Monsoon

by Wilbur Smith

  At the bottom he paused to take his bearings. A pall of silence hung over the zenana and the gardens. None of the female slaves tended the flower-beds and fountains, no person moved, and there was no birdsong. In the hush the very breeze had dropped, as though all nature held its breath. The palm fronds drooped silently and not a leaf stirred on the high tops of the casuarina trees.

  He drew his sword, knowing that he would kill without hesitation any of the eunuchs who tried to stop him, and went towards the north end of the enclosure, towards the mosque and the cemetery.

  He ran down the narrow lane between the outer wall and behind the mosque. Ahead was the thorn hedge that surrounded the cemetery. He ducked through the well-remembered gap and looked across the burial ground. Each grave mound had a headboard set above it and some of the newer graves were still decorated with faded ribbons and flags.

  The hut was on the far side, and the thorn hedge had almost overgrown and smothered it in the years since he had last seen it. The door was open and Dorian held his breath as he listened for any sound of suffering coming from the interior. The quiet was suffocating and ominous, seemingly charged with evil.

  Then he heard voices, the high feminine chatter of a castrated man. He hid the sword under a fold of his robe and slipped forward silently. There was a gust of giggles and he saw one of the eunuchs sitting on the edge of a newly dug grave, his feet swinging into the hole, the rolls of his belly fat hanging into his lap. Dorian stepped up behind him. He could see the knuckles of his spine through the fat, as the man leaned forward to speak to somebody in the pit beneath him. Dorian drove the needle point of the long curved blade of his scimitar through the joint between two vertebrae, separating the spinal cord with a surgeon’s stroke. The eunuch died without a murmur, collapsed and slid into the hole, his weight pulling him off the blade. He fell like a sack of lard on the man beneath him.

  Trapped under his weight, the other man squealed with outrage and struggled to free himself. ‘What are you doing, Sharif? Have you gone mad? Get off me.’ He pushed off the corpse and rose to his feet. The top of his head was just below ground level, and he was still peering down at the dead man lying at his feet. ‘Get up, Sharif. What game are you playing?’

  The top of his shaven head looked like an ostrich egg. Dorian raised the sword, then slashed down, splitting his skull neatly in half down to the level of his teeth. With a twist of his wrist he levered the blade from the crisp bone of the skull and turned to the door of the hut.

  He ran to it, and as he reached it Kush appeared before him, blocking the door with his huge bulk. They stared at each other for only a fleeting moment, but Kush recognized him. He had been among the crowd on the beach when Dorian had stepped ashore on his arrival with the flotilla from Muscat.

  With astonishing speed and agility for such a gross creature, he leaped back into the room, and snatched up a spade that stood against the wall. With another leap he put the heavy wooden frame on which Yasmini was stretched out between himself and Dorian, and raised the spade high over the girl.

  ‘Stay back!’ he screamed. ‘With a single blow I can burst the bags inside her and release the poison.’

  Yasmini lay naked under his threat, her long slim legs trussed tightly together at ankle and knee, and her arms stretched out over her head, pulling her tender golden breasts out of shape. She looked up at Dorian, but even her huge eyes were not large or deep enough to contain all her terror.

  Dorian launched himself across the room, just as Kush started to bring down the spade with all his strength behind it. Dorian came in under the blow before it struck Yasmini in her tender midriff, spreading his body over hers, shielding her. The spade struck his back and he felt his ribs crack. Pain flared through his chest.

  He rolled over the frame, forcing himself to ignore the pain, careful not to place his weight on her body and break the fragile sacks. Kush lifted the spade again and this time aimed at Dorian’s head. His fat face was a mask of fury, and his great belly bulged forward over his loincloth. Dorian’s whole left side was numb from the blow, and he was down on one knee, unable to rise in time to meet the next.

  He still had the sword in his right hand. He reached out with the blade and drew the edge across Kush’s belly from side to side at the level of his navel, opening him up the way a fishwife splits the stomach of a grouper. Kush dropped the spade, which clattered on the stone floor. He reeled back against the far wall and, with both hands, tried to hold the lips of the long wound closed. He stared down at it with an air of astonishment, and watched his own entrails bulge out between his fingers in slippery ropes. The hot, fetid stink of his ruptured gut filled the little room.

  Dorian dragged himself to his feet. His left arm dangled at his side, numb and useless, and he leaned over Yasmini.

