Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7) (28 page)

He heard a footfall outside the wall, and Charrière slid alongside him and squatted down. ‘I’ve found a small reed boat, about the size of a canoe. I’ve used my knife to make you a paddle from a piece of plank. It’s crude, but it will do. The channel will take you to within a hundred yards of the island, so you will need to go without making a sound, just as we used to when we crept up on deer on the shore of our lake in the forest.’

It was the first time Charrière had spoken of their past. Mayne had a sudden vision of the two of them as boys half a lifetime ago in Canada, of the birch-bark canoe that Charrière’s father had made him, of the trust they had had in him that he had betrayed by leaving. He started to say something, to tell Charrière how much he wished they were back there now, how sorry he was for letting him down all those years ago, but then he looked into Charrière’s eyes, cold, hard, dark, and said nothing. He raised himself up, keeping below the level of the walls. ‘A reed boat is good. There will be no noise if I go over a rock.’

Charrière looked back out over the desert, scanning the gloom and frowning.

‘What are you thinking?’ Mayne asked.

‘There are no camels, but I sense it. There are others there.’

Mayne stared at him. ‘Our pursuers? There’s been no sign of them since Abu Klea.’

‘I have not been able to backtrack at night and look for them. We have been on the move continuously.’

Mayne looked around. ‘There might be others hiding here in these ruins, people who have made it across from the city.’ He remembered Shaytan telling him that on the way out from Khartoum on the steamer, he had spotted figures along the banks of the Nile, scarcely human forms with distended bellies and bulbous eyes crawling over the mud and catching fish with their bare hands, eating them raw.

‘When you have gone across the river, I’ll look around. If there is anyone here, I will find them.’ Charrière handed him a cut section of reed and pointed to the hollow inside where he had pushed out the pith. ‘If you are shot at while you are on the river, you can drop over the side and breathe through this. Bullets are stopped after only a few feet underwater. You will be safe.’

Mayne thought of the women and chidren he had just been watching, and of the crocodiles. He would rather lie on the boat and be like a crocodile himself, become one with this reed boat as he had once done with a canoe, slide stealthily below the line of vision of anyone watching until he reached the other side. He pointed to the case with the rifle he had laid beside the wall. ‘If I come back without Gordon, I’ll set that up. My job is to protect him until Wilson arrives with the steamers and gives Gordon a final chance to leave. Until then I am to shoot any Mahdists that attack the palace.’

Charrière peered at him, and then at the palace opposite, narrowing his eyes. ‘Kahniekahake will have his work cut out for him. He may be able to take down a few attackers, but if the Mahdi comes, he will not be able to save General Gordon.’

Mayne was stunned. It was the first time he had been called by his Mohawk name since he was a boy: Kahniekahake, Eagle Eye. He swallowed hard. Now of all times he needed to keep focused. He looked at Charrière. ‘A few may be all it takes. It may keep Gordon alive until the morning.’

‘You need to leave now,’ Charrière said. ‘By the time you reach the boat, it will be dark enough to cross.’

Mayne followed him out of the pit, keeping below the ruined wall of the fort and then behind a ridge of mud that lined the riverbank. He felt a surge of feeling he had never felt before, a sudden overwhelming need to pour out emotion he had kept bottled up since his parents had died all those years ago, a need to reach out to Charrière and tell him the truth. He took a deep breath, holding it, ingesting the smell and taste of where they were, the horror of it and of what he was about to do. He was letting Charrière down again: he had lied to him about the rifle, and about his mission. He remembered the slip of paper with the black spot that Wilson had given him. Should he be required to enact the ultimate directive, there was one final deed he must do, a deed that would require him to shut off his emotions entirely and never return to them. He remembered Wilson’s last words as they parted ways in London three months ago, words that had drummed at him over the past few days like a headache.
Nobody must know
.

