“By the name of Ibrahim, commander of cavalry in the army of the Sultan.” He returned her gaze steadily. “But I swear to you that neither I nor my troops had any hand in last night’s work.”
“That I believe, Ibrahim my brother.”
“Is it permitted to ask the name of my sister?”
“It is permitted,” she said after a pause. “Thy sister is named Anoud.”
A sharp explosion of clucks from the black toad in the corner warned him that they had gone as far as Arab custom allowed, maybe further, even in these unusual circumstances, between a man and a woman who were not in fact related. Anyway, the commander of cavalry in the army of the Sultan had other matters waiting to be dealt with that day. It was time he left.
He got to his feet. “Let Anoud, my sister, bide here and rest in safety,” he said, and returned to the outer room, where all his belongings were stacked and Jassim Khan stood ready to help him on with his braided fariva and see that his combined bandoleer and sword belt was full and securely buckled on. Behind the closed door of the inner chamber, he could hear the black toad scolding: “Shameless one! To speak so with a man who is not thy brother, whatever he may say! To tell him thy name —”
And the girl’s answer: “The man saved my life, and it lies in the hollow of his hands, and my name with it. It is his right.”
The words lingered in his mind waking odd resonances, as he went down to re-join his troops.
23
About noon of the same day, Tussun Pasha rode into Medina followed by his escort, still a little wound-stiff as he slid from his saddle, and demanding loudly to know the meaning of the pile of heads he had met on the Pilgrim Road.
Later, when he had had time to look about him, when he had been greeted and had received back his command from a hurriedly sobered-up Ahmed Agha, there was a gathering of senior officers in one of the still-standing buildings of the citadel, at which he heard sundry reports, and at which Ahmed Agha found himself being first congratulated on the capture of Medina and then called on to account for his actions over the past thirty-six hours.
Tussun summed up, a Tussun still white from his wound, but whiter still, Thomas judged, with the need to suppress his anger and act like a man with ten years more experience in diplomacy and the handling of awkward situations than he actually possessed.
“The Wahabis yielded on terms, and according to those terms they were to march out with two hundred baggage camels, to re-join Saud ibn Saud at Diriyah. Only thirty camels were provided, so that they must leave the greater part of their gear and supplies behind. We will not say that you personally arranged for the greater part of them to be slain, all unarmed, as they marched out, by the tribesmen and the citizens of Medina, since there is no proof; but certainly you made no attempt to use your own troops to stop the massacre —”
Ahmed Bonaparte, looking thoroughly sobered and a good deal shaken by the speed with which elaborate congratulations had turned into this calling to account, tried to cut in, but the young hard voice with its strong Albanian accent rose and overrode his attempt:
“At evening, and only at evening, when the ringleaders, if there were any, had had time and to spare in which to escape — or to sink back into the general crowd — you order them to be hunted down and dealt with.”
“Time had to be allowed for hot blood to cool,” Ahmed Bonaparte made himself heard for a moment. “We had no intention to execute any man, but only to capture and hold them until your coming, Excellency.”
Tussun seemed not to hear him. “And under the cloak of this hunting, you allowed looting to break out. Houses have been fired, citizens have been killed, women and young sons raped! Have you forgotten how great is our need that the tribes should learn to trust the word and the honour of the Sultan’s armies?”
He paused at last, waiting for an answer, his fingers white-knuckled on the hilt of the dagger in his belt.
Ahmed Agha’s face changed from its usual olive colour to a dirty greyish yellow. His full dark eyes darted round the room from face to face of the men about him, and found no support anywhere.
“It is also not without importance that the tribes should learn to know the strength of the Sultan’s arm,” he said after a moment.
“But not in this way!”
“Mercy is a great thing, but Your Excellency is still young and impressionable. Take heed that you do not grow soft like the soldiers of the West” (Thomas thought of several things that he had known his own kind to do, and wondered what in the world could have given the Agha that idea) “through listening too closely to your Western friends.” The full dark gaze rested for a moment on the Scotsman’s face, and there was an uneasy stillness. Thomas looked levelly back. Ahmed Agha went on: “I have something longer experience than yourself, Excellency, of the needs of men. Turkish troops, as well as your own countrymen, are used to being allowed the run of their teeth after a victory.”
