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A Decision
by Paula Neef (Scrupulously Attentive to Detail)
[The] gradual cracking apart of my whole being...
--T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Yes, I have remembered you with longing... Now I thank God for my time with you... I have remained a lover.
--Ibn Zaydun (1003-71)
At the soft footsteps behind him, his muscles clenched. The spasm scorched his back with pain, and that made him jerk again. It was the sort of unwilled reaction the prisoner had been giving for longer than he could now calculate. He would have hated himself for it again, had he not sunk into a stupor which left him only the animal fear of pain and hope that they would kill him soon.
When they first dragged him up onto the hook, he had kept his mind in control by observing all he could about the creature--he could not think of him as fully human--who stood behind him and murmured in his ear. He had mentally synthesized and cross-referenced his notes, holding and manipulating the whole complex pattern of tiny observations. His mind worked smoothly and powerfully, as it always had. Doing this gave him a sense of aloofness, of power, a sense that his captors could not crack the internal citadel of his mind, by which he had always lived. At first, even when his body swung like a side of beef on a meat hook under the blows, even when he could no longer keep silent, his swift, clear, secret thought gave him a sense of triumphant contempt for his tormentors.
The first time that his captor had traced moist fingertips down his spine and whispered against his ear, "Why don't you tell me what I ask...," he had successfully betrayed no sign, not allowing a tremor or a tightening of his muscles. He stared at the bare, smudged wall ahead of him and drew air silently into his nostrils, tasting soap--expensive--and a musky hair pomade he had smelled often in Paris.
He understood that his captor affected this intimacy out of a psychological need to demonstrate his prisoner's helplessness and his own power. The prisoner had a large experience of the criminal mind, and knew that such motivations were as common, even banal, as they were crude. He had often assisted others who were victims of such behavior. He had always found it boring as well as repugnant. He preferred criminals with more original motivations. It had never occurred to him that he himself would become helpless in the hands of such a man. His tormentor's closeness, though nauseating, made it easy to read his biography, and he did so, turning the creature's own games against him, feeling the power of his mind rather than the helplessness of his body.
And he had steeled himself to endure. He had known not a little, nor infrequent, pain in a rough life through which he had driven himself very successfully by the overwhelming force of his mind. Though his heart was lurching and his mouth was dry when they first hauled him up on the hook, his face showed only sardonic contempt.
But nothing in his experience had prepared him for this. The pain became a wall that crashed on him, blinded him, dragged and banged his body like a piece of driftwood caught in a wave. He was utterly powerless to escape it or control it. He lost track of time. He could think of nothing but pain. His tormentor, behind him, would sometimes pause and let the smoke of his cigarette drift into his prisoner's face, and after a while, the prisoner could not keep from jerking before it touched him. His captor could make him do this again and again. "You ought not to do that," the voice said smoothly. "It must be terribly painful to your arms."
In between the sessions, the other obvious ploys, which the prisoner had thought beneath his contempt, began to eat into him-the blind wall at which he stared, the cobwebs and dirt in the corner, his nakedness in front of the grinning thugs, the bodiless, whispering, almost sympathetic voice repeating the same questions in his ear, the knowledge that he was going to die. After the first few sessions, whenever he sensed soft footsteps behind him and the cool air against his sides which meant that the door had opened and his tormentors were coming in again, his flesh shivered and he began to jerk and struggle even though he knew it was useless. He hated himself for this. He understood perfectly that his torturer wanted him to hate himself. He couldn't stop it.
He had lost count of how many sessions had gone by when he realized that the very last of his mental clarity, his ability to think at all, would soon be extinguished. He heard his tormentor's voice saying, "We will be back before long. Think about that." They shuffled out. Dully, through the thudding of blood in his ears, he registered the scrape of a chair--three-legged stool, by the sound, he noted mechanically--the rustle of clothes as the thug left to guard him sat down, and then, the unmistakable sound of someone picking his teeth.
