Trade Wind (59 page)

He looked like that whenever Amrah spoke to him in English, and the first time she had done so he had been furiously angry with Bwana Batty, who had taught the child her letters with the help of a coloured picture-book. And with Zorah herself, who had taken her to a woman missionary on sick-leave in Zanzibar, day after day during the months that he had been absent at sea, so that she might learn her father’s tongue from that unexpectedly broad-minded and tolerant spinster. Miss Dewlast, who had laboured to save souls for the God of the White Men, and died before she could return to Africa.

It was the first and only time that Rory had ever been angry with her, and Zorah had been crushed by his displeasure, for she had kept the lessons secret until such time as the child could speak the barbarous tongue with reasonable fluency, and had meant to surprise him. She had done so; but not in the way she intended, and had it not been for Batty Potter, Amrah might well have forgotten all she had learnt. But if Zorah was crushed and contrite. Batty was not That portion of Mr Potter’s heart that did not belong to Captain Emory Frost, Hajji Ralub and the ViragOy had been given unstintedly to Amrah, and he loved the little creature as he had never loved anything else in all his long and disreputable life—certainly not any of his own miscellaneous offspring! His devotion was a fresh and unexpected flower to find blossoming on such dubious soil, but it had taken firm root; and while Zorah wept, Batty had been truculent:

“I never ‘card such muckin’ rubbish in all me bleeding puffi’ declared Batty, outraged. “And the sooner you shuts your trap and gives over, the better. You fair makes me ill! Why shouldn’t the nipper learn to speak like a Christian? She’s your daughter—or so I been told.”

Rory had replied furiously that it was precisely that fact that gave him the right to bring her up as he chose, to which Batty had retorted with a single, exceedingly crude epithet.

“What you means,” added Batty shrewdly, “is that you’d like to keep ‘er all Arab, so that you can keep yourself ‘appy by makin’ out to yourself that she’s all Zorah’s and you ain’t noways responsible. Well, you ain’t going to do it! Not while I ‘as me strength. That kid ‘as every right to choose where she belongs, and by goles I’ll see she ‘as it. If you loved ‘er proper it would be different; but you don’t. And if you’re thinking of telling me to “op it, you can think again, because I ain’t a’going to!”

Batty had won, and Amrah spoke English, Arabic and Kiswahili with equal facility, though with a tendency to drop her aitches in the first of these. But Rory still kept out of reach of loving her as Batty and Zorah loved her: shying away from that emotion as violently and instinctively as an unbroken horse shies away from the human who advances with sugar in one hand and a halter in the other. And still Zorah thought: If she had been a boy—!’ and longed for a son who would bind him…

Rory held the slim, passionate body in his arms and stroked the soft hair that felt like silk and smelled of frangipani blossoms, but above her head his eyes were abstracted, for his thoughts had left Zorah and The Dolphins’ House and Zanzibar, and forgetting even the gold that lay hidden in the sea wall at
Kivulimi
, had leapt forward to the mainland and Dar-es-Salaam, the ‘Haven of Peace’, where Hajji Issa-bin-Yusuf, that rich and respected Arab landowner, lived luxuriously in a house among the coconut groves and orange orchards, and might, or might not, be the friend and ally of the pirate raiders from the Gulf.

Clinging to him and comforted by his arms and that slow, caressing hand, Zorah still sensed his preoccupation, and knowing that he was not thinking of her or of love, she pressed closer to him and kept her face hidden against him that he might not see the tears that she had always striven to weep only in secret, and now could no longer control. He had not seen them, or even known that she was crying. And when at last she had steeled herself to draw away and meet his gaze, he had released her without question, and she saw that his look was fixed on the far horizon and the wide expanse of sea that lay beyond the open windows, and that he was barely aware that she was no longer in his arms.

He had spent the night on board the
Virago
, and the following evening had sailed out of the harbour towards the sunset; heading due west for no better reason than that Dar-es-Salaam lay to the southward and Captain Emory Frost had acquired a rooted objection to advertising his destination—even on those rare occasions when he was not engaged in doubtful transactions.

