The guards put an end to it. No one but me understood their urgent command for silence, but all grasped the intent of those weapons.
The house shuddered into silence, broken only by the whimper of Isabel’s mother.
The larger of the two men walked over to his engulfed boss. Samuel’s disbelief had frozen him to the spot for one crucial second; now the instrument neatly covered all but a few inches of his footwear. A glance under the other edge convinced the man that he did not want to see further. He told his partner, “He’s dead.”
The man gave forth a rich curse, and followed it with, “What do we do now?”
“We hold them until someone comes.”
“No one will come.” I spoke in Arabic; the guards goggled as if the fountain had made a pronouncement. I went on, my voice inexorable, speaking a language designed for pure rhetoric. “No one will come but the British and the French armies. They will find you here and they will kill you. They will fall on you and they will arrest you and they will arrest your families, then they will stand you before a line of men with rifles and they will shoot you dead, your sons and your brothers and your mothers, if you do not leave us this instant, if you—”
I’ll never know if my words alone would have broken their will and sent them bolting for the door, because instead of the Army falling on them, an afrit came down, a ghost or perhaps the spirit of their dead leader: A great billowing white cloud filled the air over their heads, giving out a ghostly moan. Both men snapped up their shotguns and fired, both bores. The next moment, as one panicked guard was beating away the shredded bed-sheet, a regiment of harpies fell upon him, pounding at him with flower pots and broomsticks and the upper half of the tagine crock, descending on him like the Red Queen’s deck of cards, screaming and pummelling him to the ground. The other guard dropped his empty shotgun to rip at the revolver in his sash, and my hand threw the weapon it held—except as it left my grip I realised it was not my knife but the scrap of wood. I scrabbled for my blade. His gun went wildly off, once, before the blade reached him and he grabbed his shoulder and went down, the revolver skittering across the tiles to Edith’s feet. She picked up the heavy weapon and pointed it at him, her hands wavering but determined.
Panting and wild-eyed, twenty-one English women in dressing gowns and galabiyyas surveyed a tableau of ruination. The lovely tiles were buried under blood, death, dirt, and débris.
I thought my heart would burst with pride.
The man with my knife in him groaned—reminder that the battle was by no means over. I flew to the kitchen, where the house-keeper and her girls cowered in one corner. The younger one cried out when I appeared but I ignored them, upending drawers and overturning jugs to gather all the knives I could find. Back in the courtyard, I distributed the blades along with a couple of sturdy pestles, and we waited for the next phalanx of guards to pour in. We waited, as the pounding of our hearts gradually slowed. We waited, until we could hear over the heart-beats. Hear the boom of the surf, the nervous cheep of a bird, and some peculiar noises, coming from above.
Annie’s head vanished from the ruins of the sky-light; I stepped forward to relieve Edith of the guard’s revolver. In three minutes, Annie burst from the stairway. “I don’t think they heard! The men are doing some kind of bashing about—they had just come out onto their rooftop when I … did that.” She gestured at the entombing piano.
We waited, collective breath held. Incredibly, the violin started up, and with it, our hopes.
“Tie them and gag them,” I said. “Use bed-sheets. And the cook and her girls, we’ll have to tie them as well.” I roughly bound the knife wound on the one guard, more to save the tiles than him, and ordered my fellow Amazons to get their shoes and to bring all the clothes from the dressing-up box to the roof.
“Don’t stop to fuss with your hair,” I called after them.
“What shall I do?” asked Annie at my elbow.
“Get the girls singing, and have Maude put brown make-up on everyone’s faces and hands. And see if you can think of a distraction. Holmes heard the gunshots—that’s him covering up our noise—but if we can divert their guards’ attention for a moment, it’ll give the men a chance.”
“I may be able to think of something,” she said.
I returned to the kitchen, dropping to my heels in front of the bound cook. “I am sorry we had to tie you up,” I told her in Arabic. “Once we are out of the city I will have someone come back to set you free. And I will leave a knife in the courtyard, for you to cut your bonds. Thank you for all your service, these past days.”
