The Age of Ra

6. Caravan

The camels spat and grumbled, and the children laughed harshly and thrashed them all the harder with their switches. In a long line the beasts of burden picked their way across the desert, with a straggle of goats bleating behind. Their young drivers showed them little mercy.

Occasionally, during a rest stop, one of the fouler-tempered camels might take its revenge and bite. The children seemed to find this funny too. The bitten boy — it was always a boy — would giggle, rub the spot where the camel had sunk its teeth in, then turn on the offending animal and thrash it soundly. It was as if pain, giving it and receiving it, was all a game to them.

The adults of the Bedouin goum were no less hardy. They thought nothing of sitting ten, twelve hours in the saddle, remaining perfectly upright despite the swaying, arrhythmic lurch of the camels' motion. Their faces were imperturbable, their skin as finely folded as parchment maps, their eyes full of distance. During travel only the men spoke, and when they did, which was not often, it was to bark an order at the children or make some dusty, sardonic comment to which only the other men were expected to respond.

The women never spoke. At least, not in David's presence, although at night he heard voices coming from their tents and the sound was soft and tinkling, as refreshing as a drink of cool spring water.

This family tribe of Bedouin weren't just nomads, they were also merchants. Three of the camels did not carry people but had strongboxes hanging from their sides, two apiece. Whatever was inside the padlocked steel containers, which were stamped with hieroglyphs, was heavy and clinked metallically. These camels were the first to be unloaded each evening, and the strongboxes were kept overnight in a special tent guarded by men with rifles.

Jewellery? Weapons? Gold coins? Valuable merchandise of some sort, to be traded at the caravan's final destination.

David himself was valuable merchandise too. The ropes binding him told him this, as did the fact that he was never left on his own for a moment. When he needed to relieve himself he was always escorted by at least one armed guard, usually two, and when he was up in the saddle his wrists were secured tightly to the pommel so that he couldn't slide off even by accident. He was fed and he was given water, just enough to hold body and ka together, and he knew that the Bedouin wouldn't be keeping him alive if they didn't feel he was worth something to them. It would be a waste of precious provisions otherwise.

His memory was hazy, the recent past a blur, but little by little he pieced together what had happened.

The ba lance had slipped from his grasp at the crucial moment and the shot had gone astray. There had been a victim, but it was not him. Blood had been shed, but not his. The Bedouin caravan had been approaching just as he made his suicide attempt. He had been too preoccupied to hear, and he had, by some drastic fluke, killed not himself but the caravan's lead camel.

The sheikh of the tribe had finally managed, after several attempts, to explain this sorry mishap to him. David knew a smattering of Arabic, but these Bedouin used an unfamiliar dialect, one which had cross-pollinated with some glottal sub-Saharan language. With gesture and dumbshow the sheikh showed him a camel keeling over, and brandished the spent lance to make the point that this was the murder weapon.

So David had deprived them of a camel, and to make up for it they were going to have to sell him somehow. They seemed to have a buyer in mind.

''Osiris!'' The sheikh indicated the embroidered emblem which made up part of David's battledress, a pair of phoenix wings enfolding his chest in a feathery embrace. Then the sheikh waved an arm in a southerly direction. ''Nephthys! Khartoum!''

David pondered escape. How to do it? He was never alone, never untied, watched at all times by his captors (although ''owners'' might be a more accurate description). Opportunities to make a bid for freedom seemed few and far between.

Then there was the desert. It was a kind of open-plan jail. Even if he managed to get away from the merchants, perhaps by making a desperate dash while someone's back was turned, he would only end up lost in the wilderness again. It had nearly destroyed him the last time. It would definitely do so this time.

Grabbing a gun, taking a hostage, demanding to be released?

Same problem. Where would he go?

Only one possible solution offered itself.

Steal a camel.

At night he shared a tent with six other men and four boys. It was a thing of rugs and striped blankets, cosy in its way, like a woven-walled room. David's designated sleeping space was right in the middle, and he had to lie there and make himself as comfortable as he could with his wrists tethered to one of the central upright poles, which was embedded in the ground between two of the rugs.

