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  With the coffee halfway to roasted, Mahmoud could not very well put it back into the pouch, but it was with ill grace that he continued the ritual. I had finished the letter and was rereading it when the tiny porcelain cup was brusquely set down in front of me. I sipped it absently.

  “Interesting,” I said. Holmes did not answer. I looked at him and found that he was sitting with one knee drawn up and the other leg tucked under his robe. He was studying his cup with exaggerated concentration, one eyebrow slightly raised.

  I had known Holmes for nearly four of my nineteen years, during which time he, along with his housekeeper, Mrs Hudson, and his old companion-at-arms and biographer, Dr Watson, had become my only family. I had studied with him, spent thousands of hours in his often abrasive but never dull company, and worked with him on several cases, including the intense and dangerous kidnapping the previous summer; by now I knew him better than I knew myself, and read instantly what his posture was telling me.

  “Hum,” I grunted, a considering sound, and read slowly through the German document a third time with his unverbalised but clearly expressed scepticism in mind. After consideration I began to see what he objected to. “You may be right,” I admitted, and only after I said the words did I notice the consternation on the two swarthy faces across from us. With the sweet flavour of revenge on my tongue I nodded my head deliberately, then folded the letter back into its envelope and returned it to Holmes.

  “I should say the flourishes on the final e’s and the angle of the dots clinch it,” I said nonchalantly, and held out my cup to Mahmoud. “Is there more coffee?”

  That gentleman gave me a long, expressionless look before reaching for the brass coffee beaker, but Ali could not control himself.

  “Is this a secret language?” he burst out. “The hand signs are invisible.”

  “Merely the communication of true minds,” said Holmes. Turning his gaze on Mahmoud, he continued, “What Miss Russell has noticed is that one of the letters we so laboriously stole from the mullah’s safe is a fake.”

  “A fake!” exclaimed Ali dramatically without looking at Mahmoud. “What do you—”

  “Planted by you.” Ali made a strangling noise. “Written by you.”

  Ali began to protest in an increasingly theatrical manner, but Mahmoud began a very small and quiet smile deep in his eyes, and eventually Ali sputtered to a halt. Holmes’ voice went hard. “The night we landed, you had your fun, trailing us about and pushing us into heaps of rotting fish and mounds of refuse. I protested at the time, yet since we left the town you have continued to lead us a song and dance through the Judean hills. I have said nothing, and if you do not think Russell has been remarkably patient, you do not know her. I understand that you found it necessary to test our mettle; in your position, I might have done the same. However, this has gone quite far enough.” He waggled the letter, then leant forward and dropped it onto the embers. That neither of our companions rushed to snatch it to safety was all the confirmation needed. Mahmoud’s forged letter from a purported German spy in Tiberius smoked for a moment on the coals, puffed into flame, and curled blackly. Holmes looked up from the fire. “Five days of keeping us in the dark is about three days more than I should have thought necessary, particularly considering the way it began. Make your decision: Trust us, or let us go our way.”

  It was Mahmoud, still giving his impression of an amused stone, who broke the gaze, flicking a glance at me before he bent forward to dash the dregs from his coffee onto the letter’s crisp, trembling curl of ash, and continued the motion into standing upright. He handed his cup to Ali.

  “We will go to Joshua now,” he said, and turned towards the depths of the tent.

  “Ah,” said Holmes with a nod of satisfaction. “Joshua.”

  Mahmoud paused with his hand on the tent’s central post. “You know Joshua?”

  “I know of him.”

  Mahmoud studied Holmes for a moment, and then went on into the tent.

  “Who is Joshua?” I asked. Holmes looked at Ali with an eyebrow raised, inviting an explanation, but the man merely dusted his robes free of wood shavings and moved off to begin breaking camp. “Holmes?” I persisted.

  “You know your Bible, Russell. Surely you don’t need me to explain his nom de guerre.”

  “Joshua is a code name? For one of the military officers?”

  “This Joshua prefers to remain in a more, shall we say, unrecognised position than at the head of his troops.”

