Pirate King (33 page)

“Ready?”

They weren’t, of course—what normal person considers herself ready for a daring armed race through a strange and hostile city? But none of their protests were of any import, so when the next song got under way—the oddly appropriate pirates’ song that begins,
With cat-like tread, upon our prey we steal
—I waved my hands and glowered at the chorus until they began to chime in, and were soon singing as if their very lives depended on it.

Annie and I took up positions at opposite ends of the dividing wall. We had heaped a table and bench on top of each other, to give her the height to display her … self, while at my end I had another bench, sufficient to help me scramble over. She knelt in place. I looked at her, and nodded.

She stood. The girls were singing their hearts out—
the household soundly sleeps
—and Annie rose from above the parapet, stretching her arms high, moving to the tempo. She was too thin for a proper belly dancer and had no clue how to mimic the sinuous sway of the original, but somehow I did not imagine that would matter to her audience.

I began to count, and got as far as “two” before the violin descended into a parrot-squawk of discord. I raised my head above the stones, saw nothing but the backs of many heads, and swung myself over.

Holmes recovered first: A heart-beat before my feet hit the rooftop, his hand was swinging the violin hard into the face of an open-mouthed guard. As it made contact, I leapt for the back of another. In an instant the roof was a battlefield tumult of shouts and cries and grunts and bellowed commands and the single blast of a revolver as the pent-up masculine frustrations of twelve British citizens and a French cook exploded on the heads of the four guards.

In thirty seconds it was over. Daniel Marks continued to batter the man at his feet with—oddly—a fringed velvet pillow, but the man’s unconscious sprawl suggested that some more solid implement had gone before.

“Are there other guards?” I demanded.

As if in answer, the door crashed open and a big man came through it, moving fast, shotgun up and ready. Holmes stuck out a foot; our chief constable caught the falling guard with a tea-pot as he went by; Bert delivered the
coup de grâce
with a flower pot: as neat a piece of choreography as I had seen off the screen.

Except: The shotgun went off as it hit the ground.

And a wail of pain rose up from the women’s side.

I launched myself over the wall, seeing nothing but a scrum of
galabiyyas
and dish-towels. I hauled away shoulders until I had uncovered the victim, and saw—oh God, I knew who it would be before I got there—Edith, huddled over, one hand plastered against the side of her face.

She was breathing. “Edith, let me see. Is it your eye?”
God, I should never forgive myself, if—

Annie enfolded the panicking mother’s hands in hers, and I gently peeled away the child’s bloody hands, expecting a terrible sight.

But an eye looked back at me, stark with alarm but undamaged. And the blood seemed lower. I wiped my sleeve across the young cheek, and went light-headed with relief at the neat straight slice across the top of the cheekbone.

Around me, nineteen females drew simultaneous breaths. “Someone give me a handkerchief,” I requested, and dabbed at the wound with the delicate white scrap. The ooze was already slowing.

“Ooh,” groaned Mrs Nunnally, “my poor baby, look at that, there’s going to be a scar!”

Mrs Hatley tried to assure her that, no, it would heal nicely, but I had seen the flash of hope behind the blood. “No, she’s right,” I said. “That’s almost certain to leave a scar.” The expression on the child’s face was undeniable: pride. I gave the wounded warrior a hand up, and said solemnly, “Yes, you’re going to have a nice handsome scar. People will ask about it for years.”

The men began to spill over the wall. As they came, each was led to the small mountain of clothing we had brought up from below, and each was draped, painted, and covered to give him a semblance of belonging here. The last one over was Bert-the-Constable, holding a familiar Purdy shot-gun; Annie grabbed his hand and pulled him to one side for an urgent briefing.

As the trickle of scrambling men slowed, I climbed onto the bench to peer over the wall. Five guards lay trussed and gagged, dragged into a shady patch. Two were conscious and angry, two were half-conscious. One would be lucky to live ’til evening.

I went back to where Annie was handing Bert a cloth and Holmes was making a head-wrap out of a length of curtain. As I pawed through the much-diminished pile of clothing, hoping to find something other than one patched
galabiyya
the colour of goat dung, Bert’s Cockney voice stated the obvious. “That shot will bring attention. We must go.”

“You two bring up the rear,” Holmes ordered the two agents. When they protested, he simply picked up the shot-gun he’d left leaning against the wall and disappeared down the stair-way. I dropped the disgusting robe over my head, checking that I could reach through it for my weapons, then turned to this singular assortment of lovely young women and comically ugly men.