The smell inside the tent was noisome. One of the men did nothing but fart all night long, and all of them, including David, reeked of sweat and bad feet. The noise was pretty noisome too, since there seemed to be a competition going on to see who could snore the loudest. If predators were roaming out there in the dark, it wasn't the light of the camel-dung campfire that would keep them at bay, it was the raucous massed snoring of the people.

It was horribly reminiscent of a boarding school dormitory. There was even buggery. Almost every night, during the small hours, David would be woken up by the sound of a certain man forcing himself on one of the boys. He would have to listen to several minutes of furtive grunting and groaning, followed by a slap which was presumably intended to remind the unwilling participant to keep quiet about what had been done to him. The boy would then, often as not, cry himself to sleep.

David knew who the rapist was. The man slept in the far right-hand corner of the tent and was a sort of semi-detached uncle, high up in the tribal hierarchy and a close confidant of the sheikh. In other words, too important to be called to account for his misdeeds, even if someone in the goum were to pluck up the nerve to denounce him. He had a twisted nose and a lush moustache and had somehow contrived to lose teeth in a diagonally alternating pattern, so that his smile resembled two rows of a chessboard. David would happily knock out all of the other teeth if the chance ever came.

But escape was his priority and he could let nothing interfere with that. Having settled on a plan, he bided his time, waiting till a moonless night came. By now he had recovered from his ordeal in Southern Arabia and regained much of his strength. The caravan had turned due south, and if Khartoum was where they were headed then that put them firmly in Freegypt, between the Nile and the Red Sea. This was the time to get away, before they crossed the border into the Sudan and were back on Nephthysian soil.

His hands were tied back to back, preventing him from reaching the knots with his fingers. There was nothing to stop him, though, from gnawing at them with his teeth.

It was a painstaking process, and at one point a pains-giving process, when a tooth that had been loosened during his beating by the Nephthysians, an upper molar, suddenly fell out. There was a tearing sensation in his gum, and what felt like a jolt of electricity went shooting up through his jaw into his sinuses. He stifled a scream. Blood filled his mouth, and he spat and spat until the wound sealed itself.

Then, in a somewhat more gingerly fashion, he resumed gnawing.

Around him the nocturnal cacophony of farts and snores continued. He froze as a man shouted out something. He'd been spotted. The game was up.

But the shout subsided to a murmur, then a smacking of the lips, a snuffle, then the man was snoring again.

Finally, the knots came loose.

He was free.

Well, almost.

He got up and tiptoed over slumbering bodies that he could barely see in the dark. He trod on someone's hand and expected a yelp of protest, but it was one of the boys and they slept more deeply than the men and were accustomed to physical abuse besides. The boy mumbled, David shushed him, and the boy rolled over and went back to sleep.

He reached the tent flap and eased himself through.

Firelight flickered, revealing all seven of the goum's tents arranged in a semicircle. The goats were clustered at the mouth of the semicircle, and beyond them were the camels, lying with their legs folded under them, spectrally pale, like mountains on a horizon.

To David's left lay the tent where the valuable merchandise was stored. The men on guard looked drowsy. Their rifles drooped towards the earth.

He couldn't risk sneaking past them, however. He would have to circumnavigate the camp and come at the camels from the far side.

He crept away from the campfire, out into the indigo dark. The terrain the caravan was crossing had changed recently. The landscape was no longer rocks and hard-packed earth, but sand, nothing but sand. Scooped, ribbed, undulating, supple sand, mile upon mile of it, wave upon wave. Sand that got everywhere: in your socks, in your hair, up your nose. David had even found grains of it under his foreskin.

Keeping the tents to his right he went in a broad semicircle, slithery-footed on the dune slopes. Finally he began his approach on the camels. He had already singled out the one he was going to take: an elderly male, so beaten and worn down that there was no more obstinacy left in it. This docile creature would, he reckoned, accept an inexperienced rider at the reins and not try to throw him off at the first opportunity.

