by Wilbur Smith
“My oath on it, I will never forget it.” Tom chuckled as he steered for the Maid of York. “’Twas the day you brought Dorrie back to me after I had lost him for all those years.”
As Tom clambered aboard the Maid of York he gave orders to his captain: “Captain Kumrah, in God’s name, get this last load on board as quick as you like.” He went back to the rail and looked down at Dorian, who was still in the lighter. He called to him, “As soon as you’re on board the Gift of Allah douse all lights and hoist anchor, we must be clear of the land before first light. I don’t want Keyser and the Dutch lookouts in the castle to spy out in which direction we are headed. Let them guess whether it be east or west, or even south to the Pole.”
The last of the baggage to come on board from the lighter was Sarah’s harpsichord. As it dangled over the side, Tom called to the men on the fall of the tackle, “A guinea for the man who lets that damn thing drop down to Davy Jones.”
Sarah prodded him sharply in the ribs, and the crewmen paused and looked at each other. They were never sure what to make of Tom’s sense of humour. Tom put his arm around Sarah and went on, “Of course, once you have your guinea, out of deference to the feeling of my wife, I shall be obliged to throw you in after it.”
They laughed uncertainly and swung the harpsichord in board. Tom strode back to the side. “Be away with you then, brother,” he called to Dorian.
The crew of the lighter shoved off and Dorian hailed back, “If we become separated in the dark, then the rendezvous will be off Cape Hangklip, as always?”
“As always, Dorry.”
The two ships sailed within minutes of each other, and for the first hour they were able to keep station. Then the wind increased to near gale force and the last sliver of moon went behind the clouds. In the darkness they lost contact with each other.
When dawn broke the Maid found herself alone, with the southeaster howling through her rigging. The land was a blue smear, low on the northern horizon, almost obscured by the breaking waves and the swirling sea fret.
“Fat chance that the Dutch will make us out in this weather,” Tom shouted at Kumrah, as the tails of his tarpaulin coat flapped around his legs, and the ship heeled over to the push of the storm. “Make this your offing, and come about for Cape Hangklip.”
Close-hauled against the storm they raised the Cape the next morning, and found the Gift there before them, beating back and forth on the rendezvous. Once more in convoy they set out eastwards to round Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa. The wind held steadily out of the east. They spent many weary days tacking back and forth, steering clear of the treacherous shoals that guarded Agulhas and clawing their way into their eastings. At last they were able to double the Cape and turn northwards along that rugged and inhospitable coast.
Three weeks after leaving High Weald they finally passed through the heads of grey rock that guarded the great Lagoon of the Elephants. They dropped anchor in the blessedly calm waters, clear as good Hollands gin and teeming with shoals of fish.
“This is where my grandfather Frankie Courtney fought his last battle with the Dutch. Here, they made him prisoner and took him down to Good Hope to perish on the gallows,” he told Sarah. “My sacred oath, they were tough old devils, those ancestors of mine,” he said with pride.
Sarah smiled at him. “Are you suggesting that you are a milktoast and a caitiff when compared with them?” Then she shaded her eyes and peered up at the hillside that rose above the lagoon. “Is that your famous post stone?”
Half-way up the hill a prominent lump of grey stone the size of a hayrick had been painted with a large, lop-sided letter P in scarlet paint, so that it was visible to any ship anchored in the lagoon.
“Oh, take me ashore immediately. I feel certain that there is a letter from Jim awaiting us.”
Tom was certain that her hopes were doomed to disappointment, but they rowed to the beach in the longboat. Sarah was first over the side with the water reaching to her thighs and soaking her skirts. Tom had difficulty keeping up with her as she lifted the sodden cloth to her knees and scrambled up the hillside. “Look!” she cried. “Someone has placed a cairn of stones on the summit. That surely is a sign that a letter is waiting for us.”
A hollow space had been burrowed out beneath the post stone, and the entrance to it was blocked with smaller ones. She pulled these apart and beyond them she found a bulky parcel. It was stitched up in a wrapper of heavy tarpaulin and sealed with tar.
