Pharaoh

16

Major Edward Mayne blinked hard, wiping his eyes as they watered, squinting in the intense sunlight and the dust. Two hours earlier, he had sat shivering under his blanket, watching the first streaks of dawn ignite the desert in shimmering patches of amber and then spread into a uniform orange-red haze. It had been like that every morning in the desert, as if the first reflected heat off the land caused the dust to rise, creating a miasma that the sun could then only penetrate diffusely; to be crossing the desert was to be submerged in it, to be at the whim of the eddies and tides of history that swept over it like the violent dust storm they had endured the day before. He had felt it since they had left Korti twelve days ago, a sense that they were moving deeper into a place where colour had become monochrome and the light dispersed and opaque, increasing his foreboding about what lay beyond the loop of the river over the rocky plateau ahead.

He tried to stop himself shivering. He had still not shaken off the chill of the night, but it was becoming hot, uncomfortably so for the camels; they needed water badly. He knew that the wells ahead would be no more than trickles of muddy water at the bottom of pits in the ground, but it would be enough. He lay forward over the boulder and extended his telescope, jamming his elbows into cracks in the rock and peering through the eyepiece. The desert in this part of the Sudan was not like the dunes he had seen in Egypt; instead it was what the Arabs called goz, a vast undulating plain of low gravel ridges broken by jagged rocky outcrops, brown and grey and dull maroon. The occasional patches of desert grass and thorny scrub could seduce the unwary into thinking that the goz was more life-sustaining than the dunes of the Sahara, a dangerous illusion borne out by the bleached camel bones and half-mummified corpses they had seen poking out of shallow graves along the way. He had come to realise how so many who had descended this way from the north – the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Ottomans – had found themselves mired in this place, drawn in and then checked by some invisible force that enclosed and drained them, making return impossible. And now he was watching history repeat itself, following a modern army that seemed perilously close to foundering in this harsh land as so many had done before.

He trained his telescope on the rise in the middle distance, perhaps two miles to the south. He had recognised Abu Klea from Kitchener’s sketches, the last watering place before the Nile; they had last seen the river ten days ago at Korti, before they began the trek across the desert that cut off the loop to the east. He panned to the right, to a dust cloud that hung over the slope, and saw the flash of polished steel, then a blur of camels’ legs and khaki tunics folding in and out of the haze. He and Charrière had followed Brigadier General Stewart’s desert column all the way from Korti, but this was the first time he had seen it in broad daylight. To the left of the column was Stewart’s zariba, a defensive encirclement of thorny scrub, camel saddles and commissariat boxes where the soldiers had bivouacked the night before; to the right, a mile or so away where the slope merged with the flat desert, lay the patch of green that marked the wells. Between his position and the column was a wasteland of rocky knolls and low ridges, with undulations that made it difficult to gauge distance. He estimated that the wells were four thousand yards away, almost due south, and that the dust cloud was a thousand yards nearer, precisely on the path that he and Charrière would need to follow to get to the Nile.

He heard something in the far distance, and held his breath, listening. He had heard the same noise once before, at the cataracts on the Nile, when the jihadi tribesmen had shadowed the river column, taunting them. It was the sound of tom-toms, dervish drums, irregular, wild, rising to a climax and then tapering off again, relentless. It seemed to be coming from all directions, an unnerving feature of distant sounds in the desert; it reminded him of hearing noise when he had swum underwater, impossible to locate and making it seem as if he were surrounded. But he knew it must be coming from a dervish force beyond the wells, the object of Stewart’s advance that morning.

The Mahdist army might not yet be visible, but he knew they would be battle-ready. Kitchener had predicted that there would be a fight in the desert before they reached the Nile. That night there had been a crescent moon, and just before dawn the planet Venus had been visible on the horizon, omens the emirs always sought before unleashing war. But for Mayne, predicting battle was more than just a matter of augury and superstition. For more than a week now he had watched Stewart’s column trundle forward, excruciatingly slowly. They had marched by night, making more laboured progress than they would have done by day, exhausting both men and camels; both slept poorly in daylight, and the camels had less chance of foraging and finding water. When Stewart had reached the rocky crater of Jakdul and its wells at the midpoint of the desert route, he had lingered for days. To Mayne it was almost as if he were willing the enemy to meet him in the field, by giving ample time for spies to reach the Mahdi’s camp outside Khartoum and tell him of Stewart’s advance; the Ansar warriors would have been itching for a fight, forcing the Mahdi’s hand. This was truly a battle foretold. Mayne frowned, snapping shut the telescope. Getting to the Nile was going to take more time than he had bargained for, and with Gordon’s status in Khartoum more uncertain by the day, time was of the essence.

The camel hobbled beside him grunted and belched, emitting an odour so foul it made Mayne’s eyes smart again. It shifted on its forelegs and stared in the direction of the wells, chewing its cud. The bags of dura wheat slung over its back were nearly empty, and its hump was sagging. Both of their camels had traversed the Bayuda desert many times and knew exactly where they were, that the oasis ahead contained expanses of desert grass they could graze on as well as the puddles of muddy groundwater where they could slake their thirst. They had hobbled the camels the evening before to prevent them from wandering off on their own, and that night they had been restless. Mayne felt his own cracked lips, and was beginning to sympathise. Their breakfast of lime juice and biscuit had still not allayed the chill of the night, and he was looking forward to getting on the move again.

A figure materialised beside him, silent as ever. Over the past days Charrière’s skin had darkened with the sun and the dust, accentuating the deep grooves that scored his cheeks and forehead. The desert of the Sudan must seem a world away from the rivers and forests of Canada where he had been brought up, but he had relished the challenge to his tracking and survival skills. He tossed back the Arab robe he wore over his woollen trousers and checked shirt, took out a hunk of dried meat from a pouch on his belt and cut off a strip, passing it over. Mayne had acquired a taste for the jerky carried by the voyageurs on the Red River expedition fifteen years before; this time it was camel rather than moose meat, but he took it gratefully. Charrière cut himself a piece and the two men chewed and sucked for a few minutes without talking. Then Charrière raised the depleted water skin that had been hanging from his shoulder, letting a trickle pour into his mouth before passing it to Mayne, who did the same, taking only a mouthful, knowing that the wells ahead were under dervish control and the tepid water might be their last for some time. They had been warned about thirst blindness, and he had wondered about the wavering images he had been seeing on the horizon the day before, whether they were mirages of the desert or tricks of the mind, or both. Today he would need all the clarity he could muster. He took another swig, leaving a few mouthfuls as a reserve, then passed the skin back. Charrière plugged and reslung it, then pointed ahead, his voice slow and deliberate, with its distinctive French-Canadian accent. ‘That is no longer an army on the march.’

Mayne looked out again. ‘About a quarter of an hour ago they began to form a square. They’ve dismounted and corralled the camels inside. They’ve only just left the zariba where they spent the night, so it’s too early for them to be setting up camp again. You can see the glint of steel where they’ve fixed bayonets. They must be able to see something closer to the wells that we can’t.’

Charrière squinted at the low hills behind the wells, then slid off the rock and lay splayed in the dust beside the camels, his ear to the ground. ‘We may not be able to see it,’ he said, ‘but I can hear it. There is a pounding, a great pounding of human feet, many thousands of them. And something else I can hear in the air too, a beating sound, like a thousand drums.’

