Garment of Shadows (20 page)

“Should we go on?” I asked Holmes.

“Perhaps we ought to wait until they’ve cleared the hornet’s nest,” he suggested. Again, Lyautey disliked the sensation of cowardice, but had to agree that it would be idiotic to step into an enemy’s sights when the means to his end was coming up from behind.

So we waited. And in a quarter of an hour, we heard a shrill whistle. I ventured a peek, and saw Ali, waving at us from beside the boulder.

As one, Holmes and I looked at our companion, then at one another, and set about convincing Maréchal Lyautey that there was absolutely no need for him to climb the cliff-face.

Neither of us much cared for the picture of this white-haired, limping aristocrat tumbling into the river below.

We continued up the track on foot. In half an hour, we approached a small, neat camp-fire, where the leader of the Rif Rebellion was preparing to brew mint tea.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

I
f Lyautey was a Lombardy poplar, Mohammed Abd el-Krim was a piece of granite, his feet rooted in the mountainscape, his eyes the gaze of the Rif itself. Stocky, dark, intent—on the surface, he and the Maréchal ought to have nothing in common: One was a patrician military officer with the future of a country in his hands, the other an engineer from the hills with no military training and a tenuous grip on his fellow tribes. But when the dark Berber eyes and the blue French gaze met, there was a palpable click of connexion: two powerful, intelligent, and charismatic men who cared passionately about Morocco.

Holmes had other matters on his mind than diplomatic relations. Ali was just now scrambling down the hillside, sweating despite the cold day. “Who were they?” Holmes demanded of Ali, in Arabic.

Ali ignored the question. His dark eyes searched us intently as he drew near. “Were you hit? Any of you?”

“Only the horses,” Holmes replied. “Were they Berber?”

But either Ali did not know, or did not care. He whirled, seeing the thin stream of already-dried blood on the neck of the Maréchal’s horse. He stormed over to examine the wound—a minor one, clearly, although a handsbreadth lower would have been a different matter—before turning back, his face a peculiar mixture of anger and confusion.

“It is merely a nick,” Holmes pointed out.

Ali glared at him for a moment, then his face went closed. “Come,” he said, as he led us towards the clear place where the first tendrils of smoke were rising.

Holmes asked again, “Ali, do you know who they were?”

Ali responded, still in Arabic, “Two men. One dead, the other gone, taking both rifles and the horses.”

“How many horses?”

“Just the two.”

“Not a kidnapping, then. Was there anything on the dead man?”

“Nothing.” Then he glanced at his companion, and corrected himself. “Except these.” His hand came out of his garments with three coins: two of bronze, stamped with
5
and
10 CENTIMES
, and a very worn silver 2 peseta coin. “The Emir saw him as well. He … thinks the man Jibali. Not Rifi.”

“From Raisuli?” Holmes asked.

But I interrupted with a more urgent concern. “Did I kill him?” My voice was a touch shaky.

“You wounded him, in the hip. A knife killed him.” He saw my reaction, and gave a humourless smile. “His companion did not wish him questioned.”

Lyautey cut in. “What is he saying?”

His demand called to mind the apparent reason for my presence. I put aside investigation and turned to translation, telling him what had been asked, and answered.

He nodded, and said, “We are somewhat exposed here.”

I translated the statement—which was, I felt, a mild question—into Spanish. Abd el-Krim replied, “He has run. You are safe enough here.”

When I put that into French, I thought it prudent to change the you into
we
.

Belatedly, Ali realised that our diplomatic mission had got off to a somewhat distracted start. He cleared his throat, and launched into formal introductions.

I translated. After a moment, Abd el-Krim stepped forward and put out his hand. Lyautey took it. The Rif leader did not bother with Holmes or me, but returned to the fire, dropping to his heels to pull a primitive tea-setting from a lumpy saddle-bag.

While he was doing that, Holmes turned to Ali. “We’ve had no news of Mahmoud. And Lyautey has not seen him since the one meeting on Thursday. He suggests that an order be issued for his soldiers to watch for a man with a scar; I said to wait, for another day or two.”

