The Sleeping Sands (16 page)

He was right. When the dawn came, the young arrogant romantic who had set out from England had been utterly destroyed. Peeking into that cavemouth, the morning sun had discovered a different man, huddling in the shadows. Neither his Aunt Sara nor his friend Disraeli would have easily recognised the man who dragged himself from the hillside and presented himself at the house of Charles Wherry in Damascus. Nor would they easily recognise the man who now shook himself from the grip of remembered terror and turned his horse towards Hamadan. He was a quieter man whose hardened features could not completely disguise the occasional nervous flick of his eyes towards some dark shadow. This new Layard was no less driven; if anything he was more doggedly so than ever. In the tone of his voice and the set of his jaw, determination had replaced passion. Eyes that had once gazed at distant horizons ahead were now glazed with haunting memories of horrors too close behind. Since Damascus, he had thrown himself into the monotony of his daily tasks to escape the horror and grief of that night. For months, the rigour of his discipline and the distractions of travel and preparation had held the grief at bay. Now, riding back to Hamadan to collect his firman, the grief rode at his shoulder, whispering wordlessly into his ear and clutching at his chest.

‘You are alone,’ it beat out in his horse’s footsteps as he returned down the rocky road from Shaverin.

‘You are alone,’ it called tinnily in the cries of a startled francolin as he neared the city.

‘You are alone,’ it whispered in the dry breeze blowing through the ravaged gardens.

‘You are alone,’ it tapped on an old wooden shutter as he rode through the dusty desolate streets.

‘You are alone,’ it taunted silently from the heart of the shadows, making his horse twitch and snort with anxiety.

The city looked as if it had been sacked. There was no-one on the street. Not a thing of value remained to be seen. Layard wrestled with his nervous, bucking horse through deserted streets and alleys. At last, he emerged from one of the streets into a broad open square, surrounded by high walled dwellings and a riot of broken, empty shops and kiosks. Unlike the streets, the square was not deserted.

A tall, finely decorated horse stood in the centre of the square, its long tail twitching. Next to it stood a man no less extravagantly dressed. His rich robe was tucked into a pair of baggy brown riding trousers, themselves tucked into a pair of gleaming black cavalry boots. His a tall cap sat on a head that sported a bushy black moustache and a pair of magnificently proportioned black eyebrows, matched in fierceness only by the array of weapons and ammunition with which his body was hung about. He carried a long rifle, finely traced with swirling gilt patterns along the length of its barrel. Into his silk sash was tucked an enormous pistol that looked as if it had been intended for the pursuit of wild bear (or for that matter had been designed only to be operated by a wild bear in the first place). Next to this hung a long curved sword. Elsewhere, tucked into his sash and bandolier or else hung from any convenient part of his person were curved daggers, powder horns, bags of shot and all manner of contrivances for the operation of violence.

‘You are Layard?’ he boomed across the square. Without waiting for an answer, he produced a document from within the folds of his sash and waved it.

‘I have your firman,’ he said, smiling as Layard rode nearer. ‘I am the Ghûlam Imaum Verdi Beg. I have been appointed your mehmandar by the Shah.’

He grinned more broadly, revealing an uneven array of stained yellow teeth.

‘That means I am coming with you, good sir. I am your guide to Isfahan.’

‘The Prime Minister thought I should have an escort, then?’ asked Layard. ‘Does he still suspect me as a spy?’

‘Ah, that could not be further than the truth, sir,’ replied the Ghûlam, ‘the Prime Minister is simply concerned for your safety. Your road takes you close to the Zagros Mountains and among some wild and dangerous people.’

‘From what I have been told, the people of that region have no love for the officers of the Shah,’ replied Layard. ‘Some even suggested that I might be safer travelling alone than with an official of the court.’

The Ghûlam laughed.

‘You shouldn’t listen to the tittle-tattle of village gossips and simple tribesmen, sir,’ he said. ‘They will tell you all sorts of nonsense and half-baked tales about this and that. It is as well that I am coming with you, otherwise who knows how they would lead you astray?’

