Garment of Shadows (19 page)

The track, when we found it, was little more than a goat’s trail, narrow enough to force us into a single file, our right knees near to brushing the hill in places, the horses’ left hooves a foot from catastrophe. I watched Holmes’ back, with glimpses of Lyautey’s at the fore, as the horses plodded up the
wadi
. After the recent rains, it held a noisy little river. This was a rocky area, with débris littering the path from the near-vertical wall to our right; flash floods had carved the canyon at our left. The bank across from us had a more forgiving angle to it, but appeared to be composed of a lethally crumbling rock—hence the goat-path worn into the right-hand side.

Without Holmes to distract me with his tales of bloodthirsty rebellion and European scheming, my various mental and physical complaints reasserted themselves. The skin on the front of my thighs felt nearly raw—probably the only time in my life I would wish for a side-saddle. The wool at the back of my neck was chafing. And my mind continued to scratch at its own internal itches. The Chinaman/chanteuse; the clear but inexplicable image of a sawn-off bolt; that damned scrap of onionskin with its Arabic writing. Its stroke-victim capital A on the obverse.

I shifted the reins into my right hand and worked the other into my pocket. The crimson book was no longer quite so pretty, having developed a curve to its covers from long residence against a seated body. I opened the cover, causing the snippet inside to flutter with the canyon breeze. I grabbed it, holding down the edge with my thumb.

The A gazed up at me, insolently proclaiming its importance. I was grateful that the irritating sense of Profound Meaning that had permeated everyday rubbish had begun to fade, as my battered brain subsided into a more normal state. However, this object stubbornly retained its numinous shine. With a sigh, I put the book away, raised my eyes to the men in front of me, and determinedly set about a review of Arabic verbs.

Five minutes later, I found that I was musing on the Indo-European roots of the letter A. It had probably originated as a pictogram of an ox, in Hebrew
’alp
. Its two horns had migrated from pointing to the right to downward, as the Roman alphabet has it today … and here I was, thinking about the letter A again.

Arabic verbs were clearly insufficient distraction: I turned to the bones of the skeleton, beginning with the distal phalanges. I worked my way up to the temporal bone (mine may not have been cracked, simply bruised) and the various facial bones (my left zygomatic had also taken a knock, come to think of it) before turning downward. I made it through the cervical and thoracic vertebrae to the clavicle before getting distracted again: the scapula. Such an interesting shape, the scapula. Its flat surface linked the arms (or in birds and fish, the wings and fins) to the musculature of the upper torso. A broad bone, related to the Greek for
shovel
, it was what gave strength to the arms. When a man was strong as an ox (’alp) it was thanks to the way his A-shaped scapula—

There it was again, an image as persistent as the odour of honey had been.

This monotonous loop of thoughts threatened to derange me entirely. It was all well and good for Holmes to urge perspective in the loss of a year, but he was not the one caught up in circular thinking. I glared at his back, wondering how I might approach matters were our positions reversed, if Holmes had been the one to—

Lightning jolted my entire body. It felt like that certainly, as electrifying as the time I’d grasped a live wire, only this charge entered not through my hand, but through my eyes.

As my gaze had lifted from my horse’s ears to the backs of the two men, the shape of the approaching landscape nagged more and more stridently at my mind: to the right, the near-vertical cliff face with a large boulder balanced near its top; to the left, sloping terrain angled down to the river; in the distance, our goat-track curved around to the left, rising at an angle between those of the two valley sides.

In other words, a crooked, upside-down A with lines that did not quite touch.

A fresher or more skittish horse would have leapt into the abyss at my sudden jerk on the reins.

“Stop!” I cried. “Oh God, stop!”

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

I
don’t remember getting down from the horse, nor do I recall seeing the two men dismount and edge past their own puzzled mounts to where I stood, staring desperately at the winding track ahead of us. I came to myself with Holmes’ hand digging into my shoulder, and his urgent voice in my ear, with Lyautey’s alarmed face looking past him. “Russell, what is it?”

“An ambush. It has to be.
That
must be what the drawing was on the piece of paper. Here.” I dug into my pocket, talking all the while. “Mahmoud did it, not a random pencil. I think. Yes—it
must
have been he. What I thought was a capital A was an
aide-mémoir
, this exact spot. You see? Why else would he have drawn it?”

