O Jerusalem

FOURTEEN

ص

Since desert life is clearly the source of bravery, the more savage the group, the more brave, and the more able to defeat other peoples and take from them their possessions.

—

THE

Muqaddimah

OF IBN KHALDÛN

I felt remarkably well physically, for a person who had been bashed about in a motorcar accident. The bruises were going to be spectacular and my head throbbed mightily, but I was all right, as long as I did not move suddenly or think about the crash. Thinking about it brought on a rush of cold sweat accompanied by dizziness and a roiling stomach: hard, cold panic.

So I did not think about it, just pushed it implacably away from me, with such success that I never did remember the details. Instead, I gave all my attention to what Mahmoud was doing, and concentrated my entire being on the thought of Holmes and getting him back.

We slipped out of the back entrance to Rahel’s inn into the stillness of a Palestinian town at midnight. A third figure fell into place behind us as we passed the back of a shop—not Ali. I thought he carried a long rifle in his arms.

The town did not take long to leave behind. Mahmoud marched ahead, his swirling robes casting wild shadows in the bright light of the full moon. The road stretched palely on ahead; the lights of Ram Allah dropped behind us, and Mahmoud slowed his pace. When I was beside him he began to speak—in English again, that there might be no misunderstanding.

“There were three men in the ambush. The car slowed to climb the hill, and the minor land-slide they had engineered across the road ensured that we should slow even more. They shot the driver from the hill behind us and over our right shoulder, and we went straight into a shallow ravine. Very neatly done.

“The driver was killed. You hit your head on the side of the car when we went off the road. Ali pulled you out. I followed him into the rocks. We waited for Holmes to come, but he did not, and when I went back for him, two men had him in another motorcar that had been hidden around a bend in the road. The third man was still above us with his rifle. An extremely good shot, he was. Had we not left our equipment in Jericho, if I had my rifle, I should have gone after him, but I did not.” He shrugged, as close to an apology as he could come, and I gave him the Arabic hand gesture that said maalesh.

“You know where these men went?” I asked.

“Now I do. We have people in that area.”

“Was he hurt? Holmes?”

“There was no blood on the road,” he said, a clear equivocation.

“Was he on his feet?” I insisted.

“He walked to their car under his own power. They held a gun to his head.”

“How did they do it? How did they know we would be there?”

Mahmoud sighed deeply, a sound, I thought, of shame, but did not answer me directly. “I ought never to have submitted to a driver. A car is big and noisy and suited for conquerors in times of peace, not for scribes. I am a man who goes about on foot, and leaving that path was a foolhardy act.”

“Do you know why?” Why the ambush, why Holmes, why—

“Not yet,” he interrupted grimly, and then, shifting to Arabic, said, “That is enough of the foreign tongue. We will go quickly and in silence to the house where he is being kept. If we are seen, we may have to kill. It is to be hoped that the deaths will be few. I, myself, take no joy in death. I am not a believer in the blood feud. If it is done correctly, there will be no killing, but with so little time, it is difficult to lay careful plans, and things may go wrong. I hope, at this time of the night and so soon after he was taken, only a sleeping house will await us, and you will have no need to act. If the house awakes, we may need you. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Can I depend on you?” he asked in English.

“To… ?”

“… Kill,” he finished the phrase. I felt his eyes on me, probing in the moonlight. I stopped, and then I looked at him. His eyes were dark holes surrounded by darkness.

“I don’t know,” I said finally.

To my surprise he nodded, in agreement or satisfaction I could not tell, and began to walk again.

“You will tell me if you begin to feel ill,” he ordered.

“My head hurts,” I admitted.

“Of course.”

That seemed to be the extent of his concerns. We walked perhaps four miles altogether after leaving the town, with the rifle-bearing man trailing behind us, until Mahmoud touched my elbow and led me off the road into an almost imperceptible path through a thicket of some Palestinian cousin of the gorse, all spine and grab. At the bottom of it was a tiny mud hut; in the hut we found Ali. He greeted my arrival with a sour look.

“You brought him, then,” he said to Mahmoud.

“She has earned the right,” Mahmoud replied evenly. His deliberate use of the feminine verb ending was reinforced by the optional pronoun, to force Ali into a recognition of my identity, and my presence. The disgusted look on Ali’s face did not change, but he said no more, merely ladled us each a mug of soup from the pot. It was hot and tasted of meat and onions, and I was quite certain Ali had not cooked it.

“Thank you, Mahmoud,” I said. When my cup was empty, Ali filled it again with soup, laid a piece of flat bread on top, and carried it to the leather flap that served as a door. He knelt down to put it on the stones outside, and came back to the fire. A moment later we heard a faint scrape of shoe-leather on stone as the man out there picked it up and returned to his guard. Ali took out his knife and explored the point with his thumb.

