A Kind of Courage

by John Harris

  ‘Loose, sorr?’

  ‘Yes. But make sure his meal’s a sparse one. And let Ali be profuse with his apologies. Let him feel we have few rations. He’ll tell Aziz and they’ll probably decide it isn’t worth risking lives when we’re likely to chuck our hand in soon. It might buy us a little time.’

  7

  The tower still stood. The wall still stood. The gates still stood. And a great many lives had been lost for nothing, and the Khadari, taking their dead with them, strapped across the backs of mules and donkeys, had started to leave the camp at Addowara to begin their long trek home. Once more Thawab’s boasts had proved valueless, and he was merely more short of followers than before, and there were growls among his men that he was wasting lives.

  ‘Thank God I did not commit the Hejri,’ Aziz sneered. He gestured at the bruised face of the freed Deleimi. ‘Bin T’Khass is more likely to starve than be defeated by Thawab.’

  The infuriated Thawab’s hand went to his gun but Aziz brought up the Mannlicher. ‘I can shoot the eye from a rat,’ he pointed out coldly and Thawab subsided.

  ‘Aziz is a great leader,’ he said, controlling his temper. ‘But it is Thawab who does all the work. If the Khadari leave us, so be it. We do not need them. Rhamin Sulk is back with his offer of guns.’

  ‘We do not need guns!’

  Thawab flared. ‘He also brings news that Owinda-el is soon on the move,’ he shouted.

  Aziz paused, disconcerted. He tried to appear unconcerned.

  ‘You will have to hurry, Thawab,’ he said slowly to give himself time to think. ‘Bin T’Khass will defeat thee yet.’

  Thawab exploded. ‘We should bring in artillery!’ he shouted. ‘Owinda-el is coming!’

  ‘He has not arrived!’

  ‘Do we have to wait until he rides through the gate?’

  ‘He can run backwards and forwards from Umrah to Zereibat for all I care,’ Aziz snapped. ‘Until he passes the Dharwa range he is none of my concern. Khalit is a whore of a country and Tafas is a shadow of a sultan. Let him rot in the ditch he has dug for himself.’

  Thawab began to recover his control. ‘Aziz is an old fool,’ he said. ‘He thinks only of his own back garden. The world has changed. A share of Khalit is ours for the taking. By helping the Khaliti to throw out Tafas we can demand land south of the Dharwas. Then it would be Khusar who controlled the passes and the plain beyond.’

  ‘We are not farmers!’ Aziz stormed. ‘And Thawab gave his promise! No artillery until the plain was reached!’

  Such was the power of the old man’s personality and the threat of his anger, Thawab backed away and there was a muttering among the minor chiefs. Then one of them intervened. ‘Let Thawab stick to his word,’ he said. ‘A gun could smash down the gate with a handful of shells. We have plenty of time. Let us destroy Owinda-el for good in the Tasha and finish off Hahdhdhah at our leisure.’

  There was a chorus of agreement and murmurs from Aziz’s supporters. But not enough to give him much comfort. Always he had hoped for a negotiated peace and the joy of seeing Pentecost march out unharmed. His mind was not subtle and, obsessed with old-fashioned things like honour, he had not known until Thawab outlined them what the aims of his nation were beyond the taking of Toweida. As he turned away into the shadows, his mind was made up. His own forcefulness had stopped the artillery but it was only a temporary check, he knew, and he must follow the defecting Khadari and bully them into keeping the Ridwha Pass closed to lock Wintle from the Plain.

  As Aziz vanished among his followers, Thawab stood for a moment, lost in thought, his hand on his belt, his teeth gnawing at his lower lip. Then he saw Majid the Assassin standing alongside, staring after Aziz, his thin fanatic face twisted with hatred. For Majid there was never any question about who was right. He had been brought up since childhood to believe that a Deleimi was always right and anyone who belonged to any other clan was wrong.

  He was a thick-headed man imbued with the red-hot doctrine of the holy men who had stirred his fathers to passion and blinded their vision. To Majid the whole of life was an electric atmosphere filled with the religious enthusiasm of ancient jehads. He was unafraid in attack and fed on hatred, living always with defiance, existing for no other reason than to continue his struggle against anyone and everything that was not Deleimi. His tribe was small and his views narrow, and his courage was a fervour that cost him nothing in steeled nerves.

