The Queen’s Last Harbour

Chapter One: The Ballast Stone

The gunboat had been dying for forty-six years and was in no hurry to finish.

Angus Meldrum hung above her at eleven metres, one hand on a frame that had gone soft as wet biscuit, and worked the tape along her keelson by feel. The delta water was the colour of stewed tea. Visibility came and went with the tide — a metre and a half on the slack, nothing at all when the ebb dragged the river's silt out over the bar. He could see his own gauge and the pale shape of his other hand and that was the extent of the world.

He counted frames. Twenty-two aft of the break, spacing about sixty centimetres, iron straps still holding where the teak had rotted away around them. The boiler lay to starboard where it had rolled out of her like an organ out of a carcass, and a pair of bottles, whisky by the shoulder of them, sat upright in the mud beside it as though set down by a careful man. Meldrum tied a numbered tag to the boiler mounting and let the current turn him.

His hip ached in the cold, the deep ache that came from bone that had been put back together by a tired doctor in Aden with too many other men to see to. Underwater the ache was only an ache. On land it was a limp and a stick and the way people looked at his walk before they looked at his face.

He checked his watch, gave the wreck a last sweep with the lamp, and started up the shot line, stopping where he was meant to stop, breathing the way he had been taught in the Navy fifteen years before. The whistling in his ears rose as the pressure came off. It never stopped now. It had a pitch, a thin steady E, and he had learned to live under it the way a man learns to live beside a railway line.

He broke surface into white glare and a smell of mud and blossom.

"Nahodha!" Bushiri Ngala leaned over the gunwale of the mashua and took the tape and the slate before he took Meldrum's arm. Bushiri was somewhere north of sixty, with grey in the stubble along his jaw and forearms like mooring bitts, and he had the sailor's habit of stowing the gear before the man. "Enough for today. The tide turns and this channel gets angry."

"Twenty minutes more."

"You said twenty minutes at ten o'clock." Bushiri reached down, got a fist in Meldrum's harness, and lifted him half out of the water in one heave so that Meldrum could get his good leg over the rail. "Now it is one. Your Swiss man pays for a survey. He does not pay for you to drown in it."

Meldrum sat on the bottom boards among the fish scales and dead air bottles and let the sun begin its work. The mashua was called Baraka and she leaked at a rate that made bailing a full-time occupation for whichever boy was aboard. Above the mangroves a fish eagle turned and turned. The delta ran back from them in a dozen brown channels between walls of green, and somewhere three kilometres inland behind that green, the ground rose a metre and became coconut and cassava and the village of Kizinga, and everything Meldrum knew about the place was that it was hot, it was patient, and it did not care whether he found anything or not.

The contract was one he did not respect and did not turn down. A dealer in Geneva named Thierry Barraud had put money through a Msalani agent for a coastal heritage survey: locate, chart and photograph the wreck of the German river gunboat scuttled in the Mtanga in 1918, before the mangroves ate her. Barraud's letters were polite and specific and mentioned bronze fittings, the ship's bell, and the possibility of a strongbox. Meldrum had read between the lines on the first page. Heritage was the word men like Barraud used when they meant inventory.

But it was work in the water, and there were three men in the whole Indian Ocean who would give Angus Meldrum work in the water, and Barraud had been the only one to write.

"Amiri is late," Bushiri said.

"He's setting traps."

"He is setting traps in the wrong place. There are no fish where he is. There is only mud and one hundred years of mosquitoes." Bushiri squinted upriver, and his face changed, softened at the edges. "There. Look at him. He rows like his father."

The dugout came down with the first of the ebb, and Amiri Ngala paddled it standing, which was showing off, and Meldrum enjoyed it. The boy was seventeen, all shoulder and no weight, and he had attached himself to the survey in the first week with an appetite for gear and English words that nothing discouraged. He had learned to read a compass in two afternoons. He had learned to hold his breath to nine metres because Meldrum told him not to.

Amiri came alongside without slowing and grinned up at them. In the bottom of the dugout, between his feet, sat a lump of stone the size of a sheep's head.

"Nahodha. Look what the mud is keeping."

Meldrum looked. He went on looking, and the whistle in his ears seemed to get louder, which was a thing it did when his pulse rose.

It was not stone. It was concretion — sand and shell and rust cemented together by four centuries of seawater around whatever lay at its heart. He had cracked a hundred of them off wrecks from Malta to the Gulf. It had the weight and the wrong colour and the little bleeding stain of oxide down one side, and when he tapped it with the handle of his knife it did not ring like rock.

"Where."

"Up there." Amiri jerked his chin north and inland. "Past the second creek, where the old people say not to fish. There is a bank in the mangrove. When the tide goes out it stands up out of the water like a wall. This was lying on it. There are more."

"How many more?"

Amiri shrugged with his whole body. "Many. Some as big as this boat."

"Three kilometres from the sea," Bushiri said quietly. "Behind two banks. No ship of any size ever floated there, nahodha. Not in my life or my father's."

Meldrum was already clearing a space on the bottom boards. He wedged the lump between his knees, set the chisel against a hairline seam, and hit it with the flat of the hammer, twice, listening. The third blow opened it like a walnut.

The first thing that came out of it was a bowl.

It sat in the broken cradle of the concretion, whole, upside down, and when Meldrum lifted it free his hands did it very gently and without instruction from him. Grey-green glaze, crazed all over into a net of fine lines, a plain foot ring, and inside the bowl a carved band of leaves under the glaze. Celadon. Chinese celadon, southern kilns, a shape he had seen behind glass in a museum in Lisbon on a wet afternoon in 1951. It had come around the ocean in some other man's ship before Portugal had gone to sea at all.

Bushiri had stopped bailing.

The second thing was iron, and it took Meldrum three more strokes to get it out. A cylinder, forty centimetres long, wasted and pitted but keeping its shape — a tapered tube with a lug on top and a flat rear face with a plug seized into it. He turned it over twice before he let himself say it.

"That's a breech chamber."

"A what?" said Amiri.

"Off a swivel gun. Wrought iron, hoops forge-welded, loaded from the back. You wedged the chamber in behind the barrel and fired it and pulled it out and shoved the next one in." He was hearing his own voice speaking too fast. "They gave those up before your great-grandfather's great-grandfather. That's the sixteenth century. That's the sort of thing that comes off a Portuguese ship."

The third thing was not in the concretion at all. It was under it, in the bottom of the dugout, and Amiri handed it across with the beginning of unease in his face, because a man he had decided was unshakeable had gone the colour of the sky.

A slab of coral rag the size of a book, cut square on three edges, broken on the fourth. Cut and dressed by a mason. And across its face, worn shallow but perfectly legible where the growth had been scraped away by the tide, ran two lines of Arabic script.

Meldrum could not read Arabic. He knew inscription when he saw it. He knew building stone from ballast. He sat in the stinking bilge of a leaking fishing boat with a Chinese bowl in one hand and a gun part in the other and a piece of somebody's wall across his knees, and did the sum.

A gunboat did not produce those. One wreck did not produce those.

"Nahodha," said Bushiri. "What is it?"

"I don't know yet." Meldrum wrapped the bowl in his shirt with great care. "But whatever it is, there's far too much of it for one ship. Take us up the second creek."