Secret of the Sands

by Sara Sheridan

The party makes its way down the hill in the direction of the little harbour and the shores of the Red Sea. It is a sound, well-protected spot at the base of the Gulf of Bahrain. The ocean here is the colour of sapphires and it comes as a shock after months of muddy well water and a vista composed exclusively from a limited spectrum, the colour of sand sculpted into dunes by the wind and seen in varying degrees of bright light. As in Riyadh, the houses are fashioned of a pale, baked mud and in the distance there are a variety of promising looking vessels of all sizes that are potentially for hire or even for sale.

  No more than a mile off, Wellsted notices Kasim and Ibn Mohammed whispering to each other and the servants shifting as if uncomfortable. Something is amiss. The lieutenant sits up in his saddle, nervous that they have found her. He will have to fight them both, in that case. He is ready to do so. When he sees where they are pointing, he peers again at the houses. From here it is clear the village boundary is closed. A makeshift camp has pitched on the outskirts and even from this far away they can hear the keening sound of mourning women. Wellsted feels relief. He has little confidence that he would win a knife-to-knife battle with the slavers. Still he is not prepared for the danger of what they have encountered.

  ‘There is plague,’ Ibn Mohammed pronounces. ‘They have closed their gates and locked themselves in, waiting to see who Allah wills to live. See,’ he points and explains for the benefit of the Nazarene, ‘on the outskirts, their relations watch to see if there is life inside the infected houses from the smoke of cooking fires.’ Here he makes a wisp-like gesture. ‘Many people will die. We cannot break the boundary.’

  ‘Can we still . . .’ Wellsted starts, but the look in Ibn Mohammed’s eyes stops him from even finishing the question.

  They will not be rocked to sleep on the swell aboard a ship tonight. It is far too dangerous and they will have to carry on down the coast to find passage.

  Turning south and feeling unaccountably heavy, the caravan travels one more day and night, following the shoreline. Now there is plague in the miasma, when they see other travellers there is no question of stopping. After the elaborate hospitality of the desert, it goes against the grain to shun company, but the mounted men pass each other at a distance and at most there is a nod and a troubled smile. The sound of the waves, never far now, lulls them to sleep at night – a noise so strange after all these months that they are kept awake by its novelty.

  ‘I wonder if it is plague,’ the doctor muses. ‘Of course, it’s far more likely smallpox. People make all kinds of mistakes in diagnosis. Anything with a pustule is called plague on the Peninsula. I don’t expect they have the vaccination here, though. Furthest it’s come is Turkey. Have you been vaccinated, old man?’ he asks.

  Wellsted nods. All midshipmen are vaccinated with cowpox, they have been for many years now.

  ‘Well, that’s both of us immune. I wonder, do you suppose I might be able to examine some of the patients?’

  Wellsted laughs out loud. ‘Look at you. You’re eight stones at the outside, you’re a sleeping shadow who isn’t even capable of staying awake for more than a few minutes at a stretch and you can’t eat meat because your stomach is too weak. I’m not sure you’d survive the examination of an Arab with plague, old man. Even the strong die of it, don’t they? What if it isn’t smallpox and you aren’t as immune as you think?’

  Jessop grins his eerie smile into the darkness. ‘Oh, if you think I got through the ministerings of that emir bastard only to catch a bubo or two, you are very much mistaken. I never catch anything, James. Never have. It was one of the reasons my father thought I should study medicine. And besides, if I am going to die of anything, I wouldn’t choose plague. I’d go for tuberculosis. Highly fashionable – artists and poets die of tuberculosis, think of Keats and Henry Purcell – John Calvin, for heaven’s sake – with all the romance of a direct line to God. No one dies of the plague these days. Really. I’m invincible. I’m sure of it.’

  Wellsted laughs. Jessop’s spirit is admirable and he can’t refuse him. But the doctor’s arms are still stick thin and he wheezes sometimes when he moves too quickly.

  ‘I’ll try to keep you fashionable, Doctor, don’t you worry.’

