The Lost Army Of Cambyses

by Paul Sussman

  There was a click as he drew back the bolt of the gun. Khalifa's hand tightened around Tara's.

  'Try not to be afraid, Miss Mullray,' he said. 'God is with us. He will protect us.'

  'You really believe that?'

  'I have to believe that. Otherwise what is there? Only despair.'

  He turned to her and smiled. 'Trust in him, Miss Mullray. Trust in anything. But never despair.'

  The helicopters began lifting off, the wind buffeting them back and forth. Tara and Khalifa stood looking at each other. She didn't feel any fear, just a sort of exhausted resignation. She was going to die. That was it. There was no point in arguing or struggling.

  'Goodbye, Inspector,' she said, squeezing his hand, the wind pummelling furiously all around her. 'Thank you for trying to help me.'

  A sheet of sand blew up into her face and the sun seemed to dim. She turned her head out of the wind, closed her eyes and waited for the bullets.

  The desert possesses many forces with which to subdue those who trespass into its secret wastes. It can throw down a heat so blistering that skin shrivels like paper in a flame, eyeballs boil, bones seem to liquefy. It can deafen with its silence, crush with its emptiness, warp time and space so that those passing through it lose all sense of where or when or even who they are. It will grant visions of heart-leaping beauty – a cascading waterfall, a balmy oasis – only to snatch them away again the moment you reach out towards them, sending you mad with the agony of unrealized desires. It will raise mountainous dunes to block your path, shift itself into labyrinths from which you have no hope of escaping, suck you downwards into the unfathomable depths of its belly. Of all the weapons in its fearful armoury, however, none is more powerful, more absolute in its destruction, than that which they call the Wrath of God: sandstorm.

  It struck now, suddenly, uncontrollably, out of nowhere. One moment there was the wind, the next the desert around them seemed to erupt, a million million tons of sand geysering upwards into the sky so that the sun was blocked out and the air became solid. The force of it was unimaginable. Crates bounced along the ground, bales of straw disintegrated, oil drums were sucked up into the air and spun around like leaves. One helicopter was smashed against the side of a dune, two more collided with each other, exploding in a ball of flame that was extinguished almost as soon as it had flared by a choking blanket of sand. Men were thumped to the floor, a camel cartwheeled down the valley, heads were ripped from emaciated corpses and sent bounding along the ground like giant brown marbles. The noise was excruciating.

  Tara was swept forward and down into the crater, crashing into a tangled foliage of corpses. Bones crunched and splintered beneath her, desiccated skin ripped like parchment, teeth snapped from jaw sockets. She was rolled over and over, withered arms and legs seeming to kick and jostle her, sunken faces looming on all sides, until eventually she came to a halt, face buried in an ossified stomach cavity, a shrivelled mouth pressed hard against her neck as if kissing her. For a moment she lay still, dazed, horrified, and then struggled to her knees and tried to stand. The wind was too strong and punched her down immediately. She began to crawl, palms crunching through backs and chests, feet scrambling on a tangled ladder of spines and skulls, bones snapping beneath her like twigs. Sand scoured her flesh and jammed its way up her nostrils and into her ears so that it felt as if she was drowning.

  Somehow she reached the top of the crater and flopped onto her belly, pulling the material of her shirt across her mouth. Behind her the army was fast disappearing, swamped beneath a rising tide of sand. At the same time, around the rim of the crater, dozens of new bodies were appearing. A leathery hand emerged from the sand right in front of her face, the fingers splayed as if reaching out to grab her. Spears jabbed upwards; a horse seemed to leap from the side of the dune; a head bobbed up but was then immediately buried again. The howling of the wind was like fifty thousand voices screaming in battle.

  She tried to look for Daniel and Khalifa, eyes narrowed to thin slits against the storm, but she could see nothing, just a blinding fuzz of sand. There was a muffled roar away to her left and she cranked her head round towards it, neck muscles fighting against the wind's torque. The roar grew louder and suddenly a helicopter loomed directly overhead, impossibly low, spinning madly round and round, out of control. For a split second she caught sight of Squires's face in one of the windows, mouth wide open, screaming, and then it spun away again, pirouetting insanely towards the deeper darkness that was the side of the pyramid rock. There was a momentary flash of light and heat, a rage of agonized metal and then nothing. She came up onto her knees and, head bowed, began to crawl forward.

  After a few feet she stopped and tried to shout out, but such was the intensity of the storm she couldn't even hear her own voice. She crawled a bit further and stopped again, and this time caught a vague blur of movement ahead and to her right. She angled towards it.

  They were nearer than she had thought and after only a few metres she was on them. Daniel was astride Khalifa, both hands clutching the machine-gun, which he was trying to point at the detective's head. Khalifa had one hand on the muzzle of the gun, holding it away, and the other at Daniel's throat.

  Neither of them noticed her approaching and, struggling up to them, she seized a fistful of Daniel's hair and yanked, toppling him to the ground. The three of them grappled together, flattened by the gale, eyes and mouths filled with sand. For a moment Tara and Khalifa managed to pin Daniel down, but a furious claw of wind tore the detective backwards and away.

