A Kind of Courage Read online

  And, thank God, he thought fervently, that time wasn’t far distant. The evacuation had been hanging over them now for weeks. A provisional date had even been fixed and the removal of stores had already commenced.

  But Hahdhdhah was no sinecure. Fox had once suggested that it had been thrown up by a cross-eyed water-carrier with a penchant for treachery, and he was probably right. It was badly planned and badly sited and had been built in the days when it had been felt that a solitary fortress was sufficient to keep a whole countryside in check. It was hideously and hopelessly out of date – a wide but shabby stone-and-wood square surrounding a few thatched-roof mud huts. There were quarters for the men and the native and white officers and NCOs, a store, a gaol and an armoury and four wooden towers to look out over the plain. And apart from a bazaar, stables, stores and a Toweida brothel outside, that was about the lot. Whitewash and sweeping brushes had done wonders with it, but it was still not a place to keep a countryside under surveillance.

  It had been built by the present Sultan of Khalit’s grandfather – long after the treaty with the British had established the frontier along the Dharwa Hills. In one of his minor wars with the northern peoples, to his surprise he had been more successful than anyone had expected and had thrust his territory outwards, erecting Hahdhdhah Fort as a symbol of his strength and as a warning to the Khusar tribes.

  Modern weapons had ended all that, however, and for years Hahdhdhah had been nothing more than a storehouse and training station for the northern units of the Sultan’s roving frontier regiments and the Toweida and Juf Levies he used north of the Dharwas – supplying them with the not-very-new machine guns, rifles and mortars which were really all that were of much use among the year-gashed hills and mountains along the border of the Sultanate.

  Once, Hahdhdhah had guarded the camel route, but these days camels had given place to lorries, and the flavour of decay which was obvious everywhere on the coast was even clearer in Hahdhdhah, because no one believed in the frontier any more.

  The feeling of the approaching end was obvious even in the attitudes of the Toweida Levies who, for the most part, made up the garrison of Hahdhdhah. Stiffened by eighty men of the Dharwa Scouts, reliable Khaliti men from the mountains to the south, the Toweida Levies were neither good soldiers nor enthusiastic supporters of the Sultanate.

  ‘Ethnically, they’re as Hejri as the Khusar hill tribesmen,’ Pentecost had been told at Dhafran as he had left for the north. ‘Only the Sultan’s war made them anything else.’

  They were shabby, ignorant and dirty; careless with their weapons and even more careless with their hygiene so that when Pentecost had arrived there had been a sick bay full of sullen men.

  ‘They look to me, sir,’ Fox had commented, ‘as though they’re not fit to be commanded by a dustcart driver.’

  Pentecost had nodded gravely, unsmiling. From that moment, as he had well known, he had been on his own. Sultan Tafas, down in Khaswe, was far more concerned with other matters and was still desperately hoping that the discovery of oil in his territory might help subdue with a sudden influx of wealth the unruly elements that caused him so many sleepless nights. But, with the aid of two other British officers, Captain George Gould Lack and Captain James Frederick Minto, and three sergeants, Pentecost had managed to bring the hygiene into line, had emptied the sick bay and had even managed to give, by means of drill and a lot of patient good nature, the men under his command a little pride in themselves. Under the high scream of commands from Fox, who was his acting sergeant-major, Sergeant Stone and Sergeant Chestnut, the garrison had actually begun to look like a command fit to be led by a major.

  Not that Pentecost was really a major at all. He was actually a junior captain who had been given a temporary step-up in rank on his attachment two years before to the Khaliti army. Under the terms of the treaty, while British troops were not allowed north of the Dharwas into the disputed Toweida Plain, officers and NCOs could be seconded to the border forces, ostensibly for training and instruction, and to help them exert their authority, the appointments carried extra rank. Lack, who was there for no other reason than to superintend the removal of the ageing arms that filled the armoury, and Minto, who had been encouraged to apply for the attachment to Khalit because he had already spent most of his career being sent on courses to get him out of his colonel’s hair, were really only lieutenants. Sergeant Fox, Sergeant Chestnut and Sergeant Stone – known as the Holy Trinity or Animal, Vegetable and Mineral – had also been upped in rank to make them the superiors of the native troops they were to command.

