“Well Colonel?” The pretender to the throne and the leader of his ‘army’ were looking down from the scarp to the narrow valley which led, eventually, to the sea. Beside the Wadi below them, lay the yellow-red sandstone fortress that was their destination. Zwing, the minor sultanate that controlled the trade route to and from the sea to the interior. Beyond the dry hills that were more like huge, stable sand dunes, lay the fertile lands of larger sultanates. They needed this trade route to export their dates; and more recent discoveries of opals and emeralds. There were few enough of these, it wasn’t a rich seam, but it had meant that Zwing had become a bottle neck in this export trade. Imports of wine (forbidden to ordinary believers, but tolerated for their rulers, apparently), guns, and other luxuries from the unbelieving Northern nations, also relied upon the vagaries of the sultan. He made enemies.

Slaves were no longer exported, it being less politically correct in the enlightened Victorian era, but the white slave trade still thrived as a hidden risk of sailing too close to the shore on this coast. Male black slaves were still enthusiastically purchased from the south, from African tribes and transported to the mines and fields of the sultanates, and often worked to death in an uneconomically short time. One or two of the rulers were starting to realise that the investment of buying a muscular body for labour would pay better dividends if they were fed better, worked less hard, and therefore lived longer. Others still held to the old ways of ‘it worked for my father, so I’ll carry on with the same approach’.

What did become clear was that the Sultan of Zwing was impeding the economy of the interior. He charged unreasonably large tariffs on goods. Attempts to find other routes, East through the Mountains of the Moon for example, had failed. The mountains were inhospitable and occupied by wild people who attacked the caravans simply because they could. The one venture to find a route South, had never been heard from again, not a soul had returned. Venturing through the hinterland that supplied so many slaves was bound to offer too good an opportunity for revenge.

Like a microcosm of world power politics, therefore, the erstwhile competitors had come together and agreed that the tax bottle neck of Zwing needed to be adjusted. It would not do for any of the five southerly Sultans and Sheiks to take over; they all knew that whoever did that would become a hated and venal enemy to be destroyed. The Wars of Succession in the past had educated them. It was an unusual, perhaps unique, fact that these people had actually learned something from past history and opted not to repeat the mistake. This was where Cambridge educated Ahmed Mohammed came in to the story.

The son of one of the lesser wives of Sultan Abdul ben Abdul; he had been, briefly, the heir apparent to the sultanate of Zwing. His mother had been a good wife – which is to say an energetic and willing wife in bed. She had accepted positions that were forbidden by their religion, arguing that she was bound to her earthly husband by a rule of obedience. When he had brought her in to share his bed with his older wife, she had put on a show with her that had driven him to distraction. It was not long before she began to be the favourite, if not officially ‘first wife’. But the older, wiser, slyer, wife had arranged to marry her daughter to Ahmed of Canara, the sultan’s vizier. Ahmed Mohammed had been packed off to England to get an education and not returned to his own country for ten years. Meanwhile the old sultan had died mysteriously (in other words, he had been poisoned), the vizier had assumed the ‘governorship’, and his son had inherited the position and taken the title of sultan.

None of this would have concerned anybody, if he had been a good, wise, ruler. But he raised taxes, increased tariffs and generally acted like every other despot in the region, but a little worse. It was all comparative. In a world of slaves and whippings, beheadings and brutality, Sultan Ahmed bin Ahmed had shown himself to be slightly less extreme than his grandfather; but then his grandfather had been establishing control, ensuring all opposition was destroyed. And it was true that Ahmed had ridden with his adoptive father to quell rebelling tribesmen, he wasn’t some lazy, palace-bound, spoilt prince (which was not an ameliorating argument that could be made for his son). But he was greedy. Determined to outdo his father for opulence, the raised taxes had been spent on rebuilding the palace inside his fortress. It was impressive, it’s true; perhaps there was an element of jealousy, too, in the inland sultans’ decision to support a usurper.

It was true that Ahmed Mohammed had a true claim to the ‘throne’, but no-one would have cared if there hadn’t been self-interest involved. Britain agreed to transport him to the country – to undermine the increasing influence the French were achieving in the region. The Sultan of Brenchat gave him a hundred ancient muskets as a sign of friendship – a gift that could be disavowed if necessary – he had tried sending opals on the southern route out of his kingdom and was angry and blamed Zwing for the loss (on the grounds that he wouldn’t have had to do it if Ahmed bin Ahmed had been more reasonable). Some men were loaned from other sultanates – a two-edged sword if their loyalty remained with their original owners. Since they were all slaves, Ahmed Mohammed was easily able to buy their loyalty by promising the one thing they all craved – a return to their homelands as free men if they helped him. So the stage was set, his small army was starting to form.

