by Wilbur Smith
‘You go in, Master,’ he told Zouga. ‘I’ll wait around the back,’ and he twitched the short oaken club in his hand with gleeful anticipation.
The tobacco smoke and the fumes of cheap rum and gin were like a solid wall, but the musketeers saw Zouga the moment he stooped through the doorway into the yellow lantern light. There were four of them. They overturned two tables and smashed a dozen bottles in their eagerness to depart, jamming in a solid knot in the doorway to the rear alley before bursting out into the night beyond.
It took Zouga half a minute to push and wrestle his way through the crowd. The women of a dozen rich shades between gold and ebony reached out to pluck shamelessly at the more private areas of his anatomy as he passed, forcing him to defend himself, and the men deliberately blocked his path until he drew the Colt revolver from under his coat tails – only then they sullenly opened a way for him to pass. When he reached the back door Sergeant Cheroot had the four Hottentots laid out in a row in the filth and dust of the alley.
‘You haven’t killed them?’ Zouga asked anxiously.
‘Nee wat! They got heads of solid bone.’ Cheroot tucked the club back in his belt, and stooped to pick up one of the bodies. The strength of his wiry little body was out of all proportion to its size. He carried them down to the beach one at a time as though they were bags of straw, and dumped them head first into the waiting whaler.
‘Now we find the others.’
They ferreted them out, singly and in pairs from the fan-tan parlours and the gin hells, tracking down the ninth and last to the embrace of an enormous naked Somali lady in one of the shacks of mud walls and corrugated iron roofs behind the waterfront.
It was almost dawn when Zouga climbed wearily out of the whaler on to Black Joke’s deck and booted the ninth Hottentot down the forecastle ladder. He started for his own cabin, red-eyed and irritable, aching with fatigue when it occurred to him that he had not noticed Sergeant Cheroot amongst the dark figures in the whaler, and his penetrating voice and biting sarcasm had been silent on the return from the beach.
Zouga’s mood was murderous as he landed once again, and picked his way through the narrow filth-choked alleys to the mud and iron shack. The woman made up four of Jan Cheroot. She was a mountain of polished dark flesh, gleaming with oil, each of her widespread thighs thicker than his waist, her great mammaries each as large as his head, and Jan Cheroot’s head was buried between them as though he was drowning himself in exotic and abundant flesh so that his ecstatic cries were almost smothered.
The woman looked down at him fondly, chuckling to herself as she watched Sergeant Cheroot’s upended buttocks. They were skinny and a delicate shade of buttercup yellow, but they seemed to blur with the speed of movement, and the shock waves they created were transferred into the mountain of flesh beneath him, creating ripples and waves that undulated through the woman’s belly and elephantine haunches, travelling up to agitate the pendulous folds that hung from her upper arms, and at last breaking in a wobbling heaving surf of gleaming black flesh around Sergeant Cheroot’s head.
On the final return to the gunboat, Sergeant Cheroot sat, a small dejected figure, in the bows of the whaler. His post coital tristesse considerably enhanced by the buzzing in his ears and the ache in his head. Only Englishmen had the alarming habit of bunching up a hand suddenly, and then hitting with more effect than a man wielding a club or hurling a brick. Sergeant Cheroot found his respect for his new master increasing daily.
‘You should be an example to the men,’ Zouga growled at him as he hoisted him up the ladder by the collar of his uniform jacket.
‘I know that, Master,’ Cheroot agreed miserably. ‘But I was in love.’
‘Are you still in love?’ Zouga demanded harshly.
‘No, Master, with me love don’t last too long,’ Cheroot assured him hurriedly.
‘I am a modestly wealthy man,’ Clinton Codrington told Robyn seriously. ‘Since my days as a midshipman I have saved as much of my pay as I did not need to live by, and of recent years I have been fortunate in the matter of prize money. This, together with the legacy of my mother, would enable me to care very comfortably for a wife.’
