Tapling walked over to the slave gang. Here and there he opened a sack, looked into it, and inspected handfuls of the golden barley grain; other sacks he felt from the outside.
“No hope of looking over every sack in a hundred ton of barley,” he remarked, strolling back again to Hornblower. “Much of it is sand, I expect. But that is the way of the heathen. The price is adjusted accordingly. Very well, Effendi.”
At a sign from Duras, and under the urgings of the overseers, the slaves burst into activity, trotting up to the quayside and dropping their sacks into the lighter which lay there. The first dozen men were organized into a working party to distribute the cargo evenly into the bottom of the lighter, while the others trotted off, their bodies gleaming with sweat, to fetch fresh loads. At the same time a couple of swarthy herdsmen came out through the gate driving a small herd of cattle.
“Scrubby little creatures,” said Tapling, looking them over critically, “but that was allowed for in the price, too.”
“The gold,” said Duras.
In reply Tapling opened one of the bags at his feet, filled his hand with golden guineas, and let them cascade through his fingers into the bag again.
“Five hundred guineas there,” he said. “Fourteen bags, as you see. They will be yours when the lighters are loaded and unmoored.”
Duras wiped his face with a weary gesture. His knees seemed to be weak, and he leaned upon the patient donkey that stood behind him.
The cattle were being driven down a gangway into another lighter, and a second herd had now appeared and was waiting.
“Things move faster than you feared,” said Hornblower.
“See how they drive the poor wretches,” replied Tapling sententiously. “See! Things move fast when you have no concern for human flesh and blood.”
A coloured slave had fallen to the ground under his burden. He lay there disregarding the blows rained on him by the sticks of the overseers. There was a small movement of his legs. Someone dragged him out of the way at last and the sacks continued to be carried to the lighter. The other lighter was filling fast with cattle, packed into a tight, bellowing mass in which no movement was possible.
“His Nibs is actually keeping his word,” marvelled Tapling. “I’d ‘a settled for the half, if I had been asked beforehand.”
One of the herdsmen on the quay had sat down with his face in his hands; now he fell over limply on his side.
“Sir —” began Hornblower to Tapling, and the two men looked at each other with the same awful thought occurring to them at the same moment.
Duras began to say something, with one hand on the withers of the donkey and the other gesticulating in the air it seemed that he was making something of a speech, but there was no sense in the words he was roaring out in a hoarse voice. His face was swollen beyond its customary fatness and his expression was widely distorted, while his cheeks were so suffused with blood as to look dark under his tan. Duras quitted his hold of the donkey and began to reel about in half circles, under the eyes of Moors and Englishmen. His voice died away to a whisper, his legs gave way under him, and he fell to his hands and knees and then to his face.
“That’s the plague!” said Tapling. “The Black Death! I saw it in Smyrna in ’96.”
He and the other Englishmen had shrunk back on the one side, the soldiers and the Treasurer on the other, leaving the palpitating body lying in the clear space between them.
“The plague, by St Peter!” squealed one of the young sailors. He would have headed a rush to the longboat.
“Stand still, there!” roared Hornblower, scared of the plague but with the habits of discipline so deeply engrained in him by now that he checked the panic automatically.
“I was a fool not to have thought of it before,” said Tapling. “That dying rat — that fellow over there who we thought was drunk. I should have known!”