Ioulida was a ghost town. Except he knew it wasn’t. Candles were still glowing in the wayside cupboard shrines. He led a search through the streets of the hilltop town. He ran down a narrow alley and at the end of it there was the full moon playing Peep Bo with him. When the rest of the search party gave up, he ran on alone the length and breadth of all Ioulida’s mazy walkways. At the end of every alley and every flight of steps, he saw nobody, only the fat round moon, framed in the square of the passageway like its reflection in a well, saying, Peep-Bo! Peep-Bo! Peep-Bo!
Sir Thomas returned to the central plaza by the large church where he found his men sitting about and giving him sour looks. Grumbling and cursing, the Dragon’s crew began the long walk back to the sea. They straggled downhill in darkness, which became darker still as they entered a deep gully hidden from the moonlight.
Stones and rocks pelted them from the high cliffs either side of the gully. Hundreds of roaring Greeks charged at them from both sides, all swinging staves, rakes and hoes.
‘Stand! Stand!’ bellowed Sir Thomas, as his crew fled all around him screaming ‘The Turk! The Turk!’ The next second he was fleeing himself. He emerged from the gully into a running battle on the plain. ‘Stand! Stand! To me! To me!’ he cried, waving his rapier. But the crew could see their ship in the moonlight and ran pell-mell for the small boats.
A rock caught Sir Thomas on the forehead as he watched them go. Blood poured into his eye. He did not see the stick that cracked his kneecap. The pain was intense. He kept his footing, but was hobbled and limping now. He slashed his rapier around like a cornered crab with only one claw left. In hand to hand combat, Sir Thomas’s sliced, slashed and stabbed at his Greeks attackers in the moonlight. A hoe struck the side of his head. He fell to the ground. The heel of a boot crunched the bones of his sword hand.
The villagers stripped him stark naked, using his own garters to tie his arms behind his back. Two Ioulidans had been killed in the skirmish, and so there was not a man, woman or child who did not kick, punch or scratch Thomas, or tug his beard or pull his long hair before they slung him into a tiny stone shed, where he was shackled to the wall.
On the third day of his captivity a few Greeks came into the cell and removed his leg-irons. They stood him on his feet, and tied his hands behind his back with his gaiters again. The Greeks led him to the edge of a rocky promontory. He squinted against the bright glittering azure sea far below. His captors began talking in their barbarous tongue. They were trying to tell him something, and were pointing at the long drop to the rocks. He knew this game. He wasn’t playing. Let them throw him off the cliff and have done. He would not humour them. He would not be their sport.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said in English, ‘a long drop. Jagged rocks. A painful death. Quick about it. You will not make a Sherley wail or beg base life from primitives! I am Sir Thomas Sherley, you dogs!’
Then it began to dawn on him that they were not going to shove him off the cliff. It was something else that they were trying to tell him. They pointed at the marks on his ankles and bare feet where the leg-irons used to be, then pointed down at the sandy crescent of the bay. They seemed to be saying that the reason his irons had come off that morning had something to do with the azure bay down below. He looked back down at the shore.
And then he understood what they were trying to tell him. A great cry escaped him. His knees gave way. He lay on his face in sharp thistles and sheep droppings. They had kept him in irons only so long as they had feared a rescue attempt. No chance of rescue now. He was forsaken, utterly forsaken. The Golden Dragon had gone.
5
Their instruments at rest, Gol, Maryam, Nargis and Sahar sit with self-effacing stillness, against the wall of a courtyard crowded with wedding guests. The hired musicians are waiting for the speeches to end before they resume playing, none more impatiently than Gol for whom life has become one long wait. Waiting for Mani to return from the war. Waiting for any word of Mani. Waiting to hear if he’s dead or alive.
What a lot of speeches there have been since the band’s last song! And what a long speech this last one is! She strokes the drumskin of the dombak she has primed and ready to go. She’ll play drum on the next song, which will begin – if these speeches ever end - with a double-time drumbeat: doum-tek ka! doum-tek ka! doum-tek ka! DOUM! She can’t wait to puncture the heavy, slow silence with that doum-tek ka! doum-tek ka! doum-tek ka! DOUM! But wait she must. Wait she must.