  I thought about it, then suggested, “The Book of Joshua; ‘He sent out two men to spy out the land?”

  “Precisely so,” Holmes agreed, and, knocking his pipe out on the stones of the cook fire, went to empty his possessions from our tent.

  FOUR

  ث

  Weapons are unnecessary on the main routes… but advisable on the others, as fire-arms, conspicuously carried, add a great deal to the importance with which the “Frank” is regarded by the natives.

  —

  BAEDEKER’S

  Palestine and Syria

  ,

  1912 EDITION

  Now” being a relative thing when burdened by tents, water-skins, cooking pots, and mules, we did not get away until the middle of the morning. I packed up our meagre possessions and helped fold away the bell tent Holmes and I had shared since leaving Jaffa.

  Once on the road, we headed slightly north of due east, in the direction of Jerusalem, although Ali admitted that we were only going as far as Beersheva. We followed the pattern that had been established our first day on the road: Ali and Mahmoud went in front, holding to a steady pace and never looking back except for Ali to shout the occasional command over his shoulder, telling us not to lag or stumble or let the mules stray. The two men led by as little as ten paces or as much as half a mile, and spent the whole time talking—or rather, Ali talked, with voice and hands, while Mahmoud listened and occasionally made response. Then came Holmes and myself, either in silence with my nose in the Koran or with him drilling me on Arabic grammar and vocabulary or lecturing me on customs and history. Behind us trailed the three mules, clattering and banging with the pots draped about them, obediently treading on our heels and breathing down our necks until we entered a village, when we had to take up their ropes lest the dogs spook them, or if we heard the rare sound of an approaching motorcar in the distance, which usually turned out to be an ancient Ford Tin Lizzie.

  I had come to realise that Ali and Mahmoud were well known in this land. Mahmoud, despite his rough appearance, was a respected scribe and public reader. I found that they moved up and down the countryside in a more or less regular cycle, stopping for an hour or a week to draw up letters to distant relatives, contracts between neighbours, and pleas to the government, and to read letters received, or old newspapers, or even stories. The florid Arabic pleas to the Turkish rulers might recently have given way to more concise English documents, and the payment he accepted was now in Egyptian piastres and even the occasional English coin, but little else had changed. As we went along I began to appreciate the freedom the two brothers had, for they were familiar figures, and therefore accepted, but it was also accepted that they were different: nomads without livestock; lacking womenfolk but apparently no threat to the wives and daughters they came near; possessing a valuable skill that yet set them apart and gave them a touch of mystery and power; from no particular place, so the oddities in accent and vocabulary among us—Holmes’ proper kuffiyah and my own loosely wrapped turban, Ali’s Egyptian boots of shiny red leather and his long colourful jacket, our troop’s use of mules in a country that classified people either by the plebeian donkey-and-goat or the aristocratic camel-and-horse of the true Bedouin, our blue Berber eyes with the brown of our two Bedu companions, and even my spectacles—were not so much forgiven as expected, as if we formed a distinct and idiosyncratic tribe of our own. Ali and Mahmoud had lived this life for at least ten years, an ideal arrangement for a neighbouring (now occupying) government need
ing to keep watch on the activities of the countryside.

  I wondered if now, with the war at an end, the brothers’ way of life was about to change. Would the government want spies in the land during a time of peace?

  “Holmes, what do you make of them?” I nodded at the road ahead, where the two figures, in the Arab fashion that strikes the Western eye so strangely, were holding hands while Ali’s free arm waved in the air, illustrating a point. In Arab countries men hold hands in public; a man and a woman emphatically do not.

  “You find them intriguing?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what I find them. I don’t know this country, there may be an entire populace like them, as far as I know.”

  “No, I believe you could assume that Ali and Mahmoud are very nearly unique here. Even T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell draw the line considerably closer to home than these two.”

  It took a moment for his meaning to sink in, and when it did, I demanded, “What do you mean? Are you suggesting they aren’t Arabs?”

  “Most assuredly not. Can’t you hear the London in their diphthongs?”