“Here in the Holy City? And against the express orders of the Viceroy? Against my express orders that there should be no pillage?”
“It is easy to give orders far from the scene of the fighting.”
Into the silence that followed came the wailing call to evening prayer, floating across the roof tops of Medina.
And the men in the high bleak chamber of the citadel turned themselves towards Mecca and prayed together. And when the praying was over turned back to the matter in hand.
Tussun’s voice had regained courtesy, though a cool courtesy with the steel below the silk, when he spoke again to his second-in-command. “Ahmed Agha, it is very clear that you are a sick man; were it not so, were you in full possession of the health and strength necessary for so onerous a position as yours, none of this would have happened.”
“Was it the action of a sick man to capture Medina for you?” Ahmed said.
Tussun gave the merest whisper of a shrug, “Perhaps you did not yourself realise the toll of your strength taken from you by this superb and crowning action of your career. Now that you do realise it, I suggest that you wish to resign your position as my second-in-command and return with all honour to your own estates in the Delta.”
For a moment Ahmed seemed about to spring to his feet, but he held himself rigidly seated in his place in the circle.
“How if I refuse your most generous suggestion?”
“If you refuse,” Tussun said, the steel becoming deadly under the silk, “I greatly fear that your sickness will prove mortal; or that you may suffer an accident as fatal — a loose girth when you ride, a fall on the stairs, a stray shot from some foolish marksman out after gazelle … I strongly advise you, in the name of Allah the All Merciful, that you do not refuse.”
For a long moment the two men looked at each other, and for that moment Thomas, uncomfortably shaken, saw naked murder in the eyes of both, before the veils were discreetly drawn.
“You shall have my resignation in the morning,” Ahmed Agha said in a kind of creaking whisper. “And now — we sick men have early need of our beds; have I Your Excellency’s permission to retire to my own quarters?”
“May your sleep be calm and refreshing, in readiness for tomorrow’s journey,” Tussun said sweetly.
“Do you think that he will still be in his quarters tomorrow morning and not off and away on affairs of his own?” Thomas asked, a short while later, as he and Tussun made their way down from the citadel in the dusk, the sky turning to green crystal behind the flat roof tops and minarets of Medina.
“Surely — unless he can fight his way past the guard that he will find on the doors and windows if he attempts to so much as cast his shadow outside.”
“There are times,” Thomas said, “when I scarcely recognise you. That was skilfully done; I can feel the chill of it between my shoulder-blades yet.”
They walked a few steps in silence, hand in hand according to the usual custom of friendship. Then Tussun said, “Yet there was a time when I ordered your death, my brother.”
??
?That was an ordering of a different kind.”
A few more steps, and then Tussun broke the silence again in a changed tone: “Let us go to your quarters, and drown the memory of this evening in coffee and your medicinal arak.”
Thomas checked abruptly, remembering what he had scarce had time to remember all day. “That we will do; but first, before you come to my quarters, there is a thing that I should tell you.”
They stood in the middle of the narrow street, touched by the dim marigold light that filtered down from the fretted window just overhead. Tussun flung up his head with a shout of laughter. “So it’s true! You have a girl stowed away there!”
“I have,” Thomas said a little stiffly, “but I did not know that it was common knowledge.”
“You didn’t silence the men you took her from.”
“If you know that, then you know the manner of her being stowed in my quarters. The mob had killed her father and burned down her home and wounded her in the hand. She had no kin, nowhere to go. Therefore I gave her shelter — with something fat and female out of the palace kitchens to guard her honour, in a chamber having a door with bars on the inside.”
“Tho’mas — Tho’mas my brother — you do not need to speak so to me; I understand that she is not one of the Daughters of Delight. Better for you, maybe, if she had been.”
“How so?”
They were walking on again now, in the direction of the Governor’s Palace. “Because then she would have had a life to go back to.”
Thomas was silent, brought face-to-face with problems that he had not got round to confronting before.
