Ten

 

 

1

 

For some time now, they had been kept awake at night by drumming from the direction of the stables, by shouting, and by serenades on a particularly lacerating instrument that sounded like an out-of-tune horn.

Since Minto’s injury and Lack’s death, Pentecost had begun to rely a great deal on Beebe, Zaid Fauzan and the sergeants, and as they listened to the racket going on from the direction of the stables, they discussed the reason for it in his office.

‘Think it means an attack, sir?’ Fox asked.

‘Maybe it’s because some of ’em have left for the passes and it’s to make us think there are more of the bastards still here than there are,’ Beebe offered.

‘Could be.’ Pentecost looked worried. ‘Could be something else, too.’

It was hard to tell what the tribesmen were up to, and Pentecost was unwilling, without Minto or Lack, to take too many risks to find out. But, two nights later, when the racket from the stables had stopped, they heard a keening song in the darkness from the rocks near the side gate, as though one of the Hejris were bewailing the death of a friend. At first the Dharwas jeered, then Fauzan cuffed them to silence and sent for Pentecost.

‘Listen, Abassi,’ he said. ‘It’s a message. It sounds like a warning.’

Cocking his head, Pentecost was able to pick out the Toweida words of the song clearly.

 

‘Oh, my brother, Talal,

Leave before it is too late.

Bring your wife, Talal.

It will soon be too late.’

 

Pentecost glanced at Fauzan and then at Fox alongside him. ‘Who’s Talal?’ he demanded.

‘Half the Toweida Levies are called Talal,’ Fox said bitterly, as though he’d often found it a problem.

Pentecost turned to the grim old zaid. ‘Fauzan, find out if any of our Talals has a brother with the Hejri – or a cousin or a nephew.’

Half an hour later a diminutive Toweida appeared before Pentecost.

‘Talal Jad, Abassi,’ Fauzan said. ‘He has a brother-in-law outside.’

Pentecost eyed the Toweida. ‘Is his wife here?’ he asked. Fauzan nodded and Pentecost stared towards the rocks where the keening had now stopped. ‘They’re obviously going to try something,’ he said. ‘And they’re trying to hide the noise. Pass the word there’s to be no talking on duty. We want to hear what they’re up to.’

‘What might they be up to, Abassi?’ Fauzan asked.

‘Mining,’ Pentecost said laconically. ‘Under the wall.’

 

 

2

 

In the woollen tents in the hills, the feeling of victory grew more marked. Remarkably little success had attended their assaults on the fortress, but the arrival of the Khadari miners had begun to give them all increased confidence, and Thawab stared at Aziz triumphantly.

‘Three days, Aziz,’ he said. ‘We blow the mine three days from now. I hope the Hejri men are ready.’

‘We are ready,’ Aziz growled. ‘Make sure your Deleimi are taking care of the Khadari miners.’

‘My Deleimi have guarded the stables well,’ Thawab said. ‘There’s nothing to fear. The fortress will be ours.’

He indicated the men behind him and Aziz noticed a small mean-looking man standing among them.

Thawab caught his eye. ‘This is Rhamin Sulk,’ he said.

‘And who in the name of Allah is Rhamin Sulk?’ Aziz snorted. ‘He looks the size of a mongrel and has the face of a rat.’

The little man with Thawab frowned and his eyes glowed dangerously. Thawab grinned. Aziz’s hasty tongue was always a good ally.

‘That is dangerous talk, Aziz,’ he reminded him placidly. ‘Rhamin Sulk comes from Khaswe. He is fighting the battle against Tafas.’

‘I have heard of his men. They fight round corners. They are good at shooting men in the back.’

Thawab grinned again. ‘They will remove Tafas before long. Aziz should remember this. Rhamin Sulk could be a dangerous enemy in the future.’

Aziz sneered. ‘I am not afraid of Thawab’s assassins,’ he said.

‘Rhamin Sulk has come to bring us news. The Muleimat have closed the Pass of Tasha. It is being kept secret. If Owinda-El can be caught in the gorges, they will never recover from it in Khaswe.’

Aziz was not displeased. With no relief force, there would be no artillery. He had Thawab’s promise. He could still feel he controlled events and, God willing, Pentecost would be in another part of the fort when the mine went up.