  “I assumed that Ali had been to an English-speaking school, his English is so good, but his accent is Arabic, not Cockney. And I don’t think I’ve heard Mahmoud say more than two dozen words in English.”

  “Not Cockney, more like Clapham, and the Arab accent is an accretion. You really must work on your accents, Russell.”

  “What would two brothers from Clapham be doing here?” I demanded incredulously.

  “Russell, Russell. They aren’t brothers, surely you can see that? Aside from the complete lack of any physical resemblance, their accents and their acquired habits—table manners (if one can refer to such when there is no table), gestures, attitudes—are quite different. At the most they might be cousins, but personally I should not care to put money even on that.”

  “Friends?” I asked suspiciously; this had to be one of his peculiar jests.

  “Companions, who appreciate Arab dress and culture and enjoy the freedom of their gipsy life.”

  “And do some work for the British government on the side.”

  “For their king, yes. They are Mycroft’s, after all.”

  Ah, yes, Mycroft, the older Holmes brother, everything the younger was not: corpulent, physically indolent, a life-long cog in the machinery of government. But like the Holmes whose apprentice I had become, Mycroft was brilliant, gifted with a far-sighted ability to discern patterns, and able to grasp instantly the central issue in a tangle. Too, Mycroft, like Sherlock, was unbendingly moral, a fortunate thing for the British people and for international politics, because Mycroft’s power within the government was, as far as I could see, nearly limitless. Had he chosen to do so he could very probably have brought the government to its knees. Instead, he gently nudged, and watched, and murmured the occasional suggestion, then sat back to watch some more. If anyone was capable of shaping a pair of Englishmen into Bedouin spies, Mycroft was the man (although I was far from certain that Holmes had not been pulling my leg). I had assumed that whatever task Mycroft needed done here would be as subtle as he was; I had begun to believe that it was so subtle as to be nonexistent. However, by the sounds of things, clarification would finally be given us in Beersheva, no doubt by the mysterious spymaster Joshua.

  We stopped at one o’clock to water the mules and make tea, and when I had finished my tasks and came to sit by the small fire, I eased off the fiendish sandals and tucked my bleeding feet carefully under the hem of my dusty abayya. The sweet tea was supplemented by a handful of almonds and some rather nasty dried figs, and in less than half an hour Ali was putting things away. With a sigh I reached for the sandals, but was stayed by Holmes’ hand on my arm.

  “Wait,” he said. He scooped a handful of almond shells from the lap of his robe and brushed them onto the dying embers, then rose and walked swiftly over to where the mules stood. Pausing a moment to study Ali’s complicated knotwork, he laid hands on the ropes and in a minute had one lumpy canvas bag both free and open. He dug inside, pulled out a familiar pair of boots that I had thought gone forever, closed the bag, and retied the ropes. When he came back to the fire he dropped the boots in front of me, then in one brisk motion he bent to catch up the flimsy sandals and tossed them on top of the burning almond shells.

  The pair of stockings that I had stuffed inside the boots five days before were still damp with seawater and the shoe leather smelt musty, but I did not hesitate. I slid them on, did up the bootlaces, and returned the slim throwing knife that had been lodged awkwardly in my belt to its customary boot-top sheath. When I stood up in my old friends, neither Ali nor Mahmoud had said a thing, but my feet were shouting with relief, and I felt that I could walk to Damascus if necessary.

  We travelled on through the desert place, seeing only the low black tents of other nomads like ourselves and a few hovels, until late in the afternoon we began to come upon débris from the battle of Beersheva fourteen months before: snarls of rusting barbed wire, the broken frame of a heavy gun, the bare and scattered skeleton of a horse, and strange tufts of rabbit wire reaching up to trip us—a mystery until Holmes explained that this was a means of laying a quick and temporary road for motorcars across stretches of soft sand. When the sun had completely left the sky, we stopped, ate a cold meal, and then pressed on in the almost complete darkness under a heavy layer of clouds.

  In the daylight, thanks to my improved footgear, I had not found it difficult to keep up with our guides, but in the booby-trapped dark I fell behind again, and twice was trodden upon by the lead mule.

