Kara Kush
Now for the next phase: a bit of romantic chivalry, theatre. He seized Jamal’s robe and hung onto it, saying at the same time the ancient desert phrase of one who seeks protection, ‘Dakhilak, O Jamal, son of Zaid, Lord of the Anaza tribe. I am in your house!’
‘Enough – you have my protection!’ Jamal was half-amused, half-impressed, by the old-fashioned approach. He had seen hoary-headed ancients do it to his father in Narabia; but generally only when they wanted a camel, or to be sent to Harley Street for the treatment of some imaginary disease.
‘Peace upon thee, Emir.’
‘And upon thee peace. Come and sit here. Will you take some refreshment?’ Jamal noticed that the man was staring at a very large bowl of fruit, embedded in crushed ice, which had just been sent up. Jamal signed to him to help himself. Rind’s clothes were clean, but torn. On his head was a mountaineer’s Chitrali wool cap, and he badly needed a shave. Nurhan and Rind had worked hard at the details of the disguise.
‘Thank you. I am Samir Kandahari, and my chief is Sirdar Akbar Khan, Sharifi. I was with him in your Hadiqa City, when he was Afghan Ambassador there. I have also kissed the hand of your father, the King.’ The Afghan said no more for a time. He was too busy demolishing the pile of fruit.
‘What help do you need? Perhaps some money. Life is bad, I know, in poor Afghanistan.’ The Prince was speculating: a couple of thousand dollars should set him up in some sort of business in a place like Pakistan – repairing bicycles or something. ‘And how is His Excellency the Ambassador?’
‘Money?’ The Afghan laughed. ‘We don’t need money. We have more money than anyone else in the entire world!’ He threw back his head and roared with laughter, his eyes streaming, until Jamal was almost sure that the poor fellow was deranged.
‘You must have been through a great deal of trouble, since the musibat, the calamity …’
‘Your Highness, my master told me to show you these.’
The spy took from his waist a roll of cotton cloth, heavy with coins, and handed it to Jamal. The Prince poured the gleaming pieces onto the table. ‘Mohurs,’ he said. ‘They are hundreds of years old. You have many of these? If you want us to buy you arms, we can’t do that. The international repercussions …’
‘Highness. Let me explain. The Ambassador is well; he is in Kandahar Province. Now I beg you to listen, with patience, though what I have to say is indeed amazing. We have found the huge gold hoard of Ahmad Shah.’ Rind paused to let this sink in. ‘Sirdar Akbar Khan calculates it’s worth over four hundred billion dollars, all in gold coins. We want your father, the King, to buy them from us. We can send them, via the Baluchistan coast, by the old smuggling route to the Gulf, in dhows. When you have received them, and not before, all he wants is for you to pay us in dollars.’
Jamal leant forward in his chair as the meaning of the words became clear, wondering at the same time whether he could trust his own ears. Rind now spoke more slowly, partly to help the Prince to catch up, but also to show that the innocent ‘Samir’ had difficulty with complicated plans.
‘The money is to be placed in an account in … that country … yes, Swissera, Switzerland, in a bank account at the Credit Central. The Afghan freedom fighters will then be able to buy all the arms they need from the international arms men. The Afghans will then defeat the Russians, and our country will be free. And the threat from the Rouss to your land will be removed.’
Jamal said nothing: his mind was still reeling.
Rind looked at the bemused expression on the Prince’s face and continued.
‘O Prince! Can you not see that destiny has brought us together and kept the hoard safe until this hour, so that in one stroke all the evils will be banished? But the greatest speed is necessary if the arms are to get to us before the Russians wipe us out.’
Jamal said, ‘Jalib, interesting. But how would you get the money out of the bank, without opening an account with a signature? How soon after we got the gold would we give you the money? How would you know that you could trust us?’
Rind smiled. ‘It has all been explained to me so many times that I know it by heart, Highness. First, you open the account with a nominal sum, ensuring that money can be put into it by the use of a single word: “Goldenbird”. We can all remember it because it alludes to an ancient tale of great significance. Second, when we land the gold, when you have inspected the consignment, you will be in touch with your embassy in Switzerland, by satellite link-up, from the landing beach, and signal them to deposit the dollars. Third, we will be checking, through our own people, the precise moment when the account is credited with the dollars, by the use of the “Goldenbird” password.’
