The Wooden Shepherdess (33 page)

That night as he lay on his curtained big brass bed in the grandiose house on the Marshan where yet more cousins of Ludo's lived, Augustine mused on how strange it was he should feel a place “home” which he'd never even visited till today! If Meknes and Fez—and Marrakesh—were even better....

Tomorrow he'd better start learning Arabic.

After a day or two Ludo inducted his friend in the arts of pig-sticking, out at Sharf el Akab within sound of the roaring Atlantic: and there Augustine first met “The Glaoui.”

The Glaoui was here on a visit, and also out pig-sticking with the British. He looked superb in his flowing Moorish robes with his hooded saturnine face, riding an Arab stallion, in yellow Moorish slippers and eighteen-inch golden spurs—and couching his spear at a level for men-sticking rather than pig, for a lifetime's technical habits (he told Augustine) were too strong to break.

Augustine questioned Ludo about him while riding home. Of the former “Three Great Caids of the South,” the Goundafa and M'tougga stars were now in final eclipse and the Glaoua star was nearing its zenith (so Ludo said). On the late Madani el Glaoui's death this warrior-brother, T'hami—already the Pasha of Marrakesh—had become “The Glaoui” as well, the Premier Lord of the Atlas: a combination which made him the most powerful Moor in Morocco not even barring the Sultan. As Pasha down in the plains, perforce he favored the conquering French; and the French favored him, since they looked to his Atlas realm as their southern bulwark; but all the same (added Ludo) they sensibly poked no noses in mountain passes where captured Frenchmen—or so the story went—were buggered to death.

Ludo's own family ties with the House of Glaoua went back to a certain Ischoua Corcos who'd helped to finance the elder Glaoui's ousting of Sultan Abd-el-Aziz in favor of Mulay Hafid. Ludo's father still kept many a gold-tipped finger in Glaoui's financial pies, and Ludo himself—though the one was a Jew and the other a Moslem—had long been as close a friend of T'hami el Glaoui as men like that could allow themselves friends. Thus Ludo had much to tell Augustine about that spectacular, fabulous figure beneath whose fleecy immaculate robes was a sinewy body scarred head-to-foot. A horrible trench in the flesh ran the length of his back where in youth defenders had poured boiling lead on him scaling a fortress wall—he had had to lie in a bath of oil for a month. Few people knew that a knife-thrust had severed a nerve in his cheek, because by a Herculean effort he managed to hold his face straight in public in case you should think he had suffered a stroke....

In boyhood his sport had been potting a pigeon's egg balanced between the ankles of one of his father's slaves with a flintlock: a dangerous sport indeed for a worthless younger son, should he lame for life some favorite slave! Today he shot partridge with ball at the gallop.... Then Ludo went on to say that the Glaoui had to keep in with the French but privately seemed to prefer the English. But sometimes he showed this in somewhat equivocal ways: as once when he'd asked a highly distinguished English friend to bring home one of his brides, instead of sending the more conventional
physical
eunuch....

Indeed the Glaoui showed rather a pretty wit in this devious sort of way. At Marrakesh, when trying a case, he would publicly lay all the bribes he'd received on the table—the envelopes still unopened. He gave some away to indigent widows—unopened still; but when in private he opened the ones which remained, if they didn't come up to scratch he either appealed against himself and retried the case—or that litigant just disappeared.

The war which had lately overflowed from the Riff—the mountainous “Spanish Zone” which lay to the east of Tangier—was over at last, and Tangier no longer cut off from the rest of Morocco except by ship.

For six years Abd el Krim (though outnumbered a hundred to one) had vanquished and massacred Spanish armies, repeatedly driving the Spaniards into the sea. For the last two years he had taken on France as well, and only last summer was threatening Fez itself. Unencumbered by wounded (the Red Cross flatly refused to allow him medical aid), and with troops who could march and fight on a handful of dates, his forces could fight two battles in twenty-four hours a good forty miles apart. But they weren't without Western technical skills: having captured a field-gun from the French they took it to pieces, manhandled the pieces across the trackless mountains, re-assembled the parts in a cave and used it to bombard Tetouan.... It had taken the utmost might of Spain and France combined to defeat him, and only last month had the famous Mohammed ben Abd el Krim el-Khatabi been finally forced to surrender to Marshal Pétain's 160,000 men. But now the overland routes were open again: Augustine and Ludo could travel towards the south whenever they liked.

