Coromandel!

by John Masters

  Jason said, ‘We could go to Aleppo.’

  Mary did not speak. . . .

  Aleppo had a rich and spicy smell. He didn’t know where he had first heard the name. It was white and gold there, and hot. The desert wheeled up to the window of a house--his house, his window. He saw the window and a woman’s dark eye at the lattice as he rode in on a camel from the desert. A hundred bells tinkled, and a thousand horsemen cantered in the dust behind him. No one knew he had gold, frankincense, myrrh, and spikenard in one saddlebag, and turquoise, onyx, alabaster, jade, ruby, emerald, and a grain of mustard seed in the other. His diamond sabre jerked at his side, or at the camel’s flank, in a scabbard. What size was a camel, what colour? Ivory, perhaps. His ship lay in the harbour, and he had only to fight through the crowd to it, and swim out. The girl would wait till he came back. He would come back in another ship, the pennant streaming out from the stern and St George’s Cross flying high.

  ‘Where’s Aleppo?’ Mary said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Jason, how can we go there if you don’t know where it is? It’s time you went home. You’ll be tired, and your apples aren’t in yet, are they?’

  ‘Apples?’ he repeated vaguely. Why didn’t she see that Aleppo was a place you didn’t have to know about? He had thrown his jerkin off somewhere, and now he tripped over her clothes before he came to it.

  ‘Shhhh!’ she said. ‘Father will hear you.’

  ‘Not with your mother snoring so loud.’ At the casement he turned back suddenly and kissed her on the hand, though she held up her lips for him. She was so happy with him sometimes that he was sure he’d better marry her. He didn’t think he’d be the same person after that, but perhaps she’d like him better for the change. He said, ‘I’ll come again, night after next, early.’

  She began to say something, but he was on the ivy and away.

  The trout were not moving under the bridge, and he did not stop there. He walked quickly along the footpath, crossed a field, bore left, and cut up towards the shoulder of hill that separated the village of Shrewford Pennel from his father’s farm. It was late. Lying with Mary made the moment splendid, but for a time afterward there was never anything in his head but facts. On this journey back, the Romans had gone, and the shadows were only sleeping cows, and the smells were just of grass and dung.

  At the crest of the rise he saw the light thatch of the farm below, less than half a mile away. He had begun to hurry down to it when three men jumped out on him from the shadow of the hedge.

  He rolled silently to his back under the weight of them and lashed out with fists and shoes. Three! The Pennels only had four gamekeepers, and, of the four, Hammond was in bed with colic and Sale had gone to Amesbury. His fist jabbed into one of the men’s stomachs, and he heard a gasp. Another muttered, ‘Young polecat! Stand away, Tim.’ A heavy stick whirred down and thudded into the side of his head.

  He lay quiet for a moment after the darkness went away. His head hurt, and before he said anything he wanted to know who the third man was. He listened to their voices above him. The third man was Hugo Pennel, the squire’s son. He heard Hugo ask, ‘Who is it?’--so he could not have been hovering for long out of his senses. One of the others answered, ‘ ‘Tis young Jason Savage, master. We’ve caught him before.’

  Hugo asked, ‘Has he got any game on him?’

  Jason stood up unsteadily, and the keepers jumped to grab his arms. He said, ‘I haven’t been poaching, Master Hugo.’

  ‘What are you doing here, then?’

  Hugo was a tall young man, and even in this light you could see his clothes were richer than any of theirs. They all spoke the same broad Wiltshire--knight’s son, gamekeepers, and yeoman boy. Hugo was twenty-two. When he was fifteen his father had sent him up to London to be a page at the king’s court.

  He repeated his question. Jason did not answer.

  ‘You’ve been poaching, Jason,’ Hugo said threateningly.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Jason said.

  ‘You have!’

  Hugo wasn’t a bad young gentleman. He used to be obscene-minded and a little cruel when they were boys together, but they’d had good fun birds’-nesting and snaring rabbits and talking of ships and girls and the king. Perhaps Hugo would like to forget all that now. Hugo wanted him to answer, but he wouldn’t. It was none of Hugo’s business.

  ‘He’s been poaching, master,’ the head gamekeeper said. ‘He has a trout or a pheasant or a couple of rabbits hidden down there where he can get ‘em tomorrow.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’d better give him a taste of stick, master,’ the head keeper said. ‘He’s going to live here all his life. He’d better learn now not to It’s no use to kick, Jason.’

