Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7) (29 page)

22

Minutes later, Mayne was ushered by a Sudanese guard along the upper-floor corridor of the palace and into the room he had seen lit up from outside. It extended to the back wall of the palace, but the open door and corridor beyond led to a balcony overlooking the river, visible from where he stood now. Beside the door was a Remington rifle on an elaborate wooden shooting stand, aimed in the direction of Tutti island; the action was open and Mayne could see that it had been carefully cleaned and oiled. He took a few more steps inside. The room was large, the size of an English country-house drawing room, and was lit at each corner by glass-topped oil lamps on stands, the walls and ceiling above them smudged with smoke. The centrepiece was a large Ottoman-style desk set close to the back wall, its surface covered with papers and notebooks and maps, a brimming ashtray on one side giving off wisps of smoke. The room smelled strongly of cherry tobacco, and he realised that this was the source of the smell that had wafted over the riverbank earlier. But the most striking feature was the mass of artefacts laid out carefully on the floor, enough to fill a small museum: elaborate tribal clothing, including a patched jibba of the Mahdists; an extensive collection of weaponry, from leaf-bladed dervish spears and curved swords to kurbash whips and ornate flintlock long guns; beautiful hand-made pottery, wood carving and beadwork; and an array of ancient Egyptian artefacts, including small statues in blue-green faience and fragments of masonry with carvings on them.

A voice came from the door. ‘The Mahdi keeps sending me gifts.’ Mayne turned and saw Gordon. He remembered him vividly from the lectures he had attended in London several years before, but close to he was shorter, more compact. He was wearing the evening uniform of an officer of the Royal Engineers, as if he were going to dinner in the mess, complete with the insignia of the Order of the Bath and his campaign medals for China and the Crimean War almost thirty years before. He looked pale, gaunt, his curly grey hair thinning on top, but his eyes were a brilliant porcelain blue, staring intensely. He reached over and picked up an Egyptian
shafti
statuette with hieroglyphics on the front. ‘Do you know that for the followers of Muhammad, it is not the meaning of the word but the shape of the symbols that has significance, as well as magical powers?’

Mayne nodded. ‘I had a Dongolese guide who gave me a
hejab
with the prayer wrapped around an ancient Egyptian scarab. I do not believe he ever knew the name in the hieroglyphics on the scarab, though I recognised the cartouche of Akhenaten.’

‘Akhenaten,’ Gordon repeated, pausing. ‘Are you a student of the ancient Egyptians?’

‘I have a passing acquaintance with hieroglyphics.’

‘What do you think of my collection?’

‘Fascinating, sir. I’ve seen your material from China in the Museum of the Royal United Services Institute.’ Mayne pointed to a fragment of wall carving showing the distinctive crown and snake symbol of a pharaoh. ‘I’m particularly interested in ancient Egyptian antiquities in the Sudan, as they are something of a rarity, I find. I’ve been tracing them from the Egyptian border along the Nile. I believe that the pharaoh Akhenaten mounted some kind of expedition into the desert. At Semna we found a temple with a depiction of him in front of the Aten symbol of the sun.’

Gordon looked at him piercingly. ‘At Semna, you say? Below the third cataract?’

‘A temple to the crocodile god, Sobek.’

Gordon glanced at his desk. ‘I must check my notes,’ he murmured. ‘My recollection is that Kitchener mentioned nothing unusual at Semna, other than the remains of pharaonic fortifications on either side of the river.’

‘Kitchener was intrigued when I told him, and intended to visit for himself.’

‘You’ve seen Kitchener? How is he?’

‘Champing at the bit. He wished it had been he who had been sent to make contact with you, but his face is too well known among the tribesmen, and he would have been at risk. He was with the desert column, but was sent back from the wells at Jakdul.’

‘Kitchener is a first-rate surveyor and archaeologist, and a most loyal supporter of mine,’ Gordon said. ‘Though I own he would be a handful for any general to manage, and I feel some sympathy for Wolseley on that front.’

Mayne paused, waiting, then offered his hand. ‘Major Edward Mayne, sir. You know from my badge that I’m a fellow sapper. Attached to the river column of the relief expedition.’

‘A relief expedition that has given me no relief at all,’ Gordon said with a tired smile. He shook Mayne’s hand strongly, and peered at his mud-spattered clothes. ‘You look as if you’ve been through the wars.’

