The Monsoon (58 page)

She prostrated herself on the deck, and when Dorian refused to follow her example, she tugged at his ankle.

“Show respect for the Prince!” she hissed at him.

“Or else he will have you beaten.” Dorian was determined to resist her order. He set his jaw and raised his eyes to stare into the Prince’s face. After only a few seconds he felt his determination waver and he dropped his eyes. Somehow he found it impossible to defy this regal person. He made the gesture of respect.

“Salaam aliekum, lord!” he whispered, and prostrated himself.

AlMalik’s expression remained stern, but little laughter lines crinkled around his eyes.

“And peace unto you also, al-Ahmara.” He beckoned Dorian to come closer, then indicated a cushion below his dais, close to his right hand.

“Sit here, where I can stop you jumping over the ship’s side when next the cafard, the madness, overtakes you.”

Dorian obeyed without protest, whereupon the men ignored him and continued with their discussions. For a while Dorian attempted to follow their conversation, but they spoke swiftly and in a formal manner that tested his understanding to the limits. Their talk was full of the names of men and places of which he was ignorant. One place name he recognized, though, was Lamu. He tried to orientate himself, and conjured up in his mind’s eye the charts of the Fever Coast that he had been made to study so often during his navigation lessons with Ned Tyler.

Lamu was several hundred leagues north of Zanzibar.

It was a smaller island and, from what he remembered of the sailing orders in his father’s log book, it was another In ajar trading port and centre of government of the Omani empire.

He could tell by the wind direction and the angle of the afternoon sun that the dhow was on an approximately northwesterly heading, which would indicate that Lamu was probably where they were heading. He wondered what fate awaited him there, then craned his neck to look back over the stern.

There was no sign of Flor de la Mar on the horizon behind them.

During the night they must have run the island under and severed all contact with the Seraph, his father and Tom. At the thought he felt again that enervating mood of despair, but determined not to let himself capitulate to it. He made another effort to follow the discussions of the Prince and his retainers.

“Father will expect me to remember everything they say. It could be very valuable to him in making his plans,” he told himself, but just then the mullah stood up and went to the bows.

From there he began the call to prayer, in a high, quavering voice. The Prince and his men broke off their discussions and made preparations for the midday worship. Slaves brought ewers of fresh water for the Prince and his retinue C to wash.

In the stern, the helmsman pointed up into the north, indicating the direction of the holy city of Mecca, and every man aboard who could be spared from the running IF: of the dhow faced that way.

In unison, following the plaintive cries of the holy man, they performed the ritual of standing, kneeling and prostrating themselves on the deck, submitting themselves to the will of Allah and offering him their devotions.

This was the first time Dorian had been caught up in such an efflorescence of devotion. Although he sat apart from it, he felt himself strangely moved its rce. He had never felt the same way during the weekly services in the chapel at High Weald, and he followed the chanting and the exaltations with a keener interest than their local clergyman had ever evoked in him.

He looked up towards the heavens, into the vast blue bowl of the African sky, filled with the cloud ranges marching ahead of the monsoon winds. In religious awe, he imagined he could see in the eddies of silver cloud the beard of God and his terrible features adumbrated in the shapes and outlines of the thunderheads.

Prince Abd Muhammad alMalik rose from his position of prostration and stood erect on the low dais, still facing towards the holy city, crossing his hands over his breast in the final expression of his devotion. Dorian looked up at his bearded face, and thought that perhaps God looked like that, so noble, so terrifying, and yet so benign.

The dhow was running before the monsoon, her huge lateen sail filled tight and hard as a waterskin. The single boom was carved from joined lengths of some dark, heavy tropical timber, almost as thick as a man’s waist, and longer in all than the dhow herself. Its full weight was held aloft on the stubby mast by the main halyard. As the dhow rolled to the swells, the shadow of the boom swung back and forth across the deck, alternately shading the Prince’s regal figure, then allowing the full brilliance of the tropical sunlight to pour down upon him. He stood to his full height under the swinging boom. The Arab helmsman’s attention was diverted, and he allowed the bows of the ship to come up too far into the eye of the wind. The sail jarred and creaked ominously.

