O Jerusalem (5 page)

“Dressed as you are, everyone in the market would know your business.”

“Then you will have to spend the hour for us,” Holmes said, as if in agreement to a proposal. Mahmoud made some slight noise, but when I glanced at him, his face was without expression.

“But you look wrong,” Ali objected. “You have strange eyes. The girl even wears spectacles.”

“The spectacles are an oddity, but not an insurmountable one. As for the eyes, Circassians often have blue eyes. So do Berbers, who often have yellow hair as well. Berbers are also known for being strong-headed, which is even more appropriate.”

“We have no beds,” Ali cried in desperation.

“Maalesh,”
Holmes said. “But as an ‘old man’ I suppose I am meant to need my sleep, so I will wish you a good night.” And so saying, he kicked off his boots, wrapped himself up in his great-coat, and turned his face to the wall. I followed his example; eventually the others did as well. They could, after all, scarcely lie in comfort on the carpets and bedclothes they no doubt had in their possession when their two soft Western guests slept on the packed-earth floor.

Between the discomfort, the nocturnal activities of a variety of four-, six-, and eight-legged residents, and the gradual mid-night suspicion that our hosts were more than unusually troubled by our visit (“They could have landed at a more convenient time,” Ali had said to Steven), I did not actually fall asleep until I had heard the pre-dawn wail of a distant
muezzin
calling the faithful to prayer. I woke when the door opened and shut at first light, but by then I was numb enough to call it
comfortable, and dropped back to sleep until Ali and Mahmoud swept back in, their arms filled with bundles.

Their shopping expedition had not changed their temper. Mahmoud went silently to the corner to build a fire for coffee while Ali came perilously close to throwing his purchases at us and kicking us awake. (In truth, the room was so small that dropping the things and pacing up and down amounted to the same thing.) I blearily pushed my stiff bones upright, put on my spectacles, shifted back out of his way, and reached for the nearest twine-bound parcel.

My heart sank when I saw what it contained, and I sat rubbing my face and wondering where to begin. Ali’s idea of a suitable garment amounted to a rough, black, head-to-toe sack with a hole for my eyes combined with too-small, thin-soled, decorative sandals with narrow straps that hurt just to look at them.

“Holmes,” I said. He looked up from his gear, which was similar to Mahmoud’s, only plainer. His mouth twitched and he looked down at the wide belt in his hand, and then he relented.

“This will be fine,” he said, and stood up to begin the change of identity. “Russell’s, however, will not do. She will need the clothing of a young man.”

“That is not possible,” Ali said flatly. “It is
haram
.” Forbidden.

“It is necessary, and no one will know.”

“She could be stoned for dressing as a man.”

“It is highly unlikely any judge would approve the punishment, although a mob might use it as an excuse to throw some rocks. If you are afraid of being placed in danger, then we shall leave you.”

Alis hand gripped the shaft of his knife so hard I thought the ivory would bulge out between his fingers, but the blade remained in the sheath.

“You will not accuse me of cowardice, and she will wear those clothes.”

“Actually, no,” Holmes said, completely ignoring the
man’s fury and sounding merely bored—an old and effective technique of his. “She will not wear those clothes, or anything like them. No
burkah
, no bangles, no veil. She will not walk behind us, she will not cook our food, she will not carry water on her head. This is not, you understand, my choice; I should be perfectly happy to have her clothed head to foot and in a subservient position—the novelty would be most entertaining. However, she will simply not do that, so we must either live with it or separate. The choice, gentlemen, is yours.”

His state of undress had reached the point at which I had to turn my back, so I missed the non-verbal portions of the discussion that followed, and many of the words they used passed me by. Still, I did not need a translation for their emotional content, nor did I need to have Holmes tell me why Ali had left so precipitately, since all the women’s garments left with him. I turned back to find Holmes transformed into a Palestinian Arab.

Mahmoud through all this had placidly gone about the business of making coffee, and had now reached the stage of shaking the pan of near-black beans. He glanced up and caught my eye, then lifted his chin at the table leaning against the wall. I went over curiously and picked up the small, worn, leather-bound book that lay on the rough surface. On what would be the back cover in an English book but was the front in Hebrew or Arabic, there was a short phrase in faded gold Arabic script.

