Trade Wind (57 page)

Rory stared at him in blank astonishment, and then broke into laughter. “By God, I really believe you mean that Come off it. Uncle! You can’t believe that sort of mumbo-jumbo. Be your age!”

“Which is more than twice yours, young feller-me-lad! If you ‘ad a few more of my years you’d maybe ‘ave learned more sense. Mumbo-jumbo it may be, but I been to Pemba an’ I seen a mort o’ things that there ain’t no accounting for and which I ‘aven’t liked. I don’t ‘old with parsons and missioners and such, but after two nights on Pemba I comes back ‘ere and I says me prayers—earnest! You don’t ‘ave to laugh. I don’t scare easy, but some of the things I seen there—and more that I ‘card—I don’t want to see nor ‘ear again. Not nowise!”

“They were pulling your leg, Batty,” said Rory grinning. “I had no idea you were so credulous. Did they try to sell you a love potion, or offer to mix up a charm that would rid you of one of your enemies?”

Batty shuddered: a movement that in the bright sunlight was strangely shocking. His nut-cracker face seemed to shrink and grow pinched, and he said: “If you knew what them devils put in their messes you wouldn’t think it so bleedin’ funny. They makes them out of corpses, that’s what!—corpses which they buries first and then digs up and ‘angs on trees until they rots. I saw ‘em, I tell you! And you could smell ‘em at night. I’ve ‘eard tell as they eat them, too…
Ugh!
fair makes me skin crawl. And there’s worse things that I could tell you—”

“You needn’t bother,” said Rory. “I know. But you have to be a naked savage, or the next thing to it, to believe that they can do even a quarter of the things they’d like you to think they can.”

“A quarter would be enough!” said Batty with conviction. “More than enough! Foolish I may be, but I ain’t a big enough fool as to try spendin’ any of that damned gold. I don’t want no part of it an I ain’t taking no part of it. Not a farthing’s worth. And I’m telling you straight. Captain Rory, if you ‘as your wits about you—which I doubts—you won’t go touchin’ it neither.”

“
Bah!
” said Rory.

Batty shrugged and gave up. He had seen that particular look on the Captain’s face before, and he knew it too well to waste time in further argument He expectorated again, but with less violence, and said in a more reasonable voice: “Were you thinking of moving it somewhere, or are you going to let it lay there?”

Rory turned to contemplate the ingots again, and shook his head. “No, we can’t leave it here. It would be too easy to break down that door with the house empty, and I don’t want to stay out here just now.”

He brooded for a moment or two, and then said abruptly: “Where’s that old scoundrel, Daud? He’s sound enough, but I’d rather he didn’t see this.”

“That’s what I thought,” nodded Batty. “I sends ‘im off to get a load of fodder for the ‘orses, and one or two other things that’ll keep ‘im busy till nightfall.”

“Good. Then let’s get started.”

“Where to?” asked Batty suspiciously.

“I’m going to shift this stuff down to the seaward wall of the garden, and you’re going to help me. You know those old guardrooms?—well one of them has a sort of oubliette under it I found it by accident one day. Dropped a coin on the floor, and it rolled away and got caught in a crack between two stones in a recess against the back wall—the sort of place that probably had a bench in it once. When I went to pick it up it slid through, and a second later I thought I heard it hit something that sounded as though it was quite a way below. So I dropped another to make sure, and after that I got a crowbar and prised the stone up, and found that someone had had a hiding-place made for his wine or his valuables—or possibly for a temporary bolt-hole in time of trouble. I didn’t say anything about it because I thought it might prove useful one of these days, and it seems I was right. We can pitch this stuff down there and no one will ever find it. Come on.”

Batty had improvised a crowbar and they carried the first load down through the tree shadows and the winding, overgrown paths of the garden, and carefully lifted the tangled mass of bougainvillæa that curtained the entrance to a ruined stone cell. The stone had settled back into place and blown dust had lodged in the crack down which the coin had slipped, providing a foothold for a crop of toadstools. It had not been as easy to lift as Rory remembered, but it had moved at last, and disclosed a black space that ran back under the wall and appeared to be partly cut out of the rock on which the fortress had been built.

