by Martin Dukes
“I would hate to see you subjected to torture,” said the Grand Vizier. “But I shall, of course, receive detailed reports,” he added nastily. He turned to leave but then swivelled to face them once more, raising a finger.
“Ah,” he said. “I almost forgot the purpose of my visit. I was going to ask you what you know of these traders – Garek and his party. It seems curious that the man went to such extraordinary lengths to save Alex’s life last night. Why would he do such a thing, do you suppose? I believe he is no friend of yours; on the contrary, I have detected a certain tension in the relationship. And yet this Garek placed himself in the gravest of danger. Why? A most intriguing question, don’t you think?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself,” asked Kelly contemptuously, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Oh, I would,” said the Grand Vizier as the door swung open. “If I could. But Garek has mysteriously disappeared, he and all his friends. Like your little friend Tanya he eludes us. We will find him in the end,” he said. “We will find all of them, and then the truth will out. Good day.”
With an oily smile and a nod of the head he passed through the door, taking his bodyguards with him. The door crashed shut once more and the key grated in the lock.
“Are you alright, mate?” asked Henry anxiously, stooping at Alex’s side.
“Felt better,” croaked Alex.
“What have they done to you?” asked Kelly, cradling his head in her hands and wiping the blood away from his nose with her sleeve. “My poor sweetheart.”
“Come on, uncurl yourself, if you can. We need to have a look at you,” said Henry, probing under Alex’s shirt.
“Broken ribs, do you think?” asked Kelly addressing Henry, her face a pale mask of concern.
“Dunno. Badly bruised, anyway,” said Henry nonchalantly.
“Do you think you can sit up?” suggested Kelly gently.
“Am I still dumped?” asked Alex weakly.
“No,” said Kelly, kissing his forehead cautiously with her bruised and split lips. “Not any more. I guess we’ve got to hang together.”
“Not the form of words I’d have chosen,” muttered Henry.
As the distant walls and towers of Zanzibar crept closer across the heaving green ocean, it seemed to Will that an age had passed since last he had seen them. Wind thrummed through the shroud he held onto as the little ship, called a ‘shu’ai’, nosed its way eastward through what the skipper of the vessel had termed an “unhealthy” swell. It was hard to see how any moving arrangement of salt water could be described as such, but Will supposed the man knew his job. The anxious expression on his face as he peered southward told its own story. There were no other vessels to be seen on the face of the ocean. The last one had been sighted an hour previously, racing for port under a full press of canvas. The clouds that massed in the far south had a curious greenish tinge to them, an ominous tinge that spoke of trouble ahead. The skipper knew it.
“There’s foul weather coming,” he had told them earlier that day in Canopus. “I’d be a damn fool to go out in that.”
Will and Zoroaster had exchanged glances. Zoroaster had placed his purse on the table in front of the skipper, a much more slender purse than it had been only a few weeks ago. The captain inspected the contents, sighed and scratched his head.
“Very well,” he said. “At least I’ll drown with a bit of gold about me.”
But now he was speaking in a low voice to the man at the wheel, looking up at the set of the sails, which alternately billowed and flapped with each whim of a decidedly hesitant wind.
A quantity of wind-blown spray caught Will in the face as he turned to face Zoroaster, who was clinging to the shroud behind him.
“How long now, do you reckon?” he asked, wiping his face with his sleeve.
“A couple of hours, maybe,” shrugged Zoroaster, his hair and beard flying wild in the breeze. “There’s definitely something wrong with the sea,” said Will. “Look at it. It’s as though it doesn’t know which direction it should be moving in.”
“Indeed,” said Zoroaster grimly. “And half of Canopus is flooded with the tides. I never saw such a thing, warehouses knee deep on the wharf. The merchants will be ruined – not that I shed tears for merchants. And I fear things may soon be worse,” he said, nodding at the gathering storm head in the south. “That weather has an exceedingly ugly look. Our skipper will do well to make harbour before it is upon us.”
