I woke just long enough before Holmes and the boy returned, to splash my face to wakefulness, but not long enough for my anxiety to build. When they came in, the lad was dragging, and even Holmes sagged a bit around the edges. They had spent a long and fruitless day scouring the narrow streets of the medina, trying without result to prise further information from the owner of the funduq, venturing into the burgeoning suburbs outside the walls, even making their way through the Mellah, the Jewish quarter tucked against the shelter of the Sultan’s palace. They had asked shopkeepers and donkey-men, soldiers and madrassa students, but had found no trace of Mahmoud.
Who would have imagined that it would be a simple matter for a ducal Bedouin/English spy/arms dealer to vanish into thin air?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Before dawn on Monday, Holmes and I joined Lyautey in the silent Dar Mnehbi courtyard. The Maréchal was wearing civilian riding clothes—jodhpurs and knee-high boots—and carrying a robe. His head was bare, the close-cropped white hair gleaming in the light of the single burning lamp.
He greeted us politely, then said, “A response came to my enquiry about the soldiers at Nurse Taylor’s door. It seems that the police did not summon them. I have ordered my assistant to continue the enquiry—the possibility that criminals might be impersonating soldiers is disturbing. But, Madame, how do you feel today?”
I did not meet Holmes’ eyes. It had taken a while, the previous evening, to persuade him that a physical reminder of my emotional centre might assist the restoration of my intellectual faculties … but I was not about to go into that, even with a Frenchman.
“Very well, thank you,” I said demurely.
My headache persisted and my bruised hip and shoulders were stiff, but I told myself that exercise would help.
He nodded, and said to Holmes, “I have a djellaba and burnoose, as you suggested, but I won’t put them on until we leave the city. Wouldn’t you two prefer proper riding boots?”
“We’ll be fine,” Holmes said.
The Maréchal led us out of the palace, startling the drowsing guard. Equally surprised were the soldiers at Bab Bou Jeloud, which was still closed for the night. But none of the men made protest: Clearly, the Resident General was well accustomed to going his own way, despite attempts on his life.
Holmes had told me that Lyautey often walked the streets accompanied only by an interpreter. He had also told me that today, that rôle was mine. I was not entirely clear why he or Ali could not perform the function, but I did not argue, since the other option seemed to be remaining behind with Idir.
The Maréchal’s habit made things easier at the stables, when he simply walked into a box and led out a horse. Before he had the saddle-cloth smoothed, a pair of sleep-rumpled grooms were there to assist; by the time we rode out, half a dozen soldiers marked our exit, and although their sergeant offered armed accompaniment, they were not taken aback when the Maréchal refused.
The horses he had chosen were by no means the handsomest in the stables; all had long manes and the heavy coats of winter. Similarly, the saddles were not the highly polished trappings of cavalry officers, nor were the bridles of European style.
Something told me that the French were not unfamiliar with the business of looking like Moroccans. Strictly speaking, the horses were too well fed, well groomed, and well shod for native stock, but they would pass.
My cob was the roughest-looking of the three and had a mouth to match, but its gait was a surprise, smooth enough to preserve my tender skull from too much jostling. My body did not recall riding in a saddle quite this shape before, high fore and aft and with wide, flat stirrup hooks. The saddle would hold a corpse upright; coupled with its sturdy breastplate, I thought that my mount could climb mountains without tipping me off.
And it appeared that mountains might indeed be involved.
Away from the city walls, with the morning sun glowing behind the eastern hills, we stopped for Lyautey to don his Moroccan garb, and for Holmes and me to make adjustments to the unfamiliar saddles. Lyautey wore the garments in much the way he spoke Arabic, with more confidence than was fully justified. He looked like what he was: gentry in exotic costume.
All three of us carried revolvers.
