Coromandel!

by John Masters

  With his mouth full, Voy said, ‘The only place I have not been to is the best place of all. There’s treasure in that place. The people--ah!’ He paused.

  Jason said, ‘Yes? What are the people like?’

  Old Voy began slowly, ‘Why, they’re tall. And they have fair skins, boy, and golden hair and shining helmets. They’re nothing like the Tartars, who are small and yellowish and have eyes like this.’ He pulled up the corners of his eyes.

  ‘What is this place called where the treasure is?’ Jason asked.

  ‘Coromandel!’

  ‘Coromandel. Coromandel! Where is it?’

  ‘It’s in India, near Golconda.’

  ‘Can anyone find the treasure? Is it lying about? Or do you have to dig it up? Will the people with the shining helmets help you or fight you if you go there for the treasure? How do you get to Coromandel?’

  Voy sucked his raggedy moustache, eyeing Jason. Then he said, ‘Can you read, Jason?’

  Jason answered sullenly, ‘No.’

  Voy said, quickly cheerful, ‘That doesn’t matter. You’ll learn, won’t you?’ Feeling in his sack, he carefully drew out a book and shook it, and out fell a folded sheet of paper. He said, ‘Here’s a map of Coromandel, Jason.’ He spread the map out flat on the grass and brushed off the long-legged field spider that began to walk across it.

  Jason gazed breathlessly at the map. He could not read, but this map hardly needed reading. There were pictures. There were the blue waves of the sea, and a row of thin trees with feathery tops. There was a big dark-red stain in one corner, and writing everywhere. Voy ran his finger along a blue line and said, ‘Here’s the river of Coromandel. These humps are mountains. This is where the treasure lies, and here’s the name of the mountain--Meru. It has two peaks, see?’

  Old Voy’s strangely clean and uncalloused finger wandered over the map, and his voice was hoarse in Jason’s ear. ‘The Coromandel Coast. The City of Pearl, by the sea. And then you go up the river, a long way. Right up near the source, there, that’s the Castle of the Holy Monks. From there it’s a hundred leagues to the mountain Meru, and--‘

  ‘What’s that red mark?’

  ‘Blood. “In the cave, forty-eight paces below the eastern peak, towards the north, a countless treasure lies hid.” That’s what it says.’

  There were horsemen galloping over the empty spaces on that part of the map, and waving spears in the air. Devil faces blew wind over the sea. It was a blue and black map on yellow paper, with the bloodstain in a corner.

  Jason said, ‘How can a man travel to Coromandel?’

  Voy said, ‘In a ship from London, Jason. You go south to the Cape of Storms in Africa, and then east. It’s a long, hard voyage, Jason--but think what’s at the end of it, for you!’ Old Voy’s blue eyes gleamed, and his hand squeezed Jason’s shoulder.

  Jason said with a sudden renewal of suspicion, ‘Why don’t you go and get the treasure yourself? It’s marked on the map.’

  ‘Me?’ Voy shook his head so that his grey hair swung out clear from his shoulders. He laughed throatily. ‘I’m too old. This is young man’s work. But you can go. I’ll sell the map cheap to you, because I like you.’

  Jason was thinking--not thinking, but sinking, under a torrent of ideas: Tartary, horses and the sea racing together, snow on mountains--though he’d never seen a mountain--camels. Mary--she wouldn’t want to go to Coromandel. How far? How long to wait? How much? The map might be a fraud. Farm boys were always losing their money to gypsies and chapmen who sold charms and nostrums and curses, none of them ever any good.

  He said cautiously, ‘How much?’ trying to sound uninterested. Voy said, ‘I wouldn’t sell this map to just anyone who wanted to buy it. What’s the use of letting a man have this map who’ll send out an expedition and get the treasure for himself without ever stirring a foot from Wiltshire?’ He busied himself in a careful stowing away of his belongings as he spoke. He squeezed the leather bottle, squirted the last of the beer down his throat, and handed the bottle back.

  Jason waited eagerly. He said, ‘I haven’t got much, mind.’ Voy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Jason, you can have it for forty shillings.’

  Jason hesitated. For all the years he’d been putting a little money aside he had got only forty-six shillings and three pennies and two farthings.

  He said, ‘I’ll buy it.’

