The Golden One

by Elizabeth Peters

  Next morning Selim, now in undisputed charge of the household, relegated the extraneous members of the family to the house they had originally occupied, and went off to hire several more servants, including a cook. The patriarch of the small clan we retained in the post of doorkeeper.

  After breakfast (warmed-up rice and mutton) Emerson went out to visit the coffeeshops and listen to the local gossip. I saw no reason why we could not have visited the suk, properly veiled and escorted, but Emerson declared it would be an unnecessary risk, and Nefret produced an even more conclusive argument.

  “What if he should come while we were out?”

  She was right, but the morning dragged on, with nothing to do except bully the servants and familiarize ourselves with the rooms of the harem. We were able to bathe for the first time since we had left Cairo, and a great relief it was.

  In the course of my exploration, I discovered several secret passages with peepholes in the walls, used by the master to spy on his women. Many of the older mansions in the region had such devices, as well as escape tunnels and hidden rooms. There were three of the latter in the haremlik, two mere cubbyholes in the wall and the third a large hiding place under the floor. The trapdoor covering it was concealed by matting. It had been designed for hiding objects, not people, since it was less than four feet high and there was no means of ventilation, and it was, as I had expected, empty. Mahmud would not have left anything of value.

  Emerson returned with nothing to report, except that the town was full of soldiers, which we already knew. We were lingering over luncheon when there were sounds of a disturbance without. Emerson hurried to the door; when it opened I heard someone say in Arabic, “There is a person here, lord – I could not keep him away -”

  Emerson let out a strangled cough, and a voice I knew well murmured deprecatingly, “Lord, your slave begs your mercy, it is not his fault he did not come before this, he was detained by the cursed British and made to dig holes – see, see how his hands are bleeding!”

  A thump followed, as if of knees hitting the floor.

  My curiosity could not be contained. Nefret was already at the door, peeping out.

  Emerson stood staring down openmouthed at the form crouching at his feet. Ramses’s curly black head was bare and what I could see of his skin was almost as dark as his hair. I could see quite a lot of it.

  His voice rose in a wail. “They took my clothes, lord, the fine clothing you gave me, my gibbeh and my sudarayee and my tarboosh and my shoes, and my -”

  “God curse them,” said Emerson, recovering himself. “Come in, then, and tell me.”

  Ramses straightened, smirking like a favored servant who has talked his way out of a beating; but the old man who had escorted him there croaked, “Into the harem, Effendi?”

  Emerson drew himself up and skewered the presumptuous fellow with a fierce stare. “Did not the Prophet say, when he brought to his daughter the gift of a male slave, that she need not veil herself, for there was none present save her father and a slave?”

  This interesting theological reference may have been too abstruse for the servant, but Emerson’s stare got the point across. “Come,” he added to Ramses.

  Nefret and I quickly retreated from the door and Emerson propelled Ramses through it with a hard shove. “Now,” he said loudly, in Arabic, “make your excuses to your mistress.”

  He slammed the door and Ramses looked quizzically from me to Nefret. “Which?”

  “Me,” Nefret said breathlessly. “I’m the new favorite, aren’t I?”

  “Speak French,” I said warningly.

  Neither of them heard me, I believe. Nefret was staring at him as if she had never seen him before – which, in a way, she had not, for to the best of my knowledge this was a new role for Ramses, and when Ramses played a part he did it thoroughly. He was wearing only a pair of dirty cotton drawers and he had stained his body a rich dark brown. I observed several raw marks across his bare back, and remembered that I had heard one of the officers explain that “a few cuts of the whip” were advisable when dealing with recalcitrant members of the Labour Corps.

  Nefret had seen them too. She let out a little cry and threw herself into his arms.

  They made a picturesque tableau as they clung to one another, framed by the pointed arch of the alcove – his dark, muscular body and her slender, yielding form in its gold-embroidered blue velvet gibbeh. “Story pictures” were popular with a certain school of painting, and it was not difficult to think of a title for this one. “The Slave and the Sultan’s Favorite,” or “A Tryst with Death,” or -

  Emerson let out a sound rather like one the sultan might have made if he had come upon such a scene, and the two drew apart.