  Staring at the hills, Pentecost found he wasn’t sorry to be leaving. He was a modest, not-too-clever young man who liked to read poetry and modestly didn’t consider himself especially brave or even especially good at his job. But, at that moment, despite his anxieties, he was feeling rather pleased with himself. Life had not been worth living in Hahdhdhah when he’d arrived, and his troops had tended to hug the shelter of the walls with the tenacity of men who were fond of life. He had changed all that. Zaid Fauzan, the oldest of the Toweida officers, a grizzled warrior who was a Dharwa, anyway, and claimed to be fifty-three though he was probably sixty-three, was a born soldier, and having at last found someone to follow, he had backed Pentecost up to the hilt.

  He and Fox had started football matches between the Toweidas and the Dharwas, and between the native clerks, drivers and store-men and the Hahdhdhah villagers – since they all played in bare feet there was little need for equipment – and Pentecost had even taken the chance of allowing the men into the village. This had particularly pleased Int-Zaid Mohamed, one of the junior Khaliti officers, because his wife came from the area and she’d moved up with her daughter to a house near to the drab huddle of buildings across the plain. In a very short time there had been a marked difference in the bearing of the garrison. Although their uniforms were still falling off their backs and their German leather equipment was never complete, and though Fox, Chestnut and Stone had always seemed to concentrate their efforts only on teaching them how to make tea according to the exacting standards of the British Army, they had become – if not expert – at least sound with their weapons.

  Pentecost had deserved his success. And, though he didn’t know it at that moment, he was to be presented with an enormous stroke of luck.

  4

  Hahdhdhah village was a drab place built of mud brick on high earth mounds with a few palm gardens. The narrow streets were shaded with an occasional tamarisk or cypress, and a few melons, marrows, cucumbers, grapes and tobacco were grown, m addition to withered oranges and the inevitable dates. Once Hahdhdhah had been much bigger but, with the constant danger from the north, the families had moved away. Some of the houses had crumbled and some of the palm gardens were neglected, but there were still enough sullen villagers clinging to their scrap of soil to support the fort with eggs, vegetables, goats’ milk and fresh meat.

  The Toweidas were an indifferent people, however – the very opposite of the leaner northern tribes – and they knew that so long as they expressed no opinions and did no more than charge excessive prices for their produce, no raiding Hejri reim would ever blame them. As a result, the place was a hotbed of spies and Aziz kept men there to watch the movements in the fort.

  Since, however, the information about Aziz that reached Pentecost was always sparse, Pentecost himself had fallen into the habit of making a regular visit to the village elders. It was always ceremonial and the headman always offered a seat on his carpets, and coffee or mint tea in the mud-washed huts. But while they talked over the charcoal braziers, Pentecost was able to keep his eyes open, watching for anything that might indicate that Aziz was taking the initiative. And on this particular day, with the evacuation of Hahdhdhah presumably not far in the future, he noticed at once the three lean pale-eyed men standing quietly in the shade of the trees not far from the coffee mortars. Though their cloaks were not black and they kept their tribal beads covered, he knew instinctiv
ely that they were Zihouni reims.

  It was while he still watched the three men that Fox appeared with the news that there had been an accident.

  ‘One of our chaps?’ Pentecost asked.

  ‘No, sir.’ In front of the headman, Fox was the picture of punctilio. ‘One of theirs. Knocked down. Broke his leg. Bloody fool didn’t look where he was driving.’

  This had all the makings of trouble and Pentecost drew his breath in sharply.

  ‘Our vehicle?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir.’ Fox grinned, knowing exactly how Pentecost’s mind was working. ‘Village bus.’

  Pentecost smiled his relief He knew the vehicle. It moved about as fast as an elderly camel, was appallingly maintained and worn out before its time. Its load invariably exceeded the maximum permitted weight by a great deal, which made it even less manageable on the steep slopes down to Dhafran, and the excess of parcels, boxes, bundles, sacks, bales and trussed goats crammed on top made it into a vast, unstable, up-ended pyramid that wobbled, wavered and wandered as its uncertain wheels and even more uncertain tyres jolted and lurched over the rocky road.

