The Trade Secret Page 5

  Nat interrupted:

  ‘When after three days they came to roll the rock away there was nobody there.’

  ‘Why, yes,’ exclaimed Darius in surprise. ‘That’s exactly how the fable ends. Did I tell you the tale already?’

  ‘No, not you.’

  ‘Someone else, then?’

  ‘You could say that. Yes. Someone else.’

  Behind the sardonic reply, however, Nat was troubled. If Mithras lived and died three-hundred years before Jesus, where did that leave the Gospels? In the same way that playhouses might blow the dust off an old Florentine play and set it on the Isle of Dogs instead, changing the hero from duke to shoemaker, had the gospellers just given an old story a new setting, shifting the scene from Persia to Palestine, changing the hero from sun god to carpenter? Nat began to fear Mithras. If this pagan godhead could strike at a man’s faith, then could it not strike at his life?

  He filled his water bottle at the stream, gulped half and offered the rest to Darius, who shook his head. Nat wiped the bottle mouth with the flat of his palm, and offered it again. Still no joy. Nat tried a third time, only this time, to accommodate his friend’s fastidiousness, he made a great show of not just wiping his hands thoroughly under his own armpits, but then of drying them on a patch of turf that he had selected - and he hoped Darius appreciated this – for its being only very lightly covered in sheep and rabbit droppings. Having taken these elaborate pains, Nat then ran his finger round and round the bottle mouth until it was finally squeaky clean and ready for his lordship. Yet still, to Nat’s amazement, Darius waved it away with one of his faces, then unwound the long strap on his own leather bottle and dropped it into the stream instead. There was no pleasing some people, thought Nat, and swigged the rest of his bottle himself. The water tasted pure to him at least.

  The green ribbon among shale gave way to forested slopes of larch, pine and cedar, as the winding path rose towards a nick between two peaks in the Zagros foothills. The mules’ heads swayed as they climbed, and the nodding donkeys sent a ripple running up and down the single rope that bound them.

  As they rounded a corner, they were suddenly able to see in vast panorama all the territory that they had covered over the last couple of days. Darius dismounted the better to look back at the way they had come. He wedged his hands into the coat pockets of his balding black velvet coat. This took a little time, since the pockets were too small for his hands. When he’d finally stuffed his hands in up to the wrists, he leaned his back against the twitching shoulder of his chestnut mule, which was chomping at a patch of arum thistles, and gazed out over the vast plain, where a silver river wound between unwalled villages, and where fields and woods lay open to the sky.

  ‘Look at all that beauty and harmony,’ he said. ‘It takes a lot of work by some dedicated men to make this world unjust.’

  The chestnut mule stepped away and he fell flat on his back. Lying among the thistles, Darius stared up at the sky, blinking away the spots in his eyes. He freed first one hand then the other from his coat pockets. He rolled onto his belly, and very slowly climbed to his feet. He yanked the chestnut mule away from a fresh patch of arum, and listened to the intensely irritating sound of Nat’s laughter echoing down the mountain.

  12

  It was dusk when Nat and Darius crossed the snow line. The snow creaked under their boots as they led their mules and donkeys up the mountain. A recent snowfall had subtracted any scent of nature from the air. The only smells left in the world were dusty saddlecloth and the soupy odour that steamed from the mules’ nostrils.

  When the path curled round the dark side of the mountain, they ran headlong into a cruel cold wind. Hardier travellers might have pressed on and made the Zagros pass before nightfall, but the wind sliced like a razor’s edge, their boots were wet, and their hide gloves were packed right at the bottom of their baggage. Their hearts leapt when they came upon the ramshackle lean-to of a shepherd’s shelter.

  Three walls of the shelter were the folds of the rock itself. The door and the sloping roof were made of mouldering timber covered with tarry sackcloth. Inside there was only enough room for the two of them plus the mules and packsaddles.

  Nat led the donkeys behind a boulder out of the wind, and tethered them beside a red dogwood bush.

  Nat and Darius stowed all the equipment save the packsaddles behind the boulder, and spread the tarpaulin that had served for their tent over their supplies. Nat used the other end of the donkeys’ tether rope to secure the tarpaulin. He hammered a stake into the earth at every turn of the rope. When his fingers grew too cold to close over the hammer’s shaft, he held its handle between the heels of both hands. He bashed the final stakes into the ground and at last the tarpaulin was lashed down over their gear and supplies, bound fast by the rope that crisscrossed over the mound as tight as a corset.

