beloved of Allah and his true Prophet, the Divine Mahdi has been taken gravely ill. He has sent word for you to go to him at once.”
Osman leapt back into al-Buq’s saddle and galloped out through the gates of the compound.
The jailers came for Penrod and dragged him to his cell. As previously, they chained him to the iron stake. But before they locked the door and left him, one of the jailers grinned at him. “Do you still have the strength to attack the great emir?”
“Nay,” Penrod whispered. “But perhaps I could still twist off the head of one of his chickens.” He showed the jailer his hands. The man slammed the door hurriedly and locked it.
Standing within his reach were three large pitchers of water in place of the usual one, and a meal that in comparison to those he had previously been offered was a banquet. Rather than having been thrown on to the bare floor, the food had been placed in a dish. Penrod was so exhausted that he could hardly chew, but he knew that if he were to survive he must eat. There was half a shoulder of roasted lamb, a lump of hard cheese and a few figs and dates. As he munched he wondered who had provided this fare, and if Osman Atalan had ordered it. If that was the case, what game was he playing? They let him rest on the following day, but on the next his jailers woke him before sunrise.
“Up, Abd Jiz! The emir presents his apologies. He cannot join you in the gazelle hunt this day. He has urgent business at the palace of the Mahdi. However, al-Noor, the famous aggagier, invites you to hunt with him.” They placed the rope round his neck before they removed his chains.
Penrod’s feet were so swollen and torn that standing on them was agony, but after the first few miles the pain receded and he ran on. They found not a single gazelle, although they scoured the desert for many leagues. By the time they returned the nails on three of Penrod’s toes had turned blue.
They hunted again, day after day. Osman Atalan did not accompany them and they killed no gazelle, but al- Noor ran him hard. The nails fell off his injured toes. Many times over the next few weeks Penrod thought that the infected wounds and scratches on both feet might turn gangrenous and he would lose his legs.
By the onset of the new moon that signalled the beginning of Ramadan, both his feet had healed and the soles were toughened and calloused as though he wore sandals. Only the sharpest thorns could pierce them. He was as lean as a whippet. The fat had been stripped from his frame, replaced with rubbery muscle, and he could keep pace with al-Noor’s horse.
Penrod had not seen Osman Atalan since the first unsuccessful gazelle hunt, but when he returned to Omdurman from the field on the third day of Ramadan, he was running strongly beside al-Noor’s stirrup. He looked like a desert Arab now: he was lean and bearded, sun-darkened and hard.
As they reached the outskirts of the holy city, al-Noor reined in. “There is something amiss,” he said. “Listen!” They could hear the drums beating and the ombeyas blaring. The music was not a battle hymn or the sound of rejoicing. It was a dirge. Then they heard salvoes of rifle fire, and al-Noor said, “It is bad news.”
A horseman galloped towards them, and they recognized another of
Osman Atalan’s aggagiers. “Woe upon us!” he shouted. “Our father has left us. He is dead. Oh, woe upon us all.”
“Is it the emir?” al-Noor yelled back. “Is Osman Atalan dead?”
“Nay! It is the Holy One, the Beloved of God, the light of our existence. Muhammad, the Mahdi, has been taken from us! We are children without a father.”
For weeks they waited at the bedside of the Mahdi. Chief among them was Khalifa Abdullahi. Then there were the Ashraf, the Mahdi’s brothers, uncles and cousins, and the emirs of the tribes: the Jaalin, the Hadendowa, the Beja and others. The Mahdi had no sons, so if he should die the succession was uncertain. There were only two women in his sickroom, both heavily veiled and sitting unobtrusively in a far corner. The first was his principal wife, Aisha. The second was the concubine al-Jamal. Not only was she his current favourite, but it was well known that she possessed great medical skills. Together these two women waited out the long and uncertain course of his disease.
