‘It is of a forest, yes. It is a poem?’ When she didn’t answer, ‘Ally, what must I see?’ He studied her face again, then the paper.
‘I don’t know how to explain, Leli, just . . . it’s . . . oh, you know that first day, I said it was strange? The forest, the forest was strange—’
‘This happened? You write of this?’
‘No, no, it’s someone else writing . . . But it’s like . . .’ Remembering, she wanted to say. ‘Like . . .’ She trailed off.
A flash of insight lit his face. ‘It is this person you hear sometimes? Who is it?’
She held his eyes, wanted to say everything, and more. Said nothing.
From the shore came the sudden roar of many voices.
Boats were being rushed into the surging tide, fishermen chest high in the water, leaping aboard, paddling out swiftly, sails run up, whipping and snapping in the wind. Bellowed instructions from boat to boat rebounded off the beach, swelled by advice from the shorebound audience round Ally. Knee-deep in foaming surf, the inward tide thrust at her legs, knocking her off-balance. Koffi caught her before she fell. The tide-force heightened her alarm: she watched, hardly heard the ceaseless yells from Leli, Huru, Ben, others gathered with her.
The sails caught wind; the phalanx of boats veered to the south of Kisiri. In the distance beyond, something caught sunlight and sparkled.
‘It’s another motorboat,’ Ben shouted. ‘Coming this way. It’s the baddies!’
‘These bad people will have to stay away from Kisiri,’ Huru declared. ‘We will stop them!’
Leli’s eyes didn’t shift from the approaching powerboat. ‘Not one stranger to put their foot on Kisiri! Mzee Shaibu is saying this.’
‘There will be a fight, maybe,’ Koffi spoke uneasily.
‘There will not be fighting.’ Mzee Shaibu had come up behind them; his tone held a warning and an instruction. ‘Even young ones with impatient hearts must be wise today.’ He watched the flotilla of Shanza boats draw away; for a minute he assessed the restless knots of people spread along the shallows. Then he strode towards them.
Ally could see the motorboat clearly now. It gleamed white, sharp-nosed, riding high on the water. Suddenly it slackened speed, arced a little towards Shanza. Then it stopped and sat there, rocking on the swell.
Steadily the twenty Shanza ngalawa headed towards it. They travelled in a line abreast. Behind them, canoes drew into a second line. Together, they left no direct unobstructed route to Kisiri.
But they were under paddle and sail, fighting a strong in-flowing tide. Effortlessly the motorboat could shoot wide round them under power of its engine, leaving the Shanza boats far behind. Even Ally knew that.
But for the moment it just sat there. The Shanza ngalawa and hori neared it. The hubbub of speculation on the shore fell tensely quiet. Then the motorboat shot into life and swerved away into open sea, passing out of sight some distance behind the island and emerging beyond, vanishing past the bulge of the mangroves to the north.
For a short while the mood in the village calmed. Some of the Shanza boats returned. Others lowered sail and sculled to and fro, or moved up into the shelter of the mangrove creeks in an apparently aimless course that failed to mask the fact that they were on patrol.
On shore Lumbwi and Koffi and Mosi and Pili settled to debating possibilities, including fights, keeping a wary eye on the listening ears of the Elders grouped at the highest point at the rim of the shore.
Everyone lapsed into continuous Swahili.
And Ally was more than ever reluctant to ask for a translation. She avoided looking at Leli too directly. Every pore of her skin traced each movement, each shift in his stance, each glance at her. But it was as if Carole had thrown a fence between them and she couldn’t now quite find the gate. She saw how his face snapped taut when two more powerboats appeared from the north and then veered, accelerating, towards the island. Instantly Shanza boats holding the vigil north and south converged. Others put out from shore, making a beeline for Kisiri.
Again the powerboats changed course, swept wide into open sea behind Kisiri and sped away south past the high spine of Ras Chui.
It was going to go on like this for hours, all day, maybe all night, Ally saw, and she saw also that it was all that Leli was seeing now, and she understood why, and was frightened for him, for Shanza. Yet there was another fear too, at his absence from her, at Carole’s words, at Makena’s paper folded in her pocket that she couldn’t explain to Leli, at the overwhelming sense that what was between them was brittle, too easily ripped, and she might not know it was happening; and there was another sensation – that there was something she should know, should do.