She stares up at the neat rectangle of sky above the courtyard. The edge of a cloud tears with tedious slowness.
She looks at the newly weds, gifts piled before them on the bright silk wedding blanket, the sofre aghd sewn with little mirrors and embroidered with silver brocade. They are both younger than Gol. Here’s yet another couple moving on to the next stage of life, while she is stuck fast. Betrothal to Mani should have brought Gol change: escape from a father who never left the house, and from a mother who never changed an opinion. She is not living, only waiting.
Once, when she was a little girl, she asked her father what made the mosque’s blue walls shimmer. He showed her how each blue wall tile was glazed with a solution of tiny metal specks in suspension. She stroked the glaze under which flakes and flecks of copper and nickel were suspended like stones in ice. Suspended in a glaze.
She starts jigging her heel on the ball of her foot. Heel clacks against slipper with the blurry speed of a kingfisher’s wings. Will this mullah never end? Must he pause between every last phrase so as to let its full triteness sink in, leaving ever longer gaps between one choice word and the next? At least he is the final speaker. When he has done the band will at last be able to strike up again. For now she must endure this interminable waiting.
Even Darius has grown up and moved on. A few weeks ago, she caught sight of him in the maidan’s middle distance haggling with a couple of merchants. There he was, the New Darius, a self-possessed man of affairs, his hands full of practical gestures, the flat of his hand chopping a fraction off the top of a commission, a forefinger rolling revenue into next month. All his old dreaminess was gone, leaving only these cold, sharp gestures. Well, they say good fortune hardens the heart. Except his heart had always been harder than she’d ever suspected, hadn’t it? He’d never really been the wide-eyed poet of her imagination. His betrayal of her was cold. She never really knew him.
She closes her eyes and breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth. When she has done this seven times, she opens her eyes to find that the shadows in the courtyard have somehow thickened. More than that, the courtyard is completely silent. The mullah’s speech has ended! It ended long ago! Her heart skips a beat. Everyone is waiting for her. Late! She is late! She has missed her cue. Maryam and Sahar are frowning at her.
Gol seizes the dombak and beats the drumhead in double-time: doum-tek ka! doum-tek ka! doum-tek ka! DOUM!
Maryam grabs her arm. All the wedding guests in the courtyard hiss: suss! suss! suss! All eyes are upon her. She lays the dombak down, ashamed from head to toe.
The mullah turns his head towards her, and makes a joke about the intemperance of young women, then resumes his unending blessing.
6
Musket and bird basket slung across his back, Mani Babachoi scaled a steep mountain path through prickly bushes. Only an hour after daybreak and already it was hot. He was leading a three-man scouting party. From the top of the ridge, he’d be able to see to the far horizon and to search for any distant puff of smoke that might be a clue as to the whereabouts of the Ottoman army. The two other scouts – Abadani boors - were dawdling far behind in the foothills.
This suited Mani well, because on this pristine and beautiful morning he was, contrary to military regulations, going to release the homing dove carrying his love letter to Gol. Weeks and weeks he had spent composing the letter in his head. It was all very gol o bobol. Just her sort of thing, he was sure. Pale green lizards turned tail, rattling purple thistles as they flicked away into the bu
shes. Perhaps they heard the two birds in his basket, the army bird and the stout black and white dove that was a gift from Atash Zarafshani.
‘This is for your letter to my daughter,’ Gol’s father had told him, his scaly hands closing Mani’s upon the bird, its heart beating hard and fast against his fingers. ‘A token of my blessing upon your engagement. Not my fastest, but my strongest dove. He will fly fifteen hundred parasangs at a go.’
Later that same day, when they were alone together on the roof garden, Gol said,
‘Darius is a hypocrite. He’s the type of man who preserves the purity of the bride in his left hand by dint of the whore in his right. For men like Darius, marriage does not mean the entwining of two souls at all, but the perpetuation of the eternal purdah between men and women. He fooled me. I don’t know why it should hurt so much, since we were never lovers, but it does hurt. He has destroyed my trust. Who can be sure of anything in this world anymore?’