Mayne shut his eyes for a moment. The soldiers in the square were not just preparing for a skirmish, to repel a suicidal attack by a few jihadi horsemen like those that had beset them since they had entered the desert. What they could hear and see ahead of them now was barely imaginable, terrifying, a storm from the south, the edge of a sweeping darkness that would stir up an atavistic fear in the hearts of men whose crusader ancestors had faced it eight hundred years ago when they had come to reclaim the Holy Land. Mayne remembered how the tom-toms had so terrified the Egyptian soldiers with the river column on the Nile; he hoped the British would have more resolve than the Egyptian fellahin, men with an ancestral fear of warriors from the south. But what the men in the square must be able to see now would shake anyone, a mass advancing from the horizon against which victory might seem inconceivable.

Charrière picked up the telescope and peered through it. ‘I can see puffs of rifle fire near the square. Mahdist sharpshooters must have come up among the rocks. These folds and gullies in the desert will provide them with cover.’

‘When you see volley fire from the square, then you know the Mahdi army is attacking,’ Mayne replied. He turned over and sank back against the rock, forgetting for a moment the chill and the hunger and thirst, retracing the brief for his mission. He and Charrière had left General Wolseley’s base at Korti dressed as Arabs and riding the best camels that could be found for them, shadowing Stewart’s desert column. The column had been sent south across the Bayuda desert towards Metemma on the Nile, a direct route of 176 miles that cut off the wide loop of the river to the east. Once at Metemma, it was to meet up with General Earle’s river column and a small vanguard under Colonel Wilson would embark in the river steamers that had been sent there by Gordon from Khartoum, 98 miles to the south. The plan then was either breathtakingly audacious, or astonishingly naïve. The arrival of a few dozen British redcoats would cow the enemy, who would disappear back into the desert. Khartoum would be relieved, and Gordon saved. The expedition would be the greatest triumph of British arms since Queen Victoria had come to the throne.

Mayne knew that the chances weighed astronomically against any of this coming to fruition, not least the time factor: Gordon had issued a last plea for help weeks before, and already Stewart’s column had lingered for ten days longer than was necessary at the wells of Jakdul in the middle of the desert. The chances of the river column reaching Metemma before February were vanishingly small, with the falling level of the Nile at this time of year making the cataracts more treacherous by the hour. Yet Mayne’s own mission to get to Gordon just before the steamers arrived at Khartoum depended on Gordon knowing that the relief expedition had reached Metemma, and that rescue for himself and his people was possible; only then, Mayne knew, would he stand any chance of convincing him to leave. It had meant dogging the tails of the desert column, waiting until now, with the Nile less than twenty-five miles ahead, when the arrival of Stewart’s force at Metemma within two days seemed a fair certainty; he and Charrière could then bypass the column and make their way to Khartoum to reach it just ahead of the steamers and the relief force.

Following the column had hardly required Charrière’s tracking skills. More than a thousand British soldiers mounted on camels and horses, a thousand more camels carrying disassembled mountain guns, a Gardner machine gun, ammunition and supplies, and the usual trail of followers and servants had created a veritable dust storm visible for miles. The enemy would have known about it even before the force had departed Korti. The question in Mayne’s mind for days now had not been whether the Mahdi would detach a force from the besieging army at Khartoum to confront Stewart, but when. This morning he had the answer. The Mahdi had ample forces at his disposal, at least 250,000 men according to Kitchener, an army growing daily as the local tribesmen lost faith in British resolve and threw in their lot with the jihad. Mayne could only hope that the detachment of a large force would show that the Mahdi had not yet decided to take Khartoum by storm, but that he would starve the city into submission; that might give Mayne a better chance of reaching Gordon in time. Or it could mean that Khartoum had already fallen and that the entire Mahdi army had been released to move north. If so, his mission was over and the survival of Stewart’s force, of Mayne himself and of Charrière, would be hanging in the balance, with Egypt itself the next to fall as the Ansar surged north.

He remembered Charrière’s morning foray, and peered at him. ‘Are we still being followed?’

The other man nodded. ‘The same distance behind each day. I circled back to find their tracks. They bivouacked last night behind that ridge visible back along the trail on the horizon. Four men, with camels.’

Mayne grunted, pursing his lips. Charrière had spotted them on the first night after leaving Korti, but to begin with Mayne had thought little of it; the desert track was well used and local tribesman plied it even in times of war. But the four men had remained behind them for the full ten days it had taken Stewart to leave Jakdul, and he had become suspicious. They were not simply waiting their turn to use the wells, as Stewart’s men would have let local tribesmen through and there would have been no need for them to remain concealed. They must either be brigands or Mahdist spies, or both. It had been impossible to be stealthy with two snorting and kicking camels under them, and the tribesmen of the desert were as adept at tracking as Charrière was. But Mayne wanted to shake them soon, once they had left the exposed wasteland of the desert route. Kitchener’s map had shown an area of dense mimosa and acacia scrub in the final miles of the journey towards the Nile, beyond Abu Klea; that was where Mayne planned to leave the camels and make their move.

Charrière thrust something at him, a scrap of paper. ‘I found this in their tracks.’ Mayne turned it over, staring. It was a torn piece from a tobacco wrapping. He could read the label: Wills Tobacco Co., Bristol. He shrugged. ‘There’s plenty of British stuff like this lying around. There would have been a haul from the dead officers when the Mahdi annihilated Hicks’ Egyptian army two years ago. And brigands could have rifled tobacco from British soldiers in the desert column while they slept.’ He thought for a moment; the Mahdi had expressly forbidden smoking among his followers. He looked at the scrap again, feeling a tinge of unease. He thought back to Korti, to the faces around the conference table with Wolseley. In this world of spies, of cat and mouse, Mayne surely occupied the deepest fold; he was the spy, not the one spied on. He thought of Kitchener, who had been with the desert column but had been ordered back by Wolseley from Jakdul, fuming at not being in on the action. He remembered Kitchener’s words to him outside the conference tent: his warning about Gordon, his suspicion of Mayne and his evasiveness when Mayne had asked him about his spy network. It was possible that Kitchener had secretly ordered him to be followed, exercising his self-appointed authority in the desert beyond Wolseley’s reach. He thought too of his own secret superior, Colonel Sir Charles Wilson, caught up now in that battle square ahead of them, an intelligence officer seeing action for the first time in his career and a hovering presence over Mayne’s mission. Surely Wilson was the linchpin of all subterfuge, and would not tolerate any others interfering in his game, whether sanctioned by Wolseley or by Whitehall. If he had known, he would surely have told Mayne about any possible impediment to his mission. Mayne knew there was little to be gained from further speculation, but it nagged at him. What was going on?

Charrière gestured ahead. ‘Our followers will be watching us now from that ridge behind, and will be able to see what we can see now. They will know that if we carry on forward we must go off the track to avoid the battle, and if so they could lose us. If they are intent on waylaying us, they may choose to make their move before that.’

Mayne took the telescope and stared at the British square, seeing sporadic puffs of smoke from rifle fire. He hoped that the Ansar ranged against them was not the main force of the Mahdi army; if so, they would annihilate the square and swarm over the Abu Klea hills, making his own progress to the Nile virtually impossible. But even a British victory could have adverse consequences. If Khartoum had not yet fallen, a victory could persuade the Mahdi that a British force to be reckoned with was on the way, and that he should storm the city without delay. Either way, what happened today was going to decide the fate of Gordon. He snapped the telescope shut, and stood up. ‘Agreed. We move now.’