  “Careless,” I said softly. “I stopped up several peepholes in the walls, but I doubt I found them all.”

  Ramses dropped to his knees in front of me and clasped his hands. “Your forgiveness, honored lady.”

  “Yes, all right, just don’t do it again.” I added, just as softly, “I, too, am relieved to see you, my dear. What next?”

  “I can’t stay. You had better send me on an errand – and find me some clothes,” he added, looking up at me with a smile. His thin dark face and cheerful grin and the curls clustering untidily round his forehead filled me with a strong desire to shake him. Men actually enjoy this sort of thing! So do I, if truth be told, but only when I am allowed to take an active part. It is the waiting I find so difficult, particularly when one waits for news of a loved one.

  “When will we see you again?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I am to rendezvous with Chetwode this evening and go on to Gaza with him. Two days, perhaps three. I’ll come here as soon as we’ve finished the job, I promise.”

  He kissed my hands and my feet and rose. “Is there a bab-sirr?” he asked Emerson. “I may want to use it next time.”

  “A secret door? Oh, yes. Mahmud has too many enemies to do without that little convenience. I’ll show you, and get you some clothes.”

  Ramses nodded. He turned to his wife. She stood as still as a prettily dressed doll, lips parted and braceleted arms folded over her breast. Ramses knelt and bowed his head.

  “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “It will be all right.”

  She put out her hand, as if to touch his hair, but stopped herself in time. “Come straight here after…”

  “As soon as I can.” He took her hands and raised them to his lips.

  FROM MANUSCRIPT H

  Ramses hadn’t told her the part that worried him most. He shared that information with his father, as they tried to find him something to wear.

  “I met Chetwode in Rafah, as we had arranged. He’s not awfully good at this sort of thing; his jaw dropped down to his chest when a filthy ‘Gyppie’ edged up to him and gave him the word we’d agreed upon.”

  “Curse it,” said Emerson. “Can’t you go off on your own – leave him behind?”

  “They’d stop me before I got out of Khan Yunus. You haven’t heard the worst of it. General Chetwode, the commander of the Desert Column, is our lad’s uncle. I was dragged off to his office, where I was required to report to him and his chief of field intelligence.”

  “Hell and damnation! Who else knows about your ‘secret’ mission?”

  “God knows.” Ramses picked up a shirt, grinned, and put it aside. “Mother would say He does. If the word has come down the chain of command, Chetwode’s superior Dobell must also have been informed. There’s nothing here I can use, Father.”

  “What about that parcel you asked me to bring along?”

  “I’ll take it with me, but I don’t want to wear those things in Khan Yunus. Selim must have a change of clothing he’ll lend me.”

  “You mean to let him in on this?” Emerson asked.

  “How much does he know?”

  “Only that we are obviously bent on mischief of some sort. Selim doesn’t ask questions.”

  “He deserves to be told – some
of it, at any rate. It’s a poor return for his friendship and loyalty to be treated as if he were not completely trustworthy. Especially,” Ramses added bitterly, “when every idiot and his bloody uncle knows. I think Selim may have spotted me when I arrived; he gave me a very fishy look when I was arguing with the doorman.”

  Selim had spotted him, but not, as he was careful to explain, because of any inadequacy in Ramses’s disguise. “Who else could it be, though?” he demanded. “I do not ask questions of the Father of Curses, but I expected you would join the others sooner or later.”

  “You must have wondered what this is all about, though.” The clothes Selim had given him would suit well enough; Arab garments were not designed to be form-fitting.

  Selim folded his arms and said stiffly, “It is not my place to wonder.”

  Ramses grinned and slapped him on the back. “You sound exactly like your father. I and another man are going into Gaza, Selim. There have been rumors about a certain Ismail Pasha – that he’s a British agent who has gone over to the enemy. Since I am, er, acquainted with the gentleman in question, they are sending me to get a look at Ismail and find out whether the rumors are true.”

