Secret of the Sands

The auctioneer skilfully bats the opportunity back to the other man still in the game – a blue-robed Arab pulling on a hookah pipe beneath an intricately fringed, white parasol.

‘Two hundred dollars,’ the auctioneer shouts triumphantly. ‘Do I have more?’

Zena has to admit, this is a handsome price for an Abyssinian 17-year-old, who may or may not be a virgin. It is certainly more than any of the others have made.

‘Have I any advance?’

There is silence. The bidding is still with the Abyssinian, who nonchalantly refuses to look at his opponent. All other eyes turn to the Arab, who considers a moment, tosses his head and refuses to go any higher.

He has got me! she thinks. One of my own. She wants to tell him, in her own language, where she comes from and what brought her here. Surely he has bought her because they are from a common background. Surely his house will be the same as her grandmother’s, for how else would a wealthy Abyssinian run their home?

Eagerly, she lets them lead her from the podium and tether her to a post beside the clerk. There she overhears the arrangements being made for her payment and realises this man has not bought her for himself. He is a slave, only doing his master’s bidding. He counts out his master’s dollars.

‘My name is Zena,’ she says, with a rush of enthusiasm. ‘I come from the hills. Near Bussaba.’

The man hisses at her like a spitting snake, affronted by her impertinence. One of his attendants roughly ushers her away. She glances back at the man in slight confusion. He is still counting out her price and making his salaams to the auctioneer. She wonders if he was sold here himself. She wonders if he can remember what it felt like. There will be no fellow feeling, she realises sadly as she is tethered again. When the business is concluded, she follows the litter, docile and under guard with two other women, sidis. They come from another shipment, seemingly purchased earlier at a far lesser price. As they progress through the cramped, busy streets, Zena’s appetite is so sharp and her sense of smell so elevated that the aroma drifting from the street stalls selling thick, sticky pastries hits her like an assault of honeyed sesame sweetness in the warming air while the nutty scent of coffee almost stops her dead in her tracks. She can think of nothing else. The truth is that right now she would thank someone more for a plate of food than for her freedom. The business of the marketplace is so frantic that she is diverted by the constant stream of images. Just breathe in, she thinks as the honeyed sweetness wafts towards her. Instinctively, she knows she must not think about what is happening or she will cry.

Not far from the palace on the front, but away from the direction of the souk they step through a huge wooden gate studded with dark nails. Inside is a shady courtyard lined with blue and green tiles and dotted with huge bronze planters sprouting dark, glossy leaves interspersed by an occasional splash of garish brightness – an exotic flower or two. White archways lead away from the entrance over two storeys. Zena could swear she smells orange blossom and cinnamon and just a hint of a chicken boiling in the pot.

The litter is set beneath a date palm and the gold muslin is drawn back as the man swings his plump legs to the ground. He walks past the three women, inspecting his purchases slowly from head to foot. The one to Zena’s left whimpers. She smells, Zena suddenly realises, as the other women do, of the oil used to burnish their skin – the odour is acrid, stale and unsavoury. A flicker of emotion crosses the man’s face though it is impossible to read. He waves his hand airily and the two other women are led off by a male slave. Zena watches them go. Then the man walks around her again, inspecting her even more slowly.

‘Bathe her,’ he orders at length.

He speaks Arabic with an accent. Zena drops her head as a mark of respect. She will try to talk to him again. This time in his adopted tongue. She has to.

‘Sir,’ she says, ‘I am very hungry. Please may I eat?’

It is an audacious request from one who has spent the past two weeks up to her ankles in excrement, sleeping only periodically, propped up against a black-tongued corpse. Worse, it is a request from one who is a mere chattel and who has already been berated for even talking. But she cannot stand it any longer.

‘You speak Arabic? Ha!’ the black man laughs, though what comes out of his mouth sounds more like a dry bark.

He has no heart to laugh with, Zena thinks, but instead she tells him where she learnt the language they are speaking. ‘My grandmother taught me. In her house she had guests who were traders and I learnt to talk to them.’

‘That is good. Good,’ his brown eyes widen, pleased at his luck. ‘You speak the tongue – you are a bargain.’

