Golden Lion (36 page)

Rivers had read the auction perfectly. There was only one other bidder left against him now and the price had reached the dizzying heights of three lakhs of silver, a sum far, far greater than any ever paid for a single slave. Courtney would have to sell his ship, give up all his family’s wealth and mortgage his balls to raise the money, but that wasn’t Rivers’s problem.

He was just about to make what he felt sure would be the winning bid when he felt both his arms being grabbed from either side, and the prick of a knife, cutting through his coat and into the skin at the small of his back. ‘Begging your pardon, Captain,’ a voice growled in his ears. ‘But Captain Benbury sends you his compliments and says that if you walk away, right now, and go back to your ship, all nice and peaceful like, we won’t be obliged to kill you.’

‘Well, you can tell your damn captain …’ Rivers began. Then he stopped and thought and considered the fact that the
Delft
was already in his possession and he would much rather be alive to enjoy the added firepower it would bring to his private fleet and so he concluded, ‘Tell him I wish him a good day and I’d be obliged if you’d let me pass, for I believe my presence is required aboard ship.’

Grey was watching the auction with one eye, while at the same time casting discreet little glances in Courtney’s direction. The captain of the guard had secreted a group of his men dressed in civilian clothes to one side of the enclosure. It said much for their disguises that he was unable to spot them making their way towards Courtney, even though he knew that they were doing so. And if he, being aware of their plans, could not distinguish the men in the crowd, how could their prey possibly do so?

Hal’s entire attention was concentrated on the auction block. The tension created by the bidding process was unbearable. As the price rose higher and higher he stopped worrying about whether he could afford it. He would be impoverished, that much was obvious. He might well be in debt for years to come, perhaps even the rest of his life. But if he had Judith and his son – for surely she was bearing him a boy – by his side, that would be riches enough.

He turned to Tromp, just for a brief moment of moral support, but the Dutchman wasn’t there. Hal thought nothing of it. The movement of men in the public enclosure was much like water against a shore – a continual pattern of ebbing and flowing and eddying and it was all too easy for two men to become separated in the confusion.

He turned back to look at the auction. It took him a second to register that the bidding had stopped. The auctioneer was calling out to ‘the English gentleman’ asking him if he wished to raise his bid.
That’s Rivers
, Hal thought.
What the hell is he up to?

And then something hit him in the stomach, driving the breath from his body and causing him to double up in pain. Then he was hit again on the back of the head.

And that was the last Hal Courtney knew of the slave auction.

he men who had shoved their way into the enclosure when the entrance gate had first been opened had known that they faced a goodly wait before proceedings began, followed by a lengthy sale. Many had therefore brought canteens of water, assorted items of food to keep hunger at bay and even the odd tot of rum. One group of half-a-dozen tars, who established a little camp in front of the covered enclosure, had arrived with a regular feast of ship’s provisions, freshly bought produce and even two wooden casks containing small beer, or watered-down ale, which was traditionally drunk as a means of making water palatable and less risky to one’s health. One of the casks was soon drunk dry. The other, however, rolled under the first row of seats in the pavilion. What with all the people milling around, it would have taken a very sharp eye indeed to see the black line of gunpowder that ran from the open bunghole at the top of the cask just a few feet to where the tars were standing, eating, drinking and even smoking pipes of tobacco as they followed the proceedings on the auction block.

But one of the sailors was not watching the block at all. He had his eye on the prince’s enclosure. And when the Buzzard came to the front and nodded his head he puffed on his pipe to get a nice glow, stuck a piece of paper into its bowl and waited until it caught fire, then applied that flame to the line of powder.

The flame ran along the line and into the cask and ignited the pitch-covered rags that had been bundled into it. Then they went up too and seconds later the cry went up from the stands, ‘Fire! Help! Fire!’

The sale had not been concluded, but the auctioneer wasn’t waiting for the final bid. He grabbed Judith, almost threw her down from the block and then he and his trusties dragged her back into the pen from which she’d been led not so many minutes earlier.

The man in the mask was waiting for them. ‘I’m taking her,’ he said.

The auctioneer hesitated. His trusties were wide-eyed at the sight of that mask with its evil eyes and jagged teeth. ‘But my money,’ he protested. ‘I was assured that I would be paid a commission, even though there would be no sale.’

‘Go to the palace in the morning. You’ll get your money. But I’m taking her,’ the Buzzard said. Then he grabbed the rope to which Judith was tethered and said, ‘I can drag you by this or you can run like a human being, but I’m getting you out of here, come what may.’

Judith could hear the panic coming from the auction enclosure. ‘Are you taking me back to the palace?’ she asked.

The Buzzard nodded. She followed him through the barracoon, moving further away from the chaos caused by the fire to a gate at the far end of the complex. The prince’s carriage was waiting there, the one with the blanked-out windows. ‘Get in,’ the Buzzard said. ‘You’ll be safer if no one can see you.’

