by David Poyer
“Primarily just now we map them.”
“Why do you map them?”
She found this line of questioning both tedious and disturbing. Assad seemed to be probing for some deeper motivation. As if he suspected she was hiding some . . . secret. A drop of sweat rolled down her back.
Could he know?
Impossible. Not even at the ministry had she dropped the slightest hint. She held his eyes until they slid aside. He was sweating too.
Someone fired a shot outside. A flat bark that ebbed away over the desert. “Abdiwali,” she muttered. Bolting to the trailer door, shouldering Assad aside, she threw it open.
To a blaze of light and heat like the flare of a welding machine. The major’s guards stood a few yards off, aiming at stones piled one atop another. Another shot snapped out. It went wide by five feet, and the men laughed, the shooter too. She squinted around. Her assistant was far off down the road, headed toward the village.
“Why do you map them?” Assad repeated, behind her. She smelled musky sweat and dust and a distinctive scent. Qat, though he wasn’t chewing it at the moment.
She lost patience. Would she ever understand this country? “I map them because that’s my job. What’s yours, Major? Why are you here bothering me? You know I can pick up my cell and call the president’s office, don’t you?”
“Oh, you can call. Maybe you can call the president himself, yes? But will anyone answer?”
“What do you mean? ‘Will anyone answer’—”
Assad pushed by before she’d assimilated his sentence. “I apologize for ‘bothering’ you. Perhaps the next time we meet I will convince you of my importance.” He stalked toward his vehicle, shouting at the men, who abandoned their game and ambled to join him.
. . .
WHEN he was gone she drank down a cup of water, then another. The plastic gave it a musty taste. She stabbed at the air conditioner, but it was already at max. “Feck,” she muttered. She threw the cup across the trailer, then grabbed her bush hat and stomped out.
Behind the trailer, at the edge of the gorge. Below her vultures pushed and cawed and fought; something dead must lie down there in the brush. More circled above the compound, cocking an eye her way each time they banked past.
She stood at the edge of an immense emptiness. Miles stretched from the tips of her black Blunnies to where the Western Mountains rose purple and lavender, and beyond them the frost-capped heads of the far Mahawayo. She came here when the stupidity and arrogance became too outrageous. She had no patience. Her mother had told her this when she was small. She saw no signs she’d ever changed.
The gorge was dry, with eroding layers of buff and ruddy sedimentary rock, volcanic ash, and central basin dioctahedral clays. She’d always expected it to yield the bones of tiny protohumans, primordial hairy East African leprechauns, half simian, half hominid. Like Olduvai. Two years ago a small team had come in from Stony Brook, not well funded, and she’d tried to persuade Tim White and Berhane Asfaw to come after that, but they’d refused, said there were no indications. She squinted at the crumbling soil for anything that might be ancient bone. It was supposed to turn almost black, stained with minerals. She was a hydrogeologist, but she’d always wondered about hominids. If you knew where there was water once, wouldn’t that have been where the buggers gathered?
This desert reassured her it didn’t matter, what human beings did now. What folly and crime. How many millions died, of fever, disease, starvation, war. They’d lived in East Africa for four and a half million years. And they’d still be here long after she was gone.
WHEN she went back in an icon pulsed on the screen. She was back online, and she had a message. In a mailbox she didn’t share with Abdiwali, that no one in Ashaara or even at the UN had access to.
She hesitated, hand on the mouse. Got up, checked that the trailer door was locked, and sat again. “Face the music, O’Shea,” she whispered. Typed in the password, double-clicked, and sucked a breath as the message opened.
It was from Sweden.
Ratios of dissolved salts in the four samples submitted were compared. All samples contained a low but consistent content CaSO4 and MgSO4. Ratio of dissolved salts and percentage of sulfate content support the hypothesis of common source.
