The page of the letter flickered a shade nearer. Abbas Pasha, with a gracious inclination, put out one hand and received it, contriving to appear almost unaware of what he did. “As you say, Highness, I was not aware of the full circumstances behind this unfortunate affair. As a merciful man, I shall be delighted to relieve the Viceroy from his promise, and indeed to request him to rescind the execution order. As to the other pages of this letter …?”
“They are quite safe, in a place where it is not very convenient to reach them at this hour of night. They shall be with you before noon tomorrow; meanwhile you will wish to write a note to the Viceroy, relieving him from his promise and advising clemency. I am most grateful to Your Excellency for your understanding attitude. Will it be convenient if Captain Ballatar waits upon you in an hour to receive your letter?”
The minister got up, bowing deeply. The interview it seemed was over, and relief shone from him: “In less. In half an hour, Highness, the letter shall be ready.”
Now that he could draw breath and spare a thought for his own danger he wondered what the Vicereine’s real interest in the young man was. Maybe he was her lover. If so there might be capital to be made out of that one day.
*
Thomas must have slept after all, for suddenly the grey first light of dawn was seeping through the barred window to mingle with the last dregs of smoky lamplight in the room. The Koran lay open on the dirty mattress beside him, and someone was rattling back the bolts on the door.
His first thought was that they had come for him already, and something clutched like an ice-cold fist at his belly. But almost in the same instant he remembered that he had asked to be awakened early, in plenty of time to make his morning prayer.
But the man who entered past the guard carried a tray which he set down on the stool. “By the order of my Master Ibrahim Pasha,” the man said. “My master bids me tell you that in an hour, after you have prayed and eaten, he will be with you.”
There was a lamp on the tray also. Thomas smelled coffee, and sitting up saw small crusty loaves and a bowl of golden-dripping honeycomb, and wondered if the Egyptians were in the habit of giving their condemned men a good breakfast before their execution, or whether this bore some message of hope. But it was from Ibrahim Pasha so it was probably just a kindly gesture, with no other significance either way. It would be easier if he knew. Easier even in the matter of prayer. It was not easy to pray if one did not know if the prayer was to be that of a man going to die and asking, amongst other things, courage to die in such a way as would not shame either himself or his friends, or the prayer of a man giving thanks for a reprieve. Not that he imagined there was much likelihood of that.
A few moments later he heard the long-drawn call of morning prayer from the minaret of the citadel mosque. He got up and turned himself as well as he could judge in the direction of Mecca and made the ordinary first prayer of the day. That would serve in either case, and Allah the All Compassionate would know how to receive it.
Allah is greater than all else,
Glory and praise to O thee Allah. Blessed is thy name. Exalted is thy Majesty. Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Master of the Day of Judgment. Guide us all into the path of the Blessed … Verily my prayers and my worship, my life and my death are unto Allah, the Lord of the worlds …
When he had finished praying, he drank some coffee, by now tepid and bitter, and then forced himself to eat a little of the bread, lest men should say afterwards that his belly had been too full of fear to allow food as well.
He had just finished when footsteps again came along the corridor, the door was opened and Ibrahim Pasha came in.
Thomas, who had got to his feet at the sound of the bolts being shot back, stood looking into his face for what seemed a long time, though he realised later that it could have lasted no longer than a heartbeat, trying to read what lay behind the blunt, clever face, the light blue eyes that were such a startling contrast to the dark skin.
Then the pasha moved forward from the shadows of the doorway into the light that was beginning to filter down through the barred window. Behind him the door remained open.
“I am ready,” Thomas said.
The Viceroy’s elder son gave his rare smile. “There is no immediate hurry; you may walk out of here when you wish.”
“When I wish?”
“You are a free man, Ibrahim Bey. My father rescinded the death warrant half an hour ago, Abbas Pasha having most generously released him from his promise.”