Jamal raised his hand to stem the torrent of detail. The man seemed to have everything worked out, but there was something else that had to be understood first. ‘Mr Samir, you must remember that nothing could possibly be settled until I have told my father all this. And, of course, we would have to test the gold.’
‘We know that. As for testing the gold, take all you wish: here are fifty of the coins. And when the Magnetic Pole, your father the King, has agreed, as we know he will, you can place an advertisement in a Pakistani newspaper. This one you have on your table will do well.
‘Say, simply, “I love the golden bird,” and our representative will contact you, using that phrase “Goldenbird” for identification.’ Rind smiled and took the Prince’s hand. ‘Thank you for your hospitality, sir. I shall go now; with faith in God.’
‘Would you like to leave by the stairs?’
‘Thank you, I am quite comfortable climbing down walls.’
The Prince, taking a deep breath, wrote in his notebook the words, ‘Goldenbird, ancient tale. Sirdar Akbar Khan, Kandahar. The hoard of Ahmad Shah. Worth over $400 billion.’
After that, there did not seem to be much to do other than to go to bed. Tomorrow he would tell his pilot to get the aircraft ready. After he’d checked on the tale of the Goldenbird. If the Afghans got their arms, Narabia might not be threatened after all.
Next morning the Prince called for his car and was driven along the Khyber Road to the ancient part of Peshawar City, where veiled women and burly, swaggering frontier men made way reluctantly for the Mercedes. Jamal believed in omens. It was time to find a story-teller.
At the Jail Bridge the crowds, mini-vans, donkeys and goats were too jampacked for the car to move. Jamal left the driver there, stepping out into the smell of coriander, kabobs and sandalwood.
A party of huge Pashtuns from the borderland, plodding along with saplings which they had cut for walking-staves, saw his desert headdress and shouted, equivocally, Jamal thought, ‘Live until death, Prince of the Arabs …’
A tiny, wizened rickshaw man was tugging at his sleeve. He jumped onto the seat while the man got between the shafts. ‘Qissa Khwane’ Jamal told him.
They went into the Khyber Bazaar and down to the T-junction, where the man pointed south, through a winding street. Jamal left the rickshaw man gazing bemusedly at a fifty-dollar note, his share of the oil money of Arabia dreamt about by everyone. Nearly 1500 rupees …In a few minutes Jamal was in the Qissa Khwane: the Market of the Story-Tellers. Did stories hold a clue, not only to history, or to human hopes, as some believed, but to the very meaning of life, as the sages said?
First came the china stalls, then copper, then shawls. A man tugged at his sleeve and offered to show him the Pipul, the bo-tree descended from the one under which Buddha had taught.
Though he had spent so much time in the West, the roots of his own ancestral culture were in the most ancient East. Prince Jamal began to feel like a part of the scene rather than a mere playboy visitor.
There were no story-tellers in the main bazaar. Jamal took a right turn.
In the warren of streets, he scanned the name-boards of the tiny shops, there seemed to be everything except story-tellers to be found. Pharmacies with human skulls and stuffed lizards hung from the ceilings; a crippled man, even his head awr
y, sat among a billion beads, stringing numberless rosaries for telling the Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names; he saw shoes, slippers, glass bottles, clay pots; butchers, basket-weavers. And here were ‘guaranteed Arabian Perfumes’, just as he had seen ‘guaranteed Peshawar perfumes’ on sale in his own city in Arabia. Import and export was a funny thing …
Then he saw it, took it in, passed – and turned back. The almost illegible, painted sign, in sensuously beautiful calligraphy, which said, ‘Hasan Mirza, Da Qissa Khazanachi – Prince Hasan, Treasurer of Stories.’ Jamal pushed aside the bead curtain and bent to step inside.
A small man, perhaps sixty years old, finely boned, dressed in a blue, double-breasted suit and wearing a trilby, his features not unlike those of a south Italian, with curly white hair and a small moustache, and moving very silently towards him. ‘Peace on thee. Art thou strong?’ His smile was familiar, mannered, like those on the faces of the courtiers in the palace at Hadiqa City.
