Sara Sheridan - Secret of the Sands

As they make camp in the middle of the morning and settle down to sleep for the hottest part of the day under a hastily erected tent that provides shade probably only a degree or two cooler than the baking sand adjacent to it, the doctor dresses a burn on the older Dhofari ’s hand. The wound was acquired in the service of the British Empire, after all. He daubs lavender ointment across the skin. Kindness, the doctor always thinks, is terribly important to a patient. When he first qualified, many of his patients healed all the quicker, he’s sure, for his attention, rather than simply his medical knowledge.

‘I don’t know why you bother, old chap,’ Jones mumbles sleepily to his companion.

‘I have the ointment with me, it costs me nothing,’ the doctor points out.

Jones turns over. ‘Night night,’ he murmurs like a child rather than one of His Majesty’s finest.

Jessop burrows himself an indent in the sand. It is really very telling, he muses. Jones didn’t seem – he angles for the right word – so very ungentlemanly when they were aboard ship . He glances at the blinding orb that is reaching its height. The doctor prefers travelling by the stars. Night in the desert is quite the most extraordinary spectacle.

‘Good night,’ he returns, rather more formally, and settles down to sleep for a few hours before they get on their way.

Chapter Seven

It feels to Zena as if she has walked into a nightmare. In the low-ceilinged hold of the Arab dhow there are eighty prisoners shackled. Seventy-one of them are still alive though the shit swills around their chapped ankles and all still living are so faint from hunger and thirst that they scarcely feel it sting. Most have never before seen so many people as they are now crammed up against and for all it is an abomination not to bury the dead before sundown. They have been eleven days on board the mashua . It is this that worries her most. The majority of the slaves are ignorant of the geography both of where they came from and where they might be going, but Zena lived for six years with her grandmother, high in the cool, emerald hills of northern Abyssinia, less than two hundred miles from the cosmopolitan and bustling trading town of Bussaba. The old lady was respected and her house was a prosperous staging post of some renown for travelling caravans and pilgrims. Within its compound, Zena’s grandmother’s rules were simple and absolute: no weapons, no theft of either person or property.

It was in that place of safety that Zena learnt about faraway lands and the limits of the slave routes. She heard tell of a variety of gods and legends – all of which seemed merely curious to her, for her grandmother believed in nothing except, she always said, the goodness of people as long as you were firm. The travellers talked about where they had been and where they were going to and, though Zena has never seen a map, it is as a result of these many conversations that it is clear to her that eleven days on a ship is further than these men really need to go simply to sell her.

At the port she was separated from everyone she knew and marched aboard another vessel with strangers hand-picked from other slave raids, for it seems, though the slavers clearly prefer the young, the different quality of human cargo merits different destinations. At least that is her best guess, for as far as she can tell, the ships are not sailing together and Zena knows no one aboard. There will be, she has come to realise, no getting away. Simply to survive the crossing will be a feat.

Sitting well-fed beside her grandmother’s fire, the names of the foreign climes sounded exotic – Muscat and Sur, Constantinople and Zanzibar, Bombay and Calicut. The strange tone of the men’s skin seemed benign, somehow, as they talked wistfully of their homeland or their religious devotions. There were Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Animists and Jews and they came in all shades of brown – Nubian princes, Wahabi emirs, minor Persian noblemen, Turkish traders, the dusky emissaries of caliphs and sultans, Semitic merchants, Indian warriors, Somali pirates and Abyssinian bishops. Each and every one of the strangers was tattooed and pierced with the markings of their individual tribe – some shaven and some with long beards, some bare-headed and others with ornate headdresses or brightly coloured turbans. They dressed differently too – in white flowing robes, or embroidered jubbahs, or animal-skin capes adorned in ostrich feathers or sometimes simply in a hessian winding cloth. Under her grandmother’s watchful eye, Zena served platters of food to all of them – spiced couscous and succulent lamb piled high with melted butter poured on top till it dripped from the edge of the plate. Roasted chicken stuffed with fruit and nuts and gleaming with basting juices. Spicy wot, stewed till it almost melted into the hot injera bread. Latterly, she danced for the strangers to the beat held by Yari, her grandmother’s fat, Anatolian eunuch who played the drums. When they found out she was not a mere servant (one of many) or indeed a slave girl (even more), but a favoured grandchild, many of the visitors paid her attention and left her gifts – a phial of perfume or a length of silk. There are no gifts now.

After the third day aboard, in the darkness of the hold, she can see this new ship is following the coast to the south and, between the intermittent keening of the other women and the praying of the men, silent tears stream down her face. There can be no going back now, she mouths. All she can think of is returning to the village, and what might be there if she does. So much loss. A grave. Her mother, always surly. A marriage Zena never sought for herself, now long overdue. It should not have happened like this, she thinks. In the darkness, it is safe to mourn so she cries for a long time.

On the sixth day, after silence and exhaustion finally prevail below deck and all surrender themselves to the stifling crush, Zena notices through a tiny strip of light in the bulwark above her head that the land is on the wrong side of the ship and she knows they have turned eastwards. These territories are strange to her – she retains in her memory only some names and meagre scraps of information, but it is enough to realise the scale of the distance she now lies from home and the impossibility of an easy return.

Her grandmother’s death sent her back to the village only a few weeks before – back to her parents who had hoped for better for her. The stone compound was inherited by her mother’s elder brother who arrived a week after the burial with several camels, a horse or two and a cold-eyed wife in full burquah . He took stock of his new home, ordered an ox to be killed and cooked in celebration and banished Zena at the first opportunity.

‘Go home and get married, child,’ he commanded. ‘There is nothing for you here.’

Her presence had always been unorthodox and so, as he was fully entitled, he sent her, with only one servant and one camel, back to the shamble of huts where she was born. She travelled light with just one small wooden box of trinkets and baubles and a few lengths of dark cotton. At the time, she thought the old lady’s passing was the saddest thing that would ever happen – Zena loved her grandmother. She had nursed Baba devotedly through her short illness. When death finally came, Zena washed the old woman’s naked body and wrapped it in a white linen shroud. The servants buried the corpse and then Zena cried for three days without sleeping. Yari fed her yoghurt and honey though she scarcely tasted it.

Above Zena’s head, the hold opens suddenly and those in the way pull back from the bright stream of blinding light that beams down. A bucket of brackish water is lowered on a rope and two more of scraps – rancid fat, raw fish and rock-hard khubz . The slaves fall upon it, tearing at each other to secure a cupped handful of water and a mouthful of food. A sound that Zena identifies as laughter floats down from the white square above her head as she eats the mush between her fingers and tries not to retch. Then the light is obliterated.