By the time the shu’ai crept into Zanzibar’s harbour there was barely a breath of wind. The sea surged sluggishly against the harbour wall and the great looming mass of black cloud had spread itself over the sky from horizon to horizon. It was almost as dark as night, and the fire of the lighthouse flickered orange over the turgid waters. It was ominously quiet; even the seabirds’ voices were stilled and what little light there was had a peculiarly brittle harshness. The air was stifling, oppressive, pregnant with the pent-up fury of the coming storm.
“Floods here too,” observed Will as the vessel approached the harbour wall, and indeed the tide’s wet fingers crept into the lower streets and the warehouses at the southern end of the harbour. The mass of shipping in the harbour rose and fell uneasily with the surge, masts swaying crazily against the dark face of the sky. Lightning flickered distantly on the belly of the cloud and the first dull crack of thunder rumbled across the bay.
“That’s rain,” said Will, putting out his hand in front of him as their little ship came up against the harbour wall and her crew leapt out to make her fast. “It’ll be chucking it down in a minute.”
“I don’t doubt it,” muttered Zoroaster, reaching for his bags. “We had better hurry.”
If nature stood still, held its breath and awaited the coming storm, the same could not be said for the citizens of Zanzibar, whose busy activity along the wharves resembled a broken anthill. Hundreds of the dockyard workers were employed in carrying away goods from warehouses endangered by the slopping waters of a tide higher than anyone could recall. A great many carts stood in the streets and axle-deep along the waterfront as anxious merchants and government officials barked orders to their men. It was the perfect moment to arrive unobserved. Will and Zoroaster paddled up one of the lesser streets that led away from the harbour, bags carried on their shoulders to avoid getting them wet.
“I never saw anything like this in my life,” said Zoroaster, glancing around as a wagon loaded with sacks came trundling past.
“Hey!” came a voice from atop the wagon. “Aren’t you Zoroaster? And is that not Will?”
“Yes,” said Zoroaster, cautiously peering up at one of two men driving the wagon. “Do I know you?”
“Perhaps,” said the man, who was clearly a man of some status, to judge from his clothing. “Will certainly should. I am Rakesh bin Afzal. I have been assisting my uncle in relocating his stores.”
“Rakesh,” said Will, recognition dawning. “How are you?”
“Well,” said Rakesh, turning in his seat and looking up and down the street, “I had heard you might be returning from Zanjd. But I fear you are not aware of recent developments here, or you would not be strolling so casually in the street.”
“What do you mean?” asked Zoroaster frowning.
“Jump in the back and conceal yourselves,” said Rakesh. “I shall explain in due course.” He jerked a thumb at the rear of the wagon. “Come on, I shall take you somewhere safe.”
“Will!” cried Tanya, an hour or so later, running into his arms and bursting into tears. Her own storm of unshed tears had been building all day and now she let go, sobbing damply into Will’s shoulder. “I’m so glad to see you. Everything’s so… so… terrible.”
This reunion took place in the basement of Jemail and Rakesh’s uncle’s house, a gloomy space with a low ceiling, stacked densely with sacks and barrels. Outside it had begun to rain and a fierce wind had sprung up that rattled at the shutters on the windows and gusted along narrow, rain-lashed str
eets. A few flickering lamps cast a baleful yellow light amongst the rows of shelves and barrels.
“You had not heard, of course” said Jemail, coming forward to shake hands with Will and Zoroaster. “News sometimes travels slowly in Zanjd. But these are evil times in Zanzibar.”
“And they’ve got the others in prison,” said Tanya, stifling another sob, looking up into Will’s plump, anxious face and feeling a great surge of affection that made her hug him still tighter.
“I know, I know,” said Will. “Rakesh was saying on the way here.”
Rakesh had told them what everyone in Zanzibar and most in Zanjd knew. The Sultan had taken leave of his senses, murdered his own mother and instigated a reign of terror. The Grand Vizier held all the reins of power and was destroying all who opposed him. Zoroaster and Will might have heard for themselves had they lingered a while in Canopus, rather than making their way straight down to the docks and stepping on the first ship available.