  ‘You’ve got a bargain,’ Voy said cheerfully and folded up the map and handed it to him. ‘But mind, don’t you show that map to anyone, and don’t go talking about it, or you’ll find someone else has got there ahead of you and taken the treasure.’

  Jason held the map carefully and said, ‘But I haven’t got the money with me. I keep it in--I haven’t got it here.’

  Old Voy nodded approvingly. ‘That’s a wise man. Don’t you tell anyone where you keep your money. The world’s full of thieves these days. You treat that map as if it was money itself. Take it. Pay me any time. I trust you.’

  Jason’s heart swelled up, with the map inside his jerkin and Voy trusting him for forty shillings. He mumbled, ‘Thank you. Tomorrow night?’

  Voy nodded. ‘Early. At the spinney.’ He jerked his head towards the floor of the vale.

  Jason nodded, stepped back, and again vaulted over the hedge on to his father’s land. He felt inside his jerkin to make sure the map had not fallen out. Then he picked up the bill--hook and began to work. Old Voy waved his hand in a courtly gesture and shuffled away along the line of the hedge, his head downcast and moving from side to side as he peered at the ground. ‘No runs along there--I’ve looked,’ Jason called after him with a grin. Old Voy shook his long hair and shuffled on and at last out of sight.

  Coromandel!

  God’s blood, this hedge never grew right, and every year he was back up here, early spring and end of summer, getting thorns in his hand. The hedge was like a wall, like a prison, only he could look out over the top, and that made it worse. When he’d done here, he had to go down to the orchard. The wasps were thick on the trees now. He’d get stung a couple of times, as usual.

  Coromandel!

  He put down his bill and got out the map. There was the word. He remembered where it lay in relation to the bloodstain.

  It was written in fine wavy black writing, but bigger than any of the other words, all along the land inside the blue line where there was a ship with a high stern. He couldn’t see any flag on her. Perhaps the mapmaker hadn’t painted one in. Perhaps ships did not fly flags on the Coromandel coast. Tom Devitt said ships always flew flags, but Tom had never been to Coromandel--at least, he had never mentioned it.

  He could ask Tom about Coromandel and how long it took to get there. No, he couldn’t, because the map was a secret.

  He must ask Voy about the bloodstain.

  He must learn to read.

  Here was the place where the hills stood all around and the men were galloping on small horses under the mountain Meru.

  To get there he’d have to cross the sea at least as far as to America. The sea was to the south, beyond the Plain, beyond Salisbury’s tall spire. Men went to sea and came back like Tom Devitt, with funny clothes and funny words, or a wooden leg.

  The sea was cold blue and ended in a pit with big grey birds circling and crying over it. He’d seen the seagulls driven even here in hard winters, their cry like babies left out on the Plain, the birds standing in the fields when the icicles hung from the thorn bushes and the mud crackled under the cart--wheels and the oxen breathed steam in the shafts.

  ‘Jason!’

  He scrambled to his feet, quickly folding the map away and picking up his bill.

  ‘What have you got there?’

  ‘Nothing, Molly.’

  He wanted to show her the map, perhaps tonight, but not here in the field. Molly changed so much. By day, when the sun shone, she could be very like Mary. At night in the house, best of all when the south wind blew from the Plain and the rain hissed in the thatch, s
he was like another piece of himself, a piece that was lost from him when they were apart; then they huddled together in his narrow bed and told stories of ghosts and made up pictures in words about the men and women who had raised Shrewford Ring long ago and set up the three stones.

  Molly said, ‘It is something, liar!’

  He said, ‘It’s a map. I’ll show it to you tonight.’

  Molly said, ‘A map! I saw Old Voy up here. So did Father. He’s going to give you trouble. You know what he thinks of Voy.’

  Jason knew. His father thought the same as Parson and Squire Pennel and all the other steady people. Old Voy was good for nothing. His real name was Potts, and he came from somewhere east, almost to London. Voy himself had let that out when he got drunk in the Cross Keys one day, but he drew his rusty gentleman’s sword if you mentioned it, and insisted his name was Don Speranza Voy--a Spanish nobleman’s bastard. Voy lived like a gypsy, and told lies and poached, and slept out winter and summer, and sold charms to lovesick milkmaids. In the summer Voy lit bonfires on the edge of the Plain and sat round them with tinkers and poets and actors. He was supposed to be a confidant of the robbers on the Plain.

