Trade Wind (81 page)

The thought brought a grim flicker of amusement to Rory’s haggard, unshaven face. How Dan must have hated leaving without him! But there was little enough space to spare on the
Daffodil
, and they could hardly ship a dangerous prisoner along with a crowd of agitated women and squalling children, and the mounds of baggage, extra stores and personal attendants they would require to take with them. Dan would have had to deny himself the pleasure of handing Captain Emory Frost over to justice with his own hands, and content himself with the knowledge that the Commander of the
Cormorant
would do so in his stead. Unless the
Cormorant
had been warned to steer clear of Zanzibar until the epidemic had burned itself out; which might take months.

Now that the cholera had taken firm hold, there would be no way of controlling it. And no way of avoiding it: not even, at this date, by flight It would board every dhow that put out from the Island, and travel with the panic-stricken passengers, striking them down at sea with the same speed and ferocity as it struck others in the crowded hovels of the Black Town—or in the cells and guardrooms of Zanzibar Fort! For the cholera was here too, and Rory wondered tiredly why it should have taken a pack of scavenging dogs to tell him what should have been plain to him for the last three days at least This, of course, explained why his cell had been left uncleaned and why there had been no food or water that day. The boy whose task it was to empty that noisome bucket had probably died on the day that he first failed to appear, and now Limbili too was dead—unless he had taken flight and run away.

The night wind and the pariah dogs made it plain that there were dead men inside the Fort as well as in the city, and the silence and the im-guarded gate meant that the living had abandoned their posts and fled in panic. But there would be other prisoners. They could not all be dead! Or had the frightened garrison released them before they fled, expecting that Limbili or the Nubian would do the same for him? This last was somehow more unpleasant to contemplate than the thought that they might all be dead, and Rory did not want to believe it. But an ice-cold and entirely unfamiliar shiver crawled down his spine, and he knew that for the first time in years he was afraid—coldly and terribly afraid—and gripping the bars of the grille he shouted aloud.

His voice echoed eerily round the starlit courtyard and startled the quarrelling dogs into sudden silence. But no voice answered him, and something in the quality of that echo rather than in the silence that followed it, spoke of emptiness, and confirmed his first swift conviction that there was no one in the Fort. No one but the pariah dogs and the dead—and Emory Tyson Frost, slave trader, black sheep and blackguard, who would soon be dead too: if not from the cholera, then less mercifully from thirst and starvation, for he was locked in and alone and there was neither food nor water in the narrow, stifling cell. And no one left alive to bring him either.

For a timeless interval the fear that gripped him gave place to a crippling panic that made him fling himself at the door, bruising himself against the unyielding wood with the blind frenzy of a trapped animal attacking the bars of its cage. It passed, and sanity returned to him, and he groped in the darkness for the edge of the hard plank bed, and subsiding on it, put his head in his hands and forced himself to face the situation calmly…

There was no reason to suppose that morning would not bring some of the garrison back to the Fort. If not to bury their dead, at least to remove such property as they might have left behind them when they fled. And even if the garrison did not return there would be looters, for death and disaster bred looters as surely as carrion bred maggots, and the deserted Fort with its gate swinging open on the wind would be an invitation to more than the pariah dogs of the city. Sooner or later someone would come: and even if they did not, it might only mean the difference between a slow death in the next day or two, and a quick one later on at the hands of a public hangman. The best he could hope for was a long term of imprisonment in some jail that could turn out to be a deal worse than this one, and after a few years of that he might well find himself regretting that he had not drawn the harsher sentence.

It was a reflection that consoled him, because even now, when his parched throat and swollen tongue were already providing an ugly foretaste of the torment that lay ahead, the immediate prospect of dying from thirst seemed preferable to spending the next twenty years, or possibly the rest of his life, locked in a cell. Given the choice he would still probably settle for the former—if there was such a thing as choice, which according to Hajji Ralub’s philosophy, there was not Ralub and the majority of the
Virago
’s crew believed implicitly that a man’s fate was tied about his neck and that he could not avoid it: ‘
What is written, is written
.’ It was in many ways a comfortable philosophy, and there were times when Rory regretted that he could not subscribe to it. But in general he regretted very little.

