I whipped my head to where Gabriel’s fingers were still working methodically. “Gabriel?”
“Five. Four. Three.”
“Gabriel!”
“One,” Gabriel said, tossing the relic down on the ground in front of Halliday. It landed at his feet, and in the shimmering lamplight of the tent it glowed as if from an inner light. Halliday’s face creased into a smile. Gabriel stood, feet planted wide apart, arms folded over the breadth of his chest, still as blessedly, gorgeously naked as the day he was born.
“Gabriel, perhaps Mr. Halliday will let you put some clothes on now,” I murmured.
“Why? I have nothing to be ashamed of. But I can see why it might make him feel inadequate,” he added with a cold smile at Halliday.
Halliday gave a low chuckle. “You cannot force my hand, old man. I don’t give a damn about you, not anymore. I don’t need you at all. In fact, you’re just a complication at this point.”
He reached down, his eyes still fixed on us as his fingers closed around the Cross. He rose, clasping the Cross to his breast.
“Now, I will bid you both adieu.” With that, he gave a single polite nod of the head, aimed the gun directly at Gabriel and pulled the trigger.
The gun was small and the sound barely made a pop. I whirled to see the pool of blood welling on Gabriel’s shoulder. He clapped a hand to it as he fell to his knees, cursing as Halliday fled.
I was at his side in an instant, shoving a bit of cloth into his shoulder to stop the bleeding.
“Put some clothes on,” he said through gritted teeth. “Both of us. I’d rather not chase that bastard in my bare skin.”
I threw a robe over my head and grabbed another for Gabriel, the plain white abba he’d worn the night before. First I ripped a length off the bottom to tie the cloth to his shoulder. It was a wretched bandage, but it would have to do. He kept barking orders at me, and I obeyed, blindly, even to wrenching his shoulder as I pulled the robe over his head. He swore through gritted teeth, but when he saw my face, he mastered himself.
“It’s fine, Evie. He shot me through and through. It just hurts like a son of a bitch, and I’ve lost a little blood. Now get that damned pistol of yours and come on,” he ordered, shoving me through the tent flap. Some members of the camp were peering into the darkness from their tent flaps, but most were still yawning and scratching themselves. Dawn was just beginning to silver the eastern sky, and I had lost sight of Halliday, but Gabriel knew exactly where to find him.
I heard the engine before I saw him. He had started up his plane, and he glanced back and saw us emerging from the tents just as he pulled back on the stick. It bounced and shuddered, but it lifted into the cold morning air, carrying him upwards.
Gabriel swore again and shoved me towards the Jolly Roger. I jumped into the cockpit while he started the propeller. He dodged into the rear cockpit, hoisting himself with his good arm.
“Thank God for stupidity,” he shouted, and I nodded. If Halliday had been smarter, he would have done something to put the Jolly Roger out of commission so we couldn’t follow him. But she purred instantly to life, ready for anything.
I had nothing with me—no flying leathers or helmet or chart, but I made the best of things. I gave her all the power I could, pulling back smoothly on the stick to get her airborne. Halliday had a lead, but his Nieuport was older than my Strutter, and her engine was smaller. I gave the Jolly Roger everything I could, pushing her as fast as her engine would go. I glanced back once at Gabriel and he gave me a single determined nod. His features were set and his eyes were fixed on the small dot ahead of us in the morning sky.
But the dot was getting bigger. The Jolly Roger was closing at lightning speed, and I felt the rush of the cold morning wind freezing my fingers to the stick. Within minutes we drew even with Halliday and his Nieuport. He turned his head at the sight of us, clearly astonished. He reached into his cockpit and pulled out a revolver. A smarter man would have aimed it at me since putting the pilot out of commission meant taking out the whole plane, but he pointed it straight at Gabriel.
Without thinking, I stamped hard on the rudder paddle as I pulled on the stick and she slipped into the prettiest dive I’d ever made. The Jolly Roger protested, screaming a little as we fell—or that might have been Gabriel. The dive must have taken him by surprise, but the idea was to surprise Halliday more. It took him several seconds to figure out what I was up to, but by the time he followed me down, I had banked sharply to the west, pulling her out of the dive and climbing again as we returned back over the ridge of dusty hills.
