INCARNATION (62 page)

‘Keep your hand upright,’ Nabila ordered. ‘Press your finger on this spot. Like that.’

She went off to her bergen and returned with dressings and a small bundle of herbs.

‘You’re very lucky I still have these. I’m very angry with you. Here we are, already in danger, and you pull a stunt like this.’

‘I’m sorry, but there was no choice. We can eat lizards. Some of the bigger ones are full of flesh. Edible flesh. We don’t have to starve. We’re a day or two from Karakhoto - this will get us there.’

‘Just keep quiet and give me your hand. This is going to hurt, but like yourself, I have no choice.’

Soon, the stump was expertly cleaned and bandaged, and a concoction of bitter herbs was brewing in the cup.

‘You should have spoken to me,’ said Nabila.

‘And what would you have said?’

‘I’d have told you that I was to blame for what happened. I was the one who killed the camels.’

‘You weren’t to blame for that.’

‘No? Then who was to blame?’

‘I don’t think blame matters, do you?’

She sank down facing him. The smell of new-sprung plants filled her nostrils. She felt tired and insecure. In the act of performing her accustomed skills, she realized how poorly equipped she was to survive in these conditions.

‘You should have spoken to me,’ she said. ‘You should have confided in me.’

‘I knew you wouldn’t let me.’

‘We are in this together, love.’

‘No, you’re in this because I wanted you to come.’

‘I volunteered. I came because I loved you and would not be parted from you. And because they have been killing my people. If we destroy this thing, we will have destroyed it together. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘And do you understand how much I love you?’

‘Not entirely. I’m glad you’re with me. That we’ll be together at the end.’

‘I love you more than myself,’ she said. She reached out her hand and stroked his cheek. She lifted his severed finger and wrapped it in gauze.

‘I hope this works,’ she said.

‘We have to get there,’ he said. ‘Somehow or other, we have to stay alive until we reach our destination.’

T
he lizards came, heavy and wall-eyed, like small dinosaurs, sniffing the air in search of prey. They walked into the two traps - Nabila had built a second one - and by noon over a dozen had been captured. They skinned them, and Nabila roasted them slowly over an open fire. There’d been no sign of helicopters since they left the tombs, and neither of them could stomach raw flesh.

Once cooked, they tasted delicious, or so they told one another. David’s hand still throbbed with incessant pain, and yet the mere fact of having something to fill their stomachs with made it seem a trivial thing.

‘It’s like a picnic,’ David said, pulling a strip of flesh from his third lizard, and remembering the day they’d gone in search of the Snow Lotus.

When they finished, they stuffed four of the lizards into their bergens, and wrapped David’s finger in strips cut from their sleeping blankets. With any luck, they’d get a day or two more of baiting out of it.

Nabila walked on ahead. She still had not quite forgiven him, and she needed time to understand. Perhaps, she thought, she would not live that long.

They made supper on the remaining lizards. David pretended they were chickens, but, to be honest, they tasted more like snakes. All the same, he’d paid more for his two meals than he might have handed over at a smart restaurant for two dozen. If he got back, he planned to recommend lizard steaks to The Ivy.

Nabila took two branches from a tamarisk shrub and tried to dowse.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ said David, as she walked up and down. ‘There’s still too much moisture in the sand. You’ll end up finding wells everywhere.’

But not even that was true. She walked through a wide radius, but the branches never stirred.

A little before the sun went down, David climbed to the top of the nearest dune and gazed out towards the east. There was something strange out there, something he could not identify. He lifted the binoculars and focused them on the horizon. There was something lying in wait for them, something black, without detail. He could not see it more clearly, however much he played with the glasses.

He went back down to where Nabila was resting.

‘I’ve just seen Karakhoto,’ he said.

She looked up, not knowing if he was joking or not.

'The Black City?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘About seven miles from here. We’ll be there tomorrow.’

They left at first light. At their back, a halo still circled an enormous moon dressed in sheets of pearl. As the sunlight strengthened, they noticed that some of the vegetation was already showing signs of withering. By the end of Ihe day, the desert would have reclaimed itself.

