Trade Wind (54 page)

Rory said: “It’s blowing from the northeast. I told you it would rain tomorrow. If these bastards are coming this year they’ll be setting out soon enough, and they won’t take so very long to get here with the wind behind them.”

Majid watched the swaying curtains for a moment or two, and then rose from the divan and crossed over to the windows to look out into the night. The stars were still visible, but the palm trees had begun to whisper and rustle and the distant noises of the city came unevenly as the breeze blew and died and blew again, like a man breathing.

He turned back to look at Rory and said abruptly: “If he should say he will not come here, would you yourself fetch him for me?”

“No,” said Rory promptly. “I can always find a use for money, but I don’t need it as badly as you do, and though there are not many things I stick at, kidnapping a witchdoctor is one of them. I’ve put you on the trail, so it’s only fair that you do the next part And if you get the information I’ll help you collect the booty.”

“How do you know that I will tell you if I get it? I might say that the man did not know—and he may well not!—and then go by stealth and remove all the treasure, leaving you none.”

Rory laughed and said: “For one thing, you have sworn an oath. And for another, I shall watch you like a hawk to see that you don’t get the chance.”

“So?” Majid smiled, and regarded the tall man with shrewd, appraising eyes and a touch of envy: “My friend, it grieves me to say so, but you are a scoundrel. Yes, a reckless, ruthless scoundrel, and had you been born an Arab you would surely have risen to be a great King or a Commander of Armies, instead of only the Captain of a disreputable ship that will undoubtedly one day be sunk by the guns of your own people. It is agreed then: I will consent to do the—ah—‘next part’ for you.”

“For us both,” corrected Rory. “And you are wrong, for I have no desire to be either a King or a Commander of Armies. I am content with what I have.”

“With so little?”

“With freedom; which is no small thing. Here I am free to go where I will and do what I like, and to make and break my own laws. Or anyone else’s, if I choose.”

“You are a romantic, my friend.”

“Perhaps—if to be a romantic is to relish experience and danger, and dislike rules and restrictions and the cramping hideousness of life in the so-called ‘civilized West.’ You don’t know—you couldn’t begin to understand—the smug self-righteousness of those who live there. The sweets of Progress that can turn a green country into an ugly commercialized ash-heap. The endless laws churned out by pompous fools in Parliament that aim at making every petty peccadillo into a crime. The interference and the prying! The—”

He stopped and gave a short laugh. “I’m sorry. I must be drunker than I thought. I’d better get out before I start thumping the table and giving you my views on societies whose sole object is the suppression of something someone else likes to do. You don’t have them yet in your part of the world, but you will. You will! Someday someone is going to see that you get the blessings of Progress, Western style, whether you want it or not. And if you don’t want it you’ll get it crammed down your throat with a rifle butt.”

Majid looked at him with a slow, sly smile, and said softly: “That is not all the truth. There is something else. A reason. What is it that you do with all the money you make?—that which you do not spend?”

“Count it,” said Rory. “What else? Are you hoping for a loan? If so I must regretfully tell you that you won’t get it. Or not from me, anyway.”

“No, no. I am not such a fool as that You mean to make your fortune, do you not? And when you have made it, what I wonder will you do with it? What is it that drives you?”

“Pure greed,” said Rory lightly. “I am a miser at heart. Or do I mean a magpie? That brandy of yours is making me too talkative, so I shall wish you a very good night.
Kua-heri! yá Sidi
”

He saluted the Sultan and went out into the uneasy night, stumbling a little on the stairs, and did not speak when Batty’s faithful shadow moved across the pool of light by the side gate where three members of the Palace guard whiled away the hours playing cards.