“A Koran?” I asked him. He continued shaking the beans. “Yours?”

“Yours,” he said briefly, and followed it with a flow of Arabic that Holmes translated. “‘Start with the knowledge of God’s Book and the duties of your religion, then study the Arabic language, to give you purity of speech.’”

“Is that from the Koran?”

“Ibn Khaldun,” Mahmoud said. The name was familiar, that of an early Arabic historian whose work I had not read.

“Well, thank you. I will read this with care.”

Mahmoud reached for the coffee mortar and poured the beans into it, and that was that.

Once his mind had been turned to the problem, Ali did an adequate job in producing the long-skirted lower garment and the loose woollen
abayya
that went over it, and the heavy sheepskin-lined coat I would need on cold nights. The sandals he gave me were still thin-soled, but they fit, and the cloth he brought for my headgear was better in hiding long hair than the loose
kuffiyah
my three companions wore. He even demonstrated how to wrap a turban that looked sloppy but stayed firmly fixed.

I smoothed the skirts of my
abayya
, wishing I had a mirror, and allowed the men back inside. Mahmoud nodded, Ali scowled, and Holmes checked to see that all the ties and belts were done correctly.

Physically, I would pass as an Arab youth. There was one more difficulty, however.

“Do we still call ‘him’ Mariam?” Ali asked sarcastically. “‘Miri’ would be more useful.”

Mahmoud thought about it for a moment, then cast a sly glance at his partner. “Amir.”

Ali burst into laughter, and I had grudgingly to admit that the name was amusing.
Mir
indicated a relationship with a prince. Ali’s suggested
Miri
would indicate that I was owned by the state, the property of a prince or commander; in other words, a slave—which, although it might prove accurate, depending on how much drudge labour the men got out of me, was nothing to be proud of.
Amir
, on the other hand, was far too grand for an itinerant boy, and I could hear already that it would be a source of amusement every time it was pronounced. Still, it seemed that I had little choice in the matter: “Amir” I was, ridiculous or not.
Maalesh
.

Ali and Mahmoud were anxious to be away—or, Ali was anxious, while Mahmoud firmly dedicated himself to closing up and moving on. We packed away our clothing and the kitchen (the coffee-pots and mortar, one saucepan, the goatskin for water, and a large convex iron pan called a
saj
for making the flat bread we seemed condemned to live on) and made ready to slip away.

My first sight of Palestine by light of day was of a rain-darkened expanse of rock. The hut was set into a crumbling hillside, its bricks the same dun colour as the surrounding stones; when I glanced back fifty feet away, the structure was all but invisible. I turned my back on our shelter, and set off into the country.

After a mile or two, I asked Holmes if he knew where we were going. I thought perhaps the two Hazrs had a house in Jerusalem or in the foothills, but it seemed that the bulk of their possessions—tents, stores, cooking pots, and mules—had been left with friends some ten miles outside of town. I gaped at Holmes, then at Ali.

“You mean, you don’t have a house?”

“A hair house,” he said, the Arabic name for a tent. “Two, now. And a third mule.”

“We’re to be gipsies? In these shoes?”

“Not gipsies,” Ali corrected me scornfully. “Bedu.”

“For heaven’s sake,” I muttered. “Couldn’t Mycroft afford to get his people a house?”

Mahmoud the silent spoke up, contributing a string of Arabic that could have been a deadly insult or a recipe for scones. I looked to Holmes; he translated.

“He said, ‘Better a wandering dog than a tethered lion.’”

“Oh,” I said doubtfully. “Right.”

It looked, then, as if we were to be Bedouin Arabs rather than members of a more settled community. Not, however, the romantic, deep-desert, camel-riding Bedu brought to fame by the exploits of then Major, now Colonel
Lawrence and his Arab revolt. These two travelled a cramped little hill country on mules—God’s most intractable quadruped—T. E. Lawrence was at the Paris peace talks, and romance was fled from the land.

I stifled a sigh. Even General Edmund Allenby, my own personal hero of the Middle East—soldier and scholar, terrible and beloved commander, brutal and subtle builder of campaigns—would be far beyond my reach in this guise. If I so much as caught a glimpse of him, it would be from a rock at the side of the road while the general flew past in his famous armoured Rolls-Royce, splashing me with mud.

