The Damascus Drum Chapter 2 'Daud's Story'

Chapter Two

Daud’s Story

Daud the Trader was not the same man he had been when he had set out on his journey just three short weeks earlier. Daud came from the tiny island of Arwad, which lies about a mile off the coast of Syria in the furthest east of the Mediterranean Sea. Arwad is a small island of strange people, as we shall see. Strange island people, the Arwadites. Clever, resourceful, but like small island people, often it was ‘us against the world and the world against us’. Without a doubt Daud was resourceful. But with a highly developed sense of independence, and a natural curiosity about life, he remained free of the xenophobia so common among people of small islands.
Three weeks earlier Daud the Trader had crossed the short sea passage to the mainland. There he loaded his camels with bales of cloths and spices, precious ores and other riches, and begun what should have been a brief overland trek south. At that point he still had the light of plenty in his eyes, that light which comes from the comfortable self-satisfaction of having achieved success in the world: material success, marital success and political success. In that order, naturally.
They said Daud had had extreme good luck early in his career. Luck? Well, yes, maybe he was lucky, but perhaps that was just another way of saying he was gifted, and was awake enough to use those gifts. First of all he had the ‘eye’, that is, he was capable of seeing the advantage in things. What things? Anything really, he wasn’t particularly bothered as long as the thing in question had an end which suited his purpose. Maybe also it was a kind of clairvoyance, although Daud would have scoffed at any suggestion that he had mystical leanings. Yet he had this ability to see clearly the full potential of some thing or situation that appeared at the outset rough and undeveloped, unattractive even. Broken things and castoffs he had a way of turning around so their beauty shone again.  Daud had boldness which comes from seeing forwards, not backwards. Wisdom? No. Not yet at any rate, though it might come later. Canny he was, however, and possessed of just the right spirit of competitiveness to propel him into seizing the main chance when it arose.
Daud had forsaken the usual trade of shipbuilding, which most Arwadites have entered as a matter of course at their fathers’ sides since times biblical (and we know that the Arwadites were there at the Genesis, or at least shortly after the seventh day... well, after the Flood, at any rate, along with the Zemarites and the Hamathites and the Jebusites and the Amorites, and all the other generations of Noah and Shem and Ham and Japheth). Turning his back on the adze and awl and a life of lumber, from an early age he embarked upon a career as a merchant.  Daud realised early on that the people who built ships had a hard life for limited reward and little adventure. And those who sailed them upon the high seas, while somewhat better off in the short term, more often than not suffered the ultimate consequences of their pelagic wanderings. They would eventually disappear off the map, either through storm or piracy, or just simply getting lost. Daud was definitely of those who believe that worse things happen at sea. But trading was different. The work was not laborious, and the risks rarely mortal. Yet, it demanded a different style of throat-cutting from that meted out on the high seas.
In addition to business acumen, a successful merchant in the Levantine trading arena requires detirmination, patience and a high level of ‘people skills’.
Daud had honed his innate ability to turn a dirham by trading among his playmates. He had recognised at an early age that the real skill in selling lay in marketing. Good marketing would raise the perceived value of a product, in the eyes of the consumer, to the point where its desirability exceeded its original cost by sufficient margin to make the exercise well worthwhile, while not allowing the necessary hyperbole of the sales patter to exceed evident reason. For Daud, it was simply a matter of making his product appear so attractive to the customer, that closing a sale was never an issue, but merely a matter of how many or how much of the object of sale was required. He was no common hawker or haggling street peddler. Rather, he preferred to appear as the magnanimous dispenser of gifts, giving favourable discounts on the established price of an item whose value was undeniable. ‘Because of our special relationship’ he would say, confidingly, seducing his client to a secret collusion. In this way he maintained the perceived value of the product in the market. Above all, he wanted his client to enjoy the seduction as much as he did. For him, business had to be fun, fun in the excitement of the risk, fun in the reward, or why bother.
