“Does it make you feel free?”
“A bit. . . But a bit late.” She sighed and, at last, urged her pony gently forwards.
23
A few minutes up the slope from the caravan road han, Bertie reined in his pony and pointed to a muddy patch trampled by dozens of hoof-prints. “You see? The keeper at the han told me that thirty mules had come by soon after dawn. And ten or twelve soldiers, German and Turk, walking. I wonder,” he smiled, “if I would have deduced for myself. . . No matter now. But how many guns on thirty mules?” he called, moving on. “Three? Four?”
“Jest two at most,” O’Gilroy called back. They were on Anatolian ponies too, and keeping their distances. “Remember yer ammunition.” He was trying to work it all out himself, but he’d never officially served in the Royal Artillery so his figures were distant memories or guesswork. But he knew a mule could carry around two hundred pounds, so one gun would be six or seven mule loads – probably – and each round of ammunition must be about . . . say two eight-round boxes to a load . . .
“Ye’ll only have two hundred and some rounds anyways.”
“That sounds quite enough,” Corinna chipped in. But O’Gilroy’s only experience of gunnery had been in war, when the gunners never had enough ammunition, and he shook his head like a sage old soldier.
* * *
The plateau Ranklin and Lady Kelso were crossing must have begun as one great sheet of rock, then cracked and weathered to look like giant light-grey cobblestones stretching up and away into the light grey mist. A few timid patches of grass grew where soil had lodged in the cracks, but not a tree in sight, just bushes sheltering in occasional deeper cracks like trenches. It was colourless, bleak and very exposed.
It was also very quiet. They had prompted a few bird-calls back among the trees, but here there was no sound but the horses’ hooves and the burble of their breathing. Without mankind, and when the weather had taken the day off, the world was a pretty silent place, Ranklin reflected.
But now Lady Kelso had found an excuse to stop again and was digging in her clothing. “Would you like some chocolate?”
Ranklin dismounted rather than bring the ponies too close. “Thank you.” It was a plain Swiss chocolate bar, a bit melted from her body heat.
“I bought a lot of these in Constantinople. God knows what Miskal will give us.” She stared around. “Goat, probably. If you can’t see anything worth eating, it’s goat country.”
Ranklin took the opportunity for another stare around through the field-glasses, but learnt little except that he couldn’t see the monastery yet. The edge of the ravine lay a couple of hundred yards to the left, and the land beyond it looked much the same as this plateau, except that where the mist took over, it was rising into trees and rocks.
She said: “You know, Patrick, I’m very glad you’re with me . . . I didn’t think so to start with, but. . . Do you really belong to the Diplomatic?”
“I seem to be working for them, anyway.”
“But are you really . . . ?” She left a blank for him to fill in.
But Zurga’s probing about the coat had rewoken his artillery past. That, and this landscape: for him, spying had so far been a city thing.
“Right now, I’m not absolutely sure what I am. You’d better just think of me as more-or-less representing our Government.” And shading towards the “less” with every step, he thought dourly. He tucked away the glasses and remounted.
A few minutes later they came to a deeper trench, a fissure that had become a natural storm drain, lying across their path so that its end spilled into the ravine. It was perhaps six feet deep and had collected enough soil to be half-full of stunted bushes. But it wasn’t difficult to cross because its sides were quite gentle, if irregular, slopes.
Lady Kelso said: “Isn’t that the place?”
Ranklin looked up. He’d been expecting something tall and rectangular and it wasn’t, it was remarkably low, but it was an unnatural darker outline in the mist getting on for half a mile off.
“Must be.” Then a glint among the rocks at the lip of the trench caught his eye. He dismounted and picked up a spent rifle cartridge case. It hadn’t been there long enough for the brass to tarnish. “It looks as if the Turkish soldiers attacked up this way.”
“It’s probably the easiest way.”
“It must be the only way.” Or why advance across such open ground, visible for nearly a mile on a clear day? But they’d only expected to face old jezeel muskets with a range of a couple of hundred yards, and slow to reload. He could guess what had happened then: the defenders, if they knew their business (and the result suggested they did) had waited until the soldiers had got well past this trench and then opened fire. And the surviving soldiers, knowing there was cover behind them, had turned and run for this trench. Once men have run away, it is very difficult to start them forward again. The survivors would have stayed in the trench until darkness, then sneaked off.
And now it was their turn. Was anybody watching them yet? There should be, but a guard can get very bored, staring into mist. They might do better to let off a yell or a pistol shot and make sure they didn’t surprise anyone. He had an uneasy urge to let Lady Kelso go first and, because of that, knew he must himself. He tossed the cartridge case aside and mounted.
Lady Kelso pulled her shawl over her head and threw one end over her shoulder, half-veiling herself. “I’m ready, Patrick . . . Is your name Patrick?”
“Matthew.” Ranklin stretched in the stirrups, waved, and shouted. He realised it had been “Ahoy!” – which was a bit nautical, but what should it have been?
A few moments later there was a shot.
“It’s all right, Matthew,” she said. “That’s a normal Arab greeting.”
Ranklin swallowed. “I’m glad you can tell.”
* * *
Centuries ago, the monks had tried to surround the building with gardens; probably they’d had to carry in the soil. Now there were just a few square yards of coarse grass and small bushes, but still enough to hold the thin soil in place. And the building itself had lasted even worse.
It had always been small; now time, weather and looters had worn it down to a large sheep-pen with thick, stunted walls hardly more than head-high in most places. Avalanches off the slope behind had played a part, too: embedded in the back wall was a boulder that must weigh dozens of tons and now seemed part of the structure, except that the wall was cracked and bent around it.
Inside the empty gateway all interior walls had vanished, and the floor – cracked flagstones and drifts of trampled turf – was half covered with tents that, rather refreshingly in that gloom, made it look like an Arab encampment. These weren’t the European-style bell tents of the work-camp, but heavy, dark draped affairs: “houses of hair”, according to Lady Kelso, so perhaps they were of woven camel hair. Carpets were spread under the raised flaps, and there was even a cooking fire burning.
After some ceremonial chatter, she with her eyes demurely downcast, the apparent leader (not, Ranklin gathered, Miskal himself) had taken Lady Kelso down stone steps to a cellar beneath – presumably where the hostages were held. Their horses had been led off to some paddock behind the building, and now Ranklin was alone with some twenty-odd dour-looking Arabs.
Travelling artists and writers are very precise about how different tribes or clans of natives dress. The problem, Ranklin had found in his own travels, was that the natives didn’t always know this. Either because they couldn’t afford the “proper” dress or it was in the wash or because it was just too cold, they wore whatever they’d got. There was a general tendency to baggy, very off-white trousers and turbans – not the flowing kefiyah desert head-dress – but the rest was a wild variety that included some Turkish Army great-coats and boots, and blankets worn like shawls.