Laurie King: Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

“If you want to live, do as you’re told, immediately. Do you understand?”

They understood.

Holmes and I led the ungainly procession; Annie and Bert brought up the rear. Holmes ventured out first, checking the narrow street for guards, then continued to the next intersection before giving a signal that we could follow. One after another, our charges stepped over the threshold onto the dusty stones: Fflytte and Hale, Will and Mrs Hatley, mothers and daughters and fictional sisters, with six constable-actors, a make-believe sergeant, and a cook mixed among them. They looked as much like Moroccans as a group of painted storks might have, but from a distance, in the dim, thatched recesses of the Salé medina, each of us swathed in the same anonymous hooded galabiyya s the rest of the population wore, moving fast, we might not attract too much of an audience.

I was the only one who had been out here, so I went first – with a frisson of terror, sure that I had forgotten the way. But my feet remembered, even with the distractions of day versus night, and we trailed along, stretching out more and more as we left the quieter sections and came to the bazaar proper. Soon, we were forced to edge past laden donkeys and men with carpets and sellers of oats and spice and the occasional flayed goat or camel hanging before a butcher’s.

“I hadn’t realised how crowded it would be,” I hissed at Holmes. He raised an eyebrow in agreement and stepped to one side in order to survey the long – too long – trail of foreign shapes, moving at a snail’s pace in our wake. I shook my head in despair, edged around a donkey (four legs and two ears sticking out of seventeen baskets of yellow slippers), and looked into the lane beyond.

To come face to face with a band of enraged pirates.

PIRATE KING: Let vengeance howl;

The Pirate so decides.

I LEAPT BACKWARDS towards Holmes and collided with the donkey. The creature blatted; a rope parted; a yellow tide of leather spilt into the lane; the shoe-maker began to bellow. “Go!” I shouted at Holmes, but it was too late. On the other side of this four-legged cork the slow momentum of my fellow countrymen continued to pile up. Holmes, who was tall enough to see even over a laden donkey, spotted the pirates as they pounded around the corner at my back: Adam, Jack, the beautiful Benjamin, the Swedish accountant Mr Gröhe (in whose hand a knife looked simply bizarre), and an uncountable number of others (in whose hands the knives looked far too comfortable). Holmes turned to shout at the escapees; those who heard him did attempt to reverse their tracks and flee, but by this time the column had come to a halt, thoroughly wedged between the pressure from behind and the irritated quadruped.

The howl of pirates filled the alleyway; the donkey’s ears twitched its displeasure; those on the other side would have milled about if they had not been stuck fast; I turned towards my pursuers, and came face to face with Adam.

“Why are you here?” he demanded in Arabic, then remembered, and paused to assemble a translation.

“We wish to leave,” I replied in his tongue.

He started to answer, realised what I had said, started again, paused a second time, and then looked past me and saw the others. Including Annie, who had climbed on a greengrocer’s display to see what the problem was. Adam’s words died away as he and Annie regarded each other above the crowd. They were both unaware of the growing turmoil, the shouts of the donkey’s owner, the cries of other would-be pedestrians in three directions.

The owner of the slippers swam upstream towards his four-legged lorry, bawling a constant stream of “Bâlek! Bâlek!” (“Give way!”), although the additional pressure only forced the creature backwards, onto me and the pirates. In a minute, the beast would start to kick. Adam shouted. The man shouted back, until he came to a clear place and caught sight of his foe. His mouth went wide, then snapped shut. Without a glance at his lost wares, he grabbed the creature’s halter and hauled furiously away. A receding wave of cries, protests, and curses traced his retreat; the sardine-tin sensation grew less marked.

Adam turned at last to look at me. “You speak Arabic.”

“I do. The others do not. You must let us go. This will bring war onto your city.”

His dark eyes did not react, although a slight tilt of the head made me aware of the men at his back. A dozen or more large, armed, ferocious-looking men, hungry for a fight.

“We will return to the house,” he said.

“No!” I looked at his younger brother, Jack, and thought of those shiny boots sticking in such awful absurdity from under the piano. No child should live with that image in his memory. “Your father is dead there.”

Reaction rippled back into the men, with a burst of cross-talk. Adam seemed oblivious, but Jack took a step closer to him.

“You lie,” the younger boy declared.

“I do not. It was an accident,” I said – which, granted, was not exactly true, but … “He lies in the courtyard.” Then I added in English, “Your brother does not need to see it.”

Adam’s black eyes studied me for the longest time. With the donkey gone, Holmes and the others had come together, and I could feel him, three feet from me, ready to pull his revolver from its inner pocket and go down shooting.

“Dead.”

“I am sorry for you.” I had no idea what he was thinking, how he was going to react.

“And my uncle?”

“As far as I know, he’s still under arrest. The French-”

“The guards?”

I switched back to Arabic. “Your men are tied. Two are injured badly, the others merely bound.”

“And my father is dead.”

For God’s sake, was he about to gut me? Hug me? Turn his head to the wall and weep? “He was a brave man,” I ventured.

“He was a-” I was not familiar with the word, but his inflection made me suspect it was not a term of endearment.

He took a tremulous breath, then seemed to grow two inches taller and ten years older. For the first time, I saw a resemblance to Samuel. He looked towards the back of the crowd – towards Annie – and then whirled about to face his compatriots.

“You heard this foreigner!” he shouted at them. I thrust my hands into the galabiyya to grab my knife in one hand and the revolver in the other. Holmes pushed forward, and a sudden caterpillar of motion from the rear suggested that Annie and Bert had done the same. “My father is dead. My uncle is in the hands of the French. Who will deny that I step into my father’s boots? Any?”

The lad’s fury brought the others up short, stopped me in my place, made Holmes raise one hand to keep those at his back from shoving into an uncertain but clearly perilous situation. The pirates looked at one another. Jack wormed his way around to take up a position at his brother’s side. Benjamin stared, first at them, then at Mr Gröhe, and finally craned to look into the foreign faces, but Celeste was not to be seen. He shifted, looking as if he were about to move away – when a scream rent the air.

Everyone ducked. A gun went off, although the shutter it destroyed was a good ten feet from the bright visitor that swooped through this urban canyon, beating its wings to perch upon a frayed clothes-line strung between buildings. “She is MINE!” the bird screeched.

The street blinked, and began to breathe again. Benjamin lowered his eyes to the two brothers and, as if Rosie’s words had been meant for him alone, stepped forward to side with Adam. The remaining members of the crew exchanged another round of speechless consultation; their weapons stayed up, but their shoulders lost a degree of belligerence.