Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

  Only three steps on and the anger subsided. As emotions went, it was one of the short-lived ones, mainly because of the overwhelming guilt she felt at being spiteful towards her son.

  She turned round and looked at him.

  “One day, Jake,” she began, then sighed in that tired sort of way only a mother can. “One day, you’ll come back. When things are better, when things have had more time to settle down.”

  He caught up with her in one stride and put his arm round her. He glanced over his shoulder at where the pyramids hid behind the sand. “They look amazing, Mum,” he said in English with a glint in his eye.

  They walked on for several minutes, George falling into step beside them.

  “You mean we,” Jake said, breaking the silence.

  “Sorry?”

  “You mean we. We’ll come back and see Cairo, and the pyramids, when things have settled down a bit.”

  They pushed on in silence.

  They carried on along the road to Alexandria, towards the sea, until nightfall. Along the way, they were challenged once by a group of old boys sitting atop a broken down tractor, who quickly gestured for them to keep going on their way after looking the donkeys up and down a couple of times.

  How sorry must we all look Gail thought, that even the robbers and brigands don’t want us!

  The campfire talk, as usual, was of the road ahead.

  “A day’s walk along this road and we should be able to find any number of fishing villages along the coast,” Ben said eagerly. “Diesel will be a problem, of course, so sail boats are our first target. The smaller the boat, the more we need; nothing less than twenty feet for crossing the sea.”

  A large number of the party had sailing experience, but mostly from the river. Even George, who had sailed along the coast of Britain throughout his youth, had no real sea-skills, save for a quick trip across the Channel. In comparison to that, the Mediterranean was an ocean.

  Gail looked across at her husband as the plans were drawn out, for the twentieth time, in the dirt around the campfires. Their eyes met across the flames. He understands, she thought with relief. She didn’t want to have the conversation with him or anyone just yet, the argument, the tears. There would be plenty of that when the time came.

  A twenty-foot sailing boat might carry four people comfortably enough to Italy. Six at a squeeze. Any more, with the great distances involved, would be uncomfortable indeed, and probably dangerous. She didn’t even dare to imagine the lack of water and food that such cramped conditions might create, should the weather turn out to be anything but favourable.

  Maybe she was misjudging the type of boat they might find. Maybe they would find a yacht capable of taking them all in luxury, like some modern-day Noah’s Ark, donkeys and all.

  But she doubted it.

  Chapter 94

  Shortly after passing the pyramids of Giza, Gail had made her decision to stay in Egypt. George, of course, would stay behind with her.

  But Gail had known her husband now for the better part of forty years, and there was little he could feel that she wasn’t aware of; she knew he had an overwhelming desire to go back to Britain, to see his home and the country he loved, to see if anyone or anything from their old life was left standing. Yet he would sacrifice all of that to be with her. She only wished that she had something left to give him in return.

  After two more days of marching along the dusty road north-west, towards the sea, she was starting to have second thoughts. She was on the verge of having a let’s-wait-till-we-see-what-kind-of-boats-we-find conversation with George.

  “We will stay behind with you,” Ben suddenly said out of the blue. Along with Zahra, he’d fallen into step with them, behind the main group of travellers. Gail and George now tended to make up the rear of their human caravan; because of their age, certainly, but also because it made her see the community as ‘us’ and ‘them’. The self-detachment would make it easier to say goodbye when the time came, particularly to their son. Plus, they enjoyed watching him with his friends from a distance.

  Gail tried to feign ignorance. “Thanks, Ben,” she smiled after a brief hesitation, “but you don’t need to worry about us, we’re happy to walk at the back.”

  He looked across at her, and then at George.

  “No, that’s not what I mean,” he said in English. Of the entire group, the four of them spoke the language better than anyone, with Jake coming in a close fifth. To his credit he sometimes made efforts to talk with them in their native language, even though it was next to useless in their community. “Zahra and I have decided to stay behind with you, in Egypt.”

  They walked on in silence for a dozen or so steps.

  “Why?” George asked. They had tried to be discreet, to hide their plan from the rest of the group, in particular from Jake. Clearly they hadn’t fooled their friends.

  “Because if we cannot persuade you to come with us, then we will stay with you. This is my country, and while you are here, you are still my guests.”

  Gail giggled at Ben’s mock bow. “You don’t need to worry about us, we’ll be fine. We’ve lived here long enough now, and besides you and Zahra are the heart of the community, you belong with them.”

  Ben looked across at Zahra, walking next to George; one of those looks that only a couple completely in tune with each other can exchange, like an unspoken conversation.

  “Gail, you are funny,” he said without a hint of humour. “There’s always been something funny about you.” George was about to make a joke, but stopped when Ben raised his hand. “You came to Egypt on a whim, arrived at a well organised archaeological dig and within hours instinctively found what had eluded the best Egyptologists in the world for more than a century.” He accentuated the instinctively. They stopped walking, and Ben faced her. “Professor al-Misri knew there was something different about you. Somehow, even before you arrived in Egypt, he was genuinely excited to see you, like you were the most reputable archaeologist in the world, come to inspect his work, instead of a struggling postgrad student,” he put his hand on her shoulder. “And now, instead of going back to your home country, instead of taking that opportunity, you are going to walk all the way back to Amarna, aren’t you?”

