Atash Zarafshani’s great worry was that the catastrophe at Turbat had blighted his daughter’s life as well. Too much family responsibility had devolved onto Gol’s young shoulders. When not playing with her band - another vital source of household income, at least equal to the sale of Sea and Sky - she was running family errands, to places where he’d rather not show his face: toting pigeon crates to and from the maidan, delivering mustard seeds to the bazaar, finding the salvage-yard timber from which he’d constructed a wooden oil pipeline which - up until the present oil shortage - had piped a constant supply of oil to the numerous lanterns dotted around the roof garden, as well as to the lights and stove downstairs. Well, with such a life was it any wonder that she only ever played sad songs? But not anymore! Ever since she had gone for that first walk with Mani, things had changed. Now Atash and his doves heard happy tunes and dance music drifting up the stairs. Soon Mani Babachoi might ask his permission for Gol’s hand. If she were married to such an excellent fellow as Mani - even Roshanak could hardly find a bad word to say about him - then no-one could say that Atash had failed her as a father.
It did his heart good to see her standing before him so confident and assured, and so colourfully dressed - she was still wearing her performance costume of funnel-shaped rainbow cuffs and a long-sleeved lemon tunic. If the catastrophe at Turbat had not blighted her life, however, the Shah’s new plan of war might do it yet.
‘Can Hoseyn Ali Beg stop the war?’ she asked. He knew she was thinking about Mani. She was worried he’d be sent to the front. She wanted her father to tell her that there wouldn’t be a war.
‘If Hoseyn could stop the war,’ he replied, ‘Abbas wouldn’t have made him ambassador.’
‘He wants a war?’
‘Yes.’
‘But he’s just had twelve years of war, why does he want another one? Is it for glory? Does he want to be slain in battle like all the past shahs?’
‘Let me tell you how his grandfather Shah Tahmasp died, my child. It happened far from the field of battle. The palace servants who were waxing his legs left the depilatory on too long. Tahmasp fell asleep and died of his burns. Hot wax killed Shah Tahmasp! Sixty-six years old and he still wanted smooth legs like a girl.’
‘So why does Shah Abbas want a war?’
‘I don’t know. He’s got a big army and he wants to use it?’
‘The Turkish embassy hasn’t gone back yet, pedar,’ she said. ‘That must mean there’s at least a chance that the Turkish ambassador might yet leave with a new peace treaty. The very fact that majlis and shah are still arguing between war and peace means nothing is settled.’
‘Inshallah!’ he said, and hoped it sounded more sanguine than he felt. It seemed to do the trick. She kissed his rooster cheek, and went downstairs into the house.
Alone on the roof terrace, under the moon and stars, Atash unrolled his prayer rug.
‘Oh God, you are the One who sends forth and the One who delays. Bless Hoseyn Ali Beg’s endeavours to bring peace. May Mani Babachoi not be sent to the front. Protect my wife and child from sorrow and from grief.’
On a more personal note, he thanked the All-Merciful for the three-quarters moon which, when Gol’s wedding band came by for practice the next night, would allow him to escape to the roof garden, lamp oil or no. He climbed to his feet, and cast a last look at his garden. A cloud covered the moon. The wooden pergola became invisible, setting a constellation of pale carnation buds adrift in the night.
21
A faint sun struggled behind a hornpaper sky. Nat’s eyeballs ached from the tears he was holding back. All this way for nothing. This was Masjid-i Suleiman. This was the fabled Fire Temple of Mithras to which Darius had led him. No oil gushers, no oil fountains, no oil ponds, no oil of any kind anywhere. Only dust, weeds and a derelict chimney on a sandy mound in a scrubby wasteland. The wind blew grit into his eyes.
He saw Darius knee-deep in a sand drift at the foot of the bricked-up chimney tower, and could hear his sobs, but, this being hell, every spring of fellow feeling had dried. Rather than going to his only friend in the world, he walked in the opposite direction towards a hillock covered in scrappy weeds.