What he needed was a general. That was where Colonel Tibbert came in. Colonel was really an honorary title. He had left the Indian Army as a major.

He and Darcy (Lord Darcy of Chipping Norton) had started at Lowcross on the same day. If that was enough to create a friendship, finding that the two of them were both keen to take an army career – in a Quaker school where the military were not generally well-regarded – threw them together into mutual support of their life choices. Darcy’s family had the ability to acquire for him a commission; Tibbert’s had neither money nor connections, so he joined the Indian Army (only recently brought under Her Majesty’s direct control after having been a private army run by the East India Company for many years) as a subaltern, earned respect for his actions at Tingbadab, acquired a captaincy for his heroism at Magrib, and earned the jealousy of his colleagues by being favoured by the Nahwab of Salou. He was a good soldier, perhaps not a brilliant one, but he was clever and imaginative – which were not attributes in abundance in the British Imperial Army. To stop him from showing them up too much, his fellow officers engineered that he became the military attache to the Nahwab of Salou, which required that he was made up to a major, but got him out of the way.

Tall – six foot two inches – blond, handsome and good company, his other salient attribute would be his undoing. Discovered by one of the Nahwab’s eunuchs in a compromising position with one of the Nahwab’s younger wives (who had been attracted by the tall, good looking British officer who strode around the palace) – that is to say, the young wife was naked, on her back, with her legs wrapped around a similarly naked young man, delighting in his eight inch prick opening her wider and deeper than the Nahwab’s less than impressive five inches had ever managed to do – Tibby, as he was affectionately known by friends – had to make a demeaning naked dash for his horse and ride away bare back and bare-arsed to save himself from losing his eight inches and more. The young lady had not such a successful future, being divided into four and distributed to the four corners of the small kingdom.

The Nahwab made it clear to the British regime that he expected the officer to be returned for punishment. No matter what their crime, no true British officer however low-born could be surrendered to a native for punishment no matter how high-born. A British white man always trumped a brown skinned Indian, Tibby was already on the boat home when the body of the mother of the young wife was pulled out of the garrison well where it had been dumped (the Nahwab was not a forgiving man). The British, instead, overran the Nahwab’s lands and ceded them to the glorious Empire, which was clearly a better solution (for Britain).

So Major Tibbert returned to Britain in disgrace, and the British Army closed ranks. It wasn’t the unfortunate, embarrassing story of why he left India that prevented them giving him a place; it was the fact of him being in the Indian Army. That he had combat experience, and had shown particular skills that few British Army younger sons of nobility knew nor cared about, all counted for nothing. He was only Indian Army and that counted little in Britain.

He served with Cochrane in South America for a period, but they began to fall out over tactics and who got the most prize money. After around eighteen months, he sailed a captured Spanish ship back to Britain and met his old school friend Major Darcy of the third Dragoon Lights (Heavy Brigade) – one of those confusing names that the British excelled at - who had heard of the suggested undermining of French influence at Zwing. Darcy had heard of this from his father, who had been told it in strictest confidence by Lord Roschild, who had been told it on the QT at a dinner party in Mayfair by Lady Butler, the mistress of the current Foreign Secretary. Had it not been a secret, half the disgraced soldiers of Britain would have been applying for some adventure. Instead, Darcy proposed and the Foreign Secretary disposed, and everyone hoped that Ahmed bin Ahmed would be deposed. But if it all came to nought, then Her Majesty’s Government would have known nothing.

On meeting for the first time, Tibbert had liked Ahmed Mohammed “Ah Colonel Tibbert” the would-be sultan had said.

“I left the army a major, I’m afraid.” replied Tibby

“That won’t do, I need at least a colonel to run my army.” and so ‘colonel’ he became. He showed the ‘mettle of his pasture’ immediately by counselling delay in seeking war, as he trained the soldiers to work together and act as a unit. Arabic fighting consisted of consummate horsemen charging each other, firing their rifles and then fighting individual battles until one side collapsed. Tibby brought to bear his training in concentrated fire. Even with the old-fashioned muskets, a massed volley could cause a lot of damage. Since most of these black ‘troops’ were not experienced horseman, and few had arrived with mounts anyway, it would have been foolish to pit them against such skilful horsemen as the Berbers who almost lived in the saddle. Ahmed Mohammed was delighted to have found, not just an Englishman (for every foreigner knows that an English General is worth an extra division simply by virtue of their impressive uniform), but one who knew something about soldiering. He was not ignorant of the soldier’s slightly chequered history.

