- -
- 100%
- +
The first week after Elfi moved in, the house blazed every night with chandeliers and the courtyard and gardens sang with lanterns to greet the throngs of visitors who came to congratulate and envy. He owed it all to Murad. But on this day Elfi felt his loyalty tested as it had never been.
Elfi whipped his head out from under the jets of the fountain, taking in big breaths, and splashed the water under his arms and over his chest. He shook himself like a dog emerging from a pond. He could still hold his breath for as long as it took a hawk to circle seven times.
He had spent the night in council at the judge’s house, with the assembled Mamluke amirs and the civilian notables. Old Ibrahim Bey, the senior Mamluke and Prince of the Pilgrimage; Murad, Master of Cairo; Elfi, Tambourji, Bardissi, and the two other Beys who governed the main provinces of Egypt – the seven of them were the ruling Mamlukes. The senior kashifs immediately under their command were also present, along with Papas Oglu, the Greek captain of Murad’s river flotilla. The leading scholars and clerics of the Azhar University, headed by the judge, represented the notables. The heads of the guilds and the chief merchants rounded out the council and represented the commercial interests of the city.
Before them all, Murad had laid out his strategy: to split their cavalry forces in two, with Ibrahim Bey and his men camped on the east bank of the Nile and Murad and Elfi on the west. This plan had immediately seemed disastrous to Elfi. In vain he had argued that they should mass all their forces on the far bank of the river, where they would have the advantage of forcing the French to cross over to meet them. Murad had dismissed this on the grounds that the French might advance along either bank or both at once. Elfi countered that any doubts regarding the direction from which the French were advancing could be settled by sending out Bedouin scouts. But Murad had remained immovable and maddeningly dismissive of the enemy’s forces. Elfi had even ridden back with Murad to his house at dawn to try to change his mind, but Murad had refused to see reason.
And this morning, as Elfi gave the order to his Mamlukes to prepare for battle and to gather at the Citadel, he was thinking that his oath of fealty to his former master might never cost him, or the city, dearer.
Sitt Nafisa heard Murad’s heavy tread on the stone steps leading to her rooms and dismissed her maids with a quick flicker of her fingers. Murad was in full battle regalia, splendidly attired in vivid tunic and pantaloons, his chest festooned with gold chains, his fingers encrusted with precious stones, bejewelled sword hanging at his side and burnished pistols tucked into his scarlet sash. Nafisa guessed that his shaved head must be perspiring under the turban, and that the sable-lined cloak over his shoulders must weigh on him unbearably in the July heat. The French consul Magallon – in the days when he and his wife used to call on Nafisa regularly – had once asked her why Mamlukes made themselves such a rich prize in battle, giving the enemy incentive to kill them expressly to pillage the corpses. ‘Truly, à la guerre comme à l’amour, hmm?’ Magallon had smiled quizzically. It was just the Mamluke custom, she had explained; they were a military caste. Perhaps it was their way of defying fate.
To a casual observer, Murad might not appear to be a man preoccupied by thoughts of an imminent meeting with destiny, but Nafisa could read him under his bluster. The scar from a sword slash across his face had turned livid, as it did whenever he was in the heat of argument or battle.
‘We set off from the Citadel at noon, and we will cross the river and wait for the French at Imbaba. Ibrahim Bey has already made camp on the eastern bank.’
Nafisa nodded. All morning she had heard the kettledrums booming and the shrill pipes playing as the cavalcade of horsemen pranced through the winding streets on their way uphill to the Citadel.
‘The French won’t reach Cairo.’ Murad’s red beard bristled like a burning bush. ‘They may have taken Alexandria, but they won’t reach Cairo, nevertheless you may leave if you wish. Ibrahim Bey is evacuating his women; you can join his train. I can spare a small Mamluke escort for you, and of course you can take your maids and eunuchs.’
‘I won’t leave Cairo, whatever happens. Who will be left if I do?’ She had been brought to Cairo as a two-year-old and sold into a great house; she remembered nothing else. ‘I know Ibrahim Bey’s daughter Adila will stay also, and many of the other women. Don’t worry, about us – this is not the Mongols sacking Baghdad. But I’ll move some of the coffers of coins and jewels to our other houses in Cairo for safe-keeping, just in case there is any lawlessness – or if we need to pay a ransom.’