Daud’s first entry into the world of commerce came about when he was eleven years old.  He sailed at his father’s side to Tartous, the fortress town on the mainland a couple of miles across the water. They went to buy timber for his father’s shipyard. Oh, the romance of that first trip! While his father consorted with the timber merchant, he made friends with the son of the oxen driver who had led the ox-train loaded high with the cedars of Lebanon, oak and pine, up from the mountains in the south. The ox-train boy had a trick which so impressed Daud - he could swing his father’s huge leather whip over his head and make it crack like lightning - and Daud was spellbound. Crack, crack, crack! time and again he did it. He let Daud try, and by the end of the day the young Arwadi too could make it snap the air. What made the explosive sound was the tiny little bit of frayed string tied to the end of the leather, which the lad from Lebanon replaced from time to time as it slowly disintegrated into smoky fluff. For Daud it was a revelation, how such a simple little thing as a piece of string could make such an impressive sound.
Back on the island, Daud hatched his plan. Extracting from the shoreline flotsam a length of rope, a short stick, and a piece of string, he was soon to be seen standing out on the rocks swinging away with his whip, cracking for all his worth. He was quickly able to produce the desired effect and within a day he had all the boys on the island queuing up to have a go. At a price. A small price, admittedly, and the craze soon passed once all his young friends had had a turn and the secret of the string was discovered. Then everyone began to make their own whips. But he made enough pennies so that next time he was abroad with his father he was able to buy some coloured dyes in the bazaar. He had seen through the coloured sparrows scam straightaway: sparrows dyed yellow with saffron to imitate canaries, and other species in stranger pigments of the bird sellers’ imaginations. Daud decided to try it with seagulls. After all, the bigger the bird, the better the price, surely. The recipe was simplicity itself. First catch your seagull, preferably a very white one. It was a messy affair, certainly, and not without some danger to clothes, eyes and skin, but minor incoveniences could not dampen Daud’s energetic enthusiasm for this project.
Arwad is a small island barely half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, its narrow, twisting lanes curl in a tangle around the remains of the central castle built by Frankish knights, forming a web whose strands always lead down to the sea. Every square foot of earth is built upon with each house adjoining its neighbour in an endless chain of habitation, and every yard of shoreline north and south beyond the little east-facing natural harbour is a shipbuilder’s yard, a chandler’s or an engine repair shop. Only in the south east where the low tide reveals a wide stretch of flat rock beneath the defensive walls is there, so to speak, enough room to swing a cat. At evening time Daud would stand out on the furthest rocks, casting with his whip as if fly-fishing. He had extended his original whip with a length of twine and a metal hook at the end with a piece of fish attached. The seagulls would wheel around excitedly and one would always take the bait. Once hooked, Daud would haul in his makeshift line and roll up the exasperating bird in a scrap of torn fishing net. Then tying the beak and legs, he would clip the long feathers of the wing so the bird couldn’t fly, and bring it home to be dyed in the privacy of his own rooftop.
His first attempts in avian maquillage were hurried affairs. He daubed the dyes haphazardly by moonlight on over-excited birds, but more often than not their wings had been insufficiently clipped, and they took off in erratic flight to wash away the outrageous assault on their plumage in the warm waters of the East Mediterranean. Some, in shock and awe at this strange treatment inadvertently jumped to their death off the edge of the roof. But gradually Daud learnt to take better care of his merchandise, feeding them up well before applying the dyes, and his artistic skills developed with subtlety as well as panache. Soon he had a consignment of twelve birds, all plump in calm submission, and embellished in the bright hues of a tropical paradise. He constructed a makeshift cage from bits of fishing net and driftwood and took the birds over to Tartous. It was the time of the spring festival, and the biggest market of the year, when all the hill tribes came bringing flocks of new lambs and kid goats to sell to the townsfolk and fishermen of the coast. Daud’s birds were a sensation. He traded his first bird for half a dozen sheep from one of the big tribal leaders. Daud’s birds of paradise became instant status symbols, and soon the chiefs were ripping the gold bangles from their wives wrists and vying with each other to obtain one of his fabulous gulls. Daud was in business. He sold his dozen within the day, and was back in Arwad that evening preparing a second batch which he sold as quickly a few days later.