As might have been expected from the city’s numerous streams and fountains, Fez was built in a long valley where the sparsely-grown hills met the green and fertile plains of the bled. On this northern side of the walls, the city had no suburbs at all, merely a few scattered tombs and buildings set amidst olive groves and cactus, which soon gave way to wild ravines, dense thickets, and hidden caves in which sheltered—according to Lyautey—highwaymen, mad folk, and lepers. The morning was cold enough that our breath came in clouds, so still that we could hear the bell on a distant goat.
We were following, somewhat to my surprise, an actual metalled road, which looped back and forth out of the city towards the heights. When I commented on it, Lyautey, who was riding slightly to the fore, reined in so as to come between us.
“Roads are paramount, both for security and for civilisation,” he said. “Think of the Romans—wherever they went, straight roads. Those and railways were the first things I commanded built when I came. If I have to move troops across the country, I can now do so. If I have to be in Casablanca or Marrakech, I can do that.”
“No more Rifi tribesmen infiltrating the city,” I remarked.
“Being welcomed in that manner was an embarrassment,” he acknowledged.
“You see where the other road goes past the tombs?” Holmes broke in. He pointed to a heap of rubble just becoming visible in the sunrise. “That was where the lad found you, the other night.”
The only road along the ridge. I was wondering if it would be another embarrassment to ask why a patrol had not seen the motor, when Lyautey answered the unspoken question.
“I may need to reinstate guards along the heights,” he said. “It is a balance between security and reducing our visible presence here.”
He shot a last glance at the offending spot, and kicked his horse back into motion.
I paused to survey the city before me, nestled in the lap of the Middle Atlas. Fez was a hortus conclusus writ large, a garden walled around by hills, set about with a myriad of the fountains and streams that define luxury to a desert-dwelling people. A closed garden composed of ten thousand closed gardens; a mosaic of rooftops built out of a million mosaics; a palimpsest of history, layer upon layer of hidden life.
The first muezzin’s dawn call echoed, eerie and faint, out of the valley below, as I turned my horse’s head to follow the two men.
We were riding north-west to the meeting place with Abd el-Krim, a hard half-day’s ride into the rough land between the Sabu and Werghal rivers. The Werghal was the age-old geographical boundary between tribes, even though the current political borders between the French and Spanish Protectorates lay well beyond it. The cause of much potential strife.
But from Lyautey’s demeanour, we might have been on a family picnic. He embarked on a polite but comprehensive grilling of his cousin’s wife, exploring my history, my family, my interest in things theological, the farm I had inherited in Sussex. His interest was genuine and wide-ranging, his ability to follow an idea to its conclusion remarkable, and I could soon see why Holmes responded to the man’s supple and restless mind, his boundless energy, and his devotion to learning more than he taught.
We passed a tiny roadside shrine with its attendant marabout, and the Resident General asked me about the holy men of the Old Testament.
We moved aside to permit a troop of soldiers to pass (all unknowing) their commanding officer, and he wondered how long it would take before a transplanted soldier of ancient Rome felt at home among them.
A pair of men working among a rocky grove of centuries-old olive trees led to a detailed lecture on how the pressings would fuel the kilns for Fez zellij; riding through a quiet village led to a discussion of dogs versus cats in Islam; a Persian wheel worked by a
donkey sparked an exploration of the Archimedes Palimpsest; three unveiled women watching us pass from a streamside laundry had us discussing how Berber women could be devoutly Moslem, yet go unveiled and given free voice in village affairs.
The day woke, the sun warmed us. At mid-morning we stopped near a pink oleander, to climb numbly from the saddles and allow sensation to trickle back into our limbs. My aches had returned, my headache grumbled in the background, and I was grateful for the tea Holmes brewed over a small fire.
Then back onto our horses and on into the hills.
Ali’s instructions had been to follow the French road to a certain small village, then turn due north on a well-marked path and watch for a hut with a tree growing through it. A secondary path led away from there, following a narrow wadi that might or might not have water in it. After three kilometres, we should come to a clearing where Abd el-Krim and Ali would meet us.
