The Damascus Drum Chapter 2 'Daud's Story'

Da’ud the Trader was not the man he had been when he had set out three weeks earlier, no, not at all. Daud came from the tiny island of Arwad, which lies just 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, Arwadites, clever, resourceful, but like small island people, always ‘us against the world and the world against us’. So, when with that island-born independence Da’ud the Trader had crossed the short sea passage to the mainland, loaded his camels with bales of cloths and spices, precious ores and other riches, and begun the brief overland trek south, he still had the light of plenty in his eyes, that light which comes from the comfortable self-satisfaction of worldly success, marital success and political success, in that order, naturally.

They said Da’ud had had extreme good luck early in his career. Luck? Yes, maybe so, maybe he did have luck, but that is only a way of saying he was gifted, and was awake enough to use those gifts. First of all he had the eye, the eye 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, this ability to see the future possibility of growth from the least likely, most unbeautiful and quite unprepossessing of seeds? But Daud would have scoffed at any suggestion that he had mystical leanings. And Daud also had boldness, the boldness which comes from seeing forwards, not backwards. Wisdom...no, not yet at any rate. That might come later, who knows. Canny he was, however, and with just the right amount of competitiveness to propel him into seizing the main chance when it arose. Forsaking 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,) so, forsaking the adze and awl and a life of lumber, he decided from an early age that a merchant’s life was for him.  Daud saw that the people who built ships had a hard life for limited reward, and those who sailed them upon the high seas, while somewhat better off in the short term, invariably suffered the ultimate consequences of their pelagic wanderings, eventually disappearing off the map of the local consciousness, either through storm or piracy, or just simply getting lost. Daud was definitely of those whose belief was that worse things happen at sea. But trading was different. The work was not laborious, and the apparent risk was not mortal. 

Yet, to get established in this very competitive market required an altogether different style of throat-cutting from that meted out on the high seas.  The way of a merchant required determination and a great deal of skill and patience in dealing with people. Daud had honed his innate talents among his playmates, recognising at an early age that the real skill of marketing lay in the ability to raise the perceived value of a product, in the eyes of the consumer, to the point that its desirability exceeded its original cost by sufficient margin to make the exercise well worthwhile, while not allowing the necessary hyperbole  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 street peddler to bargain up or down, but rather the magnanimous dispenser of a favourable discount on the established price. ‘Because of our special relationship’ he would say, confidingly, seducing his client to a secret collusion, and in this way maintaining the product’s value in the market.  And above all, he wished 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.  At his father’s side, they sailed to Tartous, the fortress town on the mainland which lay a couple of miles across the water, to buy timber for the boatyard. 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 he 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 boy replaced from time to time as it slowly disintegrated into smoky fluff. For Daud this was a revelation.

Back on the island, he 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 and everyone began to make their own whips. But enough pennies were made 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 where there’s a will there’s a way.

Arwad is a small island barely half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, its narrow twisting turning lanes curl over the island in a tangle around the remains of the central castle which the Frankish knights built, forming a web the strands of which always lead down to the sea. Every square foot seems built upon, 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, swinging his whip, extended now with a long twine and a metal hook at the end, to which he attached a piece of fish. 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 then bring it home to be dyed in the privacy of his own rooftop.

His first attempts were hurried affairs, daubing dyes haphazardly by moonlight on over-excited birds, whose wings were insufficiently clipped, and which either took off in erratic flight to wash away the outrageous assault on their plumage in the warm waters of the East Mediterranean, or 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 maquillage, 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 fishing net and driftwood and took them 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 was able to trade 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 offering them in exchange for his birds.

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. He knew it would be a short lived fashion, so when the spring festival was finished he decided to invest his substantial earnings in something with a more stable future. He opened up as a trader of timber, scouring the hills of the Levant for the best-shaped pieces of wood, curved for the ships’ ribs, tight grained and straight for planking the hull. He would buy at source, having first ascertained the specific requirements of the shipbuilders on Arwad, then arrange through transport, hiring local oxen and drivers. His father was his first customer, providing the necessary starting capital to pay the timber sellers. Daud’s business thrived because his knowledge of shipbuilding meant he was able give his clients exactly what they wanted, and at a better price than from the old established traders who just sold timber by the cubic yard for house building or shipbuilding alike, without the attention to detail that Daud could offer.

From 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. Then he began to think about entering the import export market, where the real money was 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, originally bound for Tyre, was driven by storms into the safe haven of Arwad,  and he was able to match its cargo of English wool 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, and 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 someone else’s misfortune around 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 the same as his competitor’s on the next barrow. He courted the ladies in the same manner as he did deals, 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 the same 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 considered these adventures in the field of love more in the sense of keeping in training, rather than infidelities, as he would have found it more unfaithful to his own 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. He maintained, in Sidon, in Acco, in Haifa, certain ladies whose attractions, through Providence and their own attentions and intelligence, had stood the test of time, and now ably ministered to the needs of his encroaching middle age. As well as offering the comforts of home away from home, they were sufficiently detached from imposing their own will on his, that he welcomed their advice on his business matters, valuing a contribution which came from a more intuitive, more reflective source than his own, balancing perhaps his sense of the daring and the bold, which although it had stood him in good stead in building the capital foundation of his fortune, no longer conformed to the broad shore of conservatism revealed in the ebb tide of his maturation. And neither was he looking, as they say, for quick profits, as he sought no more the quick conquests of his youth, opting instead for capital security and long term growth. And so, as he had generously maintained these fair ladies over the years with accommodation, stipend and a perfectly romantic and gentlemanly manner in his dealings with them, they returned his favour with undemanding faithfulness and agreeable acquiescence to his, as we have said, softening, but no less illuminating ardour. 

And so it was that at the age of forty-one, he 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, he passed on the left the beautiful 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 castle was situated on a hilltop commanding both the coast and the entrance to the Bekaa and the rich valleys of Lebanon, as well as guarding the Homs gap, the passage between the mountains to Damascus and the desert routes east, to Baghdad and Arabia. Daud mused that this would have made a splendid entrepot.

At Homs the caravan turned south again. As they broke camp one morning on the outskirts of this city, a lone heron approached them 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 he 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 the big deal makers would have brought their factors and their secretaries, Jewish, Greek, Armenian, no matter, all were welcome as far as 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 like the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, long and sure through the next year. It was certainly one of the highlights of the year for Daud, and he was looking forward to it with all the excitement and anticipation 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.

But that night, as they curled by the fireside under the mountain sky, the noble camel drivers were not to know it would be their last sight of each other in this world. Black shapes had been gathering as the shadows of evening fell, and as the flames of the earthen hearths sank and only glowing embers remained, 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 for eternity? The dark raiders of the Banu Merg fell upon the camp in silence, and forty souls were dispatched like lambs in the Id al Fitr, each already in a state of submission, and though they were not to meet again on the slopes of the Jebel Lubnan, or the coasts of the Mediterranean, yet we may be sure that in the end each found true companionship on the shore of that greater ocean of the hereafter.

Daud, who had drunk much wine that night, decided to answer an urgent call of nature at what transpired to be a supremely opportune moment, and 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 camel hair 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 ones, 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 the 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 were loaded on their riding camels, and the caravan moved off in the direction of the desert, lit by the newly risen waning moon.