Suddenly, I realised what I was doing. It was morning, which meant I was flying into the sun, a cardinal mistake under the circumstances. I looped around again just as Halliday put a few rounds into my tail section.
Gabriel was shouting something unintelligible, but he seemed to be complaining about how close Halliday had gotten to him, and when I glanced back he put a finger into the hole in his sleeve. The bullet had passed right through, but I didn’t blame him for being sore. I’d made an error the likes of which Ryder would have tanned me for, and I couldn’t afford to make another.
I climbed again, this time even sharper, looping around until the sun was at my back. I climbed higher still, pushing the Jolly Roger until her engine screamed and her frame creaked. Halliday was in front of me, twisting and turning. He’d lost me in the sun, and I closed, coaxing from Baby every last bit of power she had to give.
It wasn’t enough. Halliday turned the Nieuport quicker and came up on me. I dodged him, and when I glanced back, I saw Gabriel had taken my pistol and managed a few shots on Halliday—nothing that stuck but just enough heat to persuade him to dive.
I turned back and pushed the Jolly Roger again, higher and to the east, lifting up into the rising sun. When I turned her again, Halliday was circling below me like a great black bird of prey riding slowly and waiting. He didn’t have to pursue me, I realised. He could just stay down there. He knew I’d have to come down sooner or later. The Jolly Roger’s fuel tank was smaller than his machine’s, for starters. He could just swoop in those long, lazy circles and wait, biding his time until I fell into his clutches.
Unless…I put my back to the sun and turned the Jolly Roger’s nose downward. I darted a quick look behind me, and to my astonishment, Gabriel seemed to know exactly what I was doing. He gave me a sharp nod and I pushed her nose further down, as far as I dared. It was a delicate balance, because if I pushed her too far, the wings could shear off. But I held her just above that point, and as I held her, she felt like a part of me. The wind whipping on her canvas wings was my breath, the pulse of her engine was my pulse. And then I cut the engine.
There was silence as we fell. Nothing but silence and the long fall, the earth rising up to meet us as we answered gravity. Halliday never heard us, and he didn’t see us until it was too late. He managed to get one shot—a lucky one that hit the Jolly Roger’s tail—but before he could get off a second, Gabriel had put a bullet into him and Halliday fell hard against his stick. His Nieuport surged downward in a long, pretty spiral. One of his feet must have got wedged against the rudder pedals, holding it in that circle as it drifted down, down, down.
I’d switched the Jolly Roger’s engine on again as soon as he’d started to fall, and she wasn’t too happy about it, but she revived herself. I pulled the stick to steady her.
Nothing. I tried again, but when she didn’t respond, I realised she was dry. Halliday had done exactly as he intended. He’d kept me airborne long enough for the Jolly Roger to burn up all her fuel. We were going to crash. I glanced over the side to where Halliday had gone down. The plume of oily black smoke reached skyward. His plane had crashed hard into the rocky slope below, and the rocks had torn his fuel tank the minute he’d hit.
I turned to Gabriel and pointed down. We were going to have to fly low and slow a
nd try to set her down and hope to God that whatever was directly in front of us wasn’t going to kill us.
I started to ease her down, but just as I did, I realised we were too close to the next line of hills. There was no way to lift her. All I could do was cut a sharp turn and hope for the best. I banked her until my palms were wet on the stick and my thighs ached from standing on the pedals. Her wheels almost skimmed the dusty top of the nearest hill, but I kept her just this side of airborne. And over the top of the rise, a hidden outcropping of solid rock loomed just in front of us, too high and too close to miss.
We crashed into the outcropping. The Jolly Roger’s beautiful nose, with its gallant rotary engine, was completely crushed, but that same engine ate the brunt of the impact. I was thrown against the control panel, but my belt held. Gabriel didn’t have that luxury. He was thrown from the tail, and I jumped out of the plane to find him.