Mani’s eyes had rolled back in his head, ‘She is mine!’ he thought. ‘She is mine!’ Victory over Darius was so total and complete that he even forgot his jealousy about the close friendship Gol had enjoyed with him for all those years before.
When his platoon had crossed tracks with the embassy’s caravan, however, Mani ran into Nat, who argued that Darius was not the hypocrite Gol thought he was. The young foreigner’s passion convinced Mani he was speaking the truth.
Should Mani write and tell Gol the truth about Darius? No. What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her, but it could destroy Mani’s hopes. No, now was not the time to write, not now when he was so far from home, and when Darius was in Isfahan. In her contrition Gol would be too receptive to the honeyed words the new rich Darius poured in her ear. He would convince her she was too fine and precious a rose for a soldier’s wife. Well, a pox on that! Besides, hadn’t she told him herself that she was over Darius? So there an end. Why tell her at all?
But then he heard her again plaintively saying: ‘He has destroyed my trust. Who can be sure of anything in this world anymore?’
Mani hauled himself up between two jagged rocks. He cuffed sweat from his forehead and from his horseshoe moustache. He heard a noise above him. Footsteps? He listened again. The mountain was quiet. Probably just falling scree. He looked down at the other two scouts toiling far below him. He rubbed the bumps and dull discs on his arms where the self-inflicted scorch marks had healed. He listened to the two doves burbling in the basket. Their trilling carried him back to how he and Gol first met. And he heard his laughter echo off the rocky hillside.
The first time he saw her she was playing at a wedding with her band. They didn’t meet. He never spoke to her, she didn’t notice him. Strange how these things work, but for some reason what stuck in his mind, the thing that made him fall in love, was the delight in her eyes as she looked across to her fellow musicians whenever the music changed pace, swerving from one mood to another. He found out her name but no more than that.
Then a week later, he chanced to see her selling those stripy blue and green carnations – the Sea and Sky hybrid - in the bazardeh, or little bazaar. Gol’s mother was doing the actual selling, while Gol herself was cutting stalks from a bunch of blue and green. He bought flowers for his mother, but failed to catch Gol’s eye. When he returned the next day, Gol and her mother were gone, and there was a man selling meatballs in their place. He never hated a stranger so much as that oaf selling meatballs.
He went for long walks through the city streets. Truth be told, he was in no way searching for her, but rather the opposite. He was hoping to see another woman of equal charisma to bring him to his senses, to extirpate this wedding singer from his blood, and let him go back to how he used to be. He wasn’t used to going round like half a person. He didn’t like it. One other woman, of equal beauty would do it. Even if glimpsed for only a few seconds, her existence alone would be enough to calm his blood, be enough to let him drop this lunatic obsession with the fiddle-player with the raven black hair. He would be able to say to his madness, ‘Look! There are other woman of uncanny charisma and blood-troubling beauty out there.’ Yet even when they swapped a passing look with him, pretty women now stirred him as little as they did the Shah.
Walking, walking, walking through Isfahan’s back streets in rain and wind and sun did at least take the edge off the gnawing hollowness that he had suffered ever since he first saw Gol. It had gone on for months this lonely walking, which he did whenever he was off-duty. One day, he was ill with a coughing fever, but still felt compelled to walk and walk, with a blanket around his shoulders. Woozy with sickness and fatigue he became utterly lost among tiny back streets, and passed a roof terrace crowned with sky-blue sea-green striped carnations. The Sea and Sky carnations! He stopped and listened to the trilling of doves. Boxes of them were stacked on top of each other on the roof terrace. He sat on the low wall of a vacant lot opposite the house, and wrapped the blanket tightly around his shoulders. A few hours later, he heard a stiff front door being dragged open and – boom! - there was Gol.
The very next day, Mani - fully recovered - marched straight to her house to declare his love, equipped with poem and burning taper. After a week he was running out of poetry and bought from the bazaar a perfect poem about a female musician, little suspecting that the chubby poet who sold it to him was his rival.
