Garment of Shadows (29 page)

I waited for a response. When none came, I went on. “Lyautey and your friend Abd el-Krim agree that Raisuli himself is very ill, which makes it unlikely that he was actively involved in putting us here. If you think he is behind this, it would, rather, be his supporters, striking a blow against France and the Rif Republic at the same time.”

I interpreted the small noise my fellow prisoner emitted as approval, however vague. I continued. “I’m not going to ask how you got here or what you imagine they have in mind for us, since I can tell that you’re finding speech difficult. More immediately, we need to free ourselves before they come back. Let me know if they left you with anything that might be of use—I have no spectacles, robe, or turban, though they did leave me my trousers, shirt, boots, and— What was that?”

I went quiet so he could repeat his short phrase. When he did, I heard the words but the meaning escaped me. At first. When they finally took hold in my mind, the darkness grew so very cold.

“What do you mean, ‘not coming’?” I demanded. “Raisuli’s made a career out of selling back foreign prisoners. Once Lyautey pays the ransom, we’ll be out of here.”

No answer came.

I pushed the silence away. “I suppose that if his followers see Raisuli as the heir of Moulay Ismaïl, kidnapping Europeans comes naturally to mind when their purse runs empty. And Raisuli seems to treat his captives better than Moulay Ismaïl did. The important ones, anyway. Like Perdicaris and Maclean. And us.”

Silence. Raisuli perhaps, but his followers?

“I have to say, it’s awfully cold in here. Did they give you a blanket or robe of some kind?”

Either he did not answer, or his response was too low for me to hear.

“What about food? I don’t imagine it’s anything to write home about, but how often do they bring it?”

He did not reply.

“Mahmoud, can you hear me?”

His answer was long in coming. When it came, I wished it had not done so.

“No food.”

The cold and dark seized my very bones. “No food?” It was my turn to whisper. “What about drink? Surely at least they bring water?”

No answer came. Which from Mahmoud was answer enough.

“You’ve been here for five days with no food or water?”

The appalled silence that fell was a palpable entity, a huge, infinitely heavy thing that drifted over a pair of tiny heartbeats, faltering lungs, weak fingers. The other time I had woken in blackness, my imagination had peopled that prison with an enemy capable of utter silence, invisible at my side, readying a knife for my throat. Here, I was in a dungeon that had known the implacable death of a thousand like me—ten thousand, suffering and abandoned beneath the ground, the living bound up with those who rotted in their chains, while above, the world went on.

I have known fear before. This was terror. It hollowed my strength and brought a whimper to my throat, and with it an almost overpowering urge to fling myself to the reaches of my shackles and scream until my voice failed.

Almost. Had Mahmoud not been there, had the memory of his sardonic gaze not been more immediate than the present reality of a man barely conscious, the wave of despair would have broken over me. But he needed me—
Mahmoud
, needing
me
—and I could not afford the luxury of losing control. If any passer-by even heard my screams, they would be dismissed as the wind, or as
a jinn
. Just as Mahmoud’s had been: He must have shouted to the limits of his strength. It was why he could barely speak.

And at that knowledge, my hollow limbs filled, my spine went stiff, my trembling mouth snapped shut. This proud and gifted man had given a lifetime of service to king and country, only to be reduced to screams for help in a deserted prison. Death in open battle was one thing; craven atrocity could not be permitted.

I
would not permit it.

“Damn it, Mahmoud,” I shouted, “Ali will have my guts for garters if I let you die here!”

I had been locked in a lightless cellar before, and survived. The experience had taught me that there are more ways to see than the one. It was hard, to force my mind away from emotion and into a cold analysis and assessment, but as I did so, I began to suspect that our captors were more driven by ideological passions than methodical criminality: They had removed my burnoose and
djellaba
, but had not stripped me bare. They had found the bank-notes, coins, and folding knife in my pockets, but failed to notice the two thongs around my neck, both of them holding gold rings. They had removed my glasses—in any event, my glasses had disappeared—but left behind the flat stone, the scrap of onionskin, and a few bread crumbs. They had found the sturdy knife I had strapped to my right wrist, but—

Incredibly, they had left me my tired footwear. Including the slim throwing knife that rode there.

