‘I’ll thank the Shah to do the same to Bramble for his embezzling my silver, by God!’
Once upon a time, reflected Anthony, Bramble was supposed to have delivered the Sherley brother’s escape fund. Those Dutch lion dollars were to have financed their plan to flee Persia together. The only sure way to do so was without telling Angelo and the other gentlemen of the party, whose continued presence would cover a pretend hunting expedition long enough for the brothers to get clean away with some Dutch merchants. But that was once upon a time. Now there was a new story with a new ending for Robert. No way out but by leaving Robert behind. Up here in this skull circle it would not matter how Robert shouted and stamped when the news was broken, nor what threats he made to tell the Shah how things really stood - no-one could hear.
‘For embezzlement, Anthony! Why it could have been father!’
‘You talk as if embezzlement were the family business! And besides, father would have had no cause to embezzle from so openhanded a sovereign. Unlike that ginger bitch, Abbas would have given our brother three ships no question. By the time we get back, Thomas will have put more gold back in the Queen’s moneybox than she ever knew was gone.’
Chanting arose from a large angry crowd in the maidan. Robert trained the perspective trunk down on the crowd, and moved the lens a notch. Within the disc’s rainbow blur of ground crystal he captured a redcapped Qizilbash parading a giant burnished steel battle standard. Two steel dragons stuck out from either side of the battle standard. Waving one arm, a mullah led the crowd in a chant. His mouth opened and closed as silently as a fish, but his words were amplified in the crowd’s chants that reached the Sherley brothers’ eyrie.
Hoping to dazzle his brother with his knowledge of these things, Anthony went into a long disquisition about the chant’s political significance. The Shi’ih crowd were cursing the names of the first three Sunni Caliphs, he explained, whom they accused of robbing Ali of his rightful succession to the Caliphate. The Sultan was Sunni the Shah was Shi’ih.
‘Shah Abbas is keeping his pulpits well-tuned,’ said Anthony, alluding to the Queen’s famous phrase about how, whenever war loomed, she used the clergy to incite a patriotic Protestant fervour. ‘For Shi’ih Persia is surrounded by hostile Sunni states, just as our little Protestant island is surrounded by hostile Papist states.’ Far from being dazzled, as he should have been, Robert said:
‘Ah! That’s the very point I’ve been wanting to tell you about. This is the great mistake you’re making. I’ve read your whole stack of ambassadorial letters and they all contradict each other.’
‘Wheels within wheels,’ said Anthony, cryptically tapping his nose.
‘No,’ said Robert. ‘Each letter contradicts the next. What helps Spain harms England, what’s good for Venice is bad for Rome. Venice wants peace with the Turk, the Pope wants war. These letters are all at cross purposes!’
‘Fear not, these letters will all carry well. I’m lucky, didn’t you know?’
‘They cannot all carry well. Either some will or others will, but not all at once, don’t you see?’
‘No,’ said Anthony his voice rising, ‘this is bigger than all that. Venice, Rome, Spain and England all set aside their differences to fight against the Turk once before at the Great Battle of Lepanto. They’ve done it before, they’ll do it again, and these letters are the means to do it!’
‘Anthony, Lepanto was before the Levant Company’s trade with the Turk. England and Venice will never, ever give up this rich trade. These are new times, brother.’
‘All times are new to the ignorant! You don’t see the broad canvas.’
‘No, you don’t,’ said Robert, ‘your letter to King James cancels out what you write to the Queen.’
Anthony scowled, and a hot flush ran up the side of his neck. All his life his younger brother Robert had been a kind of wizard whose words had the power to alter substance, whose adenoidal, actuarial tone and manner somehow made it seem as if he were the elder brother. Anthony’s best way of defending his achievements from such sorcery was to put some distance between himself and Robert.
‘Perhaps there are things about the Embassy I haven’t told you yet.’
‘My heart bleeds,’ said Robert ‘that you have not consulted me more on this Embassy. I don’t understand why you have cut me out. I have been an ambassador and you have not, and I tell you plain that the way you have enlarged the embassy ensures its failure.’
‘Perhaps you don’t know the true purpose of this mission.’
‘I’m still waiting for you to tell me!’