The breeze had strengthened, but it was still blowing in uneven gusts, and the sea was beginning to slap against the harbour wall in small, jerking splashes, turning the reflected lights of the ships from placid streaks of gold to glinting fragments that danced and jigged and leapt as the wind ruffled across the water. The air was perceptibly cooler and the streets had emptied, and Rory listened to the sound of his own footsteps and the faint echo that was Batty’s cat-like tread, and thought of the things that brandy had made him put into words: that restless craving for excitement and danger. The desire to break a law for no better reason than because it was a law. The urge to flout convention, and to escape—above all, to escape…

He had been six when his mother had run away with a dancing master and life had changed for him overnight. She had been pretty and gay and selfish, but she would have spoiled him if she had had her way, and he could not believe that she had abandoned him to the angry, autocratic father whom he had always been afraid of He had been sure she would return one day, and it had taken him a long time to realize that she had gone for good and would never come back.

The next two years had been grey ones, for his father had dismissed both nurse and governess—his reason being that they had been selected by his wife and must therefore be unreliable—and substituted an elderly tutor who disliked children and showed it in many small, mean ways. Rory had hated Mr Eli Sollet with a small boy’s helpless, simmering hate, and had imagined that the world could not hold anyone worse: until his father died of an inflammation of the lung, contracted out duck-shooting on the marshes, and left his son to the care of his only brother, Henry Lionel Frost, with whom he had not been on speaking terms since the day that Henry had chosen to make a few critical remarks on his elder brother’s choice of a bride…

At the time, Rory’s father had been convinced that this disapproval of his Sophia had its roots in spleen, since it had long been an accepted fact that he would die a bachelor, and Henry, who had two sons of his own to think of, had always looked upon himself as his brother’s heir. But the scandal of Sophia and her dancing master had proved his criticisms to have been well founded, and the senior Emory, on his death-bed, had made what seemed to him an adequate acknowledgement of this by appointing him sole trustee and guardian of his only child. The years of bondage had begun.

Uncle Henry, his acid-tongued wife, Laura, and their two stout and over-indulged sons had made the eight-year-old Rory look back upon the reign of Eli Sollet as a period of almost halcyon peace. His cousins were both older than himself, and they had bullied him unmercifully but had no hesitation, when he retaliated, in running screaming to their mother, who punished him with outraged severity.

What am I doing here? How did I get here? Why?
thought the boy Rory, locked in a dark attic with a slice of bread and a glass of water for long cold hours, sore from a whipping and burning from a deep sense of injustice. It was a thought that was to recur with great frequency during the years that followed, and one to which he never found an answer.

The years had dragged by intolerably slowly: punctuated with monotonous regularity by floggings, angry tirades and endless days spent locked in his room or the attic on a diet of bread and water, with a lesson to learn by rote—a chapter from some improving work or several pages from a volume of collected sermons (Uncle Henry and Aunt Laura were both genuinely convinced that Sophia’s son could not have avoided inheriting a large part of his immoral and unmentionable mother’s disposition, and that it was then: duty to eradicate or at least subdue that evil taint with every means in their power). They had locked him in with the New Testament on one occasion, but had not repeated the experiment, and the thrashing that had followed had been more than usually severe, for he had returned it to them with a page turned down at the twentieth chapter of St Luke and part of the fourteenth verse heavily underscored in indelible pencil: ‘
This is the heir: come, let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours.
’ Rory was growing up.

The only comfort he had found in those black years had been his discovery that all books were not long-winded sermons or dry-as-dust treatises devoted to improving the sinful, and he had read voraciously; smuggling books out of the library and hiding them under his mattress or on the top of the cupboards, and devouring them in secret. They became his escape from an intolerable world, and with their help he lived a hundred lives: Lancelot and Charlemagne, Marlborough and Rupert of the Rhine, Raleigh, Drake, John of Gaunt and Henry the Navigator. He fought battles with the Roman Legions, scaled the Alps with Hannibal and sailed into the unknown with Columbus, scuttled Spanish galleons with Francis Drake and charged with the Guards at Waterloo. He had been barely twelve when he had opened a book at random and read four lines that he had known were written expressly for him:

By a Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

I summoned am to tourney

Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end.

Methinks it is no journey.