Joan had reckoned Augustine's probable absence in terms of weeks. When weeks turned into months, and when autumn even had come without him returning, Jeremy started suspecting his friend must be having a whale of a time among Djinns and Afreets, Sultans and brigands, gazelle and wild boar: for surely simple heartache could never have kept him away so long!

After a whole month in Fez Augustine and Ludo had reached the coast at Rabat, where (or rather, across the river in Salli) they got themselves stoned and spat-on by blue-eyed and red-bearded Moslems (descended from Christian slaves, and thus all-the-more fanatical). Then down the coast past dreary commercial Casablanca to Mazagan; and on to Saffi, where beautiful bronze Portuguese cannon with handles molded like dolphins and knobs like bunches of grapes still lay about on the Keshla ramparts just where—centuries back—the Portuguese gunners had left them. There they turned inland again, towards Marrakesh; and saw for the first time—floating as if detached above the heat-haze—distant snow-covered peaks: the tempting, forbidden Atlas Mountains....

This turned their thoughts again to the Glaoui, whose hold on that mountainous south was nowadays said to be pretty complete—apart from his infamous nephew Hammou, whose torture-chambers and vast arsenal-fortress of Telouet were defended by cannon forged (for the Franco-Prussian War) by Krupp; and one or two lesser ruffians no doubt, whose eyries lay too far from the caravan routes for the Glaoui to bother about them....

Thus Mary was once more nearing her time, with Augustine on this occasion even further removed in Epoch than Space—in the Calendar Year 1345. That was by Muslim computation of course; but he might just as well have been back in Christendom's Middle Ages, in mountains where Berber chieftains living in fortified castles snapped their fingers at Sultans and even Protecting Powers. Like Christendom's mediaeval barons, each one ruled as far as the arm of his wrath could be made to reach till somebody stronger did him in.

It was wholly by Glaoui's personal favor and quite unknown to the French—who'd have done their damnedest to stop it—that late in October Augustine and Ludo had found themselves three days' journey already into those xenophobe Atlas Mountains. Tonight they were lodged in a Berber castle.... But this was a castle (it happened) whose brigandish owner was counted among those “lesser ruffians” with little love or respect for the Glaoui—though that was a fact they had found out rather too late.

Indeed there seemed good reason to doubt if tomorrow morning would find them alive.

A week ago, in Marrakesh, Ludo had played his cards well when they called at the Pasha's vast and desolate palace. Sipping his scented coffee, Ludo had hinted (no more) at their crazy impossible pipe-dream of crossing the mountains from Asni towards Taroudant “had the French been less insanely jealous of British intruders.” This nettled the Glaoui: the Atlas was his domain, and permission had nothing to do with the French.... Without more ado he had given his blessing; then turned to one of his Berber bodyguard, Ali, and told him in Shleuh (the Berber tongue) to guide this Jew and this Christian, and guard them—and not to come back without them.... Whereupon Ali—knowing full well what that warning meant from the merciless Glaoui—had sat up the whole night sharpening knives.

They had ridden on horseback as far as Asni: from there the grooms must take the beasts back, for horses were useless on mountain tracks. With the plains and their acres of olives and palms left behind, Augustine had felt like a boy escaping from school and inclined to behave like one: hoping “to stretch his legs” (among mountains anything up to 14,000 feet high), he had even pleaded for making the journey on foot. But this was a country where only the scum-of-the-earth went on foot, and Ludo had had to insist on hiring three mules to ride—with three little slave-boys thrown in—as the minimum style required when personal friends of the Glaoui took to the road. So the two of them covered their “Christian” clothes in Berber cloaks and the cavalcade had set off, with the taciturn Ali riding in front and the three boys joking along in the dust behind letting out occasional ear-splitting yells to encourage the beasts.

They sat side-saddle without any saddles—just panniers flung over each animal's back, incessantly drumming its near-side ribs with their heels since the moment the drumming faltered the sluggish animal stopped. At first it made even the seaman Augustine giddy to find himself riding like this on the outside brink of a four-foot track cut across the face of a cliff, and looking sheer down between his own drumming heels to a green-edged thread of quicksilver hundreds of feet below: then meeting a convoy of baggage-camels, and having to lie out flat on his animal's back—with the animal somehow walking with bended knees like a slinking cat—while a camel's side-bales of merchandise swayed just an inch or two over his nose.