They reached a narrow muddy creek in the foreshore opposite the island. A line of planks led over the mud to the water’s edge, and Charrière pointed to the boat pulled up alongside. It was made from a single bundle of reeds, about twelve feet long, lashed around every foot or so and ending with a slightly upcurved stem and stern. It was pristine, almost luminescent against the brown and black of the creek; Mayne knew he would need to slap some mud on it before he left. It looked like something that the infant Moses might have been launched in, and was identical to model reed boats he had seen in the Antiquities Museum in Cairo. Yet again the ancient world had caught up with him, like a hiccup from the past, unpredictable, unnerving. He stepped on the plank, swaying precariously for a moment as it decided whether to keep him on land or tip him towards the river, and then slid down it as it slapped into the mud, caught his balance and turned round.

Charrière reached over and handed him the paddle. ‘I’ll be waiting for you.’

Mayne nodded. ‘Before dawn. I’ll be back.’

Charrière turned and was gone. Mayne stepped towards the boat, then leaned forward and grasped it like a canoe, his left hand holding the paddle and one side of the boat, his right hand the other. He pushed off and brought his legs in, kneeling down and wobbling the boat to test its stability, then laid the paddle in front of him and reached down to splash mud over the reeds, darkening them to make the boat less visible, taking care to make as little noise as possible. After a few moments he straightened up and began paddling silently out of the creek, aiming for a window that had just lit up on the upper floor of the building on the opposite shore.

Now would begin the greatest test of his life.

21

Mayne let the boat glide silently towards the mudbank below the palace, crouching low and trailing the paddle with the blade held vertically to act as a rudder. For the last stretch of the river he had let the sluggish current take the boat by the stern so that he was crossing diagonally, minimising his profile both to Madhist sharpshooters who might be scanning the river from Tutti island behind him and to Gordon’s Sudanese guards watching from the palace ahead. He had seen the guards on the balustrade, openly patrolling now that it was dark and they were invisible from the island. And he thought he had caught his first glimpse of the man himself, at the upper-floor window that had lit up when he had set out from the opposite shore; the shutters had opened and a figure had stepped out on to the balcony, sharply silhouetted in the light from the room behind. It seemed cavalier in the extreme, the act of a man with a death wish, but then Mayne had seen the Sudanese soldiers below stopping and watching him, and had imagined the dervishes, too, treated to this spectacle night after night, coming to believe in the man’s invincibility.

For now, Mayne’s concern was his own vulnerability to fire from the Sudanese guards; had they spotted him, they would have seen him as an Arab in tribal dress crossing from the dervish-held shore, and would have shot him down immediately. But he had just passed under the line of sight from the balustrade, and he felt marginally safer. Once he landed, he would need to make his way along the foreshore and into the streets, where he could meld in with the locals and approach the palace gate inconspicuously.

The boat bumped into the bank, driving forward into the mud until the stem was about three feet from the end of the duckboards. It was a place that should have been swarming with rats, but then he remembered that they had long ago been chased down and eaten by the starving people in the city. He knelt as far forward on the reed matting as he could, then jammed the paddle handle-first into the mud and used it to pull himself forward, rocking the boat until it could go no further. He listened for a moment and looked up at the balustrade; seeing nothing, he launched himself on to the duckboards, feeling his holster slap against his thigh as he did so, catching his robe so it stayed free from the mud and quickly regaining his balance. The duckboards were well built, solidly anchored into the foreshore, and the boat would remain firm until he returned.

He stood upright and suddenly gagged, overwhelmed by a stench even greater than the fetid smell of the riverbank. He looked to his right, at the poles like tree trunks he had assumed were for mooring, and immediately saw the source of the stench. What he had taken to be a clump of rags hanging from the nearest pole was the corpse of a man, so putrefied that it looked as if it had been excavated from a wet grave. The right hand and left foot were missing, and it was held up by a rope around the neck. He looked at the other two poles, spaced a few yards apart with duckboards beneath them, and saw that they too held corpses. It was like a ghastly vision of the crucifixion ground at Calvary, on the mudbanks of the Nile. The corpse nearest to him had a placard around its neck and he could see that the others did too, with Arabic script he could not make out. They had clearly been placed there to be seen from the dervish shore. It could have been days ago, or more recently; he remembered the wretched people he had seen through his telescope in the city, already halfway to this state.