  She nodded quietly.

  “Then you know the rules in Egypt, Dr Turner,” he said with a grin. “You can’t visit any archaeological sites without the authorisation and accompaniment of the Tourism Police,” he gestured to Zahra, who smiled in return, though she couldn’t hide the apprehension she felt.

  But not one of them was as nervous as Gail. The reasons she had built up for staying behind meant nothing. The size of the boat, her age, how tired she felt, were all excuses to hide her real motivation. Something was drawing her back to Amarna. Back to the Library, and to the Xynutian vaults beneath it.

  And the fear inside her was growing.

  Chapter 95

  Even eighteen years after the beginning of the Chaos, the Nile Delta remained the most densely populated area of what had been, what some insisted still was, Egypt.

  But rather than this concentration of people making the area livelier, it served only to make its desolation all the more pronounced.

  What little remained of infrastructure was patchy at best; freshwater canals were mostly blocked and stagnant, roads were broken and littered with the carcasses of obsolete vehicles, and power cables were strewn across the landscape like a gigantic collapsed spider web, where one by one the high tension electricity grid had collapsed after years of neglect and unpredictable weather.

  People lived among all these remains, mostly in squalor. Some, as some always will, had managed to climb to the top of the heap and make the very most of a bad situation.

  It was people like this they did their best to avoid as they weaved their way up the road towards Alexandria, keeping themselves to themselves and walking mostly in silence through any built up area.

  About twenty miles from Alexandria, they turned towards the
sea port of Abu Qir.

  “It’s where we’re most likely to find a large boat,” Ben explained. “If people are to be believed, there may even be some international trade there, we might be able to get on board a ship heading for Europe.”

  The fact that the four of them would remain in Egypt had not been shared with the others yet, on Gail’s request. She didn’t want her last days with Jake to be fraught with arguments.

  “You may be interested to know,” Ben turned to George and Gail, “that Abu Qir is where your Admiral Nelson and the Royal Navy fought against the French in the Battle of the Nile.”

  George nodded in interest. Although he had heard of it, he knew nothing of the battle itself; but the mention of the Royal Navy caused a lump to form in his throat. It might have been a male thing, for Gail didn’t seem that affected, but to him in that very moment the Royal Navy was the United Kingdom. Knowing that in all probability neither existed anymore, and that on top of that he wasn’t going to return to see the remains, was hard to take.

  “Let’s hope the place is a little more peaceful, nowadays,” Gail said bitterly. History was a sequence of battles, wars and conflicts, punctuated by periods of peace. The lull they found themselves in now would barely have been described as peaceful thirty years ago. Peace, Gail had decided, was a distinctly relative term.

  It was shortly after thinking this that they were stopped by a man brandishing an AK-47, pointed straight at them.

  He wore a white thawb, the traditional long tunic worn by most Arab men, including most of the people travelling with Gail. What made this man’s thawb special was its brilliant whiteness, crisp and clean even in the dull evening light. His long, flowing black hair and carefully trimmed beard framed a hook nose and thick-set eyes that looked at them impassively.

  Despite the half dozen weapons the group of travellers pointed at him in return, he didn’t flinch or lower the barrel of his rifle.

  It didn’t take them long to realise that they had in fact been surrounded by men with AK-47s, and that they had been both outgunned and outmanoeuvred.

  Their luck had run out.

  Chapter 96

  Over the years, Zahra’s connections with the military and police in Egypt had been beneficial in almost every incident that the group had been involved in. Though the Tourism Police had famously been disorganised and generally poorly-lead before the Chaos, in the post-war period people had craved some form of authority and sign of governance.

  Everyone, that is, except al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. Literally the Islamist Group, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya had been famous in the twentieth century for violence towards any form of authority in democratic Egypt, and were responsible for the killings of dozens of government officials and countless policemen, policewomen and civilians, during the latter part of the century. Their long-term goal had been for an Islamic state, an enforcement of Sharia Law, and the expulsion of foreigners from Egypt.

  Now, a power vacuum had clearly given them authority over their own little part of the country.

  After some brief questioning, during which Zahra and Gail struggled to keep themselves quiet as the men negotiated, their captors escorted them to the Abu Qir dockyards, where they were locked in an empty warehouse, with no food and little water.

  On the third day of captivity, they were provided with a thin meat stew of what they suspected was some of their own donkey, though it could just as easily have been sick cow.

  On the fifth day, the man who had stopped them on the road appeared on a walkway running along the end-wall of the warehouse, several metres above their makeshift camping area. This time he wore a black thawb, and he looked as impeccable as before. They, in contrast, had done their best to stay clean but the lack of facilities for such a large group of people had taken its toll. He peered down at them and curled his lips in disgust.

