The Age of Ra Read online

  Catching and eating the rabbits wasn't much of a problem. The buggers were as tame as anything. They'd lived there for generations without a natural predator, so they would come lolloping up to me when I approached, more or less ready to sniff my hand. Then - grab, hold, twist, snap neck. Easy peasy. And they never learned, the stupid things. Never got wise. Every time I went up to their warren, another bunny would hop trustingly forward and offer itself as lunch.

  I'd skin 'em and gut 'em with a sharp stone, then lay the meat out on a rock to cure in the sun. It wasn't delicious but it wasn't the worst meal I'd had either. Ship's food could be a damn sight less tasty.

  And olives; never my favourite vegetable, or is it fruit? But they were edible and filled a hole. Mind you, after a steady diet of them for six weeks I never want to touch one again as long as I live.

  It was bearable, though, that was the thing. I knew I could stick it out, this whole ordeal, because I was convinced I was going to be found and rescued. I never had any doubt about that. It wasn't as though I was stuck on a coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific, after all. I was on an island in the Aegean, in one of the busiest parts of the Aegean what's more, an area laced with shipping lanes. Time and again I saw ships pass by, freighters, tankers, ferries, too far away to spot me, certainly too far away to be hailed, not that that stopped me from trying or from feeling crushed and despondent when they steamed on out of sight. But I remained sure that it was only a matter of time before one of them sailed close enough and I was seen and picked up. The odds were in my favour. All I had to do was sit tight and wait.

  In the end a rescuer didn't just pass nearby. He landed virtually on my doorstep.

  His name was Iannis, and he was a smuggler, and he owned a small but surprisingly nippy fishing boat which he'd inherited from his father and used to run drugs between Europe and North Africa. Normally he did this without much interference. He'd dart back and forth across the Med and the authorities on both sides were mostly preoccupied with other things, too busy keeping an eye on the enemy's manoeuvres to worry about one little boat and its comings and goings. Sometimes, though, he did fall foul of the coastguard and either had to bribe his way out of trouble or else make a run for it and lie low for a while till the heat died down.

  My island was one of Iannis's boltholes. It was also a handy stopover, a secluded spot where he could put in for the night to break up the journey.

  I was fast asleep when he anchored at my beach late one evening. I woke up in the morning, left my cave, strode down the sand... and bugger me, there was this boat sitting there, and this middle-aged man in a string vest standing on deck taking a leak over the side.

  He stared at me. I stared at him. To his credit, he didn't stop peeing. Me, I'd have been so startled my flow would have seized up. I mean, it must have been quite a sight, some scrawny fellow in a ragged sailor's outfit, looking half-crazed, with an injured face and some clumps of hair missing, growing back as stubble. Me, tottering towards him out of the blue, on an island where he had every right to believe he was perfectly alone. But Iannis, he just kept on pissing till he was done, then tucked himself away and buttoned up, still staring at me, surprised but somehow managing to stay casual, as if he'd had far stranger encounters than this in his lifetime.

  Then he asked me, in English, if I was English. I said yes, how could you tell? He said it was the uniform. Royal Navy. A midshipman, judging by the jacket cuffs. And then he said the thing that told me I was going to be all right with him. He said, ''Also known as a 'snotty'.''

  I laughed. ''That's the nickname for my rank. How'd you know?''

  Iannis gave a hefty, big-shouldered shrug. ''I know many information. Fifty years I am sailing these seas, since a boy. All that time, war. Navies, uniforms, nicknames - I pick up all these things and have them in the memory, here.'' He tapped his grizzled head. ''Languages too. I speak many very good, some not so good.''

  I didn't ask which of those categories he put his English in. That's exactly how he sounded, by the way. I know you think I'm crap at accents, Dave, but really, I've nailed Iannis's. Look sceptical if you want. Suit yourself.

  Point is, he was basically a decent bloke, and he could tell my whole sorry story just by looking at me, and he knew he wasn't going to leave me there on that island, and I knew it too by the way he'd spoken. So it wasn't long before I was on board his boat and we were putt-putting out to sea and I was enjoying a swig of paint-stripper whisky and feeling relieved and redeemed and about as happy as a man can hope to be.

