by S. W. Perry
Yet as he watches them, he cannot resolve a nagging doubt about the manner of their arrival at Lyon Quay. If they are destined for a life of commerce and discovery in the service of the Barbary Company, why were they not already aboard the Righteous when she was being prepared for sea? Why did Reynard Gault wait until the very last moment to bring them aboard?
It is almost nightfall. Rose is waiting for Timothy to return from delivering a final demand to one of the Jackdaw’s less credit-worthy customers. She would have sent Ned. He is the ideal debt-collector, with his great size, his fearsome auburn beard and his former reputation for enjoying a quarrel. But now she has seen behind the mask, she knows him to be a kindly soul. He’s far too easy a mark for a hard-luck story. He’d probably end up promising to extend the rogue’s credit. Besides, the thought of the Southwark doxies making their mooncalf eyes at him on the journey brings out a set of protective claws she never knew she had.
When Timothy puts his head around the taproom door, he looks like someone who expects an imminent beating.
‘He’s gulled you – hasn’t he?’ Rose snorts. ‘What tearful tale did he spin this time?’
Timothy holds out a handful of shillings. ‘He paid up, Mistress. All of it.’
‘Then why the look of a guilty man?’
Without a lute to strum, Timothy’s hands play an agitated minor chord against his thighs. ‘I did it out of love for him, nothing else. I didn’t want him to starve.’
‘But you have his coin, Tim. What are you jabbering about?’
Instead of giving an explanation, Timothy just looks even more wretched. ‘Promise me you and Mistress Bianca will understand. Don’t punish him. Don’t punish me. I had to do it. Because of that man Connell.’
‘No one who tells the honest truth in the Jackdaw gets punished, Tim; you know that,’ Rose says reassuringly. ‘Now calm yourself and speak out clearly. What’s amiss?’
Timothy looks around the taproom as though he expects an ambush. ‘He can’t come back, can he?’
‘Who can’t come back?’ Rose asks, struggling to curb her impatience.
‘That Captain Connell.’
‘Not unless he can fly. He’s far out on the ocean somewhere.’
Timothy’s reply brings her up with a start.
‘Only Farzad won’t come out of hiding unless he’s sure. He made me promise not to say a word until the coast was clear.’
The astonishment floods across Rose’s plump face like milk spilt on glass. ‘Farzad? You know where he is?’
Before Timothy can answer, she takes him by the arm and hurries him out of the taproom, mindful that Farzad is still wanted for questioning about the death of Solomon Mandel. But even before they reach the privacy of the parlour, Rose understands where the missing bread and pottage have gone.
Bianca has locked the shop when Rose and Timothy arrive on Dice Lane. It takes her a while to answer Rose’s urgent knocking.
‘Where is he, Timothy?’ she asks as comfortingly as she can manage, after Rose has explained why they’ve come. ‘No one will suffer any ill if you tell us.’
‘At the Rose theatre, Mistress. He said it was the best place to hide, what with it being shut up by the parish. I’ve been taking him victuals to keep him fed, else he would likely have starved.’
‘Why in the name of Jesu did he run away?’
Now thoroughly glad to be unburdened of his secret, Timothy becomes almost garrulous.
‘At first he wouldn’t tell me, Mistress. He said only that he had possession of a terrible knowledge, that he must hide himself away, that if he stayed at the Jackdaw it could harm us all. He said no one must know of it, especially not you, Mistress. He made me swear an oath.’
‘And it’s to do with Captain Connell?’
‘Aye.’
‘I know Connell looks like a cruel rogue, but what did Farzad have to fear from him?’
‘I asked, but he wouldn’t tell, Mistress,’ Timothy says. ‘He didn’t speak of Connell by name until today, when I took him some bread. When I convinced him the captain had sailed several days ago, he said I could break my oath and tell you where he was.’
‘How did you find him?’ Bianca asks.
‘He sought me out, two days after he went missing. I was at the river, buying eels. All of a sudden, there he was.’
‘And you’ve kept this to yourself ever since,’ Bianca says with a sympathetic smile. ‘I don’t know whether to admire you or curse you.’
‘Like I said, Mistress, he made me swear an oath.’
