Coromandel!

by John Masters

  ‘Him?’ Silvester interjected. ‘He’s too scatter-brained. You ought to send one of the officers.’

  ‘Perhaps Savage is too intelligent for mere shipmen to be able to appreciate his qualities,’ Drayton said. ‘But at all events he can be trusted with the money. Call for the shallop.’

  They were standing on the jetty, and it was evening. Silvester, seething with rage, cupped his hands and bellowed, almost in Drayton’s ear, ‘Phoebe ahoy! Send the shallop! Look lively, you whoreson scum!’

  It was dark. In the east two low stars shone out under the black clouds to seaward. The river slapped against the ship, and the ocean grumbled on the bar. Scattered lights glowed with faint, steady beams in the city, and somewhere among distant fields an animal howled mournfully. Drayton, Silvester, and Jason stood in the waist of the Phoebe, looking towards the invisible jetty. Grant sat in the shallop below, his oars shipped, his face a dim white blur.

  Jason’s heart beat with a steady, thudding pound inside his chest. Now he was really to slide on a rope over the side of a ship in the middle of a tropical night. Now the Dons really lay in wait for him.

  Silvester said, ‘I haven’t seen any native guards on the shore, Master Drayton. If you ask me, the king of this place isn’t anxious to help the Portugals any more than he has to. In fact he’s probably waiting for us to send envoys to him, but in secret. Why should he help us if we won’t help ourselves?’

  Drayton ignored the mate and said, ‘You have the money, Jason?’

  Jason tapped his waist, where he wore a money belt under his shirt. The buckled shoes felt awkward on his feet after so many months barefoot at sea, but he had twenty miles to walk.

  ‘Off you go, then,’ Drayton said.

  Jason slid down the rope into the shallop, and Grant rowed him ashore. ‘Good luck,’ Grant muttered. ‘And we’ll have a wee drink with the silver that sticks in your ain purse, eh?’

  ‘I’m not going to keep a penny,’ Jason whispered indignantly.

  The shallop slipped quietly back towards the ship. As soon as he could no longer hear the quiet gurgle of the oars Jason slipped across the waste land and entered the streets. It was nearly midnight.

  He worked southward through deserted streets and soon came to the square where the princess’s great palace stood. Fitful moonbeams scurried over the climbing animals and gave a livid urgency to their movements. A tiny light shone far and deep inside the tunnel-like entrance under the carved tower, and Jason imagined the sentries on guard round her chamber, and the king asleep in another part of the palace.

  He hurried on, moving always under the loom of the houses. After half an hour there were no more houses. Single palm trees stood up like gallows in the empty land. The sandy track shone white, wavering on southward, and to right and left tall, reeds bent in the hot land wind. Spice and pepper and the bitter-sweet tang of Coromandel fruit scented the wind as it blew on his right cheek and from his left, struggling up to him against the wind, he heard the steady cannon fire of the surf on the Coromandel coast.

  Now he was moving parallel with that shore, but he wanted to walk down the sands until he came to the pearlers. A dim path led off to the left, and he took it. The sound of the sea grew louder, and soon he reached the dunes, crossed them, and headed south along the glistening sand. After two hours of hard going he crept into the lee of a dune, muffled his face against the scurrying grains, and went to sleep.

  He awoke at first light and found that he had stopped only two hundred yards short of a thin point of sand, where the beach bent back to form a bay before continuing its arrow line southward. Scores of the familiar logs were drawn up in the cove where a muddy streamlet meandered out of the reeds into the sea. A dozen dark and naked men were tying the logs together, getting ready to go to sea. A huddle of palm-leaf and palm-thatch hovels crouched on the trampled mud beside the stream. He saw women squatting outside the openings of the hovels, and then one of the women looked up, saw him, and called to the men at the boats. One of the men straightened up, separated himself from the group, and walked slowly forward. Jason went down the sand to meet him.

  The man was slight of bone, and built small and square, so that there were big areas of taut skin between the bones, and he had hollow cheeks and a tight belly. He was young, perhaps not much older than Jason. They looked at each other for a time; then the young man pointed to his chest and said, ‘Simon.’ Two lockets hung on a thin cord round his neck. He opened one of them and showed Jason the crucifix inside. Astonished, Jason cried, ‘You are a Christian!’

