Trade Wind

by M. M. Kaye

  19

  Lieutenant Daniel Larrimore, having tailed the Virago as far as Ras Asuad and then lost her, turned back to patrol the narrow waters that separated the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar from the Sultan’s mainland territories. The Virago, he argued, was bound to return that way, and if Captain Frost supposed the Daffodil to be lurking for him somewhere north of Mogadishu, so much the better.

  It had been close on sunrise when the dhow sighted them, and full daylight by the time she ranged alongside and sent over a messenger carrying a single sheet of paper, stamped with the Consular seal and bearing Colonel Edwards’s urgent request for immediate assistance. The messenger reported that another naval vessel, H.M.S. Assaye, had already been contacted and should by now have reached the Island, but added that the situation being serious, he thought that any reinforcements would be welcomed: a view with which the Lieutenant found himself in so much agreement that he instantly abandoned any further ideas of waylaying the Virago, and gave orders for the Daffodil to make all speed for Zanzibar.

  Dan was well aware what the motley crew of freed slaves, petty criminals and el Harth tribesmen who composed the bulk of the Heir-Apparent’s forces would be capable of once they got out of hand, and his heart contracted with fear at the thought of Cressy in a town that might even now be given over to riot and rape at the hands of a murderous, greed-crazed mob of looters, who would think nothing of burning it to the ground. It was a situation that he could hardly bear to contemplate, and he cracked on more sail and yelled down the hatchway for more steam—and cursed Rory Frost with more than ordinary virulence, because it was entirely on his account that the Daffodil had been three hundred miles from Zanzibar on the night of the Heir-Apparent’s escape.

  The sloop made harbour shortly before midnight, and Dan, who had been visualizing the city in flames, was unspeakably relieved to find it looking much as usual, with the waterfront silent and the few men there asleep. But despite the lateness of the hour he had gone immediately to the British Consulate to report his arrival, and had found Colonel Edwards awake and engaged in writing an acidulated dispatch to the Foreign Office.

  “Glad to see you, Dan,” said the Colonel, and looked it. “Did you fetch in by chance, or did you get my message? I sent Jahia off to see if he could make contact with any Navy ship in these waters.”

  “He sighted us early this morning, sir, and we got here as soon as we could. I thought I might have some difficulty in getting to your house, so I brought a couple of bluejackets with me. Is the situation really bad, sir? The town seems quiet enough.”

  “The town,” said Colonel Edwards austerely, “is in a state of anarchy and the situation is thoroughly unpleasant to say the least of it. And as if that were not enough. Monsieur Rene Dubail called on me today to inform me that he had heard from a reliable source that I had been urging the Sultan to launch an attack on his brother’s forces and proposed to offer him aid in the form of guns and men from the Assaye, He wished to know if this was true, and upon my replying that for once his information was entirely accurate, he had the effrontery to object to what he was pleased to call my ‘unwarrantable interference in a domestic matter that was the sole concern of the Sultan’s Government and subjects, and nothing whatever to do with the British Crown.’”

  “Good God!” said Lieutenant Larrimore, scandalized. “What can he be thinking of?”

  “You may well ask. He further informed me that if I persisted in my efforts to promote civil war on behalf of a man who had no legal right to the throne—by which he meant the Sultan—it would leave him no alternative but to place the Heir-Apparent under the protection of his own Government.”

  “He must be mad,” announced the Lieutenant, taking the most charitable view: “The heat, I expect.”

  “Nothing of the sort. This isn’t the first time I’ve come up against him. Though it is the first occasion on which I have permitted myself the luxury of losing my temper. I asked him how he could even contemplate offering his country’s protection to the rebel subject of a ruling monarch, and pointed out that the Sultan had himself asked for my advice and assistance, and that he had every right to do so if he wished, since he was as much an independent sovereign as Louis Napoleon. Monsieur Dubail said the comparison was an insult, so I told him that he might call it what he liked, but it was still the truth. He did not like it at all, and the whole thing was most unfortunate: deplorable! ‘Legal right’ indeed! It is just as well that this is not a matter that our respective countries would ever consider going to war over.”

  The Lieutenant, whose mind had been occupied with other things of late, frowned and said: “But surely, sir, there was never any question of Bargash being the rightful heir?”

  “Oh, he was referring to the elder brother, Thuwani, whom Bargash once pretended to be acting for. No question of that now, however. Bargash is playing this hand for himself and no one else. But I must not keep you. You will be wanting to get back to your ship to get some sleep. About tomorrow…”

  Dan received his instructions and left; heroically resisting an impulse to make a detour that would take him past the American Consulate, and wondering when, if ever, he was going to be forgiven for having criticized Cressy’s too frequent visits to Beit-el-Tani. It had been a mistake to do so, and he had paid for it Yet how could he possibly have held his tongue? Cressy was so innocent and trusting—so sure that she was helping to further the cause of friendship and understanding between East and West He could not have stood aside and kept silent while she became involved in the ugly web of plotting and conspiracy that was being woven by Bargash and his friends. But his well-meant warning had merely resulted in a quarrel that was making it very difficult for him to present himself at her house again. Dan’s heart and his spirits sank at the thought, and he could almost wish that he had returned to find Zanzibar in flames so that he could have had the privilege of rescuing her from a burning building, or saving her single-handed from a rioting mob.

