Trade Wind (53 page)

“Good heavens—why?”

“So that the good Colonel will send messages at once to tell these gunboats to return and entrap you. I confess I should feel easier in my mind if I knew that one would be near, so that the raiders would hear of it and keep away.”

“Why not get your own ships to chase them off? They could do it.”

Majid said crossly: “Now you are mocking me. You know they would not These devils of pirates are wild and lawless men who have guns and knives and care for no one, and my men have no desire to be killed.”

“Neither have the townspeople any desire to have their women and children stolen and their slaves kidnapped, or their houses robbed and set on fire. But if the raiders come it’s either that or fight them. Unless you intend to buy them off again?”

The Sultan flung his hands out in a despairing gesture. “How can I, when you know that I have not the money? A fortune it cost me last time. A fortune! But the Treasury is empty, I am deep in debt, and I do not know where to turn for so much as a gold piece, so if these
shaitans
come they will sack the town and perhaps bum it, for I can neither fight them nor bribe them. They will stay and do what they will in the city, and only leave when they have taken their fill of goods and women and slaves to carry back to the Gulf. You do not know what they are like! You and your ship have been elsewhere whenever they came before, and your house being strong and well guarded, they leave it alone. But others have not been so fortunate.”

Rory shrugged and refilled his glass from the bottle that stood on the floor beside him. It was true that he had never been present when the Arab pirates from the Persian Gulf made their annual raid on Zanzibar. He had taken good care not to be. The northeast Trade Winds that brought the monsoon sped the pirate dhows down the coast of Africa, and they descended like locusts on the Island to kidnap children and procure slaves: camping outside the city like a hostile army and swaggering through the streets, brawling, murdering and looting. No child, slave or personable woman was safe from them, for what they did not choose to buy they stole, and at the first sight of their sails all who could do so hurried their children and young slaves to safe hiding places in the interior. But despite every precaution, many were kidnapped daily and carried off to the dhows. The poorer quarters of the town suffered most, since undefended houses were frequently broken into and victims forcibly abducted; and it was a brave man indeed who dared leave his house after dark while the raiders remained, for they stepped aside for no one, and even the Sultan’s guards took care not to interfere with them.

Majid said angrily: “It is all very well for you to shrug your shoulders. I tell you, you do not know what they are like! They are like a pack of wild dogs. They go armed about the city so that my guards, being afraid for their lives, will do nothing. And if they were not afraid, and fought them, it would be worse, since if any hindered them they would attack in force and bum the town and perhaps even my own palace. There are hundreds of them. Thousands! Strong, wild, lawless men who—”

Rory raised a protesting hand: “I know. I heard all about them last time. And the time before—and the time before that.”

“They will be worse this year,” said the Sultan pessimistically, “because they will know that I cannot give them money. Everyone knows. I cannot even pay for the building of my new palace at Dar-es-Salaam.”

“I thought you used slaves for that? And convicts.”

“I do. But even they must be fed, and I now owe so much to those who have supplied food and stone and marble that they give me no peace. There is also the tax that I am bound by treaty to pay to my brother Thuwani, and if I cannot pay that—and how can I?—he too will make trouble. Money…money…
money
!” Majid raised his clenched fists to heaven: “How I have come to abominate that word! I tell you, my friend, I think of nothing else all day and all night, and therefore I do not sleep and my appetite has gone. How can one be a ruler when there is no money to pay for one’s own amusements, let alone all the rest? Where am I to turn? Where?—tell me that!”

Rory sat up suddenly, knocking over the brandy bottle in the process, and said: “
Pemba
!…I knew I’d forgotten something!”

“How do you mean, Pemba?” enquired the Sultan sulkily.’ If you mean the revenues from the last clove crop, they were disappointing. And I have already spent them!”

“No, it wasn’t that. It was something I heard from a man I met in a back street in Mombasa one night, when we stopped to take on fresh water for those horses. I can’t think why I didn’t remember it before—except that I was fairly drunk at the time and it seemed a lot of nonsense anyway. But there might be something in it.”

