by M. M. Kaye
Until now, each man had hoped that by hiding his slaves and doing nothing to annoy the enemy he might escape their depredations, and that it would be his neighbour and not himself who would suffer. With the result that no concerted effort to deal with the pirates had ever been made, or (unless Rory Frost’s plan succeeded) ever would be made by the Sultan’s subjects. The raiders would continue to come year after year, and each time it would be his, Majid’s, money that would be expended in buying them off. And when die bargaining was over and they left at last, his frightened, angry and demoralized subjects would emerge from behind the barricaded doors of their houses to count the cost in stolen slaves, kidnapped children and looted goods, and turn on him, their Sultan, with outcries and complaints and demands that strong measures be taken to prevent any further recurrence of these outrages.
But if all went well perhaps next year they would be prepared to take a hand in putting a stop to these annual disasters, instead of confining themselves to complaining about them afterwards. It would be interesting to see.
26
“It is beautiful!” breathed Zorah, touching the filigree necklace with delicate, henna-tipped fingers and staring entranced at her reflection in the looking-glass.
The height of the room, with its Moorish arches and long stretch of cool chunam floor, made her appear even smaller and slighter by contrast, and Rory watched her and frowned; thinking that for all the early-flowering maturity of her Eastern blood, her absolute authority over his servants and the fact that she was the mother of a four-year-old daughter, she was still, by Western standards, little more than a child.
He had no idea how old she was, for at the time he had bought her she had been no more than a starving, terrified bundle of skin and bone, with the face of an old woman and a frame that might have belonged to a child of five. The negro slave dealer had told him that she was ten or twelve years old, and if cared for and well fed would “soon be a woman’; and Zorah herself had first said that she thought she was fourteen, and later that perhaps she was two years younger than that—or it might be two years older?—she did not know. But the slave dealer had been proved right as to the beneficial effects of care and good food, and since women in the East ripen earlier than those who live in colder climates (often being wives and mothers at a time when a Western girl of similar age would be wearing pinafores and studying her lessons in the schoolroom), it had been difficult to know which estimate of her age had been the right one; Zorah’s or the slave dealer’s. Or Rory’s own, which had originally been considerably lower than either.
Glancing at her reflection as she stood admiring the effect of the filigree necklace, he thought with a pang of guilt that perhaps his initial guess had been right, for she looked like a child in fancy dress. A lovely child wearing trousers of emerald-green silk below a tunic of cloth-of-silver the colour of moonlight: slender wrists and ankles encircled with bracelets of gold and spun glass, and about her neck the shimmer of seed-pearls, topaz and tourmaline.
She turned her head and smiled at him, her face alight with pleasure and her fingers caressing the trinket as though it were a sentient thing, and said again: “It is beautiful!”
“It borrows beauty from the wearer,” said Rory, reaching for that caressing hand and kissing it lightly.
A warm flush of rose coloured Zorah’s cheeks, and her smile was no longer one of pleasure but of pure happiness.
“That is not true, my lord, for it would lend beauty to a Queen. But it is sweet to hear you say it, when of late I have thought…I have feared…” Her soft voice faltered and her lashes dropped like dark curtains.
Rory took her chin in his hand and tilted up her face, but now she would not look at him. He said: “What is it that you have thought, my bird?”
“That you—that your slave had lost favour in your sight.”
“That is foolishness, little heart And since when have you been a slave?”
The black lashes lifted swiftly and her eyes were wide and passionate and adoring: “Always! From that first hour—and until the last. You may give me my freedom ten times over or ten thousand times, but it cannot alter that. I am still your slave, my lord and my life, and if I lose your favour I die!”
Rory’s hand dropped and he bent to kiss her cheek, but her arms flew up to clasp him and cling about his neck, and all the scented quivering softness of her slight body pressed against him in wild hunger and desperation. It was not only desire for his love and for its active demonstration that drove her, but the hunger to bear him a son and shame that she had not done so, and since Amrah’s birth had failed to conceive another child. She knew that she was not to blame for this, and yet she blamed herself; since surely it must be something lacking in herself—some beauty or grace or physical allure that she had once possessed and had now lost—that was responsible for his changed attitude towards her; for the infrequency of his desire and the casual kindness that had replaced passion?
She was not unaware that there were other women, for he had never attempted to disguise the fact, and in Zorah’s world, as in all the East, men were polygamous. She might wish in secret that they were not, but it was against both nature and tradition to expect them to be otherwise, and who was she to murmur if her lord distributed his favours to other women? Even to white women?
It was said that white women were sexually cold and unversed in the ways of love, yet it was of them that she was most afraid, because though the Sidi could speak and live as an Arab, he was of their blood, and it was her terror that he would one day find himself a wife from among them and return to his own land. But if she could only bear him a son, that fate might be averted. All men desired sons: strong, brave, handsome boys to carry on their line and reflect credit upon them. Daughters were pets and playthings, and if they were beautiful their value and their claim on a father’s affections might be enhanced thereby. But they could never replace a son, and Amrah was not beautiful as Zorah understood beauty. She was too like her father and she should have been a boy. Ah!—if only the All-Wise had seen fit to make her a boy, what a son she would have been!
