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‘Oh no,’ said Darius, ‘rhadar.’

  Rhadari outposts were placed along the road at strategic junctions. The bushy-haired Turkish rhadar walked round their mules and inspected their baggage. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, probably from drinking and smoking late into the night in the lonely outpost

  ‘Some mangy goatskins, a few coils of rope - where are you going?’

  ‘Masjid-i-Suleiman.’

  ‘What are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I am a poet,’ said Darius with a grand gesture, ‘and this is my companion.’

  ‘Do you have any poetry in your possession now?’ demanded the Turk in his cracked voice.

  ‘One can no more own a poem than a snowflake,’ said Darius. The Turk thought for a while.

  ‘Was that a poem?’ he demanded.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It sounded like a poem.’

  ‘As does the babble of a river singing in the Zagros foothills,’ said Darius. ‘But we can never stop its song.’

  ‘Yes, we can,’ said the Turk.

  ‘How?’

  ‘What about a dam?’

  ‘Yes, you are right. Yes, that will stop the song of the river sure enough.’

  ‘Or ice,’ said the Turk.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Ice silences the river’s song.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Darius. ‘Ice silences the river’s song… Is that a poem?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘It sounded like a poem.’

  ‘On your way!’

  Tapping their heels on the mules, Darius and Nat rode away from the isolated rhadar garrison. They had not ridden far before they heard the Turk shouting after them. They reined their mules to a halt, and twisted round in their saddles.

  Standing alone in the road, arms outstretched, the rhadar’s powerful hoarse voice called out:

  ‘Listen to the reed flute!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ called Darius.

  ‘Listen to the reed flute!’ shouted the Turk:

  ‘Grieving its exile, the reed flute says,

  Since they cut me off from my bed of reeds,

  The sound of my cry.

  Tears to shreds,

  The heart of any man or woman who hears my song

  Far from home.

  Hear the reed flute’s song within all songs,

  I long to return to my bed of reeds.

  How shall we ever get home, my friend?

  How shall we ever get home?’

  The poem was finished but the Turk stayed rooted to the spot.

  ‘Tashakkur ederim!’ Darius cried out.

  ‘Dostum,’ bellowed the Turk, raising a hand in farewell.

  ‘Dostum!’

  ‘What does dostum mean?’ asked Nat.

  ‘Friend.’

  ‘Dostum,’ Nat called back.

  They faced forward, tapped their heels on the mules, and rode away from the rhadar.

  16

  In the Ali Qapu Palace, Anthony awoke on his truckle bed. His fever had broken in the night. He listened to his breathing. Slow and steady. Except it had a kind of double sound. Not an echo, but an amplification like a heart murmur or a lung spot. He opened his eyes. The Shah was frowning down on him. In fury. With murder on his mind. Anthony’s heart seemed to fall out of his body, and his head swam. The game was up. Queen Elizabeth must have written to the Shah disowning Anthony as an ambassador, exposing him as a fraud. In which case his life was over. He should have died in his sleep, or at the hands of the physicians who had administered strange potions and laid fetid compresses upon him. But then he realised that the Shah wasn’t frowning but had shaved off his eyebrows and painted on a thick, menacing black pair. Only his forehead was angry, but the rest of his face was mild, as if it had yet to be told what the forehead had heard. A soft voice emerged from the Shah’s small mouth.

  ‘You live, Antonio.’

  ‘Your Majesty has watched over me as he does all his people,’ said Anthony.

  ‘You are well again.’

  The slow blink of Shah Abbas’s hooded green eyes was eerie. He did not blink like a man so much as nictitate like a hawk - or perhaps Anthony still had a touch of fever. Sitting cross-legged on the tapestry cushion, he spoke softly.

  ‘You must appear before my ministers in the majlis, my parliament, to tell them the true nature of your embassy.’

  ‘As your majesty commands.’

  ‘Within a very few days, the Turkish ambassador comes here, thinking he can renew the Peace League on the same terms as before. The majlis want to renew the Peace League. The army and I do not. The majlis will continue to oppose a Turkish war, but they may be swayed when they’re convinced that we won’t be fighting the Turk alone, but will have as our allies every Christian Prince in Europe.’

