In the late afternoon the cook fires started. Following the afternoon prayers, I led the mules down to the nearest rain pool to scrub their dusty hides, accompanied by what seemed to me a number of children disproportionate to the population as a whole, who were soon wetter than the mules, if not as clean. The youngsters found me greatly amusing, a mute but comprehending boy who wore strange glass circles on his face and laughed at their antics, and I returned to the village in the midst of a noisy, wet entourage.
While I was restoring the animals to their hobbles, I heard someone call my name. To my surprise, when I looked around I saw Mahmoud, surrounded by a knot of men. He was tucking something that looked like money away into the breast of his robes with one hand, and gesturing to me with the other.
I brushed some of the mud off my garments, straightened my turban, and went to see what he wanted. To my even greater amazement, when I approached he flung his heavy arm around my shoulders and turned to his companions.
“Amir is a very clever boy with the knife,” he said, enunciating carefully enough for me to follow his words. “I will wager his throwing arm against anyone.”
The juxtaposition of my grandiose name with my unprepossessing appearance had its usual effect, reducing the villagers to helpless laughter. Mahmoud grinned like a shark and kept his arm firmly across my shoulders while I stood and wondered what was going on in that devious mind of his, and what he had in store for me.
When the villagers realised that he was seriously proposing to bet on the knife skills of the youth with the ridiculous name, they made haste to accept before this madman had second thoughts. If he wished to give back all the money he had won from them during the day, who were they to object? A couple of the men scurried off to devise a suitable target, the remaining dozen began to sharpen their knives, and Mahmoud, giving my shoulders a final hard embrace, turned his head and whispered in my ear in clear English, “Do not be too good at first, understand?”
I had a sudden coughing fit to conceal my astonishment, and turned away to watch the men bringing up a length of tree trunk and some stones to prop it upright. Mahmoud proposed to run a con game on these villagers, absorbing what remained of their hard-earned cash after Ali’s unlikely victory at the horse race. Oh, I had done the same myself in English pubs armed with darts, but I had only done my opponents out of a few drinks, and they had always been people who could afford the small loss. This was something else, and I disliked the taste in my mouth.
I pulled myself up. Mahmoud knew what he was doing; these were his people, after all. Maalesh, I said myself—as no doubt the villagers would say before too long. I only wished I could feel so easy.
Under the tutelage of Holmes and a number of others, over the last four years I had accumulated a variety of odd abilities. I could pick a lock laboriously, drive a horse or a motorcar without coming to grief, dress up in a costume as a sort of amateur-dramatics-in-earnest, and fling a fully grown man (an unprepared and untrained man) to the ground. My only two real gifts, gifts I was born with, were an ear for languages and a hand for throwing. Be it a rock or a pointed object, my left hand had a skill for accuracy that I could in all honesty take no credit for, although I had on occasion found it tremendously useful. As I was about to again.
The men giggled at the sight of my thin and obviously inadequate little throwing knife, and they slapped their knees whenever my first throws went wide of the mark. Mahmoud began to look worried— well, not worried, but he took on a degree more stoniness and his right hand crept up once to rub at the scar—when three largish wagers were swiftly lost. The villagers were ecstatic. I tossed my knife in my hand and gave Mahmoud an even look, trying to get across a mental message.
Either he received it or he well knew how the game ought to be played. In either case he trusted me. He reached into his inner pocket and drew out a considerable stash of money, which he proceeded to count out, milking the drama. He laid it on the ground in front of his feet, and looked back at me.
We took those villagers for a lot of money that afternoon, with the rest of the village, men and women, looking on. I did try to lose a bit when the less prosperous men had their bets in, but it was not always possible. My losses ceased to concern Mahmoud when he saw what a good investment they were, both in the short-term cash returns when over-confidence blossomed and in the long-term benefit of goodwill. It is never a good idea to alienate your host by making him feel completely swindled.
But we did take the money of poor men. And I did not care at all for the way Mahmoud had manoeuvred me into taking it.
Eventually, enough cash had changed hands to lower the interest in the contest. My last challenger stood down, jovial to the end, if rueful. Mahmoud folded away a thick wad of filthy paper money, tucked two heavy handfuls of coin into the purse at his belt, and gave me a look under his eyebrows that was very nearly a complacent smile. As the crowd thinned, I looked over their heads and saw our companions, standing and watching with all the others. Ali gave me a sour look, Holmes an amused one. I squatted down to sharpen the tip of my blade on a stone, slipped it back into my boot, and joined them. Feeling, truth to tell, a bit cocky but more than a little ashamed.
A long Bedouin tent had made an appearance on the hillside behind the village, and the smell of coffee was heavy in the air. The children who had followed me when I washed our mules and had been kept at bay during the contest now swarmed back to claim me, but I gratefully escaped my enthusiastic admirers by insinuating myself far enough back in the tent to be among the adult coffee drinkers, perched between the mukhtars rather messy falcon and his equally ill-tempered saluki dog.
The evening followed the standard programme for a semi-formal soirée: coffee, food, coffee, sweetmeats, tobacco, coffee, and talk. An immense brass dish was carried in by six men, laden with four whole roasted sheep that had been stuffed with rice and golden fried pine nuts. Tonight the meat was delicious and actually tender. The rice was flavoured with a small, tangy red berry called sumac and the bitter, refreshing coffee that followed was fragrant with cardamom. Narghiles and regular pipes came out, the rhythmic drum of the coffee mortars fell silent for a while, the irritating “music” of the one-stringed violin and the wailing song of its player ceased, and the stories began. To my surprise and pleasure, I found that I had no great trouble in following the thread of talk. Under the pressure of continuous use, my Arabic was improving faster than I had thought possible.
The mukhtar opened. He was a once-large man now reduced to bone, stringy muscles, and bright colours: blue robe, green turban (a claim to descent from the Prophet), and a beard reddened with henna (sign of a devout pilgrimage to Mecca somewhere in his past). His teeth were worn to a few brown stumps on his gums, but his eyes were clear, his hands steady on the narghile as he smoked and talked of his part in the recent war, shooting from the high ground at the retreating Turks.
Then his son—Farash, who had spoken so intimately to Mahmoud the night before and been told of the death of Mikhail the Druse—told a complicated story about some relative who had married a woman from another tribe and ignited a feud that had lasted for sixty-two years, although I may have misunderstood this. Holmes contributed a blood-curdling narrative concerning a Howeitat clan feud begun by a marriage ceremony which greatly amused the men, although I couldn’t see quite why. Ali made a brief remark that seemed to link women and donkeys, but again, I did not understand the jest. He then told a lengthy and energetic tale about two men and five scorpions, and at some point it dawned on me that the two men he was talking about were none other than Davy and Charlie, the abusive British guards on the Beersheva road, and that the sly revenge Ali was describing explained his high spirits when he had rejoined us with the armaments on the road north of town. I laughed loudly with the others, earning myself an uncertain glance from the narrator.