  ‘That’s a bit of luck, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What happened to the driver?’

  ‘He was carried away unconscious.’ Fox grinned. ‘I think the victim had a lot of friends.’

  ‘And the victim?’

  Fox looked sideways at him. ‘I slapped a guard over him so they couldn’t take him away,’ he said. ‘He puzzled me, sir. He’s only a kid and he told Ali, the interpreter, that he came up from the Sufeiya area to help his uncle grow marrows. Personally, sir, I think he’s a bloody liar.’

  Pentecost nodded. He had a great regard for Fox’s judgement. ‘I’d better have a word with him,’ he said.

  There was nothing about the boy with the broken leg to appeal much to Pentecost. He was inclined to be pernickety about manners and the boy was surly, his thin lips twisted with pain and scorn. He wore a neat braided djellabah and gave his name as Ghani and insisted once more that he was a grower of marrows. One of the Hahdhdhahi market gardeners was prepared to swear that he was his cousin but Pentecost’s suspicions, like Fox’s, were aroused when the boy was unable to answer, without prompting, questions about his family.

  ‘Think he’s spying for Aziz?’ he asked Fox quietly.

  ‘That’s exactly what I think, sir,’ Fox said.

  Pentecost nodded. The boy certainly had an arrogant manner that no Toweida possessed, and there was an air about him that seemed to suggest he might be even more than just a Hejri scout.

  ‘Tell ’em we’ll take him back to the fort,’ he said briskly. ‘Tell ’em I’m afraid one of these Hahdhdhahi quacks might set the bone wrongly and we wish to help. Among other things, Mr Minto’s taken a pretty solid course in first aid.’

  When the interpreter explained to the Toweida who claimed to be the boy’s uncle what Pentecost intended to do, he immediately flew into a noisy panic. He would look after the boy, he said wildly. He would see that he was cared for. He was not a poor man and he would fly like the Prophet’s horse to fetch a healer he knew who had a knowledge of medicine. Pentecost’s smile never slipped.

  ‘Game little beggar, isn’t he?’ he observed to Fox. ‘Hejri agent, shouldn’t wonder.’

  The Toweida’s voice rose shrilly but Pentecost persisted gently. ‘I have learned the ways of the tribes,’ he said calmly, ‘and if the bone is wrongly set, it would not be at all odd for a stupid boy to dig into the flesh with his knife, find it and break it again to reset it. We will take care of him. It is a gesture of friendship between my nation and thine.’

  They lifted the boy into the lorry and almost at once the three lean-faced men with the hostile eyes vanished. The crowd closed over the spot where they had stood like water closing over a thrown pebble so that there was no sign that they had ever existed. A few moments later they heard the thud of a horse’s hooves.

  ‘One of those hungry-looking bastards has hopped it, sir,’ Fox commented.

  Like the Toweida, the boy protested loudly but by this time he was so weak with pain he was almost indifferent to what happened to him, and, back at the fort, Minto set the leg quickly. Whatever else there was about Minto, he took the courses he’d been sent on seriously, and he knew what he was doing.

  He watched the boy carefully, a shy young man with a stammer that grew worse when he was excited or animated. Like the rest of them, he was with the Khaliti forces because of the extra emoluments that were added to his British Army Pay and because he couldn’t face the horrors of peacetime soldiering in Europe. But for all his shyness, he was sharp-eyed and he noticed that Pentecost fussed round in his prim neat manner to make sure the boy was comfortable and properly cared for by the indifferent orderly, in a way he didn’t do even for the Toweidas under his command.

  ‘Perhaps Billy’s got his eye on him,’ Lack observed with a grin. ‘It’s this randy-making climate. If I don’t get a woman soon, I’ll be chasing you round the ramparts, Freddy, old boy. It gets us all. They tell me even old Fauzan’s got his favourites.’

  Minto smiled uncertainly, never knowing how to reply to Lack’s extrovert vulgarity. He even wondered nervously if he could possibly be right about Pentecost because Pentecost was a strange private sort of individual – a very odd pair of boots.