Rebecca’s Abyssinian cure seemed highly effective during the first stages of the illness. She mixgd the powder with boiled water, and she and Aisha prevailed upon the Mahdi to drink copious draughts of it. As with Amber, his body was drained of fluids by the scouring of his bowels and the prolonged vomiting, but between them the two women were able to replace the liquid and mineral salts he had lost. It was fourteen days before the patient had started along the road to full recovery, and prayers of thanksgiving were held at every hour in the new mosque below his window.
When he could sit up and eat solid food, the city resounded to the beat of drums and volleys of rapturous rifle fire. The following day the Mahdi complained of insect bites. Like most of the other buildings in the city the palace was infested by fleas and lice, and his legs and arms were speckled with red swellings. They fumigated the room by burning branches of the turpentine bush in a brazier. However, the Mahdi scratched the flea bites, and soon a number were infected with the faeces of the vermin that had inflicted them. The temperature of his body soared, and he suffered alternating bouts of fever and chill. He would not eat. He was prostrated by nausea. The doctors thought that these symptoms were a complication of the cholera.
Then, on the sixteenth day, the characteristic rash of typhus fever covered most of his body. By this time he was in such a weakened condition that he sank rapidly. Near the end he asked the two women to help him sit up and, in a faint, unsteady voice, he addressed all the important men crowded around his angareb. “The Prophet Muhammad, who sits on the right hand of Allah, has come to me and he has told me that the Khalifa Abdullahi must be my successor on earth. Abdullahi is of me, and I am of him. As you have obeyed me and treated me, so must you obey and treat him. Allah is great and there is no other God but Allah.” He sagged back on the bed and never spoke again.
The men around the bed waited, but the tension in the crowded room was even more oppressive than the heat and the odour of fever and disease. The Ashraf whispered among themselves, and watched the Khalifa Abdullahi surreptitiously. They believed that their blood-tie to the Mahdi superseded all else: surely the right to take possession of the vacant seat of power belonged to one of their number. However, they knew that their claim was weakened by the last decree of the Mahdi, and by the sermon he had preached in the new mosque only weeks before he fell ill. Then he had reprimanded his relatives for their luxurious living, their open pursuit of wealth and pleasure.
“I have not created the Mahdiya for your benefit. You must give up your weak and wicked ways. Return to the principles of virtue I have taught you which are pleasing to Allah,” he had ranted, and the people remembered his words.
Even though the claim of the Ashraf to the Mahdiya was flawed, if one or two powerful emirs of the fighting tribes declared for them, Abdullahi would be sent to the execution grounds behind the mosque to meet his God and follow his Mahdi into the fields of Paradise.
Sitting quietly beside Aisha at the end of the room Rebecca had learnt enough of Dervish politics to be aware of the nuances and undercurrents that agitated the men. She drew aside the folds of her veil to ask Aisha if she might take a dish of water to bathe the fevered face of the dying Mahdi.
“Leave him be,” Aisha replied softly, “He is on his way to the arms of Allah who, even better than we can, will love and cherish him through all eternity.”
It was so hot and muggy in the room that Rebecca kept her veil open a little longer, making the most of a sluggish movement of air through the tiny windows across the room. She felt an alien gaze upon her, and flicked her eyes in its direction. The Emir Osman Atalan of the Beja was contemplating her bare face steadily, and though his dark eyes were implacable she knew he was looking at her as a woman, a young and beautiful woman who would soon be without a man. She could not look away: her eyes were held by a force beyond her control, as the compass needle is held by the lodestone.
Though it seemed an age, it was only a few moments before Abdullahi leant towards Osman Atalan and spoke to him so softly that his lips hardly moved. Osman turned his head to listen, and broke the spell that had existed between him and the young woman.
“How do you stand, noble Emir Atalan?” Abdullahi whispered, and his voice was so low that nobody else in the room could overhear.
“The east is mine,” Osman said.
“The east is yours,” Abdullahi agreed.
“The Hadendowa, the Jaalin and the Beja are my vassals.”