Judith did as she was told, seeing the sense in his words. Even before the fire, she’d been able to sense the strange tension in the air. There were so many men, so much pent-up lust, and greed and raw male energy. She’d spent enough time around armies to know that those ingredients exploded all too easily into violence.

Dear God, please bring Hal safely out of harm’s way
, she prayed. And then she consoled herself with a simple thought.
If he is safe, and I am still in the prince’s palace then we may not be together, but at least there is still hope.

Only when she was sitting in the carriage did she stop to wonder why she still had her hands bound behind her back and the rope and halter round her neck. She had never been treated like that when she was the prince’s prisoner. So why was the Buzzard leaving her bound and helpless now?

The Buzzard saw Judith into the back of the carriage and pushed his own slave in there too. Then he walked around to the front and held up his arm towards the driver. ‘Can you help me up please?’ he asked, nodding his beak at the empty space on the seat next to the driver.

The carriage driver reached down to pull the Buzzard up.

The Buzzard took the other man’s hand in his and then, without the slightest warning, pulled with all his strength, catching the driver off-guard and off-balance and pulling him right off his seat and down onto the ground.

Even as the driver was falling, the Buzzard had let go of him. Then he pulled out his sword and brought it in a backhanded arc that sliced right across the driver’s throat.

As the other man lay on the ground, asphyxiating in a pool of his own blood, the Buzzard pulled himself up onto the seat of the carriage, grabbed the reins in his three-fingered hand and screamed at the horses to go. The animals heard the anger and urgency in his voice and all but bolted, sending the carriage racing away down the street.

Grey had only been a few paces from the spot where the fire started. He was one of the first to sound the alarm and then the first to make good his escape. The captain of the guard’s first priority was to organize the prince’s safe evacuation. But once he knew that his master was safely aboard a carriage, heading back to the palace, he returned to the auction site to supervise matters there.

Grey found him a few minutes later. Having established, for form’s sake, that the prince was unharmed, Grey asked the question that was his real concern. ‘Have you got Courtney?’ he asked.

The captain shook his head. ‘No. My men spotted him standing just where you said. They went to the place. But then the fire broke out. By the time they reached where Courtney had been standing, he had disappeared.’

‘So he must have escaped with everyone else who was leaving the enclosure.’

The guards’ captain shook his head. ‘No. My men have been looking. They have been watching the crowd … while they were still in the enclosure, as they were leaving, in the streets afterwards. They cannot find El Tazar anywhere.’

‘Then I will have to find him,’ said Consul Grey, and thought, but did not add aloud,
For my future prosperity depends upon
it
.

The carriage rattled to a halt, the door was flung open and the Buzzard was standing there. ‘Get out,’ he growled.

Judith frowned. The Buzzard was blocking most of her view of the outside world, but what she could see bore no relation to the palace.

‘Where am I?’ she asked.

The Buzzard did not reply. Instead he just said, ‘Get her.’

He stepped aside to reveal two other men, one white, the other African, standing there. They made a move to get into the carriage. Judith scuttled away from them, opened the opposite door and threw herself out …

Straight into the arms of another man. He caught her and held her as if she were no more of a burden than a baby. She screamed in alarm, but he simply threw her over one of his shoulders and holding her fast started running across an area of large paving stones, down a wooden pontoon that Judith could see was floating on the water. Then the man was jumping through the air and landing on the small planked area, like a miniature deck at the stern of a longboat. The moment his feet hit the boat the man was shouting, ‘Pull, you bastards, pull!’

Grey went back to his house; summoned his servants; gave them each a list of names, belonging to everyone from respectable carpet sellers to downright criminals; told them where the names on their lists were likely to be found and then sent them out across Zanzibar City. Then he too took to the streets, although the men whom he sought were the highest in the city, rather than the dregs whom his servants sought.

The wealthy merchants and Omani aristocrats to whom Grey spoke had little to offer him in his search for Captain Courtney. But when the servants returned to the house, one or two of them had worthwhile information. This led him to some new names and from them to a particular quarter of the city. And then Consul Grey discovered what had happened to Courtney, and what was going to happen to him very shortly. He thought for a moment of intervening himself, but realized that would be a futile and possibly even fatal gesture. In order to achieve the result he required, Grey needed help.

And that being the case, he might as well go to the man who could offer the most help available. And with that thought in mind, Grey set off for Prince Jahan’s palace.

al came to and opened his eyes. He could see nothing. He tried to talk but could not speak. Then he felt the bandana tied tight around his head and tasted the gag in his mouth. He was sitting on a floor with his back against a wall. His hands were tied and his ankles were bound. He was, in short, entirely helpless.

He could hear, though, and he could smell and those two senses were more than enough to tell him that he was in a place that stank of dogs and their filth and that there was a dog, a large one by the sound of it, growling in the very near vicinity.

Hal felt a shot of raw fear grip his body. If the dog attacked him there would be nothing he could do. He heard shouting somewhere close by and then the more distant sound of barking. That set off the dog and the sound of its raucous growls was followed by the shouts of a man trying to keep it quiet, the crack of a whip and a series of resentful canine yelps.