He nodded. ‘Send some valuables to the Giza estate,’ he said, turning to go.
‘Wait. What about the European merchants? A mob might attack them; people are restless in the streets, and fear makes them dangerous. We should take the Europeans into our houses for protection.’
‘You and your precious Franj! It’s your friend Magallon who has been agitating for this war against us.’ He turned on his heel. ‘Take the Europeans into our houses if you want – you won’t have room for all of them.’
‘I’ll ask Sitt Adila to open her doors to them also; between us we can try to accommodate anyone who seeks refuge.’
‘Do as you please.’ Murad was already at the door, his mind on other matters. ‘May I next see your face in good health.’ He raised his hand in farewell.
As she heard the familiar formula of leave-taking, Nafisa shuddered with a premonition that she would not see his face again. She dismissed it instantly; she was not the type to heed such intuitions and she had much to do.
‘Bilsalama. Go with God, and return safely.’
Outside the window the murmur of the city was turning to a dull roar of alarm.
TWO
The Battle of the Pyramids
‘This was the first year of the fierce fights and important incidents, of the multiplication of malice and the acceleration of affairs; of successive sufferings and turning times.’
Abdel Rahman El-Jabarti’s Chronicles of Egypt,
15 June, 1798
‘Are you writing, child?’
Zeinab raised her head from the page and looked up at Shaykh Jabarti. How old was the venerable historian, she wondered. At least as old as her father, Shaykh Bakri, and he was two score years; she herself, at twelve, was her parents’ second youngest child and only unmarried daughter. As she was serving her father pomegranate juice one evening last month, he had suddenly looked at her and turned to her mother. ‘Is she a woman yet?’ he had asked. And her mother had blushed and murmured that she was indeed, had been for four cycles of the moon now.
‘Then we should get her married,’ her father had pronounced, pinching Zeinab’s cheek where it dimpled. ‘Let me think on it.’
Zeinab had wondered whom he might have in mind, and hoped it would not be someone as old as the man her sister had married. But of course her father had not had time to think on it, with the news of the English ships off Alexandria, and now the French advancing to the outskirts of Cairo.
Shaykh Jabarti’s dictation trailed off; he was staring out of the window and stroking his beard, a world away. Zeinab waited quietly, chewing on the end of the ribbon tied around her thick, long black plait. She bent over the silver bowl of rose-water set on the table in front of her and studied her wavering reflection. Like the princesses of fairy tales, her face was as round and white as the full moon, but her eyes were large and dark and her fine black brows arched over them like birds winging over a still pool in moonlight. She blew at the rose petals in the water and the image dissipated.
‘Are you writing, child?’ Shaykh Jabarti said again, absent-mindedly, and she picked up her quill and waited. She had a fine hand, and for that reason, and because he had tired eyes and preferred to dictate his chronicle, Shaykh Jabarti tolerated her presence as his pupil and scribe. It was very unusual for a girl to be so honoured, and in fact it had been her younger brother, originally, who had been sent to learn at Shaykh Jabarti’s feet, but her brother was only interested in spinning a wheel around a stick, as he was doing right now outside the window. It was Zeinab, sent with him as an afterthought, who had proved an apt pupil. She wondered how much longer her father would allow her to receive instruction from Shaykh Jabarti. Once she was married, of course, it would be out of the question.
She had heard that the French had brought a new invention that could make calligraphy and scribes obsolete, a machine that could make many, many copies. As they advanced south towards Cairo, they had distributed countless thousands of copies, in Arabic, of their chief general’s proclamation. Shaykh Jabarti was holding a copy at that very moment and snorting as he parsed the words for hidden meanings and for lapses in Arabic grammar and syntax.
‘Egyptians, they will tell you that I come to destroy your religion; it is a lie, do not believe it. Answer that I have come to restitute your rights, punish the usurpers; that I respect, more than the Mamlukes, God, his prophet Muhammad and the glorious Koran … Tell the people that we are true Muslims.’
‘Who translated this?’ Jabarti grumbled as he peered at the sheet in his hand, and continued reading.
