The trio rode steadily, eating their meals in the saddle, pausing only to feed and water the horses. By midday the sun had soothed away Sophia’s tremor. Lucy and Patrick, meanwhile, sweated beneath their riding clothes, and drank often from their water-skins. Sophia knew they were looking forward to Cappadocia, where the sun wouldn’t broil them alive. Sophia had grown genuinely fond of the Williamses, who seemed eternally willing to ride horses and camels and vertiginous mountainside rail-cars, and to eat whatever unfamiliar foods were placed before them. And the Williamses, for their part, had grown to trust Sophia enough to loosen their vigilance here and there, bestowing her an hour to browse alone at a souk, or a solitary morning at a café. Sophia used these brief spells of freedom to make quick inquiries among the local healers, or to ask in the spice-stalls about rare ingredients and rumored cures. To her knowledge the Williamses had never caught on; still, she disliked risking their trust. Even now, they must send their regular reports to New York, describing Sophia’s general behavior and her continued eschewing of male company. Demeaning, for a woman of twenty-five to be written up like a girl at a finishing school—but the funding of her travels depended upon the Williamses’ good opinion, and Sophia never let herself forget it.
It was nearly evening when they passed over the ridge and down into the Valley of the Tombs, at the western outskirts of Palmyra. In the distance stood a lattice of columns and low walls, the stone ribs of a toppled city. They rode along the Great Colonnade, past towering groups of pillars and the half-crumbled amphitheater, and Sophia tried, as always, to imagine how it once had been: the wide, palm-lined avenues, the market-stalls where merchants traded in half a dozen languages.
At the end of the Colonnade stood the largest of Palmyra’s surviving buildings, and the city’s still-beating heart: the Temple of Bel, its high, fortresslike walls now home to a sizable Bedu village. And here were the British tourists, only just arrived: a dozen uniformed officers and their wives, all clustered before the temple gate. Nearby, their retinue of Punjabi servants was setting up camp, unpacking the provisions and raising silk-trimmed tents while a herd’s worth of camels grazed and napped. The officers stood with a dark-robed sheikh who’d come out to meet them, displaying for him the gifts they’d brought; Sophia spied a stag-handled carving set, and a china teapot painted with Scottish thistles. One of the officers had a camera, and was coaxing the sheikh to pose with the gifts when Sophia’s horse nickered. As one the group turned to gape at the approaching trio: the older pair with their holstered rifles and dust-stained leathers, and the pale young woman in her split skirt and dark shawls.
The sheikh, however, brightened at the sight of them. He abandoned the delegation and approached the riders, calling out greetings. The trio dismounted, Sophia smiling and answering in kind. The sheikh motioned to a boy loitering near the temple gate, and the boy hurried to take their horses’ reins and lead them toward grazing ground. The sheikh gestured toward the gate—and with barely a backward glance at the indignant officers, the three were ushered inside.
“So she told you nothing,” Patrick said to Lucy.
The two lay together in their tent, which they’d pitched in a corner of the temple courtyard. Sophia’s tent was some distance away, in a spot where the stones were still warm from the day’s heat. Lucy had checked on her before retiring, and found her deeply asleep.
“Only that she’d slept ‘well enough,’ whatever that means,” Lucy replied. “Nothing about wandering off alone in the dark, and then having herself a good cry afterward.”
“I asked about the old healer-woman,” Patrick said. “She died this winter.”
Lucy sighed. “Can’t say I’m surprised. She had to be eighty, at least.”
Silence, for a moment. Then Patrick said, “Whatever the old woman was giving her . . . do you think it truly helped?”
“You mean, or is it all in her mind?”
Patrick shrugged, uncomfortable.
“I think,” Lucy said, “it doesn’t much matter in the end. She suffers either way.”
He considered this. “True enough. And I suppose we’re making it worse for her, dragging her north to Cappadocia for the summer.”
“Just like Ankara last summer, and Armenia the summer before,” Lucy murmured. “She ought to stay here instead—but how would you and I do our jobs, half dead from the heat?”
“Well, maybe it’s time we stopped.”
A long pause, as each took careful stock of his words.
“You mean, quit?” A glimmer of hope had entered Lucy’s voice.
He smiled. “You’ve been thinking it, too?”
“Of course I have. She’s twenty-five, Patrick. You and I were married younger than that. It isn’t natural, what her parents are making her do, and I’m starting to hate myself for being a part of it.”
He nodded. “And here’s another thing. The two of us aren’t getting any younger, either. These are the best years we’ve got left, and we’re spending them eating in the saddle and sleeping on stones. We’ve enough money in the bank to retire for good, and I’d say we’ve earned it.”
“So what do we do? We can’t just leave her. She needs someone.”
He thought a minute. “Remember that guide in Homs, the one who showed us around the mosques and the citadel? Used to be a dragoman?”
“Abu Alim,” Lucy said. “I liked him.”
“So, someone like that, maybe.”
“And if we’re wrong?” Lucy said darkly. “Who’ll protect her then?”
“We’ll teach her what we know,” Patrick said. “And then, she can protect herself.”
A few months later, the Williamses sent word to their employers that they wished to
