The Age of Ra aog-1 Page 5

  The smell inside the tent was noisome. One of the men did nothing but fart all night long, and all of them, including David, reeked of sweat and bad feet. The noise was pretty noisome too, since there seemed to be a competition going on to see who could snore the loudest. If predators were roaming out there in the dark, it wasn't the light of the camel-dung campfire that would keep them at bay, it was the raucous massed snoring of the people.

  It was horribly reminiscent of a boarding school dormitory. There was even buggery. Almost every night, during the small hours, David would be woken up by the sound of a certain man forcing himself on one of the boys. He would have to listen to several minutes of furtive grunting and groaning, followed by a slap which was presumably intended to remind the unwilling participant to keep quiet about what had been done to him. The boy would then, often as not, cry himself to sleep.

  David knew who the rapist was. The man slept in the far right-hand corner of the tent and was a sort of semi-detached uncle, high up in the tribal hierarchy and a close confidant of the sheikh. In other words, too important to be called to account for his misdeeds, even if someone in the goum were to pluck up the nerve to denounce him. He had a twisted nose and a lush moustache and had somehow contrived to lose teeth in a diagonally alternating pattern, so that his smile resembled two rows of a chessboard. David would happily knock out all of the other teeth if the chance ever came.

  But escape was his priority and he could let nothing interfere with that. Having settled on a plan, he bided his time, waiting till a moonless night came. By now he had recovered from his ordeal in Southern Arabia and regained much of his strength. The caravan had turned due south, and if Khartoum was where they were headed then that put them firmly in Freegypt, between the Nile and the Red Sea. This was the time to get away, before they crossed the border into the Sudan and were back on Nephthysian soil.

  His hands were tied back to back, preventing him from reaching the knots with his fingers. There was nothing to stop him, though, from gnawing at them with his teeth.

  It was a painstaking process, and at one point a pains-giving process, when a tooth that had been loosened during his beating by the Nephthysians, an upper molar, suddenly fell out. There was a tearing sensation in his gum, and what felt like a jolt of electricity went shooting up through his jaw into his sinuses. He stifled a scream. Blood filled his mouth, and he spat and spat until the wound sealed itself.

  Then, in a somewhat more gingerly fashion, he resumed gnawing.

  Around him the nocturnal cacophony of farts and snores continued. He froze as a man shouted out something. He'd been spotted. The game was up.

  But the shout subsided to a murmur, then a smacking of the lips, a snuffle, then the man was snoring again.

  Finally, the knots came loose.

  He was free.

  Well, almost.

  He got up and tiptoed over slumbering bodies that he could barely see in the dark. He trod on someone's hand and expected a yelp of protest, but it was one of the boys and they slept more deeply than the men and were accustomed to physical abuse besides. The boy mumbled, David shushed him, and the boy rolled over and went back to sleep.

  He reached the tent flap and eased himself through.

  Firelight flickered, revealing all seven of the goum's tents arranged in a semicircle. The goats were clustered at the mouth of the semicircle, and beyond them were the camels, lying with their legs folded under them, spectrally pale, like mountains on a horizon.

  To David's left lay the tent where the valuable merchandise was stored. The men on guard looked drowsy. Their rifles drooped towards the earth.

  He couldn't risk sneaking past them, however. He would have to circumnavigate the camp and come at the camels from the far side.

  He crept away from the campfire, out into the indigo dark. The terrain the caravan was crossing had changed recently. The landscape was no longer rocks and hard-packed earth, but sand, nothing but sand. Scooped, ribbed, undulating, supple sand, mile upon mile of it, wave upon wave. Sand that got everywhere: in your socks, in your hair, up your nose. David had even found grains of it under his foreskin.

  Keeping the tents to his right he went in a broad semicircle, slithery-footed on the dune slopes. Finally he began his approach on the camels. He had already singled out the one he was going to take: an elderly male, so beaten and worn down that there was no more obstinacy left in it. This docile creature would, he reckoned, accept an inexperienced rider at the reins and not try to throw him off at the first opportunity.

