O Jerusalem

TWO

ب

Geometry enlightens the mind and sets one’s mind straight … The mind that turns regularly to geometry is unlikely to fall into error.

—

THE

Muqaddimah

OF IBN KHALDÛN

I was beginning to wonder the same thing myself, and in fact, the question was to run like a refrain through all the activities of the next few days. What was I doing here?

“My brother, Mycroft, suggested that you had a problem we might help you with,” Holmes replied. “That is all I know.”

“A ‘problem’,” Ali repeated.

“His word.”

“So you come all the way from England to help us with a problem you know nothing about.”

“I am regarded as something by way of an expert on problems,” Holmes said modestly.

“Or is it that your brother, Mycroft, wants you to check up on us?”

“I should think if that’s what he wanted, he would have indicated we might not trust you, but it’s difficult to say. Mycroft is something by way of an expert on keeping things to himself.”

Ali made a growling noise in the back of his throat and fingered his knife impatiently. “Why did you come? What brings you here?”

Holmes made no further effort to dodge the question, although the answer was a thing of unvarnished humiliation. “We were in danger of losing our lives in London, and needed to get away for some weeks in order to gain the upper hand on our return. Mycroft thought we could as well make ourselves useful as hide in a cave somewhere.”

“So we are to be your nursemaids?” Ali said with incredulity.

“Absolutely not,” Holmes snapped, his voice suddenly cold.

“You are an old man and she is a girl,” Ali retorted. “You may have dyed your faces, but you can’t even speak Arabic.”

“I speak the tongue as one who was born to the black tents of the Howeitat Bedu,” said Holmes in an Arabic that was apparently as flawless as he imagined it, for Ali looked at him in surprise and even Mahmoud cocked an eyebrow. “Russell speaks Hebrew, as well as French, German, and a number of fairly useless dead languages; her Arabic is progressing rapidly.”

It was an exaggeration, but I promptly dragged up a sentence I had laboriously constructed during our boat trip here (ten days spent primarily on intensive lessons in Arabic and intense games of chess) and I parroted it to the room. “My Arabic lacks beauty, but the bones are strong and it grows in the manner of a young horse.”

I was afraid they would ask me a question, at which my ignorance would be laid bare, but Ali picked up where he had left off.

“Very well,” he said, still in English. “You speak with a beautiful accent, but there is more to life here than language. We do not have time to set our steps by yours.”

“If we lag behind, leave us. An hour in the bazaar to supply the portions of our costume the boat could not provide, and we are ready.”

“Dressed as you are, everyone in the market would know your business.”

“Then you will have to spend the hour for us,” Holmes said, as if in agreement to a proposal. Mahmoud made some slight noise, but when I glanced at him, his face was without expression.

“But you look wrong,” Ali objected. “You have strange eyes. The girl even wears spectacles.”

“The spectacles are an oddity, but not an insurmountable one. As for the eyes, Circassians often have blue eyes. So do Berbers, who often have yellow hair as well. Berbers are also known for being strong-headed, which is even more appropriate.”

“We have no beds,” Ali cried in desperation.

“Maalesh,” Holmes said. “But as an ‘old man’ I suppose I am meant to need my sleep, so I will wish you a good night.” And so saying, he kicked off his boots, wrapped himself up in his greatcoat, and turned his face to the wall. I followed his example; eventually the others did as well. They could, after all, scarcely lie in comfort on the carpets and bedclothes they no doubt had in their possession when their two soft Western guests slept on the packed-earth floor.

Between the discomfort, the nocturnal activities of a variety of four-, six-, and eight-legged residents, and the gradual mid-night suspicion that our hosts were more than unusually troubled by our visit (“They could have landed at a more convenient time,” Ali had said to Steven), I did not actually fall asleep until I had heard the pre-dawn wail of a distant muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. I woke when the door opened and shut at first light, but by then I was numb enough to call it comfortable, and dropped back to sleep until Ali and Mahmoud swept back in, their arms filled with bundles.

