The Trade Secret Read online

  While he was shouting, however, a wind arose, the sails filled and the ship creaked into life and made headway. Later that same day the Nana anchored in the roadstead off Zakinthos harbour. The Sherley suite rowed ashore and went inland to stock up on food and drink for the next leg of the journey. But when they arrived back at the harbour they found their belongings stacked on the quayside, and the boat they’d rowed ashore in hanging from the side of the Nana. The captain had dumped them off his ship, bag and baggage. Well, Anthony wasn’t going to stand for that, of course. It was an outrage. Breach of contract. Nat rowed a hired skiff back to the Nana, with Sir Anthony standing in the prow like a figurehead. As they drew near, the purple-mouthed captain trained two shiny black cannons upon the skiff. They could hear him shouting as he dangled a lit taper over one of the cannons’ wicks.

  ‘What does he want, Angelo?’ asked Sir Anthony.

  ‘He vows before God, Sir Anthony,’ replied the Venetian, in as calm a voice as he could muster, ‘that he will sink your boat before letting you on board his ship again.’

  ‘Be pleased to remind him, that I have paid passage as far as the Levant, and we are not yet halfway there.’

  The next thing Nat heard was a cannon boom. The cannonball sent a single high wave over their bows like the lick of a sea-monster’s tongue. Nat let go of the oars in fright. The skiff rocked. Ears ringing, he ran his hands over his body, fearing he was drenched in blood, but it was only sea water. Sir Anthony’s wet hair hung in a lank centre parting like a Puritan, and his beard shone with silver droplets. The blue jellyfish of his hat floated in the sea beside them. He told Nat to turn the boat round.

  When the Sherley party finally arrived in the Levant, by way of another ship, there was more trouble, and it was this trouble which led to Nat being taught Persian. What happened was that Anthony’s letter of complaint to the Ottoman governor about having to pay port charges was so high-handed that Angelo, its bearer, was clapped in irons for months. That was when Anthony set Angelo’s doomed manservant Hesam to teach Nat Persian.

  ‘Sir Anthony wanted me to learn Persian in case Angelo was killed,’ said Nat in the pitch black mountainside hut. ‘But it was poor Hesam who was killed. He was always an anxious little fellow. The only time I ever saw him happy and at ease was when he was reunited with his family at the Shah’s revels. Seconds later, the Shah noticed Hesam’s Venetian doublet and stabbed him through its side-panel’s laces. Thought he’d turned renegade. Hesam couldn’t help how Angelo dressed him. He had no say in the matter. That’s what comes of having no say. You end up dead. The worst of it, Darius, was when the Shah hung his arm around Anthony’s neck - they were both a bit drunk - and said, “Sorry I killed your servant. Only I thought he’d turned Christian because of how he was dressed, do you see?”’

  ‘And what did your master say?’

  ‘“No, no, still one of your own. Can’t be helped. No good crying over it.”’

  ‘God save us from powerful men.’

  ‘Amen.’

  ‘Good night, my friend.’

  ‘Good night.’

  13

  A grey dawn strained through the sieve of the shelter’s rotten wood and torn sacking. Darius stepped carefully over the sleeping mounds of man and beast, and out the door. The wind had dropped. The mountain air was cold and silent. He stood between the boulder and the dogwood bush. The equipment and the donkeys were gone. He walked to the ledge and looked down.

  Strewn down the mountainside were three blood-soaked donkeys and all his father’s gear. The sun, which had yet to reach him, glinted cruelly off the wreckage far below. There were the flattened zinc tureens. There were the smashed wicker panniers. There was the rope ladder, still coiled, yet utterly irretrievable since the drop was sheer. A long thin strip of purple cotton had snagged on an undershrub and unravelled its whole length, leaving the hatchet dangling like a bucket in a well. The hatchet’s blade flashed in the sunlight as it twisted in the wind.

