The Monsoon (114 page)

“Broken, but not dead. I understand you perfectly, Majesty.” as mini waded out from the shore.

She sucked in her already flat belly at the cold, and raised her hands above her head. Dorian lay on the crisp white sand A and watched her.

Although they had made love only minutes before, he never tired of looking at that cream and ivory body. She had bloomed since leaving the stultifying bounds of the zenana walls. Now she bubbled with interest and excitement for all the wonders around her, and when they were alone her sense of fun and mischief enchanted him.

Waist-deep in the lake, Yasmini scooped a double handful of the sweet water and raised it to her lips. As she swallowed, a few droplets spilled from between her fingers and dribbled on to her chest.

They caught the sunlight and sparkled like a diamond necklace on her smooth skin.

Her nipples puckered at the chill and stood out crisply.

She turned and waved at him. Then, with a shudder of protest at the cold water, she lowered herself until only her head showed. Her hair, shot through with the silver blaze, floated in a dark cloud around her lotus face.

“Have courage, master Come in!” she invited, but he waved a lazy hand in refusal. This respite was so delightful after the months of hard marching up from the coast.

“Is the great sheikh, the mighty warrior and victor of Muscat, afraid of a little cold waterPshe mocked.

He smiled at her and shook his head.

“I do not fear the water, but you have exhausted all my strength, O brazen one.”

“That was my purpose!” She tinkled with laughter, and suddenly rose up and splashed a sheet of the cold water over him.

“Wicked woman!” He sprang up.

“You have exhausted my forbearance also.” He charged into the lake in a storm of spray and, though she tried to escape, he seized her and plunged both of them below the surface. They came up clinging together and spluttering with laughter.

After a while, her expression became solemn.

“I fear that you have not been truthful with me, lord,” she said.

“I am holding in my right hand that which proves your strength is far from exhausted.”

“Is it enough that I ask your forgiveness for deceiving you?”

“No, it is not nearly enough.” She placed both slim Harms around his neck.

“This is how the fish and crocodiles punish their mates when they err.” She hopped up and beneath the surface gripped his hips in the scissors of her legs.

A while later they waded back to the beach, still clinging together, and laughing breathlessly. They flopped down at the edge of the water, and Dorian looked up at the height of the sun. He murmured regretfully, “The morning is almost spent. We must go back now, Yassie.”

“Just a little longer,” she pleaded.

“Sometimes I grow weary of playing the slave-boy.” Come” he ordered, and pulled her to her feet. They went to where their clothing lay in an untidy heap, and dressed quickly. The little sailing dhow was drawn up on the sand, but before she stepped on board Yasmini paused and looked about her slowly, taking leave of this wondrous place where for an hour they had been happy and free.

On the top of the tallest tree of the island perched a pair of snowy-headed fish eagles, their sleek bodies black washed with cinnamon. One of the birds threw back its head and uttered a yelping chant.

“I will never forget that cry, Yasmini said.

“It is the very voice of this wild land.” The hills on the far side of the lake were just an outline, paler blue than the water. A long line of pink flamingo flew low along the far shore. The head of the flight rose on a thermal of warm air then dropped again.

Every following bird rose as it reached the same point in the air and then dropped exactly as the bird before it had.

The effect was extraordinary, as though a long, pink serpent undulated above the azure waters.

“Nor will I ever forget such beauty,” Yasmini whispered.

“I would like to stay here for ever with you.” This is the country of God, where man counts for nothing,” Dorian said.

“But come.

We cannot afford such a dream. Duty has me in its iron grasp.

Tomorrow we must leave this place and begin the march back to the Fever Coast.”

“Just a moment longer, lord,” she begged, and pointed to a strange dark cloud, a mile out from where they stood, that rose from the surface of the lake, five hundred feet straight into the unsullied blue of the African sky.

“What is that? It is as though the water is on fire and sends smoke into the air.”

“Tiny insects,” Dorian told her.