  In the morning, they arrive at the next town down the coast. Here, too, the gates are closed. This time, however, the purpose of the quarantine is not to contain the infection but to keep out all visitors who might carry it. Standing on the high walls, two guards agleam with weaponry bear over the party with menace. They are so comprehensively swathed in dusty fabric that their eyes are not clearly visible.

  ‘Go away!’ they call, waving the visitors off with drawn blades. Imshi. Imshi. ‘None can enter here.’

  Kasim shouts back, trumpeting their names, their mission for the soultan and explaining that they avoided the plague town – they did not go within half a mile of it, he enunciates with precision. Every one of them is healthy (here he swears an oath) and all they seek is to do business – hire a dhow and buy some slaves, if the citizens have any to spare. The guards stop shouting. They confer a moment and then disappear from sight without a word. It is a promising sign.

  Wearily, the servants dismount into the shade of the town walls. They brew coffee over a tiny fire while the caravan waits for the pronouncement. Such decisions are the province of headmen and councillors. It takes twenty minutes or so before an old man appears on the battlements.

  ‘Your name?’ he shouts down.

  Ibn Mohammed obliges and trumpets his mission for the soultan. ‘He will send you a thousand thanks for any help you can give us. We seek only to trade. We have coin.’

  The old man, an imam, peers. ‘You have not visited the plague town?’

  ‘I swear it, brother.’ Ibn Mohammed touches his heart. ‘We came from the sands.’

  The imam considers this a moment. ‘I met the soultan once,’ he replies.

  A minute later, the studded, wooden gates creak open to reveal the dusty, barefooted swordsmen. Behind them, an array of stony-faced citizens emerge from their houses to see the visitors, for these are the first men to enter the town in a month. There is a subdued atmosphere as the guards lead the caravan to the headman’s house – he is older than he appeared at a distance and is sporting the longest beard Wellsted has ever seen. The imam’s black eyes gleam like polished jet, embedded in a swathe of brown wrinkles.

  The elder motions in greeting, his dry palms outstretched and his simple bright, white dishdash dazzling. The travellers do not know it, but this impression of spotlessness is illusory. The imam is a wily impresario who wrings the best from every situation. After the simoom he appropriated fifty camels and over a hundred goats that belonged to the dead. His men scavenged in a radius of forty miles and, with the old man’s guidance, the little town worked away quietly and swelled its coffers while the survivors of the storm wandered half-blind and half-mad. The imam lives in a modest house and does not trumpet his money. He despises the soultans and emirs who keep vast harims of women and decorate their homes with unnecessary ornament. He is, in Western terms, a dangerous kind of monk, some kind of Jesus. Now he greets the visitors solemnly.

  ‘We have only fish,’ he says, humble in tone. ‘But you are very welcome.’

  Supplies in the town are running low, or so it would seem. The animals are herded to the south, well out of the way. The villagers fortify what they have by casting their nets a few hundred yards out on the water, for in time of plague no man will go further. The imam explains that the day’s catch is shared between everyone but with supply lines cut off there is little else but some flatbread, milk and, he explains as if he is embarrassed, a few eggs, which he has reserved for the pregnant women and nursing mothers, sick children and the very old. As he tells of the impending want, he eyes the slaving party, costing every piece of their clothing and appraising the camels with an expert eye. He is adept at all forms of judgement.

  ‘Please,’ he says, ‘water your animals. Our well, at least, is copio
usly supplied by Allah.’

  The old man casts his eye suspiciously over the doctor’s white skin and quickly appraises Wellsted’s true provenance. His voice is concerned as he asks Kasim, ‘My brother, have these infidels corrupted you?’

  Wellsted smiles at the very thought of either he or Jessop having any effect whatsoever on the slavers and listens as Kasim humours the elder, hiding his mirth. ‘We would surely rather die, father.’

  ‘Come, join me,’ the imam offers. ‘Sit by my side.’