Dorian had been taught by Ned Tyler that the lateen sail was notoriously fickle and unstable in any real blow of wind, and he could sense the ship’s distress at the rough handling to which she was being subjected.

From the corner of his eye he noticed a sudden change in the sail shadow cast across the deck below the dais. His eyes flickered up into the rigging, and he saw the main halyard begin to unravel just below the heavy wooden sheave block. The rope untwisted like a nest of mating serpents as, one after the other, the strands gave way.

Dorian stared in horror, for precious seconds too appalled to move or cry out. He had watched the boom being lowered and trained around when the dhow was tacked, so he knew what a vital role the main halyard played in the lateen rigging.

He started to rise to his feet, still staring up at the single mast, but as he did so the last strand of the halyard parted with a crack like a pistol shot. With a rush and roar of canvas the boom hurtled down from on high, half a ton of heavy timber, swinging towards the deck like the stroke of an executioner’s blade. The Prince was oblivious to everything but his religious devotions, and stood directly under the falling boom.

Dorian threw himself forward, shoulder first into the back of alMalik’s knees. The Prince was taken completely unprepared, balancing himself in the contrary direction to meet the ship’s movement. He was thrown off the raised dais face downward onto the deck. The piles of rugs and cushions strewn across the timbers broke his fall, and Dorian’s small body landed on top of him.

Behind them the hardwood boom crashed through the roof of the low deck-house, shattering it into a heap of broken planking and raw splinters. The great baulk of timber snapped at the splice and the fore-end whipped down, gaining velocity as it struck the foredeck. It crushed the low wooden dais on which, moments before the Prince had been standing, smashed through the bulwarks of the bows and stove in most of the deck planking.

The single lateen sail ballooned down behind it and covered the foredeck, smothering the men lying there under its stiff canvas shroud.

The dhow’s motion altered drastically as she was relieved of all the pressure of her canvas. Her bows fell off into the wind and she began to roll viciously and wallow in the swells of the monsoon.

For long seconds there was silence on board except for the banging and clattering of loose tackle and sundered rope ends. Then there came a chorus of startled shouts and the screams of injured men. Two sailors on the after-deck had been crushed and killed instantly, and three others were terribly mutilated, limbs shattered and bones crushed.

Their cries were pitifully thin in the wind.

Under the shouted orders of the dhow captain, the unhurt sailors rushed forward to hack away the tangle of ropes and canvas that covered the men on the foredeck.

“Find the Prince!” the captain shrieked, fearful for his own life if his master were hurt or, Allah forbid, killed under the massive weight of the boom.

Within minutes they had ripped away the folds of the sail and, with exclamations of relief and expressions of thanks to God, lifted him out from under the wreckage.

The Prince stood aloof in the pandemonium, ignoring the rapturous cries of thanks for his deliverance, and surveyed the remains of his dias. The boom had even sheared through the thick silk folds of the precious prayer rug on which he had been standing. The mullah rushed down the deck to his side.

“You are uninjured, thanks be to Allah. He spread his wings over you, for you are the Beloved of the Prophet.”

AlMalik fended off his hands and asked, “Where is the child?”

The question triggered another frantic search under the mountains of canvas. At last they dragged Dorian out and stood him in front of the Prince.

“Are you hurt, little one?” Dorian was grinning with delight at the devastation that surrounded them. He had not enjoyed himself so much since he had last been with Tom.

“I am fine, sir.” In the excitement of the moment he had lapsed into English.

“But your ship is fairly buggered.”

Tom knew that the men must be kept busy during the days and weeks that they had to wait for the return of Anderson from Ceylon. Idle seamen soon find mischief with which to occupy themselves; they become a threat to themselves and to each other.

