O Jerusalem Read online

  Praise for

  O JERUSALEM

  “King’s considerable talent makes history virtually leap

  off the page.… READERS CAN’T LOSE.”

  —Booklist

  “King’s impeccable research combines with her

  colorful, fully drawn characters to make this

  ANOTHER MEMORABLE ADDITION TO A

  STRONG SERIES.”

  —Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

  “The portrait of the region and of Jerusalem is

  IRRESISTIBLE.… A story that is part spy, part

  murder mystery … and part thriller moving to AN

  EXPLOSIVE CLIMAX.”

  —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  “VIVID … a SATISFYING and dramatic

  conclusion.”

  —Library Journal

  Praise for Russell and Holmes’s

  previous adventures

  THE BEEKEEPER’S APPRENTICE

  Editor’s Choice of 1994,

  The Drood Review of Mystery

  “Wonderful: an intelligently and imaginatively crafted

  novel that’s also great fun.”

  “ROUSING … RIVETING … SUSPENSEFUL.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “REMARKABLY BEGUILING.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Worthy and welcome, with the power to charm the

  most grizzled Baker Street Irregular.”

  —Daily News, New York

  A MONSTROUS

  REGIMENT OF WOMEN

  “AS AUDACIOUS AS IT IS ENTERTAINING AND

  MOVING.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “BEGUILING … TANTALIZING.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST … Enormously

  appealing … Rich in atmosphere and a plot that

  will keep the reader breathing hard.”

  —Mostly Murder

  A LETTER OF MARY

  “A LIVELY ADVENTURE IN THE VERY BEST OF

  INTELLECTUAL COMPANY.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “The great marvel of King’s series is that she’s

  managed to preserve the integrity of Holmes’s

  character and yet somehow conjure up a woman

  astute, edgy, and compelling enough to be the partner

  of his mind as well as his heart. … SUPERB.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “SUSPENSEFUL … Laurie R. King takes England

  and literature’s most famous detective with masterful

  aplomb. I loved it.”

  —Elizabeth George

  “AN INTELLECTUAL PUZZLER, full of bright red

  herrings and DAZZLING asides.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  THE MOOR

  “THERE’S NO RESISTING THE APPEAL OF

  KING’S THRILLINGLY MOODY SCENES OF

  DARTMOOR and her lovely evocations of its legends.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “ERUDITE, FASCINATING … by all odds the most

  successful recreation of the famous inhabitant of

  221B Baker Street ever attempted.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “King has the tone, mood, and voice precisely right.

  … Very good—AS SATISFYING AT THIS TIME OF

  YEAR AS A TRULY RICH FRUITCAKE.”

  —The Boston Globe

  Raves for King’s stand-alone thriller

  A DARKER PLACE

  “Laurie R. King delivers a story that … casts a spell

  of psychological terror more visceral than any serial

  killer melodrama that, for the thoughtful reader, offers

  intellectual rewards as well.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A nail-biter thriller.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A literary thriller to end all literary thrillers.”

  —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  “A terrific book. The many fans of Laurie R. King’s

  two series … will not regret that she takes us in a

  different direction and to a ‘darker place.’ A real

  page-turner.”

  —The Drood Review of Mystery

  “King is an original and skilled writing talent, and

  Waverly is one of the more fascinating new

  protagonists to come along.”

  —The Plain Dealer, Cleveland

  “Murky, complex, deeply disturbing and aptly titled

  … Highly original.”

  —The Denver Post

  “King always writes well, and her stories sweep along

  with an inexorable force that comes from a power

  greater than mere skillful plotting. … A DARKER

  PLACE is a fine study of sympathy and how it clouds

  our judgment about integrity.”

  —The Boston Globe

  abayya a robe worn over a long skirt or loose trousers and shirt

  afreet a demon or troublesome imp

  agahl a heavy ropelike wrap that holds the kuffiyah on the head

  aleikum es-salaam a greeting (response to salaam aleikum)

  bakshish a payment, tip, bribe, or donation

  burkah a concealing woman’s garment

  effendi an honorary address

  fellah/fellahin peasant, countryman

  firengi a foreigner, a “Frank”

  Ghor the low-lying Jordan River valley

  imam Muslim religious leader

  insh’allah a saying: if it is God’s will

  kuffiyah a loose headcloth

  laban a drink of sour milk or diluted yogurt

  maalesh a saying: oh, well …

  muezzin the man who calls the faithful to prayer from a mosque

  mukhtar headman of a village

  mullah a Muslim religious leader

  narghile a water pipe

  saj curved sheet of steel used to cook flat bread over a fire

  salaam aleikum a greeting: peace be with you

  sitt Mrs., Madam

  souk or suq bazaar

  wadi water-cut valley, often dry but for sudden floods

  wallah! an expression of surprise: by God!

  ya walud an expression of greeting or to call attention

  Baedeker’s guide to Palestine and Syria, 1912 edition

  The Muqaddimah (Preface and Book One) of the sweeping History written by the brilliant fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldûn. These quotations have been reworded slightly for the sake of brevity by the present editor.

  Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers

  The Holy Qur’an

  If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,

  let my right hand forget its cunning.

  PSALM 137:5

  he story that follows is a chapter in the life of Mary Russell, whose handwritten manuscripts I was sent some years ago (along with a puzzling collection of other objects, most of which have their explanations within the manuscripts themselves). The present volume, however, is published out of sequence, as it describes events that took place in 1919, during the period of the story I transcribed and published as The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. The Russell/Holmes saga has now reached 1923 with The Moor; yet in the current work, O Jerusalem, Russell is still little more than the great detective’s apprentice.

  There are two reasons for this break in the proper order. One is simply that when I first read the manuscript, an entire section seemed to be missing, creating a gap I was not able to bridge until twenty-three neatly typed pages arrived in my mailbox, with a Slovenian stamp canceled in the city of Ljubljana. (Yet another oddity in the already mystifying provenance of these manuscripts.) Secondly,
even without the since-closed gap, the current story links up closely with another manuscript dating to the winter of 1923–1924, to be published in the near future. Thematically, the pair forms a neater sequence than if O Jerusalem had been inserted second into the series.

  A word about this story’s setting may be in order. In January of 1919, the Palestine that Ms. Russell entered was freshly under British authority. The previous October, British forces had broken the back of German/Turkish control over the area. The year before that, in late 1917, the holy city of Jerusalem had been freed from four centuries of Turkish control. The Paris peace talks opened on January 1, 1919, bringing together Emir Feisal, T. E. Lawrence, Chaim Weizmann, and the other authorities charged with hammering out policy and boundaries, while in the Middle East itself, unrest continued to seethe in a climate of tragic misunderstanding coupled with basic disagreement. In March, rebellion broke out in Egypt; in April, five Jews and four Arabs were killed in a series of outbursts; in September, a riot took place in Jerusalem.

  The twentieth century is only the latest chapter of bloodshed in the story of the Middle East, for the history of Palestine is a litany of warfare. The Hyksos and the Egyptians, the Philistines and the Assyrians, Egypt again and Babylon were followed by Alexander, the Seleucids, and the Romans. Persian gave way to Moslem Arab, Crusader failed to hold it against Saladin; even Napoleon tried to take Palestine, losing a war to fly-borne eye disease.

  In the midst of all this fighting, in the early centuries of the struggle for control over this precious land bridge connecting three continents, the small walled town of Jerusalem came into being. Built around a spring in the desert hills, on a patch of rocky ground amid three valleys, there the people lived, and there they built their holy place. Weapons evolved from bronze to iron, the city wall grew thicker and higher, and eventually, with tremendous feats of engineering that ensured the supply of water during a siege, the town shifted uphill from the life-giving spring. The holy place at its center remained.

  The Temple that defined early Judaism, the center of cultic worship, was laid atop a hill. Over the centuries the Temple was damaged and repaired, devastated and rebuilt anew. In the first century of the Common Era, a troublesome rabbi and carpenter from Nazareth was paraded alongside the walls of the holy enclosure, to be executed on a hill across one of the valleys. Forty years later, the Temple was finally razed, its stones overturned, the city laid waste, its surviving population dispersed. Two and a half centuries later, the Roman Empire converted, to follow the rabbi it had executed, and under the resulting Byzantines, Jerusalem became a Christian city in a Christian country.

  Then Islam rose up out of the south and covered the land, and the followers of the Prophet Muhammad claimed the Temple Mount as their own holy ground, and built on it their houses of worship, ornate and intricate, passionate expressions of geometry and color. Crusaders arrived and were thrown out; the Mamelukes ruled; and the Ottoman Empire reached out from the north to occupy the land as far as the Red Sea, until that empire too became corrupt and weak. In the second decade of the twentieth century General Edmund Allenby pitted his clever mind against the dying empire and in September 1918 achieved his victory in the fields of Armageddon. The British declared a protectorate over Palestine, and began the process of impossible decision-making—decisions whose effects and implications have shuddered through the years to the present day.

