The Sleeping Sands (24 page)

‘Don’t be afraid auntie!’ she called out to one terrified woman who stood at the bank, clutching an infant to her breast and crying out in fear; recoiling from any attempt to gently guide her to a raft.

‘It’s easy, look!’

Lady Moon skipped out lightly onto the nearest raft and, giggling, performed a dainty little pirouette to illustrate her advice.

The goatskin was wet and slippery with mud and silt from the travellers who had already crossed. As the girl capered, lifting one leg to spin around, her other foot slipped on the skin and she fell with a startled shriek into the torrent. The water dragged her under and she was dragged rapidly downstream by the surging current.

Layard stood, paralysed for a moment; sickened by the sensation that he was reliving his nightmare. In the space between two heartbeats he heard a soft, voice whisper that he was doomed to condemn all his companions to violent death. Then, in an instant, the moment passed and Layard found himself running along the stream beside the flailing child and leaping into the icy waters to clutch her battered body to his breast.

Bracing himself against an outcrop of rock, Layard managed to keep his footing and turn his back into the current, sheltering the pale limp form of Lady Moon. A few feet behind him, an anxious group of Bakhtiari, accompanied by the girl’s mother, had come up beside him and were reaching out with poles, ropes and eagerly grasping hands. Fighting against the bombardment of the water, Layard inched closer to the shore and managed to grasp hold of an outstretched lance. He heaved himself to the bank, where a dozen hands took Lady Moon from him and a dozen more helped pull him gasping onto the bank. He got to his feet and gulped at the mountain air, coughing and spluttering.

Lady Moon’s mother and another five Bakhtiari were clustered around the girl, shouting and wailing. Layard strode to the group and gently pulled one of the men away so that he could get a closer look. Lady Moon was lying, pale and motionless on the ground. Not a blade of grass stirred by her nose or mouth and her lips had turned blue. Once more, Layard felt a sickening paralysis creep upon him.

The Bakhtiari clustered around the girl’s body fell silent, save for her softly weeping mother. On the far bank, the rest of the party stood watching, grim-faced and still. Then, there was a noise from the child. She made a small, gurgling noise, followed by another and then with a choking retch she coughed up a great spurt of stream-water. The colour returned to her face as she sat up, lapsing into an angry fit of choking and coughing, while her delighted mother clung to her and wiped the child’s plastered hair from her eyes.

Layard crouched down beside the child and laid his hand on her shivering shoulder. Exhausted and chilled by the stream, he could barely manage more than a few gentle words of comfort. The girl’s mother turned to him.

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said with a breaking voice. ‘You have returned my Lady Moon to me. If there was ever a doubt that you would find a welcome at Kala Tul, let it now rest. The clan of Ali Naghi Khan are in your debt.’

‘When you dived into the river, you looked more like a Bakhtiari than a Frank,’ said a tall warrior, who had been kneeling beside Lady Moon. He rose to his feet and fumbled in his belt.

‘Um, I found this,’ he said, pulling an object from the folds of the belt and offering it to Layard. ‘It must have dropped on the trail. I think you should have it.’

Layard accepted the object from the man, who coughed nervously and walked back to the rafts. Layard examined the gift. It was his pocket watch.

Once the whole caravan had crossed the stream, the path rose steeply once more, zig-zagging up the far side of the valley. At length, they reached a high barren plain where the fierce winds bit at Layard’s soaked and exhausted body. Still the party drove on. The plain rose gradually at first and then more steeply to another snowy pass. As they entered the narrow pass, Layard was called forward to the head of the caravan by Shefi’a Khan. He joined the khan just as they emerged from the pass.

‘Look there, Frank,’ said the khan, gesturing before them. ‘There is Kala Tul.’

Below them, the fading late afternoon light showed their path winding down a hillside even steeper than the last valley, finishing in the bed of what seemed to Layard to be a mercifully dry river bed. Beyond that, far below them, a rocky plain stretched out. The plain was dominated by a high mound, upon which a great black-walled castle squatted.

‘Home,’ said the vizier simply.

