Tim Severin - Corsair

Hasem brought his camel to a halt. Dismounting, he led Hector to where the young man lay face down. The killers had stripped him bare. Blood had crusted black where there was a spear wound in his back. ‘Is this the man you were expecting?’ asked Hasem. ‘Yes,’ answered Hector. He felt sick to the stomach that his plan for the ambush had provoked such a disaster. ‘We came across the body by accident when we were tracking the Labdessah,’ said the Tooarick. ‘They caught him, and then will have taken his camels.’

‘What should we do now?’ asked Hector. There was a lump in his throat, and he was at a loss.

‘We bury him. Then we leave without delay.’ He saw that Hector was dazed.

‘Later you can grieve. Allah has relieved your friend of his burden.’

TWENTY-TWO

‘SIDI HASEM says that his group are already dangerously far out of their own territory. They were on a tribal raid and must withdraw before the Labdessah learn they are here,’ Hector informed his friends after he had rejoined them and told them of Ibrahim’s murder.

‘Can they help us rejoin the coffle?’ asked Bourdon. He was looking hopefully at the Tooaricks’ camels.

Hector shook his head.

‘We’ll never catch up. The caravan’s three days ahead of us. Old Abdullah won’t know what has happened, and the merchants certainly won’t turn back. They will presume that we were all killed by the Tooarick. That will make them travel away from us even faster, to save their own skins.’

‘So what do you suggest?’

‘Sidi Hasem is the denim, the leader of the raid,’ Hector answered. ‘He offered to carry us back to the Wadelim camp.’

‘And what do we do when we get there?’

‘He knows about the great river where the foreign men come with their ships. Every year the Wadelim send someone to a native market near the river to trade ostrich feathers and tree gum for blue cloth. This man could bring us there if we gave him a suitable present. Hasem didn’t mention the price or whom he had in mind as our guide, but I suspect he means he himself would take us if we gave him one of our muskets.’

‘Sounds like a bargain to me.’ Bourdon had experienced more than enough of the desert.

‘Saying that, Hasem and his men are carrying only enough water for themselves. With four more men, double-mounted on the camels, he warns it will not be comfortable as we have to travel fast.’

‘Can’t be much worse than what we’ve endured on the galleys,’ Bourdon declared confidently.

He was much less complacent six hours later when the Wadelim made a brief halt to roast strips of dried meat over a tiny campfire made from pellets of camel dung. The Frenchman lay on the ground, complaining bitterly that a camel’s bony rump had worn holes in the skin of his thighs and buttocks. The Wadelim had ridden at a fast trot, and Hector and his companions had clung on as best they could, using makeshift stirrups the desert people had fashioned for them from strips of cloth. But it had been an agonising experience, splay-legged, jolted on the camel’s spine and rattled against the wood and leather backrest of the Tooarick saddle.

‘Ask them what we will do when the water runs out,’ Bourdon asked with a groan. Hector relayed the answer with a mischievous grin. ‘Sidi Hasem says that when we are really thirsty, we drink camel’s urine.’

Fortunately the water ration held up long enough for the party to reach the Wadelim camp three painful days later. As they rode to the cluster of skin and wool tents hidden in a fold in the ground, Hasem warned Hector and his companions not to be seen staring at the flocks of long-legged goats grazing among the rocks and scrub nearby. The Wadelim believed that strangers brought the evil eye.

‘We don’t have to stay for long,’ Hector reassured Karp when the clan’s children ran away screaming from poor Karp with his ravaged face. They were convinced that he was a yenun, one of the grotesque evil spirits who emerged from the desert in human form to harm them.

‘Something has been puzzling me ever since we ambushed the Labdessah,’ Hector continued. ‘I never heard your gun go off, even though you were close by. And afterwards you did not need to reload. You never fired a shot at the camel rider, even though he was a mortal enemy. Yet when we hunted the ostrich, you hit your mark every time.’

Karp looked back at him. His face was strained.

Hector went on, ‘You have no need to worry, Karp. I also remembered the time we trapped Chabrillan, the man who had caused you so much pain and grief. You attacked him under the city wall and nearly strangled him. Yet afterwards you cried. Was it because you were ashamed of your violence?’

Karp nodded. Now his expression was one of release. It was as though he was being relieved of a burden.

‘You don’t believe in violence, do you? It is part of your religion, something that you believe in profoundly. That is what you preached in Kandia when you joined Chabrillan’s men when they fought the Turks. That is why you suffered all that time on the galley, and you never tried to expose the Chevalier. You did not want revenge. You believe in peace and forgiveness.’

Tears had filled Karp’s eyes.

Hector felt a surge of admiration. ‘Karp,’ he said, ‘you are a good man. It is my duty to tell the others that we cannot expect you to help us if we must fight our way to get clear of Moulay Ismail. But as long as I lead our little band, you will continue to be one of us.’

Sidi Hasem was so eager to earn his payment of a musket that the travellers stayed only long enough for him to assemble a consignment of trade goods. Then he led them southward, at a more sedate pace this time and with one man to a camel. They crossed a dreary flat countryside where the sun had baked the reddish brown soil as hard as marble. At night they camped under the sky or they stayed with other small groups of nomads friendly to the Wadelim who greeted them with bowls of zrig, camel milk mixed with water. Gradually the countryside became less austere. There were low hills and the occasional dry riverbed where, by digging in the gravel, they found a seep of water for their camels. Later they came across small wells. The shafts were dug so deep that they had to climb down wooden ladders to clear away a surface layer of blown dust and camel dung before they could fill their leather buckets. Finally they began to arrive at settlements, no more than a dozen or so mud huts which marked the outer fringes of the desert. Instead of zrig, they were given bowls of porridge made from millet. They had reached the land of cultivators. There, at a village known to Hasem, they left behind their camels and rode forward on donkeys, always heading towards the great river which now had a name. The local people called it the Wadnil.

The countryside continued to grow more luxuriant. They began to pass fields of grain guarded by old men and small boys who chased away flocks of thieving birds. There was pasture and woodland and herds of cattle. The people changed too. They were many more, living in village after village of round straw-thatched huts, and their appearance was very different from the sinewy, olive-skinned desert people. They were taller, loose-limbed and wore their wiry hair piled up on the top of their head in the shape of a pointed cap. Instead of flowing loose robes, the common folk dressed in no more than a small loincloth, and their women went bare-breasted, often with a baby slung on their back – a sight Hector had never seen before. As the travellers came closer to the river, more and more of the people they encountered were a deep midnight black, and their skins glistened for they loved to wash, then oil their bodies.