“This was one of your men?” asked Holmes.
“Mikhail was mine, yes.”
“What was he working on?”
“I don’t know,” Joshua admitted. Mahmoud stared at him, and I heard a brief stir from Ali in the dark reaches of the building. “It’s true. There were rumours, out in the desert, of problems. Nothing substantial. He went out to listen.”
“For the sounds of dogs amongst the sheep?” Holmes suggested. He even made it sound as if such pastoral imagery were his daily fare.
“There were no dogs. I’d have heard them, if there were.”
“Something more silent, then. Wolves.”
Joshua sighed deeply, his jovial face looking more troubled than I should have thought possible. He put his hand into his breast pocket, drew out a pouch, and began to roll a cigarette. Recognising the signs, I settled myself for a longish story.
“I do not know how much you two know about our war here, so forgive me if I travel familiar ground, but our situation is a delicate one. I spent the first months of the war on the Western Front,” he began. “That war, as you undoubtedly are aware, consisted primarily of crouching in the mud a hundred yards from the enemy and occasionally, at immense cost of life, pushing his line back a few yards, or, conversely, of being pushed and losing a few yards of one’s own. Here, it was rather different. Other than the catastrophe in the Dardanelles and the constant loss of life from submarines, we contented ourselves with sitting in Cairo, gathering tit-bits of information and protecting the Suez Canal.
“Until Allenby came.” Joshua’s tone of voice when he said the name was not far from worship, although I thought this deceptively soft little man would not venerate another easily. “Allenby was given command in June of 1917. Four months later—four months!—we found ourselves crossing the Sinai into Palestine. We took Beersheva and then Gaza, and by God, we were standing in the gates of Jerusalem by Christmas. Nine months later, a year to the day after he’d begun this impossible task, he gathered up his rag-tag army of camels and colonials and pushed, and before we knew it we were in Damascus.
“It was a brilliant campaign—elegant, meticulous, sly, and inexorable. The Battle of Megiddo was a mighty victory, a beautiful thing to behold. In two stages a mere twelvemonth apart, Allenby had the country, and four hundred years of Turkish rule were broken.
“And now he’s stuck with it, and stuck with the job of keeping the country in one piece until they decide at the Paris talks how to cut it up. The French want it, the Arabs think it’s theirs, the Jews believe they were promised it, the British hold it, and General Allenby spends all the hours God gives him driving from Dan to Beersheva, calming arguments among the factions.”
“While you hear the rumour of distant wolves,” Holmes prompted.
“Who the wolves are I do not know, but yes, I believe I hear them. And I am quite certain, when we come close enough to hear their voices, we will find they speak Turkish.” Joshua was talking to Mahmoud now, and Mahmoud was listening attentively. “Not all of our enemy was taken, and by no means have all surrendered. Here as in Germany there are discontented young officers who blame their old régime for the losses during the war. They will be infuriated by the demands made by the Allies. The cost of their losing will be high indeed. A mistake, but what victor listens to counsel of generosity and reason when vengeance is at hand? We are looking here at the seeds of another war, with political ferment about to foam up around us and engulf us. Allenby believes we can salvage brotherhood; I will be satisfied if we can merely keep the upper hand. We will need it, soon enough.”
Holmes cut impatiently into this speech. “What do you wish us to do about the situation?”
“Do? I don’t want you to do anything.” The little round soldier was gone; in his place bristled a condescending and irritated military officer, putting a problematic subordinate in his place. “If we were in London, Mr Holmes, I might permit you to act, might even permit you to lead. However, may I remind you that this is not your home ground? Ali and Mahmoud are my men. Valuable men. I have few enough of those at the best of times, but in the last three months, between demobilisation and accidents, I am down to about half strength.”
“What accidents?” Holmes demanded sharply.
“Accidents. My men are tired, and peace has made them careless.” Holmes met his eyes, refusing to be dismissed. “One in a motorcar crash, the other went off a cliff.”
“And Yitzak with a knife, and Mikhail with a bullet. Do you normally lose a man on the average of one every three weeks?”
Joshua sat placidly, refusing to be drawn into an answer, but even I doubted that this was a standard rate of attrition. I also was beginning to think that Mycroft, whose job was accounting for odd fluctuations in the empire’s resources, had not been unjustified in offering us this little problem.
One thing I did not understand was why this rotund English spymaster was insisting that the deaths of his men were more irritating than worrying. Perhaps the bureaucratic passion for keeping face extended here as well. His next words seemed to confirm this.
“None of this is your concern, Mr Holmes. You are here—at my sufferance, understand, not due to any authority you might imagine your brother holds—because I want my two men to have someone watching their backs. Let me be brutally frank, Mr Holmes: you and Miss Russell are expendable. I have used better men than you, and I have even used men equally renowned. Were you to vanish, there is nothing to point to me. You are to regard yourself as a back-up, Mr Holmes. You and Miss Russell have proven that you can pass for Bedu under a cursory glance, and Ali and Mahmoud by themselves are vulnerable. Four men—if you will permit me, Miss Russell?— are safer from casual attack than two. And the two of you might be of some use in running messages or holding a rifle. Frankly, despite your brother’s influence, I should not send you if I had any others available. However, I haven’t anyone else, so I will use you, and trust you far enough to assume that you won’t get my men killed. More tea?” He held out the pot, as if his harsh insults had never been spoken. I retained my cup, but Holmes, looking more amused than angry, handed his over to be refilled.
“Tell me more about those insubstantial rumours,” Holmes suggested, as if he had heard nothing of what the man said. Joshua studied him, but was apparently satisfied, because after the tea had been poured and milked, he put away the pot and drew a map from another breast pocket. When the camp chair had been moved back he spread the map on the floor and sat on his heels like an Arab beside it, agile despite his bulk. Ali emerged from the shadows and stood behind us, looking on.
The map was of the southern half of the land, from Jaffa on the Mediterranean down to Akaba on the gulf and over nearly to the Egyptian border. Beersheva was roughly a third of the way down, surrounded by a great deal of emptiness. Joshua touched the map with the fingertips of his left hand, and then drew the side of the hand down the sheet towards himself as if brushing crumbs from its surface.
“The desert has been a place of retreat for the oppressed and a source of trouble for the authorities for thousands of years. Fanatics hid out here, establishing monasteries or raising armies; rebels retreated here to die the deaths of martyrs, or to regroup and gain strength. It seems a deadly place, empty and sterile, particularly in the summer, but the intensity of life here has spilled over onto human dreams and ideas.
“You ask what and where these rumours are, Mr Holmes. I wish it were so simple. What we hear are whispers and words. A man here”—he tapped the map near a city called Salt—“tells a story around the fire one night, a tale of Arab conquest that ends with the unbelievers dead and the city of Jerusalem closed to all but the Moslem. A woman at a well here”—his finger rested on Ramleh— “speaks of a man buying weapons. The wind has more substance, but it has voices as well, voices that Mahmoud and Ali are trained to hear. They will go about their business and listen; you will fetch water and do as they tell you.” The small uniformed figure paused to stare at Holmes again and, seeing no response, seemed satisfied that his point had been taken. He sat back and spoke to Mahmoud. “The anti-Jew speeches are escalating.”