Not that we were under his control, or even supervision: Mycroft’s name opened a few doors for us and smoothed some passages, but travelling under his cachet did not mean that we were under his protection. Indeed, our pursuits in the Holy Land took us into some quite interesting situations. However, the dangers we faced (aside from the microbial and insectoidal), although immediate and personal (particularly for Holmes, who at one point fell into unfriendly hands), were also refreshingly direct and without subtlety.
Both of us took injuries, but neither seriously. Indeed, other than being shot at by a strikingly incompetent marksman out in the desert and later set upon by thugs just outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, my own most uncomfortable moment was when I was cornered by a trio of amorous and intoxicated merchants in the Arab Quarter. Even the revelation of the quantity of hair beneath my turban did not give them much pause, as they seemed equally willing to pursue a woman as the young man they had thought me. I nearly committed murder that day—not on the merchants, but on Holmes, for the highly amused reluctance with which he came to my assistance.
As I said, I found this combination of unreality and hazard immensely appealing, and indeed it gave me a lasting taste for what is called Intelligence (which is not to be confused with Wisdom, being, in fact, often completely devoid of sense). At the time all I thought about was that we were safe from our shadowy pursuer, and that Mycroft was proving a powerful if enigmatic ally.
This is not the place to burden the reader with a detailed (that is, book-length) account of our expedition to Palestine, for, although it had its own distinct points of interest, it had almost no bearing on the case that had sent us there. It was an excursus, the chief benefit of which was that it enabled us to reconsider the balance in our relationship, and to come to a decision about how our case at home was to be handled, while Mycroft and Lestrade were assembling data for us. That our time of exile changed my life personally, that it endowed me with a sense of the texture of history that has stayed with me to this day, that it moved me to profound wonder and joy and fury, that the sense of Palestine as a refuge made me a Jew more than any one thing apart from the accident of my birth—all these have proven to be of lasting interest to me personally, but of peripheral interest to this particular narrative.
Nor shall I subject the reader to a travelogue of that most remarkable of lands. We stayed for a few days in a mud hut near Jaffa, getting our bearings and perfecting our disguises (which Holmes had used before, in Mecca) before setting off south. We moved into the empty desolation of nomadic peoples and ruined monasteries, where the desert shimmered even in January. We walked and rode across the wilderness to the Salt Sea, and in the dark before the moon rose we floated in its remarkable buoyant waters, and I felt the light of the stars on my naked body. We went north and touched the crumbling remains of mosaic pavements, the delicate stone fishes and twining grape clusters, and walked among the massive remains of temple walls and the more recent remains from Allenby’s victories. We slept under Bedouin tents that stank of goat, in caves cut into the hillsides, on warm, flat roofs under the stars, in feather beds in a pasha’s palace, under an Army lorry, under a fisherman’s skiff, and under nothing but the sky. We drank cold, sour lemonade with Jews in a Zionist settlement, hot, syrupy mint tea with a Bedouin sheikh, and Earl Grey with tinned milk in the house of a high-ranking Army officer in Haifa. We bathed (far too seldom for my taste—there are drawbacks in being disguised as a male, and one of them is public bathing) in a bubbling spring above Cana of Galilee, in a smooth stretch of the Jordan surrounded by barbed wire (under the disapproving gaze of a kingfisher), and in the tin hip bath of an English archaeologist in Jericho, whose passion for preserving her site was matched only by her extreme Zionism.
(She was, incidentally, the only person I have ever met who, seeing me in disguise, knew me immediately and matter-of-factly for what I was. She greeted us with a furious barrage of words from the bottom of her trench, established that we were not about to carry off her beloved potsherds, marched us off to her remarkable home, which resembled a low Bedouin tent made of scrap wood and corrugated iron, and closeted me in a windowless room with concrete walls and an endless supply of gloriously hot water. Holmes she allowed to sluice off under a bucket of cold water in the courtyard.)
We—I—left Jerusalem until nearly the end, circling around it on our way north, coming tantalisingly close twice and shying away, until finally we walked the long dry hills up to the city in the company of a group of Bedouins and their emaciated goats and stood, burnt black and footsore and absolutely filthy (even the normally catlike Holmes) on the crest of Mount Olivet at sundown. There before us she rose up, the city of cities, the umbilicus mundi, centre of the Universe, growing from the very foundations of the earth, surprisingly small, like a jewel. My heart sang within me, and the ancient Hebrew came to my lips.
“Simchu eth Yerushalaim w’gilu bah kal-ohabeha,” I recited: Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad for her, all you who love her. We watched the sun set and slept among the tombs overnight, to the consternation of our guides, and in the morning we saw the sun lay tender arms around the city walls and bring her to brilliant, vibrant life. I rejoiced, and I was inexpressibly grateful.
We sat until the sun set the white-gold walls to blazing and dust rose from the road, and we went across and entered the city. For three days we walked her narrow streets, ate food from her bazaars, breathed the incense of her churches. We touched her walls and tasted her dust, and in the end we came away changed, to watch the winter sun relinquish her to the night. We then shouldered our packs and turned our backs on her.