With a brusque nod, Ali stalked off to gather an armful of branches from among the rocks.

Holmes and I unsaddled the horses and I carried their blankets to the fire. Lyautey and Abd el-Krim sat across from each other, with Holmes and me at the other points of the compass, but subtly back from the fire. Ali took a seat near his leader, but also back from the fire, drawing his knife and reaching for a scrap of the wood.

Abd el-Krim adjusted a blackened pan over the flames, and spoke, his voice low and firm. “You are recovered from your illness, sir?”

Lyautey did not blink at the knowledge that the state of his health was known beyond the French borders. “I am seventy years old. I should be sitting with my feet stretched out to my own fireplace.”

(My translation went slowly at first, and was cause for a number of apologies. But after a bit, either the two men slowed and simplified their words or my mind regained its fluency, because soon it became more or less automatic. Tiring, but automatic.)

“Yet here you are,” the Berber commented, “sitting among the rocks, drinking tea with your enemy.”

Well, I thought, that was certainly getting right to the heart of the matter.

“Are you my enemy, sir?”

“I would like not to be,
Bismillah
. I am told that you show respect to my country and to its traditions. If we may call this love, then you and I have common ground.”

“I very much hope that we do,” Lyautey replied.

There was a faint smile around Abd el-Krim’s eyes, reminding me of Mahmoud. And as Mahmoud had, this host returned to the heating water, drawing a mashed and wilted handful of mint from a pouch, folding it into an aluminium tea-pot that looked as if it had been used as a football. The leaves were followed by a hefty dose of crude sugar chunks that he measured onto his palm, then stirred in with a dusty stick. He poured the tea into a glass from a height, then dumped it back into the pot, repeating the ritual until he was satisfied, at which point he handed one frothy glass to Lyautey and kept one for himself. He left the pot within arm’s reach of Holmes, to pour or not, as he wished. Holmes poured, handing a cup across the fire to Ali and another to me, the mere translator.

Following the rather pointed opening exchange, I expected to dive straight into the problem of French claims across the Werghal, but after a noisy slurp, Abd el-Krim asked Lyautey whether he had children.

“Alas, no,” the Frenchman replied. “My life has not been suited to families. And you?”

“Three young sons,” he said.

“Allah’s blessing upon them,” Lyautey said, in recognisable Arabic.
“Bismillah,”
Abd el-Krim agreed.

The polite conversation that followed was the two men’s way to get a sense of the other. The Moroccan’s questions about Lyautey’s home—burned to the ground in the first year of the War, along with all his possessions and papers, by occupying German forces seizing a convenient target for their resentments—told more about the Maréchal’s history than about the building. The Frenchman’s return questions established not only the rebel leader’s own losses, but that among the Berber, Abd el-Krim might be considered the equivalent of minor aristocracy. The cups were refilled,
zellij
tile-work and Moroccan music discussed, and delicate queries about the future (skirting around the minor problems of what the rebellion would mean) confirmed that Lyautey intended to return to France, with his wife. Abd el-Krim took this to mean the beginning of a family, and wished him many sons, but before the Frenchman could disappoint him (Madame being rather beyond childbearing years) he set down his tea and picked up our reason for being here.

“You are aware that the 1912 treaty was a bad one?”

“Not bad,” Lyautey corrected. “Perhaps incomplete.”

“It was imposed upon us, without consultation.”

“The Sultan agreed to it. Indeed, Sultan Yusef agrees still.”

“The Sultan is a prisoner and a puppet of the French,” Abd el-Krim said.

“The Sultan is … inexperienced, when it comes to international relations. It is a balancing act, to keep him informed and involved, while still … encouraging Morocco to join the twentieth century.”

“In the south perhaps, but here in the Rif? To Spain, we are a colony, open to be ravaged. Were it not for our minerals, the Rif would be left in peace.”

“I can understand that the Spanish are … problematic.”

“The Spanish are brutal. They drop mustard gas on us. On our women and our children!”

“You understand, I have no control over what Spain does on their side of the Protectorate?”

“You are the foreign minister for the Sultan, and hence for all of Morocco.”