  ‘What’s it to you what your parliament says? Surely, so great a sovereign as Shah Abbas informs his parliament of his royal will and leaves them to see it done.’

  ‘Merchants’ gold is soldiers’ pay. Good pay ever won more battles than good luck.’

  ‘And parliament speaks for the merchants…?’

  Tilting his head to one side, the Shah’s face shone.

  ‘It is incredible how you always know at once the true nature of the situation! Even when you have just come back from the dead you ask the one question that goes to the very heart of the matter.’

  ‘I am pleased your majesty thinks so.’

  The Shah beamed.

  ‘You are very crafty, Antonio.’

  Anthony attempted a crafty grin, but the truth was he had no idea what any of this was about. He was in the dark every bit as much as the bazaar which the Shah told him had been without oil for days. The merchants were learning that the oil supply wouldn’t be safe while the Turk has Tabriz. This had brought a few of them round to supporting at least a limited war,

  ‘Except it wasn’t the Turks who raided the Baku convoy, was it? Everyone says it was Arabs.’

  ‘I believe you will find that not one single witness lived to tell the world just who it was who attacked and killed every last member of the Baku convoy and its escort when they were in a narrow gorge in the Zanjan hills.’

  Anthony sensed he was being told something, but what? Was Shah Abbas saying that he had ordered the slaughter of the oil caravan? Was he saying that he had created the oil shortage on purpose as a way of convincing the merchants that they would be poorer without a war than with one? Anthony didn’t know. He wasn’t sure.

  He wished he could ask his brother. Sit Robert here now, he’d twig the Shah’s meaning in a trice. But to ask his brother to explain the Shah’s parables and gnomic sayings would be to lose face. Anthony liked the fact that his brother believed he and the Shah were concocting grand stratagems together, and he liked giving Robert a sense that the time was approaching when he too would be initiated into these stratagems - only not just yet.

  How he wished his politicking cousin and closest friend, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, whose gold was Anthony’s pay, were here to advise him. What would Essex say? He’d say, Listen. Only listen, Anthony. That’s what he’d say. Listen to the Shah and make his wants your study. When you become expert in what Shah Abbas desires then you will know what to do. For once, sweet cuz, you will not be my brave headlong soldier, but rather the patient fisherman careful to cast no shadow upon the water. Anthony sipped his little bowl of rose tea and listened to what Abbas was saying, hoping to understand what were the Shah’s most pressing needs.

  ‘The merchants’ refusal to pay the army the funds it needs to fight the Turk, threatens the survival of my kingdom. I know this. You know this. My commander-in-chief, Allahvirdi Khan, he knows this as well. Only parliament does not.’

  There’s a pointer right there, whispered Essex. The commander-in-chief. He’ll tell you straight out, soldier to soldier, the Shah’s meaning. Anthony nodded so vigorously at Essex’s wise words that the Shah paused and looked at him quizzically a moment - unless that was the eyebrows
too.

  ‘It was written in the stars that you would come to me, Antonio. Twelve years the war against the Uzbegs lasted, and the fact that you arrived in Isfahan on the very day of my victory parade shows the hand of Destiny.’

  ‘I am honoured your majesty believes so,’ said Anthony, who believed exactly the same. It was this belief that gave him confidence in his imposture. Providence sent him here. Anthony knew it was fate the moment they stumbled upon the victory parade outside Isfahan, as the glorious, vast, two-hundred-thousand-strong homecoming army flowed around stranded elms and oaks. Sunlight flared from brass instruments that looked like giant knotted trumpets, and sounded like the lowing of lonely sea-monsters, big beasts, just like Anthony and the Shah, whose very greatness made them lonely. Necklaces of hard, dried Uzbeg ears rattled on the breastplates of the royal bodyguard, and it was on this gruesome drumroll that Anthony and the Shah found each other at last.

  Outside the windows of his sick room, Anthony heard again the lowing of the sea-monsters, those giant, knotted trumpets.

  ‘What’s that noise, great Shah?’

  ‘Festivities to celebrate your return to health await you. I will now give the order for the great spectacle to begin! Come, get up and get dressed. Put this silver taj on your head. Sit on the veranda. Wait. Watch!’