They had made a good many trips, for the ingots were heavy; and when the last of them had been thrown into the darkness they replaced the stone and filled the crack with earth, and scattered dirt and rotting vegetation over it. Rory looked thoughtfully at the recess and said: “We could fill that in, you know. That would make it safer. Or better still, fit a stone slab in the bottom of it with mortar, to make it look as though there had always been a step there. Something must have stood there once, and there are plenty of those stone blocks lying around the place still. But that’ll do for the moment.”

They let the bougainvillæa drop back and screen the doorless entrance again, and Batty said “You don’t ‘ave to worry. The next time it rains the ‘ole place’ll be a mess of green again, and things grows so fast in this “eat that in ‘arf an hour no one’ll ever know you been near it.’ He stumped away up the crushed-shell paths, and gaining the house again, washed his hands with elaborate thoroughness as though he feared that some particle of the gold might have adhered to them to bring him ill luck. “You take my advice and leave it there and forget it,” growled Batty, but without hope.

“You ought to know I never take advice,” retorted Rory with a grin. “Stop wailing like a banshee, Batty. There’s nothing for you to get worried about. Since you won’t take any of the stuff, you’re quite safe from ghosts and curses, and as I don’t believe in either they aren’t likely to harm me. Try and look a little cheerful and realize that I’ve made my fortune.”

“
Hmm
. If ‘e lets you get away with it. And I don’t mean that witchdoctor, neither. ‘Oo’s to say the Sultan won’t go changing ‘is mind and want it all back again? Seems to me ‘e ‘ands it to you werry careless-like last night.”

“He could well afford to. You ought to see what he kept! He regards that stuff down there as mere chicken-feed.”

“Maybe ‘e does. But what ‘appens when ‘e’s spent ‘is lot, or lost it? I wouldn’t trust ‘im a yard; not once ‘e’s wasted ‘is share on riotous livin.’”

Rory laughed, but the laugh ended in a frown, and he said: “It’s a thought. Batty. There’s more solid sense in that head of yours than one would suspect. I’ll make a point of visiting His Highness before he starts to think over things too deeply, and get him to put it in writing—just in case of trouble. We’ll start as soon as Daud gets back.”

The caretaker had returned shortly before sunset and had helped saddle the horses and fetch the pack ponies, and it was as they were riding along the road toward Beit-el-Ras that Rory pulled a handkerchief out of his breeches pocket, and something that he had wrapped in it, and forgotten, flashed in the last ray of the setting sun and fell into the caking mud of the roadway.

He reined in, and Batty, following suit, dismounted and retrieved it. “Where did you get this?” enquired Batty, swinging the fragile trifle in one homy hand.

Rory leaned down and took it from him without replying. He had forgotten all about the necklace, and now he sat silent, swinging it from one finger and admiring the delicacy of the goldsmith’s work and the artistry that had frosted it with seed-pearls and fringed it with leaves and blossoms of topaz and tourmaline. It was a lovely thing and would become Zorah’s fragile beauty far better than the magnificent and infinitely more valuable ones in diamonds, emeralds and rubies would have done.

Batty spoke again, and in a sharper voice: “I said, where did yer get it?”

“This? Oh—same place.”

“Ho! Prigged it when ‘e weren’t looking, did you?”

“No, I did not, blast you! What the hell do you take me for?”

“It wouldn’t be the first thing you’d lifted,” retorted Batty, unimpressed. “Nor yet the last, if I knows you!” He scrambled back into the saddle and kicked his horse into a gentle trot. “I thought you told me that ‘Is ‘Ighness took all the jools and such-like stuff.”

“So he did: but I took a fancy to this, and as it isn’t particularly valuable he let me have it.”

“What you want a thing like that for?”

“To give to Zorah.”

“
You never!
” Batty’s leathery face paled and he leant from the saddle and made a grab at the necklace.

Rory snatched it away and returning it to his pocket said irritably: “Don’t be a fool Batty, you’ll break it.”

“Give it me, Captain,” pleaded Batty, his eyes bright and frightened and his voice hoarse with anxiety: “Let me ‘ave it. I’ll—I’ll buy it off you, honest I will.”

For God’s sake. Batty, what is all this? This isn’t part of the gold,” said Rory, impatient and suddenly exasperated. “And anyway, she didn’t have anything to do with taking it; this’ll be a gift.”