“I have no authority over the Spanish,” the Frenchman repeated.

Abd el-Krim’s hand waved the question away. “We will deal with Spain. What I need is a recognition that the 1904 treaty is invalid, and that the 1912 border—a paper border that cuts through tribes and even villages—was drawn by fools.”

“I cannot change a treaty.”

“And yet, I am told that the Resident General has before this day been struck by occasional blindness when faced with foolish orders. It is not inconceivable that he would also see his way to revisiting the question of boundaries by establishing a frontiers commission.”

Lyautey looked through the smoke at him, no doubt wondering where the man’s information came from. Abd el-Krim’s dark eyes crinkled in a smile that made his intelligence shine out. “My people have friends in many parts of the world, Maréchal.”

Lyautey drew himself up to return fire. “You claim that the boundary between the French and the Spanish Protectorates should be
Wadi
Werghal. And yet your incursions into the disputed area leave me with little choice but to defend the line I have been given. If you wish to redraw the boundary, you must address the issue through the proper channels.”

“Perhaps you would have me ride into Tetuán? To be shipped to General de Rivera, who would have me dangling from a rope in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor? Sir, you well know that for some things, a proof of strength is the first step to negotiation.”

“You cannot win if you move against France.”

“The Spanish run from us, and die as they run.”

“France is not Spain.”

“From the Rif, all of Europe looks much the same.”

“One does not create a new nation by hiding in the Rif.” This sentence I changed, since a literal translation of Lyautey’s
hiding
might have Abd el-Krim reaching for his rifle: “One does not create a new nation without venturing out of the Rif.”

“Nor does one create a nation by placing its leader’s head in a noose.”

Lyautey clearly decided that the preliminaries were out of the way, and that it was time for specifics. “Two days ago, I received word that your men attacked an outpost. Two of my soldiers were wounded, one of yours was killed.”

“No Rifi soldier has crossed the frontier.” The dark gaze was even, the voice sure.

“Then who were they?”

“Every land has its outlaws. These were not mine.”

“And the men stealing telegraph lines?”

“Ah. That was a mistake. It was thought that they were Spanish lines.”

“In any case, I have no choice but to reinforce that post, as well as the line leading to it. You see that?”

“I see that you should not be there in the first place.”

“Yet I am. And being there, I must hold my position. Even the leader of a guerrilla campaign will agree that land claimed must be held. France cannot permit the shame of that retreat. We have enemies closer to home to whom our failure here would be a sign of weakness. I realise—”

Abd el-Krim interrupted. “I have told my men that they are not to interfere with the French. I will repeat the order when I return.”

Lyautey nodded, as if the other man had made a formal concession, then picked up a stick, drawing a line in the ground, and another. “The Werghal River; the Sabu,” he said. Marks for Fez, Chaouen, Tetuán, Tazrut; another line for the Mediterranean coast.

Lyautey then returned to the first lines, drawing from memory precise details of where each of the French border posts stood, how many men, the difficulties of supply and access. For forty minutes, he laid before the hill man exactly where the incursions had taken place, who had been injured, when local civilians had come in the way of the fighting. He even knew when livestock and crops had been destroyed, down to the olive trees felled as firewood by Abd el-Krim’s men.

The Moroccan shifted, so as to examine the rough map, but said little beyond the occasional correction—in one place, a man had not died, merely been injured; in another, it had been a neighbour who stole the sheep, not the rebels.

Lyautey paused, letting his opponent study the map. Then he dropped the stick, and leant forward, this seventy-year-old man with a bad back and several recent operations—my own knees, considerably younger, were aching. “I am forced to send for reinforcements. Multiple battalions of infantry and engineers. We will hold the line we were given, and keep your fighters occupied. Your northern forces will be stretched thin. You are already fighting on two fronts. Your people are hungry. If France enters to your south, you will lose. Your children will starve.”

The Moroccan gazed calmly at the lines in the dirt. “If it is the will of Allah, we will win.”

“Is it Allah’s will that you have a country, or prove your manhood?”

I hesitated, racking my brain for a way to soften that blunt question, but since bluntness was the point, I had to translate it as it stood.