The Gabriel Hounds

by Mary Stewart

  I threw a quick glance over my shoulder. It seemed all wrong to be standing yelling about our private affairs in the middle of the valley, but all I could see was the tangle of bushes and trees on the cliff behind me. The palace was out of sight, and nothing moved on the path.

  I shouted: ‘It won’t do you any good if you do get across, She says she won’t see you.’

  ‘Won’t see me?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Why not?’

  I made a gesture. ‘Can’t tell you here. But she won’t.’

  ‘Well, then, when?’

  ‘Never – she meant not at all. She won’t see anyone at all. Charles, I’m sorry—’

  ‘She actually told you that?’

  ‘Yes, and she seemed a bit—’ Here my throat, sore with yelling, made me stop and cough.

  I saw Charles make a movement of intense irritation, then he turned to the boy who was standing just behind him closely attended by the black goat. I had forgotten all about him. I somehow hadn’t counted him as an audience to our conversation, any more than the goats, or the rocks and stones into which he could apparently melt at will.

  From the boy’s gestures, aided by his pointing stick, it seemed clear what Charles was asking him. And presently my cousin turned back to me and raised his voice again.

  ‘He says I can cross farther up.’

  ‘He told me there wasn’t anywhere.’

  ‘Still one or two things I can do that you can’t,’ he retorted. ‘Anyway … hopeless … can’t stand here yelling intimacies about Aunt H. across twenty feet of flood water.’ A gesture indicated the palace, invisible above me at the cliff top. ‘Right underneath … hellish row … And I’ve got to talk to you. Ahmad says there’s a place upstream. Can you make it your side?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  I turned and began to make my way up my side of the stream. There was no path, and here the water ran close under the cliff, so the going was rough, and complicated by a fairly thick growth of scrubby bushes and small trees. Soon I lost sight of Charles and his guide as I battled my way among bushes and rocks, intent on nothing but keeping my feet.

  The Nahr el-Sal’q seemed to flow for most of this part of its length in a gully fairly thickly grown with trees. These, and the broken terrain, made it impossible to stay always within sight of the water. I caught one or two more glimpses of Charles and the boy, then they vanished, apparently following some winding goat-track up into the thickets.

  I clambered on along my side of the gully for some half mile, to find the stream then curving and its bed shelving steeply up into a narrower gorge where the water dropped from pool to pool in a series of rapids, running deep and fast. Charles and the boy reappeared here, their path apparently clinging close above the torrent, but though the stream was narrow here, and everywhere full of rocks, there was still no place where it seemed safe to cross. And the narrower the gully the faster and louder grew the water, so that any kind of communication, other than by gesture, was impossible.

  The boy kept pointing upstream in an Excelsior kind of way. Charles spread his hands to me and jerked an encouraging thumb. We toiled on, separated by the loud white rush of water.

  It must have been after a full mile of painful going that the stream-bed took a sudden and final lift and curve, and ran, in a manner of speaking, right up against the cliff.

  In fact, of course, the stream came straight out of the cliff. The spring which fed the Nahr el-Sal’q was almost a miniature of the Adonis Source, leaping suddenly into the sunlight from a gash in the dry rock face that blocked the upper end of the gully. It was much smaller, less dramatic, and much less haunted. The spring, a spout of ice-green water, jetted out of the cliff with a roar that the echoes magnified, tossed itself into a churning pool, then went tearing off down among the white boulders of the gully. A few hanging bushes, soaked and ragged with the spray, waved in the breeze of the fall. The sun drove against the cliff where the water gushed, lighting the cascade into glittering brilliance, but below, where we stood, the place was in shadow and the wind off the water struck chilly.

  I stared about me with dismay. If communication had been difficult down at the ford, and worse in the gully, here it was impossible. The roar of the water, magnified a dozen times by its echoes, bellowed round from rock to rock so that, though Charles and I were here barely eight or nine feet apart, we could not have heard a word the other spoke. Moreover, I could still see no way across. To cross the torrent here would have been suicide, and above the cascade towered a seamed and sunlit crag as high as a cathedral.

