The Trade Secret

by Robert Newman

  Yes, he sees him doing it now. Ha! Ha! That’s right! Nat could never pass the bottle without first smearing it with his filthy paw. But it was his way of doing this that was rare. Not only was befouling the bottle’s mouth the right and proper thing to do, it had to be done thoroughly. Nat would first wipe his hands on his seamy breeches, or on the mule’s sweat-flecked flanks, or even once on a tuft of grass littered with sheep droppings. Then, with a show of great scruple, he would besmirch the bottle’s mouth, wanting his friend to appreciate the pains he was taking. Darius hears his own chuckle echo in the leather bottle’s neck. As his chuckle dies away he hears quite another sound. A buzzing. He looks upriver. A dead goat, buzzing with a flotilla of flies, drifts placidly out from behind the reed bed.

  Darius shrieks and upends the bottle, pouring the contaminated water out onto the bank.

  ‘None of that at any time at all!’

  It strikes him how, but for that memory of Nat coming to him when it did, he’d have drunk the water poisoned by that raft of death. Memory saved his life.

  Directly below him, a clump of rushes snags the goat’s stiff legs. The dead goat nudges the bank. Darius throws an arm across his mouth and nose against the rankest stench he has ever known. To inhale might prove fatal. He scrambles up to the top of the bank and turns round. The rushes snap and crack one by one, releasing the carrion downstream.

  If this carcass follows the same route that he and Nat’s goatskin raft once took and slides into the city, it will poison Isfahan’s water. People will sicken and die. He casts a look round at the empty plain, but there is no sign of anyone who can take his place. He must go down into the pit of death himself. His eyes sting and smart with the injustice of it all.

  ‘Oh, how easy it would have been for me never to have seen this dead goat at all! It must be ten days dead by the high stench of it. Dead of the goat plague too.’

  He unwinds his turban from his head and winds its beige linen around his nose and mouth. He takes his shirt and sandals off, then climbs down the steep grassy bank, and backs into the cold river.

  The riverbed shelves steeply, and he is immediately chest-deep in water. He swims to the fetid carcass which the fast-flowing, deep middle of the river bears along. Up close to the evil stench, he barely has time to lift the mask from his mouth before he vomits into the water. He paddles his hand around to disperse the spooling strands of sick. Wrapping the facemask over nose and mouth again, he swims upwind and upstream of the goat’s carcass, grabs its horns, and clamps its soggy flanks between his thighs. Once he has the goat’s body in this leg-lock, he lets go of the horns, and strikes out for the bank. With every stroke, his heavy breathing sucks in the facemask, and ghostly goat horns butt his behind.

  He swims from sunlight into the steep bank’s cold shade, where he stands in the slimy toe-sucking silt. He presses goat to bank with both hands. It takes all his strength just to pinion her weight against the bank, let alone lift her. He looks up. The riverbank looms as high and sheer as a cliff face. His facemask slips and falls. As he jerks out a hand to catch it, disaster strikes.

  What happens next is so horrific that for several seconds he simply cannot comprehend the event. Somehow the heavy goat slithers into his arms, her bony forelegs clamp him in an embrace, and her mouth dabs his lips. Her lips part to reveal reeking yellow teeth. Her wispy white beard wipes his chin. He screams in the goat’s face. Her weight buckles his knees. The only way out of her clutches is down. He sinks underwater, where he grabs her hind legs in one hand and her forelegs in the other, and surfaces with the heavy carcass across his shoulders.

  Like a shepherd carrying a stranded goat out of a snowdrift, he digs his toes into the bank and, little by little, scales the bank, falling to his knees every few steps, until he cannot get off his knees. He does not have the strength to carry the dead goat on his shoulders all the way to the top of the bank. He’s nearly there, but spent.

  He dumps her down, and a tide of filthy water surges from her mouth. He lies panting, sprawled on the incline just below the carcass. With his last reserves of strength, he begins to wrestle and shunt the dead goat uphill, hoping nothing falls off. Between heaving gasps, he bellows in fury. Slowly, slowly, the goat begins to rise up over the brow of the riverbank. He has done it! Almost there! The dead goat rolls back and a hoof clouts him on the temple. He punches her on the beard, and slips onto his side. He lies on his back, wearing sashes of algae and goat fur, his hair braided with bindweed, and laughs a helpless, defeated laugh.