Isotope analysis: Deuterium excess from the four samples:
Sample A - 21.41
Sample B - 21.38
Sample C - 21.41
Sample D - 21.62
All samples fall near the Levant meteoric line confirming original pluvial derivation from within the Mediterranean basin. Conformity of sample confirms sulfate analysis, again supporting the hypothesis of a common source paleowater deposit dating to 30K BCE. However data on supply and recharge rates are not adequate to speculate on size of common recoverable aquifer as proposed in the letter accompanying samples.
To clarify this further data collection is suggested at the following locations and depths . . .
She exhaled, letting tension ooze out of her fingertips, evaporate out of her wet scalp. Stress she’d carried for months. She felt weak, then immensely strong.
It was there.
But with the same thought came the knowledge: it was superlatively dangerous.
She moved to print out the e-mail, then lifted her fingers from the keys. Instead she closed that window and brought up another file.
A jagged, waist-pinched Ashaara stretched three hundred miles inland from the Red Sea, sticking its elbow deep into Sudan. Just under five hundred miles north to south, it looked like an outline of a human knee, the port of Ashaara City perched at the kneecap. Two river systems bisected it, streaming, at least in good times, toward the Red Sea from the Western Mountains. The red lines of the road network were disappointingly sparse, though not as disappointing as in reality, since whole sections had degenerated into sloughs of mud, dust, or loose stones. The south had been the most fertile region, orchards and farms during Italian times. It had produced agricultural surpluses until collectivization, when the brief but brutal rule of the aptly named Morgue had broken the Bantu and Ashaari farmers.
But she wasn’t looking there, but north, to what was perhaps the most striking feature of the whole country.
Haunt of djinns and nomads, repository of myth and legend, the Empty Quarter meant nightmare and death for outsiders. Endless desert, dunes, salt flats; only a few nomad encampments mapped by the British during the Second World War dotted its forty-thousand-square-mile expanse. It was into the dreaded Quartier Vide that the Austrian archaeologist Karl Von Zirkel had disappeared in 1894, seeking a lost city mentioned by the early Coptic Fathers. It was from the Quartier Vide that the infamous Sheikh Dahir had harried the French in the twenties, until their planes wiped out his tribesmen with mustard gas. To this day small bands of indigènes roamed its wastes, nomading from seepage to seepage, or hand-dug oasis wells fed by shallow groundwater tables under the dunes.
Tabbing back and forth from her e-mail to the map, she etched numbers beside symbols. Gradually they formed a vast dotted-line oval that stretched to the Western Mountains, nearly to the Red Sea, and across the Sudanese border. The eastern one was marked A. The western, C. The northern, B. The southern, a few miles north of where this trailer sat, was marked D.
The numbers matched the sample names of the results from Sweden.
She saved this in a hidden folder, one invisible to a casual user. Then erased the e-mail from her in-queue. She sat back, blotting her cheeks with a tissue from a dried-out container of wet wipes.
It was real.
What Costa Kyriazis had intuited, and died wondering about. What she’d suspected, inspecting photos taken from space, but never been able to prove.
What had been found before in Libya, in the Sinai, in other regions considered arid and uninhabitable for all recorded history.
The samples she’d sent to Scandinavia had come from wells or artesian seeps at widely separated locations. Yet chemically and isotopically, they were the same.
Which meant they came from the same source, and the same era—an epoch thirty thousand years in the past.
Hundreds of meters beneath the Empty Quarter, in the porous Nubian sandstone that stretched from the Mediterranean deep into Africa, lay a reservoir of “fossil” water. An underground aquifer, a primeval lake. She’d proved it existed, but not how large it was. Perhaps enough to irrigate all Ashaara for decades. Maybe centuries, if the watery lens was thick enough. But only drilling would answer that question.
A more fabulous hoard than any legend of genies and gold. An unexpected, long-sequestered treasure. A secret that, once revealed, could lead to a secure and fertile future for an entire region prone to chronic drought and famine—or to war, mass murder, and genocide.
A secret far more powerful than any explosive, Major, she thought.
One she’d have to keep locked within her brain till she could consider how best to reveal it, and to whom.
Pursing her lips, she took a last long look. Then shut down the computer, and sat in the whirring heat, alone.