I overrode the gabble of conversation with a trio of brief declarative sentences, capped by a pair of imperatives. “We have to hurry. We’ll all go together through the city to the gate. Once we’re outside the walls, the Army will see us and we’ll be safe. If shooting starts, get into a doorway. And don’t say a word to anyone.”

Then I stepped through the doorway before the questions could begin, although I heard Fflytte’s voice behind me, raised in protest that a mere assistant should give the orders, and why were all the women in men’s dress? But Hale shut him up before I had to, and we poured down the stairways to the courtyard. Male exclamations and female explanations rose up at the sight of the boots, the piano, and the two tied guards, but I turned and brutally squelched it.

“If you want to live, do as you’re told, immediately. Do you understand?”

They understood.

Holmes and I led the ungainly procession; Annie and Bert brought up the rear. Holmes ventured out first, checking the narrow street for guards, then continued to the next intersection before giving a signal that we could follow. One after another, our charges stepped over the threshold onto the dusty stones: Fflytte and Hale, Will and Mrs Hatley, mothers and daughters and fictional sisters, with six constable-actors, a make-believe sergeant, and a cook mixed among them. They looked as much like Moroccans as a group of painted storks might have, but from a distance, in the dim, thatched recesses of the Salé medina, each of us swathed in the same anonymous hooded
galabiyya
s the rest of the population wore, moving fast, we might not attract too much of an audience.

I was the only one who had been out here, so I went first—with a frisson of terror, sure that I had forgotten the way. But my feet remembered, even with the distractions of day versus night, and we trailed along, stretching out more and more as we left the quieter sections and came to the bazaar proper. Soon, we were forced to edge past laden donkeys and men with carpets and sellers of oats and spice and the occasional flayed goat or camel hanging before a butcher’s.

“I hadn’t realised how crowded it would be,” I hissed at Holmes. He raised an eyebrow in agreement and stepped to one side in order to survey the long—too long—trail of foreign shapes, moving at a snail’s pace in our wake. I shook my head in despair, edged around a donkey (four legs and two ears sticking out of seventeen baskets of yellow slippers), and looked into the lane beyond.

To come face to face with a band of enraged pirates.

CHAPTER FORTY

PIRATE KING:
Let vengeance howl;
The Pirate so decides.

I
LEAPT BACKWARDS
towards Holmes and collided with the donkey. The creature blatted; a rope parted; a yellow tide of leather spilt into the lane; the shoe-maker began to bellow. “Go!” I shouted at Holmes, but it was too late. On the other side of this four-legged cork the slow momentum of my fellow countrymen continued to pile up. Holmes, who was tall enough to see even over a laden donkey, spotted the pirates as they pounded around the corner at my back: Adam, Jack, the beautiful Benjamin, the Swedish accountant Mr Gröhe (in whose hand a knife looked simply bizarre), and an uncountable number of others (in whose hands the knives looked far too comfortable). Holmes turned to shout at the escapees; those who heard him did attempt to reverse their tracks and flee, but by this time the column had come to a halt, thoroughly wedged between the pressure from behind and the irritated quadruped.

The howl of pirates filled the alleyway; the donkey’s ears twitched its displeasure; those on the other side would have milled about if they had not been stuck fast; I turned towards my pursuers, and came face to face with Adam.

“Why are you here?”
he demanded in Arabic, then remembered, and paused to assemble a translation.

“We wish to leave,”
I replied in his tongue.

He started to answer, realised what I had said, started again, paused a second time, and then looked past me and saw the others. Including Annie, who had climbed on a greengrocer’s display to see what the problem was. Adam’s words died away as he and Annie regarded each other above the crowd. They were both unaware of the growing turmoil, the shouts of the donkey’s owner, the cries of other would-be pedestrians in three directions.

The owner of the slippers swam upstream towards his four-legged lorry, bawling a constant stream of
“Bâlek! Bâlek!”
(“Give way!”), although the additional pressure only forced the creature backwards, onto me and the pirates. In a minute, the beast would start to kick. Adam shouted. The man shouted back, until he came to a clear place and caught sight of his foe. His mouth went wide, then snapped shut. Without a glance at his lost wares, he grabbed the creature’s halter and hauled furiously away. A receding wave of cries, protests, and curses traced his retreat; the sardine-tin sensation grew less marked.

