by M. M. Kaye
It had been black night when he had closed that door, but now morning was already pale behind the blanket of the rain clouds, and the ragged casuarinas and dripping palms showed grey and ghostly against the long stretch of sodden grass that lay between the ruined storehouse and the unseen shore where the sullen tide surged and muttered among a tumble of coral rocks. It would be daylight soon—too soon. Majid returned and gestured a dismissal to the grotesque pair who squatted silently in the shadows, and they rose obediently and preceded him up the steps to the door. But before they reached it the dreadful figure on the floor stirred and lifted its head, and Majid checked, drawing in his breath in a gasp that was almost a scream.
The glow from the brazier glinted on the man’s rolling eyeballs so that they too seemed to burn red like live coals in the greying face, and he spoke in a hoarse whisper that anywhere else would have been barely audible, but that in the silent place seemed over-loud:
“Hear me, oh ghosts and devils! Hear while I curse it! As it has brought me to my death, so may it bring evil and woe to all who think to use it for their own ends. Unless it be left to lie in the dark it shall bring no good, and he who would use it shall only use it for evil ends and to create more evil…Hear me, O Demons of the Trees! Hear me, all ghosts and spirits! Wenzi wetu watungoja nawe toka hima…hima!”
The cracked voice rose steadily and uncannily until it stopped on a last high note that rang and echoed under the vaulted roof, and the man fell back, and was dead.
Majid turned and fled up the stairs, and thrusting his henchmen out into the wet dawn, swung the door to behind them. It closed with an eldritch shriek of rusted hinges that seemed an echo of another and uglier sound, and he cursed under his breath and drove home the bolts with hands that trembled uncontrollably, and turning from it hurried away into the dripping greyness with the dwarf and the negro trotting at his heels…
He had been right in assuming that his friend would not approve the lengths to which he had gone to extract information from the Mchawi, for Rory, summoned to Beit-el-Ras to hear the result of the interview, had been gratified by the news that his guess had proved correct, but brutally outspoken as to the methods employed in persuading the wizard to speak.
“What did you expect me to do? Let him go again?” demanded Majid, aggrieved. “He would not speak and he was insolent and obstinate. And what I did to him was no more than he in his day has done to others. To many, many others!”
“Maybe. But you didn’t have to kill him, did you?”
“I tell you, it is better that he died! Had he lived, how could I have permitted him to go free? He would have returned to Pemba and his fellow warlocks, and…No, no! It would have been too dangerous. It is better this way.”
Rory said brusquely: “Well, it is done now, so there is no point in arguing about it. Where is this treasure?”
They had met, for the sake of greater privacy, in a small open pavilion in the garden where there was no possible cover for eavesdroppers, and Majid had dismissed his attendants. Nevertheless, he glanced cautiously about him before replying, and lowered his voice to a whisper that was barely audible above the murmur of the surf:
“It is in a cave,” said Majid; and stooping, drew with his finger on the dust of the pavilion floor: “Here there is a well, and here a mango grove: and to the left there is a tall rock with a tree growing from it. He said we could not mistake it.”
“Let’s hope he was right,” observed Rory, rubbing the map out with his foot. “Do we go now, or by night?”
“By night,” muttered Majid. “It is better that no man should know, because if it is heard that I have found my father’s treasure there is no knowing what might happen. My brother Thuwani would increase his demands, and No, no. It is better to keep such a matter secret. We can carry it away ourselves—if it is still there and that warlock, knowing its hiding-place, has not spirited it away for his own use.”
“That at least he will not have done,” said Rory with a curt laugh, “for if he had, he wouldn’t have wasted his last breath putting a curse on the stuff!”
Majid shivered again and looked sharply over his shoulder, as though he feared to see the witchdoctor himself, or perhaps his ghost, standing behind him. “You are right. It will be in the cavern where he said. Bring horses and wait for me in the mango grove by the well. We shall need no more than a rope and a crowbar, and those I will bring.”
Rory bowed and took his departure; walking away across the wet grass between the tall columns of the palm trees to the beach where the Virago’s dinghy lay drawn up on the shingle, and Batty Potter waited to take him back to the city.