A thought occurred to him and he stared sharply at Rhamin Sulk. ‘If his business is with the Muleimat and the Khaswe assassins,’ he demanded, ‘why is he here?’

Thawab gestured. ‘He brings greetings from the fighters in Khaswe. They wish us to work for the freedom of Khalit.’

Aziz glowered. ‘Khalit is not my concern.’

‘We are part of Khalit.’

‘We have never been part of Khalit,’ Aziz roared. ‘Why otherwise do we fight for Hahdhdhah?’

Thawab eyed him contemptuously. Aziz knew nothing of the cross-currents of Arab politics or the high visionary enterprise of a twentieth-century alliance. ‘This is a narrow belief, Aziz,’ he said.

‘I am doubtless a narrow man,’ Aziz admitted, ‘but I have always been a free man. I do not take orders from men who shoot round corners.’

‘You are out of date, Aziz,’ Thawab said softly, Aziz’s discomfiture as heady to him as hashish, and there was an answering growl from the Deleimi. ‘Times have changed. We are no longer tribes. We belong to a great whole. We are as one. We fight for freedom for our nations.’

 

 

3

 

The business of keeping silent was difficult, because the Dharwas were a noisy group, always anxious to fool about. For a long time they had even been making a jest of scuttling across the open space between the ramparts, dancing and weaving and even pretending to be hit, and they had always found it a painful business controlling their desire to chatter and gesticulate.

With no sound to break the stillness, the oppressiveness of the hills grew worse. The dominant note had always been the size and desolation and it always took time to recover from the depression which the stillness and the melancholy of the giant landscape brought on. All the colour was purged away by the glare of the sun so that the view looked as though it were an old faded photograph. Apart from the eagles circling the hills or the occasional vulture hanging in the sky, there was remarkably little sign of life. In the distance, in Hahdhdhah village or in the camp across the road to the south, they occasionally saw groups of people, and now and again, a horseman hotfooting it down the road. Once they saw several of them in the distance across the plain, chasing a buck, which had emerged from a gully, but for the most part Aziz’s men kept their heads down and the landscape was empty, so that no sound broke the heavy stillness. In the fort, apart from the sentries, everyone was asleep or resting in the shade below the walls, and sometimes the unnatural silence became so oppressive an outbreak of firing and the screech of Owdi’s bugle came almost as a relief.

Because he had no wish to alarm anyone, Pentecost had not told a soul except Beebe and Fox and Fauzan the reason for the silence, and during a dawn pause in the horn-blowing and drumming and the shouting from the sangars and the stables, Minto appeared, dragging his injured leg between his two improvised crutches.

‘God, that hospital,’ he said to Fox. ‘Chap in there’s going round the bend. Says he hears the Great M-Maggot burrowing beneath the soil to drag him away. Bit hysterical, shouldn’t wonder.’

Fox’s eyes gleamed. ‘Or else he’s heard digging, sir,’ he said.

He gestured towards the water tower where, as they knew, there was little opportunity to provide flanking fire, and turned to one of the Toweidas nearby.

‘Fetch Abassi Pentecost!’

When Pentecost arrived, he brought Beebe with him and they knelt on the floor of the hospital, their heads to the ground. Beebe looked up.

‘The bastards are here somewhere,’ he said. ‘But I can’t tell where.’

‘Why not try a stethoscope?’ Minto suggested. ‘We’ve got one.’ Pentecost gestured without tuning his head. ‘Get it, Freddy,’ he said.

With the stethoscope to his ears Beebe bent again to the earth floor, then he dropped it and bolted for the door. They heard the motor of his lorry start up as he reversed it across the courtyard, and a moment later he appeared carrying a coil of wire.

‘I can probably get it to show up on the gravimeter,’ he said. ‘We ought to be able to pinpoint the sonofabitch.’

Tracing the digging to a point near the radio room, he sat back and looked at Pentecost. ‘You can hear the goddam picks,’ he said. ‘You can even hear when they hit stone. They’re after the tower again.’

Fox looked at Pentecost. ‘What’s the answer, sir?’ he asked. ‘A counter-mine?’

‘How far away do you think they are?’ Pentecost demanded.

‘Ten feet,’ Beebe said. ‘That’s all.’

