Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

'He cheats," he bellowed, 'took a gold ring off of me by sharp practice.'

Distracted by my intervention he relaxed his grip on the sinewy throat of the fakir enough for the mountebank to draw breath and gasp.

'All straight and above board,' he cried. 'He bet me six months in his service against his gold ring he could tell me which hand I had it in. Listen, he can have it back, I'm buggered if I care.' He held out his palm with the ring on it. The sergeant took it – it was a big, chunky affair, a lion's head with tiny ruby eyes – slipped it back on the middle finger of his right hand, then pulled the hand back to his shoulder as if he were drawing a bowstring, and let loose with all his might into the fakir's face. I grabbed his flailing wrist and just saved him from going over. Nevertheless, as he lurched back, he doubled up, spitting blood and a broken tooth.

'There,' shouted the sergeant, and his little eyes roamed over all the bystanders, who now numbered most of those on board, 'that's what I do, and worse, to anybody tries to make a monkey out of me.'

That was not the end of the affair. At least, I am fairly certain it was not. Night came on, the wind dropped, the boat ambled on beneath a moonless sky with just a helmsman, who had the art of steering by the stars, and a lookout in the forepeak on watch. Neither heard anything untoward, though both said that at the darkest time the silence was disturbed by the splash and gurgle of whales or larger dolphins nearby.

And in the morning the sergeant was nowhere to be found. After supper, during which he had continued to drink copiously, he had fallen into a deep slumber with his head cushioned on his arm, in the lee of the ship's side, and when morning came he had gone. Some fingers were pointed at the fakir, but the Buddhist monk swore he had slept beside him all night, below deck, sharing one of the shelves and a thin blanket and neither had stirred until first light. I, myself, had slept on deck, outside the bamboo door of the cabin where Prince Harihara and Chamberlain Anish were bedded and I, too, heard the splashing of dolphin, as I thought. Except – that immediately preceding it I had been half woken by the sound of someone pissing long and heavily into the sea. This was followed by a brittle-sounding snap, like a branch being broken over a strong man's knee, a gasp and a splash. The splash a dolphin makes when it leaps out of the water, or that of a small whale's fluke when it smacks the surface? I didn't think so. But there was no point in saying otherwise.

Those with authority on the boat, the master and his mate, exercised the prerogatives laid down by maritime custom and overruled Prince Harihara's desire for a more complete inquiry into the loss of his sergeant. Landlubbers, they said, especially those who get drunk and fail to take the most obvious precautions, have been falling off boats since ocean travel began, and that was that. Questions, of course, remained unanswered, the most weighty being: why did the sergeant not cry out?

The master shrugged with all the disdain of a man who has gone through a long life without touching intoxicating liquor but who has observed the evil effects of drunkenness from Cadiz to Surabaya. Why ask for rational behaviour from a drunk? So the matter was laid to rest, and if any shared my misgivings, they kept them to themselves.

Here is a way of killing a man. You place a long silk scarf round his neck, retaining the ends in your hands at arm's length. You raise your foot and place it on the side or back of the man's head, with your knee bent to a right-angle. Then, very sharply, you straighten the knee. It needs the speed of a falcon's stoop, suppleness, agility, determination and training by an adept. It is the method of ritual slaughter known as thuggee and is carried out by devotees of the goddess Kali. So, maybe we had a Thug amongst us. The fakir? Perhaps. But the Thugs are cunning people, usually work in small groups or pairs, at least, and are not above using a likely innocent as a decoy. From then on I always made sure that beneath the folds of my cape and buried in my loincloth my Damascene stiletto was within easy grasp, and at night I slept with its hilt in my hand. I, too, have my skills.

The voyage unfolded without further incident. We reached the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb some two weeks later, untroubled by bad weather apart from an occasional squall, and began the long haul up the Red Sea, a distance about the same as we had already travelled. We put into the small port of Mokhi where, when I found that the imams' interdiction against drinking the infusion of k'hawah beans, which had prevented me making my fortune some four years previously, had been lifted. I prevailed upon Prince Harihara to lay out a piece of his gold on a couple of sacks. I assured him they would sell as well as coriander seed once we got into Europe. We also took on fresh water and other supplies that had begun to fall low, especially lemons.

Fortunately, at that time of year, the winds were now mostly from the east and south-east, though frequently falling away, which, with the presence of much moisture in the air, produced an enervating heat; nevertheless I took great delight during these calms in swimming in the warm limpid water of the Red Sea above coral reefs of great beauty, often plunging my head below the surface and kicking my way down like a frog so the shoals of rainbow fish darted away ahead of me. I swam with ease, in spite of my twisted, scrawny and scarred old body, which skill the rest of the crew and passengers with envy, even awe. It is a skill few have who do not come from sea or lakeside communities but one

I had been at pains to acquire when it became clear to me that sea voyages were to take up a significant portion of my life.

Indeed, that early experience of surviving the sabre slash, followed by a night bedded on top of my partially dismembered mother, had left me with not only an inordinate desire to live, but also a willingness to learn how to survive in all foreseeable circumstances. Moreover, it gave me a readiness to grasp the pleasure of each fleeting moment, each sensation, from the tremulous and slight, even the tiny scrabble of.I little red spider finding its way through the hairs on the back of my hand, to the mind-blowingly grand, like the glory of a sunset with low-lying cloud at sea.

I also persuaded the Prince to lay out a tiny sum on a sackful of sponges, which were peddled at our ship's side during a calm by a couple of lads who rowed a tiny skiff up to us from the Arabian shore.

The last two hundred miles or so were the worst, as they almost always are on that particular voyage, and took a quarter of the time we spent in the Red Sea. As the banks of the Khalij As Suways, the Gulf of Suez, closed in on us, the winds blew out of the west, earning on their back the heavy, sharp grit of the desert; the sky became overcast, with a featureless grey haze tinged with ochre, and the master and crew were increasingly bad-tempered as they struggled to keep our head close to the wind without losing forward way. The dolphins and flying fish departed for the south and an evil, grubby spume settled on the decking making it slippery and movement hazardous. As the Gulf narrowed, other shipping, too, became a hazard, those going our way competing with us to find good berths within the roads before nightfall, those leaving scudding by with the wind on their quarters, angry with us for getting in their way, spilling the wind out of our sail when they got too close, so we were likely at times to drift beam-on to that evil breeze.

Still, we made Suways by close on midday on our forty-second day out of Goa, which was about what I had told the Prince to expect. It now fell to me to organise the next stage of our journey: not only was I the only person in the party who had knowledge of Ingerlond. our ultimate goal, but I was, too, the only Arab, with knowledge ot that tongue and of the processes and prices, the snares and snags that befall travellers in those parts.