“I knew it! Oh, yes, I knew it,” Sarah sang, as she dragged the parcel from its hiding-place. But when she read the inscription on it her face fell. Without another word she handed the packet to Tom and started back down the hill.
Tom read the inscription. It was in an ill-formed hand, misspelled and crude: “Hail, you tru and worfy sole who doth this missif find. Tak it with you to London Town and gif it over to Nicolas Whatt Esquire at 51 Wacker Street close by the East Hindia Dok. He shall gif you a giny for it. Opun not this paket! Fayle me nefer! If you do so, then I do rot your balls and dam your eyes! May your mannikin never rise, you God forsaken boger!” The message was signed, “Cpt Noah Calder abord the Brig Larkspur out bound for Bombay, 21 May in the yer of ow Lord Jassus 1731.”
“Words well chosen, and sentiments sweetly expressed.” Tom smiled as he replaced the packet in the recess and covered it with the stones. “I am not headed for old London Town, so I will not risk the dire consequences of failure. It must wait for a bolder soul heading in the right direction.”
He went down the hill, and half-way to the beach he found Sarah sitting forlornly upon a rock. She turned away as he sat down beside her, and tried to stifle her sobs. He took her face between his big hands and turned it towards him. “No, no, my love. You must not take on so. Our Jim is safe.”
“Oh, Tom, I was so sure it was his letter to us, and not that of some oaf of a sailor.”
“It was most unlikely that he would come here. Surely he will be heading further north. I do believe he had set upon Nativity. We shall find him there, and little Louisa with him. Mark my words. Nothing can befall our Jim. He is a Courtney, ten feet tall and made from billets of cast iron covered with elephant hide.”
She laughed through her tears. “Tom, you silly man, you should be upon the stage.”
“Even Master Garrick could not afford my fee.” He laughed with her. “Come along now, my own sweet girl. There is no profit in pining, and there is work to do if we purpose to sleep ashore this night.”
They went back down to the beach, and found that Dorian and his party from the Gift had already come ashore. Mansur was unloading the water casks into the longboat. He would refill them from the sweet-water stream that flowed into the top end of the lagoon. Dorian and his men were building shelters on the edge of the forest, weaving frameworks of saplings. They were thatching these with new reeds, fresh cut from the edge of the water. The smell of sweet sap perfumed the air.
After the trying weeks at sea in rough weather the women needed comfortable quarters on dry land in which to recuperate. It was over a year since the brothers had visited the lagoon on their last trading expedition along the coast. The huts they had built then, they had burned to the ground when they sailed, for by now they would have been infested by scorpions, hornets and other unpleasant flying insects and crawling creatures.
There was a brief alarum when they heard a succession of musket shots banging out from the top end of the lagoon, but Dorian reassured them quickly: “I told Mansur to bring us in fresh meat. He must have found game.”
When Mansur returned with the refilled water casks, he brought with him the carcass of a half-grown buffalo. Despite its tender age the beast was the size of an ox, enough to feed them all for weeks once it was salted and smoked. Then the other longboat returned from the edge of the channel where Tom had sent five of the crew to catch fish. The bins amidship were filled with sparkling silver mounds, still quivering and twitching.
Sarah and Yasmini
set to work at once with their servants to prepare a suitable feast to celebrate their arrival. They ate under the stars, with sparks from the campfire rising into the dark sky in a torrent. After they had eaten their fill, Tom sent for Batula and Kumrah. They came ashore from the anchored ships and took their places, sitting cross-legged on their prayer mats in the circle around the fire.
“I ask your forgiveness for any disrespect,” Tom greeted the two captains. “We should have heard the news you bring sooner than this. However, with the need to sail from Good Hope with such despatch, and the gale that assailed us since then, there has been no opportunity.”
“It is as you say, effendi,” Batula, the senior captain, replied. “We are your men and there was never any disrespect.”
The servants brought coffee from the fire in brass kettles, and Dorian and the Arabs lit their hookahs. The water in the bowls bubbled with each breath of the perfumed Turkish tobacco smoke they drew.
