26
Darius was approaching Isfahan as darkness fell. Campfires, hundreds of them, burned far and wide under the night sky. He led the mule through this plain of campfires, each of them thick with travellers waiting to entrain with the Ottoman caravan the following day. Drawing near the gatehouse - the same one where they’d seen the boy ganched - he found it was thick with merchants and their runners all shouting for oil at any price.
‘Gold for oil! Gold paid for oil. New gold tomans for oil!’
‘Oil, oil, who here has oil? Oil at any price!’
Darius lifted his face to the stars and whispered to the spirit of his dead friend,
‘We have beaten the Baku convoy to the gates, Nat-jan!’
At that very moment, a gauntlet bit into his burnt shoulder and pulled him against a tall white horse. Leaning down from his jewelled saddle, Sir Anthony Sherley swept a lantern beam over his face.
‘Would your excellency like to buy some oil?’ asked Darius. The English knight pushed him away with his boot, and rode off, playing his lantern beam this way and that, hunting through the crowds.
‘You search in vain, Sir Anthony. Your servant is free of you at last.’
Darius led his mule back out into the fields. He passed cooking smells, chatter, babies crying and laughter at one crowded campfire after another. Soon all these fell away to be replaced by only three sounds: tussock grass brushing his boots, oil slugging in its hides, and the footsteps of two men following him. Pretending to adjust the mule’s harness, he turned round and walked backwards.
The two pursuers weren’t Antonio’s men. They were Persian. One wore a conical hat, turbaned with cambric, the other a pot-shaped hat with a tall, upturned brim and a feather. Neither Pot nor Cone bothered to disguise the fact that they had made him their quarry, but followed as fixedly as the ploughman his plough. They must have heard him ask Antonio Mirza if his Excellency wanted to buy some oil. He cursed himself for a fool.
Cone split from Pot, and went looping ahead of their prey. They were going to come at him from different directions. Darius spied a large campfire in a dell. His heart leapt up. He’d find safety in numbers. Saved! He hurried over the ridge of this sunken encampment. Empty. The campfire blazed unattended. He was alone.
The mule tossed its head. Darius pulled its jaw down, tightening the rein about his fist. Pot descended into the dell and stood before Darius. Up close, the pot-shaped hat was an expensive one, with plume fronds on its upturned brim. Pot stared into Darius’s eyes but said nothing until Cone jumped into the bowl with a two-footed thud.
‘You shouldn’t have this oil,’ said Pot.
‘That oil belongs to a powerful merchant,’ Darius replied. ‘He will be very -’
Pot’s fist struck his jaw. Darius rocked back on his heels. Then he seemed to turn to stone. He couldn’t move a muscle. Not because the blow scrambled his brains, but because it affronted his soul, shocked him to the core, singled him out from the world, which carried on everywhere except inside the ringing cowl in which he now stood, as if a magic circle of immobility had been drawn around him. He stared numbly as Pot and Cone led away the mule. His gaze fell vaguely on the four bulbous goatskins waddling on the chestnut’s back. It dimly crossed his mind that this would be the last time he saw those sacks, that packsaddle. And then he heard the oil go gloop, gloop. It was a soft, lulling sound, yet the glooping oil awoke him with more force than a pistol shot next to his ear. This was the oil that Nat had died for. He pulled a long oak branch from the campfire. He gripped it double-fisted. Its tip glowed. He strode towards the robbers.
‘I cannot let you take that oil.’
The thieves turned and saw the club he was wielding. Pot drew a knife from his sash. Darius dropped the club instantly.
‘Pardon, please. I beg your forgiveness! Please take the oil. Take it.’
‘What were you going to do with that club?’ asked Pot.
‘You can have it,’ said Darius. ‘Take the oil. There’s a curse on it anyway.’
‘I asked you what you were going to do with that club when our backs were turned?’
Pot stepped towards him. Reflected firelight slid up and down the blade. Darius had seen the last of life beyond the little arena of this firepit. He would die here.
