O Jerusalem (27 page)

The moon went in soon after that, and the breeze died away. We rode slowly down what seemed a remarkably flat and uneventful track for a mile or two, after which we dismounted and walked another mile. It was black as a cave, and utterly silent. Even the jackals were asleep.

My horse stopped before I did, and then I felt hands on the reins, pulling them from my grasp. I followed the sound of the animals moving off, and the rattle of a bush being dragged, and then Mahmoud was whispering in my ear.

“Can you see?”

“Very little,” I whispered back, slightly ashamed. My night vision has never been good.

“Nor I,” Mahmoud admitted, to my astonishment. “Ali will lead.”

We followed the younger man up a hill, through an orchard, beneath a wall, and I realised that I could see the shape of the stones against the sky. Dawn was not far off. An owl swooped over; the night was so still, I could hear the bird’s feathers parting the air.

“There is an inner room,” Ali breathed at us. “It will be guarded. Does … she … understand?” His deliberate use of the correct pronoun echoed his earlier disdain and doubt. Mahmoud answered before I could.

“Amir understands that hesitation may mean disaster. He will do what needs to be done.”

I wished I shared his confidence. I began to sweat, despite the cold air, and my stomach turned to rock.

There was a locked gate; Ali opened it. Beyond it lay a garden, and a stout wooden door. Ali unlocked that. Inside, the building smelt of stone and woodworm and something as heavy as incense but not incense; I decided later it had to be hashish. The corridor was long and bare, and the whisper of our clothing was a harsh susurration against the hard rock walls. Ali’s feet were bare and damp, and came up from the stones with minute sucking noises. Mahmoud’s stomach growled once. The corridor seemed endless.

Once we heard voices, unintelligible echoes a long way off, fading as soon as they had begun. A minute later we passed a door from which came the sound of a man snoring. When we had eased past it, Ali picked up our pace, past doors, a window, three more corners, down a flight of stairs, and then he stopped.

“Stay here.” I heard his feet pad away damply down the stones. After a minute they came back. “Clear,” he breathed. “But we must bring the guard out.”

“Amir,” whispered Mahmoud, “take off your turban. Quickly. Your hair—loose it. Put away your spectacles. And give me your
abayya
. Now, you must call the guard out.”

“Me? How on earth—”

“Hurry! We must have the door open. The guard will not open it for Ali or me, and if we try to force the lock he will raise an alarm. You must bring him out, Amir. Your Holmes is in there,” he added.

As he had known it must, that knowledge steadied me. I straightened my shoulders and arranged my thoughts, then paused with my knuckles above the wood.

“What would he call his superior? The leader?”

“Try ‘commandant,’” suggested Ali. I had hoped for
more surety than that, but it would have to do. I started to bring my knuckles down on the door, paused again to unbutton a few of the fastenings on the neck of my shiftlike robe. I was very uncertain as to technique, to say nothing of ability to carry it off: One thing my training with Holmes had not included was the art of seduction.

I rapped softly on the door, pinched my cheeks hard to make me look flushed, and began to breathe rapidly—which was not too difficult, with my heart already racing wildly.

When the slot in the door slid open I was on the far side of the corridor, crouching against the wall with my robe over my booted feet and peering up with an expression of what I hoped simulated terror on my face. It opened with a sharp crack of iron on iron, and I did not have to feign a start. I blinked up at the pair of eyes that I could see fuzzily, framed by the small barred window.

“What?” a male voice demanded.

“That man,” I whispered fiercely in Arabic. “The commandant. He hurt me. Please, oh, please help me,” I pleaded. “I want to go back to my village.”

“Who are you?”

“I live in the village,” I improvised, my voice choked, and then to my distress I felt my eyes actually well up and a tear-drop break free to run down my face. “He hurt me,” I said with a sob.

The man laughed harshly and slapped the view slot closed; my heart plummeted. However, then came the sound of a bolt sliding, and the knob began to turn. He pulled the heavy door open and stepped out, and he was just beginning to say something about making me feel better when Ali, pressed invisibly against the wall, took one step forward and brought his arm down. The dull thump told me that he had used the haft of his knife instead of the blade; it was quite effective.

Ali and I between us caught the guard before he hit the stones and bundled his limp and immensely awkward
form back through the door. When Mahmoud had shut it behind us, we let our burden fall with a thud to the floor.

I took out my spectacles and put them back on, half aware of Ali taking a ball of twine from his pocket and kneeling beside the unconscious figure. Mahmoud ducked through the inner door and into the dimly lit room beyond; I followed on his heels, and saw Holmes.

It is extraordinary, the preposterous things that shoot through one’s mind at moments like that. At the sight of him, my body reacted as if it had been stabbed, but my mind’s first thought was how typical of Holmes it was to ensure that the dye on his skin extended beyond the normally visible portions: scalp to toe, where he was not the colour of blood and bruise, he was uniformly swarthy. My second thought was one, incredibly enough, of exasperation, that the month-old injuries to his back, the results of a bomb that had been one of the reasons for our flight from London to Palestine, had been healing so nicely, until—

I became aware of Mahmoud’s fingers digging deeply into my arm.

“He lives,” Mahmoud said, looking intently into my face.

“Yes, go ahead,” I said nonsensically, but he seemed to understand, and moved forward, sliding his knife from its scabbard as he went.

A length of rope was tied around each of Holmes’ wrists. Both led to a single hook in the beam above him. His feet rested on the floor, but his arms, pulled tight against the sides of his head, were at an angle that would have been excruciating after five minutes, and breathing must have been hellish. By all appearance he had been there for a long time. The injuries to his back, the small round burns and the long weals of the whip, were not the products of a few minutes’ work.

