O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [78]
I rapped softly on the door, pinched my cheeks hard to make me look flushed, and began to breathe rapidly—which was not too difficult, with my heart already racing wildly.
When the slot in the door slid open I was on the far side of the corridor, crouching against the wall with my robe over my booted feet and peering up with an expression of what I hoped simulated terror on my face. It opened with a sharp crack of iron on iron, and I did not have to feign a start. I blinked up at the pair of eyes that I could see fuzzily, framed by the small barred window.
“What?” a male voice demanded.
“That man,” I whispered fiercely in Arabic. “The commandant. He hurt me. Please, oh, please help me,” I pleaded. “I want to go back to my village.”
“Who are you?”
“I live in the village,” I improvised, my voice choked, and then to my distress I felt my eyes actually well up and a tear-drop break free to run down my face. “He hurt me,” I said with a sob.
The man laughed harshly and slapped the view slot closed; my heart plummeted. However, then came the sound of a bolt sliding, and the knob began to turn. He pulled the heavy door open and stepped out, and he was just beginning to say something about making me feel better when Ali, pressed invisibly against the wall, took one step forward and brought his arm down. The dull thump told me that he had used the haft of his knife instead of the blade; it was quite effective.
Ali and I between us caught the guard before he hit the stones and bundled his limp and immensely awkward form back through the door. When Mahmoud had shut it behind us, we let our burden fall with a thud to the floor.
I took out my spectacles and put them back on, half aware of Ali taking a ball of twine from his pocket and kneeling beside the unconscious figure. Mahmoud ducked through the inner door and into the dimly lit room beyond; I followed on his heels, and saw Holmes.
It is extraordinary, the preposterous things that shoot through one’s mind at moments like that. At the sight of him, my body reacted as if it had been stabbed, but my mind’s first thought was how typical of Holmes it was to ensure that the dye on his skin extended beyond the normally visible portions: scalp to toe, where he was not the colour of blood and bruise, he was uniformly swarthy. My second thought was one, incredibly enough, of exasperation, that the month-old injuries to his back, the results of a bomb that had been one of the reasons for our flight from London to Palestine, had been healing so nicely, until—
I became aware of Mahmoud’s fingers digging deeply into my arm.
“He lives,” Mahmoud said, looking intently into my face.
“Yes, go ahead,” I said nonsensically, but he seemed to understand, and moved forward, sliding his knife from its scabbard as he went.
A length of rope was tied around each of Holmes’ wrists. Both led to a single hook in the beam above him. His feet rested on the floor, but his arms, pulled tight against the sides of his head, were at an angle that would have been excruciating after five minutes, and breathing must have been hellish. By all appearance he had been there for a long time. The injuries to his back, the small round burns and the long weals of the whip, were not the products of a few minutes’ work.
Mahmoud was now standing facing him, but I could not approach. I was afraid to look into the eyes of my friend, my teacher, my only family: I was terrified of what I might see there. Instead, I watched Mahmoud watching Holmes, and I knew when Holmes opened his eyes and looked back at the Arab, because the bearded face crinkled slightly around the scar. A smile.
“By the Prophet, Holmes. You look like hell,” Mahmoud said. Reaching into his robes, he pulled out a small silver box, snapped it open with his thumb, and scooped out a quantity of some black, paste-like substance on the tip of his little finger. He leant forward and put it into Holmes’ mouth, put the box away and was wiping his finger on his robe when we heard the heavy outer door open in the room behind us.
Many things