Secret of the Sands (7 page)

Before dusk, Zena is delivered to a room on the first floor that smells faintly of incense. There is a wide bed, a carved screen, an ornate rug with velvet cushions of red and yellow scattered about it, a window covered with a wooden shutter and evenly spaced brass lamps ready to be lit for the evening. Beside the bed there lies a covered flask of water flavoured with mint, a box containing rose jelly and another of honeyed pistachios. Zena inspects everything and then sits on the bed. It does not seem like a child’s room. She waits until the
muezzin
has made the call to prayer. She waits until the sun has sunk from the sky and it is absolutely dark. The scent of night flowers wafts in through the window on the perfumed air from tubs far below outside – moonflowers, nicotiana and jasmine. She desperately tries not to doze but her belly is full, her skin is silken and the cushions are tempting. In the end, she succumbs and cannot help but fall fast, fast asleep.

What raises her is a strange noise. A cackle. She jumps up into the pitch darkness, panicked, and it takes her a second or two to realise where she is. She trips over a small table and then recovers her balance. Then in a flash she remembers.

Before her there is a man in the doorway carrying a torch that flickers in the breeze from the window. The bright flame sends strange shadows over his face so that she cannot tell what he really looks like. But he is finely dressed in a long, bright robe. His dark hair flows like a woman’s and when he smiles he has the teeth of an animal, white, bared and ready. He cackles again – the sound a hyena might make, or a dog. Zena falls to her knees.

‘
Salaam
,’ she whispers, drawing her hands together in supplication and raising her eyes only high enough to see that he wears an array of gold rings on his long fingers.

‘They sent you?’ the man asks.

Zena nods and looks up at him. ‘I was bought today. In the marketplace.’

The man laughs and beckons her towards him. Now she can see that he is younger than she first thought – perhaps twenty or so. He motions her to turn around so he can inspect her.

‘What did you fetch?’

‘Two hundred dollars, I think.’

He casts his eye over her coldly. ‘They think this will tempt me,’ he says in a derisory tone, but the comment is not directed at Zena – he is talking to himself and has turned away. He puts down the lamp and proceeds to sit on the plump cushions by the window, picking up a sweet from the rosewood box and chewing it as he mulls things over.

‘Light, girl!’ he calls.

Zena hovers for a moment behind him, and then realising that he means her, she springs into action, taking the lamp from the low table and lighting the others one by one. The room gradually takes on a buttery glow. She can see now that the man’s silken
jubbah
is edged with intricate embroidery and that he wears gold earrings in a low loop in addition to his collection of rings. His eyes are pitch black – the darkest she has ever seen. She lays the lamp once more on the low table and steps back to wait for another order. But, before one can be given, the door opens and a slave boy enters. Taken back at the sight of Zena, he retreats slightly.

‘Ah, come in, Sam. Come in. Don’t worry about her,’ the man says, his dark eyes turning from the view across the midnight city and back into the room again.

His gaze, Zena notices, is suddenly bright. The slave boy has skin as black as Zena’s own. He crosses to his master and kneels beside him. The man’s jewelled hand falls languidly onto the boy’s shoulder and then runs down the smooth skin of his strong, well-defined arm, stroking with surprising gentleness.

‘A nursemaid,’ Zena realises. ‘They wanted me because . . .’

The boy raises his eyes towards her. ‘Is it your wish for this
habshi
to watch us, Master?’ he asks.

The man cackles once more. He leans down and kisses the boy on the lips.

‘Go!’ he says over his shoulder without even looking at her. ‘Leave me!’

Zena bows and leaves the room as gracefully as she can manage but in the hallway she hovers. Her mind is racing. She doesn’t know where she ought to go. She cannot remember the direction of the bathhouse or the kitchen. The household is asleep and the maze of hallways is dark and silent. There is no one around so she crouches against the wall and decides to wait. The master, may, after all, call for her when he has finished.