Jamal’s Pashtu wasn’t up to much. He wondered whether the man spoke English, which he was very comfortable in. But it always paid to start with Arabic, he had found. People hardly ever knew it hereabouts, but it had prestige. And his father had told him that, in the East, it was always important to get the first blow in oneself.
‘And on you peace. Are there books of the narratives in your shop, may you live long, lord?’
The Mirza looked at him and answered in English. ‘I can read Arabic, of course, sir, but Persian is my mother tongue. I expect you know English language, though?’ He spoke it well, though it was certain from the cadence of his voice that he’d never been in an Anglo-Saxon country.
‘Yes, I do. Thank you. I’m from the Gulf, and I want some stories for my children.’
‘We have all the stories here; those which are not in the books are in my head. I could even have them written down for you. You have come to the right place. Have some tea.’
He clapped his hands and a small boy with a shaven head ran in carrying two glasses. As he was ushered to one of three big, worn armchairs in the shop, Jamal saw that he was in a largish room, completely lined with shelves full of books. Could all these be books of stories? They sat and smiled at one another for a minute or two.
Jamal said, ‘Have you the story of the Goldenbird? I think it must be from the Classics, or it may be an Afghan tale.’
The story-teller nodded. ‘The Goldenbird, Zarin-Parinda, is what the Afghans call the hoopoe with the crown of gold. He is the leader who takes the Thirty Birds to find their destiny, their Leader, true reality.’
‘And have you got the book?’
‘Only in Persian. It is the Mantiq al Tayir, Speech of the Bird, the famous classic by Attar. Some people call it the “Parliament of the Birds”.’
‘Is it a long story, and what are its chief points?’
‘It is quite long, but it can be summarized. I’ll have it written for you in Arabic, in a fine Naskh hand, and posted to you at home. It should arrive in a month or two.’ Like a made-to-measure suit, Jamal thought; what a good idea. But he wanted the information at once.
He said, ‘Take this, and here is my card. Send me the book. But, in the meantime, I would like to hear the story, if you would be so kind.’
The Mirza took the ten hundred-dollar notes and, without a glance at them, handed them to the boy hovering at his elbow. His suit was shiny and very threadbare, and he was certainly in reduced circumstances, but his behaviour was patrician. To Jamal he said, ‘To hear is to obey. I am the treasurer of tales, and I shall certainly tell you about the Bird. This youth, however, is my own treasurer of funds, and he will know best what to do with the money.’
‘Forgive me, Sidi Mirza, I didn’t notice your man standing there.’ These Persians had been practising courtly manners for thousands of years and they always liked to score off an Arab. ‘But I am travelling: and although myself an Emir, who does not like to handle money any more than you, I have to get things done.’ He felt quite petulant.
The Mirza beamed. ‘Your Highness. As a man of nobility the tale of the Goldenbird is exactly right for you. I shall summarize it.’
He started without further ado. ‘One day the representatives of the birds of the world decided that, like all other forms of creation, they should have a king. They agreed to seek one, and they found the hoopoe, hudhud with his golden crown, to lead them in the search. He knew the Way, for he was in the service of their Celestial Monarch.
‘They had many discussions, and they travelled through mountains and valleys, through happiness and perils, always, of course, led by the Goldenbird. They had many crises, and again and again the hoopoe had to correct them, raise their spirits, keep them moving forward.
‘Finally they reached the curtain which concealed the throne of their king, and prostrated themselves in awe and fear. Then the veil parted and the birds, as they looked up, saw that there, in front of them, was a huge mirror. Their king, they realized, was none other than the reflection of them all.’
Mirza fell silent, and folded his hands.
Jamal asked him. ‘Is this story a good omen?’
‘It speaks of man, of course, and of the fact that it is the unity of human souls which totals absolute divinity and truth, from which we are ordinarily separated.’
The Hoopoe, representative of the Great King Solomon the Wisest. Himself a king, wearing a golden crown, like the agal and kaffia headdress of the King of Narabia, leading his people to their high destiny. His father’s role.
Jamal embraced the Mirza, and stepped out of the shop into the dusty alleyways once more.
