"Aye, sir—'cept our ships went home."
"They wouldn't if they'd known we were here."
"You can lay to that, Cap'n."
"Our boys who were with General Eaton—I reckon they went home, too."
"Yes, and I wonder if we can call 'em our boys any more, us so lost and forgotten for so long."
He coughed hard, and tears rolled out of his bloodshot eyes. He wiped them furiously away with the back of his hand.
"They are our boys as long as we live," I said. "They've lost us, but we haven't lost them. Hang on with your teeth and fingernails and everything you can, as though you were in the tops of the Old Bitch in a full-reef gale. As soon as the time's ripe—and it may not be very long—we'll leg it. It's a better hope than I've ever told you."
"Then don't tell me now. If they got wind I knew anything, they could make me cough it up. I couldn't stand no real long whippings any more."
"You can stand anything you have to, Enoch Sutler. You're one of Vindictive's men. But we've talked too long, and I'll bring you the good word later."
He nodded and quickly turned away. I waited to speak to 'Giny Jim. To carry messages or tokens from any prisoner or slave was an offense against the Pasha punishable by a hundred blows of the kurbash, while the sender thereof must die on the iron hook, yet Jim might know some camel driver or baggage wallah whom he would dare ask to run the dreadful risk for such reward as we might sometime, somehow, pay. If he consented, it would be more likely for friendship's sake alone. Sahabti—the Arabic address of friend-has great meaning throughout Islam. Poor people everywhere set more store on friendship than do the rich.
There came upon me a sense of urgency, akin to panic, that dizzied my brain. That way lay death.
CHAPTER 9
Token of Hope
'Giny Jim recalled a Negro camel wallah named Giafar who passed this way three or four times a year and with whom he had drunk many horns of palm toddy. When Giafar had admired an ostrich skin Jim owned, its beautiful plumes stained with blood, that Jim had got when a mortally wounded cock strayed close to the oasis, Jim gave it to him to take to his wives and children somewhere on the hot side of Ghaira. Now that Jim could talk a bastard Arabic taught him by Zimil, they had greatly enjoyed each other's company at their far-apart meetings.
"Is Giafar slave or free?" I asked.
"He free."
"Does that mean he can go with any caravan captain who employs him?"
"He does 'at already. He like what we call a tramp in 'Giny. And he so good wif camels he no trouble gettin a job."
"If you asked him to, would he carry a message for me clear to the Baeed Oasis?"
Jim's brow became furrowed with deep thought, then he made his answer in the argot that the Vindictive men had known and loved well.
"I reckon when he got around to it, he mo' o' less will." But nine months fled-and fleeing from me was what they seemed to do, vanishing like the duration of a dream in the deep of night, dropping out of my life with only a hole left where they had been-before Giafar's kismet bore him this way again. Day in and day out during this while, I had noticed no change in Sparrow. But on the day Jim told me that this watch was over at last-at best only a fragment of the time required for one chance to succeed or fail-I recalled how Sparrow had looked on the day that it began, my gaze probing back nine months to behold his face, and compared it with the way he looked now. Then I knew he had changed for the worse, and unless the slow deterioration was arrested before long, he would not be with me at journey's end.
"Did you tell Giafar what I want of him?" "Nay, suh, but I tol' him you wanted to speak to him." "Would the chance be better if you told him, or I did?" "I don't know, Cap'n, but you's the right one." I did not gainsay that. I should have known it beforehand. "I'll take him to de quarry high sun tomorrow to watch de marble bein' cut. You make out like you gotta pump ship, and since de boss man neva let you do it on de bed, you walk to de little gully. We'll be on de knoll and start down. I'll stop lak I speak to you, and you look at me when you talk, but he'll know it's for him. Nobody can hear you if you talk quiet. Whatever you got for him, you lay on dat big white boulder. He'll pick it up after you start back to do wo'k."
During the long wait Jim and I had discussed a dozen different ways of effecting a brief meeting between Giafar and me, but since most of them had depended on careful timing, this was the simplest and the soundest yet proposed.
"Tomorrow morning, while you're taking him to the quarry-not tonight, because his tongue might become loosened by palm toddy -ask him if he has ever heard of Sheik el Beni Kabir, a horse breeder of the Baeed Oasis in the Libyan desert."
"I sho will."
The night passed, not quite like other nights, the sun rose with a somewhat different aspect, I ate and trudged to work aware of more color and changing lights than on other mornings. When the sun rose high, the two black men came to the quarry. Jim was often seen there, to bring a message between bosses or to borrow tools; and visitors from the caravans were not an unusual sight, so the guards did not glance at them twice. When they were on the knoll, I signaled to the foreman in our custom; as usual when he was in a good humor, he nodded and did not appear to watch me as I made for the little gully. At that moment the two visitors started down the knoll. As they came nigh me, Jim stopped and spoke to me.
"Giafar knows him. He's helped drive his horses to de Big River. Speak quick."
"In Allah's name, will you strive to take to Suliman, Sheik el Beni Kabir, a little horsehair band I'll leave on the rock, and tell him it is from his son in the Sepulcher of Wet Bones?" I asked in the Arabic tongue, facing Jim but my eyes turned to meet Giafar's.
"By Allah,I will."
I leaned a moment against the rock as though to wipe off sweat, then started back to my post. The guards did not look at me, nor did I see any sharpening of their idle gaze fixed on the two Negroes. Presently they walked on. All that day I watched fellow prisoners go to the gully on the common errand, but none stopped and stared at the rock, and I could believe that the hank of horsehair with brass ends was on its way.
How long a way? My heart that had beat staunchly with no support but hope and resolution, sank like a stoved boat.
Hours, days, phases of the moon, whole moons, and seasons fled by and away almost, it seemed, as if compressed into one drab, dimly remembered yesterday. In my waking life I strove to protect Sparrow and Jim. That striving required no magnanimity, no self-sacrifice; they were all who were left of my shipmates, and it seemed I needed them more than they needed me—that the ship that I must bring into port could not sail without them. In my dreams I felt no great concern for Jim—he moved silently and gracefully through them, climbing trees but never falling, surmounting every difficulty, evading every peril—but I fought endlessly and terribly tor Sparrow, Now in that gray world of dreams I had another charge. It was the token-bearer Giafar, journeying through illimitable deserts toward a great dun pasture somewhere beyond the last oasis, where ran the mares and stallions of Suliman, Sheik el Beni Kabir.
There came the day that Giafar had been gone a year. Just short of six years ago, I had become a slave. My most vivid life was in dreams—therein I knew conflict, victory and defeat, ships, seas, and storms, and sometimes the ecstasy of love realized in the flesh but with some paramour whose face I saw mistily and never recognized. If I had dared reveal my mastery of Arabic—it remained a last shot in my locker for what sudden and secret use I could not foresee—I could have established a stronger human bond and even a kind of companionship with my fellow slaves; as it was, I listened without speaking, always on the outskirts of some dreary cluster of half-entities, and my only confidants were Jim, Sparrow, and Kerry.