The Arabic startled them into stillness, the coins I placed on the table widened their eyes. I laid a small knife on the ground near the fountain: It would take a while for one of them to reach it, but I would not wish them helpless forever.
I snatched up various table-cloths and towels on my way to the roof, where I found the girls valiantly singing along to Holmes’ tunes, mixing up the words but belting out the music unabated. Maude had her lips pursed as she smeared brown paint onto pink faces, assisted by Mrs Hatley and Bonnie, both of them old hands at the make-up box. I turned to Annie, who was waving the girls into greater enthusiasm. She was wearing a tan galabiyya, the hood thrown back so that her pale hair and English skin shone out.
“You need some face paint,” I noted. “Did you come up with a distraction?”
“I need more than face paint. I’m the distraction.” She yanked off the voluminous garment, revealing a sight that had the girls strangling mid-song. She whirled around, tassels flying, to wave them back into full voice, although in truth they found it difficult to produce music past the choking laughter in their throats.
“A belly dancer?” I exclaimed. “Where on earth did you find that … costume?”
“It was in one of the boxes. Mrs Hatley didn’t think it was appropriate for the girls, so we hid it away. Do you think it’s distracting enough?”
The question was, would it be so universally distracting that it would turn every man over the wall to stone, prisoners and guards alike? “Well, if we put you at one end of the wall, I can go across at the other end and simply tip them on their faces. Maude?” I called. “I hope you have a good supply of paint.”
I distributed the various scarves, cloths, and towels to the girls whose garments lacked hoods, demonstrating how they could be wrapped. I hid Annie’s platinum locks under the folds of a brightly embroidered table-runner, then stood back to study the result. I could only hope it didn’t give any of our men a heart attack.
I motioned the girls to come together around me, and when the song came to an end, I quickly explained, “Annie’s going to catch the guards’ attention so our men can overcome them and get their weapons. Once the men are free, they’ll come here and we’ll all go down together and make our way to the nearest city gate. We will have guns at the beginning and at the end of the group, so you need to stick together between them. If there’s any shooting, jump into the nearest doorway and get as small as you can.
“Ready?”
They weren’t, of course—what normal person considers herself ready for a daring armed race through a strange and hostile city? But none of their protests were of any import, so when the next song got under way—the oddly appropriate pirates’ song that begins, With cat-like tread, upon our prey we steal—I waved my hands and glowered at the chorus until they began to chime in, and were soon singing as if their very lives depended on it.
Annie and I took up positions at opposite ends of the dividing wall. We had heaped a table and bench on top of each other, to give her the height to display her … self, while at my end I had another bench, sufficient to help me scramble over. She knelt in place. I looked at her, and nodded.
She stood. The girls were singing their hearts out—the household soundly sleeps—and Annie rose from above the parapet, stretching her arms high, moving to the tempo. She was too thin for a proper belly dancer and had no clue how to mimic the sinuous sw
ay of the original, but somehow I did not imagine that would matter to her audience.
I began to count, and got as far as “two” before the violin descended into a parrot-squawk of discord. I raised my head above the stones, saw nothing but the backs of many heads, and swung myself over.
Holmes recovered first: A heart-beat before my feet hit the rooftop, his hand was swinging the violin hard into the face of an open-mouthed guard. As it made contact, I leapt for the back of another. In an instant the roof was a battlefield tumult of shouts and cries and grunts and bellowed commands and the single blast of a revolver as the pent-up masculine frustrations of twelve British citizens and a French cook exploded on the heads of the four guards.
In thirty seconds it was over. Daniel Marks continued to batter the man at his feet with—oddly—a fringed velvet pillow, but the man’s unconscious sprawl suggested that some more solid implement had gone before.
“Are there other guards?” I demanded.
As if in answer, the door crashed open and a big man came through it, moving fast, shotgun up and ready. Holmes stuck out a foot; our chief constable caught the falling guard with a tea-pot as he went by; Bert delivered the coup de grâce with a flower pot: as neat a piece of choreography as I had seen off the screen.