  After about an hour of this the wind came up. An already cold night turned bitter, with the added pleasure of sand driven into our faces. I took off my spectacles, which were in danger of being sandblasted into opacity if not actually blown off my nose, wrapped my abayya more firmly around my body, and followed the dim form ahead of me.

  It then commenced to rain. Ali and Mahmoud appeared, waiting for us to catch them up so they could help control the mules. Soon the drops were pelting down; lightning and thunder moved in on us until the storm was directly over our heads as we pressed on, clinging to the halters of the skittish animals for fear our tents and pans would gallop off into the night. The track, never a road, turned slick, and then sticky, until even those of us who had four feet were having a hard time of it.

  When the hail began I stopped dead. “Damn it all!” I shouted at full voice, necessary against the rush of wind and the fast-increasing crescendo of pings of the hailstones on the big convex iron saj. “Why is it so almighty important that we reach Beersheva tonight?”

  Neither of our guides chose to explain. However, my protest seemed to trigger their own recognition of futility, because they did not insist on pressing on. We fumbled about in the maelstrom for a while until the wind seemed to lose a few degrees of strength and I realised we were against an outcrop of rock. There we hobbled the mules closely and removed their burdens. Ali retrieved the big tent, but rather than attempting to put it up in the gale and the rocky ground, we simply crawled under it and wrapped ourselves up in its folds, huddling together in a mound while the hail smacked at the goat’s hair above our heads. It eventually died off into the silent whisper of snowfall; finally, towards morning, there was stillness and a deep, creeping chill.

  I had drifted into something resembling sleep when the half-frozen tent shifted and crackled, and someone left our communal warmth—Ali, I decided, hearing his footsteps retreat. He returned a few minutes later, rustling strangely, and stopped near where we had tied the mules. After a couple of minutes he left the mules and came back towards where the three of us lay, and then stopped again. Up to now I had refrained from moving, theorising that if I continued to lie there numbly I might not awaken to the full force of the cold, but now I worked my hand up to where the rough tent lay across my face, and I pulled it away just in time to see Ali, crouched down on snow-covered ground and with his hands stretched well away from his b
ody, strike at the flint he held. The spark set off a great whump of petrol-triggered flame: instantly the wet bushes he had dragged up burst merrily alight, and we had a fire.

  This morning, unusually enough, Mahmoud cooked. He began with a porridge of some odd grain, hot and sweet and laced with cinnamon, eaten with wooden spoons from the common pot. This was followed by the inevitable flat bread, except that for him the big curving saj behaved itself and produced a bread that was light and unburnt and cooked through, tasting deliciously of wheat and eaten by tearing it into pieces and dipping it into a tin of melted butter. Then Mahmoud sent Ali back to the mules—it was now light enough to see what he was doing—and he came back with a dented tin that lacked a label. Hacking it open, he handed it to Mahmoud, who upended it over a pan. To my astonishment, it landed with a spurt of fat sizzling, and the smell of bacon shot up into the frigid air.

  Mahmoud cooked the bacon crisp, and then set the pan on the ground between us. He did not eat any himself, but took out his prayer beads and watched with his inscrutable look as the three of us polished off the meat and even ate a good part of the grease, dipping bread into it until we were near to bursting. Jewish (and I had thought Moslem) dietary laws prohibit the eating of pork, of course, and I normally avoid it, but that morning I swear it was a gift straight from the hand of God, and it saved my life. When we repacked the pots, the morning was just cold, not deadly, and my sheepskin coat, though damp, was nearly adequate.

  It is a superstition among the Bedouin, Holmes had mentioned to me during one of his little lectures, not to begin a day’s journey until the dew is off the ground, lest the spirits take the traveller. The custom reflects good common sense, as hair tents packed wet will not survive for long. That morning, however, had we waited for dry tents we should have still been sitting there at sunset, so we beat the snow and ice out of the black tent as best we could, redistributed the remaining load between two of the mules, and heaved the unwieldy thing onto the back of the third grumbling animal.