The Tower (30 page)

From outside came the cries of camel drivers from a caravan that had got as far as that lonely outpost and were drawing water for themselves and their exhausted animals. The aeroplane that had brought Father Hogan to Bir Akkar was lifting off at that very moment against the setting sun. It made a wide turn and headed north. The young priest followed it for a while with his eyes and, when he saw it disappear into the twilight, he felt his heart sink.

‘I’d prefer to talk about it another time,’ he said.

S
ELZNICK’S COLUMN
advanced through the blinding light of the Arabian desert, over a flat, uniform expanse in an absolutely motionless atmosphere. There was not a single well on the entire route to Jebel Gafar, and both the men and the animals were still drinking sparingly the water drawn from the well at Petra.

One of his bedouins belonged to a tribe from the south and had fought against the Turks in the last war. He knew the way to Jebel Gafar although he had never been that far. No caravan routes passed through the place, and there was said to be no water on the way in or on any of the ways out.

When they came within view of the first heights, Selznick assembled the men and had them split into a number of small groups, both so that they’d be less noticeable to anyone who might be in the area and so that they could take off in different directions to search for an object that he described to them carefully: a tower topped by a winged horse.

Selznick waited in a gorge between two hills where the erosion had created deep furrows that provided a little shade in the oblique rays of the setting sun. One by one, the squads returned to report that they had seen nothing corresponding to his description. These men were trained to discern every last detail of the desert terrain, and there was no reason to doubt their judgement. If Desmond Garrett was still alive upon their return, he would pay for this idiotic prank.

Selznick decided nonetheless to spend the night there and make another attempt the following morning. The night sky was extraordinarily clear and a full moon was rising on the western horizon, flooding the plain with a crystalline glow that highlighted every stone and rock on the uniform backdrop of the vast dusty wasteland. He distanced himself from the men, who were gathered around the campfire, well aware that the sight of his solitary figure would inspire fear in them, and rode up towards the hills of Jebel Gafar to observe the lunar landscape.

It was then that he noticed something strange at a distance of about a kilometre, where the hillside had eroded into a shape that looked rather like an amphitheatre. The ochre-coloured surface layers had crumbled, revealing a chalky layer underneath which, in the light of day, reflected an indistinct, glaring whiteness. But the low, oblique rays of the moon brought out a series of pinnacles sculpted by the wind and the rare winter rains. One of them, in particular, seemed to have too regular a shape to have been created by nature.

He made his way closer, sheltered by a rocky ridge that separated him from the object of his curiosity. When he was near enough he left his horse and approached on foot, moving in such a way as not to be seen and confident that the tan colour of his uniform would blend in well with the sand.

He climbed over the one last hillock that had been blocking his view and found himself in front of a cylindrical construction built of dry blocks of stone taken from the mountain behind it and thus of the same white colour, making it undistinguishable under the direct light of the sun. The top of the tower had partially collapsed, making its shape even less apparent, but at its centre was a figure that had been corroded over time by the elements but was still recognizable: a winged horse on its hind legs, supported by a brace that the ancient artist had crafted to look like a rock on which its front legs rested.

Selznick wanted to shout out in that empty immensity, to cry out in victory and triumph. He had finally found what he had been seeking for so many years. And he had made it there first, suffering more than anyone else, fighting longer, overcoming hunger and thirst and the proximity of the coarse and stupidly ferocious beings he’d had to surround himself with. He dropped down to the ground and took out his binoculars to examine the top of the tower, but what he saw left him astonished and furious. There were armed men on the bastions and for a moment he thought he could make out a woman as well.

He shook his head in dismay and mentally counted his men: not enough for a frontal assault. Just then, more men on horseback appeared at the base of the tower on one side, raising a white cloud of dust under the moon. There were at least thirty of them, well armed and in a compact formation. They were patrolling the surrounding territory.

Selznick returned to his camp and ordered his men to extinguish the fire they had built with a little wood they’d found on the bottom of a wadi and to seek shelter wherever they could. He found a point from which he could observe the tower and again he thought he saw a woman walking on the bastions and then disappearing.

