O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [16]
“And that he is away from home until next week,” Mahmoud replied.
“Good,” said Holmes. “Then to Gaza it is.”
* * *
THREE
ت
Common folk have no great need for the services of religious officials.
—THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN
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Three nights later, the refrain that had run so steadily through my mind at the beginning was back again: What on earth did I imagine that I was doing here? I ought to be home, in bed this night, in England. I ought to be in Oxford, worried about nothing more uncomfortable than the next day’s tutorial. Instead we had tumbled into this foreign land under the authority of two Arabs who told us the least they could about our goal and our setting. After delivering his report on Jaffa, Mahmoud had drawn back into his taciturn mode and Ali seemed positively to enjoy our discomfiture. It was, all in all, not an easy partnership, and if something was not done to change matters, the relationship between the four of us looked to descend from its current state of mistrust into open animosity. I had thought, for a brief moment earlier that evening, that the restraints were about to drop, but Holmes had inexplicably refrained from reacting at Mahmoud’s terse orders, and the shaky truce stood.
The Arab’s orders had been obeyed, and here we lay, draped on our bellies atop the precarious and crumbling remains of a stone wall, keeping very still despite the discomfort because our slightest movement sent small stones tumbling down the sheer rock face at my right hand onto the roof far below. It was five days after our arrival in the country, closer to dawn now than midnight, and we were supposedly burglarising the mullah’s villa. I say “supposedly” because in fact Ali and Mahmoud were inside while Holmes and I were given the task of keeping an undetected watch lest we be discovered—although again, why we were next to each other, abandoning the majority of the house’s perimeter to the unguarded night, had not been explained. We had been there some ninety minutes, although it seemed like nine hundred. The rock beneath me had drilled itself into my softer organs and permanently rearranged the bones of my rib cage and pelvis, while the cold had penetrated even the heavy sheepskin coat I wore. I turned my head where it lay on my forearms and murmured to my companion, whom I could touch if I wished, but could scarcely see now that the day-old moon had gone down.
“Holmes, will you tell me please what we are meant to be doing here?”
It was the first time I had voiced the question aloud. After all, I was the one to blame for our presence here, and if it had not exactly turned out the way I had imagined, this ungentle sojourn among the sites and sights of the Holy Land, I was not about to give Ali and Mahmoud the satisfaction of seeing us turn back.
Not that I hadn’t been tempted to walk away from them, beginning with the first day on the road. We covered barely twelve miles that day, although most of it was spent far from actual roads, picking our way around cactuses and over endless stones, and I was dropping with exhaustion when we halted in the late afternoon among some pomegranate trees near a dirty, nearly deserted pile of slumping mud huts that Ali called Yebna. He came over to where I had collapsed against a boulder and all but kicked me in the ribs to get me up and helping to make camp. My fingers fumbled with the well ropes and the water-skin seemed to weigh more than I did, but I did as I was told, ate without tasting the mess of brown pottage that was dinner, and slept like a dead thing for ten hours.
I woke early the next morning, the first day of 1919, when the faint light of dawn was giving substance to the canvas over my head. The air was cold but I heard the pleasing crackle of burning tinder from the direction of the fire pit in the black tent. Holmes was gone from his side of our tent, his bed-roll in a heap against the far wall, and I thought it was the sound of him going out the flaps that had awakened