It was strange to think that the only legacy he would leave to the future—the only proof that he had ever lived—would be a half-caste child whose mother had been a slave girl bought for a yard or two of calico and a handful of coins. A child who had inherited his temper and his features and who would grow up without any recollection of him, to see a new century and witness that shrinking of the world and the mushroom growth of industrialization and conformity that he had visualized with such loathing and done his best to escape.
If he had any regrets, it should be on Amrah’s behalf;—for having fathered her without thought, saddled her with the double burden of bastardy and mixed blood, and left her to fend for herself in a harsh and intolerant world. But it was too late to worry about such things now, and with any luck there might be enough of himself in her to make her accept the hazards of life as a small price to pay in return for the entertainment of living. He could at least be grateful that there had been no more children. Or not as far as he knew. Unless Yes, there was always that: it was a possibility at least. Perhaps more than a possibility…
The darkness that would not show him Zorah’s face presented him now with Hero’s. Hero staring at him haughtily, her grey eyes scornful and her red mouth curved with disdain. Hero with her face swollen and disfigured by cuts and bruises and her cropped hair looking like a wet scrubbing brush, sobbing over a few mosquito bites. Hero laughing at one of Batty’s stories; smiling down at Amrah; frowning over the iniquities of the Sultan’s regime; agonizing over the plight of slaves and the injustice of the world. Hero angry. Hero defiant. Hero asleep…A dozen Heros; but none of them afraid and none of them defeated.
Rory found himself hoping—fervently and selfishly—that she would have his child. A son conceived of the strange, unexpected passion and ecstasy of those nights at The House of Shade, who would carry something of them both into the future and hand it in turn to other sons: to grandsons and great-grandsons who would inherit Hero’s beauty and courage and his own love of the sea and strange cities, the wild places of the world and the sound of the Trade Winds blowing. It was a pity that he would never know…
The cell had slowly been growing lighter, and turning his head he saw that the bars of the grille were etched sharply black where before they had been no more than shadows against shadow. The moon must have risen. Soon it would be shining into the courtyard and he would be able to see if the cell on the far side of it, facing his own, was empty.
From somewhere outside the Fort, in the purlieus of the city, a cock crew, and was answered by another further away. The snarling and growling of the dogs had ceased, and the door of the outer gate no longer creaked on its hinges, for the wind had died. The world was so still that Rory could hear the harbour water lapping against the shore, and the slow creak of a cable as the night tide fingered some anchored dhow. Then a crow began to caw, and he realized that the growing light was not moonrise, but the dawn. He must have slept after all, for the night had gone and it was morning.
Other cocks began to crow and presently the birds awoke, and the blowflies. The little coolness of the night was dissipated by the hot breath of the coming day, and on the open ground between the Fort and the harbour a lone donkey brayed raucously, a sound like a harsh yell of despair that echoed desolately against the walls of the silent houses. But the normal early morning noises of the city were lacking, and inside the Fort there was no sound but the buzzing of innumerable flies.
Once again Rory felt the black wings of panic brush against him, and he shivered as though he were cold. Could the townspeople have fled from the cholera and the city be as empty as the Fort? No, that was absurd I Some might have run away, but only to the interior of the Island, since there had been few ships in harbour and Africa was known to be in the grip of the epidemic. There must still be people in the city—a great many of them. The unusual silence of the morning only meant that at such a time men would be waking to a new day and going into the streets with frightened faces and apprehensive looks at their neighbours, and would have little heart for crying their wares in the market place.
Nevertheless, the suspicion that the city too might be deserted remained like an uneasy shadow seen out of the comer of the eye, and presently it brought Rory stiffly to his feet to stand again with his face to the grid, straining his ears for some sound from beyond the walls that would tell him that there were still men in the Stone Town. Live men.
There was at least one man in the courtyard, but he was dead. The bulk of the body lay just beyond Rory’s range of vision where the pariah dogs had dragged it and quarrelled over it last night, and for that he was thankful, as the little that he could see was unpleasant enough. Even as he looked, a crow alighted beside it and hopped forward to peck at what had presumably once been a hand, and it occurred to him that if he were fated to die in this cell at least his body would not be disposed of in that manner, since neither the crows nor the pariah packs would reach him here. Though there would, he supposed, be rats…
Another crow flew down into the courtyard, and he looked away, sickened. But he dared not leave the window for fear that someone might enter the Fort and he would miss them. It was possible to face the prospect of death with a reasonable amount of equanimity, but Rory could see no point in giving up hope.
He could not have said how long he stood there, but at last there crept to his ears the first blessed sounds of the city awakening: a muezzin calling the Faithful to prayer, the creaking of cartwheels and a distant, indeterminate murmur of voices. Ordinary enough sounds, though disquietingly few and far between. But none the less welcome for that, because they proved that the city was neither dead nor abandoned, and listening to them some of the tension ebbed from his body and he could breathe again. But the long morning dragged away and the day grew hotter and darker, and no one entered the Fort.
