Call of the Raven

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Surely your customers are willing to pay what you charge.’

  He stroked her cheek. ‘My little negress, you would not understand. In any transaction, there are two prices that matter. What the seller is willing to accept, and what the buyer is willing to pay. My job is to find the most advantageous price.’

  Camilla furrowed her brow, feigning confusion.

  ‘Let me give you an example. This morning, I am going to broker the sale of two hundred acres of land to Chester. I happen to know that the seller will take four thousand dollars an acre for it – but I also know that Chester can make a profit even if he pays seven thousand. I receive a commission as a percentage of the final price, so my job is to push him as close to seven thousand as possible, without him feeling I have taken advantage. That is why I am rich.’ He chuckled. ‘I probably should not be telling that to you. But I suppose you do not understand a word I am saying.’

  Camilla gave him a blank smile. Not for the first time, she marvelled at what white people would say in front of black people.

  De Villiers ran his eyes over her once again. ‘You are far too beautiful to worry your head with business.’ He reached his arm around her and squeezed her buttocks. ‘I have told you my talents. Now it is time for you to show me yours again.’

  Camilla tensed. But at that moment, as if God had heard her silent plea, a riot of bells began to ring outside the window as all the churches in the city struck the hour. François frowned.

  ‘Is that the time already? Alas, I should have liked to spend more time with you. But . . . business calls. I trust I will see you again soon?’

  ‘I would like that,’ said Camilla.

  She had hoped she would not be noticed returning home, but the moment she went inside the house on Rue Royale she heard Chester’s voice bellowing, ‘Where is that little whore?’

  The doorman gave her a pitiless look and ushered her into the lounge. Chester was waiting for her, standing by the window smoking a cigar. The sight of it made the scars on her arm ache.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Chester demanded.

  Camilla was still in her evening gown. Every pore of her body seemed to reek of wine and sex. Yet what could she say that would not drive Chester into a rage? Silence was no safer. The vein on Chester’s forehead pulsed with anger.

  ‘Granville followed you last night. He said you went to de Villiers’s house.’

  There was no point lying.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You stayed the night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You fucked him?’

  Even after everything Chester had done to her, the baldness of the question still shocked her. She blushed with shame. All she could do was nod.

  The answer did not please Chester.

  ‘I do not know if it was your ignorance, your stupidity or simply the lustfulness of your race. I brought you here to be a hostess, to charm my associates – not to play the whore. You have humiliated me.’

  ‘I thought it was what you wanted.’

  The answer seemed to enrage Chester even more.

  ‘You are my property,’ he hissed. ‘Other men may look at you and admire you – they may even touch you. But they should never think they can possess you. Now they know how easily you can be had, you are worthless to me.’

  He rang the bell. Granville appeared at once.

  ‘Take her down to the St Louis Hotel and put her up for sale. Take whatever you can get, it does not matter how much. She has no value now.’

  It was so sudden; Granville had grabbed Camilla’s arms before she even understood what Chester had said. She could hardly think with the wine from the night before throbbing in her head, with lack of sleep, with the deep pain between her legs. But one thing she saw clearly. If Chester sold her, she might be taken anywhere. She would never see Isaac again.

  ‘Four thousand!’ she cried, struggling against Granville.

  Chester stared at her. ‘Four thousand what?’

  ‘The land you are buying from de Villiers,’ she stammered. ‘The man who is selling will take four thousand dollars an acre.’

  Chester took five paces across the room, coming so close to her that spittle sprayed her face.

  ‘How do you know that? How could you possibly know?’

  ‘François told me. After we had . . .’ She bit her lip. ‘He wanted to show how clever he was. He thought I was too stupid to understand.’

  Chester turned away. He stared out of the window, his mind busy.

  ‘I was going to offer six thousand,’ he muttered. ‘And I was willing to go higher. If what you say is true, you have just saved me tens of thousands of dollars.’ He swung around. ‘You should not have gone with François. What you did with him, it has displeased me very much.’

