The Monsoon (105 page)

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, alAmhara. 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, alAmhara. 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 sTomped 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 where 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 Yasrn@ni’s injuries, and was binding them up with a wad of cotton.

“It is well done, alSalil,” 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, Dowle?” 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 alSalil. 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.

or 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 alMalik, 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 alSalil 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.

The new topic of discussion on the island became the cessation of the kaskazi winds, the beginning of the kusi, and the opening of a new trading season. Also, the imminent departure of the expeditionary army of Sheikh alSalil for the mainland diverted interest from three missing eunuchs.

Among the sheikh’s large retinue few took much notice of the new slave-boy, Yassie. Though the lad was remarkably pretty and graceful of body, even in his ankle length robes, at first he seemed in ill health, shy and uncertain of himself. However, the servant-woman Tahi, the childhood nurse of the sheikh and herself a newcomer to the household, took the boy under her protection. Yassie shared her quarters, and soon his beauty and pleasant ways won o ver all the other servants and slaves.

Yassie had a trilling unbroken voice and played the sistrum with rare skill. )Sheikh alSalil sent for him every evening to sing to him in his private chambers, soothing away the worries and cares of the day, none of the household thought it strange. Within weeks Yassie had obviously found special favour with his master, and was made one of the sheikh’s body-servants. Then the sheikh ordered Yassie to spread his sleeping mat in the tiny curtained alcove off his sleeping chamber, within easy call of alSalil’s own bed, so that he could minister to his needs during the night.

On the first night of this new arrangement, alSalil returned late from the war council with his dhow captains on the terrace. Yassie had been dozing while he waited for him, and sprang to his feet as alSalil entered the chamber, attended by Batula. Yassie had pitchers of hot water ready on the brazier, and after Batula helped the sheikh strip down to his loincloth, Yassie poured the water over alSalil’s head and body so that he could bathe. In the meantime Batula hung his master’s weapons on the pegs beside his bed, sword and dagger honed, shield burnished, then came to kneel for his master’s pleasure.

“You may leave me now, Batula, but wake me in the hour before dawn, for there remains much still to be done before we sail.” As he spoke, alSalil dried himself on the cloth Yassie handed him.

“Sleep well, Batula, and may the eyes of God watch over your slumbers.” The moment the curtains fell over the doorway behind Batula, Dorian and Yasmini grinned at each other, and he reached out for her.

“I have waited too long,” he said, but she danced back out of reach.

“I have my duties to complete, noble master. I must dress your hair and oil your body.” She knelt behind him while he sat on a silk rug and, with a cloth, she rubbed his hair until it was almost dry, then combed it out and plaited it into a single thick braid down his naked back. While she worked she gave small murmurs of admiration and awe.

“So thick and beautiful, the colour of gold and saffron.” Then she massaged his shoulders with perfumed coconut oil, and touched the scars on his body.

“Where did this happen?”

“At a place called the Pass of the Bright Gazelle.” His eyes were closed and he submitted to the skilful touch of her fingers, for in the zenana she had been taught the arts of pleasing a future husband. When he was lulled and almost asleep, she leaned forward.

“Are you still so ticklish here, Dowle?”

And she thrust her tongue deep into his ear.

It galvanized him, and he gasped in protest. Goose-pimples rose on his muscled forearms, and he reached back and grabbed her around the waist.

“You must be taught more respect, slave.” He carried her to the bed, dropped her on it and knelt astride her, pinning her arms above her head. For a while they laughed into each other’s face, then the laughter stopped. He bent his head and laid his mouth on hers.

Her lips opened warm and wet to receive him, and she whispered, into his mouth, “I did not know that my heart could hold so much love!”

“Thou hast too many clothes,” he murmered, and swiftly she wriggled out of them, arching her back to let him draw them out from under her and throw them onto the floor.

“Thou art beautiful beyond the telling of it he said, considering the silky golden length of her, “but is thy body healed?”

“It is, completely. But do not take my word for it, master, prove it to thine own satisfaction, and to mine.”

” When the kusi wind blew steady and strong down the channel, and the skies were burning blue, devoid of thunderheads, the flotilla of Sheikh alSalil sailed from Lamu, and three days later made its landfall on the African mainland.

Under the waving silk of the blue banner they disembarked, and the long lines of armed men and draught animals wound away from the Fever Coast, marching inland along the slave road into the interior.

The sheikh rode in the van, and close behind him followed the slave-boy, Yassie. Some of the men remarked at adoration and hero-worship with which the lad looked at his master, and smiled indulgently.

For the long months after their escape from Zanzibar Tom Courtney explored the coast of the mainland.

He kept well south of the Arab trade routes, avoiding any encounter with the Omani, either on land or sea. They were looking for the river mouth that Fundi, the elephant hunter, called the Lunga.

Without the little man’s help they might never have found the entrance, for the channel doubled back upon itself, forming an optical illusion, so that from the sea the land seemed unbroken, and a ship might sail past without suspecting the existence of the river mouth.

Once the little vessel was safely into the channel, Tom launched the two longboats. In them he sent Luke Jervis and All Wilson to follow the main channel, and guide the Swallow through. There were many false channels and dead ends among the papyrus beds, but they threaded their way along them. Many a time they were forced to turn back when the channel they were following pinched out. It took them days of searching and gruelling labour to warp the Swallow through, and Tom gave thanks for her shallow draught. Without it they would never have been able to cross the numerous sandbars and shallows. Eventually they came out into the main flow of the river.

The papyrus beds were infested by villainous-looking crocodiles and grunting, bellowing river-horses. Over them hung a canopy of swarming insects. Vast flocks of shrieking, bleating wildfowl rose from the reeds as they passed.

Abruptly the reed beds fell away, and they sailed through stretches of meadow like flood plains, and stands of open forest on either bank. Here, herds of strange animals lifted their heads from grazing and watched the little vessels pass bI then snorted with alarm and sTampeded away into the forest. Their numbers and variety were bewildering, and the sailors crowded the ship’s rail to stare and marvel at them.

There were graceful antelope, some the size of English red deer, others much larger, with strange, fantastic horns, scimitar-shaped or lunate or corkscrewed, not antlered like the deer they knew from home.

Each day they went ashore to hunt these animals. The game was confiding, obviously never having seen white men with firearms, so that the hunters were able to approach within easy musket shot and bring them down with a well-placed lead ball. They never lacked for meat, and they pickled and dried what they could not eat immediately.

Once they had butchered the kill, gutting and quartering the carcasses, even stranger creatures came to scavenge the bones and offal they left on the riverbank. The first to arrive were carrion birds, undertaker storks and vultures of half a dozen species, which filled the sky above with a dark, revolving cloud then swooped in to settle.