Zeinab ventured a question. ‘My esteemed teacher, do you think these French are Muslim as they say?’
‘They say they agree with every religion in part, and with no religion in the whole, so they are opposed to both Christians and Muslims, and do not hold fast to any religion. In truth some hold their Christian faith hidden in their hearts, and there are some true Jews among them also. But for the most part they are materialists. They say the creed they follow is to make human reason supreme; each of them follows a religion which he contrives by the improvement of his own mind.’
Zeinab was distracted by a sudden swell of noise and ran to the window: a procession of dervishes and men in the robes of the Sufi orders were piping and drumming their way down the street. ‘Look, my teacher, they have brought down the Prophet’s banner from the Citadel!’
‘It is all done to calm the fears of the common people. Many were so alarmed they were prepared to flee, had the amirs not stopped them and rebuked them. The rabble would have attacked the homes of all the foreigners and Christians if the amirs had not prevented them; Sitt Nafisa and Sitt Adila took them into their houses.’
‘Surely the French will not reach Cairo?’ Zeinab was alarmed.
‘God alone knows. Murad Bey has had a heavy iron chain forged; it is stretched across the Nile at the narrowest point, to prevent the French ships from passing, while his own flotilla is moored below the chain. Ibrahim Bey and Murad Bey have assembled their troops and now sit in their respective camps across the river from each other, waiting for the French to arrive. Immovable as the Sphinx! Blinded in their arrogance!’ Suddenly aware of her alarm, the old man attempted to reassure her with a verse from the Koran: ‘Yet thy Lord would never destroy the cities unjustly, while as yet their people were putting things right. Amen.’
‘Amen,’ Zeinab repeated under her breath.
* * *
Nicolas Conté squinted in the sun as the Army of the Orient came to a halt along the western bank of the Nile and prepared to engage in the battle for Cairo. Ten thousand Mamlukes faced them on horseback, in full battle regalia, turbaned or helmeted, blazing in the sun with their muskets and lances, their splendid Arabians as richly caparisoned as the riders. The commanders flew back and forth along the lines, turning and wheeling their mounts on a hair, and brandishing their glittering sabres at the heavens.
‘There can be no finer animal than a Mamluke-trained horse,’ Dr Desgenettes observed, reining in his mount abreast with Nicolas.
‘A brave sight indeed,’ Conté concurred. ‘Let us take a moment to admire them before we cut them to pieces.’ He spoke with more bravado than he felt; the siege of Alexandria had been harder than anyone had anticipated, but it was the terrible, four-day forced march south across the desert with its sun of lead and its intolerable heat that had sapped every man’s strength and spirit. And the Bedouin! Even the most romantic among the French, thought Nicolas, even Geoffroy St-Hilaire, had lost all illusion about Rousseau’s Noble Savage. Like vultures, the Bedouin hovered on the horizon, ready to swoop down on stragglers who succumbed to heat, thirst, sunstroke or despair. There were many among the troops who took their own lives.
But now the ordeal of the desert march was behind them, and the great Army of the Orient was camped before the Nile at Imbaba in preparation for the Battle of the Pyramids, as Bonaparte referred to it.
‘Can one even see the pyramids from here?’ Dr Desgenettes remarked wryly to Nicolas. ‘But I admit it sounds a good deal more memorable than the Battle of Imbaba; our general ever has his eye on the history books.’
Ah yes, thought Conté, but what the history books would record about the French expedition to Egypt was yet to be written. Would this battle go down as the great triumph of the Army of the Orient? And what of his own epitaph, Nicolas-Jacques Conté, Chief Engineer and Commander of the Balloonist Brigade? Would it say that he had survived to see his native shore again one day, to be reunited with his sweet Lise, and his three children? He was a true son of the Revolution and the Republic, and as such he was not a praying man, but at times like these he almost wished he had faith.
‘Soldiers!’ Bonaparte raised his arm and every ear strained to hear him. ‘Go, and think that from the height of these monuments forty centuries observe us.’
