Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

The ground beneath her feet was hard and unforgiving. She hadn’t walked far in months, and was already weary after barely a couple of hours.

  “We need to go, leave this place,” Ben pressed. “Zahra and I have been talking about it with the others, and we all agree. This land is dead. It was already dying centuries ago, but now the river is so unpredictable, there is nothing left here for us.”

  “That’s what we’re doing, Ben. We’re moving, like we always do. There is still food,” George commented dryly. “We simply need to follow it. And the water is mostly clean.”

  “Every time we go hunting, we bring less back than the time before. And each river and inlet we pass flows stronger in my memories.” Ben held Gail back by the shoulder and looked her in the eyes. “Jake has no future here, Gail. We need to move on. We need to leave Egypt.”

  George stopped walking and looked back at them. “What do you suggest, Ben? We go north, and we need to find a way to cross the sea. And we don’t know what we’re heading to. We head south, and we die in the desert, unless we’re unlucky and manage to reach the warlords of Sudan. We go west, and we die in the desert, for sure. As for going east, well, we know there’s nothing left there.”

  Gail looked along the line of people and donkeys idling past them. Towards the back, she saw Jake, sharing a joke with Fatima, one of the young girls from the Tek family, and Saïd, her brother. The three of them were the only teenagers in their village, and along with two smaller children, the only non-adults.

  Ben followed her gaze. “We need to find more people like us, Gail. Our people are dying, and there will be nothing left for them. Jake and Fatima get on well enough, but how about Saïd? Is there anyone he could be interested in?”

  “So, what do you suggest?” she asked. Having children had been difficult for their village; even Gail and George had never been able to add to their family after Jake’s unexpected arrival, in the first year of the Chaos. She had fallen pregnant shortly after their reunion in Amarna, following her kidnapping by DEFCOMM.

  After that, it had taken years to settle into the relative safety of their nomadic lifestyle, with its migrations between middle-Egypt and the south. By the time they were ready to start trying to make their family bigger again, her body was already too old. She was only fifty-nine now, and yet almost two decades of surviving had been unrelenting; she and George both looked, and for her part certainly felt, at least seventy.

  “Europe,” he said calmly. “We leave Africa, and head for Europe, through Italy.”

  By now the last of the village had walked past them. Zahra had held back, and the group of four stood in the middle of the dusty road. Gail kicked at the layers of sand and dirt till her toe scraped the tarmac beneath. It had been a poor road even then, but the years of neglect and disuse were rapidly turning it into little more than a scar running across the arid landscape.

  “Europe, Asia and the Americas were worst hit by the war,” she said reflecting on the few news reports that had reached them during those early months. “Africa escaped the worst of it; we should stay here.”

  “But Africa is dying, Gail,” Zahra said, almost in earnest. “You can see that for yourself. Every year we pass fewer people on the road. And what little remains is still at war with itself.”

  “Europe may already be dead, for all we know.”

  “But the climate will be better, there may be more food, we might find something left apart from slum and disease. This place was a mess even before the climate changed; it has so much further to go to be a good place to live again.”

  George put his hand on his wife’s forearm. “We’re old, now. And tired. Who knows how many more migrations we’ll be able to make.”

  She looked up at him and saw the love in his eyes, stronger now than ever before. She also saw a glint that she had not seen for a long time. They had not been apart for longer than a day since her kidnapping all those years ago. Looking in his eyes now, she could see that he wanted to go. But he would never leave her behind.

  She looked to her son, who was still at the rear of the group that had overtaken them. He was carrying Fatima’s rucksack on his chest as well as his own on his back, and they were walking hand in hand. It was the first time she’d seen them that close.

  “Alright, I agree we should at least try,” she said after a deep breath. “But we need to plan this properly; I don’t want to go into any danger we don’t need to face.”

  Ben’s face opened up with the first grin she’d seen from him in days; George wrapped his arm around her shoulder and pulled her in tight, and they resumed their trek.

