A foldeh-roll a-fiddly-doe, a foldeh-ro-a-roo.’
‘Fool!’ shouts Darius. ‘Pedar soukteh!’ Your father was burnt.
‘You can’t live without me, Darius Nouredini!’ bellows Nat exultantly. ‘You were heartbroken!’
‘I thought you had the money-belt!’
‘Haul away!’
Darius hoists the sixth bag. Only one more goatskin to go, he tells himself. The lack of air in the vug, he fears, is playing with Nat’s mind, making him giddy, bombastic, crazed. He hears him splashing about in the petroleum, and singing in the oil:
I loved a lass a fair one,
As fair as e’er was seen,
She was indeed a rare one,
Another Sheba Queen.
But fool as then I was
I thought she loved me too,
But now, alas, she’s left me,
Fo la ro la ro la roo!
Out in the open air, Darius hitches the rope to the packsaddle. He slots his hands between the mule’s suede jowls and the bridle’s worn leather cheek straps and leads the buckskin away from the well. The rope from packsaddle to goatskin goes taut. The mule takes the strain, and struggles forward. From the hole in the ground, greasy and blackened, the sixth goatskin appears, and plops onto the earth. The mule tows the sack across the dusty scrub, along the greasy path made by the other sacks. Darius unties the sack and climbs back down to the ledge. He picks up the saddlecloth. It is caked in tar. He slices off as much tar-cake as he can with his knife, but it is no use. He cannot tell what is saddlecloth and what is pitch. He climbs down the rubble to Mithras’s pedestal and calls down the well.
‘Nat!’
‘Ready!’
‘No, forget about the last skin. Just come up now. The sling is more tar than saddlecloth.’
‘I’ve got the last sack here, full and ready to go!’
‘The sling won’t hold. It’s rotten.’
‘It’s not rotten, only filthy. It’s still the same saddlecloth underneath.’
‘It’s too slippy. Come up now.’
‘One more sack. The first four or five sacks clear our debts, six and seven earn us profit. We have come here for the seventh sack, or we’ve come here for nothing.’
‘You’re starved of air down there and don’t know what you’re saying.’
‘Send down the sling. The longer you cluck like a hen the more I’m down among the fireworks. We’d have had the seventh sack done by now but for you!’
The block and tackle trundles. The rope descends.
‘Level!’ shouts Nat, and Darius begins swinging the sling.
When Nat grabs the saddlecloth his fingers sink into claggy tar, and he sees the truth of Darius’s warning. This is a clump of tar on the end of rope. He should just climb on now, and be hoisted to safety before the saddlecloth gets any worse. But the seventh sack of oil is tied at the neck and ready to go.
‘Climb on now,’ calls Darius. ‘Forget the last sack.’
Nat ties the neck of the sack to the sling and shouts:
‘Ready!’
The sack swings out over the oil well, and he hears Darius’s angry curse at finding that he is after all winching oil not man.
‘Fool! You should come up now instead of this sack.’
‘Just pull your rope.’
Nat watches the seventh and final sack rise up to the jagged circle of daylight far above him, with Darius grunting angrily on every pull. Silence. Nat is alone in the pit for the last time. He wipes the oil from his hands as best he can on the sandstone walls. At last comes the sweet melody of the block and tackle’s trundle. In jerky stages the filthy beautiful saddlecloth sling appears before his eyes. Nat lifts his face in joy. He watches the tar-caked saddlecloth sling swing out over the abyss.
‘Level!’ he cheers. He reaches out to grab it but before he does, a squib of burning pitch lands on the saddlecloth. It gently blooms into flame. Nat keens a long, long howl. Darius looks down and finds a stricken helpless look in Nat’s saucer eyes, wide as a lemur in the dark.
The fire is brief, but when the flare-up has died away it has taken the saddlecloth with it. Now there is just a frayed end of greasy rope jouncing around in the middle air of the cavern.
‘Get me out, Darius! Darius! Get me out! Lay me out some more rope!’
‘That’s all there is!’
‘It won’t reach! Get me out!’