“Ali,” Mahmoud chided. Ali flung his hands wide.

“Good,” he snarled. “Beautiful.” He stood up, stabbed the knife back into his belt, and began to kick dust over the coals. “I am infinitely happy. Let us go.” He snatched up a pack from the floor, grabbed a rifle from where it leant against the wall, and pushed past us out the door flap. Mahmoud picked up the second rifle and another pack and followed. I trailed in their wake, stumbling awkwardly down the rock-strewn hillside, trying to keep the bobbing kuffiyah ahead of me in sight.

I smelt the horses before I saw them. Five horses, all dark and each bearing only the padded cloth that Arabs often use as a saddle. Ali and Mahmoud were already mounted. Mahmoud threw me a set of reins, which I was relieved to find were attached to a proper bridle rather than the plain halter many Arabs used, and I struggled to mount the rangy horse (which laid his ears back and looked as if he would rather bite me than carry me) without benefit of pommel or block. The third man leapt without effort onto the back of one of the two remaining horses and kicked it to the head of the small column. My own mount determinedly followed his mates, with me in disarray on the saddle pad, struggling to get my heel across his back.

Once upright, my eyes were drawn to the riderless horse behind Ali, and I was struck by an illogical but powerful feeling of relief, as if the very presence of a spare horse warranted the eventual addition of its missing rider. My spirits rose a fraction.

We rode hard, at a pace across the uneven hillside that would have had me quaking in terror under normal circumstances, but now seemed merely part and parcel of the whole mad enterprise. An hour later the sky was lit with a faraway flash, and a rumble soon blended with the beat of our cantering hoofs. The storm stayed far to the north of us and added a nightmare quality to our journey, dazzle followed by blindness, but even at that distance, the thunder and the slight breeze served to conceal some of the noise we were making. A passage I had laboriously translated from the small Koran Mahmoud had given me ran through my mind: “It is He who causes the lightning to flash around you, filling you with fear and hope as He gathers together the heavy clouds.”

Our guide, or guard, slowed us to a trot that jarred my aching skull even more horribly than the canter had done. I was riding blindly now, hoping the headstrong animal under me would not carry me off a cliff, and soon we slowed to a walk, and then stopped.

I clung, panting, to the edge of the saddle pad, unaware of anything but the need not to fall off.

Mahmoud’s voice came from a place near my knee. “Take and drink.” I held out my hand, groped for his, came back with an unstoppered phial, and held it up to my lips. It was the same mixture, tasting of herbs and honey and drugs, that Rahel had given me back at the inn, and it worked as well as it had before. My head slowly cleared. I gradually became aware of the three men moving purposefully around the horses. Their dark robes rendered them nearly invisible in the last light of the fading moon, and I was startled when one of them—the stranger—appeared beside me and bent to pick up my horse’s hoof. The abrupt change of the animal’s stance would have had me off, had my fingers not already been entwined in the animal’s mane. I clung on, my brain struggling to work out what they were doing, until it came to me: The horses’ hoofs were to be muffled. We must be near our goal. Near Holmes.

The moon went in soon after that, and the breeze died away. We rode slowly down what seemed a remarkably flat and uneventful track for a mile or two, after which we dismounted and walked another mile. It was black as a cave, and utterly silent. Even the jackals were asleep.

My horse stopped before I did, and then I felt hands on the reins, pulling them from my grasp. I followed the sound of the animals moving off, and the rattle of a bush being dragged, and then Mahmoud was whispering in my ear.

“Can you see?”

“Very little,” I whispered back, slightly ashamed. My night vision has never been good.

“Nor I,” Mahmoud admitted, to my astonishment. “Ali will lead.”

We followed the younger man up a hill, through an orchard, beneath a wall, and I realised that I could see the shape of the stones against the sky. Dawn was not far off. An owl swooped over; the night was so still, I could hear the bird’s feathers parting the air.

“There is an inner room,” Ali breathed at us. “It will be guarded. Does… she… understand?” His deliberate use of the correct pronoun echoed his earlier disdain and doubt. Mahmoud answered before I could.

“Amir understands that hesitation may mean disaster. He will do what needs to be done.”

I wished I shared his confidence. I began to sweat, despite the cold air, and my stomach turned to rock.

There was a locked gate; Ali opened it. Beyond it lay a garden, and a stout wooden door. Ali unlocked that. Inside, the building smelt of stone and woodworm and something as heavy as incense but not incense; I decided later it had to be hashish. The corridor was long and bare, and the whisper of our clothing was a harsh susurration against the hard rock walls. Ali’s feet were bare and damp, and came up from the stones with minute sucking noises. Mahmoud’s stomach growled once. The corridor seemed endless.

Once we heard voices, unintelligible echoes a long way off, fading as soon as they had begun. A minute later we passed a door from which came the sound of a man snoring. When we had eased past it, Ali picked up our pace, past doors, a window, three more corners, down a flight of stairs, and then he stopped.

