by M. M. Kaye
Rory laughed, and took his bishop with an innocent-looking pawn. “Check.”
“Bah!” said Majid irritably. “Why did I not see that?”
“Because I didn’t mean you to.”
“You are indeed a son of Eblis; but you have not defeated me yet, and I take your pawn—so!”
“And I, alas! take your queen. Checkmate.”
Majid scowled at his cornered monarch, laughed ruefully and swept an impatient hand across the board, scattering ivory chessmen over the soft blues and reds of the Shiraz carpet. “You defeat me too easily today, for I am thinking all the time of other things. Tomorrow I shall beat you; but tonight I am too worried.”
“Why? What have you got to worry about? Your beloved brother Bargash is safely out of the way in Bombay, and no one seems to be trying to murder you at the moment. The dhows have gone—and without your having to pay them anything out of your own pocket—and the chances are that the next time they come your disillusioned subjects will give them such a warm reception that they’ll think twice about coming again. On top of that you’ve got your hands on enough treasure to keep you in comfort for a good many years. You shouldn’t have a care in the world!”
“It is not for myself that I am anxious. It is for you, my friend. I do not like it that this English gun-ship stays in harbour and will not go.”
“I shouldn’t let that worry you too much,” said Rory, gathering up the scattered chessmen and restoring them to their box. “It’s always possible that it is not staying here solely on my account.”
“That is true. I have heard that the Lieutenant is much enamoured of the young American lady, and while she is here he will not be anxious to leave. Men in love are all the same—whatever their race. But it is also true that the British Consul has vowed vengeance on you, and he is a stubborn man. And so too is the Lieutenant.”
“If it comes to that, so am I,” said Rory with a grin.
“Allah! do I not know it! But this time I think that you have provoked them too far, and that you are no longer safe here; either in the city or even here in my house. They think that I know where you are, but I do not think that they suspect yet that you are here—within a spear’s throw of them. But once they learn it, as they will! I would not trust either of them not to demand you of me at the gun point, or to refrain from bombarding my Palace if I refused to deliver you up.”
“To be frank with you, neither would I,” admitted Rory. “In fact I’ve been thinking for the last day or two that it’s high time I moved to some less vulnerable spot. I’d hate to see the Daffodil dropping anchor out there one morning with her guns trained on your windows.”
“I too,” confessed Majid. “And I have been wondering where would be the safest place for you to go. You cannot go to your house in the city or to the one on the coast, since both are now watched; and it would be unwise to try and leave by sea. But I have remembered a little house near the shore beyond Mkokotoni, that belongs to a cousin of mine who is at present in Muscat I will send word to the caretaker that he is to see that you are well looked after and that no one knows that you are there, and also to your ship to tell them where you are, so that they can arrange with you what is to be done. If you will take my advice you will remain there quietly and in hiding until the Colonel has departed for England, and the young lady who has the Lieutenant’s heart has gone back to America and he has got tired of waiting for you. Then it may be safe for you to come back. But not until then.”
“I expect you are right,” conceded Rory philosophically. “But it sounds as though I am in for a damned dull time.”
“It is better to be dull than dead! And if you do not leave the city quickly, I think you will very soon be dead. As for your servants and the child in The Dolphins’ House, they will come to no harm, since it is only your blood that is required.”
“I know it When do I leave, and how?”
“Tomorrow night, I think. Some of the women will be visiting friends in a house beyond the Malindi Bazaar, and you shall go with them as one of the guard and separate yourself from them near the creek, where there will be horses waiting and a man who will be your guide. It will be simple enough to arrange; and safer than remaining here where there are too many peeping eyes and chattering tongues—and too many takers of bribes!”
Majid had been as good as his word. He had arranged it, and Rory had left by the women’s gate of the Palace after dark and by lantern light, wearing Arab dress and forming one of an escort of eunuchs and armed guards who convoyed a dozen closely veiled, chattering women through the tortuous maze of twisting, turning, intersecting streets, lanes and alleyways of the planless city. The sight of such a procession was too common a one to arouse much interest, and though they had twice been stopped by Baluchi soldiers and once by a naval patrol from the Daffodil, no one had cared to inconvenience a party of women from the Palace, and they had been allowed to proceed after die briefest of halts.
The bridge over the creek had been the greatest hazard, because by that time Rory had separated himself from the procession and was alone. But presumably Majid had bribed or otherwise dealt with the men who should have been watching it, for no one disputed his passage. There was no sign of any guard, and he passed safely over the malodorous creek that separated the Stone Town from the squalid shanties of the African Town, and found two men awaiting him on the open ground beyond it.
One of them was Mr Potter, with whom Rory exchanged a few whispered words before mounting the spare horse, and with the guide that Majid had provided, riding away toward the open country while Batty returned by unfrequented byways to the house of a friend in the city.
It had been a long, dark ride, taken more often than not at a foot’s pace, and they had broken their journey at midnight near Chuni and slept in an empty hut on the edge of a clove plantation: awakening to eat cold food in the first grey light of dawn before riding on with more speed through the wet grass and jungle scrub, while day broadened over the palm-clad hills to their right and the northeast Trade Wind, sweeping across the island, whipped their cloaks out into billowing folds behind them.
