“Tell me, Mahmoud, how did you come by that scar?”
The instant the words left my mouth I regretted them. Ali looked ready to succumb to an attack of apoplexy, and even Holmes let out a small grunt of reaction at my thoughtlessness. I rubbed at my forehead in a gesture of tiredness and self-disgust.
“I am sorry, Mahmoud. It is none of my business, and even if—”
“I was captured,” he said flatly, his eyes glittering across the dim room at me. “I was questioned. I was rescued. I was brought here.” He shifted to Arabic. “Ali and Mikhail the Druse brought me to this village. The mukhtar’s family cared for me and hid me from the Turks. That was two years ago. Since that day they have been my mother and my father.”
I was struck dumb with remorse; I wished he had hit me instead of answering, or shot me dead. All I could think of was a gesture that left my English self far, far behind. I went onto my knees and put out my hand to touch his dusty boot. It was a strange thing to do, and where in my psyche it came from I do not know, but it was an eloquent plea for forgiveness in ways that words were not, and it reached him. After a moment I felt his hand on my shoulder, squeezing briefly.
“Don’t worry, Mary,” he said, using English.
“I had no right—”
“Amir,” he interrupted, in Arabic now. “Be at peace.”
And strangely enough, I was.
NINE
ذ
The greatest number of marauders are found on the borders of the cultivated districts. The desert itself is safer.
—
BAEDEKER’S
Palestine and Syria
,
1912 EDITION
In the morning we made our farewells to the village and turned east. Before we left, I saw Ali take Farash aside, no doubt to press into the mans hand a piece of paper containing the names of six Turkish officers to be delivered to the spymaster Joshua. Heaven only knew where the answer would catch up with us. When the last of the children dropped, or was driven, from our tail, I turned to Holmes.
“Why do we go in this direction?” I demanded, in Arabic.
“You heard the talk last night, when Ali asked about the Wadi Estemoa. We are continuing to investigate the death of Mikhail the Druse,”
“I did catch the word haramiyeh, did I not? Bandits? To the south-east?”
“You heard correctly.”
“You think bandits murdered Mikhail?” I asked doubtfully. “But he wasn’t robbed.”
“They may or may not have been responsible, but if there are bandits, they will surely know who was moving through their territory at the time Mikhail was shot. Bandits are territorial creatures. They take careful note of who moves through their land.”
“They may know, but will they tell us?” I wondered.
He did not reply.
As soon as we were out of sight of the village we shifted direction, heading due south. That whole day we saw only innocent forms of life: women tending goats, a few clusters of black tents, once on the horizon a long caravan of camels wavering in the heat, going north towards Jerusalem. In the afternoon we dropped into a wadi to return to the lowlands, on the theory that robbers must eventually go where there are people to rob, and half an hour later a piece of rock in front of my feet popped into the air, followed in an instant by the crack of a rifle echoing hugely down the canyon walls.
The mules squealed in terror and sent me flying as they shot away down the wadi, and would have trampled the men in front of me had they not already leapt as one for the protection of boulders.
I followed their example with alacrity, and we all cowered in silence, except for Ali, who cursed the mules bitterly until Mahmoud shouted at him to shut his mouth. Another bullet pinged off a rock and another gunshot boomed through the wadi. A few minutes later a third one came, with no result other than to keep us pinned down.
I began to hear voices then, and thought at first that they came from above our heads, which would have meant real trouble, until I identified the lower tones as those of Mahmoud. I inched around to the back of my rock and could see the two Arabs arguing around the backs of their respective boulders. Actually, they did not seem to be arguing so much as Ali pleading for something and Mahmoud refusing to give permission. After six or eight minutes of this, punctuated by the odd bullet from above, Ali wore his partner down; Mahmoud, with the incongruous air of a parent giving in to a child’s peremptory demands, flipped the back of his hand in the direction in which the mules had fled, then reached into his robe and pulled out his authoritative American pistol. He rose, pointed the long barrel in the general direction of our assailant, and commenced to fire.
Ali took off, racing down the rough wadi floor in the wake of our mules, his robes and huffiyah whipping around him. However, the ploy was only marginally successful. After Mahmoud’s fourth round, the man above must have risked a look and seen the fleeing Ali. Fortunately he was a terrible shot: none of his rounds came anywhere near the fleet-footed Arab.