“They breed on the bottom of the lake in their multitudes then rise to the surface and spin tiny sails of gossamer. On these sails they float into the air and are carried away.”

“The ways of Allah are wonderful,” she murmured, eyes shining.

“Come, he urged again, “and remember that you are once more Yassie, the slave-boy, and that you must show me duty and respect.”

“Yes, master.” She bowed low with her palms together touching her lips, and her entire demeanour changed. She was a consummate actress, and when she straightened up she held herself like a servant, not a princess, and moved like a boy as she pushed the dhow out into the lake and scrambled in over the bows.

They sat apart as the tiny craft rounded the end of the island and came in full view of the village on the mainland a league away across the water. Even at that distance many eyes would be watching them.

Although these waters were so expansive as to seem like the ocean itself, they were months of travel from the Fever Coast, and the climate was drier and healthier up here on the high plateau of the continent. The village of Ghandu was spread along several miles of the lakeshore, for this was the centre of all Omani trade with the interior.

From here the long slave road wound down to the coast.

in sight now were a dozen or more canoes and sailing dhows, plying in towards the port of Ghandu. They had voyaged down hundreds of miles of lakeshore, and they carried cargoes of dried fish, ivory, slaves, hides and gum arabic they had gathered from the vast wilderness.

As Dorian and Yasmini sailed in towards the village, she wrinkled her nose with distaste. The sweet air was tainted with the stench of the fish racks and the slave barra coons When Dorian stepped ashore Bashir al-Sind, his chief lieutenant, was there to meet him with the rest of the army staff. Yassie hung back self-effacingly while Dorian was plunged immediately into the duty and responsibility of his command, a duty he had escaped for those few precious moments on the island with Yasmini.

“The women have arrived, lord,” Bashir told him, “and the merchants have gathered to listen to your orders for the march.” Dorian strode through the village, between the seething barra coons where the slaves were penned, through the squalor and misery that was in such bitter contrast to the beauty and serenity he and Yasmini had experienced a short while before. In the main sauk, seated on their cushioned stools under their gaudy silk sunshades, surrounded by his own entourage of robed guards and house-slaves, the five merchants awaited him. These men controlled all trade coming through Ghandu. They were d and the all pious, learned men; their speech was culture compliments they paid him were florid. Their deportment was dignified and noble, and they were exceedingly rich.

Yet Dorian had come to despise them in the short time he had been at Ghandu and exposed to the savagery of the trade that supported them.

Dorian had been a slave once, but alMalik had never treated him as one. Slavery had been a constant fact of his adult life, but for this reason he had given it little thought.

Most of the slaves he had ever known were tamed or born into captivity, resigned to it and, in almost every case, treated kindly as valuable chattels. But since arriving here Ghandu he had been confronted by the raw, brutal at reality. He had been forced to witness the bringing in of the freshly captured people, and it had not been a comfortable lesson.

He found himself torn by his own humanity, and his love and duty to his adoptive father, the Caliph. He understood how the prosperity and wellbeing of the nation depended on this trade. He would not shirk the duty of protecting it, but he took no pleasure in what he had to do.

It was the hour of the midday prayers, so they made their ablutions. Yassie poured water for Dorian to wash, and he prayed with the merchants as they knelt in a row on the silk rugs, facing the holy places in the north. When they resumed their seats under the sunshades Dorian felt a strong desire to forgo the elaborate opening speeches of the merchants, the further exchange of compliments, and to come to the business that had to be discussed. However, he was now so Arabic in his ways that he could not bring himself to such gaucherie. The sun was well past its zenith before one of the merchants mentioned, almost in passing, that they had two hundred female slaves ready for him as he had requested.

“Bring them to me,” he ordered, and when the merchants gave the orders the women were paraded before him. Dorian saw at once that they had fobbed him off with the oldest and most sickly. Many would never survive the gruelling march to the coast. He felt his anger stir. He had come here to save these men from ruin. He had a fin wing from the Caliph commanding their obedience, and now they were niggardly and obstructive. He controlled his anger. The condition of the women was not vital to the success of his plans. He intended to place them in the caravan merely to lull the marauders into attacking. A slave column composed entirely of men must excite suspicion.