  What had caused this tragedy? In seeking to escape the wind the donkeys must have burrowed into the clumpy red dogwood bush. But the dogwood hung over the cliff and the donkeys fell clean through. Bound by a single rope, each donkey had been tugged over the rocky ledge one by one, like worry beads. Their drop-weight had uprooted all the pegs, pulling all the oil-mining gear down the side of the mountain.

  Darius looked at the surrounding mountain range with fear. The mountains wanted rid of them. The peak across the valley cast a chilly grey shadow upon him.

  ‘That a donkey seeking shelter in a bush,’ he thought, ‘can destroy two men! What are we going to do now? What are we going to do now?’

  He heard sobbing. Nat was squatting on his heels, hands in his hair, tears rolling down his face. Darius bit his tongue to keep from saying, ‘Why did you use the same rope for everything?’ But the sight of Nat’s grief gave Darius the one thing he most needed at that moment, an answer to the unbearable questions going round and round his head. ‘What are we going to do now? Where do we go from here?’ Looking at his friend everything became very simple. Nat had no way back, so they must go forward. Darius pulled the mules out of the shelter and saddled up.

  Riding on towards the Temple of Mithras at Masjid-i Suleiman, every creak of the packsaddle seemed to say, You are doomed, you are doomed, you are doomed. Each print of his mule’s hooves called to Darius’ mind the man Nat saw step into a tar bog at the Doors of Hell, each step sinking him deeper and deeper into the tar mire. Yet to turn tail now would only lead to bad, because it meant enjoining with negation, and only bad ever came of that. To ride on was to enjoin with good, and when you did that, then good might follow. It might not. But it might.

  He remembered that Gol once told him the sparks produced by the clash of words and melody in Rumi’s twelfth ruba’ie were almost magic in their power to steel the heart. Under his breath he began to growl its refrain,, Afsous ke bi-gah shod-o ma tanha.

  Alas, we are lost upon a black sea!

  The stars be hid that led us to this woe.

  The coast has strayed, steering by clouds we sail,

  Only God’s grace may bring us home again.

  Steering by clouds was better than turning back, and it was better than drifting around. So long as he rode on towards Masjid-i Suleiman, there was a rightness to the sound of the packsaddle creaking under the sway of his portly frame, and a rightness to the morning sunlight glinting off the bridle bits.

  Over and over Darius growled Rumi’s song of the lost sailors. With each round he hissed the lyrics a little less and sang them a little more. And soon Nat was riding alongside him, singing too.

  14

  By noon they reached the Karun River. The cable ferry, a small wooden platform, could not fit them all in one go, but could only carry the expedition in three batches: first Darius, then the two mules, and then Nat.

  The barefoot, white-haired ferryman hauled Darius across the river. The cable ferry’s wooden platform was buoyed by six inflated goatskins and wobbled with his weight. Darius was relieved to step off the platform onto the bank. A wooden cogwheel squeaked as the ferryman wound the cable ferry back across the river to the east bank, where Nat herded the mules onto the platform. With trepidation, Darius watched the mules cross the water. How small a slip might do for them just as it had done for the donkeys!

  The platform wobbled each time the ferryman hauled on the cable. The chestnut and the buckskin hung their heads in the middle of the river. Powerlessness made the mules dejected. They knew that the weight of the packsaddles on their backs would drown them if their hooves slipped on the muddy planks.

  The ferryman led the mules safely onto the bank. Before he wound the ferry back across the river, Darius had him haul the raft up onto the reeds and grasses of the riverbank, for a brilliant idea was forming in his brain, and he was curious to know more about the inflated goatskins.

  ‘How do you get the air in?’ he asked, running his hands all over the tough, tight hid
e. The ferryman showed him a leather-headed cork stopper under a tented flap of hide.

  ‘Ingenious,’ said Darius, slapping the side of a bulbous inflated goatskin. ‘Most ingenious.’ Hearing a shout from the far riverbank, he noticed Nat hopping up and down like a primitive barbarian on the coast of a savage island, but was too engrossed to pay him any mind. If the goatskins kept water out, he was thinking, running his fingers through the beginnings of a black beard, would they keep oil in?

