In the yard there was an abrupt and breathless silence. The rioters had almost forgotten the presence of the white prisoners in the blockhouse. They stared at the huge half-naked corpse in awe.
The harpy was the only one not bereft of the power of movement. She snatched an axe out of the hands of the man nearest to her and rushed at the length of pipe. One of the many duties of a Sudanese woman is to cut the firewood for her household. As the first stroke of the axe clanged against his steam pipe, Jock knew she was an expert. She swung the axe again, and hit exactly the same spot. Jock could see that she was aiming at one of his welds. The metal there would be annealed by the heat of his torch. Already it was buckling. Two or three blows like that and she. would puncture and distort it. It might take days to repair the damage she had already done. If he didn’t do something to stop her she might inflict damage beyond repair.
“We will have no more of that nonsense,” he muttered.
Ryder saw him lift the rifle again. “Don’t shoot!” he shouted. “Jock, don’t shoot her.”
“Too late!” said Jock, without the least note of contrition in his voice, and again the Martini-Henry bucked and bellowed in his hands.
The bullet caught the harpy full in the chest. It picked her off her feet and threw her against the wall. She hung there, her mouth wide open, but the scream was trapped for ever in her throat. Then she slid down the wall, leaving a long bright smear on the whitewash.
The remaining rioters stared in consternation at the bodies of the two ringleaders. Retribution had come swiftly and unexpectedly. When would the next shot crash out, and who would fall? A wail of alarm went up, and they rushed for the gates.
“Keep them on the run!” Ryder had resigned himself to making the most of Jock’s precipitate action. He snatched up his own rifle and fired over the heads of the rioters. Within minutes the yard was empty, except for the harpy and her Nubian.
Ryder opened the blockhouse door cautiously and called to Rebecca, “Keep Saffron in here with you until we know it’s safe for you to come out.” With rifles loaded and held at high port, ready to get off a quick shot, the men swept the compound to make certain no danger still lurked. Jock hurried directly to his steam pipe and knelt beside it. He peered anxiously at the axe marks on the metal, removed the greasy and battered cap from his head and polished the marred surface tenderly, then he replaced his cap and studied the marks again. He sighed with relief. “Ain’t too much damage done.” He picked up the whole pipe as easily as the Nubian had, and carried it lovingly back into his workshop.
Ryder walked over to the two corpses. The harpy was sitting with her back against the wall. Her eyes and her mouth were open and her expression was faintly quizzical. He prodded her with the toe of his boot. She flopped on to her face and lay still. He could have fitted his clenched fist into the deep dark bullet-hole between her shoulder-blades. He did not need to examine the Nubian. His head lay in a puddle of his own brains.
“I don’t approve, but that was not bad shooting, Jock,” he muttered, then called to Bacheet, “Dump them in the river. The crocodiles will take care of them. No need to report this. Gordon Pasha is a busy man. We don’t want to give him more to worry about than he already has.” He waited until Bacheet and his Arabs had dragged the bodies out of the yard and through the gates that led to the canal. Then he went back to the blockhouse and opened the door. “All is safe. You may come out.”
Saffron rushed past him and darted to the menagerie gates. Old AH lay curled beside the gate post. He had been her friend. He had loved the animals as much as she did, and he had taught her how to care for them. She knelt beside his body. In the months since the beginning of the siege she had been exposed to death in many of its most hideous forms, but now she gagged as she looked at her friend’s body. The rioters had battered his head until it was shapeless, no longer recognizable as human.
“Poor AH,” she whispered. “You died for your animals. God will love you for that.” She found his bloodsoaked turban and covered his face. “Go in peace,” she said in Arabic.
She left him and went on into the menagerie. There she stopped again. She gazed around at the devastation and her knees went weak under her. Every cage had been smashed open and every one of the animals was gone. Clouds of blue flies hummed over puddles of their blood that were drying and caking in the desert sun. With an effort, Saffron steeled herself and went on down the rows of empty cages.
