Worm Winds of Zanzibar (The Alex Trueman Chronicles Book 2)

by Martin Dukes

  He turned his piercing grey eyes upon Will and smiled. “I may from time to time have need of a… sandwich.”

  Kelly was given a makeover by the young ladies of the palace. They calculated that the Outlanders had been in the citadel for one whole month and wanted to celebrate the occasion. There was quite a gathering in Kashifah’s apartment when Kelly and Tanya arrived to be greeted by cakes, drinks and an impressive array of clothes and cosmetics.

  “Sit you down here, by the window,” said Nusrat. “We shall make of you a vision of loveliness such as will turn every male head in the palace.”

  “What, so you’re saying I’m not that already?” asked Kelly mischievously.

  “Well,” said Nusrat, stirring something dark in a tiny bowl. “I think it’s fair to say at least one head has turned.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Kashifah archly, coming in with a tray of drinks. “I wonder who you mean?”

  The other young ladies of the palace got on with making ridiculous suggestions for who might be Kelly’s particular admirer, ranging from the Chief Clerk to the Navy Board to the ten-year-old son of the Grand Vizier himself.

  “I swear I’ve seen a glint in Lady Shaquira’s chamberlain’s eye as Kelly passes through the west portico,” said Nuria, one of Kashifah’s many cousins.

  “Ah, yes,” said Nusrat. “But he’s a eunuch, so he doesn’t count. To be admired by eunuchs is a prize no lady seeks.”

  “So who do you mean?” asked Kelly, although she was pretty sure who Nusrat had in mind.

  “Why, Jemail bin Afzal, of course,” she said, to great hilarity and hoots of delight amongst her friends. “It is he who has been making cow’s eyes at you this last week, is he not? Is it not he who is said to murmur your name in his sleep? So claims his sister.”

  “True enough he is a comely youth,” said Kashifah. “But he has such a small estate. Does that not trouble you, sister?”

  “It ill behoves us to judge a man by the size his estate,” said Nusrat with a smirk.

  “Well, I don’t think I want to marry a pauper,” said Nuria frowning. “And what about you, Kashifah? I suppose you will marry within the great families.”

  Nusrat had begun to apply kohl around Kelly’s eyes, so she could only lie back and consider what had been said to her. So Jemail was smitten by her. So it seemed, and she admitted to herself that she was aware of this fact, although she had been doing her best to ignore it.

  “And do you return his affection?” asked another girl called Marium. “Does he kindle a fire within your breast? Surely you must abandon all hope of riches, should you marry him.”

  “Who’s talking about marrying him?” spluttered Kelly in outraged tones, starting forward and being pressed firmly back into her seat by Nusrat.

  “Curb your passions, dearest, or I shall surely put out your eye,” she said.

  “She is betrothed,” said Kashifah. “I thought everyone knew that.”

  “Indeed, to Alex bin Trueman,” said Nusrat, “the Sultan’s boon companion. Is that not so?”

  “And what will Alex do, do you suppose, if he finds that another covets his betrothed?” asked Nuria. “Will he call him out, do you think?”

  “What, do you mean challenge him to a duel? I shouldn’t think so,” laughed Kelly. “Alex isn’t the duelling kind. It’s not how we do things, at least not since about two hundred years ago, anyway.”

  “Your nails, if I may venture an opinion, are in a sorry state,” said one of the older girls whose name, it seemed, was Lana. “Shall I have my girl attend to them? She has a masterly touch in such affairs.”

  “You are kind,” said Kashifah. “But I’m sure Nahla can manage quite well. She is an ill-favoured creature and an oaf when faced with hair, but she is very nimble with a file. I shall call her now?”

  A conversation ensued about which of them had the best maid, or indeed maids, as some of the richer girls had a small army of household staff to call upon. When talk moved on to whose maid was most idle, feckless and incompetent, Kelly found herself becoming uncomfortable. Nusrat was applying various treatments to her face, but at the same time Kashifah’s maid had come in and was filing her nails. The poor girl was as self-effacing as it was possible for another human being to be in the company of a room full of girls of about her own age. Her eyes never strayed from the work that her hands were doing and the set of her shoulders told of her anxiety.