Against the background of the dark a score of disconnected incidents from his past life rose up before him, and it was as though, standing on the crest of a ridge, he turned to look back at a road he had travelled along. A long road that dipped into dark valleys and climbed out again on plateaus and hill crests, but that seen from this vantage point gave the appearance of being a joyous and unbroken line.

He knew that the continuity of that line was an illusion, and that the valleys were there, for he had plodded through them. But now they lay below the level of his vision and were unimportant, and it was only the mountain tops that he saw, joined together by distance and bathed in retrospective sunlight. Life might have dealt him an indifferent hand but he had played it recklessly and to his own advantage, and enjoyed every move in the game!…The successes and the failures, the bad times and the good…Excitement and danger and the sights and sounds and fights in strange ports and forgotten cities…The late great Sultan, and his amiable weakling son, Majid. Batty and Ralub. Dan Larrimore and Clayton Mayo. Jumah and Hadir, Zorah—

Rory lifted his head and stared into the darkness trying to picture Zorah’s face, and found that he could not do so. All that he could recall was a catalogue of features and colouring, but they would not come alive. Yet she had lived in his house for years, loved him and been his mistress, and borne him a child: Amrah. He straightened his shoulders, and leaning back until his head rested against the wall, shut his eyes and thought about his daughter.

It was strange to think that the only legacy he would leave to the future—the only proof that he had ever lived—would be a half-caste child whose mother had been a slave girl bought for a yard or two of calico and a handful of coins. A child who had inherited his temper and his features and who would grow up without any recollection of him, to see a new century and witness that shrinking of the world and the mushroom growth of industrialization and conformity that he had visualized with such loathing and done his best to escape.

If he had any regrets, it should be on Amrah’s behalf;—for having fathered her without thought, saddled her with the double burden of bastardy and mixed blood, and left her to fend for herself in a harsh and intolerant world. But it was too late to worry about such things now, and with any luck there might be enough of himself in her to make her accept the hazards of life as a small price to pay in return for the entertainment of living. He could at least be grateful that there had been no more children. Or not as far as he knew. Unless Yes, there was always that: it was a possibility at least. Perhaps more than a possibility…

The darkness that would not show him Zorah’s face presented him now with Hero’s. Hero staring at him haughtily, her grey eyes scornful and her red mouth curved with disdain. Hero with her face swollen and disfigured by cuts and bruises and her cropped hair looking like a wet scrubbing brush, sobbing over a few mosquito bites. Hero laughing at one of Batty’s stories; smiling down at Amrah; frowning over the iniquities of the Sultan’s regime; agonizing over the plight of slaves and the injustice of the world. Hero angry. Hero defiant. Hero asleep…A dozen Heros; but none of them afraid and none of them defeated.

Rory found himself hoping—fervently and selfishly—that she would have his child. A son conceived of the strange, unexpected passion and ecstasy of those nights at The House of Shade, who would carry something of them both into the future and hand it in turn to other sons: to grandsons and great-grandsons who would inherit Hero’s beauty and courage and his own love of the sea and strange cities, the wild places of the world and the sound of the Trade Winds blowing. It was a pity that he would never know…

The cell had slowly been growing lighter, and turning his head he saw that the bars of the grille were etched sharply black where before they had been no more than shadows against shadow. The moon must have risen. Soon it would be shining into the courtyard and he would be able to see if the cell on the far side of it, facing his own, was empty.

From somewhere outside the Fort, in the purlieus of the city, a cock crew, and was answered by another further away. The snarling and growling of the dogs had ceased, and the door of the outer gate no longer creaked on its hinges, for the wind had died. The world was so still that Rory could hear the harbour water lapping against the shore, and the slow creak of a cable as the night tide fingered some anchored dhow. Then a crow began to caw, and he realized that the growing light was not moonrise, but the dawn. He must have slept after all, for the night had gone and it was morning.

Other cocks began to crow and presently the birds awoke, and the blowflies. The little coolness of the night was dissipated by the hot breath of the coming day, and on the open ground between the Fort and the harbour a lone donkey brayed raucously, a sound like a harsh yell of despair that echoed desolately against the walls of the silent houses. But the normal early morning noises of the city were lacking, and inside the Fort there was no sound but the buzzing of innumerable flies.

