INCARNATION (46 page)

‘This is one Ah prepared earlier,’ he said, and proceeded to roll the crisp note into a tube. ‘Can ye use this?’

She nodded. The way things were going, she had little chance of getting hold of any drugs for days, so why the hell not go with the cocaine? Maybe her Scottish Lancelot would be able to supply the medications she needed.

One line disappeared up her left nostril, the other into the right. She coughed, then regained her composure.

‘Gie that a few minutes,’ he said, ‘then we’ll be on our way.’

‘How’d you get in?’ she asked. ‘He has this place like bloody Fort Knox.’

He shook his head.

‘That’s where yir wrong,’ he said. ‘He’s got great locks an’ all that, an’ a big alarm system on the ground floor, but once ye get up here there’s next tae nothin’. Ah shimmied up a drainpipe at the back an’ Ah wis in by a windae before Ah got oota the taxi, more or less. Yir door wis a doddle. Yir mither keeps the key in the lock.’

‘How are we getting out? I can’t climb down a drainpipe, I’m not steady enough.’

‘Ye’ll be steady. But if ye know the password, we can cancel the alarm an’ walk oot through the front door.’

She shook her head. This was the bastard Anthony’s house: she’d never been here until her mother brought her from Rose’s place.

‘Ah, well. We’ll do it another way. Help me make a dummy here in the bed.’

They worked quickly, using blankets and a pillow to create the semblance of a sleeping form. Maddie topped it off with a fur muff from the wardrobe that was close enough to her hair colour to pass muster in poor light. Calum removed all but one of the room’s light bulbs, leaving only one 40-watt specimen to light if the wall switch was pressed.

‘This is fun!’ said Maddie, already feeling better than she had done in months.

‘Dinna let yersel’ get carried awa’,’ warned Calum. Too much euphoria could blow the whole thing. He wouldn’t rest easy till he had her in Scotland, somewhere she wouldn’t get out of so easily as this. He had the place all set. It was just a matter of getting her to believe he was the Pied Piper.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We go doon fast as we can, straight tae the front door. Once we’re oot, we scoot fir the main road. If there’s a taxi, we grab it. If no’, we’ve a long walk ahead of us.’

‘Turn your head,’ she ordered. When he did so, she leapt out of bed. She’d been sleeping in her pants: it was still too hot for anything else. It took her moments to find jeans and a T-shirt, and a few more to pack a change of underwear and one or two other items.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’m ready.’

They went out on to the landing, and closed and locked the bedroom door behind them. Maddie was well under the sway of the drug by now. He hoped he’d given her enough to keep her that way.

They crept down the stairs, one at a time. As they reached the half-landing, a sudden screech jolted them. Whatever else it was, the alarm system was rich in decibels. They hared down the rest of the stairs, along the hall, and out into the night.

T
hey woke and slept, woke and slept. The tent had become their world. Outside, nothing altered, nothing changed. The wind drove as always across the dunes, thick sand blotted out any light, and the shrieking and wailing of the storm made it sound as though doors to hell had been torn from their hinges.

Life was made up of dreams and nightmares. Several times, David found himself in an ancient city of red stone. All around the city, tall dunes of white sand rose up like mountains, throwing shadows into every courtyard and public place. Men in black robes, their faces hidden by thick hoods of camel’s hair, walked hurriedly from house to house and street to street.

The further David walked, the taller the houses grew, and before long it became very dark in the narrow spaces between them. On doors and windows he saw displayed the trophies of old executions and punishments: heads and hands and feet nailed to wooden boards.

He saw an open doorway on his left and went inside. On his left, a second opening led him into a small room. A pillow and a red quilt lay on the floor. From somewhere close by, the sound of a ch ‘in came to him, and a woman’s voice singing a song from the harem of the palace of Wei.

All day the wind blew strong,

The sun was buried deep.

I have thought of him so long, 

so long, I cannot sleep.

He laid himself down quietly on the quilt. As he did so, he noticed that the room was not a room, but a tent. And from somewhere a roaring came that wiped out the woman’s voice and the delicate music of the ch’in. He closed his eyes and slept.