  Chapter 91

  On the third day of travelling north, they passed what little remained of the modern Egyptian town of Tell el-Amarna.

  They enjoyed the hospitality of a local farmer and his wife for an evening, sleeping mostly in abandoned houses by the main road, although several of the travelling families decided to pitch their tents instead. The hospitality consisted in a few bottles of harsh, homebrewed liquor, along with a dozen rock-hard loaves of bread. In exchange, the farmer and his wife were given news of the growing strength of the Sudanese clans, and the lack of good hunting to the south. It wasn’t a fair trade; the information had been true every year for as long as they could remember, but it was gratefully received nonetheless.

  The old couple had hosted their party many times over the years, and simply enjoying the company of people you knew was enough for them.

  They didn’t share their plans to migrate to Europe, and the old couple neither asked nor seemed to care about where they were all heading. Travellers, though few and far between, were frequent enough not to warrant any special questioning. The only thing the farmer and his wife knew was that they either went north or south, and that sometimes they came past again in the opposite direction. Sometimes.

  Gail toyed with the idea, as she always did, of staying in Amarna. She had a strong emotional attachment to the place, and on the surface there seemed to be plenty of room for their entire village to move in and live.

  But the same drought and famine that affected the region they were leaving had already blighted Amarna. With the exception of the farmer and his wife, who were too old to move on and had resigned themselves to their fate, Tell el-Amarna had already been abandoned. This last couple would wait for their time to come, and then they would probably decide to leave this world together, rather than risk being left alone.

  As they left Amarna on the fourth day, Gail felt drawn towards the cliffs where she had made her discovery all those years ago. She couldn’t be sure what it was, but something new, something powerful deep down inside her, was pulling her towards the Amarna Library.

  Even so, as Tell el-Amarna disappeared behind them, she managed to shake the feeling off and march on.

  What little still passed for government and authority bumped into them on the sixth day.

  The lone horseman, an ancient firearm slung across his back, rested with them for the evening, gladly swapping some strands of sorry-looking jerky for a refill of clean, unpolluted water from one of the donkeys’ containers.

  There could be few stories of worth to tell from the shambles that was Cairo and ‘government,’ though to hear the horseman’s rhetoric one could only assume that the city had risen from its embers and had taken over the world.

  His audience knew better than to believe such propaganda, though it played along willingly, for the sake of old times.

  The truth was that the sprawling, brightly-lit metropolis that Gail and George remembered so vividly since their first visits to the country no longer existed. Pestilence and famine were destroying what war had not, though the process was infinitely more drawn out and painful.

  Slowly, what had for decades been the largest city in Africa had torn itself apart. Fires, started by the inhabitants to stem the flow of death and disease to new quarters, razed whole neighbourhoods, leaving black scars across Cairo. For the hundreds of thousands of Cairenes who had not ei
ther fled to the countryside or died in the years that followed the Chaos, the city was an unforgiving place, and the population shrank each year as tens of thousands more succumbed to this harsh new existence.

  Egypt had played a key role in the Middle-East part of the global conflict. With the United States, Russia and China out of the picture and the United Nations and NATO effectively disbanded, the religious powder-keg had finally blown. Israel had found itself set-upon by Syria and Iran, in all-out, relentless war.

  However, Egypt successfully mediated between the states, staving off the use of nuclear weapons for months.

  By remaining impartial when history made vengeance so attractive, Egypt’s role in those stages was decisive in the closing chapter of the Chaos.

  So when the last nuclear weapons were finally deployed, annihilating cities and stripping the very earth itself of life, Egypt alone in the Middle East, on the fringes of a world gone mad, was spared.

  Chapter 92

  On the tenth day they saw the smoke of the city, several kilometres before they saw the ruined capital itself. Fires raged to the west. Towards the centre and east, minarets and spires could still be seen rising from Old Cairo, reminders of a rich cultural past.

