and his skull was turned into an inkwell. It was presented to General Kitchener, who was horrified. He had it reburied in a secret grave in the wilderness.

  After the battle of Omdurman Kitchener became the darling of the Empire. He was rewarded with a peerage and a huge money grant. When the Boers in South Africa inflicted a series of disastrous defeats on the British army, Kitchener was sent to retrieve the situation. He burnt the farms and herded the women and children into concentration camps. The Boers were crushed.

  During the First World War, Kitchener was promoted to field marshal and commander-in-chief to steer the Empire through the most destructive war in all human history. In 1916 while he was on board the cruiser Hampshire, en route to Russia, the ship struck a German mine off the Orkneys. He drowned at the high noon of his career.

  Sir Evelyn Baring became the 1st Earl of Cromer. He returned to England where he spent his days writing and, in the House of Lords, championing free trade.

  Nazeera helped to raise all the children of the three Benbrook sisters. This occupied most of her time and energy, but what remained she divided impartially between Bacheet and Yakub.

  Bacheet and Yakub pursued their vendetta for the rest of their lives. Bacheet was referred to by his rival as the Despicable Lecher. Yakub was the Jaalin Assassin. In their later years they took to frequenting the same coffee-house where they sat at opposite ends of the room, smoking their water-pipes, never addressing each other but deriving great comfort from their mutual antagonism. When Bacheet died of old age, Yakub never returned to the coffee-house.

  Ryder Courtney’s cotton acres flourished. He invested his millions in Transvaal gold and Mesopotamian oil. He doubled and redoubled his fortune. In time his mercantile influence encompassed almost all of Africa and the Mediterranean. But to Saffron he remained always a benign and indulgent husband.

  General Sir Penrod Ballantyne went to South Africa on Kitchener’s staff, and was present when the Boers surrendered at the peace of Vereeniging
in the Transvaal. In the First World War he rode with Allenby’s cavalry against the Ottoman Turks in Palestine. He fought at Gaza and Megiddo, where he won further honours. He continued to play first-class polo well into his seventies. He and Amber lived in their house on the Nile, and in it raised a large family.

  Amber and Saffron outlived both their husbands. They grew ever closer as the years passed. Amber flourished as an author. Her novels faithfully captured the romance and mystery of Africa. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Saffron’s marvellously colourful paintings were hung in galleries in New York, Paris and London. Her Nile series of paintings was eagerly sought by wealthy collectors on two continents, and commanded enormous prices. Picasso said of her, ‘She paints the way a sunbird flies.’

  But they are all gone now, for in Africa only the sun triumphs eternally.

  GLOSSARY

  Arab names will not go into English, exactly, for their consonants are not the same as ours, and their vowels, like ours, vary from district to district. There are scientific systems of transliteration, helpful to people who know enough Arabic not to need helping, but a wash out for the world. I spell my names anyhow, to show what rot the systems are

  T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

  Abadan Riji – ‘One who never turns back’; Penrod Ballantyne’s Arabic name

  abd – slave

  aggagiers – élite warriors of the Beja tribe of desert Arabs

  Ammi – aunt

  angareb – a native bed with leather thong lacing

  Ansars – ‘The Helpers’, warriors of the Mahdi

  ardeb – Oriental measure of volume. Five ardebs equal one cubic metre

  asida – porridge of dhurra (q.v.) flavoured with chili

  Bahr El Abiad – the White Nile

  Bahr El Azrek – the Blue Nile

  Beia – oath of allegiance required by the Mahdi from his Ansars

  Beit el Mal – the treasury of the Mahdi

  bombom – bullets or cannon shells

  Buq, al- – War Trumpet, Osman Atalan’s charger

  cantar – Oriental measure of weight: one cantar equals a hundredweight

  dhurra – Sorghum vulgare; staple grain food of men and domestic animals

  djinni see jinnee

  Effendi – lord, a title of respect

  falja – a gap between the front top teeth; a mark of distinction, much admired in the Sudan and many Arabic countries

  fellah (pl. fellahin) – Egyptian peasant

  ferenghi – foreigner

  Filfil – pepper; Saffron Benbrook’s Arabic name

  Franks – Europeans

  galabiyya – traditional long Arabic robe

  Hulu Mayya – Sweet Water, one of Osman Atalan’s steeds

  Jamal, al- – ‘the Beautiful One’; Rebecca Benbrook’s Arabic name

  jibba – the uniform of the Mahdists; long tunic decorated with multi-coloured patches

  jihad – holy war

  jinnee (pl. jinn) – a spirit from Muslim mythology, able to assume animal or human form and influence mankind, with supernatural powers

  jiz – scarab or dung beetle

  Karim, al- – ‘Kind and Generous’; variation of Ryder Courtney’s Arabic name

  khalifa – deputy of the Mahdi

  khalifat – the senior and most powerful khalifa

  khedive – the ruler of Egypt

  kittar – bush with wicked hooked thorns

  kufi – Muslim traditional skull cap

  Kurban Bairam – Islamic festival of sacrifice, commemorating the sacrifice of the ram by Abraham in place of his son Isaac; one of the most important holidays in Islam