Fifteen minutes later they dismounted beside an exposed knoll a thousand yards closer to the square. The dervish force was now clearly visible, and Mayne trained his telescope on the approaching mass. He could make out individuals beneath fluttering banners, surging forward behind emirs on horses and camels, their blades glinting. He had been shown dervish weapons by his guide Shaytan weeks before in the eastern desert, and he knew what the British would soon be facing: ten-foot-long leaf-bladed spears, razor-sharp and as lethal as a Zulu assegai, as well as shorter throwing spears, straight, double-edged, cross-hilted swords, and a few specialist weapons – the hippo-hide kurbash whip, lethal in the right hands if wrapped around a man’s neck, and boomerang-like throwing sticks embedded with slivers of razor-sharp obsidian that could hobble the legs of camels and men alike. He peered closely, scanning the front ranks. These were not the wild-haired, semi-naked warriors Corporal Jones had seen on the Red Sea coast the year before, the Baggara tribesmen who had been the first of the Mahdi’s supporters to meet the British in open battle, where Colonel Fred Burnaby had cut such an extravagant figure with his shotgun. Here, the front ranks were dominated by Kordofan Arabs from the Madhi’s heartland south of Khartoum, men who wore skullcaps and the patched jibba tunic, who eschewed the elephant-hide shields carried by the Baggara; they were the Ansar, the most fanatical supporters of jihad. The Mahdi had astutely celebrated their traditional ways of war, stoking their self-esteem as warriors, knowing that in overwhelming numbers at close quarters their weapons could win the day against the bayonets and bullets of the British. But he also knew the power of the rifle, and had equipped select Kordofan warriors with the Remingtons that they had taken from the slaughtered Egyptian soldiers of Hicks’ force two years before; Mayne could see their ragged fusillades today on the ridge behind the main force, and knew that among them would be the captured Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers who had chosen the Mahdi over execution and had trained select Kordofan to become expert marksmen.

He watched the force assemble in front of the British, their standards with Arabic slogans held high above the front ranks. It was an extraordinary image, half buried in history, a medieval army marching out of the folds of time to confront the might of modern firepower, yet still it sent a cold shudder through him. The sheer numbers could prove overwhelming; it had happened at Isandlwana in Zululand six years before, and it could happen again here. Everything depended on the resolve of the British soldiers in the square: on the years of parade-bashing and field drill that made the Grenadier Guards and the Household Cavalry the most disciplined soldiers the world had ever seen; on that stoicism and grim humour that Mayne had seen in Corporal Jones and every other seasoned British soldier he had encountered; on the determination of the officers to play the game for Queen and country, to lead from the front and be seen by their men in the thick of the action, to sell their lives dearly and take as many of the enemy with them as possible.

Mayne steadied his telescope, watching the men ululating and dancing in the front ranks. The Ansar still had faith in their own inviolability; they had not yet encountered the volley fire of Martini-Henry rifles, and had no reason to disbelieve the Mahdi’s promise that bullets would not harm them. They were driven by an unswerving belief in divine purpose and in the power of their leader; they also believed they were defending their way of life and their families, and would fight with a savagery that seemed natural in a desert world where life was cruel and death often came whimsically.

He cast an expert eye over the marksmen’s position in the rocks behind the main force. Like the sharpshooter at the cataract, the best of them should be able to pick off a man from six hundred yards; if they had been well taught they would also understand the principle of high-trajectory volley fire, and be able to land bullets with lethal velocity in the square from a range of fifteen hundred yards or more. The fact that the bullets would be indiscriminate, hitting friend and foe alike, would be irrelevant. Even if their inviolability proved to be a shaky promise, the Ansar were still convinced that greater glory awaited them in heaven if they gave their lives for the jihad, and whether they were felled by a bullet from a Martini-Henry or a Remington would be a matter of supreme indifference when their time came.

Charrière eyed Mayne. ‘Our camels will not last long without water.’

‘They’ll be found soon enough. Whichever way this goes, the battlefield will be swarming with scavengers once the soldiers have departed. If we tether the camels here beside the trail, they’ll be found. They’ll be someone’s prized possessions.’

Charrière put his hand up to the cheek of his camel, which flinched and then stared at him with limpid eyes, chewing contentedly on the last twist of desert grass they had cut for the animals the previous day. Mayne untied his saddle bag, pulled it off and then peered at Charrière. ‘Are you thinking you’d like to take your camel back to Canada?’

Charrière said nothing for a moment, taking his hand from the camel’s face and untying his own bag; then he stopped and narrowed his eyes at the southern horizon. ‘This is a long way from the Ottawa river.’

Mayne followed his gaze, imagining the shimmer from the Nile where it snaked its way through the desert some twenty-five miles off, and remembering the untouched wilderness far up the Ottawa river: two great arteries whose course could take the unwary traveller into enveloping folds of darkness, where the river seemed to purge them of history and they became one with it, disconnected from their past lives and the motivations that had brought them there. He turned towards Charrière as he began disassembling his bag, selecting what was necessary for the trip ahead. ‘Almost all of your fellow Mohawks from the river column have returned to Canada. Why did you stay on?’

Charrière looked at him, his eyes dark, unfathomable. ‘Fifteen years ago we were hunting Louis Riel. Now it is General Gordon. Then, it was Colonel Wolseley. Now he is a general. Different quarry, same master.’

‘Is it Wolseley you serve?’

Charriere gazed back at him. ‘I could ask you the same question. Who do you serve?’

Mayne paused, and gave a wry smile. ‘Queen and country.’

‘Then I will tell you. Moi, je préfère la chasse. I like to hunt.’

Mayne eyed him. ‘Do you prefer to hunt men?’

‘I like to track my quarry, to wait for the right moment, and to kill cleanly.’

Mayne nodded towards the dust cloud over the wells. ‘There’s going to be plenty of killing before long. And unless we’re lucky enough to get through before the battle starts, we’re going to have blood on our hands, and perhaps end up as bloody heaps in the desert.’

‘Insha’Allah.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Insha’Allah. It is the will of God. My Arab friends taught me this expression at the cataracts.’

Mayne pulled out the contents of his bag, and cracked another smile. ‘You should be careful, my friend. You’re going native.’

Charrière spoke slowly. ‘An American officer serving Gordon out here who fought the Lakota after the Battle of the Little Bighorn called the Dongolese tribesmen the Indians of the desert. I find that these people and my people have a lot in common.’

Mayne stared at the horizon. He thought of the cruelty of this place, of the hardened faces of the tribesmen, of the decisions the desert forced on them that could mean life or death in an instant; and also of the humanity he had experienced travelling with them, the intensity of life for a people constantly on the edge. He remembered the year he had spent with his uncle in Canada after his parents had been killed, a damaged boy seeking meaning, and the comfort he had found in the forests with Charrière and his father, the moments of pleasure that were only possible with the danger and excitement of the hunt. He knew what Charrière meant. And he had seen enough of the Sudanese tribesmen over the past weeks to understand his empathy.

