Walkers (40 page)

Inside the shop, it was gloomy and
hot, and smelled even more strongly of
kif.
The walls were lined with scores and scores of mahogany drawers, rather
like an old-fashioned apothecary’s, and each drawer was labelled in Arabic. A
long flypaper hung from the centre of the ceiling, and dozens of files buzzed
and struggled on it fitfully. Some of the flies had white heads, and Kasyx
realised that they were humans who had been genetically tangled up with insects
in the same way as that scientist in
The
Fly.
He remembered that Andrea and he had started to watch
The Fly
on late-night television once,
after coming home from a dinner party, and Andrea had switched it off, saying
how disgusting and puerile it was. Disgusting and puerile it may have been but
she had obviously remembered it.

They poked around the shop but there
was no sign of the white woman. Tebulot picked up a brass camel-bell from one
of the shelves, and shook it. Almost at once, a door opened at the back of the
shop, and two Arabs appeared, both wearing dark glasses. They were dressed in
green
striped jellabas,
and one of
them wore a fez.

‘We’re looking for a white woman who
passed through here,’ said Kasyx.

The Arab in the fez shook his head.
‘No white woman has passed through here, lord.’

‘There was a white woman. I saw her
myself.’

‘No white woman, lord. But there are
many white women at the
Hotel Delirium.’

‘One special white woman, the
dreamer of this dream,’ Kasyx insisted.

‘No, lord.’

‘Tebulot, Xaxxa, look in the back,’
said Kasyx.

‘No, lord! You may not look there!’
the Arab with the fez cried out, lifting both of his hands. ‘Why not?’ Kasyx
demanded.

‘Mektoub,
it
is written.’

Tebulot heaved his weapon off his
back, and tugged back the T-bar. ‘Sorry, buddy, but it’s just been unwritten.
Come on, Xaxxa, let’s go take a look.’

The Arab stared at them in
hostility.
‘Eshkoon?
Who are you?’

‘The dreamer of this dream knows who
we are,’ said Kasyx.

Tebulot and Xaxxa opened the door at
the back of the shop and went through to the corridor behind it. Kasyx said to
the Arabs, ‘Stay where you are,’ and followed them.

Tebulot had already reached a large
back room, windowless, lit only by
kinki
lamps
which hung suspended at different levels from the ceiling. At the side of the
room, almost in darkness, there was a bed, draped with a homespun woollen
blanket. On this, still fully dressed, but with her baggy
sarouel
pants drawn over to one side, the white woman lay, her eyes
closed. An Arab girl crouched between her legs, a tinker’s wife, a prostitute,
her tongue lapping furtively like a cat’s. The white woman’s solar topi rested
on a wooden table in the middle of the room, on which there were plates of
food, roasted spiced lamb and dates and
couscous.

A thin boy sat on the opposite side
of the room on a bright turquoise cushion, playing the full-bellied Arab lute
called a
gimbri.
The music was
hypnotic and repetitive, the same glissando over and over and over again, to
accompany the barely audible licking. Around the boy’s eyes, steadily feeding
on the moisture which oozed out of them, flies clung like living mascara.

Now Kasyx knew why the Arabs had
tried to prevent him from coming in here. They were the guardians of Andrea’s
innermost secret. No wonder his marriage had been so barren; no wonder he had
suffered four years of coldness and isolation. Andrea had lived in Morocco for
two years before she had taken up her appointment at Scripps. In Morocco she
must have found the forbidden pleasure and the secret satisfaction which she
was looking for; and she had never forgotten it.

Tebulot said uneasily, ‘What are you
going to do?’

But Kasyx had no time to reply. The
white woman on the bed had opened her eyes, and was staring at them, and in an
instant the room and the bed and the boy and the tinker’s wife had folded up
like figures in a child’s pop-up book, and shrunk out of sight, a rectangle of
patterned darkness flying in the wind. Instead of standing in the corridor at
the back of a shop, they were out in the desert, under a glaring sun, and there
was nothing but sand around them, wherever they looked.

‘What happened?’ asked Xaxxa.

‘My wife suddenly realised we were
there,’ said Kasyx.