He was lying a few dozen feet away. He had landed hard, and when I ran to him screaming his name, nothing answered me but stillness and silence.
“Gabriel Starke, you answer me,” I ordered him as I grabbed his shoulders and shook him violently. “You are not dead, do you hear me? I won’t allow it. Now you say something, say something this very minute.”
I shook him harder and suddenly he gave a hideous noise like a death rattle. He wheezed hard for several minutes, and I realised he’d had the wind knocked out of him. He rolled onto all fours and coughed hard, getting his breath back, then settled back on his haunches and patted his empty pocket regretfully.
“Damn me, I’ve left my flask back at the camp. I could use a drink right now.”
He tested his shoulder, but the wound was clean and the blood had clotted. Gabriel rolled his eyes. “He can’t even make a good job of shooting a man. Amateur.”
I looked back to the crumpled wreckage of my beloved plane and saw the engine beginning to smoulder gently. “The Jolly Roger!” I cried.
Something wet was blurring my vision, but whether it was tears or blood, I couldn’t say. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and turned to Gabriel. He held me a moment, then pulled back.
“I’ve got to go see about him,” he said, nodding once to the tall plume of oily black smoke a little distance away.
“Why?”
His eyes never left my face. It would have been easier to lie, but he told me the truth, unvarnished and unlovely.
“Because I have to take care of this.”
“No, you don’t,” I said.
He did not argue with me, and we leaned on each other as we walked. We climbed over tumbled rocks and scrubby bushes, and over it all, the rose-pink light of the most glorious morning sun shimmered like a benediction. It seemed obscene that it should be such a morning when a man lay dead in the desert, but I had already learned that this was the truth of the desert; that life and death and beauty and pain existed together. That one was heightened by the other, that pleasure was sharper for being fleeting and that joy was keener for being snatched.
Halliday had gone down in a pillar of fire that reached to heaven like a minor prophet translated to the presence of God. The fire was still burning when we reached the plane. The frame was still intact, but parts of it had fallen to flaming rags. We picked our way through the small fires to the wreckage. I steeled myself for the worst, but when we reached the cockpit, it was empty. There was no sign of Halliday or the Cross.
“He’s not here! How on earth—”
And then I saw the trailing silk of the parachute, discarded like a spent cocoon, and streaked with blood. Gabriel picked it up, turning the silk over in his hands.
“I must have winged him,” he said ruefully.
“And we never saw him bail because we were too busy crashing ourselves,” I said. We stood and I looked at the footsteps leading into the desert, towards Baghdad hundreds of miles away.
“I have to go after him,” he said simply.
“I know you do.” I could have argued with him, but I finally understood it would have been wrong. This was something Gabriel had to do. The man he was, the man I had loved with all of my heart, the man I had always known I married, finished what he started.
My throat ached but I wouldn’t let him see my cry. Not then. Instead, I lifted my chin. “What? No poetry?”
He grinned. “A bit of Marvell, I think. ‘I would love you ten years before the flood.’”
Then he lowered his head. When he pulled back, we were both shaking, but I carried the taste of his mouth on my lips and the feel of his body in my arms.
He smiled again, and it was that beautiful smile I would take with me. “Time to go,” he said. “What did Peter say to Wendy? ‘“Now then, no fuss, no blubbering. Goodbye.’’”
I nodded, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. “I’ve only just realised—I thought you were Peter Pan. You’ve been the Scarlet Pimpernel all along.”
“No, love. Once a Lost Boy, always a Lost Boy.”
I turned and began to walk, but he called my name. I looked over my shoulder to where he was silhouetted, a tall black shadow against the rising sun. “‘Just always be waiting for me, and then some night you will hear me crowing.’” And with that he threw his head back and crowed like a rooster.
I was still laughing and wiping my eyes as I turned and walked into the west, back to the camp and out of his life while he walked east, towards the man who wanted to kill him. It was the hardest thing I had ever done, but it was the most perfect moment we had ever shared. I did not look back again.