  ‘How much?’ he asked the ferryman.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How much for all six?’

  ‘No, I cannot sell them,’ laughed the ferryman. ‘If I sell them then how shall I ever live?’

  ‘Twenty silver abbassi!’

  ‘No,’ said the ferryman, shaking his head at the exorbitant sum. ‘I might eat like Shah Abbas for a month, but then my wife and I would starve. And all the good people who use the ferry would hate me as well.’

  ‘Nails,’ said Darius, coming back from a saddle pouch and unfolding before the ferryman a cotton square upon which lay brand new clout-head nails of shiny brass. ‘With these nails you could widen your raft so much so that you wouldn’t need the goatskins in the first place. All these nails for the six goatskins!’

  Nails were another proposition altogether.

  ‘Why, there’s enough here to widen the raft and add another room on my house!’ exclaimed the ferryman. ‘But why do you need the goatskins so badly that you will offer a bag of nails for them?’

  Darius told him about the disaster that had befallen them on the Zagros Mountains, and about their expedition to fetch oil from the tar pits of Masjid-i Suleiman.

  ‘Is your friend all right?’ asked the ferryman. Darius cast an eye over at the far bank, where Nat was jumping up and down.

  ‘Yes, he’s merry.’

  ‘He looks angry.’

  ‘He is from a distant land. I believe that’s one of his native dances. These goatskins are perfect for transporting oil.’

  The ferryman fetched out his wife.

  ‘With this many nails,’ he told her, ‘I could build a raft as wide as the floor of a house and winch over a flock of sheep in one go as easy as wind a bobbin up.’

  ‘Why a cable at all?’ she replied. ‘You’d have a punt so stable you could pole it across the Karun. You could do that until you’re ninety!’

  ‘I can show you better yet,’ broke in Darius, ‘if you’ll help me drag this log out the reeds and allow me a couple of your new nails.’

  Darius nailed the rotten log to two spars of cordwood so that it ran parallel to the raft.

  ‘A book in my possession in Isfahan,’ he explained, ‘contains precise diagrams of the Catamarans of Tamil Nadu. This second hull -’

  ‘The log?’ asked the ferryman’s wife.

  ‘Just so. The log forms a second hull which is the very copy of the latest boats to ply the Bay of Bengal, living proof of Ibn Senna’s law that the larger the surface area the greater the weight that may be carried.’

  They carried the catamaran down to the river, and set it on the water. It floated a little higher on the raft side than the log-side. The ferryman and his wife hauled the cable, and the cogwheel turned, winding the catamaran across the river to the far bank. Darius watched Nat walk down to the water’s edge and study the catamaran up close. He then appeared to be kicking up clouds of dust and stones, while shouting indistinctly.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ asked the ferryman’s wife.

  ‘That is a dance his people do,’ said Darius. ‘It’s called Dance of Welcome for a New Boat.’

  ‘But what’s he shouting?’ asked the ferryman.

  ‘Song Of Joy For New Boat.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he step on?’

  ‘He’s just about to. Look, he’s aboard. Let’s heave away! Let’s haul him ashore.’

  Hand over hand they all three pulled the cable, drawing the catamaran from the far bank out into the river. When the catamaran reached the middle of the river it tipped sharply to one side. The waterlogged log was sinking and dragging the whole craft under. Nat climbed to the apex of the sinking ferry platform. In shame, Darius turned to the ferryman:

  ‘I apologise with all my heart,’ he told him, ‘for sinking the cable ferry upon which your livelihood depends.’

  ‘Can your friend swim?’ asked the ferryman.

  Nat was perched on the very last triangle of dry wood, which poked out of the water like a shark’s fin. As they reeled him in, Nat wobbled at every pull of the rope, yet somehow kept his footing on the apex.

  ‘Why, he’s like a bird on a cherry twig!’ exclaimed the ferryman.

  Nat leapt from the raft - sinking it utterly with his leap - to land upon the bank on his ribs. He lay curled up and winded, gasping for breath. The ferryman pulled Nat to his feet.

