Garment of Shadows (26 page)

Now it was dark, and I was walking up a hill. With Mahmoud. Precisely the companion one wants in a dark dream, solid and competent.

When the road turned, I saw below us a scattering of lights, climbing the slopes of the wide hollow. Some lights moved, suggesting the lamps of travellers in the medina. Off to the south was an area of greater, and stronger, lights: There, people had electricity.

Underfoot was a road, grit crunching under my boots. The sky had cleared, with the bright half-moon sufficient to keep us from walking off the cliffs. The moon—and the head-lamps of the unmoving motorcar, half a mile distant on the road above.

I had been asking Mahmoud about Lyautey, this French Maréchal we were about to meet, but he had seemed distracted. Now he stopped, studying the motionless beams for a moment. I heard a faint sound, as if he sighed. “I will go forward. You wait here, out of the light. If there is trouble, I will need you.”

I slid my hand into my robes, on one side the comforting solidity of the revolver, on the other the weight of the knuckle-duster I had fashioned from a scrap of copper pipe found as we came through Fez el-Jdid earlier in the day. “You expect trouble?”

His hand came up, following the scar that ran from left eye to beard. “One always expects trouble,” he said absently.

“Who else would this be, but Lyautey?”

“Still. You have the paper?”

“The scrap? Of course.”

“Give it to me.”

“Mahmoud, what is going on?”

“Show me,” he insisted.

Impatiently, I dug around in various pockets until I came out with the bit of onionskin on which he had sketched a brief illustration earlier, to show me the place along the route where, if there was an ambush, it might be. He’d told me, he said over coffee, simply because it was foolish not to. One never knew when a brick would fall out of the sky or a soldier would decide to make an arrest.

This demand for reassurance suddenly placed a lot more weight on the possibility of his disappearance.

“Mahmoud, if this is a trap, let’s stop right now.”

He said nothing, but there was sufficient brightness to see that his hand was out.

Asking to “see” the paper scrap was somewhat pointless in the dark, but I pulled it out, flicking it back and forth to prove its existence. His hand came over mine, removing the little triangle, wrinkling it until he was satisfied that it was the correct one. Then he thrust it back into my pocket, and turned away.

“Stay here. I will call when I am sure it is safe.”

“Don’t be long,” I said. “I’m half-frozen.”

His footsteps went ahead of me, towards the motorcar, not hesitating even as the light blinded him. It was, it would seem, the correct motor: Maréchal Lyautey, making a brief stop in his incredibly busy day for an appointment with a man he had met but once. I could hear Mahmoud’s feet over the low idle of the engine. His black silhouette grew, robes tugged by the breeze coming up the hillside.

The wind made me shiver. I squatted down to give it less of a target. Listening to Mahmoud’s footsteps recede, watching his long-stretched outline grow along the road and then disappear as he reached the motorcar, hearing his voice speak a question, my left hand held the revolver while the fingers of my right hand idly explored the ground at my feet, picked up a couple of conveniently-sized stones, and—without my thinking much about it—slipped them in the nearest pocket. Except that when I did so, there seemed to be one there already: a bump, where none had been before. My eyes watched the road while my fingers let go of the stones to explore this foreign object: a lump, with a crinkle around it—the scrap of paper, and …

I leapt upright, and my cry loosed an explosion.

“Mahmoud!” I screamed, and many things happened at once. The flash from his revolver imprinted a sense of struggling figures; voices began to shout. I ran, the revolver useless with Mahmoud up there and invisible. But before I had covered ten yards, the engine sound changed and the twin beams ahead of me swept over the road, splashing across me for a moment before they returned, seeking me out, blinding me as they drew rapidly closer.

Hand raised against the brilliance, I leapt behind a boulder just off the road, where the driver would have to risk flying off the mountainside if he wanted to run me down. Gun in one hand and knife in the other, I turned my head from the searing brightness, and waited for the impact.

Instead, a mad scuffle of hard braking made the motor veer wildly back and forth until it came to a halt, thirty feet away, its head-lamps shining at the opposite hillside. Voices, one of them sharp, commanding, even furious. After a moment came the sound of a man jumping down to the road. I crouched in silence, waiting for him, and for the dazzle to clear from my eyes.

Steady footsteps came down the roadway, on a line between me and the motor, forcing me to hold my fire. More harsh words came, in the language I did not understand. No response from the man on foot. The car stayed where it was, facing the upper hill, engine idling. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the man drew nearer.

The situation was perplexing: They must have guns—everyone in Morocco seemed to have one. Why not just pin me in the head-lamps and shoot me? Either they wanted to capture me alive, or they feared attracting attention: One or two gunshots might go overlooked, but not a blazing battle. Which meant that the man coming towards me either bore a silent weapon—against the gun they would assume I, too, carried—or he had been given the task of drawing me out. With a torch, perhaps, to guide the aim of a comrade at his back …

The threats of an angry commander with a rifle might also explain the reluctance of the footsteps—I might almost have suspected that the approaching man was a bound and gagged Mahmoud, were I not certain that he’d have contrived to give me a clue. No, this was a different kind of sacrificial goat—not a captive, but one of their own.

As my eyes cleared, the approaching figure’s stance betrayed the weapon in his hand.

Moving with stealth, I laid down the revolver. The steps slowed, and stopped, twenty feet away. He listened for my breathing, then I heard the sound of fabric shifting, and I moved.

Half a second after the beam from his hand-torch came on, my rock knocked the torch to the ground.

But he’d had the torch in his left hand, and as I closed with him, his right hand came up fast.