He smells of butter and honey and Zena is so hungry that she would willingly lick his skin.

‘Please, sir,’ she ventures, emboldened by the conversation, blurting out the question. ‘What are my duties here?’

The man stares blankly. ‘I was once a stranger too. I came from the marketplace. You will work hard here. Your master is a great man – you will work to please him.’

He does not tell her she can rise in the household as he has done. He is anticipating that he will win his freedom soon, as some slaves do, having proved their worth as family retainers. He will never leave the service of his master, but he will not be owned, or indentured, he will be a free man – a huss. He does not mention it. There is no point. After all, this slave is merely a woman and, apart from her beauty, and now the advantage she will have because she speaks Arabic, she has fewer uses than a skilled person like himself. His master has bought her only as a bauble and as she gets older her decorative effect will diminish and her value lessen.

‘What work will I do, sir?’

Another dry bark. ‘Nursemaid, habshi,’ the man says.

Zena feels an immense wave of relief wash over her. She has no experience with children, but nonetheless it sounds like an easier job than many who have been bought that morning will face in the afternoon. She smiles.

‘Feed her,’ the man orders as he turns away. ‘Then bathe her.’

Four black slave women guide Zena through an archway into the house. Through a series of shady passages their strong arms shepherd her without touching her skin. She smells the roasting meat and the baking bread so keenly that she almost breaks into a run. The slaves speak a mysterious African language that sounds like music – a cacophony of clicks and long vowels that soothes. Zena does not understand but it is clear where she is meant to go. Their chatter heightens the pace. This house is a maze, a labyrinthine warren of passages. It crosses her mind that she will never know what is around the corner here – there is no pattern. The place is vast and sprawling – one long corridor turning the corner into another short one, one room locked and another without a door at all. After two or three minutes of increasingly fragrant and warm corridors they cut into a huge room, lit by high windows. At last – it is the kitchen. For a moment, the group hovers in the doorway.

After being shipbound and starved, the delicious fecundity, the sheer generosity of the provisions on display seem an impossibility to Zena and she is stunned. Hand-hammered, bronze pots hang from the ceiling. On a table as far away as possible from the fire, fruits are laden onto wide, clay ashettes. It is all Zena can do not to rush over and reach for a pomegranate, sink her teeth into the ruby-coloured flesh and let the sweet juice run down her chin as she sucks it dry. A bough of dark, succulent grapes, trailing its leaves, is propped against a clay bowl of oranges with glossy foliage, darker in contrast to the vine. Bunches of fragrant mint fresh from the farm stalls of Muttrah hang above from a shelf of honey jars and preserved nuts that are so close she swears she can almost taste them. Around the oven, two thin boys are baking pitta bread, which they pile onto a huge, bronze sheet. A dead animal is butchered by a fat man with a cleaver. His bare chest is speckled with bone and blood as he flings the pieces of meat into a wooden box of marinade that smells of lemon, garlic and chilli. And overseeing it all, a huge Nubian chef is directing all the work, while kneading a handful of pale pastry with fat fingers that send clouds of flour into the air over his head and dust his figure into a ghost-like apparition.

Zena’s knees feel suddenly weak and she thinks she might faint until one of the slaves fetches a bone cup of milk and a small dish of thin gruel with a long-handled spoon and some dry zahidi dates. She remembers to thank the man, only just, nodding and clasping her hands in a pantomime of gratitude, before she falls, open-mouthed and ravenous, upon the meagre meal, her stomach retching at the sudden plenty, her throat swallowing at the same time. Tears stream down her cheeks. There has never been a meal more delicious. As she rouses herself from it, the cup drained dry and the plate empty, she notices that they have all just stood there and watched her gorge herself, sucking in the food, almost without chewing. Licking her fingers of the remnants, she feels suddenly ashamed. The other slaves show no emotion. Perhaps they never felt the same hunger, Zena thinks as the crockery is taken from her with dead-eyed efficiency and without skipping a beat the party moves on, back through the unnavigable passageways of the house.

She knows they will wash her next.

I wonder what the children will be like? she thinks and she places a hand on her full belly as she follows the party upwards to the tiled bathhouse, replete with a brazier for making steam.