  And had Voy really ever visited foreign places? Or had he talked to so many people that he could pretend he had? Jason shied away from that persistent thought. He had paid forty shillings for the map, and Coromandel was a magic word, like a spell.

  ‘Look at that hedge,’ Molly said in exasperation. ‘What have you been doing? What’s that going to be like when it grows across the tree next year? Here.’ She seized the billhook from him and began to cut and slash, mending his mistakes. He stood watching her and wondered whose head she wished she were cutting off--his, or Ahab Stiles’.

  When she had finished they walked down together to the farm and began to gather apples. The orchard stretched up to the front of the house, and he saw a fine big horse tethered there near the wall.

  ‘Squire’s here,’ he said.

  ‘It will be about you that he’s come,’ Molly muttered. ‘Are you sure you weren’t poaching last night?’

  They worked up close to the house. It was late afternoon, and the windows were open. When Jason climbed into the apple tree nearest the door and began to unload the heavy branches, his father saw him through the window, but Sir Tristram had his back turned. Jason admired the squire’s red silk doublet and the white cloth showing through, and went on picking apples.

  Soon his father called him. ‘Jason, come in here. Squire wants to talk to you.’

  Jason winked with bravado at Molly’s anxious face and went into the house. He pulled his forelock to Sir Tristram, who regarded him sternly and said, ‘Hugo tells me he caught you poaching last night, Jason.’

  ‘I wasn’t poaching,’ Jason said.

  ‘Come, now, don’t lie to me.’ Sir Tristram’s long face reddened.

  ‘I wasn’t poaching, and I’m not a liar,’ Jason shouted suddenly, the heat whirling up in his neck and a cold hollow forming in his stomach. A sword--if he had a sword he’d be entitled to whip it out and demand satisfaction. His hands shook, and his fists clenched and unclenched.

  Sir Tristram, taken quite aback, stammered, ‘Y-you weren’t--why, eh, what--?’ and his father said sharply, ‘Don’t shout at Squire!’

  Sir Tristram got up, the tip of his scabbard clanking on the stone floor. He said, ‘You’re going to the bad, Jason. You’ll finish on the gallows.’

  Jason said angrily, ‘I was not poaching.’

  ‘What were you doing out at three in the morning, then?’ Sir Tristram asked. ‘Stealing?’

  Jason held on to himself with a huge effort and did not speak. The squire’s face hardened. He said, ‘Go on out, then, to your work, Jason. You have become a liar as well as a poacher and a gypsy. You will have to mend your ways in the future. If you attack my keepers again, you’ll go to prison.’

  Jason turned and went out and walked blindly through the orchard. Hedge. Apples. Milk the cows.

  He opened the gate, let the cows into the byre, and roped them in their stalls. He went back to the kitchen and picked up the earthenware jugs from the corner. Molly was there, lighting the fire for supper. She glanced at him silently, and her eyelashes were wet, but Sir Tristram’s voice still snapped through the house from where he sat on his great horse outside the front door, talking to their father.

  Jason went into the byre, jerked the milking-stool into position with his foot, and dug his head into Daisy’s flank. Daisy moved over and flicked her dung-smeared tail across his face.

  He lay quiet in his bed until all the sounds of the farm were stilled and the doors bolted and his father’s footsteps had creaked up the stairs. The ceiling was whitewashed, and the beams ran like thick iron bars across it. The moon would not be up for another hour and a half. Tomorrow night, rabbits in the spinney with Old Voy’s French ferrets. A couple of nights later, and he’d take the big trout under the Avon bridge. He used to tell himself that he would stop poaching when he was married, but now he knew that he would not. They could only beat him.

  But it was a poor man’s right to take trout and rabbits. All the other squires allowed it, or at least didn’t do anything to prevent it. Why not go poaching with a few of the young men, and, when the Pennel keepers tried to stop them, fight?

  Because the young men wouldn’t go with him, that’s why. They grumbled at Sir Tristram’s selfishness, but they obeyed.

