The Trade Secret Read online

  ‘What will you use when the oil runs out?’ asked Nat.

  ‘Thorn!’

  ‘When does the next Baku oil convoy arrive?’ asked Nat.

  ‘Nobody knows. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Next month. But I know of oil springs only a few days ride from here where you can get oil as simply as filling a bottle at a fountain.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Temple of Mithras,’ replied Darius. ‘An old pagan shrine of Zoroastrian fire-worshippers in Masjid-i Suleiman. My father took me there when I was a boy, before it became Ottoman territory. Any merchant who takes a dozen mules there and back before the Baku convoy arrives will be rich.’

  ‘But it’s Turkish oil,’ said Nat.

  ‘The Turks don’t use oil any more than you Franks do. The oil is there for the taking. But to make money you need money. I’ve asked a few merchants to invest, but they said that the pagan fire-towers had all been extinguished and capped by the mullahs.’

  ‘Have they?’

  ‘Yes, but think for a moment. Eternal fire must be fed by eternal oil.’

  ‘But if the oil is buried like coal in a mine, then you’ll need miners and mining equipment, and that’ll cost more than you’d ever earn from the oil.’

  ‘You can no more bury oil than you can bury an acorn. It must rise. It seeps up everywhere.’

  ‘I have seen it! For on our way here, we passed through a valley of pitch between Hit and Falluja where the oil comes boiling out of the ground incessantly and black smoke pours into the sky forever and ever and ever.’

  Awestruck, Darius looked at his visitor in a whole new way.

  ‘You have been to the Doors of Hell,’ he said. ‘That’s what we call Hit’s valley of pitch. What’s it like?’

  ‘A heaving swamp of tar under a noonday sky as black as night. One man stepped on a dark patch of pebbles and the oil bog closed upon him. A moment later there was no sign of him, just this tar pit bubbling away under the smoky sky. Then, one of the boiling ponds erupted, shooting rocks and petroleum into the sky. Sir Anthony Sherley, my master, and the gentlemen ran for cover, but commanded the rest of us to rescue the baggage while hot rocks and gravel rained down on our heads.’

  ‘The Temple of Mithras’s oil springs aren’t like that,’ said Darius. He pushed his scrappy brown turban back on his head, exposing tumbling black hair. ‘There, the rock oil plays like a fountain. You’d just have to fill a few urns, I tell you, to come back a rich man. Oh, it is agony to have the solution to the whole city’s crisis when you cannot put it into practice! It is agony to watch a fortune slip away! I wish the next Baku oil convoy would arrive today! At least then I’ll no longer have to suffer my brilliant idea withering on the vine, because the moment will have passed. Come, let’s go and see if there’s any news of the convoy.’

  It was a simple business to close the stall, merely dropping a black cloth over the front, and this very simplicity left Nat agog. This was what it meant to be an independent artisan with a stall of your own. Just flip down a cloth and leave when you like!

  Nat and Darius emerged from the darkened bazaar onto the maidan. Stepping round stacks of melons and pomegranates, they passed an old woman just as she was spitting on the floor. Darius jerked his head as if she’d spat in his face.

  ‘None of that at any time at all,’ he muttered.

  They had not gone much further before he put his hands over his eyes and stood stock still. An Uzbeg war veteran missing an eye walked by. It was a few moments before Darius deemed it safe to open his eyes again.

  As they walked along, Nat stole a few glances at his curious new friend. Half the sights and sounds of the world seemed to put Darius quite beside himself, as if he had a skin too few. His soul and body, it seemed to Nat, were oil and water that did not mix. With his blunt jaw and broad shoulders, Darius had the body of a burly wrestler, into which frame had been poured the fine, sensitive soul of a poet. His splayfooted, galumphing walk was the poet giving a piggy back to the wrestler and struggling with the burden. His strong chin did not suggest resolve, nor his broad shoulders capability. They only made his lack of these virtues look calamitous, as if he did not know how to steer the big ship he found himself piloting. But when he spoke, his voice was a strong, assured oboe, softly honking in the roof of his mouth: ‘Bring oil to Isfahan before the Baku convoy does and you will make your fortune. But here’s where we’ll find out when the convoy will come.’

