The Mary Russell Series 8-Book Bundle
O Jerusalem, Justice Hall, The Game, Locked Rooms, The Language of Bees, The God of the Hive, Pirate King, and Garment of Shadows is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Bantam Dell eBook Edition
O Jerusalem copyright © 1999 by Laurie R. King
Justice Hall copyright © 2002 by Laurie R. King
The Game copyright © 2004 by Laurie R. King
Locked Rooms copyright © 2005 by Laurie R. King
The Language of Bees copyright © 2009 by Laurie R. King
The God of the Hive copyright © 2010 by Laurie R. King
Beekeeping for Beginners copyright © 2011 by Laurie R. King
Pirate King copyright © 2011 by Laurie R. King
Beekeeping for Beginners copyright © 2012 by Laurie R. King
Excerpt from Dreaming Spies copyright © 2014 by Laurie R. King
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
The books contained in this omnibus were each published separately by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York, in 1999, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2011, and 2012.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-804-18048-1
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
O Jerusalem
Justice Hall
The Game
Locked Rooms
The Language of Bees
The God of the Hive
Beekeeping for Beginners (Short Story)
Pirate King
Garment of Shadows
Excerpt from Dreaming Spies
O JERUSALEM
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published June 1999
Bantam mass market edition / June 2000
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1999 by Laurie R. King.
Map by Jackie Aher
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-56124.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90135-1
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random
House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books”
and the portayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and
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Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
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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
The 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
During 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
Master – Table of Contents
O Jerusalem
Title Page
Copyright
Map
Arabic Words and Phrases
A Note About Chapter Headings
Editor’s Remarks
Author’s Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Epilogue
Dedication
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)
The 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 muffled; 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.
Steven sat up. “Anyone overboard?” he asked softly.
“We’re both here,” Holmes assured him. His voice was not completely level, and from the bow came the brief flash of Steven’s teeth.
“Welcome to Palestine,” he whispered, grinning ferociously.
I groaned as I eased myself upright. “My shoulder feels broken and—oh, damn, I’ve lost a boot. How are you, Holmes?” It was barely two weeks since a bomb had blown up just behind him as he stood tending a beehive, and although his abrasions were healing, his skin was far from whole.
“My back survives, Russell, and your footwear is here.” Holmes thrust the boot at me and I fumbled to take it, then bent and pulled it and the one I had managed to hold on to back over my sodden woollen stockings.
“Why don’t they put more running lights on?” I complained.
“Troop ship,” explained Steven. “Still a bit nervous about submarines. There’re rumours about that some of the German captains haven’t heard the war’s over yet. Or don’t want to hear. Quiet with the bailing now,” he ordered. Taking the oars back in his hands, he turned us about and continued the steady pull to shore.
The remaining mile passed without incident. Even with the added water on board, Steven worked the oars with a strong, smooth ease that would have put him on an eights team in Oxford. He glanced over his shoulder occasionally at the approaching shore, where we were to meet two gentlemen in the employ of His Majesty’s government, Ali and Mahmoud Hazr. Other than their names, I hadn’t a clue what awaited us here.
Looking up from the bailing, I eventually decided that he was making for a spot midway between a double light north of us and a slightly amber single light to the south. Swells began to rise beneath the bow and the sound of breaking waves drew closer, until suddenly we were skimming through the white foam of mild surf, and with a jar we crunched onto the beach.