They had lunched with the Portuguese Governor at his invitation and the vinho verde that had accompanied the meal of succulent seafood and tasteless stringy beef had given Clinton a flush of courage.
Rather than returning immediately to the ship after the meal, he had suggested a tour of the principal city of the Portuguese possessions on the east coast of the African continent.
The Governor’s dilapidated carriage rumbled over the rutted roads and splashed through the puddles formed by the overflow from the open sewers. A raucous flock of ragged child-beggars followed them, dancing in their dirty rags to keep pace with the bony, sway-backed mule that drew the carriage, and holding up their tiny pink-palmed hands for alms. The sun was fierce but not as fierce as the smells.
It was not the appropriate setting for what Clinton Codrington had in mind, and with relief he handed Robyn down from the carriage, scattered the beggars by hurling a handful of copper coins down the dusty street, and hurried Robyn into the cool gloom of the Roman Catholic cathedral. The cathedral was the most magnificent building in the city, its towers and spires rising high above the hovels and shacks that surrounded it.
However, Robyn had difficulty in concentrating on Clinton’s declaration in these popish surroundings, amongst the gaudy idols, saints and virgins in scarlet and gold leaf. The reek of incense and the flickering of the massed banks of candles distracted her even though what he was saying was what she wanted to hear, she wished he had chosen some other place to say it.
That very morning she had been taken by a sudden spell of vomiting, and a mild nausea persisted even now. As a physician she knew exactly what that heralded.
Before the courtesy visit to the Portuguese Governor’s mouldering palace, she had tentatively decided that she would have to take the initiative. That attack of vapours had convinced her of the urgency of the situation, and she had pondered how she could induce Clinton Codrington to stake some sort of claim to the burden she was convinced she was carrying.
When Zouga had still lived at King’s Lynn with Uncle William, she had discovered a cheaply printed novel of a most disreputable type concealed amongst the military texts on Zouga’s desk. From a furtive study of this publication she had learned that it was possible for a woman to seduce a man, as well as the other way around. Unfortunately, the author had not provided a detailed description of the procedures. She had not even been certain if it were possible in a carriage, or whether anything should be said during the process, but now Clinton was obviating the necessity for experiment by a straightforward declaration. Her relief was tinged with shades of disappointment, after having been forced into the decision to carry out his seduction, she had found herself looking forward to the experience.
Now, however, she forced herself to assume an attentive expression and, when he hesitated, to encourage him with a nod or a gesture.
‘Even though I am without powerful friends in the service, yet my record is such that I would never expect a half pay appointment, and although it might sound immodest I would confidently look forward to hoisting my own broad pennant before I am fifty years of age.’
It was typical of him that he was already thinking twenty-five years ahead. It required an effort to prevent her irritation showing, for Robyn preferred to live in the present, or at least the immediately foreseeable future.
‘I should point out that an Admiral’s wife enjoys a great deal of social prestige,’ he went on comfortably, and her irritation flared higher. Prestige was something she had always intended to win at first hand – crusader against the slave trade, celebrated pioneer in tropical medicine, writer of admired books on African travel.
She could not contain it longer, but her voice was sweet and demure. ‘A woman can have a career as well as being a wife.’
Clinton drew himself up stiff
ly. ‘A wife’s place is in the home,’ he intoned, and she opened her mouth, then slowly closed it again. She knew she was bargaining from weakness, and when she was silent Clinton was encouraged. ‘To begin with a comfortable little house, near the harbour in Ports-mouth. Of course, once there are children one would have to seek larger premises—’
‘You would want many children?’ she asked still sweetly, but with colour mounting in her cheeks.
‘Oh yes, indeed. One a year,’ and Robyn recalled those pale drabs with whom she had worked, women with brats hanging from both breasts and every limb, with another one always in the belly. She shuddered, and he was immediately concerned.
‘Are you cold?’