It all lapped cold over her, like the fast rising tide around her.
*
Endlessly we scoured the darkness for Badru, yet told ourselves that many days must pass before he could return in safety. We did not voice our dread that he is lost to us – speaking it would give life to terror.
Then at dawn Goma saw his craft near the lee of the cliff. He climbed from the cave, unseen by our enemy. How we rejoiced as we hauled him to the fort!
But such news he brings – such strange, troubling news! We dare not slacken guard!
Something unseen gathers itself around us. It is in the air, in every part of me.
A rumour Badru heard, everywhere the whisper in markets and eating houses of the town, even among children playing in the streets. There is some hidden thing in the fort. A secret vast enough to hold our Omani enemies from attacking us, for the moment!
Badru found one man he knows well from former visits to the town. This man moves daily through the Omani camp carrying fresh water from the wells. He hears how they argue amongst themselves. Some say the fever has finished us already, an attack would take the fort in hours before the monsoon turns and winds bring Portuguese ships to rescue us.
Others say Portugal has already abandoned the fort. Just wait for our deaths. Do not bombard the fort, launch no attacks. Or you risk destroying the fortune hidden here.
Fortune? Here? We stared at Badru in confusion, every one of us. And then we laughed! Wildly and madly we laughed, till Badru became angry with us.
‘Think! Your enemies believe! Riches beyond dreams are in this fort, they say! They will not let you live to fight them for it. They calculate land and sea assaults by night. They build ladders to scale these walls! Be certain, my friends! Is it really madness? Think! Think! Our lives may turn on this!’
Fortune? Where? Every inch have we scoured for food, weapons, firewood, blankets, clothes, even tools.
‘A fantasy fed by our dead captain’s pirate ways!’ Diogo scorned. ‘It is again that old talk of secrets on his dying lips, no more than this!’
‘But they believe,’ Jabari said. ‘Think, my friends – this buys us a grain of time. They argue on the means to wrest your “riches” from you. They do nothing but keep their ships beyond range of your cannon. Eighty mighty cannon, you have: they fear that!’
My thought was that only twelve of us remain alive to fire them.
Twenty
Leli’s thoughts were racing. We must go to Kisiri. Why does Mzee Shaibu not listen to me? If we are there, they cannot be there. Even powerful men cannot steal Kisiri from us when all our feet are standing on it!
In the afternoon haze the little mound of land was becoming a pale ghost of itself. It seemed to him as if some part of the island’s life was draining from it. The line of boats paraded in front; others tacked to and fro from the mangroves across the bay. Their pattern imprinted itself on his mind: like the pattern of that strange procession two nights ago – the canoes of the first people of Shanza, of Mwana Zawati and Bwana Fumo.
His thoughts leapt again. Why do these strangers want Kisiri? Another hotel, another beach for another umbrella and another tourist to sit under? He watched a
spiral of birds rise like a snake above the island’s forest; then they fell against the sky and fled north in a shrill arrowhead of darkness like a shriek of fury.
He looked back at the tiny fleet of defending boats. His father was there with Huru’s father, and Pili’s and Mosi’s and Eshe’s. His mother was on the sands with the other mothers, their voices loud in discussion, swatting sandflies from their legs, lifting kangas across their mouths as gusts of wind flung little spirals of stinging sand around them.
Huru jabbed his shoulder, indicating the water’s edge below them. Saka’s friends Jela and Thimba were pointing at different parts of Kisiri while Saka held his boat in the shallows and Mzee Shaibu and Mzee Kitwana answered with sharp gestures of their own.
They are going to Kisiri! Leli set off at a run towards them.
‘Mzee Shaibu, we must all be there on Kisiri!’
‘Hear me, Leli! Thimba and Jela last night see a big black motorboat with no lights by Kisiri. These people do everything in secret. It is not honest. Saka, Jela, Thimba go to look again. You go to help, and Huru—’
‘And the English friends!’ Leli interrupted. ‘Ally and Ben . . .’
