Coromandel! (3 page)

He could not sit down comfortably. Tomorrow night he’d flip that old trout out of the Avon, and as many more as he could. Hugo had no right to disbelieve him. He’d never told Hugo a lie. He picked up the stool by one leg and went over to the next cow. Susan wasn’t a good cow. He couldn’t talk to her at all. She was just a cow.

The light darkened, and his father stood in the low doorway. ‘When you’ve finished, Jason, clean out the yard.’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Then trim the hedge up below the Plain.’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘You should have done that hedge yesterday, Jason. Daisy went through and on to Squire’s land, on his Twenty-Acre.’

‘I’ll do it today, Father,’ Jason said, but he thought: Good Daisy, clever old girl, you’ll go and find out, won’t you, with your big inquisitive face?

His father went out--heavier than Jason, and hunched. Jason couldn’t remember his mother. She had died with another baby when he and Molly were five. Through the door he watched the morning sunlight edge down the ribs of the Plain. His hands slowly stopped their squeeze and release. The distracting music of the milk ceased.

After a while he shook his head and hurried to the end of his task, hurried through the cleaning of the yard, dumped the manure and mud and straw on the pile outside the byre, took his billhook, hurried up to the farthest hedge. Once there, he began to whistle. The closer to the Plain his work lay, the better he felt. Little pieces of the Plain had been ploughed, and here and there men kept sheep on it, but the Plain was not farmland and never could be--not enough water, and the soil crumbly and chalky. Or perhaps the dark men of his dreams, the men with the stone arrows, wouldn’t allow it. The wind blew in gusts and bent over the tassels of the rye grass, and a rabbit sat up in the white mouth of its burrow to watch him.

He saw Old Voy coming along the other side of the hedge before Voy saw him. He swept short strokes with his bill, cut and bent and tied back the living fence, and from the corner of his eye watched the old man coming. Voy was small and blotchy-faced, and his dirty grey hair hung down on his shoulders. Jason didn’t think he was quite as old as he looked, because after dark he seemed to change and move like a young man. Perhaps he was sixty. His teeth were good, but for three missing at the top front. He always carried a gentleman’s sword and wore a velvet doublet with puffed, slashed sleeves. The doublet was old and very dirty. A sack dangled at his right hip, from a leather strap across his left shoulder, and Jason chuckled when he saw it. The keepers had been inside that sack twenty times and never found anything but books and papers and medicines. Old Voy also wore a sleeveless leather jerkin that bulged mysteriously over his stomach and hid a might of queer things, but never a rabbit or a partridge that anyone had looked and seen.

Voy stopped opposite Jason on the other side of the hedge and for a minute silently watched the work. Then he said, ‘You’re a good boy, Jason. You didn’t tell the rascals anything, did you?’

Jason lowered the billhook and looked at a thorn in his hand. So Voy had been watching, last night. He must have been close. He said, ‘I’d nothing to tell.’

‘I’m not a gamekeeper, Jason.’

‘I’d nothing to tell, didn’t you hear me?’

‘What were you doing there, then?’

Jason spat out the thorn and picked up the bill. ‘None of your business.’

Voy said, ‘Ah, a girl. Hugo was a fool not to believe you.’

Jason said nothing, and after a while Old Voy said placatingly, ‘You come down the spinney tomorrow night, and I’ll show you how my ferrets work. They’re from France, Jason.’

‘France?’ Jason lowered the bill. ‘Have you been to France?’

‘France? Of course I’ve been to France--and Rome, and Damascus, and everywhere.’

‘Have you been to Aleppo?’ Jason asked anxiously.

‘Yes, I’ve been to Aleppo, Jason.’

‘You have, really?’ Jason glanced up and down the hedge. He’d done enough for the time being. He could go on after eating his dinner. He took a pace back, vaulted over, and landed on hands and knees beside Old Voy. He said eagerly, ‘Do you want a piece of ray bread? Tell me about Aleppo. And I’ve got two eggs and two potatoes and an onion.’

‘Beer?’ Old Voy was looking at him, reading him.

Jason unslung his leather bottle and passed it over. They sat down on the sunny side of the hedge there, the sun high over the Plain and all the lanes and byres and cows and church towers behind them, beyond the hedge. Jason said, ‘What’s it like? Where is it?’

Voy looked narrowly at him, took a bite out of a potato, and said, ‘You want to leave Wiltshire, Jason?’

Jason remembered that Voy must have heard him last night when he shouted at Hugo that he wasn’t going to stay here for ever. But now he only said, ‘I don’t know about that. How can I leave?’

