Swords of Arabia: Warlord

by Anthony Litton

  Chapter 6

  With the banging of drums and the high wailing note of the flute as company, the Narashi forces and their remaining allies swept out of the camp. All their energies focused on the race to reach the crest of the nearby dunes, to gain an advantage, however small. They almost made it. The foremost riders, Fouad amongst them, were within fifty yards when, despite the shimmering heat, their blood iced over. They heard faintly the jingling of horses’ harnesses; one moment the dunes ahead of them were windswept, deserted, their sandy tops occupied only by the desert mouse. Then, with shocking suddenness, they were alive with silent, menacing warriors.

  To falter was death, so Fouad, his own banner flying, forced even greater speed from his horse as he plunged up the slope, “For Allah and Fouad!” His war cry and the speed of his approach caused not a ripple in the swiftly solidifying lines above him. At a desperate disadvantage, his warriors hit the unmoving line, their horses scrabbling for a footing in the deep shifting sand just below the summit.

  The spears of the enemy, many twice the length of the average man, did terrible havoc. All around Fouad, the cries of his men beat at the air as they became impaled on the spears’ steel-tipped, ferocious, length; their screams of pain the real tune and price of war. Fouad could feel the spirit of his men beginning to waver, but two things happened simultaneously. The two hundred men he had sent in a wide-ranging arc to outflank and get behind the enemy were suddenly spotted by the chiefs above him. A discernible ripple of alarm swept through the rock-like phalanx looking down on them, as it sought to regroup and take account of this new threat. Then, before they could fully adjust to the situation developing behind them, the enemy were faced with a change in the one fronting them.

  “The War Queen! The War Queen!” The shouts tore from the parched throats of the Narashi and their allies.

  “See, she comes! She will lead us to victory over these Jackals!” The roar of greeting grew and, flung back from the surrounding dunes, grew ever louder as echoes fed back into more roars of adulation. These rose to a thunderous climax as the gloriously bedecked War Litter, with its guards of chanting, ecstatic warriors, reached the outskirts of the battle.

  Mohammed, fighting as ever near his brother, turned as the tumult reached him, even over the battle screams filling the air all around him. As he turned, twisting in his high-pommelled saddle, the flaps of the swaying litter were flung back. And he was lost. Subject to a passion which was to last all his life. Zahirah, hair unbound and flying wildly around her face, eyes ringed heavily in kohl, was spitting like a beautiful wildcat, exhorting the faltering fighters on to greater effort, to bring her glory, not shame.

  “Men and friends of Narash – race up the hill; kill the Saudi and Wahhabi pigs! Men of the M’arada, remember the time past, when the Wahhabi razed your town to the ground! Killed your Sheikh! Killed all your male children! Avenge yourselves! Win a victory today to avenge that blood! Rid your tribe of that shame!” Her voice rose to a shriek as the tribesmen responded to her tirade and swept again and again against the seemingly immoveable ranks filling the skyline above them.

  The shifting, sandy slopes became covered with the dead and wounded of both sides, to an extent which imperilled the living. Horses plunging up the incline caught their hooves in the fallen bodies and fell, bringing their riders down to add to the number. The result of the battle still lay in the balance as a great shout went up.

  “Saud!”

  A horseman, dressed in simple white robes, though with the gold thread of rank woven into them, was seen riding along the ranks of the enemy. He was within dangerous yards of the Narashi forces; the very lack of distance taunting them with their inability to win the fight.

  Suddenly Fouad, with Mohammed by his side, raced at an angle along the slope in an attempt to capture or kill the apparently foolhardy leader. A band of warriors, Wahhabi, to judge by their fanatical screaming, raced towards them, seeking, in their turn, to cut down the leader of their enemy. They hit Fouad’s flank with the force of a windstorm and soon he and Mohammed were fighting for their lives. Only the courage of their guards saving them in the first few bloody seconds. The rest of the Narashi forces started to falter again. At the battle’s fringes men began to slink away. Their desert instincts telling them that, even if their leader survived the next few minutes, his cause was lost today – and perhaps forever.

