many voices, thousands of voices. This way. Follow me.'
They went forward at a full run, taking the right fork and running immediately into the ambush which had been so carefully prepared for them.
The volley of musket fire crashed out from both sides of the narrowing track, and powder smoke rolled out towards them and hung like a thick, pearly curtain amongst the palm holes and the cashew nut trees.
Through the smoke danced the ethereal robed figures of the attackers, brandishing the long-barrelled jezails or swinging the half-moon-bladed scimitars, with wild shrieks of 'Allah Akbar, Allah is greatV They rushed down on the little band of seamen, caught in enfilade on the narrow track. There were at least a hundred of them, Clinton judged instantly, and they were pressing in determinedly. Those scimitars were glittering, bright bare steel has a particularly chilling effect. Close up, Clinton shouted. 'We'll give them a volley then take the bayonet to them, through the smoke.'
The first rank of racing Arabs were almost on top of the levelled Enfields. Incongruously, Clinton noticed that many of them had tucked up the skirts of their robes, leaving their legs bared to the thighs. Their skins varied from the colour of ivory to tobacco, and there were wrinkled grey beards in the front rank, screaming and howling with rage and battle-lust. They had just seen their livelihood burned to heaps of ash upon the beach. All that remained to them of their wealth was the contents of the barracoons set back amongst the groves of cashew nut and coconut trees. Fire! ' roared Clinton, and the solid blast of sound deafened him for a moment. The gun-smoke wiped out all vision ahead of him and then hung on the windless morning in an impenetrable fog bank. Forward! ' howled Clinton and led the charge into the smoke. He stumbled over the body of an Arab. The man's turban had unwound and come down over his eyes, soaked with blood like the sultan's scarlet banner which Clinton could see waving ahead of him above the smoke.
A figure loomed ahead of him. and he heard the fluting whistle of a scimitar blade, like wild goose wings overhead. He ducked. The sharp breeze puffed a loose strand of hair into his eyes, as the blade passed an inch from his forehead, and Clinton straightened from the knees and put his whole body into the counter-lunge.
The point of his blade went in with a dead, soggy feel, sliding grudgingly through flesh until the point grated on bone. The Arab dropped his scimitar and clutched the cutlass blade with bare hands. Clinton leaned back and jerked the cutlass free of flesh. As the blade slid through the Arab's nerveless fingers the tendons parted with a faint popping sound, and the man went down on his knees, holding his mutilated hands up in front of his eyes with a look of amazement on his face.
Clinton ran on to catch up with his seamen, and found them scattered in little groups amongst the grove, laughing and shouting with excitement. They've run like steeplechasers, sir, the boatswain called. 'Grand National, ten to one the field! ' He snatched up the fallen banner of the Sultan and waved it furiously over his head, completely overtaken by excitement. Did we lose anybody? ' Clinton demanded. He also felt the dizzy euphoria of battle. The killing of the Arab, far from sickening him, had elated him. In that moment he was quite capable of turning back and taking the man's scalp. However, the question sobered them.
Jedrow caught one in the belly, but he can walk.
Wilson got a sword cut in the arm. 'Send them back to the beach. They can escort each other. The rest of you, come on! ' They found the barracoons a quarter of a mile further on. The guards had fled.
The slave-pens stretched out for a half mile along both banks of a small stream that provided both drinking water and sewage disposal for the inmates.
They were unlike the barracoons that Clinton had captured and sacked on the west coast, for those had been built by European traders with the white man's orderly eye. There was no resemblance in these sprawling comPounds built of rough, unbarked forest poles, bound together with rope made from plaited palm fronds.
Behind the outer barricades were open godowns with thatched roofs in which the chained slaves could find some shelter from sun and rain. The only thing the same was the smell. An epidemic of tropical dysentery had swept through the barracoons and most of the sheds contained the decomposing bodies of the victims. The crows and buzzards and vultures were waiting patiently in the palms and cashew trees, misshapen, dark silhouettes against the hard bright blue of the morning sky.
Clinton met the new ruler of the state of Elat, Sheikh Mohamed, at the water's edge and escorted him up the beach. The incoming tide was dousing the piles of smouldering ash that marked the last resting-places of eight fine dhows, and the Sheikh tottered uncertainly, like a man in deep shock, relying for support on the sturdy shoulder of one of his house-slaves, looking about him with lugubrious disbelief at the carnage that had overtaken him. The Sheikh owned one third shares in every one of those smoking piles of ash.
He had to rest when they reached the tree-hne above the beach. A slave placed a carved wooden stool in the shade, and another waved a fan of plaited palm fronds over his head to keep off the flies and to cool his heated brow that was dewed with the heavy sweat of despair.
His misery was completed by the lecture in broken French and pidgin English which 'El Sheetan', the mad British sea captain with the devil's eyes, was relaying to him through the shocked and incredulous interpreter.
Such things could only be repeated in a hoarse whisper, and the Sheikh greeted each new revelation with a soft cry of 'WaaW and the upturning of his eyes to heaven.
He learned that the village blacksmiths had been dragged out of the bushes and were already knocking the fetters off long rows of perplexed slaves. WaaW wailed the Sheikh.
'Does the devil not realize that those slaves have already been purchased and that the tax has been collected.'
Comfortably Clinton explained that once the slaves were freed, they would be marched back into the interior, and the Sheikh would send guards with them to see them safely home, and to warn any slave caravans that they encountered on the down-route that all the ports of Elat were now closed to the trade. Waai! ' This time the Sheikh's eyes actually brimmed with tears. 'He will beggar me. My wives and children will starve. 'El Sbeetan counsels you to enlarge the trade in gumcopal and copra, ' explained the interpreter in a sepulchral voice. 'And as your closest ally, he promises to call upon you regularly with his great ship of many guns, to make certain that you heed this advice. 'Waai! ' The Sheikh plucked at his beard, so that long curly hairs came out between his fingers. This ally makes one long for ordinary enemies.'
Twenty-four hours later Black Joke sailed into Telfa bay, forty miles further up the coast. Nobody had thought to warn the slaving fleet that was anchored there of the new policies of the state of Elat to which the territory now belonged.
The five dhows in the outer anchorage managed to cut their anchor cables and slip away into the maze of shallow coral channels and shoals to the north of the bay.