The rope dangles in the middle of the chamber, level with Nat’s head, and beyond his reach. Without the plumb weight of the tarry saddlecloth on the end of it, Darius cannot swing the rope from up on the top ledge. Nat throws clods of petroleum sludge at the rope to try to set it swinging again. The third handful he throws actually strikes. The rope jounces a little, and then hangs dead still, exactly where it was before.
‘Wait, I’ll free some more rope,’ Darius calls down. He scales the marble statue and plants his feet on Mithras’s chest, either side of the block and tackle. In this way he is able to feed an arm’s length more rope down to Nat, but at the cost of exposing his bare back to the slew of bituminous pebbles and scalding squibs that the well now spits from its depths. As the oily buckshot pelts Darius’s hanging body, he roars and squirms, but hangs onto the rope. The block and tackle rattles with the weight of his writhing. A fat ember of pitch settles on top of his shoulder. Darius endures the ember burning itself out. He holds on, and must suffer the agony of the scorching skin on his shoulder because any second now Nat will leap from vug to rope, and so the rope has to stay where it is. He throws back his head and shouts,
‘Jump, Nat! Jump!’
‘The rope’s too far.’
‘It’s now or never!’
‘I’ll slip if I jump.’
‘Do or die!’
‘I’ll fall!’
‘Come on, jump! You won’t fall!’
A sudden weight on the rope slams Darius’s knuckles against the block and tackle’s maple. Darius yanks back on the rope. Leaning backwards on the horizontal, his feet planted Mithras’s chest, he hauls the rope hand over hand, lifting Nat out of the bottomless pit. He hears great gasping sobs of deliverance break from Nat’s throat, followed by cries of exultation:
‘Oh! I’m rising, Darius! I’m rising. Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’
Darius scales down the front of Mithras, using his bodyweight to hoist Nat faster out of the pit. At the foot of the idol, he once more hauls the rope hand over hand. He has saved Nat. He is reeling him in.
‘We’re on our way!’ he laughs.
He hears a sound he cannot place. A creak in the earth. Mithras leans forward, churning earth and shunting rubble. The rope goes slack in his hand. The pulley wheel razzes in its maple box. A rockslide knocks him off his feet. Then he sees the most terrible sight of his life. The green marble giant topples headlong down the oil well. The winged Mithras stoops like a hawk for its prey, snatching Nat down into the fiery pit.
An ever-thickening dust cloud rolls over Darius. Coughing and spluttering and blinded by dust, he claws his way up to the light, climbing on rocks that seesaw under him, his feet dislodging rubble that follows Nat and Mithras down into the depths.
He escapes the pit and climbs out into the open air. He looks back at the stoved-in hillside shrouded in its pall of dust. Earth and rock lie where fire and oil shone. There is no oil anywhere save what is bagged in the sticky, filthy mound of goatskins. He throws handful after handful of earth over his head.
‘I have killed you, Nat, I have killed you! You have drowned in oil! Oh God, surely Nat is under Your protection and in the rope of Your security, so save him from the trial of the grave and from the punishment of the Fire. You fulfil promises and grant rights, so forgive him and have mercy on him. Surely You are Most Forgiving, Most Merciful!’
22
Day after day, he rode back the way they came. Day after day, he tapped his heels against the mule’s sides and listened to the four oil-filled goatskins glooping along. For this glooping sound, t
his small haul of petroleum, Nat had died. The painful burns on his back were earned while hanging upside-down, feet planted on the icon’s chest, trying to feed Nat more rope. He had held on, despite scalding squibs, and when Nat leapt, Darius had been there to take his weight. These insistent burns should have assuaged his guilt, then, but they didn’t - because the truth remained that Nat was dead because of him. A hill might fall into the earth, but a truth like that was indestructible.
He led the mule, he rode the mule, his boots were dusty, his boots were muddy, he waded through a cold stream, he was cable-ferried across the Karun River by the ferryman and his wife, until, on a snowy pass at dusk, he found himself back at the goatherd’s hut on the mountainside where their expedition had first gone wrong. Thick snow hid the wreckage and donkey carcasses from sight. A small mercy. If they had not lost most of his father’s oil-mining equipment Nat wouldn’t have died. Inside the hut, where the only sounds were the mule breathing and the oil-stove burning, the Natlessness was like glue-ear.