  Zahirah, still keeping up her relentless chant of hate and encouragement, saw her opportunity. Leaning dangerously forward out of her gilded, rocking eyrie, she pulled the rope attached to the camel’s mouth out of the hand of the startled and otherwise engaged attendant. With a few swift phrases, she swiftly established her control over the ill-tempered beast and urged it up the dunes, right to where the thickest concentration of warriors was gathered. Her guards, taken completely by surprise by her swift lunge toward the enemy, regrouped quickly and followed her with no second thought. They had to. For her to be killed or captured was unthinkable and the disgrace would fall heaviest on those most closely guarding her.

  The Wahhabist warriors, stunned and outraged by the unveiled she-devil racing toward them, were swift to see their opportunity. Capture her, and, as well as ridding the desert of an insult to Allah, they would break totally the Narashi resistance to the al Saud. A rich prize! Fifty of the warriors broke away from the Saudi ranks and raced to intercept Zahirah.

  Fouad, fighting for his own survival, saw nothing of this even greater threat to his cause occurring only yards from his own savagely fought position.

  Zahirah exulted in the imminence of her complete and public victory over her people’s killer. I’ve fooled them all! she thought, urging the now reluctant beast up the slope, towards the rapidly approaching band of warriors, intent on letting herself be captured, and so crush the Narashi will to fight on. Her heart and head were too full of her near success to spare a thought for the woman whose trust she was about to betray, who had shelved her own misgivings about Zahirah’s commitment and allowed herself to be persuaded by the girl’s impassioned pleading to be the War Queen.

  Firyal, caught out by the unexpected arrival of the enemy and the illness of the original choice, had been faced with selecting and bedecking a new girl in the very few minutes between the messenger’s arrival and Fouad’s unveiling. Zahirah, with her as always, beautiful and ardently pleading to be the substitute, became that choice. Firyal, in making that decision all unknowingly became the instrument by which the whole future of her son and his cause was irrevocably and irretrievably set.

  The forces of the Narashi and their allies, split into three groupings, fought with renewed ferocity as they sensed their approaching defeat. They well knew, many from the bitterest of tribal memory and experience of previous Saudi and Wahhabist expansionist wars, that the Wahhabi were utterly ruthless with those who fought them and lost. Death was the only reward for unsuccessful valour against the warriors of God. Little was to be lost, therefore, once battle was joined, by fighting to a death now unavoidable.

  The forces sent by Fouad to outflank the enemy were slowly being forced back down the far side of the rolling dunes. The only benefit their hard-fought action had achieved was a weakening, a thinning, of the massed ranks above them.

  This lessening of his enemy’s strength could have been fatal to them had Fouad been in a position to take advantage of it. But he wasn’t, even though, with all the irony of a random and uncaring fate, he was almost opposite the enfeebled section. He was too dangerously surrounded by a bearded, shrieking horde, each element of which was personally dedicated to his destruction, for him to be able to drive home the advantage created by his fighters’ bravery and his own foresight.

  Even his supporters rushing up the slopes in increasing numbers to his and his brother’s aid, were only matching man for man the zealots flocking down the hills and surrounding him.

  Most of the remainder of his weakened armies were desperately rallying round Zahirah and the War Litter. Her reckless l
unge towards the enemy had brought her to within twenty yards of the approaching riders, each eager to capture her. Her outriders, completely unaware of the real reason for her speeding into the very heart of danger, were inspired by her fearlessness and apparent devotion to their ruler and his cause. They fought and died by her side with all the grim, inspired tenacity of cornered lions. But they remained just that. Cornered and increasingly impotent. All their valour and sacrifice merely delaying for a few minutes longer their own death and that of their leader’s cause. The increasing heat from the sun, now a burnished disc glittering directly above them, added to their discomfort, whilst appearing to have no effect on their enemy, whose eyes still burned with the same glazed fanaticism they’d shown, at the battle’s very beginning.

  Then Mushi the camel took a decision. A decision based entirely on the ill temper and contrariness totally in keeping with both her own temperament and that of all camels from time immemorial. Her rider wanted to go straight on. This much was clear to the young camel, by the yells and rope pulling which went on whenever she deviated to either side. Equally clear to her, however was her rider’s less than total control over that rope. Hungry, thirsty and thoroughly irritated by the noise and smells around her, Mushi suddenly acted. She pulled her head forward savagely, dislodging the hand holding the rope long enough to choose a new direction for them both, and took off in it.

