INCARNATION (42 page)

‘Not any more you don’t. They know who you are, and if our mission succeeds, you’ll be the most wanted woman in China.’

She laughed aloud at the thought, at the absurdity of it.

‘Me? The most wanted woman?’

‘Why not?’ he said, laughing. He reached up and drew her round and kissed her softly. ‘You’re already the most wanted woman in the Taklamakan.’

'I’m the only one.’

‘You’re forgetting Bobtail and a few others.’

‘Do you want me?’

‘Shhhh. Just follow my instructions, and you’ll be all right.’

She unzipped his trousers and reached inside.

‘I could catch frostbite,’ he protested. ‘I’d have to ... You know, like Mehmet ...'

She warmed him with another kiss.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘this isn’t going to catch frostbite. Not where it’s going.’

T
hey found the two missing camels around noon the following day. The beasts were exhausted and looked very sorry for themselves. Unable to dislodge their loads, they’d settled down in the shelter of a dune and spent a miserable night, unwatered, unfed, and unable to snatch more than a few winks of sleep.

David and Nabila stayed close together, not just because it made them feel better, but because separation could prove fatal. The high walls of the dunes made it almost impossible to navigate. Even from the summits, other high dunes still contrived to block the view, and the best anyone could do most of the time was to steer a fairly straight course with the help of a compass, two feet of twine, and a strong sense of smell.

On the ground, a turning of a few feet here or a distraction of a yard or two there could lead to a widening maze in which all sense of true direction was lost. Two people could part, agreeing to meet again in half an hour, and never see one another again. The desert made no concessions to human weakness. Out here, orienteering was not a sport, but the most vital part of staying alive.

They’d left Mehmet behind with the main body of camels. He was conscious, but still traumatized. Nabila had been reluctant to leave him at all.

‘Ordinarily, I’d just say, “He’ll live.“ I’ve seen men much more badly injured take it in their stride and get on with their lives. But that injury weakens him and makes it hard for him to do the most elementary things. That means he may not live. Unless he can make adjustments very quickly, the desert won’t let him. And we can’t afford to let him hold us back or weaken us in any way. We can help him: but the moment he shows signs of holding us back ...’

She broke off, hating what she was saying, knowing it had to be said.

They’d followed hoofprints in order to track down the camels. Now, coming back, they followed exactly the same course. The camels had been two miles away, a dangerous distance, maybe a quarter of a day’s march. The journey back doubled the distance. All the time, David felt vulnerable, knowing how hard it could be to rejoin the main caravan if they strayed from the path even a short way.

The weather felt oppressive, the heat more clinging than normal, the air denser. David wrapped his scarf round his mouth. Nabila walked ahead with Doris, saying nothing.

Suddenly, she stopped and pointed with her stick towards an opening to one side, angled so it was now visible on the return trip. David came up, leading the other camels. He looked inside.

Between two enormous dunes a large space had been eroded from the sand, like a giant grotto, smooth-edged yet grotesque. It was bowed, like a chapel carved out of light, unpolished stone, its sides so high and rounded that David wondered for a moment if any of it was sand at all.

But it was not the sand that Nabila had been pointing at. Not the sand, not the great swoop it made over their heads. He stepped further inside and lowered his gaze.

At first, it could have been almost anything. David squinted, trying to make the object out against the bright sunlight that surrounded it. It might have been an outcrop of rock, or a strange formation of sand sculpted by the wind, or perhaps something half-angelic, dropped from the sky - part of a helicopter, say, or the wing of a light plane.

But as he looked it became clear that it was none of these. For one thing, it seemed to have been made from cloth. Parts of it fluttered loosely in the springing breeze, and a biggish section flapped back to reveal a dark interior before swinging shut again, the gesture of an erotic dancer or a butcher stripping back flesh.

‘It’s a tent,’ whispered David, ‘a bell tent. Look, that’s the centre pole.'

‘But ... who ...?’

The tent was half buried in sand, and a fine coating had covered the canvas on all sides. David took a step closer.

‘Who? Don’t you know?’ He stopped then, puzzled, and a little afraid of this unexpected thing. ‘Give me a moment.’

