Trade Wind (26 page)

“At this time of day?” demanded Mr Hollis, considerably put out. “They must be mad! Do they want to get heatstroke?”

“Oh, but they won’t be going far,” said Aunt Abby comfortably. “There are so few roads where a carriage may go. In fact hardly any, and I wonder why anyone should trouble to keep one. But Olivia only intends to take Hero to pay a call on some of the Sultan’s sisters.”

“What does she want to do that for?”

“Well, dear, it’s only polite. Being your niece, dear Hero will be expected to call on some of the royal ladies.”

“The ones in Beit-el-Tani Palace, you mean: I might have known it!” said the Consul, exasperated. “That woman Cholé again.”

“The
Princess
Cholé,” corrected Aunt Abby gently.

“‘Princess’ my left foot!” snorted her husband. “Her mother was no more than one of the old Sultan’s concubines.”

Aunt Abby closed her eyes and shuddered. “
Sarari
, Nathaniel. Not ‘concubines.’
Sarari
—or
Suri
in the singular, I believe. And their children all rank as Princes and Princesses, dear. Seyyids and Seyyidas, I mean.”

The Consul flapped an impatient hand and said: “Princesses or not, Cressy’s been seeing far too much of those women, and it’s got to stop.”

“Nathaniel!” Aunt Abby’s voice quivered with indignation. “I just do not understand you. Why, you know quite well that it was you yourself who suggested it when we first came here. I remember you telling us how deplorable it was that people who considered themselves entitled to rule over coloured races evidently did not think that they need meet them socially, and that it was not only shockingly ill-mannered but most shortsighted, and—”

“There’s no need to keep telling me what I said!” snapped Mr Hollis irritably. “I remember it quite well, and in general I am still of the same opinion. But circumstances alter cases. For one thing, I didn’t know then that Thérèse Tissot and that Englishwoman had managed to strike up a friendship with a clutch of the Sultan’s sisters and cousins—and for another, I didn’t figure on Cressy living in their pockets!”

“I am sure Cressy wouldn’t
dream
of living in anyone’s pocket,” stated Aunt Abby tremulously. “It is merely that she is young, so it is only natural that she should like to associate with young people. Thérèse—”

“Is thirty if she’s a day, and a born mischief-maker,” said the Consul, interrupting her. “Look at the way she used to roll her eyes at Clay? Never let the boy alone at one time. Forever riding with him or calling, or taking him sailing—it’s a wonder old Tissot stood for it. I can tell you, I didn’t like it by half, and I was mighty thankful when Clay sheered off. As for Olivia Credwell, she’s nothing but an empty-headed ninny whose husband must have been glad to die and get shut of her gush and chatter. A fine pair of friends for your daughter! Why, it’s got so that Cressy spends more than half her time in their company, while the three of them together spend a sight too much around at Beit-el-Tani. I don’t like it, I tell you. Those Palace women are up to something, and I don’t like it.”

“Up to something? Mr Hollis, what can you mean?”

Mr Hollis avoided his wife’s startled gaze, and scowling instead at a flamboyant arrangement of orange lilies in a large blue pottery jar, said shortly: “I don’t know. I wish I did!”

He turned away from her and began to pace about the room, his hands clasped behind his back and the jerkiness of his stride betraying his inner perturbation, and when at last he came to a stop it was not in front of his wife, but before a framed engraving of Stuart’s portrait of George Washington that hung on the far wall of the room. Mr Hollis stared at it for a moment or two without speaking, and then said heavily and with apparent irrelevance:

“It is not our practice to meddle in the conduct or politics of other countries, or to become involved in their domestic disputes. We should strive to remain neutral; if not in thought then at least in deed. And to avoid any appearance of taking sides, because once we start doing that we shall find ourselves committed all over the globe. Committed, as the British are, to interference and responsibility, oppression and suppression—and war. The founders of our country and a great many of its present citizens were and are men who fled from interference and interminable wars. They wanted peace and freedom, and by God, they got it. But the surest way to lose it is by permitting ourselves to get mixed up in the unsavoury squabbles of foreign nations. It’s none of my business if Henri Tissot and that hee-hawing half-wit, Hubert Platt, permit their womenfolk to engage in intrigue against the Sultan. But I won’t have my daughter getting mixed up in something that’s likely to raise a bad smell. Or my niece either.”