  Before entering the house, Kasim presents the old man with two boughs of dates – all they have left. Inside, the room is austere, furnished only with thin, goatskin cushions on the mud floor, bare apart from a single, loosely-woven, faded rug. They talk over coffee served in plain, thick, earthenware cups, discussing the villages affected by the sickness. The house smells faintly of fried fish and frank-incense, though there is no incense burner on view. Elsewhere there is the sound of movement – the creeping of women, most likely. The imam has three wives who inhabit the upper floor of the house. They own no more than two burquahs each and one pair of sandals.

  ‘This sickness is sent from Allah,’ the imam starts.

  He believes it is a punishment for those who have strayed. Perhaps, a punishment too for those whose wives wear jewel-lery, or those men who indulge in vanity and tile the floors of their houses or allow themselves the luxury of opulent feasting. The truth is that the villages to the north are the first a traveller will come to off the dunes and are placed in the path of the prevailing tides. As a result, they are busier, more cosmopolitan and the home of merchants who wish to display their wealth rather than holy men who wish to conceal it. The wrath of Allah strikes, the imam swears, very quickly – a fever and delirium and then swift death in most cases. For those few who survive, the sickness leaves horrible marks on the skin. One woman who received Allah’s grace and was cured, flung herself from a high wall into the ocean when she saw her beauty so destroyed. This lady was famed for her appearance and thought her husband would not desire her anymore. In another case, two nephews killed themselves at the news of the death of a favourite aunt who had been stranded in the town when they were delayed in accompanying her to the family home, some way to the north.

  Ibn Mohammed and Kasim listen with seriousness to these tragic stories.

  ‘Please, sir,’ Jessop interrupts, ‘where on the body do the pustules grow?’

  The imam hesitates then motions airily to show that they are all over. He does not want to speak directly to the Nazarene.

  ‘Everywhere?’

  He nods again.

  ‘And they rise with a fever?’

  Another nod.

  Jessop falls silent but at the next opportunity he mouths, ‘Smallpox,’ to his friend.

  ‘By Allah’s bounty we are spared here,’ the imam finishes. Ibn Mohammed, of course, has no interest in the misery the sickness has brought nor, indeed, in diagnosing what it is. The polite formalities over, he gets down to business. He offers the camels in return for the imam’s permission to allay the embargo and allow them to take a boat and set sail for Muscat. Ten thoroughbred camels will feed the town for at least four days, and if the meat is rationed it will last twice that. The imam considers this carefully, as if such a small offering might tempt him. His air of humility has proved over the years a most effective trap. Indeed, he is so good at affecting the emotion that he quite believes it himself.

  ‘It would be most kind, most kind indeed, for you to leave the creatures behind. And you are right, of course – they do not travel well on the water, and in any case you may find it difficult to house eight – or is it nine? – animals on a vessel.’ He underestimates the number deliberately. He wants them to think of him as naïve and trusting – a bumbling fakir with a poor grasp of worldly matters.

  Ibn Mohammed bows. The old man has him there. What was he intending to do – load the animals up and ship them south on what may be little more than a raft, for all he knows? There is no way to tell what kind of boat may be available.

  ‘Of course, we are interested also in hiring a boat for which we are happy to pay very generously. In addition.’

  The imam looks around as if he is surprised. ‘I cannot allow any of my men to sail a boat south,’ he says sadly.

  The implication is that it is too dangerous. Who knows what they may carry by way of infection and, in such time of danger, all men want to stay close to their families. It is an indecent suggestion and one that Ibn Mohammed is quick to amend.

  ‘Then we will buy a boat, if that is permissible?’

  The imam pauses as if the idea has only just occurred to him. He has, in fact, three vessels at harbour that belong to men who are currently in the north with their families, trapped in the very town where the plague has hit. There has been no news of their welfare. Still, the old man is silently hoping and, indeed, expects that none of them will survive. The plague kills well over half of its victims, so he is likely right. Even if he is not, he can always hand over the money when the men get home – or at least part of it – and still play the honourable retainer who has generously looked after their business while they were away. He knows these Muscat wideboys will pay anything he asks. The imam thinks he will sell them an Indian-built dhangi that belongs to the youngest of the traders. The old man prefers Arab-built ships in any case and will be glad to have the vessel’s distinctive outline out of his harbour. Anything foreign in origin causes his flesh to creep. The boat is almost a hundred tonnes and well beyond what is needed to transport ten men down the coast to the Omani capital.