“In what? What has this to do with Pemba? I do not understand what you are talking about.”

“Money—I think,” said Rory. He looked at the fallen bottle as though he did not see it, and presently stretched out a hand to lift it and hold it up to the light But what little remained of its contents had soaked into the carpet, and he pitched it carelessly out of the window and clasped his hands about his knees; his blond brows wrinkled in thought and his gaze fixed on a large beetle that had stunned itself against a lamp and was describing foolish, buzzing circles on the polished
chunam
floor beyond the edge of the rug.

The silence and that small, futile sound began to get on the Sultan’s nerves, and after a minute or two he said irritably: “Stop staring at that insect! What had you forgotten? What is this about money?”

Rory lifted his head and his eyes were no longer blank and unseeing, but alive and very bright, and his voice held an odd note of excitement:

“What would you offer me if I could show you how to get your hands on a fortune? Enough money to pay the tax to Thuwani and bribe off any number of pirates, as well as keeping yourself in funds for the next twenty years or so?”

Majid abandoned his lounging pose and sat up stiffly, staring as though he were not quite sure that he had heard aright. He said: “You think you can do that?”

“I’m not sure. But it’s possible.”

“Half!” said the Sultan promptly. “If you can do this, you shall have half.”

“Is that a promise?”

“It is an oath. I do not believe that you can do such a thing, but if you can, I swear by the beard of the Prophet and my dead father’s head that you shall take half.”

“Fair enough,” said Rory, “and I may even live to claim it. This man I met in Mombasa…’ He was silent for a space, as though collecting his thoughts, and then he said slowly:

“It was late at night, and he lurched into me and fell flat on his face under my feet. I thought that he too was drunk, and swore at him. But he’d been stabbed. He was an old man, and there was blood all over his back: it looked like embroidery until I put a hand on him to help him up. I turned him over and made him comfortable. There was nothing else I could do for him; but he held on to my sleeve and kept muttering, so I stayed with him until he went. He’d apparently got into a street fight and someone had stuck a knife into him. Told me he came from Pemba, and that his elder brother was a famous
Mchawi
—a wizard who had been consulted by your father about that drought business with the Mwenyi Mkuu, and was the only one who knew the secret. I asked him what secret—more for something to say than anything else—and he grinned and said the one that everyone wanted to know. The Imam Saïd’s secret Then he babbled a lot of nonsense about it being all very well for his brother to say that gold was no good to anyone and better underground, but there were others who could use it, and he for one did not despise riches. And after a few uncomplimentary remarks about his family he started to cough up blood, and died. I left him there and came back to the ship; and what with waking up the next morning with a head like a cauldron full of red-hot shot, and one of the horses going sick, and then getting back here to find your beloved brother conducting a private war with the British Navy, I haven’t thought of it since.”

“And you are thinking of it now because…?” Majid seemed unable to finish the sentence.

“Because it occurs to me that the man may have been referring to your late father’s treasure.”

There was a long silence in which the angry buzzing of the beetle and the flutter of moths’ wings beating against a lamp was once again startlingly audible, and then the Sultan let out his breath in an explosive sigh. His eyes were as bright as Emory Frost’s and his hands shaking. He said in a harsh whisper: “It cannot be true—it could not be!”

“Why not? No one has ever believed that your father would have hidden that treasure without anyone knowing about it. He must have had some help, even if the reports of its size are less than half true.”

“It is said that they died.’ Majid’s voice was still no more than a whisper. “There is a tale that there were only two men, both deaf and dumb and both afflicted by Allah.”

“Mad?” enquired Rory.

“Simpletons only. Strong in body, but with the wits of young children, and therefore well chosen for such a task. It was said that it took them a score of nights to bury the treasure, so great was its size, and that after it was done my father sent them out of the country, to Muscat, but that the ship ran aground in a great storm off the island of Socotra, and was lost with all aboard her.”

“Very convenient,” commented Rory. “But I still don’t believe that your father—may he rest in peace—would have hidden a sizable fortune without taking at least one other person into his confidence in case of accidents.”

