Pirate King (26 page)

BOOK THREE
I
N THE
K
INGDOM OF
B
OU
R
EGREG
November 27–30, 1924

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

PIRATES:
So stealthily the pirate creeps,
While all the household soundly sleeps.

M
EANTIME, THE STEADY
breeze serenely blew / And fast and falcon-like the vessel flew …

Morocco grew near. The girls grew more excited. Holmes and I grew tense with waiting. The odour of sea and ship changed to dust and donkeys, but no word was said of our change in status from film-crew to hostages.

The closest we came to a formal announcement was the look of hard triumph La Rocha shot towards Samuel when the
Harlequin
’s anchor rattled down.

That, and the cock-a-whoop yells of the two boys, both of them up in the rigging and thus temporarily clear of their father’s admonitory fist.

Anchor down, sails furled—and the whimsical pirate flag long stowed away—I wondered yet again if we were making a terrible mistake. Morocco had risen up against Christians, a dozen years earlier. Salé was the country’s most closed town, mistrusting of foreigners, with a long history of encouraging pirates.

It did not help that the view in front of us was dominated by a cemetery. Ochre city walls rose up on both banks of the blue-brown river, wrapping a town of pale buildings, domes, and minarets on the left—Salé—and of tawny colour—Rabat—on the right. Both were attractive enough on their own, pleasingly exotic, and girded by olive and fig trees. However, the ground between the Salé walls and the pounding Atlantic breakers was occupied by the dead, paved over with thousands of tombs and gravestones, pressed against each other like a gorget necklace of the dead around the town.

I seized myself by my own metaphorical collar.
Oh for heaven’s sake, Russell, don’t be ridiculous. This is Gilbert and Sullivan, not Fritz Lang
. “Weary Death” could surely have no place beneath this gorgeous sun and those white, curling waves.

Boats had already begun to approach, a veritable queue of brightly painted waterborne taxis coming to gather us away. Such efficiency was unexpected, but I refused to find it ominous. Holmes and I exchanged an eloquent glance, then I allowed myself to be shepherded with the rest of the women-folk, piled into the boats, and rowed ashore.

The girls were thrilled by the whole enterprise, and although some of the maternal chaperones seemed taken aback at their surroundings, none of them thought it odd that no European figures waited to greet us, just as once on
terra firma
, none remarked on the sensation of enclosure. I looked at the city gate, and saw a gaping mouth. They looked at the city beyond it, and saw a great adventure. The palm-trees were exciting, the donkeys charming, the men in night-shirts and turbans amusing. They even interpreted the large armed men at our sides as servants—although one had only to follow the direction of the men’s gazes to see that they were watching us, not watching out for us.

Every step, every turn, made me less pleased with our decision. But short of digging in my heels and forcing open confrontation here and now, it was too late. We were inside the city; soon, we were inside our prison.

I had thought my companions giddy as we were closely escorted through the narrow labyrinth of the town, zigging and zagging past weavers of mats and sellers of leather slippers, sidling around lengths of embroidery thread strung between a tailor and his child, admiring the heaps of red onions and trays of flat bread and buckets of glistening olives and heaps of fly-specked sweets, breathing in the odours of cardamom and chilli and leather and wet plaster and
kif
, ducking under the hairy goatskins of a watercarrier and exchanging curious glances with women covered head to toe in ash-coloured drapes, passing under the reed-thatching that turned the streets into mysteriously dim tunnels and by a hundred heavy nailed doors and house-fronts, their few windows high above street-level. The town struck me as relatively quiet, as bazaars go, but it thrilled the girls. However, their excitement as they walked, and the difficulty of keeping them from straying, was nothing compared to their reaction once they were ushered into the place that was to be our prison.

Their cries of astonishment would have drowned out Rosie.

Even I had to admit that as gaols went, it would be difficult to imagine one more comfortable. The word
sumptuous
came to mind.

Arabic architecture turns its back on the world, to create a cool and cloistered universe inside each set of walls. I was standing in a tiled garden. The house rose on three sides, layers of galleried passages that gave both a sense of intimacy and a plenitude of fresh air. Three levels up, a honeycomb of silvery wood turned the sky into blue tessellations, mirroring the fine blue-and-white designs beneath my feet.

The gallery railings were bleached by time, the complex amethyst and vermilion designs on the ceilings had sheltered generations of inhabitants, the gilding was a faded glory, all the more pleasing for its age. Over the intricately carved double doors leading into the house itself, mother-of-pearl inlays teased the eye inside.

The mosaic paving stones of the courtyard climbed up along the sides to form tiled benches scattered with rich cushions, and at the back into a splashing fountain surrounded by garden—this style of house,
riyad
, means “garden.” A pair of lemon trees were espaliered against the courtyard’s fourth wall, growing tall towards the sky-light; one could smell, if not see, the blossoms. Tiny birds that had been startled by the influx of noise now began to venture from the branches.

A head popped over the carved railing on the first floor, looking down at us: June, who cried, “The beds are
so
pretty!”

Above her, another head appeared—Kate, adding, “There’s a marble bath in here!”

