by M. M. Kaye
The man’s ebony skin seemed tinged with grey and had the appearance of being loose on his great body, and he spoke in a hoarse blurred voice as though he were very old, or drunk: ‘Jambo…habari za kutq?’ (Greetings—what news of the morning?)
“Sijambo! The day has gone, and it is evening,” said Rory. “What do you do here, and what of him who came with you?”
“He died,” said the man thickly. “They all died. Our dhow put in at Pangani, and we saw men falling in the streets and came away quickly; thirty-eight all told—or so we thought. But one had come aboard without our knowledge and hidden himself, hoping to escape the sickness, and he brought it with him and died. But the pestilence stayed and struck us down like ripe nuts in a gale, until at last only two were left alive—myself and an Arab from Sharja on the Gulf A wind took the dhow and ran it upon the reef near the mouth of the river, and we two who were left took the gold that the dead had no use for, and the pearls and silver also, and saved ourselves. We stole a fisherman’s boat, and the currents brought us across the sea to this place. But the Arab had taken the sickness and he died as we reached the shore, and I only am left of all those who ten days ago left Pangani alive. I only!”
The man straightened himself with an effort, holding on to the doorpost of the makeshift hut, and began to laugh loudly and foolishly, and pointing with a wavering hand in the direction of the violet silhouette of Africa behind which the sun had dipped and vanished, he said, gasping: “My tribe and all the tribes who live in the great country that lies behind those mountains are dead—all dead. But I, Olambo, have escaped! I am safe. And rich—and rich…”
He looked quickly over his shoulder as though to see if they were alone, and sinking his voice to a cracked whisper said: “I have buried it all beneath the floor of this hut; all but two pieces of silver with which I shall buy food, and the ring which was fair payment. And when I return I shall dig it up again and buy land and slaves and become great But first I must find a village. Where is the nearest village?”
“To the southward,” said Rory, jerking his chin in the direction of Mkokotoni. “But you cannot go there. Have you no food here?”
“What is that to you?” said the man truculently. “And why should I not go? I am rich and I go where I choose!”
He turned away, and Rory jerked the pistol out of the folds of his waistcloth and shot him through the back of the head.
The crack of the explosion seemed startlingly loud in the quiet thickets under the high roof of palm fronds, but the leaves muffled the sound and there was no echo, and the man fell on his face and lay still.
Rory stood looking down at him for a minute or two, watching for any sign of life. But the bullet had entered at the base of the skull, and the man had died instantly and without even knowing that he was hit There was no need for a second shot. Rory replaced the pistol, and retracing his steps came out upon the beach once more, and returned with all speed to the house. The gold was already beginning to fade from the sky and there were several things that must be done before it became too dark to see. Things which he preferred to do himself.
He fetched matches and lamp-oil from the house and a bundle of straw from the stables, and went back to the derelict hut and the sprawled body of the man who had died without knowing that the pestilence he had thought to escape had already laid its hand upon him.
The thickets were full of birds twittering noisily as they prepared to settle down for the night, but the shadows were green and still and the scent from a nearby bush of wild jasmine mitigated that tell-tale stench of faeces. For a moment Rory was tempted to cover the body with branches and pull down the hut above it, leaving the jungle to obliterate both. But he knew that he could not risk it There was no telling when the owner of the hut or some wandering fisherman might not take it into his head to make use of the shelter it afforded, so he set his teeth and poured lamp-oil over the corpse and spread straw above it, and splashing more oil on the walls and roof of the hut, was thankful that the wind and the sun had between them dried out a large part of the moisture from even so sheltered a spot as this.
He did not enter the hut or make any attempt to remove the riches that the man had buried beneath it, though if it were the accumulated wealth of thirty-eight men from the Gulf it might total an impressive amount—even subtracting the probable value of the pearls. But such considerations seemed, at the moment, of no importance, and he barely spared them a thought as he emptied the last of the lamp-oil over the threshold and struck a match.
