O Jerusalem (26 page)

Mahmoud stood there; behind him Rahel, with a rifle in her arms and looking very comfortable with it there. The intensity of the joy I felt at seeing him, this
phlegmatic, uncommunicative, and utterly trustworthy Arab, took me by surprise. I gulped back the tears of weakness, and murmured, “
Salaam aleikum
, Mahmoud.”

“
Aleikum es-salaam
, Amir,” he replied. “Your injuries were not serious, I am pleased to see.”

“Have you found Holmes?”

“We know where he is.”

“Thank God,” I said explosively in English. I let the rug drop from my shoulders and tried to stand up. Mahmoud instead pulled a stool over in front of me and sat down on it. His dark eyes probed my face.

“You are in pain,” he noted.

“It will get slightly worse, then better,” I said. Little point in denying its existence, not with those eyes on me. He thought for a minute, then seemed to make up his mind.

“You are
Inglezi, firengi
,” he said: English, a foreigner. “But you are also not
firengi
. If you were only
firengi
, if you were nothing but an Englishwoman, I would not have returned here tonight, because the
Inglezi
have no—they have a different sense of what is honourable. What was done today is a blood insult, you understand? You and your Holmes have eaten our salt, shared our bread. Blood ties exist, you understand?” He was speaking English, but a much simpler English than I had heard him use before. It occurred to me that he was thinking in Arabic and translating as he went. I assured him that I understood what he was talking about, and that I agreed. He continued. “If those ties did not exist, the exercise of retrieving him would be only a task, a service to the English government. Ali and I would do that as we have done other jobs. But this is a matter of honour, and I believe you have the right to be there with us, if you choose.”

Were I in his shoes, I reflected, I should be asking how badly I in my feeble state might handicap them, but he asked no such question. I met his eyes evenly.

“I will come, if you will have me.”

He nodded, and stood up. “There are arrangements to be made; I will return for you,” he told me. After a brief consultation with Rahel he went out. She followed, to return in a couple of minutes with another glass, this one containing two inches of a clear, brownish liquid.

“This will help you to ignore the pain. It will not remove the pain, but neither will it cloud your mind or slow you down.”

I drank it, and sat until Mahmoud came and led me away.

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

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.