Pentecost looked worried. ‘They could finish it tonight,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we’ve much time. We’ll have to go out and blow it up. Pity we haven’t Lack. He was our expert on explosives.’

Beebe sat back on his heels. ‘I’m not so goddam amateur at it myself,’ he said. ‘I could make quite a mess with a coupla pounds of plastic.’

Pentecost’s eyes shone. ‘What will you need? We have pentolite in the cellar.’

‘That’s fine,’ Beebe nodded. ‘And I’ll want a battery off one of the cars to set it off. Sandbags to damp it down and picks and crowbars to dig it in.’

Pentecost turned to Fox. ‘How many men, Sergeant’?

Fox looked worried. ‘No good arsing about with a few, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to be able to hold off any rushes they lay on to try to stop us.’

‘Forty?’

‘We’ve got plenty of men, air. How about sixty?’

‘Very well. Sixty. Thirty Dharwas and thirty Toweidas. If we mix the Toweidas in with the Dharwas, they’ll not dare desert. That ought to be enough. We’ll go through the side gate. It’s nearest. One group to give covering fire and act as reserve. Another to go for the stables. How about after dark, Mr Beebe?’

‘I reckon that’d be tricky. We’ve got to be able to see what we’re doing and we’ve got to make no mistake. We’d lose guys in the confusion and probably end up without the battery.’

‘And the Toweidas could sneak off easier,’ Fox agreed. He turned to Pentecost. ‘It’s got to be daylight, sir.’

 

 

4

 

Pentecost watched the preparations grave-faced. Outside in the courtyard Fauzan was going over their instructions with the storming party again and again.

‘I think I’ll lead this one, Sergeant,’ Pentecost said quietly.

Fox looked up quickly. ‘No, sir,’ he said immediately. ‘If anything happened to you, the whole bloody affair would fall apart.’

‘That’s right, I guess,’ Beebe agreed.

‘I ought to go.’

‘No, sir,’ Fox said firmly. ‘If you got hit the Toweidas would be over the wall like a shot. They know who’s holding this place together.’

Pentecost considered the suggestion then he nodded. ‘Whom do you suggest then, Sergeant?’

‘Mr Beebe to attend to the blasting, sir. Me and Sergeant Stone to handle the punch-up. I’ll lead the reserve. Stone to go in and clobber ’em. He’s young and he’s fast.’

‘We shall have to expect casualties, Sergeant. In daylight anyway.’

Fox stared gravely at him. ‘We’ve always had to expect casualties, sir,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’re paid for.’

The drumming from the stables continued but it seemed that there were no large numbers of Hejris there, and the few there were conducted themselves with a great deal of arrogance, shouting and gesturing and waving their flags at the fort.

‘How many do you think there are?’ Beebe asked nervously.

‘Not many,’ Fox said. ‘Thirty perhaps. There are a lot more further out, though.’

Another shout went up and Stone grinned. ‘The bastards’ll be yelling for another reason before long,’ he said.

Carelessness, fatalism, arrogance, pride of race – all made the Hejris vastly underrate the men inside the fortress, and it was decided to make the attempt during the afternoon, when they might be growing slack in the heat.

As the men gathered under the wall near the side gate, armed with rifles, revolvers, bayonets and grenades, they all went over the instructions again.

‘It’s got to be done fast,’ Stone was saying. ‘We’ve got to get there quick and under cover.’

‘Try not to get too far ahead, Mr Beebe,’ Pentecost advised. ‘An isolated man in front of the others would be a shot for a sniper.’

Beebe licked his lips uneasily. ‘OK, I’ll watch it.’

‘And if you can manage it, bring us back a prisoner. We might find out what’s going on outside then.’

Fox and Stone nodded. Fox looked thin and lean, as though he were a jockey ready for a point-to-point. Stone’s square face was set and he seemed ready for anything.

Pentecost turned to Chestnut and the limping Minto and the zaids. ‘Very well, gentlemen, let’s have the whole garrison on the walls. And silently. We don’t want anyone outside to suspect what we’re up to.’

Beebe’s group gathered under the screen they’d erected near the small side gate, hidden from sight, all of them silent, the Dharwas grinning all over their faces at the prospect of excitement.