‘Why the English ones now?’ Mzee asked quietly.
Leli glanced up the shore at Ally standing with the others in the shade of the houses. He felt her tautness. She’d taken the writing on the paper from her pocket several times. But not read it again, just put it back. Something was wrong. Why did she not say? Her silence made him afraid to be away from her.
I must keep her near. She must be on Kisiri, with me. She must not be away. And a clearer thought followed. I must not lose her.
‘Ally and Ben have seen the marks and know what we look for,’ he told Mzee Shaibu truthfully, and untruthfully, and defied Mzee Shaibu to say no, signalling Ally to come down to the water at once.
Mzee looked hard at him. Then a glance at Mzee Kitwana. A brief nod passed between them. Mzee Shaibu moved away.
Leli felt the storyteller’s gaze. The old man’s eyes were narrowed, as if measuring him. He thought of yesterday, when Mzee Kitwana spoke of the spirit of Fumo, and he’d been annoyed at the teasing.
Steadily, he returned Mzee Kitwana’s stare, and the hooded eyes gazed back. Leli was left to turn away and go down towards Saka and the boat with Ally and Ben and Huru, wondering in frustration what the unreadable expression of the old man’s face was saying to him this time.
*
We obeyed Badru, and studied Dom Alvaro’s papers. It falls to Jabari, Diogo, Paulo and me: only we are still alive who know the Portuguese language.
We looked at every page for signs of a secret, any hints of hidden fortunes. And we found one strange thing, a record of a frigate, Nossa Senhora de Madre de Deos, and how it sank. Alvaro writes that she had brought supplies to us and was standing off our shore, before unloading. At nightfall, two Arab ships appeared and fired on her. Without returning a single shot, she took hits to stern and bow, and foundered.
It is almost lost in my memory beyond all else, but Diogo and Paulo recall it well. It was in the first weeks of the siege; hunger and fever had not yet carved away our force.
‘Each day the Arabs paraded ships along the channel between us and the mainland. Every hour they fired on us, and we on them,’ Diogo told Jabari. ‘But they feared our guns. Their ships’ artillery was no match for ours.’
I began to remember. Weeks went by: by night the Arabs landed on the lower island with ladders to climb our walls. We sent raiding parties to burn the ladders. So it went, day to day, week to week: small skirmishes, the Arabs not yet able to stop us reaching the sea to smuggle supplies from passing vessels.
Then the Arabs sank the Madre de Deos. Some crew from the stricken ship swam to our shore. By dawn other Arab ships had arrived from the north, doubling their force against us. From that day, the battle changed.
Diogo pointed to a passage in Dom Alvaro’s writing.
I read. I passed it to Jabari.
Dom Alvaro writes that during that first night of the sinking, he took a rescue party to the stricken Madre de Deos to retrieve the cargo.
There follows Alvaro’s questioning of survivors from the Madre de Deos. One told of a sultan of a distant town complaining that his ships were seized by Portuguese vessels and his crews enslaved. The captain of the Madre de Deos took the sultan’s messengers hostage, stripped naked, flogged, bound hand and foot and set in the burning sun in a drifting boat to die. As news of this reached the sultan’s town, the crew of the Madre de Deos stormed in and razed it to rubble.
Then comes the lists of booty ripped from that sultan’s town and loaded on the Madre de Deos. Gold, silver, ivory, ambergris, cotton, silk, ornaments of gold and silver, even rings and bracelets hacked from the limbs of women. Rice, millet, honey, butter, cattle, goats, and what they couldn’t take, they burned including all orchards and ten thousand coconut palms. Each quantity, item, deed, noted by Alvaro.
We passed the list between us.
This bloody cargo has fed the rumours. It is here, within our walls. The wealth of that sultan’s town bludgeoned from it and brought in secret here.
Where?
No man survives from that ship. The last died of fever with Alvaro. We can ask no one.
We searched again. Storerooms, dungeons, cells, passageways, Alvaro’s quarters, the chapel, even the vacant animal pens, barracks, floors, roofs, walls, kitchens, guard rooms, gatehouses.