Layard dismounted and stroked his still troubled horse. He looked around the square. The city remained deserted but for the two men and their animals and one small face peering from a dark doorway at the far side of the square. At the distance Layard was, he could make out neither the age nor sex of the face; only a pair of wide, frightened eyes. He turned suspiciously to the Ghûlam.

‘What happened here?’ he demanded.

Imaum Verdi Beg shrugged.

‘The Shah and his court left,’ he explained. Layard stared at him, prompting further explanation.

‘The Shah’s court is attended by 13,000 men,’ he elaborated and made a sweeping gesture with his hand. ‘Whenever the Shah honours a town with his presence, it is ever thus.’

‘The people are delighted and honoured to make a sacrifice to His Majesty’s war effort,’ said the Ghûlam, as they rode out the next morning.

The city was gradually coming back to life. People had emerged from the safety of their houses and refuges in the hills and were going about the melancholy task of clearing the detritus left by the departing royal court. The fanatics and rowdies who had pursued the Europeans previously had left with the army and Layard rode unmolested through streets of subdued and wary citizens, scrabbling among the rubbish for scraps of food and firewood.

‘They are not exceptionally vocal in expressing their delight,’ observed Layard. ‘The army has left them nothing.’

‘Oh, these people will have plenty squirreled away somewhere, good sir,’ said the Ghûlam cheerfully.

‘Still,’ he frowned a little, ‘it may be better if we use your firman to gather provisions at the next village rather than here.’

In addition to assigning the Ghûlam to be his official government escort, or mehmandar, the firman gave Layard the right to demand from every settlement along his route fresh horses and enough food and drink for eight men. Layard had protested its extravagance but his mehmandar had assured him that it could be no other way.

‘The people will be honoured to feed a guest of the Shah and his escort,’ he smiled. ‘They will be only disappointed that there are not more travelling with us so that they can demonstrate their love of the Shah through greater generosity.’

Layard looked sceptically at his escort and lapsed into silence. He resolved wherever possible to pay his way along the road. This was partly through a sense of fairness and partly because he had not been completely reassured by the Ghûlam that local resentment to the Shah had been over-stated. He had spent enough weeks in the company of Persian courtiers to have experienced the complex tangle of suspicion, deception and sophistry that entwined their every interaction. It was not their way to readily share the whole truth. He had no cause to doubt that his mehmandar was any different. Still, Layard mused as they trotted on, it seemed somehow fitting that the firman had been issued for a party of eight, while only two made the journey. He fantasised that Imaum Verdi Beg and he were accompanied by a party of six attentive ghosts as they wound their way steeper into the hills and closer to the wild regions of Luristan.

‘That donkey’s load gets fatter at every village,’ commented Layard, as he watched his mehmandar drag an overloaded little beast up a steep incline in the road.

‘No worry, good sir,’ panted the Ghûlam cheerfully as he heaved the donkey over the crest of the hill. ‘I will be able to sell these supplies at the next town; to make room for more.’

Imaum Verdi Beg laughed as he trotted back down the hill and scrambled onto his own horse, which laboured up the slope behind the donkey. Layard watched with a mixture of amusement and contempt. It seemed that not only the donkey’s load but also the Ghûlam’s belly was getting fatter at each town. At the first village they had rested, his mehmandar had sent his fine horse back to Hamadan, to spare it the arduous road ahead. Reluctantly, the headman of the village had honoured the firman and provided the Ghûlam with a donkey and a scrawny old horse, which now laboured under its rider’s weight. Imaum Verdi Beg had also insisted on the village fulfilling the complete terms of the firman, accepting sufficient chickens, rice, bread and dried fruit to provision eight men. He had loaded the surplus onto the little donkey, whose own burden grew at each village as the Ghûlam repeated his demands. At each of the larger towns they reached, the Ghûlam would sell all the provisions he had gathered so far and then promptly march off to find the town governor and demand fresh supplies.

‘I do not think that the intention of the Shah’s firman was that you should extort food from every poor wretch we meet along the way and then sell it to fill your own pockets,’ said Layard sharply, losing patience with his companion’s apparently complete lack of scruple.