  Iannis told me he was heading to Tangiers, ''on business'', but he could drop me off at Gibraltar on the way if I didn't mind. Did I mind? How could I mind! He also said he'd try and find a doctor to take a look at my - he didn't say what. Just circled a finger around one side of his face and looked sorry and grim.

  Later, I found a shaving mirror in the cabin below and had a squint at myself...

  I don't want to talk about it. Not now. All I'll say is, it wasn't terrible scarring and it wasn't mild singeing either. If one's ten and the other's zero, then let's rate the damage a seven. Really, I don't want to talk about it any more than that. Maybe some other time.

  So south-west towards Morocco we went. It didn't take me long to work out that Iannis's ''business'' was less than legit. For starters, he was piloting a fishing boat that wasn't doing any fishing. The nets were bone dry and new-looking, like they'd never even been in the water. But also, whenever he spotted any other vessel, no matter what sort of boat it was he'd change course and steer clear. And then there was the little matter of the secret cargo hold I accidentally discovered, with an access hatch hidden beneath a section of false floor in the head. It was a crawlspace that ran nearly the entire length of the boat, well caulked and dry, empty but smelling strongly of hashish. I didn't mention finding it but Iannis knew I had because I'd failed to lay the floor section back quite as snugly as I should. He produced a pistol and told me that as I'd uncovered his secret he was going to have to shoot me and toss me overboard. I said there was no need for that. I didn't care how he chose to make a living. I admitted I was fond of a bit of dope myself, and added that I'd been something of a smuggler myself at school, which is true as we both know. He could shoot me if he wanted, I went on, but he'd surely be better off taking me on as a deckhand instead. With me assisting him, he could do his runs in half the time because he wouldn't have to stop for rests. We'd take the helm in shifts, travel through the night, and he could do twice as much business but I would only ask for a quarter of his profits. Ergo, he stood to gain half as much money again as he was making now, for the same amount of effort.

  The maths impressed him. Next thing I knew, the pistol had been put away, the whisky was out, and we sealed the deal by getting roaring drunk.

  Iannis was as good as his word. He got me to a doctor in Gibraltar, who didn't speak a word of English but had a face that was as expressive of his diagnosis as any words could be, if not more so. Essentially, there was nothing señor mÈdico could do for me except give me some kind of salve that might have helped had I had it six weeks earlier. He suggested plastic surgery but didn't hold out much hope of success. At least now I know the Spanish for ''disfigured'': desfigurado.

  For the next year, Iannis and I plied our not-so-reputable trade up and down the Med, the old Greek seadog and his English seapup sidekick. I can't deny it was fun. We had our fair share of scrapes, of course. Fired on by coastguards outside Naples. Rammed by rival drug runners off Malta. Not to mention the time we strayed into a mine-seeded zone not far from Tunis harbour. My fault, that one. Didn't read the charts properly. Hairiest half-hour of my life as Iannis gentled the boat around and back while I leaned over the bows peering into the water for those huge conker shapes. We actually nudged one of them with our hull, though somehow it didn't go off. It was clean underpants time afterwards, as you can imagine.

  We became firm pals, the two of us. And I know what you're thinking. A Greek sailor, and lithe, w
ell-muscled young me. Well, belay that foul thought, big brother. It wasn't like that. None of that sort of thing went on, no hanky-panky belowdecks. Mostly what we did in our spare time was get blisteringly blotto together. Whisky was our preferred tipple, but Iannis got me onto retsina too. Here's an interesting fact about retsina: it tastes the same coming back up as it does going down. I experienced that more times than I care to remember.

  All that time, I was thinking hard about the insight I'd had while floating in the sea that night. I'd talk about it with Iannis now and again. He was a great one for the deep and meaningful discussion. The deep and meaningful discussion with an ever-emptying bottle in your hand.

  Iannis liked to hark back to the days of the ''old religion'' in Greece, and I don't mean Orthodox Christianity. Before that. The days of the Olympian pantheon, Zeus and all his relatives and cronies.

