Coromandel! (17 page)

‘I didn’t mean any harm,’ Jason muttered. ‘You saw me climbing over the gate? I have a right to go wherever I want,’ he finished more bravely.

The girl said, ‘I didn’t see. I can smell the city on you. Why did you go, and your friends slept? Did you want to steal something?’

Stung to anger, Jason said, ‘I went to see if this was the City of Pearl which is marked on my map.’ He shut his mouth, cursing himself. It was better to tell lies.

But the girl said, ‘You’ve come here because of a map? Is there treasure on it?’

‘Yes,’ Jason said unwillingly.

‘Where do you have to go to get to the treasure?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t read all the words on the map yet.’

The girl said slowly, ‘Manairuppu isn’t the City of Pearl. But there is a place ten miles down the coast where a few pearl fishermen live. It is only a Village, but it might be marked on such a map as the City of Pearl. You came straight here from England?’

‘Yes.’

She said, ‘And you can’t read! Oh, how wonderful! Let me touch you.’ She put out her hands. Jason stood still apprehensively. God’s blood, this one was really off her noggin, a sort of female Softy. They ought to shut her up.

Her thin fingers passed gently down the sides of his face and over his shoulders. Then she said, ‘Now stand away over there, please, at least fifty paces from me, down the path.’

‘But, mistress ‘ Jason said.

‘Please!’ she said.

He backed away. She was looking tense, as if thinking of something else. At last she raised her hand and said, ‘Now I can see you. You are a nice-looking young man. Come close again. What is your name?’

‘Jason Savage.’

She said, ‘I live in a dungeon. I cannot see anything close to me. I see nothing but a coloured blur. I never have. I have a pair of spectacles, and with them I can read if I hold the paper very far away from my eyes. Without the spectacles I can see things a little, but only if they are more than fifty paces from me. You thought I was touched in the head?’

‘Oh, no,’ Jason said quickly, lying.

‘You did! You are going away?’

‘I don’t know, mistress.’

‘Don’t go.’

A female voice called sharply. Jason looked up and saw a square, stern face glowering at them from a window near the corner of the mansion. The girl called back mildly in the same language, picked up her trowel, and said, ‘She is telling me to come in at once. My name is Catherine.’ She smiled blindly in Jason’s direction and went towards the house. The older woman’s baleful eye fixed Jason until Catherine was safely round the corner.

Jason stared at the blank windows. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his finger and dashed it to the earth. ‘Don’t go,’ she’d said. Perhaps he hadn’t heard right. Perhaps she was dotty. He returned to his friends. This time he sat down with his back to a tree not far from them and closed his eyes. . . .

Devadassi, Princess of Manairuppu--Your Royal Highness, wilt thou accept these little gifts from thine humble servant, Sir Jason Savage, knight, of the county of Wiltshire? Devadassi, your eyes are like stars. But her eyes were tilted ever so slightly upward at the corners. Devadassi!

‘Wake up, you lousy dogs!’

Silvester was in a bad temper. The three sprang to their feet like wooden toys, barking sleepily, ‘Aye, aye, sir!’

‘Where’s that blackamoor who brought us here?’ Drayton asked peevishly. ‘We’ll never find our way back to the ship through this stinking warren.’

‘I think I can, sir,’ Jason said.

Silvester said, ‘Lead on, then. You, open the gate, and step lively.’ The servant unlocked the gate, and they went out. It was late afternoon, and the people of Manairuppu were again about in the streets.

Jason walked a pace ahead of Drayton and Silvester, He knew the road quite well. On his way to the princess’s palace he had seen the river and the masts of the
Phoebe
down an alley to the left, and noted their position.

Drayton said, ‘Do you think the Portugal ship is really coming soon?’

Silvester answered with heat, ‘I don’t know, Master Drayton. But I say it doesn’t matter a whip. What if she is? What if she does carry twenty-eight guns to our six? The truth is we’ve been warned off by a stinking Portugee, told to clear out in three days or we’ll be blown out of the water! Everyone knows the Portugals are on their last legs out here. Should we bow down and kiss the Don’s arse because a snivelling Pope of Rome divided the world two hundred years ago and gave half to the Spanish and half to the Portuguese? ‘Twasn’t his to give! God’s bread and little fishes, our business is to stay on this coast, Master Drayton, and trade wherever we’ve a mind, and let the Don chew his beard off. When the
Isabella
comes--
if
she comes--we’ll fight her. We’ll he up and board her. The Dons don’t like steel. The--‘

Drayton said, ‘My good fellow, what would the Company say if we got their ship full of holes and had to limp back to England with nothing sold?’

