The Monsoon (89 page)

The sword was in my hand. I was afraid, terrified. I threw with all my strength, and it hit him full in the chest and went through his heart.”

“Oh, merciful God.” Sarah stared at him.

“You killed your own brother.”

“I did not know it was Billy, not even then. Not until I lifted the hat from his head and saw his face.” They were silent a while.

Sarah looked horrified. Then she rallied.

“He was trying to kill you,” she said firmly.

“You had to do it, To in to save yourself.”

She saw the desolation in his eyes, reached out, took his head and pulled it to her bosom, holding him there, stroking his hair.

“There is no blame.

You had to do it.”

“I have told myself that a thousand times.” Tom’s voice was muffled.

“But he was my brother.”

“God is just.

I know that He forgives you, my darling.

You must put it behind you.” He lifted his face, and she knew that there was nothing she could say to ease the pain. It would haunt him if he lived a hundred years. She kissed him.

“None of it makes any difference to us, Tom. I am your woman for ever. If we can never go back to England, then let it be so. I will follow you to the ends of the earth. Nothing matters but you and me, and our love.” She drew him down onto the sleeping mat, and offered him the comfort of her body.

till the Swallow waited in the harbour. They had completed the repairs long since, and she was once more sleek and lovely. Her hull glistened with new paint, but her canvas stayed furled and she snubbed restlessly on her anchor cables, like a falcon at hate.

Her crew were growing restless. There had been a number of ugly fights among them, their nerves rubbed raw by inactivity, and Tom knew he could not hold them much longer in idleness, like prisoners on their own ship.

More and more Tom was tempted to defy the Sultan’s decree and sail north into those forbidden seas where he knew Dorian was held captive, or to take the Swallow across to the mainland and search for those hidden places in the mysterious interior where the ivory, gold and gum arabic were harvested.

Aboli and Ned Tyler advised patience, but Tom rounded on them angrily.

“Patience is for old men. Fortune never smiled on patience.”

The monsoon fell away, into the breathless period of the doldrums, then swung right round the compass and whispered almost inaudibly out of the northeast, those first gentle breaths that herald the change of season, harbinger of the big rains of the kaskazi.

The kaskazi gathered strength, and the heavily laden trading ships in the harbour hoisted their anchors, spread their canvas to the fresh new wind and bore away southwards to round Good Hope.

The Swallow waited in the almost empty harbour.

Then, on one of Tom’s regular visits to the fort, the vizier areeted him as though he were newly arrived in the port, and offered him a seat on a brocaded cushion and a thimble cup of thick, sweet black coffee.

“All my efforts on your behalf have borne fruit. His Excellency, the Sultan, has looked favourably on your petition for a licence to trade He smiled disarmingly, and produced the document from the sleeve of his robe.

“Here is his firman.” Tom reached for it eagerly, but the vizier slipped back into his sleeve.

“The firman is restricted to the islar” of Zanzibar alone. It does not entitle you to sail fur th north, or to call at any port on the mainland. If you do so your ship will be seized and the crew with it.” Tom tried to hide his irritation.

“I understand, and I am grateful for the generosity of the Sultan.”

“A tax will be levied on any goods you acquire in the, markets, which must be paid for in gold before the goo!” are loaded aboard your ship. The tax is one fifth part of the value of all goods.” Tom swallowed hard, but kept on smiling politely “His Excellency is generous.” The vizier held out the document, but as Tom reached for it, he again withdrew it, and exclaimed at his own forgetfulness.

“Ah! Forgive me, effendi. I have overlooked the small matter of the licence fee. A thousand rupees in gold and, of course, another five hundred rupees for my own intercession with His Excellency.” With the royal fimwn at last in his grasp, Tom could visit the markets. Each day he came ashore at dawn, bringing Master Walsh and Aboli with him, and he returned to the ship only at the hour of Zuhr, the early afternoon prayer, when the merchants closed their stalls to answer the call of the muezzin to their devotions.