I held the crumpled bit of paper up to the view ahead of us, and indeed, it could be seen as a visual echo: cliff with boulder; sloping hillside; track.

Or, damn it, it could as easily be a still-fevered brain desperately grasping for sense in an accidental scribble.

I clutched my head, as if that might impose rationality. “I said before, there’s a sort of echo when you tell me something I feel I should know. Yes, it could be my imagination—this inability to be certain about
anything
may drive me insane! But, when I looked up and saw that piece of hillside, it made an immediate connexion with the scribble on the piece of paper, a scribble I have been unable to get off my mind ever since I saw it. I
think
it is important. I
think
Mahmoud must have drawn it. And the only reason I can imagine for sketching this site would be as a warning, an illustration of where he knew danger lay. No, not even
knew
—if he’d known for sure, he would have cancelled the meeting. Say, he
suspected
. And he showed me where, in case he wasn’t able to be with us.”

Holmes and Lyautey watched me with weirdly identical raised eyebrows. It was an agonising situation, feeling utterly convinced that I was right, at the same time knowing that I was probably just deluded.

Interestingly, it was Lyautey who moved first. He stepped to the very brink of the drop-off, craning his neck to see past the cliff-top to the teetering boulder. Shrubs and small trees covered the hillside above that point. Lyautey studied the hill, the route that boulder would take were it suddenly to come free, the quantity of débris that would surely follow in its path. When he turned back, his military mind had decided.

“We will assume that you are right. What, then, do you suggest?”

Silence. Then Holmes asked, “Will the horses back up as far as the last wide place?”

“They will for me,” Lyautey said.

I objected. Granted, he was the cavalry officer, and should know what a horse could do, but it could take hours if each of the three would only obey his urging. “It would be faster if Holmes and I circled back to climb the hill, to see if there is anyone waiting at the boulder.”

“Holmes and I will go,” Lyautey announced.

“If you do,” I told him bluntly, “I can’t guarantee you won’t come back to find three horses lying dead in the river.”

He did not like it, but he was an officer to his bones, for whom delegation is vital. He took another survey of the track ahead—sorely tempted, I was sure, to risk a sudden, fast gallop up those two hundred yards—and then turned back, resignation on his face. He was opening his mouth to agree, when Holmes cut him off.

“Oh, damn,” my husband said.

Half a mile away, along the curve of track, two men with tall rifles were riding in our direction. The first man had his hood thrown back: Ali. The other, his hood sheltering his face, could only be Mohammed Abd el-Krim, Emir of the Rif Republic.

The three of us reacted according to our natures. Lyautey pushed his way past Holmes’ horse with the clear intention of making a dash underneath the hanging danger. Holmes stepped forward and began to shout loudly, one hand spread out, the sound futile against the river. I pulled out my revolver and fired it into the air.

That last action stopped the distant pair’s forward progress nicely. Unfortunately, I had not reckoned with the consequences of firing three shots in the vicinity of a guerrilla leader.

My horse, though accustomed to firearms, nonetheless jerked and nearly went over the edge.

Holmes clapped a hand over one ear, which had been a foot away from my gun.

Lyautey pressed into the shelter of the cliff and whipped out his own revolver, waving it around as he looked for what I’d been firing at.

But worst of all was the reaction of the hooded figure up the
wadi
.

He was too far away to see that I had been aiming at the sky, but plenty close to hear the retorts. He vanished from his horse’s back in an instant, sheltering behind the animal’s bulk, invisible but for the hem of his
djellaba
—and the muzzle of his long rifle, aimed straight at Ali’s back.

Ali’s hands came off the reins and out from his body. His horse slowed to a halt; after a moment, our friend’s body bent slowly forward in the saddle. My heart stopped, but Ali was not tipping lifeless to the ground; he was getting rid of his weapon. When he had done so, he sat upright again, both hands raised.

The turn of his head suggested that he was talking earnestly over his left shoulder. His right hand pointed in our direction; after a minute, a dark orange turban emerged above the second horse’s neck.

At that signal, all three of us stepped forward, raising our hands to make exaggerated pushing-away gestures, shouting fruitlessly against the noise of the water.