  Daniel grasped for the gun, which had fallen a metre to his left. Tara lunged for it too, but Daniel lashed out at her, knocking her to the floor, her head narrowly missing the point of a sword. Khalifa had battled back up onto his knees and was crawling towards them, but the wind held him back and allowed Daniel to seize the gun, swing it round and slam the butt into the side of Khalifa's head, knocking him sideways on top of Tara.

  A billow of sand momentarily blinded them. When they looked up again it was to see that Daniel had squirmed away almost to the edge of sight. As they watched, he fought his way up onto his knees and then, in defiance of the gale, which was blowing directly into his face, onto his feet, staggering as if drunk, wrestling the gun muzzle towards them. Khalifa looked around frantically. There was a skeletal arm lying on the ground beside him, snapped from its shoulder, and, in desperation, he seized it around the wrist, swung it back and launched it at Daniel. It was a weak throw, but with the wind behind it the arm gathered speed, cartwheeling through the air and slamming into Daniel's throat with the force of a sledgehammer. He staggered backwards into the storm, disappearing from sight. Khalifa rolled onto his front and began crawling after him. Tara followed.

  At first they couldn't find him. Then, after they had gone about ten metres, Khalifa tugged her arm and pointed. She followed the line of his finger, shielding her eyes with her hands, and there, on the ground in front of them, emerging from the gloom as though from beneath a curtain, were Daniel's jeans-clad legs, one booted foot twitching slightly, everything from the waist up lost in the murk. They paused for a moment, uncertain, and then continued cautiously forward as the rest of the body slowly hove into view.

  'Oh Jesus,' mumbled Tara when she could see all of it. 'Oh Christ.'

  He was lying flat on his back, arms flapped out to either side of him, a sword thrusting upwards through his sternum where he had tumbled backwards onto it. It was a short sword, its blade inscribed with the image of a serpent, the sinuous body coiling around the blood-smeared metal as though slithering from the rent in Daniel's chest. The serpent's fangs, Tara noticed, opened up around the sword's tip as though adding their own bite to that of the blade.

  'Oh Jesus,' she repeated, turning her head away. 'Oh Daniel.'

  For a moment she sat slumped on the ground, oblivious to the tumult around her. She felt as though everything in her life had broken and disintegrated. Her father was gone, Daniel was gone – it was as if the shel
l of her past had been ripped away, leaving her raw and exposed. For so long she had defined herself by her relationships with these two men, father and lover. And now they were no more and she was . . . what? Unformed, somehow. Atomized. She couldn't see how she would ever put herself back together again.

  'Miss Mullray!' Khalifa had pressed his mouth right against her ear, shouting to be heard above the raging bellow of the storm. 'We can't stay here, Miss Mullray,' he yelled. 'We'll be buried. We must go up. Up.'

  She didn't respond.

  'Please, Miss Mullray,' he cried. 'We must go up. It's our only chance.'

  He could sense that she had lost the will to go on, was about to give up and, seizing her face in both hands, he turned it towards him.

  'Please!' he screamed, his voice shredded by the maelstrom. 'Be strong. You must be strong!'

  She stared at him, sand scouring so viciously across her face she thought it would scrub away all her features, and then nodded. He took her hand and, slowly, they began to crawl away. After a few metres she looked back at Daniel's body, his open mouth already filled with sand, and then the chaos seemed to thicken around him and he was gone. She forced her head round again and struggled forward through the madness.

  It seemed impossible the storm could grow any more violent. Now, however, just when it appeared to have reached the apex of its fury, it tapped deep into some hidden reserve of energy and unleashed a vortex of sand and wind to which everything so far seemed to have been no more than a gentle prelude. Unimaginable forces raged all around them. Tara felt as if the clothes would be ripped from her body, the flesh from her back, the meat from her bones, and the bones themselves then twisted and broken and pummelled to dust. She had no idea where she was going or why. She had no idea about anything at all. She just kept moving forward automatically, driven by some imperative beyond reason or thought. Up. That was all she knew. Up.

  They reached the foot of the dune and began to climb, creeping on their hands and knees, inching slowly out of the valley, every movement a torment of exhausted muscle and sinew. The air was now so thick with sand that to have raised their eyelids even a hair's breadth would have been to have their pupils instantly scoured, and so they went forward with their eyes closed, feeling their way solely by the gradient of the land. Each clasped the other's hand, lifting and lowering their arms in unison, while with their other hand they kept their shirts pulled close across their mouths, breathing in short sharp gasps. Such was the blasting of the wind that even on their knees it was hard to keep their balance.

  How she kept going Tara had no idea. Within seconds she was exhausted and every inch exhausted her further. More than anything on God's earth she wanted to drop down onto her face and lie flat and still.