He turned back to his bag and took out the wrapped leaves containing the last of the biscuit, enough for two days. The lime juice had been finished that morning, and he left the empty bottle in the bag. He transferred the biscuit and his telescope to the pouch on his belt, along with a pencil, a roll of paper and a small leather wrap containing gold sovereigns and his Royal Engineers cap badge. He felt for the revolver on his belt, a Webley New Army Express .455, harder hitting than the old Webley-Pryse he had carried at the cataract, took it from its holster and broke it open to check that it was loaded, then snapped it shut and reholstered it. He felt for the extra box of cartridges he kept in a separate pouch beside his knife, a gold-handled blade his Dongolese escort had given him three weeks ago before they had parted ways. He pulled the empty water skin off the camel and slung it round his neck, and then did the same with the coiled blanket. He had weighed up the blanket in his mind, an extra burden he could ill afford, but the nights had been bitterly cold and with barely enough food or drink they would be feeling it more keenly from now on. Finally he slung on his back the wrapped wooden box containing his Sharps rifle, the barrel and stock tightly packed inside to ensure that the sights were not knocked out of place during their trip.

He watched Charrière finish his own packing, swirling back his robe to check the large hunting knife he had brought with him from Canada. Charrière tightened his blanket roll over his back and deftly tied the camels’ front legs together with lengths of leather cord, to ensure that they did not bolt and attract attention from the British lines, then he stood up and pointed to a low rise in the gravel plain about half a mile away, midway between their position and the British square. ‘Let’s get to that knoll,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll decide whether we can follow the trail between the two armies. Are you ready to run?’

Mayne shifted his burden until it was comfortable, leaving his arms free to swing, remembering how the Mohawk hunters preferred to run rather than walk along the forest trails in Canada. He took a deep breath and nodded. ‘You lead.’

17

Twenty minutes later, they stood panting on a rocky outcrop less than a thousand yards from the British square. To their left lay the rough ground flanking the low plateau of Abu Klea that was their chosen route, and ahead of them was a dried-up watercourse they had spotted between the two armies that was their fallback option should the other route became unviable. At the moment they could not risk moving, as they were within rifle range of the square; the British soldiers would be jittery, likely to shoot at anyone in Arab gear. They would have to wait until all eyes in the square were on the advancing Mahdist army to their right, until the moment when battle was about to be joined. And there was another factor: if the men somewhere behind who had been shadowing them since they had left Korti decided to break cover and ride them down now, it might force them to risk running, fully exposed to British fire, to seek shelter in the gullies in front of the square, hoping that their pursuers would rein up once they saw that they were being led into a murderous dead end. Mayne glanced at the angle of the sun in the sky: it was about 10.30 a.m. The watercourse gully had only become visible to them in the last few yards of their run, and would be invisible to anyone following them until they reached this point. He had to hope that their pursuers would never guess that one option open to the two men was to run a gauntlet that would appear suicidal to anyone bearing down on them from a distance.

He wiped his face with the cloth of his headdress; it had become hot, and he had cast off the chill of dawn. With his telescope he could see the British square more clearly now, the soldiers wearing pith helmets and khaki tunics with bandolier cartridge belts, their rifles at the ready. They were standing four deep, three hundred or three hundred and fifty men to a side, their sword bayonets thrust out like pikes, the slight curve in the blades reflecting wickedly in the sunlight. It seemed an image straight out of the Napoleonic Wars, a garish anachronism in this modern age of rifles with a range and volume of fire many times that of the muskets of Waterloo. The American Civil War twenty years before had shown the horrific consequences of infantry fighting as their forefathers had done in close formation but with modern rifles, and the tactic had been all but dropped from the training manuals for a European conflict. Yet it was precisely that concentration of firepower that made the square such a devastating tactic in this kind of war; that could even the odds for the British in the face of seemingly overwhelming disparity in numbers. And as the Zulu wars had shown, massed assaults by an enemy with weapons little changed since the days of the Romans could still crush a modern army, and firepower was only as good as the resolve of Tommy Atkins to stand his ground in the face of an opponent who was terrifying precisely because he did not play by the rules of modern war.

He thought of those men now: the bluejackets of the naval division manning the Gardner machine gun, the artillerymen with their mountain guns, the sappers who had built the zariba and were now standing stolidly in the square with the rifles, and above all the infantry and the cavalry, the Grenadier Guards and Household Cavalry who made up much of the camel regiments, men whose normal duty was the most intimate defence of the realm, safeguarding London and the Queen. He remembered the fatalistic humour of Corporal Jones and his mates, the intense camaraderie that fortified them against the devilry without. For those men now facing the test of their lives, the true purpose of the expedition, the reason why they were here in the depths of the Sudan and not in their barracks at Knightsbridge, would by this hour have become an irrelevance; all that would concern them was not letting their comrades down. Mayne watched the square bow outwards at the rear as the camels corralled within tried to force their way out but were pulled back and hobbled in the centre, a great mass of grunting and foaming beasts. They could prove the greatest strength of the square, something the soldiers at Waterloo did not have, an imperturbable mass that might break the dervish charge if the front lines of soldiers should collapse.

He thought of the officers he knew well, bunched together around Stewart in front of the camels, their field glasses glinting as they scanned the enemy lines: Colonel Wilson, who had been sent with the column by Wolseley to go ahead and communicate with Gordon; and Fred Burnaby, in his element again, who had hunted out war and would fight like a lion, whose yearning seemed almost a death wish. There would be other officers there too for whom the objective of the expedition would now be secondary, for whom the chance of battle would be a welcome certainty; it would give them a hope of glory little different from the aspirations of the dervish warriors, and freed from the murky uncertainties of Gordon and the opprobrium that would fall on them at home if they failed in their mission to rescue him. Whatever happened here, whether it was a last stand against impossible odds like Isandlwana in the Zulu War or a victory like Rorke’s Drift, their names would be immortalised as soldiers and not as pawns in a political game.

Charrière suddenly cocked an ear towards the ground, and then twisted round to look behind them. ‘Our pursuers. They’re coming.’

Mayne turned and raised his telescope. Over a low knoll they had traversed not long before he could see a knot of four riders, wavering in and out of focus like a mirage. The camels were tall, gaunt, spectre-like, their legs seemingly elongated in the heat haze, cantering in line abreast directly at them. The riders wore robes and headdress and had unholstered their rifles, carrying them angled out with the butts resting against their thighs. They were perhaps twelve hundred yards distant.

Mayne’s mind raced. He could set up his Sharps rifle, and it would be four rifles against one. But to use it now would almost certainly be to compromise his mission: he had adjusted the sights minutely for his expected range when he had test-fired it over the Nile near Korti, and he was loath to risk jolting it. As long as there was still a chance of reaching Khartoum, the Sharps would remain packed in its case. And even if he were able to shoot one of them, the other three would dismount and could pick them off at their ease. Their best chance still lay in the torrent beds and gullies around the plateau of Abu Klea to the east of the square, the escape route they had devised a few minutes before.