  ‘I’m not going to live here all my life!’ Jason cried, suddenly stung to furious, impotent tears.

  The keeper laughed curtly and twisted his arm. With that pain Jason got himself under control. He saw that Hugo didn’t want to beat him. Perhaps Hugo was afraid he’d make a complaint to the sheriff. But the keeper meant to see that it was done.

  After a pause the keeper said, ‘If he can poach, master, all of them will. The law’s not strong enough.’

  ‘Beat him, then,’ Hugo said; and angrily: ‘It’s your own fault, Jason.’

  But the head keeper meant to fix it in the young master’s heart that he was a squire’s son, and grown up now. He gave Hugo the cudgel and said, ‘We’ll hold him. Lay on hard, master.’

  Jason faced Hugo, and the yellow moon sank into the Plain. The wind got up. Jason’s eyes bulged, and he struggled round to keep his face to Hugo, but the men were too strong for him. They forced his head into the fork of one’s thighs and pulled down his breeches.

  The stick droned and struck harder as Hugo gathered vengeful anger that Jason should have forced him to do this. After a dozen blows Hugo threw the stick away, panting. He gasped. ‘There! Now run and complain--but you’ll get the same next time. Do you understand?’

  Jason felt cold trickles of blood running down the backs of his legs. He hauled up his breeches and fastened them. The blood wouldn’t show through. His sister Molly would wash them for him later. He’d have to tell her. She’d be thrilled and horrified and angry, and would blame him and be sorry for him all at once. There wasn’t anybody he could talk to the way he could talk to Molly.

  He didn’t answer Master Hugo Pennel, but turned and walked on the way he had been going, while the three stared at his back.

  ‘Don’t you forget what the young master said,’ the head keeper called after him, and he heard the other man say, ‘He’s a bad one, master, a real bad one.’

  His buttocks began to ache and burn so that he ground his teeth together to stop himself from moaning. In the pain, though, the power to get away came back to him, and, even as he walked down the long slope he was gone. The afterglow of the moon arched up from behind the bare hill, and it was the light from the Golden Fleece--or the brilliance from camp-fires glaring in the desert outside Aleppo, or a cave of Indian jewels. It was not Hugo and the keepers who had beaten him, but nobler, stranger enemies.

  He stopped and struck his palms together and whispered, ‘Speranza Voy!’ God’s wounds, it was Voy they’d been after--Old Voy, the poacher, the strange talker, the seller of nostrums and teller of stories. The fools had been hiding up there on the edge of the Plain to catch Old Voy, but they’d caught him instead, because Voy was too smart for them.

  He began to laugh. His window was on the ground floor, and he climbed in through it.

  The boat rocked on the sea, and the spar where he lay cut hard into his buttocks. He clung on with one hand and shaded his eyes with the other. The low land lay like a bar of gold, and thin trees waved over the white and blue line of the shore. The boat lurched; the spar swung him on a long arc, far out over the waves.

  ‘Wake up, wake up! Jason, can’t you hear the cows? Father will be angry.’

&
nbsp; He slipped out from under the blanket and stood, yawning, on the rushes. The light was grey, and a cow was mooing on the other side of the thorn hedge. A chilly wind blew in through the window, and he felt tired. He remembered last night and--went for his clothes, but Molly was quicker and had his breeches in her hand, holding them out to him. Then she saw, and cried, ‘Blood! Turn round, Jason.’

  He didn’t want to explain just now. He said, ‘Give them to me,’ and grabbed the breeches from her hand and put them on. He met her eyes, defying her to be angry with him. She was his twin, a tall girl with his thinness of body and neck and nostrils; but a woman’s lips and a woman’s eyes, darker grey than his; and small, tight breasts.

  ‘Who did that?’ she asked.

  ‘Gamekeepers.’

  ‘Were you poaching?’

  ‘No.’

  She said, ‘I’ll kill them! They have no right to hurt you.’ He pulled on his jerkin, looking down to avoid the blazing heat of her eyes.

  She turned on him. ‘It’s your fault too. Why do you go creeping about in the middle of the night? Why don’t you take Mary into the woods on Sunday afternoons the way everyone else does? Is she so hot under her shift, for you to go there every other night? You treat her as if she’s a king’s whore and you a--a prince, a knight! She wishes she was safe back with George Denning, I can tell you!’