Amrah had begged to be taken with him, and on being refused had stamped her foot at him and scowled in a manner that twenty generations of Frosts would have instantly recognized. It was so exactly a reproduction of Rory’s own, when in a black mood, that Batty had wheezed and chuckled and informed her that she was a chip off the old block and no mistake, and that one day he would take her himself even if he had to smuggle her aboard in a sea-chest, but that meanwhile he would bring her back the best present that money could buy.

Zorah had returned Rory’s perfunctory parting kiss with passionate fervour, assuring him as always that she would pray hourly for his safety and his swift return. And it was only as he turned to go that he realized that she was still wearing the filigree necklace, and was unaccountably disturbed. He had treated Batty’s warnings on the subject with considerable impatience, but now it seemed as though he himself was not entirely immune from superstition, because he came back to her, and gripping her slim shoulders turned her about, and unfastening the catch removed the necklace and flung it across the room.

“It is not worthy of you,” he said shortly in answer to Zorah’s cry of protest.” I will bring you something better. Do not wear it again, my pearl.”

He kissed her again, and this time some instinct of protection made him hold her hard against him, crushing her so that for a moment she could not breathe, and kissing her with a roughness that disguised a sudden tremor of fear. It had left her happier than she had been for many months, and when he had gone she had retrieved the necklace and attempted to fasten it about her throat again, because it was not only his gift to her, and therefore a proof of his love, but too beautiful in itself to be hidden away in some sandalwood box. But it had also proved to be too delicate for such rough treatment. She found that one of the topaz-set blossoms had been snapped off and the catch had been broken so that she could not fasten it again, and tying it instead with a piece of silk she decided to take it the very next day to Gaur Chand the jeweller, to be mended.

Colonel Edwards, walking briskly along the waterfront to take the evening air, observed Captain Frost’s schooner threading her way between the anchored dhows in the harbour, and pausing to watch her, thought: ‘
Wonder what that feller’s up to now
?’ And ten minutes later Majid-bin-Saïd, Sultan of Zanzibar, looking from a window of the city Palace, saw the
Virago
spread her sails before the evening breeze, and knowing something of her owner’s mind, smiled to see the ship head westward.

Hero too had taken advantage of the break in the monsoon to walk along the seafront with Clayton, and watching the schooner glide away from its moorings she felt that with its departure the air became cleaner and more breathable; a thought that was evidently shared by Clayton, who said trenchantly: “That’s one less bad smell in this town! If it rained around once a week, and trash like Frost and his crew were run out of the place, it might be a little less of a hell-hole. I can’t wait to get you out of it.”

But it did not look like a hell-hole that evening, thought Hero; and although a day or two ago she would have been ready to agree with him, she looked now across the quiet, wind-ruffled water and out towards the rose-pink horizon, and was not so sure that she wanted to get away from it. There would be rain again soon; perhaps tomorrow. But for the moment the sky overhead was clear and the enormous banks of cloud that piled up one above the other to the east of the island were ablaze with the sunset; a glory of gold and apricot that stained the sea and turned the white-walled town and the grey trunks of the coconut palms to a vivid, glowing coral against the quiet aquamarine of the evening.

A single star trembled like a drop of brilliant dew above the purple and blue of the distant tree-tops, and as the colours faded and the twilight swooped down upon Zanzibar, lights flowered in the town and on the dark shapes of the great dhows that lifted and sank to the breathing of the tide, and where a moment ago there had been one star there were now a thousand; each one enormous, steady and impossibly brilliant. A muezzin’s voice called from the minaret of a mosque, clear and high and with a haunting cadence that was as strange and exotic to Western ears as the green, coral-built island with its dark groves of spice trees, swaying palms and scented orange orchards was to Western eyes. And as the last echoes died away, the
Virago
’s sails melted into the dusk and were gone, and Hero relaxed her clasp on Clayton’s arm, and turning away from the sea and the darkening harbour, walked back with him through the shadowed streets.

The frangipani tree that fronted the Consulate was silver in the swiftly falling night, and the scent of its fading blossoms filled the warm air with a fragrance that Hero had once considered cloying but which tonight appeared strangely sweet and for some reason curiously disturbing. Pausing to look up at it, it seemed to her that the stars hung so low in the sky that they were caught in its tangled branches, and that she had never realized before what beauty meant.