He checked the sleepy guards again. As he looked, one of them gave in completely to tiredness and slumped to the ground. The man ended up in a sitting position, head bowed over the rifle in his lap.

The other guard turned and eyed his colleague. He muttered something to him, then went over and nudged him with a toe. The sleeping man didn't stir. Another, firmer toe-nudge sent him tumbling over onto his side in a loose heap. The second guard bent and rapped him on the cheek. He looked closer. He straightened up in alarm.

Then David heard it: a soft twang. It came from out in the darkness.

At the same moment, he saw the guard clutch his neck and reel. The rifle fell to the sand with a muffled thud. A second later, and no less quietly, the guard fell too.

David hunched down and felt his heart rate pick up and the world grow slow around him. Figures appeared at the periphery of his vision, a couple of dozen of them descending from the brows of the dunes and stealing towards the camp. They wore form-fitting black and moved in two-by-two formation, each pair swapping the lead with another pair. Their weapons, as far as he could tell, were pistols and short-stemmed crossbows, strictly not ba tech.

The first two raiders to reach the camp inspected the downed guards, then signalled the all-clear. The rest came padding in and set up a perimeter around the tent entrance. The camels made a few uneasy grumbles, but the black-clad raiders were so silent and precise in their actions that the beasts weren't unduly disturbed. Two of the raiders went into the tent and came out with one of the strongboxes. They carried it carefully between them, holding it perfectly level. Another two went in, and another. Soon all six strongboxes had been retrieved and the raiders got ready to pull out from the camp with their booty.

Then two things happened at once.

The first was that David felt the barrel of a gun being pressed against the back of his neck.

The second was that a Bedouin man emerged from the tent next door to the one where the strongboxes were kept.

The raiders froze. As did David, for a different reason.

''Stay still,'' whispered a voice behind him. ''Do not speak. Do not even breathe. Or I put a bullet in you.''

Meanwhile the Bedouin hitched up his robes and began to relieve himself on the sand. He glanced casually around him and spotted the raiders crouching by the adjacent tent. His urine trickled to a halt mid-flow, spattering onto his feet.

One of the raiders rose and aimed a pistol at the Bedouin, who would no doubt have lifted his hands in surrender if he had been less startled and if his hands had been clasping anything less crucial.

''Shoot,'' the voice behind David hissed urgently, although the man with the pistol could not possibly have heard. ''You have a silencer. Shoot the bastard.''

Gunmetal ground into David's nape, and he prayed that if a trigger was going to be pulled in the next few seconds, it wouldn't be this one.

Over in the camp the Bedouin gaped at the raider, while the raider seemed hesitant, unsure whether or not to fire on an unarmed man.

Then the Bedouin let out a beseeching cry.

Then the pistol went off, with an almost apologetic pfft.

The Bedouin collapsed. But his cry had been enough. Other Bedouin were roused from their tents. They staggered blearily outside, took stock of the situation. Rifles appeared.

The person holding David at gunpoint yelled out an order in Arabic: ''Fall back! Fall back!'' Now he knew for sure what he had suspected before, that it was a woman. Her voice, when low, had been husky, of indeterminate gender, but when raised it was clearly, unmistakably, and authoritatively, female.

The raiders obeyed, laying down fire as they retreated with the strongboxes. The Bedouin answered with a volley of bullets, trumping the handguns' silencer-suppressed pops with sharp, loud rifle cracks. Their weapons had greater range and velocity, not to mention accuracy. The raiders started dropping. Meanwhile, the camels upped and fled in terror.

The woman behind David cursed. He heard the rasping squelch of a walkie-talkie channel being opened. The woman barked a command, and somewhere far off a car engine started up. Headlight beams forked through the darkness as the engine revved, getting rapidly louder.

Muzzle flashes flickered in the camp like firefly phosphorescence. Gun smoke drifted. The Bedouin had the majority of the raiders pinned down and were blazing away at them without let-up. The strongboxes had been dropped and the raiders were concentrating on self-defence. Plunder was no longer as important as survival.