  kurbash – whip made from hippo hide

  Mahdi – ‘the Expected One’, the successor to the Prophet Muhammad

  Mahdist – follower of the Mahdi

  Mahdiya – the rule of the Mahdi

  mulazemin – the servants and retainers of an eminent Arab

  nullah – dry or water-filled streambed

  ombeya – war trumpet carved from a single elephant tusk

  Sakhawi, al- – ‘Generosity’; Ryder Courtney’s Arabic name

  shufta – bandit

  sirdar – the title of the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Army

  sitt – title of respect, equivalent to ‘my lady’ in English

  souk – bazaar

  Tej – strong beer made from dhurra

  Tirbi Kebir – the great graveyard, large salt pan in the Bight of the Nile

  Turk – derogatory term for Egyptian

  wadi – gully or dried watercourse

  Yom il Guma – Friday, the Muslim Sabbath

  Zahra, al- – ‘The Flower’; Amber Benbrook’s Arabic name

  zareba – fortified stockade of stones or thorn bush

  zenana – women’s quarters in an Arabic household

  OUT NOW

  VICIOUS CIRCLE

  THE LATEST HECTOR NOVEL BY WILBUR SMITH

  On the far side of the boggy hollow, Hazel’s Ferrari was just topping the crest of the hill. Hector realized that they had been neatly cut off from each other by the van and bike.

  ‘Hazel!’ Hector shouted her name as all his feral instincts kicked in at full force. ‘They are after Hazel!’ He grabbed his mobile phone and punched in her number.

  A disembodied voice answered the call: ‘The person you have called is presently unavailable. Please try again later.’

  When Hector Cross’s new life is overturned, he immediately recognizes the ruthless hand of an enemy he has faced many times before. A terrorist group has re-emerged – like a deadly scorpion from beneath its rock.

  Determined to fight back, Hector draws together a team of his most loyal friends from his former life in Cross Bow Security, a company originally contracted to protect his beloved wife, Hazel Bannock, and her company, the Bannock Oil Corp. Together they travel to the remotest parts of the Middle East, to hunt down those who pursue him and his loved ones.

  For Hazel and Hector have a child, a precious daughter, who he will go to the ends of the earth to protect. And brutal figures from the Bannock family’s past – thought long gone – are returning, with an agenda so sinister that Hector realizes he is facing a new breed of enemy. One whose shifting attack and dark secrets take Hector to the heart of Africa and to a series of crimes so shocking they demand revenge.

  LOVE. LOSS. REVENGE.

  PRAISE FOR WILBUR SMITH

  ‘Wilbur Smith rarely misses a trick’

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  ‘Action is the name of Wilbur Smith’s game and he’s a master’

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  ‘The pace would do credit to a Porsche, and the invention is as bright and explosive as a fireworks display’

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  ‘A violent saga set in Boer War South Africa, told with vigour and enthusiasm . . . Wilbur Smith spins a fine tale’

  Evening Standard

  ‘A bonanza of excitement’

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  ‘A natural storyteller who moves confidently and often splendidly in his period and sustains a flow of convincing incident’

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  ‘Raw experience, grim realism, history and romance welded with mystery and the bewilderment of life itself ’

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  ‘Extrovert and vigorous . . . constantly changing incidents and memorable portraits’

  Liverpool Daily Post

  ‘An immensely powerful book, disturbing and compulsive, harsh yet compassionate’

  She

  ‘An epic novel . . . it would be hard to think of a theme that was more appropriate today . . . Smith writes with a great passion for the soul of Africa’

  Today

  ‘I read on to the last page, hooked by its frenzied inventiveness piling up incident upon incident . . . mighty entertainment’<
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  Yorkshire Post

  ‘There is a streak of genuine poetry, all the more attractive for being unfeigned’

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  ‘Action follows action . . . mystery is piled on mystery . . . tales to delight the millions of addicts of the gutsy adventure story’

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  ‘Action-crammed’

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  THE TRIUMPH OF THE SUN

  WILBUR SMITH was born in Central Africa in 1933. He was educated at Michaelhouse and Rhodes University. He became a full-time writer in 1964 after the successful publication of When the Lion Feeds, and has since written over thirty novels, meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide. His books are now translated into twenty-six languages.

  Find out more about Wilbur Smith by looking at his own author website, www.wilbursmithbooks.com

  THE NOVELS OF WILBUR SMITH

  THE COURTNEYS

  When the Lion Feeds

  The Sound of Thunder

  A Sparrow Falls

  Birds of Prey

  Monsoon Blue Horizon

  The Triumph of the Sun

  THE COURTNEYS OF AFRICA

  The Burning Shore

  Power of the Sword

  Rage

  A Time to Die

  Golden Fox

  Assegai