“Stay here.” I heard his feet pad away damply down the stones. After a minute they came back. “Clear,” he breathed. ”But we must bring the guard out.”

“Amir,” whispered Mahmoud, “take off your turban. Quickly. Your hair—loose it. Put away your spectacles. And give me your abayya. Now, you must call the guard out.”

“Me? How on earth—”

“Hurry! We must have the door open. The guard will not open it for Ali or me, and if we try to force the lock he will raise an alarm. You must bring him out, Amir. Your Holmes is in there,” he added.

As he had known it must, that knowledge steadied me. I straightened my shoulders and arranged my thoughts, then paused with my knuckles above the wood.

“What would he call his superior? The leader?”

“Try ‘commandant,’ ” suggested Ali. I had hoped for more surety than that, but it would have to do. I started to bring my knuckles down on the door, paused again to unbutton a few of the fastenings on the neck of my shiftlike robe. I was very uncertain as to technique, to say nothing of ability to carry it off: one thing my training with Holmes had not included was the art of seduction.

I rapped softly on the door, pinched my cheeks hard to make me look flushed, and began to breathe rapidly—which was not too difficult, with my heart already racing wildly.

When the slot in the door slid open I was on the far side of the corridor, crouching against the wall with my robe over my booted feet and peering up with an expression of what I hoped simulated terror on my face. It opened with a sharp crack of iron on iron, and I did not have to feign a start. I blinked up at the pair of eyes that I could see fuzzily, framed by the small barred window.

“What?” a male voice demanded.

“That man,” I whispered fiercely in Arabic. “The commandant. He hurt me. Please, oh, please help me,” I pleaded. “I want to go back to my village.”

“Who are you?”

“I live in the village,” I improvised, my voice choked, and then to my distress I felt my eyes actually well up and a tear-drop break free to run down my face. “He hurt me,” I said with a sob.

The man laughed harshly and slapped the view slot closed; my heart plummeted. However, then came the sound of a bolt sliding, and the knob began to turn. He pulled the heavy door open and stepped out, and he was just beginning to say something about making me feel better when Ali, pressed invisibly against the wall, took one step forward and brought his arm down. The dull thump told me that he had used the haft of his knife instead of the blade; it was quite effective.

Ali and I between us caught the guard before he hit the stones and bundled his limp and immensely awkward form back through the door. When Mahmoud had shut it behind us, we let our burden fall with a thud to the floor.

I took out my spectacles and put them back on, half aware of Ali taking a ball of twine from his pocket and kneeling beside the unconscious figure. Mahmoud ducked through the inner door and into the dimly lit room beyond; I followed on his heels, and saw Holmes.

It is extraordinary, the preposterous things that shoot through one’s mind at moments like that. At the sight of him, my body reacted as if it had been stabbed, but my mind’s first thought was how typical of Holmes it was to ensure that the dye on his skin extended beyond the normally visible portions: scalp to toe, where he was not the colour of blood and bruise, he was uniformly swarthy. My second thought was one, incredibly enough, of exasperation, that the month-old injuries to his back, the results of a bomb that had been one of the reasons for our flight from London to Palestine, had been healing so nicely, until—

I became aware of Mahmoud’s fingers digging deeply into my arm.

“He lives,” Mahmoud said, looking intently into my face.

“Yes, go ahead,” I said nonsensically, but he seemed to understand, and moved forward, sliding his knife from its scabbard as he went.

A length of rope was tied around each of Holmes’ wrists. Both led to a single hook in the beam above him. His feet rested on the floor, but his arms, pulled tight against the sides of his head, were at an angle that would have been excruciating after five minutes, and breathing must have been hellish. By all appearance he had been there for a long time. The injuries to his back, the small round burns and the long weals of the whip, were not the products of a few minutes’ work.

Mahmoud was now standing facing him, but I could not approach. I was afraid to look into the eyes of my friend, my teacher, my only family: I was terrified of what I might see there. Instead, I watched Mahmoud watching Holmes, and I knew when Holmes opened his eyes and looked back at the Arab, because the bearded face crinkled slightly around the scar. A smile.

“By the Prophet, Holmes. You look like hell,” Mahmoud said. Reaching into his robes, he pulled out a small silver box, snapped it open with his thumb, and scooped out a quantity of some black, paste-like substance on the tip of his little finger. He leant forward and put it into Holmes’ mouth, put the box away and was wiping his finger on his robe when we heard the heavy outer door open in the room behind us.

