Chapter Four At Marletto’s Café #3
“You are not a witch. I have dealt with many witches—please do not interrupt me—and you are not one.”
“Could you tell at once?”
“No. I had to listen to you first. Now I am certain. Your name is Lyra Silvertongue.”
Lyra didn’t move, though every nerve was urging her to run out. She felt breathless.
He went on quietly, “We are being watched. While we sit here together, you are safe. I shall make sure you can leave without being followed, but you must do as I say.”
“How do you know who I am?”
“Your friend in Smyrna—Bud Schlesinger? I thought so. You must realize I have a thousand connections, more, from Morocco to Nippon. Very little happens on the Silk Roads that I do not hear about.”
“You know about the research station at Tashbulak?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what’s in the red building?”
“No. You said you think you know. What do you think it is?”
Lyra thought: If Bud Schlesinger trusts him…
“It’s an opening into another world,” she said.
His cheetah daemon stood up, her tail slowly swinging. Mustafa Bey whispered a word or two, and she sat down again, her eyes never leaving Lyra’s face.
“You know of such places?” he said.
“Yes. I know how they’re formed, and I know how to close them. I have been through…” She tried to remember how many, but couldn’t. “Several.”
“Each into another world?”
“There are billions of worlds. The door that opens inside the red building leads to the world where the roses come from. The special roses.”
“Well, that I did not know,” he said.
“I don’t know it for certain. I want to go there and find out.”
“And what will you do then? If you go through, you will not be able to return.”
Lyra picked up a piece of baklava. She was recovering a little of her composure.
“Mustafa Bey,” she said, “please tell me what you know. You haven’t told me how you know about the red building, or who made it, or how the rose-oil trade is carried on, or what is happening to it now.
If you know that no one who enters that building is allowed to return, there must be other things you know. ”
He nodded. “For centuries, for thousands of years,” he said, “there was a small trade in those roses and their oil in that region. It was like any other trade in precious material. High price, small quantity, important to guard but easy to transport, very specialist market.”
“How did you…How did merchants get hold of the material? Surely they didn’t go to the red building every time?”
“There is, or there was, a recognized guild of brokers. They would meet agents of the rose growers and distillers at various centers of exchange, Tashbulak for one. I believe that those brokers made regular journeys into the desert, to the red building, and paid generously for the rose material. There was nothing to indicate that such brokers had any dealings with another world, or indeed were any different from the traders who bought from them, my own agents included.”
“Who bought the rose material? What did they want it for?”
“Ritual purposes? Medicine? Expensive cosmetics? There was no need to inquire more closely. If a customer has the money to buy it, and the commodity is not explosive or poisonous or bulky and heavy, and does not interest those who gather taxes, then trade will soon come into being. Respectable merchants such as myself will of course be happy to help the process work easily and to make a modest profit. For a long, long time the trade went on without change, interruption, increase or decrease. A steady demand, a steady supply. If I thought about it, it would only be to speculate whether the roses might be grown somewhere else and sold more widely, but every attempt I heard about ended in failure, and there seemed no danger of the existing supply drying up, so I concluded that there was little point, given that the market was so small.”
“So you’re not interested in the roses themselves, really?”
“I am interested in everything. Money, for example. Have you much money, Queen Tatiana?”
“I have a little gold.”
“Would you lend me a gold coin? I want to show you something.”
Lyra wanted to see this something, so she felt for one of Farder Coram’s gold coins and put it on the table.
“You look suspicious, Queen Tatiana, but there is no need to be. Ah! A coin from High Brazil.”
He weighed it briefly on a little set of scales that he produced from his pocket, and made a note.
Then, with a quick flick of his fingers, he gestured to a soberly dressed man sitting a few tables away.
The man bent to listen, and Mustafa Bey murmured a few words.
The man, who was probably a secretary, set off at once to speak to a customer at a table in the corner, who listened and then stood up at once and made for Mustafa Bey.
He bowed and took the chair the merchant indicated. The secretary joined them, with writing materials to hand.