  There is, I am obliged to say, no clear evidence that the following tale is true. Granted, many of the people mentioned in it did exist, and most of the physical landmarks described by Ms. Russell—the Cotton Grotto and the Haram es-Sherîf, the cisterns, streets and public baths, the monasteries in the desert—are there to this day. Even the Western Wall was then as she describes it, a dank stone courtyard measuring some fifty yards long and ten deep, crowded round by the high dwellings of impoverished North African Muslims. Still, there is no proof that this heretofore unknown chapter of Israel’s history actually took place.

  Then again, there is no proof it did not.

  —Laurie R. King

  The education of a scholar is greatly benefited by travelling in the pursuit of knowledge and to meet the authorities of his age.

  —THE Muqaddimah OF IBN KHALDÛN

  uring the final week of December 1918, shortly before my nineteenth birthday, I vanished into British-occupied Palestine in the company of my friend and mentor Sherlock Holmes. The reasons for our temporary exile I have given elsewhere,∗ but as that adventure had almost no bearing on what we did while we were in the Middle East, I need not go into it in any detail here. Suffice it to say that our Holy Land sojourn was by way of being a retreat, distressingly near ignominious, a means of distancing ourselves from a disastrous field of battle—England—while we patched the wounds that our bodies and our self-respect had sustained and assembled plans for the next stages of that campaign.

  We entered the country, a British protectorate since the autumn’s triumphs over the Turks, under the auspices of Sherlock Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, an enigmatic and occasionally alarming figure whose authority within His Majesty’s government was as immense as it was undefined. Given the necessity of our temporary absence from the United Kingdom, Mycroft had presented us with a choice of five venues, in each of which he (and hence His Majesty) had tasks with which he needed help. Holmes, in a spontaneous and utterly unexpected recognition of my increasingly adult status in our partnership, had ceded the choice to me. I chose Palestine.

  A note about Arabic:

  Arabic has more grammatical forms than English. For example, “he” and “she” take separate verb endings, and “you” can be masculine, feminine, or plural. English translators often resort to “thou” and “thy” under the mistaken impression that the pronouns impart an Arabic flavour to the translation. To my mind, the only impression given is a stilted and thus inaccurate one, but then a literal translation is quite often not the best. I have therefore rendered Arab and Hebrew speech into their most natural English equivalent, and if the reader is disappointed not to find a story peppered with “Thou son of a dog!” and “By the beard of the Prophet!” so be it. Personally, I have always thought pepper an overused spice.

  Similarly I have rendered the names of people and towns in the orthography of English usage: Jerusalem rather than the more exact Yerushalayim, Jericho instead of Yeriho, etc.

  —M. R. H.

  ∗ See The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Arabic Words and Phrases

  A Note About Chapter Headings

  Editor’s Remarks

  Author’s Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Excerpt from Pirate King

  Other Books By This Author

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I began to learn another alphabet, and meditate on words that hissed and words that gasped.

  —JEROME, Vita S. Paulii,

  TRANS. HELEN WADDELL

  (The Desert Fathers)

  he skiff was black, its gunwales scant inches above the waves. Like my two companions, I was dressed in dark clothing, my face smeared with lamp-black. The rowlocks were wrapped and muf
fled; the loudest sounds in all the night were the light slap of water on wood and the rhythmic rustle of Steven’s clothing as he pulled at the oars.

  Holmes stiffened first, then Steven’s oars went still, and finally I too heard it: a distant deep thrum of engines off the starboard side. It was not the boat we had come on, but it was approaching fast, much too fast to outrun. Steven shipped the oars without a sound, and the three of us folded up into the bottom of the skiff.

  The engines grew, and grew, until they filled the night and seemed to be right upon us, and still they grew, until I began to doubt the wisdom of this enterprise before it had even begun. Holmes and I kept our faces pressed against the boards and stared up at the outline that was Steven, his head raised slightly above the boat. He turned to us, and I could see the faint gleam of his teeth as he spoke.

  “They’re coming this way, might not see us if they don’t put their searchlights on. If they’re going to hit us I’ll give you ten seconds’ warning. Fill your lungs, dive off to the stern as far as you can, and swim like the living hell. Best take your shoes off now.”

  Holmes and I wrestled with each other’s laces and tugged, then lay again waiting. The heavy churn seemed just feet away, but Steven said nothing. We remained frozen. My teeth ached with the noise, and the thud of the ship’s engines became my heart-beat, and then terrifyingly a huge wall loomed above us and dim lights flew past over our heads. Without warning the skiff dropped and then leapt into the air, spinning about in time to hit the next wave broadside, drenching us and coming within a hairs-breadth of overturning before we were slapped back into place by the following one, sliding down into the trough and mounting the next. Down and up and down and around we were tossed until eventually, wet through and dizzy as a child’s top, we bobbled on the sea like the piece of flotsam we were and listened to the engines fade.