  Emerging from behind the shelter of the rock, he fought the wind for breath as he ran back to the lean-to, where he held his hands to the yellow flames under the oil stove that Darius had got going.

  Darius lit his father’s oil lantern at the stove and set it on a natural shelf in the smooth, rippling rock wall. His grandmother had filled a jar with ghormeh sabzi, his favourite bean stew. He emptied the jar into the pot. As the stew popped and sputtered, the shack’s odour of musty sackcloth and rotting timber was infused with delicious aromas of coriander, goat cheese, parsley, spinach and sorrel. He served their stew on two battered tin plates, and they sat down to their first hot meal of the expedition.

  As the light flickered over three brass flames embossed on the lantern’s bulbous reservoir bowl, Darius had a moment of perfect happiness. The next moment Nat began speaking with his mouth full.

  ‘They look like three moneybags,’ said Nat, pointing some half-chewed flatbread at the lantern’s brass motif.

  ‘Not money, flames. It’s the Baku city symbol. Three flames. Baku is where my father showed me cold fire.’

  ‘Cold fire?’ asked Nat.

  ‘Fire that’s cold and harmless to the touch.’

  ‘Then not fire.’

  ‘You leave your hand there for a quarter of an hour and you’ll think it fire, for it will slowly cook your hand.’

  To cover the noise of Nat’s eating, Darius decided to tell him the story of when he discovered the cold fire of Baku.

  ‘We were in a field where my father dug down a knife’s length, and held a live coal over the divot. A blue flame leapt from the earth, like a pike jumping for meat. The next thing I knew my father had put his hand into the blue fire, and was telling me to do the same.’

  ‘Did it hurt?’

  ‘No, it was like the flame of spirits of alcohol which you can extinguish with your hand because it never rises beyond a certain heat.’

  ‘You have to dig down to get this cold fire?’ asked Nat, as the buckskin mule’s long, bristly lips snaffled flatbread from his palm.

  ‘Not always. Once I saw tiny blue flames sprinkled all over the plain like gentians.’

  ‘Then what’s to stop the wild fire spreading and setting the whole country ablaze? Why isn’t the plain burnt black?’

  ‘This Baku fire is so cold and gentle that the Azeris balance their pots on hollow bamboo canes stuck in the soil. The pot boils but the canes don’t catch fire. Listen to this, my father took me to the fire temple there, where they had two paper cylinders conducting fire-’

  ‘Paper? Are you sure?’

  ‘Paper - as I am sitting here now.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Nine or ten.’

  ‘If this cold and gentle fire feeds only on itself, then put your hand in that flame.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This lamp is from Baku, so open the glass and put your hand in the cold yellow flame.’

  ‘No, no, no, I filled this lantern myself with plain old rock oil. If you want a lantern that burns cold fire, you can find men who have the skill of dissolving the sulphurous oil vapours of the plain
into lanterns.’

  Nat was halfway through licking his tin plate clean, when he heard the word sulphur.

  ‘Sulphur? Why, Darius, this is marsh vapour, not fire! This is Will o’ the Wisp, the Lantern Man!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘In English marshes, fools see a man with a lantern beckoning them, when it’s only sulphur flares. On dark nights, the Lantern Man leads these fools to their deaths in sinking sands or black ponds.’

  ‘If I had not seen it for myself, I would not believe cold fire any more than -’

  ‘Oh, God in heaven help us!’ Nat burst out. ‘Our saddles are packed with fishing-nets for the moon!’

  He was angry. This was a fool’s errand. He remembered Kulsum’s words of warning about how her grandson only saw what he wanted to see, how he didn’t know where the real world ended and his dream world began. Perhaps it wasn’t too late to go back to Isfahan and throw himself on Sir Anthony’s mercy and beg forgiveness?

  ‘Calm yourself,’ said Darius. ‘We’re not going to Baku for its cold fire, we’re going to Masjid-i Suleiman for its oil.’

  ‘How will we even know the fire temple when we see it?’ raged Nat.

  ‘The temple is a tower by a statue of Mithras, who has the head of a man and the body of a bird with outstretched wings.’

  ‘But if the mullahs have defaced the icons then the fire temple will look like any old lime kiln and we’ll ride right past it into oblivion.’

