INCARNATION

by Daniel Easterman

  ‘Will Dr Azez Haun, passenger for London, please make himself known to Air China in the departure lounge?’

  They’d been making the announcement for something like ten minutes, always varying the name, until now he realized he was the object of their search. He felt his heart go cold. Why had he been singled out?

  He considered sitting tight and brazening it out, to see if he could still make it on to the plane. Surely, once they’d taken off …

  On reflection, he could hardly avoid detection. They’d want to check his papers before letting him on the plane. With a sigh he got up and went to a small desk at the far end of the room.

  ‘I’m Dr Khan,’ he said, speaking English. The girl behind the desk didn’t speak the language much better.

  ‘Ah, Dr Huan. You were a member of International Conference on Traditional and Scientific Medicine, yes?’

  He acknowledged that he was. She smiled and asked him for his boarding pass.

  ‘All members of International Conference are to be upgraded to first class. This is your new boarding pass. When you board, you will be directed upstairs to first class. I hope you enjoy your flight.’

  Bewildered, his heart still fluttering, he returned to his seat. A few minutes later, an announcement came, asking standard-class passengers to make their way to gate number seven. Slowly, the departure lounge emptied. Finally, half a dozen first-class passengers were left, including himself.

  ‘Will passengers Zhang, Evans, and Genscher please proceed to gate seven.’

  The first three picked up their jackets and bags and headed for the plane with the weariness of long-experienced travellers. Kirim did not know how to judge them. This would be only his second time on a plane. It seemed a comfortable enough way to travel. He’d heard that you could even sleep well in first class.

  ‘Passengers Macey and Lu to board now, please.’

  He watched them go, then glanced round and discovered that he was all alone. The fear returned then, and with it the knowledge. They’d found out about him late, and somebody high up had vetoed an open arrest that might cause embarrassment, maybe even get into foreign newspapers. So this elaborate game with a first-class transfer had been arranged.

  For a moment, he thought of walking down towards the gate, trusting to the proximity of the other passengers. Maybe he could get on board that way, maybe they’d be forced to let him go.

  He looked back at the lounge entrance. The first PSB man had arrived. And down at the doors leading out to the gate, an airport security guard carrying a submachine-gun.

  He sat tight and waited for someone more senior to arrive. And he wondered who had tipped them off.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  She arrived at the Chini Bagh at half-past eight, dressed in a white medical coat and flowered headscarf.

  ‘I’ve got to be at the hospital in a few minutes. Would you like to come?’

  ‘I don’t have a white coat.’

  ‘I’ll get you one. What colour would you like?’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘Of white coat.’

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Anything you like. We generally take a white coat, smear it with a herbal concoction, and leave it to dry. They usually come out in shades of brown, but I once had a fetching purple.’ He laughed and said he’d take white.

  The hospital was less than a thousand yards from the hotel, a small, unimposing building. A large red cross above the door proclaimed its identity, otherwise it might have been anything from a school to a silk factory.

  Inside, Nabila led him on a rambling journey along green-painted corridors in which trolleys and drip-stands and dirty laundry jostled for space with staff and patients. Several white-coated figures passed, greeting Nabila warmly. No one seemed in a hurry. A middle-aged man stopped to chat with her briefly. He showed absolutely no interest in David. Further along the corridor, several patients lay on narrow beds.

  ‘We’re running out of space. The People’s Hospital over the river has started sending us their overflow. We have to take them if someone over there prescribes Uighur medicine. You’d be surprised how many of their patients have started suffering from conditions that will only respond to traditional remedies.’

  David glanced at the inert forms on the beds.

  ‘The only thing this lot would respond to would be a shot of electricity.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  Round the next turning, they came to a scuffed dark brown door that bore Nabila’s name. It had been painted carefully on a rectangular plaque of lighter wood. She took a long key from her pocket and opened the door with what looked to David suspiciously like a flourish, as if to say, ‘This is my territory’.

