Trade Wind (35 page)

“That’s all you know! Don’t do it, Majid. Send your men in to take him by surprise and ship him out of the island. Have him locked up in Fort Jesus, or somewhere else on the mainland. Can’t you see that as long as he is here on this island you’ll have no peace? Have you ever seen a rifle?”

“No, but I have heard of them,” said Majid, relieved at this abrupt and unexpected change of topic: “They are some new kind of muskets that can kill at five hundred paces, are they not? You shall get me some. They will be most useful when we shoot deer.”

“To fire them,” continued Rory inexorably, using an index finger to emphasize each point in the manner of a schoolmaster lecturing a class, “one fits a small brass cap over a nozzle, and when the trigger is pulled a hammer descends upon that brass cap, striking it and exploding the fulminate of mercury with which it is filled. The spark from that explosion travels down the nozzle and ignites in turn the charge of powder that expels the shot. It’s quite simple—always provided one has the small brass cap! Bargash is like that cap: or, if you prefer it, like the fulminate of mercury. Without him the shot cannot be fired and the weapon is useless. Get rid of him, Majid. If you value your life, send him out of Zanzibar at once. Tonight!”

The Sultan sat silent for a time, and presently he rose and began to pace agitatedly to and fro across the flat white rooftop that still held the heat of the tropic sun.

Below him the heaving harbour water reflected the riding lights of ships and the warm gleam and glitter of the Palace windows, while to the left the city was a spangle of lights and still noisy with voices, music and laughter that would soon give place to silence and sleep. But here, high above the sea and the city, the night already seemed quiet and very still, and the tranquil sky and bright, incurious stars no more than a roof that a tall man might reach up and touch with his hand.

Majid paused in his pacing to look up at it, and wished fervently that people would leave him alone. It was not, he thought resentfully, as though he had ever expected or wanted to become Sultan of Zanzibar, and if it had not been for the death of Khalid there would have been no question of it and he would have been left to live his life in peace. But now that he was Sultan an obstinate streak in him, together with a love of money and ease and the good things of life, made him resolve to retain that position.

Not that there had been much ease so far, and precious little money; for between the exorbitant tribute that, by treaty, must be paid to the senior Seyyid, Thuwani of Muscat and Oman, and the necessity of paying heavy bribes to the raiding pirates from the Persian Gulf who periodically descended upon Zanzibar, and had to be paid to leave again, the Exchequer was in a parlous state and he often wondered where he was to turn next for the mere expenses of everyday life. And now Bargash must plot a new rebellion, and lure from their allegiance no less than three of those little sisters with whom he had played so happily in the days when they had all been children together…

He found himself thinking of those days with a passion of longing that equalled Salmé‘s. The games among the flowering shrubs and fruit trees of his father’s favourite palace of Beit-el-Motoni: the laughing, shrieking children who had chased the tame antelope and teased the peacocks, and pelted each other with petals. The riding lessons which, when the boys had learned to master their horses, had always ended with races—the winner receiving a handful of sweetmeats and uproarious applause…Was that where the rivalry had begun, and the bitterness crept slyly in like an insect eating away the heart of a rose, unseen and unsuspected until the day when the flower, full blown, unfolds to disclose the ugly ruin within?

It had taken that vicious fusillade of shots to teach him that Bargash meant to be rid of him and would be content with nothing less than his death, and now he could no longer shut his eyes to it and he would have to do something. To do what he had always hated and would always hate doing: make up his mind, and act.

The lights of the city went out one by one until there were only a few scattered spangles of gold to break the starlit darkness, and except for the surf and the dry, interminable rustle of the palms the night was quiet at last. Along the far horizon a wash of pale light heralded the rising of the moon, and presently, as it lifted out of the sea, the silence was broken by the mournful howling of pariah dogs serenading it from the dark lanes of the city and the slums of the African Town across the creek.

Majid turned from the parapet, his shadow lying black before him on the white level of the roof, and Rory said softly: “Well?”