Out of hand Dorian rejected fifty of the women, the weak old crones and the women far gone in pregnancy.

The rig ours of the march would kill the old and bring those pregnant into labour long before their time, and Dorian could not take on his conscience the inevitable deaths of their infants. For the same reason he had refused the offer of children the merchants made.

“When we leave Ghandu, I want your lightest marching chains on these wretches,” he warned the merchants. He rose to his feet as a signal that the meeting was ended.

It was a relief to leave the odious village and to go up into the hills above the lake where the air was sweeter and cooler, the view glorious. Dorian had sited his camp upon the slopes. He had learned from his own experience that his men remained healthier if they were kept away from crowded villages, if the latrine pits were built away from the water supply and if the hal al laws Of food preparation were strictly observed. He had often wondered if the ritual washing before prayers also contributed to healthier troops.

Certainly there were fewer diseases in his camps than his father had experienced on the crowded little English ships on which Dorian had sailed as a child.

Although it was late afternoon by this time, his work was not yet finished for the day. There would be an early start tomorrow on the first leg of the march, and he had to review the order of his caravan.

Five hundred of his own men, together with the female slaves, were to make up his decoy. The coloration of the captured slaves was almost purple-black. Not even the darkest-complexioned of his Arabs were that colour, so Dorian had used the infusion of tanning bark, in which the lake fishermen soaked their nets, to dye their bodies to a more natural African shade. It was still not perfect, but he depended on the dust and grime of the march to make the deception more effective.

He had encountered hwffier difficulties: none of his religious modesty men would strip naked in public forbade that, so he was forced to allow them to wear loincloths, although he made certain these were filthy and ragged. They had also baulked at shaving their heads, but no African slave had flowing locks and Dorian had insisted sternly.

They would wear light chains, but these would not be locked and could be cast off in an instant. With very poor grace the five merchants of Ghandu had contributed a hundred elephant tusks to sweeten the bait.

These were small and light, so that the men could carry their weapons in bundles on their heads along with the ivory.

Dorian would lead the column, mounted, robed and veiled, just as the marauders would expect. He would keep Yassie close at hand. She had learned to ride astride on the march up from the coast. He would have a small detachment of Arab guards flanking the column, not so weak as to excite suspicion, but not so strong as to deter an attack.

Bashir al-Sind would bring up the rear guard with another thousand fighting men, keeping two or three leagues back so that his dust would not be visible to the enemy scouts. The signal that the vanguard was under attack would be a red Chinese rocket. At the signal Bashir would rush up and surround the attackers, while Dorian and his men would pin them down until Bashir could get his forces into position.

“It’s a simple plan,” Dorian decided, after he and Bashir had gone over it together for the tenth time.

“There will be many things we cannot foresee, but those are the chances Of war, and we will counter each as it arises.

Perhaps the fisi will not come at all.” Fisi was the Swahili word for hyena, and that was what they had called the marauders.

“They will come, alSalil,” Bashir predicted.

“They have the taste for Omani blood now, and they are addicted to it.”

“Pray to Allah that you are right,” said Dorian, and went to his own tent where the slave -boy, Yassie, had his evening meal prepared for him.

here is something about this that troubles me,” said Aboli, as he studied the distant caravan through the lens.

“Share your anxiety with me,” Tom invited, with scarely veiled sarcasm.

Aboli shrugged.

“Those men are small-boned, delicately built.

They walk with a strange grace, light-footed as cats. I have never seen slaves march like that.” Three miles from where they lay in wait, the Arab caravan was descending the escarpment of the hills, winding down it like a serpent.

“They have been marching only a few weeks since leaving the lake country,” Tom explained, for himself rather than for Aboli.

“They are still fresh and strong.” He did not want to accept any evidence that might counsel against carrying out the attack.