Chapter Three Towards Aleppo #2
“You look different, Miss Silver,” he said. They were riding side by side, and it was easy to talk.
“I feel different.”
“Something happen in Madinat al-Qamar, no?”
“That’s right.”
“Something real, not imagination?”
“Well, you see, that’s interesting already. You mean, if it’s imagined, it can’t be real? What about the other way round: If it’s real, it can’t be imagined? They’re complete opposites. Is that what you mean?”
“This is your game, Miss Silver, not mine. I am a simple man. I don’t know the rules. If something look real, is it real?”
“It depends on—”
“No, it doesn’t depend. If it look real in every way, is it real?”
“Yes. I suppose it is. Until you find out it isn’t.”
“No, you won’t find that. It look real, it taste real, it smell real, the right weight, the right size, everything you can see or feel about it is just like what it should be. Is that real?”
“Yes, then. It must be.”
“Then if somebody say to you, this is not real. You think it’s real, it look and feel and weigh like everything it should be, but it’s not real. What would you say to that person?”
“I’d want to know why they thought that.”
“You wouldn’t believe them ever?”
She had to think about that. What would Gottfried Brande say?
The only thing that counted for him was hard evidence that could be expressed in numbers.
He’d have no truck with the idea that something unreal could be real.
Simon Talbot, on the other hand, thought that the distinction between real and unreal was a cultural construct, entirely dependent on the social and political context, with no permanent validity.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I was talking about the difference between real and imagined. You made it into the difference between real and unreal. What happened to the imagination? Where did that go? Do you think that ‘imagined’ means the same as ‘unreal’?”
“I am only a humble guide, Miss Silver. Your questions have a philosophical depth far beyond my ability to understand. Again I say, why you ask me?”
“Because I don’t think you’re a humble guide at all. I think you’re a very clever man, who conceals most of himself from sight. I think you could easily answer those questions, and I really would like to know what you think.”
“Of course you are right,” he said cheerfully.
“I know everything, but is not good for business to say so. I give to a customer my business card, if I had such a thing, it would not say ‘Abdel Ionides, he know everything.’ They would look at me and say, ‘If you know everything, why you dress like a beggar?’ Not easy to explain that, Miss Silver.”
“You’ve done it again.”
“What I do again?”
“Avoided the question. If something is imagined, does that mean it’s untrue?”
“All right. You drive me into a corner. You hunt me down like a cat with a mouse, and there is no escape for me. Here you are. This is what I know: without imagination you never see the truth about anything. Without imagination you think you see more truth, but in fact you see less. You know who tell me that?”
“No. Who was it?”
“A holy man from India. He was in prison with me in Baghdad. Very holy man, but not very clever, so he get caught.”
“You were in prison?”
“Many times.”
“What for?”
“In some places, Miss Silver, they put you in prison with no reason. No crime, no trial, no sentence. They don’t like your face, in you go.
Say you arrive in a city you don’t know.
You need some money. There is a marketplace.
You offer to play a game, backgammon, chess, cards, whatever they like, and you sit down and start playing with some honest citizens, like yourself, but pffft!
Along come a policeman. ‘What you do?’ he says.
I explain, simple game for innocent amusement with my friends.
He doesn’t listen, he say is against the law, I have to go before the judge.
The judge say give me some money or I send you to prison.
Well, I got no money, and prison is not so bad.
Somewhere dry to sleep, something to eat, interesting company.
Like the Indian holy man. He tell me that piece of wisdom, so in exchange I show him little game with three cards, so he can get some money to buy food when they let him out, and so we pass the time till they let me out. ”
“Did they let him out?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I see him again. Maybe not.”
And so they rode on towards Aleppo.
—
The prison governor at Kücüklü had still not managed to transfer the English archaeologist to the civilian hospital.
They didn’t want him; they had no beds—the transport situation was difficult—there was a shortage of blood in the transfusion unit—they could not allow the transfer of prisoners without adequate security staff (which was the precise opposite of their objection on a previous occasion), and so on.
So Dr. Martin Peters, whose daemon had vanished, still lay in the grubby and ill-lit prison infirmary, looked after by the same idle and superstitious orderly. When a case of dysentery turned up elsewhere in the prison, and then another, the governor became seriously alarmed.
