The Gabriel Hounds (36 page)

A dove fell, out of the sky. The birds of the air were safe enough, they had been blown away on the first hot draught of air. But one grey dove fell, a wing damaged or slightly singed, almost into my hands. It came down like a badly made paper dart, sidelong and drifting, to flutter between my feet, and I leaned forward between the hounds and lifted it, then sat holding it gently. Below my feet I thought that even the water nearest the island boiled and bulged with fish, as the carp crowded away from the bright edges of the lake towards the quiet centre. I could see them just under the surface, bright darts and gleams of gilt and glowing firecoal red.

And above the noise of the galloping flames was the noise of the animals. The dogs whined, the peacocks vented their harsh, scared cry, the partridges crooned
in panic, the rats and squirrels chittered and squealed, and I said at distressingly frequent intervals, as I hugged Sofi and Star close to me: ‘Oh, Charles … Oh, Charles … Oh, for heaven’s sake,
Charles
…’

We hardly even noticed the heavy splash from the north-east corner of the lake, or saw the violent run and ripple of the melted-gold wake as the black head speared straight for the island. I sat and rocked and crooned comfort and held the grey dove and put my cheek to Star’s damp head and wondered how soon I would have to crawl down to the water’s edge and plunge myself in again among the jostling fish.

The creature, whatever it was, had reached the island. It broke from the water, tossed a black lock of hair, and heaved itself ashore. Then it stood upright, and resolved itself into my cousin, dripping and plastered with weed, and dressed in the sodden drapes of what could only be a pair of baggy Arab cotton trousers girded up with a gilt belt, a pair of soggy Arab sandals, and nothing else at all.

He advanced to the bottom of the steps, and regarded me and the menagerie.

‘Eve in the Garden of Eden. Hullo, love. But did you have to set the bloody place on fire to fetch me back?’

‘Charles.’ It was all I could say. The dogs whined and wriggled and stayed close to me, and Sofi waved her wet tail. Half a dozen lizards whipped out of the way as he ran up the steps, and when he stopped in front of us a quail moved a couple of inches aside to get out of the drips. I looked up at him. ‘It wasn’t me,’ I said rather waveringly, ‘the dogs did it. They knocked a lamp over. And I
thought you’d gone, they said you’d escaped. They – they had me locked up … oh, Charles, darling …’

‘Christy.’

I don’t remember his moving, but one moment he was standing there in front of me, with the firelight sliding in lovely slabs of rose and violet over his wet skin; the next he was down beside me on the marble floor, and Star was elbowed out of the way, and Charles’s arms were round me and he was kissing me in an intense, starving, furious way that somehow seemed part of the fire, as I suppose it was. They say that this is how fear and relief can take you. I know I went down to him like wax.

We were thrust apart by the wet jealous head of Star, and then Charles, with a laughing curse, rolled aside from Sofi’s eager paws and tongue.

‘Hey, pax, that’s enough – hell’s teeth, will you call your beastly dogs off? Why do you have to hole up with a zoo? Oh, dear heaven, and that peacock’s filthy, and I’ve rolled all over its tail … Shove over, mate, will you? I’ve only known the girl twenty-two years, you might give me a chance. When did I last kiss you, Christabel?’

‘You’d be about ten. You’ve changed.’

‘You must tell me sometime …’

It was a lizard, dropping from the dome, that shook us apart this time. He swore, swiped at it as it shot away unhurt, and sat up.

‘Christy, I love you, and I could spend the rest of my life making love to you and probably will, but if we’re going, the sooner we go the better,
nicht wahr
?’

‘What? What did you say?’

‘I said we ought to go.’

‘Yes. I love you, too. Did I say?’

‘You made it plain,’ he said. ‘Oh Christy, love …
Christy!
’

‘What?’

His grip on me changed, as it were, and it was no longer my lover, but my cousin Charles who took me by the shoulders and shook me. ‘Pull yourself together! Darling, are you doped, or what?’

‘I’m all right.’

‘We’ve got to get out of here while there’s still a chance!’

‘Oh …Yes, let’s.’ I sat up and blinked at the leaping flames. ‘But how? Unless you can fly? Oh, the sadist you are, you’ve nearly squashed my dove … No, there it goes, thank goodness, it must only have been doped with smoke.’ I started to get up. ‘Mind the squirrel, won’t you?’