A strange, icy numbness was creeping mercifully from his back through his arms. Pain and nausea still beat at him, but ebbed. The physical numbing cleared his mind again, for a while. But it didn't matter, he thought dully. The likelihood was overwhelming that he was going to die here. At least the girl was safe...
The girl. With the thought, it was as if a door flew open in his mind and he saw her standing in it. She had escaped the car crash, he was sure of that by now. Had she been killed or captured, they would have discovered that she was a woman, and he would have been taunted or questioned on this. The thought of her in this man's hands... but she was not, he knew, his forehead cold and damp with relief.
Where, then? Were Mahmoud and Ali with her? Probably, since if they had been caught he would have heard about that, too. They would get her out of the country, and... where? Back to England? And what awaited her there? His fists closed, but there was nothing he could do, and a moment later they opened again with the knowledge of futility. Mycroft, he knew, would take care of her, for his brother's sake. Still, how could he have dragged her into this, a young girl, one who trusted him so much, in some sense under his protection? He had been wrong.... He had been wrong from the beginning. A woman...
A woman. He had so rarely permitted himself to think about her. Most of the time, he pushed any such thoughts deep down in his mind and accepted her company matter of factly, because it gave him pleasure. Suddenly, he wanted to think of her, he wanted overwhelmingly to see her, at least in his mind... while he could.
Utterly still except for his breathing, his body hung in the bare, dimly lit room, his head sunken on his chest. Through his mind the images rose and poured, drowning the wretched present, the watching guard, even part of the burning in his back... He went all the way back. When she first told him to look for the blue-marked bees, and he understood that she had instantly deduced everything he was doing... "I should have thought it obvious," she had said. To meet a mind like that... Her face bent over a tube through which blue reactant swirled, utterly rapt, as he himself had always been in a chemistry lab…the swift, eager questions her eyes looked at him and which he immediately understood, her instant grasp of the most indirect implications, her quiet, unfeigned pleasure as they trudged the Sussex roads together, comparing types of musculature and of mud, her long braids swinging on her back ... the picnic they had had the afternoon she solved her first case, drinking beer thieved from a thief... the first time she had beaten him at chess, on a sunny hillside...
And those clear eyes that always looked straight back at him, utterly honest. He had never needed or been much interested in the artificial adulation so many women seemed to lavish on men, so he had never been scared by her honesty, her quick, lucid mind equalling his own, or by her toughness of spirit. They exhilarated him...
His breathing rasped slowly, bringing him back to the present. With his arms dragged behind his head, he had to struggle for each breath, and the sense of suffocation pressed on him. But he forced himself to breathe evenly, with the massive self-control he had always had restrained the constant incipient panic at the pressure on his throat. Deliberately, he turned his mind back to her... Her toughness of spirit. It was no mere act, he knew, but... how vividly he remembered her face that first day, when he had spoken of the death of her family... her chin bent over small Jessica's head... He had wanted then to wrap his arms around her thin, scarred body, hold her more gently than he had ever imagined was possible... He had immediately turned his attention from that particular course. Now the image poured itself into his mind: to hold her... he knew that he would be awkward at first, though generally a most capable man; he had very little experience with that sort of thing... what would it have been like? To press his lips in her hair, to explore the bones of her face, her eyebrows and forehead and the back of her neck, to stroke her arms, to press his hands into the small of her back... Would she like his touch? Would she want this from him? He wanted her to like it, he wanted her to feel all he felt, to make her body tremble against his...
It was not his enemy, not even pain that wrenched him back to the grey, dingy room, it was the meanest and pettiest of irritations: his side itched. He hung still except for his ribs lifting and falling, but his mouth twisted. He could not even take care of this, and he had thought of.... The shocked numbness that had flooded him after the last beating was receding and he knew his respite was almost over. And the chances of rescue were very small...
He had always had great powers of concentration under stress. Very clearly, he held her picture in his mind. He took her face between his hands. He pressed his lips to her forehead. He kissed her eyelids, feeling the lashes under his mouth, he tilted her head back and kissed her throat. He kissed her mouth. Then he said goodbye.