How powerful were the destructive forces of the universe! And how the slightest attempt to improve things summoned them!
Just for seeking shelter in a bush, the donkeys were crow food on a cliff. Just for stealing a little lamp oil for his mother to sew by, that boy was ganched on a gatehouse hook by the Qizilbash. Just for selling the wrong poem to the wrong man, Darius suffered a face-full of pigeon dung in full view of his beloved. Just for begging the use of his own father’s oil-mining equipment he was expected to marry his step-aunt. A simple ember landing on a tar-caked saddlecloth sent Nat plunging to his death in boiling pitch. Darius spoke out loud in the quiet hut.
‘Why did I let you persuade me against what I knew was right? I should have refused to drop the rope until you agreed to leave the last bag and come out. It was in my power to save you, Nat.’
In his fitful sleep that night, whenever the wind scattered clods of earth or stones on the roof, Darius heard Nat singing his foolish ditty:
A foldeh-roll, a fiddle-dee do, a foley, rol-a roo!
The following day, Darius rode back through that green ribbon that ran between desolate stretches of rocky grey shale, the strange landscape where they’d talked about Mithras. He dismounted, unwound his leather bottle’s long thin strap and lowered it into the bright sparkling stream that ran through the narrow seam of vegetation. He reeled in the bottle, and sipped the cold water. The stream, the blue irises, the purple vetches, the bees and butterflies, and the orange spikes of foxtail lilies that were as tall as a man - he hated them all for their vainglorious existence, because each and everything here had outlived Nat Bramble.
23
The oil shortage had plunged the parliament into near darkness. Two or three lanterns only lit the Shah and his ministers as Anthony stood before them. The Shah was dressed in red from head to toe, save for the black turban crest that rose like a plume of smoke. They said that when he dressed in red it meant someone would die at his hand that day. The Shah was looking daggers at him. So was Oliver de Cannes. Why? What had happened? Anthony lowered his eyes to the rug, a perfect twin of the Persian rug that hung in the Whitehall privy gallery between the Julius Caesar portrait and the bust of Attila the Hun - either of whom Anthony had rather face now than Shah Abbas in this temper.
The Grand Vizier handed him a silver salver upon which lay several dark brown sheets of vellum, covered in handwritten Latin.
Anthony’s heart beat fast. Now he would know his doom. He picked the vellum sheets from the salver. The silence of the majlis deepened, the dark room seemed somehow to grow darker. Anthony’s heart sank into his boots as he read the beginning of letter:
From Elizabeth, by the Grace of God, Queen of England,
- To the right mighty, and right victorious prince, the Great Shah, Emperor of the Persians, Medes, Parthians, of the people on this side and beyond the River Tigris, and of all men and nations between the Caspian Sea and the Gulf of Persia,
Greetings and most happy increase on all prosperity!
God a’ mercy, how had this royal arrow come out of a clear blue sky to pierce his eye? Anthony was the garlanded buffalo on the sunny side of the square. His eyes filled with tears. He could not read the next line. He looked up and asked Abbas when the letter had arrived. Abbas didn’t answer. He rose and approached Anthony. He unsheathed a brand new sabre, a replacement for the one he had left in the Tofangchi captain during the battle re-enactment.
Anthony could hear Abbas’s heavy breathing. The sun and lion motif on the new sabre’s single-edged steel blade was inches from his eyes. Was Abbas going to cut his head from shoulders where he stood? Or blind him? Instead, Abbas said,
‘Thirty years ago,’ and burst out laughing. A bewildered Anthony looked from face-to-face: Oliver de Cannes was laughing; the austere Grand Vizier was laughing; Mulla Abdulla Shustari was laughing; the Shah’s blind brothers were both laughing, even that sour, old vinegar-faced Hoseyn Ali Beg was laughing.
‘Queen Elizabeth wrote this letter to Shah Tahmasp my grandfather in the third year of her reign. Years later she wrote to my father, the old blind Shah Khudabandeh. My father and grandfather couldn’t give them what they wanted, but I can. I can. She wanted what a rash of Popes, and Kings of Spain wanted. These Christian Princes always petition for a military alliance against the Turk. They have waited long, but now is the time. This morning I cut the Ottoman ambassador’s beard off and told him to give it to Sultan Mehmed to eat. We are invading the Turk’s lands from north, south, east, west, together with Christian princes! I will send Hoseyn Ali Beg and your brother bearing letters to all the Christian Princes setting out my plans for war!’