Zeynaab
WHEN the trucks leave she searches for her brothers through the litter of the crying and the wounded, those hit by bullets maybe not even aimed at them. A sick jerky feeling seeps into her stomach. She wants to claw her family back to her out of the milling dust. She thinks she hears them shouting, and she screams. But how small her voice is, how thin amid the crying and shouting all around. She stumbles. Rocks cut her feet. The dust’s too thick to make out the road. She glimpses a shadow with a gun. She turns and rushes away, until her sight reels and the air torches her lungs.
Hours later she wanders an apocalyptic land. The wind’s kicked up hot as flames. Not a blade of grass is left on the stony ground. She moans, hands hiding her face. Should she go back to the village? But then she’ll never see Ghedi or Nabil again. Her little brother’s so small. She saved the last piece of corn bread for him.
When she comes across the road again she sinks into the dust. People trudge by. They look dazed. Before they were all walking in one direction. Now they wander, women without hijab, men without shirts, calling in cracked voices to those who’ve vanished. A blind man totters past, groping the air, scabbed eyes lifted as if he can see. She sits. A man speaks to her. He compliments her eyes, her small feet. She doesn’t answer or look up, and at last he goes on.
Toward evening she wakes from wherever she was. She eats the last crust. Her teeth hurt. The stars are coming out. One is so bright, like a candle in the sky. Maybe that’s where Paradise is.
She decides to go back to the village. She’s afraid to go toward the city now. Even if Uncle’s there. She has a confused notion they’re still there, she’ll push the gate open and there’ll be her mother feeding the chickens, the baby on her hip, her brothers wrestling in the shade. This is some evil dream, sent by the Devil.
An old Bantu offers her a ride on his donkey. She’s afraid but his kind face makes her trust him. He asks where she’s going, and she says the name of her village. His face changes. “That was a sanctuary for the rebels,” he says.
We weren’t rebels, she wants to say, but doesn’t. Still, the old man lets her ride nearly all night before he lifts her down.
For the next two days she walks. She holds out a hand to passing people. Someone throws something from a passing truck. She almost ignores it, then realizes it’s a half-eaten banana. She wolfs it down, then staggers off the road, sick to her stomach.
SHE’S walking along a road that seems to be high above all the lands around it. Then she’s not there, that’s all, it’s as if she’s fallen asleep.
When she wakes she’s still walking, but now she’s with a group of women. They’re trudging through a village. All its doors are closed. Not even a cock crows as they plod through. It’s so much like a dream she can’t believe she’s awake. Dust bakes in the noon sun. Something sparkles and she bends. Cartridge casings lie scattered like chickens’ corn along the street. There are stains in the dust too. But no people.
The well’s capped with a wooden lid. When the refugees drag it off a black cloud rises, buzzing like a rainstorm. So many flies the light fades like a rain cloud’s passing.
She can’t see what’s down there, only the shocked faces of the women around it. She clings to one and says she’s thirsty, why aren’t they drawing water. The woman pushes her away. She says, “There are too many bodies.”
AS the days pass she feels less hungry but more ill. Her legs ache as if someone’s twisting knotted ropes under her skin. Every few minutes she has to move off the road and squat and lift her skirt. Filth covers the ground. Dirtiness drizzles out of her and she feels dizzy. She feels feverish, then chilled, as if ice encases her even in the sun. She’s had fevers before. But at home there was a bed to lie in, and her mother would bring goat’s milk and treats. She lies on the ground and moans for her mother, her family, for the smell of the mangoes.
Eventually she realizes this isn’t the way to the village. Mountains rise on the horizon, peaks she’s never seen before. She trades the xirsi amulet to drink from a well guarded by men who murmur that the refugees are unclean, they can’t be trusted, they work for the government. She wants to say this isn’t true. The government burned our village. But she dares not. The well’s surrounded by feces and sick people lying on the ground. Farther away is a pile of things covered with black rags she’s afraid to look at.