Their shopping expedition had not changed their temper. Mahmoud went silently to the corner to build a fire for coffee while Ali came perilously close to throwing his purchases at us and kicking us awake. (In truth, the room was so small that dropping the things and pacing up and down amounted to the same thing.) I blearily pushed my stiff bones upright, put on my spectacles, shifted back out of his way, and reached for the nearest twine-bound parcel.

My heart sank when I saw what it contained, and I sat rubbing my face and wondering where to begin. Ali’s idea of a suitable garment amounted to a rough, black, head-to-toe sack with a hole for my eyes combined with too-small, thin-soled, decorative sandals with narrow straps that hurt just to look at them.

“Holmes,” I said. He looked up from his gear, which was similar to Mahmoud’s, only plainer. His mouth twitched and he looked down at the wide belt in his hand, and then he relented.

“This will be fine,” he said, and stood up to begin the change of identity. “Russell’s, however, will not do. She will need the clothing of a young man.”

“That is not possible,” Ali said flatly. “It is haram.” Forbidden.

“It is necessary, and no one will know.”

“She could be stoned for dressing as a man.”

“It is highly unlikely any judge would approve the punishment, although a mob might use it as an excuse to throw some rocks. If you are afraid of being placed in danger, then we shall leave you.”

Ali’s hand gripped the shaft of his knife so hard I thought the ivory would bulge out between his fingers, but the blade remained in the sheath.

“You will not accuse me of cowardice, and she will wear those clothes.”

“Actually, no,” Holmes said, completely ignoring the man’s fury and sounding merely bored—an old and effective technique of his. “She will not wear those clothes, or anything like them. No burkah, no bangles, no veil. She will not walk behind us, she will not cook our food, she will not carry water on her head. This is not, you understand, my choice; I should be perfectly happy to have her clothed head to foot and in a subservient position—the novelty would be most entertaining. However, she will simply not do that, so we must either live with it or separate. The choice, gentlemen, is yours.”

His state of undress had reached the point at which I had to turn my back, so I missed the non-verbal portions of the discussion that followed, and many of the words they used passed me by. Still, I did not need a translation for their emotional content, nor did I need to have Holmes tell me why Ali had left so precipitately, since all the women’s garments left with him. I turned back to find Holmes transformed into a Palestinian Arab.

Mahmoud through all this had placidly gone about the business of making coffee, and had now reached the stage of shaking the pan of near-black beans. He glanced up and caught my eye, then lifted his chin at the table leaning against the wall. I went over curiously and picked up the small, worn, leather-bound book that lay on the rough surface. On what would be the back cover in an English book but was the front in Hebrew or Arabic, there was a short phrase in faded gold Arabic script.

“A Koran?” I asked him. He continued shaking the beans. “Yours?”

“Yours,” he said briefly, and followed it with a flow of Arabic that Holmes translated. “ ‘Start with the knowledge of God’s Book and the duties of your religion, then study the Arabic language, to give you purity of speech.’ ”

“Is that from the Koran?”

“Ibn Khaldûn,” Mahmoud said. The name was familiar, that of an early Arabic historian whose work I had not read.

“Well, thank you. I will read this with care.”

Mahmoud reached for the coffee mortar and poured the beans into it, and that was that.

Once his mind had been turned to the problem, Ali did an adequate job in producing the long-skirted lower garment and the loose woollen abayya that went over it, and the heavy sheepskin-lined coat I would need on cold nights. The sandals he gave me were still thin-soled, but they fit, and the cloth he brought for my headgear was better in hiding long hair than the loose kufjvyah my three companions wore. He even demonstrated how to wrap a turban that looked sloppy but stayed firmly fixed.

I smoothed the skirts of my abayya, wishing I had a mirror, and allowed the men back inside. Mahmoud nodded, Ali scowled, and Holmes checked to see that all the ties and belts were done correctly.

Physically, I would pass as an Arab youth. There was one more difficulty, however.

“Do we still call ‘him’ Mariam?” Ali asked sarcastically. “ ‘Miri’ would be more useful.”