“She has no kin? No father? No brothers? You are sure she spoke the truth?”
“Very sure.”
“So, no one to play the man’s part, to be responsible for her, to use the family authority on her behalf — to exact blood for her dishonouring …”
“I have said that I will be her brother as long as she needs me.”
“But you are not, are you. In the eyes of the law and the faith you are nothing to her. And we shall not remain long in Medina. What will become of her when we march out?” The young voice was concerned, worried on his friend’s account.
And Thomas heard his own voice answering, as though it was something that he had been considering for weeks, “I think that if she agrees, I should marry her. In that way I can leave the cloak of my protection spread over her, even when we march from here.”
Tussun gave the matter due consideration as an old married man.
“There is much to be said to that. It is time that you took a wife and got sons to come after you. But if you should wish to be rid of her after a while, it will be difficult for you even though there will be no dowry to return, with no father nor brother to hand the girl back to.”
*
“It will be difficult for you when you wish to be rid of me again, with no father nor brother into whose keeping you can return me,” Anoud pointed out three evenings later.
He had left her three days’ breathing space; he could not well leave her longer, not knowing how soon he himself might be ordered elsewhere. He had found a kindly disposed imam to visit her and lay the plan before her, since she had no kin to do so. But she, it seemed, had been less afraid of offending against the custom than he was; maybe she felt that what had happened to her, breaking her off from the normal pattern of life in her world, had also freed her somewhat from its restrictions. At all events she had sent him word that she begged leave to speak with him personally on the matter.
So he sat on the evening of the third day, as he had sat on the morning of the first, on his heels before her, as she sat propped on piled cushions against the wall, with Kadija more like an amiable black toad than ever, squatting in the same corner. She was dressed in garments of Kadija’s procuring, deeply blue, less fine than the silks she had been wearing on the night he brought her there, but at least free of the taint of blood; but she still wore his gold-fringed turban-scarf by way of veil and yashmak. The room had become more clearly a woman’s chamber, the cushions more softly coloured, an embroidered hanging on one wall, a branch of fragile almond blossom in a tall brass vase. But it was still the inner chamber of his own narrow quarters above the garden arch. Presently he would make suitable arrangements for her, when the question of their marriage had been settled.
“It will be difficult for you, when you wish to be rid of me,” Anoud said again, gently but firmly pointing out the problem as though she were his sister indeed.
“Among the people I come from, we do not get rid of our wives,” Thomas said. “Sometimes we make them unhappy; sometimes we mistreat them, as we would not mistreat our horses. But we do not thrust them back into their father’s house.” It was very nearly true.
The grey eyes above the soft folds of muslin were steady on his face. “So it would be for life,” she said. “Then it is a harder choice than it would be if it were made by our custom.”
Thomas said “If, when peace comes again to the Hijaz, there should come a time when you wish to be free, I promise that you shall go, according to the custom of your own people.”
“Yet if I do not wish to go, you will hold yourself bound for life, according to the custom of yours?”
“Yes,” Thomas said, simply.
The long lids dropped for a moment, then rose again, and the grey eyes returned to their steady regard. “Then for your promise, I promise also, that when the time comes that you wish to take a second wife —”
Thomas made to interrupt, but she checked him. “Among your people it is not the custom to take a second wife? It must be sweet, sometimes, to be the only one, but hard at other times … So, when you wish to take a second wife, you must follow the custom of my people, and do so; and I will welcome her and treat her as a younger sister, as the chief wife should do.”
“If ever that day comes,” Thomas said, half smiling, “I will hold you to that promise.” He would have liked to reach out and take her hand, the sound hand with which she held the soft folds of the scarf across her face, and hold it, and rub his thumb friendly wise over the fine-boned back of it where the blue veins branched under the olive pallor of the skin. Suddenly he remembered the feel of her and how she fitted into his arms as he carried her up the stair, but he knew that he must not touch her again until after the wedding ceremony; and the instinct was a very small and fragile one, gone as swiftly as the shadow of a moth on the lamp-lit wall.
“When can you be ready?” he asked.