Adam turned at last to look at me.
“You speak Arabic.”

“I do. The others do not. You must let us go. This will bring war onto your city.”

His dark eyes did not react, although a slight tilt of the head made me aware of the men at his back. A dozen or more large, armed, ferocious-looking men, hungry for a fight.

“We will return to the house,”
he said.

“No!” I looked at his younger brother, Jack, and thought of those shiny boots sticking in such awful absurdity from under the piano. No child should live with that image in his memory.
“Your father is dead there.”

Reaction rippled back into the men, with a burst of cross-talk. Adam seemed oblivious, but Jack took a step closer to him.

“You lie,”
the younger boy declared.

“I do not. It was an accident,”
I said—which, granted, was not exactly true, but … 
“He lies in the courtyard.”
Then I added in English, “Your brother does not need to see it.”

Adam’s black eyes studied me for the longest time. With the donkey gone, Holmes and the others had come together, and I could feel him, three feet from me, ready to pull his revolver from its inner pocket and go down shooting.

“Dead.”

“I am sorry for you.” I had no idea what he was thinking, how he was going to react.

“And my uncle?”

“As far as I know, he’s still under arrest. The French—”

“The guards?”

I switched back to Arabic.
“Your men are tied. Two are injured badly, the others merely bound.”

“And my father is dead.”

For God’s sake, was he about to gut me? Hug me? Turn his head to the wall and weep?
“He was a brave man,”
I ventured.

“He was a—”
I was not familiar with the word, but his inflection made me suspect it was not a term of endearment.

He took a tremulous breath, then seemed to grow two inches taller and ten years older. For the first time, I saw a resemblance to Samuel. He looked towards the back of the crowd—towards Annie—and then whirled about to face his compatriots.

“You heard this foreigner!”
he shouted at them. I thrust my hands into the
galabiyya
to grab my knife in one hand and the revolver in the other. Holmes pushed forward, and a sudden caterpillar of motion from the rear suggested that Annie and Bert had done the same.
“My father is dead. My uncle is in the hands of the French. Who will deny that I step into my father’s boots? Any?”

The lad’s fury brought the others up short, stopped me in my place, made Holmes raise one hand to keep those at his back from shoving into an uncertain but clearly perilous situation. The pirates looked at one another. Jack wormed his way around to take up a position at his brother’s side. Benjamin stared, first at them, then at Mr Gröhe, and finally craned to look into the foreign faces, but Celeste was not to be seen. He shifted, looking as if he were about to move away—when a scream rent the air.

Everyone ducked. A gun went off, although the shutter it destroyed was a good ten feet from the bright visitor that swooped through this urban canyon, beating its wings to perch upon a frayed clothes-line strung between buildings. “She is MINE!” the bird screeched.

The street blinked, and began to breathe again. Benjamin lowered his eyes to the two brothers and, as if Rosie’s words had been meant for him alone, stepped forward to side with Adam. The remaining members of the crew exchanged another round of speechless consultation; their weapons stayed up, but their shoulders lost a degree of belligerence.

Adam kept his chin raised, as haughty as if the question of succession had never been in doubt.
“You take me as leader?”
he demanded.
“You agree that I am my father, in your eyes?”

No one openly denied it; in fact, a general shrug of acceptance ran through them as if to say,
Well, why not?

I shot Holmes a glance, warning him, and then Annie at the back—because, in truth, whether it be Samuel or his son giving the orders, our position had changed little. We had to fight here, or risk abduction into the distant inland, never to return.

Should I attack first, before Adam could give the order? The confusion that followed would free the others for a panicked flight—
some
of them might find their way to safety. I eyed the young man’s back, tightening my fingers on the knife in my sleeve.
If I go in under his ribs with a sharp push to the right, my knife will clear as he falls into Benjamin and that big fellow, after which—

“Then I say, we let them go!”

—my right hand is clear to shoot the Swedish accountant and … Wait
.
What?

The pirate crew were looking every bit as puzzled as I.

“No!”
one of them finally said, although the word grew elongated and ended in a distinct question mark.

“Yes!”
Adam shouted.
“You said you would follow me. And I will lead you, and I will provide for you and for your families. This I vow. But I will not have you living off the takings of a wicked act. I will not feed my men off the suffering of women.”

Good God: The subversive sentiments of W. S. Gilbert had converted this hereditary Moroccan cut-throat into a Frederic of morality. I had never before thought of the Savoy operas as a tool of Anarchic philosophy.