We found nothing.
The light thickens towards the south, and it is hot, beyond endurance. There will be storms. Saaduma warns that threat of these may hasten an attack on us before the monsoon turns.
No man or woman rested, even Neema left her sickbed and took a musket and stayed at Watch. But the children no longer cry, for the barrel of flour and other food that Badru secured in the town has stilled the ache in their bellies, for the moment, and that is hope for us.
I dreamed an eagle alighted on my hand. He turned, and looked at me, and I was not afraid. I woke suddenly and the shadow and the weight of him pressed on my flesh, and stayed with me for the next hours.
I could not sleep again. I rose and went to the battlements, and only the first rays of the rising sun on the parapet took the vast bird’s presence from me.
Twenty-one
Ally’s hands, deep in her pockets, touched Makena’s paper. She didn’t bring it out: when she’d looked at it before, she’d caught a frown from Leli. She longed to explain, Makena said someone wrote it a long time ago, it’s old, but I know it’s new, too – it’s now . . . I’m scared – the word ‘haunted’ insinuated itself into her head again.
But she didn’t say it. She couldn’t bring herself to step on to the No Man’s Land now stretching between them. Carole had conjured it up, this horrible awkwardness snarling her up. Everything about Leli filled with exaggerated significance, even the heat and strength of his hand as he steadied her leaving the boat just now, stepping onto Kisiri’s shore. Did the others see it? Could they see how she felt about him?
Yesterday we shared things. Understood, knew things about each other, no need to explain . . .
But – it wormed its way in – is that true? Really? Or did I make it up?
It didn’t feel true now. Leli was somewhere else. She was alone in the tangle: Leli, Kisiri, Makena’s paper. Leli prowled beside her through the forest, rigid with concentration. Not thinking of her. Why would he, with everything else that’s happening? Carole had said it: enough on their minds without you in the way, Ally.
Trees roofed them in, trapped the stench of rotting flesh in their clothes, hair, skin. It seemed to crawl up Ally’s nostrils, the forest a cage, trapping, she circling helpless, searching, searching, questions, questions, no closer . . .
He says we must be here, we’re being told something, we must hear . . . He’s right, I know, I know, but
why me, why him? The body of some poor, dead person’s here – I don’t want to see—
Ignorance stalked her, confusion, like a creature sniffing her heels in the sultry gloom, and Mzee Kitwana’s voice came suddenly to her – ‘blind, and not blind, do we see only with the eye?’
What am I blind to?
Far to their right, Saka, Jela, Thimba moved quietly, steadily through the trees, searching for signs of intruders, lifting creepers with the blades of their pangas, looking for the source of the terrible smell. They’d passed where the drag marks in the sand had been, though several tides had pounded away all trace. To her left, Ben whispering to Huru, ‘I feel really sick. It’s something really big, that stinking thing, an’ it’s following!’
Huru pointing into the tree canopy high above. ‘Over the leaves, the koho is flying – to eat dead things. They show us where is this dead one.’
‘Vultures!’ Ben wailed.
A sudden silence. Ally halted, listening: Why no birdsong? No trill, or warble or whistle, or single rustle. The island held its breath. The smell hung like a weight in the air.
A stark, shrill shout from the fishermen. Then a fast sing-song ululating chant. Huru-Leli-Huru-Leli.
They all plunged towards the sound . . .
The men were in a clearing torn by the fall of a tree. They were inspecting shapes camouflaged by the wreckage of branches. Closer, Ally saw two crates, wooden, both chest high, three sides solid, one side a lattice lined with thick wire mesh hanging open like a door.
Still several paces away, the reek of them hit her. Unmistakable. Wood soaked with urine and sweat and something glistening that fizzed with flies. She recoiled, and in a flare of recognition knew they were cages, thought of Collins, and understood the smell. Terror.
Saka, Jela and Thimba were arguing.
‘What’re they saying?’ she appealed, stifling the urge to retch.
‘The dead thing is from this box,’ Huru informed her, ‘but Jela says there are two boxes, so maybe—’
Song Beneath the Tides Page 17