Theirs Was The Kingdom (52 page)
She had read many passionate declarations on the part of swains who minced their way across the pages of Henrietta’s novelettes, but not one of them could have coined a statement as warm or as reassuring as that. No wonder Stella gained in weight and complacency.
2
Henrietta’s occasional worries concerning Alexander were equally unjustified. A thousand miles or more to the east he was, in fact, adjusting the overall balance somewhat by losing weight, and growing lean and taut and as brown as a Bedouin under the white glare of the sun somewhere between the third and fourth of the Nile’s cataracts. There he guarded one of the last links with the Khartoum garrison that General Gordon was supposed to have evacuated long since but had not and was now himself invested and all but cut off.
It was strange, in the circumstances, that Alex’s complacency equated with that of his sister Stella. He was quite untroubled by flies, scorpions, a merciless heat from dawn to dusk, and sudden chills at night, to say nothing of the Mahdi’s tribesmen now in possession of most of the towns higher up the river, and the impossibility of saving Gordon from what the newspapers were already calling an Imperial martyrdom. Yet it was so, for Alexander, the least complicated of the Swann brood, had adapted comfortably and almost effortlessly to the strait-jacket of his profession.
It was just as well. Out here nobody, from Chief of Staff to corporal’s guard, seemed to know where anyone else was, or what they were achieving, or what the British Government at home wanted them to achieve, or how this extraordinary tangle would be unravelled. There was Gordon and his forty thousand squatting in Khartoum, hemmed in by heaven knew how many dervishes. There was Wolseley and his staff, mounting a ponderous rescue operation in Cairo. And in between, strung along hundreds of miles of river and desert track, were forlorn little parties of Europeans, poor-quality Egyptian infantry, roving gunboats, allegedly loyal Ababda tribesmen, heavily bribed and less reliable troops who gloried in the Arabian Nights’ name of “bashibozouks.” They were led by a scoundrel called the Mudir of Dongola and, always disappearing and reappearing like Sinbad’s Genie, the astonishing Major Kitchener, who had promoted himself Colonel and acquired the disconcerting habit of staring inferiors down with hypnotic eyes and a moustache that reminded Alexander of a squire in a melodrama.
It was very fortunate, he kept reminding himself, that he had never meddled in politics, not even Service politics, for a man might have lost his wits trying to make sense out of all this to-ing and fro-ing. As a subaltern, thank God, he was only required to obey the last order and he did this punctiliously, even when they despatched him across miles of desert to a place called Gadkul.
It was situated, according to his map, in the middle of a tract called the Bayuda Desert on a loop of the Nile well above Khartoum. With him marched a Bulgarian interpreter called Boris, a Highland corporal called McTavish, a score of jabbering Kababish tribesmen, and—the object of the exercise—a string of fifty-seven camels, purchased by Kitchener in Dongola with a sack of silver sent upriver by the Sirdar.
For Alex it was a welcome change from fly-pestered garrison duty in one or other of the river posts. He had never held an independent command and had never, up to that time, sat a camel, whose gently swaying gait gave him the impression of riding a small boat across a whipped-up sheet of water.
For directions he was entirely dependent upon the Kababish guide. Left to himself he would have wandered in circles, for out here camel tracks seemed to lead in every direction and there were no landmarks, nothing but sand and stone and sky. Their route, he gathered, was governed by desert wells and when night came they encamped by one, Boris the interpreter telling him that the guide said they could probably make Gadkul, and the advance post said to be established there, before the temperature soared to the hundred and twenties in the morning.
On that he turned into his bivouac tent and slept, to be awakened well before dawn by the corporal shaking his foot and saying, in the laconic voice of a swaddy who had long since adjusted to the Orient, “We’d best be aboot moving, sir. They’ve gone, the whole bunch of ’em.”
They had indeed. Outside there was no Boris, no camels, and no bashibozouks, nothing but miles of empty sand under the stars, and nothing to be done, it seemed, but to ask the corporal how they should set about retracing their steps to Korti, all of a day’s journey on foot through the scorching heat of the day.