  Thawab watched him for a moment, then his eyes narrowed. ‘Aziz is an old fool,’ he said softly.

  ‘Thawab speaks the truth,’ Majid said automatically.

  ‘He has the brain of the Toweida goat and is twice as stubborn. Deleimi men could be the rulers of Khalit. Aziz is nothing more than a stumbling block.’

  ‘Nothing more,’ Majid agreed.

  ‘Without Aziz, Deleimi men could be powerful in Khusar councils. Even in Khaliti councils. It is a great wonder no Deleimi warrior has ever thought of this and removed him from the scene.’

  Majid’s head turned quickly and, as he stared at Thawab, Thawab read in the fierce unafraid eyes exactly what he wished to see.

  ‘Could you remove Aziz, Majid?’ he asked.

  Majid spat and patted the Garand rifle. ‘I could remove Aziz,’ he said quietly. ‘Whenever Thawab asked.’

  Eleven

  1

  Their sufferings were not measured by the number of killed and wounded, which so far had not been great, or even by sickness – though the list was growing. They were measured by confinement, overcrowding, and smells. Three hundred odd people – more with the civilians – were having to live in a space eighty yards square. Their sanitation arrangements had always been bad and, though they had improved them, they had still remained primitive and inadequate. They were verminous and a plague of insects like sand fleas, brown ticks that bored into the skin, had given them all itching sores.

  Food had grown monotonous and scarce, and they were now eating a toasted wheat mash that could not sustain life – grain ground laboriously by the women with pestle and mortar or by a mill driven by the jacked-up driving wheels of a lorry. Their tobacco was gone and condensed milk was kept only for the wounded, so that dysentery was spreading and they dreamed and talked of food whenever they were off duty.

  They were all tired now and only Pentecost seemed untouched by exhaustion. He had had a trench dug across the courtyard so that they could cross it without coming under sniper fire, and since the mining, had decided that silence was perhaps their most effective weapon and had given orders that no one was to fire except at specific targets. As they crouched behind the embrasures under the shelters of canvas and rush matting, the fort looked empty, with nothing moving for hours at a time. But it also looked ominous and if a Hejri or a Deleimi showed himself outside a rifle cracked, setting off a chain reaction so that hundreds answered in reply.

  The weather had changed to cold winds and sleet and the sky took on the colour of ashes, and with their short rations they were chilled blue at night so that Pentecost had startled Beebe by appearing in a Persian sheepskin coat that made him look like a pop star posed for publicity. But the Toweida were growing nervous again and verses from the Koran had been stuck in cleft sticks on the ramparts as prayers for relief. They were all losing their sense of proportion as little irritations appeared mountainous, and small quarrels kept breaking out between soldiers and civilians, between Dharwas, Civil Guards and Toweida Levies, even occasionally between Dharwa and Dharwa and Toweida and Toweida. The zaids and int-zaids who were left were barely on speaking terms and it was only the loss of Lack – which had reduced the British officers to two, three including Beeb – that kept them from losing their temper with each other, because Minto was invariably occupied in the hospital and had even moved his quarters there. He had performed miracles with repulsive wounds and had sat night after night over the medical books and the bound journals from the library. He had even tried amputation, using the meat saw from the kitchen, and had emerged l
ooking like a butcher. There was little anaesthetic left now, though, and it was never used for the lighter wounds and the worry over his patients made him irritable. As for Fox and Chestnut, they had little in common, but since one was on duty when the other was off, there was little opportunity for them to quarrel, though Chestnut’s complaints about the refusal of Fox’s men to understand him were growing daily more bitter and Fox’s insults about Chestnut’s ancestry were occasionally not entirely in jest. As for Beebe, he was preoccupied these days with his own thoughts.

