by Jane Johnson
‘Tell me,’ Sidi Mohammed said, leaning forward and fixing Marshall with those bright, inquisitive eyes, ‘what wonders have you brought for me this time? More Christians for our endeavours? It seems to me this young man could pull an oar with the greatest of ease. Why, he is so mighty he could likely row a galley on his own! Is he a part of the goods you bring me, Master Marshall?’
‘Alas, no, my lord. The young man who accompanies me is Robert Bolitho from the land of Cornwall, whence your bold captain, Al-Andalusi Raïs, brought away so many Christian captives earlier this year.’
‘Ah, our servant Qasem bin Hamed bin Moussa Dib: a fine warrior for the good God, may he live long and prosper so that all may prosper from his righteous deeds, inch’allah. Allah be praised. Al-hamdulillah.’
‘Allah akbar,’ Marshall agreed, bowing his head. ‘Praise be to the Most High, and those who serve him. But we have disturbed your lunch, my lord: pray let us retire for a time so that you may take your ease.’
The old man shook his head impatiently. ‘No, William Marshall, no. Sit, eat with me. And young Robert Bolitho, also: sit, please, like brothers: Hassan, please ask Milouda to bring bread for all, and water, that our brothers here may wash.’
A woman brought them a bowl and ewer, and two lengths of cotton on which to dry their hands. The Sidi himself poured the rose-scented water for them. He waited till the woman had taken the bowl away, then returned with bread and olives and a heavy earthenware dish. He lifted the lid so that a great billow of steam from the dish wreathed about his face.
‘Ah, chicken with preserved lemon. God is good to me.’ He pushed the basket of bread across the table towards Marshall and Rob. ‘Eat, please. Are your family in good health, Master Marshall? Your wife, your boys, your mother?’
Rob was astonished. All this time together the man had never once mentioned the existence of a family: for all Rob knew, he might be a bachelor or a widower, and an orphan, to boot.
Marshall answered the marabout at length and then inquired after the old man’s health.
‘I continue to be hale, inch’allah, though I am sure there are many in your country who would wish it were otherwise. I think your Master Harrison was most frustrated by me when he was here. But then’ – he spread his hands apologetically – ‘he did not bring me what I hoped he would, though I offered him much in return. But maybe the time was not right, and Allah willed it otherwise.’
They ate in silence for a while, then Marshall said, ‘You have had a fine trawl of captives this year, I have heard: captives from far and wide.’
The Sidi’s black eyes came away from the chicken leg he held. ‘Indeed, Allah has been most perceptive in supplying us with fine captains, bold crews and good weather for our ships. Four hundred and twenty-three Christian souls to strengthen our cause,’ he said evenly.
Marshall smiled. ‘A fine summer’s work, Sidi. But perhaps with only four hundred and twenty-one or two, the Lord’s work might go equally well?’
‘How should it go equally well? Four hundred and twenty-one or two is not four hundred and twenty-three. The scales will not balance: one would fall short of its mark, and that would be most grievous in Allah’s eyes.’
‘Is it possible that bronze and iron might make up the difference?’
The Sidi paused. ‘How may one weigh a soul in base metals, Master Marshall? It would be like weighing feathers and stones.’
‘Maybe so. But a ton of feathers is the same as a ton of stones.’
‘In weight, perhaps, but not in worth.’
‘What if the bronze was of best European origin, and there was enough iron to accompany it to last a year?’
The marabout’s lips twitched. He picked up the chicken leg and stripped the last scrap of muscle from it with teeth as sharp and yellow as a rat’s. ‘It would depend on the quality of the bronze and iron; and on what else was to go into the counter-scale.’
William Marshall thrust a hand into the neck of his robe and withdrew a roll of parchment. This he passed to the marabout, who took it after wiping his fingers carefully on the cloth and muttering his thanks to the Lord. He scanned the contents, his face impassive. ‘I know that our culture enshrines haggling at the heart of its trading, but I find it tedious to haggle. This is all most acceptable. Spanish gold we have in plenty; English too, if that would be more… practical to your master, but of course we should need proof of their good working order before we strike our deal.’