  17

  The Sea and Sky had just come in. The rooftop pergola was a single dome of blue and green striped carnations. Bathed in the dome’s blue-green light, Atash Zarafshani was cutting and bundling bunches of carnations, while Roshanak and Gol were away in the bazardeh selling an early batch. Harvesting the Sea and Sky, the unique hybrid he’d bred himself, was usually a happy event, but the sad tune Gol hummed this morning was on his brain, and worked its way into the rhythm of the cutting, the bundling, the stacking.

  Since Mani’s death, she’d only ever sing or strum sad songs. From up on the roof, he couldn’t actually make out the words of this morning’s dirge, but guilt filled in the gaps. In the same way that Darius once convinced himself that Nat was performing a Dance of Welcome For A New Boat, so Atash persuaded himself the song Gol sang was Lament For The Lack Of A Proper Father. That’s what he heard in the song, and it was ruining his day, and ruining the happy harvest of his only success, the one thing he’d been able to make a go of since that powder magazine exploded in his face: the Sea and Sky carnations.

  A dove came in. Atash left off bundling a batch of Sea and Sky to reach into the dovecot and remove its message. The patch of yellow silk fluttered between his scaly thumbs. When he saw to whom the message was sent he was astounded. It was addressed to the very last person he expected ever to receive a message by carrier pigeon. It was addressed to himself.

  Esteemed Atash Zarafshani,

  Let it be enough for wagging tongues that Shah Abbas’s own royal ambassador hereby vouchsafes the good name of your daughter’s suitor. A sigheh alleged against Darius Nouredini is a certain falsehood perpetrated by malicious matchmakers. He was not foresworn. His name is worthy even of that most rare and precious of daughters, Gol Zarafshani.

  May I, old friend, who have grievously failed in my embassy, yet succeed in this humble suit. Inshalla,

  Hoseyn Ali Beg.

  Lisbon.

  Here was a message that had sailed from Lisbon around the tip of Africa to Ormuz, and flown by dove relay to his hand. Yet it had still to reach Gol. Atash realised at once how this yellow silk could mend her broken heart, and change her life. She thought that love was only death (Mani) or betrayal (Darius). Atash’s heart burst with excitement to think of the good news he could bring her. Love wasn’t just death and betrayal at all! It was only death! He couldn’t wait to tell her. A letter that had travelled over vast distances of sea and sky must not get stuck under the imitation Sea and Sky before reaching Gol. Atash had not left the house in daylight hours for years, but now he must.

  He went downstairs and squared his shoulders before the front door, a blackthorn walking stick in his hand. And there he remained. His courage failed him as he listened to the voices in the street, and thought of all the streets he would have to walk to reach Gol. The bazardeh was way over on the other side of the city. The unpaved streets were not so smooth and flat as the roof tiles – and he fell over enough at home as it was. If it was raining or cold he could have worn a floppy hood to stop people staring, but the day was hot. Why not wait until night when his daughter would return? he asked himself. She’d waited long enough. He leant his bumpy forehead against the door.

  If Gol had only grieved a day or two he could have waited a few hours before giving her this message, but because she had grieved for month after month after month, he couldn’t bear that she should suffer one minute more than she had to. Here at last was something he could do fo
r her. He took a deep breath, put his good hand to the door-handle, and pushed. The stiff front door described a quarter-circle in the dirt as its lowest corner dragged over the ground.

  Atash walked further from the house in the next hour than he had in the past ten years, banging his blackthorn stick on the ground. He had not thought it was so hot a day when he set out. Or had he simply forgotten that it was hotter at ground level than up on a roof? Sweat seeped from his hairline and coursed over his numb face. He could only feel the sweat when warm drops, fat as summer rain, tapped his unburnt chin, collar bone or trickled down his one ear lobe.

  He came to a bridge he did not recognise. Perhaps it was new. At the far end of the bridge was a tavern, its windows and shutters all open. A dozen pairs of eyes in the gloom seemed to be staring at him. Idle drunkards. Opium eaters.