Robert knew his brother wanted him to ignore the fine detail and applaud only the scale, but he was duty-bound to share his serious misgivings about this hopelessly compromised embassy of cross purposes. True brotherly love required Robert to point out to Anthony that his high horse was only painted white. The first shower of rain would reveal a poorly painted piebald nag.
‘These letters will get you into a terrible tangle. They’ll bog you down and sink you. I fear they will entrap and ensnare you in all kinds of ways that you don’t yet see.’
‘Trap, snap, ensnare, bog, mire, impede - these are your only joys, brother! Your very ecstasies! You want to piss on my achievement!’
‘I do not, Anthony! I offer you good counsel as a loving brother.’
‘You’re cursing the embassy, this legendary enterprise before it’s even begun, before it’s even had a chance!’
‘I simply urge you to form a single clear strategy from one or two commissions from one or two princes rather than drown in a welter -’
‘Drown! Drown in the boggy mire, I suppose! Among all the tangles! Here I stand on top of the world, about to lead the richest Embassy the courts of Europe will have ever seen, on a mission to shift the balance of world power more than Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh combined, and all you can say to me is that if only I’d listened to your advice I wouldn’t be in this awful mess, bogged down in a terrible tangle in the mire. You don’t understand, Robert. Policy is indirect. Policy is a billiard table where a statesman must use the green to sink the red in off the cushion, only so he can come up and kiss the purple.’
‘How you kiss the Shah’s cock is your own business, but unless you select your alliances this Embassy is doomed before it’s begun. Everyone understands this, everyone except you and your sweetheart the Shah.’
Up here in this bony turret among the deer skulls, Robert’s wild words were harmless. Except what if he was to carry on raving unpredictably at ground level? Anthony couldn’t risk the Shah changing his mind about sending him on the Great Persian Embassy.
‘You are right,’ said Anthony. ‘Forgive me. I’m sorry not to have talked over the embassy more with you. But I promise that once we’re on the road, I will disclose all I know to you, and I truly look forward to hearing your wise counsel.’
Robert burst into tears of gratitude to be admitted back in to his brother’s trust. He embraced Anthony, and laid his cheek on his shoulder.
‘Oh, the road, the road,’ he said. ‘Soon we’ll be on the road, putting our heads together as we ride out of here, oh heaven! Do you know I’ve had my bags packed for days now? Saddle too. Watching the servants buckle those bags, I was able to breathe for the first time in months. I saw Wiston in every shirt fold, our father, our sister Cessalye, and Thomas, above all Thomas in every slammed lid and saddlebow. Oh, I can’t wait. Soon, we’ll be on the road together.’
A strange sound entered the bone ring. The sound was like a man breathing on his spectacles, only terrifically loud, as an ant might hear it.
Hur! Hur! Hur!
It came from the maidan. And now came the rumble and thump of the crowd jumping up and down, while still roaring their Hur! Hur! Hur!
‘Look, a trick rider,’ said Anthony, glad of a change of subject, pointing at a gymnast standing on the saddles of two horses.
‘Then why the hosannahs?’ asked Robert. ‘Why the jumping?’
Anthony took the quartz crystal. In the glass disc, as clear as in a clasp locket, he saw the horizontal black moustache and fierce green eyes of Shah Abbas. In flowing green robes, Abbas galloped through the crowds. The horses he stood on were still galloping when he leapt down and, on the bounce, reappeared on a high wall near the mosque, leading the crowd and his soldiers in chanting against the Sunni caliphs.
Seeing the Shah’s face so close in the lens he felt an overwhelming sense of suffocation, of being trapped. Abbas had a habit of falling asleep with his arms around one’s chest, so that it was impossible to break his hold without waking him up. Whenever Anthony needed to get up in the night, he would spend perhaps half an hour lifting the royal arms by inches, so as to slide out of his embrace without waking him, but the moment Anthony finally placed his bare feet on the marble floor, he would hear a marble-hard voice behind him, demand to know where he was going. At such times Anthony’s own reply always sounded like a request,
‘I desire to use the chamber pot.’
