The Moghul Part 8

"Captain, I have already told you more than most foreigners know. You would be wise to prepare now to meet the Shahbandar." Karim rose abruptly and bowed, palms together, hands at his brow. "You must forgive me. In Islam we pray at sunset."

Hawksworth stared after him in perplexity as Karim turned and vanished into the darkened companionway.

Not yet even aland, and already I sense trouble. He fears the Shahbandar, that's clear enough, but I'm not sure it's for the usual reasons. Is there some intrigue underway that we're about to be drawn into, G.o.d help us?

He took a deep breath and, fighting the ache in his leg, made his way out to the quarter gallery on the stern. A lone flying fish, marooned in the bay from its home in the open sea, burst from the almost placid waters, glinting the orange sun off its body and settling with a splash, annoying the seabirds that squabbled over gallery sc.r.a.ps along the port side. Seamen carrying rations of salt pork and biscuit were clambering down the companionway and through the hatch leading to the lower deck and their hammocks. Hawksworth listened to them curse the close, humid air below, and then he turned to inhale again the land breeze, permeated with a green perfume of almost palpable intensity.

Following the direction of the sweetened air, he turned and examined the darkening sh.o.r.e one last time. India now seemed vaguely obscured, as through a light mist. Or was it merely encroaching darkness? And through this veil the land seemed somehow to brood? Or did it beckon?

It's my imagination, he told himself. India is there all right, solid ground, and scarcely a cannon shot away. India, the place of fable and mystery to Englishmen for centuries. And also the place where a certain party of English travelers disappeared so many years ago.

That should have been a warning, he told himself. It's almost too ironic that you're the next man to try to go in. You, of all the men in England. Are you destined to repeat their tragedy?

He recalled again the story he knew all too well. The man financing those English travelers almost three decades past

had been none other than Peter Elkington, father of George Elkington, Chief Merchant on this voyage. Like his son, Peter Elkington was a swearing, drinking, whoring merchant, a big-bellied giant of a man who many people claimed looked more and more like King Harry the older and fatter he got. It was Peter Elkington's original idea those many years back to send Englishmen to India.

The time was before England met and obliterated the Armada of Spain, and long before she could hope to challenge the oceanic trade networks of the Catholic countries--Spain to the New World, Portugal to the East.

In those days the only possible road to India for England and the rest of Europe still was overland, the centuries-old caravan trail that long preceded Portugal's secret new sea route around the Cape.

The idea of an English mission overland to India had grown out of Peter Elkington's Levant Company, franchised by Queen Elizabeth to exploit her new treaty with the Ottoman Turks, controllers of the caravan trade between India and the Mediterranean. Through the Levant Company, English traders could at last buy spices directly at Tripoli from overland caravans traveling the Persian Gulf and across Arabia, thereby circ.u.mventing the greedy Venetian brokers who for centuries had served as middlemen for Europe's pepper and spices.

But Peter Elkington wanted more. Why buy expensive spices at the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean? Why not extend England's own trade lines all the way to India and buy directly?

To gain intelligence for this daring trade expansion, he decided to finance a secret expedition to scout the road to India, to send a party of English traders through the Mediterranean to Tripoli, and on from there in disguise across Arabia to the Persian Gulf, where they would hire pa.s.sage on a native trader all the way to the western sh.o.r.e of India. Their ultimate destination was the Great MoghuFs court, deep in India, and hidden in their bags would be a letter from Queen Elizabeth, proposing direct trade.

Eventually three adventurous traders were recruited to go,

led by Roger Symmes of the Levant Company. But Peter Elkington wanted a fourth, for protection, and he eventually persuaded a young army captain of some reputation to join the party. The captain--originally a painter, who had later turned soldier after the death of his wife--was vigorous, spirited, and a deadly marksman. Peter Elkington promised him a n.o.bleman's fortune if they succeeded. And he promised to take responsibility for Captain Hawksworth's eight-year-old son, Brian, if they failed.