“I see that you are right,” said Majid heavily. “I will send for Nasur Ali and the Commander of my guard.”

“Good,” said Rory, and came to his feet in a single swift movement that suggested the release of a coiled spring. “And your sisters? Whatever you say, you’ll have to do something about them too.”

“No. I will not war with women.”

“Now listen, Majid—”

“No, no,
no!
I will not listen. Bargash, yes—for if he could kill me he would, and it is for that end that he buys muskets and arms his followers. But I too have such things and if necessary I will meet him with them, so for the present I will see that he is arrested, because while he is free I shall clearly have no peace. But I will not punish my sisters, who had it not been for his lies and his wiles would never have turned against me.”

Rory said deliberately: “And if I tell you that it is those same dear sisters who have already armed Bargash’s followers with the weapons you hope to find in his house? What then?”

“I do not believe it.”

“You should. Half the loafers in the bazaar could have told you as much; and if your Chief of Police is not well aware of it, I’m a Dutchman. The only reason they don’t tell you these things is that they know you’d prefer not to hear them—and would probably refuse to believe them if you did I Well you can believe it this time, because I’m telling you and it wouldn’t pay me to lie.”

Majid wrung his hands in a gesture that was oddly feminine, and his weak, pleasant face was contorted with pain and bewilderment. “You must be mistaken. You cannot be right, for there is no way in which they could have done such a thing. How could they distribute arms from Beit-el-Tani when they receive no men there other than their brothers? It is not possible. Some evilly-disposed person has been deceiving you.”

Rory said quietly: “It is you who are deceiving yourself, Majid. The arms were not distributed from Beit-el-Tani. Your sisters and an assortment of their female relatives, accompanied by a large retinue of waiting-women and slaves, have recently made several visits to a certain mosque in the city.”

“This I know. They go to pray for a loved cousin who suffers from a painful sickness that neither the
hakims
nor the English doctor seem able to cure.”

“Do they, indeed! A very convenient sickness. Almost as convenient as the convention that well-born women should only venture abroad after dark and muffled from head to foot in cloaks and head-veils. It was probably an equally simple matter to have the mosque closed to the public for half an hour or so.”

“I do not understand you.”

“It’s quite simple. Your relatives have not only been petitioning Allah on behalf of the sick cousin, but they have also been leaving offerings.”

“That too is usual,” said the Sultan stiffly.

“Offerings in the form of firearms? For that is what they have taken to the mosque—for the maulvie to collect and subsequently distribute to the adherents of your brother the Heir-Apparent. It must have been dead easy-what a paradise this is for plotters! Twenty or thirty women bundled up in cloaks and escorted by twice as many slaves, and every last one of them toting a firearm under that mound of material. If you search the mosque now, or your brother’s house or Beit-el-Tani, you won’t find the smell of a firearm or anyone who will admit to ever having seen such a thing. But that was the way it was done.”

“You have no evidence!”

“None,” agreed Rory equably.

The Sultan made a small baffled gesture and turned away again to stare out at the sea and the sleeping city, and Rory held his peace: aware of the uselessness of further argument and afraid of overplaying his hand and arousing that stubborn streak that was so unexpectedly a part of Majid’s amiable, vacillating and entirely unstable character. The silver sweetmeat dish had been overset, spilling its contents across the dark richness of a Persian carpet, and he knelt down and began to pick them up, stacking them into a neat, sticky pyramid, and wondering what he was doing here.

It was a familiar thought and one that was apt to occur to him at odd moments, and always unexpectedly.
What am I doing here?
…What is there in me, or tied to me, that should have brought me here to sit in the moonlight on a rooftop in Zanzibar? How much of it is due to my own actions and how much to blind chance? Or is it true, as the Followers of the Prophet believe, that ‘what is written, is written’ and therefore cannot be avoided?