After our stop, Lyautey pressed on, head up, spine straight. He reminded me of the Lombardy poplars that line French roads, erect and watchful. Beside him, Holmes’ pale robe formed precisely the same outline as Lyautey’s striped one, their two heads tilted towards each other as they talked. I rode behind them, Holmes glancing back from time to time to see that I had not fallen off or gone astray.
Our tea break had succeeded in restoring feelings to my legs—unfortunately. The wide, high pommel chafed raw patches while the equally tall cantle dug into my spine. My cob required constant correction, since it was determined to take the lead over its companions. To distract my mind from the various pangs and irritations, I summoned my usual mental tasks. A review of Spanish vocabulary and verb forms took up half an hour, after which I translated a memorised sura of the Qur’an (An-Nisa) from Arabic to Spanish. When that ceased to amuse, I dismounted and first shambled, then trotted beside the bewildered horse for a kilometre or two. Back in the saddle, I patted at my pockets, to see if my disparate possessions might tell me anything today about my missing life.
The heavy signet ring was on a leather thong around my neck, along with my own, thinner wedding band. I had tried to give Mahmoud’s ring to Ali, but he had refused, on the grounds that his partner must have had reason to leave it with me. So here it was, large and gold. It was a pelican, the heraldic charge of the Hughenforts. Why Mahmoud had it and not the young duke, Ali either could not, or would not, tell me.
I tucked the gold back under my shirt, and dug out the chalky stone. I knew now why the stone had made me think of building material—the snug, solid little house I shared with Holmes (or had, up to the time my memory failed) was made from Sussex flint, although of pieces far larger than this one, which did not even fill the palm of my hand. I stretched out my arm, intending to drop the stone to the ground, but instead, my fingers returned it to the pocket. When one had so little, it seemed, even a rock could be a talisman.
Similarly, I retained the items stolen in the medina. The length of pipe and decorative dagger I had left behind (since I had two more workmanlike knives and the gun), along with the hair-pin, which had jabbed holes in both clothing and skin. Bit by bit, I looked through the possessions left me, glancing at my features in the little glass, snugging the ends of the twine. I felt a mild pang of guilt over the stolen money, but no other sensation of memory. With a sigh, I put it all away.
All but the red book. I let its cover fall open to that inscrutable corner of paper. Idir’s barely legible writing looked up from my palm: the clock of the sorcerer. I smiled: Leave it to Mahmoud and Ali to find a Rifi Irregular with the wits not only to find his way around alien territory, but the persistence to locate a pair of straying foreigners. Poor child, he must have been in a fury this morning when he woke to find us missing, even though we had left him a large and prominent note to say that we would be back. And Youssef had promised to look after him in our absence.
I had no doubt: If Mahmoud was in Fez, Idir would locate him before we returned.
I went to close the small book over the onionskin corner, then stopped to turn the scrap over. The uneven capital A now faced me top-side down: three squiggled lines, one from upper left to lower right, one nearly vertical on the right side, and a shorter, less steeply angled near-connector between the two.
The right-hand squiggle had a sort of a loop at the top; its line then dropped straight down, nearly to meet the long angled line.
A pencil’s random rub, no doubt, its very randomness serving to stimulate a brain desperately in search of meaning.
And yet, wouldn’t a pencil point rubbing against a scrap of paper leave lines that were less … precise?
“What are you looking at?”
The track had gone wide for a bit, permitting Holmes to fall back to my side. I let the booklet close and shoved it away. “It’s only that note Idir wrote—‘sorcerer’s clock.’ I was thinking that we should take the boy to see a proper doctor, to see if there is anything physically wrong with his tongue.”
“I’ll ask Lyautey to arrange it, when we return.”
“An interesting man,” I said to Holmes, my eyes on the steely spine before us.
“If the world had more of his design of mind, colonial lands would be well served. How is your skull faring?”