  “Acquainted,” Selim repeated. “Ah. Is it possible, Ramses, that I am also, er, acquainted with him?”

  “You can’t go with me,” Ramses said. He hadn’t answered the question. Selim accepted this with a shrug and a nod, and Ramses went on, “Thank you for the clothes. I’ll try to return them in good condition.”

  “Tonight’s the night, then,” Emerson said.

  “Yes. Chetwode – our Chetwode – and I are meeting after nightfall in an abandoned house in Dir el Balah, just north of here. I hope to God he can find it. It will take me a while to get there by roundabout ways, since I don’t want to be recruited by some lad looking for laborers. I had better go. Do you want to send me on my way with a few curses and kicks, Selim?”

  Selim did not return his smile. “If you say I should. Be careful. Do not take foolish chances.”

  “As your father would have said. I’ll try not to. Watch over them, Selim.”

  Chetwode was late. He stood squinting into the darkness of the half-ruined building, his form outlined against the starry sky. Ramses waited only long enough to make sure the other man was alone before he moved out of the shadows.

  “Didn’t they teach you not to make a target of yourself in an open doorway?” he asked caustically.

  “Since it was you -”

  “You hoped it was me. Get out of that uniform and put these on.”

  He made certain he had covered Chetwode’s face, neck, hands, and forearms with the dark dye, and got all his hair concealed under the turban. There wasn’t anything he could do about the blue eyes that looked trustingly into his, but when the boy grinned, cheerful as a hound pup, the expanse of healthy white teeth was another reason to remind him to keep his mouth shut. Patiently Ramses went over it again.

  “If anybody speaks to you, drool and babble and bob your head. Idiots are under the protection of God. Stick close to me…” He hesitated, gripped by one of those illogical premonitions – or maybe it wasn’t so illogical, under the circumstances. “Stick close unless I tell you otherwise. If I tell you to run, do it, without arguing and without looking back. That’s an order. If you disobey I’ll see that you face a court-martial.”

  “But if we’re separated -”

  “I’ll find you if I can. If I can’t, you’ll have to make your own way back to our lines. Don’t wait for me or go looking for me.”

  Chetwode’s face was as easy to read as a page of print. Some of the sentences read: “One doesn’t abandon a comrade.” “You can count on me, old chap, to the death.” Or something equally trite. Ramses sighed and offered another cliché. “One of us has to get back with the information we’ve collected. We know we’re laying our lives on the line; that is part of the job.”

  Chetwode’s tight lips parted. “Oh. Yes, that’s right. You can count on me, old chap -”

  “Good. One more thing. Hand over that pistol.”

  Ramses had every intention of searching him if he denied carrying a weapon, but the young fool didn’t even try to bluster it out. His hand flew to his waist.

  “What if we have to shoot it out?” he demanded.

  “If it comes to that, we’ll have a hundred men shooting back at us. Hand it over, or I’ll leave you behind.”

  Chetwode looked from his stern face to his clenched fist and got the point. Slowly and reluctantly he unbuckled the belt fastened round his waist under his shirt and gave it and the holster to Ramses.

  Ramses removed the shells and added the empty gun to the pile of abandoned clothing, which he covered with a few loose stones. “Now shut up and watch where you’re going.”

  The boy wouldn’t shut up. He’d memorized the directions that Ramses had ignored, since he didn’t need them, and kept up a breathless, whispered monologue: “Keep to the north until the mosque bears 132; bearing 266 till we come to the edge of a bog… is this… Oh, hell.”

  Ramses hauled him out. “One more word and I’ll sink you back into the muck. We’re within a hundred feet of the Turkish trenches. Don’t open your mouth again until I tell you you may.”

  “Sorry.” He closed his mouth and nodded vigorously. The starlight reflected in his eyes.

  Ramses turned and led them along the edge of the bog. The boy followed so close he kept treading on Ramses’s heels. I shouldn’t have allowed this, Ramses thought in silent fury. Goddamn Murray and Cartright and the rest of them; the kid’s doing his best, but I would spot him a mile away, even if he were standing still with his face hidden. It was that “Lords of Creation” look, shoulders stiff and jaw squared – drilled into them from childhood, and almost impossible to eradicate.