That last, in Rory’s opinion, was neither a comforting nor an acceptable theory, since he would far rather shoulder responsibility for his own actions than ascribe them to the workings of an inscrutable providence that decreed them in advance—and by doing so denied him free will or the blame or credit for behaving ill or well. Those curiously disquieting and damnably recurrent questions “What am I doing here, and how and why did I get there?” were preferable to accepting his deeds as unavoidable steps in some pre-arranged plan. And yet his long association with Arabs and the East had left its mark on him, for there were times when he found himself tempted to drift with the tide and let events take whatever course they wished, in the comforting assurance that there was nothing that he or anyone else could do that would alter the destined end.

‘
What is written is written
’…

Perhaps it had been written that he should be absent from Zanzibar during the ten days that might yet prove to be crucial to Majid—and to himself. He should have been more careful. But then one could not legislate for everything, and he had had no way of knowing that the “best laid plans of mice and men’ were about to go a’gley again…though not, he trusted, in too irrevocable a fashion!

It was a nuisance, of course. A damned nuisance. But not necessarily a disaster. Not unless Majid refused to take drastic action against his brother while he had the chance. It was a thousand pities that he himself could not stay and see this thing through, but he had business elsewhere that could not wait, and the
Virago
must sail at dawn even though this seemed no time to leave the Island. If only Majid Rory flicked the pyramid of sweets in a sudden spasm of impatience that sent them flying, and stood up. He did not speak, but his shadow moved on the stonework and Majid saw it, and turned.

The moonlight was bright on his face, and recognizing the expression on it Rory experienced a sharp renewal of impatience and a suffocating and entirely unfamiliar feeling of helplessness. He would have been the first to admit that his desire to prevent Majid from plunging to disaster sprang primarily from self-interest, for it was largely owing to the Sultan’s friendship and protection that he had been able to evade the law and behave more or less as he pleased in these latitudes. But apart from that (and the fact he would get no such favours from Bargash), he had acquired a liking for this irresolute, easy-going man who had obtained a throne by default and now looked like losing it by treachery.

Rory might be scornful of Majid’s un-Arab-like refusal to deal with his once loved and now actively disloyal sisters as they deserved, but he could recognize and even envy the strength of the family tie that was responsible for it, though family affection in any form was something he himself had never known. There was another factor, too, that bound him to Majid: his respect for the dead Seyyid Saïd, who had nominated this son to succeed him.

Once, during his early years in the Island, Rory had unwittingly done Majid’s father a service when a philandering friend of the Sultan’s, visiting Zanzibar, incurred the wrath of a local chieftain who clamoured for his head (the offence having involved the virtue, or loss of it? of a flighty daughter, both parties were understandably reticent as to details). The Sultan had been unable to produce the offender because Rory—who had been handsomely paid for it—had already smuggled the man on board the
Virago
and returned him safely to his native land, without anyone being the wiser. The incident had been a trivial one, but the Sultan, learning later how the escape had been effected and grateful for having been spared the embarrassment of handing a personal friend to the headsman, had been gracious to Emory Frost and presented him, in token of gratitude, with the lease of a house, to be held by him and his heirs for the term of one hundred and fifty years.

No one who had ever met the Lion of Oman had failed to be impressed by him, and Emory Frost had proved no exception. For Saïd’s sake, if for nothing else, he would do what he could to save Saïd’s son from the death that must inevitably follow on the heels of a successful rebellion. But looking at that son’s face in the moonlight, he knew that it was going to be difficult to help a man who would not help himself.

Majid said: “With regard to Bargash, I will do as you suggest. He becomes too brazen and must be shown his place. As to my sisters, it will be punishment enough for them to see that my displeasure has fallen upon the brother they have supported, and whom their plotting has helped to bring to this pass. Summon my servants and I will do what I must do. You are right—deeds of this sort should be done by night. The day is too glad a time. Good night, my friend. May you sleep better than I shall!”

It was a dismissal, and Rory bowed; touching his forehead and breast, Arab fashion, in a gesture of submission that held no mockery. Turning he went away softly down the steep flight of stone stairs that led down from the roof, to send the drowsy attendants up to their Sultan and let himself out into the street.