Curiosity was replaced by concern on al-Jafri’s face. ‘Ah. I see.’
‘That’s why we need to find what he was looking for first, so nobody else gets hurt,’ said Nina. ‘And to do that, we need to find out everything we can about Muhammad Yawar.’
‘He’s not really a terribly important figure, historically speaking. Are you sure he is the right person?’
‘He’s all we’ve got to go on,’ she admitted. ‘He supposedly killed a Crusader called Peter of Koroneou in AD1260 - what we want to know is where that happened.’
‘Peter of Koroneou . . .’ said al-Jafri, brow knitting as he consulted his memory. ‘Ah, yes. He occupied an area of land close to what is now the Jordanian-Syrian border.’
‘Which side of the border?’ Chase asked.
‘The Syrian side.’
‘I bloody
‘Will your archives have the exact location?’ asked Nina.
‘Perhaps,’ said al-Jafri, ‘but as I said, Muhammad Yawar is a very minor figure - I doubt he rated much more than a footnote.’
‘Anything that you have will help us enormously,’ she assured him.
Al-Jafri nodded. ‘In that case, if you’ll follow me to the archives, I’ll show you what I can.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Chase to Nina, ‘while you’re doing your reading, I’ll go and sort out everything we need.’
‘The US embassy can take care of all that,’ Mitchell told him.
Chase was unimpressed. ‘They’ve got a local guide who can get us across the border, have they?’ He turned back to Nina. ‘Give me a call when you’re done. I’ll come and meet you.’ To Nina’s surprise, he pulled her close and gave her a rather more intense kiss than she’d expected before releasing her. ‘See you later.’
‘Uh, bye,’ she said as he left, taken aback. Al-Jafri looked bemused, while Mitchell veiled a smile. She felt her cheeks flush as she turned back to the curator. ‘Okay, well, so . . .’
‘The archives?’
‘Please!’
‘Here we are,’ said al-Jafri. Wearing a pair of white cotton gloves to protect the ancient pages, he pointed at a particular piece of Arabic text within the book he had taken from one of the Center’s climate-controlled underground vaults. Although the tome itself dated from the fifteenth century, it described events from two centuries earlier, collated from other accounts of the many wars that raged across the Holy Land during that period. ‘This is the first mention of Muhammad Yawar.’
Nina’s knowledge of Arabic was limited. ‘What does it say?’
‘Not much,’ said Mitchell, peering over her shoulder.
‘You know Arabic?’
‘Enough to get by.’ He grinned. ‘But Dr al-Jafri’s right - Yawar wasn’t important enough to rate more than a few lines.’
‘Those few lines may have what you’re looking for, though,’ said al-Jafri, carefully running the tip of his finger across the time-browned page. ‘It says, “The barbarian leader himself came forth to challenge Muhammad, his sword shining bright. But like the Prophet whose name he bore, Muhammad was brave and righteous and a true servant of Allah, and with a blow broke his sword into pieces. With the longest of these, he slew the infidel. Their leader dead, the other invaders retreated in fear.”’
‘Barbarians?’ said Mitchell, puzzled. ‘Is this the wrong battle? Sounds like they’re talking about the Mongols.’
Al-Jafri suppressed a mocking chuckle. ‘No, it’s the right one,’ Nina explained. ‘The Muslim perspective on the Crusades is . . . well, kinda different from the Christian one. They saw the Christians as brutal invaders, there to murder the followers of Islam and plunder their lands.’
‘
‘Kafashta?’ asked Nina.
‘It’s a small town in southern Syria. Well, it was considered a town in Yawar’s time - it probably barely qualifies as a village now. I can find it on a map for you, if you’d like.’
‘That’s okay, thanks,’ Mitchell told him, straightening. ‘That’s what we needed to know. We’ve got to go to Kafashta.’
‘In Syria,’ Nina reminded him. ‘What was it you said? Something about them not exactly being big fans of Americans . . .’
Chase met Nina and Mitchell outside the US embassy a couple of hours later, accompanied by his local contact, a Jordanian woman named Karima Farran. As Nina had come to expect, she was extremely attractive, her long dark hair wafting in the breeze.
Karima’s Land Rover looked almost as ancient as Amman itself, the military green paint so sand-scoured that it looked like patches of mould on the bare aluminium. After greeting the new arrivals and helping them load the gear Mitchell had requisitioned into the rear of the 4x4, she tied her hair back and wrapped it in a dark headscarf before handing another one to Nina. ‘You’ll need this.’
Nina took it reluctantly. ‘I, er . . . I thought hijabs weren’t compulsory for women in Jordan?’
‘They’re not,’ Karima replied, sharing a look of amusement with Chase. ‘I just don’t like getting sand in my hair.’ She gestured at the Land Rover’s decidedly tattered canvas roof. Nina got her point and quickly followed suit.
They headed northeast along a highway, quickly leaving the city behind and entering a parched landscape of pale sand and rocks. ‘So, Eddie,’ said Karima to Chase, who was beside her in the front passenger seat, ‘when is the wedding?’
Chase half laughed. ‘You know, so many people keep asking us that, I think we might actually have to come up with an answer sometime.’
‘Are you married, Karima?’ Nina asked. The Arab woman was wearing several ornate rings, but Nina wasn’t sure whether they had any significance or were simply jewellery.
‘No, I’m not,’ she replied, glancing back, ‘but there is someone. The problem is getting him to make a commitment.’
‘I know that feeling,’ said Nina. Chase snorted.
They drove for over two hours, Nina using the time to continue the crash course in Arthurian mythology she had begun during the flights. Karima eventually turned off the highway and guided them along a succession of increasingly bumpy back roads. Finally, they bounced to a stop in a village so tiny Nina suspected the handful of tumbledown houses wouldn’t even rate a dot on a map. Around it, the desert stretched off forebodingly in all directions. The sun was a bloated red ball shimmering above the western horizon.
‘This is as far as we drive,’ said Karima, climbing out. The others followed, stretching and working the kinks out of their rattled spines. ‘The border is about eight kilometres north of here.’
Nina stared into the distance, seeing nothing but rocks and the occasional scrubby bush poking above the sand. ‘We’re walking?’
‘No, no! But the Syrians watch out for vehicles that cross the border away from the official checkpoints. So we need another kind of transport.’ She led them round one of the buildings.
‘What kind of transport . . .’ Nina began to ask, tailing off as she saw the answer. ‘Oh.’
Waiting for them were four camels.
An Arab man in dusty robes stood with them, beaming when he saw Karima. They exchanged greetings, then she turned back to the group. ‘This is Attayak - he’s from one of the local Bedouin tribes.’ Nina noticed that in addition to a gun and a knife, he had a walkie-talkie and a GPS handset on his belt: clearly the Bedouin had no problem with incorporating modern technology into their traditional lifestyle. ‘There aren’t many nomad tribes left, but the ones that are cross the border all the time - they have lived here for thousands of years, and don’t care about lines on a map. Most of the time, the Syrians ignore them. Which is very useful if you want to enter the country undetected. As Eddie knows.’