Then, cresting a dune with a raucous diesel roar, came a jeep. It skidded to a halt fifty metres from the camp. A man sprang from the passenger seat and clambered back onto the flatbed, where a heavy-calibre machine gun was mounted on swivel bearings. He took up position at the machine gun's controls and started firing. Belt-fed rounds chugged into the chamber and were spat out at the camp, striking sand, tents, and Bedouin indiscriminately. The Bedouin took cover, returning fire as best they could. Several of their shots ricocheted off the jeep, but the machine gun's burping stutter continued unabated. David watched with increasing dismay as the tents again and again fell within its veering arc of discharge, their sides flapping and ripping under the bullet impacts.

Finally he couldn't help himself. ''Stop,'' he told the woman. ''Tell them to stop. There are women and children in those tents.''

Just a brief hesitation, then she said, ''So? I do not care.''

''Well, I fucking do.''

David leapt to his feet, heedless of the woman and her gun.

''Take one step towards that jeep,'' she warned, ''and I will…''

Ignoring her, he ran headlong into the camp. All the way he expected to feel the smack of a bullet impact in his back. It didn't come. Perhaps the woman had decided that if he wasn't going for the jeep then he couldn't do any harm. Besides, down in the camp there were enough stray bullets flying around to do the job for her.

He lunged into one of the women's tents. There was shrieking and wailing inside, and he saw a wizened grandmother, possibly the oldest person in the goum, lying on the rugs with half her face missing. A middle-aged woman was prone over the corpse, sobbing. Others were hoisting up the back of the tent to create a gap to crawl out through. David bent and helped. The girls went first, then their mothers. He urged them to run, go as far as they could as fast as they could into the darkness. They didn't understand his words but they understood his tone. He grabbed the mourning woman and shoved her through the gap. Waiting arms on the other side seized her and bundled her away to safety.

Ducking low, David made for the next tent in line, which happened to be ''his'' tent.

Only the boys remained inside — and Uncle Chessboard Smile. He was on his knees, holding two of the boys to his chest and cowering behind them. They boys protested and squirmed but Uncle Chessboard Smile had a grip like iron. His human shield wasn't going anywhere.

Bullets whanged and thwacked through the tent's blanket walls. David made a dive for Chessboard, locking an arm around his neck. The Bedouin let go of the boys in order to reach backwards and grapple with David. He clawed at David's face, but he was not the only one with a grip like iron. David clung on, tightening the hold, pushing Chessboard's head forward with one arm and crushing his windpipe with the other. The two boys weighed in to help, grabbing their rapist relative's flailing hands. Chessboard choked and gurgled. His efforts to resist grew feebler. His eyes bugged. His tongue bulged. David did not let up until he heard and smelled bowels loosening. Then, to make doubly certain Chessboard was dead, he twisted the man's neck till it snapped.

Having seen the boys safely out of the camp, David prepared to move to the next tent. Then he noticed that the gunfire had slackened off. The rifles were shooting infrequently and the machine gun wasn't shooting at all. He surveyed the scene. The raiders appeared to have withdrawn completely. He couldn't see them or the jeep anywhere. They were gone, along with the strongboxes. The Bedouin were firing blind into the darkness, more in anger than in the hope of hitting anything.

It was time for him to make a getaway as well. David loped off into the dunes, intending to lie low for a while, then go in search of a camel. The beasts, though terrified, would not have gone far. They were too tame, too institutionalised, to want to live wild. Once everything was calm again, they might well begin to drift back towards the camp. He would intercept them before they go there.

A figure appeared in front of him, a black silhouette like a shadow.

''You,'' said the woman who had held him at gunpoint. She was holding him at gunpoint again. ''A choice. Come with me or I kill you.''

Her eyes glinted in the distant light of the campfire, as did the barrel of her pistol.

David weighed his options, such as they were.

''I'll come with you,'' he said, as though it was a decision.