Kings of Albion

by Julian Rathbone

  'And what does he kill with that? Elephants?'

  'Crocodiles.'

  I prodded it with my stick. 'It won't do you know. Even apart from the bulk and nuisance of it all, it still won't do.' 'Why not?'

  'The Ingerlonder nobility do not hunt with bows and arrows. They hunt from horses with dogs.'

  'What animals do they hunt, then, with these dogs?'

  'Deer, hares, otters, wolves, foxes.'

  'They eat fox?' There was disgust in Anish's voice.

  'No. But they like the excuse the foxes give them to ride fast over farmland, regardless of the damage their horses do.'

  In spite of my interdiction Prince Harihara smuggled out a large selection of these weapons when we left, almost certainly with Anish's connivance.

  So, towards the end of the third month after I had arrived in the City of Victory, we set off for Gove. There were the three of us, plus four cooks, ten muleteers, ten soldiers with all their accoutrements, a couple of secretaries experienced in financial affairs, a fortune-teller, a Buddhist monk, who came along, he told Anish, because he had nothing better to do, four general servants, two of whom were always in attendance on the Prince, carrying huge parasols above him as he rode on a fine mule, a couple of dhoti wallahs to keep our clothes clean, a fakir or conjuror, and three musicians: forty-two in all, with enough baggage to need forty mules.

  This baggage, apart from an excessive amount of personal belongings, consisted mainly of dried spices: ginger, cardamom, peppercorns, coriander seed, cumin, nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves. Hidden here and there were more pearls, diamonds and some rubies, including a pair of kurundams, each as long and thick as your thumb, in perfect crystalline form, combinations of prisms with hexagonal pyramids, rhombohedrons and basal pinakoids.

  This was all far too much, of course. There were too many unnecessary people and things. At least I had drawn the line at elephants. The Prince had not been pleased. 'How will the inhabitants of the countries we pass through, and the Ingerlonders themselves, know that we are people of consequence if we do not arrive on elephants?' He only gave in on the understanding that the subject would be broached again when we arrived in Cairo where, as he understood it, African elephants would be available for sale or hire.

  On the border with the Bahmani sultanates, Gove is even more cosmopolitan than Mangalore, and since its traders deal even-handedly with both empires, although it was at that time governed by the Dravidians, a wide variety of ships and crews was available for charter, even including, amongst the latter, some Italian sailors from Venice and Genoa, Portuguese, Malays and Chinese.

  On my advice, we opted for an Arab vessel, a medium-sized dhow capable of carrying some hundred and fifty tons, manned by an Arab master and crew. They had just dropped off a cargo of blackamoors from the Zanzibar slave markets, and the master was looking for a charter to take him back up the Red Sea. This boat was called the Moon of Islam, and the below-decks cargo space had solid timber bunk beds, just shelves, really, for the slaves, which made her well equipped to take all our company and gear. There was also a cane and thatch covered area in the stern, which Prince Harihara commandeered for himself and his closest retinue – myself and Anish. There was another similarly roofed area on the foredeck. The Moon of Islam was painted green; she was well rigged with a newish sail, and her seams were well caulked. These, and similar matters, are the sorts of things a wise merchant checks when time and money permit. Otherwise he takes a chance and sometimes comes to grief, as I had with my shipload of horses.

  A hundred and fifty tons? The masters of smaller boats insist on hopping round the coastline, running for port as soon as a squall appears on the horizon, even at that time of year when the weather is generally settled, the winds steady from the north-east. In any case, with anything smaller we should have had to take two ships to accommodate us all. As it was, we left the mules behind, planning to hire beasts of burden as soon as we made our landfall in Suways, the port that serves the city of Misr-al-Kahira, Cairo, the capital of Egypt.

  Chapter Nine

  There is always excitement, even for an old trader like me, in embarcation and departure. Picture us, if you can, towed away from the quay by row-boats, manned by dock-workers, out into the estuary of the Juari river, behind us the gilded shikharas of the temple to Shiva, the dome and minarets of the mosque with its black marble portico, and then, as the estuary widens, the customs buildings and the offices of the harbour-master. All seemed to crowd together as we moved away from them. The quay itself was lined with those members of the Prince's household who were not accompanying us. including all the women and his ten elephants. A band played, handkerchiefs and scarves were waved, elephants trumpeted and were rewarded by their mahouts with ripe mangoes.