A percussive report resounded from the direction of the square, and he looked back in time to see a cloud of white smoke above the screw gun. The round exploded in the front rank of the dervish line, creating a gap that was immediately filled with spearmen in jibbas who joined in the dance, stamping their feet rhythmically. They were now formed up like an ancient Greek phalanx, in a serrated line, with an emir on camelback holding a standard at the apex of each serration. Sharpshooters on both sides were beginning to find their mark, with men falling in the front ranks of the square and the phalanx. For the first time Mayne could see that Stewart had sent out a force of skirmishers, men who were now scurrying back under fire towards the square. He pursed his lips; that had been a tactical mistake. The value of skirmishers was as sharpshooters, and the phalanx was easily within range of the massed riflemen in the square. The minutes needed for their withdrawal would forestall the first volley, as the British would not shoot as long as the skirmishers were still in the line of fire. Stewart had taken a frightening gamble. The closer the phalanx was allowed to get, the more likely it was to overrun the square without being held back by volley fire. Even with the speed of reloading a Martini-Henry, they would only have the chance of a few volleys before the enemy were upon them. If the commander of the Madhist army had any sense, he would see that the British were exercising the kind of restraint to save their own men that would never occur to him, and would order his forces to charge now.

Mayne snapped his head back. A bullet had zinged overhead and slapped into a boulder, ricocheting off into the plain. He turned and squinted, and could just make out one of the riders with his rifle levelled. He had fired mounted on his camel, from perhaps eight hundred yards; he was good. Not even the best of the Egyptian army marksmen who had gone over to the Mahdi were that proficient, and they only had Remingtons. Mayne recalled being with the soldiers above the cataract when the sharpshooter from the opposite bank had found their range; he remembered the distinctive whine of the Remington bullet, at about the same range. It was a lighter bullet than the Martini-Henry, .43 rather than .45 calibre, and made a different noise. The Martini-Henry was the rifle of the British army, the best service rifle in the world, one they did not even let their Egyptian allies use and which the Mahdi had not yet been able to capture. Yet the bullet he had just heard was unquestionably from a Martini-Henry. He had that cold feeling in his stomach again. Who were they?

Two of the riders broke off to the right, and he watched them slowly pick up speed as they brought their camels to a gallop, whipping them hard as a cloud of dust rose behind. Mayne cursed under his breath. They were heading towards the hill of Abu Klea behind the square, cutting off their planned escape route. That left only one choice, the dried-up torrent bed between the opposing armies. He swiftly calculated the distances. The ground ahead of them was flat and unimpeded, and they would be able to run fast. They were perhaps two thousand yards now from the British square, and the gap between the armies was no more than eight hundred yards. If they ran now, they would be targeted by sharpshooters from either side, and by their pursuers. But if they waited until the moment the Mahdists began their charge, when all eyes would be on the opposing armies, they might have a chance of getting through. And their pursuers would know that if they followed, they would be caught up in the maelstrom as the armies converged.

Another bullet tumbled by and ploughed into the dust ahead them. He gripped the bag with the rifle on his back and crouched down ready to run, watching Charrière do the same. Suddenly, the only meaningful time was measured in seconds. The Mahdi army must launch their attack now.

Then he heard it. A low noise, different from the stomping of feet, different from the drumbeat, a shrill, insistent chant, ten thousand men in unison: La illaha la illa ras Muhammad – there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet – repeated over and over again until it became like the rushing of a mighty river.

A great flash swept the front line as a thousand spears were brandished. The standards of the emirs were lowered like lances. The chant was lost in a rumbling that shook the earth, a pounding of feet that set Mayne’s teeth on edge. The dervish army was like a coiled spring, ready to strike.

His heart was thumping. What happened next would take place with terrifying speed: the two armies were like beasts bent on death or victory, warily sniffing out their opponent’s weaknesses and strengths, tensed for a pounce that when it came would be of appalling savagery and violence. And he knew they might not make it to the gap in time to get through. They might be running headlong into a wall of death.

A trumpet sounded, high and shrill. He looked at Charrière. Now.

18

Mayne ran forward as fast as he could, crouching low, his right hand behind his back clutching the strap on his rifle case, his left arm extended and ready in case he should trip over one of the black clinker rocks that were strewn on the desert floor. Charrière was slightly ahead and to the left, loping more than running, his Arab robe tied up around his waist and the long sheath of his knife poking out below. Ahead of them lay the gap between the British and the dervish lines, and in the centre of that the low torrent bed that was their objective. Already Mayne could see that it was shallower than he had hoped, that to run along it would leave them exposed to fire from both sides. They would either have to risk it or get down on their hands and knees and crawl, an option that was rapidly closing given the speed of the dervish advance.

A bullet whistled between them, ploughing into the gravel ahead. He dared not look behind for fear of tripping over, but the accuracy of the fire showed that their pursuers had kept within range. They zigzagged, keeping low, jumping into gullies and using any natural cover they could find. They were no more than three hundred yards away now, and the noise was suddenly overwhelming. The clap of the mountain gun was followed by the drone of the shell and then a krump as it burst in the Mahdist lines, throwing up bodies and limbs in a haze of red. The Gardner machine gun erupted in staccato fire, shooting over the heads of the crouching infantrymen, and then stopped abruptly, evidently jammed. He could hear the bullets now from the Mahdist sharpshooters zipping and droning overhead, and saw khaki forms in the British line fall back and crumple. The dervishes surged forward, keeping phalanx formation behind the emirs on camelback. The gap was narrowing alarmingly, now no more than two hundred yards, but still the British held their fire. They were close enough now to hear the hoarse goading and swearing of the soldiers, the grousing of camels, the sergeants and corporals bawling at their men to remain steady, to fire only in volley when the order came. A bullet zapped by dangerously close, not from their pursuers but fired from the square by some clear-eyed British marksman who thought he had seen two fanatical Arabs running at them from the north.

Mayne grabbed Charrière and pulled him to a halt. It was no good. They were not going to make it. It had been a calculated gamble to go for the gap, but it had closed faster than he had hoped. To continue that way now would be to run straight into the jaws of death. He dragged Charrière into a low gully in front of a boulder, protected from the rear, and they crouched down together, panting hard. They could not run around the rear of the square, as the soldiers there would be ready for an attack on that side and would gun them down instantly; nor could they try to run through the dervish line, as they would be trampled. They were going to have to veer left, to ride the tide of the dervish advance and head straight into the side of the British square, in the hope that the troops would stem the tide long enough for them to get through to the other side and safety. Their chances were vanishingly small, but it was better than certain death. Once inside the square, they would aim for the far left corner: Mayne had seen it fall back and open to let the skirmishers in, a risky move on the part of the officer in charge of that section of the line that could have put the entire square at jeopardy. He had a sudden image of Burnaby, of self-imposed heroic duty, of how such a man in his perfect milieu might make a pact with death to save his men; but all that mattered now to Mayne was that the disorder in the line at that point might allow them an escape route if they survived that far.

A trumpet blared, and suddenly the dervish shooting ceased and the phalanx came to a halt, like some great beast pausing for breath. All Mayne could hear was a sound like a distant rushing wind, the low chanting of a thousand voices that had been in the background since the start of the dervish advance. Then the lead emir raised his standard and cried out, a deep, beautiful voice like a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. The moment he stopped, a thousand throwing spears were launched from the front line, silver streaks that reflected the sun like a shimmering rainbow, flying in a low arc and then falling to cries in the British line as those thrown the furthest found their mark. Then the chant was drowned in a cacophony of drumming and the pounding of thousands of sandalled feet, the dervishes marking time like parade-ground soldiers about to march forward, making the earth beneath Mayne tremor and shiver. The air was rent by shrieks, not of fear but of exaltation, by men who would soon be with the Prophet in heaven and would beckon more to join them, drawing the jihad inexorably on until it swept away all who did not believe in the divine wisdom of the Mahdi.

