Mayne thought of the women and chidren he had just been watching, and of the crocodiles. He would rather lie on the boat and be like a crocodile himself, become one with this reed boat as he had once done with a canoe, slide stealthily below the line of vision of anyone watching until he reached the other side. He pointed to the case with the rifle he had laid beside the wall. ‘If I come back without Gordon, I’ll set that up. My job is to protect him until Wilson arrives with the steamers and gives Gordon a final chance to leave. Until then I am to shoot any Mahdists that attack the palace.’
Charrière peered at him, and then at the palace opposite, narrowing his eyes. ‘Kahniekahake will have his work cut out for him. He may be able to take down a few attackers, but if the Mahdi comes, he will not be able to save General Gordon.’
Mayne was stunned. It was the first time he had been called by his Mohawk name since he was a boy: Kahniekahake, Eagle Eye. He swallowed hard. Now of all times he needed to keep focused. He looked at Charrière. ‘A few may be all it takes. It may keep Gordon alive until the morning.’
‘You need to leave now,’ Charrière said. ‘By the time you reach the boat, it will be dark enough to cross.’
Mayne followed him out of the pit, keeping below the ruined wall of the fort and then behind a ridge of mud that lined the riverbank. He felt a surge of feeling he had never felt before, a sudden overwhelming need to pour out emotion he had kept bottled up since his parents had died all those years ago, a need to reach out to Charrière and tell him the truth. He took a deep breath, holding it, ingesting the smell and taste of where they were, the horror of it and of what he was about to do. He was letting Charrière down again: he had lied to him about the rifle, and about his mission. He remembered the slip of paper with the black spot that Wilson had given him. Should he be required to enact the ultimate directive, there was one final deed he must do, a deed that would require him to shut off his emotions entirely and never return to them. He remembered Wilson’s last words as they parted ways in London three months ago, words that had drummed at him over the past few days like a headache. Nobody must know.
They reached a narrow muddy creek in the foreshore opposite the island. A line of planks led over the mud to the water’s edge, and Charrière pointed to the boat pulled up alongside. It was made from a single bundle of reeds, about twelve feet long, lashed around every foot or so and ending with a slightly upcurved stem and stern. It was pristine, almost luminescent against the brown and black of the creek; Mayne knew he would need to slap some mud on it before he left. It looked like something that the infant Moses might have been launched in, and was identical to model reed boats he had seen in the Antiquities Museum in Cairo. Yet again the ancient world had caught up with him, like a hiccup from the past, unpredictable, unnerving. He stepped on the plank, swaying precariously for a moment as it decided whether to keep him on land or tip him towards the river, and then slid down it as it slapped into the mud, caught his balance and turned round.
Charrière reached over and handed him the paddle. ‘I’ll be waiting for you.’
Mayne nodded. ‘Before dawn. I’ll be back.’
Charrière turned and was gone. Mayne stepped towards the boat, then leaned forward and grasped it like a canoe, his left hand holding the paddle and one side of the boat, his right hand the other. He pushed off and brought his legs in, kneeling down and wobbling the boat to test its stability, then laid the paddle in front of him and reached down to splash mud over the reeds, darkening them to make the boat less visible, taking care to make as little noise as possible. After a few moments he straightened up and began paddling silently out of the creek, aiming for a window that had just lit up on the upper floor of the building on the opposite shore.
Now would begin the greatest test of his life.
21
Mayne let the boat glide silently towards the mudbank below the palace, crouching low and trailing the paddle with the blade held vertically to act as a rudder. For the last stretch of the river he had let the sluggish current take the boat by the stern so that he was crossing diagonally, minimising his profile both to Madhist sharpshooters who might be scanning the river from Tutti island behind him and to Gordon’s Sudanese guards watching from the palace ahead. He had seen the guards on the balustrade, openly patrolling now that it was dark and they were invisible from the island. And he thought he had caught his first glimpse of the man himself, at the upper-floor window that had lit up when he had set out from the opposite shore; the shutters had opened and a figure had stepped out on to the balcony, sharply silhouetted in the light from the room behind. It seemed cavalier in the extreme, the act of a man with a death wish, but then Mayne had seen the Sudanese soldiers below stopping and watching him, and had imagined the dervishes, too, treated to this spectacle night after night, coming to believe in the man’s invincibility.
For now, Mayne’s concern was his own vulnerability to fire from the Sudanese guards; had they spotted him, they would have seen him as an Arab in tribal dress crossing from the dervish-held shore, and would have shot him down immediately. But he had just passed under the line of sight from the balustrade, and he felt marginally safer. Once he landed, he would need to make his way along the foreshore and into the streets, where he could meld in with the locals and approach the palace gate inconspicuously.
The boat bumped into the bank, driving forward into the mud until the stem was about three feet from the end of the duckboards. It was a place that should have been swarming with rats, but then he remembered that they had long ago been chased down and eaten by the starving people in the city. He knelt as far forward on the reed matting as he could, then jammed the paddle handle-first into the mud and used it to pull himself forward, rocking the boat until it could go no further. He listened for a moment and looked up at the balustrade; seeing nothing, he launched himself on to the duckboards, feeling his holster slap against his thigh as he did so, catching his robe so it stayed free from the mud and quickly regaining his balance. The duckboards were well built, solidly anchored into the foreshore, and the boat would remain firm until he returned.
He stood upright and suddenly gagged, overwhelmed by a stench even greater than the fetid smell of the riverbank. He looked to his right, at the poles like tree trunks he had assumed were for mooring, and immediately saw the source of the stench. What he had taken to be a clump of rags hanging from the nearest pole was the corpse of a man, so putrefied that it looked as if it had been excavated from a wet grave. The right hand and left foot were missing, and it was held up by a rope around the neck. He looked at the other two poles, spaced a few yards apart with duckboards beneath them, and saw that they too held corpses. It was like a ghastly vision of the crucifixion ground at Calvary, on the mudbanks of the Nile. The corpse nearest to him had a placard around its neck and he could see that the others did too, with Arabic script he could not make out. They had clearly been placed there to be seen from the dervish shore. It could have been days ago, or more recently; he remembered the wretched people he had seen through his telescope in the city, already halfway to this state.
The corpse nearest to him was dripping, single drops of dark liquid that plopped into the mud, forming a small pool that had attracted a swarm of sand hoppers and cockroaches. Suddenly needing to be away from the place, he made his way swiftly up the duckboards until he had reached a point some twenty yards beyond the stone steps leading up to the palace. He stopped and sniffed, taken aback. Somehow, through the stench, he thought he had caught a familiar waft, of cherry tobacco. He had a sudden image of Burnaby, not the hideously wounded man in the desert but the languid man in the tent beside Wolseley, watching the smoke rings from his cigarette rise up into the ceiling. He shook away the image; the smell was probably a trick of the senses brought on by this place, and Burnaby a raw memory of Abu Klea. He quickly veered left, ducking beneath the level of the balustrade and making his way along the riverbank. He could see where the wall of the compound that normally abutted the river now led to a gap on the foreshore where the mud had cracked and dried. He made his way down and around it, climbing up the bank on the other side. He straightened his headdress and robe, knowing that the dirt of two weeks’ desert travel and a bloody battle would not look out of place here, then quickly strode up the dusty street ahead.