  He didn’t speak because it was no good answering Molly when she was in this mood. He kissed her, letting his lips cling for a moment to her ear, and went out.

  He let the cows into the byre and began to milk. ‘Get over, Daisy,’ he muttered, and butted his head into the cow’s flank. She moved comfortably over for him. Her side was warm, and the dew steaming off her made a sweet smell in the byre. The milk spurted ringing into the jug, with rhythm like music, like the handbells of the young men at bell practice. ‘Sweet Daisy.’ He nuzzled his head against her, turning it round and rubbing her with his hair. She champed loudly on the hay in the stall. Through the low window at the back of the byre, when he raised his head, he saw the sun rising.

  He could not sit down comfortably. Tomorrow night he’d flip that old trout out of the Avon, and as many more as he could. Hugo had no right to disbelieve him. He’d never told Hugo a lie. He picked up the stool by one leg and went over to the next cow. Susan wasn’t a good cow. He couldn’t talk to her at all. She was just a cow.

  The light darkened, and his father stood in the low doorway. ‘When you’ve finished, Jason, clean out the yard.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Then trim the hedge up below the Plain.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘You should have done that hedge yesterday, Jason. Daisy went through and on to Squire’s land, on his Twenty-Acre.’

  ‘I’ll do it today, Father,’ Jason said, but he thought: Good Daisy, clever old girl, you’ll go and find out, won’t you, with your big inquisitive face?

  His father went out--heavier than Jason, and hunched. Jason couldn’t remember his mother. She had died with another baby when he and Molly were five. Through the door he watched the morning sunlight edge down the ribs of the Plain. His hands slowly stopped their squeeze and release. The distracting music of the milk ceased.

  After a while he shook his head and hurried to the end of his task, hurried through the cleaning of the yard, dumped the manure and mud and straw on the pile outside the byre, took his billhook, hurried up to the farthest hedge. Once there, he began to whistle. The closer to the Plain his work lay, the better he felt. Little pieces of the Plain had been ploughed, and here and there men kept sheep on it, but the Plain was not farmland and never could be--not enough water, and the soil crumbly and chalky. Or perhaps the dark men of his dreams, the men with the stone arrows, wouldn’t allow it. The wind blew in gusts and bent over the tassels of the rye grass, and a rabbit sat up in the white mouth of its burrow to watch him.

  He saw Old Voy coming along the other side of the hedge before Voy saw him. He swept short strokes with his bill, cut and bent and tied back the living fence, and from the corner of his eye watched the old man coming. Voy was small and blotchy-faced, and his dirty grey hair hung down on his shoulders. Jason didn’t think he was quite as old as he looked, because after dark he seemed to change and move like a young man. Perhaps he was sixty. His teeth were good, but for three missing at the top front. He always carried a gentleman’s sword and wore a velvet doublet with puffed, slashed sleeves. The doublet was old and very dirty. A sack dangled at his right hip, from a leather strap across his left shoulder, and Jason chuckled when he saw it. The keepers had been inside that sack twenty times and never found anything but books and papers and medicines. Old Voy also wore a sleeveless leather jerkin that bulged mysteriously over his stomach and hid a might of queer things, but never a rabbit or a partridge that anyone had looked and seen.

  Voy stopped opposite Jason on the other side of the hedge and for a minute silently watched the work. Then he said, ‘You’re a good boy, Jason. You didn’t tell the rascals anything, did you?’

  Jason lowered the billhook and looked at a thorn in his hand. So Voy had been watching, last night. He must have been close. He said, ‘I’d nothing to tell.’

  ‘I’m not a gamekeeper, Jason.’

  ‘I’d nothing to tell, didn’t you hear me?’

  ‘What were you doing there, then?’

  Jason spat out the thorn and picked up the bill. ‘None of your business.’

  Voy said, ‘Ah, a girl. Hugo was a fool not to believe you.’

  Jason said nothing, and after a while Old Voy said placatingly, ‘You come down the spinney tomorrow night, and I’ll show you how my ferrets work. They’re from France, Jason.’

  ‘France?’ Jason lowered the bill. ‘Have you been to France?’