‘Going to be wed soon, eh? And then there’s the farm to look after. And your sister, what will--?’

Jason said angrily, ‘If you don’t want to tell me anything, you go away, see? I asked you about Aleppo.’

Voy eyed him all the time. When he answered he spoke in a dreamy, distant voice as though he was remembering things from a long way back. ‘Aleppo is in the East, Jason, on the edge of the desert. It belongs to the Grand Turk. There aren’t any poor people in Aleppo--least, not poor Englishmen. English people go there for the Levant Company, and they make a fortune, every one. They stay there a few years, then come home rich.’

‘How do they get rich?’

‘Buying and selling, of course.’

‘Oh!’ Jason was disappointed. After a moment he asked, ‘How rich? Richer than Sir Tristram Pennel?’

‘Much richer. Why, Jason, the streets are paved with gold there, and in the bazaar--that’s what they call the market--there’s gold lying out in big blocks ready to buy. The women wear jewels in their noses, and gold and silver ornaments from head to foot, and ride on camels. There’s wine all the time, and sherbet they sell ice cold.’

‘Where does the ice come from?’ Jason asked quickly. Old Voy was supposed to be a great liar. He didn’t want to believe that, but he didn’t want to be laughed at for a simpleton either.

‘Why, they send trains of camels and horses out to the mountains--the mountains there are to the north of Aleppo, where the Old Man of the Mountains lives. Ever heard of him?’

Jason shook his head. The Old Man of the Mountains! That’s who had the Golden Fleece. It must be!

Voy said, ‘They get the ice there in winter and cut it and store it in holes in the ground. Then in the summer--in the summer in Aleppo it’s hotter than you’d believe--they send the camels up to bring the ice down.’

Jason nodded. You couldn’t catch Old Voy out in a story any more than Pennel’s men could find a trout in his bag or a bird under his jerkin. Voy helped himself to the beer, and when he handed the bottle back it was nearly empty. He said, ‘I’ve travelled everywhere, Jason. I’ve been to Tartary. The men wear long robes made out of sheepskins, and ride all day on little ponies. It’s like the Plain there, only big! Why--‘

‘Like the Plain?’ Jason said incredulously. ‘Do they have the standing stones and the earth walls like Shrewford Ring?’

‘Of course! Why shouldn’t they? I tell you, Tartary is like the Plain, only it goes on for a thousand leagues--ten thousand--to the end of the earth. After ten thousand leagues you come to a big wall, and demons and dragons guarding the wall.’

‘Have you seen the wall?’

Voy hesitated, then said regretfully, ‘No, I’ve never seen it, Jason. I--I was captured by robbers before I got there. They held me prisoner for three weeks in a cave. I was a prisoner with a dozen beautiful girl slaves they’d captured at--‘

‘Has anyone ever been over the wall?’ Jason cut in eagerly.

‘No one.’

No one. Then no one knew what was behind the wall. There might be cities of amethyst and sapphire and topaz. The Golden Fleece might be there. But no, the Fleece was near Aleppo, where the old man lived in the mountains. He hardly noticed Voy taking the other egg.

With his mouth full, Voy said, ‘The only place I have not been to is the best place of all. There’s treasure in that place. The people--ah!’ He paused.

Jason said, ‘Yes? What are the people like?’

Old Voy began slowly, ‘Why, they’re tall. And they have fair skins, boy, and golden hair and shining helmets. They’re nothing like the Tartars, who are small and yellowish and have eyes like this.’ He pulled up the corners of his eyes.

‘What is this place called where the treasure is?’ Jason asked.

‘Coromandel!’

‘Coromandel. Coromandel! Where is it?’

‘It’s in India, near Golconda.’

‘Can anyone find the treasure? Is it lying about? Or do you have to dig it up? Will the people with the shining helmets help you or fight you if you go there for the treasure? How do you get to Coromandel?’

Voy sucked his raggedy moustache, eyeing Jason. Then he said, ‘Can you read, Jason?’

Jason answered sullenly, ‘No.’

Voy said, quickly cheerful, ‘That doesn’t matter. You’ll learn, won’t you?’ Feeling in his sack, he carefully drew out a book and shook it, and out fell a folded sheet of paper. He said, ‘Here’s a map of Coromandel, Jason.’ He spread the map out flat on the grass and brushed off the long-legged field spider that began to walk across it.

