“You know fine that anything I can be doing, that I will,” said Donald.
From the shadows on the bank a voice spoke in stumbling French, “The hakim is to come now — by the general’s orders.”
“The hakim is coming,” Thomas returned. He put his hand on the big Lewisman’s shoulder, “I’m thinking I’d no’ be here tonight if ‘twasna for you, Donal’. I’ve my life to thank you for.”
“Aye,” Donald MacLeod agreed, with the regal courtesy of his race, “and it is glad I am that it should be so, for I had sooner it was I that saved it for you than another man.”
“Effendi — come!” said the voice from the bank with increased urgency. “You must go.”
“Aye. I am wishing that we might have followed the same road; but we shall meet again. Meanwhile — the sun and the moon on your path, Thomas Dhu.”
“And on yours.” Thomas returned the old Highland form of farewell, and wondered with sudden desolation how long it would be before he heard the tongue of his own kind again.
They clapped each other on the shoulder, and Donald MacLeod hitched up the unfamiliar folds of his abba, and setting one foot on the dipping gunwale, sprang ashore. Hands came down to aid him as he scrambled up the bank, and he was lost in the black velvet shadows.
The rais, the captain, gave a high sing-song order and the sailors bent to their poles and sent the felucca out into open water and the fierce white light of the moon.
Thomas spent the night on deck, partly for the sight of Cairo and the vast square-set peaks that he knew were the tombs of dead Pharaohs slipping by on the eastern shore, partly because it was better to be fallen over occasionally by the crew than to suffer the stifling heat and the bed-bugs below in the cabin.
Watching the city slip by in the dark, the glimmer of domes and minarets pale in the moonlight against the hills eastward, he wondered where his fellow prisoners were, if indeed they were still in the capital. Was it well with them? Would Donald have the chance to make any kind of contact with them?
For the while, he longed with a feeling akin to home-sickness, to be with them, in whatever evil condition, to know the comfort of his own kind round him, instead of being out here on the breezy river with the white uncaring moon, alone, unless of course one counted the felucca’s crew, and the two Albanian troopers who seemed to be his escort, now sleeping peacefully in the stern …
*
All next day they made steadily on upriver, the north wind filling the felucca’s tapering sails that were like gulls’ wings half-spread to take flight, and most of the crew, taking their ease while they could, lay half-asleep in the narrow shadow of the gunwales, twitching like old dogs; and Thomas, for whom all things about him were too new and strange for such daytime sleep, squatted on the rais’s own mat, lent him as a sign of friendliness, on the deck which was also the roof of the cabin, and watched the life of the great river go by. Filling his eyes and mind full of the sights and sounds about him, helped to keep him from thinking too much about sundry other matters. There was plenty to watch: other traffic on the Nile, speeding upriver before the light but steady north wind, or coming down again with furled sails and crews straining at the oars, the slow mournful rise and fall of their rowing chant coming across the water. On either side the banks were high, bare and sandy, waiting for the rising of the waters that would bring another year of life, and which would start — if he had understood the rais’s explanation, mostly delivered in sign language — any time now. And life moved along them like a painted frieze wound on rollers, showing now a plantation of date palms, now the mud huts of a village set on slightly rising ground to be clear of the inundation, each with its dovecot and slender white minaret from which at the time for prayer the muezzin’s call would come out to them across the water, and the crew would rouse and turn themselves to Mecca and pray, then return to their work or their sleep. Sometimes there would be a string of camels, desert-coloured against the desert behind, and the sound that came across the water would be the beat of their bells. Sometimes the banks would sink and disappear in tall wind-swayed reeds. Sometimes wild duck flew over, now and again there was a crane wading stilt-legged in the shallows and always, far beyond the east bank, marched the mountains, blue-fissured in the morning, turning lion-tawny as the day passed and the sun moved over. What lay beyond them, Thomas wondered, beyond the long ranges that looked as though they rimmed the edge of the world? To the west there was nothing beyond the bank except the sky; he supposed there was the desert, but out here on the water, so low down, you could not see.