  He checked the sleepy guards again. As he looked, one of them gave in completely to tiredness and slumped to the ground. The man ended up in a sitting position, head bowed over the rifle in his lap.

  The other guard turned and eyed his colleague. He muttered something to him, then went over and nudged him with a toe. The sleeping man didn't stir. Another, firmer toe-nudge sent him tumbling over onto his side in a loose heap. The second guard bent and rapped him on the cheek. He looked closer. He straightened up in alarm.

  Then David heard it: a soft twang. It came from out in the darkness.

  At the same moment, he saw the guard clutch his neck and reel. The rifle fell to the sand with a muffled thud. A second later, and no less quietly, the guard fell too.

  David hunched down and felt his heart rate pick up and the world grow slow around him. Figures appeared at the periphery of his vision, a couple of dozen of them descending from the brows of the dunes and stealing towards the camp. They wore form-fitting black and moved in two-by-two formation, each pair swapping the lead with another pair. Their weapons, as far as he could tell, were pistols and short-stemmed crossbows, strictly not ba tech.

  The first two raiders to reach the camp inspected the downed guards, then signalled the all-clear. The rest came padding in and set up a perimeter around the tent entrance. The camels made a few uneasy grumbles, but the black-clad raiders were so silent and precise in their actions that the beasts weren't unduly disturbed. Two of the raiders went into the tent and came out with one of the strongboxes. They carried it carefully between them, holding it perfectly level. Another two went in, and another. Soon all six strongboxes had been retrieved and the raiders got ready to pull out from the camp with their booty.

  Then two things happened at once.

  The first was that David felt the barrel of a gun being pressed against the back of his neck.

  The second was that a Bedouin man emerged from the tent next door to the one where the strongboxes were kept.

  The raiders froze. As did David, for a different reason.

  ''Stay still,'' whispered a voice behind him. ''Do not speak. Do not even breathe. Or I put a bullet in you.''

  Meanwhile the Bedouin hitched up his robes and began to relieve himself on the sand. He glanced casually around him and spotted the raiders crouching by the adjacent tent. His urine trickled to a halt mid-flow, spattering onto his feet.

  One of the raiders rose and aimed a pistol at the Bedouin, who would no doubt have lifted his hands in surrender if he had been less startled and if his hands had been clasping anything less crucial.

  ''Shoot,'' the voice behind David hissed urgently, although the man with the pistol could not possibly have heard. ''You have a silencer. Shoot the bastard.''

  Gunmetal ground into David's nape, and he prayed that if a trigger was going to be pulled in the next few seconds, it wouldn't be this one.

  Over in the camp the Bedouin gaped at the raider, while the raider seemed hesitant, unsure whether or not to fire on an unarmed man.

  Then the Bedouin let out a beseeching cry.

  Then the pistol went off, with an almost apologetic pfft.

  The Bedouin collapsed. But his cry had been enough. Other Bedouin were roused from their tents. They staggered blearily outside, took stock of the situation. Rifles appeared.

  The person holding David at gunpoint yelled out an order in Arabic: ''Fall back! Fall back!'' Now he knew for sure what he had suspect
ed before, that it was a woman. Her voice, when low, had been husky, of indeterminate gender, but when raised it was clearly, unmistakably, and authoritatively, female.

  The raiders obeyed, laying down fire as they retreated with the strongboxes. The Bedouin answered with a volley of bullets, trumping the handguns' silencer-suppressed pops with sharp, loud rifle cracks. Their weapons had greater range and velocity, not to mention accuracy. The raiders started dropping. Meanwhile, the camels upped and fled in terror.

  The woman behind David cursed. He heard the rasping squelch of a walkie-talkie channel being opened. The woman barked a command, and somewhere far off a car engine started up. Headlight beams forked through the darkness as the engine revved, getting rapidly louder.

  Muzzle flashes flickered in the camp like firefly phosphorescence. Gun smoke drifted. The Bedouin had the majority of the raiders pinned down and were blazing away at them without let-up. The strongboxes had been dropped and the raiders were concentrating on self-defence. Plunder was no longer as important as survival.

