The Trade Secret Page 4

  ‘Don’t worry, you won’t have to do anything,’ said Masghoud. ‘In fact if you do I’ll kill you.’

  This was greeted by much laughter. Darius’s mother placed a hand upon her copper pendants, and shook her finger at the rascally Masghoud.

  ‘How can you ask your own son,’ Darius asked his mother, ‘to commit a crime against his very soul?’

  ‘Just because you can read,’ snapped Leila, ‘you think you are better than everyone else. A sigheh is just a formality. It doesn’t mean anything, and it is really nothing to do with you. You only have to stand there for an hour, just like the hangman’s horse, while the mullah performs the ceremony.’

  The hangman’s horse has no inkling that a death sentence has been read out, but Darius knew a death sentence when he heard one. It was the death of who he was, of all he ever hoped to be.

  ‘Just as your zinc-lined jugs will never be clean again,’ he told them, ‘if I marry for a day then neither will my soul ever be clean again.’

  ‘No,’ said his mother, ‘your soul will be cleansed by having helped your family for once.’

  Home was the place where Darius hardly knew himself. When he wasn’t in this airless cavern he could clearly describe the full horror of this violation, but here he lost all his powers of persuasion. Even when he did place a solid gold argument in the family’s crooked scales it somehow carried less weight than his mother’s brassy rebuttal.

  ‘You say the oil-mining tools are Masghoud’s by right of marriage,’ he said, ‘even as you seek to defile the estate of marriage in the eyes of God and man!’

  ‘Would you have Masghoud’s sister live in sin?’ she demanded.

  ‘Good point, Leila,’ said Masghoud.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pahnave. ‘That’s told you, Darius. Now do you understand?’

  His head spun. He felt sick. If they had their way, he would never be able to present himself as a proper husband to Gol, because on Darius’s wedding day the mullah would have to tell all the guests that he had been married once before. What gave Darius’s life meaning was his vision of true love. This, and not a love of metre or cadence, was why he had committed whole passages of Rumi to memory. He had done so in the wish that he would one day live and feel like the poet of Like This. But he needed his dead father’s oil-mining gear, and so once more he tried to get the storeroom key.

  ‘I’ll pay you twenty shahidi,’ he suggested to howls of derision.

  ‘Where will you ever get twenty shahidi from?’ retorted Masghoud, his stepfather.

  ‘From this oil venture,’ replied Darius.

  ‘Some things are more important than money, Darius,’ said his mother. ‘If you do your duty with this sigheh then your aunt will be able to return to respectable married life!’

  ‘Twenty shahidi in advance.’

  ‘Not if they were twenty solid silver abbassi,’ she said, folding her arms.

  Suddenly Nat broke in on the conversation.

  ‘How about twenty-five, then?’ He poured twenty-five solid-silver abbassi on the worktop.

  ‘Give him the key, Masghoud,’ said Darius’s mother.

  Together, Darius and Nat piled the old oil-mining gear onto a tarpaulin balanced between two broom handles. As they carried the equipment back through the house, Leila said:

  ‘I suppose you’re taking it to the old witch’s barn.’

  ‘We are going to my grandmother’s,’ replied Darius.

  ‘All that big barn,’ complained Pahnave, standing at a steaming dye vat, ‘just for her and a few donkeys and chickens! The selfish old crone!’

  ‘It is far too big for her,’ agreed Masghoud.

  ‘She’s a mean old witch,’ said Leila, ‘and that’s all there is to it. I’ve told her often enough how good this sale would be for the family, but all she thinks of is herself. What can she do with that barn? Nothing! But Masghoud is full of ideas for what we could do with her land. Full of them!’

  The mound of oil-mining gear clanked promisingly as they carried it along the narrow rutted street. They made way for a mule train bearing bundles of desert-thorn.

  ‘Here’s a good omen,’ said Darius. ‘Desert thorn is what everyone’s been forced to use instead of oil.’

  The young drover bringing up the rear of the mule train held his switch in a wooden hand, with which he waved his thanks to Darius for having given way. When the drover was out of earshot, Nat asked,

  ‘Was he a veteran of the Uzbeg war, do you think?’

