‘Arrest them!’ Ally cut across her. ‘It’s them, from the hotel, they called Kisiri “our island”. I mean the people who came here the other day!’
‘We have to catch them at it, Ally. Prove the connections. Or prove the buyers of Kisiri are breaking another law.’ The inspector drained the cup, and got to his feet. ‘In fact there is some help—’
‘Did you go to the hotel and look?’ Ally demanded.
‘Ally, Ally,’ Carole warned.
‘It is fine, Carole, it is good to have people who care.’ Rutere put his head on one side, regarding Ally thoughtfully. ‘We have looked, yes. Owner and staff deny any connection with animals or Kisiri. They say no one from the hotel came here—’
‘Ally and Jack saw the same woman in the office there, Rutere. They are interested in this place . . .’ Carole indicated the house.
‘I believe you. But the hotel manager insists she never came here. No link we could find. Unfortunately, we have not found the man who was with her. We keep trying! Our best chance is to find the vehicles or boats that carried these animals and the two beaten boys. These dead animals on Kisiri give their story a terrible ring of truth—’
‘Dedan!’ The idea leapt into Ally’s head. ‘He remembers car numbers! It’s like he sees pictures in his head!’
‘The boy remembers nothing, sadly. He is in shock. However, I also came to say there is in fact something you can help us with, Jack. If you and your aunt are agreeable. Accompany Collins and Dedan to a place our helicopter has found? These boys insist you are with them.’
‘Yes!’ Jack looked quickly at Carole.
‘Go, go! The sooner the better.’
‘Good, good – these children will feel safer if you are with them. They do not trust us! My men have found signs of a temporary fence in that place, and many tyre marks. It may be where the boys saw cages.’ The policeman consulted his watch. ‘My men can fetch you in twenty minutes. I will radio them now.’
‘If,’ Carole was thinking aloud, ‘if there is even a small link between the Kisiri buyers and the Tundani hotel – and if you find the Tundani hotel is involved in this animal trafficking, Rutere . . . would that be enough connection? Could that stop the buyers actually getting Kisiri?’
‘Ah, well . . . if is the big word! These buyers’ groups – a giant octopus! One leg – local wealthy men, another leg – a politician or two, another leg – foreign businessmen. All trying to get rich! Possibly the hotel is in there, or some individuals from the hotel. When the octopus is threatened, it sends a cloud of inky darkness to hide itself.’ He turned to go. ‘Have no fear, we do our best.’
The glossy Tundani hotel, its smell of money, washed over Ally. And the mess rippling out from it like the aftershock of an explosion. That could be Kisiri and Shanza in no time; Leli, Huru, Eshe, Koffi, Mosi, Pili, Lumbwi, Saka, Thimba, Jela, Hasina, Mzee Kitwana – all the people she knew, all their lives – vanished under it.
To the policeman’s retreating back, she appealed, ‘We’ve got to find something to stop them getting Kisiri!’
He flicked a sharp warning glance at her. ‘Shanza needs to find something!’
‘But—’
‘Violent men – I cannot say this too much. Shanza—’ He turned at the distant chatter of the police radio. He went through the house to the car.
He reappeared almost as fast, a distinct change in his step.
‘Well! We have found a line that may, how do you say, join a few dots? Some distance from here, surprisingly, at Breezy Point Garage in Kinyangata!’
Ally frowned. ‘That’s where Leli’s brother Shaaban works!’
‘Ah-ha!’ The policeman beamed at her. ‘Then in truth it is this Leli and his brother Shaaban who have found it for us!’
‘Leli, do not idle!’ his mother said sharply. ‘If we all walk about on Kisiri like you, nothing is done. It will storm! We must build more shelters!’
‘He is not idling, Tabia.’ His father’s voice was mild and he gave Leli a small smile. But his tone was firm. ‘The boy has done enough already. Let him alone! He must be clear in his head for the policeman.’
