The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [114]
“Simchu eth Yerushalaim w’gilu bah kal-ohabeha,” I recited: Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad for her, all you who love her. We watched the sun set and slept among the tombs overnight, to the consternation of our guides, and in the morning we saw the sun lay tender arms around the city walls and bring her to brilliant, vibrant life. I rejoiced, and I was inexpressibly grateful.
We sat until the sun set the white-gold walls to blazing and dust rose from the road, and we went across and entered the city. For three days we walked her narrow streets, ate food from her bazaars, breathed the incense of her churches. We touched her walls and tasted her dust, and in the end we came away changed, to watch the winter sun relin-quish her to the night. We then shouldered our packs and turned our backs on her.
As the sky moved from thick cobalt to limitless black, we walked north, then stopped, made our two fires and pitched our three tents, drew water from a cistern, cooked and ate the inevitable tough goat’s meat that seemed to be Ali and Mahmoud’s staple diet, and drank tiny cups of Mahmoud’s coffee, thick as honey and nearly as sweet, which he boiled and poured and we strained through our teeth. The fires burnt low and our guides went to their beds, and in communicative si-lence Holmes and I respectively smoked and searched for constella-tions. When the embers had become mere flecks in the blackness, and the vault of the sky was pierced by a million points of hard white light, I was moved uncharacteristically to song, and with the warmth of the fire on the underside of my throat I chanted to the stars the hymns of Exile, the songs distilled from the longings of a people torn from their land, taken from the home of their God, and left to weep within the boundaries of the conqueror, Babylon, a hundred generations ago.
My voice fell silent. On a distant hilltop jackals set up their eerie chorus of yelps. Somewhere an engine rose, faded. A cock crew. Even-tually, filled with that serenity that comes only with a decision reached or a task well completed, I rose to go to my tent. Holmes stretched out to knock his pipe bowl into the fire.
“I must thank you for bringing me here, Russell. It has been a most instructive interlude.”
“There is one more place in this country that I wish to see,” I told him. “We shall pass through it on our way to Acre. Good night, Holmes.”
wo days later we sat atop a windy hill and looked out across the blood-soaked Plain of Esdraelon. General Allenby had caught the fleeing Turkish army here four months before; the Cru-saders had met with calamitous defeat here 730 years earlier; various armies across the last three thousand years had struggled here for con-trol over the narrow north-south passage that joins Egypt and Africa with the continents of Europe and Asia. The plain’s Mount Megiddo, Ar Megiddo, has given its name to the site of the ultimate battle: Ar-mageddon will begin here. It is a crossroads, and it is fertile: a deadly combination. That evening, however, the only violence was the sound of a dog barking and the distant clamour of goat bells. Tomorrow we would begin to make our way to the Crusader fortress at Acre, where the boat was to meet us and carry us back to the cold of an English January and a resumption of our struggle against an unknown foe. A wearying prospect, seen while sitting here with the setting sun on our backs, the tents flapping gently in the breeze. The past weeks had been a thing apart, and only obliquely had we referred to the events that had driven us here. I knew that Holmes had chafed at being forced to allow others to do his footwork for him, even if the other was his brother Mycroft, but he had managed to control his impatience well. Finally, on that hillock overlooking the battleground, I reached out for the avoided topic and placed it firmly between us.
“So, Holmes. London awaits us.”
“She does, Russell, she does indeed.” There was a sudden light in his grey