There were few roads in this part of the island, and those few mere cart-tracks or footpaths between villages, and except for an occasional peasant glimpsed at a distance in a cane field or coconut grove, they saw no one, and the countryside seemed quiet and deserted and very tranquil. The sun had risen by the time they came within sight of Mkokotoni, and they skirted the little village, taking care to keep out of sight, and rode on up the coast with the wind-ruffled sea lying blue and foam-flecked to their left, until a branch of the wandering track took them at last through a grove of palms to a small, two-storeyed Arab house, protected by a high wall built of coral rag and shaded by orange trees and pomegranates.
The ancient caretaker who admitted them led away the tired horses to a stable at present tenanted by a single lethargic donkey, and Rory went up to the flat rooftop, and looking down on the tranquil domain that was to provide him with a safe hiding-place for the next few weeks, decided that it might have been a good deal worse. The place was certainly quiet enough, and its location so remote and secluded that few people were likely to hear that anyone other than the caretaker and his elderly, silent wife were living there. And neither Dan nor Colonel Edwards had sufficient men at their disposal to enable them to do more than watch the approaches to the city.
The house that belonged to the Sultan’s cousin stood near the edge of a line of low, coral cliffs, facing the little island of Tumbatu that lies offshore in the long curving bay above Mkokotoni. A coconut grove sheltered it from the prevailing winds and it was a peaceful spot; and though Rory Frost had never entertained any particular hankering for peace, he was surprised to find that the prospect of spending several idle weeks if not months there, with no company but his own and nothing to do but eat, sleep and swim, or lie on his back and look at the sky, was in no way unpleasant. I must be getting old, he thought. And was disconcerted by the reflectio
n.
The guide whom Majid had sent with him returned to the city that night, and the days that followed were long and very quiet. Christmas came and went, and still the shore stretched white and empty below the low cliffs of coral, and sometimes a dhow would pass on the far side of Tumbatu, and sometimes the Daffodil—patrolling the coast to watch for the Virago and make sure that she was not hiding in any small bay or deep-water creek, or lurking offshore in the lee of an islet. But the only craft that ever ventured into the narrow channel separating Tumbatu from the main Island was an occasional kyack; the little island-built canoes belonging to fishermen who lived in small scattered communities among the palm trees and pandanus and casuarina scrub that fringed the coral beaches.
For the first time in twenty years Rory found himself with nothing to do and unlimited leisure in which to do it, and the experience, paradoxically enough, proved both restful and disturbing.
It was pleasant to lie out naked on the lonely beach in the shade of a palm tree, watching the sandcrabs sidling to and fro among the sea-wrack, and listening to the tide lapping against the long shore and the wind-worn rocks. To swim in cool, glass-clear water above a multicoloured submarine world of trees and gardens, where shoals of brilliant fish darted through the branching coral and his own shadow followed him, three fathoms below, across the reefs and rocks and the white bars of sand. To walk through the long aisles of the coconut grove, or sit on the flat roof of the house on the cliffs and watch the sun set behind the mountains of Africa, or the lightning flicker in the belly of the far distant clouds.
There were days of steaming heat when the palm fronds drooped in the humid air and the birds perched motionless in the shade with beaks agape; when nothing moved and the sea seemed made of molten metal. Days when he would awake to the drumming of rain on the roof and find the world about him veiled in mist and hidden by slanting rods of grey and silver, and blessedly cool again. And other days when thunder relied above the island and wind and storm swept across it, setting the palms lashing to and fro like demented broomsticks at a Witches’ Sabbath while the sea raced white and roaring up the beach to crash in flying foam against the coral cliffs.
The storms would pass and the sun rise in a cloudless sky, and once again it would be hot and still, with nothing to tell of the furious hours except the scattered coconuts and shredded palm fronds, and here and there a broken tree and a dead butterfly…
Sitting one evening on the low parapet of the roof and watching the first star glimmer palely in a green lake of sky, Rory found himself reviewing his past life with a curious feeling of looking for the last time at the pages of a familiar book that must shortly be closed and put away for ever. As though he were an old man looking back with detachment and nostalgia on all the days that had gone: forgetting nothing, and regretting nothing—except that they would not return.
He did not know why he should feel so strongly that he had come to the end of a long road; unless it was because Batty and Majid had both been right when they had told him that this time he had gone too far and made “Zanzibar and the Sultan’s territories too hot to hold him. And yet that alone did not account for it, for the Daffodil could not stay permanently in the harbour, and the British Consul was due to go home, from where he would be sent to some other appointment. Dan Larrimore, too, had done more than his stint of service in the tropics, so it was only a matter of keeping in hiding for a few months at most, and when Dan and the Colonel had gone it would be safe enough to return and pick up his old life once more. Only quite suddenly Rory knew he would not do it. That book was closed and the story was over.