Just then, however, Pot did the very last thing Darius expected him to do: he turned a forward somersault! More astonishing still, from the wriggling ball of Pot’s grey cloak there issued not one but two pairs of feet! Four legs wiggled in the air. Up flew the knife, its silver blade spinning high into the night to land in the firepit. Pot was wrestling a dirty, ragged dervish. Cone darted forwards and hopped about the wrestling pair, looking to stab the dervish. Darius picked up the oak club again, stepped forward and slogged Cone on the beige cambric headband. Cone slumped to the ground, his face sheeted with blood.
Pot scrambled to his feet and raised his fists against the filthy dervish. The two circled each other, looking to land the first blow. But then Pot caught sight of Cone on his back and dropped his fists. As if the fight had ended half-an-hour rather than half a second ago, Pot helped Cone to his feet, and together they staggered the few steps to the edge of the dell, where he lowered Cone onto the bank, unwound the cambric and used it to staunch the smooth weir of blood pouring from above his eye. Pot turned to Darius, and asked:
‘What did you do that for? We weren’t going to hurt you. We only wanted your oil. Look at all this blood. Are you mad? It’s lucky he’s still alive. If he wasn’t wearing this you’d be a murderer you would, a murderer!’
‘But you pulled a knife,’ stammered Darius.
‘Only to make you put the stick down.’
‘You were going to rob me.’
‘Who was stabbed? Nobody! Who’s covered in blood? Him!’
‘Will he be all right?’ asked Darius.
‘Go away!’
Darius walked off a few steps, then back turned to say:
‘And you punched me in the face…’
‘Go! Just go!’
Darius left them and went to thank the wrestling dervish, who was now on the other side of the blazing fire. Through the tall flames Darius watched him retrieve Pot’s knife. A grimy face turned towards him and smiled. Darius screamed at the top of his lungs. He turned tail and ran, no longer caring about mule or oil or Pot or Cone. For he had seen a ghost. Behind him, he heard the ghost cry:
‘Don’t you know me, Darius? Don’t you know me?’
Darius froze.
‘Don’t you know me?’ called the ghost. ‘Don’t you know me?’
Darius slowly turned. The spectre stood behind the fire. A veil of burning embers rose before the apparition. Now illuminated by flame, now plunged into darkness, the ghost sang a strange incantation:
A foldeh-roll a-fiddly-doe, a foldeh-ro-a-roo,
A foldeh-roll a-fiddly-doe, a foldeh-ro-a-roo.
Darius feared he had gone mad. He sank to the ground, head in hands. A pair of arms encircled him and as they held him in their frowsy embrace, he smelt a sweet rank odour that could only be of this world.
27
The heat from the fire on their faces, Nat and Darius sat with their backs against seven goatskins of oil, while the chestnut and buckskin companionably rattled the sucker growth of the cherry to which they were tethered.
‘But if you thought I was dead,’ asked Nat, ‘then why didn’t you take the buckskin?’
‘He bolted when the hill caved in.’
‘When I lifted the packsaddle off him, I found the mutton fillet your grandmother put there to cure. I ate that mutton like a dog in the street. Then I loaded up the goatskins you left behind and rode after you. And this shirt I’m wearing belonged to the Karun ferryman. His wife fed me, even though I was a poor naked beggar who could not pay, and then man and wife together they winched me across the river on their new ferry. New wood, amber it was, our nails like shining copper pennies in the fresh timber. Did you see it?’
> ‘I had eyes for nothing, Nat. I thought I had killed you.’
‘Killed me?’
‘With my idiot plan, my mad ideas.’
Nat took hold of both his hands and looked him in the eye.
‘No, Darius, I have been more alive on our venture than I have ever been in my whole life.’
They embraced and Nat resumed telling his tale.
‘After the Karun River, I was sure I’d catch you over the next hill or the next. I raced the setting sun on my shoulder. When it sank, I dismounted and led the mule. When it rose, I hopped into the saddle again. When I found you, the robbers were already following you. And here,’ he said, raising the long knife, ‘is the blade that might have killed you.’