  Somehow, however, she kept crawling, forcing herself inexorably upwards, further and further, until eventually, just as her legs and arms began to buckle, the slope beneath her started to ease and flatten. She struggled on for another couple of metres and then slumped face forward onto the summit of the dune. She heard Khalifa's voice coming to her as if from far away.

  'Keep your head down, Miss Mullray. And try to . . . how do you say . . . wiggle your body as much as possible. It will stop the sand piling up on top of you.'

  She squeezed his hand to show she'd heard and buried her face in the crook of her arm, the storm howling over her, sand lashing in from all sides like a million biting insects.

  I must wiggle, she thought to herself. Wiggle, girl, wiggle!

  She kicked her legs feebly and raised her hips up and down a couple of times, but she was too exhausted and after a few moments her body sagged and was still. She was overwhelmed with a sudden, delicious sense of peace, as though she was rolled up in a swathe of black velvet. Images drifted through her mind: her parents, Daniel, Jenny, the necklace her father had given her for her fifteenth birthday. She remembered how she had woken to find an envelope on her mantelpiece, how she had followed the treasure trail up into the attic, how she had laughed with delight as she opened the old trunk and found the necklace hidden deep inside it. She laughed now, the sound growing stronger and stronger until it drowned out the storm and filled the entire world. She gave herself up to the laughter, allowing it to wash over her, to smother her, and then suddenly there was a blinding flash of white light and she remembered no more.

  44

  EPILOGUE

  Inspector Khalifa was asleep beside his wife, cascades of soft black hair falling across his face. It was so warm, that hair, so fragrant, and as he always did when they were in bed together, he burrowed his way into it, taking long, deep breaths as if to draw its perfume way down into his lungs.

  Rather than filling him with calmness and delight, it made him choke uncontrollably. He coughed and spluttered, fighting for breath, and eventually rolled away from her and came unsteadily to his feet. Sand showered from his back and shoulders, his wife and bed evaporated. He was standing on top of a dune, in the middle of a desert, with a blazing sun overhead and a mouthful of sand. The storm, it seemed, had blown over.

  He spat and coughed for several seconds, clearing his windpipe, and then suddenly remembered Tara. She'd been beside him when they'd reached the summit of the dune, he was sure of that. Now there was no sign of her. He dropped to his knees and began scrabbling in the sand.

  Initially he could find nothing. Perhaps she'd been rolled further along, he thought, or been dragged back down into the valley. He redoubled his efforts, but to no effect, and was beginning to despair when suddenly his hand snagged on something solid. He scraped furiously around it, scooping out armful after armful of sand until he'd revealed a small trainered foot. He seized the ankle and pulled. The body was clamped tight in the mouth of the dune, and he resumed digging, burrowing like a rabbit, revealing first one leg, then another.

  'Come on,' he hissed to himself. 'Faster! Dig!'

  He seized both ankles and pulled again, but still she wouldn't come. He changed his angle of attack, working down from above rather than the side, gouging out the sand and flinging it away between his legs. He revealed a shoulder, the back of her head and her left arm. Yanking the wrist free, he felt for a pulse. Nothing.

  'Please, Allah,' he cried, voice echoing across the desert. 'Please let her live!'

  He clawed off the remaining sand and rolled her onto her back. Her eyes were closed, her lips and mouth thick with yellowy grains, like biscuit crumbs. He felt for a pulse again but still got nothing and so he rolled her back onto her front, clasped his arms around her midriff and yanked, doubling her up. He repeated the movement, jerking her with all his strength, willing her to live.

  'Come on!' he yelled. 'Breathe! Breathe, dammit!'

  He bent his knees and jerked again and this time, suddenly, her body convulsed as though a bolt of electricity had been driven through it. For a moment she was still, hanging from his arms as though across a swing, and then she began to splutter and choke. He yanked one final time and a pat of sandy vomit spurted from her mouth onto the dune top. She coughed and retched, struggled, and drew in a deep gasping breath of air. He laid her down gently.

  'Thank you, Allah,' he whispered. 'Thank you. Thank you.'

  She lay for a while recovering, coughing and gagging and breathing, and then, wiping her sleeve across her mouth, rolled into a sitting position and looked over at Khalifa, who was squatting a few feet away. He nodded at her, she nodded at him, they smiled, and then turned their attention to the valley below.

  The army was gone. Everything was gone. There were no tents, no helicopters, no crates, no corpses. Nothing. All was buried beneath a smooth duvet of new-laid sand, as though it had never existed. Only the pyramid rock remained, vast and silent, spearing upwards into the pale morning sky, surrounded once more by a pristine expanse of desert. It had, thought Khalifa, a vaguely satisfied air about it, as though it had witnessed a great drama and was content with the conclusion.

  They sat in silence for some while, staring out across the desert
, struggling to come to terms with all that had happened, and then Khalifa spoke.

  'The mobile phone?'

  Tara patted her pockets, but they were empty. 'It must have fallen out.'

  'The GPS unit?'

  'Daniel had that.'

  He nodded and leaned back against the slope of the dune. 'Then I fear we might have a problem getting back.'