Corsair (45 page)

‘Now I know why Abdullah doesn’t need good eyesight to lead the caravan,’ Hector commented to Ibrahim as they rested by the campfire. ‘I could scarcely raise my head against the sand blast. When I did, it was impossible to see anything.’

‘It could have been much worse. The irifi sometimes blows for five or six days, and much more strongly. Entire caravans have been known to perish, unable to move forward or backward until buried by the sand. That was what happened to my father. He was leading a coffle which the wind destroyed. We never found his body. I expect he is lying somewhere beneath the surface of the desert, a dried corpse along with his camels and the merchants he was guiding. Sometimes, years later, the wind blows away the sand again. So maybe he will be found, and we can give him a proper burial.’

Picking up two metal bowls, Ibrahim rose to his feet and said, ‘You and Dan can give me a hand. In less than a week we begin the most difficult stage of our journey. There will be no water for ten days and not a blade of grass nor a single leaf for our camels to eat. There’s an old jmel among our beasts which will not survive the ordeal. It is better we put it to good use now.’

He led the way to where the camels were hobbled. Singling out the animal he wanted, he led it a little distance away. There he made the beast kneel, and showed Dan how to pull the halter so that the camel turned its head to one side, stretching its neck in a curve. While Hector held the bowl beneath the artery, Ibrahim expertly cut the animal’s neck so that the blood splashed into the receptacle. ‘Put the bowl on the embers of the campfire,’ he told Hector. ‘In a few minutes the blood will thicken to a good soup. Dan and I will start to deal with the carcass. Tonight we feast on the entrails. Tomorrow we’ll begin to dry the meat in the sun, and we’ll save the hide for when it’s needed.’ He slid his knife blade into the dead camel’s gut, exposing a globular paunch which he carefully cut open. Inside was a thick green gruel, foul smelling with lumps. Taking the second bowl he scooped out the contents. ‘This too can be cooked for our supper,’ he said. ‘It has already been eaten by the jmel. But we can enjoy it too. In the desert nothing goes to waste.’

A week later the camel hide was put to use when Bourdon reluctantly agreed to abandon his battered footwear despite his fear of snakes and biting insects. By then his boots had been cut to shreds on flinty gravel. Ibrahim expertly cut double-soled sandals for him using the skin of the dead jmel whose meat already hung in strips from their pack saddles, drying in the sun. They were now in the most difficult sector of the desert crossing, a desiccated brown expanse of sand and rocky outcrops which, in the simmering heat haze, could be mistaken for the roofs of distant towns. At its worst the heat was so intense that the coffle had to travel by night. The men spent the days sheltering from the sun under strips of cloth or in the shadow of piles of camel packs. The sand became so hot that it was painful to stand barefoot, and their precious water skins daily grew more flabby as their contents dwindled through evaporation. Finally, when it seemed that the ordeal would never end, Abdullah declared that they had passed the halfway mark. Hector, who had long since given up using the qibla to trace the direction of travel, was amazed by the blind man’s certainty.

‘How can your grandfather be so sure?’ he asked Ibrahim. ‘I have not the least idea how far we have travelled.’

‘My grandfather has crossed the desert at least thirty times,’ Ibrahim answered proudly. ‘In his head he keeps a count of the days and hours on this journey, even the number of paces. He listens to the sounds of the desert, and he says that every part has its own feeling which tells him where he is. When in doubt, he smells the sand.’

Hector had indeed noticed how, from time to time, the old guide took up a fistful of sand and held it to his face. Now he was too tactful to question Ibrahim’s assertion. Bourdon, however, was more dubious. He quietly scooped up some sand and wrapped it in a cloth. The following day he placed the sample in the old guide’s hand and asked Ibrahim to enquire from his grandfather how many days were left until the coffle reached the next watering place. The old man sniffed the sample and, with an angry outburst, flung it down in disgust. ‘What did he say?’ Bourdon asked. Ibrahim looked hurt as he translated, ‘My grandfather says that he is being taken for a fool. Either that, or the caravan has gone in a circle and we are back where we were yesterday.’

Bourdon was crestfallen. ‘Please apologise to him from me. I meant no harm. All my life I have lived among rogues and charlatans so I always suspect some sort of cheat.’