  Then, cresting a dune with a raucous diesel roar, came a jeep. It skidded to a halt fifty metres from the camp. A man sprang from the passenger seat and clambered back onto the flatbed, where a heavy-calibre machine gun was mounted on swivel bearings. He took up position at the machine gun's controls and started firing. Belt-fed rounds chugged into the chamber and were spat out at the camp, striking sand, tents, and Bedouin indiscriminately. The Bedouin took cover, returning fire as best they could. Several of their shots ricocheted off the jeep, but the machine gun's burping stutter continued unabated. David watched with increasing dismay as the tents again and again fell within its veering arc of discharge, their sides flapping and ripping under the bullet impacts.

  Finally he couldn't help himself. ''Stop,'' he told the woman. ''Tell them to stop. There are women and children in those tents.''

  Just a brief hesitation, then she said, ''So? I do not care.''

  ''Well, I fucking do.''

  David leapt to his feet, heedless of the woman and her gun.

  ''Take one step towards that jeep,'' she warned, ''and I will…''

  Ignoring her, he ran headlong into the camp. All the way he expected to feel the smack of a bullet impact in his back. It didn't come. Perhaps the woman had decided that if he wasn't going for the jeep then he couldn't do any harm. Besides, down in the camp there were enough stray bullets flying around to do the job for her.

  He lunged into one of the women's tents. There was shrieking and wailing inside, and he saw a wizened grandmother, possibly the oldest person in the goum, lying on the rugs with half her face missing. A middle-aged woman was prone over the corpse, sobbing. Others were hoisting up the back of the tent to create a gap to crawl out through. David bent and helped. The girls went first, then their mothers. He urged them to run, go as far as they could as fast as they could into the darkness. They didn't understand his words but they understood his tone. He grabbed the mourning woman and shoved her through the gap. Waiting arms on the other side seized her and bundled her away to safety.

  Ducking low, David made for the next tent in line, which happened to be ''his'' tent.

  Only the boys remained inside — and Uncle Chessboard Smile. He was on his knees, holding two of the boys to his chest and cowering behind them. They boys protested and squirmed but Uncle Chessboard Smile had a grip like iron. His human shield wasn't going anywhere.

  Bullets whanged and thwacked through the tent's blanket walls. David made a dive for Chessboard, locking an arm around his neck. The Bedouin let go of the boys in order to reach backwards and grapple with David. He clawed at David's face, but he was not the only one with a grip like iron. David clung on, tightening the hold, pushing Chessboard's head forward with one arm and crushing his windpipe with the other. The two boys weighed in to help, grabbing their rapist relative's flailing hands. Chessboard choked and gurgled. His efforts to resist grew feebler. His eyes bugged. His tongue bulged. David did not let up until he heard and smelled bowels loosening. Then, to make doubly certain Chessboard was dead, he twisted the man's neck till it snapped.

  Having seen the boys safely out of the camp, David prepared to move to the next tent. Then he noticed that the gunfire had slackened off. The rifles were shooting infrequently and the machine gun wasn't shooting at all. He surveyed the scene. The raiders appeared to have withdrawn completely. He couldn't see them or the jeep anywhere. They were gone, along with the strongboxes. The Bedouin were firing blind into the darkness, more in anger than in the hope of hitting anything.

  It was time for him to make a getaway as well. David loped off into the dunes, intending to lie low for a while, then go in search of a camel. The beasts, though terrified, would not have gone far. They were too tame, too institutionalised, to want to live wild. Once everything was calm again, they might well begin to drift back towards the camp. He would intercept them before they go there.

  A figure appeared in front of him, a black silhouette like a shadow.

  ''You,'' said the woman who had held him at gunpoint. She was holding him at gunpoint again. ''A choice. Come with me or I kill you.''

  Her eyes glinted in the distant light of the campfire, as did the barrel of her pistol.

  David weighed his options, such as they were.

  ''I'll come with you,'' he said, as though it was a decision.