When he woke the roaring was gone. Light sieved through the canvas, and sharp needles of sunlight pierced it wherever they had a chance. Nabila was sitting facing him, humming softly, a soft smile on her lips. She held a needle and thread in her hand, and was repairing a sleeve that had been torn in the tussle with the camels.

‘What are you humming?’ he asked. Images of the red city were already fading from his mind. He didn’t want to move.

‘You wouldn’t know it. An old Uighur song about men, and how they’re always deceivers, and the revenge a young girl takes on her unfaithful lover.’

‘Oh? What does she do to him?’

‘There are two versions. I was humming the one we young Uighur women sing in private. In the polite version’ - she held up the needle and thread - ‘she sews his private parts to the tail of a mad camel. But in the version I was humming ...'

‘I don’t think I want to know. And I’d appreciate it if you put that needle away. Am I right in thinking the sun has come out? And the storm has gone?’

‘How clever you red-blooded Anglo-Saxon men are. If you’d care to follow me outside, I’ll show you all there is to see.’

She put her sewing away, and stood up. Outside, the world had turned to sunshine. David stood in astonishment, willing himself to believe it was all real. From the sun downwards, everything looked just like a film set. He imagined it all being rolled back on rubber wheels, revealing raw concrete underfoot, and white lines marking the contours of the dunes.

Nabila’s voice broke into his reverie.

‘Over here, David. Please, it’s important.’

He stumbled through the sand towards her. As far as he could see, the high dunes were still in their original places, even if their shapes had changed. Navigating back might not be that difficult.

Nabila was bending down beside one of the camels. Doris, as far as he could tell. The poor beast was buried to her neck in sand.

‘Is she … ?’

‘Yes. I’ve checked,’ said Nabila. ‘I looked at the others earlier. They’re all right, but they’ll need watering quickly.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Doris? It’s hard to say. How long did the storm last?’

He shrugged.

‘God knows. Three or four days at least.’

‘Yes, that sounds about right. She’d already gone without water a couple of days before that. Even for a camel, that’s stretching things a bit in these conditions.’

‘And you say the other two are OK?’

‘So far. But if we don’t find water for them soon, they’ll die as well.’

David looked round at the acres of sand that had been tossed and sifted by the wind, then set down softly again. The routine they’d followed so far for finding water the camels could drink had been to keep a sharp eye out for the tell-tale patches of white salt that betrayed the presence of moisture beneath the sand. The water, when it could be found, was five or six feet down and brackish; but it served the camels well, and saved the fresh water.

They roused the other camels and headed off, following a bearing taken with David’s compass. Using that and the general contour of the dunes, they were sure it would take less than an hour to meet up again with Mehmet and the main caravans.

Two hours later, there was still no sign of them. Their own camels were weakening rapidly. David was sure they had been over the original camp site, but however closely he looked, he could see no sign of the missing man or his beasts, not even hoofprints.

‘He may have gone to look for us,’ said Nabila.

‘Surely not while the storm was still at its height. Look, if this was the site, then he and the camels must have left during the storm, not after. Does that make any sense?’

Nabila frowned, then nodded.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. 'I’ve heard of men being driven half insane by the karaburan and setting off to walk home while it was still blowing. Mehmet must have been on the edge already, with the pain in his wrist. He could have just taken the camels off in an attempt to get out of the storm.’

‘Then they could be almost anywhere by now.’

‘Yes - within reason. In practice he can’t have got far.’

‘We need those camels, Nabila. They have our water, our equipment

‘Why don’t you climb that dune there and see what you can make out?’

‘Right. Where are my binoculars?’

Nabila dug into one of the saddlebags and whipped out a tatty pair of army surplus glasses she’d picked up in Korla many years earlier.

‘You lent yours to Mehmet, if you remember. But you can have these if you like.’

He took them from her.

‘These aren’t exactly high-performance.’

‘I liked them very much when I bought them. I thought they were the smartest thing.'