Mid-way through the morning, they stopped to eat and drink. Nabila again went through her dowsing routine.

‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ David tasked.

“Not really. But it can’t be that hard.’

Like a soldier detecting land mines, she swept her twigs back and forward across the sand. Suddenly, the twigs jerked in her hand and pulled down hard. She drew back and the twigs at once grew lifeless. Again she swept them over the narrow patch, and again they leaped,

‘David! Quickly, over here!’

He rushed over, and she handed the twigs to him.

‘Try it. Go on, see what happens.’

‘Where…’

‘Don’t worry about that. Just hold them like this and relax.’

Still sceptical, he walked in a straight line, holding the twigs in front of him. And suddenly they dipped, at the very spot Nabila had identified.

They fetched their shovels and dug down as far as they could. Because the tools had short handles, they were forced to make the hole as wide as possible, so they could climb down into it.

At five feet, they struck moisture; at six feet, cloudy water. Nabila dug a little further, and water gushed up, filling the bottom of the hole. She bent and scooped up a couple of handfuls of water, which she lifted to her mouth. Tilting her head back, she drank. A moment after, she choked and coughed and spat out every drop she could, and kept spitting and coughing, spitting and coughing.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

But Nabila could not answer. David bent and scooped up a little water and tasted it. He spat it out immediately, gagging. It wasn’t salty, as he’d thought, but utterly foul, as though a clear chemical had been substituted for the real thing.

He hurried to bring a flask of rainwater down to Nabila. She drank it in great gulps, then spat some out, and very slowly recovered.

They filled in the hole again, and sat beside it, sipping rainwater and slowly recovering from the effects of the water that had not been water.

‘Where did it come from?’ Nabila asked.

‘I’m not sure. But I’m willing to bet that the source is that way. In Karakhoto.’

They went on walking, like shadows passing between sand and sky. David sensed a terrible emptiness building inside him. He had achieved his goal, and there was nothing more to look forward to. He would die here, and that would be an end.

Shortly after noon, they reached a place unlike any other on the face of the planet. It began with small patches where the sand had turned black, or where something like pitch had been poured on to the surface. When David bent down to see what it was, he came up with what looked like an imperfect disc of plastic, rock hard, unbreakable.

The further they walked, the more complete the blackness grew. The landscape on every side now was flat, as though the dunes had melted away. David had often wondered in the past if anything could be more bleak or desolate than the desert; he had his answer here. The lands’cape through which they were walking was the bleakest on earth. It was as if the blackness had destroyed every trace of life.

About a mile off they could see some buildings. They trudged towards them, bowed down and subdued by the vista on every side.

‘What’s that over there?’ asked Nabila, pointing at a small structure a little off to their right.

They walked across. It turned out to be something like an outsized bus shelter, open on all sides, and without a roof. From what looked like ropes, several objects were hanging from a rod along the top, and resting on a sort of bench below. David went up to one of them. He had a good idea what they were, but he wanted to be sure. He took the knife and prised lumps of the black stuff away from the upper part.

As if emerging from behind a mask, a half-decayed human face appeared out of the black shell.

‘Leave it, David,’ Nabila urged. ‘We’ve seen enough.’

But he continued to chip away at the carapace, concentrating on the area of the chest. Underneath lay the grey cloth of a work camp prisoner’s uniform, and on it a strip of white cloth with numbers.

‘They used them as guinea pigs,’ he said, stepping away from the stand to which the men had been tied. There had been seven of them. Their hands had been fastened behind their backs. ‘Just tied them there and waited to see what would happen.’

Nabila was almost too preoccupied to hear anything he said. She was thinking about Kashgar. If she closed her eyes she could see the whole city turning the colour of ink, its people dead in the streets, its birds dead in the branches of black trees. The only colour was in the sky. There was no birdsong, no barking of dogs, no calling of the muezzins in their black minarets.

