O Jerusalem

“What, me sitting in a chair while you lie in bed with bandages on your back? I’m afraid so.”

“It grows tedious.”

A bubble of joy began to expand in my chest, and I felt a stupid grin come onto my face. To hide it from him, I poured a glass of water and attempted to dribble some of it into his mouth, without much success. He closed his eyes for a few minutes, then asked, “What damage is there?”

“Superficial injuries only. Nothing broken.” Including, thank God, his spirit, not if he could joke.

“Whose diagnosis?”

“We’re in a kivutz. A communal village. They have a doctor. Actually, she’s a midwife, but trained.”

“In all my years, I don’t believe I have ever before required the services of a midwife, Russell.”

At that I did laugh, and at the noise Mahmoud put his head inside the door, then withdrew it.

“Mahmoud gave me something,” Holmes said suddenly.

“Opium paste.”

“Dangerous madman.”

“He apologises for the heavy dose. Still, it got you here.” There was no answer. I said quietly, “Holmes?”

“The car crashed, did it not?”

“It did.”

“The driver?”

“Dead.”

“I thought so. You?”

“Minor bangs.”

“What?”

“I’ll have a head-ache for a couple of days, that’s all.”

“Fortunate.”

“We were both lucky.”

“Yes. He was going for pain, not damage.”

It took me a moment to realise who “he” was. “Your captor,” I said. “What did he want?”

“Information. Joshua. Allenby.” His voice was slowing.

“Did you give it to him?”

He did not answer for so long, I thought him asleep. Then: “I would have done,” he said heavily. “The next session, or the following.”

“Who was he?”

“I wish to God I knew,” he said, and then he was asleep.

SIXTEEN

?

True visions carry signs to indicate their truthfulness. The first is that a person wakes quickly; were he to stay asleep, the vision would weigh heavily upon him. Another sign is that the vision stays, with all its details, impressed on the memory.

—

THE

Muqaddimah

OF IBN KHALDUN

We stayed at the kivutz for three days. That first day, a Saturday, Ali and Mahmoud took an early supper with the Goldsmit family, borrowed fresh horses, and rode back to the villa where Holmes had been held captive. They returned on Sunday afternoon, and found the two of us sitting in the sun in front of the small house, drowsing like a pair of pensioners on the seashore at Brighton while the busy life of the kivutz went on around us.

Ali snorted in disgust and led the horses away. Mahmoud dropped to his heels in front of us, facing to the side. Both Arabs looked grey with exhaustion, and I doubted they had slept last night either. Mahmoud reached for his pouch of tobacco and began to roll a cigarette, his fingers slow and awkward. He lit it with a vesta, and I could not help an involuntary glance at Holmes. His eyes seemed fixed on the burning end of the cigarette. With an obvious effort, he tore his gaze away and, with small, jerky movements of his strained arm muscles he eased his pipe out of his robe, filled it, and lit it. I took from a pocket the small pomegranate a child had handed me earlier in the day, and concentrated on the process of opening and eating it.

“Gone,” Mahmoud said succinctly.

“Who were they?”

“The villagers thought they were from Damascus, one man said no, Aleppo. Not Palestine, anyway, that was agreed. The owner of the villa is himself a Turk. He took to his heels in the September push, and it’s been empty ever since. These men came three or four weeks ago. Around Christmas.”

“Any idea where they have gone?”

“Wherever it was they took everything with them. We went through the house with great care.” Mahmoud turned his head to look at Holmes, searching that bruised and inscrutable face for doubt or criticism, and finding none. “In one fireplace many papers had been burnt, then pounded into ash. Thoroughly. The only things we found were recent copies of the Jerusalem Post. In one of them, from last Thursday, we found this.” He reached over and placed a small torn-out scrap of newsprint in Holmes’ lap. It was not an article but an advertisement for a watchmaker in the new part of Jerusalem. Next to the box there was a small tick mark from a pen.

“You take this to mean they are going to Jerusalem,” Holmes stated.

“Do we have anything else?”

Holmes tried to shift into a more comfortable position, and winced. The scrap of newspaper drifted to the ground; Mahmoud picked it up and tucked it away in his robe.

“The monastery of St George,” Holmes said. “Channah Goldsmit assures me there are no bees on the Mount of Temptation.”

I could not think for a moment what he was talking about; then it came to me that the two monasteries, to the north of Jericho and to the west, had been our next planned stops before General Allenby’s car had appeared and taken us away from our search for monastic bees. Ages ago, though only four days on the calendar.

Mahmoud looked away again. “Mikhail’s wax candle,” he said flatly.

“Precisely.”

Mahmoud ground the end of the cigarette out on the earth and rose to his feet. “Ali and I will waste no more time. We go to Jerusalem.”

“That is probably a good idea,” Holmes said. We both stared at him in astonishment. “You go to Jerusalem. Russell and I will meet you there. Shall we say either Wednesday night at dusk or Thursday at noon, just inside the Jaffa Gate?” He blinked mildly in the bright sunlight at Mahmoud towering above him, though I could see in the sudden lines along his jaw that craning his neck was painful. Mahmoud shook his head and walked off. Holmes eased his chin down, and let out a breath.

“You’re in no condition to clamber over rocks,” I said. “And I saw enough of the landscape to know that’s what will be involved.”

“I will be by Tuesday,” he said. For Holmes, that was a considerable concession to the body’s