  Across the river, on the other side of the estuary, the forest came down to the water's edge, the sand a white line between green trees and emerald water. Along the edge beyond their beached boats smoke gusted out of the many fishermen's villages from the fires used to cure their catch, and beyond them, above the nodding palms, and far closer than they are at Mangalore, the Western Ghats climbed into the almost perfect blue of the sky. Above them, the north-east trades that would carry us across the Arabian Sea spun angels' hair from the clouds.

  While we were still in the estuary but hail left the villages behind us we passed a point where dugongs grazed the abundant seaweed that filled a small cove and marvelled at the human way the cows suckled their young. I remarked that it was strange to find a colony so close to human habitation since their meat is highly prized. This prompted Anish to tell me they were protected in this area as servants of the goddess in her manifestation as Queen of the Sea.

  On our ship all was bustle: while most of the crew stood by the mast, with the ropes in their hands that would presently hoist the big lateen sail, the rest went about their business making movables fast wherever their passengers would let them; the passengers, apart from those closest to the Prince, moved about the decks seeking places behind gunwales and bulwarks where they might be sheltered from spray and worse, and marking out their territories with their bundled blankets or rattan bags. Few wanted to go below, and in any case much of the space was taken with our larger baggage and spice sacks.

  Gulls and other seabirds gathered in our wake, so we carried a comet trail behind us, and the air filled with their angry, pleading mewing. For a moment or two as we passed the harbour bar the ship bucked and shuddered in the swell, and spray flew across the deck; then the sailors in the forepeak cast off the hausers that linked us to the tow-boats, and those in the waist of the vessel hauled up the sail, which filled and bellied like a pregnant woman, pregnant with adventure.

  The motion settled now into the steady rhythm of the rollers that slipped beneath us on their way to crash in a line of surf on the already distant Malabar coast. In almost no time at all the uplands of the Western Ghats, beneath their line of mountain cloud, were the only sign of land, they and the birds that followed us until nightfall.

  Now the swell was no longer crested and in every direction the sea-acres of deepest indigo-black stretched to the horizon, but this was no watery desert. A shoal of flying fish flashed by, silver shards of razor-edged light, their spiny fins shredding the heaving surface. Behind them, and in ravenous pursuit, came a school of porpoises, tumbling like kittens, snapping like puppies at the fish, their skins the shiny black of carved, polished coal; while further off three whales kept station, venting their lungs in spumy breaths like smoke.

  As I said, there is always excitement, a lightening of the spirits at such times. Even though one knows landfall will come, or, if not, then a watery grave, one also knows that for a day or two, a week perhaps, this is a time out of life, a space where anxiety and worry have no place. Meanwhile, there is the brightness of the sky and the rush of the wind to be enjoyed, the smells of tar, hemp and seasoned timber to be relished, and, to be shared, the slow dance of the rise and slip of the deck, the swaying tilt of t
he horizon, as the ship performs its pavana with the wind and waves.

  Thus it was, on that day, for me – but not for Anish who, along with many others, was seasick. I suspect Prince Harihara was too, for he kept to himself in the rush-roofed area in the stern.

  For my part, using my old stick to steady myself, and with the hem of my old cape banging against my knees, I took a turn round the deck. Five of our muleteers were already crowded around a cook, who was crouched over a metal bowl of charcoal, slapping slabs of dough on a metal plate above it and flipping them over as the bubbles of air separated the skins of blackening crust. The smell of grilled bread and spices wafted by on the bluish smoke, and the Arab crewmen, properly aware of the dangers of fire at sea, looked on warily, one swinging a canvas bucket ready to scoop the sea-water that rushed by below the lee rail.

  Further on I came on our fakir, already with a tiny crowd of seamen, a couple of servants and four of our soldiers around him. Lean, with sinews in his neck strung tight like the strings on a sitar and fingers that flickered in what I imagine he took to be an entrancing way, he wore a baggy loincloth, none too clean, and a turban, so I supposed he was a Mussulman like myself, though of Indian stock.

