The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [112]
At dusk we were making way casually south, parallel to the far-off shore, but when night had fully fallen the captain changed to due east and, engines fast and quiet, we made for land. Holmes appeared, with a nearly flat knapsack and a preoccupied air, and at one in the morn-ing we were bundled onto a ship’s boat with muffled rowlocks, and taken ashore. Our landing site was just south of Jaffa, or Yafo, a town whose Jewish population had been forced to flee from Arab violence during the war. Imagine my pleasure, then, when we were summarily shoved into the burnoosed arms of a pair of Arab cutthroats and aban-doned. Before the boat had disappeared into the night we had sunk unseen into the war-ravaged land.
They were not cutthroats, or perhaps I should say they were not merely cutthroats. They were not even Arabs. We called them, at their invitation, Ali and Mahmoud, but in a cooler climate they would have been Albert and Matthew, and certain diphthongs in their English exuded public school and Oxbridge. Holmes said they were from Clapham. He also said that although they looked like the broth-ers they claimed to be, and acted like twins, they were at best distant cousins. I did not enquire further but contented myself with watching the pair of them, hand in hand in the fashion of Arab men, as they strolled the dusty roads, chattering interminably in colloquial Arabic and gesticulating wildly with their free hands while we followed in their wake.
If our two guides were not what they appeared, neither was any-thing else in the weeks that followed: The drab boat that had brought us from England was experimental, an outgrowth of war’s technology; its crew were not simply sailors, despite the presence of the child; even the two of us were not as we seemed, a father and son of dark-skinned, light-eyed nomads. Our very presence in the land had a heavy touch of the unreal about it: For the first two weeks we wandered with no appar-ent aim, performing a variety of tasks that again seemed aimless. We re-trieved a document from a locked house; we reunited two old friends; we made detailed maps of two yawningly unimportant sites. During this dreamy time I had the feeling that we were being observed, if not judged, though I could never decide if someone was testing our abili-ties, or waiting for a job to appear that we were suited for. In either case, perhaps even coincidentally, a case abruptly appeared to immerse us and shore up our sagging self-confidence with the sharp exhilaration of danger and the demands of an uncomfortable way of life. I soon dis-covered in myself a decided taste for that way of life, as the sense of daring that the tamer liberty of Wales had given me flowered into a pure, hot passion for freedom. If Mycroft’s hidden purpose was to pro-vide us with an exotic form of holiday, it certainly succeeded.
Not that we were under his control, or even supervision: Mycroft’s name opened a few doors for us and smoothed some passages, but trav-elling under his cachet did not mean that we were under his protec-tion. Indeed, our pursuits in the Holy Land took us into some quite interesting situations. However, the dangers we faced (aside from the microbial and insectoidal), although immediate and personal (partic-ularly for Holmes, who at one point fell into unfriendly hands), were also refreshingly direct and without subtlety.
Both of us took injuries, but neither seriously. Indeed, other than being shot at by a strikingly incompetent marksman out in the desert and later set upon by thugs just outside the Church of the Holy Sepul-chre, my own most uncomfortable moment was when I was cornered by a trio of amorous and intoxicated merchants in the Arab Quarter. Even the revelation of the quantity of hair beneath my turban did not give them much pause, as they seemed equally willing to pursue a woman as the young man they had thought me. I nearly committed murder that day—not on the merchants, but on Holmes, for the highly amused reluctance with which he came to my assistance.