Trade Wind (82 page)

The torn shirt dangled limply from the grille and he stared at it because it was a light-coloured thing against the dark wood, and because he had nothing else to look at. And then all at once he saw that it could still bring him all the water he needed.

It did not take long to tear it into strips and tie them together so that one end, knotted to give it extra weight, could be tossed out between the bars and reach to where the rain poured down from the verandah edge. He hit the pillar with the first try, and drew it back and reinforced the knot with his handkerchief, and tossed it out again. And this time it fell true.

Neither shirt nor handkerchief were anywhere near clean, while the rain was mixed with the mud and dust and filth of the baking days. But Rory sucked the drenched material with a greater appreciation than he had ever accorded to any wine, and flung it back and retrieved it again; repeating the process at least a dozen times before his thirst was even partly quenched, and at the last squeezing water into the tin mug and the empty basin, until both were filled and he was assured of a reserve supply.

He had not been conscious of hunger while his tongue and his parched throat had been crying out for water, but now that the edge was off his thirst the fact that he had eaten nothing for close on two days began to make itself felt. But hunger seemed a trivial thing and easy enough to bear when compared with the craving for water that had made a hell of the past forty hours or so. He knew that he could endure ten times as long without food before reaching the stage to which thirst had reduced him so swiftly. The dark forebodings of the night and the past hours, the dizziness and the despair, had sprung from thirst and vanished with its slaking, and he realized that he must have been mad to strip the skin off his hands wrenching at those unyielding bars of iron, for even if he had succeeded in bending them apart he still could not have squeezed his body through the narrow space. As for that lunatic assault on the door, it had been an even crazier action, since no human battering-ram could have broken it down or burst those massive hinges.

He looked at it now, painfully aware of his sore shoulders and wondering how he could have been guilty of such senseless hysteria. And as his gaze fell on the cumbersome lock something seemed to click in his brain.

He did not move for a long time, and it seemed to him that he did not breathe. He sat very still, his body rigid and his gaze fixed, while the sweat crawled coldly down his unshaven face and the flies settled unheeded on his bruised back and shoulders. The slow minutes slid away to the tune of rain splashing loudly and steadily into the courtyard outside, and at last he got carefully to his feet, moving as cautiously as though he were afraid of waking a sleeper, and reached out a hand that shook uncontrollably.

The crude iron handle felt rough and clammy to the touch, but it turned easily enough, and though the door had swelled with the damp so that he was forced to ignore the pain of his lacerated hands and push at it, it opened.

The negro, Limbili, dragged shouting and threatening from the cell, and already in the grip of the cholera, had forgotten to use the key that he carried at his belt, and Rory had bruised his shoulders and torn his hands on a door that he could have opened at any time during the past forty-two hours.

He began to laugh, and laughing, tumbled out into the courtyard and stood in the lashing rain, letting it sluice off him in a cleansing torrent that washed away the sweat and dirt and stink of the last days; the tiredness and the fear.

He stood with his face turned up to it and felt it beat against his eyelids and fill his open mouth, and strength returned to him; and with it an enormous exhilaration. He stretched his arms wide and laughed in that drenched, deserted place where even the torrential fall of the monsoon rain could not submerge the smell of death; or drown the intoxication of being out in the open again after those slow weeks of intolerable confinement in the semi-darkness of a cramped and evil-smelling cell. By contrast with that darkness even the grey daylight seemed brilliant to him, and the tainted air fresh and clean, and he breathed it in deeply: savouring it as though it were incense and careless of the fact that he stood in full view of anyone who might enter the Fort, or might still be in it.

He must have stood there for at least ten minutes before a sound that was not the splashing of the rain broke his trance, and he wiped the wet out of his eyes and stepped back quickly behind the nearest pillar. Someone was coming down the verandah, walking hesitantly and wearing shoes with iron nails, for above the insistent drumming of the rain he could hear the click of metal on stone, and a shuffling, dragging sound that drew inexorably nearer and stopped at last within a yard of him, on the far side of the pillar.