She stood there staring at it for so long that Clay became impatient, and grasping her by the elbow, urged her into the house. And the next day it rained again: and the next and the next. A warm deluge of falling water that stripped the last white blossoms from the tree and left it standing stark and grey and ugly in half an acre of splashing mud.

The
Virago
had taken a full two weeks to reach Dar-es-Salaam, for once out of sight of the Island Rory had turned her northward into the wind, and only after several days fetched about to run in on Lamu and Malindi, and after that Mombasa; picking up a variety of interesting information on the way, a good deal of which supported the theory that Hajji Issa-bin-Yusuf of Dar-es-Salaam was deeply implicated in the so-called “trading’ ventures of the pirate dhows from the Persian Gulf.

He had also let it be known that he himself was prepared to pay good prices for selected slaves and had gone as far as to inspect some that had been brought up secretly from the south, and were on their way to Arabia provided that the trader, an Arab from Kilwa, could dodge the ships of the Cape Squadron; too many of which had taken to patrolling those waters.

There had been news, too, of Lieutenant Larrimore and the
Daffodil
, Dan had apparently intercepted no less than seven slavers during the past few weeks, and having impounded their cargoes, run the dhows into shallow water off Lamu and released the slaves—most of whom, Rory concluded cynically, would probably have been recaptured by some other trader within the next day or so. But the
Daffodil
‘s assistance could not be counted upon in the matter of discouraging the pirates, for she had drawn off to the southward and was not expected back for some considerable time; and Rory reflected with some annoyance that it was ironic that Dan should remove himself on the only occasion when his presence might have proved a help rather than a hindrance to his, Rory’s, own particular schemes.

It was in Mombasa, in the house of a Persian courtesan, that he heard a rumour that a fleet of pirate dhows had already left the Gulf and was bound for Zanzibar by way of Bunda Abbas, Kishim and Socotra, and so down the coastal waters past Mogadishu and Mombasa—from where they would skirt Pemba and swoop down upon Zanzibar with the northeast Trades at their back. They could be expected within a matter of weeks, depending upon the weather and the chances of trade encountered on the way. Two weeks perhaps, or four—or five? Allah and the masters of the dhows alone knew. But they would come. That at least was sure, for slaves were scarce that year, owing to a great plague that had smitten the tribes in the interior and was decimating the land. Some said that it had begun on the shores of the Red Sea and had crept slowly southward along the caravan routes of the slave traders, while others held that it had been bred somewhere in the unexplored lands that lay behind the Mountains of the Moon, and spreading outward had killed off whole villages, so that a man might travel for a hundred days and find only bones and the bodies of the dead in deserted huts and in the fields that the jungle was already reclaiming.

Rory heard that many slavers who, with their caravans and followers, had left the coast to conduct their habitual raids on the interior had not returned, and no word had come back to tell of what had befallen them. And that it was whispered that the centre of the vast continent was empty of men, and that the great carnivorous cats and all other eaters of carrion had become so bold and savage from gorging on human flesh that neither fire nor muskets could protect one from their attacks.

“Wherefore it is sure,” said his informant—a garrulous Banyan from Cutch who dealt in ivory, hides and spices—“that these Gulf raiders will fall upon Zanzibar this season. For where eke shall they find sufficient slaves for their needs, if it is true that the gods have thought fit to send a plague to slay all the black men and give the great land over to lions and other wild beasts?”

“I too have heard this,” nodded the Persian courtesan. “Though it may be no more than a traveller’s-tale, since I have met none who have seen it with their own eyes, and it is always the other man who has met a man who has heard it told by a third.”

The Banyan smiled thinly, and drawing out a small copper betel-box, prepared himself a wedge of crushed nut wrapped in a leaf, popped it into his mouth and said: “And yet what of Jafar el Yemini? and Hamadam? and Kabindo the Nubian, and a score of others? Slave traders and dealers in gold and ivory, who set out many moons ago and have not returned? If it is a traveller’s-tale, where then are the travellers? Those who have seen it with their own eyes are themselves dead of the plague; of that we may be sure! Presently it will reach the coasts and come to Mombasa; wherefore I myself intend to return to my own country for a time, taking my family with me, though at this season of the year the voyage is long and unpleasant and I am always sick at sea. But one recovers—which is more than can be said of the black cholera!”