…It will serve a useful purpose by restoring our courage and stimulating research in a new direction.
I had not realised how greatly I desired Palestine until one of its towns leapt out at me from the list of places offered us, and the name was on my lips. I had no doubt that some day (next year) I should make my pilgrimage to the birthplace of my people, but a pilgrimage is a planned and contemplated event of the mind and, perhaps, the heart, which this most emphatically was not. When I was beset by fear and confusion, when no ground was sure beneath my feet and familiar places threatened, this foreign land reached out to me, called me to her, and I went, and found comfort, and shelter, and counsel. I, who had neither family nor home, found both there.
Palestine, Israel, that most troubled of lands; robbed, raped, ravaged, revered for most of four millennia; beaten and colonised by Sargon's Akkadians in the third millennium B.C.E. and by Allenby's England in the Common
Era's second millennium; holy to half the world, a narrow strip of marginally fertile soil whose every inch has felt the feet of conquering soldiers, a barren land whose only wealth lies in the children she had borne. Palestine.
At dusk we were making way casually south, parallel to the far-off shore, but when night had fully fallen the captain changed to due east and, engines fast and quiet, we made for land. Holmes appeared, with a nearly flat knapsack and a preoccupied air, and at one in the morning we were bundled onto a ship's boat with muffled rowlocks and taken ashore. Our landing site was just south of Jaffa, or Yafo, a town whose Jewish population had been forced to flee from Arab violence during the war. Imagine my pleasure, then, when we were summarily shoved into the burnoosed arms of a pair of Arab cutthroats and abandoned.
Before the boat had disappeared into the night we had sunk unseen into the war-ravaged land.
They were not cutthroats, or perhaps I should say they were not merely cutthroats. They were not even Arabs.
We called them, at their invitation, Ali and Mahmoud, but in a cooler climate they would have been Albert and Matthew, and certain diphthongs in their English exuded public school and Oxbridge. Holmes said they were from Clapham. He also said that although they looked like the brothers they claimed to be, and acted like twins, they were at best distant cousins. I did not enquire further but contented myself with watching the pair of them, hand in hand in the fashion of Arab men, as they strolled the dusty roads, chattering interminably in colloquial Arabic and gesticulating wildly with their free hands while we followed in their wake.
If our two guides were not what they appeared, neither was anything else in the weeks that followed: The drab boat that had brought us from England was experimental, an outgrowth of war's technology; its crew were not simply sailors, despite the presence of the child; even the two of us were not as we seemed, a father and son of dark-skinned, light-eyed nomads. Our very presence in the land had a heavy touch of the unreal about it: For the first two weeks we wandered with no apparent aim, performing a variety of tasks that again seemed aimless. We retrieved a document from a locked house; we reunited two old friends; we made detailed maps of two yawningly unimportant sites.
During this dreamy time I had the feeling that we were being observed, if not judged, though I could never decide if someone was testing our abilities, or waiting for a job to appear that we were suited for. In either case, perhaps even coincidentally, a case abruptly appeared to immerse us and shore up our sagging self-confidence with the sharp exhilaration of danger and the demands of an uncomfortable way of life. I soon discovered in myself a decided taste for that way of life, as the sense of daring that the tamer liberty of Wales had given me flowered into a pure, hot passion for freedom. If Mycroft's hidden purpose was to provide us with an exotic form of holiday, it certainly succeeded.
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. "Simcfiu 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 AH 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 theit 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 Al lenby 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 My- croft, 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 my 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 backup."
"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.
"If you truly feel that you cannot do this, then I shall accept that decision. I will not consider it a failure on your part. It will merely mean that you join Watson while I enlist Mycroft's help. It would be inferior, I admit — inelegant, and I think long, but not hopeless. It is, however, your choice entirely."
His words were placid, but what lay beneath them shook me breathless, for what he was proposing would in another man be sheer recklessness. Holmes the painstaking, Holmes the thoughtful, calculating thinker, Holmes the solitary operator who never so much as consulted an other for advice, this Holmes I thought I knew was now proposing to launch himself into the abyss, trusting absolutely in my ability to catch him.