“So what are we going to do?” asked Will, gazing blankly from face to face.
“They may yet be released,” said Rakesh, but with no real conviction.
“They will be executed,” said Jemail grimly. “And the devil Hussain’s torturers will have their way with them first, no doubt. I’m sorry, but to say otherwise is to fly in the face of logic,” he continued, spreading his hands apologetically. “You may be sure that my grief is your grief,” he added, shaking his head.
Will and Tanya regarded him solemnly.
“We’ve got to get them out,” said Will, his mouth set in a firm line. “Haven’t we?”
“Easily said,” observed Rakesh, sitting himself down on an upturned barrel.
“How do you propose that we should do this?” asked Jemail with a frown. “Do we have a small army to storm the Sultan’s prison? Have you seen where our friends are held, in a wing of the palace that projects out over the cliffs? What of the windows, you may ask. What indeed? There is a sheer drop of a hundred feet beneath the windows of those cells. How could anyone scale such a precipice? No one has ever done such a thing.” He turned away, punching at a stack of sacks so that a cloud of dust billowed slowly in the lamplight. Silence fell as each dwelt on their own thoughts.
“We don’t have to climb up,” said Tanya at last. “We can climb down.”
“No, no, no, child,” said Rakesh shaking his head sadly. “In order to climb down we would first need to have scaled the roof of the prison wing.”
“There is a way,” said Tanya stubbornly. “The green lady showed me.”
The others stared at her as she recounted the story of her adventure with young Mahmoud, the rock pool they had found and the ancient bronze statue whose pointing finger had directed her gaze to the Tower of the Moons.
“She may be right,” said Zoroaster tugging at his beard. “If you let yourself down from the balcony on the third level you would indeed find yourself on the roof of that wing.”
“It was your tower, wasn’t it?” asked Tanya. “But it’s not any more. Can you still get in?”
“Oh yes,” said Zoroaster. “I kept a key. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that that fraud Fajaruddin would be lodged in it forever.”
“We’d need lots of rope, then,” said Tanya, eyes gleaming.
“We’re in the right place,” said Rakesh, running his hand over a shelf full of coiled ropes. “Half of my uncle’s chandlery yard is stowed down here.”
“Hang on a minute,” said Will raising a finger. “Aren’t we forgetting something here? Even if we can climb down the walls as far as the windows of their cell, we still can’t get them out. There’s going to be bars in the window, aren’t there? Surely we need to find out what cell they’re actually in first and then get a message to them. We could do with smuggling in a hacksaw or something so they can saw through the bars.”
“First things first, then,” said Jemail. “We must try to find out which cell they’re in.”
“And then we must attempt to communicate with them,” said Rakesh.
“Can we start tonight?” asked Tanya, eyes round in the gloom. “Please?”
“Indeed,” said Rakesh, glancing around him with a fierce grin as the rain lashed at the shutters. “It is a night for desperate deeds.”
Chapter Fifteen
“It’s a wonder they didn’t break something,” said Kelly, looking at the livid purple bruises that had emerged on Alex’s back. “Your bones must be made of tough stuff.”
Alex ran his tongue past swollen lips to do another inventory of his teeth. These too remained firmly in place. Despite this, though, his whole body was one great undifferentiated ache.
“They couldn’t really have been trying,” said Henry.
“That’s not what it felt like,” said Alex, gingerly pulling his shirt back down. “It felt like they were putting in a shift alright.”
It was some hours since the Grand Vizier’s visit. Apart from this episode of brutality and menace the highlight of their day had been the removal and replacement of their toilet bucket. A new jug of water turned up too and a tray of food so unappetising that no one was hungry enough to eat yet.
“At least they’re not actually trying to starve us,” said Kelly, regarding a bowl of some kind of grey substance bleakly.
“I don’t think starvation’s going to be an issue,” said Henry. “I think the GV’s going to have us bumped off as soon as the Sultan gets over his superstitious thing. You know, that stuff about stars being lined up that Garek was on about. I’d be amazed if it goes that far. If Garek’s disappeared, I bet he’ll get that Fajaruddin chap to say it was all a load of rubbish.”
