The Monsoon (50 page)

“Danny?” Hal called.

“Danny? Can you hear me?” The question was futile, borne of his own stunned senses. He tried to move closer to him, but found his own legs would not obey his will. He glanced down at them. They were the only part of his body that had not been protected by Daniel’s. Both his legs had been stripped of the cloth of his breeches and Hal saw that his flesh had been mangled as though caught in the iron teeth of a revolving capstan.

Splinters of white bone protruded from the bloody mess.

There was no pain, so his mind discounted the evidence of his eyes. He could not believe that he had lost both his legs. He did not want to gaze upon that destruction any longer.

Hal used his elbows now to drag himself closer to Big Daniel, digging them into the soft soil and his shattered legs slithered along behind him. He lay beside the great body and gathered it in his arms.

He rocked it gently as once he had soothed his infant son to sleep.

“It will be all right. We’ll come through this together, like we always do,” he whispered.

“It’s going to be all right, Danny.” He did not realize that he was weeping until he saw his own tears falling into Daniel’s upturned face, like warm drops of tropical rain washing away the white grains of sand that coated the staring eyeballs.

Dr. Reynolds, coming up through the grove with his two surgeon’s mates, found them lying there.

“Take care of Danny first,” Hal pleaded.

“God has already taken him into his care,” Dr. Reynolds answered gently, and between them they lifted Hal onto the stretcher with his legs dangling.

Hal looked back over the bay. From where they lay at the top of a low white dune he could see the two square-rigged ships a mile out beyond the reef, the graceful Seraph leading and the Minotaur, with her black sails, looking menacing and potent. As he watched they tacked in succession and turned back into the south, taking up their blockade station across the mouth of the bay.

Tom rose on one knee and stared over the top of the dune at the walls of the fort, two hundred paces away. The heavy mist of gunsmoke was dissipating, blowing away on the monsoon wind, streaming out to sea. The top of the wall was lined with hundreds of heads, dark bearded faces below their keffiya head cloths and turbans. The defenders were brandishing their muskets and dancing on the ram parts in triumph. Tom could hear the excited jabber of their voices, and even understood some of their shouted insults aimed at the two English ships: “May God blacken the face of the infidel.”

“God is great! He has given us the victory.” Tom started to rise to his feet.

“Something has gone wrong. They should have blown the gates by now.”

Aboli reached up and seized his wrist. He drew him down to his side.

“Steady, Klebe! Sometimes the cruel lest part of the battle is the waiting.” Then they heard musket fire from the far side of the fortress, and all the Arab heads along the breastworks turned in that direction. Their shouts and taunts died away.

“The infidel is attacking the gates!” a voice screamed in Arabic, and there was an immediate sTompede. Even the gunners deserted their cannon and raced away along the catwalk to counter this new threat. In seconds the parapets were deserted, and Tom scrambled to his feet again.

“Now is our chance! Follow me!” Aboli pulled him down again.

“Patience, Klebe!” Tom struggled to break his grip.

“We can’t wait any longer. We have to get to Dorry!” Aboli shook his head.

“Even you cannot fight a thousand men on your own.” Tom stared across at the loophole in the top of the wall where he knew Dorian was incarcerated.

“He should have the sense to signal, to show us where he is. He should wave his shirt, or something.” Then swiftly he made allowance for his brother.

“But he’s only a baby. He doesn’t always know what to do.”

From the far side of the fort the scattered sound of musket shots crescendoed into a furious fusillade.

“Listen, Klebe.” Aboli restrained him.

“Danny and your father are laying the charges under the gates. It will not be long now.”

Then the blast stung their eardrums, and the thunder of the explosion stunned them. A tower of dust and smoke shot into the sky and boiled over at the crest, spreading out into a bulging thunderhead. The dust cloud was thick with hurtling debris, with lumps of rock and burning fragments that spun smoke-trails against the blue. Tom Watched a brass cannon thrown a hundred feet into the air. Human bodies and dismembered limbs were hurled even higher, along with heavy baulks of timber and other wreckage.

Before Tom could recover his wits, Aboli was on his feet and loping away across the open ground towards the fort. Tom leaped up and charged after him, but the skirts of his robe hampered him and he could not catch Aboli before he reached the foot of the wall.