  Somehow, like Aziz, he had fallen against his will under the strange spell of Pentecost and several times he found himself wondering just what it was about the boy that held him. He was far from being a dynamic character. Placid as a stone Buddha, his habits were monkish and he would probably grow dry and dull with age; but, Beebe realised, he had the kind of courage that was probably the finest of all, the courage to keep on keeping on and on, far beyond all reasonable hope, never thinking of himself as ill-used, and never thinking of himself as brave. He was always a little stiff, always formal, rarely unbending or laughing, but always friendly. Yet underneath his odd personality there was a whip-cord-and-steel core. It had been Pentecost who had brought in Stone’s body and attended to its burial.

  Nobody argued long with him, yet he was always able to disagree with the greatest possible politeness, so that they began almost to apologise for their different opinions. He had his finger on everything that happened and never seemed to sleep. Sometimes, to Beebe’s fury, he didn’t even seem to be tired. He was always prowling about, chiding a Toweida, talking gently to one of the children, or managing to wring a grudging smile from its mother, soothing the angry civilian employees who blamed him for their incarceration, placating Fox over Chestnut, or Chestnut over Fox, sorting out quarrels between Dharwa and Toweida and, when they were serious, coming down with a bang on both contestants so that they were quick to realise it wasn’t worth the effort.

  He rarely showed his anxiety, but once Beebe had found him at one of the embrasures staring to the north. His whole body had been tense, wiry and alert like a terrier at a hole.

  ‘Something worrying you?’ he had asked.

  Pentecost had turned, his face thoughtful. ‘A little, Mr Beebe,’ he said.

  ‘Set my mind at rest.’

  Pentecost’s head moved slightly, in a small gesture towards the north.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘Why don’t they bring up guns?’

  ‘Guns?’ Beebe’s jaw had dropped. ‘Artillery, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Why not, Mr Beebe?’

  Beebe found his throat was dry and he swallowed quickly. The young men in the fort had talked so casually about dying he had considered it all a load of crap at first. Now, vaguely, he saw that their understatements were only their way of equating a possibly violent end to their lives with a rather boring joke, and he saw that they did it because it helped them to avoid looking the fact directly in the face.

  ‘Maybe they’ve got none,’ he suggested.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Pentecost said slowly. ‘But it wouldn’t take them long to get some. They could fly guns into Makhrash and have ’em through the Addowara Pass in forty-eight hours. Why haven’t they?’

  Beebe stared to the north, hoping that there was a damn’ good reason why not. So far, it hadn’t occurred to him that the northern tribes had not reached the limit of their resources.

  ‘Think they’ll try?’ he asked.

  Pentecost shrugged, his smooth face expressionless. ‘I’d be surprised if they didn’t,’ he said.

  The idea of artillery shells plunging into the fortress, striking haphazardly at men, women and children, worried Beebe and brought him more and more to consider a problem that had been concerning him for days now – that of getting a message to Wintle warning him that, contrary to what he believed, it was the Ridwha not the Tasha Pass that was open.

  Messages continued to reach them. The British Government, thrown into a panic by Tafas’ move north, had scraped up two companies of fire-fighters and flown them into Khaswe. The airport was under control again, but the shooting and the bombings continued. A British officer had been shot in the back and two more headmen had been murdered, one in the Dhafran area and one near Haraa, while tribesmen from over the borders to the east and west, taking advantage of the trouble in Khalit, were busily exchanging shots with the Muleimat in Umrah and the Khadari in Zereibat. The whole country was seething with unrest.

  But the British had not called Tafas’ bluff because they had not dared to, and with British troops flying into Khaswe, his army had moved north towards Haraa and finally Dhafran. Already the first scouting lorries were heading out of Dhafran towards the Tasha.

  The news obsessed Beebe, particularly when none of the civilian workers, worried by the banners clustered in the encampment near the village, would offer to take a message south. Despite their professed desire to leave Hahdhdhah, they were terrified of being caught, and Pentecost was not eager to risk one of the stolid, cheerful Dharwas who were the backbone of the defence. There were only thirty of them still active and he knew he could never trust one of the Toweidas.