“Noble lad!” Holmes murmured.

But the pirates were not convinced. Indeed, judging by the spreading grumble of dissatisfaction, if something was not done quickly, this would be the briefest reign in Salé’s history.

I raised my voice.
“I know you men were looking forward to your share of the ransom monies, but there remains much money to be had, and without the disruption of British cannonballs or the inconvenience of French gaol.”

That caught their attention.

“The small man, in our company—Randolph Fflytte? He is a man who lives for the privilege of giving money to others. He points his camera, and it makes a man wealthy. And he may be small in stature, but in my country, he is huge in authority. If he says ‘Come,’ many will follow—all of whom will have busy cameras and equally large purses, and an equal desire to share their wealth. Think for yourselves, O men of Salé: A single payment”
—(What the hell was the Arabic for
ransom
?)—
“now, followed by years of grief with your families huddling in the far mountains? Or a moment of generosity that opens the doors to long years of gentle thievery? The choice is yours.”

The men knew all about Fflytte; even those who had not received his money personally had heard that he could certainly throw it around. It was not a far reach to believe that he might cause a tap of gold to flow. They thought about it, and the weapons in their hands sagged a fraction.

“Your pride is your country,”
I persisted in a gentle voice.
“You can conquer the world from within.”

None of which actually meant anything: I was merely offering a stall and a distraction, desperately gambling that their blood might cool and dilute their single-minded intent.

Adam stepped forward.
“My friends, the days that my uncle and my father were trying to remake are gone. The wind has shifted. If we deny this, if we shake our fists at the sky and tell ourselves that the wind is still at our backs, we will end up wrecked upon the shore, or worse, becalmed. If, however, we trim our sails and run with that new wind, who knows where it will take us? Us, and our sons and grandsons, bearing the blood of our noble ancestors
.

“The pirate way gives all an equal voice and an equal share. The pirate way demands that the king be chosen. I ask that you trust my father’s blood, and follow me.”

When he ended, I half expected the film crew to burst into applause—then remembered that they did not understood Arabic, and in any event, had their hands full with knives. Adam’s followers, more inured perhaps to flights of Arab rhetoric, were not so instantly convinced, but they could not deny that a boy who could talk like this might be just the fellow to deal with the French authorities.

Gröhe felt the shift in the metaphorical rigging first, and gratefully worked the unaccustomed blade back into its scabbard. One by one, others did the same. Three men at the far end looked at each other, looked at the guns they carried, and put them up.

Adam nodded, and gave a brief command that I did not hear, but that sent one of his men off at a run. When he faced us again, he was no longer a boy.

“Come,” he said.

We came. Through the medina we passed, the streets gone silent as word spread like a fire through dry grassland. Donkeys miraculously vanished, heaps of merchandise no longer filled the way, and I pushed the hood from my robe, allowing my European hair to shine out. When I glanced back, I could see the others doing the same.

Full points to Adam, the new pirate king of Salé, parading his foreign captives through the streets of his realm.

He led us, not to the closest gate in the walled city, but to the river entrance we had come by, half a lifetime before. Boats were already waiting, summoned by the new king’s runner. By the time the first of the boats had crossed the Bou Regreg—laden with the younger girls and their mothers, despite Edith’s furious protestations that she wanted to stay behind, to be a pirate, with Jack—a crowd had begun to gather on the Rabat side.

Finally, a small knot of us remained: Holmes, Annie, Will, and I, talking to Adam as we waited for the last boat to come back for us.

Or so I thought.

“I’ll send the film over with the luggage,” Will said.

Annie looked puzzled, Holmes (although he later denied it) did, too. I, however, merely asked, “What about the cameras?”

“I’ll keep one. They’ll be hard to find here, and Mr Fflytte owes me that much.”

“Will!” Annie protested. “You’re surely not thinking of staying behind?”

Holmes had caught up quickly. “I believe you’ll find that Mr Currie is concerned that if he comes within reach of the British authorities, he’ll find himself behind bars.”

“What?
Will!
No, not you—tell me you didn’t kill the poor girl!”

“Kill? Who? Me? I didn’t kill anyone! What are you talking about?” He looked confused, and frightened.

“Lonnie Johns,” I said.

“What, Lonnie? Good heavens, has she died?”

I remarked to my husband, “He’s a cameraman, not an actor.”

“I agree.”

“When did she die?” Will asked.