  Camilla remembered François’s hand between her legs at dinner. She thought of the way the other women displayed themselves – their low-cut dresses, pouting, painted mouths and rouged cheeks. What was the difference?

  ‘But . . .’ Chester had not finished. ‘In your wantonness, you seem to have stumbled upon something of value.’

  Granville was still holding her arms as tightly as ever.

  ‘Shall I take her to the St Louis?’ he growled.

  ‘No.’ Chester looked Camilla up and down, her dishevelled dress and unkempt hair and the make-up streaked over her face. ‘Go to your room and clean up,’ he told her. ‘I must go to a meeting with François. If what you have said turns out to be true, then maybe there is profit in keeping you after all.’

  He returned a few hours later and came up to her room in fine spirits.

  ‘Four and a half thousand an acre!’ he exulted. ‘You should have seen the look on François’s face.’

  ‘Not four thousand?’

  Camilla had never known Chester pass up the possibility of profit. Chester stroked her cheek.

  ‘My innocent little bird. If I had pushed it to the limit, François would have guessed I had inside information. He would have suspected you. At four and a half thousand, it does not occur to him what he told a black girl in bed. He puts it down to my hard bargaining instead.’

  Still Camilla was not certain what it meant.

  ‘So I can stay?’

  Chester looked surprised by the question. ‘Of course. I will send the chambermaid up presently to get you ready for this evening. I am hosting another dinner before I return to Bannerfield. François will be there, and I want you to pay him plenty of attention.’

  Camilla nodded, wondering if this new chapter of her life might not be even more of an ordeal than before. She felt no regret. She would suffer anything not to lose Isaac.

  ‘And get some sleep,’ Chester added with an unpleasant smile. ‘From now on, I think you will be kept busy at night.’

  Commanding the Raven was like going to sea for the first time again. Mungo felt the same exhilaration, the same wild sense of freedom – only now it was all his own. He stood by the mainmast, his face dashed by the spray that came over her bow, feeling the ship surge beneath his feet on the wide ocean. He tipped back his head and laughed with delight.

  Before he left, he had written a letter to Chester Marion. It had been brief and to the point. Not knowing where to send it, he had addressed it simply to Chester Marion, New Orleans. If Chester was as powerful as Rutherford had made out, it would surely find him. Mungo did not suppose it would make much difference – but he wanted Chester to know that he had not forgotten him while he was away on his long voyage.

  Of course, the Raven was not perfect. She was a new ship, untested and unscarred; there were a thousand details that needed to be put right. Her rigging slackened and had to be made taut; her seams opened and needed caulking. Inch by inch, they tightened her up; they sanded, spliced, painted and polished until she flew through the water at the slightest breath of wind.

  The same went for the men. In Baltimore, Mungo had taken on a whole new crew. He could not judge their competence as sea
men until they went to sea, so instead he took the most hard-bitten, battle-scarred men they could find. All across the Atlantic he drove them hard, cursing and cajoling them into a well-disciplined unit who jumped to obey his orders.

  They called at Prince’s Island, though Mungo did not go ashore.

  ‘The last time I was here, I killed the governor’s son,’ he reminded Tippoo. ‘It is not the sort of thing the authorities are liable to forget.’

  Instead, he sent Tippoo to find out what he could.

  ‘There is a new governor,’ the giant reported back. ‘Da Cruz died of a fever.’

  ‘And his daughter, Isabel? Is she on the island?’

  Mungo tried to keep the interest from his voice, but he did not fool Tippoo. The mate bared his teeth in a grin.

  ‘I think you want to know that. I ask, but she is not here. They say she moves to New Orleans.’

  Mungo’s memories of New Orleans amounted to little more than taverns and brothels, and Creole women dressed in a riot of colours.

  ‘I’m sure she will thrive there.’

  He was annoyed with himself how disappointed he was that Isabel was gone.

  You are not some lovelorn adolescent mooning over his first sight of a girl’s boobies, he told himself.