  17

  Thousands had gathered along the edges of the maidan to behold the games and celebrations in honour of Antonio Mirza’s return to the land of the living. Anthony was sat in state upon the palace’s veranda, with its mirrored pillars. He was propped up on cushions between his brother Robert and Allahvirdi Khan, the Shah’s sipahsalar or commander-in-chief, watching buffaloes wrestle. But he found his attention straying to a lone buffalo tethered on the other side of the maidan. Exempted from the wrestling, this garlanded bull was peaceably chewing cud. When the others were herded away, there he remained. Anthony didn’t know why, but he couldn’t look at this solitary buffalo in its floral headdress without his blood chilling.

  A great cheer rose up from the crowd. Riders galloped into the square, every man carrying a long-handled mallet. There was Shah Abbas right in the thick of them, waving his mallet round his head. Fifty riders squared off against each other to play a game that looked to Anthony to be a sort of horsebacked pall-mall or shinty. With a long-handled mallet, each rider tried to whack a ball they called a pulu towards goals at either end of the maidan. Whenever Abbas was on the ball a line of trumpeters blew a fanfare. The Shah broke off from the game, galloped to the veranda and called up,

  ‘Does the spectacle please you, Antonio?’

  Anthony stood up and bowed. Each time the Shah scored a goal or gave the pulu a good crack, he galloped up to the veranda and asked how Antonio liked the spectacle. Each successive visit left Anthony more full of trepidation. So much honour could not end well. His eyes drifted back to the lone buffalo, garlanded and doomed, tethered near the crowded bleachers.

  The horsebacked pall-mall match ended, and the riders cleared the square. All bar one. Alone, Shah Abbas rode his white stallion to the veranda, and dismounted right below Anthony.

  ‘Watch this!’ he shouted up at him. ‘Watch me!’

  Kettledrums beat. Dressed all in white, a pageboy raced towards Shah Abbas to present him with a double recurve bow, and a silk quiver full of golden arrows flighted with eagle feathers. The Shah laid his royal back upon the dirt floor of the maidan. He pulled the bowstring taut, arrow pointing at sky. The ends of the bow bent until they almost touched. The kettledrums stopped. With astonishing agility, Abbas sprang up from his shoulders as if the earth were a bow and himself the arrow! While still in midair, he shot the golden arrow. On the far side of the maidan, the garlanded buffalo crumpled to the ground, its bellowing death throes subsumed in the cheering of the crowded bleachers. The pageboy raced across the empty maidan to retrieve an eagle-feathered golden arrow from its eye.

  One moment the whole vast maidan was empty, save for the dead buffalo, and the next as many as one thousand cavalrymen, dressed in captured Uzbeg helmets, were cantering round the square to the boos, jeers and whistles of the crowd. Allahvirdi Khan leaned forward and said,

  ‘Now comes the culmination of the festivities, Antonio Mirza, the grand battle re-enactment. Shah Abbas will take the part of Shah Abbas vanquishing the Uzbegs at Meshed.’

  ‘Weren’t you at that battle as well, Oliver?’ asked Anthony, who found it comforting that the commander-in-chief had such a homely, Norman-sounding name as Oliver de Cannes.

  ‘Once is enough,’ replied Allahvirdi Khan. ‘It was a hot battle and a famous victory against a terrible foe. Shah Abbas was in the very heart of the fighting to the astonishment of the Uzbeg cavalry. This battle re-enactment, he hopes, will give the Christian princes, by your report, an idea of Persian arms, of the quality and the power of our cavalry.’

  ‘Why does his majesty want me to speak to his parliament?’

  ‘The Shah knows that you have been sent here by Queen Elizabeth on behalf of all the courts of Europe to orchestrate an alliance against the Turk. He hopes that when you tell this to the parliament they may be won round to supporting a war they now oppose. The majlis speak for the merchants, who all fear the havoc a long war will do the Levant trade.’

  ‘Will it be a long war, Oliver?’

  ‘Not with the Christian Princes attacking from the north and west, Antonio!’

