Holmes made no further effort to dodge the question, although the answer was a thing of unvarnished humiliation. “We were in danger of losing our lives in London, and needed to get away for some weeks in order to gain the upper hand on our return. Mycroft thought we could as well make ourselves useful as hide in a cave somewhere.”
“So we are to be your nursemaids?” Ali said with incredulity.
“Absolutely not,” Holmes snapped, his voice suddenly cold.
“You are an old man and she is a girl,” Ali retorted. “You may have dyed your faces, but you can’t even speak Arabic.”
“I speak the tongue as one who was born to the black tents of the Howeitat Bedu,” said Holmes in an Arabic that was apparently as flawless as he imagined it, for Ali looked at him in surprise and even Mahmoud cocked an eyebrow. “Russell speaks Hebrew, as well as French, German, and a number of fairly useless dead languages; her Arabic is progressing rapidly.”
It was an exaggeration, but I promptly dragged up a sentence I had laboriously constructed during our boat trip here (ten days spent primarily on intensive lessons in Arabic and intense games of chess) and I parroted it to the room. “My Arabic lacks beauty, but the bones are strong and it grows in the manner of a young horse.”
I was afraid they would ask me a question, at which my ignorance would be laid bare, but Ali picked up where he had left off.
“Very well,” he said, still in English. “You speak with a beautiful accent, but there is more to life here than language. We do not have time to set our steps by yours.”
“If we lag behind, leave us. An hour in the bazaar to supply the portions of our costume the boat could not provide, and we are ready.”
“Dressed as you are, everyone in the market would know your business.”
“Then you will have to spend the hour for us,” Holmes said, as if in agreement to a proposal. Mahmoud made some slight noise, but when I glanced at him, his face was without expression.
“But you look wrong,” Ali objected. “You have strange eyes. The girl even wears spectacles.”
“The spectacles are an oddity, but not an insurmountable one. As for the eyes, Circassians often have blue eyes. So do Berbers, who often have yellow hair as well. Berbers are also known for being strong-headed, which is even more appropriate.”
“We have no beds,” Ali cried in desperation.
“Maalesh,” Holmes said. “But as an ‘old man’ I suppose I am meant to need my sleep, so I will wish you a good night.” And so saying, he kicked off his boots, wrapped himself up in his greatcoat, and turned his face to the wall. I followed his example; eventually the others did as well. They could, after all, scarcely lie in comfort on the carpets and bedclothes they no doubt had in their possession when their two soft Western guests slept on the packed-earth floor.
Between the discomfort, the nocturnal activities of a variety of four-, six-, and eight-legged residents, and the gradual mid-night suspicion that our hosts were more than unusually troubled by our visit (“They could have landed at a more convenient time,” Ali had said to Steven), I did not actually fall asleep until I had heard the pre-dawn wail of a distant muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. I woke when the door opened and shut at first light, but by then I was numb enough to call it comfortable, and dropped back to sleep until Ali and Mahmoud swept back in, their arms filled with bundles.
Their shopping expedition had not changed their temper. Mahmoud went silently to the corner to build a fire for coffee while Ali came perilously close to throwing his purchases at us and kicking us awake. (In truth, the room was so small that dropping the things and pacing up and down amounted to the same thing.) I blearily pushed my stiff bones upright, put on my spectacles, shifted back out of his way, and reached for the nearest twine-bound parcel.
My heart sank when I saw what it contained, and I sat rubbing my face and wondering where to begin. Ali’s idea of a suitable garment amounted to a rough, black, head-to-toe sack with a hole for my eyes combined with too-small, thin-soled, decorative sandals with narrow straps that hurt just to look at them.
“Holmes,” I said. He looked up from his gear, which was similar to Mahmoud’s, only plainer. His mouth twitched and he looked down at the wide belt in his hand, and then he relented.
“This will be fine,” he said, and stood up to begin the change of identity. “Russell’s, however, will not do. She will need the clothing of a young man.”
“That is not possible,” Ali said flatly. “It is haram.” Forbidden.
“It is necessary, and no one will know.”
“She could be stoned for dressing as a man.”
“It is highly unlikely any judge would approve the punishment, although a mob might use it as an excuse to throw some rocks. If you are afraid of being placed in danger, then we shall leave you.”
Ali’s hand gripped the shaft of his knife so hard I thought the ivory would bulge out between his fingers, but the blade remained in the sheath.
“You will not accuse me of cowardice, and she will wear those clothes.”
“Actually, no,” Holmes said, completely ignoring the man’s fury and sounding merely bored—an old and effective technique of his. “She will not wear those clothes, or anything like them. No burkah, no bangles, no veil. She will not walk behind us, she will not cook our food, she will not carry water on her head. This is not, you understand, my choice; I should be perfectly happy to have her clothed head to foot and in a subservient position—the novelty would be most entertaining. However, she will simply not do that, so we must either live with it or separate. The choice, gentlemen, is yours.”
His state of undress had reached the point at which I had to turn my back, so I missed the non-verbal portions of the discussion that followed, and many of the words they used passed me by. Still, I did not need a translation for their emotional content, nor did I need to have Holmes tell me why Ali had left so precipitately, since all the women’s garments left with him. I turned back to find Holmes transformed into a Palestinian Arab.
Mahmoud through all this had placidly gone about the business of making coffee, and had now reached the stage of shaking the pan of near-black beans. He glanced up and caught my eye, then lifted his chin at the table leaning against the wall. I went over curiously and picked up the small, worn, leather-bound book that lay on the rough surface. On what would be the back cover in an English book but was the front in Hebrew or Arabic, there was a short phrase in faded gold Arabic script.
“A Koran?” I asked him. He continued shaking the beans. “Yours?”
“Yours,” he said briefly, and followed it with a flow of Arabic that Holmes translated. “ ‘Start with the knowledge of God’s Book and the duties of your religion, then study the Arabic language, to give you purity of speech.’ ”
“Is that from the Koran?”
“Ibn Khaldûn,” Mahmoud said. The name was familiar, that of an early Arabic historian whose work I had not read.
“Well, thank you. I will read this with care.”
Mahmoud reached for the coffee mortar and poured the beans into it, and that was that.
Once his mind had been turned to the problem, Ali did an adequate job in producing the long-skirted lower garment and the loose woollen abayya that went over it, and the heavy sheepskin-lined coat I would need on cold nights. The sandals he gave me were still thin-soled, but they fit, and the cloth he brought for my headgear was better in hiding long hair than the loose kufjvyah my three companions wore. He even demonstrated how to wrap a turban that looked sloppy but stayed firmly fixed.