“I wish you’d shut up,” said Kelly, casting her eyes upwards in disgust. “Talk about the voice of doom.”
“Have you seen the weather out there?” asked Alex, standing at the window. “Looks like a storm’s on the way. Wow! Lightning!”
The light grew very dim in their cell. Henry sat on the edge of the bed and stared glumly at the wall opposite, which was writhing with Arabic graffiti. As his eye idly found its way across the scored and pitted surface he imagined the shapes of fantastic animals and fish. His eye paused, drawn to something anomalous, something that it took a moment for his brain to interpret.
“Alex!” he said, leaping to his feet.
“What?!” Suddenly Alex and Kelly were staring at him.
“No.” He stabbed a trembling finger at the wall. “Look, it says, ‘Alex’.”
“There’s more,” said Kelly, crossing to the wall and peering closely at it. “It’s all hidden by this other graffiti stuff, but there’s definitely more. What’s that? Hang on,” she said as she traced a line with her finger. “That’s an ‘L’.”
“’LOOK’,” said Alex excitedly. “It says ‘LOOK’. I can’t make out the next word, there’s too much on top of it. Maybe that’s ‘ND’.”
“The next word’s ‘LOOSE’,” observed Henry. “Move your hand, Kelly. Next one, ‘SLAB’. Definitely ‘SLAB’, ‘LOOSE SLAB’.”
“I bet it says ‘LOOK UNDER LOOSE SLAB’,” said Alex stepping back. “Why on earth didn’t we see it before?”
“We weren’t looking, that’s why,” said Kelly. “Who’d have written that?”
“It’s got to be Malcolm,” said Alex. “Who else could it be?”
“Which loose slab?” asked Henry, moving things on.
They checked all the flagstones in their cell to see if any were loose, but it wasn’t until they moved their bed that they found one, right against the wall, one that rocked ever so slightly when pressed. The gaps around the slab, as with all the slabs, were filled with many years’ accumulation of nameless filth, but the single spoon provided with their food proved effective in scraping this away. When the filth was removed the slab rocked some more. Using the spoon as a lever they prised it up just far enough to get fingernails under its bottom edge and heave it aside.
“This had better be good,” grunted Henry, shaking squashed
fingertips.
The storm was well under way outside by now, but the Outlanders were oblivious to this as they peered into the shadows of the shallow void that the slab had concealed. A momentary flash of lightning glinted on clear polythene, or something very much like it.
“What is it?” asked Alex.
“Get it out!” snapped Henry impatiently. “Bring it over by the window, where the light’s better.”
It was a plastic bag, one that proved to contain a number of items, including what looked like a couple of grey pebbles, a lump of putty and a stiff grey plastic hairband. One of the pebbles was about as big as a hen’s egg, but considerably heavier, while the other was somewhat smaller. “For Alex only!” was written on the hairband, picked out by a conveniently timed flash of lightning. As they drew the objects out in the dim light, a slip of folded paper fluttered unnoticed to the floor.
“If this is the best Malcolm can do,” said Henry disgustedly. “I have to say I’m disappointed. I was hoping for a hacksaw blade and a packet of cheese and onion at the very least.”
“Shut up, Henry,” said Alex, handling the pebbles cautiously. “These things are angel tech.”
“Well, he might have included the user manual,” observed Henry. “Wow! What’s that?”
In Alex’s grip the larger of the two pebbles had begun to glow and had grown a slender silver spike. He pressed it experimentally to his finger tip and then gasped in pain, throwing the pebble so that it skittered spinning across the flagstones, coming to rest against the wall. The light was suddenly extinguished.
“Hot!” he said by way of explanation, sucking his fingertip. The others looked at him thoughtfully, faces lit intermittently by lightning.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Kelly.
“There before you, kid!” said Henry, darting across to snatch up the pebble. He worked it between his fingers, holding it up to what little constant light came in from the stormy sky outside. “Here, how do you operate this thing?”