Declare

is—it constitutes a rafiq , it makes the bearer an emissary, with d-diplomatic immunity to any r-r- wrath from the powers that prevail… up high, from roughly a thousand feet above sea-level on up… to the m-moon, I suppose.”
    “Why did your ability cease on your tenth birthday?”
    “I—don’t know. My f-father was alarmed, dismayed; he was in Amman, in Jordan, but my m-m-mother must have written to him about my sudden singularity. He ordered me to m-meet him in Amman in the s-summer of my eleventh year, and though it was ostensibly a holiday, for a couple of months he… tt tested me, and the jewel. We traveled to Damascus, and Baalbek, and Nazareth, always hiking among the oldest t-tombs and watching the w-weather. We fl-flew over Lake Tiberias in a De Havilland biplane and saw a waterspout that he said was Sakhr al-Jinni, a djinn that had been c-confined to the lake by King S-S-Solomon, but it didn’t approach us… and we went to the J-J- Jordan River near Jericho, and he collected samples of the river w-water.” Philby shivered, recalling even now his father’s frustrated rage as he had corked the dripping bottles. “He wanted to send the samples to the B-British Museum, to see if the water really d-d-did have any measurable special p-properties. I think he was worried about s-s-someone, some infant, who had been b-baptized there—not long before.”
    “He was testing you?”
    “Yes, and I f-failed. When I lost the ability to be two b-boys, I apparently also lost the ability to… conjure, or c-control, the old entities. I became ill—shakes and fever—with what he elected to d-d-diagnose as malaria, though I’ve never had the usual r-relapses. And I was sent home to Ig-England. A year later I went off to West-minster school, and my f-f-father made it clear that I was to go on to T-Trinity College, Cambridge, as he had done, and which I d-did. But I had a—a n-nervous b-b- breakdown , at Westminster! Do y-you know why?”
    Elena looked away from the circling gulls to face him, and she laughed in surprise. “No,” she said. “Why?”
    “Because of the unrelenting Christian instruction. Really! They did j-just k-keep on at us about Original Sin, and our individual s-sins, and how each of us m-must either submit to k-k-Christ, surrender our wills to His, or s-suffer the eternal wrath of God. I dee-dee- denied all of it. I was an atheist even then—though, thanks to my f-father, I was an atheist who was m-mortally afraid of graveyards, and of the Roman Catholic s-sacraments, and of tall storm clouds and th-thunder at twilight.”
    He looked out at the sea. The red sun had sunk below the horizon, leaving glowing golden terraces of cloud hung across the whole western half of the sky, but no cumulus clouds were rearing their shoulders and shaggy heads out there. The ring of seagulls was closer, though—a quarter of a mile away, halfway between the rocks and the cliff highway now.
    “We should g-go inside somewhere,” he said nervously. “Get something to d-drink.”
    “They’re only birds. And no microphone can detect our talk out here. When were you actually inducted into the Soviet service? You say your father was your recruiter in an unspecific sense—who recruited you specifically?”
    “Recruited. Into a t-t- treasonous cause , right? You resent that, the fact that s-secretly I was an agent of communism all along. H-how old were you in 1931?”
    “Older than most my age.”
    “Well, exactly, your p-parents were k-killed by fascist monar-chists, the right-wing C-C-Catholic lot, isn’t that so?—in Madrid, when King Alfonso fled Spain; and a few y-y-years after that you were an orphan precociously working as a wireless t-telegrapher among the Loyalists. You see I r-r-remember everything about us. But in England in 1931 the b-betrayed Labour Party was v-voted out, and a coco—a Conservative National Government!—was voted in. You sh-should sympathize—the common p-people had been viciously fooled by sin-sin- cynical propaganda, and anyone could see that mere d-democracy could never lead to real p-peace.”
    He realized that he was frowning when the bandage over his fore-head tightened, and he wondered, Do I still even believe that? Really?
    “And so,” he went on, thrusting the thought away, “when another Cambridge student, this Guy B-B- Burgess fellow, approached me about d-doing s-secret work for Mother Russia, I was— amenable. Burgess had me tr-travel to Austria in