Secret of the Sands (3 page)
Jessop and Jones are coming to realise that the
Dhofaris
have a very different sense of time. Or, as the lieutenant puts it, ‘You cannot trust a word the buggers say.’ It has been another day or two to the emir’s camp for almost a week now, and no manner of earnest enquiry elicits any other response from the men, than occasionally, a wry shrug of the shoulders. Jessop restricts Jones from becoming too insistent.
‘We are not in such a rush, old man,’ he points out.
It is long enough till the men’s rendezvous with the
Palinurus
that they have time to lag behind their schedule.
Apart from their inability to keep to a timetable, Jessop finds the
Dhofaris
very pleasant. They are endlessly patient with his attempts to map the route, which is proving extremely difficult. For a start, for most of the day, the brass instruments the doctor brought for the job are far too hot to touch.
‘Sort of thing you don’t realise in Southampton,’ he smiles.
Jones does not find this kind of thing amusing. The tasks are as much his as the doctor’s to complete but the lieutenant constantly gives up, the doctor considers, a mite too easily for an English officer who is charged with what is, after all, the fairly routine, if inconvenient, mission of checking the lie of the land. The
Dhofaris
bind their hands in cloth and try their best to assist.
At night, by the panorama of low-slung stars with which the region is blessed, the instruments provide better results. The sand dunes, however, are tricky to render. The wind will move them long before the next British mission comes inland, making that element of the map all but useless. There is no landscape on earth as changeable as the desert, Jessop muses. While the Northumberland hills where he grew up have remained largely the same for thousands of years, the features of the desert landscape might last no more than a few weeks. The doctor does not give up, though. He merely notates all his thoughts and as much detail as he can manage, down to the fact that the thin goats the
Dhofaris
have brought have shorter carcasses than their European cousins and are surprisingly tasty. A chap never knows what might prove a useful piece of information – which shrub will turn out to hold a priceless secret that can be used in British industry, or the understanding of which local custom will endear a later British delegation to an emir or a caliph and secure a lucrative trade agreement. Dr Jessop, unlike Lieutenant Jones, is focussed clearly on what the East India Company requires of him. He notes each twenty-four hours the mileage they have managed to cover and estimates that a thirsty camel can drink twenty gallons in less than three minutes.
As they make camp in the middle of the morning and settle down to sleep for the hottest part of the day under a hastily erected tent that provides shade probably only a degree or two cooler than the baking sand adjacent to it, the doctor dresses a burn on the older
Dhofari
’s hand. The wound was acquired in the service of the British Empire, after all. He daubs lavender ointment across the skin. Kindness, the doctor always thinks, is terribly important to a patient. When he first qualified, many of his patients healed all the quicker, he’s sure, for his attention, rather than simply his medical knowledge.
‘I don’t know why you bother, old chap,’ Jones mumbles sleepily to his companion.
‘I have the ointment with me, it costs me nothing,’ the doctor points out.
Jones turns over. ‘Night night,’ he murmurs like a child rather than one of His Majesty’s finest.
Jessop burrows himself an indent in the sand.
It is really very telling,
he muses.
Jones didn’t seem
– he angles for the right word –
so very ungentlemanly when they were aboard ship
. He glances at the blinding orb that is reaching its height. The doctor prefers travelling by the stars. Night in the desert is quite the most extraordinary spectacle.
‘Good night,’ he returns, rather more formally, and settles down to sleep for a few hours before they get on their way.
It feels to Zena as if she has walked into a nightmare. In the low-ceilinged hold of the Arab
dhow
there are eighty prisoners shackled. Seventy-one of them are still alive though the shit swills around their chapped ankles and all still living are so faint from hunger and thirst that they scarcely feel it sting. Most have never before seen so many people as they are now crammed up against and for all it is an abomination not to bury the dead before sundown. They have been eleven days on board the
mashua
. It is this that worries her most. The majority of the slaves are ignor ant of the geography both of where they came from and where they might be going, but Zena lived for six years with her grandmother, high in the cool, emerald hills of northern Abyssinia, less than two hundred miles from the cosmopolitan and bustling trading town of Bussaba. The old lady was respected and her house was a prosperous staging post of some renown for travelling caravans and pilgrims. Within its compound, Zena’s grandmother’s rules were simple and absolute: no weapons, no theft of either person or property.
It was in that place of safety that Zena learnt about faraway lands and the limits of the slave routes. She heard tell of a variety of gods and legends – all of which seemed merely curious to her, for her grandmother believed in nothing except, she always said, the goodness of people as long as you were firm. The travellers talked about where they had been and where they were going to and, though Zena has never seen a map, it is as a result of these many conversations that it is clear to her that eleven days on a ship is further than these men really need to go simply to sell her.