Jason gazed breathlessly at the map. He could not read, but this map hardly needed reading. There were pictures. There were the blue waves of the sea, and a row of thin trees with feathery tops. There was a big dark-red stain in one corner, and writing everywhere. Voy ran his finger along a blue line and said, ‘Here’s the river of Coromandel. These humps are mountains. This is where the treasure lies, and here’s the name of the mountain--Meru. It has two peaks, see?’

Old Voy’s strangely clean and uncalloused finger wandered over the map, and his voice was hoarse in Jason’s ear. ‘The Coromandel Coast. The City of Pearl, by the sea. And then you go up the river, a long way. Right up near the source, there, that’s the Castle of the Holy Monks. From there it’s a hundred leagues to the mountain Meru, and--‘

‘What’s that red mark?’

‘Blood. “In the cave, forty-eight paces below the eastern peak, towards the north, a countless treasure lies hid.” That’s what it says.’

There were horsemen galloping over the empty spaces on that part of the map, and waving spears in the air. Devil faces blew wind over the sea. It was a blue and black map on yellow paper, with the bloodstain in a corner.

Jason said, ‘How can a man travel to Coromandel?’

Voy said, ‘In a ship from London, Jason. You go south to the Cape of Storms in Africa, and then east. It’s a long, hard voyage, Jason--but think what’s at the end of it, for you!’ Old Voy’s blue eyes gleamed, and his hand squeezed Jason’s shoulder.

Jason said with a sudden renewal of suspicion, ‘Why don’t you go and get the treasure yourself? It’s marked on the map.’

‘Me?’ Voy shook his head so that his grey hair swung out clear from his shoulders. He laughed throatily. ‘I’m too old. This is young man’s work. But you can go. I’ll sell the map cheap to you, because I like you.’

Jason was thinking--not thinking, but sinking, under a torrent of ideas: Tartary, horses and the sea racing together, snow on mountains--though he’d never seen a mountain--camels. Mary--she wouldn’t want to go to Coromandel. How far? How long to wait? How much? The map might be a fraud. Farm boys were always losing their money to gypsies and chapmen who sold charms and nostrums and curses, none of them ever any good.

He said cautiously, ‘How much?’ trying to sound uninterested. Voy said, ‘I wouldn’t sell this map to just anyone who wanted to buy it. What’s the use of letting a man have this map who’ll send out an expedition and get the treasure for himself without ever stirring a foot from Wiltshire?’ He busied himself in a careful stowing away of his belongings as he spoke. He squeezed the leather bottle, squirted the last of the beer down his throat, and handed the bottle back.

Jason waited eagerly. He said, ‘I haven’t got much, mind.’ Voy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Jason, you can have it for forty shillings.’

Jason hesitated. For all the years he’d been putting a little money aside he had got only forty-six shillings and three pennies and two farthings.

He said, ‘I’ll buy it.’

‘You’ve got a bargain,’ Voy said cheerfully and folded up the map and handed it to him. ‘But mind, don’t you show that map to anyone, and don’t go talking about it, or you’ll find someone else has got there ahead of you and taken the treasure.’

Jason held the map carefully and said, ‘But I haven’t got the money with me. I keep it in--I haven’t got it here.’

Old Voy nodded approvingly. ‘That’s a wise man. Don’t you tell anyone where you keep your money. The world’s full of thieves these days. You treat that map as if it was money itself. Take it. Pay me any time. I trust you.’

Jason’s heart swelled up, with the map inside his jerkin and Voy trusting him for forty shillings. He mumbled, ‘Thank you. Tomorrow night?’

Voy nodded. ‘Early. At the spinney.’ He jerked his head towards the floor of the vale.

Jason nodded, stepped back, and again vaulted over the hedge on to his father’s land. He felt inside his jerkin to make sure the map had not fallen out. Then he picked up the bill--hook and began to work. Old Voy waved his hand in a courtly gesture and shuffled away along the line of the hedge, his head downcast and moving from side to side as he peered at the ground. ‘No runs along there--I’ve looked,’ Jason called after him with a grin. Old Voy shook his long hair and shuffled on and at last out of sight.

Coromandel!

God’s blood, this hedge never grew right, and every year he was back up here, early spring and end of summer, getting thorns in his hand. The hedge was like a wall, like a prison, only he could look out over the top, and that made it worse. When he’d done here, he had to go down to the orchard. The wasps were thick on the trees now. He’d get stung a couple of times, as usual.

Coromandel!

He put down his bill and got out the map. There was the word. He remembered where it lay in relation to the bloodstain.