I was lucky, both that he could not see well, and that he was not used to left-handed opponents. His blade sliced fire across my upper arm before I danced back, but my hand was alive with the awareness that my own knife had cut deep: I had done more damage than he.

He staggered away, calling out to the motorcar. Gears clashed and the beams drew back from the facing hillside, but the moment the head–lamps appeared, the first of my missiles clattered off the metal fender. The second went wide, but the third hit home, splintering one glass head-lamp into darkness while they pulled their wounded colleague inside. Then the engine roared as the driver realised the danger, and the remaining beam was rushing at me, swerving back and forth to avoid my stones. At the last instant, I threw myself to the side.

But either I’d left it too late, or a twitch on the steering wheel brought them a fraction too close. The front fender brushed beneath my arms like a bull under a toreador, and the running board slid past my legs, but as the metal body travelled down my garments, some portion reached out to snatch me, pulling me in and slamming my head a great blow.

I stepped into the dark, and was gone.

I woke, again. It was cold. I was thirsty.

This time, the darkness was absolute.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-TWO

S
herlock Holmes did not look back. One would think, he reflected, that a person could grow accustomed to walking away from a wife who might be headed towards danger (Russell?
Might?
) but after nearly four years of marriage, he had yet to learn indifference. Although considering her general state, the last thing he wished was for her to accompany him. He’d end up with her collapsed on the road, and having to purchase a donkey across which to sling her.

Still, in her stead he had been given an almost ideal travelling companion, one who would not interrupt with questions that were either imbecilic (at the one extreme) or overly perceptive (at the other), one whose very passivity was a strength. One for whom there was no distracting attachment: no hostage to fortune, no emotional grit in the machinery.

“Do you know how to whistle?” he asked the boy. The voiceless lad glanced at him without comprehension, so Holmes repeated the question—and in case his Arabic vocabulary was faulty, he followed with a brief demonstration.

In response, Idir pursed his lips and blew, with no result.

So as they walked, Holmes demonstrated first simple tunes, then the piercing blare made by a pair of fingers. Idir’s were filthy, but efficient, and he soon mastered both a breathy warble of notes and a short blast.

“Very good,” Holmes said. “Now you have a means of attracting attention. Your next task is to find us a place to sleep for the night. Preferably with a roof.”

The boy gave him a sideways glance, then gestured at his mouth with pinched-together fingers.

“By all means, we must have a meal.”

The fingers rubbed together, the universal symbol for cash.

“I have a little money, yes.”

The child was of an age when responsibility came as a gift; he walked on with a bounce in his step and a whistle on his lips.

Holmes’ plan was simple: to talk, and to listen. The fabric of social interactions in this country was closely woven, and if a group of men had lingered in the vicinity of a motorcar, waiting for a message that would send them to an abduction, elements of that series of events would make them stand out: access to a motorcar, a means of receiving a message (be it by hand, telegraph, or telephone), and a place where a minimum of three men might wait for that message.

A town was the most obvious place to find all three elements. In this part of the country, that meant either the outskirts of Fez, the growing town of Mequinez, or the hillside town of Moulay Idriss. If their opponents were followers of Raisuli, it suggested a degree of religious conservatism that might feel more at home in the last of those.

Fez itself he would leave to Russell: As he’d told her, he and the boy were too liable to be recognised there. And if his veteran beekeeper’s mind persisted in its vision of a hive turning to attack an invader, well, there was little he could do about it now except trust to Russell’s skills.

The route he and the boy would follow took them beyond Russell’s spheres of Fez el-Bali and Fez el-Jdid. As he had seen from the train, clusters of buildings lay along the road between Fez and Mequinez, each too small to be considered a village but incorporating the occasional garage, café, and telegraph connexion. Beyond Mequinez, one could describe a circle back to Fez through Moulay Idriss, but the final leg of that route sounded little better than a mule-track; it was not impossible that the motorcar had originated in the mountain fastness of Idriss I, but unlikely.

In any event, taking the slower southern way would let him pick up a few accoutrements—an inexpensive leather bag to sling across his chest, a worn prayer rug, a bright embroidered cap the boy eyed with envy—and to polish his rôle. It would also permit the local bush telegraph system to lay the ground before he faced the more demanding audience of Moulay Idriss.

But that would be tomorrow. Frankly—although he’d never say as much to Russell—he ached. It had been a long day in the saddle. And walking, which had begun as a relief, held little appeal with more than thirty miles before him.

Whatever his young companion’s background, the lad was well versed on the ways of the road. Within the hour, they were tucking into a greasy lamb
tagine
at a roadside eatery, the proprietor somewhat reassured by the appearance of coins on the table: Holy men were all well and good, but one didn’t give a wandering
marabout
a place by the fire and the choicer bits of meat if he wasn’t paying for it.

A Moroccan
marabout
could be anything from a highly respected
madrassa
teacher to the keeper of a scruffy roadside shrine (the word even meant the shrine itself). In the south, where the temperature was less deadly for those forced to sleep rough, Holmes had seen a number of raving madmen who were thought touched by God. His own form of
marabout
was that of an itinerant pilgrim, on a tour of holy places to honour a vow made when a grandson’s life was spared. And to give him an excuse to engage the locals in conversation, he would produce amulets for them, Qur’anic verses written on paper, folded into shapes he had learnt in Japan.

“Do they not look at camels, how they are made?” was folded into a vestigial face with a long neck. “And your Lord inspired the bee, from whose bellies comes a healing drink, a sign for all who give thought” became a quite recognisable honeybee. And for a patron so loud and stupid, one might have thought alcohol was being served, he folded the verse “He who claims to worship Allah but does not follow His Law is like the donkey laden with books, who does not understand the wisdom” inside a long face with two ears.