Except: The shotgun went off as it hit the ground.
And a wail of pain rose up from the women’s side.
I launched myself over the wall, seeing nothing but a scrum of galabiyyas and dish-towels. I hauled away shoulders until I had uncovered the victim, and saw—oh God, I knew who it would be before I got there—Edith, huddled over, one hand plastered against the side of her face.
She was breathing. “Edith, let me see. Is it your eye?” God, I should never forgive myself, if—
Annie enfolded the panicking mother’s hands in hers, and I gently peeled away the child’s bloody hands, expecting a terrible sight.
But an eye looked back at me, stark with alarm but undamaged. And the blood seemed lower. I wiped my sleeve across the young cheek, and went light-headed with relief at the neat straight slice across the top of the cheekbone.
Around me, nineteen females drew simultaneous breaths. “Someone give me a handkerchief,” I requested, and dabbed at the wound with the delicate white scrap. The ooze was already slowing.
“Ooh,” groaned Mrs Nunnally, “my poor baby, look at that, there’s going to be a scar!”
Mrs Hatley tried to assure her that, no, it would heal nicely, but I had seen the flash of hope behind the blood. “No, she’s right,” I said. “That’s almost certain to leave a scar.” The expression on the child’s face was undeniable: pride. I gave the wounded warrior a hand up, and said solemnly, “Yes, you’re going to have a nice handsome scar. People will ask about it for years.”
The men began to spill over the wall. As they came, each was led to the small mountain of clothing we had brought up from below, and each was draped, painted, and covered to give him a semblance of belonging here. The last one over was Bert-the-Constable, holding a familiar Purdy shot-gun; Annie grabbed his hand and pulled him to one side for an urgent briefing.
As the trickle of scrambling men slowed, I climbed onto the bench to peer over the wall. Five guards lay trussed and gagged, dragged into a shady patch. Two were conscious and angry, two were half-conscious. One would be lucky to live ’til evening.
I went back to where Annie was handing Bert a cloth and Holmes was making a head-wrap out of a length of curtain. As I pawed through the much-diminished pile of clothing, hoping to find something other than one patched galabiyya the colour of goat dung, Bert’s Cockney voice stated the obvious. “That shot will bring attention. We must go.”
“You two bring up the rear,” Holmes ordered the two agents. When they protested, he simply picked up the shot-gun he’d left leaning against the wall and disappeared down the stair-way. I dropped the disgusting robe over my head, checking that I could reach through it for my weapons, then turned to this singular assortment of lovely young women and comically ugly men.
I overrode the gabble of conversation with a trio of brief declarative sentences, capped by a pair of imperatives. “We have to hurry. We’ll all go together through the city to the gate. Once we’re outside the walls, the Army will see us and we’ll be safe. If shooting starts, get into a doorway. And don’t say a word to anyone.”
Then I stepped through the doorway before the questions could begin, although I heard Fflytte’s voice behind me, raised in protest that a mere assistant should give the orders, and why were all the women in men’s dress? But Hale shut him up before I had to, and we poured down the stairways to the courtyard. Male exclamations and female explanations rose up at the sight of the boots, the piano, and the two tied guards, but I turned and brutally squelched it.
“If you want to live, do as you’re told, immediately. Do you understand?”
They understood.
Holmes and I led the ungainly procession; Annie and Bert brought up the rear. Holmes ventured out first, checking the narrow street for guards, then continued to the next intersection before giving a signal that we could follow. One after another, our charges stepped over the threshold onto the dusty stones: Fflytte and Hale, Will and Mrs Hatley, mothers and daughters and fictional sisters, with six constable-actors, a make-believe sergeant, and a cook mixed among them. They looked as much like Moroccans as a group of painted storks might have, but from a distance, in the dim, thatched recesses of the Salé medina, each of us swathed in the same anonymous hooded galabiyyas the rest of the population wore, moving fast, we might not attract too much of an audience.
