Garment of Shadows (27 page)

At first, the men in the ramshackle wayside café were wary, receiving the small paper figures with bewilderment. But when he showed no indications of greater lunacy than giving away what he claimed were amulets, and was amiable in conversation, they slowly relaxed, and their tongues as well.

Talk was of the French soldiers, being drawn from all over Morocco to the encampment south of the city. Soon, they would march into the Rif. In the meantime, there was the thrill of the aeroplanes that rose and disappeared out over the mountains, to return to earth on the flat strip the French had caused to be laid. The younger men were eager for the fighting to begin; the older men (a man here was truly old at fifty) had a pang for the planting season, but all agreed that Abd el-Krim was sure to turn his once-Spanish guns on the French before long.

Holmes permitted the talk to run for a time on what were clearly well-worn grooves, before giving tiny nudges. Many Unbelievers must have come with the French, he supposed. Yes, they were indeed curious, he had seen that himself. But in his own village (vague, to the east, somewhere) when the Unbelievers came, it seemed to open the door to other strange men. Small groups of men, who asked odd and urgent questions. Men who seemed in a hurry. Men who were there, and gone. And their motorcars—roaring through villages at all hours, threatening life and livestock.

The very opposite of this amiable pilgrim, who was in no hurry to do anything but press into the hand of every person in the room a scrap of Arabic-inscribed paper folded into the shape of a bird or a tree or, once, the frog whose verse—“We sent a flood, and locusts and lice, frogs and blood, as signs, but they were an arrogant and criminal people”—had sparked the discussion of an influx of criminal types.

Nor was the pilgrim in a hurry to leave. He drained his final glass of tea, laid a few more coins on the low table, and wrapped his burnoose snugly around him. When the proprietor gave a final glance into his café, he saw the aged
marabout
, his long fingers playing along the beads of his
tasbih
, staring into the embers of the low-burning brazier.

Ah well, thought Holmes: Not every cast hooks a winner. These men had neither been questioned by intruders searching for Mahmoud Hazr, nor had they taken note of a fleeing motorcar, late on Thursday night.

An enemy scarcely required formal spies here, he reflected, not with half the populace in and out of the homes, offices, and military bases. And perhaps he was too near Fez for the residents of this hamlet to take note of an evening motorcar. Ten years ago, yes, but in this fast-moving world of 1924, even rural villagers were technological sophisticates.

In the morning, he and Idir were on their way again. They walked along the dusty road towards Mequinez, the only likely route for a motor abduction, stopping regularly for tea and talk, venturing a mile or two down likely side-roads. Whenever he heard a distant reminder from a muezzin, he paused to take out his scrap of carpet and say his prayers.

Idir took these for granted. As a child, he was not required to join in, but he watched with interest the first few times, and after that, accepted it as part of the day’s routine.

The lad reminded Holmes of the young street Arabs he had paid to act as Irregulars in his Baker Street days. And like those lads, one could only speculate about this one’s history and inner life. The boy was intelligent, no doubt of that. And while he seemed content to stay with this adult to whom he had been assigned, he also seemed to have his own private matters to attend to. It was a bit like walking a business-like and energetic retriever who spent more time casting to and fro in the shrubs and by-ways than at heel. Fortunately, again like the retriever, Idir had an instinct for when his companion was about to change direction, and the bright cap would come trotting back into view.

It proved a congenial way to travel, permitting Holmes adequate time for meditation over what he found during the course of the day: a garage that sold petrol, run by a wizened shopkeeper and his six grandsons; a car hire agency, run by a Jewish woman in trousers; a dozen shops with public telephones; countless small cafés where men might have waited for darkness; and any number of narrow roads that would have performed the same function.

Nowhere did his understated questions about men in motorcars strike an answer.

Very well: They had originated in a centre of greater population, where men waiting in motors were too commonplace to notice. Therefore, what was required were more specific, and hence more dangerous, questions.