Once again Rory felt the black wings of panic brush against him, and he shivered as though he were cold. Could the townspeople have fled from the cholera and the city be as empty as the Fort? No, that was absurd I Some might have run away, but only to the interior of the Island, since there had been few ships in harbour and Africa was known to be in the grip of the epidemic. There must still be people in the city—a great many of them. The unusual silence of the morning only meant that at such a time men would be waking to a new day and going into the streets with frightened faces and apprehensive looks at their neighbours, and would have little heart for crying their wares in the market place.

Nevertheless, the suspicion that the city too might be deserted remained like an uneasy shadow seen out of the comer of the eye, and presently it brought Rory stiffly to his feet to stand again with his face to the grid, straining his ears for some sound from beyond the walls that would tell him that there were still men in the Stone Town. Live men.

There was at least one man in the courtyard, but he was dead. The bulk of the body lay just beyond Rory’s range of vision where the pariah dogs had dragged it and quarrelled over it last night, and for that he was thankful, as the little that he could see was unpleasant enough. Even as he looked, a crow alighted beside it and hopped forward to peck at what had presumably once been a hand, and it occurred to him that if he were fated to die in this cell at least his body would not be disposed of in that manner, since neither the crows nor the pariah packs would reach him here. Though there would, he supposed, be rats…

Another crow flew down into the courtyard, and he looked away, sickened. But he dared not leave the window for fear that someone might enter the Fort and he would miss them. It was possible to face the prospect of death with a reasonable amount of equanimity, but Rory could see no point in giving up hope.

He could not have said how long he stood there, but at last there crept to his ears the first blessed sounds of the city awakening: a muezzin calling the Faithful to prayer, the creaking of cartwheels and a distant, indeterminate murmur of voices. Ordinary enough sounds, though disquietingly few and far between. But none the less welcome for that, because they proved that the city was neither dead nor abandoned, and listening to them some of the tension ebbed from his body and he could breathe again. But the long morning dragged away and the day grew hotter and darker, and no one entered the Fort.

Rory found that his legs could no longer support him, and subsiding onto the bed, he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. He had no means of knowing the time, and it seemed to him that the first cock had crowed hours ago…aeons ago! Or else the sun was standing still. He had drunk nothing for well over twenty-four hours, and though under normal conditions this would have been no very great hardship, it was an unbelievable torment in the oppressive, humid heat that wrung the moisture from his body and soaked him in sweat, leaving him at last feeling as dry and shrivelled as an empty seed-pod. The desire for water ceased to be an active discomfort and became instead a savage and intolerable craving, and his throat was parched and his mouth sticky, while his tongue seemed to have swelled to monstrous proportions. An odd drumming in his ears mingled with the idiot buzz of the flies that filled his cramped cell and circled about him in an aimless cloud, crawling on his face and neck and preventing him from thinking clearly—or at all.

The rhythmic throbbing grew louder, until at last it dawned on him that the drums he heard were no longer confined to his brain, but were coming from somewhere outside. They were beating in the courtyard now, faster and louder, and the air was cooler.

He opened his eyes with an enormous effort, and dragging himself to his feet, held himself upright by the rusty iron bars of the grille, and saw that it was raining.

For a brief moment the sight of those swollen drops splashing onto the parched ground and forming gleaming pools at the verandah edge seemed to him the most wonderful thing he had ever seen. And then he realized that they were of no more use to him than a mirage is to a traveller lost in a waterless desert. The rain slanted down to form lines and rods, which in turn transformed themselves into an opaque wall of water that cooled the air and made a lake in the courtyard. But it did not reach the door of the cell, and he tore at the bars of the grid, wrenching at them until his hands were raw. The iron bent a little, but did not break, and he licked the blood thirstily, and reaching for his discarded shirt, tied it about the weakest bar to give him a better purchase, and threw his full weight against it. But though rusty it proved immovable, and presently he relaxed his grip and leant against the door, panting and defeated.