  Kelly, growing gradually aware of this issue, was impatient for the task to be completed.

  “She is quite plump, is she not?” observed Nuria, referring to the maid, when Kelly had begun to think that the conversation had moved on to more congenial ground.

  “You will not find a rounded servant in my household. We like to keep them sharp,” she continued to general laughter from her friends. “My father says a full belly makes for an idle hand, and I think he is right.”

  “Well, your father’s hands must be afflicted by a very thorough paralysis,” said Nusrat dryly, “if the greatness of his girth is any indication.”

  “I was referring to servants,” snapped Nuria, flushing around the cheeks. “And my father suffers from the gout, as you know. The freedom of your tongue sometimes…”

  Kelly, who had met the maid’s eye briefly during this exchange, felt the need to move things on.

  “What about the Sultan?” she asked. “Who does he court, if that’s the right way of putting it?”

  It was as though Kelly had slammed a door. All conversation stopped. The girls regarded each other with a strange uncertainty in their eyes. Nahla’s file continued its work, however, and Nusrat’s tweezers continued to pluck at her eyebrows.

  “Oops, did I say something wrong?” asked Kelly.

  “Not at all, my dear,” said Nusrat, giving a particularly fierce tweak. “It is simply that the Sultan’s intentions remain unclear.”

  “Really? He is seventeen though, isn’t he? Hasn’t he got a….” she struggled for the right word “… sweetheart?”

  “No,” said Kashifah. “He has not.”

  “I see. He’s not, er, batting for the other side, is he?” asked Kelly. There were a few muffled sniggers at this, but in general the atmosphere in the room had become suddenly exceedingly sober.

  “I’m not entirely sure I take your meaning,” said Kashifah cautiously. “But if you’re suggesting that the Sultan may prefer the company of his own sex in all possible contexts…”

  “She was not suggesting anything,” said Nusrat, glancing around her hurriedly. She turned to Kelly. “It seems that he does not interest himself in affairs of the heart. Affairs of state occupy the whole of his attention.”

  “Zanzibar is his bride, you see,” said Kashifah. “And she is a jealous mistress.”

  Tanya quickly became bored of Kelly’s makeover party. Nusrat’s little brother, Suleiman, who was the only male in attendance, beckoned to her and they went to the kitchen, where the cook gave them cakes and goat’s milk. They munched contentedly whilst the cook and her staff prepared refreshments for the party downstairs.

  “Do want to see something?” asked Suleiman after a while, regarding her with his solemn brown eyes.

  “What?” she asked around a mouthful of cake.

  “Not telling,” he said. “You’ve got to wait to see. It’s a secret.”

  “No,” she said, reaching for her bowl of milk. “I’m fine.”

  “It’s really special,” Suleiman insisted. “You’ll like it. Nobody else knows about it.”

  Tanya considered this. What an eight-year-old boy considered a special secret might be dull, trivial or both. But then the afternoon held little else in prospect.

  “Okay,” she shrugged.

  Suleiman, delighted by her acceptance, skipped with excitement as he led them through the servants’ quarters and through a back door that opened into a narrow alley. The houses here were of the poorer kind occupied by the city’s lower classes. The upper stories leaned so close together the
y almost touched, leaving a sinuous river of sky visible past balconies and washing lines stretched like bunting from side to side. The alley was quite cool, even at midday, and the shadows were deep where the sun could not reach. The few people they passed seemed to know Suleiman, greeting him respectfully with bowed heads and many a “Salaam,” for everyone knew he was second cousin to the Sultan.

  “Where are we going?” asked Tanya when they had been walking for ten minutes or so. “I was thinking you were going to show me some stuff in your bedroom or something.”

  “You will see,” said Suleiman archly. “It is just a little way now.”

