current was at five knots from the same direction. Two of the feluccas were swept downstream and were unable to make good a course to intercept the this. Only one of them stood in her way. But Ryder had been given plenty of time to prepare a reception for it. He ordered all the deck passengers to lie flat, so as to offer no target to the attackers. As the enemy vessel raced towards them, heeled over by the wind and pushed along by the current, Bacheet and Abou Sinn were crouched below the starboard bulwark.
“Let them get close,” Ryder called down from the bridge, as he judged the moment. Then he raised his voice to full pitch: “Now!J he bellowed.
Bacheet and Abou Sinn sprang up from hiding and aimed the brass nozzles of the steam hoses down into the undecked hull of the felucca. They opened the valves and solid white jets of live steam from the this’s boiler engulfed the warriors crowded into the open boat. Their bloodthirsty war cries and angry challenges turned to screams of anguish as the dense clouds of steam flayed the skin and flesh from their faces and bodies. The hull of the felucca crashed heavily against the steel of the this’s hull, and the impact snapped off the mast at deck level. The felucca scraped down the steel side of the steamer, then spun out of control in her wake. She now wallowed directly in the path of the heavily laden barge. The Ansar were so blinded by the steam that they did not see her coming. The barge smashed into the frail craft and trod her under the surface. None of her crew surfaced again.
“That takes care of that,” Ryder murmured, with satisfaction, then forced a smile at Rebecca. “Forgive me for depriving’ you of the comfort of the cabin floor, but tonight you will have to make do with your own bed in the palace.”
“That is a hardship I am determined to endure with the utmost stoicism, Mr. Courtney.” Her smile was almost as unconvincing as his, but he was amazed at how pretty she looked in the midst of so much mayhem and ugliness.
General Charles Gordon stood on the steps above the harbour entrance and watched the this limp in. When Ryder looked up at him from the bridge, his regard was cold and cutting as blue ice, with no trace of a smile nor any hint of sympathy. When the steamer was tied up at the stone jetty Gordon turned away and disappeared.
Major al-Faroque remained to welcome the bedraggled passengers as they staggered ashore from the barge. His head was swathed in a white bandage, but his expression was ferocious as he picked out those of his men who had deserted their posts and attempted to escape. As he recognized them he lashed each offender across the face with the kurbash whip he carried, and nodded to the squad of ask ari who were lined up behind him. They seized the marked men and locked manacles on their wrists.
Later that afternoon, when Ryder was summoned to the general’s office in the consular palace to make his report, Gordon was distant and dismissive. He listened without comment to all that Ryder had to say, condemning him with his silence. Then he nodded. “I am to blame as much as anybody. I placed too much responsibility on your shoulders. After all, you are not a soldier, merely a mercenary trader.” He spoke scornfully.
Ryder was about to make an angry retort when a volley of rifle fire rang out from the courtyard of the palace below. He turned quickly to the window and looked down.
“Al-Faroque is dealing with the deserters.” Gordon had not risen from his chair. Ryder saw that the ten men of the firing squad were leaning nonchalantly on their weapons. Against the wall of the courtyard facing them sprawled an untidy row of corpses. The dead men were all blindfolded with their wrists tied behind their backs, their shirts bloodsoaked. Major al-Faroque was walking down the line, his service revolver in his right hand. He paused over a body that was twitching spasmodically and fired a single shot into the blindfolded head. When he reached the end of the line he nodded to a second squad of men, who ran forward and piled the corpses into a waiting cart. Then another group of condemned men were led up from the cells into the courtyard and lined up along the wall. While a sergeant tied their blindfolds, the firing squad came to attention.
“I hope, General, that the consul’s daughters have been warned of these executions,” Ryder said grimly. “It is not something that young gentlewomen should witness.”
“I sent word to him that they should keep to their quarters. Your concern for the young ladies does you credit, Mr. Courtney. However, you might have been of greater service to them by affording them safe passage downriver to a place of security.”