  It was at this that the boy was pointing, and presently, to my alarm, I saw Charles approaching it. My yell of protest, or perhaps my wild gesture, reached him, for he stopped, nodded his head at me, jerked a thumbs-up gesture, then with apparent confidence approached the cliff. Only then did I remember that rock-climbing had been another of the ploys with which (vide my father) my cousin had been wont to waste his time all over Europe. I relaxed. All I could do was hope that Charles had, as he usually did (vide my mother), wasted his time to good effect.

  It seemed he had. I have no idea whether it was in fact an easy climb, or whether he simply made it seem so, but there was very little to it. He went carefully, because in places the rock was wet or loose, but it was not long before he had gained my side of the Nahr el-Sal’q. He came down the last pitch at no more than a scramble, to land safely beside me.

  ‘Hullo, Aphrodite.’

  ‘Adonis, I presume? Nice to see you, but if you’ve any idea of guiding my tottering steps back across the north wall of the Eiger with you, you can have another think. It’s not on.’

  ‘I wouldn’t risk my own precious neck trying. No, I’m afraid you’re stuck, sweet coz. It’s beastly cold down here, isn’t it, and there’s still a hellish noise … Shall we get up into the sun where we can talk?’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, yes, let’s. I must say it seems a lot of trouble to go to, just to have a little conversation.’

  ‘Ah, not with you,’ said my cousin. ‘Wait a moment, I’ll tell the boy – where is he? Did you see him go?’

  ‘Haven’t you guessed? That’s not a boy, that’s a faun. He’s invisible at will.’

  ‘Very likely,’ agreed Charles calmly. ‘Well, he’ll turn up when he wants his tip.’

  I followed him out of the gully, and we soon emerged on a small stony plateau where the sun struck hotly.

  Here, too, the resemblance to the Adonis Source was underlined, for on the plateau stood the tumbled ruins of some ancient temple. Nothing remained now but the steep steps of the portico, a stretch of broken floor, and two standing pillars. It must only have been a small place originally, perhaps a subordinate shrine of the greater Gods of Afka, built at the tributary source, and it was weedy, forgotten, and undramatic. Tufts of some yellow flower grew between the stones, and half-way up one pillar where the masonry had fallen into a crumbling hole, a hawk had made an untidy nest liberally streaked with white droppings; but somehow the squared masculine-looking Roman stones, the honey-coloured pillars, the pitted steps where the thistles grew, fitted with a kind of beauty into that wild landscape.

  The steps provided a seat for us in the shade of one of the pillars. The roar of the cascade was cut off by the sides of the gorge, and the silence was intense.

  Charles got out cigarettes and offered one to me,

  ‘No, thanks. Oh, Charles, I’m awfully glad you came! What am I going to do? I can’t climb across that awful rock, and the faun told me the water wouldn’t go down till tomorrow.’

  ‘So I gather. Actually there is another way. He tells me there’s some kind of track going up into the heights near Afka, but it’s a hell of a way, and if I was to take the car up by road to meet you you’d have to go on your own, and you’d never find it. I suppose the boy might manage to cross and act as guide for you, but we’d still probably never manage an RV in a million years. The place is seamed with tracks.’

  �
�And probably creeping with wild boars and yelling tribes of Midian or whatever. Nothing,’ I said flatly, ‘will get me clambering up into the High Lebanon, boy or no boy.’

  ‘How I agree.’ My cousin leaned back lazily against the pillar and blew smoke at the sun. ‘If the water doesn’t go down again before night there’s only one thing to do, go back to the palace.’ He slanted a look at me, eyebrows raised. ‘That’s certainly what I was hoping to do. What’s all this about her not letting me in?’

  ‘Just that she said she wouldn’t, and as a matter of fact I’m not wild keen to go back there myself. I’ll tell you about that in a minute … But look, I couldn’t make out just what you were yelling at me down by the ford – you did say you’d seen Hamid, didn’t you, my driver? He was to have come for me this morning.’