  However, when he finally speaks he says only, ‘When I make any decision, I have to consider everyone who lives in this town, my brothers.’

  The old man settles onto his goatskin cushion to let the slavers wait. This kind of negotiation can take a while; indeed, his experience is that he comes off better the longer he can spin things out. The imam sighs heavily, as if weighing up his civic duty is a serious and odious business.

  ‘I think some mint tea,’ he says casually to the scrawny slave who stands by the door.

  He’ll wait for it to brew before he tells them how much the boat will be. They might need something to refresh them, for the shock.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Zena cannot take her eyes off the horizon and sleeps only fitfully. She constantly expects the emir’s men on horseback or the familiar figure of the slavers and their camels to overtake and unmask her. Her disguise is working, but these men do not know her and have no idea there is a runaway habshi in the region.

  It transpires that she is travelling with a party of cousins. Against the sunlight, the men are so alike that Zena finds it impossible to tell one from the other. They joke constantly and laugh at practically anything. On the first evening, her heart pounds and her fingers become weak as they rag her around the campfire. But she realises quickly that these men are truly pleasant people with no scrap of harm in them – at least in the situation they believe themselves to be in. Still, she is terrified that her true identity might come to light in the scrum of horseplay after sunset and then she knows the situation would change. As a woman, this smiling family would steal her away as quickly as any on the Peninsula. On the first night, when she is pushed good-naturedly, she protects herself so fiercely that the men conclude that the black boy is slightly strange.

  ‘Slaves can be that way,’ she hears one whisper to another. ‘Malik has lost his master and is travelling alone. Who knows what he has had to endure?’

  This, for the Bedu, is enough to confirm the itinerant slave boy’s oddity, and Zena is happy enough to let them believe that her lonely trip is the strangest thing about her.

  She wishes she could see her reflection. It is a disconcerting feeling not to know what she looks like now she is arrayed in men’s clothes. The first night she sneaks away from the sleeping figures. As quietly as she can, she rips a strip of material from the veil of the burquah she has packed aw
ay and tightly binds her breasts. She is lithe and long and her curves are not pronounced so can be hidden. Once the binding is in place, the outline of her body could be that of any teenage boy. Safe from that pitfall, she simply sets her mind to avoiding all the other clues to her real identity. She must not make a single slip of the tongue, she must control her expression (not easy always, for she is used to her face being obscured from show), she must pray with the cousins for her duty to Allah must be clear and she must be careful when she relieves herself. The Bedu pee crouching, but of necessity they lift the jubbah hem. It does not rise all the way, but still, if she is not careful, they might notice that she isn’t what she is pretending to be.

  I must be aware every moment, for the smallest thing might betray me, she thinks. Her nerves are wracked.

  During the long six days of the journey (for the Bedu’s original estimate was, as ever, optimistic), she is always the last to sleep and the first to wake. She watches constantly for any sign that the men have noticed a detail out of place or for the familiar outline of a search party on the horizon. She ransacks her memory for every tiny movement, every word of the slaves in whose company she has travelled three long months and she emulates them on each count. She even shyly tells the men that she is in love with a servant in her master’s caravan. A girl of thirteen she calls Jaminda, whom she has had to leave behind. For her feelings on this she need only think of Wellsted, and then such an air of sadness comes over her that no man would not believe that poor Malik has left behind his true love in order to fulfil his duty.

  The Bedu already know about the sickness at the coast. They and their fellows trade with the harbour towns and news of what transpires there reaches them regularly. As a result, they direct their caravan further north than usual to avoid the affected areas. This way it is longer to Muscat, but Zena has no desire to risk infection. The trip is risky enough as it is.

  When the sea comes into view, she feels like whooping for joy. ‘I’ve made it here again,’ she breathes very quietly.