He stood panting, safe, looking out at the wood beyond the garden. In the distance darkness collected between the trunks. If there really had been whispering – surely there hadn’t been, surely it had been a trick of his imagination – but if there had, then perhaps it gathered there now, as shadows sometimes fell together at twilight, murmuring. He looked back the short way he had come, where the ordinary stone well stood at the edge of Mr Ahmadi’s ordinary hedge. The man had passed beyond it; he too was gone, curled and sunk into shadow.
‘What was all that noise, my little prince?’ Clare stood out of sight, just inside the door, rummaging in a cupboard for something heavy. Fitz made the fear flush from him before he answered. Forget it. It wouldn’t do to make Clare upset.
‘Nothing, Bibi. Just Mr Ahmadi loaning me a book.’ He looked down and was surprised to find the book still in his hand.
‘He is such a dear man. Come inside and eat your supper.’
Fitz picked a blackberry off the cane as he went in, and chewed its hard and bitter seeds with precision, one by tiny one until he had dealt with them all. He swallowed them. He put the book on the table next to his plate, and sat down. He told himself he was going to enjoy The Giant’s Almanac.
Clare came into the kitchen. She stood next to Fitz’s chair.
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ she demanded.
He froze, his hand on the edge of the table. It was a long way back.
‘Fitz?’
A little amusement played on her face as she turned it towards him. Relieved, Fitz jumped up and kissed her cheek, and then together they ate their meal.
tabiyya
‘Come here, my eyes, and sit down beside me, for I would tell you a story.’
Though it was afternoon, and nearly summer, the room was dark. Heavy wooden shutters with close slats had been pushed across the enormous windows, nearly covering them. In the two narrow shafts of bright sunlight that still pierced the gloom, brilliant motes of dust sparkled and danced, swirling in an apparent chaos of constant motion. The boy took one of the two little stools that stood by the door, and placed it beside the old man’s chair, far from the swirling motes. He sat down. In his hand he held the shāh, and turned it over again and again against his palm.
‘Many years past when I was young like the vine in summer, I made a journey into a far country.’
The old man’s white beard had been trimmed that morning, but his eyebrows grew as wild as ever with bristling tufts. In his last, weak days, he had grown gaunt, and his faintly purple skin sagged beneath his eyes and in his cheeks. With a careful and deliberate motion, he rearranged the coarse wool blanket that covered his lap and legs.
‘I went there to trade, and I brought many valuable things with me for the market: leather and metalwork, porcelain and silk, spices, carpets, and dyed cloths of many colours. A man who goes to the market must be well furnished with many things of many shapes, and hues, and textures, if he is to be noticed at all. The market is so busy, and so full of diversions and entertainments, that a merchant with poor wares can easily be mistaken for one of the many beggars who set up their blankets beside the tables.’
The boy heard that the old man’s voice was growing weak. He went to the table that stood in the light, and from a glass pitcher poured a cup of water. The cup was black and of a high glaze, set with a ring of lapis lazuli just beneath the rim. He handed it to the old man, in order that he might drink.
‘If he is fortunate – and I have always been fortunate – a merchant spends his days trading away all the things he has, for money. In the morning I would set out my wares on the tables in the market, carefully positioning each thing to its best advantage: the gold in bright shadow, just beyond the light of the sun when in the long afternoon it fell full upon my stall; the spices where the breeze might wanton with them, coyly, both offering their scent to passers-by, and snatching it away again; the carpets flat, one set upon the other, so that the coarsest lay above and the finest below, tempting but resisting the eager touches of my customers. There is an art to laying out merchandise, and I was such an artist: not a day passed but I cleared my tables, in every city I visited. I became very rich.’
The old man took a drink from the cup with the ring of blue stones.
‘It was my custom in those days always to keep moving, to buy wares at a cheap rate in one place so that I might sell them at a higher price somewhere else. But one day when I set up my tables in the market of a new city, I had the fortune to meet another merchant whose stall was set beside mine, and when the day’s trading