At these words a great shout rang from the ranks and Nicolas’ heart leapt in his chest. As if at the signal, the Mamluke cavalry charged at a full gallop against the stationary and unshakeable square formation of the French infantry. The fantassins held their ground with supernatural discipline till at twenty paces Bonaparte gave the order to fire cannon and musket, and the first wave of the fine cavaliers fell. Amazingly, the next wave charged right behind them, but the carré held again, and the cannon fired again from the corners, and the Mamlukes were cut down again, and this went on until those that survived threw themselves in the river and tried to swim back to the opposite shore, where their confreres were massed, helpless to come to their succour. The French then turned their fire on the eastern bank.
Elfi felt the horse buckle under him as it was hit, and leapt free of the saddle before the beast hit the ground. It was the third horse that had been shot out from under him in this battle. As he landed, the bodies of men and horses beneath him broke his fall, and he lay motionless, concussion blanking out his mind.
When his senses returned, he knew time had passed, but he did not know how long. Hours? Minutes? It was dark. The din of the cannon had abated somewhat and seemed further off, as if directed at the eastern shore; or perhaps the blood in his ears and eyes was dulling his perception. He was bleeding profusely from his head, but head wounds tended to bleed disproportionately; he worried more about the wounds to his right hand and his thigh. He was in no immediate agony, so he did not think he had broken any bones. His sense of smell was undiminished, and the stench of the slaughterhouse made him retch; in all his years, he had not experienced carnage on such a massive scale.
Then he heard them – the buzzards who circled after any battle, come to pick the corpses clean of booty. If they found him alive, they would kill him. If he played dead, they would cut off his fingers for the rings, slash off his ears, then kill him anyway. He began to crawl on knees and elbows over the corpses, towards the river that was now a blazing lake of fire. Either the French had set light to Murad’s river flotilla, or Murad himself had given Papas Oglu the order to burn his ships as they retreated. As Elfi watched, the fire reached the gunpowder magazines and before his eyes the ships exploded like a thousand fireworks, sailors throwing themselves into the river in a bid to escape. Still, he slithered on his belly over the foul, blood-slick matting of human and animal dead and dying, towards the flaming water.
He did not look at the bodies he crawled over. Some of the fallen may have been his khushdash, men he had grown up with, like Tambourji and Bardissi … or they may have been his own Mamlukes and kashifs, boys he had raised to manhood, trained, manumitted, married to his slave girls and set up in fine houses. Elfi did not spare them a downward look or a moment’s prayer; there would be time for mourning, later – if he survived.
He reached the bank and unbuckled his belt and removed his scabbard and the pistols tucked into his sash; the firearms would be useless once wet. He took off his tunic and his soft leather boots, all his clothing but his shirt and pantaloons. He unwound his turban and ripped off strips of it to bandage the wounds on his head and hand and thigh. He removed his rings, the other jewels on his person, and his dagger, wrapping them carefully in the folds of the remaining length of his turban and tying the ends around his middle. Then, taking a deep breath, he slid into the water as smoothly as a crocodile.
His only chance would be to swim downriver and resurface as far from the scavengers as possible; assuming he could avoid being shot out of the water by snipers on the banks, or being caught in the floating flames. He was less concerned about crocodiles this far downriver. Elfi took another deep breath and filled his lungs. Perhaps, he thought, some alignment of his stars had kept him practising the art of holding his breath underwater for as long as a hawk took to circle seven times. The time had come when he would be tested. He plunged further into the black water.
From the city beyond the flames a terrible wailing rose in the smoky air and rolled across the water like thunder.
Zeinab’s fingers trembled so much she couldn’t manage to hook the loops around the gold-braid buttons of her tunic. Her wet-nurse was having almost as much trouble trying to dress Zeinab’s younger brother, who was whining and snivelling into his nightshirt; he had been asleep when the nurse had come into their room in the middle of the night. Zeinab herself had been wide-eyed, kept wakeful by the sound of the cannons in the distance, and then, even more terrifying, the wailing as the people of Bulaq and the bank of the Nile surged towards the city.
‘God preserve us, God preserve us!’ the nurse repeated. ‘Sitt Zeinab, hurry! They say the French have set fire to Bulaq and that the vanguard has reached the Iron Gate! They say they are burning and killing and raping women! God only knows. Your father says we must leave, we must leave right away. He is trying to find donkeys for us, but every donkey and horse in the city has already been commandeered. What will become of us?’