For the first few weeks he made no purchases, but each day sat for hours with one or other of the merchants, drinking coffee and exchanging pleasantries, examining their wares without any show of enthusiasm, striking no deals, but comparing price and quality. Tom had believed at first that his bargaining power would be strengthened by most of the other European traders having sailed already with the kaskazi, and that there would be little competition for the goods on offer.

He soon found that this was far from the case. The other traders had picked over the goods, and selected the best. The ivory tusks remaining in the market were mostly immature, few any longer than his arm, many deformed and discoloured. There was nothing even approaching that mighty pair his father had purchased from Consul Grey on their first visit to the island. Despite the poor quality, the merchants were already fat with profits and they maintained their prices, shrugging indifferently when he protested.

“Effendi, there are few men who hunt the beasts. It is dangerous work, and each season they have to travel further to find the herds.

Now it is very late in the season. The supply of ivory has been taken up by the other Frankish traders,” one of the merchants explained smoothly.

“However, I have a few fine slaves for your consideration.”

With all the grace he could muster, Tom refused the offer to examine these human chattels. Aboli had been captured as a slave in childhood, but every detail of the horrors inflicted upon him had remained starkly clear in his memory. Before he had ever sailed from the shores of England Tom had grown up with his descriptions of the heinous trade.

During his many voyages Tom’s father had ulated first-hand knowledge of the trade, and he had accurn helped inst il in the young Tom an abhorrence of its inhuman practices.

Since he had first rounded Good Hope, Tom had come in regular contact with the slavers and their victims.

During their long wait in Zanzibar Roads there had always been slave-ships anchored close to them, near enough for the stink and heartbreaking sounds to carry clearly to where the Swallow was lying.

Each day now he walked with Aboli through the slave compounds, and it was more difficult to ignore the misery all around them: the wailing of children torn from their parents” arms, the weeping of bereaved mothers, and the dumb suffering in the dark eyes of young men and women deprived of their free, wild existence, chained like animals, abused in a language they did not understand, spreadeagled on the whipping-block, flogged with the vicious hippo hide kiboko until their ribs showed white in the wounds.

The very thought of making a profit out of the torment of these lost souls made the bile rise in the back of Tom’s throat.

Back on the Swallow he discussed their predicament with his ship’s officers. Although the foremost object of the voyage was to find Dorian, and Tom never wavered from that goal, he had a duty to his crew and he had inveigled many of them aboard with the promise of reward.

So far there had been no rewards and there was little prospect of any profit to share with them.

“There are few bargains to be had hereabouts Master Walsh confirmed lugubriously. He opened his notebook, adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles on his nose, and quoted the list of the ivory and gum arabic prices he had compiled before they left England.

“The price of spices is more favourable, but still leaves little profit when we take into account the hardships and expenses of the voyage. The cloves and pepper, now, there is always a ready market for them, and to a lesser extent for cinnaMon and, of course, the cinchona bark is in demand in America and in the Mediterranean countries afflicted b malaria.”

“We must have a few hundredweight of cinchona for our own use,” Tom cut in.

“Now that the big rains are beginning there will be much fever among the men.” The boiled extract from the bark was bitter as gall but, a century ago, the Jesuit monks had discovered that it was a sovereign remedy for the malarial fever. It had been the fathers who had first introduced the cinchona trees to this island.

Now it grew here profusely.

“Yes,” agreed Aboli softly.

“You will need the cinchona.

Especially if you’re going inland to search for your own ivory.”

Tom looked at him sharply.

“What made you think I would be so foolhardy as to flout the decrees of the Sultan and John Company, Aboli? Even you have counselled me strongly against such a course.”

“I have watched you sitting in the bows each evening and staring across the channel at the African mainland.

Your thoughts were so loud that they almost deafened me.”

“It would be dangerous.” Tom stopped short of denying the accusation, but his head turned instinctively towards the west, and a dreamy look came into his eyes as he stared across at the hazy outline of the land fading into the dusk shadows.

“That has never stopped you before,” Aboli pointed out.

“I would not know where to begin. It is a land unknown, terra incognita.” He used the caption from the charts in his cabin that he studied so avidly.

