But why the special interest?
In the first days, he had been past caring; but now an interest in his future was beginning to wake in him, and he cared a good deal. If only the Albanian orderlies had more than three words of French, or he and Donald more than three words of Turkish, or a single word of Albanian, they might have found out.
A shape loomed into the doorway, for the moment blotting out the dazzle of evening light, as Donald ducked his tall head to enter, a smaller shadow at his heels. Donald had spent every moment of the past days that he could spare from Thomas himself, helping among the Albanian wounded in the village, who without him would have lacked all help save for the clumsy butchery of their own barber-surgeons. It was in the course of his work among them that he had picked up Medhet (that seemed to be his name) who had brought himself in with a sabre gash across his ribs, who seemed to be a self-appointed soldier rather than just a hanger-on with the Albanian force, and who could not be a day more than fourteen. Donald had dealt with the flesh wound, and Medhet had promptly shifted his allegiance and attached himself as friend, surgeon’s mate and general dog’s-body to the big Lewisman.
After helping him to dress Thomas’s wound and sitting beside him on watch when the fever was at its height, he had divided his loyalties, or rather spread them wider to include both young men.
Now he set down the bowl of warm water and strips of linen that he had been carrying, and came — a cheerful-seeming callant with a wicked faun’s face, naked save for the tattered remains of his kilt-like fustanella and a strip of bandage line across his chest — to squat beside Thomas and give whatever help was called for, including keeping off any flies that were beyond the chameleon’s range.
Looking at them, the urchin and the big fair-haired young man, Thomas realised with a sudden feeling of warmth that they were probably the only living friends he now possessed. Donald was folding back the bandage with intense concentration, easing it away from the wound where it still stuck. His hands were sure and delicate in their work; but his down-bent face looked weary almost past belief, and it was unlike him to have no word to spare while he worked.
“Could ye not have left it until ye came to sleep?” Thomas asked. Donald shared the room in the headman’s house and it would at least have saved the special coming in and the going away again.
The big man shook his head. “I’m needing to see it in the daylight. Ye canna judge, by a palm-oil glim.”
“It feels better,” Thomas said hopefully, “no’ so hot.”
“It is better.” Donald was bathing the wound, pressing gently, exploringly. Only a little pus came out now. He took up a small flask of arak from among the tools of his trade. He had always been a believer in the use of whisky to keep a wound clean from infection. And now with no whisky he had discovered the native palm spirit to be just as good, and fortunately the Albanian Muslims and the Egyptians of the Delta seemed not to consider it as alcohol, so it was easily come by. Now he poured a few drops into the wound.
Thomas drew his breath in with a hiss as the spirit bit on the still raw flesh. “Ach, damn you, Donald!”
Donald put the stopper back into the flask and reached for the bandage linen. “Be glad you can be feeling the good fire. I was none so sure at one time the wound was not going to mortify.”
But his voice was as leaden as his weary face. Exhaustion, Thomas had seen in him before, this was something else. “What’s amiss, then?”
Donald glanced up for a moment, without pause in his careful bandaging: “I lost a man but now — out from between my hands.”
Thomas thought: ‘A man of the enemy. One of the men that killed Willie Moffat and the rest.’ But he did not speak the thought aloud. Maybe when you were striving to save living flesh and it went dead under your hands, it did not seem like that. “Ye’ll have done the best that ye could for him,” he said, aware that that was barren comfort, too.
“Aye,” said Donald, “and until yestere’en I thought that maybe he’d a chance.” He finished off the bandage. “He was a bonnie fighter; but now he’s food for the jackals, and the heart is sore within me.”
“I’m sorry.” Thomas reached down to set his hand on the other’s wrist as he tied the final knot.
“‘Never get involved with your patients.’ That’s what our surgeon told me once. ‘There’s no sense in the both of ye bleeding.’”
“Maybe that — the getting involved wi’ your patients — is what makes ye a good surgeon.”
Donald shook his head. “It’s not that, makes me a good surgeon.”
“Something does. Something makes you an even better surgeon than you are a drummer, Donal’ Finn.”
“Aye.” Donald agreed seriously, and for a moment they looked at each other, the rest unsaid between them. Then he gathered his gear and drew his legs under him to get up. “I’ll be none so ill, if I get the chance.” He got wearily to his feet. “Medhet is biding with you — he understands. He’ll fetch you some soup by and by. Aye, and see that you sup it.”
He turned and ducked out through the doorway; and the urchin, grinning from ear to ear, settled himself to keep the flies at bay with a swishing palm frond, his eyes fixed on Thomas’s face like a hound pup, adoring and eager to please.
Almost at once voices sounded outside; the doorway darkened again, and Thomas brought his gaze down from the thatch as another tall figure came stooping in. For an instant he thought that Donald had come back for something, then saw that this was a much older man, darkly saturnine of face, and wearing a white abba loosely flung on over what looked like the uniform of a French army officer.
Thomas had heard of the French gunner colonel seconded to the Egyptian army to assist Muhammed Ali, the Ottoman Viceroy, in building up the new artillery arm of his forces, who had arrived at El Hamed last night to take possession of the three captured British field guns, and hazarded a guess as the man paused by the door.
