The Sultan's Daughter (48 page)

But Roger's glance rested only for an instant on this brilliant array of warriors. At the sight of another erection in front of the dais he had gone white to the lips. It consisted of eight small platforms, about three feet in height, arranged in pairs, each pair being a yard apart. Between the pairs stood four stout stakes, the height of a man and sharply pointed at the upper ends. He gulped, gave a shudder and instantly began to sweat with terror. It was clear to him now that the fiendish Pasha had told his cavalry to bring in prisoners not so that he might extract information from them, but simply to have them killed in his presence for his amusement.

That row of stakes could mean only one thing. A favourite method with the Turks of putting criminals to death was to impale them, and that was the ghastly end which Djezzar clearly meant to inflict on Roger and his companions.

Corporal Gensonné and Trooper Auby, being ignorant of Turkish customs, had evidently not realised the awful purpose that the stakes were to serve. The Corporal was marching forward between his guards, unaided and with set but courageous mien. The Trooper's wound had opened and blood from his right side was seeping down his pale-blue breeches. With the help of two guards, he was limping forward. His face showed fright but no special terror. Roger had halted in his tracks, but was pushed on by the men on either side of him.

As he advanced, he was visualising the ghastly scene which must soon be enacted. Each pair of guards would mount the low platforms, dragging their prisoner up with them. They would lift him breast-high, force his legs apart, bringing the point of the stake in contact with his anus. Then, each seizing a leg, they would jump down from their platforms, so that their weight would drive the stake up into their victim's body. If they did their work well the point of the stake would come out of the prisoner's mouth or the top of his head. If they bungled it it would emerge through his chest or the side of his neck. But for him that would be a matter of no importance
for, in any case, as the stake pierced his vitals he would suffer unimaginable agony.

The prisoners were brought to within a few yards of Djezzar. Roger found himself staring into the cruel, hooknosed face with its handsome, curly beard and fine, upturned moustaches. Suddenly, in a hoarse voice, he began to plead for himself and his companions. One of his guards struck him in the mouth, reducing him to silence.

The Pasha gave a curt order that the executions should begin and pointed to young Auby. His guards flung him to the ground and ripped off his breeches. Either from terror or because he had lost so much blood from his wound, he fainted. The two muscular Turks lugged him up between them and forced his limp body on to the stake. Suddenly he came to, his eyes starting from his head, and he gave an awful groan. But it was all over in a moment. The point of the stake came out from his neck and his head flopped forward.

As the deed was done, Roger heard a sudden chatter of excited female voices. Looking round, he saw that about twenty feet up from the courtyard, in a wall at right-angles to the line of stakes, there was a row of open arches. They were filled by about twenty veiled women, who had evidently been summoned to see the fun. A few of them had their eyes averted, or covered with a hand, to shut out the atrocious sight of Auby's sagging body. But the majority were staring down eagerly at it and some were crying in shrill voices:

‘Praise be to Allah and blessed be His Prophet! Death to the Infidels! Death to the Unbelievers!'

But Roger's glance rested on them only for a moment. At the sight of Auby's death Corporal Gensonné realised what was in store for him. Giving a furious curse he turned on the guard who stood on his right and with one blow knocked him down. The other guard grabbed him by the shoulders. But Gensonné wriggled free and kicked him in the groin. Swerving away, he dodged a third man who had come at him and ran towards the great gate, which stood wide open.

For a moment Roger was seized with an impulse to follow his example. But there had been half a dozen guards lounging by the gate. They were now running in a group to intercept
the Corporal and the head jailer with three of his men had dashed in pursuit of him. Against such odds no attempt to escape could possibly succeed.

Djezzar was roaring with laughter at the discomfiture of the two guards who had been standing on either side of Gensonné. But the Corporal's bravery did not incline the sadistic Pasha to clemency. With an amused smile he waited as the ten Turks closed round the solitary Frenchman, seized him by the arms and dragged him, blaspheming wildly, back to the line of stakes. While four of them held him, two others wrenched the breeches from his kicking legs, then they carried him between them to the stake next to that upon which Auby's body hung impaled. Roger closed his eyes to shut out the horror of what followed. The Corporal screamed and screamed and screamed, then suddenly fell silent. Again there came from the women's balcony treble cries of:

‘Death to the Christian dogs! To Iblis with the Unbelievers!'

