There were few shops and not much in them, but he bought a quantity of small, misshapen grey-green coffee beans, some knobs of hard brown sugar and a pair of equally hard cheeses, one tin of condensed milk that had originally belonged to His Majesty’s forces and was cause for intense bargaining, some millet, three kinds of pulse, two tins of tomatoes, a handful of aromatic mint leaves, a quantity of onions, half a dozen dry-looking pomegranates, two lemons, four small eggs (which were then wrapped in straw and placed in a string bag he had brought with him), four new tea glasses, two porcelain coffee cups and a bowl, a box of German matches and several packets of well-travelled Egyptian cigarettes, some dried fruits, a few small scoops of half a dozen spices, each wrapped into a tight square of paper with the end turned in, ten oranges, six carrots, and an antique cabbage. Mahmoud carried the eggs and the tea glasses; I was loaded with everything else.
From a side street came the sound of hammer on metal, and we were soon standing in a metalsmith’s while Mahmoud searched the artisan’s wares for a coffee-pot to replace the one broken beneath the British soldier’s boot. The bargaining and tea drinking looked as if they would go on for some time, and since no-one was paying me the least attention I allowed my burdens to slip to the ground and moved off to look about.
My eye had been caught by a stack of bright colours through a doorway, which seemed to be a workshop adjunct to this one. The colours turned out to be, not rugs as I had thought, but a pile of embroidered robes. Some of them were the traditional garish red-and-orange on black fabric, but two were a striking, subtle blend of greens and green-blues on a natural creamy cotton. The needlework was both strong and delicate, and had they not been so obviously women’s garments, I should have been very tempted.
Mahmoud, however, had no such compunction. Before I heard him coming, the lovely thing was plucked from my hand. I turned, startled, to watch him walk back over to the smith and drop the dress in a heap onto the carpet beside the pot that was under negotiation. It seemed, I decided eventually, that the garment was to be a bonus to justify the ruinous price the artisan was demanding for his work. After another twenty minutes the bargain was completed, money changed hands, and Mahmoud picked up his eggs in one hand and the four glasses in the other. I shoved the new purchases into my parcels and staggered after him.
When we returned to the inn Ali was missing and Holmes was trying, with limited success, to oversee the packing of our possessions onto the mules. Mahmoud seemed undisturbed at the absence of his partner, and simply set to and directed the inn’s servants in the packing and tying of loads. When we left town Ali had still not appeared. It was not until we were well clear of the check-point on the Hebron road north of town (manned by three taciturn but businesslike British strangers) that he materialised, sitting nonchalantly on a rock by the side of the road, in his hands a nubbin of wood and his great knife, at his feet the bulky parcel that we had buried in the wadi before approaching Beersheva.
Once the revolvers and rifle were distributed between their persons and the mules, we were away again, and I finally had the opportunity to ask Mahmoud to explain the transaction involving the dress.
“I wished to finish my business,” he told me. “We would have been there all day.”
“You said something to him about a girlfriend?” He and the shopkeeper had laughed after Mahmoud’s comment, one of those shared masculine laughs, the same in any language, that instantly raises a woman’s hackles.
“I told him you wanted the kaftan for your girlfriend.”
“I see. Oh. Do you mean you bought it for me?”
“I paid three shillings for it. If you want it I will give it to you for four.”
“Truly? It’s a beautiful thing, yes. I’d love to have it. Thank you.” He grunted and picked up his pace, but suspicion had begun to dawn, and I trotted to keep up with him. “Mahmoud, did you buy the kaftan because you saw I wanted it?”
He glared over his shoulder at me as if I were mad. “Of course not. I wanted to hurry the business. That is all.” He began to walk even more quickly, and I allowed him to pull away. I was very pleased to own the garment, but I wished I could understand quite how it had come about.
And I did not forgive him for that hackle-raising laugh.
SEVEN
خ
Victories often have hidden causes. Muhammad said, “War is trickery.” A proverb says, “A trick is worth more than a tribe.”
—
THE
Muqaddimah
OF IBN KHALDÛN
North of Beersheva lies a strip of true agricultural land where the soil is more than a thin scum of dust on the surface of rock and there is water enough to encourage the crops. The small fields of green wheat and barley looked strange at first to eyes accustomed to the stony places, but when we entered a brief hollow where the green stretched out on either side and the trees along the edges of the track had miraculously escaped the Turkish axe, I was hit again by a flash of déjà vu, back to the previous summer as gipsies. Here we had mules clanking behind us instead of the creak and tinkle of a gaudy horse-drawn caravan, and the sky over our heads was brilliant and clear instead of grey, but the feel of being on the road incognito was very similar.
“This reminds me of Wales,” I said to Holmes.
“In Arabic!” he growled, in that language. This also was like our time in Wales, when I was required to maintain the disguise even when unobserved. Obediently, I re-worded the sentence into something resembling Arabic.
Holmes corrected my vocabulary and pronunciation, and waited until I had repeated it, before he answered that yes, he remembered Wales, and then launched off on a completely unrelated tale of a Bedouin raid he had participated in while a guest of the Howeitat tribe, of which I understood every second word. My Arabic was improving, but it was a strain to have to think in a foreign tongue.
We lapsed into silence. A mile or so passed, the only sounds our laden mules, the occasional lorry, the tinkling of various goat bells, and from time to time the drift of conversation from the two men ahead of us. Ali seemed in high spirits; I wondered idly what he had come upon during his trip to retrieve the guns that cheered him so.
Mostly, however, my thoughts were on the previous night’s curious encounter with the spymaster Joshua. His stubborn determination to present an unruffled, unworried façade in the face of what to me seemed some fairly serious problems had struck me as odd then, and seemed even more peculiar at a distance. And he certainly was no judge of men, if he thought Holmes would be deflected by pretty words and stern instructions. Indeed, had he wanted Holmes’ interest to be piqued, he could not have chosen a better approach.
I stirred myself and trotted forward to join Holmes, who had drawn ahead of me while I was deep in thought.
“Tell me, Holmes,” I began, only to have him hiss at me in disapproval. I laboriously constructed a sentence in Arabic, which came out something like “Consider Joshua want help you—your, or no?”
Holmes put the sentence right for me, waited until I repeated it with the correct inflection, and then said merely, “I think you’d find that our friend Joshua is a very clever man indeed.”
Which was all well and good, but I personally would not trust the little man one inch further than was absolutely necessary.