The story of the Spanish noble lady who had been misused by him in exchange for sparing the deputy governor’s life was well known in polite circles – and generally found to be most amusing. The reason for his very temporary visit to Cuba was less well known, concerning, as it did, a fifteen year old virgin and her mother. London had quickly come to learn not to leave attractive women alone with him for more than a few minutes – though Lord Delfont of the Isles was gracious enough to own that the child born nine months after Lady Delfont had been seen having a tete-a-tete in the gardens at a soiree was actually his.

Still, Ahmed was not looking for a saint, he was looking for a soldier, and Colonel Tibbert fitted that description admirably. He could shoot straight; use a rapier, foil, cutlass or sabre; stick a pig very accurately with a lance, and even (as he later showed) had an understanding of archery. On top of all these practical skills, he understood the theory and practice of troop movements. And he was tough. In India, he had been shot twice. Once, his tight jacket was what kept his inner parts inside long enough for the surgeon to sow him up. He still wore the same jacket, with the clearly repaired bullet wounds. He knew it inspired a mixture of respect, fear, and a little disgust (there being a blood stain around one hole), which was precisely his intention. In short, he was the kind of officer the British Army needed; but it preferred people who knew which way to pass the port.

Since starting their trek from the Dry Mountains – an area that received a surprising amount of rainfall in fact, but the rocks were porous and the water disappeared into huge underground aquafers that surfaced in the inland farming region and the Wadi Zwing – the small band had grown. The ability to form an army from the disaffected can be difficult, people will leave as soon as join, but Ahmed Mohammed had been quite successful so far in bringing in minor tribal leaders who objected to their prettiest girls being taken by the Sultan. Not that they objected to a girl being an object to be bought and sold or given at will; rather they objected to having the most succulent breasts and thighs being reserved for the Sultan’s use. Sultan Ahmed had taken many eligible women for his harem, and a few younger ones for his son.

Ahmed bin Ahmed bin Ahmed was that son; he had not yet reached his fourteenth birthday. He was fat, lazy, spoilt ... and nasty. The only girl he had so far fucked – against his father’s permission – had been so roughly treated that she was severely damaged, having a fistula that would almost certainly result in an early death. His father had been furious, and had given orders that the eunuchs were to refuse his son all access to his son’s own harem until he was fourteen. For several years the sultan had collected women for himself and girls for his son in readiness for him being of age, but he was aware of his son’s failure to develop the traits needed to be a good ruler. Even Sultan Ahmed could see that his son’s reign would be disastrous, but then he couldn’t see how his own was careering downhill fast.

Two years ago, Ahmed bin Ahmed bin Ahmed had been thrown from his horse – the horse shying at a snake on the track. The horse had been tied and whipped mercilessly until its flanks were mere shreds of flesh. All the men watching despaired at the lost of a horse for such a minor infraction. Their feeling was that a good horseman would have stayed on, so it was the boy’s fault. Horses were the real currency in these lands. As the saying went “A women is a good fuck but a horse is a ride for ever!” The horse simply died of its wounds and fed the dogs. Since then, the heir to a desert kingdom had not ridden a horse. He was despised by the subjects as much as the Sultan was hated.

And the Sultan had become hated. He was hated by his subjects for raising taxes; he was hated by his minor sheiks for undermining their authority; and he was hated by the inland powers for leeching off their trade. When Ahmed Mohammed raised his standard in Kebir Al Foranti, if people did not actually flock to him, they breathed a sigh of relief and made sure they did not see where he went when asked by the Sultan’s hunting parties.

The first skirmish was an easy win for Tibby and his massed guns. The twenty horse riders were all shot down, their bodies buried, their weapons taken. The Sultan never heard what happened to them, which undermined his confidence. The next was more of a minor battle, at least in the oral histories. In fact it was against only fifteen mounted men and twenty foot soldiers. But, since they were vanquished and the victors write the history, the reputation of Ahmed Mohammed was increased to glorious, unbeatable, leader. Tibbert always made sure that Ahmed received the praise. It would not do to steal that limelight, as long as Ahmed did not begin to believe the exaggerated praise.