Leli returned his father’s smile. But he went to help his mother arrange containers of water and heave up the palm fronds to be laid over canes. He could not be angry with her today. She was the first to be ready with food and blankets and water, yelling encouragement to her friends. ‘Do not dig potatoes with a blunt stick!’ she scolded one who brought only a single bottle of water. ‘What will you drink when this bottle is empty? We stay on Kisiri till these bad people leave us in peace! Many days. Many weeks!’
And the shelters were going up fast, palm thatch tied in firmly against the storms. Hard sun was forcing through the cloud and drying the ground, but rain would come before night – a few hours only to become truly prepared.
He looked through the trees at the water and Shanza beyond. Where is the inspector? He takes too long! His thoughts fizzed in a thousand different directions. The inspector must see how it all fitted together!
He ran through it, in his head. Last night, Mzee Shaibu calling people in the village together to hear the D.O.’s assistant.
‘Three things happen, just in the last three weeks,’ the assistant explained, opening a big map and pointing to it as he spoke. ‘First, someone buys land on the Tundani road – there. A big piece – only sand dunes and birds. Then another one takes land to the south, a few miles from here – there. Now someone buys Kisiri.’
‘And they look in our forest!’ Leli had flared up, ‘and they go to Dr Carole’s house, it is all the same thing! They will join everything together and swallow Shanza,’ and he’d braced himself for a rebuke for interrupting the visitor. But Mzee Shaibu just drew his finger from the bottom of the map, through Shanza, to the top at Tundani to show people what Leli meant.
For a long time everyone went quiet, thinking, before the arguing began.
Then Mzee Issa held up his hand for silence. ‘We must hold our place. We must walk the thorny path, even though it tears our legs,’ going three times round in his words the way he always did – and Leli could not stop himself from shouting, ‘We must be there, on Kisiri!’ and others agreed, Mzee Issa, Mzee Kitwana, Mzee Shaibu, his father, his mother, many, many others.
He looked across the water again, this time towards Ally’s house. She would not know he was here. He itched to tell her all that had happened since finding the dead animals on the island, since their late, tired arrival back in the village last night. Fumo had warned, and Leli had heard. Fumo understood this. Leli knew, because Fumo had not come again.
A mad thought! I cannot say this to anyone else, but I can say it to Ally.
He felt bold. He would tell Inspector Rutere, Ally found the cheetah. Ally is important. Ally must be here on Kisiri with us now. You must fetch her!
He saw that a police boat was leaving Shanza and crossing the bay towards Kisiri. He jumped at his father’s voice. ‘No tangled paths in your mind to waste the policeman’s time, Leli?’
In truth his thoughts were as tangled as the branches of the fig tree overhead; Shaaban, Kisiri, the dead animals, Fumo, Ally – they all quarrelled in his head for attention. He stuck his chin in the air and squinted into the tree for inspiration.
What must I report to the policeman, so he understands everything?
One – Eshe decides to take my letter quickly to Shaaban herself and goes on the bus from her cousin’s house to Kinyangata.
Two – Shaaban reads, and questions Eshe about the strangers in their boats. Eshe tells him what she knows, but . . .
Three – Eshe has already travelled to Lilongelewa a day before the dead animals and the street boys’ beating and someone buying Kisiri, so she does not know, and cannot plant ideas in my brother’s head. But . . .
Four – Shaaban telephones Salim at Kitokwe, and Lumb
wi is there telling Salim everything. Lumbwi takes Salim’s bicycle to ride quickly to Mzee Shaibu and fetch Leli to the telephone.
In his head, Leli could still hear his brother’s words. ‘Show Mzee Shaibu my letter, so he can put all the parts together. There is a truck here in the garage right now. It fell in a ravine last night and broke. The driver is angry, shouting all the time into a satellite phone till another man arrives. Hear this, it is important, Leli: this new one is the man I told about in my letter, who is maybe a poacher or soldier. These two men quarrel about a map, throw it in the truck and leave. I have just looked at this map.
‘Leli, there is Kitokwe, Shanza, Kisiri, Tundani! Many marks, red, purple – near Shanza and on Kisiri. More even forty miles away. A thick blue line makes a big shape round Tundani and Kisiri and Shanza. It is like a boundary—’
‘Leli!’ With a nudge, his father broke Leli’s train of thought.
