Golden Lion (22 page)

Not suffering from either ailment, he saw no need to go in and waited outside while Judith went in to browse among the sacks of herbs, the phials of potions and the various pills and powders that the venerable proprietor, his skin as dry, brown and translucent as ancient parchment, kept on shelves that ran along the full width and most of the height of one wall. There were rows of neatly labelled jars and bottles and a hundred herbal infusions: sassafras root tea to cleanse the blood, jimsonweed for rheumatism, chestnut leaf tea for asthma, mint and cow manure tea for consumption, and many more besides.

Judith explained that she was Egyptian, a member of the Coptic Church en route to a new life in the Indies with her husband, an English merchant, and mentioned that they were looking for lodgings for just a few nights until the ship that was due to take them on the next leg of their journey arrived. The apothecary seemed very interested in her need for a place to stay, so she said that her husband would be happy to pay a very good rate for suitable accommodation.

That she had funds had already been established by the considerable quantity of remedies, soothing teas and tinctures, and cosmetic preparations she had already ordered, for Judith, having found a shop that was a veritable treasure trove, had decided that she might as well stock up for what was going to be a long voyage with few creature comforts.

‘I have some rooms that I could make available to you. They are very modest indeed and assuredly far inferior to those to which you are accustomed. Nevertheless for a very modest consideration I could offer them to you.’

‘May I see these rooms, please?’ Judith asked.

‘Of course, of course … but please excuse me, I will only be a moment.’

The apothecary disappeared and a moment later Judith could hear the distant sound of a marital dispute as the apothecary tried to persuade his wife that they should vacate their home and spend the next few days staying with their daughter, who evidently lived just a few doors down the road.

Realizing that the resolution of this dispute might be a while in coming, Judith took her purchases outside, removed one or two items that she thought she would need in the next day or two and asked Hal in her sweetest tones – the ones that he had long since realized meant ‘this is an order’ – whether one of his men could kindly take everything back to the
Delft
.

Judith was just browsing through yet more sacks of vividly coloured seeds, herbs and even petals when the apothecary reappeared, and said, ‘Follow me please,’ and led her past a scowling elderly lady to a modest apartment, comprising three simply furnished rooms and a flat roof shaded with old sailcloth. There was a clear view of the waterfront and beyond that the sea. Judith could even pick out the
Delft
– or rather, the
Christina
– bobbing at her mooring. Hal, she knew, would be glad of the ability to keep an eye on his ship. For her part, she could see that the apothecary’s wife was a diligent housekeeper for the whole place was spotlessly clean. It also benefited from the combination of fresh sea breezes wafting in from the roof terrace and the heady, herbal scents from the shop downstairs.

‘I might be interested,’ she told the apothecary, knowing that too great a display of eagerness would be fatal to her chances of securing a decent price. ‘How much?’

He promptly named an outrageously excessive sum, to which Judith then replied with the offer of a pittance. They spent an enjoyable few minutes haggling back and forth and then, honour satisfied on both sides, agreed on a sum that both of them would have considered reasonable from the start.

Hal returned with a pair of sailors carrying a chest in which were a number of items of clothing and – for he was well aware that Zanzibar was a place in which one could not afford to be unarmed – the Neptune sword and a fine pair of pistols that had once belonged to his father. Once the chest had been deposited and Judith had begun unpacking, Hal first settled the bill for Judith’s purchases and then sat down to write a letter to Consul Grey in which he apologized for any misunderstanding that may have occurred over his activities during the recent, but now thankfully concluded war in Ethiopia; hoped that the consul had not suffered any undue inconveniences as a result of said misunderstandings; requested an audience with the consul, explaining that he was travelling in the company of Mr William Pett of the East India Company, who would be very grateful for the consul’s assistance in finding him swift passage back to England; and finally added that he had various items of correspondence that also needed to be sent back to their shared mother country. ‘I am sure that the knowledge that we are united as true Englishmen, loyal to our King and Country, will outweigh any minor disputes we may in the past have had,’ Hal concluded. There was, however, no mention of Judith. Zanzibar was a place where nothing could stay secret long. There was no sense in doing anything that might indicate that General Nazet, of all people, was present there.