  Cheers broke out as Abbas led one hundred Tofangchi cavalry into the square. He raised his silver sword, and let out a high-pitched cry. Two lines of horse thundered towards each other, and then through each other, merging into a friendly squall of merry confusion in which it was impossible to descry any order of battle.

  ‘Huh,’ said Robert, ‘we have swapped pall-mall for pell-mell! What squalid chaos! How poor a show!’

  Robert was not the only one suffering from the sorry spectacle which the battle re-enactment had become. Down on the maidan, Shah Abbas was enraged by its dismal failure. Wheeling his great white horse, the Shah began hacking with his jewelled scimitar at his elite veterans in their captured Uzbeg helmets. At first none of the spectators realised what the Shah was doing. It was not until swathes began to open up around his white stallion that the spectators realised it was no longer a mock battle. In quick succession three cavalrymen toppled from their saddles and lay bleeding on the ground. A gasp ran over the crowd. Shouting and whistling, they tried to warn the cavalry, most of who still had no idea what was happening, and were making merry in swordplay.

  Right under the veranda, a Tofangchi captain in a captured Uzbeg helmet was tiptapping swords with an old comrade. They were both laughing because the Uzbeg helmet was too big, and kept slipping over one eye, every time it was dinked with a sword. Anthony saw Abbas charging his white horse straight at this cavorting pair. The enraged Shah was a black-whiskered panther running through a frightened herd of gazelle. Cavalrymen in Uzbeg and Persian attire dispersed in all directions, clearing the panther’s path to his quarry.

  The Tofangchi captain didn’t see the Shah, until he was only a few lengths away. By chance he pushed up the Uzbeg helmet just in time to put spurs to his horse. He rode hard, trying to escape Shah Abbas. Standing up in the short stirrups, he looked for a way out of the square, but his mount was no match for the Shah’s white stallion. The royal sword chopped him at the waist. The blade sank in so deep that the sword lodged in the Tofangchi’s torso. Tofangchi, horse and sword galloped off together a little way, until the dead captain toppled off the saddle, and the horse stopped in its tracks. Abbas galloped out the square towards the Naqsh-i Jahan palace.

  Crawling wounded littered the maidan. Corpses were carried away in sheets. The crowd buzzed in agitation. On the veranda, Robert Sherley said:

  ‘Brother, if you have any money at all left from the silver he’s given you, I beg you to purchase camels so we can quit this place at once. We could be home in a few months. Think of it, England in a few months! Wiston. Sussex. We must
get out of here at once! Each day grows more oppressive. Sitting here with the king’s two blind brothers right behind us… Do they not fill you with horror?’

  ‘No. Why should they?’

  ‘The Shah, their brother, ordered their eyes put out!’

  ‘It was a mercy in Shah Abbas to spare his brothers’ lives in this way.’

  ‘By blinding them? Can you really think so?’

  ‘It had been a mercy in King Henry only to have blinded and not slaughtered his wives. Our Queen, his daughter, chopped her cousin Mary’s head off.’

  ‘If a letter comes from the Queen, she will chop your head off too, with the Shah her axeman. I heard Oliver de Cannes say he believes the Queen has sent you here on a secret commission! And there were you stroking your beard and nodding away all the while as though it were true! What if a letter should come from Queen Elizabeth? Who knows what this Shah might do!’

  At the far end of the maidan Anthony watched a group of men lug the dead buffalo from the square.

  18

  In the roof garden of the Zarafshani’s one-storey house, Gol crouched behind the elm screen and squinted through its tightly woven mesh. There was Mani Babachoi yet again, standing in the vacant corner plot across the street. She watched his loose white sleeves fall back to the elbow revealing the coloured bandages that she had been throwing down to him day after day. He started his routine of pacing to and fro, flapping his white sleeves, building himself up for the act of burning his flesh to prove the ardour of his soul. He lit a dangling rag. Flame climbed the rag. Gol’s heart sank. She once saw a white stork standing in a field of burning stubble, cooling itself with its wings, waiting to snap its beak upon any field mice that ran from the flames into its path. Mani Babachoi was the stork at the stubble burning. Trapped behind the dead twigs she was the crouching field mouse.