Mahmoud thought about it for a moment, then cast a sly glance at his partner. “Amir.”

Ali burst into laughter, and I had grudgingly to admit that the name was amusing. Mir indicated a relationship with a prince. Ali’s suggested Miri would indicate that I was owned by the state, the property of a prince or commander; in other words, a slave—which, although it might prove accurate, depending on how much drudge labour the men got out of me, was nothing to be proud of. Amir, on the other hand, was far too grand for an itinerant boy, and I could hear already that it would be a source of amusement every time it was pronounced. Still, it seemed that I had little choice in the matter: “Amir” I was, ridiculous or not. Maalesh .

Ali and Mahmoud were anxious to be away—or, Ali was anxious, while Mahmoud firmly dedicated himself to closing up and moving on. We packed away our clothing and the kitchen (the coffee-pots and mortar, one saucepan, the goatskin for water, and a large convex iron pan called a saj for making the flat bread we seemed condemned to live on) and made ready to slip away.

My first sight of Palestine by light of day was of a rain-darkened expanse of rock. The hut was set into a crumbling hillside, its bricks the same dun colour as the surrounding stones; when I glanced back fifty feet away, the structure was all but invisible. I turned my back on our shelter, and set off into the country.

After a mile or two, I asked Holmes if he knew where we were going. I thought perhaps the two Hazrs had a house in Jerusalem or in the foothills, but it seemed that the bulk of their possessions— tents, stores, cooking pots, and mules—had been left with friends some ten miles outside of town. I gaped at Holmes, then at Ali.

“You mean, you don’t have a house?”

“A hair house,” he said, the Arabic name for a tent. “Two, now. And a third mule.”

“We’re to be gipsies? In these shoes?”

“Not gipsies,” Ali corrected me scornfully. “Bedu.”

“For heaven’s sake,” I muttered. “Couldn’t Mycroft afford to get his people a house?”

Mahmoud the silent spoke up, contributing a string of Arabic that could have been a deadly insult or a recipe for scones. I looked to Holmes; he translated.

“He said, ‘Better a wandering dog than a tethered lion.’ ”

“Oh,” I said doubtfully. “Right.”

It looked, then, as if we were to be Bedouin Arabs rather than members of a more settled community. Not, however, the romantic, deep-desert, camel-riding Bedu brought to fame by the exploits of then Major, now Colonel Lawrence and his Arab revolt. These two travelled a cramped little hill country on mules—God’s most intractable quadruped—T. E. Lawrence was at the Paris peace talks, and romance was fled from the land.

I stifled a sigh. Even General Edmund Allenby, my own personal hero of the Middle East—soldier and scholar, terrible and beloved commander, brutal and subtle builder of campaigns—would be far beyond my reach in this guise. If I so much as caught a glimpse of him, it would be from a rock at the side of the road while the general flew past in his famous armoured Rolls-Royce, splashing me with mud.

Instead of a sojourn in a marble-floored villa filled with carpets and cushions, I would be on foot, in crude sandals, sharing a tent with Holmes, and with no private toilet facilities for miles. I thought about lodging a protest at least about not being given my own tent, but decided to let it be for the present. We had slept in close proximity before, when need be, and until I could arrange something else, sharing a tent with him would be better than sharing a tent with all three males.

The afternoon wore on, the rain lessened, and I succumbed to enchantment. The thrill of being in Eretz Yisrael, the exotic sensation of the clothes I wore, the glory of watching the sun move across the sky and smelling the brilliant air and the cook fires and the sheer intoxication of Adventure made me want to dance down the stony road, twirling my rough garments about me. I did not even mind too much that we were heading away from my own goal of Jerusalem, nor that we had still been told nothing whatsoever about our mission by the two close-mouthed Arabs. I was in the Holy Land; much as I craved to set eyes upon the city itself, holy ground to three faiths, the countryside would have to suffice for now.