The remainder of the day had been hot and still and unbearably humid; but Rory had slept through the greater part of it, and being untroubled by nerves had not dreamt but awoken refreshed; to hear the familiar sound of rain drumming steadily on the roof of The Dolphins’ House. It had slackened off towards sundown, and the clouds had lifted to show a narrow streak of gold above the slate-grey sea, and later, as he rode through the ankle-deep mud of the road that ran westward towards Beit-el-Ras, they parted to disclose a wide pool of newly washed sky in which a scatter of stars swam serene and brilliant.
He had taken Batty and four spare horses with him, and Majid, who was accompanied by the two deaf mutes, had not kept him waiting. They left their escorts to keep watch in the shadows of the mango trees, and going forward alone were surprised by the ease with which they reached their goal.
The Island was honeycombed with underground caves, and without the Mchawi’s detailed directions they might have searched for a lifetime without finding the way into this one. But given those directions it had been a simple matter, and within a remarkably short time the light of their one oil lantern fell on the hidden, hoarded treasure of Sultan Saïd, and threw back a multi-coloured sparkle that shamed the stars.
“Your father, may he rest in peace, knew what he was about,” observed Rory, finding his voice after an awe-struck interval. “Where in the name of seven thousand and seventy angels do you suppose he managed to collect all this from? It looks like the loot from the sack of ten cities.”
He received no answer, for Majid had not even heard the question. He was on his knees lifting the scattered jewels and letting them run through his fingers like rivers of light: watching the flame of the lantern flash and glitter on gem-set sword belts, scimitars with diamond-studded hilts, necklaces, rings and brooches of pigeon’s-blood rubies, carved emeralds, sapphires, turquoises, moonstones and amethysts, and rope upon rope of shimmering pearls.
Rory glanced at the jewels and the chased goblets, the glittering weapons and chests of uncut gems, and disregarded them. For beyond them, piled up in a staggering heap that reached from floor to ceiling, lay bar upon bar of raw gold; crudely shaped ingots from the accumulated loot and tribute and treasure of centuries, that had been melted down to make it more portable and added to year by year. Jewels were alluring things, for apart from their value their sparkle and colour and glowing, baleful beauty charmed men’s eyes and hypnotized women. But for himself he preferred the gold.
He got it. Or the greater part of it.
Majid had always loved beautiful things, and the shapes and colours and glittering splendour of the lovely treasures that were the work of master craftsmen, of jewellers, goldsmiths, swordsmiths and the like, lured his eye and captured his heart to the exclusion of the clumsy yellow ingots that represented fabulous riches but were without beauty or form. Besides, there were plenty of gold coins; moidores, guineas and ducats. And a profusion of silver dollars, blackened by the years but ringing melodiously when struck against stone. He was satisfied with those and as many ingots as he could carry in a single saddle-bag, and gave Rory the rest—together with a necklace of delicate gold filigree work set with seed-pearls, topaz and tourmalines. A pretty trifle of no great value that Rory had thought would please Zorah.
“That stuff will be heavy. Will you take it now?” asked Majid carelessl
y, holding up a collar of pearls and diamonds fringed with tallow-drop emeralds, to watch it flash and scintillate in the lantern light. “Or shall you leave it here until you can take it away by sea?”
“ril take it now. I’ve got six horses out there. Four of them pack animals with saddle-bags. The sooner we move this stuff the better. You say those two servants of yours are reliable, but there are few men I would trust once they had laid eyes on this; and if we come here again and again we shall be followed and there will be talk.”
Majid nodded without taking his eyes off the shimmering glory in his hands: “You are right. But we cannot take all this in one night.”
“We can try,” said Rory laconically.
It had taken him all night, but with Batty to help him he had done it And because The House of Shade had been little over a mile and a half away, they had taken the gold there; thrusting it into a ground-floor room leading off the central courtyard, where the window shutters were further reinforced by iron grille work and the doors were stout. Daud-bin-Saud, the caretaker, an elderly Arab who had once been the Virago, second mate and now occupied two rooms in the thickness of the old wall beside the main gate, had admitted them, and having been told that his services were not required had gone back to his bed, being too familiar with Captain Frost’s ways to be curious.
Majid had brought gunny bags and deep wicker baskets such as are used to carry fruit and vegetables to market, and when he had filled them with treasure with his own hands Rory had carried them out one after another from their hiding place, from where they were removed to a wing of the Palace of Beit-el-Ras.