  Time was of the essence, Beebe knew. They had already been besieged for forty-five days but, while the bleak courage of the garrison was still obvious, the unburied dead around the stables came back to plague them with their stench. Twice already the rations had been reduced and there was a great deal of sickness among the civilians who were not buoyed up by responsibility. They were living on a handful of meat and rice a day now, and Beebe knew that if Wintle was caught in the Tasha, nothing on God’s earth would ever produce a second column of sufficient strength from the Sultan’s indifferent army to get through to them in time.

  Like the Fajir, through which he had passed from Dhafran on his journey north, the Tasha was narrow. Its sides were a limitless expanse of rock and crumbling hill, with vast slopes of shale and shingle. Its paths descended in zigzags, and it was a place of dry, windless silences. Down its roads the Muleimat warriors strode, their heads up, always armed; and the few guards, in fragments of Sultan Tafas’ uniform, rode their thirty-two-inch-high donkeys, their rifles across their backs, their putteed legs hanging down on either side almost to the ground while their miniature mounts tottered along on twinkling feet. It was a place where bridges constantly slid away into gulfs in the rains, where there were always dead mules and donkeys which had not survived the journey, or burned-out lorries, their wheelless axles in the air like the amputated stumps of some strange metallic victim of a ritual murder.

  It was an oppressive place and in Beebe’s mind there was always the picture of Wintle’s lorries caught beneath its crags. He had not had any particular fondness for Wintle when he had met him in Dhafran but, remembering how little fondness he had had for Pentecost when he’d arrived at Hahdhdhah, he now began to wonder if perhaps the fault were with him and not Wintle, because there was a great deal about Wintle that was repeated in the younger man. Though their characters were very different, they were both professionals in the best sense of the word.

  Wintle deserved a chance. And, even more, so did Pentecost.

  2

  Resolutely, Beebe knocked on Pentecost’s door. Pentecost was writing at his desk and outside the fortress was silent. An unexpected rainstorm had saturated the sentries and left them cold and wretched in the wind that followed.

  There had been a lot of drumming during the day and Beebe had heard bugles among the rocks, and seen Deleimi tribesmen dodging from cover to cover. They had been expecting an attack after dark but the rain had come at the crucial moment and stopped them in their tracks, and Beebe had later seen the shadowy figures withdrawing towards Addowara, their shoulders bent against the rain, their garments soaked.

  Pentecost waited for him to speak, a small smile playing across his lips. Beebe always felt awkward in his presence, even sometimes like a small boy up before his headmaster.

  �
��You found anyone yet to get out to warn Wintle?’ he asked bluntly.

  Pentecost eyed him for a moment, then he shook his head.

  ‘Wintle’ll be going into a trap, with the Ridwha wide open,’ Beebe pointed out.

  ‘I’m aware of that, Mr Beebe. I’m also aware that the Khadari might still decide to wait and see which way the wind blows.’

  ‘Somebody ought to tell Wintle. The Tasha’s more dangerous than the Ridwha.’

  Pentecost acknowledged the truth of this with a slow nod of the head and Beebe drew a deep breath.

  ‘How’s about me?’ he asked.

  For a moment, Pentecost said nothing and Beebe was half afraid he was going to laugh in his face. He ought to have known: Pentecost would never have done anything so impolite.

  ‘You, Mr Beebe?’ he said, and Beebe found himself wishing to God he’d do him the honour of just once using his Christian name.

  ‘Yeah, me,’ he said. ‘Why not?’

  ‘In principle, no reason at all why not, Mr Beebe.’ To his surprise, Pentecost didn’t immediately offer an objection. ‘There are one or two small drawbacks, however. You don’t speak Khaliti and you don’t look much like a native of the state. There’s an encampment guarding the road south and if they caught you wandering about outside the fort, they wouldn’t be in doubt for long about where you’d come from.’

  ‘I can disguise myself.’ Beebe ran a hand over his face. He’d stopped shaving at the beginning of the siege and his heavy beard and moustache had grown rapidly.

  ‘I suppose you could,’ Pentecost agreed. ‘All the same, I’m not entirely happy about it It’s not your quarrel. You’re not really involved.’

  ‘All the more reason why I should leave,’ Beebe said. ‘Then everybody’ll be able to say I shoved off just when it was getting dangerous.’