Keystone (49 page)

On the tenth day they saw the
smoke of the city, several kilometres before they saw the ruined capital
itself. Fires raged to the west. Towards the centre and east, minarets and
spires could still be seen rising from Old Cairo, reminders of a rich cultural
past.

“Why is it
burning?” Jake asked in wonder. He had never known a city, and this was the
closest he had ever come to Cairo. He spoke in fluent Arabic, though his
parents insisted on always speaking to him in English, which he understood
perfectly well but very rarely used.

Gail pulled
her son closer. He was more man than child now, but she could still remember
when it was his head tucked under hers, and not the other way round. Sometimes,
she longed for those days to return, when he would run to her and wrap his arms
around her legs in the biggest hugs. Such moments were rare now. This was his
world and it no longer scared him, but instead filled him with a sense of
adventure that she desperately wanted to control and contain.

“Because
there’s no one there to put out the flames,” she replied. “So when a fire
starts for whatever reason, it just burns and burns. Eventually, all of Cairo
will burn away.” She drew a short breath. “There’s only death in Cairo, which
is why we should always avoid it.”

“Actually,”
George said pensively, “they’re probably trying to get rid of areas that they
no longer want, because of disease. It shows there must be some kind of
organisation there, even if it’s only localised in one or two areas.”

Gail shot him
a nasty look, and he shrugged. Of the two of them, Gail had always been the
more adventurous. But motherhood had an uncanny way of changing that, and since
Jake’s birth their roles had naturally reversed.

Jake kissed
his mother softly on the top of her head and released himself from her grasp.

She watched,
fighting back a tear, as he walked slowly away, towards the rest of the village
who were assembling further down the road.

“He’s not a
child anymore, he has to learn this stuff for himself,” George started.

“You’re
wrong!” she cut him off, barely able to keep her voice down. “You tell him
stupid things like that, and you make him believe that there’s hope in that
hell-hole!”

“There might
be hope.”

“There’s no
hope in Cairo, and you know it. We’ve seen it. We saw what it was like years
ago, and we barely escaped it. He’s here because we got out of places like that
and learnt to survive, so don’t you throw all that away by inviting him to go
in there because there
must be some kind
of organisation
,” she pulled a face and waggled her head from side to side
mockingly.

“I’m sorry, I
just –”

“You should
be,” she turned her back on him and crossed her arms. She stood rigid for
several minutes, but softened as he wrapped his arms around her from behind and
held her tight.

“I’m too tired
for this,” she sighed. “The only reason I’m going along with this exodus of
yours is because of Jake. Him and Fatima, and Saïd, and anyone else who still
has some life left in them and deserves a better go at it than we’ve had here.”

“I know,”
George whispered gently, kissing her on the cheek. “And so does he.”

She turned and
pulled him in closer, burying her head in his chest. She listened to his heart
beating for almost a minute before looking up into his eyes. Big, silent tears
had started to roll down his face and his bottom lip had curled outwards in
that ugly way she somehow found so attractive.

“What’s
wrong?” she asked, wiping his tears away with her thumbs.

He nodded
towards Cairo. “If we hadn’t landed there, twenty-seven years ago, do you think
things would have been different?” he asked, swallowing any further tears.

“What happened
was always going to happen,” she dug her chin into his chest and smiled. “But
because we landed there all those years ago, and because of everything that
happened from that point on, we both found ourselves hundreds of miles away
from the nearest explosion when it did. Because of all that, we’re here, and so
is Jake. And that’s all that matters.”

They walked
hand in hand to the assembled villagers, who had already started to plan their
route past Cairo.

 
“The biggest danger is that we have no speed,”
Zahra said. If anyone tries to stop us, for any reason, we have no way of
escaping. I can guarantee you that they will have horses that are faster than
our donkeys.”

Their
migrations over the years had never taken them past Cairo. It had always been
an un-passable barrier to the north of their world. For the younger generation,
life in the countryside was all they knew or remembered.

“Why would
anyone want to stop us? What do we have that they could possibly want?” Fatima
spoke clearly and with an indignant tone.

 
“Places like this are different,” Zahra
explained. “It doesn’t matter what you have, you can still be shot just because
you walk into the wrong street, or look at someone the wrong way.”

“So what is
the right way to look at people?” Jake asked. No one answered.

Of all the villagers,
Ben and Zahra knew Cairo best, and they had started to draw a map in the dust
on the side of the road.

“This used to
be the road, up from Saqqara and Dashur towards Giza,” Zahra explained. “We’re
about here, and up ahead the pyramids will be visible on our left.”

The Pyramids of Giza
, Gail thought
suddenly.
Jake’s never seen them!
She
envied the fact that he was going to see them for the first time, and wondered
how much time, if at all, she would have to show them to him. When he was very
young he’d seen other pyramids, like the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, and the Red
Pyramid and Bent Pyramid slightly further north. But
never
Khufu’s Great Pyramid.