After an hour, we were forced to stop and pack gauze around the painful chafe of my sandals’ toe-straps. The discomfort did not put a halt to my pleasure, though, and the cup after cup of cool water we dipped out of an ancient stone trough fed by a road-side spring filled me with the sensation of communion. I did not complain, at the footwear or at the heavy burden I carried, and 1 kept up with the pace our guides set.

The sun was low at our backs as we walked along a dusty road with groves of young orange trees on either side, when abruptly first Mahmoud and a split second later Ali stopped dead, their heads raised, their postures radiating alarm. I could hear nothing but the insistent lowing of a cow, smell nothing other than the sweet evening air of the orange grove. I glanced at Holmes in a question, but he shook his head to show his own incomprehension.

Ali wheeled about and bundled us off into the trees, where we threw off our packs while Mahmoud retrieved a well-cared-for Lee Enfield rifle from one of the larger bundles. Ali slipped away into the dusk, pearl-handled revolver in hand, while Mahmoud gestured for us to follow him.

Holmes spoke in a low voice remarkably free of impatience. “May I ask—”

“No smoke,” Mahmoud answered curtly. “And the cow has not been milked. Be silent.”

We approached the farm buildings with caution and indeed, aside from the loud complaints of the cow, an unnatural silence lay heavy around us. We took up positions behind a shed from the deserted-looking house and barn, and waited.

A quarter of an hour after he had left us, Ali stepped into the open farmyard and trotted across to us. He spoke to Mahmoud; Holmes translated for me.

“Whoever did this is gone. The two hired men are in the trees, shot in the back. I saw no-one else.”

Our companions exchanged a look, and separated again, Ali towards the barn, Mahmoud into the shed. It proved to hold only an assortment of farm equipment, but we heard a shout from the barn, and when we got there, Ali had lit a paraffin lamp and was kneeling next to a man who had spilt more blood across the earthen floor than I would have imagined possible. A dagger very like that in Ali’s belt jutted from the man’s chest. The theatrical sight of the curved hilt and the copious blood nearly shocked a gust of laughter out of me, so closely did it resemble the corpse in some stage melodrama, but the urge to giggle passed in an instant and another reaction took over.

A bare two weeks earlier, Holmes and I had been bombed, hunted down, chased through London, and finally shot at while standing in an office of New Scotland Yard; a sniper’s bullet had exploded the window beside me, missing me by inches. I thought I had left behind the blinding terror of the exploding window and the hard slap of lead on brick, but I had not; now I plunged straight back into the dry-mouthed, heart-pounding state as if no time at all had intervened between that attack and this one.

“Oh, God, Holmes, she’s here,” I found myself saying with a whimper. “She’s here waiting for us, she must have known where we were going. Someone in Mycroft’s group has been bought. We have to get out of here, Holmes, we can’t trust these men, we can’t trust anyone, we—”

He caught me and shook me, hard. “Russell! Use your brain. It is not us. She could have had us any time in the last day. This is not about us, Russell. Think.”

I stared at him, and the panic retreated, my vision slowly cleared. I swallowed, nodded, and Holmes released me.

Still, two men were dead, and this one would be soon. If it wasn’t to do with us, what was it?

Mahmoud had bent over the dying man, so close his beard brushed the man’s shoulder, and was speaking forcibly into his ear. “Yitzak,” he said, over and over again until the still figure stirred slightly and the blue eyelids flickered.

“Yitzak, who did this?” It took me a moment to register that he was speaking in Hebrew.

“Mahmoud?” the flaccid lips breathed. The embroidered skullcap the man wore was dislodged by his faint movement. It tipped and dropped away to the earthen floor, revealing thinning hair, a circle of pale scalp, and a clotted head wound.

“We are here, Yitzak. Who did this?”

“Ruth?”

“Ruth and the children are not back yet. The carriage is not in the barn. Your family is safe. Who was it, Yitzak?”

“Man. Saw him. With. The mullah . Last week.”

“The mullah who preached in Jaffa?” Yitzak blinked his affirmation. “It was one of his men?”