Majid shook his head. “We have always thought that when he buried it he meant to tell his heir upon his death-bed, and could not, because he died at sea and in the arms of my brother Bargash. My father would have known that had he told my brother, or any that were with him, Bargash would have grasped both the treasure and the throne. If any man knew the secret it was the Englishman who was British Consul here at that time, for my father held him in great friendship and called upon his name as he lay dying. But the Englishman lied and denied it, and now he is back in his own country, and the treasure, if it is anywhere, is with him.”

Rory gave a short laugh and came to his feet, kicking aside his empty glass. “Don’t you believe it! I knew the old ram-rod better than you did. A damn’ sight too well! Told me I was a disgrace to his nation and tried to get me deported from the Island. Worse than the present incumbent, though you wouldn’t think that possible. You may not like to believe it, but you can take it from me he was the kind of upright idiot who’d cut his throat before he’d steal sixpence, even if he were starving. I know the breed—and so did your father!”

“But he might still have known.”

Rory made a sweeping, scornful gesture of negation with one hand. “If he had, he’d have told you. Because there wouldn’t have been any point in your father confiding in him except to ensure that someone knew the secret, and could be trusted to hand it on to his heir supposing he should die in Oman, or before he could get back here. And as you were not told it, your father didn’t tell him. That, as Uncle Batty would say, is as plain as the nose on your face. All the same, I bet he told someone, and I’m putting my money on it being that witchdoctor.”

Majid pulled at his lip, his eyes glittering with excitement and his brows wrinkled in doubt, and at last he said pensively: “It is true that the greatest witchdoctors in the world live in Pemba. It has always been renowned for its wizards and warlocks, and my father had great faith in them and often consulted with them on matters of spells and magic and the secrets of the past and the future. There was one whom he visited often and who once came to Motoni, and if he told anyone, he would have told that man. But why?”

“Don’t ask me. Perhaps he wanted a spell put on it.”

Majid’s head jerked round as though it had been pulled on a string. “That is it! Yes, that is it…a spell to keep it safe from discovery and the hands of thieves. I remember hearing that the man could summon demons and that he was famous for such spells. You are right, my friend. There is someone who knows.”

“Well, there we are,” said Rory. “All you’ve got to do is to trace the man, find out if he had a brother who died recently in Mombasa, and then get him to talk.”

“But how—how?” the Sultan struck his hands together and the sweat glistened bright on his excited face. “To trace him will be easy. But if he will not talk? He may not, else why has he not spoken before?

Knowing that my father’s dead and that I am Sultan, he has still kept silent. That can only mean that he does not intend to speak of it to anyone. So what if he holds to that and will not tell?”

Rory laughed unpleasantly and said: “Threaten him with a dose of his own medicine. You’ll find that he’ll be only too ready to spit up all his secrets rather than face the sort of treatment that he and his kind have been handing out to their wretched victims for years. Or are you afraid to threaten a witchdoctor?”

“I would be a fool if I were not,” said Majid, shuddering. “And you too would be wise not to treat such men lightly.”

“I don’t,” said Rory briefly. “But then I don’t treat money lightly either, and in this case it looks like being one or the other. Do we risk offending the powers of darkness, or give up the treasure? Or if you prefer to put it another way, which are you most afraid of? Being cursed by a witchdoctor, or overrun by pirates and infuriating your brother of Muscat and Oman by failing to pay your yearly tribute money? Though mind you, if you’d take my advice you’d refuse to pay Thuwani another penny, treaty or no treaty!”

Majid said crossly: “So you have often said. But then you have nothing to fear, since he is not your brother.”

“No, thank God.”

Majid smiled wryly and said: “You may well do so. It shall be the money then.”

“Good. I shall leave the details to you and only remind you that if you hope to use some of it to buy off the Gulf pirates, you haven’t got too much time. Look over there—”

He jerked his chin in the direction of the curtained archways and Majid turned and saw that the thin silk was beginning to move at last; billowing out on a draught of air that stole through the hot rooms and set the lamps swaying.