Thomas acted quite naturally according to the custom of his new world. He dropped to his knees and bending forward, laid his forehead for an instant on the other man’s feet. “My lifelong thanks be to you Ibrahim Pasha, and to my Lord your father. I shall be allowed to thank him in person?”
“Assuredly. Also I think it would be polite to do as much for Abbas Pasha, though I doubt if many thanks are due in his direction. Your chief gratitude, I believe, is due to my mother.” He stooped and made the small token gesture of assistance to rise, a hand lightly under Thomas’s elbow as he rose to his feet again.
“The Lady Amina?” Thomas was puzzled. How could the Lady Amina have swayed the thing one way or the other?
Ibrahim Pasha shrugged very slightly, and answered the unspoken bewilderment. “Who, except possibly Abbas Pasha can say? The ways of women are their own — I know only that she was occupied on your behalf last midnight … Come now, this is not the most pleasant of places for conversation, and you will doubtless wish to return to your own quarters to wash and change before life goes on again.”
Thomas gathered up his Koran and followed him out of the cell, the guards falling back to let him pass, and down the dark tunnel-like corridor towards the open air and the living world at the far end. The clear morning light dazzled him, and the smell of dust and wood-smoke and the song of the birds in the shade-trees of the maidan fell on his senses like a shout.
Did Lazarus feel like this? he wondered, and did not even notice that he was mingling his faiths again.
Figures came towards him — he towards them — and foremost among them, travelling at a wavering run, Tussun with outspread arms, looking as though he had spent the grandfather and grandmother of all nights on the town.
What in Allah’s name had been in that wine?
12
With the inundation sunk away, and the Nile Valley hazed with the first young shoots of flax and barley pricking through the steaming black earth, the time was almost come to launch the Sudan expedition. But first there was another matter to be dealt with: the matter of Tussun’s marriage.
Ibrahim Pasha had been married almost two years before, immediately on his return from his hostage years in Istanbul, to the daughter of one of the Viceroy’s Albanian allies. But he had no son as yet to continue the proud new line; and in any case, Egyptian support also needed taking care of. So now, before Tussun went off to his first war, Muhammed Ali was marrying his younger son to a daughter of Sheikh Michal ibn Ishak, leader of one of the oldest and most powerful Cairene families.
Tussun, who had of course never seen his bride, was not especially interested, but quite willing, indeed rather pleased. Now that he was seventeen he felt that a wife was something he should have; a mark of manhood. And his mother and his sister Nayli had both assured him that the girl was not ugly and did not have evil-smelling breath. So plans went ahead, with much haggling over dowries and drawing up of legal documents between the fathers of the bride and groom, and much visiting in closed carriages between the harems of both families.
And eventually the appointed day arrived, and the evening of the appointed day. Earlier, in the majlis of the sheikh’s house in the Fatamid quarter, the wedding ceremony had taken place — if ceremony it could be called, Thomas, present among the bridegroom’s friends, had thought; Muslim though he now was, there were still things about his adopted faith that he found strange and alien. And a wedding which consisted in t
he imam asking, first, the groom and then the bride’s father in the presence of a few witnesses if they agreed to the marriage, and in which the bride herself did not take part at all (though he gathered that she was probably somewhere close by, where she could hear what went on) was one of them.
“When I come back from the south,” Tussun had said the night before, “I shall set the women to finding a wife for you, Tho’mas, so that our sons may grow up together and be brothers also.”
Thomas had laughed. “It is a good thought, but truth to tell I am not sure that I relish the thought of tying myself to a girl I have never seen before the wedding night.”
“Ah but it is not like that at all. The women will describe her to you; and when you pull off her clothes on the wedding night, you may find her as beautiful as — as a full moon reflected on still water among lotus flowers. And if not —”
“Aye, if not? How if the women’s descriptions are more kind than accurate, and she has a face like the back end of a camel?”
“Then you can always divorce her, after a decent interval, so long as you make the proper provision for her. Or if you do not care to actually put her away, you can take another wife and hope for better fortune the second time.”
