The Eye of the Serpent (14 page)

Alec began to get up from his seat but something hit the back of his head, almost flinging him across the table. He felt a sharp pain. Then Madeleine gave a shriek of alarm and he saw that she too was lifting her arms to ward something away. He looked in surprise at Ethan, who was jumping up and reaching for his pistol.

‘Bats!' Ethan yelled; and then, quite suddenly,
the night sky above them seemed to become even darker. They came flapping down in eerie silence. Fruit bats. Thousands of them. They had large, furry bodies and elongated doglike snouts, and though Alec had never heard of a fruit bat ever going anywhere near a person before, these creatures seemed intent on attacking human targets.

He was dimly aware of Archie running frantically towards the cook tent, his upper torso covered in a mantle of flapping, furry shapes, but there was no time to dwell on that, because now a bat was lunging straight at Alec's throat. He could see the open jaws fringed with rows of sharp little fangs, glittering in the moonlight like shards of broken glass; and then the teeth were snapping at his throat. He grabbed the bat's back legs and swung it down hard against the tabletop, snapping its spine with a loud crack.

Another scream from Madeleine alerted him to the fact that she had a couple of the creatures tangled in her hair. He tried to pull one away, then yelped as the bat's teeth sank into the back of his hand. But he hung on and dragged the bat off, Madeleine's yells of protest telling him that he had torn out some hair in the process. Coates
moved to help him remove the other bat and, throwing it to the ground, he stamped down on it with a heavy work boot, stilling its mad fluttering for ever.

The three of them stood there for a moment in a fog of indecision, desperately looking around for shelter, but the air was a blizzard of flying shapes, moving at incredible speed. Alec saw that the native workmen had snatched up burning branches from the campfire and were flailing at the moving shapes around them. One had found a curved scimitar and was lashing about him like a madman, cleaving bats bloodily apart as they sped by.

‘Under the table!' yelled Ethan, and everybody moved to obey him. Alec pushed Madeleine under the trailing hem of the heavy canvas tablecloth and then scrambled after her, all too aware that bats were slamming into the tabletop inches above his head; the impact on the wood sounded like the drumming of outsize hailstones.

Coates had snatched a heavy frying pan from the table, and as he moved into position, he started to wallop any creatures that attempted to follow him underneath. Mickey had pulled out a hunting knife and was stabbing at anything that
moved, while Doc Hopper was kicking and stamping with his size-eleven feet. Ethan let off a couple of shots but had to concede that there were just too many bats to be deterred by bullets, and he too ducked under the table and pressed his back up against the others. He leaned out and gestured to the Arab workmen to come and join them.

They gratefully accepted his offer and ran for cover. One man, a little slower than the rest, found himself covered from head to foot with writhing, flapping shapes. He fell to the ground as countless jaws went to work on him.

Madeleine screamed and pointed towards him and Ethan reacted without hesitation, dashing out from under the table and running to the man's assistance. He went down on his knees and started tearing the creatures away, slamming them down hard onto the ground. Alec tried to go and help him but Coates grabbed his arm.

‘No, lad, stay here!' he hissed.

As Alec watched helplessly, Ethan cleared most of the creatures off and helped the man to his feet. Slipping an arm beneath his shoulder, he half dragged, half carried him back to the table, where his friends helped to remove the bats that
were still clinging to him. Alec winced, for when they were pulled off, their teeth ripped away chunks of flesh, making the man cry out pitifully. At last everyone was squashed under the table, those on the outside striking out at anything that attempted to get past them. The bats kept coming, crawling across the sand to be crushed by feet or fists or whatever implement came to hand. Above them, the thuds of bats on the tabletop were rapidly softening as the heaps of the dead provided cushioning.

‘Where's Archie?' yelled Ethan, remembering the cook, and everybody craned their heads to look towards the cook tent. At that moment the big Scotsman emerged, dressed in a curious collection of homemade armour. He had an upturned metal colander strapped to his head with a leather belt, and he wore a thick cricketing sweater, shin pads and gloves. He carried a cricket bat and grinned like a maniac, his teeth shockingly white against his sunburned face. Patches of crimson on his clothing indicated where he had pulled away the bats that had attacked him earlier.

As the others watched in amazement, he took up a defensive stance and started hitting out at
the bats as they came speeding towards him, the willow smashing their bones and flinging them aside like broken toys.

‘I believe Mr McCloud used to play professionally,' Alec heard Coates say in a voice that was surprisingly calm, given the circumstances.

‘Get under here!' Ethan yelled but Archie just grinned and carried on hitting out, clearly relishing the game. He struck one large bat with such force that it went tumbling through the air in a high arc, clearing the rows of tents and bouncing off the rocks across the road.

‘Six!' bellowed Archie.

‘'E 'as gone quite mad!' Madeleine yelled into Alec's ear and he could only agree with her. But then, quite suddenly, everything stopped. There was a last flapping swirl above them and the remaining bats sped up into the sky and were gone. Archie bent over, gasping to recover his breath, and the people beneath the table began to emerge carefully, ready to dive back under cover at the slightest sign of danger.

But the bats were gone as quickly as they had appeared, leaving behind only the piles of their dead, with here and there the occasional
twitching, squeaking survivor, waiting to be put out of its misery.

Ethan stared around in disgust and tilted back his stetson. Alec saw that fresh blood was running down his face where a bat's teeth had broken the skin.

‘Would somebody like to explain to me what just happened here?' Ethan muttered. ‘Fruit bats! Since when did fruit bats start attacking people?'

‘Like those hyenas,' said Alec. ‘They don't attack people either, right?'