  One of the walls was covered in posters showing the various acupuncture points and meridians, the major therapeutic flowers and herbs, and optical charts.

  The other walls held glass-fronted wooden cabinets of a type David remembered from his schooldays. They’d pursued him from one lab or classroom to another, tall and ugly, crammed full of dark jars that held unnameable substances. A quick glance showed him that these were little different. He could make out what looked very like a giant centipede in one, staring out at him with frightened disdain.

  'Plop yourself down,’ said Nabila, pointing to a typing chair.

  ‘I’m quite comfortable standing, if you ...'

  ‘I said, sit down.’ Her voice had turned peremptory. He sat down. As he did so, he noticed with interest a desk and some filing cabinets hard against the back wall. He wondered if they contained Nabila’s records of the mysterious outbreaks of illness.

  ‘Is that where you keep ...?’

  ‘Roll up your sleeve,’ she ordered, cutting him off.

  Bemused, he did as he was told. She came and stood beside him and began to feel his pulses, all six of them. It took several minutes, during which time she said absolutely nothing. When she was done, she wrote down her findings on a sheet of white paper.

  ‘Very good,’ she said. ‘You’re alive. Now, tongue, please.’

  ‘What’s all this in aid of?’

  ‘No questions. Tongue.’

  There was nothing for it. He stuck his tongue out as far as it would go. Nabila pulled it out half an inch further, took a long, hard look at it, and nodded.

  ‘Tongue back,’ she said. He hoped she wouldn’t want to examine much more of him.

  She went to her desk, consulted a couple of leather-bound books, and wrote out a prescription. Holding it in one hand, she went round the cupboards, taking down jars of dark liquid and decocting a little from each one into a tall measuring jar. When it was half-full, she handed it to him.

  ‘This is for you,’ she said.

  ‘But I’m not ill.’

  ‘No?’

  She took a mirror from the desk and held it in front of him. The face that looked back was red-eyed, red-nosed, and crack-lipped.

  ‘It’s hay fever,’ he said. ‘You can’t do anything ...'

  ‘Drink the medicine.’

  ‘It looks disgusting.’

  ‘It is disgusting. You’ll have to get used to it. I’ll give you a prescription for the hospital pharmacy. They’ll give you a bag of herbs, and you can boil them up later.’

  He sipped from the jar.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he gasped, pushing it away from him.

  ‘Don’t sip it. Just drink it down in one go.’

  He closed his eyes, pretended it was whisky, and poured it down his throat.

  She smiled.

  ‘Good boy.’

  ‘I hope that isn’t all you brought me in here for.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Well, I quite enjoyed having my pulses read.’

  ‘Good. I’ll read them again tomorrow. You should be a lot better by then anyway.’

  ‘You have very delicate fingers.’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘they’re quite coarse. I know a Chinese doctor who can detect the sex of an
unborn baby just by reading the mother’s pulses.’

  ‘I’m sure his fingers weren’t quite as graceful as yours.’

  This time she blushed. To cover her embarrassment, she turned and went to a cupboard containing three shelves of wide-necked jars.

  ‘I’ve had enough, thank you,’ said David. Surely she couldn’t be planning to dose him again?

  ‘This isn’t medicine,’ she said. She took down a huge jar from the second shelf and brought it over to the desk. It had a cork stopper in its mouth, which Nabila removed with no little difficulty. Once it was out, she laid it to one side and rolled up her sleeve. David wondered what disgusting specimen of preserved livestock she was about to fish out. She plunged her hand into the jar, swished about a little, then drew out a roll of something wrapped tightly in polythene and secured with corroded elastic bands.

  She wiped the roll with a small towel, and set it on the desk. Before touching it further, she resealed the jar and returned it to the cupboard.

  . The elastic bands had rotted. They fell away in pieces as Nabila started to undo them. She brushed them aside, then unrolled the polythene. Inside it was a tube of paper, tightly rolled. Carefully, she unrolled it across her desk.