  ‘Great fountains of oil gushing into the sky - that, my friend, is how we shall know the place! And look, we do not have fishing nets for moonshine - we have this gorgeous piece of engineering!’

  Darius produced from the saddle-pouch a block and tackle. It was indeed gorgeous. The whole maple slab was the weight, shape and size of a Geneva Bible. A maple metal book with spinning parts! Nat clapped his palm voluptuously upon its cover. The steel wheel was grooved for rope. He spun the wheel and listened to its smooth, well-balanced whir. Maybe Darius did know what he was doing.

  ‘All right, Darius. I suppose oil is in your blood, after all.’

  Darius announced that they’d commemorate the return of Nat’s faith in their oil venture with a pot of jasmine tea. He searched the saddle-pouch, found a cotton bag, opened it, sniffed and cried out in disgust.

  ‘Oh no, she’s given us these foul grinds of bitter beans! My grandmother drinks qaveh, this muddy bean drink the Arabs and Turks drink.’

  Nat was curious, and so he prepared a pot and put it on the little oil-stove.

  The charred odour the qaveh released as it came to the boil carried Nat back to the Sherley party’s journey through the Ottoman Empire, when Nat had first smelt qaveh - or as the Turks called it kaveh. But he had yet to taste it. This would be his first time.

  He poured a measure into a tin cup, and took a sip, and then another. Each swallow revealed new tastes: now earthy, now metallic, now nutty. He didn’t know what Darius was on about: it wasn’t bitter at all. Well, only the sandy lees were bitter, only on his last swig did he pull the face that Darius had pulled on his first.

  ‘How much do we have?’ he asked.

  ‘Have it all,’ said Darius, dropping torn orange peel into his cup to sweeten or disguise the foul taste.

  Still in hats and coats, they wrapped themselves up in their blankets, set their necks comfortably on their saddlebags. Darius extinguished the Baku lantern, and they lay side by side in the pitch-black. Outside the wind howled and hooted, sending the odd shower of mud and stones clattering onto the roof. Darius asked:

  ‘How did you first fall into Antonio’s service?’

  ‘I was living with my uncle,’ replied Nat, ‘a master tailor who was suiting two gentlemen of the Sherley party. They told him Sir Anthony needed a literate servant for his mission to Tuscany. I thought we were only going as far as Tuscany. Not Isfahan!’

  ‘What was his mission?’

  ‘To raise hell. His cousin the Earl of Essex, England’s commander-in-chief, sent him to set Spain’s Italian territories ablaze. The thinking was that the Spanish could not invade our island if they were busy fighting wars and putting down insurrections in Italy. Anthony was supposed to ally himself with Tuscan rebels, but by the time we got to Italy, they’d already surrendered to the Pope. Then a Venetian senator told Anthony that Shah Abbas needed a good soldier to help him liberate Ormuz from the Portuguese.’

  ‘Why were you living with your uncle?’

  ‘My father and mother died.’

  ‘How did they die?’

  ‘There was a famine in Datchworth, the village where we lived.’

  ‘They starved to death?’

  ‘Not exactly. They both died of the bloody flux, the dysentery which comes from eating nothing but boiled tussock grass and rotten barleycorn.’

  ‘You buried them?’

  ‘No. My parents sent me away from Datchworth in the middle of the second summer of rain, when the stewards and bailiffs were fencing in the woods and commons, and when my school classmates were dying. Seemed adults could survive on pigeon-pie, rye bread and rosehips, but not children.’

  ‘Hard to believe a parent is dead and buried,’ said Darius, ‘if you weren’t there when they were dying, isn’t it? If you never saw the body. Never went to the funeral - if there even was one.’

  ‘Yes. Hard. We have this in common, you and I. And the other thing I found it hard to fathom was how there could be a famine only half a day’s ride from London, which is what Datchworth is. In London Bridge corn mills, down on the meal floor, you have to walk to the water’s edge just to be free of the flour clouds. There I was under London Bridge choking from a superflux of grain, while out in the country the want of grain was death. Down on the meal floor, lost in a wheat mist, I used to rage and weep. Still, away from the corn mills I was content enough, because I was learning.’

  ‘Tailoring?’

  ‘No, school. My uncle had sons enough, all trained to the craft, so I wasn’t needed to apprentice, which left me free to go to school almost every day.’