  ‘What balance!’ he exclaimed. ‘Your feet are not even wet, master! How did you do that? Even a slack-wire walker would have fallen into the river, but not you, master, not you! Heh-heh!’

  Darius tried to help him up, but Nat snatched his arm away.

  ‘I’m not talking to you,’ he snarled.

  The ferryman and his wife hauled on the cable, raising the wreck of the raft and dragging it up onto the grassy bank. The log had dropped off, but the two spars of cordwood to which the log had been attached still protruded from the side of the platform.

  The expeditioners were invited inside for lemon tea and pashmak, a sweetmeat that looked and tasted like sugared wool.

  ‘Now here’s what I don’t understand,’ said the ferryman’s wife. ‘If you have money already then why choose this wild venture? Why put yourself through all this hard slog?’

  Nat’s jaw froze mid-chew, and Darius slowly set down his tea. The ferryman’s wife had asked the one question that went right to the heart of their crooked endeavour, and which lay a hair’s breadth away from exposing them both for the embezzlers they were. She and her husband awaited a reply, and were looking from Darius to Nat. At last Nat managed a reply:

  ‘My friend Darius is performing this quest for the hand of a beautiful woman, a musician called Gol. She has set him the task of fetching oil from this fire temple so as to show all the world that he is not the fat, empty windbag, the great big hollow greasy sack of lies, cowardice and chicken farts that everyone thinks him to be.’

  Touched by the romance of the story, the ferryman and his wife brought out a seventh goatskin, a little older than the rest, to add to the six.

  When the ferryman learnt that the nails were to have been used for building a shadoof to hoist buckets of oil to the surface, he insisted that they take back half the shiny new nails they had given him.

  ‘No,’ said Darius, ‘now we can just lower these goatskins down the well, and hoist them out full of oil.’

  ‘Even with goatskins you’ll still need to knock up a shadoof or little jib-crane. Take half the nails.’

  ‘No,’ said Darius. ‘You will need every last nail if the ferry is not to sink again.’

  ‘Not so many,’ said the ferryman. ‘Listen, you’ll come this way on your return and you can bring back any nail which you can pull out of your shadoof when you’re done.’

  Feeling unworthy of such trust, Darius nodded his assent and finished his tea in silence.

  Their venture rescued, and seven deflated goatskins folded upon their saddlebows, with half the nails back on loan, Nat and Darius made their farewells to the ferryman and his wife, and set off towards the border with the Ottoman Empire.

  15

  Two days’ ride from the Karun River, Nat and Darius came to the River Oraxes, the border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. The border was unguarded, deserted in fact, since garrisons were placed instead at city gates or crossroads.

  The Pul-i-Shah, the Shah’s Bridge, with its new style Isfahani architecture and tabletop-flat paving, appeared fantastically out of place in this valley in the middle of nowhere. It looked as if robbers had emptied it out
of a bag. There was no other manmade structure in the valley. Just a few bees, oxeye daisies and scrub - and then this projection of political will spanning the River Oraxes. The mules’ shod hooves rang upon Pul-I-Shah’s paving slabs, before descending the ramp to the Turkish path. Resting a hand on the pommel to ease his saddle sores, Darius turned to Nat.

  ‘Beware,’ he said. ‘We are entering territory where poetry is forbidden.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Sedition,’ replied Darius. ‘Too many poems by subject peoples seething against the Ottoman yoke. Too many satirical verses about the Sultan has made him ban poetry throughout his empire. And besides, to Turkish ears poetry is too Persian a thing. We are a nation of poets, they are not. Thus, at the River Oraxes, the whimsical thought, the flight of fancy, the heartfelt couplet must be left at the border, for we are in Ottoman territory now.’

  The two muleteers ambled past a couple of open villages, and followed a road that skirted a walled town. Up ahead, on a long, straight, dusty road, sat a small stonewalled fort built on the roadside, from which emerged a dusty Turkish soldier about their own age, with a matchlock rifle slung across his back on a white crepe strap.