The straw burned easily enough, and he fed the fire with the dead brown debris of fallen palm fronds and the rotted husks of coconuts. The hut at first only smouldered, but presently it caught alight and burned fiercely, crackling and hissing and sending up choking clouds of smoke to be lost in the branches above it.
The glare was a beacon in the gathering twilight, and if it burned until darkness fell it would be seen for miles. But Rory did not waste time worrying over such considerations, since it was unlikely to attract the attention of anyone who would be sufficiently interested to ask questions or attempt to put it out.
The nauseous fumes from the crackling pyre fouled the twilight and caught at his throat, so that even standing up-wind of the oily smoke he could not escape it, and he coughed and choked and held a folded handkerchief over his face. But he did not turn away until he was sure that not only the hut but a circle of bushes around it were well alight, and that there was nothing left that might hold or carry the infection.
It was dark when he left the thickets and came out again on the shore and into the clean air, and once again he went down to the sea and bathed in it and washed out his clothes, and carrying the wet bundle under one arm, returned to the house. Flames still gleamed brightly among the shadows and sparks and smoke rose above the palm fronds. But the blaze was dying down and it was unlikely to spread, for the grass and the tangle of casuarina, pandanus and wild coffee were green and moist and lush from the monsoon, and beyond the radius of the fiercest heat they had shrivelled but not burned.
The night had been clear and calm and breathlessly hot, and Rory dragged a string cot up to the open roof and slept out in the white moonlight. And each time he woke he saw the orange glow among the trees near the cliff edge and a smudge of smoke against the stars, and smelt the sickly odour of smouldering greenstuff and charred flesh. But he heard no drums, and once, as he was dropping off to sleep again after an hour of tossing wakefulness, he thought that if those he had heard on the previous night had indeed been the Drums of Zanzibar, then this was the disaster they had warned of, and he had averted it. But if the cholera had reached the coast there would be other dhows and other kyacks, for the seas that lay between the Island and the mainland were narrow ones, and all too easy to cross with a favourable wind. Batty had been right, and when the Virago returned they must quit these waters and sail beyond the reach of the sickness that was ravaging all Africa.
By the morning the Trades were blowing strongly again. And all that day it rained; and all the next. Warm, steady rain that fell in noisy cataracts from the gutters at the roof edge, and sluiced off the palm fronds to whip the earth into a splashing sea of mud. Fresh droves of creeping, flying insects hatched out and found their way into every room, and the sound of falling rain made a background for the silence of the isolated house.
It was impossible to go out, and Rory wandered through the empty rooms, restless and curiously uneasy; making plans and discarding them, and wondering what had become of Batty and why he had heard no word from Majid, and whether it would be safe to return to Kivulimi—which would at least be preferable to this lonely, god-forsaken spot. But he knew that The House of Shade was certain to be watched, and the fact that he had had no news meant that the Daffodil was still in port. And in any case, it was here that the Virago was to call for him. He would have to stay. And it was his own fault: he had brought this upon himself by abducting and raping Hero Hollis.
Considering that episode
in the long, wet, idle hours, he could not understand how he had come to do such a thing. Rage alone did not account for it. He had been enraged before, and almost as greatly as when Batty had brought him the ugly story of Zorah’s death; but he had not reacted to it by losing his head and behaving with the brutal and shortsighted stupidity that he had displayed in the matter of Clayton Mayo’s betrothed. Not that he could even pretend to shortsightedness, because at the back of his mind he had been perfectly well aware of the probable consequences of such an act, and he had had no desire to bum his boats and find himself outlawed from Zanzibar. Yet he had done it. Deliberately, and in a cold fury that he could not explain away by saying that it was solely on Zorah’s account.
