So I sat propped against the rough plaster wall, watching the flames die down in the hearth and alternating between drowsy half-sleep and abrupt, heart-pounding terror when it was all I could do to keep from tearing open the outer door and shrieking the name of my lost companion and mentor into the night.
This cycle went on for a couple of tiresome hours, and I had just twitched my way back down into a state of torpor when a stealthy movement somewhere in the building brought all my nerves jangling to life.
Gritting my teeth, I lifted my head to look into the room.
Mahmoud stood there; behind him Rahel, with a rifle in her arms and looking very comfortable with it there. The intensity of the joy I felt at seeing him, this phlegmatic, uncommunicative, and utterly trustworthy Arab, took me by surprise. I gulped back the tears of weakness, and murmured, “Salaam aleikum, Mahmoud.”
“Aleikum es-salaam, Amir,” he replied. “Your injuries were not serious, I am pleased to see.”
“Have you found Holmes?”
“We know where he is.”
“Thank God,” I said explosively in English. I let the rug drop from my shoulders and tried to stand up. Mahmoud instead pulled a stool over in front of me and sat down on it. His dark eyes probed my face.
“You are in pain,” he noted.
“It will get slightly worse, then better,” I said. Little point in denying its existence, not with those eyes on me. He thought for a minute, then seemed to make up his mind.
“You are Inglezi, firengi,” he said: English, a foreigner. “But you are also not firengi. If you were only firengi, if you were nothing but an Englishwoman, I would not have returned here tonight, because the Inglezi have no—they have a different sense of what is honourable. What was done today is a blood insult, you understand? You and your Holmes have eaten our salt, shared our bread. Blood ties exist, you understand?” He was speaking English, but a much simpler English than I had heard him use before. It occurred to me that he was thinking in Arabic and translating as he went. I assured him that I understood what he was talking about, and that I agreed. He continued. “If those ties did not exist, the exercise of retrieving him would be only a task, a service to the English government. Ali and I would do that as we have done other jobs. But this is a matter of honour, and I believe you have the right to be there with us, if you choose.”
Were I in his shoes, I reflected, I should be asking how badly I in my feeble state might handicap them, but he asked no such question. I met his eyes evenly.
“I will come, if you will have me.”
He nodded, and stood up. “There are arrangements to be made; I will return for you,” he told me. After a brief consultation with Rahel he went out. She followed, to return in a couple of minutes with another glass, this one containing two inches of a clear, brownish liquid.
“This will help you to ignore the pain. It will not remove the pain, but neither will it cloud your mind or slow you down.”
I drank it, and sat until Mahmoud came and led me away.
FOURTEEN
ص
Since desert life is clearly the source of bravery, the more savage the group, the more brave, and the more able to defeat other peoples and take from them their possessions.
—
THE
Muqaddimah
OF IBN KHALDÛN
I felt remarkably well physically, for a person who had been bashed about in a motorcar accident. The bruises were going to be spectacular and my head throbbed mightily, but I was all right, as long as I did not move suddenly or think about the crash. Thinking about it brought on a rush of cold sweat accompanied by dizziness and a roiling stomach: hard, cold panic.
So I did not think about it, just pushed it implacably away from me, with such success that I never did remember the details. Instead, I gave all my attention to what Mahmoud was doing, and concentrated my entire being on the thought of Holmes and getting him back.
We slipped out of the back entrance to Rahel’s inn into the stillness of a Palestinian town at midnight. A third figure fell into place behind us as we passed the back of a shop—not Ali. I thought he carried a long rifle in his arms.
The town did not take long to leave behind. Mahmoud marched ahead, his swirling robes casting wild shadows in the bright light of the full moon. The road stretched palely on ahead; the lights of Ram Allah dropped behind us, and Mahmoud slowed his pace. When I was beside him he began to speak—in English again, that there might be no misunderstanding.
“There were three men in the ambush. The car slowed to climb the hill, and the minor land-slide they had engineered across the road ensured that we should slow even more. They shot the driver from the hill behind us and over our right shoulder, and we went straight into a shallow ravine. Very neatly done.
“The driver was killed. You hit your head on the side of the car when we went off the road. Ali pulled you out. I followed him into the rocks. We waited for Holmes to come, but he did not, and when I went back for him, two men had him in another motorcar that had been hidden around a bend in the road. The third man was still above us with his rifle. An extremely good shot, he was. Had we not left our equipment in Jericho, if I had my rifle, I should have gone after him, but I did not.” He shrugged, as close to an apology as he could come, and I gave him the Arabic hand gesture that said maalesh.
“You know where these men went?” I asked.
“Now I do. We have people in that area.”
“Was he hurt? Holmes?”
“There was no blood on the road,” he said, a clear equivocation.
“Was he on his feet?” I insisted.
“He walked to their car under his own power. They held a gun to his head.”
“How did they do it? How did they know we would be there?”
Mahmoud sighed deeply, a sound, I thought, of shame, but did not answer me directly. “I ought never to have submitted to a driver. A car is big and noisy and suited for conquerors in times of peace, not for scribes. I am a man who goes about on foot, and leaving that path was a foolhardy act.”
“Do you know why?” Why the ambush, why Holmes, why—
“Not yet,” he interrupted grimly, and then, shifting to Arabic, said, “That is enough of the foreign tongue. We will go quickly and in silence to the house where he is being kept. If we are seen, we may have to kill. It is to be hoped that the deaths will be few. I, myself, take no joy in death. I am not a believer in the blood feud. If it is done correctly, there will be no killing, but with so little time, it is difficult to lay careful plans, and things may go wrong. I hope, at this time of the night and so soon after he was taken, only a sleeping house will await us, and you will have no need to act. If the house awakes, we may need you. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Can I depend on you?” he asked in English.
“To… ?”
“… Kill,” he finished the phrase. I felt his eyes on me, probing in the moonlight. I stopped, and then I looked at him. His eyes were dark holes surrounded by darkness.
“I don’t know,” I said finally.
To my surprise he nodded, in agreement or satisfaction I could not tell, and began to walk again.
“You will tell me if you begin to feel ill,” he ordered.
“My head hurts,” I admitted.
“Of course.”
That seemed to be the extent of his concerns. We walked perhaps four miles altogether after leaving the town, with the rifle-bearing man trailing behind us, until Mahmoud touched my elbow and led me off the road into an almost imperceptible path through a thicket of some Palestinian cousin of the gorse, all spine and grab. At the bottom of it was a tiny mud hut; in the hut we found Ali. He greeted my arrival with a sour look.