Darkness and Mequinez approached simultaneously. Mequinez had been a small backwater town until the opening of a railway station, when modern life began to pump in energy. The town’s disproportionately vast ruins traced the palaces and mosques, stables and pavilions of terrible old Sultan Moulay Ismaïl, who had fought off Turk and European alike, wrapped an iron fist around the country with his army of Black Guards, entertained himself by acts of extreme cruelty, and employed Christian slaves as either beasts of burden or sources of income. Now it had the beginnings of industry and the drawing room
salons
of an expatriate European community.

More immediately, it had facilities for native (and seemingly native) travellers. He hired beds at a
funduq
, wishing it had been a British inn built above a public house with a good claret, and took his footsore self down the road to an eating establishment, asking his increasingly tedious questions over glasses of cloying mint tea, skewers of overspiced chicken, and plates of dry couscous. At the end of the fruitless exercise, he and Idir returned to their hired beds and curled up in their
djellabas
. He hoped they didn’t catch some loathsome malady from the cushions.

By noon, he was well finished with Mequinez. As they walked north, a mule-cart came rattling behind them, and the driver called out to see if the pilgrim would like a ride.

He was a burly, one-eyed farmer who had seen Holmes and Idir in the market that morning, where he had gone to deliver a load of reeds. Holmes glanced thoughtfully at the road ahead of them, noting its almost complete lack of garages, cafés, or shops containing public telephones, and tossed the boy onto the cart’s flat back. He climbed up beside the man, who whipped his mule into a bone-jarring trot and launched into a monologue about reeds, mules, wives, children, and the state of the country. Holmes rode along, nodding at appropriate spots, idly folding a piece of paper while smoking one of the farmer’s hand-rolled cigarettes—a tobacco so powerful it made his tongue go numb. Idir sat watching the road roll out behind them, his feet dangling free, practising his whistles.

When the man paused for breath, Holmes handed him the amulet, then managed to slip in a question about motorcars. But though the farmer had much to say about them, he had no specific knowledge.

The man was heading more or less in the direction of Moulay Idriss. The road turned north, bringing into view an unlikely piece of architecture, away in the distance.

“Is that the ancient city of the Romans?” he asked the man.

The man followed Holmes’ eyes to what could only be a triumphal arch and began a detailed story about the time his wife had got it into her head that what their farmyard needed was a stone entranceway and how much time he’d had to spend hauling blocks out of the place until she was satisfied.

Clearly, not a student of archaeology.

On the other hand, the arch piqued Idir’s curiosity. When they were on the ground and the man had whipped his mule back into a trot, Idir tugged at Holmes’ sleeve, looking a question at him.

Holmes glanced at the sun, and at the distance to the white city of Moulay Idriss. They’d made better time than he had reckoned, and after two days of pointless questioning he doubted he would strike gold here; so why not permit the boy some entertainment?

He nodded, and Idir skipped ahead in pleasure. Fifty metres down the road he bent to pick up something; when Holmes caught up, he saw the boy scowling in mighty disapproval, working to smooth a wadded bit of paper back into shape.

Holmes’ amulet for the cart driver had been a mule.

“Do you know what this is?” Holmes addressed the lad.

Idir waggled both hands on the sides of his head.

“Not the amulet, the buildings. They’re Roman.”

A quick lift of one eyebrow indicated that the lad was listening.

“Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, even before the birth of the Prophet Mohammed (blessed be he), there was a great empire sprung from the city of Rome, in Italy. You know Italy?”

A shrug.

“The empire stretched across the known world, from England to India, and across the north of Africa to here. Here, and a town down near Rabat, were the empire’s south-western boundaries.”

He told the lad stories of Roman emperors for a time, and soon they were craning their necks at the stone arch topped by a stork’s untidy nest, a monument that would surely collapse at the next minor tremor. Volubilis was a vast tract of scattered blocks and broken columns, with but a portion of the city under archaeological excavation. The miracle was that any portion of the original remained to be studied: for centuries, local building projects had made use of all this conveniently prehewn rock as a quarry. Much of Mequinez had been built of Volubilis stone—Holmes had spotted the odd block and column along the road, discarded by grateful slaves upon news of the old Sultan’s death. More recently, a small-scale railway had been driven through the site, to speed the pillaging.