  The wind scattered more rocks or clods on the path outside. Nat stilled his breathing. Reading his thoughts, Darius said:

  ‘Antonio could not have followed you so far.’

  ‘No,’ said Nat, but even so he listened a few seconds more.

  ‘What will he do if he catches you?’

  ‘At least as bad as what he and Eli Elkin did to the Italian boy on the ship we set sail in. They gave him the bastinado, broke both his arms.’

  From Darius’s sharp intake of breath, Nat could clearly imagine the way he was wincing in the dark.

  ‘But why did they do that?’ asked Darius.

  Nat told Darius how the Sherley party set sail from Venice for the Levant on the Nana e Ruzzina, a ship they shared with seventy other paying passengers, all of whom had packed three weeks’ worth of food and drink for the voyage. But not Sir Anthony. Oh no. He reckoned it was only a few days’ sail to Zakinthos, the ship’s first port of call, and so ordered Nat and the other servants to pack only a few days’ worth of food. First, Adriatic headwinds slowed the Nana e Ruzzina, and then the Mediterranean becalmed her. When they ran out of food, the gentlemen of the party devoured the servants’ rations.

  At the foot of the mast, under the flapping of the bark’s only sail, Nat sat down and awaited the bloody flux. It had found him out. A man could wriggle and wriggle but never escape his fate. He had escaped Famine in Datchworth, only for Famine to find him in the Mediterranean. The bloody flux might have come, too, had it not been for one of the lower servants sharing food, and striking up friendships with Armenian servants from whom they cadged a little halva and kofte.

  Soon even Sir Anthony himself was starving. Yet even when they were down to the last drops of stagnant rainwater from the butt, he still stood upon ceremony. He bid Nat pour the brackish dregs into a silver flask which was set upon a silver salver, before he stood up, proposed a toast to his cousin the Earl of Essex’s victories again
st Papists, bowed to Robert Sherley, received his brother’s bow in return, and together they knocked back the last of the rainwater. It was well done. But now even the water butt was empty. A mask of rage settled on Anthony’s red-bearded face. And then the Neapolitans started mocking him.

  There was a wood-burning stove against the wheel house, where some Neapolitans dined al fresco three times a day. They refused to sell a morsel to the English nobles, no matter how many jewelled rings the Sherleys pulled off their fingers. Mocking the Englishmen’s hunger was too fine a sport to sell for any price. The Neapolitans wafted cooking odours towards the starving heretics, scraped leftovers into the sea for the birds, and threw sucked trotters at the starving Sherley retinue.

  As the sun flared off the empty silver flask, Anthony heard from Angelo that one of the Neapolitans had said that Queen Elizabeth was a man. That was all it took. Anthony prized open his parched and cracked lips and commanded Eli Elkin to find the slanderer. Elkin dragged the Neapolitan by the hair to the English end of the deck, where Anthony told him to administer the bastinado. Elkin set to work with his billy club. Anthony stood over him, as intent as a hunter signalling his dog into the brush, his pop-eyes rapt with the most terrible glee. Elkin broke both the Neapolitan’s arms to stop him protecting his head. Then blood burst from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears. Once Elkin had begun flaying the slanderer he couldn’t stop. He slathered at the mouth. All this fury even though he had no quarrel with the Neapolitan himself. But his dander was up. Eventually the English gentlemen themselves had to pull Elkin off him, and when they did, he thrashed his head like a dog pulled off a bear.

  The young Neapolitan, his bones broken, howled so terribly that the crew and the passengers all came running. They squared up to the Sherley party. Anthony, Robert, and Angelo drew swords. A huge expanse of decking suddenly appeared. Into this gap stepped three Armenian merchants, entreating peace in a five-tongue pidgin: Farsi, Napolitano, English, Veneto, and Spanish, and offered food to the Sherley party. Everyone sheathed swords. There it might have ended. But the furious captain of the Nana e Ruzzina marched up to Sir Anthony, and demanded to know how any passenger dare meddle with his authority. Sir Anthony listened to Angelo’s translation, nodding along, now and then asking his interpreter to clarify a nuance. When Angelo had satisfied him on all points, Anthony hauled off and punched the captain smack in the mouth. Eyes wide with disbelief, the captain spat out a tooth, and launched into a furious tirade, none of which Angelo translated.