There was a long silence. Everybody just stood there, gazing about them in mute amazement. It was Archie who recovered himself first. He threw down his cricket bat, took off the colander helmet and marched quickly back to the kitchen tent. He emerged a moment later, holding a handful of hessian sacks.

‘Right,' he said, ‘let's get some of these wee laddies gathered up. Only choose the plumpest ones.'

Ethan looked at him. ‘What's the point?' he said. ‘We'll just dig a big hole and shovel them all in.'

‘This is nay for burial,' Archie assured him. ‘It's for tomorrow's dinner.'

Everyone stared at him.

‘Have you taken leave of your senses?' Coates asked him.

‘Not a bit of it. These thangs are a bloody delicacy around here. We'll keep enough for tomorrow's grub and sell the rest in the market in Sharia el-Karnak.' He looked around at their appalled faces. ‘I'm telling ya,' he said. ‘These things are delicious. You go to one of those fancy hotels in Luxor and you'll pay top dollar for curried bat. It would be a crime to waste 'em!'

But it seemed that nobody else was in a big hurry to sample the delights of bat curry, so Archie started collecting up the dead creatures himself. The others watched him in horrified silence and wondered once again just what exactly had been in the Highland stew they'd been served earlier.

DARKNESS WAS FALLING
when Mohammed and Llewellyn arrived at the outskirts of the bazaar. Everywhere oil lamps were being lit, illuminating the rows of stalls that lined the streets. Here were people selling everything, from fresh fruit to pots and pans. Men in white galabiyas stood calling out their wares; women in black robes and burkas sat at looms, weaving rugs and throws. Llewellyn looked around in amazement.

‘I didn't expect this many people,' he murmured.

‘Here, everyone likes to shop at night, when it is cooler,' Mohammed told him.

‘You call this
cool
?' Llewellyn said incredulously. True, the heat wasn't as intense as it had been earlier, but it was still warm enough to be uncomfortable. The ancient Ford coasted slowly along the packed streets – the bazaar seemed to go on for ever, like a half-remembered scene from a childhood fairy story.

Llewellyn gazed hopefully out from the back seat and saw stalls selling fine leather sandals – hundreds of pairs arranged on bamboo displays; he saw wooden crates stacked one upon the other containing chickens and pigeons, and over to his right, larger cages occupied by goats and sheep. A group of men to his left were standing in a pool of light, haggling loudly over the price of a cockerel, the buyers waving their hands in the air, the seller acting as though he had just received the biggest insult of his life.

The Ford moved on between fruit stalls piled high with multicoloured displays: tiny green bananas and plantains, deep red mangoes and bright orange tangerines, the rich aroma filling the air with a sweet perfume.

Exotic music spilled from gloomy coffee houses where furtive-looking men sat in groups around battered tin tables, drinking, playing cards
and enjoying their hookah pipes, the air fragrant with thick clouds of tobacco smoke. Here, a toothless woman crouched behind a huge basket of fish, the stench assailing Llewellyn's nostrils; there, a man offered eggs of every size and colour piled in great precarious-looking heaps; and, of course, there were the inevitable stalls offering tourists so-called relics: stone statues, items of jewellery, lumps of rock that the sellers would claim had come from the tomb of some ancient pharaoh.

It quickly became apparent that the Ford could make no more progress through the press of bodies. The bazaar led onwards into narrow side streets where no vehicle could venture, and even here on the wider streets at the bazaar's outskirts, people crowded round them, banging on the windows and waving whatever it was they were trying to sell.

Llewellyn wondered glumly why he'd even bothered coming here. He had underestimated the size of the bazaar. How was he ever going to spot Tom Hinton? Mickey had hinted at Hassan's unreliability, and even if Tom
had
been here recently, what were the chances of him coming again?

Llewellyn thought wistfully of his hotel room. He hadn't actually visited it yet, but it would surely be clean and spacious with a ceiling fan overhead to cool the sweat on his brow, and of course it would come with a shower. He promised himself that he would have the water as cold as possible, and when he was dry and tingling, he would douse his body in his favourite lavender cologne. Afterwards he would go down to the restaurant and order himself a delicious meal with a fine bottle of wine, all expenses paid by the Hinton family. His resolve began to crumble. The heat and clamour of the crowded bazaar suddenly overwhelmed him. What was he thinking of, coming here, anyway? What had he expected to find? Tomorrow. He would look around the bazaar tomorrow. He was just about to lean forward and tap Mohammed on the shoulder to tell him to turn round and head for the Winter Palace when, quite unexpectedly, the impossible happened.

He saw Tom Hinton.

At least, he was pretty sure it was Tom. After all, he had never seen the man in the flesh, but this chap looked pretty much like the photographs he had been given by Tom's parents. Llewellyn told
Mohammed to stop the Ford and took out his wallet so he could study the small photo he carried to make a comparison.

The young man was standing at a stall across the street, a display of antiquities, and seemed to be going carefully through the objects arranged on the tabletop, as though searching for something in particular. He was wearing a khaki shirt and trousers and a wide-brimmed hat; the oil lamp on the table cast his face into shadow, so it was hard to make a positive identification and yet . . .

Llewellyn got out of the car. ‘Wait here,' he told Mohammed, and began to cross the road towards the stall.

‘Mr Hinton?' he called out. ‘Is that you?'

The man looked up in surprise and Llewellyn finally got a good look at his face. It was Tom Hinton all right – there could be no mistake, even though the fresh-faced young man in the photograph seemed light years away from the pale, haggard creature that was staring indignantly back at him now.

‘Mr Hinton, I—' Llewellyn broke off in alarm as he was suddenly surrounded by a clutch of shouting Arabs, all trying to sell him their wares.
Each of them held a small stone statue. As far as Llewellyn could see, the statues were all identical.