Aboli knelt and made a stirrup with his intertwined fingers.

Without pausing Tom placed one booted foot into it and Aboli boosted him high into the branches of a strangler fig tree, whose roots were woven into the joints between the stone blocks. Tom climbed upwards like a monkey: neither the sword scabbard banging against his legs nor the brace of pistols thrust into his belt could slow him.

Aboli and the three other men followed him up, but Tom reached the top of the parapet ahead of them.

He scrambled into the gap where the wall had begun to collapse and threw his legs over the top.

A startled brown face confronted him. One Arab had not been drawn away from his post by the tumult of the assault on the gates. With a shout of astonishment, he recoiled before Tom’s sudden appearance, and tried to level the musket in his hands, but the curved hammers hooked in a fold of his robe and while he struggled to free them the sabre flew from Tom’s scabbard as though it was a bird.

His thrust caught the man in the throat and severed his vocal cords so that his next shout was stillborn. He tottered backwards and dropped, arms flailing, fifty feet into the courtyard behind him.

While Aboli and the three seamen scrambled over the battlements, Tom cast a quick look around the walls and the courtyard of the fort.

Through the thick billows of dust and smoke he saw the indistinct shapes of the Arabs stumbling away from the ruins of the gateway.

Along the catwalks at the top of the parapet a wailing mob was fighting to get away from the smoking shambles that had been the gate to the fort.

Then, through the shattered gateway poured a yelling mob of English seamen. They struggled over the rubble and raced up the ramps to fall upon the Arabs on the walks of the ramparts. There were a few scattered musket shots and Tom saw one seaman fall backwards down the ramp. Then the two sides met and became a confused mass of howling, hacking, fighting men.

Tom looked for his father in the mob. Usually Hal’s height and his black beard distinguished him even in the worst melee, but Tom could not find him. However, he could not spare the time to search longer.

“This way!” he called, and led his party along the catwalk to the ramp furthest from the gate. Their robes disguised them, and the

Arabs around them let them pass without a second glance. Tom went down the ramp at a run, and reached the halfway landing unchecked.

From there an arched doorway opened into the interior.

Two guards were at the entrance. One gawked at Tom’s pale eyes and European features, then swung his scimitar above his head.

“FererighiP he screamed, and swung a full-blooded cut at Tom’s head with the curved blade.

Tom ducked under it and riposted with a clean thrust high in the line of engagement, which went deep into the Arab’s chest. As he withdrew his blade, the breath from the guard’s punctured lungs whistled out of the wound, and he dropped to his-knees. Aboli killed the other guard as swiftly. Then they jumped over the corpses and ran into the dark narrow passage beyond.

“Dorry!” Tom screamed.

“Where are you?” He flung the robes back from his face and tore the turban from his head.

He no longer needed the disguise and he wanted Dorian to recognize him.

“Dorian!” he cried again. His voice echoed weirdly along the passage and was answered by wild shouts in a babble of different languages.

Along both sides of the passage were the entrances to a dozen or more cells. The original doors must have rotted away a half century ago, for they had been replaced by others of raw timber and crudely barred construction. Tom saw gaunt, bearded white faces peering through the openings and clawed hands reaching out towards him in supplication. He knew at once that these were the prisoners from the ships captured by al-Auf. Dorian must be among them, and his spirits soared.

“Dorian!” An English voice answered, “Jesus love you, sir, we have prayed for your coming.” Aboli lifted the heavy locking bar from its brackets, the door burst open and the prisoners forced their way out of the tiny stone cell into the passageway. Tom was almost trapped in the flood of ragged, stinking humanity, and fought himself clear, hurrying on to peer into other cells.

“Dorian!” he bawled above the hubbub. He was trying to work out in which of the cells he had last seen his brother, but he was uncertain of his bearings.

He grabbed one of the released prisoners and shouted at him as he shook his shoulders.

“Is there a young white boy here, with red hair?”

The man stared at him as though he was mad, then pulled himself free and ran to join the flood of released men streaming down into the courtyard. Tom reached the end of the passage and the last cell. The door was ajar and he stepped into the tiny stonewalled room. It was empty.