  Nat was confused. He thought they were going somewhere they could hear the news, but instead Darius brought him to a poultry fair. Boxes of doves were stacked as high as a man. The birds’ cumulative cooing, burbling and trilling made such a tremendous noise that he had to raise his voice to ask Darius why he had brought him to this pet shop when what he wanted was news.

  What Darius said next so astounded Nat that he began to wonder whether all those pamphlets he’d dismissed as ‘traveller’s tales’ might have been true after all. Maybe Walter Raleigh wasn’t lying about the Amazonian men whose head grew in the middle of their chests. Perhaps there really were winged horses in Guiana. There were certainly winged messengers here. For what Nat was looking at, Darius now explained, was the hub of a complex communications network that spanned an empire. Three thousand dovecots ringed Isfahan alone, sending and receiving information to and from distant cities, ports, ships at sea and generals in the field, and, with a bit of luck, the Baku oil convoy.

  ‘Messages looped under the wings of doves hold the empire together,’ said Darius. ‘All the news comes here. The price of cloth of Khormanshah, the husband’s apology to his wife, and the -.’

  He broke off, and stared with his mouth wide open. Nat followed his gaze to a tall, gawky, raven-haired young woman approaching the pigeon stand. She handed a box of birds to the owner of the pigeon-post stand, together with a scrap of silk covered in tiny script for which she received a few brass coins. The woman then shouldered her stripy cotton bag, from which the headstock of a kind of lute or fiddle was showing, and turned to go.

  ‘Gol,’ whispered Darius. ‘My beloved. Perhaps this is a sign that now is the time! I shall speak my heart! I shall tell my love! Farewell, Nat!’ And with an air of great moment, he hurried after her, the oil quite forgot.

  From a distance Nat watched Darius and Gol greet each other. They gabbled away, not with the clotted awkwardness of lovers, but the easy familiarity of friends. Far from declaring his love, whatever he was saying was making her smile and laugh. If that girl was Darius’s beloved, she didn’t know it. How could she, when he lacked the courage to tell her? His gestures as he spoke to her had all the empty bombast of a tumbril-stage player in a town square mystery play. Well, no doubt you could find a thousand things to say if you never said the one thing worth saying.

  Watching Darius and Gol walk off together, Nat was seized by a terrible loneliness. Giving a servant a day off was like giving a sailor a horse, he thought. What was he to do with a day off? But there across the maidan was Ali Qapu palace, its tall stilted veranda a cobra’s maw, the mirrored columns glistening teeth, ready to devour his time and thought and life and sweat. Instead of climbing back inside that cobra’s mouth, he put off his return and loitered by the sarrafi.

  The moneychangers’ stalls were crowded. Travellers who were planning to leave with the Ottoman Embassy’s caravan were changing abbassi to dinars. Voices were raised in a hubbub of business. Scales swung like jib-cranes, coins rose and fell. And the sarrafi were still out of kilter with each other on Spanish ducats.

  Nat had six dollars Anthony didn’t know about. What if he parlayed these half dozen dollars into a couple more that were his and his alone? He came upon a currency merchant who was offering to exchange lion dollars for ducats at one to two. For a moment he hesitated, but then he remembered Robert Sherley’s words: ‘Why, Master Bramble, he recovers,’ and that decided him. Worse than struggling against temptation was the prospect of no temptation to struggle against. The chance might never come again
.

  He unbuckled the hawking belt. He exchanged all three-hundred and six lion dollars into six-hundred and twelve Spanish ducats. Once filled with so much Spanish coin, the belt weighed heavy on his hips as he marched down to the other end of the bleachers.

  His luck was in. He found a sarrafi buying ducats for dollars at one to one. He unslung his belt and was just about to convert his six-hundred and twelve ducats into as many leeuwen daalder, when eight roughriders burst into the maidan from a nearby entrance. The shouting horsemen came galloping straight towards him. Nat clutched the hawking belt to his chest. They spurred their horses into a charge and bore down on him. He dived into the gap between two sarrafi stalls. The roughriders missed him narrowly. He expected them to wheel and come at him again, but by the time he dared raise his head, he found they had dismounted at the far end of the bleachers, ordered tea from the tea-caddies and were talking to a couple of older currency merchants.

