Coromandel!

by John Masters

  Jason went close, turned his own head upside down, and saw that the old man’s skin was wrinkled and that he had no teeth. From this angle the street looked very strange. The old man’s eyes flickered, reminding Jason of a cockerel’s just before it died.

  Jason said, ‘Why?’

  The old man’s eyes flickered again, but he did not answer. Jason sighed and walked away down the street, jingling his money in his breeches.

  At a stall he tasted a round yellow sweetmeat and grinned at the stallkeeper because it was very good, and held out his money, but the stallkeeper would not take any. Five or six children had begun to follow him, and he threw them a penny. They grabbed it and ran away down an alley. He strolled on, breathing deeply of the exotically tainted air. Perhaps this place Manairuppu was the City of Pearl of his map. If so he might find pearl houses, a pearl-paved street. . . . The road to Meru began here.

  He turned down a shady side-street. Soon it ended in an open square by a muddy stream. Several big trees grew in the square, and high in the sky hundreds of brown and white birds, like hawks, wheeled silently above the city. Jason stopped to watch them as they swooped down in twos and threes and swept up refuse from the ground and rose again, fighting in the air over what they had found.

  A huge red stone tower filled the side of the square opposite him. It was the one he had seen in the distance from the ship, but then he had seen only its upper part rising above the houses. It was not square, like an English tower, but had two sides much longer than the others, and the sides sloped sharply in as they rose a hundred and more feet into the air so that it looked like a book stood on its edge, the pages a little open. A black doorway with a stone slab atop gaped in the side facing the square, and people went in and out like beetles. But the carvings in the outer stone! He walked forward. The red stone writhed to life as he approached. Not a square foot of stone was uncarved. The tower crawled with men and girls and animals, none ordinary, all vividly alive, all climbing on one another’s backs in fretted tiers, to the blue sky and the circling hawks.

  Jason walked slowly under the stone slab of the doorway and into darkness. After many paces in the sudden cold, the yellow light strengthened, the black walls fell back, and he stepped out into a sunbathed courtyard.

  A wide cloister, supported by squat stone pillars, surrounded the courtyard. On the far side a heavy building, of the same red stone as the tower, rose in tortured shapes to a stone spire and a final golden spike. Yellow and white flowers lay scattered in the dusty sunlight, and a hump-backed white bull sat at ease in the cloisters, leaning against a pillar and chewing cud.

  Wondering, and prepared to believe anything amid these marvels, Jason crossed the courtyard. At the far side he crossed the cloister and entered the building with the spire and spike. He was in a wide, dark tunnel, and for a moment he could hardly see. He paused and sniffed the air---he smelled burning wood, and cow dung, and crushed flowers.

  Now he could see. He took another pace and stopped dead. Here too the stone walls crawled with moving, living sculpture. He bent to look.

  An elephant. Off the coast of Africa, Fremantle had drawn an elephant for him on the deck of the Phoebe, and this was one. But this elephant had four trunks. More monkeys. Bulls being led to market for slaughter--no, Fremantle said the people here did not like to eat any kind of meat. And here was a war, with men fighting, and among them a troop of women with breasts as round as water-melons. That was wrong. They ought to know better here! He’d never seen a woman like that, and he’d wager no one else had either. And--God’s blood! God’s very bones! Here was the act of a man swyving a woman, and another, and another--hundreds of times, over and over.

  He walked on, peering in amazement. Men and women, bulls and cows, monkeys, elephants--and the bodies twisted in so many lascivious ways. It was interesting. He would never have believed there were so many ways of ‘Why, that’s impossible!’ he muttered. He knelt to have a closer look.

