Trade Wind (73 page)

The guide whom Majid had sent with him returned to the city that night, and the days that followed were long and very quiet. Christmas came and went, and still the shore stretched white and empty below the low cliffs of coral, and sometimes a dhow would pass on the far side of Tumbatu, and sometimes the
Daffodil
—patrolling the coast to watch for the
Virago
and make sure that she was not hiding in any small bay or deep-water creek, or lurking offshore in the lee of an islet. But the only craft that ever ventured into the narrow channel separating Tumbatu from the main Island was an occasional
kyack
; the little island-built canoes belonging to fishermen who lived in small scattered communities among the palm trees and pandanus and casuarina scrub that fringed the coral beaches.

For the first time in twenty years Rory found himself with nothing to do and unlimited leisure in which to do it, and the experience, paradoxically enough, proved both restful and disturbing.

It was pleasant to lie out naked on the lonely beach in the shade of a palm tree, watching the sandcrabs sidling to and fro among the sea-wrack, and listening to the tide lapping against the long shore and the wind-worn rocks. To swim in cool, glass-clear water above a multicoloured submarine world of trees and gardens, where shoals of brilliant fish darted through the branching coral and his own shadow followed him, three fathoms below, across the reefs and rocks and the white bars of sand. To walk through the long aisles of the coconut grove, or sit on the flat roof of the house on the cliffs and watch the sun set behind the mountains of Africa, or the lightning flicker in the belly of the far distant clouds.

There were days of steaming heat when the palm fronds drooped in the humid air and the birds perched motionless in the shade with beaks agape; when nothing moved and the sea seemed made of molten metal. Days when he would awake to the drumming of rain on the roof and find the world about him veiled in mist and hidden by slanting rods of grey and silver, and blessedly cool again. And other days when thunder relied above the island and wind and storm swept across it, setting the palms lashing to and fro like demented broomsticks at a Witches’ Sabbath while the sea raced white and roaring up the beach to crash in flying foam against the coral cliffs.

The storms would pass and the sun rise in a cloudless sky, and once again it would be hot and still, with nothing to tell of the furious hours except the scattered coconuts and shredded palm fronds, and here and there a broken tree and a dead butterfly…

Sitting one evening on the low parapet of the roof and watching the first star glimmer palely in a green lake of sky, Rory found himself reviewing his past life with a curious feeling of looking for the last time at the pages of a familiar book that must shortly be closed and put away for ever. As though he were an old man looking back with detachment and nostalgia on all the days that had gone: forgetting nothing, and regretting nothing—except that they would not return.

He did not know why he should feel so strongly that he had come to the end of a long road; unless it was because Batty and Majid had both been right when they had told him that this time he had gone too far and made “Zanzibar and the Sultan’s territories too hot to hold him. And yet that alone did not account for it, for the
Daffodil
could not stay permanently in the harbour, and the British Consul was due to go home, from where he would be sent to some other appointment. Dan Larrimore, too, had done more than his stint of service in the tropics, so it was only a matter of keeping in hiding for a few months at most, and when Dan and the Colonel had gone it would be safe enough to return and pick up his old life once more. Only quite suddenly Rory knew he would not do it. That book was closed and the story was over.

There were other seas and other islands; and other strange and beautiful lands to explore. But once again he had the feeling that time was running out, and Authority—in the form of an acid-faced woman in black bombazine, and a heavy-jowled, cold eyed business man with mutton-chop whiskers and a gold watch-chain stretched across his stomach—was advancing with relentless swiftness to convert and exploit the wild places of the world and to drag them forward, in the sacred name of Progress, toward uniformity and a dead level of humourless hygienic money-grabbing mediocrity. Aunt Laura and Uncle Henry were on the march, and it was their seed that would inherit the earth.

Watching the stars blossom one by one in the darkening sky above the glass-still sea, Rory could hear in the silence the faint, insistent beat of a far-away drum, and the sound transformed itself to him into the feet of Progress, trampling ruthlessly forward and destroying as it came: abolishing old savageries and creating new and worse ones in their place.