Jason saw that Drayton was being superior and foppish to try to hide the fact that he had no stomach for the risks Silvester hungered for; but he was not deceiving anyone, and he knew it. So he turned on Fremantle and snapped, ‘Why did you not tell us that the Portugals had such a hold on the Coromandel coast? You must have known.’

‘I was in the King of Madura’s jail most of my time here, master,’ Fremantle said. ‘And from what I did hear, Master Silvester is right. The Portugals have never been so strong here as in Goa. They’re just pretending. One good push and they’ll fall down. I think we ought to do as the mate says.’

‘No one asked you for your opinion,’ Drayton snapped. ‘Down here? This place stinks worse than Billingsgate at high noon, d’Alvarez would not even tell us where the pearl fisheries are.’

‘I know,’ Jason broke in eagerly. ‘There is one ten miles down the coast. The Don’s daughter told me.’

‘His daughter? Why should she be talking to you?’ Silvester asked crossly.

‘I don’t know, sir.’

Drayton said, ‘Ten miles? We might take the
Phoebe
down there and see.’

‘Not worth it,’ Silvester said bluntly. ‘We need water and fresh vegetables and meat on the hoof, even if it’s only goats, and that’s all we’ll get. Are we going to wait and fight the
Isabella
, or are we going to run away with our tails between our legs?’

‘I have not made up my mind,’ Drayton said. ‘I shall discuss the matter with the sailing master tonight. Those places d’Alvarez mentioned, farther up the coast, sound promising.’

‘Bah!’ Silvester said. ‘He was just holding out a carrot as well as beating us with a stick.’

‘I shall discuss it all with Master Green,’ Drayton repeated coldly.

Jason thought: That settles it; we shall sail in a couple of days, and we shall be running away. Green was an old windbag who said he had served with Grenville as a boy, but the crew thought his chief services had been in the Tilbury ale-houses.

Drayton said, ‘But there is one thing we can do. We can send a man down to the pearlers to buy some pearls. Then we will know whether they are of sufficiently good quality for us to try to develop the trade. I shall send you, Jason.’

‘Him?’ Silvester interjected. ‘He’s too scatter-brained. You ought to send one of the officers.’

‘Perhaps Savage is too intelligent for mere shipmen to be able to appreciate his qualities,’ Drayton said. ‘But at all events he can be trusted with the money. Call for the shallop.’

They were standing on the jetty, and it was evening. Silvester, seething with rage, cupped his hands and bellowed, almost in Drayton’s ear, ‘
Phoebe
ahoy! Send the shallop! Look lively, you whoreson scum!’

It was dark. In the east two low stars shone out under the black clouds to seaward. The river slapped against the ship, and the ocean grumbled on the bar. Scattered lights glowed with faint, steady beams in the city, and somewhere among distant fields an animal howled mournfully. Drayton, Silvester, and Jason stood in the waist of the
Phoebe
, looking towards the invisible jetty. Grant sat in the shallop below, his oars shipped, his face a dim white blur.

Jason’s heart beat with a steady, thudding pound inside his chest. Now he was really to slide on a rope over the side of a ship in the middle of a tropical night. Now the Dons really lay in wait for him.

Silvester said, ‘I haven’t seen any native guards on the shore, Master Drayton. If you ask me, the king of this place isn’t anxious to help the Portugals any more than he has to. In fact he’s probably waiting for us to send envoys to him, but in secret. Why should he help us if we won’t help ourselves?’

Drayton ignored the mate and said, ‘You have the money, Jason?’

Jason tapped his waist, where he wore a money belt under his shirt. The buckled shoes felt awkward on his feet after so many months barefoot at sea, but he had twenty miles to walk.

‘Off you go, then,’ Drayton said.

Jason slid down the rope into the shallop, and Grant rowed him ashore. ‘Good luck,’ Grant muttered. ‘And we’ll have a wee drink with the silver that sticks in your ain purse, eh?’

‘I’m not going to keep a penny,’ Jason whispered indignantly.