There were other seas and other islands; and other strange and beautiful lands to explore. But once again he had the feeling that time was running out, and Authority—in the form of an acid-faced woman in black bombazine, and a heavy-jowled, cold eyed business man with mutton-chop whiskers and a gold watch-chain stretched across his stomach—was advancing with relentless swiftness to convert and exploit the wild places of the world and to drag them forward, in the sacred name of Progress, toward uniformity and a dead level of humourless hygienic money-grabbing mediocrity. Aunt Laura and Uncle Henry were on the march, and it was their seed that would inherit the earth.
Watching the stars blossom one by one in the darkening sky above the glass-still sea, Rory could hear in the silence the faint, insistent beat of a far-away drum, and the sound transformed itself to him into the feet of Progress, trampling ruthlessly forward and destroying as it came: abolishing old savageries and creating new and worse ones in their place.
The bow and arrow, the spear and the poisoned dart would go, but the sword would not be beaten into a ploughshare: it would be fashioned instead by the civilized West into weapons that would destroy by the hundred thousand—because men were covetous and the world no longer wide enough. The iron ships and iron trains would make an end of old barriers and older customs, and the harnessing of steam and gas and electricity would mean larger and larger cities and more and more factories—and a soaring birthrate. It would not be long before there were twice as many people in the world as there had been when he, Emory Frost, had been born in that quiet old manor house in Kent. And after that three times as many; and then four—and five…
There would be more Restrictions, more Discipline, more Laws. And more Tyranny!…all the things he had rebelled against. There would be no escaping them, and he wondered if the world of the next century would be the better for them or the worse, and why he should never have realized before that what he had taken to be misfortune had, in reality, been luck in disguise. Incredible luck!
He had fancied himself ill-treated, and revenged himself by cutting loose from the ties of country and acknowledging no law. But if his fickle mother had not deserted him and his stiff-necked and embittered father had not died and left him to the untender mercies of Uncle Henry and Aunt Laura, he would in all probability have seen no more of the world than the Kentish countryside and the smoke-stained, grimy city of London. He would never even have known what he was missing, or that his generation would be among the last to see the strange and far-away places before they were overtaken, altered and finally submerged by the hungry tide of industrialization and uniformity. But he had escaped—and he had seen them.
He had traded up and down the Ivory Coast and dealt in slaves and cowries and coral, pearls and muskets and elephant tusks. He had anchored in harbours unknown to Western ships and roistered in towns that were old when London was young. He knew every port from Aden to Akabah and Suez; had crossed the Arabian sea to Bombay and Goa, bartered ivory for pearls in the Persian Gulf and marched inland across deserts of burning sand to strange, hidden cities that until then no other white man had ever seen. But before the century was out there would be steam-driven ships churning a path across those seas, and one day the old cities—if they were not destroyed by war and the bigger and better engines of destruction that men were so industriously devising—would be pulled down and swept away, and in their place would arise a flavourless uniformity of brick and mortar, populated by once-colourful people aping the white man’s dress and speech, so that all cities would in time become identical masses of houses and factories, shops, boulevards and hotels, linked by trains and steamships and filled with imitation Westerners imitating Western ways.
But he had escaped—and he had seen them. He had seen the squalor and the enchantment, and known that although the world was shrinking with the relentless swiftness of a sandbar when the tide has turned, it was still, for a little while longer, a vast and mysterious place full of unexplored territories, secret cities and beautiful, beckoning horizons. And he was suddenly and sincerely sorry for all those people who would come after him and never know what it had once offered, but would think, as each generation in its turn had thought, that it was the best organized and most enlightened of all.
Yes, he had been fabulously lucky! It was strange that he should not have realized that until now. Though he supposed that he must s
ubconsciously have known it, for the roving, lawless, swashbuckling years had not constituted an aimless journey, but a means to an end: the acquiring of a sum large enough to enable him to ruin his uncle—a sum he intended to get by fair means or foul. But he had got it even before that fabulous fortune in gold had come into his hands. The figure he had aimed at had been reached on the day that Clayton Mayo paid in good coin for a consignment of temporarily worthless rifles. Yet he had made no attempt to dispose of his ship or return to the land of his fathers, and he wondered now if he would ever do so?
Uncle Henry’s hated image had suddenly become a foolish rag-and-pasteboard bogey whose arms and legs jerked to strings: a thing hardly worth revenging oneself upon. And supposing he were to return and regain his patrimony?—what then? Would he really be able to settle down to the life of an English squire, walking his acres and discussing crops and cattle, local politics and the affairs of a small market town? It seemed highly unlikely and the prospect held no allure for him. Yet there was little point in regaining his family acres only to leave them empty and idle, or sell them to some stranger.
There had been Frosts at Lyndon Gables for more than a century before its title and acres had been listed in Doomsday Book. A Frost had fought for Saxon Harold at Senlac, and ten years later his manor had been restored to his sons by Norman William. The first Emory had returned to it, one-armed, from Agincourt, and a Cavalier grandson of the Tyson Frost who had built the stately rose-brick mansion in the days of Elizabeth, had held it for King Charles and seen it reduced to a shell by Cromwell’s men; and lived to rebuild it in the years of the Restoration.