Not long after that, as he had foreseen, all of his awareness began fading, except for pain. They returned for more sessions. Once, with an effort, he raised his head. The guards stood on all sides of him, grinning. Solitude engulfed him like nausea.
The room was silent. They had left him alone again, for a time. Occasionally, he heard the movements of the guard, who was not even a human presence. Unbelievably, he seemed to hear a familiar voice--her voice?--but it could only be a dream, a hallucination.... The soft footsteps sounded behind him again. His tormentors must be coming for him. He hadn't thought they would come now--but he didn't know--. He jerked convulsively, the wave of pain driving to his legs. He sensed a different presence in the room. No one touched him or spoke to him. He opened his eyes. Before him stood Mahmoud, looking straight into his face. Mahmoud smiled, crinkling the scar that cut his features. "By the Prophet, Holmes. You look like hell." Holmes felt distantly that he should be glad to see his comrade, but he could feel only pain and unbelief.
Then he was aware of something else. He knew, absolutely, that she was in the room. That she was afraid to come around and look at him. Shame scalded him, then he felt gratitude. He tried to wrench around, to see her. Mahmoud's finger pushed into his mouth and something sticky and sweetish melted on his dry tongue. He felt the ropes that held his wrists cut, and had a flash of absurd terror as the cords gave way, releasing him into space. The agony of his arms dropping knifed through his shoulders, and a groan rose in his throat; proudly he bit it off. A warm, delicious feeling, disturbing and familiar, was creeping up his limbs. With his last moment of consciousness he struggled to stand upright. Then a kindly blackness broke over him.
He had been aware of the swaying motion and the chafing on his raw shoulders for some time when he registered the slender, strong body at his back. Then he felt against his shoulders the cushiony swell which, since he was a detective more experienced in some matters than in others, he took some moments to realize were a woman's breasts. The softness made something catch in his throat. Vaguely he felt that this was improper. He tried to lean forward, but found himself slewing sideways. His back burned. He felt the body behind him leave his back, and the agonizing chafing stopped. He slipped back into darkness.
Then he seemed to be lying over someone in front. His face lay in the hollow of the someone's neck. He felt smooth skin, warm and sweating a little, smelling of early sunshine. Something familiar about the arm which braced his side caught him; his heart surged.
"Russell?"
He heard her clear voice: "Holmes! Thank God-" He felt an obscure annoyance because she subsided into buzzing.
Again the lurching and rolling, again the pain, again the vague sense of others around him, again the body underneath him. It was Russell, it was Russell…. His back felt better, but he realized she was riding bent almost double beneath him and must be excruciatingly uncomfortable. She must have been going on that way a long time. How surprising that someone would go to such trouble merely to protect his body from pain…. He tried to sit up, to ease his weight on her, but his muscles were like wet rags. Suddenly he remembered the bumping car and the men who had dragged him out of it with the bag over his head.
"Russell?"
"Yes, Holmes. We're all here. You're safe now."
It was all right, then. The darkness rolled over him, then ebbed again. He had to know she was there, or everything around him might dissolve, and the people around him become a man with expensive Turkish cigarettes ...
"Russell?"
"Holmes." She knew what to do. He felt like a man slipping in a bog, but he knew without question that she would always throw him this lifeline.
"Russell?"
"Holmes."
Hands grasped and dragged at him again. Pain clawed his shoulder. He controlled himself, then looked for her. He was already aware of how unbelievable this was. He could hardly remember the last time he had looked to anyone for reassurance, not since he was a child. All the same, he did not try to stop the rush of relief when he saw her standing in front of him, a stricken look on her face.
"Russell."
She knew what he wanted.
"Yes, Holmes. It's all right."
"Yes?"
"Yes."
"Good."
If she said it was, then it was. He allowed himself to be carried where they wanted.
In the days that followed, he drove himself as hard as he ever had in his life. He knew that it would take some time for his back to heal, but he intended it take as little as possible. He fiercely shoved all that had happened to him into the back of his mind. He thought about the wax candle and the scrap of newspaper that Mahmoud had found at the... villa, as he now learned it had been.
He turned his mind from thinking about Russell. It had been an aberration, what he had imagined in captivity. She broke through at moments. Sometimes he knew that she was looking at him when she thought he wasn't looking. Sometimes he looked at her when he thought she wasn't looking. At those times, he wanted to tell her how it had felt to know her at his back. He wanted to tell her what he had thought of in captivity. But no, that was foolish...
He did not resent her for having rescued him. He was too generous for that. His mouth even twitched in a ghost of his old smile when he heard about her frightened victim performance with the guard. "The pinching your cheeks was a good touch," he said. "The kind of thing one should think of under pressure." At the quick, shy smile that lighted her face at his praise, he turned away to clear his pipe.
Even the shame that had burned him at first when he understood that she had come into that dingy room had faded quickly. Partly this was because she so clearly did not see it in that light, understanding wounds and pain as facts of life perhaps even better than he did. Partly it was because of his own nature again; though proud enough of his real accomplishments, he had never needed a hollow admiration from others. Deep underneath, the shame that ground at him had little to do with her having seen him that way... it was because he had seen himself that way. That, he did not know how to find the way out of.
No, it was not resentment and it was not shame in front of her. But he could not--he must not--depend on her, on this slender half-child, this girl, this--woman. It was ridiculous. He had never depended on anyone. As she drowsed beside him, he found himself looking at her, remembering where his mind had drifted when he was a prisoner, and how her voice had been a lifeline to which he had clung when he washed to and fro on the darkness of opium and pain. "Russell..." He snapped his mind shut on that. It was not only ridiculous, it was dangerous. And it was not right to depend on a woman--and she was a woman, despite appearances--in these circumstances, to subject her to these sorts of dangers, although he realized, of course, that he had been increasingly subjecting her to this sort of thing over the last few years and that she seemed to relish it. And if he lost her... at that unexpected turn of his mind, he scrambled to his feet and stalked away. He could feel her eyes on his back, but it was impossible. It was simply impossible.
All that he had thought of while a prisoner, he must banish from his mind. It was absurd; he had imagined those things only because of the nearness of death, the extremity of his body. It could be no part of his daily reality. That sort of thing was for other people. He had lived his whole life without such involvements, except during one short and disastrous period; he had done very well living purely out of his mind. It was by far the best, safest thing, for both of them. If anything, recent experience demonstrated the truth of that.
Still, it was good to be with her, he could not deny that. In the days following his rescue, they drowsed in the sun together for hours--he felt he could not get enough sun--sharing the dates and pomegranates that she brought and getting their fingers sticky like children. She did not ask questions that were best not asked. She did not try to cheer him up with small talk, which they had both always detested. She did not fuss over him. They had, from the beginning, been able to communicate as well in silence as with words, an ability which had been growing in the last year. She just sat near him, did what needed to be done, and although they did not often have physical contact, her nearness went out to him like a touch.
That first day, as the sun dropped behind the brown hills, he felt a curious tightening in his stomach. He could barely remember feeling like this, he must have been a tiny child, long ago.... He shrugged it off angrily. But it grew stronger as the night grew darker. (That blank wall...) When he took himself to his bed, he saw that a small clay lamp glowed on the windowsill. She had set it there, of course, and he did not have to check to know that she had filled it with enough oil to burn all night. He could not thank her aloud, but then it struck him that, with her, he did not need to.
Deep in the night, his arm muscles began to spasm, jerking themselves over his head as if to illustrate, in case anyone had forgotten, what his tormentors had done to him. He knew it was futile to rage at his body for betraying him, he could only wait it out. He did not want her to hear him, so he set his teeth into the pillow and wished his arms would stop their sickeningly comic ballet. Then he heard her rise.
He felt her cool fingers touch his naked shoulders. They carefully avoided each welt and burn. Her hands found the hard, trembling muscles, then her palms kneaded him deeply. He ached at her gentleness. At last, she drew his arms down to his sides. Suddenly he remembered Mahmoud saying, "Since that day they have been my mother and my father." Strange to think of this; he knew how much she had depended on him since they met, but surely he could not.... She said nothing, she treated his need very matter of factly, a mere physical necessity like handing someone a handkerchief after a sneeze. He could have reached out and pulled her face to his for that. But he could not, must not, permit himself to feel that. She was a valuable assistant, he told himself. He was of course grateful for her help. Tomorrow he must go to bed later, perhaps the spasms would not attack him if he was tired enough and loosened his muscles first...
Holmes was hanging from the beam in the dirty, bare room, watching the guards grin at him, jerking his head hopelessly to see the thing with the cigarette coming behind him. "You ought not to do that. It must be terribly painful to your arms." It was a dream that he had been rescued, he would never get out, he was trapped, utterly helpless, alone. The brand was coming again.
"Holmes?"
The voice dragged him back to the surface, shuddering and gasping. His eyes caught the light of the lamp she had set there again this night. He shut his teeth on his breath.
"My God, Holmes, was that you?"
His heart was still banging. He cleared his throat. "Was what me?"
Not even to her could he tell what had happened to him in that room. He hoped she wouldn't push him, as seemed to be the way with women. She did not. After a moment, her dark, slender form settled back onto her bed. "Jackals," she muttered. She said nothing more.
Yes, jackals, he thought. And she knew. For a moment he hated her for knowing, then relief like cool air flowed over him. He did not have to tell her about dreams. Cautiously, he let his cheek settle into the pillow. He shut his mind from thinking about what he had remembered in the dream.
Instead, there rose in his memory a mountain land, a starry, summer night. He saw the quiet darkness inside the tiny caravan, heard it torn by her crying, her mounting gasps of absolute panic, the frantic reaching in her sleep. He had longed then to gather her into him, though he had pushed that feeling down at the time. Now he wanted again to reach out his arm to where she lay on her nearby bed, pull her against him, hear the dream that followed her, tell her all that had happened to him, shelter both of them somehow.
He held himself very still. He was still staring at the clay lamp when it paled in the light of day.
They went on to St. George's. For a while, in finding the crucial beeswax candles and interviewing the abbot about his shadowy visitor, in the joy of the pursuit, Holmes was able to push other things to the back of his mind. It was only when he asked the abbot for a description of his quarry and the abbot said "I understood that you had met him," that something seemed to climb up his throat. He controlled himself with the perfection of a lifetime's practice. He would not give in to his emotions, and he did not (he had jerked and danced on those cords... knowing yet not knowing what was coming behind him... "You ought not to do that...")
She was not watching, she was studying a picture of the Virgin, but he was all the more vividly aware of her. He did not want to tell her, he could not tell her, and a woman should be protected from such things, and yet... he had ached to tell her, too, since he first knew she was behind him in the room. And... there was something between them, a tacit understanding, he had never had with anyone else, he knew. He knew that she could take the truth. It was important that she understand. He began. "I... encountered him. I should know his voice if I heard it again, his smell, possibly his step.... I do not, however, know what he looks like, because he never... approached me to my face."
She had understood. He realized he had known she would. Though he only saw her from the corner of his eye, he realized immediately from the twist in her mouth that she saw what had happened to him clearly, was feeling the same sickness in her stomach that he felt in his. A knot that had been there since they dragged him into that room began to relax, a little. He felt a moment of sheer wonder. Then he felt he should have known all along that she would understand him. And finally, he shoved both feelings away. It was a relief to have her understand part of it, but--he simply could not lean like this on her, on anyone. He never had. He would not begin at this time of his life. What was he to do about this? What did one do in this situation? He went on talking to the abbot, a welcome distraction.