As the sky moved from thick cobalt to limitless black, we walked north, then stopped, made our two fires and pitched our three tents, drew water from a cistern, cooked and ate the inevitable tough goat’s meat that seemed to be Ali and Mahmoud’s staple diet, and drank tiny cups of Mahmoud’s coffee, thick as honey and nearly as sweet, which he boiled and poured and we strained through our teeth. The fires burnt low and our guides went to their beds, and in communicative silence Holmes and I respectively smoked and searched for constellations. When the embers had become mere flecks in the blackness, and the vault of the sky was pierced by a million points of hard white light, I was moved uncharacteristically to song, and with the warmth of the fire on the underside of my throat I chanted to the stars the hymns of Exile, the songs distilled from the longings of a people torn from their land, taken from the home of their God, and left to weep within the boundaries of the conqueror, Babylon, a hundred generations ago.
My voice fell silent. On a distant hilltop jackals set up their eerie chorus of yelps. Somewhere an engine rose, faded. A cock crew. Eventually, filled with that serenity that comes only with a decision reached or a task well completed, I rose to go to my tent. Holmes stretched out to knock his pipe bowl into the fire.
“I must thank you for bringing me here, Russell. It has been a most instructive interlude.”
“There is one more place in this country that I wish to see,” I told him. “We shall pass through it on our way to Acre. Good night, Holmes.”
TWO DAYS LATER we sat atop a windy hill and looked out across the blood-soaked Plain of Esdraelon. General Allenby had caught the fleeing Turkish army here four months before; the Crusaders had met with calamitous defeat here 730 years earlier; various armies across the last three thousand years had struggled here for control over the narrow north-south passage that joins Egypt and Africa with the continents of Europe and Asia. The plain’s Mount Megiddo, Ar Megiddo, has given its name to the site of the ultimate battle: Armageddon will begin here. It is a crossroads, and it is fertile: a deadly combination. That evening, however, the only violence was the sound of a dog barking and the distant clamour of goat bells. Tomorrow we would begin to make our way to the Crusader fortress at Acre, where the boat was to meet us and carry us back to the cold of an English January and a resumption of our struggle against an unknown foe. A wearying prospect,
seen while sitting here with the setting sun on our backs, the tents flapping gently in the breeze. The past weeks had been a thing apart, and only obliquely had we referred to the events that had driven us here. I knew that Holmes had chafed at being forced to allow others to do his footwork for him, even if the other was his brother Mycroft, but he had managed to control his impatience well. Finally, on that hillock overlooking the battleground, I reached out for the avoided topic and placed it firmly between us.
“So, Holmes. London awaits us.”
“She does, Russell, she does indeed.” There was a sudden light in his grey eyes that I had not seen in some weeks, the anticipation of a hound long denied the hunt, and I did not think the “she” referred to the city.
“What is your plan?”
He put his hand inside his dingy robes and withdrew his pipe and tobacco pouch.
“First, tell me why you have brought us here.”
“To Jezreel? I told you my mother’s name, I believe.”
“Yes, it was Judith, was it not? Not Mary McCarthy. Refresh my memory of the story, Russell. I try to forget things that I will not need in my work, and tales from the Bible normally fall into that category.”
I smiled grimly. “Perhaps this is one story you may see a use for, Holmes. It is one my mother and I read when I was seven. She was the granddaughter of a rabbi, a small woman, quiet, possessed of a remarkable wisdom. Although the story is Apocryphal rather than from the Hebrew canon, she chose this as the first story we studied together because she did not believe that religion should be an easy thing. Also, it involves her namesake.”
“The Judith and Holofernes story.”
“It happened here, or at any rate the story was set here, in a small town astride the Jerusalem road that we have just come up. Holofernes was the commander of an army from out of the north, sent to punish Jerusalem. This little town barred his way, so he cut off its water and laid siege to it. After thirty-four days the townspeople gave God an ultimatum: Provide water within five days, or we stand aside and Jerusalem can have this army.
“Judith, a wise, upstanding, wealthy young widow, was disgusted with them. She put on her richest clothes, summoned her maid, and left the town to walk out to Holofernes’ camp. She told him she wished to be saved from the coming destruction and paraded herself around in front of him for a few days. He, of course, invited her to his tent. She got him drunk, he passed out, and she cut off his head and took it back with her to the town. The invasion fell apart, Jerusalem was saved, and two and a half thousand years later women named for her give their children nightmares with the story.”
“A stimulating tale, Russell, though hardly one that I should choose for a seven-year-old.”
“My mother believed in starting theological training early. The following year we did the Levite’s concubine, which makes the Judith story sound like a nursery rhyme. Still, that is why I wanted to come here, to see where Holofernes arrayed his troops. Does that answer your question?”
He sighed. “I’m afraid so. Then you did see what I was thinking, on the boat?”
“I could hardly miss it.”
“And you offer this as an alternative.” He waved one hand at the darkening plain.
“Yes.” I would not consider the implications, not until I had to.
“No. I am sorry, Russell, but I will not have you place yourself within the enemy camp. I do not believe that you would find this opponent of ours an obliging drunkard.”
“I won’t be sacrificed, though, Holmes. I refuse to abandon you.” I was relieved, but all the same I would not be a coward.