When rivers had to be crossed there weren't any bridges: they had to be forded, towing the three boys behind through the ice-cold water gripping the tails of the mules in their teeth. At night they would come to some mud-built village, where Ali would summon the Sheikh and the magic of Glaoui's name would secure them lodging of sorts: a carpet to sleep on, mint-tea and rock-like bread—and possibly hard-boiled eggs. For three days, indeed, all had gone well: three magical days.... But then on the fourth—and late in the afternoon at that—they had come to a spreading valley where Ali had seemed uncertain which track to take (so uncertain that Ludo suspected they'd taken a wrong one already to find themselves there at all). There was no one about to ask; but on cresting a rise they had sighted this castle, and sanguinely hoped for rather higher-class entertainment here than villagers could afford.

The bare earth was crimson; the snow-capped mountains were crimson and even the river was tinged with red. The castle itself was crimson, with splashes of white high up round the few outside windows—like eyes.... As they neared it, hundreds of sharp-sighted pigeons flew out and wheeled in the crimsoning evening sky. The final approach to the castle was cut single-file through a thicket of otherwise quite impassable thorn, a thicket which barely left room to skirt three sides of the fortress and get to the fourth where alone was there any gate—and even then they were still single-file, on the narrow bank of a raging pinkish river. The gate moreover was masked by a short curtain-wall which would leave attackers no room for wielding a battering-ram, and no hope of covering-fire from across the torrent.... “Whoever planned this castle's defenses,” Augustine remarked, “certainly knew his job!”

But where had they got to? “Who owns this castle?” Ludo had asked their “guide” more than once; but Ali seemed not to hear. The gates were closed; but now a wizened face had looked out through a wicket, so Ludo made Ali ask him in Shleuh....

When he learned at last where he was even Ali blenched, and pulled his hood over his face. He whispered to Ludo that Allah had brought them to country where claiming the Glaoui's friendship merited instant death. “Mashallah,” said Ali.... But “Allah's Will” be damned, and hastily Ludo conferred with Augustine.

The sun was already setting, and nobody spends the night in the open but footpads and cut-throats.... Anyway, turning back once they'd been seen would be fatal.... Bluff seemed their only hope: two English travelers (thanks be to heaven at least they weren't French!) who pleaded the law of Koranic hospitality, naming themselves “deeaf Allah”—“guests sent him by God.”

Hoping against all hope that no one would recognize Ali as one of the Glaoui's men, Ludo boldly beat on the gate with his fist while Augustine felt like some wretched MacDonald, back in the days of Glencoe, beating by night on the gates of the Master of Stair. Then the wicket was opened again, to reveal this time an almost gigantic elderly Negro: a man of majestic presence, dressed in a black-and-white striped jillaba and wearing a silver-sheathed koumiyah nearly as big as a scimitar. Ali was hiding his face in his hood and appeared struck dumb, so it fell to Ludo himself to say the piece which ought to have come from his man: “Tell your master that two very high-ranking Englishmen—intimate friends of the English King—have been sent by Allah to stand at his gate and await a hospitality rightly famous among the Faithful.”

The man looked doubtful (perhaps he didn't know very much Arabic). Anyway, back he went for orders; and dusk was already falling before at last he heaved wide open the groaning gates and they found themselves in a pitch-black vaulted darkness filled with the roar of rushing water.... For here was the final attacker's hazard, and only a narrow booby-trap bridge crossed a sluice which ran like a mill-race. Guiding hands, however, were laid on their arms; they crossed a courtyard where tribesmen were camped, and climbed the outside stair of a corner-tower.

This small upper room was completely empty. Across the four corners were cedar-beams polished with age providing racks for their cloaks, but otherwise—nothing. A bare polished plaster floor like old ivory faintly reflected the reds of the richly-painted cedarwood ceiling; bare polished-ivory walls reflected the dying hues of the sunset. The windows were small and unglazed, with beautiful wrought-iron grilles looking up at the pink of snow-covered peaks or down at the darkening vegetation around those mountains' feet. The very air seemed the color of blood.