There were prisoners everywhere they walked now. Their bodies were black and twisted, as though a sculptor had tried to represent different types of agony, like stations of the Cross. David reckoned they were coming to some central point from which all this blackness had radiated. The buildings they had seen in the distance were only a few hundred yards away.

‘I think this must have been the real Karakhoto,’ David said. ‘These are all ruins.’

‘How do you know they weren’t made like this by the blast?’

‘Because there never was a blast. Not in the sense you mean. They didn’t intend to destroy the buildings, just to kill these poor bastards.’

‘Leaving the buildings intact.’

‘Not exactly. But they may already have a method for getting rid of this stuff.’

‘And what about the place where they make these bombs? Is it underneath here?’

‘It could be. I have to assume they need some form of air conditioning, and that they take in fresh air from up here. If we could find a vent.'

She looked round.

‘If they had vents, they’d never have risked coating them in this stuff. The complex must be further on.’

‘In which direction?’

‘If the link is with Lop Nor, it must be east of here.’

‘Wait here,’ he said.

He left his bergen with her, and went off, carrying only his binoculars. She watched him walk to the nearest ruin and vanish round the other side. A few minutes later, he reappeared on top of the far wall, and she could see him sweeping the ground in front with his glasses.

When he returned, he was sombre.

‘They’re camouflaged,’ he said, ‘but there’s no mistaking them. The first ones are about two miles away. Let’s get over there now. I want to take a reading on the GPS.’

Without dunes to cross, this last stage of their journey took only a short time. Nabila looked back from time to time, seeing again in the ancient city’s disfigurement the fate of her home and everyone in it she loved. David faced forward, determined to see through what he had started.

He knelt down at the first vent and put his ear to it. A dull humming noise rose from unguessable depths.

‘It’s operational,’ he said.

‘Couldn’t your people just parachute in some explosives? You could drop them down these vents. I’ve seen that sort of thing in films.’

He smiled ruefully, but shook his head.

‘Look at it,’ he said, looking out at the field across which vents were scattered. ‘It’s vast, and God knows how deep it is. Explosives would only tickle it. By the time I got to the second vent, they’d have a troop of their best security men up here.’

‘What can you do, then?’

‘Telephone the coordinates back to my base. They already have planes waiting at Dehra Dun in India. They’ll open the place up with two or three passes of carpet bombing, then penetrate the rest with nukes. It’s the only way, Nabila. Believe me.’

‘Dare I ask what’s supposed to happen to us?’

‘We start walking. If we’re very lucky, we’ll be out of range when they drop the bombs. If we’re too slow or they come in sooner, we won’t even know what hit us.’

‘And when do you think they’ll come in?’

‘Tonight,’ he answered, looking up at the sun as it pressed down towards the western horizon. ‘They’ll fly in very high, release very high, and get the hell out before the entire Chinese air force comes on their tails.’

She looked at him, agonized. There seemed to be nowhere in any of this for people.

‘They’re fighting a war,’ he said. ‘In order to stop a war.’

T
hey spent about an hour calculating the rough dimensions of the complex. When that was done and the GPS reference obtained, all that remained was for David to make his call.

‘Do you trust telephones?’ he asked as he swung up the Mobilfone’s lid.

‘No. What about you?’

He shook his head.

‘What if our problem back there wasn’t the tomb or the sand, but the phone itself?’

‘You can always call out an engineer.’

‘On what?’

‘Your other phone, of course.’

David picked up the receiver and slowly keyed in a number. His hand shook as he did so. He heard the key signals, then a long series of crackles, beeps, and buzzes that suggested he might be in business after all. Then silence. His heart sank. Please, he whispered, not after all this, not after coming so far. Not after what they did to Sam.

‘Welcome to Long Distance Communications,’ intoned a recorded message, a woman’s voice. ‘If you would like to speak to Vauxhall Central, press one. If you would like to speak to West Europe Desk, press two. If you would like to speak to East Europe Desk, press three. If you would like to speak to Africa Desk, press four…’