First they discussed the trade and the goods that the captains had gathered during their last voyage along this coast. As Arabs they were able to travel where no Christian ship was allowed to pass. They had even sailed on past the Horn of Hormuz into the Red Sea as far as holy Medina, the luminous city of the Prophet.
On their return journey they had parted company, Kumrah in the Maid turning eastwards to call in at the ports of the empire of the Moguls, there to deal with the diamond merchants from the Kollur mines, and to buy bales of silken rugs from the souks of Bombay and Delhi. Meanwhile, Batula sailed along the Coromandel coast and loaded his ship with tea and spices. The two ships met again in the harbour of Trincomalee in Ceylon. There, they took on board cloves, saffron, coffee beans and choice packets of blue star sapphires. Then, in company, they had returned to Good Hope, to the anchorage off the beach of High Weald.
Batula was able to recite from memory the quantities of each commodity they had purchased, the prices they had paid, and the state of the various markets they had visited.
Tom and Dorian questioned them carefully and exhaustively, while Mansur wrote everything in the CBTC journal. This information was vital to their prosperity: any change in the state and condition of the markets and the supply of goods could spell great profit or, perhaps, even greater disaster to their enterprise.
“The largest profits still lie in the commerce of slaves,” Kumrah summed up delicately, and neither captain could meet Tom’s eye as he said it. They knew his views on their trade, which he called “an abomination in the face of God and man.”
Predictably Tom rounded on Kumrah. “The only piece of human flesh I will ever sell is your hairy buttocks to the first man who will pay the five rupees I ask for them.”
“Effendi!” cried Kumrah, his expression a Thespian masterpiece: an unlikely mixture of contrition and pained sensibility. “I would rather shave off my beard and feast on pig flesh than buy a single human soul from the slave block.”
Tom was about to remind him that slaving had been his chief enterprise before he entered the service of the Courtney brothers, when Dorian, playing the peace-maker, intervened smoothly: “I hunger for news of my old home. Tell me what you have learned of Omani and Muscat, of Lamu and Zanzibar.”
“We knew that you would ask us this, so we have saved this news for the last. Those lands have been overtaken by momentous events, al-Salil.” They turned to Dorian eagerly, grateful to him for having diverted Tom’s wrath.
“Good captains, tell us all you have learned,” Yasmini demanded. Until now she had sat behind her husband and held her peace as a dutiful Muslim wife should. Now, however, she could restrain herself no longer, for they were speaking of her homeland and her family. Although she and Dorian had fled the Zanzibar coast almost twenty years ago, her thoughts often returned there and her heart hankered for the lost years of her childhood.
It was true indeed that not all of her memories were happy ones. There had been times of loneliness in the isolation of the women’s zenana, although she had been born a princess, daughter of Sultan Abd Muhammad al-Malik, the Caliph of Muscat. Her father had possessed more than fifty wives. He showed interest only in his sons, and could never bother himself to keep track of his daughters. She knew that he was barely aware of her existence, and could not remember any word he had spoken to her, or even a touch of his hand or a kindly glance. In all truth, she had laid eyes on him only on state occasions or when he visited his women in the zenana. Then it had been only at a distance, and she had trembled and covered her face in terror of his magnificence and his godlike presence. Even so she mourned and fasted the full forty days and nights stipulated by the Prophet when news of his death reached her in the African wilderness whence she had fled with Dorian.
Her mother had died in Yasmini’s infancy, and she could not remember a single detail about her. As she grew older she learned that she had inherited from her the startling streak of silver hair that divided her own thick midnight black tresses. Yasmini had spent all her childhood in the zenana on Lamu island. The only maternal love she had known was given to her unstintingly by Tahi, the old slave woman who had nursed her and Dorian.
In the beginning Dorian, the adopted son of her own father, was with her in the zenana. This was before he reached his puberty and underwent the ordeal of the circumcision knife. As her adopted elder brother, he protected her, often with his fists and feet from the malice of her blood brothers. Her particular tormentor was Zayn al-Din. When Dorian defended her, he had made a mortal enemy of him; the rancour would persist throughout their lives. To this day Yasmini remembered that dire confrontation between the two boys in every detail.