Chapter Thirteen

Jessop has thoroughly enjoyed his stay at the encampment. He has made notes about the
Bedu
and their way of life, the details of the trading routes of the tribe and their customs of war and has even managed some observations on the way one family interweaves with another. The site is temporary, of course. The
Bedu
are set to graze their animals there till only saltbush remains. The wells fill up once a season and the
Bedu
will stay to drink the water dry and then move on. The tents are comfortable enough though and, like most nomads, the tribe is hospitable to a fault. An Arabic tribesman will go hungry himself in order to feed his guests lavishly. It is well known that if you come across a camp in the desert and are accepted as a guest, you’ll always be fed better than the people who actually live there.

By the third and final day, the doctor is gratified to see that there is a marked improvement in all but one little girl who, Jessop now fears, might well lose her sight as the infection progresses. Clearly it had advanced too far by the time he arrived and he knows there is little more he can do for the child but clean the pus and hope her body might rally. The danger is septicaemia, blood poisoning. If the little girl succumbs to it she will almost certainly die. He has tried to transmit this information but fears it loses something in the translation. The devoted mother, meanwhile, has placed a copy of the
Quran
under the girl’s sleeping rug and spits into the child’s face to clean it (starting Jessop all over again on the painful process of the vinegar eye wash). Now, leaving her daughter in the care of others, the woman has taken to following Jessop, entreating him to save her daughter in the same way he worked his magic on the other children. No amount of explanation or reassuring smiles and hand gestures seems to communicate that he can do no more, and she neglects her domestic duties and hovers in her dark
burquah,
a little behind the white men, occasionally breaking into a keening wail that makes Jones start.

‘I do wish she’d stop that!’ he says. ‘Bloody hullabaloo.’

Jessop fans himself with a flat square made of rushes. He realised early on, even before they left Sur, that his concerns are different from Jones’ and he has now become tired of the repeated conversation about breeding strains and fetlocks, shipping livestock via Bombay, how much a chap might need to furnish a Knightsbridge house decently or fix its leaking roof and how Arabia has little to offer civilisation.

Today is their last in the encampment and Jessop wishes he could discuss what he has found with Jones, but the lieutenant will not engage in conversation on any other topic than those most dear to his wallet. Still, it has become clear the more Jessop uncovers about conditions inland, the more difficult supplying any reasonable traffic of British ships seems to be. Both water supplies and tribal territories shift with such alarming regularity that he has come to the conclusion that the business of resupply might need to be assessed almost every time a British ship docks and treaties of alliance would have to be constantly renegotiated. It was hoped matters might prove more stable here than on the coast, but from his enquiries he now understands that if anything they are less so and there is very little out here in the hinterland anyway – it makes no sense even to use the place to ferry supplies. It is simply too dangerous and travelling through the desert has proved painfully slow. He’ll be glad to get back to the coast and rendezvous with the
Palinurus
when it comes back down from the inhospitable north.

Preparations are underway for the party’s departure. The
Dhofaris
are making sure the camels drink as much as possible before the return journey and both Jessop and Jones are wordlessly steeling themselves for the privations of the trip. There is little enough to pack and, apart from overseeing the animals, the bearers and guides lounge drinking coffee, picking their teeth with
araq
and sharing the last of their supplies of
qat
leaves, which they chew open-mouthed. Stimulated by the effects, they argue over nothing in particu lar for hours while the
Bedu
avoid them. The tribes are not enemies, nor are they friends, Jessop notes in his diary. At prayer time, the
Dhofaris
and the
Bedu
lay down their mats separately, at meals they skirt around the edges of the other’s group. They have not travelled together and so the oath of the caravan where one traveller will fight to the death for another and all are brothers does not apply.

On the last night, Jessop and Jones eat in the big tent, sitting on huge, hard pillows grouped around a central, low table piled high with food so laden with fat that it shines in the dim light from the oil lamps. The
Bedu
carry naphtha, harvested easily from the surface of the infertile plain and distilled into a crude fuel for lamplight, which smells faintly medicinal. ‘Arabia,’ Jones maintains, ‘consists of land either too desiccated for cultivation or too poisonous. It is as well that God has given them
naft
for they could not afford candles.’

The emir and his eldest son sit to one side – the officers are cross-legged on the other. The boy has scarcely started to grow his beard, but he is accepted by the men of the camp as a leader in waiting. He is, after all, the son of a great man and wishes that he could be lost on the sands and make a name for himself, as his father did. The men respect his lineage and his pluck even though, as yet, he has had the opportunity to prove neither. He spends more time now with the adults than the other children and as a result has not succumbed to the eye infection, or at least, has not had kohl applied to his eyes by the solicitous woman who started the spread of the sickness.

