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 body, 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.