‘My lord, the Christian Princes will ask why the Shah of Persia has not sent the elder brother, and will scarce believe it to be a true embassy if I am not there.’
‘They will have my letter and carry gifts of great price.’
‘Oh my lord, send anyone but me to the courts of Europe you insult the Princes and your great stratagem dies. Custom demands you send the elder brother.’
‘Must it be you, Antonio?’
‘Oh, great Shah, how I wish it were not so for I shall I hate this embassy that takes me from my lord and my love.’
Anthony covered his face with his hands, and then peeked to see how this had gone down. Shah Abbas wore a face of woe. The painted eyebrows and mournful expression gave him the look of a tragedian in old Athens. For a moment he appeared to be as blind as his two brothers, his green eyes unseeing as his raised face went slowly side to side, earrings tinkling in the hush. His chest heaved in his tight scarlet tunic and when he opened his mouth wide. Anthony expected a lion’s roar but instead out crawled a boy chorister’s squeak.
‘I am what men, to mock me, call a Shah, when it seems I have no say in what most touches my heart. You, Antonio, must go to the courts of the Christian princes. But your brother stays here as hostage against your faithful duty and your swift return to the Shah who loves you.’
‘As your majesty commands. I request only that I be the first to break this news to my brother.’
24
The following day, Anthony and Robert Sherley went to the top of the Shah Tahmasp tower, the tallest building in Isfahan. Its turret was tessellated with the skulls of deer and gazelle, leopard and lynx. Anthony had brought Robert up here to break the news that he was going to be staying behind as a hostage.
‘Looks like a besieging army down there, all those tents and campfires,’ said Robert. ‘Except they’re all leaving.’
‘Last caravan before the war,’ said Anthony.
Each day the tent city upon the western plain thickened like algal bloom, as more and more traders, pilgrims, migrants, merchants and servants camped out awaiting the departure of the caravan, to which they would hitch themselves for safe travel to every town and shrine from Isfahan to Istanbul.
While waiting for his moment to break the news, Anthony ran the quartz crystal perspective trunk, the Sultan’
s gift to the Shah from the Istanbul observatory, over the crowds and encampments outside the city wall, searching for Bramble, hoping to capture him within the ground glass disc’s rainbow borders.
‘I have been sending Elkin, Pincon and Parry daily into the caravanserai to seek out the villain,’ said Anthony. ‘The Ottoman caravan will leave in a day or two, taking Bramble and my silver coins with it if we don’t bustle! He’s down there somewhere among that filthy horde. But oh, it is shaming that even as the Embassy is about to depart my mind is not full of high statecraft but all taken up with finding that whoreson. Cock a bones, the agonies that slave has put me through! I need my three-hundred dollars for the Embassy! Am I to beg my stipend from Hoseyn Ali Beg, like the young housewife married to the old miser!’ He lowered the quartz crystal from his eye, saying, ‘Ugh! All is confusion! See if you can find my brand on one of these filthy sheep.’
‘To escape detection so long,’ said Robert, squinting into the perspective trunk, ‘the renegade must have accomplices in Isfahan.’
‘Bramble won’t want to make a life here! He cannot leave except with a caravan and this is the first to go since he fled.’
Robert laid quartz crystal on bone sill, and looked his brother in the eye.
‘When do we leave?’
The moment had come to tell him. Anthony would have to be very careful how he told him for nothing must jeopardise the Embassy. But tell him he must. This was the time and place. It was now or never.
‘The Embassy,’ Anthony began, ‘will leave in two days. But there’s something which you should -.’
‘Two whole days! I don’t know if I can last two more days in this place! Look what Abbas did to the governor of Ghilan yesterday. Hacked off his lips and nose for embezzlement. Then sends him wandering naked and blind, his head and arms in stocks, no man allowed to shelter him.’
The Trade Secret Page 10