Just as the dervish line surged forward, Mayne heard an order being bellowed from the British square, and then a deafening crack as three hundred and fifty Martini-Henry rifles fired in unison. It was as if a sudden hurricane had hit the dervish front line, blowing men back. Seconds later another volley thinned out the next wave, but still they kept coming. The British had cut it fine, holding their fire until every bullet would strike flesh, hoping that the piles of bodies would stem the dervish advance; and when there was no more time for reloading, the enemy would still face a glittering palisade of bayonets, wielded by modern riflemen trained to use cold steel as murderously as their predecessors who had confronted the forces of jihad in an earlier age.

A bullet whanged off the boulder and punched Mayne in the neck, bowling him over. Charrière crouched down and felt for the wound. There was no blood, thank God; the bullet was nearly spent and had not penetrated. He caught sight of two distant camels about a thousand yards to the east of the square, their riders kneeling down and shooting. They were the two pursuers who had ridden away from the others to cut off their likely escape route, but they had now seen that they were not going that way and had turned back. Mayne knelt up, peering back along the desert track to the north. The other two men had also dismounted and were firing at them, the noise of their bullets lost in the din from ahead. He turned back to the square. The dervish line had now extended outwards, the phalanx having been split by the volley fire, the northern mass wheeling round to come in on the flank of the square in front of him and Charrière. The dervishes seemed to be coming directly at him, a surging wave of screaming men and shimmering spears that tore down upon them with a roar like the sea, the low hill behind them sparkling all over with jets of flame from rifle fire.

They were in a death trap. He crouched forward, ignoring the throbbing in his neck, and nodded at Charrière.

They dashed forward towards the square, swept in by the dervish advance. Dust swirled and lashed at Mayne’s face, a storm that sucked him in like a vortex. And then it lifted as they came close, and he saw detail with astonishing clarity. The first wave of dervishes seemed to bound into the square like animal predators, lunging into the British bayonets, screaming. One man was running so hard that the barrel of the soldier’s rifle went through the hole in his stomach made by the bayonet, thrusting out like a bloody pike and discharging into the press of dervishes behind. Men with hideous wounds from British rifle fire kept running forward, some so badly injured that they gargled blood when they tried to scream; they knew there would be no succour for the wounded from either side, and that to fall before they had expended their last drop of life might be to forfeit their promised place in the afterlife.

The British soldiers held their ground, dying where they stood rather than being pressed back. But the dervish tide was sweeping in like surf over rocks, surging and climbing over the soldiers, and then the first few were inside the square. Mayne saw one Ansar run screaming into a bayonet and be lifted bodily over the soldier’s head, a jet of flame bursting through his body in tendrils of blood as he cartwheeled away; the soldier fell backwards and was immediately speared under the chin by the next dervish, the broad blade slicing his face off and throwing it into the air. Dervishes tumbled and scrabbled over the bodies that cluttered the line, hacking and stabbing their way forward, following the emir whose camel had galloped through a gap into the square unscathed, spitting and snorting as it halted. Just as the emir planted his banner, a soldier shot him from below, the bullet ripping through him from the groin and blowing his head open like a flower, his body dropping like a stone. Beside the dead emir Mayne saw the sailors frantically trying to clear the Gardner machine gun being cut down to a man, speared in the back and the neck, their throats slit. A dervish throwing stick came scything in, slicing through the legs of two camels at the leading edge of the corralled mass in the centre of the square, causing them to fall with a bellow and crush the man who had been holding them. The first of the dervishes was at the camels now, the spearhead of a phalanx that seemed bound to envelop them and wash over the rear of the square just as it had done the front. And yet the camels stood solid and the square held, rent with gaps where the phalanx had struck but still unbroken.

And then Mayne too was inside, stumbling over bodies, everything in a blur. Dervish bullets zipped overhead like insects, whacking off metal and thudding into flesh, slapping into the flanks of camels. He heard the clash of blades, the dull thwack of swords on sweaty tunics, the screams and shrieks of the dervishes. And then he heard the bellowing of the British sergeants at the rear, reversing the line so that the soldiers could fire into the square, aiming on either side of the knot of camels in the centre and into the melee at the front where almost all of the British soldiers had fallen. There was an immense crack of rifle fire and a rushing of bullets overhead, and then another volley. The mountain gun joined in, a thunderous clap as it fired at point-blank range. Mayne ran on, staggering, his ears ringing from the gunfire. Another team of sailors raced up to take over the Gardner machine gun and got it into action, a juddering, hammering sound as it spat rounds from its multiple barrels, the men crouched behind the carriage wheels lifting the wooden trail and panning the gun along the line of the approaching dervishes. Then the gun jammed again and the bluejackets frantically tried to clear it, only to be swept away and hacked down by the tide of dervishes who overran the position. Seconds later the force of the assault was broken by the mass of camels in the centre of the square, imperturbable as ever despite the bullets thwacking into them and the tide of humanity pressing up against their flanks. In that instant of lost momentum the British soldiers were among the dervishes, the officers firing their revolvers and laying about them with swords, the men thrusting and slashing with their bayonets. Dervish bullets fired from the distant ridge whistled and rasped by as they plunged into the melee. More soldiers came up from the rear bayonet-fighting, desperately parrying and thrusting, slashing at necks and heads when they could with the points of their blades. Mayne saw an officer empty all five chambers of his revolver into a screaming dervish before the man ran him through with his spear and collapsed in a bloody heap on top of him. Another officer with a knuckleduster grasped a dervish in a headlock and punched his nose upwards so that it shattered into the man’s brain; he then was caught by an emir with a whirling kurbash whip who snared him round the neck and decapitated him with a sword.

Mayne was conscious of Charrière beside him, pulling him close to his ear. ‘To the camels!’ he yelled, dragging him forward. But then a dervish came screaming at him, his curved knife held high, and Mayne dropped to the ground and lifted a discarded rifle, pulling the trigger but only hearing the jar of the spring in the receiver. He dropped the loading lever and frantically tried to prise the spent cartridge from the breech, but was knocked violently sideways as the dervish ran straight into the bayonet; he saw the bone and cartilage protruding from the man’s hips where he had been hit as he ran into the square. He had been a dead man running, and for a horrible moment Mayne realised that most of the dervishes who had made it this far would be like that, the living dead, fuelled only by adrenalin and faith. He struggled upright and tried to pull the bayonet out, but the man’s abdomen muscles had clenched it tight and he saw that the blade had snapped where it had hit the backbone. He looked up and saw a British soldier staring at him, aiming, and then a hand grabbed his shoulder and Charrière pulled him violently away, towards the camels. Charrière had picked up a sword and was slashing and hacking on either side, cutting a way through to the centre of the square. The mountain gun a few yards away erupted in an immense clap and belch of flame, leaving Mayne reeling as Charrière dragged him on. The throng became too tight to move, and he dropped the sword and whipped out his knife, using it to parry a spear and then twisting his assailant off balance and slicing through his neck, nearly severing his head. Ahead of him Mayne saw a bullet take off the lower jaw of a camel and the bones and teeth fly into the soldier who had been holding it, ripping off his ear and leaving him screaming and clutching at the ragged hole. Another bullet burst through his head and sprayed blood and brains over the flank of the beast, which remained standing and making chewing motions with its upper jaw as if nothing had happened.