Peter Elkington himself came down to the Thames that cold, gray February dawn they set sail, bringing along his own son, George--a pudgy, pampered adolescent in a silk doublet. Young George Elkington regally ignored Brian Hawksworth, a snub only one of the two still remembered. As the sails slowly dissolved into the icy mist, Brian climbed atop his uncle's shoulders to catch a long last glimpse. No one dreamed that only one of the four would ever see London again.

Letters smuggled back in cipher kept the Levant Company informed of progress. The party reached Tripoli without incident, made their way successfully overland through Arabia, and then hired pa.s.sage on an Arab trader for her trip down the Persian Gulf. The plan seemed to be working perfectly.

Then came a final letter, from the Portuguese fortress of Hormuz, a salt-covered island peopled by traders, overlooking the straits between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, gateway to the Arabian Sea and India's ports. While waiting at Hormuz for pa.s.sage on to India, the English party had been betrayed by a suspicious Venetian and accused of being spies. The Portuguese governor of Hormuz had nervously imprisoned them and decreed they be shipped to Goa for trial.

After waiting a few more months for further word, Peter Elkington finally summoned Brian Hawksworth to the offices of the Levant Company and read him this last letter. He then proceeded to curse the contract with Captain Hawksworth that rendered the Levant Company responsible for Brian's education should the expedition meet disaster.

Peter Elkington admitted his plan had failed, and with that admission, the Levant Company quietly abandoned its vision of direct trade with India.

But Brian Hawksworth now had a private tutor, engaged by the Levant Company, a tousle-haired young apostate recently dismissed from his post at Eton for his anti-religious views.

This new tutor scorned as dogmatic the accepted subjects of Latin, rhetoric, and Hebrew--all intended to help Elizabethan scholars fathom abstruse theological disputations--and insisted instead on mathematics, and the new subject of science. His anti-clerical outlook also meant he would teach none of the German in fashion with the Puritans, or the French and Spanish favored by Catholics. For him all that mattered was cla.s.sical Greek: the language of logic, pure philosophy, mathematics, and science. The end result was that the commoner Brian Hawksworth received an education far different from, if not better than, that of most gentlemen, and one that greatly surpa.s.sed the hornbook alphabet and numbers that pa.s.sed for learning among others of his own cla.s.s.

To no one's surprise, Brian Hawksworth was his father's son, and he took naturally to marksmanship and fencing. But his first love came to be the English lute, his escape from the world of his tutor's hard numbers and theorems.

It lasted until the day he was fourteen, the day the Levant Company's responsibility expired. The next morning Brian Hawksworth found himself apprenticed to a Thames waterman and placed in service on one of the mud-encrusted ferryboats that plied London's main artery. After three months of misery and ill pay, he slipped away to take a berth on a North Sea merchantman. There he sensed at once his calling was the sea, and he also discovered his knowledge of mathematics gave him an understanding of navigation few other seamen enjoyed. By then he scarcely remembered his father, or the luckless expedition to India.

Until the day Roger Symmes appeared alone back in London, almost ten years after that icy morning the Levant Company's expedition had sailed. . . .

The _Discovery _groaned, and Hawksworth sensed the wind freshen as it whipped through the stern quarter gallery and noticed the increasingly brisk swirl of the tide. Almost time to cast off. As he made his way back to the Great Cabin for a last check, his thoughts returned again to London, those many years ago.

He had found Symmes at the offices of the Levant Company, nursing a tankard of ale as he sat very close to their large roaring fireplace.

He bore little resemblance to the jaunty adventurer Hawksworth remembered from that long-ago morning on the Thames. Now he was an incongruous figure, costumed in a tight-fitting new silk doublet and wearing several large gold rings, yet with a face that was haggard beyond anything Hawksworth had ever seen. His vacant eyes seemed unable to focus as he glanced up briefly and then returned his stare to the crackling logs in the hearth. But he needed no prompting to begin his story.