‘Your ex-wife,’ Tebulot corrected
him.

Kasyx said,’ Yes, my ex-wife. And
judging by that, my wife that never really was.’

‘You don’t want to feel bad about
it, man,’ Xaxxa told him.

‘I don’t. I just feel embarrassed.’

They shielded their eyes against the
throbbing brightness of the desert, wondering which way they should go. There
were dunes upon dunes, ribbed by the wind and stretching for miles. And there
was that extraordinary sound that the desert made, as if it were a huge distant
dynamo, thrumming on and on and on. The sound of heat and distance and wind
blowing through
the foggara,
the
mysterious underground waterways that were built by the people of the Sahara in
the centuries before the white imperialists began to criss-cross the sand.

Then, one by one, twenty or thirty
horsemen appeared on the brow of a distant ridge, their outlines melted by the
rising heat so that they looked like a frieze cut out of thin black
tissue-paper. They paused for a minute or two, and while they did so, Kasyx
pressed his hand against his helmet and examined them close-up.

‘Can’t see their faces,’ he said.
‘They’re all draped around with muslin.’

‘Are they armed?’ asked Tebulot.

‘Muskets, of a kind,’ said Kasyx.
‘Hard to tell what sort of firepower they’ve got, though. Andrea never did like
guns. Maybe they’re just decorative.’

In an extraordinary way, the
sand-dunes in between the horsemen and the three Night Warriors began to move
up and down, in a kind of carousel-motion; and as they did so the ridge on
which the horsemen were standing was carried nearer and nearer, without the
horsemen actually having to ride. Within a very short space of time, the horsemen
were standing only fifteen feet away, silently, unmoving, their hands on their
saddle-pommels, their heads completely wrapped in
tegelmousts.

‘Allah akbar!’
the tallest of the horsemen proclaimed. ‘There is no other god but Allah
and Muhammad is his prophet!’

Kasyx stepped forward across the
sand, closely followed by Tebulot and Xaxxa.

‘We’re looking for a white girl,’ he
said. In the dry desert air – air which could turn the inside of a man’s nose
and throat into glasspaper, his crimson armour crackled even more loudly with
static electricity.

‘You are unbelievers,’ the horseman
retorted. ‘We have come to escort you away from the desert, and away from this
land.’

‘No way, Jose!’ said Tebulot. ‘We
came to look for our friend Samena, and we’re not leaving until we’ve got her.’

Without any further warning, the
horseman reached into the folds
of his
jellaba,
and whipped out a long curved sword.
‘Bismillah!’
he cried, his voice as harsh as a hawk’s, and spurred
his horse forwards. Behind him, there was a teeth-grating ring of steel against
steel, as twenty more swords were drawn from their scabbards. They flashed in
the desert sun like pieces of exploding glass.

Tebulot lifted his machine, and
fired a single heavy bolt of energy. There was a crack which echoed and
re-echoed across the desert, and the horseman flared up into an incendiary ball
of fire leaving nothing in the air but a smudge of black smoke. His horse
reared, and whinnied, and then broke into a thousand tiny bricks, which
scattered across the sand.
‘Allah akbar!
Allah akbar!’
shrieked the horsemen, and whipped their mounts towards the
Night Warriors. But now Tebulot set his machine to fire a multiple spray, and
with a deafening fusillade of pure power, a dozen horsemen burst into flames,
and their horses shattered beneath them. As Tebulot reset his weapon, Xaxxa
slid up and away to the left of the horsemen on a shining strip of energy,
pulling down his protective visor as he went. He curved thirty feet up into the
air, and then came streaking down towards the Arabs, his knees bent like a
champion surfer, his body immaculately balanced, and as he flashed past them he
punched and kicked in a flurry so fast that seven horsemen were hurtled off
their horses before they could even take a swing at him with their swords.

‘Night Warriors!’
he crowed, as he rode his energy-strip up again, and turned a loop high
in the desert air. Only three horsemen were left, and they were already yanking
at their reins and turning their horses around to make their escape. Xaxxa
whistled down on them as fast as a jet-fighter and drop-kicked the nearest of
the three, so that he was hurled headlong into his two companions. All three of
them collapsed on to the sand in a tangle of
jellabas
and flying limbs.