At the port she was separated from everyone she knew and marched aboard another vessel with strangers hand-picked from other slave raids, for it seems, though the slavers clearly prefer the young, the different quality of human cargo merits different destinations. At least that is her best guess, for as far as she can tell, the ships are not sailing together and Zena knows no one aboard. There will be, she has come to realise, no getting away. Simply to survive the crossing will be a feat.
Sitting well-fed beside her grandmother’s fire, the names of the foreign climes sounded exotic – Muscat and Sur, Constantinople and Zanzibar, Bombay and Calicut. The strange tone of the men’s skin seemed benign, somehow, as they talked wistfully of their homeland or their religious devotions. There were Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Animists and Jews and they came in all shades of brown – Nubian princes,
Wahabi
emirs, minor Persian noblemen, Turkish traders, the dusky emissaries of caliphs and sultans, Semitic merchants, Indian warriors, Somali pirates and Abyssinian bishops. Each and every one of the strangers was tattooed and pierced with the markings of their individual tribe – some shaven and some with long beards, some bare-headed and others with ornate headdresses or brightly coloured turbans. They dressed differently too – in white flowing robes, or embroidered
jubbahs,
or animal-skin capes adorned in ostrich feathers or sometimes simply in a hessian winding cloth. Under her grandmother’s watchful eye, Zena served platters of food to all of them – spiced couscous and succulent lamb piled high with melted butter poured on top till it dripped from the edge of the plate. Roasted chicken stuffed with fruit and nuts and gleaming with basting juices. Spicy
wot,
stewed till it almost melted into the hot
injera
bread. Latterly, she danced for the strangers to the beat held by Yari, her grandmother’s fat, Anatolian eunuch who played the drums. When they found out she was not a mere servant (one of many) or indeed a slave girl (even more), but a favoured grandchild, many of the visitors paid her attention and left her gifts – a phial of perfume or a length of silk. There are no gifts now.
After the third day aboard, in the darkness of the hold, she can see this new ship is following the coast to the south and, between the intermittent keening of the other women and the praying of the men, silent tears stream down her face.
There can be no going back now,
she mouths. All she can think of is returning to the village, and what might be there if she does. So much loss. A grave. Her mother, always surly. A marriage Zena never sought for herself, now long overdue.
It should not have happened like this,
she thinks. In the darkness, it is safe to mourn so she cries for a long time.
On the sixth day, after silence and exhaustion finally prevail below deck and all surrender themselves to the stifling crush, Zena notices through a tiny strip of light in the bulwark above her head that the land is on the wrong side of the ship and she knows they have turned eastwards. These territories are strange to her – she retains in her memory only some names and meagre scraps of information, but it is enough to realise the scale of the distance she now lies from home and the impossibility of an easy return.
Her grandmother’s death sent her back to the village only a few weeks before – back to her parents who had hoped for better for her. The stone compound was inherited by her mother’s elder brother who arrived a week after the burial with several camels, a horse or two and a cold-eyed wife in full
burquah
. He took stock of his new home, ordered an ox to be killed and cooked in celebration and banished Zena at the first opportunity.
‘Go home and get married, child,’ he commanded. ‘There is nothing for you here.’
Her presence had always been unorthodox and so, as he was fully entitled, he sent her, with only one servant and one camel, back to the shamble of huts where she was born. She travelled light with just one small wooden box of trinkets and baubles and a few lengths of dark cotton. At the time, she thought the old lady’s passing was the saddest thing that would ever happen – Zena loved her grandmother. She had nursed Baba devotedly through her short illness. When death finally came, Zena washed the old woman’s naked body and wrapped it in a white linen shroud. The servants buried the corpse and then Zena cried for three days without sleeping. Yari fed her yoghurt and honey though she scarcely tasted it.
Above Zena’s head, the hold opens suddenly and those in the way pull back from the bright stream of blinding light that beams down. A bucket of brackish water is lowered on a rope and two more of scraps – rancid fat, raw fish and rock-hard
khubz
. The slaves fall upon it, tearing at each other to secure a cupped handful of water and a mouthful of food. A sound that Zena identifies as laughter floats down from the white square above her head as she eats the mush between her fingers and tries not to retch. Then the light is obliterated.
The following day, a ladder is lowered and two men climb into the darkness. Each has a cloth tied round his mouth and nose, for the stench is foul. Together, they roughly remove the dead, hacking the chains and hoisting the stiff bodies over their backs. When the hatch closes behind them once more, they throw the cadavers into the sea from above, like a fishwife emptying a pan of trash – a shudder runs through the cabin as the survivors hear the splash, though all are relieved the rotting corpses are finally gone.