  He managed to snatch a bare hour of sleep that night, and at first light joined the small flotilla in which Colonel Edwards, together with the Commander of the Assaye and as many officers as could be spared from duty, proceeded up the coast to the Sultan’s camp at Beit-el-Ras to call upon His Highness.

  The interview proved tolerably satisfactory, in that it had resulted in the Sultan striking camp and moving off with his entire force to attack the rebels. Dan and several of the younger officers had been requested to accompany him, and the cumbersome amateur army marched away from the coast through groves of palm trees, fragrant plantations of cloves and oranges, tangled thickets of jungle greenery and rough stretches of open country, towards the centre of lie island and rebel-held Marseilles.

  By mid-afternoon they had covered roughly ten miles, and after a halt and a brief conference it was suggested that the British contingent should ride ahead to reconnoitre, and led by a reluctant guide they left the track and rode off at a tangent towards a grove of trees that lay just beyond the boundary of the Marseilles estate. There had been a farmhouse near the grove, but it had been recently burned and now lay blackened and deserted; the ashes still hot to the touch and a thread of smoke drifting up from a charred beam that had once been part of the roof.

  It was a sobering sight, for it made the rebel force a reality and not merely something that had been spoken of in words but whose existence had yet to be proved. There was nothing unreal about the burned and looted building whose shell made an ugly blot against the lush green of the trees. And neither was there anything illusory about the vicious whine and crack of a dozen musket balls that greeted the advance party as they emerged on the far side of the grove. They were well out of range, but the horses did not take kindly to the sound of the shots, and Dan lost patience with his plunging animal, and dismounting, handed the reins to his coxswain, Mr Wilson, who had accompanied him, and went forward on foot to study the rebel position. It looked to him a good deal stronger than they had been led to suppose, and stari
ng at it through eyes narrowed against the dazzle of the hot sunlight, he realized that subduing it was likely to prove a more serious matter than anyone had suspected.

  The stretch of ground that lay immediately ahead provided little in the way of cover, for the palm and clove trees that a short time ago had made it a green and pleasant place had been ruthlessly destroyed to allow an uninterrupted field of fire, while the house itself might almost have been a fort, so well was it constructed for defence. Large, two-storeyed and solidly built, it was flanked on either side by several detached buildings and outhouses, and surrounded by a high wall that Bargash’s men had evidently loopholed and protected with parapets of sandbags.

  There was also a formidable outer stockade of recently felled palm trunks, and Dan regretted that he had not thought to bring a telescope with him, since at this moment it would have proved a far more useful piece of equipment than the ceremonial sword that had been an active irritation ever since he had buckled it on at dawn. But even without one he could make a reasonably accurate guess at the amount of opposition the Sultan’s force were likely to encounter in any attack on the position; if-which he began to doubt—they could be persuaded to attack it at all!

  The sunlight glinted on the brass barrels of at least three guns that had been mounted near the outer gates, and the enclosure was alive with armed men. He could see muskets and dark faces at every window, and the men peering down from between the sandbags that reinforced the low parapet on the roof continued to fire at him. An occasional spent ball dropped into the grass or struck the rocks at his feet, but as he was still out of musket range he remained where he was, for there was one important point that needed to be made clear; did they or did they not possess rifles? He thought it unlikely, since the Lee-Enfield rifle was still something of a novelty in the East, and though they were now in general use in the British Army in place of the antiquated “Brown Bess’ (and had been issued with disturbing results to the East India Company’s Bengal Army), they were not as yet being manufactured for sale abroad. But it was always possible that some might have found their way here and Men into the hands of the rebels, for they commanded high prices and there was a brisk trade in stolen army rifles smuggled out of India to Afghanistan, Persia and the Gulf.

  The Lee-Enfield’s range was far greater than that of the old-fashioned musket, and Dan was well aware that in offering himself as a target he would be taking a considerable risk. But it was one that would have to be taken, because if the defenders of Marseilles possessed rifles it was going to make a deal of difference to the Sultan’s gun crews. And since he was convinced that no one armed with a Lee-Enfield would be able to resist using it on a tempting target, and it was not in his nature to order another man to run a risk that he, personally, would choose to avoid, that target would have to be himself.

  A few nerve-racking minutes later, having induced the insurgents to waste a quantity of ammunition on him and proved to his own satisfaction that their armament did not include rifles, he turned and walked thankfully back to where the remainder of the party waited at the edge of the grove:

  “We’ll have to get a couple of guns and some rockets up here,” said Dan. “No good storming that place until we’ve blown a hole in it. Let’s get back.”