After Ali had disappeared and the excitement died down, I wondered how long we had before the man above summoned reinforcements. One rifle we could hide from; two or three could prove uncomfortable. I could only hope Ali found the mules quickly and returned with our Lee Enfield, or else darkness fell, before the bandits regrouped.
“Holmes,” I whispered loudly.
“Oui,” came his reply. Yes, that would certainly confuse any listeners, to speak in French. I asked in that same language: “I think I am in a better position to gain the top unseen. Shall I try?”
“Non !” That was Mahmoud’s voice, not that of Holmes. “Il ne peut pas le faire,” he said. I wondered idly if his use of the masculine pronoun in referring to me was deliberate or due to an ignorance of French grammar.
“Pourquoi pas?” I asked. Why must I not go?
“Ali va revenir. ” Ali will return.
“Holmes?” I asked for confirmation.
“Oui,” he said. “Ça va.”
Fine, I thought, and dug a little deeper into the lee of the boulder. We’ll all just wait here for Ali to rescue us, or until we’re picked off one by one.
We lay, cramped and still. Every so often the man above us would fire a couple of bullets into the wadi, and once he moved, forcing the three of us to scuttle around to the more protective sides of our rocks. However, he was such a bad marksman that we were in more danger from a ricochet than a direct shot. The day faded, my bladder filled, and then in a distinct anti-climax came a noise from above, followed by Ali’s voice calling the all-clear.
We climbed stiffly up the steep wall and found Ali along with a man firmly bound by what seemed to be gardening twine. A rifle lay on the ground beside them, a piece of armament so antique it explained the man’s wretched marksmanship. Ali was seated comfortably on the man’s back, smoking a cigarette, and I looked in wonder at the surrounding landscape, which seemed to me utterly open, flat, and devoid of objects to hide behind. The same thought obviously occurred to Holmes.
“How did you manage to come up on him?” he asked Ali, who merely grinned at him.
“As invisible as a rock,” commented Mahmoud drily.
“That was Ali, who took out the gun over Jerusalem?” Holmes asked.
“That was Ali.” Mahmoud shook his head as if at the prank of a high-spirited son, then looked at his partner sternly to ask, “The others?”
“A camp with three horses, two of them gone. This fool”—he paused to swat an all-too-conscious head with his open palm— “thought he could act on his own.”
Mahmoud squatted down to peer into the bandit’s face. “When will they return?” he asked the man.
The man began to snarl threats and bluster, despite his position, until suddenly he screeched and began to buck his body up and down in an attempt to dislodge Ali from his back. Ali calmly took his cigarette from the man’s backside and put it back between his lips. The air smelt of burning wool. The bandit groaned and began to curse, then
went very still as the hot end of Ali’s cigarette appeared three inches above his cheek-bone.
“When will they return?” repeated Mahmoud, his voice even more gentle. The man stared through his one visible eye at the cigarette, and jerked violently when it dropped an inch closer to his face. Ali laughed; Mahmoud waited; Holmes looked on in stony silence; I tried not to look at all.
“When?” Mahmoud said for the third time. There was no answer. Showing no emotion, he took the cigarette from Ali’s fingers, drew deeply on it, tapped off the ashes, and then whirled his bulky body around the man in a swift movement that trapped the bandit’s head underneath one knee and against the other, grinding his left cheek into the ground. The cigarette end approached the man’s eye, slowly, inexorably. I gulped and looked away.
The bandit began to scream, but in fear, not in pain, and there were words in his voice. His Arabic was too rapid for me to understand, but whatever he said seemed to satisfy Mahmoud because when I looked again the hand holding the cigarette was resting on the man’s shoulder.
“Good,” he said in a soothing voice. “I have one other question, then we will leave. Tell me about the men who killed a man in the Wadi Estemoa.”
“I did not kill him,” the bandit gabbled. “I don’t know anything about a killing in the Wadi Estemoa.”
