Tiger Island, page 1
Tiger Island
Peter Tonkin
© Peter Tonkin 1997
Peter Tonkin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1997 by Headline Book Publishing
This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Acknowledgements
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so,
But let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny, nonny.
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
One
It was the captain from Sohar who found the island first. He found it but he did not name it, though he talked about it often so that both he and it passed through history and into legend. It happened in a year near the turn of the eighth Christian century when Haroun al Rashid was the Caliph in Baghdad and Charlemagne was King in France, and the one sent the other greetings and an elephant.
The captain was shy about his name. His father and his father’s father had made their names as desert traders — caravanserais. It had been the camels of the captain’s father that had brought so much that was rare and wonderful to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where the great Caliph al-Mansur had decreed that a great city should be built. The city called Baghdad.
The early death of all-too-indulgent parents had combined with a prodigal youth to dispose of the riches to which the captain had found himself heir, and to destroy the family business upon which they had been founded. So that now, in maturer years, he avoided the desert caravans and sought to rebuild his fortunes upon the sea. And he allowed himself to be known merely as a man who came from a town up in the Zagros mountains — the last place he had been thrown out of before he arrived in Sohar itself.
Thus, because of this modesty, all along the southern coast from Sur to Basra, where he had served his weary, late-come apprenticeship on more ships than he could readily recall, he was known merely as Saleh ibn Sa’idabad. And in time, as the stories he brought back with him from this very voyage were told and re-told, that name would become shortened to Sindbad.
Sindbad stood at the very forepeak of his ship with his left foot up on the low board there, and his right hand lying loosely on the jib outhaul. The jib was the only sail left to him. On the deck behind him, invisible in the darkness but all too vivid in his mind, lay his exhausted crew like corpses piled atop the tangle of rags and rope ends which was all that was left of his sails and his rigging.
It was a miracle the ship had held together at all through the fearsome storms but she was well-found and had been lovingly crafted by the master builders in Sur. Her sides and solid keel were made of aini wood which had been imported all the way from Calicut to the treeless desert port. Here the teak-hard wood had been cut, chiselled and moulded into shape before being sewn together with solid ropes made, like the rigging, of coconut coir rope, brought in from Minicoy Island in the Laccadives. The sides had been sealed with chundruz gum and fish oil; the bottom limed with burned seashell. The spars and two stubby masts were of poon wood and it was fortunate indeed that the sails had given way to the storm winds of the last few days before masts or spars had gone.
Sindbad had set out from Sohar in late November, following the north-east monsoon across to Calicut. He had cruised down to Serendeeb on the lookout for a decent cargo to bring home with him, but he had found a half-dead drifter yellow of skin and barbarous of diction, sole survivor of a shipwreck in far Sabang. This man was known as Wang and he talked of great wealth across a strange, enchanted sea beyond the Malacca Strait. Now Sindbad knew the Malacca Strait and the Spice Islands of old. He had heard tell of yellow-skinned djinn and he was willing to listen to this one. He provisioned at Sabang and began to explore through the reaches increasingly few of his fellow captains had ever dared to explore, until he found himself beyond what would one day be called Singapore, heading along the south-west monsoon winds for the mouth of the Pearl River and China itself. And it had led him to six days of contrary storms, with winds and water more terrible than anything anyone had ever experienced.
The hand lying so listlessly on the straining outhaul rose to pluck at the salt-sprayed mess of hair which was Sindbad’s beard. The captain’s weary eyes fought to make out any detail in the roiling blackness before him. He needed to see below the clouds in case of any unexpected reef lying in wait for his unwary vessel; but most of all he needed to see above them, for his only guides now were the stars.
Sindbad required only the most fleeting glance at the wheeling constellations to have a clear idea of his heading and a rough notion of his position. From time immemorial, the desert traders such as his father had guided themselves across the great sand sea by watching the stars, and it had been a matter of ritual and family honour that Sindbad also should learn to guide the caravan by astral navigation at his father’s knee. The secret of astral navigation was one of the most closely guarded mysteries of the caravanserais, and Sindbad was unique in having left the sand sea for the real sea with the priceless, secret knowledge locked in his memory. The knowledge was ancient. After all, had not the stars guided the sages from the furthest East to the very cradle of the infant prophet Jesus? But it was passed only from father to son, and that in deadly secret, for the knowledge was the lifeblood of the great trading companies. And, for all that dhows, bedans and booms such as this one had plied up and down the coasts and out along the trade routes dictated by the monsoon winds, their captains were careful men who did not like to go where their forebears had never explored before. They were, after all, sensible, conservative traders. They knew to steer by the sun at dawn or sunset, to follow the morning star and the Polar star; some of them could even see Venus in the western sky and follow her during the day. But only Sindbad knew the full story of the heavens, for this was desert knowledge, not sealore yet. And so it was his ability as an astral navigator that had made him the excellent captain and confident explorer he had become.