The water is tepid. It feels cool in the heat of the day and makes a delicate trickling noise as the old woman scoops it up in a glazed clay jar and then pours it over Zena’s hair. Another girl, not much older than herself, mixes oil of lemon with oil of thyme and thickens it with date paste. It is as if she is being basted – prepared for the pot. The efficient hands simply do their work, sponging her, soothing and anointing her skin with oil, combing out her long plaits and resetting her hair into a smooth coil. They are neither gentle nor rough and they say nothing. Zena asks, first in her own language then in Arabic, what they are doing, where she will be taken next, what the family is like.

‘Please,’ she says, ‘tell me about this place.’

But not one of the slaves even acknowledges that they understand what she is saying and she gives up and simply allows them to pummel her clean.

When a slave arrives bearing a diaphanous, aquamarine kaftan of fine, silken gauze, Zena does not even wonder. Who can say what is unusual in such a place and what is common? The others are dressed in plain, pale robes of rough cotton, but what does that mean? Surely personal servants of the family merit a more luxurious uniform than common house servants. The hands dry her with white linen and as she slips into the dress they bind up her hair in a golden turban and draw leather sandals onto her feet, instructing each other in the strange musical language that Zena cannot understand. After the dhow and the slave market this is heaven – no matter that they are only doing what their superior has bid them. No matter that they do not acknowledge her in any way.

Before dusk, Zena is delivered to a room on the first floor that smells faintly of incense. There is a wide bed, a carved screen, an ornate rug with velvet cushions of red and yellow scattered about it, a window covered with a wooden shutter and evenly spaced brass lamps ready to be lit for the evening. Beside the bed there lies a covered flask of water flavoured with mint, a box containing rose jelly and another of honeyed pistachios. Zena inspects everything and then sits on the bed. It does not seem like a child’s room. She waits until the muezzin has made the call to prayer. She waits until the sun has sunk from the sky and it is absolutely dark. The scent of night flowers wafts in through the window on the perfumed air from tubs far below outside – moonflowers, nicotiana and jasmine. She desperately tries not to doze but her belly is full, her skin is silken and the cushions are tempting. In the end, she succumbs and cannot help but fall fast, fast asleep.

What raises her is a strange noise. A cackle. She jumps up into the pitch darkness, panicked, and it takes her a second or two to realise where she is. She trips over a small table and then recovers her balance. Then in a flash she remembers.

Before her there is a man in the doorway carrying a torch that flickers in the breeze from the window. The bright flame sends strange shadows over his face so that she cannot tell what he really looks like. But he is finely dressed in a long, bright robe. His dark hair flows like a woman’s and when he smiles he has the teeth of an animal, white, bared and ready. He cackles again – the sound a hyena might make, or a dog. Zena falls to her knees.

‘Salaam,’ she whispers, drawing her hands together in supplication and raising her eyes only high enough to see that he wears an array of gold rings on his long fingers.

‘They sent you?’ the man asks.

Zena nods and looks up at him. ‘I was bought today. In the marketplace.’

The man laughs and beckons her towards him. Now she can see that he is younger than she first thought – perhaps twenty or so. He motions her to turn around so he can inspect her.

‘What did you fetch?’

‘Two hundred dollars, I think.’

He casts his eye over her coldly. ‘They think this will tempt me,’ he says in a derisory tone, but the comment is not directed at Zena – he is talking to himself and has turned away. He puts down the lamp and proceeds to sit on the plump cushions by the window, picking up a sweet from the rosewood box and chewing it as he mulls things over.

‘Light, girl!’ he calls.

Zena hovers for a moment behind him, and then realising that he means her, she springs into action, taking the lamp from the low table and lighting the others one by one. The room gradually takes on a buttery glow. She can see now that the man’s silken jubbah is edged with intricate embroidery and that he wears gold earrings in a low loop in addition to his collection of rings. His eyes are pitch black – the darkest she has ever seen. She lays the lamp once more on the low table and steps back to wait for another order. But, before one can be given, the door opens and a slave boy enters. Taken back at the sight of Zena, he retreats slightly.