‘None of that at any time at all,’ said Darius with a shudder. Nat grinned to hear his friend come out with his old saying again.
‘Here’s our treasure!’ said Nat, throwing his back against the goatskins and smacking them with satisfaction. ‘It is almost as sweet to be reunited with these sacks of oil as with you, my friend. Now we just have to walk the oil through the gate and set up on the maidan to make our fortune!’
‘Alas, it’s not so simple,’ said Darius. ‘Your old master Sir Anthony is out with his people hunting for you.’
‘He can’t stay at the gates forever, so shall we wait till he goes?’
‘No,’ replied Darius. ‘Every second counts. What if the Baku convoy comes in while we’re waiting out here? Our oil will be cheap as sticks. Everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been through, will have been for nothing.’
Nat got to his feet and walked to the steep riverbank and listened to the turbid river. Now and then a whitecap flashed in the dark. Well, if his fall through the bottomless pit had taught him anything it was that oil floats on water. He turned his head and said:
‘The river. Let’s bind these goatskins into a raft of oil.’
‘And just leave our good mules here for thieves?’
‘Or let them go.’
They untethered the mules, fed them kola nuts and slapped their rumps.
Then Nat and Darius roped all seven bulbous goatskins together, rolled them down a steep grassy bank into the fast-flowing Zayandeh River, and flung themselves aboard. The river whisked their oil raft to the city wall, where a heavy chain strung across the water stopped their raft dead. There was not enough slack in the chain to lift it more than a hand’s breadth. They kneaded and dunked the raft under the chain, and through a narrow archway in the foot of the wall, and then flowed into Isfahan.
28
Sitting on their goatskins, Nat and Darius drifted across a wide ornamental lake. As loud and disordered as it was outside the city, all was silent and serene inside the city walls. They could hear the ripples made by the slowly twirling raft. A mandarin drake turned his eye of fire upon the two men who lowered themselves into the water, which came up to their chests. They waded through thick clusters of water lily and lotus, towing the bobbing goatskins behind them. They took hold of a willow’s exposed roots to climb out of the water onto a garden rockery.
Dawn cracked overhead as they dragged the goatskins across mosaic-tiled paths, through flowerbeds, and over an empty lane. They came to a long pool with stone columns along its paved borders. Reflected in its sheen of greasy algae were the bearded barbarian Darius and Nat the asphalt dervish, his hair a tarry clump of tats. The goatskins landed with a smack in the pool, and they ran along the paved border, towing the oil raft to the end of the waterway, hauled it out of the water, crashed through some bushes, and were soon lost among thorns and briars. The muddy raft, coated in leaves and bark, became wedged stuck between the low branches of a pink oleander thicket. Together they tugged the rope with all their might, but it wouldn’t budge. They were in a pink hell. Nat began to panic.
‘It’s getting light now, and here we are like poachers in a wood. Any second now a root is going to rip through these rotten sacks!’
They heaved on the rope one more time. The oil raft broke free and they tumbled backwards through the oleander to find themselves in a lane busy with market traders carrying their wares in bags and bundles, on mules and handcarts, to the maidan. Nat and Darius joined them.
In the breaking dawn, the mosque’s dome glowed like a jellyfish. The goatskins made a high-pitched whine, as they dragged them across the maidan, and when they reached the foot of the bleachers, the base of each scoured sack was hot to the touch, and its hid singed bald. Darius sawed through the soggy rope netting. They separated the sacks. They humped each one up the bleachers, and stood beside their merchandise on the third stone step.
Hands on hips and fighting for breath, Darius said,
‘We have brought our goods to market.’
Nat cast an anxious look at Ali Qapu Palace as a shutter opened on the second floor.
Leaving Nat to mind the oil, Darius found a ceramist in his workshop. Alas, the only ceramic tureens about the right size were snow leopards sitting proudly with the tops of their heads missing. Tall vases for reeds, they came up to Darius’s waist but they would have to do.