No stars came on this black night, however; no glimpse of Venus, no hint of the moon. Instead, as the south-west monsoon drove him onwards at a brisk pace through the sharp chop which was all that remained of the tai-fun, the grey overcast on Sindbad’s right quarter began to lighten with a weary dawn. And against it, providentially, there hunched a black hump of land, thatched with shaggy vegetation.
There was something slightly unsettling, almost sinister, about the place, and had he not been so desperate, Sindbad would never have called to the giant Ali, who held the tiller immovably in his massive armpit, to steer across the wind. Sindbad remained silent beyond that one weary order to his most trusted crewman and his friend. There was no need to disturb the rest of the crew, for there was no ship work to be done. The jib would pull them down to the miraculous landfall; the two masts were bare, their booms sad and skeletal.
Abruptly, Sindbad turned and walked stiffly across to Wang. A brusque shake of his shoulder stirred the yellowskinned seafarer. A grunt and a gesture directed his narrow gaze.
The Oriental heaved himself forward and, at his movement, some of the others began to stir. Sindbad left them to their own devices and went forward with Wang. ‘Do you know this place?’ he asked, his voice rough.
‘No,’ answered Wang, in his almost impenetrable lisp. But the tone of the simple negative would have told Sindbad enough, even had he not understood the word.
‘Are there any dangers we should look for especially?’
Wang shrugged. He had seen dragons in the tai-fun and had pointed them out to Sindbad. Both of them had believed that what they had seen was just what the Oriental described, though later, wiser, more scientific eyes might have seen only waterspouts running along the squall line. As far as the Chinese was concerned, there were vampires in the darkness, and spirits, good and evil, all around. Everyone aboard knew that there might be giants, djinn, houris and monstrous beasts on any strange island and in any fathomless deep. Nothing was certain, except the love of Allah whose name be praised, and anything at all was possible.
The island they were approaching through the thick, hot, stormy air was an ancient outcrop half of coral and half of volcanic rock. It was a strange geological mixture of caverns and fissures, almost like a calcified sponge of unimaginable proportions. It stood at the heart of a long reef which in a thousand years or so would be christened the Rifleman and was normally far beyond the reach of shipping, but the storms had pushed the water level up that morning and, indeed, the tide would continue to rise for some time yet; the reefs were in consequence safely below Sindbad’s long, solid, aini-wood keel.
In early days, the island had been home to millions of sea birds and their guano had coated the rough stone and coral with fertility. The first plants sprang up from seeds secreted in those droppi
But Sindbad was the first man ever to come here. The giant Ali drove the ship right into shore on his captain’s orders, beating her smooth sides along the rough outreaching mangroves until the jungle grudgingly fell back into a little bay backed with a shallow beach. Here Ali allowed the ship to come ashore, wedging her forefoot into the sand and letting her swing to while the oiled ropes that held her together groaned. Once she was safely beached, Sindbad leaped down and began to walk up the slight incline towards the gloomy jungle. As he did so a huge bird took off and flapped away down the still brisk wind.
‘What manner of bird was that?’ asked one of the crew.
‘A roc,’ answered another, knowledgeably. None of the others showed any desire to join their captain on the shore of this forbidding place.
Sindbad stood on the sand looking up at the jungle wall as it towered over him, and then above the vivid canopy to the thin strip of grey sky down which the roc had disappeared. The echoing boom of the wind was answered by howls from deep within the forest. The atmosphere of the place was enough to daunt the stoutest hearts. Most of Sindbad’s landfalls since he had left Sohar had been on the coasts of lands clothed in rainforest, but he had never been face to face with untamed jungle at such close quarters before. The howls of the indri and the lemurs as they greeted the dawn sounded like the screaming of demons to him, and just as it was natural to assume that a monkey-eating eagle with a three-metre wingspan was the monstrous roc of legend, so it was all too easy to people the unknown with creatures from nightmare and fairytale.
But full of djinn and monsters or not, the jungle must be explored and some hunting must be done. His men had killed the last of the goats more than a month ago and there had been no meat since — except for those unfortunates who had confused their burgeoning cargo of cockroaches with their dwindling supply of dates. They were well supplied with swords, knives and the short, reticulated bows favoured by Mongol horsemen. Ali, the massive steersman, was further armed with a huge knife, almost as big as Sindbad’s own scimitar and even more ornately bejewelled, which the giant had won in a test of strength in Serendeeb.
‘Ali! Wang! Hassan! Come with me,’ ordered Sindbad. ‘Bring the bows. The rest of you, build a fire up the beach. We will be back with meat. Then we will pray. Then we will cook.’
Sindbad marked the trees they passed with slashing blows of his scimitar, and it was well he did for almost as soon as they entered it, the jungle closed in around them; apart from the fact that it tended sharply uphill, there was no way of telling whether they were moving inland or back towards the shore.
