Coromandel! (16 page)

Drayton recovered his poise and strolled on across the stone acres. Near the throne he stopped. The sailors stopped behind him. No one spoke. Behind the spectacles the small brown eyes of the man on the throne darted from one to another of their faces. A crimson ring glittered on the little finger of his right hand, and Jason saw that the hand was shaking.

Master Drayton said, ‘In my country, Sir Don, it is the manner of a host to make some welcoming remark to those who visit him-- ‘Steeth, I suppose he doesn’t understand English.’

The man on the throne said, ‘The servants of His Most Catholic Majesty are under no obligation to be polite to pirates.’ He spoke good English--slow, but nearly faultless in accent.

‘Pirates, you say?’ Silvester broke out indignantly. ‘The
Phoebe
is a ship of the Company of Merchants of London, and--‘

‘Be calm, master mate,’ Drayton muttered. The priest had a long jowl and pale, dull eyes. Drayton continued, ‘Sir Don, we are not pirates but traders. As a matter of courtesy--no more--we have come here to tell you of our plans. We hope you will help us in a work of trade which will bring great good to all Christendom.’

Silvester muttered, ‘Hope he will help us! Blow his teeth in, I say.’

The man on the throne said, ‘Great good to Christendom! But talking will do no harm. Perhaps you will dismiss your sailors so that we may speak freely. They can wait in the garden.’

Drayton said, ‘Very well. Savage, Grant, Fremantle, leave us. We will be some hours. I have a lot to discuss with His Excellency Sir Don--?’

‘Don Manoel d’Alvarez, milord. My chaplain, Padre Felipe. And may I have the honour of. . . ?’

Jason followed the other two sailors out of the room.

The heat in the garden was stifling. Old Fremantle lay asleep under an orange tree. Grant sat with his back to the wall, his head nodding. Jason went to the gate and peered through into the street.

The earlier bustle had subsided, and the city was much quieter. The smells were the same--of filth and animals and dead fish and cooking food--but now he could smell the sea too, a salty tang which underlay all the other smells. Occasionally a woman passed and Jason stared surreptitiously at her breasts, but he was becoming used to that now, and almost woke up Grant when a very young girl who had her nakedness decently covered by a bodice hurried by.

And now a man came slowly down the street, and, though he seemed strong and well, he walked with painful slowness and swept the ground in front of him with a long-handled brush as he came.

This was too strange. Jason looked at Fremantle, then at Grant. They were both asleep. God’s blood, it wasn’t very long since he had decided it was no use trying to share the wonders that he saw and felt.

He climbed over the gate and dropped lightly into the dusty street. The man who was sweeping the road passed carefully by. Jason walked alongside him and tried to find the words to ask him in Tamil why he swept the ground so carefully before putting his feet down on it. But he did not know the words, and the man took no notice of him, so Jason returned to the gate. There was the old man he had noticed when they first came, still standing on his head against the garden wall.

Jason went close, turned his own head upside down, and saw that the old man’s skin was wrinkled and that he had no teeth. From this angle the street looked very strange. The old man’s eyes flickered, reminding Jason of a cockerel’s just before it died.

Jason said, ‘Why?’

The old man’s eyes flickered again, but he did not answer. Jason sighed and walked away down the street, jingling his money in his breeches.

At a stall he tasted a round yellow sweetmeat and grinned at the stallkeeper because it was very good, and held out his money, but the stallkeeper would not take any. Five or six children had begun to follow him, and he threw them a penny. They grabbed it and ran away down an alley. He strolled on, breathing deeply of the exotically tainted air. Perhaps this place Manairuppu was the City of Pearl of his map. If so he might find pearl houses, a pearl-paved street. . . . The road to Meru began here.

He turned down a shady side-street. Soon it ended in an open square by a muddy stream. Several big trees grew in the square, and high in the sky hundreds of brown and white birds, like hawks, wheeled silently above the city. Jason stopped to watch them as they swooped down in twos and threes and swept up refuse from the ground and rose again, fighting in the air over what they had found.