Once again it was grey daylight before they were done, and they had gone their separate ways in the pouring rain, too exhausted to feel exhilarated. And that day Rory had slept at Kivulimi with a pistol in his hand, while Batty snored gently, his back to the door that guarded an Emperor’s ransom in gold.
The weather had changed that afternoon, bringing one of those brief, shining intervals that broke the grey monotony of rain clouds and sultry, breathless heat like a green oasis in a weary desert. A fresh wind swept the sky clean, and on every tree, shrub and creeper in the garden of The House of Shade the sunlight blinked and blazed on a million raindrops; sucking up the moisture from the paths and the pools that lay on the stone-flagged terrace, and drying out the sodden window shutters.
Rory could feel the sun hot on his shoulders as he stood in the doorway of the room that Batty’s slumbering form had protected for the last eight or nine hours, and stared incredulously at its fabulous contents. The thing that had seemed reasonable enough by darkness and the light of a ship’s lantern seemed unbelievable and entirely fantastic by day, and looking at those roughly shaped bars of metal he wondered if he were still asleep and dreaming.
He stooped slowly and picked one up, balancing it in his hand and feeling the weight of it, and then taking the knife out of the sheath at his belt he tried the sharp edge of the blade on the metal, and knew by the ease with which it cut that the gold was pure and had not been adulterated by alloys.
Tossing it down again, he saw it dent where it struck the stone floor; and for a fleeting moment the dead-weight of that fabulous pile seemed to press upon his shoulders and drag him down, and he was aware of a feeling of lost freedom and a sharp nostalgia for the reckless, carefree past It was gone almost as quickly as it had come, but it left an uncomfortable taint behind it, and he wondered if life would ever be the same again, or hold again the same tingling sense of adventure that had thrilled through him when he had dropped over the wall of Dr Maggruder’s ‘Academy for Young Gentlemen’ on a cold November night almost twenty years ago, and which had never really left him from that hour.
With the help of those ingots he could now have his revenge on the Unjust Steward, Uncle Henry, and pay off the long score of his childhood. He could sell the Virago and buy a larger and swifter ship—but to what purpose? There was no longer any necessity to make his fortune, and he had never run cargoes just for the sake of running them. Need had played a large part in it, and profits had been the object; the bigger the better. But now there would be no further reason to buy or sell; to drive hard bargains or to dodge the ships of the Cape Squadron.
He could afford to pension off his crew, square his account with Uncle Henry, and settle down—if he had ever wanted to do such a thing, which he had not! But though he had frequently cursed the Virago for an ill-found, wild-steering, bloody-minded bitch, he, like Batty, had grown attached to her, and the thought of selling her to some Arab trader, who would run her on a reef or lose her in a gale the first time she played her tricks on him, was suddenly unthinkable. As unthinkable as giving her to Batty and thereby losing both of them; leaving them behind while he went…where?
Memory presented him momentarily with a picture of a house with twisted chimneys and ivied walls, set among tall elm trees and the deep green of English oaks: a house in which he and many generations of his family before him had been born, and which was still his by law despite the fact that Uncle Henry continued to live there and to regard it as his own. He had meant to return and claim it when he had made his fortune, and he had made it last night: or acquired it, anyway. It lay piled before him in careless profusion on the floor of a small shuttered room in a house in Zanzibar. Enough gold to buy him anything he wanted and take him anywhere in the world…
A shadow fell across the flagstones and the ingots of raw red gold, and Batty’s dry little cough broke the afternoon silence of the sun-baked courtyard. Rory turned:
“Well, Batty—there it is. That’s the fortune you were being so sceptical about not so long ago. What are we going to do with it?”
Batty cleared his throat and spat a stream of tobacco juice at a butterfly sunning itself on a spray of the petra that fell in a mauve cascade from a stone urn on the verandah above. “Ain’t none of my business, Captain Rory. It’s your own look-out.”
“There’s enough for both of us. Uncle. For all of us, if it comes to that.”
“Not for me,” said Batty firmly.
“Don’t be a pig-headed old idiot You helped me get it and you can take as much of it as you like. Go on, help yourself.”