His first reaction on hearing of that tragedy had been a savage anger against all those Europeans who despised the East as uncivilized, and yet considered that when living there the colour of their own skins gave them the right to behave as they pleased, and automatically placed them in a superior—and governing—class. It had seemed an excellent thing to him to set the Gulf raiders on to knocking a portion of the contempt and superiority out of some of them, and he had promised himself, too, that when he found out the name of the man who was directly responsible, he would give him a thrashing that he would remember for life. It was only when he discovered that the man was Clayton Mayo that he had lost his head and his temper and his sense of proportion, and planned an iniquitous revenge that had ended by putting him in jeopardy of a summary trial and a swift hanging, and turned him into a fugitive—hiding in an empty, echoing house on the cliffs, watching for the sails of a ship and waiting for news.
He had jeopardized them all: Batty and little Amrah, Hajji Ralub and Ibrahim; Jumah, Daoud, Hadir and a dozen others…and for what? It would have been easy enough, when Colonel Edwards had issued that ultimatum, to call off Omar-bin-Omar’s men and content himself with thrashing Clayton Mayo in a manner that would have damaged that handsome lady-killer’s features and made him unattractive to look at for several months. And since the Colonel appeared to be aware of the circumstances of Zorah’s death, it was unlikely that either he or Clayton’s stepfather would have raised a finger in protest. They would, on the contrary, have considered him justified and let the matter drop.
But jettisoning common sense and justice together with a hitherto outstanding talent for self-preservation, he had planned that unjust and archaic method of retaliation, and carried it out in the teeth of Ralub’s warnings, Batty’s angry opposition and the promptings of reason. And now he could not conceive what had made him do it. Or, in spite of its disastrous consequences, feel the least regret for having done so!
Three days of rain that seemed like the prelude to another Flood kept Rory penned up and plagued by memories, uneasiness and ill-temper in the misty, untenanted house. But on the fourth morning the sky was clear again and the day breathlessly hot, and he went back along the cliff-top through the pandanus and the coconut palms, and found that the ashes and the burnt fragments left by the fire had been washed into the earth, and the rank jungle grass was already springing up to cover what little remained of the blackened ruin, the wreck of a tin box and some charred bones that had once been a man. But the sight brought him little satisfaction, for he could not forget the negro’s story. Or that Pangani and the coastal ports were all too near, and that there would be other dhows and other stowaways trying to escape the plague that was burning its way like a slow fire across Africa. He could only hope that Majid would be as good as his word and that he and the merchants and Customs officials would see to it that no man landed in Zanzibar from an infected port, and that if the news was bad, that they would close the harbour against all coastal shipping. At least the wind had died, and from the look of the sky they were in for a period of flat calm: which was not a thing he would normally have been grateful for, since it betokened a period of grinding heat. But in the present circumstances it could prove a godsend, for though it would seriously delay the Virago, it would also prevent dhows and fishing boats from the coast from reaching Zanzibar.
He turned from the burned patch among the steaming green thickets and went down to bathe feeling a little easier in his mind. But though the sea levelled out until it lay as still as oiled silk, and evening brought no breath of breeze to ruffle its calm surface or sway the quiet palms, his uneasiness returned; and with it a disturbing feeling of something overlooked. Something that he should have seen—that he had seen, but failed to comprehend or guard against.
It tugged at the fringes of his mind with the nagging persistence of a dripping tap or a creaking shutter, but though he went back step by step over every incident from the moment he had seen the negro wade ashore to the one in which he had turned away from the crackling pyre, satisfied that he had destroyed anything that might carry the infection, he could think of nothing else that he could have done. He had carried nothing away and he had walked straight from the fire into the sea. There was no need for him to trouble about it any more. And yet somewhere in the back of his mind a tap still dripped and a shutter creaked…
The week that followed was the hottest that he could remember for this season of year. Even at midnight, lying on the open rooftop, he found it too hot to sleep, and the slow hours dragged by in a sweating silence that was unbroken by any of the familiar sounds that he associated with the island night Not a leaf stirred and no drums beat in the scattered villages. Even the cicadas sang no more among the palm groves or the tangled thickets, and the tired whisper of the tide did not reach the house on the cliffs. There were times when it seemed to Rory that if he were to shout aloud from the rooftop his voice would carry to Zanzibar city, so hot and still and silent were the nights.