A huge red stone tower filled the side of the square opposite him. It was the one he had seen in the distance from the ship, but then he had seen only its upper part rising above the houses. It was not square, like an English tower, but had two sides much longer than the others, and the sides sloped sharply in as they rose a hundred and more feet into the air so that it looked like a book stood on its edge, the pages a little open. A black doorway with a stone slab atop gaped in the side facing the square, and people went in and out like beetles. But the carvings in the outer stone! He walked forward. The red stone writhed to life as he approached. Not a square foot of stone was uncarved. The tower crawled with men and girls and animals, none ordinary, all vividly alive, all climbing on one another’s backs in fretted tiers, to the blue sky and the circling hawks.

Jason walked slowly under the stone slab of the doorway and into darkness. After many paces in the sudden cold, the yellow light strengthened, the black walls fell back, and he stepped out into a sunbathed courtyard.

A wide cloister, supported by squat stone pillars, surrounded the courtyard. On the far side a heavy building, of the same red stone as the tower, rose in tortured shapes to a stone spire and a final golden spike. Yellow and white flowers lay scattered in the dusty sunlight, and a hump-backed white bull sat at ease in the cloisters, leaning against a pillar and chewing cud.

Wondering, and prepared to believe anything amid these marvels, Jason crossed the courtyard. At the far side he crossed the cloister and entered the building with the spire and spike. He was in a wide, dark tunnel, and for a moment he could hardly see. He paused and sniffed the air---he smelled burning wood, and cow dung, and crushed flowers.

Now he could see. He took another pace and stopped dead. Here too the stone walls crawled with moving, living sculpture. He bent to look.

An elephant. Off the coast of Africa, Fremantle had drawn an elephant for him on the deck of the
Phoebe
, and this was one. But this elephant had four trunks. More monkeys. Bulls being led to market for slaughter--no, Fremantle said the people here did not like to eat any kind of meat. And here was a war, with men fighting, and among them a troop of women with breasts as round as water-melons. That was wrong. They ought to know better here! He’d never seen a woman like that, and he’d wager no one else had either. And--God’s blood! God’s very bones! Here was the act of a man swyving a woman, and another, and another--hundreds of times, over and over.

He walked on, peering in amazement. Men and women, bulls and cows, monkeys, elephants--and the bodies twisted in so many lascivious ways. It was interesting. He would never have believed there were so many ways of ‘Why, that’s impossible!’ he muttered. He knelt to have a closer look.

He heard a sucked-in gasp of breath near him and turned quickly, flushing to his hair. It was a girl; she’d caught him looking at these. He leaped to his feet and swept off his sailor’s woollen hat. He said, ‘I was just looking at the carvings, mistress. I am--‘

She was plump and short and shining brown. Her eyes were black and black-rimmed, the lashes picked out most clearly in black. She had three violet spots painted or tattooed on her cheeks, two on the right and one on the left, and on her right nostril was a tiny gold ornament with a red stone in the centre of it. She wore a skirt of blue and silver that was drawn in between her thighs in the universal fashion here, and showed her dimpled knees. Her breasts were hidden, but poorly, by a short silver jacket with flowered designs on it. Her mouth was deep red, deep-lipped, and small. Her hair was oiled-black, drawn back tightly from her forehead, with a white flower stuck in it above her ear. Heavy silver bangles hung on her wrists; and on her ankles were silver anklets in the likeness of snakes; and her feet were long, slim, and bare. The nails of her toes and fingers were painted glossy black.

Jason stared and stared, and his mouth drooped open, and words failed him. Her face was like a heart; the brown column of her neck slid down under the jacket; she was inhumanly beautiful. He had never seen, never dreamed of, such beauty--and he had dreamed much. She had a flute in her hand. Such riches--gold, rubies, silver! She could be nothing but a princess. This was a palace that he had wandered into. She was a princess, and her divine eyes were flashing angrily at him.

He fell on his knees and said humbly, ‘Forgive me, Princess. There were no gates. No one stopped me.’ He had spoken in English. He searched frantically in his memory, but no phrase of Fremantle’s Tamil suited.

She came slowly to him, her hips swaying and her navel sliding round and round. She stopped above him and said--

But what did she say?

He gazed up at her and said, ‘Jason Savage, Your Royal Highness. Jason Savage, an English sailor. May I go now?’