Round the back of the hillock, he was out of the wind. He sat against a limestone bas-relief of Mithras and traced his finger over the pagan stonework. Bore-holed by dust-mites, the old impostor had lost his nose so that he looked like a syphilitic sailor. Nat ran his finger over raised glyphs which had crumbled away in patches. The Zoroastrians, or whatever they were, who knew how to read these glyphs, were long gone. It was a dead alphabet.
He flayed the glyphs with his steel-tipped knife sheath, hot tears running down his face. He hewed the glyphs harder and harder, faster and faster, for all that they withheld, and because ignorance and folly had been his only patrimony. Great chunks of Mithras broke off, and satisfyingly huge cracks opened up in the limestone.
Then the whole facade caved in. To his terror, Nat found himself perched over a black abyss. The earth wobbled as if he was on the top of a tall ladder. Running fissures opened in the ground beneath him. He rolled backwards. An ever-expanding crater chased him, the soil opening up beneath him. He got to his feet and ran. Behind him, the whole hillside caved in and collapsed into the black abyss with a noise like rolling thunder.
A cloud of dust rose where the hill once stood. The deafening landslip was followed by abrupt and total silence. The dust unveiled a green marble giant, a twelve-foot high statue of Mithras with his outstretched wings.
Nat and Darius crept forward to peer over the edge of the crater at the winged Mithras. A cascade of rubble descended to a subterranean ledge on which the beautiful idol stood. Darius stepped gingerly onto this rocky stairway, fearing it would give way at every step. On all fours, he climbed backwards down the rocks to the subterranean ledge, Nat following after.
At the foot of the marble Mithras, Darius kicked a rock into the black chasm. They listened to its splash in flooded darkness far below. They lay on their bellies on the rocky ledge of Mithras’s pedestal and lowered a lantern on the end of the rope. A deep cavern revealed its shape. Sandstone walls shot with zigzags of hard shale. At the bottom of the well bubbled a pool of boiling pitch. In this black pond hoops of hot oil rolled and tumbled over each other like eels at play.
‘Oil,’ cried Nat. ‘Oil! Oil! Oil!’
‘A furnace,’ said Darius. ‘It will incinerate our goatskins.’
‘Even if we douse them first?’
‘Yes. But look! Look! Halfway down. There!’ He swung the lantern in the direction of a vug, a cave within the cave wall, a kind of alcove. On its floor, the swinging light discovered standing pools of shining black oil. ‘There’s our chance. That shelf there. The oil is shallow. It won’t scald.’
‘But how do we reach it? How do we get the oil out of the well?’
‘I don’t know.’
They reeled in the lamp, and clambered up the rubble cascade, past the green marble shoulders of the giant Mithras, and out into the open air.
The wind had dropped and the sun was shining. In the shade of a dead tree, Nat set a pot of Kulsum’s qaveh to boil. Darius snapped a thick branch off the dead tree. The loud crack scared the mules to the end of their tethers.
‘We can’t make a jib crane out of this brittle timber,’ he said, ‘so all the ferryman’s nails are useless.’
The coffee came to the boil. Nat offered him a cup but Darius asked him to pass him a drink of water instead. He then watched Nat wipe his hands on his seamy breeches, before thoroughly smearing the bottle’s mouth with his dirty palm. Spotting a blade of grass in the lip, Nat sucked a forefinger and stuck it into the bottleneck to prise out the grass. Darius waved the water away:
‘Perhaps I’ll drink the qaveh after all.’
They sat with their tin cups steaming in the open. Darius took a swig, and pulled a face at its bitterness. As he sipped his qaveh, his gaze rested upon the marble idol. Only Mithras’s head wa
s above ground, like a gravedigger.
‘Look at Mithras,’ he said. ‘Straight as a chess-piece even though half the hillside has caved in around his shoulders. We don’t need a crane, we can hang the block and tackle around his neck. All we have to do is tie the saddlecloth to the other end of the rope. Then it’s simple! I lower you down to that shelf of oil halfway down the oil well, and after you’ve filled up all seven goatskins with oil, I’ll winch you up again!’