“Mahmoud, are you there?”

“…”

“I have a knife. I’m going to get us out of here. Don’t you dare die on me.”

His response was indistinct, trailing away in echoes, but even so, I knew what he had said:
insh’Allah
. And I knew, too, that even now, there would have been a faint smile as he said it.

Rage warmed my fingers as they searched the shackles around my ankle. Fury pushed back the darkness, reducing it from a deadly threat to an exasperating inconvenience. The shackles were rough with rust, but not to the extent that they were weakened. The hasp was fastened with a padlock, which felt new. I had a brief picture of a man in a
djellaba
haggling with the medina equivalent of an ironmonger, and that stoked my outrage further.

I needed something to open the lock. A year ago, I’d have put my hand to my head and drawn out a pair of hair-pins, but my hair was short now—I even recalled cutting it, eleven months ago in India—far too short to need pinning. My spectacles were gone. And the knife might be slim, but its point would not slip into the padlock’s hole. I could try using it to prise the mechanism apart, but the lock felt solid, and I was loath to risk snapping my only weapon.

I sat against the pillar, finger-tips caressing the cool blade. The alternative was to conduct a detailed search of the ground within my reach, in hopes of finding an object that could be turned to picking a simple lock. A bit of metal, my trodden-on spectacles, a stout twig, even a bone—and my mind hastily turned away from the question
What kind of bone would you expect to find here?

Before I started crawling about, I went again through the inventory of my possessions: stone, paper, crumbs. Half a dozen small buttons on my garments: What if I carved one down …? Too short.

The knife scabbard in the top of the boot was of leather, but it was stiff. Perhaps if I sliced away its softer portions …

The boot. With its old, worn, brass lace-hooks.

I drew up my right foot, and got to work.

“I’m assuming that you have nothing that could be used on these locks,” I said, “or you’d have freed yourself long ago. But whoever brought me here was either in a hurry, or had been told that I was a woman, which made him loath to strip me properly. For whatever reason, he—they—left me my boots. Which have various bits of metal on them. And that should make matters easier.”

A throwing knife is a flat piece of steel whose handle is simply a continuation of the blade, cross-hatched to offer control. I keep mine sharp, and it took but a moment to separate one of the thinner brass lace-hooks from its leather. The knife’s handle was too thick, so I slid the little loop over the blade, pulling at it to work it flat, and talking, so as to keep Mahmoud with me.

“I should tell you,” I said, my words pushing away the darkness that caressed my skin, “I’ve had amnesia, since the night you and I were set upon outside of Fez. I took a knock on the head, but a farmer and your young friend Idir came to the rescue.” I told him the story, all of the past events from the time I had staggered away from the fleeing motorcar. Whether he was hearing me or not, I could not tell, but my fingers kept prying.

And then the knife slipped, slicing a chunk out of my finger and, far worse, flipping the metal snippet into the darkness. I cursed, and stuck my finger in my mouth. Should I conduct a search for the thing, or just start again?

I made mental note of the direction in which I thought it had flown, then picked up my boot and got to work on the next-thinnest hook—this time leaving it attached to the leather. I resumed the story, with Holmes, Lyautey, and me riding north out of Fez.

Lacking its key, a padlock may be opened in two ways. It can, of course, be picked like any other lock, a technique requiring both a pick and a companion wire to hold the sequence of manipulated pins in place. But a padlock may also be popped open with a shim: a thin, narrow strip of metal that, worked into the tiny gap between the lock’s shaft and its body, releases the latch. That was what I was attempting to create.

It was a ridiculous task, one that I would have said impossible—one I would not even have attempted—but for two factors: First, I suspected that my captors had not invested in an expensive lock. And second, I had no choice.

If I did not free my ankle, Mahmoud Hazr and I would die here. Time, the story, and my skin, all wore on.