S
HE WENT DOWN THE STAIRS
to a walkway that encircled the tower’s inner courtyard and provided access to the rooms all around it. She went into her room, a plain bare space with solid stone walls. One corner of the room was covered with carpets and blankets, while another had a number of cushions arranged around a copper plate holding bedouin bread and a clay water jug. Next to the door was a rack with rifles, sabres and pikes and a round shield of damascened steel. The room was lit only by the reflected moonlight on the white limestone walls.

Her attention was suddenly attracted by a clear but very soft noise, barely perceptible, coming from outside. She leaned out of the narrow window and started. A man had tossed a rope onto the bastions and was climbing up the shadowed part of the outer wall. She instinctively ran to the weapons rack and seized a rifle. She aimed at the man, who was close now to the parapet, but something stopped her finger from pulling the trigger, a presentiment. The intruder swung out of the shadowy area and turned to face her. It was Philip!

The woman dropped the gun and ran out of the door to the stairs and the upper walkway just in time to call the guard. ‘I heard a suspicious noise coming from over there,’ she said. ‘Go and check.’

The sentry rushed off in the opposite direction and she reached the spot on the bastions where the rope was hanging from a hook jammed into a crack between two stone blocks, just as Philip grasped the parapet to hoist himself over the side. He was rooted to the spot at the shock of seeing her in front of him.

‘Oh, my God! Is that you?’

She pulled him away from the guard’s range of vision. ‘You’re mad!’ she said. ‘Why did you do it? You might have died . . . You may die still.’ Philip could hear a deep note of anguish in her words. ‘Follow me, quickly,’ she said, and led him down the stairs to the lower walkway and to her room. Panting, she closed the heavy door behind her.

Philip held her close in a feverish embrace, as though he feared she might once again vanish without warning. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘What is this place?’

The woman shook her head.

‘This is the place I was searching for, that my father is searching for, isn’t it? Tell me, you must tell me. You can’t deny me an answer. It was you who had me come all this way.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s not true. I didn’t want to see you again.’

But Philip felt her trembling in his arms. He pulled the winged-horse pendant out of his bag. ‘You’re lying,’ he said. ‘This is yours and you put it in here that night in Aleppo. The name of this place is carved right here. You wanted me to come here.’

‘No, this is not what I wanted to happen,’ said the woman. ‘I thought I would be long gone from here by the time you arrived. But unfortunately, that’s not the way it went. I was forced to stop here, to wait . . . That’s the only reason you found me here.’

She spoke resolutely, staring right into his eyes with such a steady look that Philip felt lost once again.

‘But then . . . why? Why did you want me to risk my life to find this desolate place . . . Just so that I would find what I was looking for?’

The woman nodded.

‘That’s not possible. I don’t believe you. You would have left this place without waiting for me, knowing you’d never see me again?’

She raised her eyes to his and they were moist and so dark that Philip felt seized by sudden dizziness. ‘My life . . . it’s not up to me, Philip,’ she said again.

‘But right now it is up to you. Your beauty is a treasure and you can do as you like. But don’t reject me, I beg of you. If you do, I’ll go right out onto those bastions. I won’t hide and I won’t defend myself. I heard you call my name for the first time,’ he said. ‘Let me say yours, please, now.’

‘Arad.’

‘Arad,’ he repeated, as if he were saying a magical word capable of opening a door that had always been closed to him.

The palms of her hands had been on his chest, but now she let them slip up to his shoulders and around his neck. Philip felt a rush of blood shooting through his veins like a river of fire. He kissed her lips, warm and sweet as fruit in the sun. She responded to his kiss and pressed against him, and Philip trembled with indescribable emotion. He caressed her thighs and her stomach and her magnificent breasts. He undressed her and contemplated her body in the moonlight as she opened her arms to him. He embraced her, awed by the paleness of his skin against her dark beauty.