There was a mattress of dried palm fronds against the wall but no other furnishing. The sunlight slanted in through the loophole set in the far wall, and Tom crossed to it quickly. He looked out at the sweep of the bay and -the two ships lying offshoreI “This is the one,” he muttered. He jumped onto the step below the loophole and stuck his head through the opening. The liana grew up the outside of the wall, almost close enough to touch.

“This is the cell they had Dorry in.

But where is he now?” He jumped down from the step and looked around the empty cell. Iron rings were cemented into the stone blocks, to which men had been chained. The walls were covered with graffiti, scratched into the soft coral. He read Portuguese names and dates a hundred years old, worn and overgrown with moss and fungi. There were more recent additions in Arabic script, and he picked out a religious exhortation, a line from Sura 17 of the Koran that he recognized because All Wilson had made him learn it by heart: “The seven heavens and the earth, and all things therein, declare His glory.” Below that there was another scratching, made with a belt buckle or some other metal implement. It was fresh and raw, in lopsided childish letters:

“
DORIAN
COURTNEY
, 3RD
FEBRUARY
1 69.”

“He was here!” Tom shouted aloud.

“Aboli, Dorry was here!” Aboli appeared in the doorway, blocking it with his massive dark body.

“Where is he now, Klebe?”

“We will find him.” Tom paused only to rip off the constricting robe that hampered his movements, and hurled it against the wall.

Then they ran together back down the passage and out into the sunlight. The fighting was still surging through the courtyard below them and over the ramparts of the fortress, but at a glance it was obvious that the defenders were in rout. Hundreds had escaped through the shattered gateway. They had thrown away their weapons and were streaming into the forest. Others were trapped within the walls. Many were on their knees pleading for quarter, but Tom saw others leap from the ramparts rather than face the English cutlasses. With their white robes ballooning around their bodies, they shrieked as they plunged to earth.

However, a few were still fighting. One isolated group of a dozen men was holding the east bastion and screaming their defiance, “Allah akbar! God is great,” but as Hal watched, the Englishmen swarmed over them, cut them down and threw their bodies over the battlements.

Tom looked desperately for a small figure and a fiery patch of hair in the confusion, but there was no glimpse of his brother. A woman raced up the ramp towards Tom.

Her black veil had blown away and her head was uncovered. Tom saw that she was little more than a child.

Her long black hair streamed back from her terrified face, and her kohl-darkened eyes were those of a fawn pursued by the hounds.

Shouting with excited laughter, four seamen followed her, their shirts soaked with the blood of the men they had killed, their faces speckled with bloody droplets, swollen and inflamed with lust.

They caught the girl at the edge of the ramp and threw her down.

Three pinned her to the stone flags and, although she struggled, they pulled up the skirts of her robe and exposed her slim brown limbs and her smooth naked belly. The fourth sailor ripped open his own breeches and fell on top of her.

“Grease the pink lane for us!” his mates encouraged him Tom had never imagined anything so horrific. As a novice of the Order of St. George and the Holy Grail, he had been taught that war was noble and all true warriors were gallant. He ran forward to intervene, but Aboli seized his arm and held it in a grip of iron.

“Leave them, Klebe.

It is the right of the victors. Our duty is now to Bomvu.” He used his pet name for Dorian, which meant “Red” in the language of the forests.

“We can’t let them!” Tom blurted.

the loophole set in the far wall, and Tom crossed to it quickly.

He looked out at the sweep of the bay and -the two ships lying offshore.

“This is the one,” he muttered. He jumped onto the step below the loophole and stuck his head through the opening. The liana grew up the outside of the wall, almost close enough to touch.

“This is the cell they had Dorry in.

But where is he now?” He jumped down from the step and looked around the empty cell. Iron rings were cemented into the stone blocks, to which men had been chained. The walls were covered with graffiti, scratched into the soft coral. He read Portuguese names and dates a hundred years old, worn and overgrown with moss and fungi. There were more recent additions in Arabic script, and he picked out a religious exhortation, a line from Sura 17 of the Koran that he recognized because All Wilson had made him learn it by heart: “The seven heavens and the earth, and all things therein, declare His glory.” Below that there was another scratching, made with a belt buckle or some other metal implement. It was fresh and raw, in lopsided childish letters: