All Honourable Men (34 page)

“I still wonder if the whole thing . . . it isn't that dreadful mummified little banker Dahlmann just
using
Dr Streibl to make his own dream come true.”

Ranklin shrugged his eyebrows. “Well. . . perhaps no more than Streibl's using Dahlmann. He has romantic dreams of turning the golden road to Samarkand into steel rails with Dahlmann paying for it. Millions of Reichsmarks, and Streibl probably doesn't care if it makes a penny in return. And he's only romantic up to a point: he'd see Miskal Bey squashed like a fly for Standing In The Way Of Progress.”

She hunched, self-protectively. “And the Kaiser's using both of them – is that what you think?”

“I don't know about the Kaiser, he sounds as much of a romantic as Streibl, but the military and the Wilhelmstrasse, yes, perhaps so.”

She said nothing but didn't move, either. To seem politely
busy, he found his prismatic compass and took a sight on the Peak; although it was just a faint silhouette by now, it was still too close, filling some twenty degrees of arc.

Then she sighed and said: “Everybody
using
everybody else . . . and I suppose Sir Edward Grey's using me – and you?”

“I seem to be working to the Foreign Office which may or may not be working to Sir Edward. We're getting contradictory signals from that building.”

“Oh, that's just policy as usual.” She was quiet for a while, then: “And I suppose I'm using you all – or this occasion. I didn't
have
to come . . . Will you be honest with me? Am I more likely to get my foothold in English society by getting these people freed or keeping the Railway delayed? You said you'd answer honestly.”

Ranklin hadn't promised any such thing, but decided to be honest anyway. “Frankly, neither, I'd say. Just Thank you and farewell.”

After a time she said: “Yes. Yes,
that
sounds like policy as usual . . . I wonder if you said that to set me free?”

“Does it make you feel free?”

“A bit. . . But a bit late.” She sighed and, at last, urged her pony gently forwards.

A few minutes up the slope from the caravan road
han
, Bertie reined in his pony and pointed to a muddy patch trampled by dozens of hoof-prints. “You see? The keeper at the
han
told me that thirty mules had come by soon after dawn. And ten or twelve soldiers, German and Turk, walking. I wonder,” he smiled, “if I would have deduced for myself. . . No matter now. But how many guns on thirty mules?” he called, moving on. “Three? Four?”

“Jest two at most,” O'Gilroy called back. They were on Anatolian ponies too, and keeping their distances. “Remember yer ammunition.” He was trying to work it all out himself, but he'd never officially served in the Royal Artillery so his figures were distant memories or guesswork. But he knew a mule could carry around two hundred pounds, so one gun would be six or seven mule loads – probably – and each round of ammunition must be about . . . say two eight-round boxes to a load . . .

“Ye'll only have two hundred and some rounds anyways.”

“That sounds
quite
enough,” Corinna chipped in. But O'Gilroy's only experience of gunnery had been in war, when the gunners never had enough ammunition, and he shook his head like a sage old soldier.

* * *

The plateau Ranklin and Lady Kelso were crossing must have begun as one great sheet of rock, then cracked and weathered to look like giant light-grey cobblestones stretching up and away into the light grey mist. A few timid patches of grass grew where soil had lodged in the cracks, but not a tree in sight, just
bushes sheltering in occasional deeper cracks like trenches. It was colourless, bleak and very exposed.

It was also very quiet. They had prompted a few bird-calls back among the trees, but here there was no sound but the horses' hooves and the burble of their breathing. Without mankind, and when the weather had taken the day off, the world was a pretty silent place, Ranklin reflected.

But now Lady Kelso had found an excuse to stop again and was digging in her clothing. “Would you like some chocolate?”

Ranklin dismounted rather than bring the ponies too close. “Thank you.” It was a plain Swiss chocolate bar, a bit melted from her body heat.

“I bought a lot of these in Constantinople. God knows what Miskal will give us.” She stared around. “Goat, probably. If you can't see anything worth eating, it's goat country.”

Ranklin took the opportunity for another stare around through the field-glasses, but learnt little except that he couldn't see the monastery yet. The edge of the ravine lay a couple of hundred yards to the left, and the land beyond it looked much the same as this plateau, except that where the mist took over, it was rising into trees and rocks.

She said: “You know, Patrick, I'm very glad you're with me . . . I didn't think so to start with, but. . . Do you really belong to the Diplomatic?”

“I seem to be working for them, anyway.”

“But are you really . . . ?” She left a blank for him to fill in.

But Zurga's probing about the coat had rewoken his artillery past. That, and this landscape: for him, spying had so far been a city thing.

“Right now, I'm not absolutely sure what I am. You'd better just think of me as more-or-less representing our Government.” And shading towards the “less” with every step, he thought dourly. He tucked away the glasses and remounted.

A few minutes later they came to a deeper trench, a fissure that had become a natural storm drain, lying across their path so that its end spilled into the ravine. It was perhaps six feet deep and had collected enough soil to be half-f of stunted
bushes. But it wasn't difficult to cross because its sides were quite gentle, if irregular, slopes.

Lady Kelso said: “Isn't that the place?”

Ranklin looked up. He'd been expecting something tall and rectangular and it wasn't, it was remarkably low, but it was an unnatural darker outline in the mist getting on for half a mile off.

“Must be.” Then a glint among the rocks at the lip of the trench caught his eye. He dismounted and picked up a spent rifle cartridge case. It hadn't been there long enough for the brass to tarnish. “It looks as if the Turkish soldiers attacked up this way.”

“It's probably the easiest way.”

“It must be the only way.” Or why advance across such open ground, visible for nearly a mile on a clear day? But they'd only expected to face old
jezeel
muskets with a range of a couple of hundred yards, and slow to reload. He could guess what had happened then: the defenders, if they knew their business (and the result suggested they did) had waited until the soldiers had got well past this trench and then opened fire. And the surviving soldiers, knowing there was cover behind them, had turned and run for this trench. Once men have run away, it is very difficult to start them forward again. The survivors would have stayed in the trench until darkness, then sneaked off.

And now it was their turn. Was anybody watching them yet? There should be, but a guard can get very bored, staring into mist. They might do better to let off a yell or a pistol shot and make sure they
didn't
surprise anyone. He had an uneasy urge to let Lady Kelso go first and, because of that, knew he must himself. He tossed the cartridge case aside and mounted.

Lady Kelso pulled her shawl over her head and threw one end over her shoulder, half-veiling herself. “I'm ready, Patrick . . . Is your name Patrick?”

“Matthew.” Ranklin stretched in the stirrups, waved, and shouted. He realised it had been “Ahoy!” – which was a bit nautical, but what should it have been?

A few moments later there was a shot.

“It's all right, Matthew,” she said. “That's a normal Arab greeting.”

Ranklin swallowed. “I'm glad you can tell.”

* * *

Centuries ago, the monks had tried to surround the building with gardens; probably they'd had to carry in the soil. Now there were just a few square yards of coarse grass and small bushes, but still enough to hold the thin soil in place. And the building itself had lasted even worse.

It had always been small; now time, weather and looters had worn it down to a large sheep-pen with thick, stunted walls hardly more than head-high in most places. Avalanches off the slope behind had played a part, too: embedded in the back wall was a boulder that must weigh dozens of tons and now seemed part of the structure, except that the wall was cracked and bent around it.

Inside the empty gateway all interior walls had vanished, and the floor – cracked flagstones and drifts of trampled turf – was half covered with tents that, rather refreshingly in that gloom, made it look like an Arab encampment. These weren't the European-style bell tents of the work-camp, but heavy, dark draped affairs: “houses of hair”, according to Lady Kelso, so perhaps they were of woven camel hair. Carpets were spread under the raised flaps, and there was even a cooking fire burning.

After some ceremonial chatter, she with her eyes demurely downcast, the apparent leader (not, Ranklin gathered, Miskal himself) had taken Lady Kelso down stone steps to a cellar beneath – presumably where the hostages were held. Their horses had been led off to some paddock behind the building, and now Ranklin was alone with some twenty-odd dour-looking Arabs.