  They came to what seemed to be an abandoned building, with shuttered windows that had been crudely boarded across and nailed to the wall. Between this building and the neighbouring property there was a narrow space, blocked with a few cracked and rotten planks that Suleiman pulled aside easily. There was no one about, although voices could be heard from a balcony further along the street and a mule brayed distantly beyond. The space between the houses was choked with rubbish and spindly saplings that were doing their best to grow towards the narrow strip of sky high above.

  “I’m not going down there,” Tanya told Suleiman bluntly as he squeezed past the planks.

  “Come on,” he said. “It soon gets wider. Not far now.”

  Tanya frowned. After a moment’s hesitation in which she considered her clothes, she followed after him, pausing to push the planks back into place.

  “Wait for me,” she hissed after his diminishing form.

  It was quite clear they were trespassing, and there was a kind of delicious thrill to this as Tanya squeezed herself through the narrow cleft between the two buildings. Were I a year older, she thought, I wouldn’t be able to do this. Even so, she was a good deal larger than her guide, and by the time she emerged into a courtyard garden her red dress was scuffed and marked from the brickwork she had squeezed past. She looked around curiously, brushing twigs from her hair. All was overgrown and abandoned, although a little fountain chuckled in a pool choked with weeds. Fish might have swum there once, but now there were broken pots and a thicket of dry, dead undergrowth. A sizeable tree had grown through the paving slabs, and some of its branches were entwined with balconies on the upper floors. It was clear that this place had been abandoned for many years. What might have been a rat darted amongst undergrowth at the far end of the courtyard.

  “Is this it?” she asked with a shudder, looking ruefully at where there was a tear in the seam of her dress. “Have you brought me all this way to look at a lousy ruined old house?”

  “No,” said Suleiman with an impish grin. “We’re not there yet.”

  On one side of the courtyard there was a broken-down wall. Some of it had fallen into a culvert that directed what might have been a buried river out and under the city wall. At this time of year only a thin trickle meandered amongst tumbled stone.

  “Come on,” said Suleiman, clambering down over the chunks of brickwork.

  “You’ve got to be joking,” she said, folding her arms. “Girls round here don’t climb.”

  “But you’re not from round here, are you?” he said gleefully, pausing to look up at her with eyes that dared her to refuse.

  Tanya considered her options. It was a fair way back to Kashifah’s house and she wasn’t entirely sure she could remember the various turnings that Suleiman had made along the way. She found herself wishing she had stayed in the house.

  “Step down here first,” Suleiman said, helpfully indicating a flat part a little way down the slope.

  Tanya sighed, stroking away the hair that had fallen in front of her eyes.

  “I think you’ll find I can climb as well as you can,” she told him.

  The climb proved to be no particular challenge, and from the bottom of the culvert they could see along a dark tunnel that led beneath the city wall. A rectangular patch of light at the far end showed where the tunnel ended.

  “Mind your footing here,” said Suleiman. “It’s dark in the middle.”

  It was dark, and Tanya found her feet splashing through water as she followed her guide towards the tunnel’s end. Her slippers would be ruined, she lamented, but at the same time a strange excitement was building within her. This was dangerous, she told herself. Kelly would be furious if she knew what she was doing. But these considerations only brought a delicious tingle to her fingertips as she found her way through the gloom of the narrow tunnel in pursuit of Suleiman’s inky silhouette. There was no stench of sewage, however, and the culvert was almost high enough for her to stand up in without stooping. At the far end stood Suleiman, looking out past a sweep of rock to where the sea was beating up against the western walls of the city. The scent of salt was in the air and a little spray was blown to them on the breeze. An iron grille blocked access into the tunnel from outside, but it was ancient and heavily corroded. A rust-eaten length had been bent away so that a child could wriggle through. Tanya regarded it fatalistically and sighed.

  “This had better be good,” she told Suleiman as she went down on hands and knees to follow him. “It really had.”

  Outside, it was good to feel the warm sun on their faces after the cool gloom of the tunnel. They stood at the end of a spur of land where an arm of the palace jutted out into the sea. High walls towered above them, their feet in the surging breakers, heads scouring the puffy white clouds that floated northwards, blown by the brisk breeze that whipped Tanya’s long hair around her face.