“Giza was
still there ten years ago, and our visitor a few nights ago confirmed that it
was still there now, though there’s not much left. Hopefully we should be able
to go through relatively quietly.” Zahra saw the look in Gail’s eyes and
laughed. “We probably won’t have time for a history tour Gail, I’m sorry.”

Gail shrugged
it off and smiled, though inside she clung to the hope of an unexpected detour.

Zahra’s
biggest fear was that they would lose their donkeys. The animals had been with
them for so long, and had been indispensable throughout their travels; no human
could carry enough water to last that many days between refills. Camels and
horses would certainly have to be handed over to whatever militia controlled
the Saqqara road. Who knew how desperate they’d be for six tired donkeys?

“Then we
should reach the sea in two days by following the road to Alexandria,” Ben
finished the plan off.

“And as for
how you look at people,” Gail said to Jake with a smile, “don’t.”

Gail was shocked at how little
their party took notice of the pyramids. Admittedly, from where the road lay it
was impossible to get a good view. They took a right angle turn off the main
road and onto the principle crossing of the canal, which with its stagnant
waters and years of detritus could probably be walked across without getting a
toe wet.

They turned
their backs on Cairo as they crossed the flat bridge, and got their first
decent glimpse. Khafre’s pyramid, though half a mile away and partly hidden by
the encroaching sand-dunes, stood proud, the smooth limestone casing still
clinging to its upper reaches. The Giza plateau was a dozen or so metres higher
in elevation compared to the bridge, exaggerating the monument’s scale, but her
scientific mind ignored that for the time being. She’d never walked across this
bridge, never stood there, looking at it as an ancient Egyptian would have:
from water-level.

George stopped
and gave her time to reflect, but hurried her along as soon as the last of
their group had passed them. She looked at Jake, who had paused on the other
side. He was looking past her, at the ruins of Cairo.

She could
sense Jake’s eagerness to explore, and the realisation that he was more
intrigued by what remained of Cairo than the ancient Egyptian pyramids upset
her. She would later acknowledge that they were both fascinated by a lost
culture, just not the same one.

They gathered
on the other side of the canal. The pyramids were now all but hidden behind the
wall of sand that had practically invaded Giza, and in the years to come would
no doubt cross the canal and eventually reach the Nile itself.

She looked
back, towards Cairo.

An impenetrable
concrete barrier ten feet high cut across all four lanes of the main road into
the city, joining two large buildings on opposite sides of the road and sealing
off the outside world. A hundred-metre wide band of scorched-earth had been
created between the wall and the rest of Giza. Rubble, the remains of all the
buildings that had been demolished to create the flat-zone, had been piled up
in a neat border on the side nearest them. Cairo was a fortress.

“I don’t think
they want visitors,” Jake said.

“It’s a good
thing we don’t want to visit then, isn’t it?” Gail commented, turning back to
their path and patting him on the shoulder.

Her protective
nature towards her son, and everything she had said the day before about Jake
and Cairo, still stood. But the main reason she didn’t want to give him the
time of day to look at Cairo was the most non-maternal instinct of them all:
spite. To her the pyramids, along with countless other sites in the country,
epitomized what had been great, and what was to this day still so intriguing,
about the ancient Egyptians. That her own son had failed to recognise that, or
even vaguely share her interest, to look at the pyramids in all their glory and
gasp
, made the anger well up in the
pit of her stomach.

Only three
steps on and the anger subsided. As emotions went, it was one of the
short-lived ones, mainly because of the overwhelming guilt she felt at being
spiteful towards her son.

She turned
round and looked at him.

“One day,
Jake,” she began, then sighed in that tired sort of way only a mother can. “One
day, you’ll come back. When things are better, when things have had more time
to settle down.”

He caught up
with her in one stride and put his arm round her. He glanced over his shoulder
at where the pyramids hid behind the sand. “They look amazing, Mum,” he said in
English with a glint in his eye.

They walked on
for several minutes, George falling into step beside them.

“You mean
we,
” Jake said, breaking the silence.

“Sorry?”

“You mean
we
.
We’ll
come back and see Cairo, and the pyramids, when things have settled down a
bit.”

They pushed on
in silence.

They carried
on along the road to Alexandria, towards the sea, until nightfall. Along the
way, they were challenged once by a group of old boys sitting atop a broken
down tractor, who quickly gestured for them to keep going on their way after
looking the donkeys up and down a couple of times.

How
sorry
must we all look
Gail thought
, that
even the robbers and brigands don’t want us!

The campfire
talk, as usual, was of the road ahead.

