‘Your countryman,’ the prince began, ‘the one that is called the Buzzard: did he always have the morals of a pig, even when he was a man?’
Hal made an exhausted attempt at a laugh. ‘He was born a treacherous, thieving rogue. It’s in his blood.’
‘Yes, I thought as much. He has stolen Judith Nazet. This angers me because she was my property …’
‘She is nobody’s property. She is a free woman.’
‘Very clearly, Sir Henry, she is not,’ Jahan pointed out. ‘She is currently the Buzzard’s prisoner, on a ship sailing south. It is my fault. I should have known better. I saw him betray his god for money. A man who will do that has no honour, no shame. If he were a Mussulman and it was known that he had betrayed the prophet, blessings be upon him and Allah, the all-knowing, the all-merciful, in such a fashion, then if he were to die a thousand times it would not be enough. But you are different. You fought for your god.’
‘For my god, for freedom and for the woman I love.’
Jahan gave a rueful sigh and a nod of the head. ‘Ah, I cannot blame you for that, El Tazar. She is a queen among women. She was here, in my harem, and her beauty outshone even my finest concubines. No, fear not, I did not defile her, though I was sorely tempted as any man alive would be.’
‘So why not? You could have raped her. What stopped you?’
‘That is a good question. For of course you are right. Within these walls, and even outside them I may do exactly as I wish. So, what precisely was I thinking …?’ The prince paused for a moment’s thought and then said, ‘She and I spoke. I told her that I was waiting until you were captured. I said that I would force her to give herself to me because if she did not, both she and you would die. She was not concerned for herself, of course, for she is as brave as any man. But she would not want you to suffer for her.’
Hal’s voice was heavy with contempt: ‘Is that how you like to seduce women, by threats of violence if they deny you?’
Jahan’s attitude, which had been one of lordly amiability, suddenly turned as cold as frost. ‘You are either very brave or a very foolish man to make such a suggestion, for I could have you killed for it.’
‘You will have me killed anyway, I have no doubt, if that is what you want,’ Hal said.
‘Yes,’ the prince agreed. ‘But whatever you may think, I am not a man who glories in the power of life and death, as some do. Nor do I take pleasure from hurting women or forcing them to my will. For example, the women of my harem belong to me. They exist to please me, that is their function and they must perform it. But I do not hit them, nor threaten them and you may be sure that the others are always jealous of the one who is my chosen one and wish that they, not she, were enjoying my favours. So it would give me no pleasure to force myself on Judith Nazet, and though I am angered by the defeats she has inflicted on the armies that I sent against her, I do not hate her for them. I respect her. Though she is a woman she fought like a true warrior. If she had been killed in battle, I would have rejoiced. But I came to the conclusion that if I were to take her with threats or violence I would be the one who was most degraded.’
‘That’s a fine speech, I’m sure. But still you put her on the slaver’s block.’
‘That was a matter of necessity – a means of forcing you back to Zanzibar. I wanted to get you here, in front of me, where I could see this barracuda who treated my ships like so many helpless sardines. I wanted you to fight the one-armed monster I had created. I thought it would entertain me.’ The prince looked almost sorry for himself, as though he sought Hal’s sympathy as he said, ‘It is hard, you know, for a man in my position to find something new to entertain himself.’
‘And then your monster betrayed you.’
‘Yes, he did. So now you can do me a great service by killing him.’
‘I have to find him first.’
‘I can help you with that,’ Jahan said. ‘The Buzzard is in league with another Englishman called Benbury.’
‘I know him, he’s the master of a ship called the Pelican,’ Hal said. ‘But he’s not English. He is Scottish.’
‘And that is not the same thing?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Huh,’ said the prince at the surprise of learning something new. ‘In any case, one of this Benbury’s crew was seized when we raided the tavern where you were found. He was persuaded to tell us all he knew about his master’s plans.’
‘I heard screaming during the night,’ Hal said.