“I think,” Thomas had said, “that I had better leave all that until I am an agha with an agha’s well-lined saddle bags.”
Now, having survived the day of non-stop feasting, Tussun’s friends and supporters had escorted him to the garden pavilion where his bride, smuggled out by a side door from her father’s house, awaited him. The young men strolled in shifting groups, or lounged on spread rugs and cushions, drank coffee and sherbet and ate yet more sticky sweetmeats, tossing the usual unseemly jests to and fro while they waited with him for the dusk to deepen into the dark, and the time for him to go in to his marriage night.
Thomas, standing with one shoulder propped against a slender column of the arcaded court, felt himself an onlooker, detached from all the rest. He had overeaten and the rich food sat like lead in his belly, adding to his sense of vague desolation. He wished he did not feel so cut off … If Zeid were here, or Colonel D’Esurier, or Donald … But Colonel D’Esurier, after a few days in Cairo last week, was back in Suez; something to do with naval gun mountings; and likely to remain there. Zeid had already gone south with a fresh body of cavalry, ahead of the main body of the expeditionary force; and Donald was still in Alexandria, though he would be going south also with the medical team before long. He wrote sometimes. His last letter had contained news of Sir John Moore’s death at Corunna and Wellesley’s return to the command, and had given Thomas, as news from the outer world always did, a pang of homesickness for the old life and the old regiment which did nothing to cheer him up now. Maybe, he thought, searching for a gleam of light in the surrounding gloom, they would be able to meet when he passed through Cairo. It would be good to see Donald again after this long while, and maybe hear news of Medhet — maybe even see Medhet himself again in the by-going, if, as seemed likely, his regiment was among those ordered south. The gloom which had lightened for a moment, descended on Thomas again. They were all going south, or at any rate would be far out of Cairo; Tussun as soon as the three days and nights of his wedding should be over; leaving him behind. And that was the hard aching core of his dark mood, that, after all, the Viceroy had refused his application to go with the Sudan expeditionary force.
Tussun would be gone with his two regiments, and he, Thomas, would be still tethered here in Cairo, not only powerless to turn aside the spear thrust or stop the bullet that threatened him (he remembered the Vicereine’s supper party, and wry amusement winced within him at his own foolishness), but denied the chance to gain military experience, the chance to achieve honour and excellence and certain shining goals that he found mattered to him surprisingly deeply, even now that he was rising twenty-two and might expect to have outgrown such boy’s dreams.
“Good training officers are not without their worth,” Zeid had said; while Colonel D’Esurier had consoled him, “If it’s a war you’re wanting to blood your sabre, I do not think you will have so very long to wait.” And when pressed for further details he had laughed his creaking inner laugh. “My dear young friend, I am the Viceroy’s gunnery adviser, not one of his ministers. But only consider. The Wahabis — followers of Saud ibn Saud, who have spread across most of western Arabia since they poured out from Diriyah and the mountains of the interior a dozen years ago, and whose version of the Faith stands in much the same relationship to the rest of Islam as the followers of Calvin to the rest of Christianity; whose method, moreover, of spreading that version is by fire and sword — cannot, one assumes, be left indefinitely in possession of the Holy Cities and the trade and pilgrim routes. The Viceroy has been building troop transports and armed escort vessels at Suez, rumour has it, by order of the Sultan sitting uneasy on his throne in Istanbul. Put these facts together, and make of them what you will …”
Thomas had duly put them together, but whatever he made of them for the future, gained little comfort from them for the present time.