“Reasonably well. I’m grateful that the Maréchal picked a horse with a smooth gait for me. Although if you’re asking if I got another chunk of my life back overnight, I don’t think so. What I can remember does seem somewhat … firmer. But it’s maddening. It feels like a wall, utterly solid in places, almost transparent in others. For example, when I think about my childhood, California is both clear memories and vague shadows. We went there during the missing months, didn’t we?”
“Yes. Last spring.”
“I figured we had. Still, I couldn’t tell you what we did. There was a man, a thin man whose hat flew off. Was he Chinese? Or a singer?”
“Those were three separate individuals.”
“It did seem an unlikely combination. And I gather that Ali and Mahmoud still work for your brother, Mycroft. Who runs a spy ring for the British government.”
“Mycroft isn’t a spymaster so much as an … instigator. He directs men and women like the Hazr brothers, true, but essentially he is looking at trends in the world, and at the means of, shall we say, nudging them in a direction beneficial to Britain.”
“What is he nudging here in Morocco?”
“I should imagine he aims to keep French interests in check.”
“By selling guns to the Rebellion?”
“Apparently.”
“Is that why we are here, too? Spying for him?”
“No. In fact, you and Mycroft are having a degree of feud.”
“Good heavens. Why?”
“It’s complicated, and has nothing to do with the current situation. So, the summer before last remains your most recent memories?”
“There are odd jigsaw-puzzle bits that float to the surface—a burning aeroplane, and an elephant, and a heap of building wreckage in a street a bit like those in the medina, only not there. They’re like that scrap of paper with Idir’s writing on it: They make my brain itch with frustration.”
“It’ll all come back.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then you’ll have lost a year, which by the time you’re my age, will seem of little importance.”
Small consolation. But he was right, and he’d also been right when he told Ali that pushing only made this particular wall grow stronger. Turn my eyes away from the memories, and let them slip in under their own inclination.
Resolutely, I changed the topic. “Tell me about this Rif War, Holmes. The books I found yesterday had more to do with the seventeenth century than the twentieth.”
“Light-hearted reading, I imagine, that of Moulay Ismaïl and his captured slaves? It’s as well Captain De la Rocha did not pattern himself on Sultan Ismaïl.”
“You mentioned him before—who is he?”
But he waved the name away: no doubt so
meone inhabiting the hole in my past. “The Rif mountains across the north of Morocco are not particularly high, but they are wild and inhospitable, particularly this time of year. Its residents are Berbers rather than Arabs—a people every bit as fierce and inaccessible as the land itself.”
He described the long decades of tension along the north between Berber and European that threatened to wash through the gates of Fez. On paper, Morocco was a Protectorate, not a colony, but in fact this was a typical colonial conflict with European powers jostling for supremacy.
Most of what he told me sounded familiar, but I let his voice flow around me, talking about Umayyads and Almohads, Fatimids and Ottomans. The lecture was soothing. If nothing else, it distracted my mind from what it did not have, and my body from what it could not change.
Still, when we stopped at a tiny village in quest of a meal, I was more than ready.
The food, brought by a toothless crone and her imbecilic grandson, was appalling and fly-blown, and had my sense of smell remained as intense as when I first woke in the medina, I should have run from the threat. But our teeth were strong and it filled the stomach, with the inevitable mint tea afterwards to settle any gastric uneasiness. Following tobacco for the men, we rode on, watching for the designated track coming in from the right.
The track, when we found it, was little more than a goat’s trail, narrow enough to force us into a single file, our right knees near to brushing the hill in places, the horses’ left hooves a foot from catastrophe. I watched Holmes’ back, with glimpses of Lyautey’s at the fore, as the horses plodded up the wadi. After the recent rains, it held a noisy little river. This was a rocky area, with débris littering the path from the near-vertical wall to our right; flash floods had carved the canyon at our left. The bank across from us had a more forgiving angle to it, but appeared to be composed of a lethally crumbling rock—hence the goat-path worn into the right-hand side.