‘Your people do not pray?’ the emir asks Jessop, as if in passing.

So far, the emir has answered the doctor’s questions but has shown little interest of his own. This last night, the atmosphere feels stilted and the doctor is glad that the emir has thought to make an enquiry or at least start a conversation.

‘Ah. No. We do not pray as you do – five times a day.’

For a long time, the emir does not respond. After the silence has started to drag he turns again to the white men. ‘And you eat pig? Drink the grape?’

A grin breaks out on the doctor’s face. ‘Yes. Yes, all my people do.’ He reaches into the bag he always carries with him and helpfully pulls out a picture of King William on the face of a decorative, enamel miniature. The likeness shows His Majesty at his coronation a mere three years before.

‘This is our shah,’ he explains, ‘our caliph. Sultan, perhaps. We call him a king.’ Jessop is unaware that carrying this manner of representational likeness is deeply offensive to followers of Islam and tantamount to idolatry. The emir’s son glances sideways at his father to see what he might do, but the emir affects scarcely to notice the miniature.

‘Your shah is powerful? He has many camels? Many horses?’

‘Ah,’ Jones cuts in. ‘Yes. His Majesty King William loves horses.’

This is, in fact, not strictly true. His Majesty is a sailor rather than a landlubber and his concerns are largely marine. In the main, he becomes enthusiastic about horses only if the animals are racing and he has taken a bet. But the comment at least brings the conversation round to a subject upon which Jones wishes to elaborate and he grasps upon it, becoming suddenly quite animated.

‘I am sure His Majesty would be most impressed by an animal of the tenor of your fine beasts. The sultan kindly sent him an Arab horse last year from Muscat and His Majesty by all accounts is completely taken by the creature.’

The emir does not rise to the suggestion. He reaches out and picks at some gleaming couscous that has been piled before him. As he raises it to his lips there is a terrible sound. At first Jessop thinks there has been a stir that has woken the animals but as the ululation starts up in earnest he realises it is the women. They are screaming in chorus. No, not screaming, not really. It is more as if they are
singing
their screams. A slave enters the tent, slips to the emir’s side and leans, as discreetly as any footman at Windsor Castle, to whisper in the emir’s ear. The couscous stops in midair. The emir’s face, if it is possible, becomes stonier. He looks at Jessop and Jones and Jessop thinks fleetingly that being caught in his gaze is like being a butterfly pinned to a board. He has a terrible sinking feeling in his stomach and a sudden longing for his matchlock, which is safely stowed in his saddle bags, with ample ammunition, ready for the journey they will start before dawn. He wishes fervently that it was nearer to hand.

‘I say,’ says Jones, now outside the tent where he can see the
Dhofaris
scattering like buckshot into the night. ‘Whatever is going on?’

Jessop makes to rise but a heavy weight bearing down on his shoulders renders it impossible. Suddenly it is as if darkness closes in on the tent, the polished scimitars, like lightning bolts, the only brightness. It is hard to tell exactly how many men are in the shadows drawing their traditional, curved knives.

‘
Ibn al-kalb,’
the emir growls. ‘
Nazarene ala aeeri. Ya binti. Ya binti.’

‘Your daughter?’ Jessop asks, picking out the word. ‘Why? What has happened?’

‘
Ya binti. Ya binti,’
the emir repeats darkly in his distress as the eyes of his son flash in horror and the hideous sound of the keening women in the background grows ever louder and more frantic.

And after that, it all goes dark.

When Jessop and Jones wake again they are bound to each other with a rough cord. Shifting, they each notice that their muscles are stiff and sore and that they are thirsty. The atmosphere in the tent is stifling. Slowly Jessop comes to realise that they are being held on the far side of the settlement and that the tent has been pitched quite deliberately in the full glare of the sun. The
Dhofaris
have gone, their animals are forfeit and it will be hours before they are given water, never mind food.

‘I don’t understand,’ Jones sinks into self-pity with an ease that does not entirely surprise his fellow officer.

‘It’s the little girl,’ Jessop explains. ‘I think the little girl died.’