  ‘I prayed that you would come,’ she whispered. ‘I did not think it was possible, and now it’s too late. Kush has put terrible things inside me.’

  ‘I know what he has done,’ Dorian told her. ‘Don’t talk. Lie still.’

  Kush gave a high, keening cry, but Dorian barely glanced at him as he slumped forward on his face then kicked and struggled weakly in the mess of his own guts.

  Dorian slipped the blade of his scimitar between Yasmini’s ankles and cut the leather thongs. Then he did the same for those at her knees. ‘Don’t try to sit up. Any contraction might burst the bags.’

  With a touch of the razor edge he cut the bonds that held her wrists, then dropped the sword and massaged his paralysed left arm. With a surge of relief he felt it begin to tingle and the strength flowing down it to his fingertips. He slipped his arm under Yasmini’s shoulders, lifted her carefully off the wooden frame and set her on her feet.

  ‘Squat,’ he ordered, ‘slowly. Make no sudden movement.’ He helped her down. ‘Now spread your knees apart and push gently as though you were at stool.’ He knelt down beside her and placed his arm around her shoulders. ‘Gently to begin with, then harder.’

  She took a deep breath and bore down, her face contorted and darkened with blood. There was a sudden spluttering sound and one of the packets was driven out of her body with such force that it hit the floor between her feet and burst open, spilling the red powder across the flagstones. The acrid chemical smell of chilli mingled with the stink of Kush’s faeces, and stung their nostrils. ‘Good! Well done, Yassie.’ He held her tighter. ‘Can you do the same with the other sack?’

  ‘I will try.’ She took another breath and strained again. But after a minute she gave a sharp sigh and shook her head. ‘No, it will not move. I can’t do it.’

  ‘Ben Abram is waiting at the end of the Angel’s Road,’ he said. ‘I am taking you to him. He will know what to do.’

  Gently he lifted her to her feet. ‘You must not try to walk. The least movement might burst the bag. Slowly now, put one arm around my neck. Hold on.’

  He slipped his good arm under her knees and lifted her easily. As he strode to the door, Kush was moaning and blubbering, ‘Help me. Don’t leave me. I am dying.’ Dorian did not look back.

  He skirted the open grave in the bottom of which lay the two dead eunuchs. He went quickly, dreading meeting another for he had left his scimitar on the floor of the hut, and he did not yet have full use of his injured arm. Much more, he dreaded jolting or squeezing Yasmini. He had to try to balance speed against caution, and he whispered soft reassurance to her as he went, trying to calm and comfort her. ‘It will be all right, my little one. Ben Abram will be able to rid you of it. It will soon be over.’

  He crossed the lawns with a smooth stride that cushioned his precious burden, and he climbed the staircase to the terrace of the saint’s tomb one step at a time, treading lightly. He lowered her through the opening into the tunnel, and when he scrambled down beside her he peered anxiously into her face for any sign that the movement had triggered something unspeakable within her tender womanhood. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. She nodded, and tried to smile. ‘We are nearly there
now. Ben Abram is waiting.’ He lifted her again, and had to bend almost double to clear the low roof as he started down the tunnel.

  He saw the light ahead and almost involuntarily took a longer step. A fragment of loose coral rolled under his foot, and he stumbled and almost fell, bumping her into the wall.

  ‘Ah!’ Yasmini gasped as she was jolted, and Dorian felt his heart constrict.

  ‘What is it, my darling?’

  ‘It stings inside me,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Allah, it burns!’

  He ran the last few paces and carried her out into the sunlit saucer among the ruins.

  ‘Ben Abram!’ Dorian shouted. ‘In God’s Name, where are you?’

  ‘Here, my son.’ Ben Abram stood up from where he had been waiting in the shade and hurried to them, lugging his bag.

  ‘It has begun, old father. Make haste.’

  They laid her on the ground, and Dorian gasped out an almost incoherent explanation of how Yasmini had rid herself of one packet. ‘But the other is still inside her, and it has begun to leak.’

  ‘Hold her knees up like this,’ Ben Abram said, and then, to Yasmini, ‘I am going to hurt you. These are the instruments I use in childbirth.’ They glittered in his hands.

  She closed her eyes. ‘I submit myself to the Will of God,’ she murmured, and dug her fingernails into Dorian’s forearm as Ben Abram went to work.

