Monsoon Queen

Excerpt

Monsoon Queen
Jo Carthage © 2024
All Rights Reserved

Chapter One

The jute rope flowed through Noor’s hands as she climbed down into the shipwreck. The shallow waters of the Gulf of Tajoura filled the creaking hold, but the crew deck was just above the lapping waves. She landed, and her sandals crunched on salt-encrusted cedar. Noor breathed a sigh of relief. At least this deck isn’t entirely rotted. Though she’d lived all of her twenty-one years within smelling distance of the sea, she could not swim. She hadn’t been permitted to learn.

Noor stood in a pillar of noonday sun shining through the hole she’d hacked in the deck above. Everywhere else was darkness. Noor peered into the gloom, checking for any cracks of sunlight on the side of the wreck where she knew her master, Musa, had anchored his dhow.

When she was certain he couldn’t see, she let a gentle glow rise in her fingertips, lighting the hold. Musa didn’t know she could cast light or move objects with her mind. He hadn’t been there when she’d found her magic that past summer, her hands on the body of a soft black cat who’d been trampled by a British officer’s horse. If he had seen her healing, he’d have had her killed.

Slaves could not be mages in Tajoura.

Before her magic had come, Noor had thought she would be trapped with Musa for the rest of her life; now, she studied with her imam every chance she got, gaining control over her power and searching for a chink in the world she could pry open long enough to escape.

The shipwreck jerked, a low wave slamming into the side.

Noor got back to work. She surveyed the crew deck, checking every corner and cavity until…there. A small tumble of rags and arm-length splinters of cedar shielded a glint of silver.

She hitched up her guntiino, the long red and yellow striped wrap she wore like an Indian woman’s sari, and raised her hand to light her way into the darkness.

Noor pulled Musa’s leather purse from under her guntiino and began filling it with silver coins.

“Teach that captain to talk too freely in the hookah shop,” she muttered as she swept up the treasure. “Or maybe just to know a thief when he sees one.”

Musa had overheard this dhow’s former captain in the hookah shop the night before, moaning about his sailors abandoning their backpay as they scrambled to escape the wreck two monsoon seasons ago. This boat was one of many. Ever since the British Empire had set their sights on Aden to the East across the Gulf and rumours of sightings of Lord Admiral Nelson’s Victory had been reported from the Cape northwards, merchants who’d never plied Tajoura’s shallow and reef-filled waters were trying their luck on the last free port on the Horn of Africa.

Many didn’t survive the experience.

Musa had sailed her out here on his rickety dhow several times a month for years, ordering her to loot the remains of shattered ships. He claimed any treasure she found or took it out of her hide if she tried to conceal it, to save up enough to buy passage somewhere else, anywhere else. Musa forgets that the alternative to allowing slaves to buy our freedom is having his throat slit in the night. Noor dreamed about it, but she didn’t kill, wouldn’t risk her secret connection to haya magic by using it for violence. Her imam had warned her that to do so might sever her connection forever. But even without knowing she had powers, Musa should have been more cautious. For now, Noor was biding her time, trying to find another way out.

So here Noor was, collecting other people’s pay for someone else’s profit; it wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. She was relacing the purse when something else glimmered in the heap of mouldering cloth.

Noor’s fingers were delicate and careful of scurrying crabs and cedar splinters. There. She found what had caught her eye: a Yemeni dagger, a jambiya, with a pearl-dotted sheath and a polished moon-coloured lunella shell as a pommel.

It shone in her light.

“What kind of Yemeni man would abandon his family’s jambiya?” she muttered.

Beautiful weapons were impossibly expensive for someone like her and far too dangerous to own. She took a breath and stuffed it down the front of her guntiino. The dagger fit snugly between her belt and her belly. The leather purse went between her teeth. She climbed up her rope, arm over arm. Noor extinguished her light as the sun hit her upturned face. She reached the bare bit of stable hull that she’d tied onto and stood up on it, gripping the gunwale as the rising tide shook the wreck.

Noor glanced over the edge to see Musa glaring up at her from the helm of his tiny, shallow-drafted dhow, bobbing only a few arm lengths away from the wreck. His bald head glittered with sweat. His mouth was twisted and red.

“That’s it?” he shouted, gesturing at the purse between her lips.

She turned to descend the rope ladder, making a face where he could not see. Her sandaled feet slipped on the slimy, fraying rope, hands cramping tightly above the knots. A wave bucked the ship, and she slammed into the hull, the contents of the purse bruising her lips. The rope snapped—

Noor fell, and the warm water was over her head in seconds. She forced herself to hold her breath, struggled to look up, eyes burning with the salt. There it was, Musa’s hand lowering to rip the purse from between her teeth.