The thought of Farzad alone and scared, hiding in the empty playhouse like a half-starved feral cat, brings a sudden tear to Bianca’s eyes. ‘Does he know about Solomon Mandel?’ she asks.
‘Aye, Mistress. I told him.’
‘Does he also know Master Nick has sailed with Captain Connell?’
‘No, Mistress.’
‘And is he at the Rose now?’
‘Aye. But he’s still afraid to come home. He thinks you won’t abide his return.’
Bianca suddenly moves closer. Timothy flinches, thinking he’s going to have to atone for his sins by suffering a stinging backhand. But it does not come. To his astonishment, she draws him to her and kisses him on the forehead.
‘Go straight away to the playhouse,’ she whispers, ‘and fetch Farzad home. And tell him Rose will have the pottage pot warmed up by the time he gets there.’
A cold breeze spills off the river into the silent lanes of Bankside. The Jackdaw has closed its doors for the night. In the taproom, five figures sit together before the dying fire. Only one of them appears animated.
That is not to say there hasn’t been a deal of noisy rejoicing over Farzad’s return. But now Bianca, Rose, Ned and Timothy are sitting in appalled silence while Farzad tells them the story of Aži Dahāka – the cruellest man in the world.
‘I call him this name after a bad spirit that lived in Persia in the time of my ancestors,’ Farzad explains as the embers crackle in the hearth. ‘The old Aži Dahāka had three heads and could burn whole villages with his fiery breath. But I must tell you of the new Aži Dahāka. He has only one head. But I think the Devil dwells inside it.’
It is not easy to tell a tale of suffering and death beneath a blazing sun, when you’re in a darkened English tavern on a chilly April evening. But Farzad tries his best, even though it is a story he is fearful of raising from the place, deep in his soul, where he has tried so hard to bury it.
It is a hot Arabian day some three years past, he begins. A round score of his extended family is making the Hajj pilgrimage, a requirement of their faith. They have pooled their resources to pay for a dhow to take them across the water to Al-Qatif, where they will embark on the long trek across the desert to Mecca. It is early afternoon on the second day at sea and the deck of the dhow is too hot to walk on barefoot. Below is even worse: a fetid dark dungeon where the air is so thick it is like trying to breathe through hot pitch. None of them have been to sea before, and the women – especially his grandmother Abijah – are suffering greatly. Grandma Abijah is becoming delirious. Only the soothing hand of Farzad’s younger sister, Sabra, on her brow can calm her. Sabra – or so his father always says – can calm a hurricano.
But despite the discomfort, the rest of the party are otherwise in good spirits. The pilgrimage will be hard – they know it. But they will return in a state of grace. And if any should fall along the way, although those left behind will weep, they will be happy, because the departed soul will be guaranteed entry to heaven.
It is Farzad’s cousin, Ramin, who first catches a glimpse of a triangular lateen sail shimmering like a shark’s fin against the skyline – a corsair caravel, her canvas swollen with wind, twenty oars a side. And she is coming on like an arrow fired from a bow.
‘They mean us no ill,’ Farzad’s uncle, Hassan, says. ‘When they see that we are pilgrims, they will let us go on our way.’
But Farzad has already seen the fear in his
father’s eyes.
And he is right to be afraid. The corsairs turn out to be a band of godless brigands from Khor Fakkan. They swarm over the dhow like ants over a carcass. And they care not a fig for pious pilgrims. They see them only as booty.
The captain of this pack of dogs is a tall, princely man the corsair crew call Tafilalt. This is not his true name, as Farzad will later learn, but the name of the distant desert region from which he hails.
Tafilalt is taller than any man Farzad had yet seen. He carries himself like a prince, his chiselled face lined with wheals of raised skin, as though Allāh – the most merciful, the most compassionate – has stitched him together out of hide left too long in the sun. He does not walk like an ordinary man. He appears to glide as though transported by magic, for Farzad can see no sign of feet between the white robe that he wears and the reflected brilliance of the sun bouncing off the deck planks.
