I cannot enter. Diogo says it is ten days since, but I cannot count them. Days, nights join, only my father’s last hours stay with me, Fernando forcing me away as my father dies.
Horrors seep from that room!
I lean against the passage wall. I force up courage. I push the door. Beyond, all calm and clear, each object as my father kept it.
It is Fernando’s doing! Like a void about me, I feel the absence of that kind man who was my father’s friend and became mine, and is now victim of the pestilence himself and dead.
I cross to the window. I stand as my father often stood, hands resting on the sill, gazing at sea and sky. As if the stones he touched might make me wise. Each night he sat here, writing. Each night he prepared reports for any ship to reach the fort. Each night, he hoped. Each night he refused despair. I see him lean over pages in dim light, writing, writing, pausing only to read his words, and then he writes again . . .
His papers and journal lie before me on a low stone ledge below the window, neatly piled and weighted with a blood-red shell of some spiked creature of the sea. I take up each page and in the light of the rising moon, see the neat hand for his writing of reports, the angry hand for his journal, his foretelling of the price we would all pay for the greed and savagery of the man whom Fate had made first captain of this fort and brought this horror on us.
That cursed, cursed name: Dom Alvaro.
My father’s furious words: ‘Ruthless. Greedy. His every act will cut friends from us. His actions will have one outcome – the deaths of men and women and their children.’
Memories rise like mist from the stones of the room, as if my father breathes them to me. Days, weeks, months, years, roll over me as the tides that carried us here.
I write it now: that journey here with my father. That icy February we left Portugal! My mother dead of fever, my father striving to hide his dread of life without her. We must cross oceans to new lands, he said. It would be our hope and our salvation.
How my five-year-old self shared his longing for escape from the places of my mother’s suffering. For ever would they wrap our sorrow round us!
We boarded a ship in Lisbon, bound for Africa and India. It was in a fleet of eleven commanded by men of great repute for the brave, dangerous voyages into unknown seas they had made, to the glory of our nation.
My father travelled as ship’s doctor. Our goal to reach the southernmost cape of Africa, named by our sailors ‘The Cape of Good Hope’. Then to turn north along the far, eastern shores of that mysterious continent. Even the greatest commanders and explorers still knew little of it.
How eager we were then, my father and I, to begin our new life there!
And how our eagerness dimmed. Week followed week, followed week. Ocean currents drove us back. Cruel storms overtook us. We shipped much water and kept ourselves afloat by pumping day and night, every soul on board, even I, weak and small as I was. Then a hurricane struck and three ships were flung off course. We never saw them again.
Another two went down before our eyes, all hands drowned. Our ships pitched and plunged with such terrible force that our drinking jars were broken and many months’ supplies of water spilled. Savage waves tossed us like corks, two hapless seamen swept overboard and swallowed in an instant.
Food dwindled. Fever raged. Almost dead with fatigue, my father tended the sick and dying night and day.
Not till the fifth month of our voyage, not till the first weeks of June, did we round that southern cape of Africa and turn north. Only eight men on our vessel still capable of working, even the navigator sore sick. No one else to plot our course in treacherous seas of hidden reefs and perilous currents.
July was well advanced before we chanced upon a welcoming harbour where people brought goat and fowl, eggs and fruit and honey to trade, and showed us where to find fresh water. There we took the sick ashore to recover under shelters on the beach. My father and I stayed with them, while the remnants of the fleet took on provisions and made repairs. Then the great ships hoisted sail and took the winds without us. We watched them dwindling to the north, thence to cross the ocean to India and its riches.
Years later my father admitted to me the terrible truth of that voyage. Full 2500 healthy men left Portugal with us. In the voyage and after, more than 1100 poor souls died.
For many more months my father ministered to those who lived, and buried those who died, until some few ships of the fleet returned from India and took up survivors.
So it was that my father and I were free at last to leave the fleet and travel with an Arab trading vessel bound for Mwitu, a town far to the north. There, the captain told us, Portuguese sailors who had escaped their ships had chosen to make a life among the townspeople, protected from the searching eye and punishment of passing Portuguese fleets. It was a town of many travellers: we might hear of some peaceful place for my father to find work.