  The Pennels meant to send him to prison. He’d never let them take him. He’d use his knife and run away and join the murderers and sheep-stealers who lived on the Plain. He’d be sorry for Mary and sad for Molly, but he couldn’t help it. He’d do it rather than be locked up.

  They had no right to disbelieve him. They had no right to tell him he was going to be here all his life, because then his dreams, being impossible of coming true, would be like a mad-man’s. If he was really to be here until he died he could not, even in his mind, ride deserts and sail oceans. He could not use his power to make the sounds of the night blur until they became anything he chose. He could not turn silence into music and his thoughts into poetry--such poetry as Old Voy learned from his strange friends and sometimes shouted aloud in the woods. He could not make new stars out of an old moon or change the midday sun into a fresh dawn, or the fields into a foreign shore--the strand of Coromandel.

  Coromandel!

  The map was better than a night’s dreaming, far better than Mary’s female warmth. He slid out of bed and felt behind the casement, where he kept a candle. He made a light, lit the candle, and stood it on the floor. He pulled up a loose board in the corner of the room and from the hole beneath drew out a book and the map. He had found this book eight years ago in the lane near Shrewford Admiral, lying on its face and all muddied. He did not know what the name of the book was or who had written it, or what it was about. He put it aside now, after stroking the leather binding and turning over a few of the crackling leaves. He spread out the map beside the candle and lay flat on his stomach to study it.

  He heard the soft footsteps before they reached his door, and shaded the candle with his hands as Molly came in. She slipped down beside him.

  She whispered, ‘Is this the map? How much did you pay for it?’

  ‘Five shillings,’ he said.

  ‘Five shillings! You are a fool, Jason. It’s not worth a groat. Old Voy made it up himself and just waited for some donkey to come along who would buy it. Look at those horsemen! It’s beautiful, Jason. What are you going to do with it?’

  It was night, and the vast world had become enclosed in the circle of candlelight, and they two were alone there. He said, ‘I’m going to Coromandel to find the treasure. I’ll come back here and buy a bigger place than the Pennels’. I’ll give you diamonds and cedar wood, Molly, and ten thousand pieces of eight.’ He felt the ecstasy of giving her those things, and in the dark corners the floor creaked under the weight of the golden coins. It had happened, and now what should they do? He said, �
�You won’t have to marry Ahab Stiles.’

  ‘No! We’ll go to London and find a prince and a princess to marry.’

  ‘I think Mary wants me to marry her,’ he said slowly, feeling less exalted.

  ‘She did a month ago,’ Molly said heatedly, ‘but she doesn’t now that she knows you better--knows you less, she’d say.’

  Jason considered. His sister was probably right, but all the same he must ask Mary to marry him. Otherwise he might hurt her. He said aloud, ‘I don’t hate her, as you hate Ahab.’

  ‘Ahab!’ Molly snapped. ‘Miserable, creaky old thing, always looking at me like a dog that’s just been beaten. Forty years old, and foul-smelling as a badger.’

  Jason hardly listened. He was thinking: What will Mary Bowcher do with a big house where all the wardrobes are full of pieces of gold, and tame lions and peacocks stroll up and down in the garden, and twenty huge blackamoor servants with great swords bring her cider at dinner-time?

  Molly got up suddenly. ‘It’s all pretend, Jason, isn’t it? Isn’t it? The map’s worth nothing, and you paid more than five shillings for it. We’re twenty years old, and we’re going to be here for ever. What’s the use of pretending? A little bit of real happiness that you can touch is better than any dream.’

  Jason whispered furiously, ‘Go back to your own room, Molly. I don’t want to talk to you. Leave me alone.’

  ‘You’re going to be a farmer here,’ she whispered. ‘And I’m going to be a farmer’s wife in Pewsey. Isn’t Wiltshire good enough for you? Why do you make everyone who loves you uncomfortable when they’re with you? And then angry, because they think they’re missing something you can see and they can’t? Why don’t you leave us alone?’

  Jason breathed almost silently, ‘I’m not going to give up anything. If they send me to prison I’ll kill them. If I can’t even think of going to Coromandel I’ll be a murderer instead.’ Molly said as softly, ‘God’s blood, I hate you, Jason. If you ever leave Wiltshire I’ll leave too. Do you hear me? I will! I will!’