He had read it over and over again, fascinated to find that something said in verse could make such piercing sense. But though his journeys had been easy enough to make in the spirit, they had been hard to make in the flesh. Five times he had run away only to be ignominiously captured and brought back. And when at last he was sent away to school, the three years he spent at an establishment noted for its success in crushing the spirits of recalcitrant and unmanageable boys had seemed a paradise cont-pared to his uncle’s house.

It had been a strict and brutal school. Run more on the lines of a reformatory than a seat of learning, by mean and unimaginative men under a headmaster who, though preaching in the school chapel as one in the full confidence of the Almighty, underpaid his assistants, saved money on food and amenities, and believed with Uncle Henry that inflexible strictness, harsh corporal punishment and near-starvation was the only way to deal with difficult boys. But four years under his uncle’s roof had inured Rory to all these things, and he had swallowed such learning as was offered him with an avidity that would have disgusted his schoolmates had it not been for the fact that he had also learnt to use his fists with a skill that had taught them to leave him severely alone, and a ferocity that no subsequent punishments had succeeded in curbing.

He had been fifteen when he decided that he had had enough of school and Uncle Henry, and on the night following that decision he had climbed out of his dormitory window, slid down a conveniently placed drainpipe, scaled two walls and walked out into the world a free man. And that time he had not been caught or brought back…”

27

The northeast Trade Wind that stirred up the evil-smelling dust of Zanzibar and woke the palms to rustling music, was a very different wind from the cold northeaster that had once blown icy raindrops into the face of a boy who plodded along in the darkness, making for the nearest seaport. But recalling that long-ago night and the dungeon years behind it, Rory felt again a tremor of the fierce determination that had possessed him then. A determination to escape and live his own life in his own way, and never again to allow another man or woman to tell him what he must do, or punish him for not doing it.

He had lived ever since by his family’s motto; taking what he wanted when he wanted it. And he had never let sentiment or remorse or any scruples stand in the way of his desires, or permitted anyone to order or own him. Love, friendship, affection, were all dangerous things if one let them get too great a hold on one, so he had seen to it that they should not do so. For his charming, selfish mother had taught him early a lesson that he had never forgotten—that pain inflicted by someone loved and trusted is deeper and more unendurable than the worse savageries that can be committed by those one hates or cares nothing for. He had no intention of allowing his own emotions to become either a weapon that could be turned against him or a tie that could hold him against his will, and there were even times when he resented Batty, Ralub, Zorah and the child Amrah, because in their several ways they implied a claim on him, and he would not admit any such claim: least of all through his affections. Faithful Batty, loyal Hajji Ralub, adoring Zorah, and Amrah—Amrah who was his own daughter…

The child had been a mistake: his mistake, and a bad one. He had never paused to care or consider whether his casual amours were productive of anything more than the gratification of a passing desire, and he had certainly never thought of it when the starving, terrified creature he had bought in an idle moment off an Arab slave trader had grown into a lovely and desirable woman. He had taken her because it pleased him to do so.

Rory had had other mistresses; and possibly other bastards, though if so he was unaware of it. But Zorah had differed from the others in that she belonged to him. She was as much a part of his household as Batty and Ralub, his servants and his crew and Murashi, the white cockatoo. He had bought her, and she had no other home, and though he had tried, once, to trace her people, it had proved an impossible task and he had abandoned it. And then she had grown up and without his quite realizing it taken over the management of The Dolphins’ House from the fat, idle negress who had been in nominal charge, and within a year of her becoming his mistress, Amrah had been born.

He could still remember the shock it had given him when she had told him with shining pride that she was carrying his child: his sudden involuntary spasm of revulsion. “It will be a son,” said Zorah. “It cannot be otherwise, for I have prayed for a son and made offerings, and surely my prayers will be granted.’ But he did not want a son and he did not want to see Zorah bear one. Not his child; someone who would have a claim on him and grow up to carry his blood into a future that he could only view with hostility and distrust. Someone who would be a responsibility and a tie—looking to him for advice, affection and security.