She spoke again, and pointed to the darker recesses of the building and cocked her head to one side. A queer, muted music began in there. She pointed to the flute, then to herself, and said, ‘Devadassi.’ She held out her hand, palm up. Jason took it reverently and pressed it to his lips. She jerked it free and sprang a pace back from him. She was looking at her hand as though he had fouled it with his lips.

Two men in white skirts, with strings slung across their naked chests, walked slowly forward out of the inner gloom where the music was. The princess had begun to laugh silently.

Jason stammered, ‘I--I am sorry, Your Royal Highness. I did not mean any harm.’ He turned and fled, rushing down the dark tunnel, past the coupling carvings, across the cloister, across the courtyard, through the red tower, into the square.--There he stopped and took a deep trembling breath. Her soft laughter still shivered in his ears. At his feet two kites fought over the corpse of a rat. He began to run toward Don Manoel’s mansion.

He climbed over the gate and stopped, one foot on the ground and one upon the gate, his hand still grasping an iron curlicue. He stared in astonishment at Grant and Fremantle. Grant was sitting with his back to the wall, his head nodding. Fremantle lay asprawl under the orange tree.

Jason shook his head in disbelief. He’d seen a dead rat, a thousand carvings, an old man standing on his head, and a princess, and still those two slept. He peered back through the wrought-iron tracery. Yes, the man was still there, still upside down.

The shade of the orange tree, which had been two feet from Fremantle’s head, was now painting the old sailor’s grey hair with false gold. Only an hour had passed. Jason grunted discontentedly. Drayton and Silvester ought to have finished their talking by now. He walked slowly towards the house. He’d go up the steps as far as he dared, and listen to see whether the conference was near an end.

As he walked he began to sing.

‘Alas, my love, you do me wrong,
To cast me off discourteously,
And I have loved you so long,
Delighting in your company.’

It was a yearning and mysterious tune. He used to sing it with Molly under the Plain, and for a moment he felt the wind in his face and felt the turf under his feet and saw Shrewford Ring before his eyes, and stopped singing.

He began again. He was in Coromandel.

‘Greensleeves was all my joy,
Greensleeves was my delight. . .

The first thing he must do was learn to speak Tamil properly. Then gradually he would work his way up until he became rich and powerful. He knew her name already--Princess Devadassi, a beautiful name. He spoke it two or three times in varying tones of entreaty, then returned to his singing.

‘Greensleeves was my hart of gold,
And who but my lady Greensleeves?’

He could rescue the king her father from drowning, or from a runaway horse. He had not seen many horses here, though--a runaway elephant?

With the treasure, by God!--with the treasure he could dress so magnificently and bring her so many elephant and camel loads of gifts that the people would line the streets, gaping, to watch him pass by, and the king would have to treat him like an ambassador at the least. He wondered how often the princess came to d’Alvarez’s palace here for dinner, and whether they danced afterwards. Even if they didn’t, he could make an opportunity to dance for them, and then--and then!

He stopped. A girl was working in a flowerbed a yard off the path. She was sitting back on her heels and looking at him, a trowel in her hand and the earth turned over among the roots of the dark-red flowers in front of her.

Jason thought he must have frightened her. He took off his cap and said, ‘I am an English sailor, mistress. Our Master Drayton is with Don d’Alvarez. He told us to wait out here.’ She said, ‘Don Manoel is my father. He has been preparing for this ever since your ship was sighted yesterday. Was that you singing “Greensleeves”?’

Jason looked round. She was staring a little to the side of him and over his head, but there was no one near her, except him, who could have been singing. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Grant and Fremantle are asleep by the gate. But you speak English!’

The girl said, ‘My father spent six years in England, senhor, in His Majesty’s embassy there. My mother and I were with him. I was a child. After that we went to Rome, then back home to Portugal, and then, two years ago, we came out here. You have been in the city.’

Jason started and looked more closely at her as she rose to her feet. She was slight and dark-haired and not at all beautiful. Her eyes were strange--wide-set, brown, and fully open under dark, questioning eyebrows. She had an olive skin and long thin hands. She said again, ‘You have been in the city.’