  “Why is it burning?” Jake asked in wonder. He had never known a city, and this was the closest he had ever come to Cairo. He spoke in fluent Arabic, though his parents insisted on always speaking to him in English, which he understood perfectly well but very rarely used.

  Gail pulled her son closer. He was more man than child now, but she could still remember when it was his head tucked under hers, and not the other way round. Sometimes, she longed for those days to return, when he would run to her and wrap his arms around her legs in the biggest hugs. Such moments were rare now. This was his world and it no longer scared him, but instead filled him with a sense of adventure that she desperately wanted to control and contain.

  “Because there’s no one there to put out the flames,” she replied. “So when a fire starts for whatever reason, it just burns and burns. Eventually, all of Cairo will burn away.” She drew a short breath. “There’s only death in Cairo, which is why we should always avoid it.”

  “Actually,” George said pensively, “they’re probably trying to get rid of areas that they no longer want, because of disease. It shows there must be some kind of organisation there, even if it’s only localised in one or two areas.”

  Gail shot him a nasty look, and he shrugged. Of the two of them, Gail had always been the more adventurous. But motherhood had an uncanny way of changing that, and since Jake’s birth their roles had naturally reversed.

  Jake kissed his mother softly on the top of her head and released himself from her grasp.

  She watched, fighting back a tear, as he walked slowly away, towards the rest of the village who were assembling further down the road.

  “He’s not a child anymore, he has to learn this stuff for himself,” George started.

  “You’re wrong!” she cut him off, barely able to keep her voice down. “You tell him stupid things like that, and you make him believe that there’s hope in that hell-hole!”

  “There might be hope.”

  “There’s no hope in Cairo, and you know it. We’ve seen it. We saw what it was like years ago, and we barely escaped it. He’s here because we got out of places like that and learnt to survive, so don’t you throw all that away by inviting him to go in there because there must be some kind of organisation,” she pulled a face and waggled her head from side to side mockingly.

  “I’m sorry, I just –”

  “You should be,” she turned her back on him and crossed her arms. She stood rigid for several minutes, but softened as he wrapped his arms around her from behind and held her tight.

  “I’m too tired for this,” she sighed. “The only reason I’m going along with this exodus of yours is because of Jake. Him and Fatima, and Saïd, and anyone else who still has some life left in them and deserves a better go at it than we’ve had here.”

  “I know,” George whispered gently, kissing her on the cheek. “And so does he.”

  She turned and pulled him in closer, burying her head in his chest. She listened to his heart beating for almost a minute before looking up into his eyes. Big, silent tears had started to roll down his face and his bottom lip had curled outwards in that ugly way she somehow found so attractive.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, wiping his tears away with her thumbs.

  He nodded towards Cairo. “If we hadn’t landed there, twenty-seven years ago, do you think things would have been different?” he asked, swallowing any further tears.

  “What happened was always going to happen,” she dug her chin into his chest and smiled. “But because we landed there all those years ago, and because of everything that happened from that point on, we both found ourselves hundreds of miles away from the nearest explosion when it did. Because of all that, we’re here, and so is Jake. And that’s all that matters.”

  They walked hand in hand to the assembled villagers, who had already started to plan their route past Cairo.

  “The biggest danger is that we have no speed,” Zahra said. If anyone tries to stop us, for any reason, we have no way of escaping. I can guarantee you that they will have horses that are faster than our donkeys.”

  Their migrations over the years had never taken them past Cairo. It had always been an un-passable barrier to the north of their world. For the younger generation, life in the countryside was all they knew or remembered.

  “Why would anyone want to stop us? What do we have that they could possibly want?” Fatima spoke clearly and with an indignant tone.

  “Places like this are different,” Zahra explained. “It doesn’t matter what you have, you can still be shot just because you walk into the wrong street, or look at someone the wrong way.”

  “So what is the right way to look at people?” Jake asked. No one answered.