Travelling artists and writers are very precise about how different tribes or clans of natives dress. The problem, Ranklin
had found in his own travels, was that the natives didn't always know this. Either because they couldn't afford the “proper” dress or it was in the wash or because it was just too cold, they wore whatever they'd got. There was a general tendency to baggy, very off-white trousers and turbans – not the flowing
kefiyah
desert head-dress – but the rest was a wild variety that included some Turkish Army great-coats and boots, and blankets worn like shawls.

But almost every one carried a modern Mauser rifle, as if it were part of him.

None of them said anything. He thought of offering his cigarettes, but they wouldn't go around. So in the end he just hummed to himself and wandered to the east wall in a gap between tents. In clear weather he could have seen for miles in any direction except to the north where the steep slope rapidly became sheer; it was as if the old monks had been saying Hey there, look at us being lonely. It would have been quite a good place for a fort, if there had been anything to guard except the ravine, about fifty yards off.

Then one of the Arabs came up to him and pointed towards the cellar steps. Ranklin followed obediently.

Down there was one biggish room criss-crossed with heavy arches that made it a collection of dark alcoves. Three primitive oil lamps glowed on the rough-hewn stone and flickered as people passed. Ranklin was led to where Lady Kelso was kneeling and wiping the brow of an old man wrapped in a blanket. He had a grey beard, long grey hair and the eyes in the lined, gaunt face were half-open but not seeing anything.

“Miskal?” he whispered.

She nodded. “I think he's dying. It could be cancer, I don't know.”

“Is he in pain?”

“How can you tell with these people? They will be so stoical. And stuffed to the gills with opium. Thank God for that.”

Ranklin looked down at the bundled figure. They seemed to have come so far, and now they had found him . . . he was just this.

She stood up. “I've told them that you are my ‘brother in the book of Allah'. It means we can be alone together without it being immoral. It's more for your sake than mine: they see me as one of Miskal Bey's old whores and nothing . . .” She let her voice trail off, then rallied: “So I
was
right about the ransom demand: it wasn't his idea at all, it was his son Hakim. Oh – and they've let the Railway engineers go. A few days ago.”

She had just thrown in the news as an afterthought. Ranklin stared. “They did . . .
what
?”

“Let them go. It seems that Miskal had a . . . a lucid period and asked who these captives were, and came down on Hakim like a ton of bricks for doing anything as shabby as taking hostages for ransom. And insisted they be let go. So they were.”

Ranklin recovered a little from his daze. “But dammit . . . the Railway must have got them back before we got off the boat. Why did they let us come? Or go on with the ransom?” Fleeting thoughts of Dahlmann and Streibl providing fraudulently for their old age galloped through his mind – and out again. Too many people knew, or soon would.

“We-ell . . .” She hesitated. “Hakim isn't being very confiding about this; perhaps you'd do better, he speaks pretty fair French. And,” she lowered her voice, “I get the impression he hasn't got a firm grip on these people. Perhaps it's his father still being alive, perhaps he just isn't the man Miskal was.” She said that with feeling. “And I also have the impression he's still expecting to collect the ransom.”

“For what, for Heaven's sake?”

Actual shrugging wasn't what ladies of her generation did; but she
looked
a shrug.

Ranklin felt trapped, and couldn't help looking around at the dark corners. “I don't like this at all. They knew we'd find out they'd deceived us, yet . . . I think Zurga must be close behind and I'm not sure we're supposed to come out of this alive.”

She took that with complete calm. She had her job – Miskal
– and there were twenty-something men to worry about the rest.

Ranklin went back upstairs.

Hakim was standing in the gateway with another Arab, staring back along the plateau. If there was any family resemblance between him and the bundled old man downstairs, Ranklin couldn't see it, except for the large hooked nose usual among Arabs. Hakim's face was slightly chubby, and although taller than Ranklin he was shorter than most of the men around. Perhaps that didn't help his authority, and for that much Ranklin sympathised. His one badge of office seemed to be that he wore both a bandolier and a belt of cartridges – sheer unnecessary weight. That apart, he had a short beard and his age might be anything between thirty and forty; with different races you just couldn't tell.