Instead of a sojourn in a marble-floored villa filled with carpets and cushions, I would be on foot, in crude sandals, sharing a tent with Holmes, and with no private toilet facilities for miles. I thought about lodging a protest at least about not being given my own tent, but decided to let it be for the present. We had slept in close proximity before, when need be, and until I could arrange something else, sharing a tent with him would be better than sharing a tent with all three males.

The afternoon wore on, the rain lessened, and I succumbed to enchantment. The thrill of being in Eretz Yisrael, the exotic sensation of the clothes I wore, the glory of watching the sun move across the sky and smelling the brilliant air and the cook fires and the sheer intoxication of Adventure made me want to dance down the stony road, twirling my rough garments about me. I did not even mind too much that we were heading away from my own goal of Jerusalem, nor that we had still been told nothing whatsoever about our mission by the two close-mouthed Arabs. I was in the Holy Land; much as I craved to set eyes upon the city itself, holy ground to three faiths, the countryside would have to suffice for now.

After an hour, we were forced to stop and pack gauze around the painful chafe of my sandals’ toe-straps. The discomfort did not put a halt to my pleasure, though,
and the cup after cup of cool water we dipped out of an ancient stone trough fed by a road-side spring filled me with the sensation of communion. I did not complain, at the footwear or at the heavy burden I carried, and I kept up with the pace our guides set.

The sun was low at our backs as we walked along a dusty road with groves of young orange trees on either side, when abruptly first Mahmoud and a split second later Ali stopped dead, their heads raised, their postures radiating alarm. I could hear nothing but the insistent lowing of a cow, smell nothing other than the sweet evening air of the orange grove. I glanced at Holmes in a question, but he shook his head to show his own incomprehension.

Ali wheeled about and bundled us off into the trees, where we threw off our packs while Mahmoud retrieved a well-cared-for Lee Enfield rifle from one of the larger bundles. Ali slipped away into the dusk, pearl-handled revolver in hand, while Mahmoud gestured for us to follow him.

Holmes spoke in a low voice remarkably free of impatience. “May I ask—”

“No smoke,” Mahmoud answered curtly. “And the cow has not been milked. Be silent.”

We approached the farm buildings with caution and indeed, aside from the loud complaints of the cow, an unnatural silence lay heavy around us. We took up positions behind a shed from the deserted-looking house and barn, and waited.

A quarter of an hour after he had left us, Ali stepped into the open farmyard and trotted across to us. He spoke to Mahmoud; Holmes translated for me.

“Whoever did this is gone. The two hired men are in the trees, shot in the back. I saw no-one else.”

Our companions exchanged a look, and separated again, Ali towards the barn, Mahmoud into the shed. It proved to hold only an assortment of farm equipment, but we heard a shout from the barn, and when we got
there, Ali had lit a paraffin lamp and was kneeling next to a man who had spilt more blood across the earthen floor than I would have imagined possible. A dagger very like that in Ali’s belt jutted from the man’s chest. The theatrical sight of the curved hilt and the copious blood nearly shocked a gust of laughter out of me, so closely did it resemble the corpse in some stage melodrama, but the urge to giggle passed in an instant and another reaction took over.

A bare two weeks earlier, Holmes and I had been bombed, hunted down, chased through London, and finally shot at while standing in an office of New Scotland Yard; a sniper’s bullet had exploded the window beside me, missing me by inches. I thought I had left behind the blinding terror of the exploding window and the hard slap of lead on brick, but I had not; now I plunged straight back into the dry-mouthed, heart-pounding state as if no time at all had intervened between that attack and this one.

“Oh, God, Holmes, she’s here,” I found myself saying with a whimper. “She’s here waiting for us, she must have known where we were going. Someone in Mycroft’s group has been bought. We have to get out of here, Holmes, we can’t trust these men, we can’t trust anyone, we—”

He caught me and shook me, hard. “Russell! Use your brain. It is not us. She could have had us any time in the last day. This is not about us, Russell. Think.”

I stared at him, and the panic retreated, my vision slowly cleared. I swallowed, nodded, and Holmes released me.