Here is a lesson: all trade is founded on reputation.
Nury’s trade was selling eggs.
Nobody had ever sold eggs in al-Ghazira before. Not in a properly organized way, at least. In those days, everyone in the town had a few chickens in their houses, and when they laid they ate eggs, when they didn’t they didn’t. No one would have thought of buying or selling eggs, except perhaps from a neighbour.
Nury changed all that. He found out who had chickens and whose chickens laid when. Every morning he would set out with his basket beside him and go from house to house, buying eggs from some and persuading others to buy a few on the days their chickens weren’t laying. He was successful, but none of it would have been possible but for one thing, and Nury had thought of it. That was the sign of his genius.
Selling eggs is a trade like no other. Who looks after the chickens in a house? Who sells their eggs? Everyone knows the answer: the women of the house. Nury’s trade was founded on dealing with women. There was not another man in al-Ghazira who could have gone from house to house talking to the women and been left alive for a week. But no one so much as asked a question about Nury the cross-eyed Damanhouri, for everyone had heard his story. Nury was safe and his trade prospered. Nury, harmless and ageless, went from house to house buying and selling, talking of God knows what.
Nury built a trade on a story. Soon people were used to eating eggs every day, or whenever they wanted to, and people began to count on the extra money they made from selling eggs. Nury did quite well out of it all; soon he even built himself a little house. Nury’s trade was a work of craftsmanship; a masterpiece in the art of staying alive. Nury’s crossed eyes had the gift of looking, not just ahead, but up and down, right into the heart of things.
But here is another lesson: Blindness comes first to the clear-sighted.
Never mind. Most people in Nury’s place would have been happy merely to carry on with their trade. Not Nury. Nury the Damanhouri was an artist. For him every egg was an epic, a thousand-page song of love, death and betrayal. By looking at an egg Nury could tell what the chicken had been fed; from that he knew whether the house he had bought it from was close to starvation or had finally found a pot of gold. If one day a house had no eggs to sell, Nury would wonder why and ask a few questions and discover that they’d killed their chickens to feed a man who had a son who was the right age for their daughter. If a poor man’s house suddenly began to buy eggs, Nury would be the only man in al-Ghazira to know that they’d found a pearl the size of a football. Nury had imagination. But, more important, Nury was the only man in al-Ghazira who went from house to house every day, talking to people, even going into courtyards, taking in, in one glance, as much as other people take in in ten. Not a leaf fell, not a sheep shat in al-Ghazira without Nury’s knowing of it. But all this he did quietly, for silence was in his nature.
There is a moral in this: an eye in a courtyard is worth a hundred guns.
Inevitably, Jeevanbhai Patel was the first man to see what Nury was worth. Patel was already a well-to-do man then, and he gave Nury some pointless job to do in the evenings, when he wasn’t doing anything else. The job was unimportant. What Patel wanted was his knowledge, for he saw power in knowledge, and for him power meant money. In barely a month Patel’s investment paid off.
At that time the Malik — this very same Malik who lives shut away in the Old Fort now — was a young man, recently returned from a school for princes in India, where the British had sent him. He had become Malik after his father’s death, only a year before, but already people knew that here was a man very different from the senile and foolish old Malik, his father. This new Malik was a storm of energy. No one met him who did not come away reeling. People said that it was impossible even to look at the Malik for more than a minute at a time — his whole face was blood red like the setting sun. They said he had secret ways of making the blood rush to his face to terrify people. He never laughed, never smiled, and such was his temper that much of the time people were grateful to leave the Fort alive.
At that time something happened which made his temper worse than ever. A few years ago the British had found oil in some of the kingdoms around al-Ghazira, and already there were rumours that al-Ghazira was just a speck of sand floating on a sea of oil. So the British, for the first time, sent a resident to al-Ghazira, to make the Malik sign a treaty which would let the British dig for oil.
With great fanfare the Resident arrived, in a battleship. People liked him: he was a fat, round little man who laughed a lot and slept a lot. He liked fancy clothes and pomp and ceremony and parading soldiers. Everywhere he went in al-Ghazira hundreds of people followed him, because whenever he spoke he made his lips into a circle of such perfection that everyone who saw him held their breath waiting for a black, wonderfully rounded goat’s turd to fall out. And so it was that he came to be known as Goat’s Arse.
Once every week Goat’s Arse would go to the Old Fort and plead and argue, trying to persuade the Malik to sign the treaty, but the Malik wouldn’t hear of it. He had seen what had happened to the princes of India and he had sworn he would never let himself be reduced to their state. So, inevitably, the day came when — much against his will, for he was a peaceable man — Goat’s Arse began to talk of calling for battleships and the Malik began to despair.
The Malik used to read a lot, and at that time, in his worry, he began to spend whole days reading until it became a kind of madness — histories of the great Baghdadi and Cairene dynasties, lives of the caliphs and the kings and so on. From one of these he got an idea. In his madness he decided he would teach the British a lesson.
He decided to fry Goat’s Arse.
Carefully the Malik made his plans. He invited Goat’s Arse to a private dinner to celebrate, he said, his birthday. Goat’s Arse was delighted; he thought the Malik had finally decided to sign the treaty. It was a special occasion, he thought, and ought to be treated with proper ceremony. When the day came he dressed himself in his best uniform, all scarlet and black, and mounted his great white charger. Before him, with their lances and flags and raised pennants, rode his small squadron of Indian cavalry, and ahead of them marched four Sikhs, immense men in turbans, playing bagpipes and kettledrums. It was something to see: plump little Goat’s Arse on his white horse, with all those troops, turbaned and bearded, sashed and sabred, parading through the town, past the harbour, into the Maidan al-Jami‘i, straight through towards the Fort on the hill. The whole town came running out of their houses to follow them. At the foot of the hill the crowd was stopped by the Malik’s Bedouin guards, for the Malik had given them strict orders that nobody was to be allowed near the Fort but Goat’s Arse and his entourage. So the crowd stopped at the foot of the hill and watched Goat’s Arse and his troops till they disappeared.
Outside the Fort, Goat’s Arse’s troops presented arms and blew their bugles and did many other things of that kind, until the great old gates swung slowly open. Then Goat’s Arse rode majestically to the head of his squadron, stately and erect on his white charger, and led them towards the gate …
How was Goat’s Arse to know that right above that gate the Malik had stationed the man he most trusted — a eunuch, ebony-black and so enormously fat he had come to be known universally as Jabal the Mountainous Eunuch — with a vat of boiling oil, or that in seven kingdoms Jabal was renowned for his cowardice, and at that very moment, waiting for the Malik to fire the flare which was to be his signal to tip the oil over, he was a quaking heap of flesh almost ready to jump into the oil himself?