Hal re-read his work and decided that it would do the job admirably. He sent one of his most reliable men off to deliver the missive by hand. Then he, Judith and Aboli, with two seamen acting as guards, set off to see the city, the noisy bazaars and the crowded souks.

‘The blessings of Allah upon you!’ young boys chirruped, trying to grab hold of Hal or Judith in order to lead them to their family’s stalls. Aboli would try to scare them off with growls and fierce expressions, but with limited success.

They passed stalls selling ivory and gum Arabic, a substance prized for its sweetness as well as its adhesive properties. There were baskets full of spices and stalls of shimmering silks and carpets from Muscat whose sellers unrolled them, proclaiming the expert craftsmanship of the weave to Judith as the party passed. There were slaves too; men, women, boys and girls, chained in sorry-looking lines and guarded by thugs brandishing cutlasses or clubs. The slavers themselves, or their quartermasters more often than not, stood there hawking their human stock, pointing out the men’s strong arms and shoulders, the women’s breasts and skilled hands, and sometimes even the private parts of the young girls, which so disgusted Hal and the others that they would deliberately look the other way so as not to encourage the slavers.

At times the streets became so narrow that the flow of people along them slowed to a crawl, like blood clotting in the veins of the town, and here it was cooler because the sunlight rarely found its way in. Those tenants in the top apartments could almost reach out and touch the buildings opposite, and crows and starlings chattered noisily overhead.

At one choke point, where a vendor stood grilling octopus, squid and oysters, this sea’s bounty flavoured with mouth-watering spices, a blind man stood upon an old upended crate decrying the iniquity of those who turned their back on Jesus to follow instead the false god and his prophet Mohammed.

‘You will live to see the end of days!’ the man called, his blind eyes reminding Hal of the whitish pulpy lychee fruits a boy had tried to sell him earlier. ‘You will be cast into torment and the eternal abyss for you have betrayed He that created us in His own image!’

There were plenty of Mussulmen passing but none of them seemed to pay the blind man any attention and neither did he seem afraid for his life, despite disparaging the faith of those who controlled Zanzibar.

‘He is like the hadeda bird,’ Aboli said. ‘He chatters so much that they grow used to him. After a while they do not hear him at all.’

‘This island is extraordinary,’ Hal said, his eyes taking in the flow of faces going by. There were black faces, white, brown and yellow and every shade in between. The eyes were almond-shaped or bulbous and popping, and the noses were flat, curved or beaked. Hair was woolly or silken, black or golden, in this cauldron of humanity where the blood of European, Bantu and Arab was mingled with that of the inhabitants of so many other lands that were washed by the western portion of the Indian Ocean.

‘When my father led an embassy to Venice, on behalf of our former emperor, Iyasu’s father, I became used to the crowds of people from different nations crowding the piazzas, or going to and fro on the canals. But even that was nothing like this.’ Judith gave a wry, dry laugh. ‘But then, Venice was Europe, Zanzibar is Africa. This is a hotter, wilder, more savage continent.’

She took Hal’s arm in hers and leant in close. ‘Maybe I should have brought my armour,’ she joked, and Hal remembered how fine she had looked in her polished mail hauberk beneath a white tunic, mounted on a black Arabian stallion with its golden armour and crest of ostrich feathers. When Hal had first met Judith in her glorious war gear, he had thought she was a man. He had known her only as General Nazet and had never conceived that the famous warrior and leader might be a woman. Looking at her beside him now, and knowing every inch of her supremely female body as he did, Hal wondered how he could ever have been thus deluded.

‘You will have to stay close to me, Captain Courtney,’ Judith said, her breath against his ear enough to have his loins stirring, urging him to take her back to their lodgings and the soft bed awaiting them.

‘Have no fear, my love,’ he said, ‘I swear I shall protect you. You are quite safe with me.’

She smiled demurely and kissed his cheek though her eyes darted hither and thither as they drank in the sights all around them, and Hal grinned back, enchanted to experience Zanzibar through her eyes, as though he were seeing it himself for the first time.