So we arrived in Mwitu, and went to pay our respects to the king. I see us, again, haunted by all we had endured. And then I see the ruler’s kingly splendour – the silken cushions and brass ornaments of his sumptuous chair, his crimson robe, the gold thread of his turban, the beaten silver of the ceremonial sword resting on a fold of satin at his side. He sat beneath a yellow silk umbrella held against the sun, and at his side, his son. No taller than me, no older: Jabari, Prince of Mwitu. I hear the king tell us it is the prince’s Birth Day, and we are welcome to his celebrations. I hear my father tell him it is my Birth Day too, and so joyously does the prince whirl and caper! His green silk turban, the silver dagger in his sash, gleam and sparkle in the sun and he chatters at me merrily, though I understand no word.
All the while musicians played on ivory horns, great elephant tusks as tall as a man which had a hole for blowing in the middle.
I had never seen such splendid things! I could not drink the sights in fast enough. Such feasting for the prince’s Birth Day! Meats and fruits and sweet confections of dates and honey and spices, and a wild, marvellous display of skill on horseback – that joyous day stretched on and on and on into the night, so far from the sickness and death I had seen on ship and land, that at last it began to sweep the darkness from me.
Now, I remember, too, that when the king asked my father about Portugal and its ruler, my father’s anger showed – his shame at the barbarous deeds of our countrymen in distant places where they had savaged some city and few fled the killing. All in the name of Portugal and Christianity, yet only staining their names with blood, my father said.
Then, in my childishness, I did not know what he meant, and did not want to hear.
We roamed the port, Jabari and I, among merchants and seamen loading the riches that brought my countrymen to these shores. We drank sweet water in the wells, played among houses flanked by palm groves stroked by soft winds from the sea. We lived by each other’s side, though we could not speak each other’s language; gestures, smiles and frowns spoke for us till words came too.
He was my brother, until my father received word of a doctor needed in a Portuguese settlement to the south. A fort was being built there.
I howled with grief! Patiently my father insisted we must find our own way in this world and drew pictures of the journey we must make. The winds that ruled the sea blew now from the north-east, and we might freely travel southwards with them. But even a week’s delay could bring the monsoon from the south-west with squalls and rough seas to trap us in port for months.
I prayed secretly for the monsoon to keep us in Jabari’s house for ever. Before the week was out, we took a merchant ship bound for Zanzibar. The captain would leave us at the new settlement on the way.
‘When I have my own ship,’ Jabari whispered as we embarked, ‘I will find you, brother, and together we will see the world!’
We swore eternal friendship. Brothers till death might part us.
Jabari. Prince. Friend, brother who lived
in my heart until the memory grew dim behind all else in this place of poison.
Unable to rouse myself, filled with the memories, the voices of my father’s room imprisoned me. The weakness spread anew, a creeping poison through my limbs, and a strangeness, half-dreaming, half-waking. I called again to Her.
I saw Her cross the water to this island’s shore. I saw the world She inhabits filled with life, with talk and laughter – a promise She holds out to me in the sunlight of Her gaze.
Then Her image fractured, and I knew that I dreamed, only dreamed. This Spirit bringing Hope lives only in the turbulence of my fever. I tried to rise from the floor, but cold despair of trembling limbs bound me fast. Despair can kill; how often my father warned! First goes the will to live, then life itself. Even as he died, he murmured to us all, ‘Hope! Hope may yet grant you life, my friends.’
I could not summon hope.
How long did I stay there? I do not know. Footsteps roused me. Diogo by the door. I searched his face, battle-scored, gaunt with starving.
I saw Fernando’s death before it came, and Theresa’s, and others besides. But I have not seen Diogo’s. I have not seen my own.
I yearned to tell him. The horror and strangeness of these dreams! Of death, of Her, this Spirit of Hope who haunts me and fires me as the rising sun.