  ‘Not like that at any time at all,’ hissed Darius, who then performed an odd corkscrew shudder that travelled all the way up and down his spine, and twisted the features of his face.

  They slept that night in his grandmother’s barn.

  9

  The next morning, Darius rose early and went into town. He returned leading two mules and three donkeys, which he’d bought from Bachtiari nomads, and with boots, blankets, gloves and clothes.

  Nat was well pleased with his mule. A strong-looking, sooty buckskin, the height of a good English hack, it had cream circles around its eyes, like the scoops in the chopars’ grimy faces.

  In the shade of a gnarly mulberry tree, whose ancient boughs zigzagged not just side to side but up and down as well, Darius handed Nat his Persian disguise.

  ‘Where does it button?’

  ‘There on the shoulder,’ said Darius.

  ‘The shoulder?’

  ‘Only women wear shirts that fasten at the neck.’ Nat belted a cambric sash around the cotton kameez which hung to the knees of his English breeches.

  Kulsum, Darius’s grandmother, joined them in the shade of the zigzag mulberry. Small, spry and nimble, her high-pitched speech sounded like an adolescent boy’s breaking voice.

  ‘Why the new clothes?’ she asked.

  ‘Nat-jan is in disguise,’ replied Darius, sitting on a bough, ‘so that he’s not spotted by his master.’

  ‘These boots might have been made for me!’ said Nat, stamping about delightedly.

  ‘Mine too,’ said Darius, kicking his new boot heels through the dust. ‘So many soldiers came back from the war with enemy boots that even an Uzbeg captain’s boots like these are cheap.’

  ‘If he’s run away from service,’ Kulsum began, but then broke off abruptly as she caught sight of her dead son’s oil mining gear laid out on a blanket under the mulberry tree. She knelt in the dirt and ran her fingers over the equipment, over wooden-framed packsaddles, panniers, zinc-lined oil tureens, rope ladders, stacked buckets, block and tackle. ‘All these stupid things came back,’ she said at last, ‘and he did not.’

  She unwound a long skein of purple cotton from a hatchet’s blade and ran her finger across the steel. ‘Still sharp after so long. Do you remember any of these things, Darius?’

  ‘The saddlecloth’s fiery stag with the smoking hooves, I remember that.’

  She spread the linen-backed saddlecloth on her lap. Its padded brocade was couched with a fire-breathing beast with hooves of smoke and antlers of fire, but what had once been vivid bronze flames had faded to the pale yellow of old butter.

  ‘Chinese,’ she said. ‘Your father’s love for things from faraway places,’ she said, casting a look at Nat the foreigner. ‘That’s what took him to Baku. That’s what killed him in the end, and why he died so faraway. Your father didn’t want to be an agent for the oil merchants. He wanted to strike out on his own and so he fetched his own oil from Baku, and sold this Azeri oil in the bazaar, from the same stall where your bookstall is now - and that’s why you are by the tinsmiths! On his first trip to Baku, I sent away your father as a boy and he came back a man. But the next trip he went away a young man and came back old.’

  ‘Was that was the trip I went with him on?’ asked Darius piped up.

  Kulsum nodded. Nat’s heart sank to hear what happened to the last man to go with Darius on an oil expedition. Perhaps it wasn’t the road but his son that did for the old man.

  ‘Well, never fear,’
Darius told his grandmother, ‘we’re not going nearly so far as Baku, only to Masjid-i Suleiman. Just a few days there and back. I’ve told Nat-jan all about the oil pools under the fire temples.’

  ‘Be careful, Nat-jan,’ said Kulsum. ‘He sees what he wants to see, hears what he wants to hear.’

  ‘Why didn’t my father take me with him on his last trip? I could have looked after him.’

  ‘He didn’t want you to know how sick he was. He didn’t want you to see him weak and struggling. And he wanted you to be schooled and to study so you wouldn’t have to haul Azeri oil all your life. I told him he was too weak to go, but he wouldn’t listen. I was so angry, I sent him away without my blessing. He died out on the road. Some dervishes buried him with all correct observance. Folk speak ill of the dervish but they buried your father right, remember that. They brought all this metal home, too. I keep friends with the dervishes. I always have victuals and a little drink for them when they pass here on their way up to the mountains. God knows there’s enough people hate them already.’