With the sun still nailed to the sky, Beebe felt a little sick as he reflected how much depended on him. He still wasn’t sure what had made him volunteer, but the unbending rigid attitude of resistance that Pentecost showed had stirred in him an unwilling admiration that was growing daily, and he had committed himself almost without thinking.

From the ramparts, Minto, sitting in a chair at an embrasure near one of the Martinis, a rifle in his hand, raised his fingers to indicate they were ready. Pentecost looked at Beebe who nodded, and the civilian drivers they had recruited swung the gate back. There was a group of rocks shining metallically just beyond the arch and Beebe and Stone slipped out silently and waited there for everyone to emerge. Then Stone called softly, and the blasting party began running for the stables.

For a moment there was no reaction, either from the lulls or from the stables, then suddenly the Hejris came to life. A green flag went up and a blast of rifle fire burst from the ruins. Two of the Toweidas went down at once, rolling over like shot rabbits, but one of them leapt to his feet again and went after the others, limping heavily, his face twisted with pain.

There had been no attempts to fortify the ruins, and in no time they were against the wall and Stone was lobbing grenades inside the windows.

‘OK.’ He nodded to Beebe as the crashes stopped. ‘Inside!’

 

 

5

 

From the ramparts, Pentecost watched as Stone’s men began to throw out bundles of twigs and stones to form a barrier between themselves and the hills.

Behind them there were already three sprawled silent figures on the ground, and three more limping back towards Fox’s group among the rocks, their heads down to avoid the storm of bullets that had started from the hills and the surrounding folds of land. The silence of the afternoon had been split by the violent outbreak of firing from the walls; and from all sides, from ditches and gullies and the rock piles, men were seen running to reinforce the reims firing on the stables. Occasionally one of them stood and waved, clearly thinking that it was an attempt to cut a way out of the fortress, and a hail of fire was being directed at the gates, as though they expected them to open at any moment and a convoy of lorries to emerge.

The uproar was deafening, with everyone shouting and no one listening. Zaid Fauzan was flourishing a revolver at a loophole with wild gestures, laughing like a maniac, and Owdi was alternately blasting away on his bugle and firing his rifle. Next to him one of the Toweidas, overcome with the excitement, was shooting wildly at the ruins of the stables and Pentecost took him by the shoulders and directed his aim towards the rocks while he kept firing automatically. The wounded Dharwas from the hospital came crawling out with rifles and crept to the parapets, shouting with joy at the prospect of a fight after all the silence, but the Hejris were keeping up a remarkably well-sustained fire and soon there was a steady stream of wounded men heading back again.

 

In the stables, Stone and his group were crouched low behind the walls shooting towards the rocks, Stone cuffing the Toweidas as they fired wildly, their heads down. Still sickened by the sight of what Stone’s grenades had done to the defenders, Beebe was searching for the shaft of the mine. He found it just outside the wall on the Hejris side of the stable.

‘You’ve got to cover me,’ he said to Stone. He signalled to his Toweida helpers but as they grasped their picks and crowbars and the explosives, the Deleimi guards began to appear from the hole. They were shot as they emerged by the Dharwas who by this time were dancing and laughing with excitement.

‘OK,’ Beebe yelled as they dragged the last of them out of the way. ‘Let’s go!’

Holding the haversack containing the pentolite, he jumped into the shaft, followed by the men with the battery and the wires. Immediately, out of the darkness a Khadari miner appeared and Beebe shot him with the revolver hanging from the lanyard round his neck. More came out, some with their hands up, and Beebe passed them up the shaft, but they were all killed and dragged away except one, his teeth ripped out by a bullet through the cheek, whom Beebe, remembering Pentecost’s request for prisoners, managed to save. The Dharwas were now almost out of control in their excitement and he had to swing his fists to stop the butchery.

With the last of the Khadari miners hiding in a chamber at the end of the tunnel, Beebe got to work by the light of a torch held by one of the Toweidas. Sandbags, rocks, everything they could find was used to tamp the pentolite in place in the holes Beebe had dug out with a crowbar.

‘Detonators,’ he said, realising he was shouting in the sustained excitement.

The man with the detonators failed to appear, and Beebe found himself shrieking with rage. It was some time before they realised that the man had been killed, and it was Stone who clambered out of the shelter of the stable and dragged the body inside. He was hit in the upper arm as he did so but not disabled and he ignored the wound, searching the dead man’s haversack for the detonators.

