That left the other bearded man with the lantern.
As I’d hoped, he was more terrified of the dark than he was of me, and took care to set the light down before grabbing for the gun in his belt—both with his left hand. As he turned, I saw the reason for his clumsiness: His right arm rode in a sling. The revolver was not clear of his belt when I hit him in the face, following the blow with a harder one to his exposed neck.
I stood over the three unconscious men, panting—with fury more than effort—and gloating over my arsenal and the undamaged lamp. Run me over and plunge me into confusion, would you? Kill my friend with darkness?
I stepped forward to rip the sling off the last man, pushing back his sleeve. Bloodstained bandages lay heavy about his upper arm; my left hand tingled with glad awareness.
But I had no key.
I searched their every pocket, turned out every pouch, even ran my fingers down their collars feeling for strings, finding an assortment of weapons, an odd variety of foodstuffs, and dirt. But no keys.
I retrieved my flat flint-stone—I was becoming quite attached to it—knotted the hem of the man who seemed closest to consciousness, and wedged one of the knives under the door. Then I gathered the considerable armful of weaponry and returned to my companions.
Halfway back, I discovered what they had done with the keys: a faint glint of reflection caught my eye. When I raised the lantern, a scrap of metal gleamed from the far end of a track dug into the dust of ages. Once a padlock went shut, the men had simply tossed its key into the dark. No doubt, I thought as I bent down awkwardly around my armload, another source of amusement.
I made my way to the new prisoner, who squinted warily against the approaching light.
“Hello, Holmes,” I said.
“Russell!” He cleared his throat to conceal the flare of relief. “I thought I recognised those boots. I am most gratified to find you inside of them.”
“Not half as much as I was,” I replied. He took the lamp from my hand, freeing me to lay down three rifles, four handguns, and half a dozen daggers, all the while keeping a death grip on the key. “Mahmoud is over there. I was just about to start on his shackles when we were interrupted. Where is Idir?”
“When I last saw him, he was racing off into the darkness. I trust he’s too clever to have been recaptured. What shape is Mahmoud in?”
“Better than he was a couple of hours ago. And you?” He, too, had been left relatively clothed, apart from bare feet and lack of robes.
“My skull took a crack. Thank goodness for turbans. For the rest, contusions alone. How did they take you?”
“I was drugged. This key doesn’t fit yours.”
“Where are we?”
“Habs Qara, the Mequinez dungeon. Mahmoud has been here since Thursday, with nothing to eat or drink. I’ve given him water. I’ll see if this key fits his shackles, then search those three more closely.”
“Are they dead?”
“Unconscious. One of them might not make it. Well, two. One is bleeding, and another I hit kind of … hard.” With the admission, reaction tightened my chest. A living soul, dying, at my hand. Yes, they had left me little choice, but a life is a life, and there was a cost to be paid.
But not just now.
I tried the key in Mahmoud’s lock, feeling the tension quivering through his body as my hands fumbled. At last, the mechanism clicked. In one convulsive movement, he snatched the steel shackles from his leg and threw them as far as he could manage. He sat panting for a moment before he spoke, again in Arabic: “ ‘She removes from them their burden and the shackles that were upon them.’ ”
I laughed. As the echoes faded, a groan came from the direction of my victims.
“I need to tie that man,” I told him. “After that I’ll bring you some more water and we’ll get the fire going.”
“There may be others outside,” Holmes pointed out helpfully.
“There’s nothing we can do about that just yet. And we have the guns. Once you’re loose and Mahmoud is on his feet, we can go look.”
A closer search of the three men produced two more knives, tobacco, a handful of dried fruit, two fist-sized hunks of stale bread, a boiled egg, an orange, and five candied almonds. The edibles allowed me to resist the urge to kick them as I went.