“But Nat!” The words were a protesting squeak, and the Consul swung round to glare at his wife and say loudly:

“Or you either, Mrs Hollis! I won’t have it. Why, the way your daughter has been talking of late anyone would think she was canvassing votes for a Presidential election, with Bargash as her own private candidate. She’s taking sides, and I’ve no doubt she thinks it’s all mighty exciting—like acting a part in a play about a Wicked Sultan and a Noble Heir. But what she’s really doing is getting herself mixed up in the private quarrels of coloured people: primitive, lawless people who don’t understand our ways of thinking or living, and have never balked at murdering their own kin to get what they want. Well, I guess she’ll have to find something else to keep her amused, because I’m not standing for any members of my family sticking their noses into affairs that are nothing to do with them, or helping stir up trouble against the ruler of a territory to which I have been sent as the accredited representative of my country. It’s downright dishonourable foolishness, and by goles, it’s going to stop!”

13

The Seyyida Salmé, daughter of the late great Sultan, Seyyid Saïd, the ‘Lion of Oman,’ sat cross-legged on a silken carpet in an upper room of Beit-el-Tani, one of the royal houses in Zanzibar city, and read aloud from the
Chronicles of the Imams and Seyyids of Muscat and Oman
…

“Then went Seyyid Sultan-bin-el-Imam-Ahmed-bin-Saïd to Newaz, and ordered certain men to go to el-Matrah, there to lie in wait for Khasif and to send him bound to Muscat where he should be imprisoned in the Western Fort and kept without food and water until he died, and afterwards to take his body in a boat and throw it into the sea a long distance from the land. And this they did, to the great delight of the Sultan, who proceeded next to es-Suwaik, which was then in the hands of his brother Saïd-bin-el-Imam, and captured it…”

Salmé‘s soft voice slowed and stopped, and she let the heavy book slide off her knees on to the carpet where the breeze that crept through the slats of the shutter ruffled its pages with a sharply urgent sound.

Save for the flap and flutter of the parchment the green-shadowed, mirror-hung room was silent, and in that silence Salmé could hear other sounds: the clatter of pots and pans and a shrill clamour of voices from the servants’ quarters on the ground floor, the wash of the sea, the musical cry of a coconut-seller and the beehive hum of the city. All comfortable, familiar noises that made a background to each day, and that had once spelled peace and security. Once, but no longer.

It was, she supposed, inevitable that there should be quarrels and feuds and noisy differences of opinion in such a family as her father’s, for although the old Sultan had for many years only one legal wife, his harem overflowed with
sarari
—concubines of every shade and colour from blue-eyed, pearl-fair Circassians to ebony-skinned Abyssinians—whose children ranked as royal, with the right to call themselves Seyyid or Seyyida, But the enormous swarm of half-brothers and sisters, who together with their mothers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces and legions of attentive slaves, occupied the Zanzibar palaces and overflowed into a dozen royal residences, had on the whole lived happily together under the kindly and benevolent eye of the Lion of Oman, and it was only since his death that things had changed.

It was, thought Salmé sadly, as though all peace and contentment had died and been buried with him. And sometimes she would awake in the night and weep quietly for all that had been lost—for the once great Empire that her father had ruled and which was now divided between three of his sons; for the gay, careless days of her childhood when quarrels had been transient things, as short and fierce as a fire made of dry grasses, and as quickly over; not slow-burning and deadly like the dissensions that were now tearing apart what had once seemed a happy and united family.

Her abstracted gaze rested on her own small person reflected in one of the great gilt-framed and monsoon-tarnished mirrors that were to be found in all her father’s palaces. And seeing the light glint on the jewelled medallion she wore on her forehead, she recalled a long-ago morning; a blue and gold morning at the Motoni Palace, when she had escaped from her nurse and run to see her father without waiting to put on the jewel-studded ornament that should have held her twenty plaits together, or the jingling gold coins that should by right have been attached to the end of each one of them. Her father had scolded her for appearing before him improperly dressed and had sent her back in disgrace to her mother…It was the only time he had ever been angry with her. The only instance of anger that she could remember in all those sunny, happy, wind-swept years.