Tafilalt, Farzad quickly comes to realize, is a very bad man indeed. Pity is alien to him. He tells his captives that he has not been born of a woman, but of a stone in the desert. And in this spirit, he announces that they must forget all that has happened in their lives till now: childhood, siblings, parents, marriage, children… everything. If they do not forget, then memory will soon become a torment to them instead of a comfort. From this point on, memories – however cherished – are better cast into the sea and left to sink. They should consider themselves born anew.
They are to be landed at the port of Suakin, on the Red Sea. There they will join a slaver caravan for the long walk across the desert to the western edge of the world – and the fabled slave markets of Marrakech, Tripoli and Algiers. Of those who survive the march, the fittest men will be sold for galley slaves, the less hardy castrated and sent to work as house slaves. As for the women, the young will go for concubines, the older for nursemaids. To prepare them for this enticing destiny, they must each develop a hard outer skin of endurance.
Tafilalt does not expect them to accomplish this by themselves. They will be educated by a man who has taught Tafilalt himself all he knows about piracy.
It is now that Farzad learns that Tafilalt is not the worst man on the ship. Not by a long way.
To his utter bewilderment – because he has never yet met a Christian – the man who is to instruct them all in this new hardiness is not of Tafilalt’s race. Not even of his religion. He is an infidel. A man who has come from a distant land to make his living netting human souls from the sea, the way the fishermen at Bandar Siraf haul up the gleaming silver hamour. He is a walking white cadaver with a salt-scoured face and wild eyes. Aži Dahāka in human form. The cruellest man on earth. The corsairs call him Conn-ell.
First, this Conn-ell has the pilgrims – young and old alike – clapped in ankle-chains. Then he forces them to squat for hours in the prow of the ship beneath the blazing sun, without water. Those who cannot bear it he chastises, with whispering slashes of a cane. Slashes that begin with the tip pointing accusingly at heaven, and that end with it smacking hard against the deck on the down-stroke.
Grandmother Abijah is the first to lose her mind. Even Sabra’s soothing words cannot calm her. So Conn-ell orders the pins removed from her irons and has her thrown into the warm waters off Kish Island, to take her rest as best she might find it.
At this, his sister begins a great and terrible wailing, even though the air is so hot it burns the mouth like melted sugar. Even Tafilalt comes over from his wooden throne on the stern to see what the commotion is about. The wailing only ceases when Sabra too joins Grandma Abijah at her rest.
It takes fourteen days to reach the Bab-el-Mandeb, the stretch of water that marks the entrance to the Red Sea. It is known in Farzad’s own language as the Gate of Tears. It is aptly named. By the time they reach it, his cousin Ramin, three aunts and his uncle Hassan have also been cast into the sea because they failed to grow this calloused skin of endurance that Aži Dahāka, the cruellest man in all this world, demands of them.
During that grim fortnight three other vessels are run down and taken: two traders from Manora in Sindh, across the Arabian Sea, and a Christian ship carrying Portuguese merchants. All who survive capture – and more than a few prefer to die, resisting – are inducted into Aži Dahāka’s madrasa, the school of endurance.
For Tafilalt, this is proving a prosperous cruise. Consequently there are few provisions left aboard to feed and water his own crew, let alone forty or so captives. But he has thought ahead. At the Gate of Tears, two other corsair caravels are waiting. And thus it is that Farzad, his father, two uncles and a nephew are transferred with five Portuguese Christians to another vessel.
But the Bab-el-Mandeb can be capricious. The next day a sudden and violent squall separates the little armada. Separated from the others, Farzad’s ship is swamped by the heavy seas and abandoned by the survivors among her crew. The only living soul left aboard is Farzad.
With her stern barely above water, she drifts on the current for two more days. To keep out of the sun, Farzad crawls through a hatch into a tiny, steeply tilting space that the water has not reached. And there he stays, his feet against a deck brace, emerging only when the sun slips below the horizon.
The drowned – including his father – come to visit him frequently. They bump against him in friendly greeting as the currents inside the wreck bring them to the surface like fruit bobbing in a cask. He is alone, but unafraid. Being a pilgrim, when the vessel sinks he is certain that he will see again his father, sister Sabra, cousin Ramin, grandma Abijah and uncle Hassan.