"Aye, 'tis a tale to make the blood run ice." Symmes eased open a b.u.t.ton of his ornate doublet and shakily loosened his new ruff collar.

"After the Venetian rogue gets us arrest'd with his d.a.m.nable lie, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d Portugals clap us in the hold of a coastin' barge makin' for Goa, in company with near a hundred Arab horses. When we finally make port, they haul us out of that stink hole and slam us in another, this time the Viceroy's dungeons. We took ourselves for dead men."

"But what happened to my father?" Hawksworth blinked the sweat from his eyes, wanting the story but wanting almost more to escape the overheated, timbered offices that loomed so alien.

"That's the horrible part o' the story. It happen'd the next mornin', poor luckless b.a.s.t.a.r.d. We're all march'd into this big stone-floor'd room where they keep the _strappado_."

"What's that?"

"Tis a kindly little invention o' the Portugals, lad. First they bind your hands behind your back and run the rope up over a hangin' pulley block. Then they hoist you up in the air and set to givin' it little tugs, makin' you hop like you're dancin' the French lavolta. When they tire o' the sport, or they're due to go say their rosary beads, they just give it a good strong heave and pop your arms out o' your shoulders. Jesuits claim 'twould make a Moor pray to the pope."

Hawksworth found himself watching Symmes's wild eyes as he recounted the story, and wondering how he could remember every detail of events a decade past.

"Then this young captain comes in, struttin' b.a.s.t.a.r.d, hardly a good twenty year on him. Later I made a point to learn his name--Vaijantes, Miguel Vaijantes."

"What did he do?"

"Had to see him, lad. Eyes black and hard as onyx. An' he sports this sword he's had made up with rubies in the handle. Ne'er saw the likes o' it, before or since, e'en in India. But he's a Portugal, tho', through an' through. No doubt on that one."

"But what did he do?"

"Why, he has the guards sling Hawksworth up in the _strappado_, lad, seein' he's the strongest one o' us. Figur'd he'd last longer, I suppose, make more sport."

"Vaijantes had them torture my father?"

"Aye. Think's he'll squeeze a confession and be a hero. But ol'

Hawksworth ne'er said a word. All day. By nightfall Vaijantes has pull'd his arms right out. They carried him out of the room a dead man."

Hawksworth still remembered how his stomach turned at that moment, with the final knowledge that his father was not merely missing, or away--as he had told himself, and others--but had been coldly murdered. He had checked his tears, lest Symmes see, and pressed on.

"What happened to you, and to the others? Did he torture you next?"

"Would have, not a doubt on't. We all wonder'd who'd be the next one.

Then that night they post a Jesuit down to our cell, a turncoat Dutchman by the name of Huyghen, who spoke perfect English, thinkin'

he'd cozen us into confessin'. But he hates the Portugals e'en more'n we do. An' he tells us we'd most likely go free if we'd pretend to turn Papist. So the next day we blurt out we're actually a band o' wealthy adventurers in disguise, rich lads out to taste the world, but we've seen the error o' our ways an' we've decided to foreswear the flesh and turn Jesuits ourselves. Thinkin' of donatin' everything we own to their holy order." Symmes paused and nervously drew a small sip from his tankard of spiced ale. "Vicious Papist b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

"Did they really believe you?"

"Guess the Dutchman must've convinc'd 'em somehow. Anyway, our story look'd square enough to get us out on bail, there bein' no evidence for the charge o' spyin' in any case. But we'd hardly took a breath of air before our old friend the Hollander comes runnin' with news the Viceroy's council just voted to ship us back to Lisbon for trial. That happens and we're dead men. No question. We had to look to it."

Symmes seemed to find concentration increasingly difficult, but he extracted a long-stemmed pipe and began stuffing black strands into it with a trembling hand while he composed himself. Finally he continued.

"Had to leave Goa that very night. What else could we do? So we traded what little we had for diamonds, sew'd 'em up in our clothes, and waded the river into India. By dawn we're beyond reach o' the Portugals. In India. An' then, lad, is when it began."

"What happened?"