The current shoved her back against the hull of the wreck, and she lost hold of her climbing rope.

Noor shoved her panic away and pushed away from the wreck, tried to think of how she could use her magic, but her mind thrashed as the water forced itself between her lips. She couldn’t focus. She crunched against the hull again and turned into it, fingers digging into the rotting wood, forcing herself up one handhold at a time until she got her bruised lips above the water and gasped in sweet, salty air. A wave filled her mouth. She slipped and found a new hold, again and again, each breath a little shallower, until she felt Musa’s fingers dig in around her elbow before wrenching her over the side and throwing her to the deck.

As she tried to stand, he hissed, “You ugly idiot, I got my sandals wet because of you,” and cuffed her hard to the deck.

The jambiya’s sheath jammed into her stomach, and she curled around it protectively.

He hasn’t seen the blade yet.

Musa had already turned back to the helm, cursing her loudly as he adjusted the rudder, his fishing spear bloodied across his back. She had a moment to catch her breath.

Unfortunately, what she breathed in was the smell of a freshly killed dugong. The gentle creatures were like horses or the cows the Afar herdsman brought to the annual bazaar that had started just the prior month. With soft grey skin and silly faces, the dugong bore live babies. Her master liked to hunt them while he waited for her to scavenge for him, though Noor knew it was no real hunt. The sweet things would gather around any boat, as curious as kittens. She rolled away from the corpse, trying to keep her disgust off her face.

Then she froze. Strange bells sounded from across the harbour. Turning, Noor cocked her head, trying to find the source.

Silence.

Somali traders’ ships didn’t use bells. Neither did the double-masted Yemeni dhow that slipped into port under cover of night to avoid British patrols.

Only British imperial warships rang bells when they entered a harbour. She’d heard that from refugees, from women who’d escaped Mocha and Sidon.

No British warship had ever yet entered Tajoura’s harbour.

The bells rang again, and Noor’s breathing kicked up when she saw their source. At the mouth of the harbour, a ship as massive as the biggest mosque in Gaza, crowded out the sky. Its dozen square sails covered the faces of the clouds, each deck painted black and gold in succession, the colours wavering in the golden morning light.

“I’ve heard of that ship,” Musa growled behind her. “Striped like a bee, stung Napoleon in their last wars. The Victory. Their great Admiral Nelson died there.” He slapped at the ropes in the rigging, jerking the knots, swinging the sail out and into the wind. “They’ll blow us out of the water as soon look at us, with their alam mages or cannons or both.”

The bells rang louder.

Noor stared at Musa, the jambiya heavy against her stomach. If Musa stayed facing away from her, she could creep up behind him, slide the dagger out, and slit his throat the way he had the dugong’s.

There was a reason slaves weren’t allowed weapons.

The bells sounded, and she felt the weight of the knife like the promise she’d made to herself years ago: free yourself so you may remain free. She kept her eyes on the Victory as Musa hurried them back to port.

*

Noor trotted behind Musa’s donkey as he rode, her body aching. Thankfully, it was a short walk from the harbour to his stall in the souq, the vast market of saffron-and-butter-coloured tents in the heart of the city. They left the dugong carcass with a butcher, who shared Noor’s grimace of distaste. The entire way back into town from the harbour, Noor could smell the fear in the streets as old fighters gathered their guns and wide-eyed fathers hurried their children away from the continuing sound of bells.

They reached the tiny stall where Musa repaired and traded the treasures Noor scavenged. It was also where he drank all his profits away. The din of the British bells had Musa reaching for his palm wine the instant he unlocked the doors of the stall.

Within moments, he was out.

Noor closed the doors behind him. Only he had the key to lock them, but everyone on the street knew he was a mean drunk with an uncanny ability to catch thieves in the act. She casually walked around a corner, and then she ran. She sprinted to the highest place in the city—the minaret of her imam’s mosque.

She pushed past fruit sellers and chicken pluckers, dodging between spice heaps and hookah shops, ducking through fabric stores and between hagglers. She passed a dozen men and women who would report her passage to Musa, but as long as she was seen going into the mosque, it would be a favourable report.

She made it to the white mosque steps as the bells rang out again.

Noor dashed up and then came to a skidding halt before Imam Tariq. A tall, slender man with greying hair, he unfolded himself from where he’d been sitting at the base of a towering, white pillar, his eyes still fixed on the harbour and lined face worried. He drew a leather thong with a heavy key hanging from it from under his long khameez and handed it to Noor.

“I can guess why you’re here. Remember—”

She gave him her first smile of the day. “I won’t let anyone else up in the minaret; I promise. Musa is down for the afternoon. I want to see what the British are doing.”

Imam Tariq nodded. “Are you thinking of fighting them if they attack?”