On the third step of the white stone bleachers, Nat and Darius unstoppered a goatskin. Together they peered in at the oil, and saw their own wobbly heads before a cornflower blue sky. The black oil winked with golden bubbles. Unexposed since Masjid-i-Suleiman, this magical substance from the bowels of the earth had the power now to change their fortunes, and let them start again. Darius slowly poured oil from the goatskin into a snow leopard’s head. All around them, the fir pole scaffoldings of market stalls were being erected. They looked at each other.
‘Give me your hand,’ said Darius.
Nat’s eyes misted over. He was deeply moved that Darius should choose this very moment to solemnise their friendship.
‘With all my heart,’ he replied, and held out his hand.
To Nat’s surprise, however, Darius seized his elbow, dunked his hand in a snow leopard’s skull, then raised it high for everyone to see how it was gloved in fresh, black and shining oil. Then, Darius, the prolix poet and grand speechifier, spoke the most powerful and eloquent speech of his whole life - and it was only one word long. His strong, clear voice boomed across the maidan:
‘Oil!’
29
Word spread. Tea rooms emptied. Venerable merchants, who hadn’t run in years, nor slept since last night’s crazed, hopeless hunt for oil outside the city gates, came running across the square. Nat tilted a snow leopard’s brim to let these panting merchants glimpse the purity of their wares.
‘Behold, the finest oil known to man!’ declared Darius, as they swarmed round. ‘No tarry sludge but pure oil from a secret reserve kept by ancient Zoroastrians for their pagan fire-worship rites!’
The first lot was sold for two gold tomans, about one hundred abbassi. But Darius would not sell the second lot until he had entered the first sale in his calfskin book. Only Nat could see that Darius wasn’t writing anything at all but only pretending to enter the sale in his ledger, all the better to get the merchants slathering at the mouth. At last he closed his little book and announced:
‘The bidding for the next jar begins at the closing price of the last.’ The merchants shouted curses and insults. Darius promptly closed the book and stood there, eyebrows raised. The merchants fell silent. He nodded and opened his book again. Immediately, new bids were cried out, to which he theatrically cupped now one ear then the other.
‘Two gold tomans and twenty-five abbassi!’ shouted a merchant.
‘Two gold tomans and fifty!’ cried another.
‘And fifty-five!’
‘And sixty!’
‘Sold!’
Once again Darius took an age pretending to enter the sale in his book, once again he announced that that starting price was the closing price of the last lot. Again the heckles, again the shut book, again the raised eyebrows, again the abashed silence, and once again the book was reopened and outcry bidding erupted.
Nat feasted his eyes on Darius at work. What a tragedy if Darius had never known this hour! He was born for this role. This was him: standing on a step, balding velvet coat buttoned over his podgy belly, lording it over the merchants, beating them at their own game, teaching them how much money they stood to lose if the game were not rigged, reminding them never to let the poor man pitch his talents equally against theirs or else they’d be poorer than he! No-one else but Darius could have rinsed more gold tomans from these merchants’ purses. He was excellent at this. He was as unbudgeable as the solid tar of his hair. No matter how high the bids, he refused even to consider selling all his oil at once. Vast sums he waved away with a waggle of his fingers, flicking their offers back in their face. It drove the merchants livid, but they weren’t going anywhere. In between taking the merchants’ money, and pouring more oil into ceramic snow leopards, he feasted his eyes on Darius, and marvelled that the two of them created all this clamour and hubbub by their own labours, their own visions and dreams. They had defeated the odds.
The last lot of oil was sold, and the auction came to an end. Unsuccessful merchants, who had failed to purchase any of that morning’s oil, went away darkly muttering that if Shah Abbas couldn’t stop the Turk attacking the Baku oil convoys, upon which all commerce depended, then a quick war was needed.
The sky darkened. The Zagros Mountains slipped away behind a grey mist without anyone noticing. Charcoal clouds smudged the sky. It began to drizzle and then to rain.
Nat and Darius gathered their slough of empty, oily goatskins, and walked away, leaving a black stain on the steps of the stone bleachers.
The Trade Secret Page 12