  Our sergeant, the second in command of the soldiers, a big, burly-fellow with a scimitar which had a spike protruding from the hilt, grumbled in my ear, 'He won't levitate or do his rope trick on account of the wind. He reckons if he did the ship would go on and leave him suspended above the ocean.'

  I could not restrain a laugh. 'Well,' I replied, 'we'll see when the wind drops or when we get to dry land.'

  Meanwhile the fakir was contenting himself and his onlookers by discovering long chains of knotted silk scarves in their ears and an abundance of hard-boiled eggs in his own mouth. Considering his entire upper body, apart from his turban, was bare, all this was remarkable enough in its way.

  I moved on to the forepeak and found, in the angle of the bow, the Buddhist monk. As I approached he contorted himself into a yogic position beneath his saffron robe and began to repeat, with eyes shut and face lifted to the sky and sun. some meaningless mantra. His head was shaved; the simple accoutrements of his craft – a begging bowl, a pottery drum, linger cymbals and tiny bells – stood on the deck beside him. He was slight of build, had long fingers and feet, and no eyebrows at all, though the skin where they had been was red, raw and flaking. Indeed, apart from a dark haze over his scalp, his skin was smooth and hairless, like a eunuch's. He was darker than most of our party, not African dark but heading that way. Lost in his rapture, meditation, whatever, he paid no attention to me, did not open his eyes or move at all, apart from his lips, which continued to emit their monotonous drone until I passed on. On account of his religion and physical characteristics I took him to be Sinhalese from Sri Lanka.

  A sudden commotion in the waist of the ship drew my attention away from him. Our sergeant had the fakir by the throat, had him up against the gunwale the edge of which was in the fakir's back and likely to make an apt fulcrum for levering him over the side. I swung myself past the mast, ducked my head under the comer of the sail and tapped the sergeant on the shoulder with the end of my stick. 'At least,' I said, 'tell me why he deserves drowning before you put him in the sea.'

  He twisted his head and brought his big bullish face within inches of mine. His breath smelt of rice beer, garlic, smoked fish.

  'He cheats," he bellowed, 'took a gold ring off of me by sharp practice.'

  Distracted by my intervention he relaxed his grip on the sinewy throat of the fakir enough for the mountebank to draw breath and gasp.

  'All straight and above board,' he cried. 'He bet me six months in his service against his gold ring he could tell me which hand I had it in. Listen, he can have it back, I'm buggered if I care.' He held out his palm with the ring on it. The sergeant took it – it was a big, chunky affair, a lion's head with tiny ruby eyes – slipped it back on the middle finger of his right hand, then pulled the hand back to his shoulder as if he were drawing a bowstring, and let loose with all his might into the fakir's face. I grabbed his flailing wrist and just saved him from going over. Nevertheless, as he lurched back, he doubled up, spitting blood and a broken tooth.

  'There,' shouted the sergeant, and his little eyes roamed over all the bystanders, who now numbered most of those on board, 'that's what I do, and worse, to anybody tries to make a monkey out of me.'

  That was not the end of the affair. At least, I am fairly certain it was not. Night came on, the wind dropped, the boat ambled on beneath a moonless sky with just a helmsman, who had the art of steering by the stars, and a lookout in the forepeak on watch. Neither heard anything untoward, though both said that at the darkest time the silence was disturbed by the splash and gurgle of whales or larger dolphins nearby.

  And in the morning the sergeant was nowhere to be found. After supper, during which he had continued to drink copiously, he had fallen into a deep slumber with his head cushioned on his arm, in the lee of the ship's side, and when morning came he had gone. Some fingers were pointed at the fakir, but the Buddhist monk swore he had slept beside him all night, below deck, sharing one of the shelves and a thin blanket and neither had stirred until first light. I, myself, had slept on deck, outside the bamboo door of the cabin where Prince Harihara and Chamberlain Anish were bedded and I, too, heard the splashing of dolphin, as I thought. Except – that immediately preceding it I had been half woken by the sound of someone pissing long and heavily into the sea. This was followed by a brittle-sounding snap, like a branch being broken over a strong man's knee, a gasp and a splash. The splash a dolphin makes when it leaps out of the water, or that of a small whale's fluke when it smacks the surface? I didn't think so. But there was no point in saying otherwise.