  ‘Yes, I saw him, and it’s all right, I came instead. You knew Ben’s father was delayed and couldn’t get home till Sunday – yesterday? Well, he telephoned again last night to say he couldn’t make it, had to go on to Aleppo and possibly Homs, and wasn’t sure when he’d get home, so I told Ben I’d go back there later, but I wanted to come straight up to Beirut while you were here. I didn’t try telephoning you last night because it was pretty late when he called, and I left first thing this morning – and I mean first thing, literally crack of dawn. There wasn’t a thing on the road, and I came up the Barada Valley at the speed of sound, and the frontier post let me through in twenty minutes, which must be an all-time record for them. I got to Beirut about eight o’clock. Your driver was in the hotel lobby when I checked in and asked about you, and he told me you were staying the night here and he’d promised to come and fetch you. So I told him not to bother, I’d come straight up myself.’

  ‘As long as he hasn’t lost another contract by giving me the day.’

  ‘Not to worry, I paid him,’ said Charles. ‘I’m darned sure he’ll get another contract anyway, the Phoenicia’s always full of streams of people wanting cars. He seemed pretty pleased.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. He’s a very nice chap, as a matter of fact. I had a lovely day yesterday.’

  Charles tapped ash off into a clump of weeds. ‘That’s what I’ve come to hear about. After all the trouble we’ve gone to to have a little conversation, it’d better be good. What the devil do you mean by stealing a march on me, young Christy? Was Aunt H so disgusted with you that she refused to see anybody else?’

  ‘Probably.’ I sat up. ‘Oh, my dear, there’s masses to tell you! Actually, I’d no real intention of calling at the palace, but when we got to the village Hamid stopped the car, and it looked so near, sort of weird and romantic, and of course it never occurred to me really that she’d refuse to see either of us. Look, away down there, see? You can actually see it from here, too. It looks rather gorgeous, doesn’t it? I must say distance lends enchantment! Close to it’s just about dropping to bits.’

  You could indeed, from this high eyrie, see the end of the promontory on which the palace stood. As the eagle flew, it cannot have been much more than three-quarters of a mile distant, and in the clean and brilliant air even the branches of the feathery trees were clearly visible.

  We were looking down on the back of the palace. I could see the high blank wall and inside it the flower-roofed arches enclosing the glint of the lake. Beyond the Seraglio sprawled the jumble of roofs and courtyards whose geography, even now, I couldn’t guess at. From the distance the palace looked completely deserted, like a ruin open to the sun.

  ‘See the green courtyard and the lake?’ I said. ‘That’s the Seraglio where I slept.’

  ‘How appropriate,’ said Charles. ‘And Aunt H?’

  ‘She has the Prince’s Court.’

  ‘She would. Well, tell me all about it. Hamid told me you rather took them by surprise, but you got in in the end.’

  ‘“In the end” is right, and I didn’t get to Aunt H till about midnight.’

  I told him my story then, omitting nothing that I could remember.

  He heard me out to the end without much interruption. Then he stirred, dropped the stub of his cigarette carefully beside his foot on the stone, and crushed it out. He regarded me frowningly.

  ‘Quite a story, eh? Well, we expected a queer situation, didn’t we? But it’s queerer even than you think.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  He asked flatly: ‘Did she strike you as sane?’

  I have often read about moments of ‘revelation’. These seemed to be sudden – blinding lights on the Damascus road, scales dropping from eyes, and so forth. I hadn’t ever thought about it much, except to class it vaguely as a ‘miracle’, a thing that happened in the Bible or some other lofty context, and not normally – not in real life – at all. But in a minor and very personal way, I had a revelation now.

  There was my cousin, the same boy I had known for twenty-two years, looking at me and asking a question. I had known him ever since I could remember. I had shared the bath with him. I had seen him smacked. I had jeered at him when he fell off the orchard wall and cried. I had discussed sex with him at the age when we had no physical secrets from one another. Later, when we had, I had regarded him with a tolerant and familiar indifference. Meeting him the other day in Straight Street I had been pleased, but not bowled over with delight.

  And now, here, suddenly, he turned his head and looked at me and asked a question, and I saw, as if I had never seen them before, the grey long-lashed eyes, the well-cut hair growing thick and smooth, the faint hollow under the cheek-bones, the slightly arrogant and wholly exciting cut of nostril and upper lip, the whole vivid intelligence and humour and force of the man’s face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, irritably.