The bow and arrow, the spear and the poisoned dart would go, but the sword would not be beaten into a ploughshare: it would be fashioned instead by the civilized West into weapons that would destroy by the hundred thousand—because men were covetous and the world no longer wide enough. The iron ships and iron trains would make an end of old barriers and older customs, and the harnessing of steam and gas and electricity would mean larger and larger cities and more and more factories—and a soaring birthrate. It would not be long before there were twice as many people in the world as there had been when he, Emory Frost, had been born in that quiet old manor house in Kent. And after that three times as many; and then four—and five…

There would be more Restrictions, more Discipline, more Laws. And more Tyranny!…all the things he had rebelled against. There would be no escaping them, and he wondered if the world of the next century would be the better for them or the worse, and why he should never have realized before that what he had taken to be misfortune had, in reality, been luck in disguise. Incredible luck!

He had fancied himself ill-treated, and revenged himself by cutting loose from the ties of country and acknowledging no law. But if his fickle mother had not deserted him and his stiff-necked and embittered father had not died and left him to the untender mercies of Uncle Henry and Aunt Laura, he would in all probability have seen no more of the world than the Kentish countryside and the smoke-stained, grimy city of London. He would never even have known what he was missing, or that his generation would be among the last to see the strange and far-away places before they were overtaken, altered and finally submerged by the hungry tide of industrialization and uniformity. But he had escaped—and he had seen them.

He had traded up and down the Ivory Coast and dealt in slaves and cowries and coral, pearls and muskets and elephant tusks. He had anchored in harbours unknown to Western ships and roistered in towns that were old when London was young. He knew every port from Aden to Akabah and Suez; had crossed the Arabian sea to Bombay and Goa, bartered ivory for pearls in the Persian Gulf and marched inland across deserts of burning sand to strange, hidden cities that until then no other white man had ever seen. But before the century was out there would be steam-driven ships churning a path across those seas, and one day the old cities—if they were not destroyed by war and the bigger and better engines of destruction that men were so industriously devising—would be pulled down and swept away, and in their place would arise a flavourless uniformity of brick and mortar, populated by once-colourful people aping the white man’s dress and speech, so that all cities would in time become identical masses of houses and factories, shops, boulevards and hotels, linked by trains and steamships and filled with imitation Westerners imitating Western ways.

But he had escaped—and he had seen them. He had seen the squalor and the enchantment, and known that although the world was shrinking with the relentless swiftness of a sandbar when the tide has turned, it was still, for a little while longer, a vast and mysterious place full of unexplored territories, secret cities and beautiful, beckoning horizons. And he was suddenly and sincerely sorry for all those people who would come after him and never know what it had once offered, but would think, as each generation in its turn had thought, that it was the best organized and most enlightened of all.

Yes, he had been fabulously lucky! It was strange that he should not have realized that until now. Though he supposed that he must subconsciously have known it, for the roving, lawless, swashbuckling years had not constituted an aimless journey, but a means to an end: the acquiring of a sum large enough to enable him to ruin his uncle—a sum he intended to get by fair means or foul. But he had got it even before that fabulous fortune in gold had come into his hands. The figure he had aimed at had been reached on the day that Clayton Mayo paid in good coin for a consignment of temporarily worthless rifles. Yet he had made no attempt to dispose of his ship or return to the land of his fathers, and he wondered now if he would ever do so?

Uncle Henry’s hated image had suddenly become a foolish rag-and-pasteboard bogey whose arms and legs jerked to strings: a thing hardly worth revenging oneself upon. And supposing he were to return and regain his patrimony?—what then? Would he really be able to settle down to the life of an English squire, walking his acres and discussing crops and cattle, local politics and the affairs of a small market town? It seemed highly unlikely and the prospect held no allure for him. Yet there was little point in regaining his family acres only to leave them empty and idle, or sell them to some stranger.