‘But good sir,’ protested the Ghûlam, looking hurt, ‘I give each and every one of the village headmen an official receipt for what we take. They are welcome to claim full reimbursement from the government for everything. Besides, those wretches have all quoted exorbitantly high prices, which I have honoured on all of the promissory notes I have written. Those gourumsags, those untrustworthy scoundrels, they have been extorting us good sir – not the other way around.’

Imaum Verdi Beg sounded so convinced of his own argument that Layard let the matter drop. He rode on in silence, resolved to address the matter when they reached Isfahan.

Their road took them from the gardens of Hamadan to a great fertile plain that stretched out in the shadow of the Luristan Mountains. The plain was densely populated with Lur communities who offered little loyalty to the Shah. Some villages would make a show of recognising the firman, kissing it and pressing it to their foreheads before filling the Ghûlam’s saddlebags. Others would refuse it and Imaum Verdi Beg would resort to whip-blows and threats of reprisal before winning their reluctant compliance. More often than not, Layard would leave his irredeemable companion to his own devices and make his way among the locals as best as possible. Even without the firman, he found that the Lurs, like other people of the East, set great store in receiving strangers and he met with hospitality wherever he went.

Around the hearth at each settlement, the conversation was threaded with an ominous theme. The crops, usually so abundant on the plain, were failing with increasing regularity. Stores of grain and rice were dwindling and those that remained were under constant threat from the tax-collectors of the Shah or from marauding bands from other tribes. Rumours of a plague, spreading from the South and West had reached the ears of the nomads, who spoke in hushed whispers of distant settlements that had been devastated by pestilence. There were mutterings of war and rebellion on everyone’s lips as the governor in Isfahan tightened the screws to feed the Shah’s coffers. At each community he rested, Layard found the same pervasive sense of unease. People were agitated and listless. They showed signs of exhaustion, complaining of sleeplessness and of being tormented by nightmares. As with other nomads he had encountered, they assumed his European nationality implied medical expertise and flocked to him, complaining of headaches, poor digestion and fevers. Here, there was yet no sign of the plague but rather Layard saw in the people some sort of collective malaise of the spirit, as if all the countryside and the very earth itself were unsettled and afflicted by a deep sense of wrongness.

The anxiety and fear on men’s lips was most in evidence when they spoke quietly and urgently of some unseen terror that had crept into the mountains.

‘Whole communities are found destroyed,’ said one old man, the firelight flickering in his eyes as he leaned forward to look at Layard. ‘Not like the plague, when some people survive. This is everyone!’

He coughed and took a drink of goat’s milk before continuing.

‘I have heard from travellers who have seen it with their own eyes,’ he said, clutching Layard’s forearm with a bony hand, to emphasise the veracity of his tale.

‘They tell of whole towns where the buildings have been thrown down and the people all gone. Not a soul survives. There are no dogs, no goats, no horses – nothing. What is more, sir, is that there are no bodies to be found, either. Nothing survives.’

He shook his head sadly and leaned back, looking gloomily into the fire.

The next morning, as they rode across the plain, Layard spotted a thin line of black tents on the horizon. He pointed them out to his mehmandar, asking to whom they belonged.

‘They are Bakhtiari,’ muttered the Ghûlam, ‘the worst scoundrels among this country of scoundrels. They ride down from their strongholds in the mountains to carry out what they call chapaws and what everyone else just calls out and out robbery. They are lawless rebels, good sir. They prey upon the whole of this region, even up to the gates of Isfahan itself. We will do well to keep as clear of them as possible, although I don’t doubt we will meet with them soon enough’

Imaum Verdi Beg scowled darkly at the distant black tents and spurred his poor old horse into a trot, looking back over his shoulder at the little donkey, running flat out behind.

Layard trotted along, trailing a little behind the Ghûlam. He peered at the tents, trying to isolate any human figures but all he could make out were the tent flaps waving in the breeze. The tents squatted like a ragged line of black crows, ominously on the line of the horizon. More ominous still, behind them loomed the bulk of the Luristan Mountains, marking for Layard the palpable boundary of the known world. To his right, a purple, undulating haze in the summer heat revealed the Zagros Mountains. A soft, mournful cry echoed far above him. He looked up at the sky. There, a single eagle wheeled on the rising thermals.