  The young man nodded and smiled and repeated, ‘Simon,--Simon! Ave Maria, pater noster, credo . . and then a long gabble in Tamil, ending in the words ‘Padre Felipe.’

  Jason said, ‘You know Padre Felipe?’

  The man nodded excitedly and held up the crucifix. All right, Jason thought; Padre Felipe made him a Christian, and his Christian name is Simon. Very interesting, but it was not going to help much, except that the man seemed very willing to be friendly.

  In his carefully rehearsed Tamil, Jason said, ‘Pearls. I want to see pearls.’

  Simon clapped his hands in pleasure, gently took Jason’s arm, and led him to the log boats. The other men smiled shyly, and Jason smiled back at them. Simon whipped the cord round his logs fore and aft, pushed the craft into the shallow water, and beckoned to Jason to get in.

  Jason looked at his shoes. He could take them off and leave them here until he returned. It was early. Drayton would not expect him back on the Phoebe until the middle of the night. He sat down, took off his shoes, left them well up the sand, and ran into the sea. The sun came up out of the east and sparkled in the drops his feet kicked up. It was a lovely and exciting morning, and he was going out to catch pearls asleep in their oyster beds.

  He climbed carefully into the craft and sat down. It began to rock violently and did not settle until a woman--who, he decided, was Simon’s wife--slipped in behind him and steadied it. Then Simon bent his rough paddle into the water, and the muscles stood out on his shoulders and forearms, and the boat started moving. They crossed the little cove, cleared the point, and faced the sea.

  The water gurgled over Jason’s feet, where a big roped stone lay, and he laughed delightedly. He was not on the sea, but in it. In this craft he was not a sailor but a fish or a seagull, his eyes far below the level of the crested waves. The seas steadily increased in size as the boat increased its distance from the line of sand and the cluster of palm trees that marked the shore. For a moment Jason thought he was going to be sea-sick and afraid. But--he looked round at the heaving water--what could go wrong? This craft could not overturn or be swamped. And a volley of flying fish skimmed out of the sea and over the boat, and plopped into the sea the other side, and Jason laughed again. He had not come to Coromandel to be comfortable.

  After three hours Simon and his wife stopped paddling. All round them the other log boats of the little fleet rose and fell in dizzy swoops. The shore had dropped below the horizon. Simon stood up and, with an apologetic murmur, threw three small handfuls of rice into the sea. He stayed there a moment with his palms joined, rocking easily to the boat’s wild motion. Then he murmured, Ave Maria, Ave Maria!’ and sat down.

  His wife picked up the roped stone with her feet and, holding it as easily as if her toes were fingers, swung her legs over the stern. Simon caught the other end of the rope in his hands and held it fast. His wife sucked air deep into her lungs. She was a slim, short girl with a deep chest and fine legs. She wore nothing but a net fastened round her waist. The cavity of her chest swelled and swelled, and suddenly she slipped over the stern and slid down into the deep. Her brown body wavered down, glistening and distorted in the moving water, and then began to move along the bottom. Simon gave an occasional stroke with his paddle to keep the craft steady against wind and sea. The water was not very clear, and Jason could not really see what she was doing. Then he leaned far over, put his head under water, and opened his eyes. Ah!
the salt stung him, but he could see--a dark spider down there, and wavery tentacles that might be her arms, reaching out and in, out and in, with a rhythm of movement that matched the rhythm of the waves.

  When he could hold his breath no more, Jason raised his head, wiped his dripping face, and crouched back in the centre of the boat. A long time passed, and he looked at Simon in alarm and pointed down. Simon nodded and smiled.

  Long after that the girl’s head slowly broke surface, and she hung over the side of the log boat, breathing in slowly, the water running down her flat nose and in a stream off her chin into the inside of the boat. Simon hauled the stone up and into the boat. The woman handed Simon the net from her waist, and Simon emptied it amidships. All round them the other pearlers, men and women, dived and surfaced. Simon took a blunt knife from the string round his waist and began to open the oysters. The shells flew overboard in a stream, but already his wife had taken the stone between her feet and again sunk below the surface. Now Simon paddled the craft, split the oysters, threw the shells overboard, and kept touching the rope that led to the bottom of the sea. There were no pearls in the first catch.