Mustafa Bey indicated the scales and the gold coin. The customer listened closely; they weighed the coin and exchanged a few words; the secretary wrote them down, and the customer and the great merchant both signed the paper. Mustafa Bey put the gold coin in the customer’s hand and nodded.
“Er—what have you just done?” said Lyra, watching the customer walk away with her coin.
“I have bought a grove of olive trees. Ali…”
Another instruction to the secretary, who went and brought someone else to the table.
Polite greetings; a bow of respect from the customer; the secretary gave him the paper to read, and then Mustafa Bey spoke to him for a minute.
The man nodded, looked at the paper again, rocked thoughtfully on his chair, closed his eyes, and murmured a few words.
Then he opened his eyes and nodded again. Another agreement was written out and signed, with gestures and words of mutual respect, and Mustafa Bey sent the secretary away to bring someone else. Meanwhile, the waiter came with fresh tea.
“What have you bought now?” Lyra said.
“A consignment of very fine carpets from Bokhara.”
The same thing happened again. This time Mustafa Bey exchanged the carpets for a fishing boat currently docked at Smyrna, and then he exchanged that for some precious stones from Ceylon, and finally he exchanged those for…
some gold. Four coins of the size of Lyra’s now lay on the table where her one had lain.
“There is your gold coin, or one exactly similar,” said the merchant. “Please allow me to weigh it to confirm what I say.”
He did that, and then slid the coin across the tablecloth.
“Yours,” he said, and added one more. “This is the interest your coin earned while it was in my care. The rest is my profit.”
Lyra blew out her cheeks, and then thought that was rather a vulgar thing for a queen to do, and brought her expression back to normal.
“Well,” she said. “So that’s what money can do. And the roses? How do they come into it?”
“It was a small fluctuation in prices that brought them to my attention. I am not the only merchant involved in this trade, you understand, though by some way the biggest. Some of the steady customers began to complain that they were being outbid by strangers, and in turn my agents found that the rose oil was selling in regions further west than previously. There were rumors of adulteration with inferior products. I sent a small team into the desert of Karamakan, and only one man came back. He described the red building and everything he saw inside it in terms so rapturous that I thought he was quoting poetry. He said that the red building had two doors, the one he entered through, and through which he came back, and another through which he could leave, but not return.”
“Really? What did he say?”
“He spoke of rose gardens and meadows rich with color—incidentally, the roses are a unique color. Did you know that?”
“I’ve never seen them.”
“Partway between red and yellow, he said, but not orange. Some blend of color that was impossible to describe, but beautiful, subtle, complex. He told me of an air scented with fragrance, of fields and gardens tended with care and skill, of profound craftsmanship in every homestead, where the growers boil the petals for rosewater and then distill it in simple vessels down to the finest and most exquisite oil—a barrel to make a thimbleful. And then the exchange—a process of ritual and courtesy, attended by hospitality and ancient formulas. Only members of a guild of dealers from the region of Karamakan are allowed to take part in the commerce, and everything they take for exchange is the finest this world can offer. My agent learned that the prosperity brought by the market in rose oil was spread throughout that city, that nation, that people. Everything was harmonious, everyone busy with work they valued and enjoyed, everyone well rewarded. I was happy in my turn to hear of a place where such prosperity existed, where people were glad to live and proud to work. I was eager to help the trade that sustained their wealth and did no damage to mine, and happy to accept their conditions and obey their laws. And now you tell me that the place where the roses grow is another world entirely.”
“But how could your agent know all that, if he couldn’t go out of the other door?”
“I do not know. Perhaps he was allowed to look out of it. And now you tell me that he had been looking at another world?”
“If I’m right…But please, could you keep that to yourself?”
“You have told this idea to no one else?”
“No one. Could I speak to this man, I wonder?”
“His daemon became sick later, and they both died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry…And Mustafa Bey, have you ever heard the term alkahest? The alkahest?”
He shook his head. “Never. Is that a term of botanical science?”
“I don’t think so. I heard it and just wondered what it meant.”