“You did not kill him, no, but you do know who did. Tell me.” He lifted his hand, took another draw from the now-short cigarette, and touched it briefly to the man’s ear. The man jerked as if he’d been shot. When the burning tip came back to hover above his face, he tried to focus on it with an eye as white rimmed and staring as that of a colicked horse. “Who were they?” asked Mahmoud, his voice ever more soft and dangerous.
“Strangers. I have seen them!” the man shouted, almost sobbing as the burning tobacco came closer. “Farther east, near the sea, I’ve seen them before. With the salt [something].” I missed the key word, but Mahmoud knew what the bandit was talking about, and so did Ali. Even Holmes nodded briefly.
“Those who work near Sedom, or Safi?”
“Mazra. On the [something].”
“Good. I thank you, my brother. And I hope very much that you have told me the truth because by the Prophet, if you have not, I shall come back and burn out both of your eyes.”
The man winced, but he held Mahmoud’s gaze. Satisfied that he was hearing the truth, Mahmoud withdrew his hand. The man closed his eyes and shuddered in relief. Mahmoud patted his shoulder, and stepped away.
Ali got up from his seat on the man’s back and squinted into the setting sun. “I shall have to go find the mules that this son of a dog frightened, ” he grumbled, and turned to kick the man’s ribs in irritation. “I will take his mare,” he decided. “She looks fast.”
The figure at his feet squeaked at Ali’s proposal but gave no other protest. Ali kicked him again for good measure and went over to where the horse was tied to a prickly bush. He undid the reins, threw himself onto the pad that passes for an Arab saddle, yanked the animal’s head around, and kicked her into a gallop. Mahmoud went over to the saddle-bags that lay on the ground beside the bandit’s rifle and went through them, removing various things and leaving the rest scattered on the ground. He then picked up the rifle, jerked his chin at us, and walked away.
When we had caught him up I protested. “You can’t leave him tied there. What if the jackals find him?”
“I left him his knife. He will be free before night falls, and his friends will find him by morning.”
“Holmes?”
“He won’t die, although in England he would probably be hanged for his various crimes.”
“If you say so. What was that he said about the salt?” I asked Holmes.
“Salt?”
“The men who killed Mikhail were seen with the salt something-or-other, on the somewhere.”
“Ah. Salt smugglers, on El Lisan, the peninsula that comes out into the Dead Sea.”
“Salt smugglers?” I said in amazement.
“Anywhere a valuable commodity is controlled by the government, there will be individuals who circumvent regulations.”
I made a connexion in my mind. “That’s what Ali meant, that the dirty salt in Mikhail’s bag was not government salt. Is there a link?”
“Between his having the salt and salt smugglers appearing later on in the case? Not necessarily. I should think smuggled salt is relatively common in this area. Mahmoud?”
“ ‘He who feeds a lion is a fool,’ ” he said by way of confirmation. “No-one buys government salt.”
We walked a couple more miles before I spoke again. We seemed to be making off rapidly in a new direction, and the desert is a big place. “How is Ali going to find us?” I wondered aloud.
“Surely you can say that in Arabic,” chided Holmes, so I did.
“Ali will find us,” Mahmoud answered unhelpfully, and strode on.
And Ali did find us, trotting up in the dull moonlight on the horse with the three mules behind him. The large fire Mahmoud built may have helped, of course, but I was beginning to think there was some mind-reading going on here.
The rider dismounted, put the hobbles on the smug-looking mules, tucked the reins securely up behind the neck of the bandit’s horse, and slapped her hard on the rump. She galloped off in the direction they had come from, her ears pricked.
“She will go to the wadi,” Ali said to me in explanation. “I did not give her water, and she will smell it there. I would not want to be accused of stealing a horse.” He laughed merrily, pulled over the bowl of spiced lentils that Mahmoud had left near the fire, and ate with one hand while gesturing wildly with the other as he recounted the day’s adventures.
This was not the same Ali as had sprinted away down the wadi that afternoon. Since we had left Beersheva—since Holmes had come down on his neck so critically, in fact—Ali had withdrawn into himself, had tended to avoid direct discourse and avoided looking at us, particularly at Holmes. Now, however, he was full of his previous good humour, and more. He seemed to have grown a couple of inches, and his beard seemed more sleek, as he joked and ate and explained (to all of us, not just to Mahmoud) how he had found the mules.