Lighting the fire, now that we had an active flame, took but an instant. I brought more water, handed Mahmoud one of the rock-like and grubby dried figs I had taken from the groaning man (my third victim, the one I had simply hit), and fetched another handful of the smashed crate. Leaving Mahmoud gnawing the fig before the flames, I turned to the search for Holmes’ key. Neither of us had heard the thing land, since the men had been making noise when they threw it, but beginning at Holmes’ pillar, I quartered the area, finally spotting a track in the dust that ended at a slab of fallen ceiling plaster.
With Holmes quenching his thirst at the drip, I hunted farther afield. I discovered a scattering of wooden slats closer to the entrance, but the real treasure was a half-flat, rust-speckled tin I found in a corner. I set it beneath the drip, spread my sodden boot before the little fire, and settled down with my companions to a prison picnic.
Mahmoud was reviving more quickly than I would have imagined possible. Perhaps desert life and month-long Ramadan fasts accustomed a person to desiccation? And the familiarity of the setting now, evoking a thousand cook-fires around which he and Ali had set up their goat-hair tents, was no doubt restorative as well. Still, I went first with my tale, catching Holmes up on every detail of my fairly tumultuous Tuesday—it was, he interrupted to tell me, not yet midnight on Wednesday, which meant that I had been here a mere twenty hours. When I finished, he picked up his own portion of the story, taking us through two long days with Idir, the market rumours in Moulay Idriss, and his submission to abduction.
He took our silence, correctly, as surprise, and explained, “It meant that the lad could escape, with news of what had happened. And they swore convincing oaths that they would not kill me. Which, strictly speaking, they did not. They do seem to have a fondness for clouting people on the head,” he reflected. “For which one should perhaps be grateful, since the chances of recovery may be a fraction better than a knife under the ribs or a bullet to the chest. Still, waking to find oneself bound, hooded, and on the floor of a motorcar does not improve one’s temper.”
“You are certain that Idir was an unwilling hostage?” I asked.
“Reasonably so,” Holmes agreed.
Mahmoud spoke. “The boy is loyal.”
Holmes and I could hear the conviction in our companion’s voice. However …
“If that is so,” Holmes said, “it would support the thesis that these attacks come from men only thinly familiar with Abd el-Krim’s situation. An insider would know that one of the Emir’s close advisors had taken a mute lad under his wing, so that when a mute lad later surfaced at the side of a man dressed as a marabout, even a head-bashing fool would take care to keep him close at hand.”
“Which suggests that whoever gave us away is within Lyautey’s camp, not Abd el-Krim’s,” I concluded.
“It would appear so.”
“Mahmoud, you were about to tell me how you knew there would be an ambush on Lyautey.”
He shifted before the fire; a speech of any length required a summoning of energies. “I did not know. I wondered. This is how it happened.
“Ali and I were in Chaouen, helping search for traps left by the Spanish, when Mycroft’s letter came. We decided it was time to bring the Emir and the Maréchal together. Ali went north, to convince the Emir, while I made my way to Rabat to summon you, then take you to Fez to assist me with the Maréchal.” He paused to drink from the rusty tin; when it was empty, I went back to the drip to refill it.
Holmes called from near the entrance, “Russell, give me a hand here.”
The groaning man was conscious now, though still securely bound. Between us, Holmes and I dragged him, bucking and shouting, over
to my pillar, where Holmes snapped the shackles onto his ankle. When he began shouting, Holmes cocked a revolver at him.
The man went silent.
Back at the fire, I spoke before Mahmoud could resume.
“That man we just moved has a recent slice on his right arm, about where you might expect to see the wound from a left-handed person’s knife. His bearded companion has a lot of scrapes and scratches on him, as if he’d pushed his way at speed through a wooded hillside. The third man—clean-shaven a few days ago—looks more like a clerk than someone who would casually knife a wounded comrade. He also looks remarkably like one of the men dressed as a French soldier who came to arrest me in Fez the day after you and I parted company.”