He saw no sails in all that interminable week. The sea lay empty and shimmering, dotted with little coral islets basking in the heat-haze like mirages in a burning waste of desert, and there was no point in looking for the ViragOy because she, like every other sailing ship on that glassy ocean, must be lying motionless and becalmed, waiting for the wind. The Daffodil alone would not be affected by the failure of the Trades, but there had been no sign of her for some time past, and Rory wondered if Dan had given up and left for the coast, and why there was still no word from Batty.
He considered riding into Mkokotoni for news, but knew that it would be tempting providence to do so, and he regretted that it was so seldom necessary for old Kerbalou or his wife to go to market, since at least that way he would have heard at second-hand the gossip of the villages. But as the estate provided all they required in the way of food, Kerbalou’s visits to Mkokotoni were few and far between, and only undertaken when such commodities as oil or salt ran low, or his wife required a length of cloth or some trifle that must be purchased from a bazaar.
The sense of peace and quiet that Rory had at first enjoyed had been destroyed by the arrival of the doomed negro, and the slow, sweltering hours were heavy with a discomfort that was far more mental than physical, because an intolerable feeling of urgency and foreboding weighed on him and would not be shrugged off. The thought of the negro still obsessed him. Not because he had killed the man in cold blood, for that had been necessary and he would have done it again. But because of something that was in some way connected with him, or with the broken kyack that now lay sunk in the channel near the reef Something that he could not remember…
And then on the last day of that long week, after a night made tolerable by a refreshing breeze, he had remembered it. The thing he had seen and forgotten. The words he had overlooked.
It was Kerbalou’s elderly silent wife who reminded him of it, though she was unaware of having done so. Rory had been on his way to the stables when he had seen her drawing water from the well behind the house, and had gone to her assistance, for the clumsy leather bucket was heavy. She had twitched her cotton head-veil over the lower part of her face in an automatic gesture that was more a concession to convention than any attempt to hide her lined and unalluring features, and as she did so
the sun glittered on the tiny piece of looking-glass that was set in a cheap silver thumb-ring that she wore on her lifted hand. And seeing it, Rory was suddenly reminded of another ring: the one that he had seen by moonlight on the negro’s hand.
But it had not been on his hand when he died, and he had said something about a ring: ‘All but two pieces of silver with which I shall buy food, and the ring which was fair payment…’
Payment for what?
Rory turned swiftly on Kerbalou’s wife and demanded to know where she had got the ring and how long she had had it, and was inordinately relieved when the startled woman replied that it had been a wedding gift and that she had worn it for more than thirty years. He carried the bucket to the kitchen door, and leaving it there went quickly away to fetch the wooden rake with which Kerbalou cleared away fallen leaves, and having found it went once again to the little clearing where the fisherman’s hut had stood.
The grass was already inches tall between the black ash and the charred fragments of wood and bone, and he raked it over carefully, sifting it between his fingers, and presently came across two discoloured disks of metal. The silver coins that the negro had mentioned, which had been kept aside to buy food in the nearest village. But though he searched meticulously, covering the ground inch by inch, there was no sign of anything that could have been a ring.
Returning to the house for a spade, he dug in the circle of fire-scarred earth, and eventually uncovered a heavy bundle wrapped in a length of cheap cotton cloth. He had no idea whether the taint of infection could still linger on such an object, but this was no time for caution, and he untied the clumsy knots and laid bare the accumulated wealth of all those dead men from the dhow that had sailed so short a time ago from Pangani. It was a rich haul, and enough, as the negro had said, to keep a man in affluence for the rest of his life. Gold and silver coins, a certain amount of jewellery, and a brocade bag that was heavy with pearls. But there was no ring there either.