“Two. Not his. I—” Yitzak coughed wetly and groaned, and that was all he told us. Ten minutes later his breathing ceased. Mahmoud stood up, looked at the drying blood on his hands, and went outside. While Holmes moved in a circle around the body, examining the scuffed ground, I stood and listened to the sound of a hand pump and the splash of water. When Mahmoud came back into the barn, the entire front of his dark garment was wet. He picked up the lantern from the floor, and inclined his head towards the door, a clear gesture that we should leave. Ali protested in Arabic, something about Ruth and the children seeing this.

“We must not bury him,” Mahmoud told his brother. “We must go.”

“We cannot—” Ali began.

Mahmoud moved slightly, a matter of drawing himself up, and Ali stopped immediately. Mahmoud’s face was dark with rage, not at Ali but at what Ali was forcing upon him. I took an involuntary step back, and hoped fervently that I would never have that look directed against me. “You will go and tell the neighbours,” Mahmoud said forcibly. “We will meet you on the road. Insh’allah,” he added: If God wills it.

Ali glanced at us and nodded, but before he could turn away, Holmes spoke for the first time.

“Why did the killer leave his knife?”

Mahmoud stood with the lantern in his hand and looked at Holmes; neither he nor Ali showed any reaction.

“The knife,” Holmes repeated. “This man was knocked unconscious, dragged here, dramatically arranged in the doorway by two men wearing boots and robes rather than trousers, and stabbed with that knife. His position shouts out ‘murder most foul.’ Of Jew by Arab. The shocking effect was deliberate.”

Ali turned to leave, but Mahmoud stopped him with a gesture, and went back over to examine the body more carefully. The three men studied the scuffed boots, the head wound, the pitiful skullcap, the marks on the floor, and above all the ornate dagger that had slowly taken the farmer’s life. After a couple of minutes, Mahmoud rose. “We cannot bury him,” he repeated.

“I agree,” said Holmes. “It would raise an even worse uproar than this would. But given an hour or two, we could transform murder into an unfortunate accident. And if the two hired men might simply disappear for a while… ?”

Mahmoud reached up to rub at his beard, and his fingertips travelled briefly down the scar. He nodded thoughtfully. “ ‘Allah is the best of tricksters.’ Yes. Better for all. But quickly.”

“It might also be best to remove your possessions from the vicinity. It is one thing for unburdened men to slip into the groves, were a stranger to come upon the farm; quite another to make an escape encumbered with mules and household goods.”

I could see where this was going, but truth to tell, I had no wish to assist in the doctoring of the site. I did not even want to think about what they would have to do to disarm the effects of this death. Oh, I protested, of course, but in the end I gave in gracefully to the combined demands of the three men that I take the laden mules and get them out of the area. I do not think I fooled Holmes, but I protested.

We loaded the animals, tied them so I could control all three with one lead, and Ali gave me instructions that a child could have followed, on how to reach a hidden place where I might wait until they joined me. He repeated the directions three times, until I turned on my heel and walked away with all the Hazr worldly possessions trailing behind.

After my proud little gesture, I was greatly relieved when I succeeded in finding the place without mishap. I had envisioned dawn breaking with me still stumbling about the countryside, trying to explain myself in yet more stumbling Arabic, but I found it, the ruins of a burnt-out and long-abandoned caravanserai—roofless, overgrown, and no doubt infested with snakes, scorpions, and other happy creatures. I hobbled the mules, found a smooth boulder to perch on, drew my feet up under the hem of my skirts, and gave my soul over to patience.

And to thought. The shakiness that had overtaken me on seeing the dead man was beginning to fade, but I still felt queasy, and my mind skittered nervously away from speculations concerning what my companions were doing. I firmly directed my thoughts to the question of what threat might be felt both by a family of Jewish immigrants and by a pair of wandering Arabs, and meditated upon the possible relationship between two Palestinian Arabs and a family of Jewish settlers. What was I not seeing here?

And what, indeed, was I doing here?

