INCARNATION (61 page)

The sound of the explosion echoed loudly round round the tombs, awakening who could say how many spirits from their long slumbers. As it faded away, David could hear the smack and crack of small stones striking the floor. He’d have given anything to see exactly how much damage had been done. For all he knew, the entire roof might come crashing in on their heads any moment.

The stones stopped falling. There were cracking sounds, and groans, as if stone under stress were preparing to give way. Then a long silence, then more stones clattering to the floor.

‘What’s happening?’ shouted Nabila.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why don’t you light a match?’

He was ready to do so when he heard a new sound. He could not quite make it out at first, and then he realized what it was.

‘It’s coming through,’ he shouted. ‘It worked!’

‘What’s coming through?’ asked Nabila, standing to share in his excitement.

‘Sand! That’s sand pouring through the hole. We did it!’

They made their way as fast as possible to the mound, and started to climb up. Suddenly, they were standing in a steady stream of fine sand. The mound was growing in size every moment.

‘Come on, we have to keep this under control.’

With only their hands as tools, they spread the sand, pushing it down from the top of the mound, and as widely out at the bottom as they could manage. Like grain pouring into a silo, the sand rushed down remorselessly.

It went on for a couple of hours, and then, in one instant stopped. The sound stopped, and the darkness in which it had been wrapped. Through the hole came sunlight, sunlight so pure and so bright they had trouble seeing.

It was easy now to climb the mound in order to reach the roof. David went up first. The hole was big enough to squeeze through. He put his head up and looked out on the most beautiful landscape he’d ever seen. Mile after mile of sand dunes, mile after mile of emptiness, mile after mile of light.

He climbed out. Nabila came behind and passed the bergens up to him. Then she climbed through herself. She sat for a long time, while her eyes filled with bitter tears.

He kissed her hard on her mouth, and she kissed him back as if for the first and last time. Their lips and tongues were dry, as though they’d turned to leather.

‘We’re filthy,’ he said. ‘I think we should find some water.’

H
unger became something more than pain. It took everything - air, light, the desert, the open sky - and imbued it with the same sense of gnawing, nauseating hunger that filled their own bodies. And the thirst lay on top, like raw skin on top of a wound.

‘Why don’t you use the Mobilfone?’ she demanded again and again. ‘Ask them to take us out of here. You’ve done your best. It just isn’t possible to go on.’

But he did not ring, he would not consider ringing, and somehow they did go on. Over this dune, then over that. Another night came, and they huddled on the sand, shivering, without even the strength to get inside their sleeping bags, thin things of silver foil that seemed incongruous amid such savagery.

Morning found them side by side, not quite touching, fitful in dreams of hunger. Not food, not water, but the lack of them filled their sleep. David dreamt that he was in his garden at home, with Sam and Maddie. They walked round and round, but could find neither vegetables nor water. The whole garden had turned to sand and pebbles. A vulture stirred its clumsy, ragged wings on a branch of the ash tree. The other trees had turned to tamarisk shrubs. In the next garden, camels with tall spindly legs like those of Dali elephants brayed among the chimneypots.

They woke to a grey sky and biting cold. ‘David, wake up, something’s wrong.’ Nabila shook him into consciousness. She could sense a deep change in the atmosphere.

‘It’s too early for winter,’ David said, sitting up and staring at the shifting field of grey above their heads. In his mind, he could still see Sam scrabbling in the sand to find water.

‘Early or not, those look very like clouds. This does happen from time to time, you know. Pressure builds up, clouds form, there’s a thunderstorm, and everything clears.’

Even as they spoke, the sky grew more and more like slate. A wind was pushing hard, throwing sand into their faces with mounting force, herding thunderclouds together high above.

‘We should get on to high ground,’ urged Nabila. ‘If it does rain there’ll be a colossal downpour. It won’t last long, but a lot of water will come down. That’s when flash floods occur. They often sweep down gullies like this. We wouldn’t stand a chance.’