‘No. No, please go on.’ She felt trapped, and not for the first time resented the role that her sex had forced upon her.
‘Miss Ballantyne – Doctor Ballantyne – what I have been trying to say to you – is that I would be greatly honoured if you could find it in yourself to consent to become my wife.’
Now when it came she was not really ready for it, and her confusion was genuine.
‘Captain Codrington, this comes as such a surprise—’
‘I do not see why. My admiration for you must be apparent, and the other day you led me to believe—’ He hesitated, and then with a rush, ‘you even allowed me to embrace you.’
Suddenly she was overcome with the urge to burst out laughing, if only he had known her further intentions towards him – but she skittered away from the subject, her expression as solemn as his.
‘When would we be able to marry?’ she asked instead.
‘Well, on my return to—’
‘There is a British consul at Zanzibar, and you are bound there, are you not?’ she interrupted quickly. ‘He could perform the ceremony.’
Clinton’s face lit with slow, deep joy. ‘Oh Miss Ballantyne, does that mean – can I take it that—’ He took a pace towards her, and she had a vivid image of the tiny house in Portsmouth bursting at the seams with little blond replicas of himself, and she took a quick pace backwards and went on hurriedly.
‘I need time to think.’
He stopped, joy faded and he said heavily, ‘Of course.’
‘It means such a change in my life, I would have to abandon all my plans. The expedition – it’s such a big decision.’
‘I could wait a year, longer if necessary. Until after the expedition, as long as you wished,’ he told her earnestly, and she felt a flutter of panic deep in her belly.
‘No, I mean I need a few days, that is all,’ and she laid her hand on his forearm. ‘I will give you an answer before we reach Quelimane. I promise you that.’
Sheikh Yussuf was a worried man. For eight days the big dhow-rigged vessel had lain within sight of land, the single, huge lateen sail drooped from the long yard, the sea about her was velvet smooth during the day and afire with phosphorus during the long moonless, windless nights.
So deep and utter was the calm that not the slightest swell moved the surface. The dhow lay so still that she might have been hard aground.
The Sheikh was a master mariner who owned a fleet of trading vessels and who for forty years had threaded the seaways of the Indian Ocean. He knew intimately each island, each headland and the tricks of the tides that swirled about them. He knew the great roads that the currents cut across the waters the way a post coachman knows each turn and dip of the road between his stages, and he could run them without compass or sextant, steering only by the heavenly bodies a thousand miles and more across open water, making his unerring landfalls on the great horn of Africa, on the coast of India and back again on the island of Zanzibar.
In forty years he had never known the monsoon wind to fail for eight successive days at this season of the year. All his calculations had been based on the wind standing steady out of the south-east, day and night, hour after hour, day after day.
He had taken on his cargo with that expectation, calculating that he could discharge again on Zanzibar Island within six days of loading. Naturally, a man expected losses, they were an integral part of his calculations. Ten per cent losses was the very least, twenty was more likely, thirty was acceptable, forty was always possible and even losses of fifty per cent would still leave the voyage in profit.
But not this. He looked up at the stubby foremast from which drooped the fifteen-foot-long scarlet banner of the Sultan of Zanzibar, beloved of Allah, ruler of all the Omani Arabs and overlord of vast tracts of eastern Africa. The banner was as faded and soiled as the lateen sail, both of them veterans of fifty such voyages, of calms and hurricanes, of baking sun and the driving torrential rains of the high monsoon. The golden Arabic script that covered the banner was barely legible now, and he had lost count of the number of times it had been taken down from the masthead and carried at the head of his column of armed men deep into the interior of that brooding land on the horizon.