  The evidence of her pain rippled across her lovely face, and tightened and twisted her lips. Once she made a small mewing sound, and Dorian whispered helplessly, ‘I love you, flower of my heart.’

  ‘I love you, Dowie,’ she gasped, ‘but there is a burning fire inside me.’

  ‘I am going to cut you now,’ Ben Abram said.

  A moment later Yasmini cried out and her whole body stiffened. Dorian looked down and saw blood on Ben Abram’s hands as he took up a silver instrument, shaped like a double spoon. A minute later he sat back on his heels, with the blood-smeared, sodden, half-disintegrated packet captured between the spoons. ‘I have it!’ he said. ‘But it has leaked the spice into her. We must get her down to the water quickly.’

  Dorian snatched her up, his injured arm and the pain of his cracked ribs forgotten. He ran with Yasmini’s naked body clutched to his chest. Ben Abram hobbled along behind them, losing distance as Dorian tore away between the palm trees. He ran down the beach and into the ocean, plunging Yasmini into the cool green water. Ben Abram came in after them with a brass enema syringe in his hand. Dorian held Yasmini’s lower body beneath the surface while Ben Abram repeatedly filled the tube of the syringe with sea-water and forced it into her. It was almost half an hour before he was satisfied and allowed Dorian to carry her out of the water and up the beach.

  She was trembling with shock and pain. Dorian wrapped her in his woollen shawl and they laid her in a shaded place under the trees. Ben Abram took a large bottle of salve from his bag, and anointed her injuries. After a while her shivering abated, and she told them, ‘The pain is passing now. It still burns, but not as badly.’

  ‘I was able to remove most of the poison in the spoons. I think I managed to flush out the rest before it did much damage. I had to cut you to reach the sack, but it is a clean cut and I will stitch it up now. The salve will heal the wound swiftly.’ He smiled at her encouragingly as he prepared a needle and catgut. ‘You have been lucky, and you have Tahi and al-Salil to thank for that.’

  ‘What will we do now, Dowie?’ She held out one hand to Dorian. He took it and squeezed it. ‘I can never go back into the zenana.’ She looked like the little monkey-faced girl again, pale and huddled in the shawl, bedraggled wet hair hanging limply over her shoulders, eyes underlined with purple shadows of pain.

  ‘You are never going back into the zenana again, I give you my oath on it.’ Dorian leaned across and kissed her bruised, swollen lips. Then he stood up and his expression turned grim. ‘I must leave you here with Ben Abram while he finishes his work,’ he said. ‘I also have work to do, but I will return very soon, before Ben Abram is done. Be brave, my love.’

  He strode back through the trees, jumped down into the saucer and went along the tunnel under the walls of the zenana. He climbed out cautiously onto the terrace of the saint’s tomb, and took a minute to listen and watch. All was still deathly quiet, so he dropped down the stairs and crossed the lawns. He paused behind the thorn hedge of the graveyard and satisfied himself that the corpses of the eunuchs had not been discovered or the alarm raised. Then he went forward cautiously.

  At the door of the hut he paused to allow his eyes to adjust to the gloom after the strong sunlight. Kush was curled up on the floor in the position of an unborn child in the womb. His bloody hands were still clutching his open stomach, and his eyes were closed. Dorian thought he was dead, but as he stepped up to the eunuch he opened his eyes. His expression changed. ‘Please help old Kush,’ he muttered. ‘You were always a good boy, al-Amhara. You would not let me die.’

  Dorian stooped and picked up his sword from the floor. Kush became more animated. ‘No, don’t kill me. In the name of Allah, I beg you for mercy.’

  Dorian slid the blade into the scabbard on his belt, and Kush whimpered with relief, ‘I said you were a good boy. Help me onto the litter.’ He tried to crawl towards the bier that he would have used to take Yasmini to her grave, but the movement opened the great wound in his belly. Fresh blood trickled out, and he subsided again, clutching himself. ‘Help me, al-Amhara. Call others to help carry me to a surgeon.’

  Dorian’s expression was merciless as he stooped and seized Kush’s ankles, then leaned back and dragged him across the floor towards the door. ‘No! Don’t do that! You will open the wound further,’ Kush squealed, but Dorian ignored his protests. There was a long slippery mark of blood and gastric juices on the flags behind Kush. Dorian hauled him feet first through the doorway into the sunlight. Kush moaned and grabbed the jamb of the door, hanging on to it with the strength of a drowning man. Dorian dropped his legs and in one movement almost too swift for the eye to follow he drew and swung his scimitar, lopping off the three fingers of Kush’s right hand that were clawed around the doorpost. Kush howled and held his mutilated hand to his chest. He stared down at it in horrified astonishment. ‘You have maimed me,’ he stuttered.