Holmes sat down on a block that had thus far remained in situ, smoking a cigarette while Idir scuffed at some grass from a bit of mosaic pavement, squatting to prise up a few of the stones.

The curator’s house, surrounded by gardens, terraces, and decorative pergolas, was currently a centre of activity. A cluster of Europeans including three women consulted with several Army officers. Holmes watched, but stayed where he was, not wishing to be driven away with a stick or arrested for permitting the boy to rob the site. When his cigarette was finished, he dusted his clothing and turned back to the road, prayer beads in hand, making for the splash of white buildings surmounting the pair of hill-tops above.

The town of Moulay Idriss was
haram
—sacred, or forbidden, a holy place suited for mystics. It contained the tomb of Sultan Idris I, a direct descendent of the Prophet, who came to Morocco in the year 789, married a local woman, and laid the foundations of Fez. The little town was conservative to the point of xenophobia, welcome home to extremists and fanatics; only very recently had foreigners even been permitted entrance. The shrine was a natural goal for any Moslem pilgrim; it was also a place where an unmasked European might expect to meet harsh hands.

Idir caught him up, chewing on an apple he had either begged or stolen from the Europeans.

“We need to take care in this place,” Holmes told him. “They are very proud, and not loving of strangers.”

The lad looked at him sideways, clearly understanding all too well what that meant. The enthusiasm went out of him as they drew near the town, the sun beginning to throw their shadows ahead on the steep road. He stayed close by Holmes’ side for a time as they followed the flow of bodies towards the central square. But when the inhabitants did not instantly leap on them with cudgels, and when Holmes settled into a native café under one of the main square’s arcades, where the air was rich with the odour of grilling meat, some of the tension left the lad. After a few moments fidgeting on a bench, he wandered off to study the wares of the fruit merchant, then stood watching the sawdust flying from a hand-drill as old as civilisation, but he kept one eye on Holmes, and trotted back as soon as the food appeared.

When their plates were empty and the glass of tea had been refilled, Holmes drew out his pencil and the paper again. For the next three hours he produced a series of origami shapes with Arabic script at their hearts, and never had to pay for his own refill of tea. He made it clear that he was no beggar—he did not accept coins for his paper amulets—but in the end, the café’s customers paid in gossip. Idir’s initial trepidation gave way to boredom, and he wandered in and out, as was his habit.

Holmes did not expect to hear news of a motorcar racing through Moulay Idriss, considering the state of the back road to Fez. However, to catch the scent of a politically-based abduction, a town of fanatics seemed as good a place to begin as any.

Love for Lyautey and his French Protectorate was thin on the ground here, despite general agreement that the French trade fairs were worthy additions to the country’s festivities, and that French roads simplified travel to market, and the medical clinics had saved the lives of their sons. When Holmes dropped gentle mention of the northern rebellion, as he had suspected, there proved to be mixed affection for Abd el-Krim: The Emir took a satisfyingly strong stand against the foreign oppressor, but he was both a commoner, and from a tribe that was already too powerful for their neighbours’ comfort.

Raisuli, though …

“I am told that the Sherif is ill,” Holmes commented as he wrote a careful verse.

A pool of quiet spread around him. When he finished the line, he looked up to find the men around him studying their finger-nails and gazing into their glasses.

So: Raisuli had friends here. And even those who loved him not hesitated to venture a criticism. Clearly he, or his son, or perhaps merely his followers, were a force to be reckoned with.

“It was merely a rumour I heard in Fez,” he said. “It may be untrue,
insh’Allah
.”

The chorus of agreement confirmed the tenor of their support.

“I was also told that the Resident General has been ill. Although when he was pointed out to me in the medina, he looked quite hearty.”

This took the conversation neatly sideways for a time, into wide-ranging speculation as to who might replace the Maréchal and what difference it would bring. Only when the conversation had looped around to the changes in village life under the French did Holmes drop in his question about dangerous motorcars and inquisitive strangers.