  The girl came up again; more shells poured into the boat. Jason got out his knife and began to open oysters.

  The work went on steadily. After every four or five dives man and wife changed roles, and Simon dived while his wife stayed in the boat. Every time anyone in the fleet got a pearl he stood up in his boat and shouted, ‘Pearl!’ But when the red sun touched the water, and all around the sea was like wine, and Jason’s fingers bled from the sharp edges of the oysters, the whole fleet had found only four pearls.

  At last Simon, who was diving, said, ‘One more.’ This time he added, smiling at Jason, ‘For you.’ He made the sign of the cross, threw another handful of rice into the sea, and went down with the stone. The young wife’s face was grey and pinched, and she moved listlessly at her tasks. Jason took the rope from her and let it run through his hands as Simon swept the bottom. Through the hours Jason had gained confidence, and now he knelt up in the shallow well, his feet over one side and his head peering down into the sea on the other.

  He heard a hollow booming of wood on wood and glanced up. All day one or another of the pearlers had been standing upright in his craft, taking no part in the fishing but only looking ceaselessly around the low horizon. Now this man was beating his paddle regularly against the side of his boat, and loudly shouting a single word over and over again.

  Jason turned to Simon’s wife and said, ‘What?’ She scrambled up to him, tugged at the rope, and shrieked the same word in his ear. Jason hauled hard on the rope, thinking to pull Simon to --the surface by main force. But the rope came up easily, and Jason fell backwards into the sea.

  Bitter sea water flooded his mouth and stomach before he managed to control himself. He sank slowly through the water, and all was green and blurry, just the way he had thought it would be when he had tried to be a trout; but his eyes smarted and his chest hurt and he wanted to be sick. He saw the underside of the log boat quite near, and the rope swaying beside it. Now he was a fish, and everything looked just as he had imagined. But were a fish’s eyes--?

  Oh, Mother, I shall drown! He was in great danger; it was foolish to be worrying about whether his imagination had been true; he ought to struggle. He began to kick and push with arms and legs.

  When he broke surface he flailed madly with his arms and croaked, ‘Help!’ The log boat rocked ten feet away from him, and the girl’s naked back was turned to him, and he heard many loud noises of booming and screams, as all the pearlers shouted and banged their paddles against the logs. A breaking wave forced him under the water once more, but not before he had seen a black triangle, like a sail, cruising slowly past the stern of the boat.

  He struggled to get at his knife. He had seen plenty of sharks. As he struggled he sank, and a great white belly swung lazily over him, and the curved rows of teeth shone, and the dark mouth grinned. He slammed his legs together, surfaced, gulped air, and sank in a flurry of foam.

  The shark’s back glistened in the water as it turned, and he saw one cold eye, getting larger. Then Simon’s face swam down in front of his bulging eyes, and he saw a trail of thin bubbles rising from Simon’s mouth.

  As soon as Simon’s hands touched him, Jason’s panic exploded. He opened his mouth to yell, grabbed Simon, and held tight with all his strength. The sea rushed down into his belly, and Simon’s fingers jabbed like pointed sticks into his eyes. With the last of his consciousness he let go his grip.

  The girl was dragging him into the boat by his hair. He fainted again.

  He awoke to the sound of retching and moaning. It was himself, lying face down in the bottom of the boat, with his head rested on Simon’s feet and the water swirling an inch below his nostrils. Simon sat in the stern and the girl in the bow, both paddling. Jason sat up shakily. Their little boat, with all the fleet, was headed for the setting sun.

  After a time he muttered, ‘Thank you, Simon.’

  Simon laid down his paddle and searched with his fingers in the strong cloth bag he wore round his neck. He brought out a single large pearl and said, ‘For you. I said.’

  Jason asked, ‘You found this the last time?’