The police boat had reached the island. Leli took Shaaban’s letter from his shirt pocket and went down the sands to meet the inspector.
Inspector Rutere finished reading.
‘So your brother works at this garage—’ he began to Leli.
‘He is a clever mechanic,’ Leli’s mother intervened. ‘He is young but he is a bird that flies with his own wings.’
‘Tabia speaks the truth, sir,’ his father put in quietly. ‘Shaaban has a good head. If he puts one and one together it will always come to be two.’
Urgently Leli held out a scrap of paper. ‘Shaaban gives the number of the broken truck in his garage, and also the car that he talks about in that letter to me – the one that belongs to the same man. I gave the numbers to the sergeant and here they are for you, sir.’
The inspector took them and smiled. ‘This is very good, very good. We will see if Dedan or Collins have memory yet of vehicle numbers they followed or saw in the ravine. Or the one that carried them. We can look in the hotel and its records . . . Let us pray there is a match between these things. Let us pray that when our officer gets to Kinyangata garage this map is still in this truck where your brother saw it. And if we are lucky, the forensic team will find traces of animals, even of Collins’ and Dedan being carried . . .’
As he spoke, he was looking round at the shelters, the running children, everyone busy and shouting across to each other, the air thick with woodsmoke from the cooking fires. On the high ground, above the steep cliff, men stood as lookouts. Canoes were drawn up in ranks on the beach, ready.
‘I am very grateful!’ he said. ‘I am thinking everyone will have reason to be grateful.’
Leli felt suddenly immensely lighter. And determined. He said, ‘Sir, Dr Carole, and Jack and Ben, and Ally . . .’ he steeled himself to ignore the look his mother would throw, ‘. . . they must hear that we are staying here on Kisiri. They must come—’ He could not bear the thought of Ally not being here.
‘My sergeant brings them. Mzee Shaibu has asked for Dr Carole. A doctor may be needed here. See – already.’
Another police boat was crossing. Eagerly, Leli watched.
‘Leli!’ His mother spoke sharply. ‘You will—’
‘The boy does not need instructions, Tabia,’ his father intervened. He put a hand on Leli’s arm, just a fleeting touch, and catching his eyes. ‘Be steady, Leli. And be patient. The sun never sets without fresh news.’
Twenty-three
Badru has measured the cave – it is six hundred paces from the mouth to its innermost wall. The cave’s deeper reaches curve out of sight of the mouth, into a large cavern.
We tested the distance above, on the cliff. From the fort’s outer wall, above the cave-mouth, six hundred paces brings us beside the chapel in the court. Goat and cattle pens were there. The animals now all dead: only a well remains, abandoned when it became rapidly and strangely dry, filled with broken stone to prevent any creature falling into it.
The centre is solid, the stones wedged firm, but we saw narrow cracks.
We waited till the westering sun was low enough to put our eastern walls in shadow and the enemy patrol passed far out on the ebb-tide. Then we lowered Badru again outside the walls to the cave entrance, waiting for his returning signal on the rope to haul him up.
He saw light glowing in the cave-depths, the colour of the dipping sun in the west! It could not come from the cave mouth to the east, at this hour deep shadowed by the high cliff. Some other source is lighting the cave.
We set to prising out the wedged stones from the abandoned well, and were an arm’s reach down before we saw the lower stones have shifted and opened a broad channel plunging deeper.
Jabari went to the store below Alvaro’s house to fetch the mason’s chisels and hammers. We removed the stones to the height of a man. We lowered Badru into the well. He hung there, holding up a hand for silence. Then signalled wildly for us to bring him up again.
From within, he heard the surge and suck of tide below!
We dig more urgently, and yet more carefully, lest we send stones tumbling to block the space below. We work into full darkness, for the Arabs are moving three ships closer. Diogo calculates they have forty cannon and prepare ships as firing platforms to send against us.
The treasure draws them. Badru’s friend in the town said that scores have joined this Arab fleet since the talk of riches – tales born of a siege held month after month by men kept far from their homes, to do nothing but wait for other men’s deaths.