And then they were through and among the camels. They stumbled beneath the first beasts’ legs, crouching down and slithering through the faeces and urine as they made their way forward. The din of battle was muffled for a few moments but then intensified as they came towards the other side and out into the melee again, dodging among screaming and shrieking men, hearing the thwack of blades on flesh, the whine and whistle of bullets and the thuds as they found their mark. Mayne slipped in a pool of blood and fell face to face with a British soldier lying on his back with a fearful wound to his head; his eyeballs had protruded from their sockets and burst, the liquid glistening like bloody tears on his face. ‘Water,’ the man croaked, reaching for him blindly. ‘Water.’ Before Mayne could think of acting, Charrière had heaved him up and dragged him on. A bullet nicked his arm and ricocheted into Charrière’s shoulder, lodging in the flesh. Charrière flicked the bullet away with his knife and then stood facing two dervishes who ran at them screaming, their spears levelled. He pulled the spear from the hands of one of them, reversed it and ran the man through until he was nearly embracing him, then pushed the body away as it went limp. Mayne drew his revolver and shot the other man, the gun jumping back in his hand as he fired; then he picked up a Martini-Henry rifle and slammed the butt into the man’s neck as he went down. A few yards ahead of him Charrière had found another sword and was slashing and stabbing, cutting a path through the mass of dervishes, allowing space for a British sergeant to order a ragged volley at point-blank range that dropped a dozen of them in one go. Mayne ran behind, crouching low, sensing the British soldiers on his left and the dervishes to the right, and the two sides closing together again behind him in the shrieks and yells of hand-to-hand fighting.

As they approached the far edge of the square, Mayne saw a huge man propped with his back against a rock, surrounded by dead dervishes, his tunic drenched with blood. He blinked, wiping the sweat from his eyes, and stared again. It was Burnaby. He had taken a fearful spear thrust to the neck, a gash wide enough to put a hand through that had somehow missed the jugular but had sliced deep into his windpipe. Above his thick thatch of dark hair the top of his skull had been sliced clean off by a sword, exposing his brain. His left arm was twisted horribly under his back, but with his right hand he was fumbling to load the massive four-barrelled howdah pistol on his chest, spilling the big .577 rifle cartridges out of a pouch on his belt. His eyes were strangely askew, but they flickered with recognition as Mayne came over to him. ‘I say, Mayne old chap.’ His voice sounded strange, reedy, and the gash in his throat frothed as he spoke. ‘Nearly took you for Johnny Arab in that attire. You couldn’t help me, could you? Trying to load this damned thing. I’m afraid that dervish bowled me over an awful crumpler.’

Mayne knelt down and reached for the cartridges. He and Burnaby had been to the same school, and that peculiar expression was one he had used himself countless times on the playing fields, holding his cricket bat with the wicket knocked out behind him. For a second it seemed a perfectly normal thing to say out here, where war for a man like Burnaby was simply a continuation of the contests of his youth. It was a thought that instantly evaporated when he looked again at Burnaby’s horrific wounds. He grasped the barrel of the pistol and dropped four cartridges into the breech, then snapped it shut and clamped Burnaby’s hand around the grip, putting his finger on the trigger. ‘I say, Mayne,’ said Burnaby, his voice weaker. ‘You couldn’t light me one of my cigarettes, could you? Really could do with it now.’ He seemed to be struggling for words, and Mayne knelt down. Burnaby’s voice was now little more than a whisper, and his neck was seeping bloody froth. ‘Listen here, Mayne. You know I work for Wilson too. I know your true mission. Watch your back. Don’t trust anyone. Anyone. Now, out of my way.’

Mayne had blocked out the battle for the last few seconds, but threw himself sideways just in time to see a half-naked dervish rush at them, his spear held high. Burnaby raised the pistol with a wobbly hand and fired. The round hit the dervish square in the face, blowing his head backwards in a haze of blood and brain. Burnaby suddenly jerked back and blood erupted from his nose. He had been hit in the forehead by a spent bullet that had caved in his sinuses and lodged in the bone of his forehead. The force of the blow had knocked him unconscious, and his head was lolling, his eyes half open and sightless and his breathing coming in terrible rasps. The bullet had been a small mercy, but not enough. There was only one thing Mayne could do for him now. As he pulled out his revolver, he saw a soldier who had detached himself from the melee and was hurtling towards him, bellowing for him to stop, his bayonet poised. Mayne remembered Burnaby’s comment about his desert attire; to the soldier he would look like a Mahdist about to finish off their beloved colonel. There was a shriek from in front, and another dervish came hurling forward. Mayne wrenched the howdah pistol from Burnaby’s hand and fired all three remaining barrels in quick succession, the massive recoil kicking the gun high above him each time. The rounds hit the dervish in the centre of his chest, blowing his heart out and leaving a hole large enough to see through. The man fell in a gory heap on Burnaby, whose eyes were now glazed over in death. Mayne sprang back to face the soldier, dropping the pistol and raising his Webley, but before he could aim it and shout a warning that he was British, the other man had tumbled backwards as a bullet struck him.

Mayne turned and ran forward, slipping over the gore from a man’s abdomen and driving his right knee painfully into the ground, then picked himself up and leapt over the stacked wooden crates that formed the edge of the zariba. He saw Charrière waiting, then glanced back, hearing his own rasping breath, the pounding and ringing in his ears, the shrill whistling he experienced after gunfire. Hearing those things, he realised that something was different. The shooting and shrieking had stopped. And then he saw a most incredible sight. The dervishes had turned and begun to walk silently out of the billowing gun smoke in the direction they had come, their spears and swords held down. The ferocious energy that had propelled their advance had suddenly been expended, and the British had stood their ground. He was astonished by the dignity of their departure, by its utter disjunction from the savagery of a few moments before; it was as if they were mere tribesmen again, no more than people passing through, a timeless imprint of humanity in the desert that made the battle seem just a passing storm. The last of them disappeared out of sight, and for a moment the British troops slumped and exhausted in the zariba seemed agape with disbelief, stunned into immobility. It had been less than fifteen minutes since the dervish charge had begun. Fifteen minutes.

Then there was a rippling noise, a ragged cheer that quickly became a snarling frenzy of rage. The soldiers picked themselves up and surged forward, hacking and stabbing at the fallen dervishes, yelling profanities in voices hoarse with gunpowder and adrenalin and thirst. Mayne heard the crack of rifle fire, and the sliding and crunching of bayonets in bodies. They had seen dervishes feign death and leap up with knives, and they were taking no chances. Ever since Hicks’ army had been annihilated, they had known they would be given no quarter in defeat, and now they were doling out the same in return. It was war unchanged from the days of the first jihad over a thousand years before, war without morality. Mayne saw a soldier bayonet a dead dervish over and over again in the face, bellowing maniacally. Another was on his knees bashing a head to pulp with a rock, his arms drenched with blood like a butcher’s. An officer appeared, waving his revolver and trying to restore order, but Mayne knew he would be able to do nothing until the bloodlust had run its course.