  The faded stripy rag over the tavern door disgorged a few drunks onto the bridge right in his path. Three men shouted at him. Mockery had found its meat. But God would protect a father venturing to lift his daughter from sorrow.

  He quickened his pace, buckled and fell. His stick clattered to the ground. He lay on his back, squinting against the sunlight, groping for his stick. Three heads appeared above him, crowding out the sun, three petals around the sun’s yellow stamen. Three exceedingly odd petals. Atash blinked the sweat from his eyes and focused on the three faces. One petal lacked a jaw, one had bullet-flecked cheeks of subcutaneous buckshot, and the third was disfigured by a star-shaped powder burn.

  The three odd petals helped Atash to his feet, handed him his stick, and led him into the tavern, where almost every man turned out to be a wounded, disfigured or damaged war veteran. When Atash told them his pressing hurry to pass an important message to his daughter, the stocky one with the bullet-flecked cheeks, who turned out to be the tavern-owner, whistled for his son, and sent him to deliver the message to Gol in the bazardeh.

  A glass of mint tea on a brass tray was handed to Atash. Golden light, reflected from the river, percolated through the coloured glass of dormant lanterns and empty bottles suspended from the tavern’s ceiling. A few musicians were rehearsing in a corner, but sweeter than music came the sound of something he had sorely missed: political gossip.

  The whole tavern was alive with the rumour that the Turkish commander-in-chief Cigala had been spooked by reports that Persian spies, a mountain scouting party, had sent Allahvirdi Khan his battle-plans by way of messenger pigeon, and so the Turks had camped on the plain at Ezurum for months, too scared to move, paralysed with indecision, until the Persians swept onto the plain and crushed them.

  Atash leaned back against the wall. From the corner a one-legged flautist played a sweet, bright trill. His daughter’s songs were so uniformly sad that he had almost forgotten that music could be happy at all. But perhaps that little strip of pale yellow silk he had sent her with the tavern-keeper’s boy would change all that.

  18

  Why do you need a note from some ambassador before you decide to trust him?’ demanded Kulsum Nouredini, Darius’s grandmother. ‘You spend eighteen months thinking him a liar, then, on a stranger’s say-so, you don’t! Why wasn’t Darius’s word good enough for you all along? Have you so little idea of him? No eyes or ears in your head to know what little store to set by any words that come from the lying mouth of that mother of his?’

  ‘How is he?’ Gol asked.

  ‘You are not his only sorrow, Gol Zarafshani,’ Kulsum replied, shaking hay out into the cribs. ‘He suffers for his friend. He grieves over what happened to Nat-jan.’

  Gol stared at a hoof print in the dirt, while Kulsum described how Darius had stood by a burnt-black tree and watched the Embassy depart, and had seen Nat-jan battered and bruised, his doublet slashed to ribbons, which meant that Nat’s money from the oil venture had fallen into Antonio Mirza’s hands.

  ‘Darius grieves as much from this injustice as from your bad faith. In fact, the one compounds the other, since you were not there to comfort and console him. And I’ll tell you one last thing, Gol Zarafshani. If by your lack of faith you’ve lost your chance to marry such a man as Darius Nouredini then you have your punishment already, and there an end!’

  And with that Kulsum blew her white fringe from her eyes, shooed her away like a cloud of midges, and went to fetch more hay.

  A few hours later, Gol found the blackened tree trunk Kulsum had described - or at least what was left of it. For the wind, despising all dead things, had snapped the trunk in two. The top half hung down to the ground, forming a triangle with the earth.

  Gol sat with her back against the charred tree plucking her tanbur. Here she was at another of Darius’s haunts, just like yesterday when she went in search of his old bookstall. Not only was it not there anymore, there was not the slightest trace of its ever having existed. The narrow booth had been subsumed either by the tinsmiths on one side or the coppersmiths on the other, it was impossible to tell which, so completely had it been obliterated - as if her memory of Darius in the stall was the memory of a dream.

  She would stop haunting the old places of Mani and Darius. She would begin living again. She listened to the river puttering invisibly beneath the steep bank, and it suggested a key and a tune. A song landed in the palm of her hand like a ripe apple. She called the song The Haunt. As she sang it for the first time, the chord changes and the melody were so inevitable that she felt she was singing a famous old song, as if it had always existed, and not just been born this second.