He almost crowed at his cleverness, restored to his sense of worth by having pitted himself against a superior force and decisively won the day, and it dawned on me that Mahmoud’s air of indulging a child’s entreaty, when we had first been pinned down in the wadi, was part and parcel of the affair. By pretending to deprecate Ali’s dangerous, difficult, and life-saving act as a childish trick when we all knew the immense skill and nerve it had required, he was allowing Ali to flaunt his own feat as a game—neither man would have permitted himself the undignified braggadocio of mere pride.
I laughed aloud in pleasure at the analysis, and at the delicious complications to be found in human intercourse; Ali turned his head and laughed with me.
We did not bother with the tents that night, merely wrapping ourselves in abayyas and rugs for a few brief and very cold hours. The night was still inky overhead, spangled with the intricate spray of a million pure, bright stars, when Ali’s tea-making sounds began. Wrapped tightly inside my rug, I sat more or less upright and huddled near the small fire, my breath coming out in clouds before my face. When we started off I retained my rug, only returning it to the mule’s pack when the sun had come up in our faces.
Over breakfast, which as usual was eaten in the late morning, I asked Holmes for the map I knew he had secreted somewhere in the folds of his robe. I ignored Ali’s ostentatious display of checking the countryside for onlookers, as we had seen perhaps three human beings all morning (and those miles away) and I took the small folded paper Holmes handed me, spreading it out on my knees.
With some effort (the map was both small and highly detailed) I traced our path out of Beersheva, through the Wadi Estemoa, up to a nameless square indicating the village, down into the other wadi where we had been set upon by a thief, and then straight east to where we
now sat. I saw that in a short time we should come to Masada, or Sebbeh as the map had it, Herod’s hilltop fortress that was the last stronghold of Jewish resistance to fall to the Romans in the year 74.
Masada was a natural hill fort on a cliff overlooking the Dead Sea. Directly opposite lay the wide peninsula called El Lisan—the Tongue—with the town of Mazra in its eastern crook and its northernmost tip given the unlikely name of Cape Costigan. The gap between our bank and the peninsula, however, was as I remembered: a bit far for mules to swim and, according to the depth lines sketched onto the water, too deep to wade.
“Will we go around the south to get to Mazra?” I asked.
“Too slow,” grunted Mahmoud.
“We swim, then?” I asked brightly, and added in English, “What jolly fun.”
The facetious remark was too much for Mahmoud. “That will not be necessary,” he growled repressively, and sent me to unhobble the mules.
It was a bare twenty map miles from the previous night’s comfortless camp, but it was late afternoon when we reached the vicinity of Masada. The climb down the cliffs was too precarious to risk the legs of the mules in the dark. Ali again pulled his vanishing act, hurling himself down the precipitous path to the sea, leaving the tents and cook fire to us.
I briskly followed Ali’s example. Before I could be handed a water-skin or a handful of tent pegs, I made my own escape, in the opposite direction.
I approached Masada from the high ground and made my way up the remains of the ramp that the Romans had used in their final assault on the fortress of rebels. Once inside the walls, I crossed the deserted plateau to stand with the last rays of the sun on my back, gazing down at the Roman camp and the sea behind it. Two years after Jerusalem fell, the inexorable might of Rome had thrown a circle around the hill and then, one basket of rubble at a time— carried by Jewish prisoners who, in painful irony, were safe from the arrows of their brothers overhead—built a ramp for their siege machines. The ramp was completed; the next morning the siege machines were brought up, the defences were breached, and the invaders stormed the walls to find: nothing. Nothing but death, an entire community—men, women, and children—that chose suicide over captivity. I wondered what thoughts went through Flavius Silva’s mind as the Roman victor stepped onto the charnel-house of a mountain-top that morning. I wondered too what thoughts went through the mind of the man writing the account, a man who had actually commanded Jewish forces in that same revolt, who had been one of two survivors of another suicide pact that followed a defeat, who had turned his back on his people to wield a propagandistic pen for his new masters. Josephus the turncoat, I thought, was not a person to appreciate the grim irony of Masada.
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