The corpse nearest to him was dripping, single drops of dark liquid that plopped into the mud, forming a small pool that had attracted a swarm of sand hoppers and cockroaches. Suddenly needing to be away from the place, he made his way swiftly up the duckboards until he had reached a point some twenty yards beyond the stone steps leading up to the palace. He stopped and sniffed, taken aback. Somehow, through the stench, he thought he had caught a familiar waft, of cherry tobacco. He had a sudden image of Burnaby, not the hideously wounded man in the desert but the languid man in the tent beside Wolseley, watching the smoke rings from his cigarette rise up into the ceiling. He shook away the image; the smell was probably a trick of the senses brought on by this place, and Burnaby a raw memory of Abu Klea. He quickly veered left, ducking beneath the level of the balustrade and making his way along the riverbank. He could see where the wall of the compound that normally abutted the river now led to a gap on the foreshore where the mud had cracked and dried. He made his way down and around it, climbing up the bank on the other side. He straightened his headdress and robe, knowing that the dirt of two weeks’ desert travel and a bloody battle would not look out of place here, then quickly strode up the dusty street ahead.

Seconds later he was at the wrought-iron gates of the palace, among a throng of people trying to get in: emaciated, shrunken bodies with hollow eyes, little different from the corpses on the poles. The women wore the tattered remnants of rainbow-coloured garments, the men filthy rags that had once been white jalabiya robes, any colour their clothing still had deadened in the wan moonlight, making them look like ghosts. Some wore only loincloths, some no clothes at all, the women with shrivelled breasts that could not have nursed for weeks; one carried a partly swaddled baby that had clearly been dead for days. They were like supplicants at the gate of a great church, beyond begging for food or alms but wanting divine intervention, to catch sight of the man whose touch they believed could elevate them from this horror and save them from the fate that was overtaking them as they stood there. Mayne had no choice but to push among them, pressing against their bones, moving with them as they heaved ever forward against the barrier, for a moment feeling as if his own fate were to be here forever amongst them, like the helpless supplicants in purgatory in Corporal Jones’ medieval paintings. Then he was at the bars of the gate and saw the Sudanese guards on the other side, three men wearing tarboosh hats and carrying Remingtons. He fumbled with the belt under his robe and pulled out his Royal Engineers cap badge, thrusting it through the bars, then ripped off his headdress and opened his robe at the neck to reveal his khaki tunic. ‘English,’ he exclaimed. ‘I am a British officer. I need to see General Gordon. I need to see
Gordon
.’

At the sound of that name, the people around him suddenly hushed, turning from the gate towards him, staring up at him with the eyes of those who had been rescued from certain death, yearningly grateful. ‘Gordon,’ said the nearest man, clutching him. ‘Gordon Pasha.’ Others took up the chant.
Gordon Pasha. Gordon Pasha
. Mayne realised to his horror that these people had never seen the man, or were too far gone to tell the difference; and that he was about to become their messiah, the saviour who would heal their illnesses and bring their dead children back to life and pour forth grain in abundance from his outstretched hands. For a split second he felt rage towards Gordon for bringing this on him, for not being where he was now. He began to struggle as the people tried to pull him away; he dropped the badge and clung to the gate with all his strength, feeling himself pulled back and lifted off the ground. ‘English,’ he bellowed at the guards. ‘I need to see General Gordon, now.
Gordon Pasha
.’