‘If I lived long enough on this river,’ he thought, ‘I should come to believe that the world was shaped like a sword-blade instead of an orange, reaching only from those palm trees in the west to those mountains in the east, but running on north and south for ever.’ And suddenly gave a little shiver as though touched by a cat’s-paw of breeze off the water, as it came to him that that might be exactly what he was going to do.
He shook his shoulders. ‘Och awa’. Dinna’ be such a fool, Tam Keith; when the peace is signed, ye’ve only to demand to go back wi’ the other prisoners, and they’ll have to let ye; Donal’ too. Ye have Colonel D’Esurier’s word for it … But if it’s no’ just as easy as that?’ whispered a small chill voice at the back of his neck. ‘Then — then I’ll just have to break out eastward and see what’s over those mountains …’
Late in the afternoon the felucca rounded a great slow bend in the river, and a short way ahead he saw yet another village; another huddle of mud huts among date palms, presided over by the twin heavenward-pointing fingers of minaret and tall slender dovecot, another irrigation wheel powered by another pair of plodding weary oxen. But on the bank above the landing place a little group of men appeared to be waiting for them, and even at that distance one seemed faintly familiar.
Shouts came across the water. The rais cupped his hands and shouted back. More shouts came from the bank, and at an order from the rais the steersman put over the steering oar and the felucca headed in for the landing place.
Close under the bank, the village was lost to sight. Only the creaking wheel bailing its never-ceasing arc of dripping pots to fling the Nile water into the irrigation channel, and the little group of men on the landing slope. The sailors shed the wind from the sails and, as the felucca settled lightly and with much shouting against the bank, the man who Thomas had been eagerly looking at came down the slope and stepped aboard.
Thomas got to his feet, and all the 78th Highlanders was in his salute. “Sir.”
Colonel D’Esurier returned the salute casually. “Ah, at last! I was beginning to be afraid I might have missed you.” He spoke to the rais, and the felucca was poled out from the bank. One of the crew brought another mat and cushions from the cabin.
“How does the leg?” he asked, as the two men settled down.
“Better by the day,” Thomas told him, “though I am still as lame as a duck.”
But he was not going to waste the heaven-sent appearance of the French colonel in general courtesies and polite enquiries as to his health; and plunged straight in with the question he most desperately needed answered: “Sir, what news of the rest of us?”
“The rest of you?”
“The prisoners.”
“Still held in barracks in Cairo — around four hundred of them. There would have been rather more, but — the mortality rate among the wounded — the hot climate … You understand …?”
He spread his hands in a gesture of deprecation that had all of France in it.
Thomas was looking at his own hands, hanging loose across his knees. “I understand,” he said heavily.
“But I think there will be no more deaths now. Oh they had a bad time on arrival — paraded through the streets to the glory of His Excellency the Viceroy — if I do not tell you, others will — but His Excellency’s order that no harm should come to them has been strictly obeyed. Negotiations are already under way with General Frazer for their rep
atriation when the British evacuate Alexandria. Meanwhile” —a tinge of amusement stole into the Frenchman’s voice —“our consul in Cairo has made it his concern to see that they receive a sufficiency of fresh vegetables, to obviate the risk of scurvy.”
Thomas missed the tinge of amusement. He had another anxiety more urgent to himself than the first. “Donald was taken ashore last night, somewhere below Cairo …”
“I know. It was partly to set your mind at rest on that score that I came — having given my word to Ahmed Agha that I will not speak of your existence or whereabouts to the Viceroy. Really the cloak-and-dagger aspect of this affair might become tedious if it were not also faintly amusing.”
“Then you can set my mind at rest?” Thomas said bluntly. He did not find anything even remotely amusing in the situation.
“Ah yes, I think so. He is now in Ahmed’s household, where for the present he will act as assistant to the general’s private physician.”
“He will hate that.”