The shallop slipped quietly back towards the ship. As soon as he could no longer hear the quiet gurgle of the oars Jason slipped across the waste land and entered the streets. It was nearly midnight.

He worked southward through deserted streets and soon came to the square where the princess’s great palace stood. Fitful moonbeams scurried over the climbing animals and gave a livid urgency to their movements. A tiny light shone far and deep inside the tunnel-like entrance under the carved tower, and Jason imagined the sentries on guard round her chamber, and the king asleep in another part of the palace.

He hurried on, moving always under the loom of the houses. After half an hour there were no more houses. Single palm trees stood up like gallows in the empty land. The sandy track shone white, wavering on southward, and to right and left tall, reeds bent in the hot land wind. Spice and pepper and the bitter-sweet tang of Coromandel fruit scented the wind as it blew on his right cheek and from his left, struggling up to him against the wind, he heard the steady cannon fire of the surf on the Coromandel coast.

Now he was moving parallel with that shore, but he wanted to walk down the sands until he came to the pearlers. A dim path led off to the left, and he took it. The sound of the sea grew louder, and soon he reached the dunes, crossed them, and headed south along the glistening sand. After two hours of hard going he crept into the lee of a dune, muffled his face against the scurrying grains, and went to sleep.

He awoke at first light and found that he had stopped only two hundred yards short of a thin point of sand, where the beach bent back to form a bay before continuing its arrow line southward. Scores of the familiar logs were drawn up in the cove where a muddy streamlet meandered out of the reeds into the sea. A dozen dark and naked men were tying the logs together, getting ready to go to sea. A huddle of palm-leaf and palm-thatch hovels crouched on the trampled mud beside the stream. He saw women squatting outside the openings of the hovels, and then one of the women looked up, saw him, and called to the men at the boats. One of the men straightened up, separated himself from the group, and walked slowly forward. Jason went down the sand to meet him.

The man was slight of bone, and built small and square, so that there were big areas of taut skin between the bones, and he had hollow cheeks and a tight belly. He was young, perhaps not much older than Jason. They looked at each other for a time; then the young man pointed to his chest and said, ‘Simon.’ Two lockets hung on a thin cord round his neck. He opened one of them and showed Jason the crucifix inside. Astonished, Jason cried, ‘You are a Christian!’

The young man nodded and smiled and repeated, ‘Simon,--Simon! Ave Maria, pater noster, credo . . and then a long gabble in Tamil, ending in the words ‘Padre Felipe.’

Jason said, ‘You know Padre Felipe?’

The man nodded excitedly and held up the crucifix. All right, Jason thought; Padre Felipe made him a Christian, and his Christian name is Simon. Very interesting, but it was not going to help much, except that the man seemed very willing to be friendly.

In his carefully rehearsed Tamil, Jason said, ‘Pearls. I want to see pearls.’

Simon clapped his hands in pleasure, gently took Jason’s arm, and led him to the log boats. The other men smiled shyly, and Jason smiled back at them. Simon whipped the cord round his logs fore and aft, pushed the craft into the shallow water, and beckoned to Jason to get in.

Jason looked at his shoes. He could take them off and leave them here until he returned. It was early. Drayton would not expect him back on the
Phoebe
until the middle of the night. He sat down, took off his shoes, left them well up the sand, and ran into the sea. The sun came up out of the east and sparkled in the drops his feet kicked up. It was a lovely and exciting morning, and he was going out to catch pearls asleep in their oyster beds.

He climbed carefully into the craft and sat down. It began to rock violently and did not settle until a woman--who, he decided, was Simon’s wife--slipped in behind him and steadied it. Then Simon bent his rough paddle into the water, and the muscles stood out on his shoulders and forearms, and the boat started moving. They crossed the little cove, cleared the point, and faced the sea.

The water gurgled over Jason’s feet, where a big roped stone lay, and he laughed delightedly. He was not on the sea, but in it. In this craft he was not a sailor but a fish or a seagull, his eyes far below the level of the crested waves. The seas steadily increased in size as the boat increased its distance from the line of sand and the cluster of palm trees that marked the shore. For a moment Jason thought he was going to be sea-sick and afraid. But--he looked round at the heaving water--what could go wrong? This craft could not overturn or be swamped. And a volley of flying fish skimmed out of the sea and over the boat, and plopped into the sea the other side, and Jason laughed again. He had not come to Coromandel to be comfortable.