‘Ah, come in, Sam. Come in. Don’t worry about her,’ the man says, his dark eyes turning from the view across the midnight city and back into the room again.

His gaze, Zena notices, is suddenly bright. The slave boy has skin as black as Zena’s own. He crosses to his master and kneels beside him. The man’s jewelled hand falls languidly onto the boy’s shoulder and then runs down the smooth skin of his strong, well-defined arm, stroking with surprising gentleness.

‘A nursemaid,’ Zena realises. ‘They wanted me because …’

The boy raises his eyes towards her. ‘Is it your wish for this habshi to watch us, Master?’ he asks.

The man cackles once more. He leans down and kisses the boy on the lips.

‘Go!’ he says over his shoulder without even looking at her. ‘Leave me!’

Zena bows and leaves the room as gracefully as she can manage but in the hallway she hovers. Her mind is racing. She doesn’t know where she ought to go. She cannot remember the direction of the bathhouse or the kitchen. The household is asleep and the maze of hallways is dark and silent. There is no one around so she crouches against the wall and decides to wait. The master, may, after all, call for her when he has finished.

Chapter Thirteen

Jessop has thoroughly enjoyed his stay at the encampment. He has made notes about the Bedu and their way of life, the details of the trading routes of the tribe and their customs of war and has even managed some observations on the way one family interweaves with another. The site is temporary, of course. The Bedu are set to graze their animals there till only saltbush remains. The wells fill up once a season and the Bedu will stay to drink the water dry and then move on. The tents are comfortable enough though and, like most nomads, the tribe is hospitable to a fault. An Arabic tribesman will go hungry himself in order to feed his guests lavishly. It is well known that if you come across a camp in the desert and are accepted as a guest, you’ll always be fed better than the people who actually live there.

By the third and final day, the doctor is gratified to see that there is a marked improvement in all but one little girl who, Jessop now fears, might well lose her sight as the infection progresses. Clearly it had advanced too far by the time he arrived and he knows there is little more he can do for the child but clean the pus and hope her body might rally. The danger is septicaemia, blood poisoning. If the little girl succumbs to it she will almost certainly die. He has tried to transmit this information but fears it loses something in the translation. The devoted mother, meanwhile, has placed a copy of the Quran under the girl’s sleeping rug and spits into the child’s face to clean it (starting Jessop all over again on the painful process of the vinegar eye wash). Now, leaving her daughter in the care of others, the woman has taken to following Jessop, entreating him to save her daughter in the same way he worked his magic on the other children. No amount of explanation or reassuring smiles and hand gestures seems to communicate that he can do no more, and she neglects her domestic duties and hovers in her dark burquah, a little behind the white men, occasionally breaking into a keening wail that makes Jones start.

‘I do wish she’d stop that!’ he says. ‘Bloody hullabaloo.’

Jessop fans himself with a flat square made of rushes. He realised early on, even before they left Sur, that his concerns are different from Jones’ and he has now become tired of the repeated conversation about breeding strains and fetlocks, shipping livestock via Bombay, how much a chap might need to furnish a Knightsbridge house decently or fix its leaking roof and how Arabia has little to offer civilisation.

Today is their last in the encampment and Jessop wishes he could discuss what he has found with Jones, but the lieutenant will not engage in conversation on any other topic than those most dear to his wallet. Still, it has become clear the more Jessop uncovers about conditions inland, the more difficult supplying any reasonable traffic of British ships seems to be. Both water supplies and tribal territories shift with such alarming regularity that he has come to the conclusion that the business of resupply might need to be assessed almost every time a British ship docks and treaties of alliance would have to be constantly renegotiated. It was hoped matters might prove more stable here than on the coast, but from his enquiries he now understands that if anything they are less so and there is very little out here in the hinterland anyway – it makes no sense even to use the place to ferry supplies. It is simply too dangerous and travelling through the desert has proved painfully slow. He’ll be glad to get back to the coast and rendezvous with the Palinurus when it comes back down from the inhospitable north.