‘Who made you the Shah of Persia? I’m not going down the well. You’re the one who knows good oil from bad. You go down.’
‘I’m the heaviest, you’re the lightest - these are elementary engineering principles.’
‘The same elementary engineering principles you used for your catamaran? You nearly drowned me in water and now you want to drown me in oil.’
‘I didn’t invent the key principles of physics, Nat, I merely apply them.’
‘Key principles of cluck-cluck-cluck.’
Naked but for suede breeches, Nat sits in the saddlecloth on the edge of the abyss. He leans back on the rope, the soles of his feet on the ledge. He is terrified as never before in his life. His eyes follow a trail of rope. The trail starts where the rope loops in and out of the saddlecloth’s grommets to fashion the bosun’s chair or sling he’s sitting in. From there the trail rises to the maple block lassoed around Mithras’s neck - how fragile that block looks now! From the block and tackle’s pulley wheel the rope drops down to Darius, who has the rope looped over his shoulder and then wrapped around his waist like a village tug o’ war team’s anchorman. He looks at Darius’s face. There is terror there too.
‘I’m going to swing out and swing back,’ says Nat, his voice trembling. ‘To test. Brace yourself.’
He hops backwards off the ledge, swings out a few feet, and lands back where he left, on the lip of the ledge. He gasps and sags against the rope with relief. Darius hands Nat the lantern, then feeds more rope through the maple block around the marble neck.
‘You will not swing back level this time, Nat.’ Their eyes meet. Nat steps back off the ledge, and drops a few yards. Darius lowers him hand over hand into the dark depths. Nat listens to the pulley wheel chuntering, and to the block and tackle’s maple box scraping against the icon’s marble chest. Side to side it scrapes with every turn of the pulley wheel. As the bosun’s chair descends, the lantern’s light travels over shale zigzags in the sandstone walls. Halfway down the well he comes to the vug. Its pool of shallow oil glows bronze in the lantern’s beam.
‘Level,’ he shouts. The rope halts its descent with a bump.
Nat kicks his legs backwards and forwards. He swings towards the ledge of the vug, and then back out again over the bottomless pit, his stomach turning over. Forward goes the swing, Nat’s feet almost touch the ledge. Back goes the swing. Forwards goes the swing, and he leaps from the saddlecloth. He lands on the vug’s oily ledge, slips and drops the lantern. He watches his only light somersault down into the pit.
‘Whores in God’s hell!’ he shouts, his curse echoing around the pit.
Blackness. Then movement on the black pond far below. A smoothly expanding blue ring ignites the pit with a muffled whoompf. Abruptly, the black pond turns into a glaring disc of yellow fire. With a whoosh and a peeling sound, one whole wall of the cavern ignites, lighting up strips of shale and long zigzags of sandstone with racing flames. Nat screams in terror. A confetti of bituminous flames showers the cavern. Darkness returns for an instant before the black pit belches up more gobbets of burning pitch, which spatter the walls. Soon the whole cavern is seeded with spitting, sizzling, glowing yellow flakes of fire. Cowering against the back wall of the vug, Nat is better sheltered from the firestorm than Darius, who is spattered by scalding tar up on the ledge.
Petrol bats flit from wall to wall scorching Darius all over. He strips off his limpid rag of a shirt for fear it will catch fire. The black hair on his bare chest and belly, arms and shoulders, swoops and sweeps like iron filings drawn by a magnet. Having been too poor all his life to use the depilatory dowa, he has a full pelt. Molten pitch falls as slow as furry snow upon his naked, hairy torso. He can smell the singeing of his body hair. Each scalding gobbet that settles upon him fizzles another patch.
‘Are you all right, Darius?’
‘My poverty has made me flammable!’ he calls down.
From his leather bottle, Darius douses his body hair as best he can, then pours water down the front of his shalwar to flameproof his loins. He sprinkles water onto the bundle of goatskins, then, with his own leather belt, straps the seven skins to the saddlecloth. Kneeling at the feet of the green marble giant, he lowers the bundle of goatskins down to Nat on the vug. The block and tackle clatters and rattles on Mithras’s marble chest as he feeds rope through its trundling pulley wheel.