His shouting drove the people to an even greater frenzy, the women ululating and the men chanting, those at the back reaching over to touch him, others from the streets around running up to join in. He felt his strength falter, and his hand began to slip. The shortest of the three Sudanese, with a corporal’s stripe on his sleeve, sauntered over and picked up the badge, turning it over and staring at it sceptically. Mayne remembered something else; he scrabbled frantically with his free hand at his belt and produced a handful of gold sovereigns, spilling some and throwing the rest through the bars, then holding on with both hands. ‘There is more,’ he yelled. ‘More gold!’

The corporal perked up, quickly collecting the coins and weighing them in his hands, then signalled the other two guards to come alongside. Just as Mayne was about to let go, the gates opened; he was dragged in and they were shut again, the soldiers beating the people back savagely with their rifle butts. The ululations turned to a low moan that increased in a crescendo and then dropped again, like a terrible sigh. The two soldiers used the flat of their rifles to push Mayne roughly between them, and then one of them pulled at his belt so that the remaining coins spilled out. They quickly picked them up while the corporal stood in front of him, turning the badge over and over in his fingers. ‘I will take this to Gordon Pasha. If he will not see you, I will throw you back to the dogs,
Turk
.’

He spat out the last word, and Mayne was taken aback momentarily; it was a term the dervishes used for all foreigners, yet this man knew he was English. The corporal marched off towards the palace, past two more guards and up a staircase. Mayne had to contend with the other two men now, both evidently convinced he was concealing more gold. They pushed him more roughly between them, trying to pull off his robe, and one of them cocked his rifle. Mayne made a tactical decision. He could not allow himself to die for nothing so close to his objective. He whipped out his revolver and aimed it at the head of the nearer man, holding the grip with two hands and thumbing back the hammer. ‘Drop your rifle,’ he snarled. ‘
Now.
’ The man did as he was told; the second one followed suit, and they both backed off uncertainly, glancing up to the balcony. Mayne kept the pistol trained with one hand and shook off his robe with the other. He had no need of a disguise any more, and if he was going to die here he would rather die dressed as a British officer, albeit in sandals and the dirty cotton shorts he had worn under his robe. He straightened his crumpled tunic and Sam Browne belt and waited.

A minute or so later, the corporal came back down the stairs and across the gravel forecourt towards him. ‘You can put that away,’ he said, pointing at the revolver. ‘Gordon Pasha
will see you.’

Mayne remained where he was, revolver trained. He was taking no chances. Then he saw that a figure had come out on to the balcony, too far off to be identifiable but unmistakably European and wearing a uniform. He paused for a moment longer, then lowered the revolver, holstering it. The two soldiers picked up their rifles and came up to him, but the corporal waved them off towards the gate. Then he grabbed Mayne’s tunic and pulled him close. ‘There is nothing for you in there, Turk. He has nothing left to give.’ He jerked his head towards the corpses hanging from the poles, visible beyond the balustrade. ‘Those men were Mahdi spies. The Mahdi is coming at dawn. The jihad will sweep all before it, and men like you had better join it or run. Otherwise you too will end up feeding the vultures and the crocodiles.’

‘
Insha’Allah,
’ murmured Mayne.

The man stared at him, his eyes dark, unfathomable, then pulled him close, so close that Mayne could smell his breath, and whispered harshly in his ear. ‘Forty thousand angels will join us. We will descend on the city like raptors. Join us, Englishman, and you too will rise to heaven, and the light of God will shine on you for what you do here today. Now go.
Insha’Allah
.’

He released Mayne’s tunic, turned him around and pushed him towards the stairs. Mayne reeled. Gordon’s gateman had gone over to the Mahdi, and would surely open the gates to the angels of death when they came swooping in. He knew he had no time to lose. He tripped over the edge of a flagstone and then regained his balance, stumbling forward. Over the river and around the palace he saw only blackness. Ahead of him at the top of the stairs was a blinding orange light. He remembered what the guard had said, about the coming of the Mahdi. He knew he had to be back across the river and in position before dawn. He reached the steps and began to mount them, his heart pounding. Everything hung on what happened next.