She frowned. “I’m not sure what little light bursts and dust spinners are going to do against a warship.”

“You can do more than conjure dust spinners, Noor. You and I both know that.” He gestured to the bruise rising red on her cheek.

Noor touched the mark, drawing a strand of life from the imam and weaving its invisible light into her skin, the sensation like the taps of butterfly wings in the morning light.

Imam Tariq nodded at her good work, then turned to the harbour. “Remember to get back before he wakes.”

She ran up the tight circle of well-worn steps, hand on the jambiya hidden beneath her clothing to keep it from slipping. Normally, no one but the muezzin and the imam was allowed here, but in the past few months, it had become her sanctuary. She reached the top of a minaret and looked out over the only city she had ever called home.

Tajoura sprawled before her, representing thousands of years of trade and growth and tribes coming together, fighting, and making peace. Here, Yemeni traders drank tea with Chinese merchants and Somali craftswomen from the south. To the north was one of the largest slave markets in the region. Her parents had sold her when she was small, her mother layering her hair in thick protective braids before she left. Noor still wore them that way. Since her hair style matched the traders from Mogadishu, Noor figured she was probably from there. To the west lounged the beautiful Lake Ghoubbet with its swift currents and massive, slow-moving sharks.

And there, to the east, the imperial warship hung against the sky like visiting death. It seemed to be anchored in the deepest part of the harbour. Their navigator had probably never been to Tajoura before and hadn’t been up for trying to dock. It didn’t really matter. Their battle mages and cannons could obliterate the city from the middle of the bay just as well as from the docks.

Noor squinted at boats with bands of yellow, black, and white around their edges being lowered from the sides of the warship, shallow-draft vessels that could be rowed over the reefs. A crowd moved from the souq to the docks. Some were bound to be armed; she hoped they had someone with them who spoke English because none of the British who had wandered through the souq during her time here could speak a passable sentence of Arabic or Afar.

She considered offering the crowd her help to translate, to avert bloodshed. Her skill with languages was one of the few things Musa had given her besides beatings. Noor had a knack for finding books in the tumbled-down wrecks of others’ lives and livelihoods—histories and mysteries, poetry and proverbs, stories holy and profane, and sometimes all of those at once. The right book in the right hands could be worth more than her weight in gold, and Musa knew it. He sold her finds to a wide range of traders, some of whom corresponded with him for months before arriving to purchase certain books when she could find them. He preferred his palm wine to writing, so he had made sure she’d learned to read and write Arabic, French, English, and to transcribe Afar and Kiswahili into English and Arabic. She could also speak passable Amharic and Mandarin, practicing those with the Ethiopian caravans and Chinese tea traders. But the thought of being surrounded by the sweating, shoving men on the docks, of seeing armed British men again so soon—

Noor could not touch the memories those feelings brought, the singed aching of her scars.

Instead, she watched.

A man stood in the Victory’s shore boat, his jacket a bloody red with bone-white bands crossing his chest. He stepped onto the dock, moving towards the crowd, hands outstretched, holding a box. He came bearing a gift. Something in Noor’s shoulders relaxed; perhaps this was just a resupply, not the dawn of war.

A man wearing the clothing of an administrator of the Ottoman Empire, which theoretically ruled here, intercepted the soldier, accepting the gift. There was a conversation between the two men, with a third waved forwards from the crowd. Ah, they did find a translator. The crowd softened, edges flowing away. When the men broke apart, the sailor went back to his boat, where he gestured for his comrades to disembark, and the Ottoman administrator waved the remaining people away. Noor watched as the sailors moved through the dispersing crowd towards the souq.

She remembered another group of British men. They had been army men coming down from the Red Sea.

They had moved in a pack too.

Some of these ones seemed to be heading for the fruit stalls, others towards the grain market, still others towards the stockyard. She wondered how many multiples of the base price they would end up paying, or if they would pay at all, waiting until the delicate moment when a trader brought up the price to gesture towards their warship’s dozens of cannons. There was no reason but honour that kept them from buying goods in the market today and bombing the city tomorrow.

That thought stuck with her.

Noor saw a group of them heading towards the hookah shops. Knowing she still had time before Musa woke and wanting to see if her haya magic would guide her next steps, she returned to the cool dark of the minaret, passing the muezzin on his way up. Imam Tariq would be busy welcoming people for the dhuhr prayer; she would give him the key back later. She would also make up the prayer later.

Sailors in strange ports spoke freely when they thought no one could understand them; their tongues were even looser when surrounded by sweet hookah smoke. Noor needed to know their plans if she was going to use them to get free. If nothing else, this would be a chance to practice her listening English. As she made her way to the hookah shops, the call to prayer, the athan, floated out over the city, lilting and strident and beckoning as always.