Mahmoud nodded, then picked up his tale. “The roads in the Rif are little more than foot-paths. In the rain they become muddy streams. I did not hurry, since I thought it would take Ali far longer to reach the Emir than it would for me to reach you. As I went, I stopped often to rest the horses and to speak with the local people.”
Mahmoud being, after all, a spy.
“We had a site for the proposed meeting, half a day’s ride from Fez, remote yet open enough to reveal a trap, to either side. When I had explored the immediate area and found it satisfactory, I continued down the track along the wadi until I met with the road. There I was told a story about two mad strangers seen on the cliffs above the river, hunting for goats. I laughed, and agreed they were mad, but I also located where they had been: a spot where a large boulder hung above a cliff, an object that Allah might one day choose to roll down on an unbeliever. It was a place where, on the track near the cliff, I had noticed a fresh branch lying, one belonging to a tree that grew considerably higher up the hillside. It looked like a kind of marker.”
A spy, and a man with the instincts of an Indian tracker.
“When we reached Fez on Sunday, I went to a funduq where we might leave the horses. The next morning, Idir and I took the train to Rabat—the boy had never been on a train before. He liked it very much.
“In Rabat, I found your hotel, as Mycroft had told us, but I met your absence. As no-one had a clue where you might be,” he said to Holmes, “I had little choice but to follow the moving picture crew. To one of the most inaccessible places in the country.”
“The director wanted sand dunes,” I said.
“Russell,” my husband interjected, “I am most relieved to find that your memory continues to return.”
“Not all of it, but most.”
“There is little but sand in Erfoud,” Mahmoud continued. “Barely a road. Certainly no railway. I considered abandoning the attempt and making do with just the two of us, but since I had five days to fill until Ali came to Fez, I thought I might as well fill them entertaining the lad, and seeing a part of the country with which I was not familiar.” Spying out that land, too. “So we took another train—two trains—as far as we could get. And then we stole a lorry.
“When we located the encampment, I sent Idir in to fetch you.” His eyes flicked to mine. “When you had heard me out, and brought some necessities from your tent, we drove north to the railway. I can only hope to return the child to the Rif before he is introduced to further sins—Idir is even more enamoured of motorcars than he is of trains, and now believes that all one need do to acquire one is to steal it.”
His words held another reassuring trace of humour, but I was distracted by an image of sheer terror: “Did we nearly smash into a camel on the way?”
“We did, scarcely half an hour after we’d started. The beast must have wandered away from some camp-fire. Had we not still been on sand, we should have overturned, or broken a half-shaft. As it was, you and Idir screamed—he with pleasure, you with alarm—and the creature’s tail slapped our wind-screen as we went past.”
Mahmoud reached stiffly out to the collection of food-stuffs I had laid onto the rock, and selected a date. Rubbing away the lint and twigs, he went on. “We reached Fez at mid-day on Thursday. You and I took coffee near the clock while Idir bought sweets, and then we returned to the funduq. Later, I went with Idir to a hammam. When we were clean, I sent him back to the funduq with clothing for Miri, while I went to Dar Mnehbi.”
“Where you called yourself Monsieur Hassan,” Holmes provided. “The Maréchal said that you were a man interested in establishing schools, and that you and he had an oddly wide-ranging conversation.”
“Yes, I was … trying to get a feel for the man. One hears much about the Maréchal, but meeting him face to face was … thought-provoking. I spent the afternoon drinking coffee in the medina and listening to street rumours, and decided that I needed a second, more specific conversation with the Maréchal. I left a message at Dar Mnehbi, requesting an appointment. That evening, when we returned to the funduq after dinner, there was a message from the Maréchal saying that he would be passing along the road above the Merinid tombs, at nine o’clock that evening.”
“An odd venue.”
“Earlier, he had said that I happened to catch him at his one free hour of that day. And the man is known to work all hours, in all manner of places—setting a rendezvous along his route would not be unlike him.”