She no longer knows where she’s going. But still she trudges on, singing about the turtle and the ostrich. She wraps her bleeding feet with cloths she finds along the road. She sings all the songs she knows, until her lips bleed. She stares back at two girls who push a cart with bicycle tires.
Her bowels clench in familiar pain and she has to leave the road again.
SHE’S trudging on numb feet when a truck snorts along the road. The refugees part without looking up. The trucks won’t stop. Even if they did, bad things happen with the soldiers, with the truckers.
A very strange-looking person leans out of the cab. Her face is white as the clouds. Her eyes are blue as the birds on a bowl Zeynaab used to eat from. Her hair’s like the silk of the maize. Zeynaab stops dead, staring. She’s never seen a human being like this before. If it is a human being.
To multiply her astonishment, the woman speaks words she understands. “Little girl, where’s your mother?”
“She’s dead.”
“Your father?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you no family?”
She doesn’t cry, only stares.
The woman doesn’t need to invite her into the truck. She just holds out something in a bright wrapper.
THERE are three other children in the back, all boys. For a moment her heart leaps; but none is Nabil or Ghedi. The mountains go in and out of sight, then grow ahead as the truck twists and turns upward. One mountain stays. She tugs on the woman’s arm when she needs to go into the brush. When the woman realizes she’s sick she gives her a bottle of strange drink. It’s salty but sugary too. Zeynaab drinks it all and when she’s done the woman gives her another from a box on the floorboards. Then she unwraps the filthy rags from Zeynaab’s feet and throws them out the window.
The truck climbs, and the cab, where she rides with the woman and the driver, smells bad. When it overtakes refugees the woman tells the driver to slow. She leans forward, searching as they press through the throngs. Now and then she tells the driver to stop. When Zeynaab realizes what she’s doing a chill shakes her.
She’s looking for children who are alone. Like the witches in the stories her aunties told her. Is she in a story now? Where are they going? She tries to muster courage to ask, but can’t. The truck lurches as it climbs. Enormous rocks loom over the laboring vehicle, throwing cool shadows. Birds she’s never seen before dart past. She needs to stop again, but puts it off so long it’s almost too late. The woman smells sweet. It comes to Zeynaab that she herself is the source of the bad smell.
A
t last the truck heaves to a stop, panting like a tired elephant. She’s never seen an elephant, only a picture in a book Auntie showed her. Her auntie went to school, when there were schools, in the Italian times. The driver lets down the gate in the back. He calls the boys to come down. He gives each of them a bottle of water. He shows them how to twist the caps off and they drink, eyes searching the sky as they tilt the bottles up.
The woman takes a pair of shoes from a box. They’re red as the guava flowers after the rains come. They’re plastic, and they sparkle. They’re so beautiful she can’t take her eyes off them as the woman bends and slips them over her torn, nailless, blackened toes. Then comes around to the side and, before she’s quite ready, holds up her arms for Zeynaab to jump down.
Her attention’s still on the wonderful shoes, so she doesn’t notice, at first. The woman tugs at her hand, and she turns. And gasps.
The mountain rears above them, a cliff that goes up to where the sun lives. It’s half in shadow, and rocks and stones jut from it. Only after walking for some time, new shoes slippery on the sun-heated scree, does she make out the path.
They climb for hours, until her thighs ache and her head spins again. The boys trail after them, chattering at first, then silent. The woman halts to rest, but not often enough. They sweat out the water and there’s no more. Birds soar, balancing on the wind.
High above and far away, a thread dangles from heaven. It flutters and sways, like spider silk in the wind. Only as they approach does she gradually make out a resting place at the top of the trail, at the foot of a cliff that flies up and up so far she can’t tip her head back enough to see the top. When they reach it, wheezing, dizzy, there’s an ancient pavement set with bits of colored stone, a picture of a man in a brown robe with a circle around his head, holding up two fingers.
In the center, where the colors are worn, sits a large woven basket. The woman urges her toward it. Zeynaab resists, weeping in terror. The woman tries to persuade her, but all she hears are broken words, like jagged shards of pottery that gouge at her ears.