It was not a long wait, as waits for Holmes tended to go, but it seemed considerably more than two hours before one of the drowsing mules twitched up its ears and a low whistle came out of the night. This was followed by the sound of three men moving quickly; in less time than it takes to describe, we had become four men (to all appearances) and three pack mules, still travelling quickly.

There are no true mountains in Palestine, not by European standards and certainly not within a days walk of Jaffa, but I could have sworn that our two guides had imported some for the occasion. We scrambled up and down precipitous if unseen hillsides, obliging me to cling to the pack ropes and let my surefooted animal lead me in the darkness, abandoning all pretence of my being in charge of it. At some hour well before dawn, we quit the hills and took to a dusty road for a few miles. Finally we stopped. Ali pressed cold food into our hands, we swallowed mouthfuls of musty water directly from a skin, and then we curled up on the hard ground and lay motionless as stones until the sun was well up in the sky.

I woke to the sound of argument, unmistakable if unintelligible. I started to sit up, and sank back immediately, wondering if I had been beaten while I slept. Not a part of me did not hurt. I then remembered Yitzak, and blood, and I redoubled my efforts to become upright.

The name Jaffa—or Yafo—seemed to be central to the argument. Working from that clue, I decided that our two guides were proposing to double back and see what they could find out about Yitzak’s “man with the mullah.” Holmes, naturally enough, was objecting to this plan; if I knew him, he would propose instead that he himself return to Jaffa and investigate while Ali and Mahmoud cooled their heels here. Seeing Ali’s expression flare into outrage, I judged that the proposal had just been made, and that perhaps it was a good time for me to step in.

“Holmes,” I called. “Do I understand it aright, that they wish to go into Jaffa and ask questions but that you object?”

“But of course,” he began. “How can I know—”

“Holmes,” I said, addressing my mentor, my senior partner in crime, a man nearly old enough to be my grandfather, a person revered by half the world. “Holmes, don’t be difficult. They’re right, and you’re wasting time. I didn’t argue last night when I was sent away with the rest of the household goods, because it was the sensible thing to do. Now the sensible thing would be to let them get on with it. Painful as it is to admit, I can’t be left alone here during the day—my Arabic wouldn’t stand up to a visitor. Yours would.”

I allowed nothing in my attitude to suggest another reason that he stay where he was instead of haring off for a strenuous day in Jaffa; if he was not going to mention his half-healed back, I was certainly not about to bring it up. He glared suspiciously at me, and Ali looked flabbergasted at my effrontery, but Mahmoud glanced sideways at me with something verging on respect, looked up into the air, and recited in English, “Would they attribute to Allah females who adorn themselves with trinkets and have no power of disputation?” He then arose, taking the argument as settled. Ali followed his example with alacrity lest Holmes change my mind, but before they went, Mahmoud went to one of the packs and dug out a grimy block of notepaper, the stub of a pencil, a wooden ruler, and a tidy skein of string with knots tied all through it. He handed the collection to me, and pointed with his chin to a spot down the dusty road.

“The tall rock with the vine?” he said in Arabic, and waited until I nodded. “One hundred metres, with that as the centre. We need a map.”

“Why?”

It seemed a reasonable enough question on my part, but his answer was not helpful.

“ ‘A subdivision of geometry is surveying,’ ” he pronounced.

“And… ?”

“ ‘One who knows geometry acquires wisdom,’ ” he elucidated, then turned on his heel and walked away, with Ali close behind him. I looked at Holmes, let the crude survey instruments fall to the ground, and went back to my pile of packs to sleep.

However, further sleep was not meant to be, thwarted by (in order of appearance) an old man in a cart, a young boy with a cow, an even younger boy with six goats, three cheerful and extraordinarily filthy charcoal burners gathering fuel, the old man in the cart returning, and a chicken. All including the chicken had to pause and investigate our curious encampment, making conversation with Holmes and eyeing his apparently dumb but not unentertaining companion.