“Colonel D’Esurier?” He managed a rather sketchy salute.
The Frenchman came forward. “And you I think, are Private Thomas Keith of the 2nd Battalion, 78th Highlanders? I had meant to come earlier but I have been fully occupied with this business of the field guns, and now it is later in the day than I had imagined. If your wound troubles you too greatly or you are too weary to receive visitors …”
Thomas was not used to being spoken to after this fashion by senior officers, but it seemed that he had passed beyond the boundaries of his own familiar world, and, therefore, as nothing was familiar nothing could be strange. In any case, here was his chance to find out things that he urgently needed to know. He got a firm hold on his thinking processes, which still seemed not completely under his own control. “Will you be seated; I apologise for the lack of anywhere but the floor.”
Colonel D’Esurier folded up like a surprisingly elegant camel on to the mat beside him, Medhet giving back warily, the least possible amount. “I have not spent three years in Egypt, much of the time in the desert, without becoming well used to sitting on the floor.”
Thomas waited until he was settled, and then asked him the most urgent of the questions, “Monsieur, what has happened to the rest of us — the prisoners, the wounded? Is all well with them? We heard that they — we — were safe under the protection of Ahmed Agha, but …”
“But you do not trust Ahmed Agha? Quite safe, and in Cairo long since.” The Frenchman’s face flickered into a faint sardonic smile. “You will have heard of British heads carried on Turkish lances, and set up over town gates? — a time-hallowed custom of the Ottoman empire. Let me assure you they were taken only from dead men. The prisoners and wounded are in no danger — save that which besets any wounded man until his wound is healed. Nevertheless, they are not so much safe by reason of the Agha’s protection as because the Viceroy wishes to resume friendly relations with Britain as soon as may be, and has ordered all prisoners of war to be well treated, after being taken alive in the first place, and has reinforced the order by proc
laiming a bounty of seven Maria Theresa dollars per living man — twenty in the case of officers. If there’s one thing the Turks and Albanians understand, it’s dollars.”
Thomas nodded, his eyes fixed gravely on the other man’s face, and asked his second question: “Monsieur, can you tell me why Donald MacLeod and I have been separated from the rest?”
“Donald MacLeod? — Ah, the young surgeon?”
Thomas saw no reason to explain that Donald was officially only a medical orderly. “Was that on the Agha’s orders? We have been — anxious.”
D’Esurier’s lips twitched. “Assuredly you do not trust him, do you? You should be flattered; the Agha is hated by his men, he is cruel and greedy and his vices are in a class by themselves; also they call him Ahmed Bonaparte for the good opinion that he has of himself. But he is a superb cavalry general as brave as a lion — and a good judge of men.”
“Maybe if I knew for what purpose …” began Thomas, his mouth uncomfortably dry.
The twitch at the corner of the Frenchman’s mouth broadened into a smile. “I believe you may set your mind at rest on that point: you are, both of you, much too old for the Agha. No, like most Ottoman generals, Ahmed Agha has his own private guard, and he feels that he has found two worthy acquisitions to its ranks: a skilled surgeon and — if I may say so — an extremely personable young soldier who speaks French, knows how to bear pain like a gentleman, and is the best swordsman and shot in his regiment.”
“Who told him that?” Thomas demanded, startled.
“Apparently you did, when he questioned you as to your skills more or less as your surgeon friend was engaged in removing the bullet.”
“I must have been more far-gone than I knew.”
The colonel looked at him with a seeing eye. Ahmed Agha was not alone in being a good judge of men. “But it is true, I think, yes?”
“Yes,” Thomas said.
“So — it is very simple. He bought you both from your Albanian captors — paying an officer’s bounty for each of you, and something over, beside.”
Thomas struggled up on to his elbow, “But, Sir, he has not the right! We are both prisoners of war!”
“As to the right, Ahmed Bonaparte considers himself above such questions. But in this case I do not think that either of you will suffer by it.” Colonel D’Esurier quietly changed the subject. “You speak excellent French, better than I had expected, though the Agha told me that it was as good as his.”
Thomas heard the faint sheen of steel in the other’s voice, and knew that for the present, at all events, there would be small chance of changing the subject back again.
“My grandfather was out with Charles Edward. After, he was twenty years in exile and served them in the French army. When he came back, he married into a farm close by Edinburgh; and when I was born and old enough — my father was a master watchmaker and silversmith in the city — I used to go out to him at every possible moment. It was he that taught me the language.”
“Ah, the Keiths seem to have the wild goose blood in their veins. Are you by any chance related to the famous brothers — the Earl Marshal and Field Marshal Keith who served under Frederick the Great?”
Thomas caught his breath in a crack of laughter. “Only in the sense that every member of a clan may claim kinship with every other. I am not a gentleman even if I can bear pain like one — though I think my grandfather would have claimed to be.”
“Mine also.” The colonel was amused and thoughtful. “I wonder if I can make the same claim. You have to remember that I joined the revolutionary army; I was a republican until three years ago, when we all became imperialist overnight.”