Marshall inclined his head. ‘All shall be as you decree, Sidi.’
‘Inch’allah. Your ship is… where, exactly?’
‘Within distance of an agreed sign. She will sail in when I call for her and you can have a boat sent out with trusted men aboard to verify the cargo.’
The marabout looked across the table at Hassan bin Ouakrim and they spoke rapidly in their language for a time. At last the Sidi said, ‘Hassan tells me the boy with you has come here to reclaim his wife.’
Rob sat up straighter and tried not to look too hopeful.
Marshall shrugged. ‘She is a worthless drudge, not even married to the lad yet, but he has a fancy to wed her nevertheless. I cannot imagine she is of much value to your cause, Sidi. If you could see your way clear to include her in our bargain, it would ease the boy’s heart.’
‘And Matty too,’ Rob said quickly. ‘Matty Pengelly.’
Marshall shot him a poisonous look. ‘Shut up, Rob.’
The Sidi looked affronted. ‘The boy seeks to bargain for souls, does he? You had better tell him that is business best left to the older and wiser among us, and that I trade only with those whom I know well enough to trust. It pains my heart not to be able to grant your request, Master Marshall, but Hassan tells me the girl with hair of fire is already sold to a master who has paid far more for her than you could possibly give him in recompense.’
Rob struggled upright from his place at the table, and at once Hassan shot to his feet, hand on the hilt of his dagger. ‘I have money!’ Rob cried. He hauled out the pouch of gold he had collected and threw it down on the table where it landed with a resounding clatter.
The marabout stared at it as if Rob had thrown down a dead dog. Then he addressed himself to the Londoner. ‘I realize that the boy is young and callow, but you are responsible for his manners, Master Marshall, and they are sorely lacking. I am greatly insulted. Perhaps I should take you both and put you in irons and send Hassan and Al-Andalusi to bring in your ship and its crew of infidels. How many more souls might that add to our cause, I wonder? Sixty, eighty, one hundred? In my time my corsairs and I have consigned to the Devil the souls of seven thousand, six hundred and forty-three Christians, and I should like to make it a round ten thousand before I die. Al-hamdulillah.’ He paused, then ran the palms of his hands down his face, kissed them and touched them to his heart. ‘This house has an exceptionally beautiful courtyard full of symmetry and peace. It is the perfect place in which to turn my attention towards the simplicity of spiritual truths and away from the complexities of the outside world. At the heart of my courtyard I have had a fountain made from a number of Nazarene skulls. I like to contemplate it each day after my morning prayers, to admire the subtle relationship between decoration and form. Water sounds most pretty falling through the eye-sockets of a dead infidel, Master Marshall; it is very pleasing to the ear. Perhaps you would care to join me in my contemplation? I think I might find room for another skull in its centrepiece.’
Marshall had gone several shades paler. ‘No, Sidi, I beg you. Forget the captives: they are not an important part of this bargain. The four cannon you shall have, and all the shot and powder you require. They are of the finest quality, as you shall see: you have my word on that. And their provenance is most interesting: I think you will appreciate the irony extremely, for they were founded for the Cornish coast’s defence at the Crown’s expense, lord. They were destined for the rearming of Pendennis Castle and St Michael’s Mount. Sir John Killigrew commends them to you and says yo
ur corsairs are welcome to them and to the wretched Cornish too.’
Sidi Mohammed al-Ayyachi nodded graciously. ‘An irony indeed. Sir John has my thanks.’ He touched his breast. Then he leaned forward and picked up the pouch Rob had cast on the table and weighed it thoughtfully in his hand. ‘This feels to me very like the price of one Christian soul. Let us make our deal, Master Marshall.’ He threw the pouch towards the Londoner with the speed and force of a striking cobra.
Surprised, Marshall fumbled the catch: gold spilled out across the room, gleaming in the rays of sun that slanted into the room from its high window.
‘Four cannon; all the shot and powder we require; and this fine young man for our galleys.’
Rob felt his bones turn to water. ‘What? No!’