Roger knew then that his turn had come. Within the next few minutes life for him would be over. Never more would he enjoy the passionate embrace of his beautiful Georgina, never again see the green fields of England. Starting forward, he shouted to the Pasha in the best Turkish he could muster, and with all the strength of his lungs:

‘Excellency! If you have me killed Allah will call you to account for my death. I have had no trial, but could prove my innocence. I am no enemy but a friend. I have papers to prove it. Sir Sidney Smith will vouch for me. I am not a Frenchman but English and your ally.'

One of the guards again silenced him by striking him on the mouth. Suddenly one of the women up in the balcony cried, ‘He lies. He is a French Colonel. I knew him in Cairo.'

Instantly Roger recognised the voice. It was Zanthé's. Looking up he saw her leaning right out over the balcony. The tawny eyes above her yashmak marked her out from the other dark-eyed women. Djezzar also looked up and called back:

‘Then, moon of my delight, we'll make him wriggle on a stick.'

‘No, Pasha, no!' she cried. ‘Such a death is too swift for
him. In Cairo he insulted me. I pray you give him to me so that I may see him die by inches. Give him to me for a plaything, so that I may be avenged on him.'

Giving a bellow of laughter, the bearded Pasha waved a hand to her and shouted, ‘Beautiful one, when your red lips speak, to hear is to obey. He is yours, to do with as you will.'

‘May Allah reward you, mighty Pasha,' she called down. ‘I'll have him castrated, then he shall live on offal served in our chamber-pots.'

The mail-clad men surrounding Djezzar roared their applause and the women up in the balcony with Zanthé broke into peals of shrill laughter.

At a sign from the Pasha, two of the guards took Roger by the elbows, hurried him away across the courtyard, down the spiral stairs, thrust him back into the dungeon and again shut him up there in the pitch darkness.

Sinking down on the floor, he propped his back against the slimy wall. His thoughts were so chaotic that for a few minutes he could hardly grasp that, temporarily at least, his life was safe. By a miracle he had escaped the excruciating agony of having a four-inch stake rammed through his intestines and dying with its point lodged in his gullet.

Zanthé's unexpected appearance at the critical moment had at first amazed him. But after a few moments' thought he realised that it was not particularly surprising. When the Sultan had declared war on France the previous autumn, the Turkish officials in Cairo would have been secretly apprised of it long before Bonaparte learned that the Porte had openly become his enemy. Naturally, on one excuse or other, the highly placed Turks in Egypt would have slipped away to Syria, taking their women with them. As Acre was the capital of Syria it was logical that Zanthé, and whoever was now her protector, should have taken refuge there.

As Roger's mind cleared he began fearfully to speculate on what was in store for him. He had been saved from an agonising death, but only by a woman who nursed a bitter hatred for him. She had shouted down that she intended to have him castrated. At the thought the saliva ran hot in his mouth and his flesh crept. Swallowing hard, he wondered if he
would not have been more fortunate had he suffered those few minutes of searing pain and now was dead.

In a swift series of pictures his mind ran back over the key episodes in his association with Zanthé. He had taken her by force, enjoyed her, then found that she had spoken the truth when she had declared herself to be a virgin. Yet he had been for several weeks afterwards under the illusion that, although she had at first fought him off, the pleasure she had later felt during his embrace, wordlessly confessed beyond dispute by her passionate response, had been a positive indication that next time she would give herself willingly to him.

But when he had carried her off from the Viceroy's palace she had swiftly shattered that optimistic belief. With renewed distress, and now with fear, he recalled how she had declared that should he again attempt her she would resist him to the utmost. He remembered also the intense resentment she had expressed at his having ravished her on that first occasion.

