city and all its inhabitants hung on him.
One of the many myths that had built up around the image of General Chinese Gordon was that his voice could carry above the din of any battlefield. Penrod heard it now in the uproar of this inevitable disaster. “Number- two gun, open fire.” Penrod had never expected to welcome those harsh and hectoring tones. They carried clearly across from the secondary emplacement that Penrod had built in anticipation of just such a moment as this. His knees went weak with relief. Then he braced himself, and turned his mind back to the jammed gun.
Waiting, sleepless, on the glacis of the hospital fortifications, Gordon had heard the opening volleys of the battle, and seen the rocket flares sailing up from the harbour into the night sky. He had roused his gunners. They limbered up the second Gatling and ran it through the alleyways and byways of the city. It took them eight and a half minutes to reach the harbour and unlimber the Gatling in the empty emplacement that had been prepared for it. True to his nature, Gordon had timed them. He nodded approval and thrust the hunter back into his pocket.
“Number-two gun, open fire,” he grated, and the monstrous thunder of the six rotating barrels smothered the frenzied war cries of the Dervish. A moving sheet of fire swept relentlessly across the revetment, of the creek. From this angle he caught them in left flank and rear. His fire tumbled them off the walls like ripe apples from a wind- shaken tree. Most lost their weapons in the fall. Those who rose to their feet again were hurled forward by the press of bodies still surging up the creek, and were trapped against the footwall of the fortifications.
“Back! Go back! It is over,” shouted those in the forefront.
“Forward!” screamed those coming up from the beach, “For God and His Ever Victorious Mahdi!” The creek became a massive log-jam of bodies packed so tightly that even the dead were held upright by their comrades.
Penrod could not witness all this taking place while he struggled with the jammed bolt. At last he forced the point of the bayonet behind the lug of the cam and hammered on the hilt with his palm. He ignored the pain, and shouted at Sergeant Khaled, “Back up the crank!” Khaled heaved anti-clockwise on the handle, taking the pressure off the cam and suddenly the lug flew back, with a clanging force that would have taken off Penrod’s thumb, had he not jerked it away. The crushed and deformed cartridge case flew clear. As Khaled released the handle, the next round dropped from the hopper and was fed smoothly into the breech. The bolt cocked with a sweet, almost musical clank.
“Number-one gun cocked and ready, Sergeant.” Penrod slapped Khaled on the shoulder. “Commence firing!” Khaled stooped to the crank, and Penrod himself took hold of the twin traverse handles and depressed the barrels so they were aimed down into the struggling confusion of mud-smeared Ansar. The gun jumped, hammered and shook in Penrod’s hands.
Not even the bravest could withstand the combined fire of the two Gatlings. It rolled them back until they jammed in the portal of the drain tunnel, then decimated their ranks, piling their bodies like faggots of firewood on that narrow strip of beach. As the survivors staggered through the shallows towards the boats, the bullets kicked foam from the surface around them. When at last they clambered aboard, the heavy bullets splintered the deck timbers and struck down the crew cowering within the hulls. Their blood dribbled out of the bullet-holes and trickled down the outside of the hulls, like claret spilt from the goblet of a drunkard.
With their cargoes of broken bodies on the decks, the dhows steered back across the river in the first flush of day. As the last pulled out of the bight of the harbour the Gatlings ceased their dreadful clangour.
The timid silence of the dawn was marred only by the lamentations of the new widows across the river on the Omdurman bank.
Penrod stepped back from the Gatling, whose barrels glowed as though they had been heated in a blacksmith’s forge. He looked around him like someone awakening from nightmare. He was not surprised to find Yakub at his side. “I saw Osman Atalan in the front rank of the enemy host,” he told him.
“I saw him also, lord.”
“If he is still on this bank of the river, we must find him,” Penrod ordered. “If he is alive, I want him. If he is dead, his head shall be sent to the Ever Victorious Mahdi. It may discourage him and his Ansar from another attack on the city.”