By dawn donkeys had been bought, at an exorbitant price, to carry Zeinab and her mother and youngest brother; the men and the servant girls would have to walk. Shaykh Bakri had stayed behind, heading for the Azhar where the ulema had congregated.
Zeinab looked around her as they tried to thread their way through the thronged streets; it seemed as if all the citizens of Cairo were on the move, most on foot, carrying what they could. As their slow procession approached the outer gates of the city they were met by a terrible sight: people returning, wailing, bloody, half-naked, the women tearing their hair and screaming: ‘The Bedouin! The Bedouin! They fell upon us as soon as we left the city walls. Turn back! Turn back!’
‘Bring me my jewellery coffer.’
‘Sitt Nafisa?’ Fatoum looked up from brushing Nafisa’s hair. The maid’s consternation was apparent. ‘Shouldn’t we be hiding the jewellery?’
‘No, fetch it as soon as you finish dressing me.’ If she was to meet the emissary of the French, she wanted to inspire respect for who she was: Murad’s wife and Ali’s widow. Human nature being universal, she knew that an appeal to esteem and cupidity would be a more reliable card than appealing to pity. But what cards were left for her to play in the face of this overwhelming defeat? Her mind buzzed like a trapped bee. What would the French exact of her? How did they mean to deal with her and with the wives and children of the amirs? The worst fears of the city had been laid to rest the morning after the battle when it transpired that the French had not burned and pillaged the eastern shore; it was the fire on the ships that had given rise to that rumour.
But where was Murad? She made an effort to concentrate on her dressing. She stepped into the rose pantaloons Fatoum held out for her, then slipped the embroidered violet tunic over her sheer white chemise and let the girl tie a rose-and-gold sash round her waist, cinching it in. Nafisa smoothed her thick braid over one shoulder and fixed a small toque on her head, then let a filmy veil float down over it.
‘Sitt Nafisa, the jewellery.’
‘Let me see.’
She rifled through the tooled leather casket the maid held before her, selecting two thick ropes of pearls and winding them around her neck. She picked two ruby drop-earrings and threaded the fine gold hoops through her earlobes, then slipped the matching bracelet and ring on one hand, and an emerald-and-diamond bracelet on the other wrist. She hesitated, then carefully took a large yellow diamond ring out of a velvet pouch and slipped it on her middle finger; it was as big as a pigeon’s egg and sparkled like the sun reflecting off ice.
She wondered if the looters who had raided Murad’s house in Qawsun had found the coffer her eunuch had hidden under the planks of the second-floor loggia. Ibrahim Bey’s house in Qawsun had been raided too, and several houses belonging to the other amirs, abandoned in their rout.
She had had no word from Murad, but he was alive, that much she knew. The servants on their estate in Giza had reported that their master had appeared and disappeared like a whirlwind, dismounting barely long enough to snatch up the coffers of treasure hidden for that eventuality – and then he was gone.
For the last time, but not the first, she allowed herself a moment of regret. Regret that Murad had not turned out to be the worthy heir of Ali Bey the Great that she had hoped he would become, with her help, when she married him. Seeing in Murad an energetic, domineering temperament that brooked no rival, she had chosen him for a mate. But his instinct to dominate others was not matched by the ability or the judgment to govern them. In their years together, she had learned to handle him with the finesse of a spider weaving a web, but he was ever conscious of the long shadow of Ali Bey. Sensing that he did not measure up to her first husband, he became bitter and intractable, resentful of her interference.
Shaking off that final moment of regret, Nafisa got to her feet. The emissary of the French was at her door. General Bonaparte had sent his own stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, as a gesture of goodwill.
With as convincing a show of calm as she could muster, Nafisa waited for him to come up to the second floor reception hall. She had ordered the finest Bukhara carpets laid on the stone floor and the most sumptuous, gold-embroidered silk pillows spread over the wooden banquettes. Within a few moments she heard a springy step on the staircase; her first impression was of a smooth-cheeked boy in skin-tight breeches and a short, close-fitting blue coat. He hesitated for no more than a moment before advancing towards her.