  ‘There is more,’ Tippoo went on. ‘The English officer we fight against? The man you throw off the ship?’

  Mungo was jerked back from his memories of Isabel. ‘Fairchild?’

  ‘He lives. I think you make him a hero. He has his own ship now, the Maeander. He is in these waters. He call at Prince’s Island two weeks ago.’

  Mungo swore. ‘Fairchild has the right to come aboard any ship he encounters. If he finds us, it will count for nothing that we are engaged in lawful commerce now. He will not rest until he has us both in irons.’

  ‘Then best to keep away from him.’

  ‘His ship will be patrolling off the coast. We will plot a course well west of there.’ Mungo thought for a moment, his yellow eyes gazing into the far distance. ‘And see if you can buy any guns before we leave.’

  As soon as they departed Prince’s Island, Mungo doubled the lookouts at the masthead. They sighted dozens of ships in the waters south of Cape Verde, but most were miles away, and only a few came close enough to hail. They kept special watch for the red, white and blue of the Royal Navy ensigns. Once, they sighted a double-masted ship lying hull down over the horizon to the east, with what looked like a red naval ensign at her stern. But it vanished into the haze, and they did not see her again.

  They put in at Cape Town for supplies. In a tavern by the waterfront, Mungo found a weather-beaten Dutchman, a hunter. A bargain was arranged – an excessive quantity of gin in exchange for everything the man knew about elephants.

  ‘Can they be killed with a bullet?’ Mungo wanted to know.

  The old hunter leaned forward, slurring his words from the alcohol.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘but it ain’t easy. There’s a spot on the neck, a hollow behind the ear about two thirds of the way down. That’s where to aim for.’

  By the time they had finished, Mungo had a first-class education on the subject of hunting elephants – and the hunter was snoring face down in a pool of gin on the table.

  From Cape Town, the Raven doubled the tip of Africa and turned north-east. Mungo had heard many tales of the terrible storms that mariners often encountered around the Cape, but the weather stayed fair and kind, as if fate herself were smiling on his venture. They passed without difficulty. There, at last, he could relax a little. Fairchild’s ship was part of the Western Preventative Squadron – he would not enter the Indian Ocean.

  They followed the coast, keeping a wary distance. For hundreds of miles the shore rose in steep shelving cliffs, waiting like black teeth to snap up any ship that strayed too close. They saw nowhere to land, and Mungo did not dare go too close for fear of the wild currents and unpredictable winds that swirled around them.

  Further on, the cliffs shrank down to a low shore of mangrove swamps and golden beaches. Even these were not so placid as they looked. Sometimes, Mungo would see the bleached ribs of wrecked ships poking up through the sand, evidence of the dangers that still lurked beneath the blue waves.

  They sailed past the settlements at Durban and Delagoa Bay, and on into the Mozambique Channel. Still they could not find a place to land. Mungo wanted to avoid the established ports, where the ivory trade was controlled by middlemen and prices would be inflated; he was looking for somewhere they could land unobserved. But the further north they went, the closer they came to the more inhabited parts of the Swahili coast.

  ‘This is near your part of the world, is it not?’ Mungo said to Tippoo.

  For all they had done together, the times they had saved each other’s lives, he still knew almost nothing of the mate’s life before the Blackhawk. Tippoo never mentioned it, and Mungo knew better than to ask. Yet here in the Indian Ocean, he was reminded of something Sterling had said: I won him in a card game in Zanzibar.

  Mungo pointed to the chart spread out by the binnacle, where the island of Zanzibar was marked.

  ‘Is that your home?’

  He did not really expect Tippoo to answer. But perhaps being in these waters, so close to his past, had shaken something loose in the giant. Instead of changing the subject, he stared out over the rail and said, ‘Yes, Sterling won me in a card game. But my father was a king.’

  It sounded like a preposterous boast, but Mungo did not laugh. There was something in Tippoo’s proud bearing that made it seem strangely plausible.