  Brilliant! was how Mohammed, his eyes shining with admiration, later described the resulting manoeuvre and its consequences to a still shocked Zahirah. And so it appeared. The suddenness and speed of, what seemed, Zahirah’s diversionary ploy, completely threw the galloping warriors. Instead of ending up in their midst, Mushi’s sideways plunge took them both away to the left, as the zealots, wrong-footed, plunged past her down the slope, right onto the swords and spears of the racing Bedouin guarding her. Her protectors, inspired by her apparent brilliance and courage, closed with the enemy and fought with an audacity unimaginable moments before.

  Mushi, oblivious to the fate whose instrument she was, plunged on. Had she turned to the right rather than the left, the result of the battle still might, just might, have been other than it was. But she had turned to the left and her ever-increasing speed took her in seconds into the thick of the fighting surrounding Fouad. The shock of her arrival, along with her many dozens of surrounding Bedouin, rocked the riders circling round the Narashi leader for the final kill.

  Fouad, his face streaked with sweat and smeared with patches of sand and blood, seized the moment. He broke out of the murderous ring enclosing him and, rallying his men and grasping Mushi’s leading rope, raced for the point in the fanatics’ lines weakened by their facing his diversionary force. Zahirah, her face a mask of fury at the turn of events, still had her wits about her enough to shriek encouragement to the Narashi, now suddenly in the ascendant.

  Mish’al ibn Nawwaf the young warrior in charge of the two hundred behind the attacking force felt, rather than heard, the change in the battle on the other side of the dunes. With the instincts which were to make him one of the greatest of Fouad’s military leaders, he regrouped his scattered force and dashed for the thinning lines above him. His charge, coinciding as it did with Fouad’s own race to the top, was enough to tilt the bloody balance the Narashi way. Almost simultaneously the two groups of warriors reached the crest of the hills and their combined might smashed a way through the suddenly crumbling line, with such speed that the two groups of allies were in momentary danger of fighting each other.

  Reeling from this unexpected turn of events, their centre in chaos, the Saudi forces attempted to regroup, the resourceful Saud almost turning the battle yet again. The ferocity of the Narashi onslaught and Fouad’s brilliant use of the advantage so unexpectedly gained proved too much for the Saudi warriors, however, and, singly at first, then in groups growing rapidly in size, the al Saud army, brought to smash and discipline the impertinent Narashi, fled, broken and in complete disarray.

  Great was the slaughter of goats and sheep in the camp of Fouad and his people that night. Warriors, all weariness forgotten as the liquids of victory pulsed through their veins, boasted of their role in the recent battle. Fires burned brightly, sending glowing sparks up into the infinity of the desert sky. The sonorous boom of the drums underpinned the high keening of the flute as the camp gave itself up to revelry. Dancing and feasting were the order of the day, for not only had they won a victory of which men would speak for generations to come, but tonight their Sheikh would marry. Take as wife their War Queen; she who had led them to victory. Surely the sons of such a union would be warriors indeed!

  Zahirah was gazing into the middle distance as women, her own slaves now to mark her new prominence, bathed and then dressed her in the glittering robes that Fouad had decreed as fitting for his bride. She remained silent amidst their chatter, unconscious of her unnatural reticence. From slave girl to Sheikha! How they all envied her, these girls living lives of few rights and infinite uncertainty. Frightened of Fouad though they all were, still they envied her her coming marriage. Give the Sheikh a son and her future was secure, they said. She shuddered. For that to happen she must allow herself to be taken by her people’s killer. The man who had killed her first husband, her father, brothers.

  No, never! she had vowed, but then realised that, through Ahmad, she was powerless. She could take the risk of giving the Saudis their victory, as it would seem as though her capture was misfortune, and he would have been safe. To refuse Fouad, however, even though, according to both Holy Law and tribal custom, it was her right, would expose them both to his anger. No, she must go through with it. Praise be, she thought suddenly. At least her life wouldn’t be cluttered with hordes of his women, jealous at her arrival.

