Fiddler Fair (anthology)

He raised his eyes from contemplating the neck of his camel, just as a shaft of golden light, as bright as the words of the Koran, broke through the clouds. Where it struck the ground, on the road between them and the fortress, there was a stark white figure, that seemed to take in the golden light and transmute it to his own brightness.

Ali squinted against the light. Who was this? Was it mounted?

Yes, as it drew nearer, strangely bringing the beam of sunlight with it, he saw that it was mounted. Not upon a camel, but upon a horse of a whiteness surpassing anything Ali had ever seen. Not even the stud reft away from the Turks was of so noble a color—

Now he saw what the noise was; behind the rider came every man of the fortress, cheering and firing into the air—

Ali goaded his mount into a loping canter, his heart in his throat. It could not be, could it?

From the canter he urged the camel into a gallop. The size was right; the shape—but whence the robes, the headcloth, even the headropes, of such dazzling whiteness? They had been mired in mud for months, he had not thought ever to see white robes until spring.

It was. His heart leapt with joy. It was! The figure was near enough to see features now; and it was not to be mistaken for any other. Aurens!

He reined his camel in beside the white stallion, and the beast did not even shy, it simply halted, though Aurens made no move to stop it. He raised his hand, and the mob at his back fell respectfully silent.

Ali looked down at his friend; Aurens looked up, and there was a strange fire in those blue eyes, a burning that made Ali rein his camel back a pace. There was something there that Ali had never seen before, something that raised the hair on the back of his neck and left him trembling between the wish to flee and the wish to fall from his camel’s back and grovel at the Englishman’s feet.

“Lawrence?” Ali said, using the English name, rather than the one they all called him. As if by using that name, he could drive that strangeness from Aurens’ eyes. “Lawrence? How did you escape from the Turks?”

The blue eyes burned brighter, and the robes he wore seemed to glow. “Lawrence is dead,” he said. “The Turks slew him. There is only Aurens. Aurens, and the will of Allah.”

Ali’s blood ran hot and cold by turns as he stared down into those strange, unhuman blue eyes. “And what,” he whispered, as he would whisper in a mosque, “is the will of Allah?”

At last the eyes released him, leaving him shivering with reaction, and with the feeling that he had gazed into something he could not, and would never, understand.

“The will of Allah,” said Aurens, gazing toward Deraa, toward Damascus, and beyond, “Is this.”

Silence, in which not even the camels stirred.

“There will be jihad.”

General Allenby swore, losing the last of his composure. “He’s where? ” the commander of the ­British forces in the Middle East shouted, as his aides winced and the messenger kept his upper lip appropriately stiff in the face of the general’s anger.

“Outside of Damascus, sir,” he repeated. “I caught up with him there.” He paused for a moment, for if this much of the message had the general in a rage, the rest of it would send him through the roof. He was sweatingly grateful that it was no longer the custom to slay the bearer of bad news. “He sent me to tell you, sir, that if you wish to witness the ­taking of Damascus, you had best find yourself an aeroplane.”

The general did, indeed, go through the roof. Fortunately, early on in the tirade, Allenby said something that the messenger could take as a dismissal, and he took himself out.

There was a mob lying in wait for him in the officers’ mess.

“What did he say?” “What did he do?” “Is it true he’s gone native?” “Is it—”

The messenger held up his hands. “Chaps! One at a time! Or else, let me tell it once, from the ­beginning.”

The hubbub cooled then, and he was allowed to take a seat, a throne, rather, while the rest of them gathered around him, as attentive as students upon a Greek philosopher.

Or as Aurens’ men upon his word. The similarity did not escape him. What he wondered now, was how he had escaped that powerful personality. Or had he been permitted to escape, because it suited Aurens’ will to have him take those words back to Jerusalem?

First must come how he had found Aurens—he could no more think of the man as “T. E. Lawrence” than he could think of the Pope as “Binky.” There was nothing of Britain in the man he had spoken to, save only the perfect English, and the clipped, precise accent. Not even the blue eyes—they had held something more alien than all the mysteries of the east.

“I was told he had last been seen at Deraa, so that was where I went to look for him. He wasn’t there; but his garrison was.”

“His garrison! These wogs couldn’t garrison a stable!” There was an avalanche of comments about that particular term; most disparaging. Kirkbride waited until the comments had subsided.

“I tell, you, it was a garrison.” He shook his head. “I can’t explain it. As wild as you like, tribesmen riding like devils in their games outside, the Turkish headquarters wrecked and looted—but everything outside that, untouched. The Turks, prisoners, housed and fed and clean—the guards on the town, as disciplined as—” He lacked words. The contrast had been so great, he could hardly believe it. But more than that, the town had been held by men from a dozen different tribes, or more—and yet there was no serious quarreling, no feuding. When he ventured to ask questions, it had been “Aurens said,” and “Aurens commanded,” as though Aurens spoke for Allah.

Aurens, it appeared, was on the road to Damascus, sweeping all before him.

“They gave me a guide, and sent me off camel-back, and what was the oddest, I would have sworn that they knew I was coming and were only waiting for me.” That had been totally uncanny. The moment he had