  ‘Nothing. What did you say?’

  ‘I asked you if Aunt H struck you as sane.’

  ‘Oh.’ I pulled myself together. ‘Yes, of course she did! I told you she was odd and woolly and said she forgot things, and she was really quite sharp and nasty in a way, but …’ I hesitated. ‘I can’t quite explain what I mean, but I do know she looked sane. However peculiar she was, and the way she was dressed and everything … Charles, her eyes were sane.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s what I mean. No, wait, you haven’t heard my side of it yet.’

  ‘Your side of it? You mean you’ve heard something more since we last met?’

  ‘Indeed and indeed. I rang my people up on Friday evening to tell them I was leaving Damascus soon for Beirut. I told them I’d met you, and that we were going to spend two or three days together and we were coming up to see Great-Aunt H. I wondered if they had any messages to send, or anything like that. Well, my mother said they’d had a letter from her.’

  I looked at him, startled. ‘A letter? Do you mean another Will or something?’

  ‘No, a letter. It came about three weeks ago, while I was in North Africa. Must have been just after you left. My mother had actually written to tell me about it, and when I phoned she told me her letter would be waiting for me care of Cook’s in Beirut. What’s more, she’d forwarded Aunt H’s letter to me there.’ His hand went to his inside pocket.

  ‘You’ve got it?’

  ‘I picked it up this morning. Wait till you’ve read it and then tell me if it makes sense to you.’

  He handed me the letter. It was written on coarse-looking paper which could have been some sort of torn-off wrapping, and the handwriting was spidery and spluttery as though it had been written with a quill pen; which in fact it probably had. But it was perfectly legible.

  My dear Nephew,

  Last month I recd a letter from my dear Husband’s friend and colleague Humphrey Ford who you will remember was with us in Resada in 1949 and again in ’53 and ’54. He tells me that he recently recd the news from a Friend that my Gt-Nephew, yr son Charles, is at present studying the languages of the East with a view (he thinks) to adopting my dear Husband’s profession. Poor Humphrey cd not be clear over this as he is getting sadly absent, but he informed me that you
ng Chas will be travelling this yr in Syria. If he wishes to call on me, I shld make a point of receiving him. As you know I do not approve of the freedom with wch young people are brought up nowadays, and yr son is what my dear Mother wd have called a Scapegrace, but a clever boy, and wd be amused to receive him. There is much to interest him here in the study of Eastern Life and Manners.

  I do well enough here with my small Staff who are v. attentive and a man from the village who looks after the dogs, Samson cannot abide the Dr. Young Chas will remember him.

  Regards to yr Wife also to my other Nephew and Wife – the little girl must be well grown by now, a strange little thing, but like enough the Boy to be called Handsome.

  Yr affec Aunt,

  Harriet Boyd.

  Post Scriptum – The Times continues flimsy so that I cannot believe Yr. Representations were sufficiently decided.

  Post Post Scriptum. I have purchased an excellent Tombstone locally.

  I read through the letter once, then clean through again, more slowly, and I think my mouth must have been wide open all the time. Then I gaped up at my cousin. He was leaning back against the pillar, head back, eyes narrowed under the long lashes, watching me.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘But Charles … when did she – is it dated? There’s a squiggle at the top but I can’t read it.’

  ‘Arabic,’ he said shortly. ‘Written in February. From the postmark it looks as if she didn’t get it mailed straight off, and she didn’t send it airmail, so it took nearly three weeks on the way. But that’s not the point. It was certainly written after Christmas’s Last Will and Testament. Would you or would you not say that was an open invitation?’

  ‘I certainly would. Two months ago? Well, obviously something’s happened to make her change her mind.’

  ‘John Lethman?’

  ‘D’you think that’s possible?’ I asked.

  ‘Not having seen the ménage, I wouldn’t know. What’s he like?’

  ‘Tallish and rather thin, and slouches a bit. Light eyes—’

  ‘My dear girl, I’m reasonably indifferent to him physically. Would you say he was honest?’