  I will not be a ghost when I die,

  I haunted too much when alive

  all the old places we used to go.

  no ghost life for me

  when I am dead

  if you see a ghost,

  in the shape of your clothes

  at the foot of your bed,

  or your misty shaving mirror,

  if you hear one moaning by our old tree,

  it won’t be me,

  when I die I’m done with haunting

  when I die.

  She hears an animal grunt nearby and peers round the snapped triangular trunk of the blackened tree. A goat lifts its head above the grassy riverbank’s ridge. The goat must have fallen into the water and is now struggling to clamber up the steep bank. A hoof digs into the grass, slips and the goat slides back down the bank. As it does so, its howl of frustration sounds strangely like a man’s. Then the goat makes an even more astonishing noise: it laughs!

  She creeps towards the riverbank. What she sees next fills her with horror. A savage barbarian slams the goat’s head on the bank over and over again. He wears a tribal headdress of reeds and bindweed. His hairy chest and stomach are streaked with algae, mud and goat fur. Welts and whorls scar his back. A rampaging madman murdering all in his path? An escaped prisoner killing his supper with his bare hands?

  She runs back behind the snapped black trunk, and squats behind its widest part. Her heart thumps in her chest. She peeks out. Goat and barbarian are wrestling. The wounded goat is fighting off the barbarian. Together they roll out of sight and down the riverbank.

  Silence follows. Has a kick from the goat knocked the barbarian out? Or has barbarian vanquished goat? She holds her breath. The barbarian emerges above the top of the bank, dragging the dead goat in a headlock.

  Gol pulls in her head and presses herself up against the trunk. She draws in her elbows tight beneath her ribs, willing herself to become one with the dead tree. But then to her horror she notices her tanbur lying in plain view. She reaches out a hand and snatches the bag behind the black tree. She listens. It is the silence, the immaculate silence, which tells her she has been detected. The barbarian has seen her.

  She looks to the horizon measuring the distance she has to sprint. She sets down her bag. She will leave everything behind. She must sacrifice belongings for speed. She balances on her toes, coiled and ready to spring. She takes a deep breath, and flinches at the sound of the barbarian’s voice.

  ‘Gol, Gol,’ he calls. �
�Help me! I can’t move this goat by myself. She’s slipping!’

  She runs to the lip of the muddy bank and looks down.

  Darius and the flyblown rotten carcass are slithering through the long grasses back down towards the river’s reeds. She drops to her belly, crawls headlong down the bank and grabs a goat leg, halting the slide just before it hits the water.

  ‘Thank you,’ croaks Darius, a bullfrog among the reeds.

  They hang, one above, one below the carcass. Then, Gol pulling and Darius pushing, they heave the dead goat up the bank onto the flat, where each grabs a hind leg, and together they haul the carcass away from the riverbank.

  Dumping the bloated beast, they stagger a few steps, fall to their knees and vomit in chorus. They wipe their hands and faces with tussocks of grass. They run, holding their filthy, sticky arms away from their bodies, towards a bend in the river, upstream from contamination.

  The bank is shallower here. They wade in and submerge themselves in the crystal-clear, sunlit water.

  Gol swims upstream on her back, looking up at the white clouds and the azure sky. She feels the touch of his palm under her shoulders and then, like the nudge of a fish, under the backs of her thighs. Very slowly he glides her round in the sunlit water. Her ears are underwater, and so when he speaks she can hear the deep watery echo of his voice but not what he is saying. His lips are cold and soft when they touch hers. His warm mouth tastes of pondweed. His touch leaves her.

  She opens her eyes, and swims on her back, steering by clouds. When she rolls over, he is nowhere to be seen. She swims round and round in a circle. No Darius. She swims to the bend in the river and finds a hairy starfish floating on his back. She wades towards him and places one hand between his shoulder blades and the other under his knees to buoy him up in the sunlit water. She spins him slowly round and round, the crown of his head bowing the current, the river peeling reeds and slime and goat-fur from his hairy chest and smooth shoulders, revealing the scars earned in the oil well under the Fire Temple of Mithras. She kisses his cold lips. His arms enfold her and they tumble over each other like otters at play.