Five Dead Men

In the North African desert, during the closing years of the nineteenth century, a warrior chieftain appeared from out of the sands themselves, claiming to be the incarnation of the Prophet. He called himself the Mahdi, and he pledged to sweep the Infidel English colonizers of the Sudan and their Egyptian allies from the land, to scourge the land by fire, blood and steel until not a single interloper was left among the living. At the head of his minions, called Ansari or believers by the Mahdi but Dervishes and 'Turks' -- a name for all outsiders -- by the British, the Mahdi rode, wielding his trademark, a jewel-encrusted sword whose origins lay in the time of the Crusades. At first, the Mahdi was dismissed as a mere madman. But as the Bedouin tribesmen of sub-Saharan Africa rallied to his standard, taking up the sword against the hated Infidel in a Holy War of Madiyyah, the Mahdi’s forces swept across North Africa in a blood-tide of death and destruction that left nothing but ashes and rubble strewn in its wake. The British and the Egyptians (the latter who, to this day, maintain interests in the Sudan) built and then manned forts such as mighty Omdurman against the incursion of the Mahdi, but were unable to turn the tide on their own. As the situation worsened, and before the crisis had passed the point of no return, a military expedition comprised of British regular forces was launched against the warrior chieftain’s band in a desperate bid to defeat him. But it too failed to succeed. All but a few of the soldiers were exterminated in the desert wastes of Kordofan, and in its aftermath the Mahdi grew even stronger and far bolder than he had ever been before. The Sudan’s defenders realized that unless drastic measures were taken, and the Mahdi stopped, before long the war would be certainly lost and the entire region of sub-Saharan Africa plunged into an era of barbarism and bloodshed the likes of which had never before been seen. While the last outposts of once great colonial power manned their forts along the Nile and in the desert vastness further inland, counting the days and weeks until they too would be destroyed by the Mahdi’s ferocious hordes of nomadic warriors, foreign mercenaries were sought out in a last-ditch effort to turn the tide of battle in the war against the Mahdi. The center of mercenary activity was Zanzibar, a small island republic that lay off the East African coast, ruled by its Sultan who was the Mahdi’s sworn enemy -- for the Sultan himself held an ancestral claim on the lands of the Sudan. In the days during which this story occurred, Zanzibar was a place where anything went and any pleasure or vice could be bought by whomever carried enough gold in his purse with which to meet the seller’s price. From its slave markets to its hashish dens, Zanzibar had long since earned a reputation for being a hotbed of every form of corruption, vice and sinful pursuit known to man. At the same time it was also a place to which an adventurer might come in order to make both his fortune and write his name forever on the bloodstained pages of history.