They looked at each other a moment in silence. Then Thomas asked, “In the Imperial army is it the custom for colonels to coming visiting privates?”
“In other words, why have I come? Ahmed Agha felt that, as a student of men, I should perhaps be interested in his new — acquisitions. And your surgeon has no French and I, lamentably, little English. A pity.”
The mention of Donald jerked Thomas back to an earlier part of the conversation, and gave him the strength to hold to it for his friend’s sake that he had lacked in holding to it for his own. “Monsieur le Colonel, forgive me, because he has no French and therefore cannot ask it for himself, I must return to this matter of our position and ask for him as well as for myself. Since we are prisoners of war, what happens if, when the time comes for the rest of us to be repatriated, we wish to be repatriated also?”
The Frenchman hesitated an instant, then yielded. “I think that Ahmed Agha, if he still wishes to keep you — which is by no means certain, for he is a man who sometimes confuses will with whim — may well try bribery. I do not think that he will seek to keep you by force. That is not altruism; he is no fool, and only a fool would keep a personal physician or an officer of his guard against their wills. It would be risky, do you not think?”
“So we would be free to go?”
“When the time comes, you may not find it easy; but free to go, if you persist, certainly. Meanwhile, my friend, I suggest that you accept the chance that the gods have sent you.” He drew his long legs under him and got up, hitching at the loose shoulders of his abba. “I have stayed long enough, and you must rest. But I think that we shall meet again.”
When he had gone, Thomas returned to staring up into the reed thatch overhead. “The chance that the gods have sent you …” What chance? A new strange life for which he would have to pay by deserting from the old one? Well, he would not have to make that choice yet, not for months, maybe a year; certainly not while he was spread all over this stinking bed. But ever since he had emerged from the fever he had had this sense of another door shutting behind him … He had never felt a strong bond with the regiment, though he had kept faith and given them the best that was in him in exchange for his pay. It was Willie Moffat and the rest that he had felt the bond with. Maybe that was how it was with mercenaries. Maybe that was how Grandfather had felt towards his French regiment … He was still too weak to think very clearly, and had used up most of what clear-thinking he had while Colonel D’Esurier was here. He was still prone to drift easily from waking into sleeping and back again, across a hazy borderline between the two … And Willie Moffat and the rest were dead; all but eleven of the Grenadier company. And it was as though their deaths had cut the bonds of custom and loyalty behind him … “The chance that the gods have sent you …”
The reed thatch overhead was becoming lost in shadows, and beyond the shadows? His mind had drifted back to the cracks in the ceiling plaster of the old house in Leith — cracks that had formed the map of a Far Country, mighty rivers, and mountain ranges that were damp stains in the daytime, forests where danger, striped and spotted and golden-eyed, stalked the shadows among the trees; and always something on beyond …
The light of a palm-oil lamp wheeled across the thatch, and he blinked back into the waking world to find Medhet kneeling beside him, a bowl that gave off a greasy-smelling steam in his hands.
“Effendi — Tho’mas Effendi — soup.”
Donald would have taught him that.
Thomas heaved himself further up on the pile of folded rugs that served him for pillows, and took the bowl. It was broth of some kind, herb-smelling and with rice in it, and mercifully fewer gobbets of fat than usual. He gulped it down, scraping out the solids that remained in the bowl with his finger, for he was beginning to be hungry, while the boy sat and watched him worshipfully.
Thomas emptied the bowl and handed it back. Then on a sudden impulse — it was only later that he understood the idea behind it, that if he was going to live in this new world he should be able to communicate with it — he repeated “Soup”. Then touched the boy’s forehead with the tip of one forefinger saying, “Head”.
By the end of that first lesson, he knew the Albanian words, and Medhet the English ones for Head, Heart, Soup and Sword (the last drawn with a finger in the dust beside him).
It was not perhaps a large vocabulary with which to enter a new world, but it was a start.
3
A while after moonrise the felucca, the breeze spilled from her sails, poled in to the bank of the great river, into the velvet blackness under the date palms where a group of figures waited for it. The two young men standing on deck, silent among the hushed activity of the sailors, turned to look at each other, seeing only anonymous shapes in the Turkish robes given to them in place of the uniform stripped from them as from all the prisoners and the dead after El Hamed. Seeing each other insubstantial in the wind-stirred palm shadows as though they themselves were of the dead.
Somehow they had not expected their parting time to come until they reached Cairo later that night; but presumably Ahmed Bonaparte, wishing to keep his new acquisitions quiet from the Viceroy for the present, had decided that Cairo might be too public. They had parted from Medhet several days ago, leaving him to re-join his adopted regiment much against his will, since they could not bring him with them. In the month since Colonel D’Esurier’s visit, they had learned, all three of them, to communicate reasonably well in a bastard mingling of Albanian, French and Scots-English, with a few words of Arabic thrown in, drawing closer together in the process, and at parting the boy had wept on both their necks, “You are my brothers — my heart will sicken without my brothers …”
“Do what you can for Medhet, if you get the chance,” Thomas said. “You are more likely than I am to come at the ear of Ahmed Bonaparte, at least in the next few months.”