‘Well, hardly ...' He broke off, sensing she was hurt. ‘I only meant ...’ he started, then broke off again.

‘In Kashgar we have a saying: However highly polished your spectacles, you will see through them only what you want to see.’

He laughed.

‘Who made that nonsense up?’

‘I did. And it isn’t nonsense. Remember you’re in the desert. It’s easy to be misled by a mirage.’

‘I’ll do my best to keep out of their reach.’ He bent and kissed her. ‘Don’t leave this spot, for God’s sake. We can’t afford to get split three ways.’

‘I’m staying put whatever happens. Haven’t you noticed the tamarisk bush over there? I’m going to dig down. There might be water.’

‘Good luck.’ He kissed her again and started up the dune.

The sand, softer than ever after the storm, made every step of the climb a torture. The dune must have been close on four hundred feet high. Each time David placed a foot on the slope ahead of him, it sank down, giving him little purchase. His legs ached intolerably before he’d gone fifty feet. The sun was high, not far short of noon, and the heat that blazed down on him from behind threatened to bake him dry. He kept his head down and plodded on, one hand on his stick, the other in free air, defying gravity, or so it seemed.

At the top, he looked behind him, all the way down the flank of the dune. A long diagonal trail of blurred footprints marked his passage. His eye flicked over it, then down to where Nabila and the two camels waited like insects.

The dune was high enough to give him a vantage point from which to see for several miles in most directions. Again and again, he swept his eyes over the deceptive landscape, a uniform carpet of ochre full of hollows and hummocks and great sweeping hills. He almost thought that, if he could strip it away, another landscape would be revealed, of green fields and gentle slopes and small river valleys. Nothing moved. No birds straddled the sky. No gazelles raced between the dunes.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of something. A series of black marks against the sand. It was hard to tell if it was moving at all at first. He raised Nabila’s glasses and started to sweep. Where the hell were they? He altered the focus several times, but still the marks eluded him. Again he tried with his bare eyes. The marks were still there, but only just: in a moment they’d have passed out of his line of sight behind a dune.

This time he got the glasses in line and found what he was looking for. There was no sign of Mehmet, but the six camels disappearing from view were unmistakable.

He waved his arms and shouted at the top of his voice.

‘Mehmet! Mehmet! Over here! Look up, Mehmet!’

But there was no answering cry, no waving figure acknowledging him.

He gave up at last and started back down the dune, bumping and sliding and skiing his way down ten times faster than he’d gone up.

Nabila was waiting for him.

'I heard you call. Did you see Mehmet, or were you just trying to get his attention?’

‘He was down there. I didn’t see him, but I caught the tail end of the caravan moving in line. He must be at the front. We’ve got to act quickly, otherwise he could be lost for good.’

‘Which direction’s he heading in?’

‘That’s the funny thing. They were going due south.’

‘He’s taking the most direct route out of the desert, then. He must think we’re dead.’

‘He has no reason to think otherwise. Look, I’ll take one of the camels and try to head him off.’

Nabila shook her head decisively.

‘No point. You’ll get no speed out of either animal.’

‘But Mehmet

‘You’ll have to go on foot. But if you do that, I want you to make completely sure I can follow you. Wait.’

She went to the first camel, a gangly creature David had named Elvis. It took her a while to find what she was looking for, rummaging through the huge packs while Elvis snorted protests and moaned softly at the lack of water.

‘Here,’ she said, triumphantly pulling out a loosely wrapped bundle of thin wooden sticks that turned out to have Chinese flags glued to one end.

‘Stick one in every five hundred yards or so, always well within sight of the one before. And pick them up again on your way back.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better if you followed me? Most of the camels are over there with Mehmet.’

‘Then you’d better get a move on. I’m staying here.’

She thrust the flags at him. He took them and kissed her, then turned to go.

He had walked about six feet when her voice stopped him.

‘David ...’

He turned round and looked at her. She seemed small and tired. Her skin had dried, making it look as though she’d aged years since the storm started.

‘Make sure you come back to me,’ she said. ‘Do you hear me?’