* * *
I walked back to the village, a long and dusty trek, and after explaining Halliday’s villainy, I fell onto my pallet and slept straight through until nightfall. Aunt Dove was there when I awoke, and I told her the whole story from start to finish, and she listened, asking nothing as I talked myself hoarse. I owned every mistake, every doubt, every failure I had made. And when I was finished, she nodded briskly.
“I’m not at all surprised,” she said seriously. “I never liked him. You’ll remember I said so on several occasions.”
I didn’t bother to argue. I stared out of the tent at the setting sun. The eastern horizon was already dark and I would not look there. It was dangerous to hope too much for what might never come.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked, bright-eyed as Arthur hopped on her shoulder and pecked at her jewellery.
I thought of the long days in the desert, of how easy it would be to stay another day, a week, a month or more. Waiting, endlessly waiting, until the whole of my life was lost in it.
“We go back to Damascus,” I told her. “And then to England. It’s time to go home.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Leaving the Bedouin was not quite as easy as I had expected. First, they wanted to hold a feast, and it took an entire day to cook the sheep.
“A whole sheep?” I asked Sheikh Hamid.
“A whole sheep,” he assured me. “We will celebrate our victory and honour our guests.”
And so I bowed my head gravely and we sat a day waiting for the feast. It was carried in on great platters, heaps of mutton dripping in grease on top of masses of fruit-studded couscous. There were a dozen other dishes, none of which I recognised, and Aunt Dove and I were placed at the right hand of Hamid as honoured guests. They danced and told stories, and eventually, when we had eaten far more than we could ever have imagined, Aunt Dove fell to snoring gently and I turned to Hamid.
“The Saqr. I had no idea what Gabriel did out here.”
He smiled. “Every cause needs a myth to believe in. During the war, the story of the Saqr inspired our men, gave them hope during dark hours when the Turks raided. It was a black time for us. Whole villages were burned or driven to caves to starve. Livestock were killed, tents put to the torch and more men than I care to count were thrown down wells to drown. The
Turk wrote his resentments with the blood of the Bedouin, and even now, the sight of a Turk can anger a desert-dweller like nothing else. They had a talent for cruelty.”
“Did Gabriel, in his role as the Saqr, drive them out?”
“No, little sister. The Bedouin is warrior enough to defend his own. But the Bedouin are scattered across the desert like so many grains of sand. Over the generations, our ways have changed. The Bedu of the north does not love his brother from the south. The Bedu of the east does not love his brother from the west. Howeitat, Ruwallah, Mezrab—and a hundred more. We are brothers, and yet we forget to understand one another. We share blood, but blood feuds, as well, and it is these quarrels that keep us divided. We needed something to unite us, to remind us that we are one and the same. Your Colonel Lawrence did so in the south. But here, we had the Saqr, the falcon who flies with us.” His eastern cadences and poetic language slipped for a moment and he grinned. “Besides which, Djibril is a bloody brilliant fighter.”
I returned the smile. “You have an acute grasp of the power of an image in popular imagination.”
He shrugged. “Not unlike your picture in front of an aeroplane holding a packet of washing powder. Does not the common Englishwoman see such a thing and think to herself, ‘I, too, can be like this daring and beautiful woman if only I wash my things in Daisy Biological Washing Powder’? Of course she does. And the Bedu looked to him and believed they could be like him, like they once were, princes of the desert, sons of the wind.”
“They might have looked to you for that example,” I pointed out. “You have all the same qualities as Gabriel.”
He shrugged. “But I am known to them. There is a mystique about the foreigner, don’t you think? You like us because we are different from you. We live in tents and tend our sheep, and we live as our people have since the days of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Our language, our laws, our customs, all are different and strange to you. And yet yours are just as curious to us. We are amused and puzzled and intrigued by you, and if one of your kind finds our cause just, perhaps it persuades us even more that we must prevail.”
City of Jasmine Series, Book 2 Page 31