That night, he lay on his side, staring at the rectangle of stars through the open door of his sleeping cell. The cell had a plank door, but he could not bring himself to close it and be shut in the darkness. He had smoked, but it did not help. He heard Russell's faint movements in the next cell, and realized that he had been straining to listen for them. With an angry jerk, he pulled his bedroll over his head and shifted his thoughts into a more accustomed track.
Somewhere ahead of him, in Jerusalem, his tormentor waited. Holmes was as conscious of him as if the man still breathed at his back. His mind, back in control, combed carefully through all the facts the Abbot had given him that evening. He sorted each into its proper place, correlated it with what he knew already. His mind worked almost like... before. While he thought, he could stave off other things he did not want to think about. Satisfied with his work, he closed his eyes.
Sleep did not come. It had not come, these last nights, except when Russell gave him opium. Other things came to him, the things that crept up on him at night: the image of himself as he had been three days ago, breath on the back of his neck.... He breathed slowly through the pain that seemed worse at night.
He thought again of Abbot Mattias. The old man had a face as gnarled and hard as the desert thorn trees. The detective had encountered very few people, he thought perhaps four or five in a lifetime, whom he could not deceive if he wished. He had known immediately that he could not fool the abbot. "Through the body, the spiritual agony of guilt and shame," the Abbot had said.
He rose. He drew on his sheepskin coat against the night chill, and picked his way through the darkness and over the rocky ground until he stood before the abbot's door. A faint yellow glow lighted the window, though it was late. He stood still for a moment. He had never done anything like this in his life. He said hoarsely, "Father."
The door opened. The Abbot stood before him, a cloak that was an older, more threadbare version of his own flung over his shoulders. The old man looked searchingly into his face, and without a word stood back from the doorway.
He came inside, not to the small office where they had sat earlier that afternoon, but to the Abbot's even smaller sleeping cell, like his own little more than a cave carved into rock, whitewashed and clean. It contained a wooden frame latticed with age--dark leather strips and covered with a single wool blanket, which evidently had just been pushed to the foot of the bed, a wooden stool, and a low wooden table holding an open illuminated Bible, a clay basin of water, a lighted beeswax candle, and a reed basket with a heap of dried flowers. On one wall hung a Russian cross, on the opposite a mourning Virgin, similar to the one in the Abbot's office. Through the open doorway to the office, he could see shelves of books, their leather spines dully gleaming.
The Abbot held out his hand toward the bed, and Holmes smiled internally as he understood the Abbot's courtesy: he was being offered the marginally more comfortable piece of furniture. The host contemplated his guest, then disappeared into the next room and returned carrying the bottle and two squat glasses that Holmes recognized from the afternoon. The abbot poured the wine, handed him a glass, pulled the stool closer to the bed, and sat down.
The abbot spoke for the first time. "In some faiths, people avoid wine because it makes one foolish. Yet it can be part of a sacrament, and... it can be a help."
"Yes," said Holmes. "I've known brandy to work that way, too." He smiled thinly and partook of the help.
The two men sat drinking their wine, the one no longer young, his shoulders hitched as if they hurt, the other very old, quiet and watching his guest politely and undemandingly. Eventually the abbot said conversationally, "You know something about apiculture."
The corners of his guest's mouth twitched, the smile instantly disappeared. "I keep bees, at home," he said.
"Ah," the abbot smiled, and the matrices of fine lines all over his face deepened. "That was always one of my favorite parts of the work here. That, and the gardens." With a thin, brown finger he stirred the rustling flowerheads in his basket. They were mostly pinks, reds, pale yellows, and one small, startlingly blue one. "Medicinal. We can give you a salve for your back made from one of these." He picked out the blue flower and dropped in into Holmes' palm, which opened for it. "Before you go, take that to Brother Eugenius in our infirmary and ask him to give you the salve we make from that flower. The bees make honey from it, too. Tell me, how is it to keep bees in a rainy climate?"
