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Authors: David Harris

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BOOK: Monsters in the Sand
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Was it dysentery, a parasitic worm, or liver disease? Cholera had broken out in southern Persia – maybe that was it – but aching limbs could mean malaria. He unclipped the lid of his box and tried to look confident as he read the labels on bottles and tins. The boy’s life, and his own, depended on his choice. Sulphur, tincture of mercury, magnesium sulphate? Austen wished he’d spent more than two hours in medical training before leaving London.

‘When the doctors said they had no cure and committed the prince’s spirit into the hands of Allah, they died,’ Au Kerim had warned him while they rode towards the castle gates.

‘Hussein, I have suffered your illness.’ Austen grinned. ‘Twice.’

The women gasped and Au Kerim put his hand on the hilt of his sword.

‘And look at me – I’m as strong as a bull!’ Austen punched his chest.

The fear in Hussein’s eyes retreated.

‘In the language of the Romans, the illness is called
Mal Aria,
Bad Air. That’s all it is. Bad air to be blown away, as easily as this.’ Austen puffed his cheeks out and blew a long, slow breath.

Then he lifted out a square tin container. ‘I need two cups of water.’

A servant sitting in the corner of the room filled gold cups from a large silver jug, then placed them beside Austen. When the servant moved away, Austen flicked his eyes at the women. Their faces were haggard with grief, but he was shocked by their beauty.

He concentrated on his medicine and poured some powder into the palm of his hand. ‘Ophir, the grandson of the prophet Noah, brought this medicine from faraway Peru. It is made from the sacred cinchona tree and Ophir, may Allah feast him in paradise, taught us its secret.’

He poured the powder into a cup and swirled it around, then drank it himself to prove the medicine was not poison. Then he prepared a dose for Hussein. ‘It tastes as bitter as the urine of an old camel that has drunk only at salt lakes.’ The corners of Hussein’s lips curled with the hint of a smile and Austen held the cup to his lips. ‘But if medicine is to do you good, it must taste bad.’

Hussein gulped quickly, his nose wrinkling at the smell.

‘All of it.’

He gagged and spluttered, but finished the cup and his mother burst into tears of relief.

As he took the cup away, Austen looked at the younger woman and a glance flashed between them.

Voices shouted in the corridor, metal clashed and one deep voice boomed above the others. ‘Au Kerim!’

‘Here, My Lord.’

Austen stood up to meet Mohammed Taki Khan, the paramount chief who could call on twelve thousand foot soldiers and three thousand cavalry. His name was revered across Persia as the only leader who had not bowed his head to the eunuch governor of Teheran.

With metal clinking and rattling, Mohammed Taki Khan marched into the room. To Austen’s amazement, the chief wore the chain mail of a crusader killed more than six hundred years ago, perhaps when Saladin and Richard the Lionheart fought for the Holy City of Jerusalem.

The chief’s rugged face had been hardened by years of warfare, but when he looked at his son tears came to his eyes. That moment of tenderness touched Austen’s heart. He remembered his own father’s final
hours of laboured breathing. A faint breath out. No breath in. The silence of death. Then the mad onrush of his grief.

‘How is my son?’ There was no hiding the fear in the chief’s voice.

‘The prince has taken his first dose of sulphate of quinine, for malaria.’

‘Allah be praised for sending us the Lion.’ Then, no longer the father, but the chief again, he turned to Au Kerim. ‘We are betrayed. Traitors have led the eunuch’s army by a secret way through the mountains and they will be within gunshot before dark. The eunuch has a regiment of Russian-trained artillery with twenty cannons.’

Everybody in the room knew that the castle of Tul could not withstand cannons. It would fall and they would all be at the mercy of the eunuch.

Chapter 4

‘How long have we got?’ Austen was the first to speak.

‘One hour,’ said the chief. ‘Then my son must be taken to safety.’ He and Au Kerim strode from the room, yelling orders to men in the corridor.

Weapons first. Austen went into the corridor, loaded his pistols and picked up his dagger and sword. Then he returned to the room. ‘We’d better get you ready to move.’

He rummaged in his medicine box and unscrewed a jar of thick black paste. ‘It’s like fungus mixed with bitumen.’ He dipped the tip of his finger into it, tasted it and grimaced. ‘Ugh. But, Hussein, this medicine saved my life when I was near death crossing the Syrian Desert. I hadn’t eaten for twelve days, I was weak with dysentery and had to ride two more days and nights.’