In the end, I threw off my cloak and my attempt at sleep, to storm over to the vine-covered rock and begin my assigned survey. I knew it was a completely pointless bit of make-work, given us by Mahmoud just to see if we would do it, but by God, do it I would, and in a manner so meticulous as to be sarcastic. Taunting, even. So I sweated beneath the sun with that length of tangled string, barking my shins on rocks and disturbing whole communities of scorpions and dung beetles, mapping out a precisely calculated square whose sides ran compass straight, placing in it every bush, boulder, and patch of sand. I measured, Holmes (when we were alone) noted down the measurements, and then I took a seat in the shade of a scruffy tree and rendered up drawings that would have made an engineer proud. Four drawings, in fact: the map; a topographical diagram; an elevation from the lowest point; and finally as precisely shaded and nuanced an artist’s rendering as I could master.

Holmes chose a remarkably similar means of dealing with the frustration, impatience, and resentment of having been relegated to the side-lines, only instead of string and inert paper, he worked with words and fools. He sat on his heels, rolling and smoking one cigarette after another, while our visitors (except for the chicken) climbed out of carts or divested themselves of burdens and settled in for a long talk. Holmes nodded and grunted and wagged his head or chuckled dutifully as the conversation demanded, and the only time he even came close to leaving his scrupulously assumed position on the side-lines was when he asked the old man (on the cart’s return journey) if things were peaceful in Jaffa. I pricked up my ears, but it was obvious the man knew nothing about Jaffa and was interested only in equine hoof problems—his donkey’s and our mules’.

By dusk, Holmes and I were ready respectively to strangle a visitor and shred a notebook. He stood up abruptly, and with uncharacteristic rudeness all but lifted the garrulous old man back onto his cart, waved an irritable arm at the stray chicken to dislodge it from its roost on the heap of our possessions, threw some wood on the fire, and slumped down beside it. I tossed my ridiculously precise drawings onto the ground, took out my pocket-sized Koran, and went to sit beside him. I was physically tired and mentally frazzled, but I positively welcomed submitting to the lessons that followed.

Holmes had learnt Arabic nearly thirty years earlier during a sojourn to Mecca, and I had begun intensive lessons upon leaving London ten days before. I did not know if I would be able to absorb enough of the language in the time at my disposal to be of use, but I was determined to try, and Holmes, as always, was a demanding teacher. Our every spare moment of the past days had been given over to the lessons, in language, manners, and deportment. I knew to use only my right hand for eating, I had the most useful verb forms and the most basic vocabulary under control, and I was learning to adopt the small, tight hand motions and the head and body movements of the native Arab speaker.

I had also received a quick tutorial concerning the society into which we were moving, Arab (both hadari, “settled,” and bedawi, “nomadic”), Jew (some of whom had ancestors here in the days of Temple sacrifice), and myriad splintered varieties of Christian. Until the war, with the Turk on all their backs, these disparate groups had existed as more or less amicable neighbours; but since the Turkish surrender, the cap was off, the long-building pressure threatening to erupt—complicated further by British attempts at even-handedness, the rise of Arab nationalism, and the growing number of brash Jewish immigrants, both Zionist and refugee.

The British government looked to have its hands full with this tiny country in the next few years.

None of which explained why Ali and Mahmoud had been so fearful of detection on the night we arrived. I looked up from the small leather book I had been puzzling at.

“Holmes?”

“Yes, Russell.”

“You referred to Ali and Mahmoud’s ‘little games.’ Was that whole demonstration of caution a façade?”

“Not all, no. Certainly if we’d been caught by a patrol at that hour of the night we’d have had a most unpleasant time of it. I do think, however, that the good brothers were attempting to illustrate how very awkward our presence here will be. A fact of which any sensible person would be aware.”

“You don’t think they wanted us here? Then why did Mycroft—”

“I don’t think they wanted us here, no. Two young soldiers trained in desert warfare they might have tolerated, although even that I doubt.”