  ‘When we come back we will be rich, mumuny, rich enough to pay builders to throw up a house beside yours for Gol and I to live in.’

  ‘Oh, my lamb, you do not know where the dream world ends and the real world begins.’

  Over the next hour, she packed their provisions. She filled the young men’s saddle pouches with parcels of cheese, flatbread and dried apricots. She slipped a raw mutton fillet under the saddle of the sooty buckskin. Tenderised under the saddle, she explained, salted and cured by the mule’s sweaty back, this would be safe to eat without cooking should their tinder be lost or soaked, leaving them without the means to make a fire.

  She lit a yard fire and set a bunch of rue to grill. When it began to smoke, she banged the flower heads in her hand. The rue at once disintegrated into ash in her palm. Cupping the pile of ash, she blew these flakes of rue first over Darius’s head and face and then over Nat’s.

  ‘This is the blessing I never gave your father.’ She whispered some lines of Hafiz:

  Smoke of rue guard thee!

  A cloak of honour

  And a saddled steed I send thee,

  Constant comrade of my heart.

  Darius and Nat rode out of the gate and onto the road. Darius led the way on his chestnut mule, towing behind him the three panniered donkeys, looped together by the one long rope, and Nat brought up the rear on his sooty buckskin.

  ‘We’re doing it,’ exclaimed Darius, ‘we’re really doing it!’

  10

  At the maidan, Nat and Darius dismounted and led their convoy past the hessian awnings of market stalls and livestock corrals. Before they saw the prisoner, they heard his screams.

  The zealous red-sashed Qizilbash were parading a youth bound to the back of a mule through the maidan. Stripped to the waist, hands tied behind his back, the young prisoner had two flaming torches sticking out of the tops of his shoulders.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, let the boy die quickly,’ Nat prayed, wondering how deep the Qizilbash must have gouged to make the flaming brands stand up.

  ‘What have you done to him?’ cried a stallholder.

  ‘A thief,’ the captain of the Qizilbash declared. Half in delirium, the youth cried out:

  ‘Help me, brothers! All I took was a little lamp oil and a lamp!’

  Market traders rounded on the Qizilbash:

  ‘A lamp?’ cried one and all. ‘You do this for a little lamp oil and a lamp? This torture for a lamp? A poor pilferer! Look at him! A boy so skinny deserves alms, not fire.’

  ‘What if it had been your lamps?’ retorted the Qizilbash captain sagely. ‘What then?’

  A small object struck the ground with a clank. A tin lamp. A second clank was heard, then a third. One after another, the merchants began throwing lamps and lanterns at the red-fringed boots of the Qizilbash. More and more oil lanterns not worth a man’s life crashed to the ground, some burst into flames on landing.

  The Qizilbash put their hands on their dagger hilts. Once they had been the royal bodyguards - until ousted by the Tofangchi, orphan spawn of foreign slaves - and must they now endure pedlars’ and traders’ scorn? The next second merchants and Qizilbash were at daggers drawn. It looked like there would be blood. But then a hideous cry pierced the air, a cry so extreme that everyone stared at the prisoner.

  The mule carrying the prisoner had bucked, dislodging from the torch’s cup a burning gobbet of flaming pitch which landed on the open wound of the youth’s shoulder. His scream of agony utterly silenced everyone who heard it. The Qizilbash seized the moment when everyone else was suspended in shock and horror to hurry the prisoner out of the maidan.

  Nat turned to find Darius with both hands clamped over his eyes, the mule’s reins in the dirt.

  ‘You can open your eyes now,’ he told him, but Darius did not move, or give any sign that he had even heard him speak. Nat placed the mule’s reins in his palm, and said: ‘You’re facing the West Gate now, which is about five lengths away. Hold these reins and follow me.’

  Nat led the convoy out of the maidan’s bright sunlight into the dark archway of the city gatehouse. Too late he realised that they had walked straight into danger. As his eyes adjusted to the gatehouse gloom he saw that they were alone with the Qizilbash, who spun round at their approach. The lantern thief was hanging halfway up the wall. But not by his neck, the Qizilbash had ganched him on an iron hook which stuck out from his ribs. The torchlight from his shoulders illuminated the dark arch and cast flickering shadows on the dead boy. When Nat looked down he found a row of Qizilbash staring at him, their eyes aglow with reflected torchlight. In a voice that echoed round the vaulted stone, the Qizilbash captain declared:

  ‘A warning to thieves!’