  Within a day or two, however, he was reporting his own suspicions in the bare whitewashed cell that served Pentecost for an office.

  ‘I don’t know who this kid is you brought in, Billy,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think he’s a Toweida at all.’

  Pentecost smiled. ‘Neither do I,’ he admitted.

  ‘He’s no pauper, either,’ Minto went on earnestly. ‘And he’s no grower of marrows. He wouldn’t know a marrow from a barrage balloon.’

  ‘I don’t think he even comes from the Toweida Plain,’ Pentecost said. ‘I think he’s from north of the hills.’

  The boy remained in the fortress, not a prisoner but always discreetly watched by a Dharwa Scout to see that he didn’t escape. Pentecost was well aware that if he could prove the boy was a spy he was entitled to put him in the dungeon. According to the Sultan’s law that he administered, he could even have the boy shot if he felt like it. His word on the Toweida Plain was final, and, though he was nothing more than a mere attachment from the British Army, no one would have quibbled about a thing like that. Hejri spies had been imprisoned and shot before by Khaliti troops anxious to repay a few old debts.

  For a long time, nothing happened, and Pentecost found he was waiting for something to happen.

  He conducted his affairs quietly, and sent his command about its business, one eye always on the hills, the other on the road across the plain. His orders from the south, in an attempt to avoid trouble, had always been irksome in the extreme. Across the Toweida Plain, they couldn’t question any party of less than ten men unless they were armed and off the path. And as the paths were often impossible to discern at a distance and the Hejri clothing made the concealment of weapons always very simple, the danger inherent in this restriction was immense, and Pentecost had lost more than one careless Toweida as a result.

  Occasionally he talked to the boy from the village. Occasionally he questioned him. Occasionally the suspicion broke down and the boy’s scowl gave way to a wary smile, but still he stuck to his story that he was the nephew of the Toweida marrow-grower and had come north from the Sufeiya River area to help his uncle and to find a bride for himself.

  Lack’s attitude was full of scorn. He was less experienced in Hejri ways and didn’t like Hahdhdhah. ‘I’d pull the plug on him,’ he said firmly. ‘You’ll probably find the little bastard’ll nip away when you’re not looking, and then you’ll have put up a black that won’t look so hot in your file. Send him down to Dhafran and let them deal with him.’

  Pentecost ignored the advice and exactly one week later he was awakened from his sleep at first light by a startled Sergeant Fox.

  ‘Sir, there’s a bloody
great crowd of blokes outside,’ he said.

  Pentecost blinked himself to full consciousness. ‘What sort of blokes?’ he asked gravely. ‘Toweidas? Khaliti? A column from Dhafran, perhaps, bearing messages that it’s time to shut up shop and go home?’

  Fox grinned. ‘None of them, sir. They’re Hejris.’

  ‘Hejris?’ Pentecost sat bolt upright. ‘Hejris?’ he said again.

  When Hejris appeared outside the fortress it was time to be worried. They had plotted, intrigued and murdered for generations to get back the disputed land north of the Sufeiya River and were to be trusted about as far as you could trust a homicidal lunatic armed with a cleaver.

  He was reaching for his clothes now. ‘What are they doing?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Pentecost stared at Fox. For a Hejri to sit outside the hated fortress of Hahdhdhah doing nothing seemed about as normal as a cow circling in orbit.

  Fox looked puzzled. ‘That’s what gets me, sir,’ he said. ‘They’re just sitting there, waiting.’

  ‘What for?’

  Fox gave a wry smile. ‘We haven’t found out yet, sir. We’ve not really established contact.’

  Pentecost lit a cigarette and beamed at Fox in the precise manner of a clever prefect at school talking to a dim small boy. ‘Then it’s time we did, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Tell ’em not to go away.’

  Fox grinned. ‘I’ll suggest coffee, sir.’

  Ten minutes later, Pentecost had shaved and dressed and was walking to the wooden tower near the great barred gate that was closed every evening at sundown – less to keep anyone from getting in to steal the store of elderly and valueless armaments that were his care and concern than to stop the Toweida Levies getting out to stir up trouble among the Hahdhdhahi women in the village.