“The patient Dr. Peters,” he said to the orderly. “He can’t stay in there if we have two patients with dysentery.”
“Prisoners.”
“What? What?”
“They en’t patients. They’re prisoners. So’s he.”
“Take him out of the infirmary and put him in a clean cell, and then—”
“Put him in a what?”
“A cell that you have thoroughly disinfected. Put him there, and then move the two infected prisoners to the infirmary.”
“Not allowed to do that, sir. Only military staff can move prisoners.”
“If I tell you to do it, you’re not only allowed to do it, you’re required to. Don’t waste any more time. Get one of the day guards to help you. And do it now, not—”
A peremptory knock, a stamp of boots on the wooden floor, a loud parade-ground voice. “Sir! Visitor, sir. To see you now, sir.”
The guard who stood there, saluting smartly, was the most soldier-like of all the prison officers, which was why the governor had given him the duty of greeting visitors.
“Well, who is it? Where’s he from?”
“Colonel Grigorian, sir. Intelligence Corps. Urgent, sir.”
“Ah. Yes. Well, show him up. And go on, go on, man,” he snapped at the orderly. “See to that cell at once.”
Rolling his eyes, the orderly followed the guard out, leaving the governor more agitated than he’d been for days. Intelligence Corps? Was he in trouble? Should he have reported the English archaeologist to someone?
The visitor arrived quickly, and saluted the governor, who fumbled a salute in response and cursed himself.
“Colonel Grigorian, ah—welcome,” he said. “Please do sit down.”
The officer was slim, in his fifties, with very dark eyes and a hawk daemon. He wore a khaki uniform with an astrakhan cap, a Sam Browne belt, and a holstered pistol. The governor didn’t recognize his insignia.
“I won’t take very long,” said Grigorian. “The prisoner Peters. Dr. Martin Peters. How long has he been here?”
“Oh, er—let me see—I can find out in a moment…” The governor started fumbling among his papers, fully aware of how unmilitary he must seem next to this smartly turned-out, fierce, unblinking soldier.
“All right,” said Grigorian, “never mind now. I’m in a hurry. I want all the papers you have relating to this man. Every single one. You understand?”
“Every single one,” said the governor, nodding.
“Now arrange for him to be taken down to my car. I understand he’s wounded. Is that correct? Can he walk?”
“No—shot in the top of the thigh—he’ll have to be stretchered, I’m afraid. He—”
“See to it, then, at once. And send whatever possessions he arrived with.”
“Of course. Yes. He’s—umm…I expect you’re aware of post-traumatic cytokinesis?”
“Of course. It’s hardly surprising. I shall wait outside with my car.”
He saluted again. The governor knocked some papers onto the floor in his haste to respond, and rang his bell for the orderly.
Would the wretched brute have cleaned the stretcher since bringing Peters into the infirmary on it?
Perhaps this Grigorian wouldn’t notice. And now there’d be no conversations about archaeology. It was all so difficult.
They had to wake Malcolm to get him into his clothes and onto the stretcher, and he was deep in a morphine dream.
In the course of the uncomfortable journey down the stairs and into the car, he woke up enough to see what was happening, and when the car began to move away and the yellow light from a streetlamp fell across the face of his captor, he understood a little more; but the morphine claimed him back before he could speak.
He didn’t even notice when Asta leapt up from the floor of the passenger compartment and lay purring on his chest.
—
Marcel Delamare, the President of the High Council of the Magisterium, had recently returned from a successful and productive visit to London.
“Successful” meant that he had had his way over every item on the agenda, and “productive” meant that the memorandum of understanding signed by the two sides had a sequestered annex that was not mentioned in the press release.
Officials were going to clarify the details later, and from what Delamare had seen of the Brytish delegation, there would be little difficulty from them.
It had been understood by both sides, and loudly proclaimed in the press, that the discussions expressed the profound and enduring friendship between the kingdom and the Magisterium.
To mark the occasion, the President of the High Council was made a Knight of the Order of St. Stephen and St. Paul, which entitled him to wear a flamboyant gold cross set with pearls and rubies.
Having been officially photogrammed doing so, Delamare decided privately to put the ridiculous thing away and never look at it again.