And now she had him at her mercy. She could not have made plainer her reason for asking of Djezzar his life. Clearly, she intended to revenge herself on him by depriving him of his manhood and, not content with that, meant to extract payment from him, by hours of degradation and torment, for every moment of pleasure he had had with her.

He did not have very long to wait before his punishment began. After he had spent about an hour in miserable contemplation of his fate the jailers came for him again. They marched him up to the courtyard, across it and through a door under the balcony from which the women had watched the impaling of Auby and Gensonné, then up a flight of stairs and through several passages to a door on which the Chief Jailer knocked loudly with the hilt of his dagger. After a few moments an iron grille was lifted and a pair of heavily lidded eyes peered at them. The door was then opened by a hugely fat negro with several chins, whom Roger at once placed as a eunuch. At a piping call from him, two other eunuchs appeared, took the prisoner over from the jailers and hustled him inside.

The vestibule through which they took him was lit by hanging lanterns made from silver filigree work, encrusted with coloured glass. By the soft light they gave he saw that
the walls were hung with rich silk Persian rugs of beautiful design and that the place was furnished with chests of rare wood inlaid with ivory. No sound penetrated to this luxurious apartment and the delicious scent of jasmine hung on the still air.

Roger was taken through a hanging curtain of beads, down a corridor, through another room—an aviary, where dozens of cages held twittering birds of every rainbow hue—then into a loftier chamber with on one side slim, marble pillars supporting arches of lace-like carved stone. The arches gave on to a long balcony that had a lovely view over the bay, in which the ships of Sir Sidney Smith's Squadron were lying at anchor.

But Roger knew that they were much too far off for anyone in them to hear a cry for help, however loud his shouts, and after one glance to seaward his gaze became riveted on Zanthé. She was seated at the far end of the room, cross-legged on a low divan heaped with cushions. Squatting on the floor near her were two other women and behind the divan stood a fat, elderly negress. All the women were wearing yashmaks, but the silk of Zanthé's was so diaphanous that, as Roger advanced, he could see her lower features clearly through it.

Agitated as he was, he still found her beauty breath-taking. Her curling hair, with its rich bronze lights, serene forehead, dark, tapering eyebrows, magnificent tawny eyes and red, full-lipped, cupid's bow-mouth were all as he remembered them and as he had so often visualised them when day dreaming about her. When he arrived at about ten feet from her divan he was about to bow to her but was not given the chance.

Two of the powerful eunuchs seized him by the arms, forced him to his knees, then pushed his head forward towards the floor, while the third shouted in the thin, high voice of a castrato:

‘Down, Christian dog! Down! Lick the floor in obeisance to Her Exalted Highness, daughter of the Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid, Descendant of the Prophet, Shadow of Allah upon Earth, Padishah and …'

He was still declaiming shrilly when one of the other
eunuchs struck Roger a sharp blow on the back of the head. His face hit the marble floor with such force that his lips were bruised and his nose began to bleed. Jerking up his head he stared at Zanthé and exclaimed in French:

‘Can that which was said in jest really be true? That … that you are a daughter of the Sultan?'

Her face remained impassive, but she gave a slight shrug and replied in the same language, ‘I am the only daughter of the late Sultan. But do you take me for such a fool as to have revealed it to you while I was in Cairo? Had I done so when we first met you would have demanded a King's ransom for me and, on the second occasion, your General would have kept me as a valuable hostage.'

‘But … but,' Roger stammered, ‘how can you be? You … you said that you were French.'

‘I told you that my mother is French, and that is true.'

The enormity of his crime now came home to Roger. To lay hands on a woman of royal blood in any country was
lése-majesté;
and in Turkey, where all women of good class were so jealously guarded, to have forcibly deflowered a Princess must merit the most ghastly tortures that the Eastern mind was capable of conceiving.

‘Had I but known—' he began.

‘That which is done is done,' she said sharply, ‘and had I been but a merchant's daughter I would have felt no less the disgrace you inflicted on me.' Then she gave an order in Turkish to her Chief Eunuch, the meaning of which Roger did not grasp.