“Was the message in his writing?” Holmes asked. “I would not have known, if it were. But the note was written on a typing machine.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. Yet it was on Dar Mnehbi stationery, and in the message I had left that afternoon, I told the Maréchal that I required privacy. In addition, Miri and I were armed. So we went.”
“Leaving Idir behind.”
“He is a child, and this was adult business. And he is resourceful: If we became separated, he knew when Ali was returning, and he knew where our rendezvous place was to be.”
“The sorcerer’s clock?” I asked.
“So it is called,” Mahmoud said.
“You had him write it for me, on that scrap of paper. While we ate dinner.”
“I thought that having him tell you where the rendezvous was might reinforce its importance to him, since the lad tends to wander and lose track of the time. I also thought having him write it for you would make him feel less overlooked when we left him behind.” He closed his eyes for a moment, summoning strength. I took over his tale.
“As I told you, I’ve spent the past few days with a very faulty memory. Most of it seems to be returning, but that night is still … dreamlike. As I recall, you and I walked through the medina and left out of the Bab Guissa, on the north. That’s when you told me about the possible ambush site, wasn’t it?”
“I thought it best if I was not the only one to know. I used that same scrap of paper—”
“—to show me how the site with the hanging boulder would look, coming from the south. Then we climbed the hill towards the Tombs. After a time, we saw motorcar head-lamps, pointing down the road towards us. That was when, under the ruse of checking to be sure I had the scrap of paper, you tucked your ring into my pocket.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He took a minute to answer, as if reading his answer in the flames before him. “Fez is unfamiliar territory. Had I known the land better, I might have seen earlier how unlikely a place that was to meet. But Lyautey being famous for unconventional work habits, I did not see the trap until we were too deeply inside it to escape. There was no way for both of us to avoid capture, but I had given you the warning. Leaving you behind was the only way I could see to keep the Maréchal from an ambush of his own.”
And coincidentally, to preserve a scrap of golden family history.
“Miri had her revolver out, and she was positioned out of the lights—if they shot me, she was as ready as she could be. The instant I passed the head-lamps I drew my own weapon. I saw that the man in the back was wearing a French officer’s cap, then the front door flew open into me—there wasn’t much room, between the motor and the hillside—and my gun went off, but before I could even attempt to aim it, there were three men on top of me.
>
“They were practiced at abduction, no doubt of that. Gag in my mouth, hands bound behind my back, shoved onto the floor of the motor. Couldn’t have taken more than twenty seconds.”
He looked up with an apologetic glance—at Holmes, not at me. “And all I could do was lie there and listen to them attack Miri.”
“One of them approached me,” I told him, “armed only with a hand-torch and a knife—his job seemed to be locating me, so one of the others could shoot me.”
“Or take you hostage,” Mahmoud added. “He was not pleased at his assigned rôle.”
“Did they not imagine I might have a gun?”
“They asked me if you did. I said no.”
“And they believed you?”
“Not entirely. But they had a knife at my throat. Men like that generally imagine threat to guarantee the truth.”
“Oh. Well, I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but when the fellow switched on the torch, I knocked it out of his hand, and managed to cut him on the arm. The motor started moving, and I got one of the head-lamps with a rock, but before I could smash the second, there was a lot of shouting, and they dragged my attacker inside and sped away.”
“They saw someone coming,” Mahmoud said.
“Who? Idir?”
“We’d left the boy at the funduq.” Apparently he’d been unconscious during my rambles earlier.
“He followed.”
“I might have known. But the voice said, ‘Someone’s behind us.’ Which would be on the uphill side.”
“A mathematical farmer,” I provided. “He’s lucky your abductors were so agitated. They could have just shot him down if they hadn’t panicked. And me as well.”
“They seemed to imagine that villagers were closing in, particularly when they then passed another person coming up the hill. Idir, as you say. With one of them lying on top of me bleeding and the other two shouting at the driver, they had no intention of stopping again until we arrived here. I apologise,” he said. “The entire show was a display of exceeding incompetence.”