  Fouad, unusually, had only a few women, and they all concubines, as his last wife had died some years earlier. She, Zahirah, for now, was to be his only wife. Honour enough for the freeborn daughter of any great chief. For a slave, an unimaginable prominence.

  Aware of one or two increasingly curious looks from what were, now, her new handmaidens, she slammed shut that part of her mind which urged her to reject the Sheikh publicly and finally; instead, she used all her growing willpower to present herself as shyly joyful at the great impending honour. After all, she would be even closer to Fouad, and in an even better position to do him damage, physical or otherwise. Her only danger was if she had a child by him. But that she wouldn't do. She knew enough of the arts of avoiding such a blessing from Allah to ensure she remained free and unencumbered.

  Firyal entered her dressing area and escorted Zahirah to where Fouad waited under a colourful awning outside the large tent. It would have been entirely in keeping with Narashi tradition for the short ceremony to be held in the privacy of the tent; instead, Fouad had decreed the public celebration of his bonding to the girl whose fame for her part in his victory was, even now, sweeping across the sands to the tents of his friends and his enemies. Perhaps even more importantly, that same word was reaching waverers and many potential future friends of Fouad and his family.

  The Imam, his great black beard still matted with some of the blood he had caused Fouad’s enemies to spill only hours before, performed the simple ceremony with all the dignity of a believer. Mohammed and Faisal, acting as witnesses, confirmed both parties’ agreements to the terms of the wedding contract. Fouad, and then Zahirah, exchanged the obligatory vows. The Imam, quoting from the Koran, took the hands of them both and held them so their thumbs were touching. He then repeated more verses from the Holy Book and – it was done; Fouad the ruler and Zahirah the captive were now married according to tribal custom and Holy Law, in a powerful mix almost unique to Narash.

  Zahirah was now the wife of Fouad; married by the flickering light of a hundred camp fires to the man she hated most in all her world, on the very day she had helped him to his greatest victory. Though a great sickness rose in her throat, she forced herself to raise her head. As she did so, Fouad looked down
at her. All but one of the onlookers felt a fierce joy as they saw in the locked gazes of the two pairs of intense black eyes a promise of fiery joy. One, seeing deeper, glimpsed something of other, darker emotions, writhing in a flickering, half light, which was only part acknowledged by one of their bearers.

  The celebrations, though reaching new heights, didn’t extend out into the desert beyond the camp. There, in the still warm darkness and guarded only by a few disgruntled and casual sentries, grazing quietly with her sisters, was another, perhaps the only, heroine of the day. Mushi munched contentedly on the sparse greenery, utterly oblivious to the great events she had not only played a part in, but sent in an entirely new direction.

  Chapter 7

  1907

  The hard, sun-bleached surface of the walls burned her hands as she stood at the topmost point of the citadel and looked down on the teeming scene of humanity far below. Closely packed in the narrow streets and alleyways of the capital, all seemed unconcerned as they rubbed shoulders with animals defecating at their feet. They appeared oblivious, also, to the noise throbbing through the burning air; its many-toned waves mingling with the shimmering heat haze engulfing, almost choking, the city. The cry from the minaret and a camel’s spiteful bellow rose up with the heat and, joined, they battered at the heavily veiled figure watching the activities below with a resentful interest.

  Even so high above the shouting of street vendors, the shrieks of the orphaned urchins running between their feet, the gathering of beggars at the city gates; even up high where the cool of the breeze from the blue waters of the gulf made the unbearable bearable, she felt herself stifled. Actually had difficulty in breathing.

  Suddenly restless, she followed the walkway round the large square tower, her sandalled feet whispering in contact with the centuries-old surface with its dusting of silk-fine sand. Her black eyes, cold and calculating as onyx above the veil masking half her face, observed the laden caravan slowly approaching the gates. The camels, their attendants, and guards were all clearly weary at the end of its weeks’ long journey from the southern hinterlands, the Al Rab’ al-Khali, the Empty Quarter. Bloated with he-camels and goats brought for sale and slaughter, it trudged slowly towards the city and its near forgotten comforts.