He felt the young woman’s eyes seeking out the slightest sign that he was lying.

‘It kept my horse alive, too.’

Hussein’s eyes sparkled, but he broke out alarmingly in another sweat.

Austen remembered the face of a ten-year-old Arabian boy, who had led a hundred exhausted men back to battle in the Sinai Desert. Only a hundred men – out of two thousand. The boy took them into the battleground where his father, the sheik, lay dead. Austen could do nothing to save the life of that Arabian boy, but he wasn’t going to let this boy die, or be taken captive by the eunuch. He had seen the eunuch fly into a rage when a servant dropped a plate. The servant’s teeth were smashed out and hammered into his skull.

Did Hussein suspect that his father would stand and fight to the death while he, the next chief, got away? What must that feel like?

‘One spoonful now.’ Austen dug a small spoon into the black sludge. ‘Open wide.’

Hussein opened his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut. Austen scraped the blob of medicine against the boy’s top teeth to drag the sticky mess off the spoon.

Hussein dry-retched.

‘Eat it. Get it down.’

His mother called, ‘Water, quick!’ and held the cup to his black and slimy mouth.

‘Now that wasn’t so bad.’ Austen put his medicines away and ignored the boy’s murderous glance.

‘I must go and prepare for your journey.’ His mother kissed Hussein on both cheeks. Then she spoke to the young woman. ‘Khanumi, watch over your brother.’

So that was her name. Khanumi.

As soon as the mother had left the room, Khanumi reached one hand out to Austen. ‘Give me your dagger.’

She was nineteen or twenty, a few years younger than he was, but she spoke with an authority that was frightening. Shocked at her defiance of the rule against speaking to a man, Austen handed it over meekly.

Khanumi pulled a red silk kerchief from her belt, dragged up her left sleeve and tied the kerchief around her left forearm. Then she slipped the dagger into the folds of silk, pulled her sleeve down to hide it and raised one eyebrow at her brother. ‘Just in case it comes to a fight.’

She looked down at her hands. ‘Tell me, stranger,’ she murmured, ‘why don’t you escape now, while you have a chance? If you stay here, you’ll die.’

‘Well, for a start, I’m staying because I don’t like running away from tyrants.’

Why not tell them? We could all be dead before sunset. ‘I’ll never forget my first tyrant. When I was only seven years old, I was sent far from my home to a school in Paris, so that I could improve my French. But I was the only English boy in that school and on the first morning in class, a big boy behind me kept whispering, “
English Pig”.
When I answered back, the schoolmaster hit my hand ten times with a leather belt for talking in class. Every day, the teacher thrashed me for the slightest error.

‘He hurt the smaller boys as well. One day the belt buckle made a boy’s hands bleed, so during lesson break, I told the class, “When the tyrant returns, we must all rise to our feet and hurl our inkpots at his head.” The boys cheered and promised to stand with me.

‘The tyrant’s footsteps approached and I grabbed my inkpot. As soon as he was inside, I threw it, but missed and hit the wall. None of the other boys stood up or threw his.

‘After the lesson, limping from a savage beating, I faced my classmates. “Traitors, cowards! I’ll fight you – one by one or all together.” They fell upon me and I fought until l was struck down from behind and kicked in the head with wooden clogs until I was unconscious.’

He put his fingertips to the side of his head. ‘The scars are still there.’

Khanumi and Hussein stared at him.

‘You see, Hussein, there are some things we must do – or die in here.’ He touched his heart. ‘Like search for Nineveh.’ How strange that Nineveh had brought him by chance to this room. If he had known this was what it meant, would he have wanted it any other way?

Khanumi loosened the knot of her headscarf.

Austen had to avoid looking at her, had to keep talking to Hussein. ‘Oddly enough, I first encountered Nineveh by chance. Ten years ago, I was walking through a dim room in the British Museum and happened to notice a dusty, neglected display. A broken slab of rock was marked with mysterious wedge-shaped writing and the carving of a man with an eagle’s head. Under the glass lid was a note, with faded writing.
Assyrian. Eighth Century BC. Supposed to be from Nineveh. Location of Nineveh unknown.

‘I can’t explain why, but the name
Nineveh
cast a spell on me. Day and night I dreamt of escaping to ancient Assyria. I longed to gallop away into the desert and find this place that haunted my dreams. When I sat in dreary London to study my law books, the pages dissolved into visions of fabulous palaces. I craved freedom, adventures, savagery, beauty.’