Rory stayed still, rigid and listening. The Fort was filled with the noise of rain and for the space of several minutes he could hear no other sound. Then suddenly he was startled by a sigh; long-drawn, desolate and inhuman. A sound so full of despair that it made his skin prickle and the hair lift on his scalp, and he moved involuntarily: and saw that the intruder was nothing more alarming than a tired, mud-splashed horse trailing a length of broken rope.

The sight served to bring him sharply back to reality, for it was not only proof that the main gate was still open and unguarded, but suggested that the situation in the city might be even worse than he supposed if animals such as this were roaming loose and masterless on the waterfront, and in this condition. The horse was a pure-bred Arab mare, and it was bleeding from a number of wounds that were not only recent but had undoubtedly been caused by teeth. Rory regarded them thoughtfully, and recalling the pariah dogs of the previous night, lost his exhilaration and was abruptly sobered. If the pariahs, normally the most cringing and cowardly of creatures, had taken to attacking runaway horses, it meant that they were becoming bold and savage on a diet of fresh meat; and if so the sooner he got away from here, and clear of the city, the better.

He had given no thought as to where he should go, but looking at the horse it occurred to him that luck had decided the matter for him by providing him with a mount The
Virago
had gone and it would not be possible to return to The Dolphins’ House, or embarrass the Sultan by asking him for asylum. And though he had other friends in the city, they would have troubles enough of their own to contend with at such a time and he could not add to them. There remained
Kivulimi
: The House of Shade. He would be safe enough there, and it would be a deal quicker and less hazardous to make the journey on horseback than on foot.

Rory rubbed the mare’s nose, and picking up the trailing rope, led the animal away under the empty, rain-loud arches, past the blind cells with their gaping doors and the silent figure of a man who had crawled into an angle of the wall and died there. The door of the guardroom immediately inside the gate stood open, and he paused, and after a brief hesitation, hitched the rope to the latch and went in—to be rewarded by the discovery of a length of dun-coloured country-made cloth that had evidently been used as a sheet A quick search disclosed nothing else that could be used as a covering, but the sheet would serve, and he could not afford to be too particular, since at the moment his sole garment consisted of drenched and dirty trousers of unmistakably European cut.

He hoped that the late owner of the sheet had not died of cholera, but that was a risk that would have to be taken, and he did not waste time worrying about it Setting swiftly to work he tore a long strip from the cloth and wound it about his head and across the lower part of his face, Tuareg-fashion, and having rolled his trousers to the knee, tied the remainder about his waist so that it covered him from waist to calf in the manner of the seamen from the dhows. There were a pair of heavy leather sandals in one comer of the room, and he appropriated them gratefully, and releasing the uneasy mare, went out through the deserted gate and into the grey, concealing veil of the falling rain.

The wind had not found its way into the Fort, for it was blowing from the northeast, and the high Fort walls and tall, close-crowding buildings of the city had kept it at bay. But here in the open it sent Rory’s makeshift garment flapping wetly against his legs, and he could hear the boom of surf breaking along the harbour front.

Despite the rain there seemed to be a great many birds on the foreshore, and the pouring day was filled with the sound of wings and screaming gull voices and the harsh cawing of quarrelling crows. The mare snorted and shied as half a dozen mangy pariah dogs trotted past making for the beach, but there were few men to be seen and fewer ships in the harbour, and the charnel-house smell that defied the rain and penetrated the drenched fold of cloth that covered Rory’s nose and mouth made him think gratefully of
Kivulimi
.

The gardens of The House of Shade would be green and full of flowers, and the bay below it clean sand and clear water. Old Daud the caretaker would still be living peacefully in his room by the gate, undisturbed by the cholera, since the nearest village was a full two miles distant, and there was little reason to visit it while the kitchen gardens provided fruit and coconuts, vegetables and maize, the sea was full of fish, and Daud kept both chickens and goats.