  He heard a sucked-in gasp of breath near him and turned quickly, flushing to his hair. It was a girl; she’d caught him looking at these. He leaped to his feet and swept off his sailor’s woollen hat. He said, ‘I was just looking at the carvings, mistress. I am--‘

  She was plump and short and shining brown. Her eyes were black and black-rimmed, the lashes picked out most clearly in black. She had three violet spots painted or tattooed on her cheeks, two on the right and one on the left, and on her right nostril was a tiny gold ornament with a red stone in the centre of it. She wore a skirt of blue and silver that was drawn in between her thighs in the universal fashion here, and showed her dimpled knees. Her breasts were hidden, but poorly, by a short silver jacket with flowered designs on it. Her mouth was deep red, deep-lipped, and small. Her hair was oiled-black, drawn back tightly from her forehead, with a white flower stuck in it above her ear. Heavy silver bangles hung on her wrists; and on her ankles were silver anklets in the likeness of snakes; and her feet were long, slim, and bare. The nails of her toes and fingers were painted glossy black.

  Jason stared and stared, and his mouth drooped open, and words failed him. Her face was like a heart; the brown column of her neck slid down under the jacket; she was inhumanly beautiful. He had never seen, never dreamed of, such beauty--and he had dreamed much. She had a flute in her hand. Such riches--gold, rubies, silver! She could be nothing but a princess. This was a palace that he had wandered into. She was a princess, and her divine eyes were flashing angrily at him.

  He fell on his knees and said humbly, ‘Forgive me, Princess. There were no gates. No one stopped me.’ He had spoken in English. He searched frantically in his memory, but no phrase of Fremantle’s Tamil suited.

  She came slowly to him, her hips swaying and her navel sliding round and round. She stopped above him and said--

  But what did she say?

  He gazed up at her and said, ‘Jason Savage, Your Royal Highness. Jason Savage, an English sailor. May I go now?’

  She spoke again, and pointed to the darker recesses of the building and cocked her head to one side. A queer, muted music began in there. She pointed to the flute, then to herself, and said, ‘Devadassi.’ She held out her hand, palm up. Jason took it reverently and pressed it to his lips. She jerked it free and sprang a pace back from him. She was looking at her hand as though he had fouled it with his lips.

  Two men in white skirts, with strings slung across their naked chests, walked slowly forward out of the inner gloom where the music was. The princess had begun to laugh silently.

  Jason stammered, ‘I--I am sorry, Your Royal Highness. I did not mean any harm.’ He turned and fled, rushing down the dark tunnel, past the coupling carvings, across the cloister, across the courtyard, through the red tower, into the square.--There he stopped and took a deep trembling breath. Her soft laughter still shivered in his ears. At his feet two kites fought over the corpse of a rat. He began to run toward Don Manoel’s mansion.

  He climbed over the gate and stopped, one foot on the ground and one upon the gate, his hand still grasping an iron curlicue. He stared in astonishment at Grant and Fremantle. Grant was sitting with his back to the wall, his head nodding. Fremantle lay asprawl under the orange tree.

  Jason shook his head in disbelief. He’d seen a dead rat, a thousand carvings, an old man standing on his head, and a princess, and still those two slept. He peered back through the wrought-iron tracery. Yes, the man was still there, still upside down.

  The shade of the orange tree, which had been two feet from Fremantle’s head, was now painting the old sailor’s grey hair with false gold. Only an hour had passed. Jason grunted discontentedly. Drayton and Silvester ought to have finished their talking by now. He walked slowly towards the house. He’d go up the steps as far as he dared, and listen to see whether the conference was near an end.

  As he walked he began to sing.

  ‘Alas, my love, you do me wrong,

  To cast me off discourteously,

  And I have loved you
so long,

  Delighting in your company.’

  It was a yearning and mysterious tune. He used to sing it with Molly under the Plain, and for a moment he felt the wind in his face and felt the turf under his feet and saw Shrewford Ring before his eyes, and stopped singing.

  He began again. He was in Coromandel.

  ‘Greensleeves was all my joy,

  Greensleeves was my delight. . .

  The first thing he must do was learn to speak Tamil properly. Then gradually he would work his way up until he became rich and powerful. He knew her name already--Princess Devadassi, a beautiful name. He spoke it two or three times in varying tones of entreaty, then returned to his singing.

  ‘Greensleeves was my hart of gold,

  And who but my lady Greensleeves?’

  He could rescue the king her father from drowning, or from a runaway horse. He had not seen many horses here, though--a runaway elephant?