Alvaro’s records show that the Madre de Deos carried the booty plundered from that hapless distant city and its sultan, also a cargo of gold from Sofala, and ivory from a captured Indian ship bound for Cambay. A fortune indeed!
But we have not found it, and with fire in her eyes, Winda scorns any talk of fortunes. Our only prize is that every woman, man and child may fly this desolate place and live, forever free of it.
Neema is stronger again, and baby Jorge rallies. Hunger has weakened him dreadfully, yet he has a spirit that will not succumb. All gives us hope. I took my turn at Watch and felt my limbs stronger, all trembling gone. I drew into my heart that moment of freedom on the wall. I felt again Her presence, real, and strong, my Spirit of Hope who will save us.
It began this night. We heard movement among the ruined houses outside the western gate. We feared the worst and stood at arms. Chane and Diogo stayed to widen the channel through the well into the cave.
At first light we saw their ships nearer, that some hundred men have landed and with utmost speed and cunning thrown up earthworks among the broken buildings. Paulo says they will have brought up guns from the ships and lodged them behind. Our time runs out with increasing speed.
But with Badru I descended our new-cut channel, and saw there is a second cavern, high above the cave. It cuts into the coral as a deep shelf, invisible from below. It has space to take us all, affords safety to stow our preparations and to hide and wait.
We are still twelve in number, and three children. The fever has claimed no other.
Chane and Neema prepare ropes and slings for carrying things. We have the canoe brought by Badru, Rahidi and Jabari. Paulo has repaired another. Omar and Saaduma build a raft from remnants of damaged boats. We will lower it in sections through the channel, to be roped together in the cave below.
Again and again, Jabari stalks through the captain’s house, paces and views from every angle. The house is built against the fort’s outer wall; a stone staircase climbs outside from the courtyard to the living floor above. Beneath is the storeroom, empty now of all but the scuttle of spiders. Broad doors lead to the store from the open court, also a narrow wooden stairway goes up inside to the captain’s chamber above, closed by a trapdoor that—
*
I could not finish – Jabari called me and Diogo to the captain’s house!
He was moving through the empty storeroom, counting his steps for us to hear. Then paced its
walls outside, counting again. ‘You see?’ he demanded.
Inside the store, the span of walls is shorter from rear to front, than the measurement outside. Three whole paces shorter.
We fell to inspecting the wall along the back, but detected nothing. Yet something fills the rear of the storeroom and there is no doorway into it.
A large hidden space between the store and the fort’s outer wall.
We climbed the stairway to the captain’s rooms above and examined the floor, its empty hollow sound ringing beneath our tramping feet. Long ago we burned every stick of furniture for firewood, except the bed, pushed hard against the wall. A broad stone ledge protrudes there and two legs of the bed rest on it. We drew them off, and with our newly suspicious eyes, we saw.
Four blocks of stone with fine cracks between the joints, no mortar sealing them.
We fetched the tools and levered one stone up and the black damp of the place below breathed in our faces. Our lamp illuminated the dulled wood of many chests, packed close, and when Jabari prised one open, the sheen of metals: gold, silver, copper – goblets, plates, bracelets, rings. In another, coins – more than any man could imagine.
Here is the poisoned treasure that sucks our enemy towards us.
It sets a fire amongst us, igniting a plan!
Goma and Neema brought the children into our midst so they could see our hope. We embraced, one and all, each making the promise to each other.
Without time pressing dangerously against us, how we might dance!
Now will we escape this place of hell, in such a way that no one will know we have gone, or follow us.
We believe they will attack from their earthworks outside the western gate. They will cross the coral ditch and throw ladders against the wall, believing few of us alive to throw them off.
This we will do: pack the guardrooms above that gate with gunpowder salted with items of treasure. At an appointed time, ignite the gunpowder, by slow fuses devised by Diogo and Paulo. Chane and Omar prepare the cannon to follow – to fire in quick succession as if many men are poised to fight.
Song Beneath the Tides Page 19