His sense of being shut off from the scene around him, in which he had no part, produced the odd effect of making him more acutely aware of his surroundings than he would otherwise have been, as he propped up his column and looked moodily on. It was a scene half sharp-edged in torchlight, half lost in shifting shadows. The torches burned full-circle round the garden-court, the resin scent of them mingling with the perfume of white-starred jasmine and hyacinth and damask roses, just coming into flower; their flames, teased by the light wind off the Nile, picking out and losing and finding again the laughing wine-flushed faces of the young men, who, knowing that there would be nothing stronger than sherbet to drink in the house of an orthodox Cairene sheikh, had made their own arrangements beforehand; snapping a response of coloured fire from a turban jewel on the gold hilt of a dagger, a gold-fringed cummerbund, an embroidered sleeve, silk that rippled crimson and emerald and saffron. And above the coloured shift and shimmer, the night moths danced like the notes of the flutes and zither the musicians were playing in the shadows.
And overhead also the sudden dark remoteness of shade-trees in the main garden beyond the wall, standing aloof as himself from the vivid scene; and among their twisted branches, as he looked up at them with a sense of kinship, a stealthy client-life of their own, dark among dark, climbing shadows that moved and paused and moved again, the cats of Cairo about their usual night-time business.
One of the prowling shadows, on a lower branch than the rest, checked for an instant into velvet stillness, and seemed to meet his gaze, eyes catching the farthest fringe of the torchlight to become faint green lamps among the leaves. He wondered if that was what had been giving him for some moments past the sensation of being watched. But it did not seem likely that any of the slinking shadows living their own self-contained lives among the night-time roof tops and the branches of planes and oleanders would feel enough interest in the torchlight scene in Sheikh Michal ibn Ishak’s garden court, to spare it a passing glance, let alone to single out one human among all the rest for watching. And when the twin green lamps had turned away, and the shadow was lost among shadow branches, the sense of being watched still remained with him.
And remained so strongly that he found himself looking among the faces of his fellow guests, though it was just as unlikely that any of them would be watching him. In fact, one was. Out of the midst of the few Mamelukes standing as they always seemed to do in any company, in a close-knit and flamboyant group of their own, the harsh high-nosed face of Sulieman ibn Mansoor of the Mameluke Guard was turned towards him, the eyes half closed as though he watched from behind a veil. Thomas had met that veiled hostile glance more than once since the evening of the duel; he supposed it was not surprising, for the man had been a friend of Aziz. What he found more disturbing was the presence behind him of the gigantic Nubian, his freedman. Mubarak, who was reputed to be the strongest man in Cairo, well able t
o break another man’s neck with his bare hands, yet he moved as soft-footed as a cat, and reeked like a whore of rose-oil and musk that seemed, coming from him, to be the very breath of all uncleanness. It seemed to Thomas that he could catch the smell now across the crowded court and seeping through the scents of the flowers and, hot torch-resin, and his stomach turned a little as always with acute distaste. The best thing to do was simply to shut one’s mind to him and assume that he was not there. Thomas assumed accordingly, and giving his full attention to ibn Mansoor, gave him back stare for stare, until after a few moments the Mameluke turned his gaze elsewhere.
Yet still the sense of being watched remained with him.
It was the sensation that he had known before from time to time in the desert, never knowing who or what it was that watched him; the sensation he had known most strongly of all in the Vicereine’s salon, when the eyes upon him, waiting for him, had been the long-lidded dark eyes of the Lady Nayli; filled with a kind of hungry speculation.
Something — it was as though the passing memory had renewed that momentary link — drew his gaze up to the nearest of the shuttered windows in the high house wall to his left, and for an instant he had a sense of unseen eyes meeting his own. There was a flicker of movement behind the delicate window tracery; and he thought he heard a breath of women’s laughter above the voices and the music of flutes and zithers in the garden.
He turned his attention firmly back to the torch lit scene around him, his gaze seeking out and coming to rest on the flushed and laughing face of Tussun, his turban at an even more rakish angle than usual, his eyes bright in the leaping torch-light. It was near the time for him to go in to his bride, and the bawdy jests were flying thick and fast; though lacking, by Muslim custom, all reference to the bride’s past and reputation, they seemed to Thomas to lack also something of the richness and variety that he remembered from other weddings he had attended, especially during his days with the 78th.