  With the treasure, by God!--with the treasure he could dress so magnificently and bring her so many elephant and camel loads of gifts that the people would line the streets, gaping, to watch him pass by, and the king would have to treat him like an ambassador at the least. He wondered how often the princess came to d’Alvarez’s palace here for dinner, and whether they danced afterwards. Even if they didn’t, he could make an opportunity to dance for them, and then--and then!

  He stopped. A girl was working in a flowerbed a yard off the path. She was sitting back on her heels and looking at him, a trowel in her hand and the earth turned over among the roots of the dark-red flowers in front of her.

  Jason thought he must have frightened her. He took off his cap and said, ‘I am an English sailor, mistress. Our Master Drayton is with Don d’Alvarez. He told us to wait out here.’ She said, ‘Don Manoel is my father. He has been preparing for this ever since your ship was sighted yesterday. Was that you singing “Greensleeves”?’

  Jason looked round. She was staring a little to the side of him and over his head, but there was no one near her, except him, who could have been singing. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Grant and Fremantle are asleep by the gate. But you speak English!’

  The girl said, ‘My father spent six years in England, senhor, in His Majesty’s embassy there. My mother and I were with him. I was a child. After that we went to Rome, then back home to Portugal, and then, two years ago, we came out here. You have been in the city.’

  Jason started and looked more closely at her as she rose to her feet. She was slight and dark-haired and not at all beautiful. Her eyes were strange--wide-set, brown, and fully open under dark, questioning eyebrows. She had an olive skin and long thin hands. She said again, ‘You have been in the city.’

  ‘I didn’t mean any harm,’ Jason muttered. ‘You saw me climbing over the gate? I have a right to go wherever I want,’ he finished more bravely.

  The girl said, ‘I didn’t see. I can smell the city on you. Why did you go, and your friends slept? Did you want to steal something?’

  Stung to anger, Jason said, ‘I went to see if this was the City of Pearl which is marked on my map.’ He shut his mouth, cursing himself. It was better to tell lies.

  But the girl said, ‘You’ve come here because of a map? Is there treasure on it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jason said unwillingly.

  ‘Where do you have to go to get to the treasure?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t read all the words on the map yet.’

  The girl said slowly, ‘Manairuppu isn’t the City of Pearl. But there is a place ten miles down the coast where a few pearl fishermen live. It is only a Village, but it might be marked on such a map as the City of Pearl. You came straight here from England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She said, ‘And you can’t read! Oh, how wonderful! Let me touch you.’ She put out her hands. Jason stood still apprehensively. God’s blood, this one was really off her noggin, a sort of female Softy. They ought to shut her up.

  Her thin fingers passed gently down the sides of his face and over his shoulders. Then she said, ‘Now stand away over there, please, at least fifty paces from me, down the path.’

  ‘But, mistress ‘ Jason said.

  ‘Please!’ she said.

  He backed away. She was looking tense, as if thinking of something else. At last she raised her hand and said, ‘Now I can see you. You are a nice-looking young man. Come close again. What is your name?’

  ‘Jason Savage.’

  She said, ‘I live in a dungeon. I cannot see anything close to me. I see nothing but a coloured blur. I never have. I have a pair of spectacles, and with them I can read if I hold the paper very far away from my eyes. Without the spectacles I can see things a little, but only if they are more than fifty paces from me. You thought I was touched in the head?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Jason said quickly, lying.

  ‘You did! You are going away?’

  ‘I don’t know, mistress.’

  ‘Don’t go.’

  A female voice called sharply. Jason looked up and saw a square, stern face glowering at them from a window near the corner of the mansion. The girl called back mildly in the same language, picked up her trowel, and said, ‘She is telling me to come in at once. My name is Catherine.’ She smiled blindly in Jason’s direction and went towards the house. The older woman’s baleful eye fixed Jason until Catherine was safely round the corner.

  Jason stared at the blank windows. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his finger and dashed it to the earth. ‘Don’t go,’ she’d said. Perhaps he hadn’t heard right. Perhaps she was dotty. He returned to his friends. This time he sat down with his back to a tree not far from them and closed his eyes. . . .