There had been Frosts at Lyndon Gables for more than a century before its title and acres had been listed in Doomsday Book. A Frost had fought for Saxon Harold at Senlac, and ten years later his manor had been restored to his sons by Norman William. The first Emory had returned to it, one-armed, from Agincourt, and a Cavalier grandson of the Tyson Frost who had built the stately rose-brick mansion in the days of Elizabeth, had held it for King Charles and seen it reduced to a shell by Cromwell’s men; and lived to rebuild it in the years of the Restoration.

Father to son, the land had been held and tilled and tended by men of his name and his blood, and it was probably better to let his unamiable cousin Rodney carry on the tradition than to leave the place to go to wrack and ruin, sold piecemeal for building lots, or as a whole to some rich industrialist who would have no feeling for the land. Someone ought to care for it and keep it, and a Frost could probably be counted upon to do that better than a stranger—if only because his roots would be deep in that particular patch of earth.

As for himself, he had no roots. Unless they were here in this island, in which for the time being he had made himself an outlaw. Yet even when both Colonel Edwards and Dan Larrimore were gone and it might once again be considered safe for him to return to the city, that safety would only last as long as Majid lived—which did not look like being over-long if he continued his present mode of life! And since Majid had no son to succeed him, one day Bargash would return and inherit the throne, and then Zanzibar would cease to be a refuge and a happy hunting-ground for Captain Rory Frost and the
Virago
, He would have to find somewhere else. Go further East, to Java or Sumatra or the islands of the Coral Sea.

A year ago, even a few months ago, such a prospect would have been alluring enough. But now that strange sensation of having come to the end of the road had brought with it an unfamiliar and disconcerting feeling of uncertainty, and of being no longer free and untrammelled: a vague disinclination to set out in search of new horizons. Perhaps it was the gold lying hidden in The House of Shade that was dragging at him like an unseen anchor; chaining him to possessions and robbing him of the desire to be free. Or perhaps…

Rory shook himself impatiently, and coming to his feet realized that he must have been sitting idle on the parapet for a considerable length of time, for the moon had risen and his shadow lay black on the warm stone of the rooftop.

The night was hot and very quiet, and the sea so still that it lapped against the long curve of the beach in lazy ripples that barely broke into foam, and made a sound no louder than the rustle of the dead palm leaves that stirred in the soft night breeze. The cicadas that had shrilled before moonrise and the frogs that had croaked in the marshy ground beyond the coconut grove had fallen silent and only the drum still beat.

There were always drums beating in Zanzibar, and this one was so far away that the sound was barely more than a vibration in the stillness. But for some reason the faint, insistent beat seemed to hold an odd note of urgency that added to Rory’s sudden feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction, and he came down from the roof, and walking swiftly across the quiet garden, summoned the dozing caretaker who slept by night in a small brick-built cell to one side of the massive gateway in the outer wall.

Kerbalou shuffled out yawning, and lifting the heavy bar, drew the door open to allow Rory to pass out, wondering sleepily where the white man could be going at this time of night and on foot, since except for a few isolated huts belonging to fishermen there was no village of any size for several miles.

But Rory had only gone out to drown his restlessness and cool his hot body in the placid sea, and though he had not been particularly successful in the first of these objectives, a long swim out towards Tumbatu and back had both refreshed him and made him ready for sleep. The deserted beach was white in the moonlight and the sea a shimmering expanse of watered silk, and he leant against the trunk of a coconut palm that stretched low over the sand, and rested a moment in the shadow of the coral cliffs; looking out towards the steel-grey shadow of Tumbatu while the night breeze breathed coolly on his body.

Something moved in the silver stillness, and he discovered that he was not the only person abroad that night, for there was a small boat flitting down the channel; a thing as ghostly and insubstantial as a moth in the moonlight. It was a fisherman’s
kyack
, a common enough sight in those waters, and he watched it idly as it tacked and ran into shore barely twenty feet from where he stood among the shadows. He heard the prow grate upon the wet sand and the slap of the sail as it swung idle in the light breeze, and then a man stepped out of it into the shallow water and turned to peer down into the bottom of the boat as though examining his catch.