He went back to Doris and found his torch in a pack towards her rear. She watched him impassively as he rejoined Nabila, carrying the torch like a small club. He approached the tent again, tentative and wary, as though it might rear up and attack him.

Holding the torch at an angle, he gripped the large flap and drew it back. He shone the light down into the hole this created, then looked inside.

‘Well, what do you see?’ asked Nabila impatiently. By now she had a premonition of what it would turn out to be.

‘Two men,’ he said, then, turning, he spoke with greater exactitude. ‘What’s left of two men. Some sand has got in, but not enough to cover them. Not yet.’

‘They must have been trapped in a storm. Or grown too ill to go any further. How recent was it, do you think? Can you tell from ...?’

He switched off the torch and looked round. What was in the tent had not been very pretty.

‘They’re not skeletons,’ he said. ‘More like mummies, really. It’s this dry air, it preserves things amazingly well. By my reckoning, they’ve been here over a hundred years.’

‘And exactly what do you base that reckoning on?’

He smiled.

‘I can do better than that, I can tell you their names: one was called Yolchi, the other Muhammad Shah.’

‘Now you’re just playing games. I don’t think it’s so nice to poke fun at the dead.’

‘Poke fun? Nabila, haven’t you heard of Sven Hedin?’

‘The Swedish explorer? Yes, of course. Everybody in these parts has heard of his adventures. But he died in the fifties, David, back home in Sweden, not out here.’

‘He tried to make the crossing from Merket to the Mazartagh Mountains back in 1895. He went into the Taklamakan with four men, eight camels, three sheep, and two dogs, and he barely made it out with two of the camel-handlers. The last he saw of Yolchi and Muhammad Shah, they were sitting in this tent, waiting for the inevitable. They both knew they had no strength left. God knows how Hedin and the others survived.’

They hurried away from the tent as though it was cursed or contaminated, leaving behind not even a prayer for the spirits of the two men trapped for ever inside it. The tent itself was of no use to them: the canvas was rotten, the ropes were nearly gone. They preferred to leave it as a shrine. As they plodded on, the dunes on every side seemed to weigh more heavily on the narrow path they were treading between them.

Neither of them noticed anything much out of the ordinary until they reached a spot about halfway back to the camp. They had just started to turn the corner of a low dune when David noticed something.

‘Can you feel it?’ he asked.

‘The breeze?’

‘Yes. It’s getting fresher all the time.’

‘And the fresher it gets the faster it becomes.’

He looked down at his feet. The wind was scuffing the sand along in small puffs. Further off, it was raising it in little plumes, their feathered tops spinning, then fading off into nothing.

‘Look,’ David said. 

‘It’s wiping out the track.’

‘We don’t have time to get back to Mehmet before the hoofprints are completely wiped out. There’s a real risk we could make a wrong turning.’

Nabila looked up. The round disc of the sun was reddening, but all around it, like a murky halo, a grey haze was forming. On the tops of the higher dunes, sandspouts were performing a crazy dance. The horizon was veiled in a yellow-grey mist.

‘It’s blowing up into a full-scale sandstorm, David - I was caught at the edge of one years ago. It’s stupid to think of trying to push on. Let’s put ourselves and the camels into the lee of that dune.’

She pointed to a dune of red sand some three hundred feet high. All along its edges, sand lifted in a thin red veil, as though mocking them.

‘What about Mehmet?’

‘We’ll get lost if we push on. He’ll just have to fend for himself as long as the storm continues. He knows the desert well enough. There’s plenty of food and water for him.’

The sombre image of the sand-choked tent and its gnarled inhabitants rose up in David’s mind.

‘How long do these storms usually last?’ he asked.

‘There’s no saying. A few hours sometimes. Often a day or more.’

‘That’s all?’

Nabila hesitated. The camel she was leading was growing fractious.

‘No,’ she answered. ‘Sometimes they can go on for a week. In the city it’s never very bad, we’re too far from the heavy sands. But in the desert ... I’ve heard patients speak of it. You can survive a week in the karaburan if you have enough water with you. Provided the wind doesn’t drive you mad first and send you wandering in circles.’

‘Have you known of that happening?’

