O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [108]
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
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The morning began early, when a fist pounded on the door with a rhythm I knew well.
“Up, Russell! You have work.”
I tucked my hair into my turban and opened the door, to see a familiar sight: Holmes, not rising from his bed, but rather coming home after a long night. I wondered if he had slept at all. I yawned; he looked at me with that dreadfully cheerful, superior attitude of the earliest bird around.
“Are you going to give me breakfast while you tell me about it, Holmes?”
“No time for either.”
“Holmes!” I objected.
“Can you find your way to the Souk el-Qattanin?”
“The Cotton Bazaar? Er—”
“Straight down David Street past the jog where it becomes es-Silsileh, two hundred yards towards the Haram, then north on el-Wad, and the Souk el-Qattanin comes in on your right. Just follow the sound of looms.”
“Why?”
“Because the army and the Red Cross have begun to renovate the souk and restore it to its original purpose, thus creating jobs for—”
“No, Holmes: Why do I need to go into the souk?”
“The innkeeper has arranged work for you on the renovation project there.”
“Work? What kind of work? I don’t know how to run a loom. And isn’t today Friday? I thought everything stopped on Friday.”
“You won’t be weaving. And it’s mostly Christians today, of course. Ideal for your purposes; the other days it’s mostly Arab women, and you wouldn’t fit in.”
“But doing what?”
“Carrying rocks and dumping the baskets where you’re told, I should think.”
“That’s it? What, are we out of money? I think I’d rather beg. Surely you can make me up to look like a leper or a multiple amputee or something.”
“Don’t be frivolous, Russell. You will watch. For anything unusual.”
“Everything’s unusual, Holmes,” I pointed out.
He ignored my sarcasm. “You’d better leave your spectacles here, too.”
“Then how am I to watch?”
“Listen. Perceive. For heaven’s sake, Russell, use your brain. Now, you are already late. Take a cup of coffee down in the courtyard, and I’ll see you in the afternoon.”
“What will you do?” I cried desperately.
He paused in the doorway to his cubicle, looking back at me sternly. “I will sleep, of course, Russell. I am, you will be so good as to remember, an old man who is recovering from a serious injury. I must have my rest.”
His door closed softly in my face. I stood with the ancient wood in front of my nose for some time before I decided that I might as well follow his instructions and learn something as go back to bed and lie there scratching and wondering. Folding my spectacles into a pocket, I went down the shaky stairs and out into the bazaar.
The project in the Cotton Bazaar was, inevitably, under the auspices of the army. A bored sergeant leant against a wall, smoking an Egyptian cigarette and looking at the women and a few men who were clearing rubble from the derelict street.
The Cotton Bazaar was one of the covered markets, a filthy Mediaeval near-tunnel of crumbling stone and rotting timbers that had, understandably, been abandoned for some years. I could hear the rhythmic sound of a number of looms, coming from no place in particular but seeming a part of the air. In the section of the bazaar still awaiting renovation, two privates with spades formed one end of the line, a group of donkeys with panniers the other, and in between we, the workers, balanced the heavy baskets on our heads to transport the rubble across the uneven and narrow places where the donkeys would not go.
I had carefully constructed an explanation for my presence, as good a speech as I could manage considering that I had no idea why I was actually here, but I rapidly put together another explanation in broken Arab English for the sergeant. He was not interested. He just waved me to the waiting baskets without looking at me and spat onto the paving stones. I took a basket and joined the line of dispirited workers.
Two hours later I was very aware that my skull was not fully healed: it did not take kindly to the weight of a wide basket laden with damp soil and stones resting on it. My stomach