3 Send for Yunanian, the Chemist
The Palace, and
The British Embassy
Hadiqa City
Narabia
JUNE 18
King Zaid of Narabia and its Dependencies sat in his reception-hall and thought about his life. He was, indeed, a king to the outside world: but, to his people, among whom kingship was actually proscribed as alien to Islamic thinking, he was still the Sheikh. In fact, by Bedouin custom, the sheikh of all sheikhs was known by the plural: ash-shuyukh, the sheikhs. That was the nearest to a king they would allow anyone to be. Traditionally, kings were their enemies: the ancient ones, of Egypt, Persia or Rome.
Other desert kings – and sheikhs – had four wives at a time: he now had none; Zarifa had died twenty years ago, and he had not remarried. Other desert kings had as many as two or three hundred sons. He had only one: Jamal, of Oxford – and California, places where he often preferred to spend his time.
This multi-million-dollar Hollywood-style palace had been designed by perhaps the world’s greatest, certainly its most expensive, architect. King Zaid’s zoo was the biggest in the world, bought as a package from a German firm. His underground nuclear shelter was enormous, and the very best. His fountains, over there beyond the pillars in the marble hall, flowed with rosewater, as had those of the great Caliph Haroun el Rashid of old, but Zaid’s money was in Zurich, and his slaves, effectively, included highly sophisticated top executives in business corporations around the world.
Arabia, he reflected, was now full of rulers like him. One or two generations ago, their forebears had been high or low: some desert chiefs, others only poor fishermen, on the Gulf, over yonder, which the Russians in Afghanistan had nearly reached. As chiefs, of course, the kings had claimed the most imposing ancestry, descent from the Queen of Sheba, from Abraham, from other people whose names sounded strange, and were largely unknown to most of the world, but which, in the ears of a hundred and fifty million Arabs, conjured up pictures of pure magic. The magic of long ago.
King Zaid had tried to balance the needs and rules, the customs and the requirements of the old and the new, of Arabia and London, of camel and Cadillac. In conformity with Islamic law, he wore no silk or gold; he did not drink alcohol or smoke; he would not have recognized a pig if he had seen one, and he said his prayers five times a day. When the oil wealth came pouring in, especially after the t
wo huge OPEC price rises – which the West had called blackmail – he had tried to use it wisely. Now his capital, Hadiqa City, had the best of everything.
Nobody starved, nobody even went hungry for a day, unless by choice in the fasting month of Ramadan. There were eight colour television channels, showing soap operas of life in New York or Blackburn, in all its rich intensity, to an often baffled audience of two million people, most of them still unable to read or write. His army was equipped with weapons so modern that they were not even in service with the countries which produced them. Their armies could not afford the sophisticated gadgetry until their governments had got the money from Narabia or its like to pay for them. His fellow kings were, generally, much alike. Only that morning he had received a call, on the satellite link-up between his palace and that of the king of Naranjia. ‘My wives have just bought a new ’plane for a trip to Paris,’ the Naranjian had said; ‘They want to load it up with diamonds, or something, there: and a new dress designer from Haiti will be in France, too. Is there anything they can buy for you?’
A servant, a huge, fat Nubian eunuch, with a gold sash and curly-toed slippers, was suddenly at his side, ‘Majesty, His Royal Highness presents his homage. Returned from El Bakistan, he seeks an audience. The matter is urgent, says the Prince, O Majesty the King!’
‘Kafur, tell the Prince that I am here, in the Diwan.’
The old man leant back on the sofa, tucked his feet under him, took out his rosary, and called for fresh coffee flavoured with ground cardamoms.
What Prince Jamal had to say drove the last, beguiling thoughts of a desert life completely out of the King’s head. The Russians’ SS 20 missiles, in their silos at the Caspian base in the USSR, could not reach his country. Now, the immense military build-up in southern Afghanistan, with the preparation of missile sites in the Kandahar area, only a few hundred miles away, put his entire country at their mercy. The way to Arabia through Pakistan might not yet be open to the Soviet ground forces, but from Afghanistan they could hold the Arab world to ransom. And the oil produced in the USSR might be exhausted by the end of the decade, according to American estimates. Would the Russians move into Arabia?