‘Oh, yes. A man was brought to us about a year ago. There’d been a big storm along the southern sector of the Taklamakan. It went on for four or five days. This man was a goatherd from Tongguzbasti. He’d gone out into the desert in search of tamarisk, along with a camel for the load. At midday he had some bread and water and lay down for a sleep. When he woke there was a storm the like of which he’d never seen before. There was nothing for it but to hunker down and make the best of it; but at some point - whether it was day or night he couldn’t say - he found himself on his feet, shouting and screaming at the noise, and walking for what must have been miles.’

‘He must have been hopelessly lost.’

‘Should have been. His camel never turned up again. But he was incredibly lucky. When the storm cleared he started walking west, and by a sheer miracle he hit the northern tip of the valley Tongguzbasti’s in. He was in a bad state by the time he reached us. I wouldn’t have given him another day.’

They selected their spot carefully, unloading the camels in a hurry and using the bales and boxes they carried to build an improvised barrier that might in a pinch keep some of the sand from them.

The day darkened rapidly. As the wind spiralled in force, the sun was bit by bit eclipsed until it became nothing but a dim ember glowing behind endless ashes of sand.

‘What happened to him?’ asked David as they placed the last sack on the barricade.

‘Who?’

‘The man who got lost beyond Tongguzbasti. You didn’t mention his name.’

‘Atik,’ she whispered, her voice barely audible above the roaring of the wind. ‘He was called Atik.’

‘And was he all right? Did he recover?’

She looked into the face of the wind.

‘No,’ she said. ‘He lasted two days. We thought we’d saved him, but he kept running away from us.’

‘Running away? But surely ...’

‘Not in body. He was too weak even to get out of his bed. In his mind. He ran away from us in his mind. We couldn’t catch up with him. He died with his face unchanged. It was the face he’d brought in from the desert.’

With the dune to their backs and the camels ahead of them, David and Nabila watched the storm take hold of the world. Piece by piece, everything was wiped out. They held one another’s hands tightly and wondered if, when they next saw clear daylight, they might ever find their way again in the darkness of the desert.

And David wondered if the faces he had glimpsed in that rotting tent had been like the face of the madman caught on the edge of all things lunatic. And whether his own face might not soon grow the features of his own madness. 

He thought of Sam, and he thought of Maddie, and he felt the madness grow in him like another storm.

‘A
h said, Ah’m jist mindin’ ma own business. If you dinna mind.’

‘Actually, Hamish, I do mind. If you don’t move on, I’ll be forced to arrest you for loitering.’

Calum looked the policeman up and down. He hadn’t yet reached the age when all policemen look young. But he was long past the point when they all looked like the enemy. This London Bobby was proving a considerable pain in the arse.

‘Am Ah offendin’ you or somethin’? Ah mean, lookit all these other folk walkin’ up and doon. You’re no’ arrestin’ them, are ye? Ah dinnae see you threatenin’ them wi’ the handcuffs an’ a night doon the slammer.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, you know what this is all about. I daresay it’s not the first time you’ve been asked to move on. Your face doesn’t fit, Hamish. Your clothes don’t fit. Your accent doesn’t fit. Now, I’m asking you for the last time: are you going to move, or do I have to move you?’

Calum took one last look at the house and smiled.

‘Nae bother,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t ye ask me nicely the first time?’

He dipped his head and strolled away comfortably, feeling the street around him like a long, bright coat. His feet barely touched the paving stones, his head felt elevated, like it was up there among the clouds, like it was part of the sky. A less astute observer might have assumed he was on a high. Well, perhaps he was: but it wasn’t the high the policeman thought, or the passers-by if they so much as noticed him.

He could feel the policeman’s watchful eyes hang on him as he walked away, and he formed his fingers behind his back into a V-sign. He didn’t mind being chased off. For the moment, he’d seen all he needed to, found out all he wanted.

The house was owned by a man called Farrar. Some sort of bigwig in a government ministry. Fair do’s. This Farrar was shacked up with the woman Calum had recently been shagging senseless on the biggest bed this side of the Channel. Nobody had known a thing about the girl, which probably made his life easier. He guessed that Farrar was the live-in lover, Elizabeth the sex-starved mistress, and Maddie Elizabeth’s daughter. He had a shrewd idea what Maddie’s problem was; he thought he had the means to solve it while solving some of his own problems at the same time.