And more even than that: This self-contained individual, this man who had rarely allowed even his sturdy, ex-Army companion Watson to confront real risk, who had habitually over the past four years held back, been cautious, kept an eye out, and otherwise protected me; this man who was a Victorian gentleman down to his boots; this man was now proposing to place not only his life and limb into my untested, inexperienced, and above all female hands, but my own life as well. This was the change I had noticed in him and puzzled about, the intensity and relish with which he was facing the coming combat: There was no hesitation left. He had let go all doubt, and was telling me in crystal-clear terms that he was prepared to treat me as his complete, full, and unequivocal equal, if that was what I wished. He was giving me not only his life, but my own.
I had long known the intellect of this man, been aware for nearly as long of his humanity and the greatness of his heart, but I had never had demonstrated to me so clearly that the size of his spirit was equal to his mind. The knowledge rumbled through me like an earthquake, and in its wake a small voice echoed, wondering if I had just pronounced his epitaph.
I don't know how long it was before I looked up from the small carved queen into the carved-looking features of the man across from me, but when I did, it seemed that his eyebrows were waiting for something. I had to think for a moment before I realised that he had actually asked a question. But there was no decision to be made. "When faced with the unthinkable," I said shakily, "one chooses the merely impossible." He smiled approvingly, warmly.
And then a miracle happened.
Holmes reached out his long arms to me and, like a frightened child, I went inside them, and he held me, awkwardly at first, then more easily, until my trembling faded.
I sat, safe, listening to the steady beat of his heart until the oil lamp guttered out and left us in darkness.
Two days later the Crusader walls of Acre closed in on us, as unlike the sun-swept stones of Jerusalem, eighty miles away, as could be imagined. Jerusalem's golden walls had sparkled and shone, and the city vibrated with an inaudible song of joy and pain, but Acre's walls were heavy and thick, and its song was a multilingual dirge of ignorance and death. The long shadows seemed like spectres to be avoided, and I noticed Holmes glancing about him sharply. Alt and Mahmoud, in their customary place four strides ahead of us, seemed as unaware of the gloom as they were of anything outside themselves, but even they edged towards the middle of the streets as if the walls were unclean.
I tried to push away the mood, but it crept back stubbornly. "I wonder if these stones would speak with such a bleak voice if I didn't know what the place stood for," I said to Holmes irritably.
"To a mind attuned to observation and deduction, the product reveals the mind of its creator." He squinted up at the great, ponderous blocks that loomed up to hide the sky, and rubbed his hands together slowly. "Take Mozart — frenzied gaiety and weeping put to music. The agony of the man is at times unbearable. Let us go."
We made our way through the streets down to the water, and when we turned a final corner, Ali and Mah moud had disappeared. I felt shockingly naked without those two swathed backs billowing along in front of me, heads together, but Holmes just smiled and nudged me ahead. As we went past a wooden door set into a wall he spoke into the air. "Marhaba," he said, and to my surprise added, "'Alia-M'aq."
I echoed his thanks, and the blessing, and we went on to the edge of the water, and we sat drinking mint tea from a nearby stall and watched the waves rub at the remnants of the Crusader pier until dark, when we were found by the crew member who had taken us ashore at Jaffa the month before. Our backs were to the fortress as he rowed us noiselessly towards the waiting boat, our faces turned to England.
We stood on the deck and watched the last lights of Palestine fade. Jerusalem was hidden from sight, but to my eyes there was a faint glow in the southeast, as of stored sunlight. I recited under my breath, "CAI naharoth babel sham yashavnu gam-bakinu — Im eshkahek Yerushalaim tishkah y'mini — "
"You sang that the other night, did you not?" asked Holmes. "What is it?" "A psalm, one of the more powerful Hebrew songs, full of sibilants and gutturals." I translated it for him. "By the waters of Babylon, where we lay down and wept when we remembered Zion — We hung up our lyres, for our captors required songs of us, and our tormentors demanded mirth.
How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither,
May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,
If I do not remember you."
"Amen," he murmured, surprising me again.
The land receded to a smear of lights against greater darkness, and we went below.