“I am not suggesting that you abandon me, Russell, only that you appear to do so.” He rose and went to his tent and came back with a familiar wooden box in his hand. He set out the pieces as they had been in the game we had played off Crete, before my queen had fallen. He then turned the board around to take possession of the black. This time it was I who captured his queen, I who pressed and chivvied him into a corner. The game shifted, however, for I knew his intentions and refused to be drawn in.
The moves lengthened, slowed, as our two diminutive armies clashed. Pieces fell and were removed from the field of battle. The first stars emerged unnoticed, Ali brought over a small oil lamp and set it on a rock between us, and Holmes laid a pincers movement that took my second bishop. I took a rook (a hollow victory; Holmes scorned their stolid directness) and two moves later lost one to his knight. (Holmes’ knights were terrible weapons when a certain mood was upon him, more like Boadicea’s bladed chariot with its wholesale mowing-down of men than a proper knight on horseback.) Mahmoud pressed tiny cups of syrupy coffee into our hands, watched the board for a time without comment, and went off.
It was a long game. I knew that he intended to duplicate my surprise victory, when I allowed the queen to fall in order to set up a trap in the hands of the commoners, but I refused to be manoeuvered. I drew him out, I kept away from his pawns, and used my queen with great caution, and eventually he seemed to change his tactics and laid another triangle of pincers to drive me into. I danced away from it, he relaid it farther back on the board. Again I avoided it and sent my remaining rook down to place him into check. He evaded it, I brought up my queen in support, and then somehow in the excitement of closing in I overlooked the board in front of me, and the pawn that had been weak man in the first, long-forgotten pincers movement was in my second rank, and then it was before me, newly born a queen.
“Regina redivivus,” Holmes commented sardonically, and proceeded to tear into the unprotected back side of my offence like a hailstorm through peach blossoms. I fell before his resurrected queen in a complete rout, was mated in half a dozen moves, and then it was my turn to laugh quietly and shake my head before I sobered.
“Holmes, she’ll never fall for it,” I objected.
“She will, you know, if the distraction is believable enough. The woman is proud and scornful, and her anger at our absence will make her incautious and all too willing to believe that Sherlock Holmes has failed to preserve his queen, that poor old Holmes stands alone, exposed and helpless.” He reached out and rocked the crown of the black king with the tip of his finger. “She will swoop in to pick me off,” he tapped the white queen, “and then, we have her.” He picked up the black pawn and rolled it around in his hands as if to warm it, and when he opened his hands the black queen lay there. He put her back onto the board and sat back with the air of a man concluding a lengthy and delicate business negotiation. “It is good,” he pronounced, “really very good.” His eyes gleamed in the last flicker of the lamp’s wick, with a curious, intense relish such as I had seen on his face the week before, when he was facing a young assailant with a large knife. Joie de combat, I supposed, and my heart quailed before this changed Holmes.
“It’s dangerous, Holmes,” I protested, “really very dangerous. What if she sees what we’re doing? What if she doesn’t play by the rules and just decides to wipe us both out? What if—” What if I fail? a voice wailed inside me.
“What if, what if. Of course it’s dangerous, Russell, but I can hardly spend the rest of my life rusticating in Palestine or tripping over bodyguards, can I?” He sounded quite pleased about it, but now that the time had come, I wanted to hide.
“We don’t know what she’ll do,” I cried. “At least let Lestrade provide some guards at the beginning. Or Mycroft, if you don’t want Scotland Yard in on it, until we know how she’s going to react.”
“We may as well put an advertisement in The Times to inform her of our intentions,” he scoffed. “You ought to take up fencing, Russell, truly you should. It offers a most instructive means of judging your adversary. You see, Russell, I have a feel for my opponent now, I know her style and her reach. She has made some points off me in the game thus far, but she has also revealed her own faults. Her attacks have all been patterned on her perception of my nature, my skill at the game. When we return, she will expect me to continue dodging and parrying with m
y customary subtlety and skill. She knows that I will do so, but…I shall not. Instead, I shall foolishly lower my blade and walk unguarded into her. She will stand back for a moment, to see what I am doing. She will be suspicious, then gradually convinced of my madness, then gloating before she strikes. But you, Russell,” he swept his robed arm over the board, and when he drew it back the black queen stood in the place of the white bolt-and-nut king. “You will be waiting for her all the time, and you will strike first.”
Dear God. I had wanted more responsibility, and here it was, with a vengeance. I worked to control my voice.
“Holmes, it is no false modesty to say that I haven’t the experience in this—this ‘game,’ as you insist on calling it. A mistake on my part could be fatal. We must have a back-up.”
“I shall think about it,” he said finally, and then he leant forward over the chessboard and looked into my eyes with that same curious intensity that he had shown earlier. “However, I want you to realise, Russell, that I know your abilities, better than you do. After all, I have trained you. For nearly four years I have shaped you and tempered you and honed you, and I know the mettle you are made from. I know your strengths and weaknesses, particularly after these last weeks. The things we have done in this country have honed you, but the steel was there to begin with. I do not regret my decision to come here with you, Russell.
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