  ‘The king of Zanzibar?’

  ‘The Sultan of Oman. Zanzibar is part of his kingdom.’

  ‘Then you are royalty.’

  Tippoo shook his head. ‘My mother was a slave girl. A man cannot be half-free. So I was a slave.’

  ‘How did Sterling find you?’

  ‘He came to Zanzibar to speak to my father. America sent him to tell my father to sign a treaty against the British. Sterling saw my mother and asked if he can buy her. My father offered him a bet. They play cards. If Sterling wins, he takes my mother. If he loses, he takes me.’

  It was impossible not to sympathise – to be wagered against your own mother in a card game, knowing one way or another you would be torn apart.

  ‘Sterling was a real son-of-a-bitch.’

  Tippoo shrugged philosophically. ‘I was a slave. And if I not go with Sterling, I not find you. Not find you, not be free now.’

  ‘That is true.’

  Mungo could see that Tippoo was growing uncomfortable with the conversation. He had revealed more about himself in the past few minutes than he had perhaps to anyone since leaving Zanzibar. Mungo gave him a reassuring grin.

  ‘With any luck, by the time you have finished this voyage you will be richer than a king.’

  That was a hollow piece of bravado. Every day decreased the chances they would find somewhere to land. All the men knew it. The mood on the ship grew sullen; Mungo became snappish and short-tempered. And still the continent of Africa denied him.

  One day, they came to a bay lined with reed banks. Mungo examined them with his telescope, but there was no break in them as far as the eye could see. It would have been another disappointment – except he had hardly any hopes left to dash.

  ‘We will not get in that way.’

  Virgil Henderson, the bosun, stirred himself. For some time he had been studying the shore; now he turned and said in his Georgia drawl, ‘Looks a lot to me like the Sea Islands back home.’

  ‘What of it?’ asked Mungo.

  ‘From a ways off, those swamps seems like a solid wall. But close in, you find there’s river mouths you never guessed would be there.’

  There was nothing to lose.

  ‘Lower the boat,’ Mungo ordered.

  They took the cutter in to shore. Henderson had been right: going closer, they saw mazy channels opening up, so tight and circuitous that they vanished among the reeds
. Mungo chose the largest, and steered the cutter in. Hope rose in his heart, more than he had felt for days.

  It did not last long. After a few bends, the channel split into half a dozen little rivulets too narrow even for a canoe. They retraced their course and tried another one of the inlets. That too yielded nothing. The men sweated on their oars under the hot sun; the moment they paused, flies swarmed off the reeds and attacked them.

  ‘Even if there is a way through, we will never find it this way,’ said Mungo.

  Henderson leaned over the side and scooped up a handful of water. He tipped it in his mouth, then hastily spat it out with a sour face.

  ‘Salt.’

  ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘Water should be sweeter where the river flows out.’ He looked around. The reeds about them were deep in the sea, waving gently in the water as the current ebbed and flowed. ‘Tide’s high. When it goes out, we might be able to find where the river is.’

  They waited. As the tide receded, the reeds seemed to rise out of the water. Some of the channels dried up; others, deeper, remained in a delicate skein of shining water between the mudbanks. Long-legged birds emerged wading through the shallows, while insects skittered across the mud.

  Mungo took the cutter to the deeper water, studying the glassy surface for any ripple that would betray a current.

  ‘There.’

  It was not much – barely a pucker on the face of the bay. But when they rowed over to it, and Mungo put his hand in the water, he felt the pressure of a current on the back of his hand.

  He tested the water, as Henderson had. It was much less salty than the sea.

  ‘There must be a river near here.’

  They followed the current as best they could, navigating around clumps of reeds and mudbanks that blocked their way. Sometimes the channel was so shallow they had to get out and haul the boat across. Soon all the men were plastered with filth, stinking to high heaven. But always there was a trickle of water leading them on.

  ‘If there is a river, it cannot be more than a brook,’ Mungo muttered, heaving the heavy boat forward over the sucking mud.