I was the only one who had been out here, so I went first—with a frisson of terror, sure that I had forgotten the way. But my feet remembered, even with the distractions of day versus night, and we trailed along, stretching out more and more as we left the quieter sections and came to the bazaar proper. Soon, we were forced to edge past laden donkeys and men with carpets and sellers of oats and spice and the occasional flayed goat or camel hanging before a butcher’s.
“I hadn’t realised how crowded it would be,” I hissed at Holmes. He raised an eyebrow in agreement and stepped to one side in order to survey the long—too long—trail of foreign shapes, moving at a snail’s pace in our wake. I shook my head in despair, edged around a donkey (four legs and two ears sticking out of seventeen baskets of yellow slippers), and looked into the lane beyond.
To come face to face with a band of enraged pirates.
CHAPTER FORTY
PIRATE KING: Let vengeance howl;
The Pirate so decides.
I LEAPT BACKWARDS towards Holmes and collided with the donkey. The creature blatted; a rope parted; a yellow tide of leather spilt into the lane; the shoe-maker began to bellow. “Go!” I shouted at Holmes, but it was too late. On the other side of this four-legged cork the slow momentum of my fellow countrymen continued to pile up. Holmes, who was tall enough to see even over a laden donkey, spotted the pirates as they pounded around the corner at my back: Adam, Jack, the beautiful Benjamin, the Swedish accountant Mr Gröhe (in whose hand a knife looked simply bizarre), and an uncountable number of others (in whose hands the knives looked far too comfortable). Holmes turned to shout at the escapees; those who heard him did attempt to reverse their tracks and flee, but by this time the column had come to a halt, thoroughly wedged between the pressure from behind and the irritated quadruped.
The howl of pirates filled the alleyway; the donkey’s ears twitched its displeasure; those on the other side would have milled about if they had not been stuck fast; I turned towards my pursuers, and came face to face with Adam.
“Why are you here?” he demanded in Arabic, then remembered, and paused to assemble a translation.
“We wish to leave,” I replied in his tongue.
He started to answer, realised what I had said, started again, paused a second time, and then looked past me and saw the others. Including Annie, who had climbed on a greengrocer’s
display to see what the problem was. Adam’s words died away as he and Annie regarded each other above the crowd. They were both unaware of the growing turmoil, the shouts of the donkey’s owner, the cries of other would-be pedestrians in three directions.
The owner of the slippers swam upstream towards his four-legged lorry, bawling a constant stream of “Bâlek! Bâlek!” (“Give way!”), although the additional pressure only forced the creature backwards, onto me and the pirates. In a minute, the beast would start to kick. Adam shouted. The man shouted back, until he came to a clear place and caught sight of his foe. His mouth went wide, then snapped shut. Without a glance at his lost wares, he grabbed the creature’s halter and hauled furiously away. A receding wave of cries, protests, and curses traced his retreat; the sardine-tin sensation grew less marked.
Adam turned at last to look at me. “You speak Arabic.”
“I do. The others do not. You must let us go. This will bring war onto your city.”
His dark eyes did not react, although a slight tilt of the head made me aware of the men at his back. A dozen or more large, armed, ferocious-looking men, hungry for a fight.
“We will return to the house,” he said.
“No!” I looked at his younger brother, Jack, and thought of those shiny boots sticking in such awful absurdity from under the piano. No child should live with that image in his memory. “Your father is dead there.”
Reaction rippled back into the men, with a burst of cross-talk. Adam seemed oblivious, but Jack took a step closer to him.
“You lie,” the younger boy declared.
“I do not. It was an accident,” I said—which, granted, was not exactly true, but … “He lies in the courtyard.” Then I added in English, “Your brother does not need to see it.”
Adam’s black eyes studied me for the longest time. With the donkey gone, Holmes and the others had come together, and I could feel him, three feet from me, ready to pull his revolver from its inner pocket and go down shooting.