The corporal, a forty-year-old veteran, seemed to find nothing very surprising or even alarming in their situation. Neither, for that matter, did he see any necessity to seek orders from a young and obviously inexperienced officer. He was polite, of course, but he did not tender his advice in the form of questions, as was customary, but said, bluntly, “Hae ye the compass aboot ye—sirr?” When Alexander handed it to him, he consulted it casually, as he might a watch, and added “We’ll aim for higher upriver. We’d ne’er make Korti nor Gadkul on foot. It’s my belief those heathen led us a goose chase north o’ the route. I’m thinking we’re no mair than three hours’ march o’ the big bend, at Abu Hamed.”
The name Abu Hamed had some significance for Alexander. He said, “That’s in the hands of the Mahdi, isn’t it? Our advance posts were at Merowe, nearly a hundred miles downriver, or so I was told when I was given my route.”
“Aye,” said the corporal, patiently, “but you c’n tak’ your choice—sirr. A brush wi’ the Fuzzies, or slow death from thirst and heatstroke an hour or so after sunup. If you’ll tak’ my advice it’ll be the river at its nearest point.”
There was no gainsaying a man as sure of himself as that, so they abandoned all but essential kit, filled their water bottles, and struck off across the desert in a northeasterly direction, trudging on until the sun rose and every step became a penance. He soon had reason to be thankful that he had put himself in the corporal’s hands. Not only did they find the river before the heat became unbearable, but they also struck it opposite a grounded paddle steamer that McTavish recognised as one of the fleet of steamers General Gordon had sent out of Khartoum a week before under the command of Colonel Stewart of the 11th Hussars. Stewart, he said, had been lured ashore and cut to pieces, together with nearly all his party.
“It’ll be the saving of us, nonetheless,” said the Highlander, but added, with the pessimism of his race and calling, “for the time being, that is.”
They waded out and climbed aboard. It had been systematically looted, of course, and there was nothing of any value aboard. The ten-pounder gun was still on its mountings, having proved too much trouble to break loose and haul away, but there was no ammunition for it and every cabin and locker had been ransacked by the dervishes. Below decks it was relatively cool, however, and Alex gratefully accepted the corporal’s offer to take first watch, stretching himself on the planks of a stripped bunk and falling asleep in seconds.
This time he was awakened by sustained and distant gunfire that seemed to come from downstream, so he went in search of the corporal, at first nowhere to be found but ultimately located flat on his back under one of the boilers in the engine room astern. He said, in response to Alexander’s query, “It’ll be the Fuzzies, probing the flank guard above Merowe. They’ll have come downstream from Abu Hamed as soon as they heard we were establishing base at Gadkul and were aiming for Shendi or Mentemma.” It struck Alex then that there was a Gilbertian flavour about the chain of command out here. The lower you probed the more positive and coherent was the analysis of any given situation. This man, for instance, could make sense out of an assortment of sounds and produce a rational answer in a matter of seconds, whereas officers of Major and above would have made any number of guesses and lost themselves in fantasy. The Highlander talked and behaved as though he had been born and raised out here in the desert. The names of the squalid little river towns dropped from his tongue as though they were as familiar as Aberdeen, Kelso, Inverness, and Glasgow. Everything he said had authenticity so that when he suggested the steamer could, with a little attention, be started up and refloated, Alex was positive that this was so and that he would do it. He had experience, it seemed, with marine engines, having worked for a spell on a paddle steamer that cruised the Inner Hebrides in the short Highland summers, and learning this Alex had a curious certainty that this adventure would end like all his previous adventures, in survival. It was as though he had inherited a talisman passed to him by his father, like the shape of his nose or the colour of his eyes. A certain amount of doubt, however, was expected of him as a bystander and an officer, so he said, “
How
could she be refloated? Even if you get the engine started she’s still stuck on a sandbank.” The corporal replied, in that tone of mild exasperation the veterans reserved for boys in authority over them, “Aye, she is that, sirr. But there’s more water come down since she struck a week since. Ye can see that if ye look at the paint on her hull. Full power and hard over and she’ll float off easy enough, providing she isn’t holed, and if we’re lucky she’ll drift down on the current and fetch up beyond Merowe.” And then, most improbably, he made the kind of joke a friendly uncle might make at the expense of a venturesome nephew, saying, “ Ye might even get a medal, sirr, for salvagin’ Queen’s property written off by the quartermaster,” and smiled, showing discoloured front teeth under a red, ragged moustache and the wide cleft in them that Phoebe Fraser always said meant that the owner would die a wealthy man.