Rory found that his legs could no longer support him, and subsiding onto the bed, he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. He had no means of knowing the time, and it seemed to him that the first cock had crowed hours ago…aeons ago! Or else the sun was standing still. He had drunk nothing for well over twenty-four hours, and though under normal conditions this would have been no very great hardship, it was an unbelievable torment in the oppressive, humid heat that wrung the moisture from his body and soaked him in sweat, leaving him at last feeling as dry and shrivelled as an empty seed-pod. The desire for water ceased to be an active discomfort and became instead a savage and intolerable craving, and his throat was parched and his mouth sticky, while his tongue seemed to have swelled to monstrous proportions. An odd drumming in his ears mingled with the idiot buzz of the flies that filled his cramped cell and circled about him in an aimless cloud, crawling on his face and neck and preventing him from thinking clearly—or at all.
The rhythmic throbbing grew louder, until at last it dawned on him that the drums he heard were no longer confined to his brain, but were coming from somewhere outside. They were beating in the courtyard now, faster and louder, and the air was cooler.
He opened his eyes with an enormous effort, and dragging himself to his feet, held himself upright by the rusty iron bars of the grille, and saw that it was raining.
For a brief moment the sight of those swollen drops splashing onto the parched ground and forming gleaming pools at the verandah edge seemed to him the most wonderful thing he had ever seen. And then he realized that they were of no more use to him than a mirage is to a traveller lost in a waterless desert. The rain slanted down to form lines and rods, which in turn transformed themselves into an opaque wall of water that cooled the air and made a lake in the courtyard. But it did not reach the door of the cell, and he tore at the bars of the grid, wrenching at them until his hands were raw. The iron bent a little, but did not break, and he licked the blood thirstily, and reaching for his discarded shirt, tied it about the weakest bar to give him a better purchase, and threw his full weight against it. But though rusty it proved immovable, and presently he
relaxed his grip and leant against the door, panting and defeated.
The torn shirt dangled limply from the grille and he stared at it because it was a light-coloured thing against the dark wood, and because he had nothing else to look at. And then all at once he saw that it could still bring him all the water he needed.
It did not take long to tear it into strips and tie them together so that one end, knotted to give it extra weight, could be tossed out between the bars and reach to where the rain poured down from the verandah edge. He hit the pillar with the first try, and drew it back and reinforced the knot with his handkerchief, and tossed it out again. And this time it fell true.
Neither shirt nor handkerchief were anywhere near clean, while the rain was mixed with the mud and dust and filth of the baking days. But Rory sucked the drenched material with a greater appreciation than he had ever accorded to any wine, and flung it back and retrieved it again; repeating the process at least a dozen times before his thirst was even partly quenched, and at the last squeezing water into the tin mug and the empty basin, until both were filled and he was assured of a reserve supply.
He had not been conscious of hunger while his tongue and his parched throat had been crying out for water, but now that the edge was off his thirst the fact that he had eaten nothing for close on two days began to make itself felt. But hunger seemed a trivial thing and easy enough to bear when compared with the craving for water that had made a hell of the past forty hours or so. He knew that he could endure ten times as long without food before reaching the stage to which thirst had reduced him so swiftly. The dark forebodings of the night and the past hours, the dizziness and the despair, had sprung from thirst and vanished with its slaking, and he realized that he must have been mad to strip the skin off his hands wrenching at those unyielding bars of iron, for even if he had succeeded in bending them apart he still could not have squeezed his body through the narrow space. As for that lunatic assault on the door, it had been an even crazier action, since no human battering-ram could have broken it down or burst those massive hinges.
He looked at it now, painfully aware of his sore shoulders and wondering how he could have been guilty of such senseless hysteria. And as his gaze fell on the cumbersome lock something seemed to click in his brain.
He did not move for a long time, and it seemed to him that he did not breathe. He sat very still, his body rigid and his gaze fixed, while the sweat crawled coldly down his unshaven face and the flies settled unheeded on his bruised back and shoulders. The slow minutes slid away to the tune of rain splashing loudly and steadily into the courtyard outside, and at last he got carefully to his feet, moving as cautiously as though he were afraid of waking a sleeper, and reached out a hand that shook uncontrollably.
The crude iron handle felt rough and clammy to the touch, but it turned easily enough, and though the door had swelled with the damp so that he was forced to ignore the pain of his lacerated hands and push at it, it opened.
The negro, Limbili, dragged shouting and threatening from the cell, and already in the grip of the cholera, had forgotten to use the key that he carried at his belt, and Rory had bruised his shoulders and torn his hands on a door that he could have opened at any time during the past forty-two hours.
He began to laugh, and laughing, tumbled out into the courtyard and stood in the lashing rain, letting it sluice off him in a cleansing torrent that washed away the sweat and dirt and stink of the last days; the tiredness and the fear.
He stood with his face turned up to it and felt it beat against his eyelids and fill his open mouth, and strength returned to him; and with it an enormous exhilaration. He stretched his arms wide and laughed in that drenched, deserted place where even the torrential fall of the monsoon rain could not submerge the smell of death; or drown the intoxication of being out in the open again after those slow weeks of intolerable confinement in the semi-darkness of a cramped and evil-smelling cell. By contrast with that darkness even the grey daylight seemed brilliant to him, and the tainted air fresh and clean, and he breathed it in deeply: savouring it as though it were incense and careless of the fact that he stood in full view of anyone who might enter the Fort, or might still be in it.
