Bilvidic nodded. ‘Yes, and I have two children also — a boy aged eleven and a girl nine.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jan said.
Bilvidic’s face softened into a friendly smile. ‘It does not matter. It is my work. There is always some danger. The boy — Francois,’ he added, ‘is in France now. He has gone to Dijon to stay with his grandmother for the New Year.’
The drums were growing louder and a moment later Georges called down that the mob was coming out of the palmerie. Bilvidic muttered a curse as we went towards the windows. ‘It is those men who came in from the mountains. They have whipped up the people into a fury again.’ The mob looked different this time as it swept past the ruins of the souk. It was led by a man on mule-back, and it seemed to have more purpose. ‘There is going to be trouble this time.’ Bilvidic turned to the stairs. ‘Georges! Can you see anything moving on the piste from Agdz?’
‘No, nothing. Un moment. Yes, I think so. Just one man; riding a mule, I think.’
Presumably it was a straggler from the party who had already arrived. ‘Ecoutez!’ Bilvidic said. ‘There is to be no shooting. You understand? No shooting. We retreat up the stairs and then up to the roof. Only then do we fight. As long as there is no shooting we have a chance.’
Julie came in with the coffee. She poured us each a cup and took the rest upstairs. We drank it scalding hot, conscious of the growing murmur of the advancing mob. It wasn’t such a large mob, but it seemed more compact. It was bunched up behind the man on the mule and there were very few women in it. Knives flashed in the sunshine as they neared the house. Several men carried swords and one a lance. There were guns, too.
There was no hesitation this time. They came straight on towards the house. The leader trotted his mule up to the door and shouted, ‘Give us the men who killed Ali. Give us the slayers of the men in the gorge.’ He was a tall, bearded man with dark, aquiline features. He was the man who had shaken his fist at us from the entrance to the gorge after the slide.
‘Get up the stairs,’ Bilvidic said to me. And when I hesitated, he added, ‘There is nothing you can do to stop them this time. Get upstairs. Georges and I will hold them. Take everybody up to the roof. Hurry, monsieur. I don’t think they will hurt the women.’
The man was looking in at us now. I saw recognition in his eyes and the blaze of a fierce hatred. He shouted something and then his face vanished abruptly. The next instant a lump of concrete was flung with a crash through the window. He was screaming at the crowd and they answered with a deep, baying roar, split by wild cries as they swarmed forward.
‘Up the stairs, all of you,’ Bilvidic shouted.
We backed away from the room. I motioned Jan and Ed to go on ahead. The two Frenchmen were also backing across the room, their guns in their hands. The tide of the Berber mob rolled against the house, breaking against it, lapping round it. Windows crashed in, the frames splintered under heavy blows. Men climbed through over the sills. The door fell open with a crash. The room was suddenly full of them.
Bilvidic and Georges were in the archway between the main room and the study. The Berbers, finding themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, hesitated — uncertain and suspicious like animals. They stood, silent and baffled, facing the two Frenchmen. Their momentary stillness was full of fear.
Then the study windows were broken in and Bilvidic was forced to move back to the stairs. The tribesmen thrust forward, milling into the alcove between the two rooms. A gun was fired and a bullet slapped the wall above our heads. Bilvidic was backing steadily. It was only a matter of time. I turned, gripping my gun, and ordered everybody up to the roof top. ‘Keep down though,’ I shouted. ‘Keep down below the parapet.’
A ladder led from the top storey on to the flat roof. Julie was waiting for me there and our hands gripped. Karen went up and then Jan and then Ed. We were alone on the landing with the guttural jabber of the Berbers lapping the house. She was looking up at me and my grip on her hand tightened. And then suddenly she was in my arms and our lips touched, a kiss that was without passion, that was a physical expression of what we were suddenly feeling for each other, of the love we had found. Then the door behind us was flung open and crashed to again as Bilvidic and Georges thrust their shoulders against it and turned the key. ‘Montez! Montez!’ Bilvidic shouted. ‘Up on to the roof. Quick!’
I pushed Julie up and followed quickly after her. And as my head emerged into the slanting sunlight, I heard Jan shouting something excitedly. Georges followed me and then Bilvidic. The noise of the mob milling round the house was terrifying. A gun fired and a bullet whined over our heads. I pulled Julie down. Bilvidic and Georges were hauling up the ladder whilst blows rained on the door they had locked against pursuit. It splintered and burst open and at the same moment they dropped the trap-door leading on to the roof.
And then I heard what Jan was shouting. ‘Look! Philip. Look!’
I lifted my head above the parapet. A lone horseman was galloping across the open space between the two forts. It was a French officer. He rode bent low over the horse’s neck, his round, pale blue hat screening his face, his cloak streaming out behind him. The horse, a big black, was lathered white with sweat and dust.
Julie and I stood up then. It was so magnificent. He was riding straight for the house, urging his horse on as though he intended to ride the mob down.
The roar of voices that circled the house gradually died as the horse, almost foundering, was pulled on to its haunches on the very edge of the thickest of the mob where they milled around the front door. ‘Abdul! Hassan!’ The rider had singled out two men from the mob and ordered them to take charge and clear the crowd from the doorway. ‘You. Mohammed. Drop that gun!’
It was Legard. His body sagged with exhaustion, his eyes blazed with tiredness. His horse could barely stand. Yet he and the horse moved into the mob as though they were reviewing troops on parade. Here and there he singled out a man and gave an order.
In a moment the mob was moving back away from the house. They were going sheepishly, their eyes turned away from the Capitaine. They were no longer a mass. They were just a crowd of rather subdued individuals moving quickly away from the scene, anxious to avoid recognition. They were like children and he scolded them like children. ‘Moha! Why are you not looking to your goats? Abdul! You should be teaching the children today. Youssef! Mohammed!’
, He picked them out, one by one, riding his horse in amongst them. He seemed to know them all by name and what they should be doing. And at no time was his voice raised in anger. It was only pained.
‘Mohammed Ali. You here, too? Why do you make me ride so hard today? Yakoub. I have been to get food for you and now you have brought me back.’
He knew them all and they ducked past him, their heads bowed in respect and contrition. ‘Llah ihennik, O Sidi — Allah keep you in peace, O master.’ And they scuttled away across the sands in ones and twos, like whipped dogs with their tails between their legs.
The noise of the mob died into the whisper of individuals and then into silence. Even the voices immediately below us, searching for a way up to the roof top, became subdued and receded into silence. One by one the men who had invaded the house came out, and Legard sat his horse, watching them — and to them he said nothing. They murmured their greetings, grovelling before the sternness of his face, and then they slunk away.
The last to come out was the man who had been their leader. He stood for a moment facing Legard. Neither spoke and the man’s head dropped and he ran quickly to his mule and left.
We rigged the ladder then and went down. Legard was standing in the door of the house surveying the wreckage as we came down the stairs. He looked at us in silence. He was drooping with tiredness and I saw that it wasn’t only the dust of travel that made his face grey. He looked desperately ill. His eyes glittered as they fastened on us. ‘Imbeciles!’ he cried, his voice savage with anger. ‘You are here two days and you cause trouble.’ He began to cough. ‘My relief has arrived and now I have to come here and deal with this. All because of you, because you are so stupid that you …’ His words were lost in a fit of coughing. He staggered forward to the settee and collapsed into it, clutching at his stomach, his eyes half closed. ‘See to my horse,’ he croaked. ‘Somebody see to that poor devil of a horse.’ He began to cough again.