‘For Christ’s sake hurry!’ Beebe shouted, in a panic of fear that they would be overwhelmed before they’d finished.

The detonators were passed to him at last and, forcing himself to be calm, he unwrapped them carefully. It was a job that demanded a steady hand, and the thought that they might at any moment be swept away by a rush from the rocks made it difficult to keep his head. He found he was sweating profusely in the stuffy atmosphere of the tunnel and had to keep shaking his head to blink away the moisture that filled his eyes.

He attached the wires at last and pressed the detonators firmly into the plastic pentolite, then driving the other men before him, began to pay out the coils, cursing and sweating every time they became tangled. At the top of the shaft, he attached one of the wires to the battery, his fingers fumbling and clumsy in his haste.

‘The bastards are coming!’

Stone’s words struck his ears but he forced himself to ignore them. The firing redoubled and a Dharwa fell against him, knocking him over, and he had to drag himself clear and paw about in the rubble under the body for the end of the loose wire.

The Hejris had left the sangar now and were running towards the stables with the green flags, aware at last of what was happening and determined to stop the demolition of their work. Firing increased from the ramparts and Fox’s post among the rocks, and Beebe heard the crack of the Martini.

‘For Christ’s sake hurry!’ Stone shouted. ‘We can’t hold ’em much longer!’

‘Nearly ready,’ Beebe shouted back, and he was aware of Stone clambering up the pile of rubble, a Sten gun in his hand. The chattering in his ear almost deafened him, and he became aware of men falling sideways. A bullet hit the ground near his head and whined away, then he looked up as he finally managed to find the end of the wire.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Stand clear.’

Then he realised that Stone had fallen backwards and was sitting among the rubble, still holding the Sten, his legs outspread, a thin trickle of blood coming from his mouth, a bewildered expression on his face, enamelled eyes blankly on the sky. For a second, Beebe stared at him, startled, then he remembered why he was there and clapped the second wire to the battery.

Near the wall of the fort he saw the earth balloon upwards in a cloud of blue smoke, then the blast, travelling along the tunnel and up the shaft, knocked him over on to Stone. Stone didn’t move and it dawned on Beebe that he was dead.

For a second, shocked, he crouched near the body, trying to avoid the falling dirt and stones and small bouncing rocks, then he turned and jerked a hand towards the fort.

 

 

6

 

As the light faded from the sky, the Dharwas were still noisily excited and Minto cheered the shocked Toweidas by giving them all a tot of arrak and doling out cigarettes. As they had all been smoking a mixture of cloves, chopped straw and bark for some time, cigarettes from the store which they kept for the sick were a tremendous reward.

Beebe’s prisoner had died and they lost four men killed and seven wounded but they soberly felt that, despite the loss of Stone, they had done a great deal of damage and still retained the initiative. The scattered corpses of the dead outside troubled them, but they were just beginning to recover from the shock of the fight when the alarm bell rang, and Owdi’s bugle started in a tuneless fanfaronade.

Fox put his head round the corner of Pentecost’s office.

‘Main gate, sir,’ he said. ‘The bastards have got torches and what looks like tar barrels!’

‘Cover the gate, Jim,’ Pentecost said, reaching for his belt. ‘And let’s have the searchlight and some of Chestnut’s fireballs ready.’

The firing burst out as he spoke, a sudden clatter from outside and the sharper, more disciplined, answer from inside.

In a fury at the loss of the mine, Thawab had flung his men against the gate with everything he possessed. But the attack was ill-organised, and though the tar barrels were fired, under the sustained fire of the fortress and a sortie led by Pentecost they had not been pushed hard enough against the woodwork and the hurriedly mounted attack was driven off. For ten minutes there was a frantic free-for-all and in the darkness one of the Deleimis actually managed to scramble into the fortress. Just as the infuriated Fauzan knocked him flying and was on the point of blowing his brains out with the revolver, Fox pushed up the weapon.

‘Take him down to the cells,’ he said. ‘Billy’ll want to talk to him.’