He also realized that, for his own wellbeing and peace of mind, he must find solace in work. Otherwise he would spend the long, tropical days brooding on Dorian’s fate and his father’s terrible injuries and slowly deteriorating state of health. He found himself torn between these two conflicting loyalties. He knew that, as soon as Hal was fit to travel, he must try to get his father home to the peace and security of High Weald, where he could be nursed back to health by English surgeons and cared for by a staff of loyal servants.

On the other hand, this would mean leaving Dorian to his fate as a slave in an alien world. He felt the irresistible force of his oath to his brother summoning him towards that awful coast that was Africa.

He went to Aboli to help him resolve this dilemma.

if my father would let me take command of the Minotaur, and gave me a small crew of good men, then you and I could go after Dorian. I know where to start to search for him. Lamu!”

“Then what of your father, Klebe? Are you ready to desert him, now that he needs you most? What will you feel when the news reaches you when you are somewhere out there,” Aboli pointed to the west where the mysterious continent lay beneath the horizon, “that your father is dead, and that perhaps you could have been there to save him?”

“Do not even speak of it, Aboli,” Tom flared at him, then subsided with a sigh of uncertainty.

“Perhaps by the time Captain Anderson and the Yeoman return, my father will be strong enough to make the voyage home without us. I will wait until then before I decide, but in the meantime we must get the Minotaur ready for any call we make upon her.” Despite the work already done on her, she still showed the effects of her sojourn at the hands of al-Auf, and they both knew that her hull was probably heavily infested with ship-worm, the curse of tropical waters.

That very day Tom ordered her to be careened. He had never had to do this before and knew he must rely heavily on the expertise of Ned Tyler and All Wilson. The ship was unloaded of all her cargo and heavy gear, including her cannon and water barrels. All this was ferried to the beach and stored under thatched lean-to shelters in the palm grove and the guns arranged to protect the camp. Then the lightened hull was warped in parallel to the beach on the high spring tide.

Lines were run through heavy sheave blocks from the top of all three masts to the shore, and secured to the largest, strongest palms above the beach. Then, with three fathoms of water under her hull, the Minotaur was hove over. Twenty men on each of the capstans and the rest of the men on the shore-lines strained and chanted and heaved.

Gradually the ship took on a heavy list to star, board, and her planking on the opposite side was exposed until she was in danger of rolling clean under. But by this time the tide was in full ebb and the Minotaur settled on the sandy bottom with her entire port side exposed.

Before the tide was fully out, Tom and Ned Tyler waded out to inspect her planking.

The Minotaur had been in these waters for almost four years and her bottom was foul with weed and barnacles.

Although these would affect her speed and sailing characteristics, they would not threaten her existence. However, when they scraped away the weed they found what they had most feared: everywhere ship-worm had bored their holes into the timbers of the hull below the waterline.

Tom was able to thrust his forefinger full length into one of these burrows, and feel the worm squirm as his fingertip touched it.

In some places the holes were so close together that the wood resembled a Swiss cheese.

The carpenters had iron vats of pitch boiling over fires on the beach. Ned poured a ladleful, bubbling, into one of the worm-holes.

The loathsome creature came writhing and twisting, in its death throes, out into the open. It was as thick as his finger, and when Tom seized its head and held it up as far as he could reach, the red serpentine body hung down as far as his knees.

“The old lady would never have made it back home with this filthy crew aboard,” Ned told him.

“Her hull would have broken up in the first real gate she ran into.” With an expression of disgust, Tom flung the parboiled worm far out into the lagoon, where a shoal of small silver fish churned the water white as they devoured it.

The carpenters and their mates came wading out to join them in the work of ridding the hull of these vermin, and kept at it until the tide turned and the rising water drove them back to the beach. They worked through five successive low tides to scrape off the weed and shellfish, then cooked out the worms and plugged their holes with pitch and oakum.

Those planks that were riddled and rotten past saving were cut out and replaced with bright new timbers. The scoured bottom was painted with a thick coat of pitch, covered with a mixture of pitch and tallow, then another two coats of pitch before Ned and Tom were satisfied.