“The boxes, naturellement. My men guessed only explosives. And now I remember, Kazurga is an artilleryman . . . You say it was in the train with you?”
“Joined us after Basle, before Friedrichshafen.” He couldn’t remember the name of the station where they’d met the second carriage.
“Bavaria – of course. One tests a mountain gun in mountain country, no? And Kazurga Bey at the same time?”
“He’d come aboard at Basle.”
“Close enough. So: they were teaching the Tornado of their new mountain gun when voila: a perfect opportunity comes to test it in action. And far better if it is commanded by a Turk when used against a Turkish citizen – which, however reluctantly, Miskal Bey is still.
“And after this demonstration,” he went on thoughtfully, “of course the Turks must buy such a wonderful weapon. In the midst of peace we are in war, and in the midst of war we are in salesmanship. How truly wicked this world is.”
* * *
After a few minutes of switchbacking along beside the river, Ranklin realised they were still on a path, but now a much older one. No particular thing told him that, it was more the ease with which they moved. As if, for centuries, people had walked and ridden this route and paused to push aside fallen rocks and trees or kick stones to fill up gulleys. So perhaps this was was an original route to the monastery. There had to be at least one.
After maybe a mile, the guide led them across a shallow patch, over a wide beach of shingle and up beside a smaller tributary flowing from the north. On its far side a slim shaft of darker rock, five or six hundred feet high, rose abruptly from wooded foothills.
The guide said something to Lady Kelso and she turned in the saddle to Ranklin. “He says that modesty forbids him to say what the locals call that peak. So now we know.”
Ranklin tilted his head to squint upwards. Well, it was . . . distinctive. And would be a useful landmark in clearer weather.
After a while they turned east again, down a widish and virtually dry valley. Ranklin had a military eye for landscape – he couldn’t help choosing sites for artillery wherever he went – not a geologist’s understanding of how it got that way. But he knew from experience that in limestone country rivers could suddenly decide to flow underground instead, leaving dry beds above. Here “dry” was a relative term: the old stream bed was at least damp, its centre patched with grass, bushes and the occasional reeds of boggy stretches. They stayed on the firmer shoreline with its intermittent patches of shingle beach.
For nearly a mile they followed the curves of the dry stream. The left side was a bank averaging fifty feet high and dotted with thin pines; on the right steep slopes swept up to the distinctive peak. Then the left bank rose and was suddenly split by a sheer-sided ravine nearly a hundred feet high that let out only a small, apologetic stream which shuffled around fallen boulders and vanished quickly into a marshy patch. The guide stopped, pointed, said something.
“He says,” Lady Kelso interpreted, “that we should climb the bank over there-” beyond the ravine “- and keep going for about a mile, with the ravine on our left.”
“That sounds like good-bye.”
“Up there counts as Miskal’s land. On a clear day we’d see the monastery from the top of the bank.”
* * *
Before the Ford reached the turn-off to the monastery, the caravan road had woken up and they were meeting long strings of laden mules, pack-horses and especially camels, plodding and gurgling down from a night-stop further up. It was a scene that might not have changed in over two thousand years.
“I suppose the Railroad will wipe this right out,” Corinna commented.
“Perhaps.” Bertie looked philosophical about it. “But on smaller roads . . . I think Turkey will never have railways like France and England.”
The monastery route was just a track leading up towards a low pass on the tree-covered slope beside the road. It was marked by a small han – what might charitably be called a wayside inn but here a small rundown building for travellers and good, big stables with a dozen and more horses. The proprietor knew Bertie and they all sat down to tiny cups of coffee and, it seemed to Corinna, just as tiny steps in the negotiation process.
She was about to get impatient, then realised that Bertie was in just as much of a hurry, and if there were a faster way of doing things, he’d be using it. It was nearly twenty minutes before they got up and went out to choose horses.
* * *
Ranklin and Lady Kelso zigzagged the horses up the bank between the under-nourished pines and found themselves on the edge of a flat plateau of bare rock that stretched ahead, sloping sightly upwards, until the mist took over.
It was so surprisingly open and exposed after being dominated by the landscape for nearly two hours that they stopped. After a while, Ranklin unbuttoned his coat to use his field-glasses, but until he looked back at the Peak and other slopes behind them, there was virtually nothing to see. There must be mountains somewhere off in the mist ahead, but here he couldn’t even feel them.
He let the glasses dangle from their strap, but Lady Kelso seemed in no hurry to get moving again. Perhaps, one short stage from the whole point of her mission, she needed time to prepare for that step.
Or just to talk. “Can they really build a railway through all this?”
“Not this bit. They’re sticking to the solid mountains.” He gestured backwards, west. The German taste for tunnelling made more sense now that he’d seen something of the country. It was probably simplest to say the hell with trying to follow twisting dead-end valleys and just tunnel a straight line: once you’d done that, you were at least safe from weather and landslips. Judging from the rocks around, this land didn’t need much excuse to slip.
“I still wonder if the whole thing . . . it isn’t that dreadful mummified little banker Dahlmann just using Dr Streibl to make his own dream come true.”
Ranklin shrugged his eyebrows. “Well. . . perhaps no more than Streibl’s using Dahlmann. He has romantic dreams of turning the golden road to Samarkand into steel rails with Dahlmann paying for it. Millions of Reichsmarks, and Streibl probably doesn’t care if it makes a penny in return. And he’s only romantic up to a point: he’d see Miskal Bey squashed like a fly for Standing In The Way Of Progress.”
She hunched, self-protectively. “And the Kaiser’s using both of them – is that what you think?”
“I don’t know about the Kaiser, he sounds as much of a romantic as Streibl, but the military and the Wilhelmstrasse, yes, perhaps so.”
She said nothing but didn’t move, either. To seem politely busy, he found his prismatic compass and took a sight on the Peak; although it was just a faint silhouette by now, it was still too close, filling some twenty degrees of arc.
Then she sighed and said: “Everybody using everybody else . . . and I suppose Sir Edward Grey’s using me – and you?”
“I seem to be working to the Foreign Office which may or may not be working to Sir Edward. We’re getting contradictory signals from that building.”
“Oh, that’s just policy as usual.” She was quiet for a while, then: “And I suppose I’m using you all – or this occasion. I didn’t have to come . . . Will you be honest with me? Am I more likely to get my foothold in English society by getting these people freed or keeping the Railway delayed? You said you’d answer honestly.”
Ranklin hadn’t promised any such thing, but decided to be honest anyway. “Frankly, neither, I’d say. Just Thank you and farewell.”
After a time she said: “Yes. Yes, that sounds like policy as usual . . . I wonder if you said that to set me free?”