C
HAPTER 13

M
R
J
OHN
M
URRAY

50 Albemarle Street

Mayfair

London

England

Kala Tul. October 14
^th
1840

My Dear Sir,

I learned with pleasure from M. Boré of the interest that you have taken in my proceedings in this country and have furthermore discovered that I am indebted to you for the kindness you have shown in helping me to pursue my labours here. I am hopeful that I will be able to soon provide you with some update of my travails for inclusion in the Quarterly and only regret that I cannot furnish you at this point with fuller information than private letters will afford.

I have to beg your indulgence for the brevity of this letter. Paper is scarce in the Bakhtiari country and I am grateful for the gift of some from the Persian official who is travelling with me and who has kindly offered to take this letter to Isfahan for posting on his return. It is in recognition of his generosity that I seek to spare certain unnecessary details of my explorations which I shall be in a position to expand on more fully at a later date. Suffice it to say that my investigations continue and I am hopeful that I will soon be able to provide information about the local antiquities that you and other men of learning among your circle may find of great interest. Having completed my investigations in the Syrian desert and moved through Babylonia into Persia, I am now more convinced than ever that an excavation within this region may prove illuminating. But more of that in due course.

As to other matters, I would be grateful if you could pass on my regards to Mrs Austen. I sent her a letter from Julfa, but I fear that the post may prove erratic during these troubled times, particularly if it is required to pass through that “Ultima Thule” of the Pashalic that is Baghdad. With the plague spreading across the country, it feels as if God’s own earth is crying out against misgovernment. You may reassure Mrs Austen that I am in far safer and noble-minded hands here among the Bakhtiari than at any point since I left Jerusalem. In fact, you may tell Mrs Austen that her nephew is held in high esteem by none other than Mehemet Taki Khan, the great chief of the Bakhtiaris. Following some small services that I was able to perform, the Khan has become a great friend of mine. In fact, prior to my departure for Sûsan to continue my investigations, the Khan has insisted on taking me lion hunting with him in the mountains. A great honour indeed. Mrs Austen may take some comfort from the fact that I am living with the ease and contentment of a medieval baron among these most noble people. I am even learning the finer points of Persian poetry and letters, the task of my instruction in which having been taken on by a most civilised member of the local clergy. Who knows? My next letter may well be written in the flowing Persian script itself.

I thank you once again for the kind assistance I have received from you in my absence.

Believe me,

My Dear Sir

Yours very faithfully

A H Layard

The Matamet finished reading the letter and carefully folded it before handing it back to his official.

‘Shall I post the letter?’ asked the official.

‘Wait two weeks,’ said the Matamet. ‘Then post the letter as the Frank requested.’

‘He says very little about his objectives in the region,’ observed the official.

‘On the contrary,’ said the Governor flatly, ‘he has told me everything.’

He leaned back in his chair, his dark eyes sparkling in an otherwise emotionless, flaccid face.

‘Summon my captains,’ he said in his unearthly, feminine voice. ‘our waiting is over.’

*                      *                      *

Arriving at Kala Tul, Layard had felt as if he had travelled back through the centuries to some medieval court. Mehemet Taki Khan’s castle was full of servants, wives and children, courtiers, advisors and countless visitors and petitioners. Layard was given a space in the crowded guest quarters, where he felt acutely conscious of the watchful eyes of the Matamet’s official.

Along with the official, Layard shared his quarters with a number of important visitors. They included two physicians, one from Isfahan, the other, from Shuster, a noted and ferocious-looking seyyid, a holy man claiming descent from the Prophet; half a dozen local chieftains who owed fealty to the Khan and another seyyid, also from Shuster, who spent most of his time quietly reading the Koran. The other guests had greeted Layard politely but coolly, and had made a point of asking him as an infidel to refrain from sharing the same dishes at mealtimes. The castle’s resident mullahs had been less circumspect in their hostility to Layard, protesting at his accommodation in the castle but they had been vociferously over-ruled by Ali Naghi Khan’s wife. Layard had been pleasantly surprised too to observe that Lady Moon’s mother had been supported in her opposition to the other mullahs by Ali Naghi Khan’s own holy man; he who had travelled to Kala Tul with the caravan. Immersed in the complexities and sophistries of court life, he felt that he was in need of all the friends he could muster.