He must have stood there for at least ten minutes before a sound that was not the splashing of the rain broke his trance, and he wiped the wet out of his eyes and stepped back quickly behind the nearest pillar. Someone was coming down the verandah, walking hesitantly and wearing shoes with iron nails, for above the insistent drumming of the rain he could hear the click of metal on stone, and a shuffling, dragging sound that drew inexorably nearer and stopped at last within a yard of him, on the far side of the pillar.
Rory stayed still, rigid and listening. The Fort was filled with the noise of rain and for the space of several minutes he could hear no other sound. Then suddenly he was startled by a sigh; long-drawn, desolate and inhuman. A sound so full of despair that it made his skin prickle and the hair lift on his scalp, and he moved involuntarily: and saw that the intruder was nothing more alarming than a tired, mud-splashed horse trailing a length of broken rope.
The sight served to bring him sharply back to reality, for it was not only proof that the main gate was still open and unguarded, but suggested that the situation in the city might be even worse than he supposed if animals such as this were roaming loose and masterless on the waterfront, and in this condition. The horse was a pure-bred Arab mare, and it was bleeding from a number of wounds that were not only recent but had undoubtedly been caused by teeth. Rory regarded them thoughtfully, and recalling the pariah dogs of the previous night, lost his exhilaration and was abruptly sobered. If the pariahs, normally the most cringing and cowardly of creatures, had taken to attacking runaway horses, it meant that they were becoming bold and savage on a diet of fresh meat; and if so the sooner he got away from here, and clear of the city, the better.
He had given no thought as to where he should go, but looking at the horse it occurred to him that luck had decided the matter for him by providing him with a mount The Virago had gone and it would not be possible to return to The Dolphins’ House, or embarrass the Sultan by asking him for asylum. And though he had other friends in the city, they would have troubles enough of their own to contend with at such a time and he could not add to them. There remained Kivulimi: The House of Shade. He would be safe enough there, and it would be a deal quicker and less hazardous to make the journey on horseback than on foot.
Rory rubbed the mare’s nose, and picking up the trailing rope, led the animal away under the empty, rain-loud arches, past the blind cells with their gaping doors and the silent figure of a man who had crawled into an angle of the wall and died there. The door of the guardroom immediately inside the gate stood open, and he paused, and after a brief hesitation, hitched the rope to the latch and went in—to be rewarded by the discovery of a length of dun-coloured country-made cloth that had evidently been used as a sheet A quick search disclosed nothing else that could be used as a covering, but the sheet would serve, and he could not afford to be too particular, since at the moment his sole garment consisted of drenched and dirty trousers of unmistakably European cut.
He hoped that the late owner of the sheet had not died of cholera, but that was a risk that would have to be taken, and he did not waste time worrying about it Setting swiftly to work he tore a long strip from the cloth and wound it about his head and across the lower part of his face, Tuareg-fashion, and having rolled his trousers to the knee, tied the remainder about his waist so that it covered him from waist to calf in the manner of the seamen from the dhows. There were a pair of heavy leather sandals in one comer of the room, and he appropriated them gratefully, and releasing the uneasy mare, went out through the deserted gate and into the grey, concealing veil of the falling rain.
The wind had not found its way into the Fort, for it was blowing from the northeast, and the high Fort walls and tall, close-crowding buildings of the city had kept it at bay. But here in the open
it sent Rory’s makeshift garment flapping wetly against his legs, and he could hear the boom of surf breaking along the harbour front.
Despite the rain there seemed to be a great many birds on the foreshore, and the pouring day was filled with the sound of wings and screaming gull voices and the harsh cawing of quarrelling crows. The mare snorted and shied as half a dozen mangy pariah dogs trotted past making for the beach, but there were few men to be seen and fewer ships in the harbour, and the charnel-house smell that defied the rain and penetrated the drenched fold of cloth that covered Rory’s nose and mouth made him think gratefully of Kivulimi.
The gardens of The House of Shade would be green and full of flowers, and the bay below it clean sand and clear water. Old Daud the caretaker would still be living peacefully in his room by the gate, undisturbed by the cholera, since the nearest village was a full two miles distant, and there was little reason to visit it while the kitchen gardens provided fruit and coconuts, vegetables and maize, the sea was full of fish, and Daud kept both chickens and goats.
No one would come looking for a missing prisoner there, for there would be other and more important things to occupy the authorities than the fate of Captain Emory Frost of the Virago, And in a day or two it was going to be impossible to identify the bodies of those who had died in the Fort, or even tell whether one of them had been a white man. As for his parole, Rory had no qualms on that score for he had certainly not plotted an escape. He had merely found himself abandoned by his jailers and walked out, and even that stiff-necked stickler for the letter of the law, Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul in Zanzibar, would hardly expect him to remain behind an unlocked door and starve himself to death in the deserted Fort!—though Rory suspected that Dan Larrimore, placed in a similar position, would have proceeded to the Consulate, explained the situation, and given himself up.