  7. Zafirah

  It was another kind of caravan, albeit a modern one consisting of a motley assortment of jeeps and other four-wheel drives, the majority of them converted to carry heavy-calibre machine guns and RPG launchers. They filed across the desert in a ragged line, travelling mostly at night. By day the vehicles would be parked in the lee of a rock formation or the shade of a palm oasis and have camouflage netting pulled over them. Their occupants would then sleep, or play cards, or roll cigarettes and aromatic joints and drink endless glasses of sweet mint tea, which David would share with them even though to him it tasted like liquid chewing gum.

  After days of walking followed by weeks on camel back, David was finding it a relief simply to be in motorised transport. A bench seat in the rear of a canvas-topped Luaz ZT off-roader was the plushest armchair imaginable. The rumble of a Ukrainian-built engine was a lullaby. For a large portion of each journey he slept soundly, head angled against the canvas awning, feet perched on a case of grenades.

  Zafirah, the group's leader, seemed amused by this.

  ''Stiff?'' she asked him one morning as he stood beside the car massaging a crick out of his neck. ''Perhaps I could arrange to get you a pillow.''

  ''Sheets and blankets too, if you don't mind,'' David replied.

  She didn't quite laugh but the skin around her lustrous green-and-brown eyes did crinkle slightly.

  ''You don't behave like a captive at all,'' she said. ''You seem so calm.''

  ''Am I a captive, Zafirah?''

  ''That depends. Maybe.''

  ''Only, I've been taken prisoner twice in the past month or so, so I'm getting to be something of an expert. And this doesn't feel like captivity to me. You've even given me a change of clothes.'' His uniform was gone, replaced by a borrowed shirt and jeans.

  ''So if this isn't captivity, what does it feel like?''

  David frowned. ''Hard to put into words. It's more like you're letting me come along for the ride, rather than forcing me to. Besides, Freegyptian guerrillas aren't renowned for kidnapping foreigners, as far as I'm aware.''

  ''Perhaps not. But we are always looking for ways to fund our efforts. What if we're taking you somewhere in order to ransom you back to the British army?''

  ''Then,'' said David, ''I say go right ahead, and I hope you get a decent sum for me.''

  They were members of the Liberators of Luxor, one of the dozen or more rogue paramilitary factions at large within Freegypt. Ostensibly the country was under the rule of the Secular People's Front, the dominant political party in the government, but it and Prime Minister Bayoumi controlled little more than a swathe
of the north-east. South of Cairo all the way down to Abu Simbel, everything became a broiling free-for-all, particularly along the Nile's fertile banks. Up in Lower Freegypt, around the Nile Delta, they were welcome to fiddle about with democracy if they liked. They could do as they pleased there in the north, with their industry and their urbanisation and their trading ports. But down south, in the Upper part of the country, where poverty was rife and most people lived at subsistence level, democracy remained a notional concept at best, a nice idea but as unaffordable as silk. There was either lawlessness or there were warlords imposing their own regional dominion, which amounted to the same thing.

  A land without gods is a land without order. This was the collective international consensus on Freegypt, and most Freegyptians would admit that their nation was not without its chaotic elements.

  But look at the rest of the world, they would reply. Look at the divine power blocs and their constant warring. Look at the death and madness that ravages the entire globe. And then tell us that lands with gods are doing any better.

  Zafirah had no surname that David knew of — none that she would tell him, at any rate. She seemed fascinated by his surname, however. She would use it at almost every opportunity. ''Westweenter,'' laying marvellous, elongating emphasis on the middle syllable. He liked to watch her closely when she said it. Her lips would purse, then part in a shape that could be as equally a smile as a sneer, before coming together again at the end as if to kiss. Her soft accent made the fusty Englishness of the name exotic. In her mouth it became weird, unfamiliar, a kind of incantation. It seemed to mean something to her that it didn't to anyone else.

  He also liked to watch Zafirah closely when she wasn't saying his name, or even talking to him. When she was ordering her men around, for instance. She would stand and issue rapid-fire instructions, her hand cocked on her hip, her head raised at an angle — jauntiness and haughtiness combined, a perfect blend of opposites. The men scurried when she spoke. They feared her but, more than that, they were besotted with her.