  It had taken the best part of an hour to manhandle the guns into position, and by the time they had done so they were drenched with sweat and grey with the gritty dust of the open country, and Dan, who in company with the rest of the naval contingent had discarded his coat, hat and sword belt, and was working in his shirt sleeves with a borrowed scarf wound turban-wise round his head against the relentless glare, was feeling far from confident as to the outcome of the engagement. The Sultan’s troops were for the most part untrained and undisciplined men with few ideas on the subject of organized fighting and none at all on tactics, and already a body of them, rushing forward to the attack on their own initiative and without waiting for the guns to make a breach for them, had met with a withering fire that had left the ground in front of the palm stockade strewn with dead and wounded.

  This disaster had effectually discouraged any further advance, and now that the guns were at last in position Dan discovered that it was he and his fellow officers who would have to man and fire them, for with the exception of a handful of Turkish gunners the Sultan’s troops (who had received a salutary lesson and were not anxious to have it repeated) remained firmly in the rear and refused to move.

  The hour that followed was a torment of dust and din, and though at sunset the wind died and the air became cooler, the evening reeked with the stink of black powder and the smell of blood, and the guns had become almost too hot to handle. The crews had worked under continuous fire from the roof, the loopholed walls of the mam buildings and the well-served brass guns by the gateway, and Dan’s left arm had been put out of action by a splinter of rock sliced off by a shell that had landed less than five feet away and killed a Turkish gunner.

  Three of the naval officers and two more Turks had been wounded by the scrap-iron which the rebels were firing in place of round shot. But their casualties were negligible when compared with those they had inflicted on the garrison of the besieged house, and though the pursuit and arrest of slave ships had accustomed Dan Larrimore to unpleasant sights, he was young enough to wince and sicken at the sight of the bloody devastation wrought by round shot and rockets landing among a dense mob of shouting men.

  There must, he thought, have been anything up to five or even six hundred men inside the walls of Marseilles. Arabs of the el Harth tribe, raiders and Bedouins from the Gulf, and terrified African slaves who screeched and ran to and fro like panic-stricken animals, striving to take shelter behind walls and outhouses. But they would soon have nowhere to hide, for now at last the way was open: the outer gate a mass of rubble and pieces of what had once been men, and the inner doors smashed to splinters.

  Now, for once, it was Majid who called for action—and could not persuade his troops to move, though he placed himself courageously at their head and urged them to follow him. Waverer and man of peace as he was, the Sultan yet had sense enough to see that an attack at this moment would be met by little resistance from his brother’s demoralized forces. But the disastrous sortie of the earlier afternoon, the deafening crash of gunfire and the crackle of musketry that had rolled over them ever since, and above all the sight of their own dead and wounded, had sapped his troops’ courage, and neither threats nor pleading could persuade them to advance.

  “For Christ’s sake!” muttered Dan between clenched teeth, “can’t they see that all they’ve got to do is to walk in? The place is a shambles I At least half of those poor devils in there must be dead or dying, and they can probably take it without firing another shot. Or do the chicken-livered bastards expect us to take the bloody position for them? Why the hell we should be expected to do their dirty work for them I don’t know, but if they won’t, I suppose we shall have to try.”

  He looked round at the handful of smoke-blackened, powder-grimed, exhausted ragamuffins who had set out only that morning suitably attired to attend an audience with a reigning monarch, and knew that they could not advance unsupported. There were too few of them; and those few too young and tired and dishevelled to impress even the battered garrison of Marseilles, who seeing such a ragged remnant advancing against them would draw encouragement from the sight, and shoot them down at point-blank range. And yet…

  It was getting dark and the battered house seemed to move with a curious up and down motion as though the ground was not quite solid. But now that the wind had died it should be still. He could not understand why it did not stay still. His left arm was caked and sticky with half-dried blood, and the tourniquet that Massey had applied above the ugly ragged gash was biting into his flesh and causing him a great deal of pain. He tried to move the fingers of his left hand and discovered that he could not do so, and once again the distant house swayed dizzily before his eyes and he found himself thinking t
hat if there were any men left alive in it they must surely fall off the roof and out of the windows. Perhaps they were all dead, and if so there was really no reason why he and his fellow officers should not occupy the place themselves. Finish the job, thought Dan hazily. That’s right—finish it…

  He said: “Wait here while I take a look. May as well finish…finish the…” The Assistant-Surgeon caught him as he fell.

  “No you don’t,” said the Assistant-Surgeon grimly. “Or the rest of us either. We’ve done the spade work for them and they can damn’ well do the rest themselves. Home, I think. And not on those blasted horses either! The least our cautious allies can do is lend us a reliable guide and some decent animals, and the sooner we all get back on board the better.”

  They had got back—the majority on horses from the Sultan’s own string and the four injured officers in a creaking bullock cart, while behind them the Sultan’s forces prepared to camp for the night, leaving the dead lying sprawled before the broken walls of Marseilles and the wounded to crawl painfully away under cover of darkness.

  It had been a slow and uncomfortable journey, and Dan, who had lost a good deal of blood and was unconscious for most of it, was surprised to find how relieved he was to see so commonplace a sight as the riding light of his own ship reflected in the grey harbour water. He had submitted impatiently to having his wound washed and dressed, and as soon as that unpleasant operation was over, stumbled to his bunk with the observation that at least the next few days were likely to prove peaceful.

  But he was wrong, for the next few days were anything but peaceful.