Zorah, who adored the child, knew that Rory’s affection for his daughter, though real enough, contained something that she could not understand; a baffling quality of restraint and wariness as though, almost, he were afraid of her or of caring too much for her. And because she did not understand it she explained it to herself, with the philosophy born of uncounted generations of women who have believed themselves to be inferior beings, devoid of souls and created only for the service and pleasure of men and the bearing of children, as stemming from the fact that Amrah had disappointed him by being a girl. Had she been a boy he would have loved her and been fiercely proud of her strength and sturdiness and quick intelligence: Zorah was sure of that. And sure, too, that it was only disappointment that brought that curious closed look to his face. A look that she had noticed often enough, and that would come without warning when he had been playing with the child, or merely watching her as she teased the white cockatoo or raced in delighted, laughing pursuit of one of Pusser’s kittens. And when it came he would get up abruptly and leave the room, and often he would leave the house and not come back for a day—or a week or a month.
He looked like that whenever Amrah spoke to him in English, and the first time she had done so he had been furiously angry with Bwana Batty, who had taught the child her letters with the help of a coloured picture-book. And with Zorah herself, who had taken her to a woman missionary on sick-leave in Zanzibar, day after day during the months that he had been absent at sea, so that she might learn her father’s tongue from that unexpectedly broad-minded and tolerant spinster. Miss Dewlast, who had laboured to save souls for the God of the White Men, and died before she could return to Africa.
It was the first and only time that Rory had ever been angry with her, and Zorah had been crushed by his displeasure, for she had kept the lessons secret until such time as the child could speak the barbarous tongue with reas
onable fluency, and had meant to surprise him. She had done so; but not in the way she intended, and had it not been for Batty Potter, Amrah might well have forgotten all she had learnt. But if Zorah was crushed and contrite. Batty was not That portion of Mr Potter’s heart that did not belong to Captain Emory Frost, Hajji Ralub and the ViragOy had been given unstintedly to Amrah, and he loved the little creature as he had never loved anything else in all his long and disreputable life—certainly not any of his own miscellaneous offspring! His devotion was a fresh and unexpected flower to find blossoming on such dubious soil, but it had taken firm root; and while Zorah wept, Batty had been truculent:
“I never ‘card such muckin’ rubbish in all me bleeding puffi’ declared Batty, outraged. “And the sooner you shuts your trap and gives over, the better. You fair makes me ill! Why shouldn’t the nipper learn to speak like a Christian? She’s your daughter—or so I been told.”
Rory had replied furiously that it was precisely that fact that gave him the right to bring her up as he chose, to which Batty had retorted with a single, exceedingly crude epithet.
“What you means,” added Batty shrewdly, “is that you’d like to keep ‘er all Arab, so that you can keep yourself ‘appy by makin’ out to yourself that she’s all Zorah’s and you ain’t noways responsible. Well, you ain’t going to do it! Not while I ‘as me strength. That kid ‘as every right to choose where she belongs, and by goles I’ll see she ‘as it. If you loved ‘er proper it would be different; but you don’t. And if you’re thinking of telling me to “op it, you can think again, because I ain’t a’going to!”
Batty had won, and Amrah spoke English, Arabic and Kiswahili with equal facility, though with a tendency to drop her aitches in the first of these. But Rory still kept out of reach of loving her as Batty and Zorah loved her: shying away from that emotion as violently and instinctively as an unbroken horse shies away from the human who advances with sugar in one hand and a halter in the other. And still Zorah thought: If she had been a boy—!’ and longed for a son who would bind him…
Rory held the slim, passionate body in his arms and stroked the soft hair that felt like silk and smelled of frangipani blossoms, but above her head his eyes were abstracted, for his thoughts had left Zorah and The Dolphins’ House and Zanzibar, and forgetting even the gold that lay hidden in the sea wall at Kivulimi, had leapt forward to the mainland and Dar-es-Salaam, the ‘Haven of Peace’, where Hajji Issa-bin-Yusuf, that rich and respected Arab landowner, lived luxuriously in a house among the coconut groves and orange orchards, and might, or might not, be the friend and ally of the pirate raiders from the Gulf.
Clinging to him and comforted by his arms and that slow, caressing hand, Zorah still sensed his preoccupation, and knowing that he was not thinking of her or of love, she pressed closer to him and kept her face hidden against him that he might not see the tears that she had always striven to weep only in secret, and now could no longer control. He had not seen them, or even known that she was crying. And when at last she had steeled herself to draw away and meet his gaze, he had released her without question, and she saw that his look was fixed on the far horizon and the wide expanse of sea that lay beyond the open windows, and that he was barely aware that she was no longer in his arms.
He had spent the night on board the Virago, and the following evening had sailed out of the harbour towards the sunset; heading due west for no better reason than that Dar-es-Salaam lay to the southward and Captain Emory Frost had acquired a rooted objection to advertising his destination—even on those rare occasions when he was not engaged in doubtful transactions.