Mahmoud was now standing facing him, but I could not approach. I was afraid to look into the eyes of my
friend, my teacher, my only family: I was terrified of what I might see there. Instead, I watched Mahmoud watching Holmes, and I knew when Holmes opened his eyes and looked back at the Arab, because the bearded face crinkled slightly around the scar. A smile.

“By the Prophet, Holmes. You look like hell,” Mahmoud said. Reaching into his robes, he pulled out a small silver box, snapped it open with his thumb, and scooped out a quantity of some black, paste-like substance on the tip of his little finger. He leant forward and put it into Holmes’ mouth, put the box away and was wiping his finger on his robe when we heard the heavy outer door open in the room behind us.

Many things seemed to happen simultaneously: hurried footsteps and a large angry stranger with his mouth open standing in the inner doorway; my hand, of its own accord and with no pause for thought, going down to the top of my boot, plucking out the throwing knife that lived there, and sending it in one smooth movement through the air straight at the intruder’s throat just as Ali’s moving fist, wrapped around the butt of his own heavy knife, materialised behind the man’s head; another dull thump and the man jerked to one side and collapsed to the floor at the same moment my knife clattered and sang down the stones of the opposite wall. Time shuddered and began to move in a linear fashion once more.

With a look of wonder Ali peered down at his right arm, separating the neatly slit sleeve with the fingers of his left hand and dabbing curiously at the blood welling up in the long, shallow incision that ran from his wrist to his elbow. For a terrible instant I had a vision of Ali on the floor with my knife protruding from his throat: had he been just inches over … He stared at me, and then back at his arm, and an expression of sheer joy came over him. I thought he would burst into laughter. My apologies died in my throat.

From behind me came a noise, a curious, highpitched
cough that contained both gasp and groan, cut off instantly. I whirled to see Mahmoud, his knife still in his hand, easing Holmes’ arms out of the cut ropes. Holmes took one stiff step forward and collapsed, but Mahmoud, in a motion so smooth it looked rehearsed, shifted along with him, so that Holmes half fell across the Arab’s shoulders with another grunt of pain. Mahmoud straightened, and then he was carrying Holmes, all the lanky length of the man with the bloody back draped across those broad shoulders.

Mahmoud put his head down, aimed at the door, and went through it fast, scuttling sideways like a crab to thread himself through. Ali stood up from tying the gag on the second man, snatched up a heavy robe from the first guard’s chair, and threw it across Holmes’ back as Mahmoud passed, then followed them out into the corridor. I paused inside the door to retrieve my knife and a heap of clothing that I thought looked like Holmes’; and again outside to catch up my own turban and
abayya
from the corner where Mahmoud had thrown them. Then I ran, pulling on clothes as I went. Ali locked the door behind us with the guard’s ring of keys, which he slid noiselessly under the opposite door, and then we were all three running, as silently as we could, down the stone corridors, up the stairs, and out, out into the cool, crisp, wet-smelling air of dawn. I would not have hesitated to kill were we stopped, I knew that now. In fact, I could taste the desire for battle and murder and revenge between my teeth; but no-one raised an alarm, and we slipped out of there with the ease of mice leaving a pantry.

It was not until we reached the perimeter wall that trouble came, and when it did, it happened so quickly that again, it was over almost before it began, certainly before I could involve myself.

Ali pulled open the gate and stepped back for us to pass. Mahmoud, still carrying Holmes and showing no sign of flagging, went through first. I followed perhaps
three paces behind him, and had just cleared the wall when to my instant and complete terror a loud voice spoke at my shoulder, demanding that we stop and identify ourselves.

Or rather, he began his demand. He never finished it. Our eruption through the gate on top of him had apparently startled him as much as he did us; he was fumbling with his rifle as he spoke, and made the fatal mistake of assuming Mahmoud and I were alone. I have never known a human being to move more swiftly than Ali. Before I had rounded on our attacker, Ali’s vicious blade had done its work, and when Ali’s hand came off the man’s mouth, there was only surprise there, no pain or fear. Just surprise, and then nothing at all.

I had seen men die before, but only men in hospital beds, when death released them from the terrible suffering of gassed lungs or torn bodies. This was a very different matter, this transformation of bone and muscle into a limp, empty thing that landed on the ground with the meaty slap of a dropped water-skin. A noise welled in me, pressing hard against my closed lips, but whether it was a scream or gales of laughter I will never know, because Ali saw it coming and cuffed me so hard my teeth rattled.

“Do not be stupid,” he hissed at me. “Run.”

I ran.

The sun was nearly on the horizon, the sky dangerously close to full light, and Mahmoud with his flopping burden was all too clear a quarter of a mile down the road. It was quite a ridiculous picture, I thought with that portion of my mind not taken up by the sensation of cross-hairs between my shoulder-blades, rather like a long-legged man mounted on a small donkey, but it was also very impressive, the strength of the man sprinting down the road with thirteen-plus stone across his shoulders. He had, I thought inconsequentially, not even paused when the last guard had appeared, merely trusted Ali to take care of the problem.

The bizarre tangle of robes and limbs ahead of me stepped to the side of the road and vanished. I slowed when I reached the place, only to be passed by Ali, who crashed into the narrow path between the bushes without slowing and dived down the precipitous path that lay there, moving at a dead run. Still, I saw to my astonishment, barefoot: his red boots were in one hand, the dead guard’s rifle in the other. I slid and scrambled down the hill in his wake, and though I pushed hard, when I reached the horses, the only one there was our nameless guide, mounted, holding the reins of my mount, and looking nervous. No sooner did the reins hit my palm than he drove his heels into his horse’s ribs, and I had a battle to persuade my own mount to wait until I was on his back before he followed his fellows down the narrow, dusty, stone-strewn track.

When ambitious men overcome a dynasty and seize power, they inevitably adopt most of the ways of their predecessors
.