  Devadassi, Princess of Manairuppu--Your Royal Highness, wilt thou accept these little gifts from thine humble servant, Sir Jason Savage, knight, of the county of Wiltshire? Devadassi, your eyes are like stars. But her eyes were tilted ever so slightly upward at the corners. Devadassi!

  ‘Wake up, you lousy dogs!’

  Silvester was in a bad temper. The three sprang to their feet like wooden toys, barking sleepily, ‘Aye, aye, sir!’

  ‘Where’s that blackamoor who brought us here?’ Drayton asked peevishly. ‘We’ll never find our way back to the ship through this stinking warren.’

  ‘I think I can, sir,’ Jason said.

  Silvester said, ‘Lead on, then. You, open the gate, and step lively.’ The servant unlocked the gate, and they went out. It was late afternoon, and the people of Manairuppu were again about in the streets.

  Jason walked a pace ahead of Drayton and Silvester, He knew the road quite well. On his way to the princess’s palace he had seen the river and the masts of the Phoebe down an alley to the left, and noted their position.

  Drayton said, ‘Do you think the Portugal ship is really coming soon?’

  Silvester answered with heat, ‘I don’t know, Master Drayton. But I say it doesn’t matter a whip. What if she is? What if she does carry twenty-eight guns to our six? The truth is we’ve been warned off by a stinking Portugee, told to clear out in three days or we’ll be blown out of the water! Everyone knows the Portugals are on their last legs out here. Should we bow down and kiss the Don’s arse because a snivelling Pope of Rome divided the world two hundred years ago and gave half to the Spanish and half to the Portuguese? ‘Twasn’t his to give! God’s bread and little fishes, our business is to stay on this coast, Master Drayton, and trade wherever we’ve a mind, and let the Don chew his beard off. When the Isabella comes--if she comes--we’ll fight her. We’ll he up and board her. The Dons don’t like steel. The--‘

  Drayton said, ‘My good fellow, what would the Company say if we got their ship full of holes and had to limp back to England with nothing sold?’

  Jason saw that Drayton was being superior and foppish to try to hide the fact that he had no stomach for the risks Silvester hungered for; but he was not deceiving anyone, and he knew it. So he turned on Fremantle and snapped, ‘Why did you not tell us tha
t the Portugals had such a hold on the Coromandel coast? You must have known.’

  ‘I was in the King of Madura’s jail most of my time here, master,’ Fremantle said. ‘And from what I did hear, Master Silvester is right. The Portugals have never been so strong here as in Goa. They’re just pretending. One good push and they’ll fall down. I think we ought to do as the mate says.’

  ‘No one asked you for your opinion,’ Drayton snapped. ‘Down here? This place stinks worse than Billingsgate at high noon, d’Alvarez would not even tell us where the pearl fisheries are.’

  ‘I know,’ Jason broke in eagerly. ‘There is one ten miles down the coast. The Don’s daughter told me.’

  ‘His daughter? Why should she be talking to you?’ Silvester asked crossly.

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  Drayton said, ‘Ten miles? We might take the Phoebe down there and see.’

  ‘Not worth it,’ Silvester said bluntly. ‘We need water and fresh vegetables and meat on the hoof, even if it’s only goats, and that’s all we’ll get. Are we going to wait and fight the Isabella, or are we going to run away with our tails between our legs?’

  ‘I have not made up my mind,’ Drayton said. ‘I shall discuss the matter with the sailing master tonight. Those places d’Alvarez mentioned, farther up the coast, sound promising.’

  ‘Bah!’ Silvester said. ‘He was just holding out a carrot as well as beating us with a stick.’

  ‘I shall discuss it all with Master Green,’ Drayton repeated coldly.

  Jason thought: That settles it; we shall sail in a couple of days, and we shall be running away. Green was an old windbag who said he had served with Grenville as a boy, but the crew thought his chief services had been in the Tilbury ale-houses.

  Drayton said, ‘But there is one thing we can do. We can send a man down to the pearlers to buy some pearls. Then we will know whether they are of sufficiently good quality for us to try to develop the trade. I shall send you, Jason.’