  Nat stared in dumb terror at the Qizilbash. He couldn’t reply. If he did they’d want to know why a foreigner was in disguise, and their great oil expedition would end right here at the city gates. Nat had led them into disaster and capture. But then he felt a hand on his shoulder and to his astonishment he heard Darius reply to the Qizilbash captain in a strong, clear voice:

  ‘Let wrongdoers beware! None shall escape justice, for there is no hiding-place from God!’

  The Qizilbash captain, grateful to be so vindicated, wished God’s blessing upon their journey, before leading his men out of the gatehouse.

  Long after the Qizilbash had gone, Nat and Darius were unable to move.

  ‘Is he dead yet?’ whispered Darius, looking at the stone paving between his new brown boots.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  Nat looked up. Molten pitch dripped onto the dead youth’s naked chest, peeling his flesh into petal-shapes. For a long time, they stood there, heads bowed, pilgrims at a shrine, their packsaddles full of stolen money, below the body of the boy who had stolen a little oil and a lamp.

  The hooves of their mules and donkeys clattered and scraped slowly over the stone flags, as they emerged from the West Gate onto the broad, flat road. Nat felt exposed on this open road, and continually twisted in the packsaddle, sure that he would soon hear the thundering hooves of Sir Anthony’s horse.

  ‘This way,’ said Darius, tapping his heel into the mule’s right flank, leading them off the road into a lane of orchards. They rode a hidden track that ran parallel to the road through fig, apricot, almond and lemon orchards, and which opened out at last to waving barley fields under a great domed sky of duck-egg blue.

  11

  Three days’ ride from Isfahan they came to a strange landscape where barren shale stretched either side of a thin ribbon of vegetation. An almost straight line divided the green ribbon from the bleak, rocky wilderness all around, the sudden snap between the living and the dead. The green ribbon, explained Darius, followed a subterranean stream. It seemed to Nat that the effects of an underground stream were more spectacular than an overground one. He was amazed to find such wild profusion, such colour against the grey rocks. Within this narrow ribbo
n were spiky, orange foxtail lilies as tall as his mule, crocuses the colour of peeled apples, lush purple vetches, and blue irises, all buzzing, clicking and chirping with bees, bugs and birds.

  The subterranean stream put Nat in mind of the River Walbrook, and of its peculiar connection with where they were now headed.

  ‘The Romans built a Temple of Mithras on the east bank of London’s River Walbrook,’ he told Darius as they rode along. ‘The spot where the Temple once stood is marked by a foundation stone, a huge boulder called the London Stone. Hard to imagine there was ever Roman fire worship there, in fact it’s hard even to imagine there was ever a river there. The Walbrook is either bricked over or else it’s a stinking trench, or open sewer filled with -’

  ‘None of that at any time at all.’

  They heard a babbling sound where the underground stream bubbled overground and ran as a bright, clear brook. As the mules dipped their heads in to drink, Nat turned in the saddle to ask Darius,

  ‘Who was Mithras?’

  ‘The Zoroastrians believed he was a Saviour sent to lead them out of darkness into light. Mithras’s birth fulfiled a prophecy. Three Magi followed a star to where Mithras was born to a virgin on the day of the winter solstice.’

  ‘That’s December 25th, the same birthday as Christ!’

  ‘Really? Mithras was about three hundred years earlier. There is no such thing as a virgin birth, of course, but the Zoroastrians believed that Mithras was the Son of God, and that his father, Ahura Mazda, was the God of Light, and that is why their day for worship is not Friday as with us, but Sunday, the day of the sun. At the end of his life, Mithras had a final supper with twelve of his disciples, each representing, you see, the twelve signs of the zodiac. This is the primitive way in which our ancestors thought. When Mithras died, they buried him in a gurabe, a tomb-dome, with a great rock blocking the entrance, but then the strangest thing happened -’