  The Turks had ringed the city round with trenches and breastworks. An intricate network of cactus hedges provided an additional defense. The series of ridges that ran from Gaza eastward to Beersheba were also fortified, but they had no trouble getting through. The defenders knew no attack was imminent; reconnaissance planes would have warned them of such preparations, even if they had not had busy little spies reporting back to Turkish HQ. The area between Gaza and Khan Yunus was peaceful. People came and went, tilling the fields, carrying produce to the British encampments, engaging in all the mercantile activities that spring up when new customers are available. It would have been impossible to keep tabs on all of them.

  Once over the ridge, Ramses led his companion in a wide circle that brought them to a guard post just as the sun was rising. Chetwode had protested; he wanted to crawl romantically through the barbed wire and the cactus hedges.

  “It’s too hard on one’s clothes,” Ramses said shortly. He had learned from experience – and from that master thief, his uncle – that the best way of getting into a place where you weren’t supposed to be was to walk boldly up and demand entrance. He had supplied himself with a convincing story – a sick, aged mother awaiting him, enough money to arouse cupidity without arousing suspicion, and a few bags of a substance he expected would serve better than money. Hashish wasn’t hard to come by in Turkish areas, but the best varieties were expensive.

  The noncommissioned officer in charge of the post didn’t believe the pathetic story about the dying mother. Ramses had not expected he would; they then proceeded to the next stage of negotiation, which left him without a certain percentage of his money and his merchandise. It wasn’t an outrageously high percentage; the NCO knew that if his victim started howling protests, it would have brought an officer to investigate – and demand his share.

  Ramses had been in Gaza only once, in the summer of 1912, but he knew the place fairly well; he’d spent several days wandering around, enjoying the amenities of the suk and admiring the fine old mosques and making a brief, informal survey of the ancient remains, since he knew his father would expect one. There weren’t many. For almost four thousand years the area between the Sinai and the
Euphrates had been fought over, conquered and reconquered, destroyed and rebuilt. Egyptians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, and Crusaders had occupied Gaza in turn. It had been one of the five cities of the Philistines, the site of the great temple of Dagon, pulled down by Samson in his last and mightiest feat. (He’d got that information from his mother; his father didn’t give much credence to anything in Scripture unless it could be confirmed by archaeological sources.) The most recent conquest had been by the Ottoman Sultan, Selim the First, in the sixteenth century; in revenge for the city’s stubborn resistance he had let his troops sack and destroy a large part of it. However, by 1912 Gaza had become a prosperous town with almost forty thousand inhabitants. The population had spilled out beyond the walls, to north and south and east; the central city, raised on the accumulated debris of various levels of destruction, contained the administrative and commercial buildings, as well as the homes of wealthier citizens.

  On the hill that rose from the center of the upper town stood the Great Mosque, formerly a Christian church built in the twelfth century. He had spent an enjoyable afternoon admiring the carvings and the magnificent gray marble columns. It was now being used as a powder magazine.

  So much for the Great Mosque, Ramses thought. So much for the other architectural treasures of Gaza – the little church of St. Porphyry, an exquisite example of early Christian architecture, the beautiful ancient mosque of Hashim, even the remains of the old walls and their seven gates. Modern weapons were much more efficient than the older variety. One well-placed shell and the Great Mosque, with its delicate octagonal minaret, would be gone.

  And so would hundreds, maybe thousands, of people.

  The suk appeared to be as prosperous as ever, with stalls selling everything from handmade lace and the fine black pottery of the region to a variety of mouthwatering fruits and nuts and vegetables, whose discarded rinds and husks littered the ground. Ramses found a popular café, squatted genteelly, and ordered mint tea. The habitués were an inquisitive lot; they put him through a merciless but friendly interrogation, not leaving off until they had determined his name, place of origin, business, and ancestry, and had commiserated with him on the condition of his poor young brother. “He has blue eyes,” said one observant man.