Batty took a quick step backwards as though to duck an attack, and shook his grizzled head with considerable emphasis: “What, take a slice of that stuff after what you told me last night? After that Mchawi’s puts ‘is dying curse on it? Not me! I ain’t an overly superstitious cove, but I wouldn’t ‘ave laid me “and on that stuff, “cept that I knows you when you gets the bit between your teeth, and I knew you wasn’t reasonable to argument at the time. ‘Sides, I didn’t know then what I knows now. If you takes my advice you’ll ‘eave the ‘ole bloomin’ lot into the sea and forget about it. It’ll be safe there.”
Rory stared at him in blank astonishment, and then broke into laughter. “By God, I really believe you mean that Come off it. Uncle! You can’t believe that sort of mumbo-jumbo. Be your age!”
“Which is more than twice yours, young feller-me-lad! If you ‘ad a few more of my years you’d maybe ‘ave learned more sense. Mumbo-jumbo it may be, but I been to Pemba an’ I seen a mort o’ things that there ain’t no accounting for and which I ‘aven’t liked. I don’t ‘old with parsons and missioners and such, but after two nights on Pemba I comes back ‘ere and I says me prayers—earnest! You don’t ‘ave to laugh. I don’t scare easy, but some of the things I seen there—and more that I ‘card—I don’t want to see nor ‘ear again. Not nowise!”
“They were pulling your leg, Batty,” said Rory grinning. “I had no idea you were so credulous. Did they try to sell you a love potion, or offer to mix up a charm that would rid you of one of your enemies?”
Batty shuddered: a movement that in the bright sunlight was strangely shocking. His nut-cracker face seemed to shrink and grow pinched, and he said: “If you knew what them devils put in their messes you wouldn’t think it so bleedin’ funny. They makes them out of corpses, that’s what!—co
rpses which they buries first and then digs up and ‘angs on trees until they rots. I saw ‘em, I tell you! And you could smell ‘em at night. I’ve ‘eard tell as they eat them, too…Ugh! fair makes me skin crawl. And there’s worse things that I could tell you—”
“You needn’t bother,” said Rory. “I know. But you have to be a naked savage, or the next thing to it, to believe that they can do even a quarter of the things they’d like you to think they can.”
“A quarter would be enough!” said Batty with conviction. “More than enough! Foolish I may be, but I ain’t a big enough fool as to try spendin’ any of that damned gold. I don’t want no part of it an I ain’t taking no part of it. Not a farthing’s worth. And I’m telling you straight. Captain Rory, if you ‘as your wits about you—which I doubts—you won’t go touchin’ it neither.”
“Bah!” said Rory.
Batty shrugged and gave up. He had seen that particular look on the Captain’s face before, and he knew it too well to waste time in further argument He expectorated again, but with less violence, and said in a more reasonable voice: “Were you thinking of moving it somewhere, or are you going to let it lay there?”
Rory turned to contemplate the ingots again, and shook his head. “No, we can’t leave it here. It would be too easy to break down that door with the house empty, and I don’t want to stay out here just now.”
He brooded for a moment or two, and then said abruptly: “Where’s that old scoundrel, Daud? He’s sound enough, but I’d rather he didn’t see this.”
“That’s what I thought,” nodded Batty. “I sends ‘im off to get a load of fodder for the ‘orses, and one or two other things that’ll keep ‘im busy till nightfall.”
“Good. Then let’s get started.”
“Where to?” asked Batty suspiciously.
“I’m going to shift this stuff down to the seaward wall of the garden, and you’re going to help me. You know those old guardrooms?—well one of them has a sort of oubliette under it I found it by accident one day. Dropped a coin on the floor, and it rolled away and got caught in a crack between two stones in a recess against the back wall—the sort of place that probably had a bench in it once. When I went to pick it up it slid through, and a second later I thought I heard it hit something that sounded as though it was quite a way below. So I dropped another to make sure, and after that I got a crowbar and prised the stone up, and found that someone had had a hiding-place made for his wine or his valuables—or possibly for a temporary bolt-hole in time of trouble. I didn’t say anything about it because I thought it might prove useful one of these days, and it seems I was right. We can pitch this stuff down there and no one will ever find it. Come on.”