Before he left the redoubt Penrod called to Sergeant Khaled, “See to our wounded. Get them to the hospital.” He knew how futile that would be. Both the Egyptian doctors had deserted from Gordon’s regiment months ago, but not before they had stolen and sold all the medical supplies. At the hospital building a few old Arab midwives still treated the wounded with herbs and traditional potions. He had heard that Rebecca Benbrook had tried to teach some of the Sudanese women how to take care of the wounded in a more orthodox fashion, but he knew that she had no medical training. She could do little more than attempt to staunch bleeding, and make sure the wounded had clean boiled water to drink, and extra rations of dhurra and green-cake.
Before the words were out of his mouth he heard a scream. He glanced in the direction it had come from and saw a woman dressed in black robes bending over a wounded Dervish. The Arab and Nubian women of the city had an instinct for death and loot. The first were arriving even before the crows and the vultures.
The wounded Dervish wriggled and writhed as the woman prodded him into position with the point of her little dagger. Then, with an expert stroke that started in his throat under the ear and raked forward, she opened both his carotid and jugular arteries and hopped back so the blood would not soak her skirts. Long ago Penrod had learnt not to interfere in this type of business. Arab women were worse than the men, and this one had made no attempt to conceal what she was about. He turned away. “Sergeant, I need prisoners for questioning. Save as many as you can.” Then he jerked his head to Yakub. “Come, All-seeing Yakub. Let us seek the Emir Osman Atalan. The last I saw of him, he was on the beach trying to rally his men as they ran for the boats.”
“Wait for me, Pen. I am coming with you.” Amber had crept out of the dugout.
Once again he had forgotten her presence. Her hair was in tangled disarray, her blue eyes were underscored with plum-coloured bruises, and her yellow frock was filthy with smoke and dust. The revolver was too big for the hand that held it. “Will I never get rid of you? You must go home, Amber,” he said. “This is no place for you, and it never was.”
“The streets are not safe,” Amber argued. “Not all the Dervish got away in the boats. I saw hundreds of them escaping that way.” She waved the Webley in an indeterminate gesture over her shoulder. “They will be waiting to ravish me or cut my throat.” “Ravish’ was one of her new words, although she was uncertain of its meaning.
“Amber, there are corpses and dying men down there. It’s no place for a young lady.”
“I have seen dead men before,” she said sweetly, ‘and I am not a lady yet, just a little girl. I only feel safe with you.”
Penrod laughed a little too harshly. He always felt lightheaded and detached from reality when fighting was over.
“Little girl? In stature, perhaps. But you have all the wiles of a fully fledged member of your sex. I am no match for you. Come along, then.”
They slipped and slid down the bank into the creek. The first rays of the sun were gilding the minarets of the city, and the light improved every minute. Penrod and Yakub moved cautiously among the bullet-torn bodies of the fallen Ansar. Some were still alive, and Yakub leant over one with his dagger poised.
“No!” Penrod said sharply.
Yakub looked aggrieved. “It would be merciful to help his poor soul through the gates of Paradise.” But Penrod indicated Amber, and shook his head again even more definitely. Yakub shrugged and moved on.
Penrod was looking for Osman Atalan’s green turban. As he ducked out under the stone arch of the tunnel on to the muddy beach, he picked it out: it was on the head of a corpse floating face down in the lap and wash of the wavelets at the edge of the bank. Through the clinging folds of the jibba he saw that the corpse was lean and athletic. There were two bullet-holes in its back. The Gatling had inflicted massive damage he could have thrust his fist into the holes. A few fingerling Nile perch worried the ragged tatters of raw meat that hung from the wounds. The end of the turban floated free, waving like a tendril of seaweed in the wash of the current. Osman Atalan’s long dark hair was entwined with the cloth.
Penrod felt his spirits plunge when only moments before he had been intoxicated. He felt cheated and angry. There should have been more to it than this. He had sensed that he and Atalan were caught up together in the ring of destiny. This was no way for it to end. There was no satisfaction in finding his enemy floating like the carcass of a pariah dog in a drainage creek with fish nibbling his flesh.
Penrod sheathed his sabre and went down on one knee beside the floating body. With a strangely respectful