Amrah had begged to be taken with him, and on being refused had stamped her foot at him and scowled in a manner that twenty generations of Frosts would have instantly recognized. It was so exactly a reproduction of Rory’s own, when in a black mood, that Batty had wheezed and chuckled and informed her that she was a chip off the old block and no mistake, and that one day he would take her himself even if he had to smuggle her aboard in a sea-chest, but that meanwhile he would bring her back the best present that money could buy.
Zorah had returned Rory’s perfunctory parting kiss with passionate fervour, assuring him as always that she would pray hourly for his safety and his swift return. And it was only as he turned to go that he realized that she was still wearing the filigree necklace, and was unaccountably disturbed. He had treated Batty’s warnings on the subject with considerable impatience, but now it seemed as though he himself was not entirely immune from superstition, because he came back to her, and gripping her slim shoulders turned her about, and unfastening the catch removed the necklace and flung it across the room.
“It is not worthy of you,” he said shortly in answer to Zorah’s cry of protest.” I will bring you something better. Do not wear it again, my pearl.”
He kissed her again, and this time some instinct of protection made him hold her hard against him, crushing her so that for a moment she could not breathe, and kissing her with a roughness that disguised a sudden tremor of fear. It had left her happier than she had been for many months, and when he had gone she had retrieved the necklace and attempted to fasten it about her throat again, because it was not only his gift to her, and therefore a proof of his love, but too beautiful in itself to be hidden away in some sandalwood box. But it had also proved to be too delicate for such rough treatment. She found that one of the topaz-set blossoms had been snapped off and the catch had been broken so that she could not fasten it again, and tying it instead with a piece of silk she decided to take it the very next day to Gaur Chand the jeweller, to be mended.
Colonel Edwards, walking briskly along the waterfront to take the evening air, observed Captain Frost’s schooner threading her way between the anchored dhows in the harbour, and pausing to watch her, thought: ‘Wonder what that feller’s up to now?’ And ten minutes later Majid-bin-Saïd, Sultan of Zanzibar, looking from a window of the city Palace, saw the Virago spread her sails before the evening breeze, and knowing something of her owner’s mind, smiled to see the ship head westward.
Hero too had taken advantage of the break in the monsoon to walk along the seafront with Clayton, and watching the schooner glide away from its moorings she felt that with its departure the air became cleaner and more breathable; a thought that was evidently shared by Clayton, who said trenchantly: “That’s one less bad smell in this town! If it rained around once a week, and trash like Frost and his crew were run out of the place, it might be a little less of a hell-hole. I can’t wait to get you out of it.”
But it did not look like a hell-hole that evening, thought Hero; and although a day or two ago she would have been ready to agree with him, she looked now across the quiet, wind-ruffled water and out towards the rose-pink horizon, and was not so sure that she wanted to get away from it. There would be rain again soon; perhaps tomorrow. But for the moment the sky overhead was clear and the enormous banks of cloud that piled up one above the other to the east of the island were ablaze with the sunset; a glory of gold and apricot that stained the sea and turned the white-walled town and the grey trunks of the coconut palms to a vivid, glowing coral against the quiet aquamarine of the evening.
A single star trembled like a drop of brilliant dew above the purple and blue of the distant tree-tops, and as the colours faded and the twilight swooped down upon Zanzibar, lights flowered in the town and on the dark shapes of the great dhows that lifted and sank to the breathing of the tide, and where a moment ago there had been one star there were now a thousand; each one enormous, steady and impossibly brilliant. A muezzin’s voice called from the minaret of a mosque, clear and high and with a haunting cadence that was as strange and exotic to Western ears as the green, coral-built island with its dark groves of spice trees, swaying palms and scented orange orchards was to Western eyes. And as the last echoes died away, the Virago’s sails melted into the dusk and were gone, and Hero relaxed her clasp on Clayton’s arm, and turning away from the sea and the darkening harb
our, walked back with him through the shadowed streets.
The frangipani tree that fronted the Consulate was silver in the swiftly falling night, and the scent of its fading blossoms filled the warm air with a fragrance that Hero had once considered cloying but which tonight appeared strangely sweet and for some reason curiously disturbing. Pausing to look up at it, it seemed to her that the stars hung so low in the sky that they were caught in its tangled branches, and that she had never realized before what beauty meant.
She stood there staring at it for so long that Clay became impatient, and grasping her by the elbow, urged her into the house. And the next day it rained again: and the next and the next. A warm deluge of falling water that stripped the last white blossoms from the tree and left it standing stark and grey and ugly in half an acre of splashing mud.
The Virago had taken a full two weeks to reach Dar-es-Salaam, for once out of sight of the Island Rory had turned her northward into the wind, and only after several days fetched about to run in on Lamu and Malindi, and after that Mombasa; picking up a variety of interesting information on the way, a good deal of which supported the theory that Hajji Issa-bin-Yusuf of Dar-es-Salaam was deeply implicated in the so-called “trading’ ventures of the pirate dhows from the Persian Gulf.