‘A fair description, sir.’

Gordon put a hand on his own immaculate red tunic. ‘I apologise if you feel discomfited, but I dress to keep up appearances. I am sensible to the fact that I am still governor general of the Sudan, even though the territory over which I exert jurisdiction has shrunk from an area the size of France to these city walls, like Constantinople at the end of the Byzantine empire. At any rate, I still dress for dinner, though I dine alone, and apart from lime juice to fend off the scurvy and some carefully rationed bully beef, I eat the same as those poor people for whom I am responsible, that is to say biscuit and unleavened bread and water from the one remaining well in the city that has not become tainted.’ He paused, then picked up a decanter from a side table. ‘But I do have my small indulgences. They keep my mind from the hunger. Can I offer you a drink? I have brandy, Greek I’m afraid, so like firewater, though perfectly palatable after one’s throat has become numbed to it.’

‘No thanks.’

Gordon poured himself half a glass, then put it on the table. He peered at Mayne closely. ‘I know the name, but we haven’t met, have we?’

‘No, sir. My speciality is survey, and I’m in the field much of the time. But I took a refresher course at the School of Military Engineering while you were posted at Chatham, and I attended your lectures on the Sudan.’

‘Have you been out here long?’

‘Since July. With General Earle’s staff.’

‘Dragging whaleboats up the Nile? A scheme that would make Sisyphus in Hades glad of his own torment. And before that?’

‘I first came to Egypt in 1882, after our invasion.’

‘Correction,’ said Gordon, picking up a cigarette from a box on his desk and lighting it, sucking in deep and blowing out smoke. ‘Not invasion, but
intervention
. An intervention to prop up the Ottoman regime in Cairo, against the wishes of the Egyptian army and the Egyptian people, in order to secure our controlling interest in the Suez Canal and keep the investors happy.’ He tapped his cigarette. ‘Have you much desert experience?’

‘I carried out forward reconnaissance for the river column.’

‘Ah. You mean you are an intelligence officer. To whom do you answer?’

‘Lord Wolseley, sir.’

‘Not Baring, in Cairo? Or Colonel Sir Charles Wilson?’

Mayne was taken aback momentarily, too tired to keep up his guard. ‘They both have an interest, inasmuch as they have read my reports.’

‘Wilson is an old friend, though I have found him distant in recent years, but Burnaby works for him and keeps me abreast of affairs.’ He looked at Mayne shrewdly. ‘Apparently there’s a secret complex of rooms under Whitehall. There are operations afoot that even Burnaby is not privy to, and that Wilson only reports to the highest authority. But doubtless you know that.’

Mayne had recovered his poise. ‘Colonel Wilson at this moment is with the steamers that are heading upriver from Metemma towards Khartoum. My mission is to persuade you to leave so that they may take you off to safety when they arrive.’

Gordon leaned his head back, exhaled a deep lungful of smoke towards the ceiling and then looked back at Mayne, a smile on his face. ‘Correction. Your mission is to provide me with agreeable companionship on this night. I have my Sudanese soldiers, whom I love dearly, but there is little conversation to be had. Ever since Colonel Stewart left, I have been starved of friendship. I still weep at the thought of his vile murder when the steamer
Abbas
was wrecked, for which I hold myself responsible. I have missed his counsel dreadfully.’

‘Kitchener has seen you since then.’

‘Only once, when he came in disguise like you. But he had little time, and our conversation had a very particular course, as I shall tell you shortly.’

‘You know he holds you in the highest regard.’

‘Too high, in my opinion. His desire for revenge may lead him to murderous courses of action that will muddy the waters even further.’

‘Or lead him to glory. There is talk of him as a future sirdar
of the Egyptian army, as the one who may lead a force big enough to crush the Mahdi.’

Gordon exhaled again. ‘Glory is nine tenths twaddle, wouldn’t you say?’

Mayne remembered Burnaby’s final moments. ‘For those who seek it, sir, yes. For those upon whom it falls, perhaps it constitutes that remaining one tenth and is a worthy thing.’

‘I believe, then, that Gordon of Khartoum is nine tenths twaddle and one tenth glory.’