‘Persuasion often has that effect. It seems that Captain Benbury and the Buzzard hope to sell your woman to a Portuguese called Lobo. I know of this man. He has a gold mine. I can get you there.’
‘How?’
‘You will leave in three days’ time. You will be taken on a journey that will bring you no pleasure, but it is also the only possible way to get you close to Lobo. If you try to attack him, you will fail. If you pay a social call, he will turn you away, or simply kill you. But there is one way you can get into his mine, though you may wish that you had not. For he works men until they die. And so he always needs new men …’
Hal shrugged his shoulders as if he could not care less. ‘I know what forced labour is like. I have the whip-marks to prove it. I can survive.’
‘Maybe so,’ said Jahan, ‘but first you have to get there. And that will be no easy matter, for the man who will take you would happily kill you first.’
‘It sounds to me as though you want me to die more than the Buzzard,’ Hal said.
‘Puh!’ Prince Jahan looked like a man who had ordered a series of apparently delicious dishes only to find that each tasted worse than the last. ‘I want you all gone, all you Englishmen, Scotsmen … you are all equally unwelcome in my sight. You will be put aboard a ship within the hour. As to which of you dies, and when, that is no longer for me to decide. Let the will of Allah be your judge …’
On the afternoon after the slave market, Mossie sat in the captain’s cabin of the Golden Bough as she lay at anchor off the Zanzibar coast, far enough from the city to avoid prying eyes. His shoulders were slumped and his head downcast as he told a story that was interrupted by more than one burst of tears. ‘I should have done something. Lady Judith has been taken away, Captain Henry is in chains and Mister Tromp is dead. But I didn’t know what to do!’
‘Do not blame yourself, little Sparrow,’ Aboli comforted him. ‘You did exactly what I asked. You followed as close as you could to the captain until he left the island. So it is thanks to you that we know what happened, thanks to you that I could send men to the harbour to find out which ship took Captain Courtney away. Now we know that he was on the Madre de Deus, bound for Quelimane. We know that he is with slaves bound for the gold mines. We would not know any of this without you, Mossie, do you understand?’
The boy nodded his head, feeling a little better thanks to hearing Aboli’s words.
‘Good,’ the first mate continued. ‘Now, Mossie, listen to me as I tell you how we will rescue Captain Courtney.’
The boy nodded eagerly, as if he were listening to an exciting bedtime story.
‘First, we will follow the ship on which our captain is held prisoner. If we catch it at sea, we will attack and take the captain back,’ Aboli said.
‘Will you kill the bad men who took the captain?’
‘Yes, we will look at them like this …’ Aboli contorted his scarred face into a terrifyingly warlike expression that had Mossie shrieking in fear and excitement.
‘Then we will stick our swords and our spears into them like this,’ he lunged his arm forward, ‘and this, and this!’
‘But what if you can’t get to their ship in time?’
‘Ah, then, I will go ashore with my Amadoda brothers. The mines where the captain is going, and Lady Judith too, maybe, are close to our homeland, the Kingdom of the Monomatapa. So we will know the country around us like we know our own hands. And we will get the captain and his lady and bring them back to the coast, wher
e you and Mister Tyler and Mister Fisher and all the crew of the Bough will be waiting for us.’
‘So you will bring Lady Judith and Captain Henry back to us, all safe and well?’ Mossie asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you promise?’
Aboli looked at Mossie with a deep solemnity in his eyes and said, ‘I have known the captain since he was a little baby. He is like my own son to me and I will never let him come to harm. So yes, little Sparrow, I promise. I will bring the captain and Lady Judith back to you.’
ou must eat,’ the girl said, pointing at the plate of goat’s cheese and fruit bought at a market in Zanzibar that she had put on the table over an hour previously. Judith had not touched it, though she was faint with hunger, for it seemed like an act of surrender to accept food given by men who had stolen her. The girl looked at her plaintively. ‘Think of the little one. Even if you can’t face it, you must keep your strength up.’
Judith picked up a piece of cheese and bit into it and the girl gave her a strained smile, half glancing back at the cabin’s door as though she feared what, or who might come through it.
