They looked at one another with perfectly blank faces, and all slowly shook their heads.
‘Nowadays it is not so strict,’ said the odabashi, ‘and all sorts of odds and sods get in, but when I was a little chap it was all by what we call the devshurmeh. It still is, but not so much, if you understand me. The tournaji-bashi goes round all the provinces where there are Christians, mostly Albania and Bosnia, the others being what you might call scum, and in each place he takes up a certain number of Christian boys, sometimes more, sometimes less, whatever their parents may say. And these boys are fetched away to a special barracks where their pricks are trimmed pardon me the expression and they are learnt to be Mussulmans and good soldiers. And when they have served their time as ajami, as we say, they are turned over to an orta of janissaries.’
‘So I suppose a good many janissaries talk foreign,’ observed the carpenter.
‘No,’ said the odabashi. ‘They are took so young and so far off they forget their language and their religion and their people. It was different with me. My mum was in the same town. She was from the Tower Hamlets in London, and went cook-maid with a Turkey-merchant’s family to Smyrna, where she took up with my dad, a cake-maker from Argyrocastro, which made trouble with the family. He took her back to Argyrocastro, but then he died and the cousins put her out of the shop, that being the law, so she had to sell her cakes from a stall. Then the tournaji-bashi came round, and the cousins’ lawyer gave his clerk a present to take me, which he did – took me right away to Widin, leaving her alone.’
‘And she a widow-woman,’ said the carpenter, shaking his head.
‘It was cruel hard,’ said the bosun.
‘I hate a lawyer,’ said the gunner.
‘But I had not been a prentice-soldier in Widin six months before there was Mum with her stall of cakes outside the barracks: so we saw one another every Friday, and often other times; and it was the same in Belgrade and Constantinople when I was out of my time.
Wherever the orta went. And so I never forgot my English.’
‘Perhaps that was why they sent you here,’ suggested the bosun.
‘If it was, I wish I had cut my tongue out,’ said the odabashi.
‘Don’t you like it here?’
‘I hate it here. Present company excepted.’
‘Why so, mate?’
‘I always been in cities, and I hate the country. And the desert is ten times far worse than the country.’
‘Lions and tigers, maybe?’
‘Worse, mate.’
‘Serpents?’
The odabashi shook his head, and leaning towards them he whispered ‘Jinns and ghouls.’
‘What are jinns?’ asked the bosun, somewhat shocked.
‘Fairies,’ said the odabashi, after a moment’s consideration.
‘You don’t believe in fairies, do you?’
‘What, not when I seen a fucking great fairy in the old tower over there? This high,’ ?
holding his hand a yard from the ground ? ‘with long ears and orange eyes? In the night it goes Uhu, uhu, and every time some poor unfortunate bugger cops it somewhere or other.
No worse omen in this mortal world. I’ve heard it almost every night the last week and more.’ He paused, and then said ‘I didn’t ought to have said fairies. Spirits is more like.
Unholy ghosts.’
‘Oh,’ said the bosun, who might scorn fairies, but who, like most sailors and certainly all his shipmates in the Surprise, most heartily believed in ghosts and spirits.
‘And what are ghouls?’ asked the gunner in a low, almost furtive voice, dreading to hear yet drawing his bag closer.
‘Ho, they are far, far worse,’ said the odabashi. ‘They often take the shape of young females, but the insides of their mouths are green, like their eyes. You see them walking about in graveyards sometimes, and after dark they dig up the fresh corpses and eat them. Ay, and not always so fresh, either. But they take all sorts of shapes, like the jinns, and you meet them both at every turn in this bloody desert we got to walk across. The only thing to do is to say transiens per medium illorum ibat very quick without a mistake or you’re . . .’
At this time of night throughout the fast the castle cooks flung the bony remains of their feast over the outer wall; and now the jackals were ready waiting. But once again they fell foul of the hyaena and four more of her kind, and the odabashi’s words were cut off by a sudden Bedlam of screaming, howling and terrible laughter not twenty yards away. The Surprise’s warrant-officers leapt to their feet, grasping one another; and as they stood there aghast a heavy body landed on the pole above them. A moment later its enormous voice filled the tent: Uhu, uhu, uhu.
A frozen silence inside the tent and a startled silence outside followed the last Uhu, and in this silence they heard a still larger voice cry ‘Strike that tent up forward there. D’ye hear me there? Where’s the bosun? Pass the word for the bosun. Mr Mowett, the first party may light its lanterns and stand by to move off.’
CHAPTER SIX
HEI Company’s Ship Niobe Suez
‘Dearest Sophie,’ wrote Captain Aubrey to his wife,
‘I take advantage of the kindness of Major Hooper, of the Madras establishment, to send you these few hurried lines: he is on his way home, travelling overland – last from the Persian gulf across the desert on an amazingly fine white thoroughbred camel that carried him a hundred miles a day – and so far he has only spent forty-nine days on his journey: he means to go on by way of Cairo.
‘We came here in pretty good order, marching by night and resting under tents and awnings during the heat of the day, and we crossed the isthmus sooner than I or the head camel-driver had thought possible, having made four stages in three in spite of a late start the first night. This was not because of any extraordinary zeal on the part of the men (although they are a very decent ship’s company, as you know) but because a mighty stupid English-speaking Turk in command of our escort had filled their heads with tales of ghosts and genii, and the poor silly fellows hurried forward all night long at a sort of shuffling trot, all crammed together, each dreading to be left any distance behind, and all wanting to be very near Byrne of the foretop, a man with a luckv snuffbox, warranted to preserve the owner from evil spirits and the falling-sickness. And unhappily there was always something to keep them in a high pitch of superstititous dread. We camped by wells; there were always bushes and stretches of camel-thorn nearby, and in them there was always some creature to howl or scream like a soul in torment at dawn or dusk or both. Then as if that were not enough there were the mirages by day, scores of them; I remember one that happened when we moved off early, well before sunset, from Bir el Gada. No great way from us, so clear and sharp you would have sworn they were real, there appeared shining water and green palm-trees, with girls walking under them, carrying pots and talking. “Oh, oh,” cried my pack of idiots, “it’s ghouls – we are lost.” And there was that great savage brute Davis (a cannibal, to my certain knowledge) clinging to the bosun with his eyes tight shut and the bosun clinging to a camel-girth and both of them calling out to little Calamy, begging him to tell them when it was all over. A most pitiful set of poltroons; and I should have been ashamed of their being seen, but that the Turks were just as bad.
‘And I must say that Stephen was not always quite as discreet as he might have been.
When Parson Martin tried to dismiss ghouls and the like as weak superstition he set him dowri with the Witch of Endor and the Gadarene swine and evil spirits by the dozen out of Holy Writ – cited all sorts of classical ghosts, appealed to the unvarying tradition of all nations and ages, and gave us a circumstantial account of a Pyrenean werewolf of his acquaintance that absolutely terrified the younger mids. He and Martin hardly had any sleep at all (unless they dozed on their camels by night when we were on the march) for while the rest of us lay under our awnings they hurried about the bushes finding all sorts of plants and creatures; but I think he might not have brought in so many serpents – he must know how uneasy they make seamen feel ? and he certainly should never have brought the monstrous bat, three foot across. It flew from the table and clapped on to poor Killick’s