His guest told him, warming to the subject despite his preoccupation, feeling an obscure comfort in his old enthusiasm. The abbot knew a great deal about bees, and their conversation ranged easily over the relative difficulties of keeping them in the desert and on the Sussex headlands, the flavors of honey, the medicinal--and sometimes homicidal--uses of plants, a subject that had always fascinated Holmes. The abbot seemed in no hurry. The level of wine in the bottle dropped. The talk wandered to the hardships of life in a cliffhung monastery.
"A desert monastery life is more similar than you might expect to the life of a farmer on your coast," the abbot said. "One is always so subject to the vicissitudes of nature, though in your part of the world trouble is more likely to arrive as an Atlantic storm. Here, we worry about drought, and the rockslides which are always a danger to us."
Holmes nodded. The abbot poured more wine.
"I was caught in a rockslide here once, when I was a young man, " the abbot continued. "In the wadi on the far side of our community. Just one stone hit me. It broke my leg clean through. I called for help, but the rock wall blocked the sound of my voice. I was alone, you see."
A muscle moved in Holmes' jaw. He tossed back the wine. He watched his host with strained, level, grey eyes.
"I could not move. I had been out under the sun for hours when my brothers found me. I was crying aloud when they carried me. I could not keep from crying and shaking. Oh, they were very kind to me, of course. What would I have done without my brothers?" The corner of his mouth turned up. "Still, it took me a long time to forgive them for--seeing me like that. Or perhaps it took a long time for me to forgive myself."
Holmes' hand, behind his leg, was gripping the wooden edge of the bed so hard that pain jabbed his back. He saw again the blank wall in that room. Then he saw Russell's face in the dim caravan. His throat closed...
"I could tell you, and it would be true," the abbot went on in his conversational voice, "that many strong men have not endured what you endured so successfully. But that is of limited help, isn't it?"
"Not much help, father," Holmes managed. A ghost of a smile.
The abbot studied him. "I would guess that many people have thought you cold."
Holmes' face was blank.
"I do not think," the abbot went on, "that these people entirely--understood you." He looked at his guest under wrinkled, hooded eyelids. "I think you are far from a cold man."
Holmes gazed back at the abbot a moment, very still. Then he moved impatiently as if to set down his glass and rise. The abbot raised a hand and went on: "My son, I told you this afternoon that God has given you a great gift. Indeed, I would judge he has given you many gifts, more than most people have. I think you have spent much of your life trying to rise above the ordinary restrictions of being human. You have succeeded greatly. Your success is admirable. But--the higher you rise above flesh and blood, the harder it is to come back to it. And, while in this life, one always comes back to it." The abbot looked straight at his guest. "Even you." Then he smiled, very gently.
"The cigarettes--" rasped Holmes. "I thought I could--" His body lurched toward the abbot. He felt a hand come down on his shoulder, beyond the havoc of the knout. Words jerked out of him in short, harsh bursts. The abbot sat quietly. The things the man had done to him, his knowledge that he could not have endured much more, his utter vulnerability to the needs of his own body, his terror, came out. He could hardly believe he was saying these things. He went on. "The most common, vulgar kind of wretch.... I could always--think my way through anything.... He could-make me..."
At last he fell silent. He stared past his knees, breathing heavily. Then he raised his eyes to the abbot's. The abbot released his shoulder. Holmes felt spent, but he also felt the knot in his stomach relax at last. The single square window in the abbot's cell had turned from black to grey, he noticed. "There's no--cure, for this sort of thing, I suppose," he said. But he smiled, wryly, as he said it.
"No. Not a complete one," said the Abbot. He refilled Holmes' glass and mirrored his smile. "Not as long as you are human, and own a body of flesh and blood--and heart--which I suspect will be for some time yet. But you know, it is not entirely evil to belong to flesh and blood. After all, it is as God made us."
Holmes sat silent, feeling his relief. Oddly, he was less weary than when he had first walked down to the Abbot's sleeping cell. He sipped slowly, and gently rolled the dried flower between his thumb and finger.
