‘I’m not going to give him the medallion, you know. Not after Talma and Enoch. I’ll bury it, eat it, or throw it down a hole.’
‘I wouldn’t ride with you if I thought you would.’
The canyon ended in a steep rubble slope that led to its rim. We dismounted and dragged at the reins, pulling our exhausted horses upward. Unwillingly they advanced a few yards, heads thrashing, and then in frustration reared and kicked. We were as tired and unbalanced as they were. We slid on the slope, the reins jerking in our hands. No matter how hard we hauled, they were dragging us backward.
‘We have to go another way!’ I shouted.
‘It’s too late. If we turn back we ride into Bin Sadr. Let them go.’ The reins flew out of our hands and our mounts skittered back down into the canyon, fleeing in the direction of the oncoming Arabs.
To be dismounted in the desert was tantamount to death.
‘We’re doomed, Ashraf.’
‘Didn’t the gods give you two legs and the wits to use them? Come, fate hasn’t brought us this far to be done with us now.’ He began climbing the slope on foot, even as the Arabs came round a bend to spot us, warbled in triumph, and began firing more shots. Bits of rock exploded behind us where each bullet hit, giving me energy I didn’t know I had. Fortunately, our pursuers had to pause to reload as we scrambled upward, and the steep slope would be challenging for camels as well. We climbed over the lip of the latest hill, panting, and looked about. It was a landscape of desolation, not a living thing in sight. I trotted to the rim of the next ravine…
And stopped short in amazement.
There, in a shallow depression, was a huddled mass of people.
Hunched, the whites of their eyes like a field of agates, were at least fifty blacks – or they would have been black if they were not covered by the same powdery Egyptian dust that coated us. They were naked, dotted with sores and flies, and laced together with chains, men and women alike. Their wide eyes stared at me as if from masks of stage makeup, as shocked to see us as we to see them. With them were half a dozen Arabs with guns and whips. Slavers!
The slave drivers were crouched with their victims, no doubt puzzled by the echoing gunfire. Ashraf shouted something in Arabic and they answered back, an excited chatter. After a moment, he nodded.
‘They were coming down the Nile and saw the French. Bonaparte has been confiscating the caravans and freeing slaves. So they came up here to wait until Desaix and his army passes. Then they heard shots. They are confused.’
‘What should we do?’
In reply, Ash brought up his musket and calmly fired, hitting the slave caravan’s leader full in the chest. The slaver pitched backward without a word, eyes wide with shock, and before he’d even hit the ground the Mameluke had two pistols out and fired both, hitting one drover in the face and another in the shoulder.
‘Fight!’ my companion cried.
A fourth slaver was pulling his own pistol when I killed him before I could think. Meanwhile Ash had drawn his sword and was charging. In seconds the wounded man and a fifth were dead and the sixth was running for his life back the way he’d come.
The suddenness of my friend’s ferocity left me stunned.
The Mameluke strode to the leader, wiped his sword on the dead man’s robes, and searched his body. He straightened with a ring of keys. ‘These slavers are vermin,’ he said. ‘They don’t capture their slaves in battle, they buy them with trinkets and grow rich off misery. They deserved to die. Reload our guns while I unshackle these others.’
The blacks cried and jostled with so much excitement that they tangled their own chains. Ash found a couple who spoke Arabic and gave sharp orders. They nodded and shouted to their fellows in their own language. The group stilled enough to let us free them, and then at Ash’s direction they obediently picked up the Arab weapons, which I reloaded, and rocks.
Ashraf smiled at me. ‘Now we have our own little army. I told you the gods have their ways.’ Gesturing, he led our new allies back up to the crest of the ridge. Our posse of pursuing Arabs must have paused at the sounds of the fighting on the other side of the hill, but now they were coming up after us, pulling at their reluctant camels. Ash and I stepped up within view and Bin Sadr’s henchmen shouted as triumphantly as if they’d spotted a wounded stag. We must have looked lonely on the pale blue skyline.
‘Surrender the medallion and I promise you no harm!’ Bin Sadr called in French.
‘Now there’s a promise I’d believe,’ I muttered.
‘Ask for mercy yourself or I will burn you like you burnt my brother!’ Ashraf shouted back.
And then fifty newly freed blacks emerged on the ridge crest to form a line to either side of us. The Arabs halted, stunned, not understanding that they had walked into a trap. Ash called out a sharp command and the blacks gave a great cry. The air filled with stones and pieces of hurled chain. Meanwhile, the two of us fired, and Bin Sadr and another man went down. The blacks passed us the dead slavers’ arms to shoot as well. Bedouin and camels, pelted with rocks and metal, went sprawling, screaming, and bawling in outrage and terror. Our pursuers tumbled down the steep slope in a small avalanche of rubble, their own aim spoilt by their precarious position. Hurled stones followed them, a meteor shower of released frustration. We killed or injured several in their pell-mell retreat, and when the survivors gathered in a little cluster at the base of the canyon, they peered up at us like chastened dogs.
Bin Sadr was holding one arm.
‘The snake has Satan’s luck,’ I growled. ‘I only wounded him.’
‘We can only pray it will fester,’ Ashraf said.
‘Gage!’ Bin Sadr yelled in French. ‘Give me the medallion! You don’t even know what it’s for!’
‘Tell Silano to go to hell!’ I shouted back. Our words echoed in the canyon.
‘We’ll give you the woman!’
‘Tell Silano I’m coming to take her!’
The echoes faded away. The Arabs still had more guns than we did, and I was leery of leading the freed slaves down into a pitched battle. Bin Sadr was no doubt weighing the odds as well. He considered, then painfully mounted. His followers did so too.
He started to ride slowly away, then turned his camel and looked up at me. ‘I want you to know,’ he called, ‘that your friend Talma screamed before he died!’ The word died reverberated in the wilderness, bouncing again and again and again.
He was out of range now, but not out of sight. I fired in frustration, the bullet kicking up dust a hundred paces short of him. He laughed, the sound amplified in the canyon, and then with the companions who were left, turned and trotted back the way he’d come.
‘So will you,’ I muttered. ‘So will you.’
Our horses gone, we took two of the slavers’ camels and gave the four others to the freed blacks. There were enough provisions to get the party started on the long trek back to their homeland, and we gave them the captured guns to hunt for game and fend off slavers who would no doubt try to recapture them. We showed them how to load and fire, a task they learnt with alacrity. Then they clutched at our knees to give thanks so fervently that we finally had to pry them off. We’d rescued them, it was true, but they’d also rescued us. Ashraf sketched a path for them through the desert hills that would keep them away from the Nile until they were above the first cataract. Then we went our separate ways.
It was my first time on a camel, a noisy, grumpy, and somewhat ugly beast with its own community of fleas and midges. Yet it was well-trained and reasonably docile, dressed in rich and colourful harness. At Ash’s direction I took my perch as it sat, then held on as it lurched upward. A few cries of ‘Hut, hut!’ and it began moving, following the lead of Ash’s beast. There was a rocking rhythm it took some time to get used to, but it was not altogether unpleasant. It felt like a boat in a seaway. Certainly it would do until I found a horse again, and I needed to reach the French expeditionary force before Bin Sadr did. We followed the ridge crest to a point above a Nile ferry and then descended to cross to Desaix’s side of the river.
On the far bank we crossed the trampled wake of the army, rode through a banana grove, and at length struck desert again to the west and aimed for low hills, circling around to the army’s flank. It was late afternoon when we spied the column again, camping along the dark course of the Nile. Shadows of date palms combed the