As the dazed and sullen man was dragged away by a couple of none-too-gentle Dharwas, sporadic firing was still going on at the Deleimis crouching among the rocks. Still shuddering from the violence of the attacks, Beebe could hear a man wailing near the gate and he wondered if it were the prelude to another attempt at a mine.

‘What’s he saying?’ he asked Fauzan who was waiting alongside him.

‘He says, Abassi, that his brother has been killed in the fight and that as life means nothing more to him, he wishes to die also.’

He moved Chestnut’s searchlight nearer and, cocking his head to listen, directed it carefully and hefted his rifle in his hand.

Beebe shivered. He was still overwhelmed by Stone’s death that afternoon, still wanted to weep at the shock and horror of the killing inside the stables. The raging excitement of the Dharwas as they had returned, their boasting of their prowess as warriors, the ecstatic joy of fanaticism they had felt at the fight as they had exhibited their stained bayonets and blood-splashed clothes, had not touched him. He felt drained and lonely in his misery.

Fauzan glanced at him, guessing what was troubling him, and gestured at the searchlight.

‘Abassi,’ he whispered. ‘Press the switch.’

As Beebe’s hand moved and the light flared they caught a glimpse of a red Deleimi cloak and black headcloth among the rocks, then Fauzan’s rifle cracked near Beebe’s ear and the red cloak disappeared with a jerk.

‘You can switch off the light, Abassi,’ Fauzan said with a grim smile. ‘We have helped him join his brother.’

When everything was quiet, Pentecost sent Chestnut to fetch the prisoner and Ali, the Toweida interpreter, from where he was cowering among the civilian workers, his head under a blanket. It was hard to say who was more worried. Certainly the Deleimi, a lean tigerish man with a curled beard and a vast bruise on his cheek where Fauzan had hit him with his revolver, showed no fear.

‘Ask him how many of the Hejris and Deleimis there are outside,’ Pentecost said.

The answer came back quickly. ‘More than Bin T’Khass can stop.’

‘And where did the miners come from? The men who dug the mine?’

The Deleimi spat. ‘They came from the Khadari,’ he said.

‘Does Wintle know?’

Yes, the Deleimi said, Owinda-el knew all right. A Khaswe official had been visiting the Khadaris in an attempt to negotiate their loyalty for another year and they had sent him back with a message that the Ridwha and the Fajir passes were closed to Sultan Tafas.

‘Who else is with Aziz?’

A list of tribal names and leaders followed, quoted by the Deleimi with a fierce pride, as though he were determined to frighten them. Among them they noticed that of the Muleimat.

Minto looked at Pentecost. ‘That m-means every bloody pass through the Dharwa range is l-locked up, Billy,’ he said.

Pentecost frowned for a moment. ‘Does Owinda-el know this too?’ he asked the prisoner.

The Deleimi sneered. ‘The Muleimat are cleverer than the treacherous Khadari,’ he said. ‘They have not told him. They have taken the Sultan’s subsidy.’

Pentecost was silent for a moment. He had noticed the Deleimi’s contempt for the Khadari. ‘Many Khadari miners were killed when we blew up the mine,’ he pointed out. ‘This would not please the Khadari.’

The Deleimi sneered. ‘The Khadari are cowards and turncoats. They have taken their dead and gone back to open their pass. They are going to take Tafas’ money again.’

They were silent while the prisoner was led away, then Pentecost turned to Chestnut. ‘Take his weapons and ammunition from him, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Then give him a meal and turn him loose.’

‘Loose, sorr?’

‘Yes. But make sure his meal’s a sparse one. And let Ali be profuse with his apologies. Let him feel we have few rations. He’ll tell Aziz and they’ll probably decide it isn’t worth risking lives when we’re likely to chuck our hand in soon. It might buy us a little time.’

 

 

7

 

The tower still stood. The wall still stood. The gates still stood. And a great many lives had been lost for nothing, and the Khadari, taking their dead with them, strapped across the backs of mules and donkeys, had started to leave the camp at Addowara to begin their long trek home. Once more Thawab’s boasts had proved valueless, and he was merely more short of followers than before, and there were growls among his men that he was wasting lives.

‘Thank God I did not commit the Hejri,’ Aziz sneered. He gestured at the bruised face of the freed Deleimi. ‘Bin T’Khass is more likely to starve than be defeated by Thawab.’