“It’s bad luck,” insisted Batty stubbornly. “‘Ow can you give it to ‘er when you knows there’s bad luck on it? You give it me and I’ll buy you something just as pretty. Give you my word I will.”

Rory scowled at him, but abandoning his intention of cursing Batty in a manner that would have put the late warlock’s efforts in the shade, laughed instead, and urged his horse to a gallop. The matter was not mentioned again, but Batty’s face remained surly and troubled and he relapsed into a silence that was anything but companionable. And as the sunset faded and the swift green twilight closed down upon the Island he glanced over his shoulder more than once, as though he feared that the witch-doctor’s demons might be padding after them in the dusk.

Beit-el-Ras was already falling into ruins, for like so much Arab work it had been left unfinished, and Majid seldom went there; preferring his city palace or the home of his childhood, Beit-el-Motoni. Wind, rain and heat, damp and neglect, had been hard at work on its walls and windows and rabbit-warren of rooms, until now even the kindly light of candles and oil lamps could not disguise the fact that its day would soon be over. But in the wing at present occupied by the Sultan something of its old magnificence remained, for here silken hangings disguised damp-stains and flaking plaster, the floors were strewn with carpets from Tabriz and Samarkand, while lamps burning perfumed oil stood on tables of ebony and sandalwood inlaid with ivory, silver, or mother-of-pearl.

Half-a-dozen huge wooden chests, carved, polished, and ornamented with brasswork and heavy bronze locks, stood ranged against one wall, and Majid himself was seated cross-legged upon a pile of Persian rugs, supporting himself on a gold-embroidered bolster and several cushions, and engaged in admiring a selection of richly jewelled daggers. He nodded affably to Rory, and waving him to a similar pile of cushions a few feet away, said: “You will eat with me, and we will talk later.”

The meal had been long and elaborate, and when it had been cleared away Majid belched comfortably and relaxing against the cushions, began once more to toy with the daggers; turning them this way and that so that the lamplight struck brilliant sparks of red, green and violet light from the diamonds, and woke the pigeon’s-blood rubies to baleful life.

“I see that you at least are not afraid,” remarked Rory, watching him.

“Of the
Mchawi’s
’s curse?” Majid examined the setting of a carved emerald with careful attention, and then said slowly: “Yes—and no. For you see, he had put a magic on that hiding-place for its safe keeping, yet we two were able to enter and to remove these things without harm, and his spells did not prevent us. So I have thought that because I am my father’s heir, and he must surely have meant me to know where his treasure lay hid so that if need arose I might make what use of it I pleased, the magic was powerless against me. And if that is so the curse will be also, since why should my father have wished to withhold his riches from me, who by his wish succeeded him?”

“So you think that absolves you from any evil consequences?”

“I believe that it may. That is why I say ‘No, I am not afraid.’ But I also say ‘Yes, I am,’ because I have a fear that such a man can wish evil for its own sake, and so perhaps ill fortune may fall upon me.”

“But you consider these jewelled things are worth it?”

Majid made a gesture of negation. “It is because I know full well that evil awaits me on either path. If I let the treasure lie, I reap evil from my people and the pirates and my brother Thuwani—because I have no money. But with a small part of these things I can buy relief from all three, and much pleasure for myself. Therefore I accept the lesser evil.”

Rory grinned and said: “That seems simple enough. But what about me? No reason why the
Mchawi’s
familiars shouldn’t get to work on me.”

“None,” agreed Majid placidly.

Rory laughed in genuine amusement and said: “And you don’t give a damn either—not as long as you’re all right. And why should you? I don’t myself. I haven’t seriously believed in wizards and warlocks in the past, and I don’t intend to start now. Not if it means giving up my share of the loot. I’m sticking to that. But there’s something else I want from Your Highness.”

“Another necklace?” enquired Majid doubtfully.

“No, I want a paper from you, signed and sealed, to say that the gold is a payment, or a free gift, to Captain Emory Frost of the
Virago
, in return for services rendered to the State. Will you grant me that?”

“Assuredly. But why? You have the gold.”

“At the moment. But there may come a time when others may contest my right to it.”

“It may be that you are right. I will give you such a paper: my scribes shall prepare it.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve prepared one myself,” said Rory blandly. “I thought it would save time. It’s in Arabic, with an English translation just to be on the safe side. All it needs is your signature and seal, and your thumb-print to make it really water-tight.”