  “It’s less windy further round,” said Suleiman, setting off along the narrow space between the sea and the stone flank of the city. “It’s low tide now, so there’s plenty of space.”

  Wondering how long it was until high tide, Tanya followed Suleiman as he jumped and clambered around the rocks at the base of the wall. It was far too late to regret the wear and tear on her clothing by now, so she began to enjoy herself. The sun warmed her shoulders as she stooped to look in rock pools or picked up wave-worn spars of driftwood caught in weed-shrouded clefts. She realised she had been rather bored by the cloistered existence of the palace youth, so to run with Suleiman across a sudden stretch of sand with the wind in her face was marvellously liberating.

  “Stop,” he said suddenly, tugging at her arm. “See yonder – the high buildings on the spur, with the tower behind?”

  “Yes, I see them,” said Tanya shading her eyes, and in truth the great grey mass of masonry was hard to miss, thrusting up from the sea two hundred feet or more. There was a double row of tiny windows high up under a low pitched roof.

  “That’s the Sultan’s prison,” said Suleiman. “The public jail is on the other side of the city. That’s where the Sultan keeps his own prisoners, those who have conspired against him; high-born people, sometimes.” He looked up at her with a ghoulish glint in his eye. “They torture them there, you know. Sometimes, when the wind is in the right direction, I hear them scream.”

  Tanya shuddered. “And what’s that tall tower? It must be the tallest in the city.”

  “That’s the Tower of the Moons, the Sultan’s observatory. Fajaruddin has his telescopes up there. He studies the stars and casts his horoscopes, so they say. It was old Zoroaster’s tower once, before the Sultan gave it to Fajaruddin. Shame.” He wrinkled his nose. “I liked Zoroaster. He used to do tricks to amuse me when I was little. Fajaruddin’s far too grand for that.”

  “Zoroaster’s nice,” agreed Tanya, idly stirring a dead crab with the tip of her toe.

  “Come on, we’re nearly there,” encouraged Suleiman, taking her hand and urging her onwards.

  They scrambled up a mass of barnacled rock, feet slithering for purchase on seaweed, and emerged on a flatter part that might perhaps be completely submerged at high tide. There were a number of large, shallow rock pools here, and Suleiman threaded his way confidently amongst them with Tanya in pursuit. When she caught up with him he was standing on a rocky prominence above one of the larger pools, looking down into the
water.

  “There,” he said triumphantly. “Look!”

  Wind-chased ruffles hurried hither and thither across the surface of the pool, and it was a moment before a glassy calm resumed and she could see down past floating weed and anemones and darting tiger-striped little fishes. Then she saw it, deep in the pool – a female figure. Her heart jumped within her and her mind groped for an instant before recognition dawned. It was a statue, of some green metal, like an ancient Greek one she had seen in books. The figure was very elegant, naked, with one hand placed to cover her belly and the other pointing out in front of her so that her index finger came within inches of the surface of the pool. Her hair was elaborately coiled and dressed and there were white stones set in her eyes so that she appeared to stare up at them imperiously. The lower part of her body was weed-grown and thickly encrusted with barnacles.

  “She’s my green lady,” said Suleiman proudly. “No one else knows she’s here.”

  “Wow,” said Tanya, crouching to look more closely. “She must be very old.”

  “I think she’s made from bronze,” said Suleiman. “Bronze goes like that when it gets wet and old. I never saw anything like her. Our faith forbids us to make images like that, you see, although they have them elsewhere in the world, so they say. Is she not beautiful? I often come to visit her.”

  “She is beautiful,” agreed Tanya.

  Little fishes were swimming around the statue’s extended index finger. Tanya turned her head, looking over her shoulder to see where the lady was pointing. It was as though she was directing Tanya’s attention towards the Tower of the Moons. There were a number of slit-like windows in the sides of the tower, but its top was flat and presumably there was an open platform there, from which the stars might be observed. Slightly lower than half way down on the side that overlooked the Sultan’s jail there was a tall window with a balcony. Here a servant was shaking out what might have been a table cloth, a tiny doll-like figure, the white cloth sparking bright in the sun.