Alex left him to his work, after an offer to help had been declined, and made a thorough search of the derelict, discovering, under a trap in the bows, a box of Martini-Henry rifle ammunition that had been overlooked by the looters because it was buried in oily rags and cordage. Alex was armed only with a revolver but the corporal carried a Martini-Henry, so Alex took the box down to him, thinking it might be useful if they were challenged from the banks on the voyage downstream. By this time the corporal, stripped to his underclothes and covered in grease, had made repairs to pistons and steampipe and was lighting the fire. His situation aboard ship seemed to have invested him with the gruff authority of a seagoing captain, for he waved the ammunition aside and ordered Alex aft, with orders to put the steering wheel hard over against the moment when the starboard wheel began to revolve.
It happened within minutes, the wheel seeming to heave and flutter a little, its metal-sheathed blades flailing the sand as it dragged the head of the little vessel around, pointing her midstream. After a moment or two of horrid uncertainty she edged herself clear of the bank into shoulder-deep water, where she at once began to spin in slow, ever-widening circles, apparently not answering to the helm. Alex, craning his neck over the stern, saw that the rudder bar was bent to an angle of about fifteen degrees.
He shouted the news to the corporal who came up, took a look, and went below again without a word. A moment later he managed to start the port wheel going, and thereafter the steamer pursued a crazy course into mid-channel and would have soon crossed the river and buried her nose in the eastern bank had not she chanced to strike a submerged bank or some other obstruction that diverted her into midstream current. The corporal was able to keep her clear of the banks for a zig-zag mile or so by starting and stopping the paddle wheels alternatively.
It could not last, however, for he was unable to hear the sailing directions Alex shouted above the grind of the ancient pistons, the hiss of steam escaping from a hole he had been unable to repair, and the clank of churning wheels. Shutting off both engines, he came on deck again dragging a long sweep he had unearthed from somewhere, and having lashed it to the stern rail he directed Alex to steer as best he could while he got a real head of steam on the patched-up boiler. He seemed, Alex thought, completely absorbed in his work, with no concern at all for the possible presence of dervishes on either bank, or the heavy firing downstream.
It was a bizarre experience, sailing zig-zag down the wide and muddy Nile under a high, brassy sun and through a depopulated land. All the time, Alex noticed, the firing became heavier, the crump of artillery punctuating a long rattle of musketry, so that it seemed to him they were drifting into a major engagement of some kind. He took the opportunity to clean and oil his revolver, freeing each chamber of sand and reloading with six fresh bullets taken from his ammunition pouch. Presently, during one of their involuntary lurches towards the eastern side of the channel, he saw dervishes, about a hundred of them, who began shouting as soon as the steamer came in view and tried a few long-range shots that fell short or dropped well astern. Alex, sweating freely over his unmanageable sweep, caught the silvery glitter of their impact on the reddish-brown surface of the flood.
It was all rather jolly, he decided, or would have been had the sweep not assumed a capricious personality of its own and jumped and bucked independently of his heaves and pressures. Where the river narrowed he saw more dervishes, mounted and unmounted, thronging downstream so far as he could make out, and every now and again a random shot struck the plates or superstructure of the steamer, ricocheting with a musical whine but doing them no harm. For the little tub continued to thresh her way downstream all the late afternoon and Alex reflected that, warm as it was up here under the canopy, it must be hellishly hot in that little boiler room below. Then, as dusk fell, they came within sight of Merowe, perhaps five miles downstream, and in the fading light he could see a continuous line of flashes on both banks but a heavier concentration where the British flank guard was posted to defend the Korti bridgehead.