The infuriated Thawab’s hand went to his gun but Aziz brought up the Mannlicher. ‘I can shoot the eye from a rat,’ he pointed out coldly and Thawab subsided.

‘Aziz is a great leader,’ he said, controlling his temper. ‘But it is Thawab who does all the work. If the Khadari leave us, so be it. We do not need them. Rhamin Sulk is back with his offer of guns.’

‘We do not need guns!’

Thawab flared. ‘He also brings news that Owinda-el is soon on the move,’ he shouted.

Aziz paused, disconcerted. He tried to appear unconcerned.

‘You will have to hurry, Thawab,’ he said slowly to give himself time to think. ‘Bin T’Khass will defeat thee yet.’

Thawab exploded. ‘We should bring in artillery!’ he shouted. ‘Owinda-el is coming!’

‘He has not arrived!’

‘Do we have to wait until he rides through the gate?’

‘He can run backwards and forwards from Umrah to Zereibat for all I care,’ Aziz snapped. ‘Until he passes the Dharwa range he is none of my concern. Khalit is a whore of a country and Tafas is a shadow of a sultan. Let him rot in the ditch he has dug for himself.’

Thawab began to recover his control. ‘Aziz is an old fool,’ he said. ‘He thinks only of his own back garden. The world has changed. A share of Khalit is ours for the taking. By helping the Khaliti to throw out Tafas we can demand land south of the Dharwas. Then it would be Khusar who controlled the passes and the plain beyond.’

‘We are not farmers!’ Aziz stormed. ‘And Thawab gave his promise! No artillery until the plain was reached!’

Such was the power of the old man’s personality and the threat of his anger, Thawab backed away and there was a muttering among the minor chiefs. Then one of them intervened. ‘Let Thawab stick to his word,’ he said. ‘A gun could smash down the gate with a handful of shells. We have plenty of time. Let us destroy Owinda-el for good in the Tasha and finish off Hahdhdhah at our leisure.’

There was a chorus of agreement and murmurs from Aziz’s supporters. But not enough to give him much comfort. Always he had hoped for a negotiated peace and the joy of seeing Pentecost march out unharmed. His mind was not subtle and, obsessed with old-fashioned things like honour, he had not known until Thawab outlined them what the aims of his nation were beyond the taking of Toweida. As he turned away into the shadows, his mind was made up. His own forcefulness had stopped the artillery but it was only a temporary check, he knew, and he must follow the defecting Khadari and bully them into keeping the Ridwha Pass closed to lock Wintle from the Plain.

As Aziz vanished among his followers, Thawab stood for a moment, lost in thought, his hand on his belt, his teeth gnawing at his lower lip. Then he saw Majid the Assassin standing alongside, staring after Aziz, his thin fanatic face twisted with hatred. For Majid there was never any question about who was right. He had been brought up since childhood to believe that a Deleimi was always right and anyone who belonged to any other clan was wrong.

He was a thick-headed man imbued with the red-hot doctrine of the holy men who had stirred his fathers to passion and blinded their vision. To Majid the whole of life was an electric atmosphere filled with the religious enthusiasm of ancient jehads. He was unafraid in attack and fed on hatred, living always with defiance, existing for no other reason than to continue his struggle against anyone and everything that was not Deleimi. His tribe was small and his views narrow, and his courage was a fervour that cost him nothing in steeled nerves.

Thawab watched him for a moment, then his eyes narrowed. ‘Aziz is an old fool,’ he said softly.

‘Thawab speaks the truth,’ Majid said automatically.

‘He has the brain of the Toweida goat and is twice as stubborn. Deleimi men could be the rulers of Khalit. Aziz is nothing more than a stumbling block.’

‘Nothing more,’ Majid agreed.

‘Without Aziz, Deleimi men could be powerful in Khusar councils. Even in Khaliti councils. It is a great wonder no Deleimi warrior has ever thought of this and removed him from the scene.’

Majid’s head turned quickly and, as he stared at Thawab, Thawab read in the fierce unafraid eyes exactly what he wished to see.

‘Could you remove Aziz, Majid?’ he asked.

Majid spat and patted the Garand rifle. ‘I could remove Aziz,’ he said quietly. ‘Whenever Thawab asked.’