“Within a day and a night, if need be — yet grant me a while to mourn my father.”
“You shall have as long as may be. How long, I do not know, for I do not know when I shall be ordered from here; and I must be sure you have the safety and support that I can give you, before I go.”
“Then give me a day and a night of mourning, and when they are passed, I will be ready for my Lord,” said Anoud.
News of the taking of Medina ran like scrub-fire through the Muslim world, and was received with joyful relief by most of it. The Grand Shariff Ghalid at once announced that he was joining the Sultan’s forces in their campaign to rid the Holy Land of heretics, and threw Mecca open to the forces of deliverance, also the great port of Jiddah, to serve better than Yembo had ever done as a base for Egyptian supplies and reinforcements.
Mustapha Bey, he that was son-in-law to the Viceroy, entered Mecca in triumph at the head of the Viceroy’s Turkish reinforcements; the troops being forbidden their usual butchery on entering a captured town, so that the lives and property of the Meccans were better spared than those of the Medinans had been.
From Mecca, Mustapha Bey attacked Teif, the summer capital of the Grand Shariff, which had been in Wahabi hands since they had captured it with hideous slaughter in the name of the True God, ten years before. The Wahabi garrison fell back into the hills, on the strong fortress of Terraba. And there for the present, they were left to themselves; for Terraba had a reputation to raise the hair on the back of th
e neck: a strong fortress in bad black country, which since the death of its sheikh some years before had been ruled over by his widow, Ghalia, with a welcome for any man who counted himself an enemy of the Ottoman world. Added to that, Ghalia herself (how else could a woman hold such men and such a place?) was known to be a witch. Altogether a place for not meddling with, so long as one could put off the meddling.
The chief cities of the Hijaz were now in Egyptian hands, but the power of the black-robed zealots from the heartland was still unbroken beyond the mountains; and even in the Hijaz flying Wahabi squadrons menaced the caravan routes and constantly attacked the Egyptian army’s supply trains; so that, while Tussun set to work to clear up the situation in Medina and heal the wounds caused by Ahmed Agha’s brutalities, Thomas found himself living much the same kind of life, on a larger scale, as he had lived at El Hamha in his first months with the Bedouin cavalry. A policing job intensified now and then into small-scale savage warfare from which the long-distance patrols often returned with riderless horses in their midst.
Well into April, when the fragile colour-wash of desert flowers and grasses was already beginning to dry up, and the hills were turning tawny as a lion’s coat, Medina received a new governor, Quera al Din, one of Muhammed Ali’s generals, sent out from Egypt for the purpose. And Tussun received orders to return to Jiddah at last, while Thomas with four hundred picked sabres departed for Mecca to keep an eye on the Grand Shariff.
The time for Anoud to mourn her father was over; and the time to make ready for her wedding was come.
Thomas, who had taken up residence in his tent in the cavalry camp, had not seen her again during those weeks, but with Tussun’s enthusiastic agreement he had her moved from her cramped lodging in the small rear room of his own quarters to much larger and pleasanter rooms in the harem of the Governor’s Palace, opening on to the more shady pleasance of the women’s court; and in his little leisure time had scoured the souks and craftsmen’s quarters of the city for pretty and comfortable things, embroidered cushions, a finely chased brass lamp, a coffee pot engraved with verses from the Koran, to make it pleasant for her. She had asked, through Kadija, that she might have a loom and he had found one for her; also embroidery material; the women of Medina were noted for their skill. He would have given her a lute, many Arab women could play, but he remembered her hand. Better leave that for the time being. Selling a pair of silver-mounted pistols of his own, he bought her a belt of gold chain-work strung with coral and turquoise; every woman should have gold for her wedding. Her morning gift he possessed already, a piper’s silver plaid brooch of the 78th that he had bought long ago in a Cairo souk with an absurd aching in his throat, and carried with him ever since until it became almost a kind of talisman. It was of no great value in terms of Maria Theresa dollars, but it had values of its own which he thought Anoud might appreciate. So the almost unknown girl, her needs and his own obligations towards her, made a shadowy constant background through that time, and he found it oddly pleasant.