He laughed. ‘Is that what it is? Oh, and look at all the dear little rats. Come on!’ He jumped up and pulled me to my feet and held me for a moment, steadying me. ‘Don’t look so scared. We’d be safe enough here, probably, if we had to stay, but it might get a bit hot and uncomfortable before it dies down, so we’ll have a bash at getting out straight away. There’s only one possible way out, and we’d best be quick about it.’

‘What way? We’ll never get down from the window now, because we’d never get at the rope, and I couldn’t make it without one, I really couldn’t—’

‘It’s all right, darling, I didn’t mean the window. I meant the postern.’

‘But the corridor’ll be going like a torch! The fire started in the Prince’s room, you know.’

‘Even so, I doubt if it will. The shaft back there—’ nodding at the painted door – ‘would act as a chimney if the underground passage really were going up, and it shows no sign of it. Come and let’s look.’

He pulled the door open cautiously. The smell of smoke was no stronger here than elsewhere, and the spiral shaft was pitch dark. Behind me, Sofi whined deep in her throat, and I made a comforting sound and touched her. ‘You’ll come too. Don’t worry.’

My cousin turned his head. ‘Was the big door shut, the bronze one to the Prince’s corridor?’

‘Yes, I shut it. I came that way. I thought it would seal off the draught.’

‘You have your moments, don’t you? And the air in there was so dead that it may only be burning slowly down from the Prince’s room. We’ll have to try it, anyway.’

‘But even if the passage is all right, we can’t get to the main court – the fire’s there too by now – you can see it! And it’s no good trying the postern, Charles, it’s locked, and the key’s out, they said so. And even you surely can’t pick locks in the dark?’

‘Not to worry, I’ve got the key.’ He grinned at my look, fishing somewhere in the tatty off-white trousers, and producing a ring of keys that gleamed and rattled. ‘What do you bet it’s one of these? I snitched it off poor old Jassim when I made a break for it. They were no use for getting back in with, because they bolt the gates as well here, but if one of these fits the postern we’ll get
out.’ He stopped short with his hand on the door. ‘Look, before we go down you’d better dip a hankie or something in the lake to hold over your mouth if the smoke’s bad. Come on, it won’t take a moment.’

‘Have you got something?’

‘Half a trouser leg will do for me if I can tear the things.’

We ran down the steps. ‘Where did you get that Carnaby Street rig anyway?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it’s quite a saga, I’ll tell you about it later. I suppose they’re Jassim’s, but never mind, they’ve had a dip now and only smell of weeds and water-mint and lovely mud. I only hope I can tear the beastly things, they’re still damp and as tough as hell … There, that’s it. What the well-dressed refugee is wearing. While you’re about it I’d splash a bit more water over yourself, too …’

It was like kneeling by a lake of liquid fire, but the water was cool and sharply restorative. Its flickering reflection caught Charles’s laughing face and brilliant eyes. I laughed back at him. It was impossible to be afraid. A light, almost wild exhilaration seemed to possess me, something sharp and positive and clear, the aftermath of a far more powerful drug than any Grafton had given me.

He jumped to his feet. ‘That’s better, shall we go?’ We ran up the steps. Most of the small animals and birds seemed to have dispersed into the cool shadows of the bushes, or among the wet growth at the water’s edge. ‘This way, my lovely lady Christabel; give me your wet little hand. If anyone had told me when I had
to share the bath with you twenty years ago …’ A pause while we negotiated the threshold of the painted door. This was made no easier by the fact that he held me all the time, and I him … ‘Though as a matter of fact I don’t think I had any doubt even then. It’s just been a case of taking the air here and there for a few years till the true north pulled, and here we are. D’you feel like that?’

‘Always did. When I saw you in Straight Street, the bells went off like a burglar alarm and I thought “Well, really, here he is at last.”’

‘As easy as that. Are you all right? There is a bit of smoke after all.’

There was in fact a good deal. If it had been possible to feel fear any more, I might have felt it then. As we crept down the spiral stair – slowly because we had no light and even a twisted ankle might have meant disaster – the heat grew palpable, and smoke met us, the real thing, acrid and heavy and scraping the lungs like a hot file. The dogs whined at our heels. Nothing else had followed us.

‘Will they be all right – the animals?’ I asked, coughing.

‘Should be. There’s always the water if things get desperate, Once the fire’s out and the place is cool again, the birds will be able to get out into the valley, and I’m afraid I’m not just terribly concerned about the rats and mice. Hold it, here’s the door. Let’s see what’s cooking outside.’