Daud knew it would be a short lived fashion, so when the spring festival was finished he decided to invest his considerable earnings in something with a more stable future. He set himself up as a trader of timber, and went scouring the hills of the Levant to find suppliers. He often bought directly from the forest owners, picking out suitable trees after having first ascertained the specific requirements of the shipbuilders on Arwad. Or if buying from another trader, he knew how choose the best-shaped pieces of wood: curved for the ships’ ribs, tight grained and straight for planking the hulls. Then he would arrange transportation door to door, hiring local oxen and drivers to bring the cargo to Tartus from where he shipped it to Arwad. His father was his first customer and paid Daud in advance, thus providing the necessary capital to pay the Lebanese timber merchants. His business thrived because his knowledge of shipbuilding enabled him to give his clients exactly what they wanted. The old established traders who just sold timber by the cubic yard whether for house building or shipbuilding. Daud offered personal service, as well as attention to detail. From supplying timber he progressed to trading in all manner of shipbuilders’ materials, ropes and sails, bitumen for caulking, iron nails, as well as ships stores. It was so exciting, the way one thing led to another, always expanding.
Soon Daud began to think about entering the import-export market, where the real money was to be made. He was well placed in the market to hear of the best deals; he shared in the gossip of the ship captains who regularly dined with his father in Arwad, and his Aleppo office kept him informed of cargoes coming from the east. He had a real coup early on. A ship, en route for Tyre with a cargo of wool had been driven by storms into the safe haven of Arwad. Daud managed to match its cargo against a large caravan of silk from Cathay which had just passed through Aleppo on its way to Tartous. He brokered a barter deal between the captain and the leader of the caravan in which he took ten per cent of each cargo as commission. Both ship and caravan were able to turn around smartly on their respective return journeys without having to spend costly time in port finding buyers for their wares.
By the time he was twenty five, by luck and a keen sense of how to turn to advantage someone else’s apparent misfortune and thereby increase his own fortune, he was already a rich man. He never lost his flair for being able to make his apples look the shiniest in the market, even if they were identical his competitor’s on the next barrow. He courted the ladies in like manner: with charm and panache, quietly flattering in his earnest ardour and the generosity of his compliment. He married well, for both himself and his family, a beautiful daughter of Arwad’s richest ship owner. He always treated her as the princess she had been brought up to believe she was, and in return she was happy to produce for him an endless succession of heirs and daughters. This success, however, did not circumscribe his amatory endeavours, which he continued to pursue with equal earnestness as did he his business, on the regular visits to his trading offices in every port in the Eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Smyrna.
Daud did not consider these adventures in the field of love as infidelities. Rather, he saw them as his way of keeping in training. He would have felt himself unfaithful to his own nature, not to mention his sense of justice, beauty and the chase, had he disavowed his inclinations. However, he was as discreet as he was irrepressible, and with the passing years his passion, while not waning, did soften, like a flame of a lantern that is turned down for optimum brightness while paying heed to economy of fuel and wick. In Sidon, in Akko and in Haifa, he maintained certain ladies whose attractions, through Providence as well as their own careful attentions, had stood the test of time, and who now ably ministered to the needs of his encroaching middle age.
As well as offering Daud the comforts of a home away from home, their patron’s regular periods of absence allowed these paramours to preserve a lively tension in their relationships. Regular intervals of freedom and independence were balanced by times of romantic fondness and solicitude in which nagging had no place. They were intelligent women, and he welcomed their advice on his business matters, the more intuitive, more reflective advice provided in the cool arbour of the feminine embrace. His own sense of the daring and the bold had stood him in good stead in earlier years as he built the capital foundation of his fortune. But now the main part of his business progressed upon a fairly steady course, governed by seasonal opportunities of harvests. Expansion continued, but it was a more subtle affair, to be found in new and unexplored markets, unexpected opportunities arising out of unforseen events, wars, and the fickle changes of fashion. In all this he was not looking simply for quick profits, just as he sought no more the quick conquests of his youth. Instead he opted for capital security and long term growth with modest but reliable dividends. And as he generously maintained these fair ladies over the years, in like manner they returned his favour with undemanding faithfulness and agreeable acquiescence to his time-mellowed ardour.
And so it was that at the age of forty-one, Daud found himself on the road to Damascus. He was travelling with an enormous caravan: 200 camels loaded with goods that he had collected in his entrepots on the coast. This convoy of riches was timed to coincide with the pilgrimage season, when hundreds of thousands of people would pass through Damascus on the way to, and returning from, Mecca. Mecca, the Holy City of Arabia, where first Abraham had established that men and women worship according to unity. Mecca, where he set the imprint of his feet in the wondrous Black Stone fallen from heaven and which became the orientation and lodestone in this world for the travellers in the spirit of the next.