  ''Gods who were like us,'' he said. ''Gods you can understand. Fighting, fucking, falling over, fouling up. Zeus, always being caught with the pants down. Dionysus, never sober. The Furies, hounding the men, driving them mad. I have known many women like that, it's true. I even married with one, for too many years. Gods you feel you could sit down, have chitchat with. They would be interested in you, like you in them. They never left the people alone, always making mess in lives. But because they wanted to be with us. They liked humans. This lot, the One True Pantheon. Pfah!''

  Imagine someone spitting at their feet here.

  ''They use us, that's all. What is the saying? A means to an end. For getting the own back on each other. They have no respect for us, even though we keep them going. Without worship from us they are nothing. And do they thank us? Do they even notice us any more?''

  His conclusion was always this. Somebody should take a stand against them. Somebody should show them the contempt they show us. See how they like it.

  ''Freegypt,'' he'd say. ''If only the whole of the world was like Freegypt.''

  He didn't mean at war with itself. In that respect the whole world was like Freegypt. He meant, simply, independent of the gods. Freegypt might be troubled but at least its troubles were of its own making. Secular troubles.

  We often stopped off at Freegypt on our travels. Nothing I saw of the place made me think here was some humanist paradise. Alexandria, Port Said, El Alamein - I found them to be typically fly-ridden North African seaports, where baksheesh for the harbourmaster meant you could get away with loading or offloading just about anything, if you were reasonably discreet. No one there looked to me any happier or more enlightened than anywhere else. Not even the foreign apostates who'd come from abroad seeking a life without theocracy. They just seemed kind of disappointed, as if they'd been expecting more. This wasn't the promised land, just another fucking fucked-up country. The dockers were lazy, the hookers surly, the sailors ready to stick a knife between your ribs as soon as look at you... The main difference I did notice was the absence of hieroglyphics. All signage came in Arabic, or sometimes Arabic and English. Officials didn't have cartouches on their uniforms telling you who they worked for and how important they were. But apart from that, Freegypt never struck me as being particularly, well, free.

  But there was something there, I thought. If Iannis was right - and I was more and more sure that he was - and somebody had to make a stand against the gods, Freegypt was where to do it. It was the place to start.

  And I was the man for the job.

  Destiny calling. A year, almost to the day, after I met Iannis, we parted ways. The big old fellow hugged me and blubbed like a baby. Told me losing me was like losing the son he'd never had. I didn't point out that you can't lose a son you've never had. Truth be told, I was a little choked up and teary myself. We'd had some great times together. But I'd found something more important to do now. Iannis understood. He gave me some extra money, on top of the money I already had, the drug earnings I'd carefully saved up and hardly spent any of.

  ''For the doing of good work,'' he told me. ''To free the world.''

  I stood on the dockside at Port Said and watched his boat chunter off into the distance, till it was lost in the sparkle of the sea.

  Then I turned and went south.

  A disfigured white man in an Arabic country wasn't going to get far unless he learned the local lingo. So first thing I did was get a job with a private English-language school in Cairo, which I managed without having a passport or any form of ID, let alone a qualification. The school head was as open to unsolicited cash windfalls as anyone. In theory I was teaching middle-class Freegyptian kids to speak English. In practice, I was doing my best to pick up their tongue. I struggled with the glottal stops and the long consonants and the superheavy syllables, but I got there in the end. In fact I've been told my ''teachers'' succeeded too well. Zafirah says my Arabic is horribly slangy. I slur and elide like a slack-jawed teenager. But I like to think that gives me the demotic touch, which I'd never have back home, say, speaking with this posh accent of mine, dontcha know, toodle-pip, what-what.

  Then, once I was conversational in Arabic, if not quite fluent, I headed down to Luxor, because here was where the infighting was at its worst. When you set out to cure a disease, you don't bother yourself with the secondary symptoms. You go straight to the source of the problem, and Luxor was it, a festering wound in Freegypt's gut.