They struggled to the top of the dune. Both knew there was no guarantee as to where it would rain, if it did. If the clouds opened up half a mile away, they might not be able to get there before the water had sunk into the ground.

‘We should dig some trenches,’ David said. ‘We can line them with our sleeping bags.’

‘The bags are quite narrow

‘That doesn’t matter. Slit them down one side and the bottom. They’ll still be fine to sleep in. We can use them as blankets.’

They got to work, scooping out clumps of sand with the little trenching shovels that they’d used from the start to dig down to water for the camels. As David threw his first shovelful to one side, there was a crack of thunder some distance away, followed in due course by flashes of lightning.

'I’d say that was around five miles over that way,’ he said, pointing off towards the north. ‘It’s coming in hard from the mountains.’

‘Is it moving in this direction?’

‘It’s too soon to tell. It could be moving round in circles for all I know. But if we can go by this wind, I’d say it is coming our way. That’s if it doesn’t wear itself out before it gets here.’

In the distance, the storm head was building. Steep clouds like rock faces rose with dizzying speed into the seemingly endless sky, while blue and white flashes rushed through them excitedly, charged with enough energy to power a city. In the unnatural light, the desert jumped out of the darkness like a vista at the North Pole.

‘It could pass us without raining - that sometimes happens. It could be circling round and round that spot out there.’

‘Anything could happen. Let’s get these holes dug, then we can wait and see.’

They scooped out four shallow trenches, each one the length and breadth of a man’s grave, and they lined them carefully with the light silver material. They removed their shirts and used them to line two smaller holes. It was bitterly cold, but they’d grown used to that. The cloths were weighted down against the wind with a variety of objects from the packs: a gun, a shovel, a rescue beacon. And all the time the sky darkened, and the wind changed its pitch, and the sound of thunder grew until it was above their heads.

And then the wind stopped. They looked up to see themselves enveloped in an inky darkness that stretched for mile upon mile. Somewhere far away, perhaps as far as the desert’s edge, a violet light shivered like dawn. Next moment, a vast downpour of freezing rain crashed on to the desert all round them. A curtain of water washed over everything, and it quickly became difficult to breathe, as though they had fallen into a dark lake or a great inland sea. They crouched, frozen to the bone by the icy water, without any means to warm themselves in all that empty space. The rain fell without cease, and in the gully below, as Nabila had predicted, water rushed in torrents and tore at the sides of the dunes, mating away at them and threatening to send them tumbling.

They lost all measure of time. All that mattered was the cold and how to endure it. They huddled together, finding a thin shelter in one another.

Then it was finished. One moment the downpour, the next a blissful silence and a sky as clear as they could have hoped for. The sun came out, and before long their wet trousers were steaming in the sudden warmth and their skin had started to lose the deadly chill that had set in it.

The trenches were filled with water. They used cups to fill the water containers, and when that was done they drank and drank from what was left until their bellies had grown distended.

It was time to move on.

They made good speed at first, though the water they carried dragged them down. Now that the ache of thirst had been removed, hunger returned to gnaw at them. There was no way forward but to push one foot ahead of the other, no way to find the willpower to go on but to blot out all thoughts and all anticipations. David consulted the compass every mile or so, and with adjustments and bends they crept on towards their objective. He had only one purpose in remaining alive - to reach Karakhoto and make that one telephone call that would summon down death and destruction on the ruined city and whatever lay beneath it. The holocaust he would unleash would engulf himself and Nabila - but having come this far, and being so very close to death, what other choice did they have?

As they walked, the landscape around them began to alter perceptibly. Gradually, the sand started to turn a pale shade of green. Tiny seeds that had lain dormant just beneath the surface for long months or years, now suddenly drenched by rain, had rushed to germinate. They would flourish for a day or two, until the moisture was sucked back from the sand and the dead heat of the sun at noonday shrivelled them.