Essex once told him he felt he was putting his head in a lion’s jaw every time he kissed the Queen. Kissing Abbas felt the same. A panther in his prime, though, not a mangy old lioness. If his love was suffocating, his air of violence was a close, overcast day, its looming thunderheads throwing down spectacular bolts like the one that killed Angelo’s manservant, or mutilated the embezzling governor of Ghilan, or which would - by Christ! - have chopped Anthony’s own head off, had the ink had been a little fresher on the lioness’s letter to the panther. He lowered the perspective trunk and was relieved to see Abbas reduced to a far-distant dot. Soon the Embassy would achieve the same feat!
Into the circle of bone bounded Shah Abbas dressed in scarlet with a posse of Tofangchi, his bodyguard of Georgian war orphans, the sons of slain Christians. The bodyguard spread out around the turret walls in silence until they had surrounded the Sherleys. Forgetting to drop to their knees, the brothers turned from the Shah before them to look back at the Shah down in the maidan. Their heads spinning they saw Shah Abbas both far-off and near to the eye, both down in the maidan and standing before them in the bone circle at one and the same time.
‘A double!’ cried the Shah delightedly. ‘A double so that I may spend the last precious hours I have with my Antonio before he leaves with the Embassy.’ The brothers dropped to their knees, and bowed their heads in silence. ‘This tower, Antonio, was built by Tahmasp my grandfather, to commemorate the most successful hunting party ever to leave the royal stables. All these animals were killed on one hunt. Every one of them. Will you come hawking with me? Nothing shall rise before us that is not game! For flies I have sparrows, for larks and finches I have marlins and tercels to set upon them, for pigeons hawks, for buzzards peregrine falcons, and for deer and gazelles I have golden eagles. And five hundred dogs to fetch it all in. In this way we shall make a clean sweep of the country, and leave a silence behind! Come!’
The Sherley brothers walked towards Shah Abbas.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ the Shah asked Robert, who froze on the spot. He watched Abbas, Anthony and the Tofangchi disappear down the long, winding staircase, leaving him alone among the skulls, a ghost in the bright blue sky.
25
The darkness is absolute. ‘Or am I blind?’ Nat wonders. ‘Did my eyes burn out when I fell through molten oil into the water below?’ He is encased in sticky bitumen. ‘What happened? I fell through oil into water, and would have drowned but for Mithras smashing through the underground water chamber.’ He must have slid from the vadose down some kind of chute into these catacombs of hollow sandstone where he can breathe. Better to have drowned than lie here in this sticky, tarry grave.
‘Oh God, hear me in the truth of thy salvation. Deliver me out of the mire, that I sink not. Let not the flood drown me, neither let the deep swallow me up; and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.’
His arms are outstretched ahead of him as though he were diving into a lake. Rocks and earth pinion his wrists and ankles. He waggles the blind antennae of hands and feet, the only parts of him that can move.
‘Dear God, let me die in the open air, out on the honest earth below Your sky. Let me be numbered among the creatures of the earth and air, and not the scuttling underground creatures.’
Oil trickles towards him along a slant chute. The approaching oil rumbles louder and louder behind him. The soles of his feet grow hot. No trickle now, but a glugging flood. Oil is scalding the channelled earth behind him. He flippers his feet in impotent frenzy. Hot oil clouts his heels, flows over his ankles, up his legs and over his body, then rises around his Adam’s apple, then submerges his face. He holds his breath until his lungs are about to burst. The oil rolls away. He sucks air like pebbles on a beach when a heavy wave withdraws.
Slicked and greased, he finds he can move his shoulders a little, and wriggle his legs enough to shake off the sticky jagged clumps of tar shale shackling his ankles.
For several moments, he believes it possible that he is not going to die in this tunnel, that the last taste in his mouth won’t be oil. Then, from far behind, he hears a sound which ends that small hope. A rolling heavy tide of oil. Like a condemned man manacled to Traitor’s Gate for seven tides of the Thames, he can hear the dark tide that will drown him. Oil booms into the chute and thuds against the soles of his feet. He hurtles forward into a widening passage. The rip tide of oil passes over him. He breathes air again, gasping and spluttering on a chute. He crawls, he slips, he sprawls into shallow puddles of oil. He slithers blindly through a narrow opening that shelves steeply. He slides down a ramp of slick bitumen. A rock bangs his hip. Rocks clash. The clash echoes.