  Dorian sheathed the sword, seized the eunuch’s ankles again, and dragged him through the dirt of the cemetery towards the open grave. They had covered half the short distance before Kush realized what he intended. Now his screams were high and girlish, and he rolled and struggled so that his dangling entrails flapped and twisted in the sand.

  ‘The women listening to your caterwauling will think your foul packets have burst in Yasmini’s belly,’ Dorian grunted. ‘Sing on, you great bag of pig fat. There is no one to help you now, this side of the devil in hell.’

  With one last heave he tipped Kush into the grave, on top of the other two bodies, and looked down at him, standing with both hands on his hips while he recovered his breath, and waited for the pain in his broken ribs to subside a little. Kush read his own death in those green eyes.

  ‘Mercy!’ He tried to rise, but the agony in his guts was too great and he drew up his knees to his chest, and huddled against the side wall of new-cut earth.

  Dorian went back and fetched the spade. When he returned and took up the first spadeful of earth, Kush screamed, ‘No, no! How can you do this thing to me?’

  ‘As easily as you performed your unspeakable cruelties upon the defenceless women in your charge,’ Dorian replied. Kush screamed and pleaded until the earth smothered his cries. Dorian worked on doggedly, until the grave was filled in over the three bodies. Then he stamped it down and shaped the mound neatly.

  From the hut, he fetched the headboard with Yasmini’s name carved on it, and planted it on the mound. He tied a burial ribbon around it with the prayer for the dead embroidered on it. Then he replaced the spade in the hut, gathered up the pieces of severed leather thongs and took down Kush’s robes from wh
ere the eunuch had hung them on a peg in the wall. He rolled them into a bundle and tied it with a length of leather thong.

  Before he left the room, he glanced around to make certain that all was in order, and smiled grimly. ‘For the next hundred years the poets will sing of the disappearance of the three eunuchs after they had murdered and buried the lovely Princess Yasmini. Perhaps the devil himself came to escort them down to hell. Nobody will ever know. But what a fine legend it will make for posterity.’

  Then he left the zenana for the last time along the Angel’s Road.

  When Dorian returned to where he had left them, Ben Abram had finished stitching Yasmini’s injuries, and was binding them up with a wad of cotton.

  ‘It is well done, al-Salil,’ he assured Dorian. ‘Seven days from now I will remove the stitches and within a month she will be completely healed, as though it never happened.’

  Dorian wrapped Yasmini in Kush’s soft robes of finest wool, then helped her gently onto the stallion’s back, holding her across his lap, so that there was no pressure on her wounds. They started back at a sedate pace towards the fort. She was so completely swathed in the voluminous robes that no inquisitive person they passed on the road would be able to tell if she were man or woman.

  ‘No one outside the zenana has ever seen your face before. They will never recognize you as the Princess Yasmini, for she lies under her headboard in the graveyard of the zenana.’

  ‘Am I really free, Dowie?’ she whispered with difficulty, for despite his care the stitches were pulling painfully.

  ‘No, you silly little baggage. You are now the slave-boy who belongs to the great Sheikh al-Salil. You will never be free.’

  ‘Never?’ she asked. ‘Promise me that I will be your slave for ever. That you will never let me go.’

  ‘I swear it to you.’

  ‘Then I am well content.’ She laid her head on his shoulder.

  For many weeks thereafter strange rumours were whispered in the souks of Lamu about the disappearance of Kush, the eunuch. He had been well known in the islands, feared and hated even outside the walls of the zenana. Some said that while walking on the road by night he had been taken by the forest djinns. In another version of the same story the abductor was Shaitan himself. The more pragmatic believed he had stolen from his master, Caliph al-Malik, and that, fearful of discovery and retribution, the eunuch had hired a dhow to take him across the channel and had fled into the interior of Africa. To give substance to this theory, the Sheikh al-Salil issued a warrant for the arrest of Kush and offered a reward of ten thousand rupees for his capture. After a month or so when nothing further was heard of the eunuch, the idlers in the souks lost interest in the case.