They struggled on until mid-afternoon, by which time neither could move another muscle. Without food, they were dying inside. They drank copiously, only to regret it soon after. David developed severe cramps that tormented him until he threw up, Nabila went to her bergen and fetched some herbs to ease his stomach pain. She heated a little water in a metal cup, using tamarisk twigs to make a fire. David sipped the infusion, a foul-tasting mixture smelling strongly of yarrow, and his tight stomach muscles slowly relaxed.

While he drank, he looked out over the vista of soft green. If you half closed your eyes just so and moved your head this way, you could believe you were in an expanse of meadows and tall, sloping lawns.

He opened his eyes to see a gecko making its clumsy way across the ground vegetation. It paused to feed on tiny insects that had sprung to life on the newly grown leaves. David got to his knees and crept towards the little creature, but as he neared it, it glanced at him and ran off to bury itself in the sand.

‘Do you still have the herbs you used to treat Mehmet?’ he asked.

Nabila nodded.

‘I had some left over. Why?’

‘If we go on at this rate, one of us is going to have an accident.’

‘Would it make any difference if we did?’

‘It might.’

He fell silent after that, and sat a little apart from her, watching the day pass. A vulture was circling in the copper sky, a mile or so away, its ragged wings catching fire in the sun. David thought it was waiting for them to die, and that others would join it before long.

When the sun dropped low and the green valley they were in vanished, he remained seated as he had been. Nabila brought two sleeping bag halves and put them gently round his shoulders, and kissed him goodnight. He said nothing. He was making up his mind to do something terrible.

Dawn again, and dew heavy on the grass and shrubs. Nabila did not wake.

He stretched his limbs painfully, and rose from the position he had occupied all night without moving. He went to his bergen, and found the bits and pieces to build what he wanted. Some thin cord cannibalized from rope, the boards from the ammunition box, a spring from his pistol. It took over an hour, and looked a mess when it was done. He tested it several times until he was satisfied it would perform well. Nabila was still asleep.

He found a suitable spot on which to set it up. It was steady, and it operated smoothly.

‘What’s that?’ a sleepy voice behind him asked.

He turned and smiled at her, a lopsided smile that had no connection to anything but itself.

‘Lizard trap,’ he said. He showed her how it worked.

‘You’ll need bait,’ she said.

‘We’ll catch some flies.’

She smiled at him with her thin, parched lips, and he smiled back at her, wishing she’d stayed asleep.

She went off a little way to wash and brush her hair and defecate if her bowels permitted. David took the opportunity to go to his bergen again. This time he took out the Ek survival knife that he’d used to amputate Mehmet’s hand, and that Nabila had used to slaughter the camels with.

The hardest surface he could put his hands on was a metal armour plate from the tombs: he’d taken it with him in a vain belief that it would somehow find its way back to London and the Chinese department in the British Museum. It was hard work getting his little finger correctly positioned on the plate. He wanted the operation to be as quick and painless as possible. Any slipping or last-second holding back could result in a nasty wound, all to no purpose. A half-severed finger was no earthly use to him.

He tied a tourniquet tightly round his wrist, and at once felt the flow of blood to his hand become constricted.

Taking deep breaths, he laid the finger as accurately as he could on the plate, which he rested on top of the box holding the Mobilfone. He brought the edge of the blade against his skin, and he told himself there was no choice, not if they wanted to live.

‘David! What are you doing?’

He looked up to see her coming towards him. There was anxiety in her voice and movements. It had to be now or never. He bit his lip hard and sucked his breath in. His forehead was covered in sweat. He tensed himself, pretending it was not his finger, that it would not hurt.

‘David?’

She was running to him. He gripped the knife as hard as he could and slammed down, slicing his finger through in a single motion.

‘Oh God, David! What have you done?’

He looked up at her and smiled a tilted smile.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. He nodded at his severed finger, at the blood pouring from it. ‘It’s done now.’

‘Why? What’s the point of it?’

‘It’s bait,’ he said. ‘We put this in the trap, it attracts flies, and the flies attract lizards.’

His right hand was shaking. He let the knife fall to the ground and clutched his right hand. After the first shock, pain had started to course through the stump.