He wafts his hand ahead of him in the blackness. A wall. His fingertips trace one right-angled groove after another. Bricks. The product of hand and trowel. Man has been here before him. He crawls round patting a ring of bricks no wider than the span of his arms. And then he knows where he is. This must be the foot of the chimney tower, thirty underground yards from where the marble Mithras plunged towards him: a cathedral bell crashing down on the bell-ringer. He climbs to his feet at the base of the tower. He spreads his arms out and touches curving wall on either side. There is no breaking through these thick solid walls. He raises his arms as high as they will go, wiggling his fingers above him. He shouts ‘Hoy!’ and hears the echo climb the tower.
He crumbles loose powder from dry brickwork. The brick dust stings his wounds. His whimpering echoes up the chimney. He braces himself off the ground, feet pushing back against curving brickwork and inches up the inside of the tower. His whole body trembles and shakes. The pain in the muscles of his arms and thighs redoubles with every breath he takes. Up and up he climbs. The darkness is so immaculate that he has no sense of how high he has climbed. A large slab of dry mortar detaches from under his palm. He hears it bounce down the inner walls. A sickeningly long fall. His stinging palms press against the curved wall, but his whole body starts shaking and trembling so violently that hands and feet keep slipping.
A crunching blow to the ridge of his skull pile-drives his neck into his shoulders. Sharp dust prickles his eyes. He reaches up a hand and finds a rusty iron bar. He grabs hold of the bar with both hands. He lets his feet dangle over the sheer black drop of the inside of the chimney tower. He swings to and fro and finds he can hook the back of his knees over two more bars. He hangs from the three iron bars, right at the top of the tower, and sobs in the sweet relief at no longer having to brace his aching muscles against the fire-tower’s walls.
He climbs up through the bars. His fingers touch a mortar ceiling. He runs his fingertips over the mortar, and finds a flint, which he excavates with his thumbnail. Perched on two bars, he uses the flint to dig out the mounting of the third. He scrapes and gouges at mortar until he can rotate the bar. He jerks the bar side to side, working it loose like a stiff door-bolt. Suddenly he is holding the full weight of the bar in his hand. He touches it to either cheek, and kisses the iron bar
. He climbs through the gap he has created. He lies on his back on the two bars fixed under the cement ceiling. He thrusts the loose bar up at his coffin lid. He thrusts it upwards - once, twice, three times. Tunk. Tunk. Tunk. He cuffs dust from his face, and tastes it on his tongue. He adjusts his grip on the iron bar. Tunk. Tunk. Tunk. Ever larger chunks of mud, brick and mortar fall onto him. Tunk. Tunk. Tunk. A slab clunks his cheek. Orange lights flicker on the insides of his eyelids. ‘If I were blind, would I still see these orange spots?’ He tunks the iron bar upwards with all his might, and strikes the very thing for which he has been mining: the first nugget of sky. He can feel cool air among the dust. There is a different quality to the blackness. He flails away with the iron bar, mining this rich seam in frenzy, digging out stars, a clipped moon, a galaxy, clouds - he can see them all!
Nat throws the iron bar, and hauls himself up onto the rim of the tower. He sits with one leg hanging outside the tower. He feels the wind on his eyes, on his eyelashes, on his lips, in his nostrils, in his mouth. He holds his breath to hear the dead tree’s gentle clacking and creaking.
‘Darius,’ he calls out. ‘Darius!’
All alone. But his prayer has been answered: he will die in the open air.
He coughs a long hacking cough. He stands up on the rim of the tower, legs apart with his arms raised aloft. He shouts to the elements:
‘I am Nat Bramble! I am the sky miner! I gouged the stars and moon out of the earth! I knocked down the wall between death and life! Knocked it clean through!’
He squats on the round ledge, and leaps from the tower. He lands in sand. Curled on his side at the foot of the Fire Temple of Mithras, cowled in oil, more mineral than man, he sobs for the deliverance he has won for himself.
He lies immobile. The soft heavy sand flashes here and there with mica. The sands drift over him with the night winds. A delicious heaviness steals over him. ‘If I don’t stay awake the sands will bury me.’ He blacks out, and the first ray of dawn discovers, scattered in the sand, a blackened barefoot heel, a protruding elbow, and a tussock of stiff, black hair.
The Trade Secret Page 11