Lovely, I thought morosely. I was on the verge of my twentieth year, I had worked with Holmes for four of those, and I had just in the last few weeks succeeded in convincing him of my competence and my right to be treated as a responsible adult. Now I would have to start all over again with these two proud and no doubt misogynist males. I did not look forward to the task.

“Do you think they’re trying to get rid of us?”

He did not answer directly but with another lesson in cultural identity. “In the desert, Russell, your brother’s abilities are all that stand between you and a burial in the sand. It is why the Bedouin’s sense of loyalty is so absolute: he must have complete faith in the man who watches his back. These two don’t yet know us.”

It seemed to me that Holmes was demonstrating a good deal more forbearance towards these Arabs than he would have had they been, say, from Scotland Yard. I said as much, and he only smiled.

“Patience is a virtue much valued in the Arab world, my dear Russell.”

“Patience, loyalty, and eating with the right hand,” I said crossly. His smile only deepened.

“Wait, Russell, and watch. But for now, how much of the foregoing can you put into Arabic?”

The fire burned low and my brain cells began quivering with fatigue, and at long last our two companions emerged from the night. Ali immediately seized a pan, stirred up the fire, and set about making a meal. Mahmoud stood looking down at the flames, his fingers travelling through his beard and over his scar. Not a word had been spoken. I stretched, and went over to fetch the drawings I had left lying on the ground. I dusted them off and handed them to Mahmoud, and because I was watching for it, I saw the brief twitch of astonishment as he looked through the pages, and something else as well—a dim gleam of chagrin? or amusement?—but he had himself well in control before he looked up, and merely gave me a brief nod of acceptance. He put them away—with care—in an inner pocket of his robe, and bent to warm his hands over the fire. When he spoke, it was in Arabic, the trickier parts of which Holmes translated for me, murmuring in my ear.

“The mullah who spoke in Jaffa is a wandering preacher, well known as a speaker of sedition and unrest.”

“Against—?” asked Holmes.

“The Jews. The British. The foreigner in general.”

“Against the Turk as well?”

Mahmoud grimaced. “The Turk has held this land for four hundred years. The fez is no longer considered a foreign garment.”

“Where is this mullah now?”

“He has a villa near Gaza.”

I narrowed my eyes at his tone of voice. “You sound as if you disapprove.”

Mahmoud drew a breath and blew it out through his nose thoughtfully. “There is a saying: ‘A full heart or a full purse.’ A mullah is a man of God. Men of God seldom gather wealth to themselves. A man with a villa on the top of a hill is not a poor man.”

Holmes, being a man who assumed the worst about anyone, a man who would not have shown surprise had the Pope been accused of forgery, grew impatient with this discussion of ethics and morals. “What of the men who were with the mullah in Jaffa?” he demanded.

“Ah,” said Mahmoud, brightening a little. “That is interesting.” It was so interesting that he had to drop to the ground and make himself comfortable, taking out his embroidered leather tobacco pouch. “The mullah travels with two servants, a secretary and a bodyguard.”

“It was not they who committed the murders,” Holmes said flatly.

“You think not?”

“Your friend Yitzak said ‘not his’ before he died. They were either the servants of some other man or not servants at all.”

Mahmoud did not argue with Holmes: neither did he agree; he just continued to assemble his cigarette with close deliberation, and went on. “There was another man, a tall, clean-shaven man in European clothing, not a uniform, who stood back and listened. watching the other listeners. Afterwards he was seen speaking with the mullah. The two did not appear to be strangers.”

“Ah! That is our man.”

“You think so?”

“Don’t you?

Mahmoud reached for the long-handled fire tongs and did not answer, not directly. “In any case, he is gone, and no-one knows who he was.”

“Didn’t you—” Holmes stopped. Mahmoud paused with the coal halfway to his cigarette and eyed Holmes. Ali bristled. I held my breath; but in the end Holmes did not voice his criticism, merely waved it away. “It can’t be helped. But you know where that mullah’s villa is?”

“And that he is away from home until next week,” Mahmoud replied.

“Good,” said Holmes. “Then to Gaza it is.”