Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7) (24 page)

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.