It was dusk and the Pelican had dropped anchor, meaning that the Buzzard would be along soon to check on them: to check on Judith.
When they’d taken her aboard in Zanzibar, they’d shoved Judith into a locked, lightless hold in the bowels of the ship. They gave her a wooden bucket for a latrine and a ragged pair of trousers and a rough canvas smock that had belonged to a cabin-boy – ‘Died of malaria, the little tyke,’ a sailor had informed her – then left her entirely alone aside from occasional deliveries of food and water. Hal had taught her how to tell the time from the ringing of a ship’s bell. So she knew that two days and nights had passed and it was just after ten in the morning, or four bells in the forenoon watch, when a sailor came to the hold, instructed her to follow him and led her to a cabin in the ship’s forecastle. It was cramped and damp but it was far preferable to the hold and Judith had female company there also, for a little while after she had been installed a young woman had been all but thrown into the cabin with her.
‘I will prepare your meals and empty your night soil,’ the girl had stammered, trembling with fear because the Buzzard had been at her shoulder. ‘Whatever I can do to make you more comfortable, such as can be done aboard a ship, I will do.’
‘Thank you,’ Judith said and then addressed the Buzzard. ‘Where are you taking me?’
The solitary eye stared out from its hole and the smiling façade with its white teeth leered, and Judith had looked around the gloomy cabin for anything which she might use as a weapon, just for the satisfaction of lashing out at the foul mask and the even more repellent human being who lurked behind it. She could almost smell the violence coming off him and, unarmed and vulnerable as she was, she realized that she feared him as she had never feared a man before. Judith hated that fear and despised herself for feeling it and yet she could not help herself flinching a little and shielding her unborn child with her hands, as if she feared the Buzzard would take his knife, open her belly and pull the child from her womb.
‘Hold your tongue, woman,’ he rasped in a voice as rough as old rope. ‘Be glad I have given you the wench. There are plenty aboard who would have her, plain as she is.’ And then he had left them, locking the door behind him.
A while passed before the girl spoke again. ‘They told me you’re with child. I had a babe of my own, not so long ago.’ There were tears springing in her eyes with those words, and that was all she said.
Now Judith ate and invited the girl to join her. Once she started she did not stop until the plate was empty, though she let the girl take her share too. Her name was Ann Missen and she had been aboard an East Indiaman bound for Bombay when the topmastman had spied the Pelican seemingly adrift off the southern tip of Madagascar, her mainsail in tatters on the yard as though she had come through a canvas-ripping squall. Assuming the caravel was a merchantman in trouble, the Indiaman’s captain had laid his ship alongside and assured Captain Benbury that he was at the man’s service and would do whatever he could to assist, namely by giving Benbury the spare sail in his hold. That was when men had poured from the Pelican’s hatches and stormed aboard the Indiaman with pistols and steel and slaughter. Ann’s husband, a company clerk out to take up a prestigious post in the Bombay office, fought bravely, killing a man with his pistol before he was hacked to pieces before his young wife’s eyes.
‘I never knew he had such courage in him,’ Ann had said, recounting the tale and Judith had suspected she was still numb from the shock of it, that she had not yet accepted that her husband was gone from her for ever. Judith had not dared ask the girl about her own child, preferring to hope that it had died before the couple had left England for their new life.
Now as they leaned back in their chairs, their stomachs feeling as full as if they’d had a five-course feast, Ann said, ‘Tell me more about your life.’
Ever since the Buzzard had sneeringly addressed Judith as General Nazet on one of his visits to the cabin, Ann had developed an insatiable appetite for stories about Judith’s past: her childhood in the hills of Ethiopia, her travels around Europe and then her military campaigns. ‘What I don’t yet comprehend is how you got to be this general. I mean, why did all those men let a woman lead them?’
‘Perhaps because I was not really raised to be a woman,’ Judith said. ‘I was my father’s only child and so, since he had no son, he taught me everything that he would have taught a boy. I learned to ride and fight with swords and guns. When I had bedtime stories, they were not about princesses and handsome princes, but about the great military leaders like Alexander, Julius Caesar and Hannibal, the greatest of all African generals.’