Many things seemed to happen simultaneously: hurried footsteps and a large angry stranger with his mouth open standing in the inner doorway; my hand, of its own accord and with no pause for thought, going down to the top of my boot, plucking out the throwing knife that lived there, and sending it in one smooth movement through the air straight at the intruder’s throat just as Ali’s moving fist, wrapped around the butt of his own heavy knife, materialised behind the man’s head; another dull thump and the man jerked to one side and collapsed to the floor at the same moment my knife clattered and sang down the stones of the opposite wall. Time shuddered and began to move in a linear fashion once more.

With a look of wonder Ali peered down at his right arm, separating the neatly slit sleeve with the fingers of his left hand and dabbing curiously at the blood welling up in the long, shallow incision that ran from his wrist to his elbow. For a terrible instant I had a vision of Ali on the floor with my knife protruding from his throat: had he been just inches over… He stared at me, and then back at his arm, and an expression of sheer joy came over him. I thought he would burst into laughter. My apologies died in my throat.

From behind me came a noise, a curious, high-pitched cough that contained both gasp and groan, cut off instantly. I whirled to see Mahmoud, his knife still in his hand, easing Holmes’ arms out of the cut ropes. Holmes took one stiff step forward and collapsed, but Mahmoud, in a motion so smooth it looked rehearsed, shifted along with him, so that Holmes half fell across the Arab’s shoulders with another grunt of pain. Mahmoud straightened, and then he was carrying Holmes, all the lanky length of the man with the bloody back draped across those broad shoulders.

Mahmoud put his head down, aimed at the door, and went through it fast, scuttling sideways like a crab to thread himself through. Ali stood up from tying the gag on the second man, snatched up a heavy robe from the first guard’s chair, and threw it across Holmes’ back as Mahmoud passed, then followed them out into the corridor. I paused inside the door to retrieve my knife and a heap of clothing that I thought looked like Holmes’; and again outside to catch up my own turban and abayya from the corner where Mahmoud had thrown them. Then I ran, pulling on clothes as I went. Ali locked the door behind us with the guard’s ring of keys, which he slid noiselessly under the opposite door, and then we were all three running, as silently as we could, down the stone corridors, up the stairs, and out, out into the cool, crisp, wet-smelling air of dawn. I would not have hesitated to kill were we stopped, I knew that now. In fact, I could taste the desire for battle and murder and revenge between my teeth; but no-one raised an alarm, and we slipped out of there with the ease of mice leaving a pantry.

It was not until we reached the perimeter wall that trouble came, and when it did, it happened so quickly that again, it was over almost before it began, certainly before I could involve myself.

Ali pulled open the gate and stepped back for us to pass. Mahmoud, still carrying Holmes and showing no sign of flagging, went through first. I followed perhaps three paces behind him, and had just cleared the wall when to my instant and complete terror a loud voice spoke at my shoulder, demanding that we stop and identify ourselves.

Or rather, he began his demand. He never finished it. Our eruption through the gate on top of him had apparently startled him as much as he did us; he was fumbling with his rifle as he spoke, and made the fatal mistake of assuming Mahmoud and I were alone. I have never known a human being to move more swiftly than Ali. Before I had rounded on our attacker, Ali’s vicious blade had done its work, and when Ali’s hand came off the man’s mouth, there was only surprise there, no pain or fear. Just surprise, and then nothing at all.

I had seen men die before, but only men in hospital beds, when death released them from the terrible suffering of gassed lungs or torn bodies. This was a very different matter, this transformation of bone and muscle into a limp, empty thing that landed on the ground with the meaty slap of a dropped water-skin. A noise welled in me, pressing hard against my closed lips, but whether it was a scream or gales of laughter I will never know, because Ali saw it coming and cuffed me so hard my teeth rattled.

“Do not be stupid,” he hissed at me. “Run.”

I ran.

The sun was nearly on the horizon, the sky dangerously close to full light, and Mahmoud with his flopping burden was all too clear a quarter of a mile down the road. It was quite a ridiculous picture, I thought with that portion of my mind not taken up by the sensation of cross-hairs between my shoulder-blades, rather like a long-legged man mounted on a small donkey, but it was also very impressive, the strength of the man sprinting down the road with thirteen-plus stone across his shoulders. He had, I thought inconsequentially, not even paused when the last guard had appeared, merely trusted Ali to take care of the problem.

The bizarre tangle of robes and limbs ahead of me stepped to the side of the road and vanished. I slowed when I reached the place, only to be passed by Ali, who crashed into the narrow path between the bushes without slowing and dived down the precipitous path that lay there, moving at a dead run. Still, I saw to my astonishment, barefoot: his red boots were in one hand, the dead guard’s rifle in the other. I slid and scrambled down the hill in his wake, and though I pushed hard, when I reached the horses, the only one there was our nameless guide, mounted, holding the reins of my mount, and looking nervous. No sooner did the reins hit my palm than he drove his heels into his horse’s ribs, and I had a battle to persuade my own mount to wait until I was on his back before he followed his fellows down the narrow, dusty, stone-strewn track.