The great Khan of the Bakhtiari himself was not at home. In his absence, the affairs of Kala Tul were overseen by his three remaining brothers. On his first evening at the Castle, after having enjoyed the luxury of a bath, Layard was invited into the great hall of the castle to meet them.

The hall had a rough grandeur. Layard’s first impression was of a shadowy space that flickered with the warm light of burning torches and coloured glass lamps. It smelled strongly of wood-smoke, rose-water and warm sheepskins. Its solid walls and heavily beamed high ceiling echoed with a constant murmur of conversation, chanting of mullahs and the singing of poetry. The castle seemed to soak up the multitude of quiet voices in its shadows and orchestrate them into a gently throbbing heartbeat. The court had none of the savage barbarism of Yusuf Effendi’s chambers or the cruel terror of the Matamet’s palace. Neither did it have any of the luxury or hospitality of the Sufi’s house. It felt to Layard to be a place of ancient power, rooted more strongly in the world of the Persian epic poems that the Bakhtiari were so fond of reciting than in any modern era. Standing in it, Layard allowed himself the fantasy that the castle was sleeping, dreaming of its antique glories, while he, a transient and parasitic thing tiptoed across it; gently lest it should wake.

Layard stepped forward to meet the Khan’s three brothers. Each brother was strikingly different from the others yet all three gave the same impression to Layard of having been grown from the fabric of the castle itself. He had encountered Bakhtiari chieftains before – on the road with the Ghûlam and in Isfahan – but for the first time he was meeting them in the very seat of their power, surrounded by all its trappings and majesty. The fine fabrics and arsenal of weapons with which they were adorned no longer seemed outlandish or exotic to the Englishman but rather the natural manifestation of the castle into human agency. In them, the castle’s ancient dream had become a living reality into which he had clumsily trespassed; a pale, transparent ghost projected by a distant modern world.

‘Mr Layard, you are most welcome to Kala Tul,’ said one of the three brothers. ‘I am Au Khan Baba. These are my brothers, Au Kerim and Au Kelb Ali. I must apologise for the absence of my elder brother, the Khan. He will join us, no doubt in a day or two. His vizier and my other brother’s wife have both spoken highly of you. Please join us and tell us a little of your travels.’

Au Khan Baba was a handsome man, a little shorter than Layard yet with a noble and warlike bearing. He spoke courteously but with the air of a man used to command. Layard accepted his invitation and spent the evening in the company of the three brothers, discussing his journey and taking the opportunity to observe the Bakhtiari chieftains at close quarters.

Au Kerim was the quietest of the three. He was short and heavily muscled, with a scarred face from which dark, brooding eyes scowled. He showed most interest in the conversation when it turned to matters of combat and became most animated when asking Layard how his double-barrelled gun operated. Periodically, he would excuse himself from the company to inspect the castle’s watch, who manned a battery of heavy matchlocks, swivel-mounted on its turrets.

‘My brother Kerim never rests,’ apologised Au Kelb Ali. ‘He lives and breathes war. He is our brother’s most unyielding captain. Please forgive him his lack of manners. He finds conversation a little tiring.’

Au Kelb Ali was a complete contrast to Au Kerim. He was slender and tall, with a pale consumptive complexion. His eyes sparkled with a quick intelligence and he was the most vocal in conversation, asking questions of Layard about all manner of details of his journey. He was showed a keen interest in Layard’s opinions of the situation at the border; of the mood of the Shah’s camp and also of Layard’s impressions of the Matamet. His most marked enthusiasm however was for information about any strange or unexplained events on the road. He interrogated Layard at length about the ruined Bakhtiari castle he had visited near Freydan.

‘And there was no sign of the people, you say?’ asked Au Kelb Ali, pausing momentarily to cough into a silk handkerchief; behaviour that seemed strangely incongruous in a wild warrior chieftain.