When this second hook was more or less flat, I cut it from the boot, then struggled around to face the pillar. The metal dug into my ankle, but the soft tile pillar stood atop a slab of rock hard enough to be a grindstone. I worked away at the slip of brass, wearing it down, flattening it on the stone. My fingers grew raw. My hips ached, my ankle burned. I ripped various bits from my clothing to shield my skin from the blade. My conversation descended into babbling—snatched recollections about the night of his abduction; meeting Nurse Taylor; my reaction to finding his ring, first in my pocket that night with the head-lamps on me, then again beneath the brass-worker’s bench on Saturday morning. I told him about throwing Holmes head-over-heels at the top of the stairs in Dar Mnehbi, and what Holmes had said about the shadowy person who possessed information about the secret meeting, and my own speculations about whether that man was within the ranks of the French Protectorate or the Rif Republic. On and on.

I had not heard any reaction from my companion for at least an hour. Apart from my stream of words and the susurration of brass on stone, the only sound in the universe was one that added a note of vicious irony: a slow, regular drip of water into a small pool, thoroughly out of reach. And on I worked.

The knife blade had opened the hook to a gentle curve, taking pieces of my flesh as tribute for its task. A thousand blows from the knife handle now flattened the curve—even Mahmoud’s ring came into play, the knife jammed through it to form a rolling-pin. Once the curve had opened, I set about reducing the metal hook to the thickness of paper by grinding it—and my finger-tips—against the stone slab.

As I said, it was a ludicrous plan. I did not actually believe it was going to work: The hook would not be long enough, it would never be thin enough, the padlock was sturdier than I hoped. But as my only other option was to curl up hopelessly on the filthy stones, I kept going: rubbing, resting my fingers, rubbing again.

The brass wore away, becoming sharp enough to contribute another set of slices to my finger-tips. My fingers were so numb, merely picking up the slip of metal risked losing it, much less trying to use it.

Ten, twenty times I slid the boot-hook down the shaft of the lock. Each time, one edge would go in, an eighth or a quarter of an inch, before the flatness of the hook and the curve of the lock shaft would reach a point of disagreement. Half a dozen times, I thought it irretrievably stuck; each time, repeated attempts freed it, and I sat with my hands tucked under my arms for a while, to rest them, warm them, and allow the blood to dry. Then I would try again.

For the hundredth time—the five hundredth?—I wiggled the little scrap of metal down the padlock shaft to the hole and pushed it in. This time it was thin enough. In fact, it was too thin: At first I thought it was merely the lack of sensation in my fingers that lost track of the sliver of brass against the rough steel, but no. The thin hook was gone, vanished into the body of the lock.

My heart stopped. Hours of labour, my only hope of escape, gone. The urge to fling myself to the ground and wail rose up, but I ruthlessly forced it down. Without moving my right hand on the lock, I splayed and clenched my left fingers to restore circulation, until I could pick up the knife. Closing my eyes (as if this might help me to see!), I rested the blade along the shaft and probed, blindly, ever so gently, hoping I might ease the minuscule brass sheet up. I could feel it, but short of turning the lock upside-down, it did not seem inclined to come out. I started to move my arm, to lay the knife down and turn the lock over, and then stopped.

Maybe it had caught on something. Something internal. A rough bit, or …

With a prayer to the gods of the open skies, I gave the knife a tiny jab.
Click
.

I did not believe it. I had doubted for so long that anything was going to happen—I had been so convinced that I would be found here, in a year or a century, a rust-clogged padlock nestled against the bones of my foot—that I did not trust my senses.

But the lock snicked. More than that, it moved: Cold metal pressed against my palm.

I fumbled and dropped it, then grabbed it with horror, convinced that it had relocked itself—but it had not. The padlock haft swung free. A quick twist and it was out of the ankle shackle, and the chain fell away.

I stifled the urge to leap for freedom. I did shove away the chain. And rested my head against the pillar. I may have wept, a little. And then I snatched up the padlock to throw it into the darkness …

And stopped.

I had spent hours rubbing metal on stone, but the metal had been brass. Brass does not participate in the chemistry of Fe2+O2=Fe2O3+ heat. The equation that iron and oxygen equals rust and heat has lit many a back-country camp-fire. In plain English, rust is the slow oxidation of iron; a spark happens when the oxidation is instantaneous.