The tableau held, while Abd el-Krim considered. Any sensible man would simply shoot this potential traitor in the back and ride away to safety; that this man did not instantly do so suggested the superior quality of the brain beneath the colourful cloth.

Then Ali’s hands came down. Moving with great deliberation, he dismounted, took a few steps forward, and stretched out on the ground. The other man darted forward into the shelter of Ali’s horse, and stood with his rifle lowered on Ali.

“Now what?” I asked.

“I’ll have to go up there,” Lyautey said. “The man won’t wait forever.”

“That’s too much of a risk,” Holmes objected. “I will go, and tell them what the problem is. Abd el-Krim is sure to know another route. I’ll bring them around, and meet you two back along the track.”

Lyautey, being a man, objected to this plan, even though if ambush there was, he was the more likely target than Holmes or I. Not that I was in any way pleased with Holmes’ offer to fling himself into danger, but rationally, I could see that it was less hazardous—for us all—than to send Lyautey forward along the track. One stick of dynamite—even a muscular man with a stout lever—would bring half the hillside down on us.

One considerable problem remained. “I still don’t think I can get this horse to walk backward all that way.”

“If I get him started, you should have less of a problem,” Lyautey told me.

There followed a jostling for position: Holmes moving forward to take control of the Maréchal’s horse, Lyautey coming back to assist me. And that was when the trap was sprung.

The flaw in my reasoning had been based on the ambush being explosive rather than munition-based. I—we all—had assumed that with a nice precarious boulder at the ready, any trap would make use of that. However, though their Bedu brothers might adore dynamite, Moroccans seemed to prefer guns. At least, the two men in the trees on the other side of the boulder preferred guns.

When they saw Lyautey appear to turn back, they opened fire.

The first volley took a chunk out of my horse’s ear, which was too much even for a phlegmatic Army animal: It reared, made a mid-air
volte-face
that I would not have believed possible had its hooves not brushed my eyebrows in passing, and vanished down the trail. Holmes’ horse bolted as well, in the opposite direction: The beast came within a hair of tumbling into the river as it attempted to push past Lyautey’s, but then that one gave a scream of pain and leapt from standstill to full gallop. In moments, both were vanishing around the curve.

I had thrown myself down as my horse rose, and Holmes was merely lashed by his mount’s tail as the creature made its lunge for freedom, but Lyautey was between Holmes’ saddle and the cliff when the gunfire began, and the animal’s weight drove the breath from his lungs. The Maréchal staggered away from the rock-face. Holmes and I both leapt to haul him back against the scant protection of the cliff. His face was alarming, although I’d had the wind knocked out of me enough to know that his lungs would remember how to draw air before he passed out. But perhaps not before he got in the way of a bullet.

We stood with our backs to the cliff-face, Lyautey between us, pistols drawn. Holmes had the disadvantage, being right-handed, but I aimed at the puff of gun-smoke above us and emptied first my gun, then his. Its third bullet hit something, because the gunfire suddenly stopped. At the same instant, Lyautey gave a great, ragged whoop of indrawn breath, then began to cough. Holmes pounded him between the shoulder blades while I helped myself to the Maréchal’s revolver, and waited for a return of fire.

None came.

I risked a glance at the pair upriver. I knew there was little hope that Ali lived: One twitch on the trigger finger, one surprised reaction to the sudden volley of fire, and the long rifle would have punched a hole through our friend’s spine.

I could not believe my eyes. The man with the gun had come out from behind the horse; at his feet, Ali was up on one elbow.

The rebel not only had brains, he possessed an astonishing degree of self-control.

I glanced at Holmes, who was as amazed, and as relieved, as I. When I looked upriver again, the two men were on the move. Ali’s rifle was back in his grasp, and both were scrambling up the steep alley side, comrades in arms. Ali moved faster, and vanished into the trees while the stockier man was still labouring upward. But the Moroccan was determined, if not fleet of foot, and soon pushed into the scrub. Ali’s horse lowered its head to pull at the sparse grass, then raised it again, startled, as our two came into view, their panicked run already slowed to a trot. Four sets of ears pricked upright, and in their simple way, our two forgot why they had been moving so fast. Before long, all four horses grazed in companionship, half a mile upriver.