Tebulot methodically fired a single
short shot at each of the fallen horsemen. Their robes flared up one by one,
and they vanished. Puffs of smoke blew across the desert. Kasyx walked across
the sand, occasionally kicking one of the bricks which had so recently been
horses. From a hundred yards away, Xaxxa came slowly sailing back towards them,
six inches off the ground, holding his hands up above his head like a boxing
champion.

‘Who were those dudes?’ asked Xaxxa,
as he came to rest beside Tebulot. ‘Don’t tell me your wife sent them.’

‘Ex-wife,’
said
Kasyx. Then, ‘No, I don’t think she did.
Her
response to finding us inside her private dream was to hide, to run away.
These horsemen were aggressive, and ready to cut our heads off. They were sent
by the Devil, if you ask me. He may have used the Arabic vernacular of my
ex-wife’s dream, but I’m pretty sure that they were down to him.’

‘So he’s here somewhere,’ said
Tebulot. ‘The question is, where?’

‘He’s back in that Arab city, in my
opinion,’ Kasyx replied. ‘That’s where my ex-wife’s greatest guilt is located;
that’s the kind of place that a devil would find attractive.’

‘Question is, where is it?’ asked
Xaxxa. ‘I mean, she could even have stopped dreaming about it, in which case it
won’t even be there any more.’

But, strangely, they turned around
and the city was only a half-mile behind them.

Their thoughts about it must have
drawn it closer; which made Kasyx realise that no matter how substantial
anything appeared to be in a dream, it was really no more than a creation of
the dreamer’s imagination, and as such it could be moved and shifted and
switched on and off as easily as the image from a movie camera. Tebulot glanced
at him in surprise, but Kasyx said, ‘Come on, while we still have the chance.’

They entered the city by a wide
gate, at which crowds of leprous beggars sat and shook their wooden bowls for
dirhams.
Again they plunged into the
twisting alleyways, pushing their way through children, and merchants, and
hunched-up creatures in long
woollen
jellabas
that may not even have been human. They were almost about to give
up the search as hopeless, when a high, clear voice called out,

‘Lords! Are you seeking someone?’

They looked to their left. There was
a narrow alley between two buildings, cluttered with broken pottery and
discarded bedding. At the end of the alley, a stone staircase rose to a
green-painted door, and outside the door stood a pale, handsome boy in a simple
white robe and a white head-dress, beckoning them.

Kasyx stepped forward. ‘We seek a
white girl called Samena.’

‘She is here,’ the boy acknowledged.
He turned and glanced inside the half-open door, and then he beckoned.

‘Could be a trap,’ Tebulot
suggested, ‘don’t see that we have any alternative,’ said Kasyx.

‘Come on, man, they give us any
jive, we can always beat the shit out of them,’ added Xaxxa, enthusiastically.

‘This guy definitely thinks we’re
the A-Team,’ Tebulot complained.

Walking in Indian file, they went
down the alley and climbed the stairs. The boy held the door open for them, and
they could smell the strong cheap perfume that drenched his hair and his
clothes, a favourite in the Sahara,
Bint
es Sudan.
Inside the house, it was stuffy and gloomy. Decorative shutters
had been closed over the windows, so that only a few thin flower-patterns of
sunlight shone on the blue-and-yellow mosaic floor, and on the figures who sat
on heaps of dusty cushions around the walls.

One of the figures they recognised
immediately, and Kasyx felt a surge of sheer relief. It was Samena –
blindfolded and gagged, with her hands bound behind her back, but apparently
safe and well. The other two figures were unknown to him. A fat European,
unshaved, in a grimy white suit; a young man, with his face covered in a muslin
tegelmoust;
and an older man, thin
and elegant, who could have been either Moroccan or European, wearing a
combination of tailored grey Savile Row jacket and baggy
sarouel
trousers. He was smoking a thin clay-headed
sebsi,
a
kif
pipe, and the stony blankness of his eyes showed that his mind
had already retreated into the dream within a dream.