  The horsemen’s arrival spooked the sarrafi, who refused to transact any more business of the day. And so Nat buckled the bulging hawking belt hard against his hips, and hurried back across the maidan. He could wait one more day to become a rich man. He would change the money tomorrow, as soon as he could get away.

  Nat returned to Ali Qapu Palace. Behind the onion-shaped double-doors, the Shah’s personal physicians were, he was told, by Anthony’s bedside. Back in the servants’ quarters, Nat turned in for the night. He pulled his blanket over him and clutched the money to his belly. Tomorrow these ducats would be dollars. Tomorrow he would hand Sir Anthony three hundred and three lion dollars. And keep all the rest! This was the making of him. He wouldn’t always be a servant. One day he would be a merchant. His eyelids felt as heavy as the pennies on a dead man’s eyes, and soon he was asleep.

  5

  One hundred!’ exclaimed Nat. ‘But this is six-hundred and twelve silver ducats here.’

  ‘It’s the best price you’ll get,’ said the sarrafi, half of whose teeth were silver. ‘The Spanish have landed two ships full of silver at Ormuz.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘The chopars. They came in last night.’

  ‘Chopars?’ asked Nat.

  ‘They are the Shah’s couriers.’

  ‘The horsemen with white sashes?’

  ‘Yes, they brought the news. They overtook the Ormuz caravan only yesterday. Tomorrow all that Spanish loot comes here, and so everyone is dumping all their ducats as quick as they can.’

  ‘But silver is silver. It is the same metal as it always was.’

  ‘My friend, I don’t want to melt it down to make a sword or a cup. I’m not a silversmith, I’m a sarrafi. And one hundred is the best price you will find anywhere today.’

  ‘We shall see about that,’ said Nat. But the next stall he came to offered only fifty leuwe daalder for his ducats, and the one after that wouldn’t buy his Spanish coins at any price. So Nat returned to the first moneychanger. One hundred lion dollars were poured into the hawking bag, and he wandered away from the stall, dazed and grief-stricken. One part of his brain knew that his life was over and yet still his legs moved as he put one foot in front of the other, and still his ribcage rose and fell with every breath, and still he kept searching the currency exchange, long after he knew that he was never going to find any money merchant offering more than a hundred lion dollars. Once he gave up his search he would have to think about what happened next.

  Into his mind there stole a memory from England, from the early days of the Datchworth famine. He remembered foraging for edible roots with a boy who died. Nat covered his body with his coat and found the boy’s mother a few fields away. She must have guessed what news he brought, for she no sooner saw him coming than she dropped her spade and ran away. There she was, a grown woman, running from a boy. Boy that he was, he gave chase for a few paces, then stopped, for he suddenly understood that she was running away from the moment when she would be told her son was dead. For so long as she ran across the barren field, she could believe, in one part of her mind at least, that the truths of a few moments ago still held. So long as Nat hung around the sarrafi he could convince himself that his own life was not over.

  He stayed by the moneychangers all day, until the setting sun tinted the scales red, and the lamps were lit. The oil dearth had reduced even the rich sarrafi to the use of inferior naphtha in their lanterns. Black smoke plumed from the sarrafi’s cressets. The Doors of Hell were here.

  ‘I am lost,’ he told himself

  Alone, he wandered the vast maidan. The biggest city square in the world now seemed to him a wilderness, a windy plain far from any human habitation. He was cold, hungry and tired. He passed a mosque, a synagogue, he sat in a cathedral, but the Armenians cast suspicious looks upon him, and so he left. There was nowhere in this whole city where he could rest. He found it hard to breathe. He pulled off his neckerchief and undid the hooks of his doublet. There was nowhere for him left on earth. He sought out Darius in the bazaar.

  6

  Are these chopars really King’s Messengers?’

  ‘Yes, they are,’ replied Darius.

  ‘But they look like brigands!’

  ‘They are brigands, too. Ha ha! In the Shah’s name they are authorized to commandeer any man’s horse to expedite the mail. That’s the official function. But they are horse-thieves first and envoys second.’