And at the very top, her face visible through the holes of the wooden roofgrate, was (who else?) Edith: “There’s chairs! On the
roof
!”

At the thought of children on the rooftiles, all the mothers gave exclamations of dismay and scurried for the stairs, followed less urgently by the others.

I remained in the courtyard. A bird’s chirp punctuated the voices of the innocent that were now ringing out from all the nooks and crannies of this open-sided house. Prison? Hah! Holmes and I were mad. We had drastically misread the intentions of La Rocha and his companions. The insane logic of W. S. Gilbert had infiltrated our brains and turned them to blancmange, making us see pretend pirates as real, fictional threats as actual.

It would appear that this entire affair was instead aimed at wringing every last possible franc, pound, and
rial
out of Fflytte Films: The cost of hiring the most luxurious available house in Salé; the cost of hiring large and probably unnecessary guards; the price of the luscious odours trickling from a kitchen somewhere in the hidden depths; the cost of the logs stacked high beside the burning fire and the price of the army of cleaning women who had recently got the house ready (carpets still slightly furled at one edge; the faint trace of cleaning fluid beneath the saffron and lemon blossom) and no doubt the repairs to plumbing, wiring, and roof that had been tacked onto the rent for our benefit, along with tuning the decorative French spinet piano and replacing the bed-coverings and sprucing up the wall-hangings and …

How long before the door-bell rang and the first in an endless stream of carpet-sellers and slipper-makers and kaftan-fitters and knick-knack vendors came to ply their wares to the unwary?

Only one way to find out.

I went back to the door and grasped the handle. It did not open. I rattled it a few times, in the event it was simply stuck, and was about to bend to examine the mechanism when it flew in towards me. I gave a wide smile to the two large men standing without, then made to step down into the street.

And they stopped me.

I brushed away the large hand spread out before my face, but the other man moved in front of me as well. Which made for a lot of man in a little doorway.

“I need some items from the shops!” I said, assuming all the effrontery of an English lady. “Shops, you understand?” Clearly they did not. “Mercado? Bazaar?
Suq?
” They understood that last, it being Arabic. However, I did not care to reveal that my grasp of that tongue went beyond a handful of words. “What do you call it—the medina?” I leant forward, touching my fingers to my sternum and speaking as if to a deaf man or an idiot child. “I … need to
go
—” I directed my fingers in a walking motion, then pointed: “—to the
medina.
”

He shook his head and jabbed his own grubby finger towards the interior of the house. When I did not move, he pointed more emphatically; had I been a man, he would have given me a shove and slammed the door in my face.

Being a good Moslem, however, he hesitated to touch a strange female. That did not mean he was going to let me pass.

Then the marginally smaller of the two spoke up, in the same accented Arabic I had heard on the
Harlequin. “You’re sure this is not a man?”

“He
would not make that mistake.
”

“If she were my sister, I would beat her for wearing those garments.”

“Don’t speak to me in that gibberish,” I snapped, offering up a mental apology to the two cousins who had taught me the glorious language of the
Qur’an
and of Ibn Kaldoun. “I demand you permit me outside.”

The first man loomed into the threshold, forcing me to move away, then dropped back again to the street and yanked the door shut. I slapped at its solid surface a couple of times for effect, but I had little need of further conversation with the two.

No: not the fevered imagination of a pair of detectives. We were prisoners, in a delicate-looking, highly effective, exotically beautiful, golden-cage of a cell.

What an interesting situation.

I spared a moment’s thought for Holmes and the others, hoping that the male prisoners would be treated with as much care.

But as things now stood, I was the sole protector of a score of British females, plus Edith.

The most urgent order of business, therefore, was to claim a bed before all the good ones were taken.

A closer look at the house suggested that it was—or, had been—the home of a wealthy Moslem Francophile. In an upstairs storage room were dusty tea-chests filled with the good china, the good linen, and an assortment of Moroccan
galabiyyas
,
kaftans
, wraps, and footwear sufficient for a small village, but underneath the top-dressing of French paintings, French piano, and French side-tables lay the furnishings of a traditional Arab home.

Once I had claimed a bedroom, I snooped through all the other rooms within the fortress-like outer walls. The timber grid covering the inner courtyard was, I was relieved to see, both closely built (its holes would permit the tiny birds to pass, but exclude neighbourhood cats) and sturdy enough to keep a small person—an Edith-sized person, say—from tumbling thirty feet to the tiles. There was even a canvas cover, furled out of the way, designed to exclude rain and keep in warmth. Around this weather-silvered sky-light was a veranda, open to the air and furnished, as Edith had said, with chairs and divans. The roof, too, was walled.

Three of these upper walls were chest high. Two of them looked down over sheer drops to the street, the third onto a heap of rubble where a house once stood, its stones now in the process of being pilfered down to its foundations. The fourth wall, to the west, was higher than my head. It suggested that something lay on the other side.

While the others enthused over the intricate mosaic of domes, minarets, laundry lines, palm-trees, and the pot-plants and divans of neighbouring rooftops, I dragged a bench over to the high wall, chinned myself on the wall-top to peep over—then fell with a squawk when a man on the rooftop twenty feet away snapped a shotgun to his shoulder and pulled the trigger.