  Those with authority on the boat, the master and his mate, exercised the prerogatives laid down by maritime custom and overruled Prince Harihara's desire for a more complete inquiry into the loss of his sergeant. Landlubbers, they said, especially those who get drunk and fail to take the most obvious precautions, have been falling off boats since ocean travel began, and that was that. Questions, of course, remained unanswered, the most weighty being: why did the sergeant not cry out?

  The master shrugged with all the disdain of a man who has gone through a long life without touching intoxicating liquor but who has observed the evil effects of drunkenness from Cadiz to Surabaya. Why ask for rational behaviour from a drunk? So the matter was laid to rest, and if any shared my misgivings, they kept them to themselves.

  Here is a way of killing a man. You place a long silk scarf round his neck, retaining the ends in your hands at arm's length. You raise your foot and place it on the side or back of the man's head, with your knee bent to a right-angle. Then, very sharply, you straighten the knee. It needs the speed of a falcon's stoop, suppleness, agility, determination and training by an adept. It is the method of ritual slaughter known as thuggee and is carried out by devotees of the goddess Kali. So, maybe we had a Thug amongst us. The fakir? Perhaps. But the Thugs are cunning people, usually work in small groups or pairs, at least, and are not above using a likely innocent as a decoy. From then on I always made sure that beneath the folds of my cape and buried in my loincloth my Damascene stiletto was within easy grasp, and at night I slept with its hilt in my hand. I, too, have my skills.

  Chapter Ten

  The voyage unfolded without further incident. We reached the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb some two weeks later, untroubled by bad weather apart from an occasional squall, and began the long haul up the Red Sea, a distance about the same as we had already travelled. We put into the small port of Mokhi where, when I found that the imams' interdiction against drinking the infusion of k'hawah beans, which had prevented me making my fortune some four years previously, had been lifted. I prevailed upon Prince Harihara to lay out a piece of his gold on a couple of sacks. I assured him they would sell as well as coriander seed once we got into Europe. We also took on fresh water and other supp
lies that had begun to fall low, especially lemons.

  Fortunately, at that time of year, the winds were now mostly from the east and south-east, though frequently falling away, which, with the presence of much moisture in the air, produced an enervating heat; nevertheless I took great delight during these calms in swimming in the warm limpid water of the Red Sea above coral reefs of great beauty, often plunging my head below the surface and kicking my way down like a frog so the shoals of rainbow fish darted away ahead of me. I swam with ease, in spite of my twisted, scrawny and scarred old body, which skill the rest of the crew and passengers with envy, even awe. It is a skill few have who do not come from sea or lakeside communities but one

  I had been at pains to acquire when it became clear to me that sea voyages were to take up a significant portion of my life.

  Indeed, that early experience of surviving the sabre slash, followed by a night bedded on top of my partially dismembered mother, had left me with not only an inordinate desire to live, but also a willingness to learn how to survive in all foreseeable circumstances. Moreover, it gave me a readiness to grasp the pleasure of each fleeting moment, each sensation, from the tremulous and slight, even the tiny scrabble of.I little red spider finding its way through the hairs on the back of my hand, to the mind-blowingly grand, like the glory of a sunset with low-lying cloud at sea.

  I also persuaded the Prince to lay out a tiny sum on a sackful of sponges, which were peddled at our ship's side during a calm by a couple of lads who rowed a tiny skiff up to us from the Arabian shore.

  The last two hundred miles or so were the worst, as they almost always are on that particular voyage, and took a quarter of the time we spent in the Red Sea. As the banks of the Khalij As Suways, the Gulf of Suez, closed in on us, the winds blew out of the west, earning on their back the heavy, sharp grit of the desert; the sky became overcast, with a featureless grey haze tinged with ochre, and the master and crew were increasingly bad-tempered as they struggled to keep our head close to the wind without losing forward way. The dolphins and flying fish departed for the south and an evil, grubby spume settled on the decking making it slippery and movement hazardous. As the Gulf narrowed, other shipping, too, became a hazard, those going our way competing with us to find good berths within the roads before nightfall, those leaving scudding by with the wind on their quarters, angry with us for getting in their way, spilling the wind out of our sail when they got too close, so we were likely at times to drift beam-on to that evil breeze.