‘I do not like this place,’ Wang lisped. ‘It is full of bad spirits. No luck can come to us here.’
Sindbad was inclined to agree. The atmosphere of riotous overgrowth and dangerous wildness was overpowering. It filled him with fear of he knew not what. But just as he was preparing to give up and return empty-handed, the undergrowth fell back into a pig run. They followed it along what seemed to be a green-walled, green-roofed tunnel, and as they went, life seemed to withdraw from them. It was as though the creatures of the forest, innocent of any knowledge of these interlopers, nevertheless understood too well what they were about. Even the pigs who had made this path kept well clear.
After some hours, they came to a clearing high on the watershed of the island which afforded them a glance away to the north-east across a rolling downward slope of canopy and a distant reach of grey-green gleaming desert for beyond. Here the four of them stopped for a moment, too tired even to speak to each other. Had they been men wise in the ways of the ocean, living more than a thousand years in the future, they might have seen something sinister in that flat expanse of wet reef where the grey-backed waves should have tumbled. But they were men of their time and no more than that.
Sindbad looked around, feeling defeat overwhelm him. Only the giant Ali seemed to have any strength left. ‘Ali,’ said Sindbad, ‘follow this track upward for a count of a thousand paces. Seek the pigs that made it. If you find any, call. If you find none, return. We will wait here.’
The giant smiled amenably and trotted off. Sindbad shook his head. His steersman seemed as stupid as he was strong, but he was actually the cleverest of all of them. If anyone could find food, it would be Ali. The three remaining made themselves comfortable and waited. Sindbad silently counted Ali’s departing steps.
Abruptly, the thick leaf mulch beneath them seemed to give a little heave and all the mocking, howling babble around them ceased. The silence extended even to the wind which faltered as though the movement of the earth had been enough to take its breath away. Sindbad fell to his knees, plunging his sword into the strange earth and feeling the ground with his hands. ‘Is it alive?’ he breathed. He looked up at Wang whose face had gone the colour of ivory. ‘Is this in truth the back of some creature which is alive?’ he asked.
Wang shrugged. ‘I have known the ground to shake,’ he answered. ‘In my home country, which we call the Middle Kingdom, such things are not unknown. The earth can move, like the waves of the sea.’
Sindbad looked down, frowning, trying to come to terms with the idea of the ground moving. ‘Are there monsters down there that cause the earth to move?’ he asked, his eyes switching from the Oriental’s earnest frown to the terrified face of Hassan.
‘Oh yes,’ confirmed Wang. ‘Dragons.’
Sindbad shook his head and picked himself up. The conversation had taken only an instant or two, and had been the only sound to break the silence after the tiny earth tremor. But now there came another one. It was a huge, deep-throated roaring. Sindbad had come across hunting cats of various types and sizes in his youth and subsequent travels but he had never heard a roaring like this one. It seemed to personify that forbidding, shaking forest. It could only be the calling of an unimaginable monster, of Wang’s dragon, or of something even worse perhaps.
Sindbad looked around. Ali must be more than seven hundred paces up the path, and possibly already returning. Should they wait? It would be useless to call with this wild roaring all around them.
‘We will return to the ship,’ he decided. ‘But slowly, so that Ali can catch us up.’
Somehow, the careful retreat which the three of them began became something of a rout. Immediately after the terrible roaring ceased, the insane, howling babble began again, and it seemed much louder and more threatening than before. The pig track led down a slope which tempted their feet into a jog and then into a full, sliding dash. They almost missed their turning back into the jungle but Sindbad had marked the place well with slashes of his scimitar. They fled into the gloom of the foliage and stumbled back to the beach in short order.
The beach was all confusion. The crew were half on the ship wanting to be away and half on the sand waiting for the captain’s return. But the ship itself lay beached on a steep slope of bare reef, for the water on this side had gone as well. A pile of blackened logs at the edge of the forest told of a fire lit — and then suddenly extinguished. As they hauled themselves back aboard the little vessel, they all exchanged garbled versions of what they thought had occurred.
Sindbad’s mate, Haroun ibn Sur, a wise and keenly observant man, told how they had collected enough wood to build a fire and had brought the fire box with its precious cargo of glowing charcoal out of the sand box on the main deck. They had ignited tinder and lit the fire as directed. As they worked, silently behind them the water had withdrawn as though the very land itself was stealthily rising from out of the sea. At the moment the fire really caught hold, the ground had given a shake as though there was something alive down there which was reacting to the pain the fire caused. They had dowsed the flames at once, but not before they heard a monstrous screaming roar which seemed to come from the forest, from the sky, from the ground beneath their feet. The moment the shivering stopped, the island seemed to start sinking again, for there, low down the slope of the naked reef, the tide was rising with much more than natural speed.