  Of all the villagers, Ben and Zahra knew Cairo best, and they had started to draw a map in the dust on the side of the road.

  “This used to be the road, up from Saqqara and Dashur towards Giza,” Zahra explained. “We’re about here, and up ahead the pyramids will be visible on our left.”

  The Pyramids of Giza, Gail thought suddenly. Jake’s never seen them! She envied the fact that he was going to see them for the first time, and wondered how much time, if at all, she would have to show them to him. When he was very young he’d seen other pyramids, like the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, and the Red Pyramid and Bent Pyramid slightly further north. But never Khufu’s Great Pyramid.

  “Giza was still there ten years ago, and our visitor a few nights ago confirmed that it was still there now, though there’s not much left. Hopefully we should be able to go through relatively quietly.” Zahra saw the look in Gail’s eyes and laughed. “We probably won’t have time for a history tour Gail, I’m sorry.”

  Gail shrugged it off and smiled, though inside she clung to the hope of an unexpected detour.

  Zahra’s biggest fear was that they would lose their donkeys. The animals had been with them for so long, and had been indispensable throughout their travels; no human could carry enough water to last that many days between refills. Camels and horses would certainly have to be handed over to whatever militia controlled the Saqqara road. Who knew how desperate they’d be for six tired donkeys?

  “Then we should reach the sea in two days by following the road to Alexandria,” Ben finished the plan off.

  “And as for how you look at people,” Gail said to Jake with a smile, “don’t.”

  Chapter 93

  Gail was shocked at how little their party took notice of the pyramids. Admittedly, from where the road lay it was impossible to get a good view. They took a right angle turn off the main road and onto the principle crossing of the canal, which with its stagnant waters and years of detritus could probably be walked across without getting a toe wet.

  They turned their ba
cks on Cairo as they crossed the flat bridge, and got their first decent glimpse. Khafre’s pyramid, though half a mile away and partly hidden by the encroaching sand-dunes, stood proud, the smooth limestone casing still clinging to its upper reaches. The Giza plateau was a dozen or so metres higher in elevation compared to the bridge, exaggerating the monument’s scale, but her scientific mind ignored that for the time being. She’d never walked across this bridge, never stood there, looking at it as an ancient Egyptian would have: from water-level.

  George stopped and gave her time to reflect, but hurried her along as soon as the last of their group had passed them. She looked at Jake, who had paused on the other side. He was looking past her, at the ruins of Cairo.

  She could sense Jake’s eagerness to explore, and the realisation that he was more intrigued by what remained of Cairo than the ancient Egyptian pyramids upset her. She would later acknowledge that they were both fascinated by a lost culture, just not the same one.

  They gathered on the other side of the canal. The pyramids were now all but hidden behind the wall of sand that had practically invaded Giza, and in the years to come would no doubt cross the canal and eventually reach the Nile itself.

  She looked back, towards Cairo.

  An impenetrable concrete barrier ten feet high cut across all four lanes of the main road into the city, joining two large buildings on opposite sides of the road and sealing off the outside world. A hundred-metre wide band of scorched-earth had been created between the wall and the rest of Giza. Rubble, the remains of all the buildings that had been demolished to create the flat-zone, had been piled up in a neat border on the side nearest them. Cairo was a fortress.

  “I don’t think they want visitors,” Jake said.

  “It’s a good thing we don’t want to visit then, isn’t it?” Gail commented, turning back to their path and patting him on the shoulder.

  Her protective nature towards her son, and everything she had said the day before about Jake and Cairo, still stood. But the main reason she didn’t want to give him the time of day to look at Cairo was the most non-maternal instinct of them all: spite. To her the pyramids, along with countless other sites in the country, epitomized what had been great, and what was to this day still so intriguing, about the ancient Egyptians. That her own son had failed to recognise that, or even vaguely share her interest, to look at the pyramids in all their glory and gasp, made the anger well up in the pit of her stomach.