The night after, the ship arrives in Muscat, rolls up its sail and the slaves are marched onto the deck by the light of the moon to be doused in sea water under the careful, still gaze of Asaf Ibn Mohammed. As the sky lightens and the Muslim call to prayer echoes over the city from minarets dotted along the shoreline of the sapphire bay, Zena catches sight of Kasim in the shadows, feeding scraps to a small guenon monkey he must have captured in the forest – a white-lipped tamarin. The little beast is tethered to him on a string but the animal is cleaner and better cared for than any of the
dhow
’s human cargo. Zena is not sure, but thinks that she can make out that it is eating fruit of some kind. Gently, the man who less than a month ago beat Zena’s uncle to death sets the animal to one side with a small, metal cup of water so he can watch the slaves disembarking. He does not move into the light as three huge negroes, six feet tall, bound in muscles, their veins standing out like vines over sculpted stone and their eyes like the eyes of statues, bundle the new shipment ashore into a rickety warehouse. Everyone is so afraid and so glad to be on land again that not one single protest is raised. It would make no matter, in any case, for the handlers are in possession of both whips and the strength of lions. They are deliberately only dressed in indigo loincloths so that every rock-hard muscle is on show. What starving, enfeebled fool is going to try to make his case in the face of such strength? Who would dare even ask a question? These men can slice the weakest of them right down the middle and drink their blood, if they wish it, and no one will say a thing.
* * *
Locked inside the warehouse, Zena knows what to expect. She’s heard of this. Her skin will be oiled for the marketplace, which is surely close by. She can hear it, smell it. She feels sick with apprehension and hunger as she squats and waits. No one says a word, though two boys, not more than twelve and probably brothers, if Zena guesses correctly, hold hands. Wafting from a distance, they hear the waves of communal prayer that accompany the dawn. The haunting words of the
Salat
sung by a
mullah
with a strong, clear voice: ‘You alone we worship. You alone we ask for help.’
I should have run,
she berates herself, thinking of the proximity of the undergrowth near the beach. She knows she is confused. One moment one thing, one moment another. But right now running seems as if it would have been easy, certainly easier than the long days on the
dhow. I might have made it,
she thinks.
At least I would have tried.
As the dawn rises, the fiery orange gradually fades from the sky and through the slats of the locked door Zena catches bare glimpses of the harbour, slices of Muscat life in the bright morning light. It is unexpectedly beautiful. She has never seen anything like this place – a huge bay bordered by high, green hills. It is a big city, she realises – larger than any settlement she has ever known. The dockside is properly paved and the houses and businesses built of a pale mud crammed between the date palms. The newer constructions are whitewashed so they dazzle when the sun hits them, and over time the older ones have muted to a dun brown. Along the dock there is a castle of some kind – a fortification set back from the water’s edge, with huge, dark guns pointing out to sea over its battlements.
The dock is already busy – a sure sign of a profitable trading port – with forty ships or more at anchor. Outside, the morning’s trade has started – a man with birds in a wicker cage is setting up his stall next to a hawker in a dazzling white
jubbah
with a litter of prayer mats. The men are boiling water over a small fire and are set to brew mint tea with a sliver of cinnamon and some honey which they will sip from delicate, etched-glass cups. Three dirty goats are tethered between the stalls. A toothless beggar with only one leg and one eye struggles past, arrayed in a filthy swathe of rags, his sole possession a
calabash
from which he stops intermittently to drink. One of the traders hastens to beat him away. ‘Son of a dog!’ the man shouts, waving his arms as if batting off a fly, the tone of his protestation furious. ‘Away with you!’
Ibn al-kalb. Imshi. Imshi.
‘They will eat us,’ one of the other girls bursts out suddenly as the angry words filter through. Her voice is trembling. ‘No one ever comes back when they are taken. They will eat us all.’
She begins to cry, huge sobs wracking her angular, bony frame. The rest of the group remain absolutely silent though a few shoulders round in fear. Zena ignores the hysteric – she knows she will be sold here, not devoured. Besides, seeing Muscat waking up has somehow heartened her. It is not as alien as she might have expected. The city is prosperous, clearly, and if the call to prayer is anything to go by, there are a lot of
mosques
so perhaps it is also devout. She knows it is unlikely she will get away now, for apart from anything else, where can she run to? But this is a large and cosmopolitan place, she knows more about it than anyone else she is locked up with and the worst, surely, is over. She turns her head towards the light and thinks she must, at least, try to remain hopeful.
Someone kind will buy me,
she thinks as she clutches her empty stomach and assures herself that she will eat soon, perhaps within the hour.