“It is my intention to do so, General, as soon as I am able to effect repairs to my steamer,” Ryder assured him.
“It might already be too late for that, sir. Within the last few hours I have received the most reliable intelligence that the Emir Osman Atalan of the Beja tribe is in full march with his array to join the Mahdi’s besieging force out there.” General Gordon pointed out of the window across the White Nile at the Omdurman bank of the river.
Ryder was unable to conceal his alarm. With the notorious Osman Atalan opposing them, the nature of the siege would change. Any escape from Khartoum would become incalculably more difficult.
As if to endorse these grim thoughts, the next volley from the execution squad crashed out, and immediately afterwards Ryder heard the soft sounds of human bodies flopping lifelessly to the ground.
The Emir Osman Atalan, beloved of the Divine Mahdi, was riding at large. In response to the Mahdi’s summons to Khartoum, he had been for many weeks on the march up from the Red Sea Hills with his army. His warrior spirit chafed at the monotony and drudgery of the pace set by the great agglomeration of animals and people. The baggage train of camels and donkeys, the columns of slaves and servants, women and children was strung out over twenty leagues, and when they camped at night it was like a city of tents and animal lines. Each of Osman’s wives rode in a curtained litter on the back of her own camel, and slept at night in her own commodious tent, attended by her slaves. In the van and in the rear guard rode the legions of the forty thousand fighting men he commanded.
All the subservient tribes had massed to his scarlet and black banner: the Hamran, the Roofar of the hills and the Hadendowa of the Red Sea littoral. These were the same warriors who, within the last few years, had annihilated two Egyptian armies. They had slaughtered Baker Pasha’s superior numbers at Tokar and El Teb and left a wide road of bleached bones across the desert. When the wind came from the west the inhabitants of Suakin on the coast twenty miles away could still smell the unburied dead.
Many of the tribes under Osman Atalan had played a major role at the battle of El Obeid where General Hicks and his seven thousand had perished. They were the flower of the Dervish army, but in their multitudes they moved too slowly for a man such as Osman Atalan.
He felt the call of the open desert and the silence of wild lands. He left the teeming legions to continue the march towards the City of Infidels while he and a small band of his most trusted aggagiers ranged out on their horses to indulge in the most dangerous sport known to the bravest of the tribes.
As he reined in his steed on the crest of a long wooded ridge that overlooked the valley of the Atbara river, Osman Atalan cut a romantic, heroic figure. He wore no turban, and his thick black hair was parted down the middle and drawn into a long plait that hung to the level of the blue silk sash that girl the waist of his ornately patched jibba. He held the scabbard of his broadsword clamped under his right knee against the saddle. The hilt was exquisitely fashioned from rhinoceros horn with a patina like amber, and the blade was inlaid with gold and silver. Under the fine loose cloth of his jibba his body was lean and wiry, the muscles of his legs and arms like the woven sinews of a bowstring. When he swung down from the saddle he stood tall beside his horse’s head and stared out across the wide land below, searching for the first glimpse of the chase. His eyes were large and dark with the thick, curling lashes of a beautiful woman, but his features seemed carved in old ivory, hard flesh and harder bone. He was a creature of the desert and the wild places, and there was no soft flesh on him. The inexorable sun had gilded but not blackened his skin.
His aggagiers rode up behind him and dismounted. The title of honour was reserved for those warriors who hunted the most dangerous game on horseback, armed only with the broadsword. They were men carved from the same stone as their lord. They loosened the girths of their horses’ saddles, then tethered the animals in the shade. They watered them, pouring from the waterskins into leather buckets, then spread mats of plaited palm fronds before them and put down a small heap of dhurra meal for them to feed. They themselves did not drink or eat, for abstinence was part of their warrior tradition.
“If a man drinks copiously and often, he never learns to resist the sway of the sun and the sand,” the old men said.
While the horses rested the aggagiers took down their swords and shields from where they were tied to the saddles. They sat in a small, companionable group in the sunlight, and began to strop their blades on the cured