Beit-el-Motoni had been her father’s favourite palace, for it lay far out of reach of the noise and stench and bustle of the city, and was encircled by palms, green groves of trees and gardens full of flowers. A tall rambling house, several storeys high, whose windows faced the sea and caught the strong cool breath of the Trade Winds. In its colourful, clock-filled rooms the throngs of
sarari
had lived in friendliness and amity, surrounded by their children, their servants, slaves and eunuchs, and ruled over by the Sultan’s only legal wife; childless, ugly, imperious Azze-binti-Seif, the Seyyida.

While their elders sewed and gossiped, visited each other or spent long hours in the bath-houses, the children learned to read and write, to ride their father’s fiery Arab horses and sail the light
kyacks
off the coral beaches. And there were always the gardens to play in and innumerable pets to feed and caress—peacocks, kittens, monkeys, cockatoos and a tame antelope.

Life in the Women’s Quarter at Motoni had been gay and carefree and luxurious, and there had never been any need to plan for the morrow. The long sunny days, regulated by the five sessions of prayer as decreed by the Holy Book, had followed a settled routine that created of itself a pleasant feeling of safety and permanence, and it had never occurred to Salmé that it could ever end. Yet it had ended. Grave news had reached Zanzibar of trouble in far-off Oman, and Sultan Saïd, together with several of his sons and a great retinue of courtiers, servants and slaves, had embarked for Muscat—Oman’s capital city and most valuable possession.

That had been the beginning of the end, and Salmé knew that she would never again hear guns without remembering the sound of cannon firing in farewell as the stately ships sailed slowly past Motoni. The women and children had crowded to the shore to wave and weep and pray for the Sultan’s safe return, and after he had gone the great palace had seemed empty and forlorn, as though the heart had gone out of it.

Her brother Bargash had sailed with his father, but the Princes Khalid and Majid were among those sons who had remained behind. Khalid, the eldest of the sons born in Zanzibar, was to act as Regent in his father’s absence, with Majid next in succession. And since by now the Seyyida Azze was dead, the Sultan had given authority over his women and the palaces to Cholé, his favourite and most beautiful daughter.

But the days that followed his departure had not been happy ones, for lovely Cholé, with the best will in the world, had been unable to avoid arousing jealousy and resentment among the less favoured women, and quarrels and disagreements had become regrettably frequent Khalid, for his part, had been over-strict, and once there had almost been a major tragedy when fire broke out in one of the palaces, and the screaming women, attempting to escape, found that the Regent had caused all the gates to be chained and given orders to the soldiers on guard that no one might leave, for fear that the common people might see the faces of the Sultan’s women.

There were few who for one reason or another did not pray for Seyyid Saïd’s safe and speedy return. But the weeks lengthened into months and the months into years and the news that came from Oman was never good news, and there was no word of Saïd’s return. Khalid fell ill and died, and now it was Majid—kind-hearted, easy-going, dissolute and unheroic Majid—who was Regent in his place and heir to the Sultanate.

Saïd had never intended to stay away for so long, for he loved Zanzibar and was at peace there. But the vexed problems of his native land, that had dragged him from his green and gracious Island, held him fast among the barren sands and harsh rocks of Arabia. His old enemies, the Persians, had defeated his eldest son Thuwani’s army on land and scattered the fleet that he himself had brought to blockade them by sea; and the British having refused his plea for help there had been nothing for it but to accept the harsh terms the victors imposed upon him, and broken and humiliated to turn at last towards home.

Perhaps he knew that he might never reach his beloved island, or see Motoni again, with the blue seas breaking white on the coral shore and the palm trees bowing to the Trade Wind. Or perhaps it was because he felt old and tired and disillusioned—and defeated. But to the surprise and dismay of his followers he had taken with him on board sufficient planks of wood to make a coffin, and given strict orders that should anyone die on the voyage the body would not, according to custom, be consigned to the sea, but would be embalmed and taken to Zanzibar, and laid to rest there. The great dhows had sailed out from Muscat and turned their carved and painted prows towards the south, and five weeks later the crew of a fishing boat, casting their nets off the shores of the Seychelles, sighted the royal ships and raced before the wind to Zanzibar to bring the glad news that the Lion of Oman was returning home.