He sat alongside Charrière behind a rock. They were outside the zariba now, but it was safer to hide until the officers had regained control and there was less risk of being mistaken for dervishes and shot. The officers would want to capture any surviving dervishes, yet would probably be unwilling to give chase until they were certain that the enemy was routed. Mayne and Charrière would have to rely on their speed to escape once they had revealed themselves. Mayne lay close to the earth, panting hard, regaining his breath. His sense of smell was returning, and he recoiled from it: the acrid sulphurous reek of black powder, the sickly latrine stench of spilled bowels, the coppery odour of blood, the smell on his own body of sweat and fear and adrenalin. He caught a whiff of roasting flesh, and saw a dervish a few feet away who had been shot at point-blank range, the powder burns encircling the wound and wisps of smoke rising from the hole. The smoke of battle was clearing now, and he sensed sunlight through the haze. He heard a bugle and the shouted orders of the sergeants and corporals, ordering the men to re-form the square in case of fresh attack. He stared back at the ground. The earth was cracked and blackened, parched as it always had been, the dark patches of blood already sopped up by the dust. The desert was beginning to absorb the residue of battle even before the frenzy of killing had died away.

He listened hard. He realised that the background sound had gone, the chanting, the drumbeat, the pounding of feet; the dervish army had abandoned the wells and was retreating. Soon the soldiers he could now see standing and moving about slowly in the swirling dust would snap back to reality; the square would consolidate, and the advance would be ordered. But for the moment they were caught by the shock of battle, as dazed as he was. Colour was returning, gradually, as if he were looking at an old-fashioned daguerreotype, where the iodine and mercury had created a maroon monochrome but the artist had touched it up with crude streaks of colour to give a semblance of reality.

Mayne looked at his hands, blackened by the greasy grime of gunpowder, and felt the throbbing bruise on his neck where the bullet had struck him before they had entered the square. He stood up and looked around him, trying to calm his breathing. He saw blood and brains spattered on faces, and the cracked lips of dying men, their bodies no longer producing saliva, their tongues swollen and off-white with mucus. One man missing the top of his head convulsed and juddered, and then went still. A soldier lying on dead comrades pulled a spear from his own neck, as he did so releasing a gush of arterial blood that pumped out of him like a geyser, his face whitening as his body drained. He fell back, alabaster among the grey. Another who had been too close to the muzzle blast of the screw gun was lying obscenely exposed with his clothes blown off, his skin lacerated in a crazy pattern like a pavement. It was the first time Mayne had registered the instant aftermath of battle. Ten minutes ago these men had all been alive, and the shocking speed of their deaths seemed to leave a lingering aura over them, like the warmth on a fresh corpse; but he knew that with each rasping final breath that aura would dissipate and the colours would go, sucked into the desert and extinguished by the burning heat of the sun, leaving only a monochrome image of desiccation and decay.

He remembered something his Dongolese guide Shaytan had told him at the cataracts, about the wind created by a desert battle: that if you listened hard enough, you could hear the distant shrieks and sighs of banshees who performed a wild dance in the sky high above the fight, mocking both the victors and the vanquished. He remembered the carving of the desert battle he had seen in the underground chamber beside the cataract: the Egyptian soldiers advancing hieratically, Akhenaten at their head, then their bodies splayed below, the vast disc of the sun and its rays dominating all. Had Akhenaten sensed this too? Had he fought battles against an enemy from the south where the desert seemed the only victor, where the sun seemed to eclipse all? Had he turned back to Egypt, bringing with him a new God and a belief that the power of the Aten might release men from conflict that could only ever give the illusion of victory?

He remembered crouching beside Burnaby, an event that seemed impossibly long ago, and Burnaby’s whispered warning to him: watch your back. He looked at Charrière, sword still in his hand, the blood congealing on his arm where he had prised out the bullet. He could barely think of his thirst. They would both need water, soon. There was no chance now of reaching the wells of Abu Klea, which would soon be under British control; they could not risk being seized and questioned. It would have to be the Nile, more than twenty miles off. They had to hope to find another source on the way if they were to have any chance of surviving the marathon run that now lay ahead of them.

He remembered their pursuers. Had that been the purpose of Burnaby’s warning? He looked beyond Charrière to where the clearing smoke had revealed the rocky knoll to the east, the rising ground that had provided a defensive position for the British encampment overnight. That was the direction their pursuers would have taken if they had decided to outflank the battlefield and regain the track to the Nile on the other side. More likely they would be lingering in the valley, waiting for the British to march down to the wells, intent on picking over the battlefield and checking the dead so they could tell their paymaster that their job had been done for them. But it would only be a matter of time before they realised that Mayne and Charrière had survived, and that with camels they had the advantage of speed. Mayne knew it was essential that the two of them cover the open ground on the way to the shrub and mimosa forest before their pursuers regained their trail. The forest would be a maze of danger and dead-end passages in the dark, and they needed to get as far through it as they could while it was still daylight.

And there was added urgency. The dervishes who had melted away from the battle would soon pass word of their defeat to the Mahdi himself, which might lead him to order the final assault on the city, losing Mayne precious time in his attempt to reach Gordon before it was overwhelmed. Abu Klea would show the Mahdi that the British were a force to be reckoned with, that they were superior to the Egyptian army he had terrorised and routed two years before. If the British were to stay in the Sudan, the jihad would not be the walkover his early successes had promised. But the victory might ultimately be a hollow one. The Mahdi knew that the British were there under duress, and that if he were to order the assault on Khartoum now, to remove Gordon from any hope of rescue, they would abandon the Sudan and withdraw to Egypt. He knew they were not present in numbers sufficient to defeat his main force in a set-piece battle; yet if word of Abu Klea were to reach tribesmen of wavering loyalties, it might tilt them towards the British, whilest the news might cause the garrison at Khartoum to redouble their resolve to stand firm, thinking that a British force was finally on its way to defeat the Mahdist army and relieve the city.

Mayne stared in the direction of the Nile to the south, seeing only the haze of an approaching dust storm on the horizon, and below that the undulating rocky plain that extended to the dark smudge marking the beginning of the tangled mass of shrub. He could see no sign of humanity, no flickering lights, no crumbled ruins, not even the camel trail that must lie somewhere in the folds of the ground ahead. He felt as if by passing through the battle he had entered a darker place, a shadowland, a world beyond knowledge where even the pharaohs had feared to tread. This was the land that Gordon had made his own, and it was only here that his motivations could be understood. He swallowed hard, trying to rid his throat of the taste of battle, then twisted round to look one last time. There was no sign of their pursuers, for now. He nodded to Charrière, who dropped the sword and sheathed his knife. Mayne holstered his revolver and grasped the wrapped rifle that was still on his back, knowing that the instant they stood up in their Arab gear they could still fall prey to a trigger-happy British soldier. They crouched forward, readying to leap up and run.

A bugle sounded, and he heard the stomping noise of soldiers falling in. Now was their chance. All eyes would be down the slope towards the retreating Mahdist forces, and the wells where the soldiers and their camels would be desperate to slake their thirst.

They needed to move fast. Mayne put his hand forward to signal Charrière. He tensed, his heart pounding.

They began to run.