“I daresay. But it will be for only a short while. When a suitable time arrives he will enter the general hospital which was founded during the French expedition of nine years ago. A military hospital originally, though now open to all. I assure you he will not be tied full-time to the general’s disordered bowels.”
“Will he be able to make contact with the British wounded?”
“Alas! no. His existence is to be no more advertised than yours, until peace is restored between Egypt and Britain, when the general hopes to come to some amicable arrangement with your government in the case of your friend and yourself. I told you something of that before; do you remember? Or were you still too dazed with the fever?”
“No, I remember. But I do not think you ever told me that we were to be split up, Donald remaining in Cairo while I was shipped off up the Nile.”
“I was not conversant with the general’s immediate plans for you myself at that time.”
“And now you are? Would you mind passing them on to me; I do have a certain personal interest.”
“You are to go up to Aswan to train with the Bedouin cavalry stationed there.”
There was a small sharp silence between them, fringed and feathered round by the sounds of the felucca under sail, the pad of bare feet, the slap and whisper of water along her sides. Thomas was thinking hard in the stillness within himself. He had heard things, vaguely, during the past month as he picked up more of the tongue of his captors, of the crazy political and military situation in Egypt; of the constantly changing roles played by Turks and Albanians and Mamelukes — Mamelukes, men of that strange slave-born military breed that seemed to be beyond the understanding of other men, divided among themselves into pro-Turkish, pro-British (the force that had betrayed them at El Hamed had done so under that flag) and pro-Independence factions. He had heard still more vaguely of the newly formed and still forming Bedouin Irregular Cavalry. Something deep within him that had not stirred to the idea of a place in Ahmed Agha’s personal bodyguard, nor of a golden bribe, stirred now and lifted to the thought of horses; the living power of Flambeau between his knees, the sense of completeness, the asking flowing down the reins and the response flowing back …
But that was not a thing to be spoken of to anyone else. “How far is Aswan?” he asked at last.
The other gave the merest trace of a shrug, “Something over a thousand kilometres.”
“A thousand —” Thomas began, and checked. “Like this, all the way?” he glanced up at the bird-wing sweep of the lateen sails against the depth of blue.
“Except when the wind fails or goes round to the south-west, and the crew has to furl sail and take to the oars,” D’Esurier told him. “Then of course progress becomes even slower.” He smiled, “It is possible, just, to survive the boredom. Myself, I have made the trip three times. Admittedly, I was able to go ashore, pot-hunting or to explore certain ruins which interested me. Whether you are allowed ashore or not will probably depend on the goodwill, or the carelessness, of your escort.”
“And if I am not?”
“I can only suggest that you cultivate a lively interest in the life of the river-bank.”
“Crocodiles?” said Thomas, without enthusiasm.
“Crocodiles, or hippo if you like, when you get far enough south. I was thinking rather of the birdlife. I have never known such richness of birdlife even on my own Charente Maritime. Wild geese, teal, snipe, kingfisher and hoopoe when you come in close. Look, even at this moment, the black and white bird over there at the edge of the reeds. That is an ibis — sacred to the ancient Egyptians —”
He felt quickly in the folds of his abba, and brought out a notebook and lead pencil, riffled through in search of a clean page, and began to draw, supporting the notebook on his knee.
Watching the sure quick movements of the pencil point, and the essence of the bird captured in a few deft lines on the paper, Thomas made the surprising discovery that the bitter-faced gunner colonel was a brilliant bird artist. “I wish I could do that,” he said.
D’Esurier smiled at his tone, “Have you tried?”
“Yes, at home — around Edinburgh. I have not the gift. I can make and chase the design on the silver lock-plate of a pistol — strapwork and interlacing, even a formalised flower. I can’t catch the likeness of something living.”
“No?” The Frenchman put the finishing touch to a feathery reed tip, and flicked the page over. “The followers of Muhammed say that only Allah may do that … For myself, I find enough pleasure in the exercise of what skill I have to make it unlikely that I shall ever embrace the faith of Islam.”