The Abbot said, "That woman of yours."
Holmes' startled gaze jumped back to the abbot's face. "What--I have no--Father, she is not a woman of mine."
The abbot apparently had not heard him. He stirred his finger in the flower basket, smiling sleepily. "She seems a remarkable young woman."
"She is--remarkable," said Holmes at last. "But, you understand, Abbot--I have never done anything untoward with her."
"Perhaps you should," said the abbot.
"Some day," added the abbot, to Holmes' blank face.
Holmes' gaze moved away to the window. He seemed to be seeing something beyond the clean, whitewashed cell. The hoarseness returned to his voice. "I could not--" he said. "I thought I would not--ever--" he broke off.
"God has given you a great gift, my son," said the abbot.
Holmes was silent for a long time. The blue flower in his palm gave not a sweet but a dry, aromatic, oddly vivid fragrance, he noticed. He had always found that sweet-scented flowers became cloying. At last he rose. He stood looking down at the abbot. "Give me your blessing, father," he said. A few moments later, he was striding away up the cliff face, back to where the girl waited. The sun was rising over the wadi.
Her door stood partly open. His beard settled into his chest as he gazed down at her. He felt empty and clean and very quiet.
She was sleeping. Her tumble of hair looked red in the slanting early light. It had never occurred to him before that he loved hair of that color, it was not the sort of thing he had thought about for most of his years. Her blanket had fallen back and her abbaya was open at the throat in the chill air. Averting his eyes, he stooped over her. The dried flower in his pocket rustled faintly. Soundlessly his lips moved: "Russell." He bent his lips to her hair. Then, he gently he pulled the blanket over her shoulders, and stepped out.
Before his own sleeping cell he sat down. No sounds of movement came yet from her doorway, and his mouth quirked in amusement and acceptance as he realized that he had again been listening for them. It was good knowing she was nearby. Presently he heard her sigh and yawn, then the scrape of a bedroll being pushed back. She came out, dressed and ready, smiled at him but said nothing, and sat down on the ground a few feet from him. They rested in contented silence.
He knew she deduced where he had gone in the night. It was all right. He sat, accepting that she had heard his nightmares, had seen him helpless and stripped of his power and confidence, accepting all of it tranquilly. He could feel joy again in the company of this gangly orphan who had tricked his enemies and saved his life, who understood without the need for tedious and difficult words the things he felt and could hardly say. He wanted to hold her in his arms and thank her for what she had done. His muscles tightened, he almost moved toward her. He stopped, held himself back before she could see. No, he would not impose himself upon her now, at a moment when perhaps she could not refuse him. But at the right time, he would find the way to thank her.
And he knew something else. There was a feeling he sometimes had when he knew he had hit upon the solution of a troubling case. He had it now. "I should have thought it obvious...." If she would have him, he would ask Russell to marry him. When and how he had decided this he was not sure, but it seemed now like something he had known a long time. He would marry her, novel as the decision seemed after all these years of monastic bachelorhood. He knew he needed the joy--and, yes, the comfort--of her nearness, and though he was aware it would rankle his independent nature from time to time, he accepted the need. However it had stolen up on him, he couldn't escape it now, and he gave up wanting to. He felt calmly, absolutely certain. He wanted to take her burdens as his own, to hear out her nightmares when she was ready. And he wanted to love her with his body as he had dreamed while a prisoner. For now, he must wait, letting her learn more and see more of the world, so that when he asked her she would know what she chose. And then he would offer himself, difficult and eccentric as he knew he was, for her to reject or to have.
In a few minutes, they would go down to the main monastery, to breakfast and to a last conference with the abbot, to the road and to Jerusalem. For now, sitting with her, Holmes felt a sense that was new to him, of quietness and hope. It crossed his mind that in a way, his enemy had done him a favor. Around them the monastery was beginning to wake. The sun was pouring into the wadi, filling it like a cup with light, and it was going to be a glorious day.
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