It is then that he prays to Allāh, the most merciful, the most compassionate, that his mother too might fail to graduate from Aži Dahāka’s madrasa of endurance. Because then they will all be together in heaven.
When, through salt-scorched eyes, he sees a vessel bearing down on him in the glorious sunset of the second day adrift, he begins to scream, fearing the cruellest man in all the world has returned for him. But the ship is a Christian ship, an English merchant venturer exploring the Arabian Sea, challenging the Portuguese who claim these waters for their own. And she is safe from corsairs because she carries cannon. Safe from Aži Dahāka…
Rose is sobbing into Ned’s vast chest. Ned himself has that old familiar, fiery scowl, which warns that his temper is having difficulty constraining itself. Timothy has his arms protectively around Buffle, as though he fears the dog is in imminent danger of kidnap. Only Bianca is motionless, though in the firelight the glistening of her eyes is clear to everyone.
‘So I did not come to heaven,’ Farzad says wistfully as he stares at the embers in the hearth. ‘I come to Southwark instead. And I don’t know if you can get to heaven from Southwark.’
Ned’s voice is like the low rumble of a landslide. ‘But you can go to hell from here, and that’s where Connell will be going, if ever he should show his face here again.’
‘Why did you not come to us, Farzad?’ Bianca asks. ‘We would have called the constable.’
‘There is no constable who can tame Aži Dahāka, Mistress. When I was insulted in St Saviour’s market by some apprentice boys, they said Conn-ell was here – in London; that he would know what to do with a Blackamoor like me. Then I saw him here. I feared that if he recognized me, he would kill me – and perhaps all of you. I could not risk such a thing.’
‘But you waited until after Ned and Rose’s marriage before you fled,’ Bianca says, her voice almost breaking. Rose, her head still buried in Ned’s chest, begins to make a noise like a distressed goose, her body heaving in dismay.
‘Only when I saw he had sailed away did I dare to come out of hiding.’
‘If he saw you, he didn’t remember you,’ Bianca says. ‘Which means there was no cause whatever for you to go prancing off and toppling all our hearts like skittles.’ Her voice is harsher than she intends, but it is the harshness that follows relief.
After what she’s heard, Cathal Connell seems the obvious suspect in the Jew’s murder, even if he was at
the wedding feast all night. Perhaps Aži Dahāka has the power to be in two places at once, or to become invisible. She pulls herself up short, recalling the nonsense some people on Bankside have claimed about her. Then she remembers Nicholas’s warning, that the coroner’s jury still wants Farzad questioned. ‘Now you are returned to us, my young gallant, you are to stay here at the Jackdaw. Do not venture outside. Do you promise me?’
‘But I must go outside, Mistress,’ Farzad says.
‘You have no need, not for a while. I forbid it.’
For a moment she thinks he’s about to weep. His dark eyes are vast in the light from the embers, a look of desperation in them. ‘But I must go out. I must go to Master Nicholas – to tell him that I am home.’
14
Nicholas is drowning. Nicholas is clinging to a sharp rock while the waves pound his body to pieces. He is being eaten by a great fish. He is in the hands of the cruellest man in all this world.
Bianca has lived with the first three images in her head since the Righteous sailed, five long days ago. The fourth – conjured by Farzad – is new to her. And having already looked into Cathal Connell’s eyes, it is the image now that she fears above all the others.
Unable to sleep, she hears the watch calling midnight, and the answering bell from St Saviour’s steeple. Unwilling to abandon Farzad to his troubled dreams, she has rejected her bed above the shop on Dice Lane for a mattress in the Jackdaw’s attic, though it has required stern words to keep Ned and Rose in her old chamber on the first floor. So she lies now where Nicholas used to lie when he was here, and wishes he was beside her and not at the mercy of the new Aži Dahāka.
She wonders if Reynard Gault knows what manner of man he employs to command the Barbary Company’s argosies. Or if Robert Cecil – if he knew – would be content to have his emissary in the bloodstained hands of such as devil. But being a woman of the Veneto, she knows only too well how merchant venturers can hide away their Christian consciences when profitable trade pouts its painted mouth alluringly at them.