“A day’s walk
along this road and we should be able to find any number of fishing villages
along the coast,” Ben said eagerly. “Diesel will be a problem, of course, so
sail boats are our first target. The smaller the boat, the more we need;
nothing less than twenty feet for crossing the sea.”

A large number
of the party had sailing experience, but mostly from the river. Even George,
who had sailed along the coast of Britain throughout his youth, had no real sea-skills,
save for a quick trip across the Channel. In comparison to that, the
Mediterranean was an ocean.

Gail looked
across at her husband as the plans were drawn out, for the twentieth time, in
the dirt around the campfires. Their eyes met across the flames.
He understands
, she thought with relief.
She didn’t want to have the conversation with him or anyone just yet, the
argument, the tears. There would be plenty of that when the time came.

A twenty-foot
sailing boat might carry four people comfortably enough to Italy. Six at a
squeeze. Any more, with the great distances involved, would be uncomfortable
indeed, and probably dangerous. She didn’t even dare to imagine the lack of
water and food that such cramped conditions might create, should the weather
turn out to be anything but favourable.

Maybe she was
misjudging the type of boat they might find. Maybe they would find a yacht
capable of taking them all in luxury, like some modern-day Noah’s Ark, donkeys
and all.

But she
doubted it.

Shortly after passing the
pyramids of Giza, Gail had made her decision to stay in Egypt. George, of
course, would stay behind with her.

But Gail had
known her husband now for the better part of forty years, and there was little
he could feel that she wasn’t aware of; she knew he had an overwhelming desire
to go back to Britain, to see his home and the country he loved, to see if
anyone or anything from their old life was left standing. Yet he would
sacrifice all of that to be with her. She only wished that she had something
left to give him in return.

After two more
days of marching along the dusty road north-west, towards the sea, she was
starting to have second thoughts. She was on the verge of having a
let’s-wait-till-we-see-what-kind-of-boats-we-find conversation with George.

“We will stay
behind with you,” Ben suddenly said out of the blue. Along with Zahra, he’d
fallen into step with them, behind the main group of travellers. Gail and
George now tended to make up the rear of their human caravan; because of their
age, certainly, but also because it made her see the community as ‘us’ and
‘them’. The self-detachment would make it easier to say goodbye when the time
came, particularly to their son. Plus, they enjoyed watching him with his
friends from a distance.

Gail tried to
feign ignorance. “Thanks, Ben,” she smiled after a brief hesitation, “but you
don’t need to worry about us, we’re happy to walk at the back.”

He looked
across at her, and then at George.

“No, that’s
not what I mean,” he said in English. Of the entire group, the four of them
spoke the language better than anyone, with Jake coming in a close fifth. To
his credit he sometimes made efforts to talk with them in their native
language, even though it was next to useless in their community. “Zahra and I
have decided to stay behind with you, in Egypt.”

They walked on
in silence for a dozen or so steps.

“Why?” George
asked. They had tried to be discreet, to hide their plan from the rest of the
group, in particular from Jake. Clearly they hadn’t fooled their friends.

“Because if we
cannot persuade you to come with us, then we will stay with you. This is my
country, and while you are here, you are still my guests.”

Gail giggled
at Ben’s mock bow. “You don’t need to worry about us, we’ll be fine. We’ve
lived here long enough now, and besides you and Zahra are the heart of the
community, you belong with them.”

Ben looked
across at Zahra, walking next to George; one of those looks that only a couple
completely in tune with each other can exchange, like an unspoken conversation.

“Gail, you are
funny,” he said without a hint of humour. “There’s always been something funny
about you.” George was about to make a joke, but stopped when Ben raised his
hand. “You came to Egypt on a whim, arrived at a well organised archaeological
dig and within hours instinctively found what had eluded the best Egyptologists
in the world for more than a century.” He accentuated the
instinctively
. They stopped walking, and Ben faced her. “Professor
al-Misri knew there was something different about you. Somehow, even before you
arrived in Egypt, he was genuinely excited to see you, like you were the most
reputable archaeologist in the world, come to inspect his work, instead of a
struggling post-grad student,” he put his hand on her shoulder. “And now,
instead of going back to your home country, instead of taking
that
opportunity, you are going to walk
all the way back to Amarna, aren’t you?”

She nodded
quietly.

“Then you know
the rules in Egypt, Dr Turner,” he said with a grin. “You can’t visit any
archaeological sites without the authorisation and accompaniment of the Tourism
Police,” he gestured to Zahra, who smiled in return, though she couldn’t hide
the apprehension she felt.

But not one of
them was as nervous as Gail. The reasons she had built up for staying behind
meant nothing. The size of the boat, her age, how tired she felt, were all
excuses to hide her real motivation. Something was drawing her back to Amarna.
Back to the Library, and to the Xynutian vaults beneath it.

And the fear
inside her was growing.