Dorian and Zayn had been only a few months short of puberty, and their departure from the zenana and entry into manhood and military service was looming large. That day Yasmini was playing alone on the terrace of the old saint’s tomb, at the end of the zenana gardens. This was one of her secret places where she could escape from the bullying of their peers, and find solace in daydreams and childish games of fantasy. With Yasmini was her pet vervet monkey, Jinni. Zayn al-Din and Abubaker, both her half-brothers, had discovered her there.
Plump, sly and vicious, Zayn was bravest when he had one of his toadies with him. He wrested the little monkey from Yasmini and threw him into the open rainwater cistern. Though Yasmini screamed at the top of her lungs and jumped on his back, pummelling his head and trying to scratch lumps out of his skin, he ignored her and began systematically to drown Jinni, ducking the monkey’s head each time he surfaced.
Summoned by Yasmini’s screams Dorian came racing up the staircase from the garden. He took in the scene at a glance, then launched himself at the two bigger boys. Before his capture by the Arabs, his brother Tom had coached Dorian in the art of boxing, but Zayn and Abubaker had never before come into contact with bunched, flying fists. Abubaker fled from this terrible attack, but Zayn’s nose burst in a spray of scarlet at the first punch, while the second sent him somersaulting down the steep staircase. When he struck the bottom, one of the bones in his right foot snapped. The bone set ill, and he would limp for the rest of his life.
In the years after he had left behind his childhood and the zenana, Dorian had become a prince in his own right and a famous warrior. Yasmini, however, was forced to remain behind, at the mercy of Kush, the head eunuch. Even after all these years, his monstrous cruelty lived vividly in her memory. Yasmini grew to lovely womanhood while Dorian fought his adopted father’s enemies in the Arabian deserts far to the north. Covered in glory he had returned at last to Lamu, but he had almost forgotten his adopted sister and childhood sweetheart. Then Tahi, his ancient slave nurse, had come to him in the palace and reminded him that Yasmini was still languishing in the zenana.
With Tahi as a go-between they had arranged a dangerous tryst. When they became lovers they were committing a double sin from the consequences of which not even Dorian’s exalted position could protect them. They were adopted brother and sister and, in the eyes of God, the Caliph and the counc
il of mullahs, their union was both fornication and incest.
Kush had discovered their secret, and planned a punishment for Yasmini so unspeakably cruel that she still shuddered when she thought about it, but Dorian had intervened to save her. He killed Kush and buried him in the grave the eunuch had dug for Yasmini. Then Dorian disguised her as a boy and smuggled her out of the harem. Together they escaped from Lamu.
Many years later, after his father Abd Muhammad alMalik had died of poisoning, Zayn—still limping from the injury Dorian had inflicted—ascended the Elephant Throne of Oman. One of his first acts as caliph was to send Abubaker to find and capture Dorian and Yasmini. When Abubaker caught up with the lovers there had been a terrible battle in which Dorian had killed him. Yasmini and Dorian had escaped once again from Zayn’s vengeance and been reunited with Tom. However, Zayn al-Din sat on the mighty Elephant Throne to this day, and was still Caliph of Oman. They knew they were never entirely safe from his hatred.
Now, sitting by the campfire on this wild and savage shore, she reached out to touch Dorian. It was almost as though he had read her thoughts, for he took her hand and held it firmly. She felt strength and courage flowing from him into her like the balmy influence of the kusi, the trade wind of the Indian Ocean.
“Recount!” Dorian ordered his captains. “Tell me these momentous tidings you bring from Muscat. Did you hear aught of the Caliph, Zayn al-Din?”
“Our tidings are all of Zayn al-Din. As Allah bears witness, he is Caliph in Muscat no longer.”
“What is this you say?” Dorian started up. “Is Zayn dead at last?”
“Nay, my Prince. A shaitan is hard to kill. Zayn al-Din lives on.”
“Where is he, then? We must know all of this affair.”
“Forgive me, effendi.” Batula made a gesture of deep respect, touching his lips and his heart. “There is one in our present company who knows all this far better than I do. He comes from the bosom of Zayn al-Din, and was once one of his trusted ministers and confidants.”