O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [94]
I ate and drank the food Holmes put in my hand, accepted the thick robe he wrapped around my shoulders, and watched, enchanted, as the city slept and changed shape beneath the waning moon, until in the morning the sun woke her and restored to her that bright, hard beauty. Holmes again pushed food into my hands, cadged a mug of coffee from somewhere and gave me some, and when the city across from us was veiled by the dust raised by lorries and donkeys and the sun on our shoulders held a promise of heat, we rose, and went up to Jerusalem.
The city had seen more activity and renovation in the last twelvemonth than she had the whole of the Turkish occupation. The roads into the city were crowded with lorries carrying boulders and timber and tiles, with donkeys carrying rocks, sacks, and provisions, and with thoroughly draped women carrying a little of everything. Upon reaching the valley bottom we inserted ourselves between a caravan from the east and an army lorry whose driver’s accent declared him from the East End. At camel pace we circumnavigated the walls until we reached the Jaffa Gate, our lungs full of dust and our ears assaulted by shouts and curses, and I felt that had this not been Jerusalem, I might have turned on my heel and fled back out into the clean, simple, silent expanse of the desert.
We threaded our way among a fleet of horse-drawn carriages for hire and entered Jerusalem in the footsteps—literally, as he had chosen to mark his pilgrim’s entrance on foot—of the conqueror Allenby. To our right rose the Citadel, somewhere to our left lay the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, before us sprawled the great labyrinth of the bazaar, and all around us swirled an informal market, a miscellany of goods and peoples. I saw none of these. I did not notice the picturesque Copts and the Armenians, did not register the toasted-sesame smell of the round bread loaves that passed beneath our noses on the panniers of a donkey, did not even hear the strange, flat clang of bells or the “bakshish” cries of the beggars or the polyglot of tongues. My whole being, my entire awareness, was taken up by a small, crudely lettered sign propped in the window of the Grand New Hotel: Baths.
I was suddenly aware that, aside from a cold hip-bath at the kivutz, I had not properly bathed since leaving Allenby’s headquarters in Haifa a week before: my turban had glued itself to my head and my tunic to my shoulders, my hands revealed black creases where the skin bent, my face was filthy with caked-on dust, and, not to put it gently, I stank. Even Holmes, who when in disguise had the knack of appearing far more unkempt than he actually was, who possessed a catlike ability to keep his person tidy under the most unlikely of circumstances (such as the time earlier in his career when he had arranged with a local lad to bring him fresh collars along with his foodstuffs while living in a stone hut on Dartmoor), even Holmes, as I say, was showing signs of wear, both visible and olfactory. The darkness on his face was not all dye and bruises.
“Baths, Holmes,” I breathed.
“I can hardly take you into a bath-house,” he said absently, scanning the area around us.
“Not a public bath-house, Holmes. A bath, in an hotel, with a door and a lock. Oh, Holmes,” I groaned.
“Patience, Russell. Ha! This will be our man.”
I tore my eyes from the beguiling sign and followed his gaze, to where a lad of perhaps ten or eleven years was hopping off a low wall. The child walked backwards a dozen or so steps in our direction, finishing up a spirited conversation with the handful of other urchins who remained perched on the wall, then turned his back on them, hopped over the single leg of one beggar and the leprous hand of another, scrambled beneath the belly of a camel and dodged both the rock thrown at him by the camel’s owner