  “As you can see,” he said in Arabic, showing the empty expanse of the warehouse in a flowing gesture, “we do not have much to offer. We, like most, are a poor people, though we are infinitely richer than you in both culture and pride.”

  George held Gail’s arm tightly, both for comfort and to attempt to quell any rebellious leanings she may have been feeling. She patted his hand reassuringly and he released his grip slightly.

  “We have considered your request for a vessel to leave Egypt. It has been rejected. Our boats are too valuable, and your old, stringy donkeys are not sufficient compensation. I must add on a personal note that we would not have been sorry to see you leave. You are rabble. Only a few of your people are strong enough to be a part of our country, though I suspect all of your minds have already been infected by blasphemous liberalism,” he spat the words out in disgust. “And at what cost such liberalism?” he threw his arms up in the air. “The end of your world! Fire and devastation! Death!” Pacing up and down the walkway, he stopped above Gail and Zahra. Their faces and hair were uncovered, and he looked down his nose at them. “And now you want to leave the last place on Earth where order and law remain?”

  Zahra looked to the floor, not wanting to exacerbate the situation. But Gail kept her eyes fixed on the man on the walkway. George’s grip tightened once more, but she didn’t waver. The seconds drew out into minutes, until eventually the man swore and drew a pistol from inside the folds of his thawb.

  He pointed the gun directly at Gail’s head. “You dare to stare at me, you whore?” he exclaimed, his pistol arm trembling. George was about to act when Jake stepped between his mother and the man with the gun.

  In Arabic he apologised for his mother’s indiscretion, and in English he pleaded with her to swallow her pride and look to the floor.

  “You are British?” the man asked in surprise.

  George nodded. Gail dropped her chin to the floor but kept her eyes on the man as much as possible. “Yes,” she said, defiantly. “My name is Dr Gail Turner, and I worked with the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo.”

  The man lowered his pistol and leaned over the railing to get a better look at the dirty, dishevelled elderly woman who had defied him. He raised his eyebrows and a wide grin played across his face, exposing his perfect, straight, white teeth.

  He dug inside his thawb and brought out a small book. On its cover was an emblem looking rather like a green rose flower with writing across the centre.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

  She’d seen enough Qur’ans to know what one looked like, and was about to make a snide remark when the emblem in its centre caught her eye. She looked closer. Beneath what she recognised as the Arabic word for Allah was the bold outline of the Amarna Stickman; the symbol of Aniquilus.

  Aniquilus. The destructor of the Xynutian race. And now its symbol had been adopted by fundamentalists. The irony made her smile.

  “Aniquilus,” she said. “Although you probably know it better as the Amarna Stickman.”

  The man put the book and the pistol away and stood tall on the walkway. His initial surprise at hearing a new term for the Stickman was quickly hidden. “Absolutely correct, Dr Turner.” And without saying a further word, he turned on his heel and left the warehouse.

  He returned soon after, accompanied by a much older man dressed in grey. They descended a set of steps to the warehouse floor and made their way towards Gail and George.

  “Dr Turner, I presume,” the older man said in perfect English. He smiled at his little joke and stuck his hand out towards her. “Assalaam aleikum! You are most welcome; I do apologise for the conditions in which you have been kept, these are trying times, and you can never be too careful.”

  Gail was taken completely off-guard, and accepted the hand in bewilderment, though she stopped short of the formal waleikum salaam response. She had just escaped a pistol-shot to the head from this man’s sidekick, and now she was being welcomed like an old friend.

  “I am sorry, how rude of me not to introduce myself. My name is Omar Abdel-Rahman. I am responsible for Abu Qir. Please, do come this way,” he ge
stured for her to follow him.

  George, Ben, Jake and Zahra stepped forward to protect her.

  Abdel-Rahman waved them away. “You do not need to worry; we will not harm such an esteemed guest to our country. However, one of you may come with us if it makes you feel more comfortable.”

  Chapter 97

  Gail and George were taken to a sitting room, instructed to make themselves as comfortable as possible, then left alone.

  The room could only be described as opulent. Not just comparative opulence in bleak times, but the kind of opulence that one would expect of a rich home during the twentieth century.

  Gold picture frames held paintings that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an art gallery, twin crystal chandeliers hung from richly decorated ceiling roses, plush carpets covered the floor. A display cabinet filled with pottery and glassware occupied one corner of the room, while floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled the remaining wall-space. They sat on one of three Chesterfield sofas, arranged in a square with a large open fireplace making up the fourth side.

  George nudged her in the ribs and nodded towards the small coffee table in front of them.

  It was stocked with old copies of National Geographic, and a large hardback tome on Islamic art. All were well-thumbed, and Gail noted with interest that the topmost copy of National Geographic was from November 2039, and carried an article on the Amarna Library. Much to the combined chagrin and delight of her esteemed University colleagues, she had been interviewed by the reporter for that very issue, two months before achieving her Doctorate. The chagrin came from some conservative archaeologists who sneered at the sensationalist journalism; she always suspected that they were just trying to hide their envy. The delight came mostly from her old friends Dr Hunt and Ellie.