How many times had that banner wafted out proudly, long and sinuous as a serpent on the breeze, as he brought his vessel up under the fort at Zanzibar Island. Sheikh Yussuf caught himself dreaming again. It was an old man’s failing. He straightened up on the pile of cushions and precious rugs of silk and gold thread, and looked down from his command position on the poop deck. His crew lay like dead men in the shade of the sail, their grubby robes folded up over their heads against the heat. Let them lie, he decided, there was nothing mortal man could do now, except wait. It was in the hands of Allah now. ‘There is one God,’ he murmured. ‘And Mohammed is his prophet.’ It did not occur to him to question his fate, to rail or pray against it. It was God’s will, and God is great.
Yet he could not help feeling regret. It was thirty years since he had taken such a fine cargo as this, and at prices that compared with those of thirty years before.
Three hundred and thirty black pearls, each one perfectly formed, young, by Allah, not one of them over sixteen years of age. They were of a people he had never encountered before, for he had never before traded so far south. It was only in this last season that he had heard of the new source of black pearl from beyond the Djinn Mountains, that forbidden land from which no man returned.
A new people, well favoured and beautifully formed, strong and tall, sturdy limbs, not those stickline legs of the people from beyond the lakes; these had full moon faces and good strong white teeth. Sheikh Yussuf nodded over his pipe, the water bubbled softly in the bowl of the hookah at each inhalation and he let the smoke trickle out softly between his lips. It had stained his white beard pale yellow at the corners of his mouth, and at each lungful he felt the delightful lethargy steal through his old veins, and take the edge off the cold frosts of age which seemed always now to chill his blood.
There was suddenly a higher pitched shriek, that rose above the low hubbub which enveloped the dhow. The sound was part of the ship, day and night it came up from the slave hold below the dhow’s main deck.
Sheikh Yussuf removed the mouthpiece from his lips and cocked his head to listen, combing his fingers through his scraggling white beard – but the shriek was not repeated. It was perhaps the final cry from one of his fine black pearls.
Sheikh Yussuf sighed, the din from below decks had slowly decreased in volume while the dhow lay becalmed, and he was able to judge with great accuracy how high his losses were by that volume. He knew he had already lost half of them. Another quarter at the very least would perish before he could reach Zanzibar, many more would go even after they were landed, only the very hardiest would be fit for the market, and then only after careful convalescence.
Another indication of his losses, though not as accurate, was the smell. Some of them must have gone on the very first day of the calm and without the wind the heat had been blinding. It would be even worse in the holds, the corpses would be swollen to twice life-size. The smell was bad, he could not recall a worse stench in all his forty years. It was a pity that there was no way in which to remove the bodies, but this could only be done in port.
Sheikh Yussuf dealt only in young females. They were smaller and much hardier than males of the same age, and could be loaded more densely. He had been able to reduce the clearance between each deck by six inches, which meant an entire extra deck could be built into the hold.
Females had a remarkable ability to go without water for longer periods than the males, like the camel of the desert they seemed able to exist on the accumulated fat in their thighs, buttocks and bosoms, and to make the Mozambique passage even in the fairest conditions of wind and tide required five days without water.
Another consideration was the loss of males destined for China and the Far East by the necessary surgery. The Chinese buyers insisted that all male slaves be castrated before they would purchase. It was a logical precaution to prevent breeding with local populations, but one that entailed additional losses to the trader who must perform the operation.
The final reason that Sheikh Yussuf dealt only in comely young females was that they commanded a price almost twice that of a young male slave in the Zanzibar market.
Before Sheikh Yussuf loaded his wares, he allowed them to fatten for at least a week in his barracoons, with as much to eat and drink as they could force down their throats. Then they were stripped naked, except for light chains, and at low tide taken out to the dhow where it lay high and dry on the shoaling beach.
The first girls aboard were made to lie on the bare boards of the hull in the bottom of the hold, each on her left side with her knees raised slightly so that the knees of the girl behind her could fit against the back of her legs, the front of her pelvis against buttocks, belly against back, like a row of spoons in a rack.
At intervals the chains were snapped into the ring bolts already set into the deck. This was not only for security but also to prevent the layer of human bodies sliding about in rough weather, piling up in heaps and crushing those beneath.