Thomas looked at him in surprise. He had heard, of course, stories of forced conversions of their Christian captives by Barbary pirates and the like; but the idea that a Christian (were the French still Christians?), at any rate a Western man born and bred in a Christian country, should ever speak so of becoming or not becoming a Muslim was something completely new to him.
Colonel D’Esurier, in the act of putting away his note-book, looked up and caught the young Scot’s startled gaze upon him, and quirked his eyebrow. “It happens, my friend, it happens. Have you never heard that Bonaparte himself has always had a great admiration for the Muslim faith — so much so that, realising it to be the only thing which holds Egypt together, during the Ninety-eight expedition he set on foot plans for a possible mass conversion of the French forces involved.”
Thomas was silent a moment. “No,” he said at last. “I hadn’t heard that. What happened?”
D’Esurier’s lip twisted in sardonic amusement. “The plan fell through. I believe a compromise might have been reached on circumcision, but not on the use of wine.”
Thomas gave a crack of laughter, and then, in the light of his Presbyterian upbringing, was shocked at himself for having laughed. In the past few months his education had been progressing rather too fast for comfort.
Silence settled between them for a while, the Frenchman leaning back on his elbows, his narrowed gaze going up to rest lazily on the cross-line of the main spars; the Scot sitting forward with hands linked round up-drawn knees, his gaze questing straight ahead, past the high curve of the prow. But when D’Esurier broke the silence, the subject of their talk had not changed. “I must go ashore at the next village. My horse will be waiting for me there. But before I do —” He rummaged under his abba again, and brought out, probably from the same place as his notebook, a thicker volume which glowed crimson and gold in the westering light.
“We had three Arabic-speaking scholars with us on that expedition,” he said as if there had been no break in the conversation. “They were part of Bonaparte’s private entourage — the general’s menagerie, the more irreverent amongst us called it. He set them to making a new French translation of the Koran, of which this is a copy. It has lost something in the translating of course, but it has kept something too. Take it as a gift from a friend, which you may find useful.”
He held the book out to
Thomas, who took it carefully, handling it with a craftsman’s respect for the work of another craftsman, but without opening it. “Thank you, Sir, I shall treasure it — a gift from a friend in a land where I am a stranger.”
The words sounded stiff and over-formal in his own ears, but the gift had startled him afresh, and he felt awkward, and not quite sure how to handle the situation.
Colonel D’Esurier saw his uncertainty and added, “If you are to serve with and maybe eventually command Muslim troops, you should at least be familiar with the Koran.”
Thomas said, “Yes, Sir, I do understand. The Koran is their Holy Book as the Bible is ours.”
“And as the Torah is the Holy Book of the Jews and all three in many places identical. We are the People of the Book, we three.” The Frenchman’s cool measuring gaze met Thomas’s. “I wonder, my friend, if you do understand. The Muslim’s Faith, the Muslim’s Book, affect their daily lives much more closely than Christianity and the Bible affect the life of the western European soldier.” (Thomas’s mind went back to the 78th Highlanders, and he could well believe it.) “The Spaniards are probably the nearest to Islam in terms of the all-pervasive impact that religion has on their lives — which could be because most of Spain spent a few hundred years in the hands of Muslim conquerors and had to be wrested back for Christianity by their forefathers.”
He drew his legs under him and got up, and Thomas realised that, unnoticed while they talked, the felucca had been nearing the bank and now was running in towards the landing slip of the next village.
“Study it, during your trip upriver. God knows you’ll have enough time — at least it may provide a change of occupation from studying the wild life of the Nile,” the Frenchman said lightly, and turned towards the gunwale as the felucca bumped alongside.
Left to himself, Thomas settled down again, with Colonel D’Esurier’s gift in his hands. The book was bound in soft crimson leather, gold-tooled with arabesques whose exquisite intricacy made him itch for an engraving tool, and the silver lock-plates of a pistol under his hand. This was the kind of artistry that he could handle, that he understood as though it were some secret that one was admitted to as to a brotherhood … He opened the book.