The caravan journeyed safely along the coast road south from Tartous, turning inland just before the great mountain range of the Jebel Lubnan. As the land rose to green, fertile hill country, Daud passed on the left the beautiful and forbidding white stone fortress of Krak de Chevaliers. Even Saladin had decided to circumvent this virtually impregnable redoubt in the interests of economy and effective warfare. The now-abandoned hilltop castle commanded both the coast and the entrance to the Bekaa and the rich valleys of Lebanon. It also guarded the mountain passage know as the Homs Gap which led to Damascus and the desert routes further east, to Baghdad and Arabia. Daud mused that this would have made a splendid entrepot.
At Homs the caravan turned south again. As the travellers broke camp one morning on the outskirts of this city, a lone heron appeared from the direction of Damascus, circled the dusty baggage train just once and flew on. And Daud, while he did not consider himself to be unduly superstitious, nevertheless always welcomed a good omen, and a white heron gracing his view above the mists of the early morning was indubitably such a portent. After all, he thought, was it not due to his wit and his effort that he had reached such a degree of completion of worldly success? And was it not one of the just desserts of this success that he could now muse upon the potential of further financial gain which this camel train’s cargo would ensure, with the inevitable deals he was sure to make in the coming weeks in the great metropolis? In Damascus he would meet with traders from Samarkand and Constantinople, Cairo and Isfahan, all on holy pilgrimage, to be sure, but trading during pilgrimage was sanctified by holy tradition. The big deal makers would have brought their factors and secretaries - Jewish, Greek, Armenian, no matter, all were welcome in Damascus - to finalise the clauses and dot the iotas, while their masters continued into the shriving wastes of the desert. Then, with contracts arranged, the goods would flow in abundance like the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, long and sure through the coming year. The Damascus pilgrimage trade was certainly one of the highlights of Daud’s business calendar, and he was looking forward to it with all the excitement of a little boy before his birthday.
It was early spring. As the caravan headed south, the road climbed again, leaving the greening pasture of the river plains. Although warm in the day, old winter snow still lay in scattered drifts in the deeper folds of the hillsides and at night the drivers huddled in groups around campfires to keep warm. They were not so far now from their goal, but still, these were wild places on the edge of the sown. The desert stretched away forever on one side, and desolate rocky mountains rose on the other, mountain paths that must traversed before arriving at their destined oasis of Damascus.
That night, as the noble camel drivers curled by the fireside under the mountain sky, they were not to know it would be their last sight of each other in this world. As the fisher of sleep cast its skein across this school of souls, netting them in slumber for their nightly plunge in the ocean of the unconscious, how many knew that they went so willingly into this deep of existence for eternity? As the flames of the earthen hearths sank and only glowing embers remained, black shapes gathered unseen in the shadows of evening.
The dark raiders of the Banu Merg fell upon the camp in silence. The forty souls, already surrendered to death’s gentler cousin, sleep, were dispatched like the sacrificial lambs of the Id al Fitr. And though these true companions were not to meet again on the sun-blessed slopes of the Jebel Lubnan, or the coasts of the Mediterranean, yet we may be certain that each would be gathered again on the shores of the hereafter.
Daud, who had drunk much wine that night, had decided to answer an urgent call of nature at what transpired to be a supremely opportune moment. As the assailants conferred together briefly before the final murderous act, the trader of Arwad slipped away unseen to perform his toilet. Consequently, of all the forty one wayfarers, he alone survived the massacre. From his vantage point, crouching under a bush in a cleft in the rocks a few yards away, naked under a thin camelhair wrap (for unlike the rest of the camel crew, he had an abhorrence of sleeping in his clothes), he watched as the whole event unfolded. A hundred or so black-cloaked demons crept noiselessly into the camp and lay gently down over the sleeping caravaneers, as if to cover each in an extra blanket. A gurgling sound, no different from the frothy gurgling of a ruminating camel, came from each doubled form as the short blades of Damascus steel gently unpicked the seams of their victim’s throats. Forty breaths escaped their prisons of flesh and bones and joined the soft night air. The slaughter performed, the baggage camels were reloaded, and then, still in silence, the fully dressed corpses of the caravaneers were loaded on their own riding camels, and the camel train moved off in the direction of the desert, lit by the newly risen waning moon.