I saw Diogo looking long and hard at me, for in my fever I had spoken all aloud. He raised me from the floor with hands strong on my arms.
I write his words: even now their meaning is a leaping spark of hope in me. ‘I see no fever in you, my young friend! On my life, I do not! Your body’s pain is hunger. Your soul’s pain is grief. Ten nights you have wandered since your father died. Endlessly you roam and roam, as if you search. Endlessly you write, as if you search! This would make any soul a little mad. It is grief eats you! Take heart! Believe. Hope!’
My heart beats hard. Is there truly life still? For me? For us? Does Hope hear my plea?
I write this, I write this. So that our story is heard. So that our story is heard!
fourth day
secrets
Ten
The day dawned with a heavy, moist warmth. Ally woke early, into the shrill of birds in the bougainvillea and human voices somewhere near.
She stepped onto the veranda. She was edgy. As if she needed to be ready.
Ready for what? Nothing was happening. It felt like days and days since she’d seen Leli, not just one. They hadn’t stopped at Shanza on the way back from the ruins yesterday, though she’d asked. Carole just brushed her off with, ‘Tomorrow’ll be soon enough, Ally’.
Now she could hear Ben and Jack up on the roof, hatching a plot for a beach camp, wheedling a tent from their aunt.
‘OK, OK!’ she caught Carole’s laughing reply. ‘Condition one: you pitch it between Shanza and here. Two: no midnight boating expeditions! And listen, don’t make any wild plans for the day after tomorrow. I managed to swap a day with another doctor, so – an unexpected day free! We could do another trip somewhere.’
Ally fetched a glass of juice. She couldn’t face anything else, her stomach in a knot with this peculiar urgency to see Leli.
He’s at school. He might not be around after. Even if she persuaded the others to go to Shanza, maybe he wouldn’t be there. Maybe I won’t get to see him ever again.
Carole’s car drove off; Ben heaved an old green canvas tent out of the house. He struggled round, spreading it on the ground, untangling a spaghetti of guy ropes.
Ally downed her drink and went to help, holding an end of this or unwinding that, sorting out which pole fitted where. But he was plainly happier wrestling with it on his own, so she left him to it and went in to where Jack was shaking out sleeping bags.
‘We can take what food’s here, Carole said she’ll bring in more later,’ he said. ‘Driftwood on the beach for fires.’
Grateful for purposeful activity, she offered, ‘I’ll do matches and torches and food.’
But then it was all piled ready, topped by a pan to cook in. And the heat beyond the veranda was a furnace, and no one could face carrying it anywhere. Ben flopped in a chair, and Jack insisted, ‘Not moving till it’s cooler.’
Ally wandered along the veranda, past open doors to the bedrooms used by Carole and her brothers, to the tiny one at the end she’d instantly claimed. She flopped on the narrow bed, shaded by half-closed window shutters. The little room, its view through the open veranda door to the curve of the headland and the glint of open sea, already felt like a place she’d known all her life.
Her eyes fell on the sill of the glassless opening that formed the window. Weighted with a twist of driftwood was the postcard she’d meant to write to Zoe. Days ago! She got up, picked it up, turned it over, put it down again: home, faithful promises to Zoe – Everything, everything, everything, you’ve got to tell me . . .
Guiltily distant, in another universe . . .
‘Hodi!’ Huru’s call broke her thoughts. He strolled into sight up the cliff path from the beach.
Eagerly she ran out, jumping down from the veranda. No Leli appeared. Just Huru, gleefully announcing, ‘School shut, school shut! Digging machines are there! The new hotel road is going just by. Not safe to pass to the school! Teacher is angry, angry that no one told her!’ He inspected the camp supplies with interest. ‘Good things! Very good! Everything to the beach!’
So then they were lugging it all down to the shore, and there was Leli after all, holding the dugout canoe in the surf, his smiling eyes welcoming her. Within minutes they were all ferrying supplies to the end of the long bay, below Ras Chui, Huru declaring, ‘Ras Chui there, Shanza near – good for receiving visitors!’ and skimming away again in the canoe with Leli to announce the event to everyone.