He pulled it open cautiously. More smoke came wreathing in, and with it a red and sullen light, that flickered. He shut it quickly.

‘Hell’s delight! It looks as though we may have to try the window after all. We can—’

‘Perhaps it’s only the torches they lit for the fun and games tonight,’ I said quickly. ‘They frightened me to death when I came this way before. There’s one just outside.’

He inched the door open again and craned through, and I heard his grunt of relief. ‘You’re right, praise be to Allah, that’s all it is. Our luck’s in. The smoke’s seeping under the Prince’s door like floodwater, but no fire.’ He pulled me through and let the door swing shut after the dogs. ‘Come on, darling, we’ll run for it. Thank God to be able to see. Can you make it?’

‘Of course. Let’s just hope we don’t run smack into the caravan.’

‘The camels are coming, yoho, yoho … Don’t worry about that, love, I tell you our luck’s in – and it’s going to hold.’

And it did. Two minutes later, after a terrifying run along a passageway hot and choking and blind with smoke, we reached the postern, and while Charles fumbled with the lock I felt for and dragged back the heavy bolts. Then the key clicked sweetly in the oiled wards, and he pulled the door open.

The hounds brushed past us. Ahead was clear air, and the cool rustle of trees. My cousin’s arm came round me and more or less scooped me up the rocky ramp and on to the clean rock under the trees. The postern door clanged to behind us, and shut us out of Dar Ibrahim.

… A charm

For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles …

S. T. Coleridge:
This

Lime-Tree Bower my Prison

Only then did I notice the shouting. Not the noise from the direction of the
midan
, of which I had been vaguely conscious all the time, but a new uproar, as of an excited crowd, which came from beyond the west wall where the main gate stood.

With the hounds trotting, sober now, beside us, we picked our way through the dancing shadows of the trees and along under the rear wall. The shade it cast was inky black, the night sky above it fierce as a red dawn.

At the corner of the Seraglio, below Charles’s window, we paused to reconnoitre. There seemed to be no one about. We ran across the path and into the belt of trees which overhung the Nahr el-Sal’q. High above us I could hear the cry of some wheeling birds, jackdaws, I think, flushed from the burning walls. Far down at the foot of the cliff I saw, through the stem of the trees, the red gleam of the river, this time dyed by the fire.

We paused in the darkness of the sycamore grove. There was smoke, thin and stinging, in the air, but it smelled fresh after the garden. Charles held me close.

‘You’re shivering. Are you cold?’

‘Not a bit, not yet, there hasn’t been time – and you must admit it was warm enough in there! Charles, the shouting. Ought we to go and help?’

‘Not the slightest need,’ he said shortly. ‘Apart from the fact that I don’t give a damn if Grafton and Lethman are both crisped to a cinder, half the village is there already by the sound of it, and with the place going up like a torch, any minute now they’ll be running sightseeing buses from Beirut. And there’s the little fact that nobody came to look for you. Let them burn. But for heaven’s sake, what were you doing back in there? You were supposed to be miles away and as innocent as the day. What happened?’

‘They brought me back.’ As briefly as I could I told him my story, cutting through his shocked comments with a quick: ‘But you? What made you come back for me? How did you know I was there?’

‘Darling, I heard you, screeching like a diesel train just before the place went up in smoke.’

‘You’d have screeched if you’d been me, let me tell you! But never mind that now – how did you get in? They said you’d escaped by the main gate.’

‘I had. They tried to dope me with their filthy pot, and I filled the place with smoke and pretended to be stoned, and poor old Jassim fell for it and I clobbered him and got out. The only trouble was that when they laid me out first and locked me up they took my clothes
… I can’t imagine why Lethman thought that would stop me from getting out if I could find a way, but it seems he did.’

‘He probably wanted them to wear. He went up to drive your car away, you know, and he’d want to look like you if anyone saw him.’

‘I suppose so. He might in that case have left me with something more than an old blanket for the duration. And I rather cared for that shirt, blast him. Well, I took Jassim’s keys off him and hurtled out of my little pad in a state of nature, and grabbed a few dreary-looking garments that were lying about in the gate-house. Don’t you like them? I took what you might laughingly call the bare minimum, and ran for it. I knew if anyone followed me they’d go straight down by the ford, so I doubled round the back, this way, under the Seraglio windows. Big deal. There went our hero, stark naked, with his pants in his hand, and leaping like a grasshopper every time he trod on a thistle.’