At last Mani reached the abandoned hill fort, a squat stone box high on a ridge and dragged open the door. A cool breeze fluted through an espial set deep into the rough-hewn wall. He crossed the dirt floor to look through this rocky window, and then jumped back and flattened his back against the wall.
The entire Ottoman Army was within shouting distance. Tens of thousands of Turks! How had he not heard them? Had the hillside acted as an acoustic shadow? However it was, from this little stone hut on the ridge he could hear and see tens of thousands of enemy soldiers. He could hear dogs barking, and even the odd canteen clank. Mani ran back to the door and made warning gestures at the Abadanis, trying to tell them to keep their heads low and their mouths shut. He crept to the edge of the window again and looked down. Ottoman cavalry, artillery and transport were camped on the plain, and the horses corralled. With his marksman’s eye he could make out details such as the silver chasing on a musket stock, and the folds in the paper hats of the men digging latrines. In the middle of the plain, the cannons were limbered, the cavalry mounted, the men formed lines that marched or ran. His heart beat fast as it hit him that he’d caught the Ottoman army rehearsing its battle plan. Here before him were revealed the battlefield tactics which they were going to deploy against Allahvirdi Khan’s troops.
Hands trembling, he spread the army-issue silk on the broad slab of rock which formed a window ledge and drew what he saw, cross-hatching blocks of artillery and sketching arrows swooping this way and that to describe the swing of cavalry. When the manoeuvres finished, Mani folded the silk into a satchel which he strapped to the sky-blue army-issue dove.
As he watched the Turkish soldiers, he was struck by the fact that these men were different from all others he had ever seen before in his whole life, they wanted to kill him.
If they did then Gol would spend her whole life thinking Darius betrayed her.
He smoothed pale pink silk on the rocky ledge and weighted down the four corners with pebbles. As soon as his reed pen inked the first black words on the pink silk, he saw the poverty of the flowery love letter he’d been meaning to send, with all its gol o bobol bluster. This was truer. Mani wrote and told Gol that her first love, Darius Nouredini, had been faithful to her all along.
Outside, the Abadanis arrived, groaning and wheezing after slogging up the mountain track, and flung themselves down on the bank beside the door. A few moments later, he heard the knock of bottleneck on bowl.
Mani flapped the pink page around to dry the ink, folded it into a satchel and took Atash Zarafshani’s black and white dove from the bird basket. Its keel – or breast muscle – was hard as a wrestler’
s biceps. As he hurriedly harnessed the dove, he muttered to him:
‘Fly like a musket ball, my champion. Rip through headwinds right across iran zamin. Find Gol on the roof among the Sea and Sky carnations. That’s how I found her, after all! That’s how I found out where she lived! You know your way back to the Sea and Sky, my beauty. Go and find her.’
He heard scuffling outside. A scream. The Abadanis’ bodies thudded one by one against the door. Turkish voices. He watched the door rock on its hinges. The echo in the little stone lodge punched his eardrums. The door wouldn’t open because of the weight of the two dead Abadanis upon it. He heard their bodies being dragged away.
When the three janissaries burst through the door, and levelled their muskets at his head, he was holding a bird in each hand.
The janissary captain, a Magyar from the Elayat of Budin, takes a pace forwards. Both the birds the Persian spy holds are already harnessed with silk satchels containing vital intelligence about the army’s precise location and strength – perhaps even its battle plan. The success of the Ottoman strategy depended on surprising the Persians. Therefore this whole war could hinge on the secrets carried by two birds – one black and white, one blue – in this little stone lodge.
The Magyar takes another step forward, but as he does so, the Persian lifts both arms, threatening to launch the birds if the Magyar comes any close. The Magyar stops. The Persian’s floppy sleeves have fallen to his elbows, revealing track marks on his forearms. An opium addict. A poppy demon. Therefore unpredictable. Yet there is calculation in his eyes. He can be reasoned with. The Magyar lowers his musket, and signals for the Egyptian janissaries behind him to lower theirs too.
The Trade Secret Page 18