He stared at Marshall, his eyes round with horror, but the Londoner was already down on his knees, scrabbling up the coins.
29
Robert Bolitho had never suffered a day’s sickness in all his twenty-three years. He had evaded the pox, the plague, the scarlet fever. Years of farm labour had toughened his sinews and rounded out a lanky frame into useful brawn. At six foot five, he towered over other men, and with his sky-blue eyes, fair skin and straw-yellow hair presented as fine a specimen of God’s Adam as could ever be imagined.
As a Barbary slave, this boon was soon to prove a curse.
Rob was stripped naked, inspected minutely, even down to the state of his teeth, and given a bundle containing a blanket, a short hooded jacket, a collarless shirt and a pair of wide-legged cotton breeches. A clerk wrote down an approximation of his name and entered it into a register. He was then taken down into one of the slave dungeons, the mazmorra, wherein he found a hundred and more other wretches likewise jammed into dark and stinking close quarters wherein men moaned and whimpered, or crouched wordless and broken on the ground; or cursed and railed in a dozen different languages. In the middle of the night he and the other new prisoners were awoken and taken to have great iron rings fitted about their right legs by a smith who cared not one whit whether he struck iron or bone with his heavy hammer. At this last indignity, one of the men broke into loud and racking sobs: the fetter was the final confirmation of the loss of his humanity.
In the register, did he but know it, Robert Bolitho’s name had been written in the section designated for future galley-rowers; but, it not being yet the raiding season, he was meanwhile selected for rock-breaking, the grimmest of ordeals requiring the strongest of the captives. His captors marked him out even as they urged him blinking out into the harsh first light.
‘He could last three months, this one,’ one of the overseers declared.
‘If he does, I’ll give you a chicken.’
The first overseer stared at him coldly. ‘The Qur’an forbids gambling, Ismael. Watch your step, or you’ll be joining them.’
Over four months after Robert Bolitho was set to work in the quarry, hewing out by hand tool and sheer brute force massive stones and hoisting them two miles to the coast via sledge and ropes, he was still alive, against all the odds.
Rob had seen men fail and die by the dozen – dropping from exhaustion and malnutrition, whipped bloody or driven mad by the sun. One man had gone berserk and tried to murder a guard: he had been summarily executed, his head struck without ceremony from his body, which had taken two steps grotesque and headless before collapsing. The head had bounced off down the hill. No one had bothered to retrieve it. Other men had died from contaminated water; others still of shame and despair.
Throughout it all, as the hemp ropes embedded themselves in his flesh, leaving weeping welts, as the iron fetter dug into the infected sores around his ankle, as his back was striped with whip marks, as his muscles wailed in protest as he swung the mallet at the unforgiving rock, as vermin bred in his hair and feasted on his skin, Rob kept on surviving. When he thought he could not go on, he remembered Cat, seated on her ancient throne on Castle an Dinas, her fox-red hair blowing in the wind, and willed himself to live.
There were days when he forgot what the view from Kenegie, which he had loved so dearly, looked like; days when he forgot his own name. But he never forgot the precise shade of Catherine Anne Tregenna’s eyes, or the curve of her mouth as she smiled.
30
I was forthwith taken from the howse of the Sidi to a donjon they called a mazmorra which laie beneath the ground into which a small hole gave only a littell raie of light, & there I founde a true picture of miserie & humaine suffering – an hundred poore unfortunates in ragges & squalor, some as thin as wyrms, weak from disease & beatings & lack of repast…
I put the letter down, appalled, and looked up at Idriss. ‘Were the captives really kept in such atrocious conditions?’
‘I expect so. There were so many slaves they probably feared an uprising if they kept them strong and above the ground.’
‘Such cruel times; such barbarous people.’
‘And of course no one would ever treat prisoners so badly today, contravening their human rights so shockingly. I won’t mention Guantánamo Bay. Or the ferocious slaving of Africans by the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Americans…’ He counted them off one by one on his fingers.
‘I take your point,’ I said, forcing a smile.
