Laurie King - The Beekeeper's Apprentice

The days passed quickly. To my surprise Holmes did not seem to chafe under the enforced rest but appeared relaxed and cheerful. We spent hours devising complex mind games, and he taught me the subtleties of codes and ciphers. We took apart and rebuilt the ship's spare radio, and began an experiment on the point at which various heated substances will self-ignite, but as it made the captain exceedingly nervous, we moved on to picking pockets.

Christmas came and went, with flaming pudding and crackers with paper crowns and carols about iron-hard ground and snowy footprints, and after dinner Holmes came onto the upper deck with a chess set.

We had not played more than a handful of games since I had gone up to Oxford, and we quickly set to rediscovering the other's gambits and style. I had improved in the last eighteen months, and he no longer had to spot me a piece, which pleased us both. We played regularly, though first a black bishop and then the white king rolled overboard and we had to improvise substitutes (a salt cellar and a large greasy nut and bolt, respectively).

Holmes won most of the games but not all. He was a good player, ruthless and imaginative, but an erratic one, for he tended to glory in bizarre gambits and impossible saves rather than the methodical building of defence and thoroughly supported offence. Chess for him was an exercise, boring at times and always a poor substitute for the real game — rather like scales compared to the public performance of a concerto.

One hot afternoon off the island of Crete he came to the board with a greater focus than was his wont and a nervous intensity that I found disturbing. We played three half-games, scrapped each time when he was satisfied with the direction each opening gambit had established. The fourth game, though, began with a peculiarly gleeful attitude and opening moves along the very edge of the queen's side of the board. I braced myself for a wild game.

Holmes had drawn white, and he came out, whirling his knights across the board like a berserker with his chain mace, sixteen squares of shifting destruction and disruption that had me slapping together hasty defences at half a dozen spots across the board, summoning and abandoning bishops and rooks, spraying pawns ahead of the fray and leaving them in odd niches as the action stumbled away across the board. One after another he swatted aside my defences, until in desperation I separated my royalty, moving my queen away from the vulnerable king to draw my opponent's fire. For a time I succeeded, but eventually he trapped her with a knight, and I lost her.

"What's the matter with you, Russell?" he complained. "Your mind's not on the game."

"It is, you know, Holmes," I said mildly, and reached forward to move a pawn, and with that move the entire haphazard disarray fell into a neat and deadly trap that depended on two pawns and a bishop. In three moves I had him mated.

I wanted to whoop and leap into the air and kiss Captain Jones on his bristly cheek for the sheer joy of seeing Holmes' consternation and amazement, but instead I just sat and grinned at him like a dog.

He stared at the board like a conjuror's audience, and the expression on his face was one of the biggest prizes I have ever won. Then it broke, and he slapped his knee with a short bark of delighted laughter and rearranged the pieces to replay the last six moves. At the end of it he wagged his head in appreciation.

"Well done, Russell. Deucedly clever, that. More devious than I'd have given you credit for. My children have bested me," he quoted, somewhat irreverently.

"I wish I could claim credit for it, but the move came up in a game with my maths tutor a few months ago. I've been waiting for the opportunity to use it on you."

"I'd not have thought that I could be tricked into overlooking a pawn," he admitted. "That's quite a gambit."

"Yes. I fell for it too. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a queen in order to save the game."

He looked up at me, startled, and then back to the board, and his face changed. A tightness crept slowly into his features until he looked pinched and pale beneath the brown of his skin's surface, as someone does who is stricken by a gnawing pain in the vital organs.

"Holmes? Holmes, are you all right?"

"Hm? Oh, yes, Russell, I am fine. Never better. Thank you, Russell, for such an interesting game. You have given me much food for thought." His hard visage relaxed into the gentlest of smiles. "Thank you, my dear Russell."

He reached out, but his fingers did not quite touch my cheek before he pulled them back, stood, and turned to go below. I sat on the sun-drenched deck and watched his back disappear, the victory turned to ashes in my mouth, and wondered what I had done.

I did not see him again until we arrived at Jaffa.

I had not realised how greatly I desired Palestine until one of its towns leapt out at me from the list of places offered us, and the name was on my lips. I had no doubt that some day (next year) I should make my pilgrimage to the birthplace of my people, but a pilgrimage is a planned and contemplated event of the mind and, perhaps, the heart, which this most emphatically was not. When I was beset by fear and confusion, when no ground was sure beneath my feet and familiar places threatened, this foreign land reached out to me, called me to her, and I went, and found comfort, and shelter, and counsel. I, who had neither family nor home, found both there.

Palestine, Israel, that most troubled of lands; robbed, raped, ravaged, revered for most of four millennia; beaten and colonised by Sargon's Akkadians in the third millennium B.C.E. and by Allenby's England in the Common

Era's second millennium; holy to half the world, a narrow strip of marginally fertile soil whose every inch has felt the feet of conquering soldiers, a barren land whose only wealth lies in the children she had borne. Palestine.

At dusk we were making way casually south, parallel to the far-off shore, but when night had fully fallen the captain changed to due east and, engines fast and quiet, we made for land. Holmes appeared, with a nearly flat knapsack and a preoccupied air, and at one in the morning we were bundled onto a ship's boat with muffled rowlocks and taken ashore. Our landing site was just south of Jaffa, or Yafo, a town whose Jewish population had been forced to flee from Arab violence during the war. Imagine my pleasure, then, when we were summarily shoved into the burnoosed arms of a pair of Arab cutthroats and abandoned.

Before the boat had disappeared into the night we had sunk unseen into the war-ravaged land.

They were not cutthroats, or perhaps I should say they were not merely cutthroats. They were not even Arabs.

We called them, at their invitation, Ali and Mahmoud, but in a cooler climate they would have been Albert and Matthew, and certain diphthongs in their English exuded public school and Oxbridge. Holmes said they were from Clapham. He also said that although they looked like the brothers they claimed to be, and acted like twins, they were at best distant cousins. I did not enquire further but contented myself with watching the pair of them, hand in hand in the fashion of Arab men, as they strolled the dusty roads, chattering interminably in colloquial Arabic and gesticulating wildly with their free hands while we followed in their wake.

If our two guides were not what they appeared, neither was anything else in the weeks that followed: The drab boat that had brought us from England was experimental, an outgrowth of war's technology; its crew were not simply sailors, despite the presence of the child; even the two of us were not as we seemed, a father and son of dark-skinned, light-eyed nomads. Our very presence in the land had a heavy touch of the unreal about it: For the first two weeks we wandered with no apparent aim, performing a variety of tasks that again seemed aimless. We retrieved a document from a locked house; we reunited two old friends; we made detailed maps of two yawningly unimportant sites.