The Age of Ra (17 page)

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 hostilities, 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.

''We start training our men, together. We instil them with discipline. We forge them into a unit, a single army. And we gather weapons. As much as we can. Every type that we can.''

That was three years ago. And here we are now.

13. Cache

''H
ere we are now,'' echoed David, as the jeep they were riding in plunged into and out of a pothole the size of a small crater. Steven crunched gears and cursed. He was driving at least fifteen miles an hour faster than was wise on a road this badly made, but seemed of the opinion that it was the road that should mend its ways, not him.

''So what do you make of it?'' Steven asked, or rather the Lightbringer asked. For the past half an hour David had been listening to this masked man in the seat beside him talking in Steven's voice, using Steven's intonation and turn of phrase, sounding exactly like Steven... Cognitively he knew it was his brother under that mask. He had no doubts on that score. Who else could it be? Nobody but Steven could have told that anecdote about throwing up all over Mrs Plomley, or conjured up the speech-impedimented shade of Mr Perkins quite so accurately.

For all that, David could not shake off the impression that he was sitting next to an impostor, or perhaps a psychic channelling Steven's dead spirit. He longed for a peek beneath the mask, for final irrefutable confirmation of what he knew to be true, but he'd decided to let Steven choose to show him his face in his own time. He would do it when he wanted to, if he wanted to.

''What do I make of it?'' David said. ''Well, it's quite a tale.''

''I know! I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't lived through it. But actually what I meant was, what do you make of us meeting up again like this?''

''Fluke. Happy coincidence.''

''Me, I think it was meant to be. I mean, my own brother pitching up here in Freegypt - what are the odds? Astronomical. But as soon as I heard from Zafirah that she'd picked up this British soldier in the desert and his name was David Westwynter, I felt this click inside. Like, of course Dave's here. Why shouldn't he be? You didn't get the same feeling, though.''

''No.''

''Well, you always were the hard-headed, practical one, weren't you?''

''Perhaps our meeting would have had more significance for me if you hadn't spent all that time arsing around, stringing me along, pretending you didn't know me. Was it really necessary, that whole charade?''

''To start with, yes. I'm the Lightbringer, remember.''

''So?''

''Well, I couldn't just walk up to you and say, 'Hi, Dave, how's it going? Long time no see, big brother.' I'd no idea how you'd react. You might have punched me in the face, and that wouldn't have looked good in front of all those people. Instead, I thought it'd be better if I got you on your own, then did the big reveal.''

''Except you didn't. You made me play senet with you first.''

''Yes, that, I admit, was for a laugh. I was waiting to see how long it'd take for the penny to drop. Your face, Dave!'' Steven chuckled and slapped the steering wheel. ''What a sight. Haven't seen you look so shocked since the time we found that polished mahogany Osiris Special in Mum's bedside cabinet.''

''Glad it amused you.''

''Look, I'm sorry, all right?'' It was one of those apologies that didn't sound very apologetic. ''You know me. If there's temptation, I always give in to it.''