  Simon nodded, smiled, and made the sign of the cross. Then he pointed at Jason and spoke again, slowly, in Tamil. Jason understood that it was Jesus, aided by Jason himself, who had found the pearl for Simon.

  When they got ashore it was dusk. Jason put on his shoes and tried to tell Simon that he wanted to buy some pearls and then go back to the ship. But Simon took his arm and dragged him persistently towards the huts, saying, ‘We must eat; then you can go; but rest here now while the women cook.’ He pointed to the clean sand behind the huts and sat down with a sigh. The women went into the huts, and soon wood-smoke began to drift across the sand and tingle in the men’s nostrils.

  Jason stretched out beside his new friend and waited comfortably. He ought to be buying pearls, but that could wait. He smelled savoury fish, and the bare mud, and hot spice, and the burning driftwood. The wind was backing into the south-west. There’d be a land wind every night at this season. He’d seen a shark. He hadn’t been very brave, but he’d do better next time. He’d found the City of Pearl. He must dry his wonderful map.

  It was a night of stars, and the breeze was soft and warm, and the sea thunderous at his right hand. He walked quickly northward on his return journey, his mind in an active reverie. These pearlers of Coromandel were as strange and deep as anyone else when you began to get to know them. They put red heathen marks on their foreheads, but some of them were Christians. Simon had two lockets, and in one he kept a crucifix and in the other a small stone emblem, red-painted and squatly deformed, but unmistakably a representation of a man’s sexual organ. Then there were crosses daubed on the leaf walls of some of the hovels, and among the very crosses crude red and black drawings of picks and trowels and triangles and swastikas. And Simon said ‘Ave Maria’ as he launched a big leaf on to the small waves at the edge of the sea, the leaf loaded with a tiny pile of rice, a few flowers, and a pinch of turmeric.

  Doing business with them was not easy, though the language problem had not been as difficult as he had feared. A word or two of Portuguese learned in Lisbon, his small stock of Tamil, the liberal use of pantomime--even English, spoken slowly--and they could understand each other. But buying the big pearl and two smaller ones had been hard. First they had tried to give him the three pearls, and it took a long time to make them understand that he wanted to pay. Then they became nervous and told him they were not allowed to sell their pearls to anyone but the king, and the king’s price was very low. So Jason said he would pay them well, and brought out his money to show them he meant what he said. Then they bit the coins as he offered them, and argued among themselves. Finally they agreed to take three guineas for the three pearls, and Jason accepted. They told him he must never say how or where he had got the pearls, or the k
ing would send men down to punish them. They asked if he could come again to buy more pearls. If he would, they would go out more often. As it was, they only went pearling once a week, or even less often, because the king’s price was so bad that they had to spend most of their time fishing for food rather than for pearls, and gathering coconuts, and working to raise rice in the little fields beside the marshy stream. They had given him a fiery whitish drink out of a coconut shell, but they were very poor; and the fish had smelled good, but it had not tasted good, and there was not much of it. Already he felt hungry again.

  The tower of the king’s palace loomed against the stars ahead. Damnation on his foggy brain! He had meant to ask Simon more about the king and his daughter, and whether there were many princes--but what was the use? Drayton and Green were as frightened as rabbits with a ferret in the warren, and the Phoebe would sail tomorrow--today; it was after midnight.

  He’d never see the Princess Devadassi or his new friends the pearlers again. He ought to stay here and set up in business for himself when the Phoebe sailed. What business? He was only a farmer. No, he was a dancer too. But perhaps they wouldn’t like his dancing here.

  Now he was passing the palace. His footsteps dragged, and he looked up at the tower and whispered, ‘Princess, I love you.’ . . . She smiled at him and spoke in a sweet voice, sweeter than the flute. It was cool where she was, but outside the sun beat at your eyes in blinding waves. A fallen leaf scurried in the dust behind him, and then a big white flash lit the world.

  He watched an ant crawling, crawling. Dust thickened in his nostrils, and in the back of his head the bones groaned together with a terrible jangling sound. The dust tilted, the light faded--he was in a boat. He could not be; that was dirt in his clutching fingers. A bare foot, its toenails black-painted, moved near his eye. He sat up slowly.