‘Level!’ comes Nat’s voice.
Down on the vug, gritty fumes scrape the roof of Nat’s mouth, and the noxious, metallic air makes his head woozy. He leans out and grabs the swinging saddlecloth in oily hands. He unstraps its bundle of goatskin sacks, hitching the rope to a natural sandstone pillar. Standing up to his shins in warm oil, he glides the mouth of a sack through the shallow pool. The sack bellies out. Stiff hide grows supple as it fills. He stands the full goatskin up, stoppers it, and ropes it onto the saddlecloth..
‘Ready!’ he shouts. ‘Haul away!’
The goatskin sack swings out into the cavern, then ascends in jerky stages up towards the light. The block and tackle squeaks with every turn. He sees Darius reach out an arm and grapple the black sack, like a fisherman leaning from a boat to land a sea lion. The chamber darkens, for a second, its shaft of natural light eclipsed by Darius climbing the rocky stairway to attach rope to mule, which drags the sack up the rubble cascade to the light.
Nat is alone.
The only sound comes from the rumbling oil at the foot of the well, which sounds like an evening tide trapped in a rocky inlet. Nat skims the second sack’s open mouth through the shallow pool of warm rock oil. As he does so, a starburst of pitch and embers illuminates the vug, which becomes suddenly beautiful. Quartz crystals, embedded in the vug’s sandstone walls, wink and glint in the firelight. A molten squib lands on the oil pool and floats past him like a bronze sail at sunset. He wades through gold-rimmed ripples of oil. When he hears Darius climb back down the rubble cascade to the promontory at the foot of the marble Mithras, he shouts,
‘We are going to succeed, Darius! We’re on our way!’
A second time, the saddlecloth descends towards Nat. A second time he loads in a full sack of oil, a second time Darius winches it up towards Mithras’s pedestal, a second time the harnessed mule drags the sack the last bit of the way up the rubble staircase and into the light. And so it goes, a third, and a fourth and a fifth time, with Nat shouting:
‘We’re on our way, Darius! We’re on our way!’
On the sixth time, however, there’s a hitch. A small stumble. A falling squib scalds the back of Nat’s neck, he claps his hand to his neck, slips and falls. He lands on the very edge of the vug, and watches his hat drop down into the bottomless pit. His skin seems to bristle all the way up the back of his body from heel to head. For several seconds he stays absolutely rigid, not daring to blink. He looks over the vug’s edge at the burning well where his life nearly ended, and sees his hat come floating back towards him, rising on an updraught from the furnace. His hat floats past him and carries on up towards Darius. A cruel practical joke occurs to Nat. With the sole of his boot he rolls a boulder off the ledge, lets out a scream, then hides at the back of the vug.
Darius hears the scream followed by a thud-splash far below in the oil well. The next second, right in front of his face, the lambskin hat disintegrates into flakes and burning embers. A message from hell. Nat has fallen into the bottomless pit.
‘Nat! Nat!’ cries Darius, but hears only his own deep voice straying lost around the chamber, echoing from wall to wall. ‘Merciful God don’t
let him die! Oh, Nat, oh, Nat!’
There comes a small sound, barely audible above the great rumbling slurry of captured tides of oil:
A foldeh-roll a-fiddly-doe, a foldeh-ro-a-roo.
He listens. A cry of help? or death throes? or a belching of oil?
A foldeh-roll a-fiddly-doe, a foldeh-ro-a-roo.
The noise ceases. Darius lies down on the marble pedestal. He holds his breath and listens. It comes again. The same sound, clearer and more distinct:
A foldeh-roll a-fiddly-doe, a foldeh-ro-a-roo.
A squib shower lights the vug. Darius sees the hatless ghost of Nat Bramble leaning against a lumpy sandstone pillar, a fiery veil of golden nuggets falling before him, singing:
‘Love me little, love me long,
Is the burden of my song.
Love that is too hot and strong,
Burneth soon to waste.
The Trade Secret Page 9