Yet even Hector had reason to doubt the old man when the caravan crossed a low range of rocky hills and Ibrahim rode up to him to say that his grandfather had announced that they should be in sight of the longed-for watering hole. Hector strained his eyes, but could see nothing. The desert stretched out as usual, bare, monotonous, and utterly devoid of life. There was not even the false glimmer of a distant mirage which so often duped him into thinking that a lake lay ahead. Suddenly his camel lurched off at a trot, and within a dozen strides was plunging along at a mad gallop. All around, the other camels were similarly stampeding. They surged forward in a roaring, incoherent mass. Ahead, Ibrahim was goading his camel even faster, kicking up a cloud of dust. After some three miles of this mad careering gallop, Ibrahim drew to a halt, jumped down and began to scrabble at the ground, peeling back a cover made of camel and goatskins. Beneath the cover the ground was a water soak which had been protected from the sun. Ibrahim and the camel drivers dug troughs which filled with a few inches of water, and the thirsty camels shoved and jostled, biting and kicking one another as they fought to suck up the water that they craved. Ibrahim’s face beneath his great bush of hair broke into a broad grin. ‘My grandfather has succeeded again,’ he exulted. ‘The worst is over.’

When the camels had slaked their thirst, he asked Dan, Hector and the others to go on ahead with him. ‘There’s a second, better, waterhole about an hour away. I will show you how we can harvest the desert’s bounty. It’s time to celebrate with a feast.’

‘Please, no more camel’s intestines,’ groaned Bourdon.

‘No. This time we’ll have roast ostrich.’

Sure enough, as they approached the next waterhole, a flock of about twenty ostrich ran off. The giant birds paced away across the desert, their wings outspread. Hector had come across ostriches in the Emperor’s menagerie. But this was the first time he had seen the birds in the wild.

‘We’ll never get close enough to shoot them. They run as fast as a galloping horse,’ he said to Ibrahim.

‘That’s not how we’ll do it,’ the young man replied. ‘This waterhole is where the birds prefer to drink. All we have to do is dig some holes in the sand where you and the others can lie hidden with your muskets. The birds are suspicious of camels so I’ll take them back to the coffle, and bring the caravan here at dusk. Good hunting!’

The ambush was easier than Hector had anticipated. He and his three companions prepared their hiding places. Less than an hour after Ibrahim had ridden away, the flock of ostriches came walking back across the desert, unaware of any danger. The hidden musketeers waited until the great birds made easy targets. Their first volley brought down three ostriches. When the flock foolishly came back a second time, they killed another four. That evening the entire caravan fed better than it had done for many weeks, and Hector fell asleep on a patch of soft sand. He was gorged on roast ostrich meat.

A cry of pain awoke him. He sat up, feeling slightly groggy, and looked around. His eyes had to adjust to the half-darkness. It was still several hours before dawn but the moon had risen and was shedding enough light to see that the camp was in uproar. Dan was already on his feet, a pistol in his hand. Their camels, which had been hobbled kneeling, were straining at their bonds as they tried to rise to their feet. They were roaring and moaning in fright. In the distance there were shouts of alarm. Suddenly a figure flitted between Hector and the last embers of the campfire. For a heart-stopping moment he thought it was a djinn, one of the spectres which Ibrahim had spoken about, evil spirits which wander the desert in the form of men or animals or dust devils. This one had assumed the shape of a human. It was pale grey from head to foot, gaunt and stark naked. It held a spear in each hand, and the hair on its head was long and filthy. As the figure glanced towards him, the creature’s eyes glittered for a moment in the moonlight. It took Hector a few seconds to realise that what he was looking at was a desert thief.

The attack was over before anyone could react. Ibrahim lit a brand from the fire and went to check their losses. Two camel saddles were missing, and several strips of dried camel meat. One of their animals was bleeding from a deep gash where a thief had stabbed it in the shoulder with his spear. ‘The bandit probably hoped to cripple the creature so we had to leave it behind,’ he commented glumly. He called out for his grandfather to come to look, and when there was no reply, went to where the old man had lain down to sleep beside a thorn bush. He found him sitting, dazed from a blow to the head. With his acute hearing Abdullah had been the first to detect the presence of the thieves as they crept into camp, and had tried to intercept them. They had struck him down without mercy. ‘They must have been watching the waterhole, waiting for a coffle to show up,’ said the old man after he had recovered enough to speak, and various merchants arrived with similar tales of thefts and losses. ‘This time we were lucky. They were only sneak thieves. If there had been more of them, we might have been murdered as we slept.’