Preparations are underway for the party’s departure. The Dhofaris are making sure the camels drink as much as possible before the return journey and both Jessop and Jones are wordlessly steeling themselves for the privations of the trip. There is little enough to pack and, apart from overseeing the animals, the bearers and guides lounge drinking coffee, picking their teeth with araq and sharing the last of their supplies of qat leaves, which they chew open-mouthed. Stimulated by the effects, they argue over nothing in particular for hours while the Bedu avoid them. The tribes are not enemies, nor are they friends, Jessop notes in his diary. At prayer time, the Dhofaris and the Bedu lay down their mats separately, at meals they skirt around the edges of the other’s group. They have not travelled together and so the oath of the caravan where one traveller will fight to the death for another and all are brothers does not apply.

On the last night, Jessop and Jones eat in the big tent, sitting on huge, hard pillows grouped around a central, low table piled high with food so laden with fat that it shines in the dim light from the oil lamps. The Bedu carry naphtha, harvested easily from the surface of the infertile plain and distilled into a crude fuel for lamplight, which smells faintly medicinal. ‘Arabia,’ Jones maintains, ‘consists of land either too desiccated for cultivation or too poisonous. It is as well that God has given them naft for they could not afford candles.’

The emir and his eldest son sit to one side – the officers are cross-legged on the other. The boy has scarcely started to grow his beard, but he is accepted by the men of the camp as a leader in waiting. He is, after all, the son of a great man and wishes that he could be lost on the sands and make a name for himself, as his father did. The men respect his lineage and his pluck even though, as yet, he has had the opportunity to prove neither. He spends more time now with the adults than the other children and as a result has not succumbed to the eye infection, or at least, has not had kohl applied to his eyes by the solicitous woman who started the spread of the sickness.

‘Your people do not pray?’ the emir asks Jessop, as if in passing.

So far, the emir has answered the doctor’s questions but has shown little interest of his own. This last night, the atmosphere feels stilted and the doctor is glad that the emir has thought to make an enquiry or at least start a conversation.

‘Ah. No. We do not pray as you do – five times a day.’

For a long time, the emir does not respond. After the silence has started to drag he turns again to the white men. ‘And you eat pig? Drink the grape?’

A grin breaks out on the doctor’s face. ‘Yes. Yes, all my people do.’ He reaches into the bag he always carries with him and helpfully pulls out a picture of King William on the face of a decorative, enamel miniature. The likeness shows His Majesty at his coronation a mere three years before.

‘This is our shah,’ he explains, ‘our caliph. Sultan, perhaps. We call him a king.’ Jessop is unaware that carrying this manner of representational likeness is deeply offensive to followers of Islam and tantamount to idolatry. The emir’s son glances sideways at his father to see what he might do, but the emir affects scarcely to notice the miniature.

‘Your shah is powerful? He has many camels? Many horses?’

‘Ah,’ Jones cuts in. ‘Yes. His Majesty King William loves horses.’

This is, in fact, not strictly true. His Majesty is a sailor rather than a landlubber and his concerns are largely marine. In the main, he becomes enthusiastic about horses only if the animals are racing and he has taken a bet. But the comment at least brings the conversation round to a subject upon which Jones wishes to elaborate and he grasps upon it, becoming suddenly quite animated.

‘I am sure His Majesty would be most impressed by an animal of the tenor of your fine beasts. The sultan kindly sent him an Arab horse last year from Muscat and His Majesty by all accounts is completely taken by the creature.’

The emir does not rise to the suggestion. He reaches out and picks at some gleaming couscous that has been piled before him. As he raises it to his lips there is a terrible sound. At first Jessop thinks there has been a stir that has woken the animals but as the ululation starts up in earnest he realises it is the women. They are screaming in chorus. No, not screaming, not really. It is more as if they are singing their screams. A slave enters the tent, slips to the emir’s side and leans, as discreetly as any footman at Windsor Castle, to whisper in the emir’s ear. The couscous stops in midair. The emir’s face, if it is possible, becomes stonier. He looks at Jessop and Jones and Jessop thinks fleetingly that being caught in his gaze is like being a butterfly pinned to a board. He has a terrible sinking feeling in his stomach and a sudden longing for his matchlock, which is safely stowed in his saddle bags, with ample ammunition, ready for the journey they will start before dawn. He wishes fervently that it was nearer to hand.