  I realised something right away. Basically, all that the factions who were slugging away at one another wanted was to be top dog. Each of them had no aim other than that, to rule the region and be boss. It sounds obvious, but in all the confusion they themselves seemed to have forgotten the causes they'd started fighting for all the decades ago. Now it was just rhetoric and entrenched positions, with motive and logic long lost. It was gang mentality. Each side knew all the others were their enemies and wanted to beat them, and that was it.

  A go-between was needed. Someone non-aligned. Someone who could mediate among the factions and show them that there was a greater prize available to them than just crushing their foes.

  That was how the Lightbringer came into being. My alter ego. The jumpsuit - it was straightforward, non-threatening, mundane. The gloves? So my lily-white hands wouldn't show. And the mask... well, I settled on that so that my desfigurado fizzog wouldn't put anyone off and also so that I wouldn't be just some meddling foreigner, a European colonialist coming and telling everyone else what to do. They'd had enough of that back in Victorian times, when the map of Egypt was British imperial red. The mask anonymised me. Is that a word, anonymised? It should be. Effaced me. Made me distinctive and at the same time less distinct.

  It took ten months - ten long months of bloody hard slog. I convinced the Liberators to give me a chance first of all. The lovely Zafirah helped out there. She put her trust in me almost before anyone else did. And once I had the Liberators in the bag, I used their ground-knowledge and their strategic resources to get to the enemy camps and win hearts and minds there as well. Not easy. I've lost count of the number of times I wound up kneeling with a gun to my head and some sweaty guerrilla commander yelling at me that he was going to blow my brains out, and all I could do was talk and keep talking and pray that no one ripped my mask off and saw the mangled face underneath. Which did happen a couple of times, as a matter of fact, and luckily the result worked in my favour. Everyone was so startled by what they saw, they stopped and heard me out.

  What I was offering them was both less and more. Less in terms of tangible military conquest, more in terms of status. I was offering them a new ideology to replace the ones they'd pretty much allowed to lapse. I was telling these local warlords that they could continue fighting over Upper Freegypt and maybe one day end up with a slightly larger chunk of land to call their own, but never the whole region. That was not going to happen. It had been stalemate here for a century. How was that likely to change? Or they could break the cycle and start afresh.

  You'd be surprised how well the message went down. I know I was. Seems there was a real appetite for an end to the hosti
lities, or else the paramilitaries had had their fill of relentless, grinding conflict and couldn't stomach any more. They were tired of killing their own countrymen, but none of them wanted to be the first to say ''enough''. None of them had the nerve to raise the white flag and tender the olive branch. Their leaders couldn't afford to do that, as a matter of pride, until I came along and presented them with a dignified, face-saving excuse. Throwing in their lot with the Lightbringer wasn't a climb-down. It was the opposite, a way up and out of the morass of partisanship they'd become bogged down in.

  The day came when there was a big powwow between me and every one of the faction leaders, just us sitting down in a room to seal our alliance once and for all. All of them knew by then that I was a displaced Englishman with complexion issues, and they had got past it. It didn't matter to them. I kept the mask on anyway at all times, because I knew it was helping to build a mystique around me. Across the region the Lightbringer was becoming this strange, not quite human figure, unknowable, a little monstrous perhaps, someone people talked about in slightly disbelieving whispers, an object of speculation and wondering, and that all served to foster my reputation and further my cause.

  But in that room, as we formally agreed to work together as a united force of Upper Freegyptians, it gradually became clear that the faction leaders were deferring to me. They kept looking to me to confirm or disagree with whatever they said. I realised that I was making all the running, setting the tone, and they were happily going along with it. When we got up from the table it was bear hugs and handclasps all round, and I could tell that quite without meaning to or trying to, I'd taken charge. I was the big shot now. I was top dog. There'd not been any election, any show of hands. I hadn't had to arm-wrestle a rival into submission or kill one of them just to show the others I meant business. By unspoken consent all the warlords had deferred to me. They seemed only too happy to pass the burden of command on to someone else. They were waiting for me to tell them what to do next. So I told them.