  ‘France? Of course I’ve been to France--and Rome, and Damascus, and everywhere.’

  ‘Have you been to Aleppo?’ Jason asked anxiously.

  ‘Yes, I’ve been to Aleppo, Jason.’

  ‘You have, really?’ Jason glanced up and down the hedge. He’d done enough for the time being. He could go on after eating his dinner. He took a pace back, vaulted over, and landed on hands and knees beside Old Voy. He said eagerly, ‘Do you want a piece of ray bread? Tell me about Aleppo. And I’ve got two eggs and two potatoes and an onion.’

  ‘Beer?’ Old Voy was looking at him, reading him.

  Jason unslung his leather bottle and passed it over. They sat down on the sunny side of the hedge there, the sun high over the Plain and all the lanes and byres and cows and church towers behind them, beyond the hedge. Jason said, ‘What’s it like? Where is it?’

  Voy looked narrowly at him, took a bite out of a potato, and said, ‘You want to leave Wiltshire, Jason?’

  Jason remembered that Voy must have heard him last night when he shouted at Hugo that he wasn’t going to stay here for ever. But now he only said, ‘I don’t know about that. How can I leave?’

  ‘Going to be wed soon, eh? And then there’s the farm to look after. And your sister, what will--?’

  Jason said angrily, ‘If you don’t want to tell me anything, you go away, see? I asked you about Aleppo.’

  Voy eyed him all the time. When he answered he spoke in a dreamy, distant voice as though he was remembering things from a long way back. ‘Aleppo is in the East, Jason, on the edge of the desert. It belongs to the Grand Turk. There aren’t any poor people in Aleppo--least, not poor Englishmen. English people go there for the Levant Company, and they make a fortune, every one. They stay there a few years, then come home rich.’

  ‘How do they get rich?’

  ‘Buying and selling, of course.’

  ‘Oh!’ Jason was disappointed. After a moment he asked, ‘How rich? Richer than Sir Tristram Pennel?’

  ‘Much richer. Why, Jason, the streets are paved with gold there, and in the bazaar--that’s what they call the market--there’s gold lying out in big blocks ready to buy. The women wear jewels in their noses, and
gold and silver ornaments from head to foot, and ride on camels. There’s wine all the time, and sherbet they sell ice cold.’

  ‘Where does the ice come from?’ Jason asked quickly. Old Voy was supposed to be a great liar. He didn’t want to believe that, but he didn’t want to be laughed at for a simpleton either.

  ‘Why, they send trains of camels and horses out to the mountains--the mountains there are to the north of Aleppo, where the Old Man of the Mountains lives. Ever heard of him?’

  Jason shook his head. The Old Man of the Mountains! That’s who had the Golden Fleece. It must be!

  Voy said, ‘They get the ice there in winter and cut it and store it in holes in the ground. Then in the summer--in the summer in Aleppo it’s hotter than you’d believe--they send the camels up to bring the ice down.’

  Jason nodded. You couldn’t catch Old Voy out in a story any more than Pennel’s men could find a trout in his bag or a bird under his jerkin. Voy helped himself to the beer, and when he handed the bottle back it was nearly empty. He said, ‘I’ve travelled everywhere, Jason. I’ve been to Tartary. The men wear long robes made out of sheepskins, and ride all day on little ponies. It’s like the Plain there, only big! Why--‘

  ‘Like the Plain?’ Jason said incredulously. ‘Do they have the standing stones and the earth walls like Shrewford Ring?’

  ‘Of course! Why shouldn’t they? I tell you, Tartary is like the Plain, only it goes on for a thousand leagues--ten thousand--to the end of the earth. After ten thousand leagues you come to a big wall, and demons and dragons guarding the wall.’

  ‘Have you seen the wall?’

  Voy hesitated, then said regretfully, ‘No, I’ve never seen it, Jason. I--I was captured by robbers before I got there. They held me prisoner for three weeks in a cave. I was a prisoner with a dozen beautiful girl slaves they’d captured at--‘

  ‘Has anyone ever been over the wall?’ Jason cut in eagerly.

  ‘No one.’

  No one. Then no one knew what was behind the wall. There might be cities of amethyst and sapphire and topaz. The Golden Fleece might be there. But no, the Fleece was near Aleppo, where the old man lived in the mountains. He hardly noticed Voy taking the other egg.