Gordon grinned, then took a deep draw on his cigarette, holding the smoke in and exhaling it out of the window. He looked at his cigarette. ‘I do apologise. I’ve spent too much time alone, and have forgotten how to be civil. I should have offered you one of these. I smoke them to overcome the terrible smell of decay from outside.’ He offered Mayne the box from the table. ‘And they help further to suppress my appetite; that is, what taste is left after ingesting the stench outside. Would you care for one?’

Mayne declined, and Gordon put the box back on the table. ‘Perhaps you don’t enjoy the peculiar smell. It’s cherry tobacco, from Morocco. They were given to me as a birthday present by Burnaby, and I’ve become addicted.’

‘I fear I have some bad news for you, sir. The worst. A week ago, near the wells of Abu Klea, there was a fight between the dervishes and the desert column.’

‘I know of it. My Sudanese spies were there. A
hell
of a fight, by all accounts.’ Gordon paused, suddenly looking crestfallen. ‘They talk of a great bear of a man, fighting with the strength of twenty, finally being brought down by a dervish spear.’ He sat down dejectedly, letting his cigarette burn between his fingers. ‘Fred Burnaby?’

‘Your account tallies, sir. I saw him myself. He died as a soldier.’

‘You mean he died in great pain, with fearful wounds. I’ve been around glorious deaths in battle all my life. I know what it’s like.’

‘Before we left Korti, he passed on his best wishes to you. As did General Buller. They all did.’

‘Burnaby’s I accept, with sad pleasure. The others’ are hollow words. How many more men must die in this futile campaign? It is a campaign for the satisfaction of those who are running it, not for the purpose of relieving Khartoum. That is the sad lesson of war, one that we learn through bitter experience. The game of war has become as self-perpetuating for us as it has become for the army of the jihad, fuelled by the bloodlust of the warrior, where the fight and the holy crusade becomes an end in itself.’

‘Have you felt it, sir? That attraction?’

‘I am
not
a crusader, Mayne. I am not here to fight Islam. The Mahdi may not convert me to his cause, but I find little in Islam that would dissuade me from it, were I of a doctrinaire bent, and much to commend it. Yet I am regarded as a Christian warrior, and the evangelists hang on my every word.’ He picked up a thin volume from the table. ‘
Reflections in Palestine
, by Major General Charles Gordon,’ he said, and tossed it contemptuously back. ‘I went to Jerusalem three years ago with the perfectly sound intention of following up Wilson’s work there to identify the site of the crucifixion. My aim was to debunk all of those who have let their faith carry them forward into making spurious claims, and cloud their reason. And then my erstwhile friends go and publish a book without my sanction made up from the musings about religion I happened to have written in my notebooks while I was there. It reads like the worst sort of mysticism.’

‘I do not believe it tarnishes your reputation, sir.’

‘Speaking of my reputation, there is something I would like you to do.’ Gordon went over and sat down at his desk, then opened a folder and took out a sheet of paper. He quickly read it through, and then glanced up at Mayne. With his pale face and watery eyes he looked feverish, but he spoke clearly, with controlled passion. ‘There were many who believed that my cause in the Sudan was the abolition of slavery, and many who were dismayed when I allowed it to continue under my jurisdiction. Some thought that was the beginning of my decline; that I had become seduced by the trappings of despotism, removing myself from the decencies of British behaviour. Some even clamoured for my rescue in order to pluck me from the moral vacuum that I supposedly inhabited. My
decline,
Major Mayne, I can assure you, has been brought on by constant anxiety over the arrival of relief, and I am worn to a shadow by the food question.’

He put one hand to his brow, shutting his eyes for a moment, and then lifted the lid on a small brass inkpot and dipped a quill pen into it, raising it and touching it lightly to the side of the inkpot to let the excess ink drain out. ‘Anyone who knows this country should be perfectly aware that such a law could not be enacted definitively without so radically altering the way of life here that it would require us to occupy the Sudan as a province, to control every aspect of it and to create a new society and new economy. It is only now, on the eve of an extinction brought about by lack of British resolve, when all institutions in the Sudan have ceased to exist, that I can sign a law mandating the destruction of slavery. It is too late for the people of Khartoum, but I can only hope that those slaves who have been put in the front ranks of the Mahdi’s army will come to know of it, and will hereafter cease to obey their masters, who they will have seen slinking in the background, cowards both as fighters and as arbiters of human justice.’