  ‘Then how can anyone trust the news these bandits bring?’

  ‘What news? News about the Baku convoy? Is the oil coming?

  ‘They’re saying a ship full of Spanish silver has come in at Ormuz,’ wailed Nat.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I have lost most of my master’s money! What am I going to do now?’

  ‘Oh, that is a heavy blow,’ said Darius. ‘Sit here! Sit down, yes, that’s good. Don’t worry, I can stand. Indeed I am sorry that such bad luck has hit you. But don’t worry about this stolen silver, my friend.’

  Nat cut him a look. How did he know?

  ‘Stolen?’

  ‘The Spanish steal their silver from the New World,’ replied Darius equably. ‘They have minted so many coins from their plunder that they have destroyed currencies all along the Silk Road from here to China.’

  ‘But silver is silver,’ said Nat.

  ‘Too much and it’s as cheap as tin.’

  ‘But it’s not tin, it’s silver. There is the same amount in Isfahan today as there was yesterday, so why has the price changed? Why are Spanish ducats worth not one third of what they were worth yesterday on a few horse-thieves say so? Oh, I am in hell! What shall I do?’

  ‘You were not to know. Your master will understand that you’re not to blame for a caravan of Spanish loot arriving in Ormuz or here. Even the most experienced and venerable money changers could lose money to a sudden swarm of Spanish silver.’

  Nat stuffed both hands into the hawking belt’s meat pockets then scattered two fistfuls of silver ducats on the display table’s black velvet.

  ‘I happen to have saved this many coins from my wages. Let’s set out for that pagan oil well. The Temple of Mithras.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Darius. ‘It’s too late.’

  ‘Come on, I believe in your plan! Have the chopars said anything about a Baku oil convoy? No! No! We can bring back oil while the price is high and split the profits!’

  ‘The moment has gone. It’s too late now.’

  ‘Too late? No, come on! Here, take it, invest it, let us leave at once, tonight or at first light!’

  Darius stared hard at Nat.

  ‘If you have all this money,’ he asked, ‘then why do you even need to attempt such a venture?’

  Silence fell. Both men were still.

  ‘I was speculating with my master’s money,’ Nat confessed, ‘in the hope of earning myself a little profit. I had no authority to change the money into Spanish silver.’

  ‘If the money is not yours then you have no right to try to drag me into your villainy. You are a man w
ithout honour!’

  Nat scraped the ducats back into the hawking belt, buckled the meat pocket, and looked up.

  ‘And what about you, Darius? You will never dare do anything in your whole life. You are all talk, all mouth. I saw you with Gol, I watched you with the woman you call your sweetheart. Sweetheart? Ha! Can you not see how your Gol sees you? You’re her pet eunuch. You will never tell Gol you love her, never, not until you are eighty. You’ll be an old man before your faint heart dare speak, and only then because your aged wits grow so feeble that you forget the fear in which you have wasted your little, little life, living only for independence!’

  He left the stall with such speed that he heard the illuminated sheets flapping in his wake. As he searched for a way out of the dark labyrinth of the half-empty bazaar he feared that that, having lost his way in these dim passageways, he would stumble past Darius’s stall again. But soon he was standing outside the bazaar in the night and staring across the maidan at Ali Qapu Palace. Now he had to face his fate.

  All the way across the vast square he hoped for some accident to befall him. If only a runaway bullock cart would knock him spark out, then he could tell Sir Anthony that cutpurses had snatched the lion dollars. Everyone would pity him. If only a troop of horse-backed brigands would stab him and steal the hawking belt in full view of the palace guards.

  With heavy tread, he climbed the narrow winding stairs to the second floor lobby. Robert Sherley stood outside the sealed double doors with Marshal, Parry and Pincon. Marshal laid a hand on Robert’s shoulder. There were tears in Robert’s eyes. New hope flared in Nat. Perhaps Anthony was dead!

  ‘How does my master?’ Nat asked.

  ‘He mends,’ replied Robert Sherley. ‘He will be well again, after all! So we shall not be left here without him, God be praised!’