“Not even you have travelled out there, Aboli. It would be folly to go without a guide to lead us.”

“No, I do not know this northern land,” Aboli agreed.

“I was born much further south, near the great River Zambezi, and it is many years since I was last there.” He paused.

“But I know where we can find somebody who could lead us into the interior.”

“Who?

Tom asked, unable to hide his excitement.

“Where will we find this man? What is his name?”

“I do not yet know his name or his face, but I will recognize him when I see him.”

When they went ashore the next morning, the first chained files of slaves were being led to the market from the barra coons where they had,] been incarcerated overnight.

Like all the other commodities at this late season their ranks were thinned, and fewer than two hundred specimens were on offer. when the Swallow had arrived, there had been several thousand for sale. Most of those remaining were old or frail, thin with sickness or scarred from the kiboko. Buyers were always chary of @j whip-marked slave, for it usually meant that he or she was incorrigible, not amenable to training.

Previously, when passing through the market, Tom had averted his gaze, had tried to avoid studying them, their repugnance and Pity too troubling. But now he and Abili took up a position at the main gate of the slave-market from which they could watch the sorry columns being herded past. They scrutinized every individual as he came level with them.

There were two or three black men in the ranks who seemed to Tom to be of the type they were seeking, tall and strong and heroic despite their chains. But when he touched Aboli’s arm and glanced at him in enquiry, Abol i shook his head impatiently.

“Nothing?” Tom asked quietly, despondent. The last of the slaves were filing past, and Aboli had shown no interest in any of them.

“Our man is there,” Aboli contradicted him, “but the slavemasters were watching us. I could not point him out.

The slaves were led to their stalls around the square and each was chained to his post. The masters took their seats in the shade, wealthy men, complacent, rich IA dressed, attended by their personal slaves who brewed” coffee for them and lit the hookahs. Eyes hooded and sly, they watched Tom and Aboli as they made a slow circuit of the market.

Aboli stopped at the first stall and examined one of the slaves, a big man and a warrior by his looks. The slave, master pulled open his mouth to show his teeth, as though he were a horse, and palpated his muscles.

“Not more than twenty years of age, effendW the Arab said.

“Look at these arms, strong as a bullock. There is another thirty years” hard work in him.” Aboli spoke to the slave in one of the dialects of the forests, but the man stared back at him like a dumb animal.

Aboli shook his head, and they passed on to the next stall, to repeat the routine.

Tom realized he was slowly working his way towards the man he had already selected. He looked ahead, trying to guess which he was, and then, with sudden certainty, he recognized him.

He was naked except for a brief loincloth, a small man, with a thin wiry body. There was no fat or soft flesh on him. His hair was a thick, unkempt bush, like that of a wild animal, but his eyes were bright and piercing.

Gradually Tom and Aboli approached the group in which he was tethered, and Tom was careful to feign disinterest in the one they had chosen. They inspected another man and a young girl, then, much to the slave master chagrin, made as if to move on. As if in afterthought, Aboli turned back to the little man.

“Show me his hands,” he demanded of the slavemaster, who nodded to his assistant. Between them, they grabbed the slave’s wrists, and the chains clanked as they forced him to extend his hands for Aboli’s scrutiny.

“Turn them over, Aboli ordered, and they turned them palm uppermost. Aboli concealed his satisfaction. The first two fingers of both the man’s hands were calloused to the extent of being almost deformed.

“This is our man,” he said to Tom in English, but his inflection made it sound like a rejection. Tom shook his head as if confirming his rejection. They turned away, leaving the disappointed slavemaster staring after them.

“What is it about his hands?” Tom asked, without looking back.

“What is it that has marked them that way?”

“The bowstring,” Aboli said curtly.

“Both hands?” Tom stopped with surprise.

“He is an elephant hunter,” Aboli explained, “but keep walking and I will explain it to you. The elephant bow is so stiff that no man can draw it from the shoulder. The hunter creeps close, that close.” He pointed out a wall ten paces away.