We were sitting in the ante-room of a beautiful courtyard restaurant owned by friends of Idriss, where we had feasted on pigeon pastilla and fish brochettes and been complicit in the sharing of a bottle of fine local rosé – either that, or the contents of the foolscap pages had rendered us both a little tipsy.
‘Khaled will just love this,’ Idriss said suddenly. ‘He’s been researching the Sidi al-Ayyachi for years, but I don’t think he ever found a source that described him personally or, I suspect, so accurately.’
‘He seems like a complete monster.’
‘Heroes and villains: they’re all monsters really,’ Idriss said, smiling. He tapped one of his ubiquitous Marlboros out into his hand, then sat there looking at it. After some seconds of this, he replaced the cigarette, closed the box with a gesture of finality and pushed it away. ‘Time to give up one bad habit,’ he said.
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
‘You seem very sure about it.’
‘There are some things in life I am very sure about.’ He looked at me so intently that I felt dizzy.
Just at that moment one of the waiting staff, who had all evening been both courteous and unobtrusive, knocked over a small vase in the courtyard, and there was a burst of activity as someone saved the scattered roses, someone else mopped up the water, and yet another ran for the dustpan and brush. ‘We should go,’ I said, looking at my watch. Past eleven, though it felt like three in the morning to my exhausted head.
‘Don’t you want to finish going through the papers?’
‘I’m very tired. We can finish them tomorrow. Or the next day – if you don’t mind my staying a little longer.’ And I wanted some time to myself, to reflect on what had been a rather extraordinary day. A lot had happened in a very short space of time. Not least the kiss in the alley.
Idriss beamed. ‘I was very much hoping you’d say that. Our house is your house for as long as you like.’
We walked back through the deserted medina, the waxing crescent moon casting its silvery light down upon us as we went. Thin cats scurried at the sound of our footsteps. We disturbed a pack of feral dogs worrying at the rubbish left by the day’s market; they did not growl at us but simply melted away into the darkness until we had gone. Somewhere a bird sang, its chant hanging plaintive and melancholy in the still air. ‘Andaleeb,’ Idriss said. ‘I don’t know the English name for it, I think it’s a sort of lark or something. Our tradition has it that they sing with the voices of lost lovers. If the stars are smiling on them you will hear its mate call back in a moment. Listen.’
So there in the shadow of the ancient Almohad wall we stood and waited, and seconds passed like an eternity. ‘She’s not co
ming,’ I joked, but Idriss put a finger to his lips. ‘Wait.’
Sure enough the silence gave way to another song, above and to our left.
‘She’s up on the minaret.’ Idriss smiled. ‘Now they will be together.’
Alone later in his room, I sat on the edge of the bed and took the envelope out of my bag. Inside lay the truth about two other parted lovers. I had promised Idriss I would not finish reading their story without him, yet I could not help but steal a glance at the pages to come.
Fettered hand & foote in cowlde iron, I read, and beaten oft & savagelye till wee bledde. My eye skipped down the page and lighted on alas, poore Jack Kellynch, so goode a man never deserved so crewel a fate, hys was a verie meane & crewel deth. Poor Matty Pengelly, I thought then, and wondered what had become of the girl. Had she known what had happened to Jack, or was she already sold to a master who worked her hard in his kitchen or, worse, in his bed? I got up, removed the djellaba and the veil, and brushed out my flattened hair. I took a brief and chilly shower in the little room next door and climbed into my narrow bed. I meant to stow the papers away, I really did, but even as I laid my hand on them my eye scanned Oure shippe put into Plymouth on the twentie third daie of July 1626 & never was I so gladde to see the shores of England. So there it was. It had taken Robert Bolitho the best part of a year, but he had, despite all his terrible experiences, finally prevailed and brought his Catherine safely home. I wondered how he had escaped the slave prison and made away with Cat, but I would simply have to wait to find out. I should sleep, I told myself.
But I did not. I tossed and turned and could not get comfortable. I could have sworn I heard an owl hoot outside my window, but that was ridiculous: I was in the heart of an African city and not the wilds of Cornwall. Even so, when I finally fell asleep, it was of Catherine I dreamed.