Khanumi slipped her headscarf off. ‘But Nineveh is not in our mountains. It is buried somewhere near the Tigris.’

Well, when death was so close, why not confess? ‘Actually, I don’t have much money. Almost none, in fact. I’m here only because my uncle gave me the last of his coins. I can’t afford the bribes for permission to dig, or to pay teams of workers. Because I’m nobody important, I have no papers of permission from the supreme sultan in Constantinople or from the British Embassy. If I dig into the mound of Nimrud, where I think Nineveh is buried, I’ll be thrown out of the country and never let back in. And, you see, that’d be the end of my dream. So, all I can do is wander the land once ruled by Nineveh, search for signs, and hope that –’

Footsteps pounded in the corridor and Au Kerim burst in, his damaged face enraged.

‘What is it?’ Hussein was alarmed.

‘The eunuch refuses to negotiate with our chief. He has demanded we send you, the son.’

Austen knew the eunuch. It was a trap.

Hussein Kuli tried to sit up. ‘If I don’t go?’

There was no need for Au Kerim to answer.

A desperate plan began to form in Austen’s mind.

Chapter 5

Austen scooped up a handful of dirt and patted it over his head, which had been shaved bald. He rubbed more dirt and twigs into his beard, now dyed black.

Gathering the filthy cloak around him, he was a shadow among shadows as he crept through the forest. Two soldiers patrolled the barricade of empty baggage carts at the back of the army camp. A burst of gunfire erupted on the far side and the guards stopped, then peered nervously in the direction of the sound.

Silent and swift as a wolf, Austen slipped from the trees and was among the carts. He crawled between wheels and shafts. When it was safe to move, he climbed from under the carts and began to beat his bare head with his hands and chant a prayer. Soldiers
glanced at him, then quickly turned away in fear from one of the eunuch’s dervishes. To see into the eye of a dervish in trance was to receive the curse.

He staggered and sang his way towards the big tent in the centre of the camp. When he was near the eunuch’s tent, he slapped his head and face to cover his searching eyes. Russian officers in red and gold uniforms stood near the twenty cannons aimed out at the chief’s army. Near each cannon was a stack of bags holding grapeshot of musket balls and sharp metal. One blast would reduce men and horses to a bloody mess.

In front of the cannons, the chief’s horsemen made mock-charges, firing muskets into the air. They galloped close to the cannons and at the last moment dragged their horses back on their haunches. Dust swirled high, then they galloped away, shouting war cries.

Austen knelt in prayer near the corner of the eunuch’s tent.

Over on the right flank, chain mail glinted. The chief was leading his elite cavalry into position.

A single rider emerged from the tumult of dust and horsemen. His cloak was a rainbow of colours and a shining mace hung from one side of his saddle. The royal sword glittered with rubies and onyx. Hussein
was a splendid chief, but his body swayed and he leant so far forward that he almost fell from the saddle. He passed between the cannons, into the eunuch’s camp and stopped only a few yards from Austen.

Five officials in flowing robes and absurdly high turbans strutted out to greet him. One stepped forward and said, ‘I am the lord of the bath towels. This is the lord of the coffee grinders, the lord of inkpot cleaners, the lord of the pipes, and the lord of the spurs.’

From the door of the eunuch’s tent ran the
farrashes –
the whippers – who slashed invisible people in the eunuch’s path. Dervishes in rags fell to their knees and beat their backs with thorny branches. Clowns dressed as hunchbacks, apes and skeletons tumbled over the ground. An orchestra of flutes, drummers and bell-ringers marched out and danced around them.

And here he was, with that bloated face and those smooth, hairless cheeks. The eunuch’s enormous thighs rubbed, so that he waddled rather than walked. His turban danced with the lights of sapphires and rubies, and his pudgy fingers sparkled with rings. Austen tried to imagine what he’d looked like as a young Russian boy the day his parents had sold him to slave traders. At the age of just twelve, he was taken away and castrated.

‘Welcome, Prince Hussein!’ He stretched out his arms. ‘Climb down and kiss me.’

‘You are outnumbered. Your cannon will not stop all of us.’ Hussein’s head wobbled from the effort of speaking. He slid one finger into his mouth, drew it out and held it up in the tribal challenge:
Any of your men who survive will return to you as naked and weak as this finger.

BOOK: Monsters in the Sand
12.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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