“Lucy!” She called as she went, and she imitated the chittering sound that was the monkey’s special recognition call. “Billy! Billy, baby, where are you?” She reached Lucy’s cage. The door had been torn off, and the cage was deserted. She stood before it, grieving. She had been so young when her mother died that she could barely remember it but she knew she had not felt as bereaved as she did now.
“They couldn’t have done this. It’s so cruel.” She knew that if she stood there longer she would start to blubber and her father would be ashamed of her. There was only one other place in the menagerie to search. She went to the feed shed at the far end of the enclosure.
“Lucy!” she called. “Billy, where are you, my baby?” She peered into the gloom.
“Billy!” She made the chittering monkey sound, and a tiny dark shape shot out from behind a pile of straw. With a single bound it landed on her hip, climbed on to her shoulder and chittered softly in reply to her call.
“Billy!” whispered Saffron. “You’re safe!” She sank to the floor and hugged the small furry body to her chest. Despite everything her father had told her, she began to cry and could not stop.
Before sunrise the next rooming, just after the mission bells had sounded the end of curfew, Ryder heard feminine voices in the yard, followed by the slamming of the door to the green-cake shed. He wiped the lather from the blade of his razor on to his wash-rag, and made one last pass from the bulge of his Adam’s apple to the point of his jaw. He examined his clean shaven image in the hand mirror, and grunted with resignation. Despite the kiss of the razor, his jaw was still blue. Not everybody can have whiskers like the pretty soldier-boy. He folded his razor, laid it carefully in the velvet slot in its fitted leather case and closed the lid. Then he left his private quarters in the blockhouse, and went out into the yard.
He glanced at the gate to the menagerie, and felt the surge of fresh anger and grief for the wanton slaughter of his animals. He could not yet bring himself to go into the enclosure. At least Bacheet had removed old Ali’s body and buried it before yesterday’s sunset, in accordance with the law of Islam.
Now Bacheet and his men were collecting tusks from where they were piled against the inner wall, and carrying them back to the warehouse. Ryder called Bacheet to him, and they went to inspect the main gates. There was nothing left of them but a few charred planks. “We will have to abandon everything in the outer stockade,” Ryder decided. “We will move into the inner fortifications. The gates are solid and strong. We can defend them.” He left Bacheet to carry out those orders.
For the last half an hour he had heard the hammering of metal on the anvil coming from Jock’s workshop, but now there was silence. He crossed to the workshop and looked in at the door. Jock McCrump had just lit the blue acetylene flame of his welding torch and was lowering the smoked-glass goggles over his eyes. He looked up at Ryder. “Old vixen could swing an axe like a lumberjack, and she packed a punch like John L. Sullivan his self It’s going to take couple or three days to fix this. Now make yourself scarce.” He bent over the damaged pipe and played the flame on to the gash in the metal.
“In one of our bloody moods today, are we?”
“Ain’t nothing to laugh and dance about. You should have let me shoot her before she did this.”
Ryder chuckled. They had been together a long time and knew each other’s foibles. He left Jock to get on with it and went to the green-cake shed. Nazeera and all three Benbrook sisters were there. They were wearing the working aprons and gloves they had made for themselves, and they were trying to restore order to the devastated kitchen.
“Good morning, Ryder.” Rebecca smiled at him. Ryder was taken aback by the warmth of her greeting and because she was still using his first name.
“Good morning, Miss Benbrook.”
“I would be obliged if in future you would address me by my Christian name. After the way you protected my sister and me yesterday, we need no longer stand on ceremony.”
“What little I could do for you was only my duty.”
“I was particularly pleased that you were so restrained in your use of force. A lesser man might have turned the riot into a massacre. You have the humanity to realize that those poor people had been driven to excess by the terrible dilemma in which they are caught up. However, I would like to express my sympathy for the grievous losses you have suffered.”
Saffron had been listening to her elder sister impatiently. She was not pleased by this new warmth between