‘Until you,’ Ann said, for Judith had become her heroine.
Judith laughed. ‘I was no Hannibal! But I did learn about how battles are fought and won, and because my father was a tribal chief, I rode with the men of the tribe and they came to accept me as my father’s heir, as if I were his son. So when the call came for troops to go north to fight for the emperor against the Arab invaders it was I who led my people, for my father was too old and sick to command them. Before we even reached the main army, we encountered some of El Grang’s forces and defeated them. News spread of the victory, so when we arrived at the army’s main encampment all the soldiers were cheering us as we rode in and the women who followed the army were throwing flowers. So the soldiers adopted me. I became their leader, but also their mascot, almost their good luck charm and suddenly I found myself at the head of the entire army, for they would follow nobody else.’
‘I bet all the old men who were generals really hated you for that,’ Ann said. But before Judith could reply a key turned in the lock, the cabin door opened and the Buzzard came in, bringing with him the stench of unwashed bodies and fouler things from the sailors’ quarters adjacent in the forecastle.
‘There’s a storm coming,’ the Buzzard said as the door swung shut behind him. He glanced at the empty plates on the table then stood staring at Judith as he did each evening when he came to check on her. Ann edged away from him, like a hand recoiling from a flame, but the man was not interested in her.
‘Where are you taking me?’ Judith repeated, as she did whenever the Buzzard appeared in their midst.
‘Nowhere you will enjoy,’ he replied, that eye fixed on her, assessing her the way a man appraises a slave at the block before deciding whether or not to bid.
‘Hal Courtney will kill you,’ Judith said. ‘He will find you and he will gut you like the feeble creature you are.’
The man moved, though not towards Judith. He grabbed Ann by the throat and threw her back, pinning her against the cabin’s damp bulkhead. She tried to scream but the sound was pitiful and then the man drove a gloved fist into her stomach and stepped back so that she crumpled to the floor.
The masked man came over to Judith who protected her belly but otherwise faced up to him, her chin r
aised, inviting him to strike her face.
He was so close that it was all she could do not to close her eyes for fear that his wicked beak might peck them out.
‘See what happens to the girl when you disobey me,’ the Buzzard’s voice rasped through the mask’s mouth slit. Behind him Ann lay in the dark corner, curled in on herself and gasping for breath. ‘I have an interest in keeping you bright-eyed and hale as a prize hog. But her …’ he jerked his head back. ‘She is nothing. Mine to do with as I please.’
‘You are a coward,’ Judith spat.
The Buzzard turned and walked over to the girl, who whimpered, one arm raised in a feeble defence. He bent and knocked the arm aside then slapped her across the face with enough force to drive her head back against the timbers. He straightened and turned back to Judith.
‘You see what’s happening here?’
Judith would have given anything to fly at him now and tear at his flesh with her bare hands. No, not anything. Not the child.
She nodded.
‘Good. When the storm hits us you will be safe enough if you sit on the floor and hold on to the leg of the cot,’ he said, nodding towards Judith’s bed. Ann had no bed, just a few blankets on the bare boards. ‘Or you could hold on to each other,’ he said, tilting his head on one side while he thought about that. In three strides he reached the cabin door and opened it, then stopped at the threshold.
‘Don’t waste your strength praying for your gallant young hero to rescue you and have his vengeance on the rest of us,’ he said. ‘Courtney is dead. He was taken to his execution like a bullock to the slaughterhouse.’
And with that he was gone.
he Madre de Deus was hell afloat. A Portuguese three-masted merchantman, she plied the seas on the endless circuit by which gimcrack trade goods were exchanged for African human beings who were then transported in her holds to the slave markets of the New World, or the East Indies, or the Ottoman Empire. It mattered not to her owner and captain João Barros whom he carried, where they went, or who bought them in the end. So long as he was paid that was all he cared about.