But there wasn’t a single moment, not half a second’s pause, for her to speak to Leli. The conversation wasn’t for Jack or Ben to hear, not about what had happened – or not happened – on Kisiri, or the other things that jumped about in her head. Everything was for her and Leli, no one else.
She watched the canoe clear the long, rocky nose of Ras Chui. It turned shorewards and out of sight, steering for the village. Beyond, Kisiri was sculpted in hard, angled shadows by the lowering sun, though the island rode a flat, dull sea in this windless, almost leaden afternoon, and she couldn’t even see the birds that usually swirled like a smoke plume above it. For a moment it seemed almost to be a creature asleep, biding its time.
She turned back. Jack had been collecting firewood, and stopped. He was observing her watch the disappearing canoe. There was a question in his face, and she didn’t want to answer. She set off, away from him, along the beach, finding chunks of driftwood and the husks of pods from the flotsam and jetsam along the high water line.
Only slowly, straightening up with a hank of dry seaweed in her hand, did she sense someone at the rim of the forest.
A stab of alarm: it was near the path, where she’d had that feeling, that haunted feeling – for the first time she named it honestly for herself.
The figure moved out of shadow. One hand lifted in greeting. With relief she recognized him – the slow, stiff walk, the stick. The old storyteller, Mzee Kitwana.
He was unsteady in the deep drifts of sand.
‘Hujambo, Leli’s English friend.’ He halted, breathing heavily with effort. ‘You work hard!’
‘Sijambo, Mzee Kitwana.’
‘Eh, you learn our language!’
‘Leli’s trying to teach me, but I’m bad at languages,’ she volunteered. ‘Did I get it right?’
‘It is well.’ He took a scrap of cloth from a pouch he wore round his neck and wiped his forehead, surveying the scene: Ben, banging in tent pegs, Jack poking something at the water’s edge. Then the old man turned a direct, unwavering stare on her. ‘Leli is telling me you wish to hear Fumo and Zawati’s story?’
‘Yes!’ she said, pleased. ‘If—’
‘Aha!’ A gusty wheeze cut her off, and for a minute he said nothing more as if his mind had drifted off. He resumed suddenly, ‘It was my father who told the tale before me. I learned it from my father. He learned it from his father. One passes it to the next, you see. I have heard it is not this way in your country.’ He gave her another slow look. ‘It is not this way in our country, in the cities that are always running to catch themselves.’
He considered her thoughtfully, folding the cloth and tucking it in the pouch. She felt herself flushing, tried not to look away, it would be impolite.
He said, ‘There is the story of Fumo and Zawati’s journey here. But it is part of a bigger tale that is not often told. I will tell you this . . . I see that you are old enough to know, and to see. It is a fine story, of Bwana Fumo, whose name means Spear, and his friend Mwana Zawati, whose name means Gift . . . It asks to be told!’ He narrowed his eyes. That same disconcerting stare. ‘You will hear. Wise leaders. Long ago. It must be told! It must be heard. You will come, Leli’s friend, you will hear?’ He looked hard into her face.
She held his gaze. ‘I’ll come to hear, Mzee Kitwana.’
‘You will not forget.’
‘I won’t forget.’
‘Leli’s gift, like our great Zawati,’ he murmured, and he reached forward, making a circling gesture round her head. ‘Daughter of Sunlight.’ He let his hand rest lightly on her hair. ‘Son of Night. Night and Day, Day and Night . . .’
She stared at him in surprise. Why say that? He couldn’t know her name, her full name, she never used it! Did Carole say something to him – oddly, Carole had asked only yesterday – why Ally, not Elly? And Ally had answered, Mum told me I just said it wrong when I was little, and it stuck . . .
Kitwana sighed deeply. ‘You will be a loyal friend to Leli. He will be a loyal friend to you.’
And she saw then he was only talking about the colour of her hair and the gift of friendship, and it was a coincidence, no more, nothing about her name, only Zawati’s name, and already he was turning away, shutting her out.
Song Beneath the Tides Page 8