No one would come looking for a missing prisoner there, for there would be other and more important things to occupy the authorities than the fate of Captain Emory Frost of the
Virago
, And in a day or two it was going to be impossible to identify the bodies of those who had died in the Fort, or even tell whether one of them had been a white man. As for his parole, Rory had no qualms on that score for he had certainly not plotted an escape. He had merely found himself abandoned by his jailers and walked out, and even that stiff-necked stickler for the letter of the law, Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul in Zanzibar, would hardly expect him to remain behind an unlocked door and starve himself to death in the deserted Fort!—though Rory suspected that Dan Larrimore, placed in a similar position, would have proceeded to the Consulate, explained the situation, and given himself up.

But then Dan was that sort of upright fool, thought Rory, who had no sympathy with priggishness and heroics though he had always had a certain sympathy for Dan. Chasing slave traders in these waters, where every man’s hand was against you and even the slaves themselves accepted their fate as an immutable law of nature and were apt to regard their deliverer as mad, must be a thankless task—its only rewards heat, discomfort and exile, the abuse of all who owned slaves and the hatred of those who sold them, the dumb incomprehension of the freed and the loud imputations of base and selfish motives expressed by Christian nations who should have known better.

Dan’s job was no sinecure, and Rory smiled a little grimly at the thought of his own frequent contributions to Lieutenant Larrimore’s troubles. He hoped that Dan was enjoying a brief period of respite while conveying Miss Cressida Hollis and wives and families of the Western residents to the Cape.

The rain drove into his eyes and he cupped a hand about them and peered under it at the harbour and the few grey shapes that rocked at anchor…And there—unbelievably, impossibly—was the
Virago
!

Even at that range and seen through the slanting lines of rain there was no mistaking her. He would have recognized her at twice the distance and by almost any light She had
not
gone! Dan and the Colonel had cheated him! Or else—or else…

He would not even frame the thought, but he drove his heels into the flanks of the shivering horse, urging it to a gallop, and rode for that part of the shore that was nearest to the anchored schooner.

He had never known a day when the waterfront was not crowded or the beach free of an ugly litter of jetsam, among which the corpse of a slave flung overboard from a dhow was no uncommon sight. But today there were no crowds, and not one corpse but twenty: victims of the cholera thrown into the creek for disposal and carried out by the tide to be stranded on the sands of the harbour. The waterfront was silent and deserted, except for the crows and the seagulls and a number of pariah dogs, who between them were disposing of the dead.

There were no boats, either. Any that had been left drawn up on the beach had been stolen long ago by panic-stricken citizens fleeing from the infection, and Rory waded into the sea and making a trumpet of his hands hailed the schooner. But no one answered him. The
Virago
rocked and swung at her moorings, wraith-like in the grey sea and the falling rain, her decks deserted and her hatches battened down, and no one on watch.

Rory hailed her again, but the wind snatched his voice away and lost it among the voices of the rain and the surf and the mewing of the gulls, and he knew that he was wasting his breath. There was no one to hear him; and if he swam out to her he would not only be wasting time, but energy as well.

He returned to the horse, and mounting again, wrenched brutally on the wet rope that served for a bridle, and turning from the harbour and the road that would have taken him to
Kivulimi
, rode back in the direction he had come from: heading for The Dolphins’ House and riding with a reckless disregard for his own neck and die safety of any passing pedestrian.

35

It was on the day following Captain Frost’s incarceration in the Arab Fort that Dan brought the first news of the cholera to Mr Hollis.

The citizens of Zanzibar took a casual view of a disease that was always among them, and they had not at first been unduly disturbed at its appearance in the Malindi quarter, or taken the trouble to report it. Even Colonel Edwards’ normally efficient grape-vine had failed to recognize its importance and neglected to mention it: with the result that the Colonel as well as Lieutenant Larrimore was inclined to regard Rory Frost’s statements on that subject as deliberately alarmist, and almost certainly made with some ulterior motive in view—probably (as Larrimore had suggested) the acquiring of hostages. Nevertheless, he had made enquiries, and elicited the information that there had indeed been two cases of cholera in the Malindi quarter, though there was no reason to suppose that they indicated the beginning of a serious epidemic.