He opened his eyes and raised himself up so he could see over the parapet to the ridge opposite. He was looking for a telltale flash of light off a blade or a gun barrel, but he knew that the reconnaissance scouts of the Ansar were too good for that; they had blackened the barrels and receivers of their Remingtons, and with the sun behind them on that ridge they would give off no reflection. He squatted on his knees, keeping his head below the parapet, feeling better after his rest. The soldier tending the fire below the billycan took his pipe out of his mouth and spoke. ‘General Wolseley came to talk to us last week. He claimed that no amount of dervishes could withstand the smallest of our columns.’
‘Bosh,’ exclaimed Jones, propping himself up from where he had been lying against the parapet. ‘Hicks’ army of ten thousand two years ago was annihilated. Annihilated. All of the wounded were murdered with those spears, and the prisoners they took had their eyes gouged out and their manhoods ripped off before being crucified, when the dogs ate them alive. I heard it myself from a Dongolese who had been there and seen it all.’
Mayne tightened his bootstraps, and paused. It sounded like a typical soldier’s exaggeration, except that it was true. ‘Hicks’ army was made up of Egyptian conscripts, fellahin from the Nile valley,’ he said. ‘About the least likely soldiers you can imagine, and terrified of the desert. Quite a few of them had been in the rebel Egyptian army that we defeated at Tel el-Kebir when we first invaded Egypt in ’83, and some of them were still prisoners in chains when they were conscripted for the Sudan. But we have to hope that Wolseley is right. After all, he was talking about British soldiers. About the best. About soldiers like you, Jones.’
Jones stiffened. ‘Johnny Fuzzy-Wuzzy won’t take me without a fight.’
‘Indeed. Now let’s get cracking and set up a fire position on that parapet. I want to be ready when the sun drops out of our eyes and we can see that ridge clearly.’
7
Mayne lay against the parapet overlooking the Nile and extended his telescope. High above him he heard the sound of birds flying north, huge flocks of flamingos migrating from the desiccated marshlands below Khartoum, a whistling and whooshing that followed the flow of the river rather than working against it, as the expedition was. For a moment he felt a chill down his spine, as if he were watching the remaining life force of that place bleeding away past him. He shook off the thought and scanned the opposite clifftop with his telescope, tracing the jagged line of rock from the crag where the signallers had set up the heliograph to the furthest point he could see in the dust haze to the south, well beyond rifle range. The afternoon sun was arching west and framed the line of the ridge with absolute clarity, but made it impossible to see through the cracks and gaps where Mahdist sharpshooters might be lurking. He lowered the telescope and shaded his eyes. In this light all they could hope to see was a puff of smoke, and that would give them less than a second before the bullet whined overhead or smacked into the rock, or into one of them. Shaytan had told him that some of the Madhi’s men had become highly proficient with their Remingtons, and they would have the advantage of the sun behind them. Mayne realised that he might be watching and waiting interminably. He would give it half an hour longer, until the sun had dropped below the level of the hills on the horizon, and then he would leave the sangar and make his way down the scree slope below the cliff towards the river.
He left the two sentries at the parapet and slid down a crack in the ancient masonry wall that concealed him from the opposite cliff but gave a clear view of the scene below. A pair of rocks jutting out into the river formed a natural gateway into the cataract, constricting the river to a muddy torrent as it flowed into the pool where the whaleboats were collecting. Confronting the torrent was a solitary man in a canoe, inching his way up against the flow, a hawser line coiled behind him. Once he had made it through, he would find a place to tie the rope off, and then teams of men would use it to haul up the whaleboats, dozens of which were now milling below the cataract, waiting their turn to follow. Mayne could tell that the man in the canoe was a voyageur, from his measured stroke along one side of the boat, the paddle twisted each time to act as a rudder, rather than the frantic paddling from side to side of the British soldiers, who had little idea how to control a canoe. He well remembered his own first efforts as a nine-year-old boy on the Ottawa river, and that moment when he suddenly realised he was one with the boat; that he could use it as an extension of himself.
As he watched the voyageur work his way up the torrent, unswerving and utterly focused, he saw a man on the jutting rock above him hurl a stone trailing a thin line to the rock on the opposite side, where it was caught by another man and then passed to a team of sailors, who hauled across a thick hawser that had been attached to the line, looping it around a rock and making it fast. At the same time, a procession of soldiers stripped to the waist, followed by west African Kroomen, shiny black and wearing only loincloths, made their way up among the rocks to the point where the canoeist would shortly attach his rope, beyond the torrent and in the first pool above the rapids that would provide the next staging post. On a rock above it all, the sergeant major in charge of today’s efforts had positioned himself ready to bellow orders and encouragement as the first whaleboat was brought into position. After weeks of trial and error they had brought the procedure to a fair state of perfection, but even so every day brought new challenges, new obstacles to overcome in the rocky bed of the river, and all the time the level of the Nile was dropping inexorably, making any kind of progress a challenge at best.
Mayne recognised the man who had hurled the line as his friend Charrière, the foreman of the Mohawks. He was wearing the corduroy trousers and check shirt that Wolseley had provided for them, and his long black hair was braided down his back. Among the Mohawks, Charrière was known by his Iroquoian name, Teonihuapataman, meaning ‘he whose blood flows like the river’, but he also bore the French name he had inherited from his grandfather, a voyageur who could trace his ancestry back to the first adventurers from France who’d gone to the New World more than two centuries before. As part of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawks had fought alongside the British in the American War of Independence, and again in the war of 1812, but since then their reputation for brutality had softened as they intermingled with the Algonquian people of the Ottawa valley, becoming voyageurs in the fur trade and logmen on the river. To Mayne, though, who had lived with them and watched them hunt and explore, they still had an edge to them, men whose forefathers had been steeped in the blood of savage war.
Mayne remembered Charrière’s disquiet when they had met again on the Red River expedition. Mayne had been away at school and then at the military academy in England, and he had cut the long hair that he had grown as a boy. To the Mohawks, hair retained memories, and to cut it was to sever a link with a past in which Mayne had been adopted into the tribe and shared the coming-of-age rituals with Charrière as they became adolescents. Their friendship had endured, and had been rekindled here in this most unlikely of places, but there had been a distance between them; Charrière had never again called him by the Mohawk name that Mayne had been given as a boy.