‘Will they attack again?’ demanded the merchant’s spokesman angrily. He was wearing the same faded red burnous as the day Hector first saw him, and was in a foul mood. He had lost several packs of trade goods.

‘They are Tooarick of the Labdessah tribe. They live by plunder,’ answered the guide. ‘It is best that the caravan moves on tomorrow before the word gets out that we are here, and the Labdessah summon their fellows.’

The spokesman rounded on Hector. ‘You are meant to be our guards! Instead you were snoring by the fire.’ He was spitting with rage. ‘When we march, you will be sure to protect us. Otherwise it will be the worse for you!’

‘There is no point in quarrelling,’ the old man intervened. ‘Save your strength for the journey. Now that the Tooarick have found us, they will not give up. They will follow us like jackals.’

His prediction was painfully accurate. The coffle moved on the next morning but the thieves struck again during the following night. Hector and his companions stayed on guard with their muskets but failed again to detect the intruders and did not fire a shot. The Labdessah were expert thieves. Stripped naked, their bodies smeared with ashes, they crept their way into the encampment and made off with more trade goods. They cut the hobbles of a dozen camels and drove them off into the darkness. A merchant who tried to stop them was stabbed in the stomach and died four hours later. The merchants swore and raged. They shouted at Hector and his companions, and blamed Abdullah for their troubles. But there was no remedy. On the third night the caravan was robbed yet again, and however urgently the travellers marched onward, they knew they were failing to shake off their tormentors. They embarked on a sand sea where a succession of tall dunes extended in every direction like waves on the surface of an ocean. If they looked behind them from the summits of the taller dunes, they could see in the far distance a Labdessah outrider mounted on his camel. He was tracking them, waiting for them to make camp so that his fellows could plan their next attack.

Hector grew more and more frustrated. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ he confessed to Ibrahim on the fourth day of their ordeal. The young man, who normally rode beside his grandfather in advance, had dropped back to join the rear guard. ‘The caravan is being bled to death.’

Ibrahim shook his head. ‘My grandfather tells me that it is impossible to shake off the Labdessah once they have attached themselves to a coffle. They are like the parasites that feed on the camels. Once they fasten on to their victim they do not let go.’

‘Then I suggest we give the Labdessah a nasty surprise.’

Ibrahim cocked his head on one side as he looked at Hector with sudden interest. ‘You have a plan?’

‘The Tooarick don’t yet know that we have good muskets,’ Hector said.

Ibrahim thought for a moment before replying. ‘Not unless they witnessed you shooting the ostriches. Otherwise you have not yet used your guns in their presence. The Labdessah have always attacked in the dark, and they are armed with spears or knives.’

‘Then I propose we deal with them as we dealt with the ostriches. When we come to a suitable place – a dip between the sand dunes where we are out of sight of the pursuit – Dan, Jacques, Karp and I will get down off our camels and prepare an ambush. We will scrape out shallow holes where we can lie in wait with our muskets. You ride on, taking our camels with you, and rejoin the coffle. With luck the Labdessah will blunder straight into the trap, and we will give them a bloody nose. Later you can come back and collect us.’

Ibrahim’s face lit up. ‘We could set the ambush right now, over the next sand ridge. I’ll tell my grandfather about it later. But please be careful. The thieves have the eyes of falcons and would immediately notice anything unusual. We must work quickly.’

The next hollow between the dunes proved an ideal site for the ambush. There was a patch of soft level sand on which grew a few withered bushes, no more than two feet high. Here Hector and his companions slid down from their camels and hastily scraped out shallow trenches for themselves. Placing their muskets before them, they lay down, and Ibrahim quickly threw sand over them to cover them. Then he remounted and led the camels off in the direction of the marching caravan. ‘I’ll be back before nightfall,’ he called. ‘In the name of Allah, shoot straight!’