His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden outburst of jeering and shouting. Just ahead of them a crowd had gathered around a slaver’s block. The slaver, a Portuguese man in rusty back- and breast-plates, was struggling to hold on to a rope on the end of which a black boy struggled and fought like a hooked mackerel.

To roars of laughter the slaver leant back and hauled the boy towards him so that the lad sprawled in the dirt. There were Arabs in finely embroidered gowns and headdresses, hard-bitten Portuguese merchants, ship’s captains, agents, craftsmen looking for cheap labour and quartermasters looking for slaves with experience as crew aboard merchantmen. There were stall traders too, these having been drawn away from their own businesses by all the excitement.

The man kicked the boy where his ribs showed beneath the skin but the boy did not cry out. Instead he grabbed hold of the slaver’s leg, wrapped his thin arms around it and held on for all his worth. Which would not be much, because few would bid for such a wildling.

The other slaves, three Africans and a European, cowered nearby, afraid of their owner’s wrath and the tall, armed guard who held on to the rope which bound them all together.

As men’s and women’s voices joined in a cacophony of harsh shouts and high-pitched screeches, all offering their view on what was happening the slaver drew his pistol and, gripping it by its long barrel, began to beat him with the stock. But the boy had other ideas and he bit into the soft flesh of the man’s bare calf so that he bellowed.

‘Stop! Leave him!’ Judith called out in Arabic, pushing through to the front of the crowd, shrugging off their hands as Hal and Aboli tried to restrain her.

‘What is it to you?’ the slaver demanded. Hal grimaced. The last thing they needed was to draw this kind of attention.

‘Come away,’ he growled at Judith, tugging at her arm. She stood firm.

‘What it is to me is I do not like my slaves damaged before I buy them.’

‘You want to buy this little brat?’ he demanded with surprise.

She nodded. ‘But I won’t pay you more than half a silver rupee.’

The boy looked up, equally astonished, and Hal saw him properly now. He could not have been more than twelve years old. Under the dirt and grime his skin was the same colour as Judith’s, the dark gold of fresh acacia gum.

‘Done!’ the slaver shouted hurriedly. ‘Sold to the lovely lady with a good eye for a bargain!’ and struck the wooden auction block with the pistol’s barrel to confirm the sale.

With a shrug of resignation, Hal slipped a small coin from his purse and flipped it across to the slaver. That worthy placed his foot on the boy’s backside and gave him a hearty shove. The boy bolted like a jack rabbit, ducked under Judith’s outstretched arms, and kept running, but not for much further.

Aboli reached out a long black arm and grabbed him by the scruff. When he lifted him the boy’s legs kept on oscillating wildly in the air.

‘Where do you think you are going?’ he asked in not unkindly tones. ‘You belong to my lady now, Mossie.’

‘Mossie?’ Hal asked.

‘It means sparrow. And I think it’s a perfect name for him,’ Judith answered, with a smile. ‘However, I don’t think you are going very far, are you, my Mossie?’ The child stopped churning the air with his thin stick-like legs, and drooped pathetically in Aboli’s great fist. Then with an obvious effort he renewed his defiance.

‘I will not be a good slave!’ Mossie glared at Judith. ‘You just wait and see.’

Hal decided that it was time for him to take over negotiations. He crouched on his haunches so that his eyes were on a level with Mossie’s. ‘I don’t have slaves on my ship, and that’s where you’re going, on my ship. So if you insist on being a slave, I will just have to throw you overboard for the sharks to eat. Is that what you want, Mossie?’

Mossie glared at him sullenly, but his eyes filled with tears, making it clear that was not what he had in mind, at all. Hal winked up at Judith, and she understood that was his signal for her to intervene.

‘Mossie, I will pay you a copper penny for every month you work as my bodyguard on board the ship, and I promise no sharks.’ He looked at her with sudden increased interest.

Hal felt his devils urging him for a little more fun, so he cut in again. ‘I will pay you two copper pennies a month.’ He raised on Judith’s offer.

Mossie barely glanced in his direction. ‘No.’ He shook his head.

‘Why not?’ Hal demanded.

‘Because she speaks my language much better than you do, and besides that …’ He broke off, and looked away with embarrassment.