She climbed on top of his body and towered over him for an instant like a black idol, like a goddess sculpted in basalt. Then she took his hands and placed them on her hips so he could guide their surging dance, long and lingering in the lunar silence. He followed her every move, sought her in every sigh, every shiver. He touched every centimetre of her splendid skin until the slow, majestic roll of her hips turned into a paroxysmal tremor. He responded hard and violent then, inebriated by the odour of that primordial woman, that black Eve born of mystery. He drew her in beneath him and clasped her in a frenetic embrace, sinking into her torrid flesh and escaping the world and the desert and the whitewashed walls of that lonely tower. He fled far, far away, soaring into the light of the moon like a wayfaring spirit, a quivering Pegasus, flying over the dunes and mountains, over the empty silent plains, all the way to the white foam of a remote sea . . . Then he fell, collapsing into her warm dampness and her still-panting breath. He was exhausted, his mind lost in the abyss of her black shining eyes. They slept.

T
HE DISTANT SOUND
of a gallop shook her from a deep sleep and Arad leapt to her knees, limbs taut, like a lioness ready to strike. She ran to the window and saw a long wake of dust with the tips of spears glittering here and there in the moonlight, gun barrels as well. A large purple standard was fluttering in the wind against the light blue of long cloaks. She ran back to the bed, where Philip was still lost in sleep. She shook him hard to wake him. ‘Hurry, you must leave immediately. If they find you here, they’ll kill you.’

‘Who? Who wants me dead? Selznick? He’s been searching for this place just as I have. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? The man who was after me in Aleppo. I’m not afraid of him. I won’t go.’

Arad dragged him to the window. ‘Do you see them? They are the ones who will kill you if you don’t go. I can’t explain it all now, but I swear to you, they’ll kill you without a moment’s hesitation.’

‘I don’t want to lose you again. I’m staying.’

‘They’ll kill me as well. Is that what you want? You must go, Philip! Listen to me. If my destiny allows it, I will search for you and I will find you, wherever you are, because it’s true, I lied to you. I left that jewel so that you would join me here, but I thought I would be alone. Destiny has decided otherwise. Come with me, come right now, I beg of you.’

‘There’s one thing,’ said Philip. ‘I left something in Aleppo, a little silver musical instrument, in my uniform. I have to have it.’

‘Your uniform,’ murmured the woman. ‘I kept it to remember you by, to remember the way you smell . . .’ She rummaged through a sack and Philip heard a silvery ringing. The sistrum shone a moment later between her long fingers.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for saving it for me.’

The galloping was closer now. They could hear pounding hooves, neighing, men shouting.

‘Follow me,’ said Arad.

She led him down a small spiral staircase on the inside wall that ended in a hidden cell closed by a hatch. As Philip was making his way further down, she let the hatch fall behind him and bolted it shut.

‘Forgive me,’ she said, ‘but this is the only way to save your life. Someone will come to open the hatch in two days and you’ll be free. Farewell.’

Philip pounded his fists furiously against the hatch, but no one was there to hear. Arad was already on the upper walkway, leaning over the courtyard, when the gate burst open and a large group of warriors surged in. At their head was Amir.

‘I’ve been deprived of your beauty for too long, Arad,’ he called up in greeting. ‘I couldn’t wait to see you. I hope you are well.’

‘I am well, Amir. And I too am happy to see you.’ She went down to the courtyard as the men drew water for themselves and their horses from the well at its centre.

Amir drew closer. ‘The moment is near, my lady. Five weeks from today the cycle of the constellations will be complete and the light of knowledge will shine resplendent on the Sand of Ghosts and on the Tower of Solitude. The queen will be healed.

‘The time to take the treasure has come. I have already procured an enormous quantity of naphtha from the Caldaean merchants and it is on its way to the sea. A consignment of weapons – the most modern and deadly that money can buy – are arriving from Tartous, and invincible blades are being forged in Damascus as I speak. Now we must take the gold we need to pay for these things. But there is something else you must take from the treasure chamber: the standard of the black queens. We have practised for the trial that awaits us thousands of times. We cannot fail. If you succeed, if your key strikes at the same moment that mine does, the door will open and the standard will be yours. You will perpetuate your dynasty, and I will kneel at your feet, should you wish to cast your eyes upon me.’