  It was a map of southern Sinkiang, showing the desert rim oases and part of the Taklamakan itself. The colours used to designate contour ran from bright yellow to dark brown. Across this expanse, someone had drawn a series of perfect red circles. Each circle had a number attached, the smallest being two, the largest eleven. Beside these were dates in proper Arabic numerals.

  ‘These are the deaths,’ said Nabila, taking a red pen from her pocket and uncapping it. ‘I learned last night that there have been others. Here ...’ On the map she placed a clear plastic rectangle punched full of circles, ovals, curves, and other shapes. Centring the rectangle on a spot near Chira, she quickly inscribed another little circle. ‘And here ... and here.’ Against the first circle, she wrote "7", against the second "4", and against the third, "9"; 20 deaths in all.

  ‘Do you have more details?’ he asked, sitting to study the map.

  She extracted a file of patient notes from a drawer under the desk.

  ‘These are photocopies,’ she said. ‘The originals are kept in a safer place.’

  He began to pore over the map.

  ‘I have to be at a clinic,’ said Nabila. 'I’ll leave you here. I’ll lock the room behind me, so if you need anything, speak up now.’

  ‘I’m fine. You’d better get going before they send somebody looking for you.’

  When she was gone, he sat for a while, just to get his bearings. It took him several minutes to realize his feelings of unreality had nothing to do with the hospital or the mysterious objects he found himself surrounded with. It was Nabila. He was starting to have feelings for her that could ruin everything if he didn’t check them right away.

  He examined the map, building up rough patterns from the positions and dates of the deaths. The patient files suggested possible patterns of severity. Using a pencil and ruler, he drew lines between some of the circles, and from the circles towards a series of vanishing points that might have been the origin of the toxin which was causing the deaths. Whatever it was, he felt certain it was coming from somewhere along a line about four hundred miles into the desert. The line was several hundred miles long, an impossible distance to search.

  She returned in just over an hour. The clinic had gone well, one of her patients had been fit enough to go home, and her professor had congratulated her on her paper at Urumchi. She came in smiling and dropped a heap of files on a chair.

  ‘You look happy,’ he said. She explained why.

  ‘My patient is the wife of the deputy chairman for the county,’ she said. ‘She went away very pleased with my treatment. Next thing, she’ll send her husband. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘He doesn’t have hay fever, does he?’

  ‘No idea. What about you?’

  ‘I ...’

  She held the mirror in front of him again. No redness, no puffiness, no nasal discharge.

  ‘Don’t think that lets you off more treatment,’ she said. ‘Getting fully better requires hard work. Now, have you ever been to Lake Karakul?’

  The name evoked more memories of his first visit. He’d only spent half a day there, but he still remembered it as the most beautiful place he’d ever been.

  ‘Briefly,’ he said.

  ‘Good. That means you can drive. I go there once a year, in July. It’s already late, and I daren’t leave it any longer.’

  ‘Exactly what do you go there for?’

  ‘The Snow Lotus. It blooms the same time every year. It’s extremely rare. You can find specimens at Heaven Lake, near Urumchi. I was very tempted to go when I was there, but there was the problem of getting the flowers back. I know where they grow around Karakul.’

  ‘This is more medicine, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, more medicine. It’s very helpful for rheumatism or arthritis. Also menstrual cramps. I use it quite a lot.’

  ‘Sounds like fun,’ he said. ‘Karakul.’ He thought for a moment, then looked up, tapping the map in front of him.

  ‘Nabila, have you ever heard of a place called Karakhoto?’

  She nodded quietly.

  ‘The Black City,’ she said. Her voice was low, as though she did not want to be overheard. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Is it in the desert?’

  ‘Perhaps. People say it is, I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘But you could find out?’

  ‘It’s not that simple, David. Karakhoto is a buried city. It lies beneath the sands. No one has seen it in centuries. But everyone knows the name. It is the Devil’s city.’

  He took a slow breath and looked at her.

  ‘I want to go there,’ he said. ‘I think it’s where our weapons are being stored.’

  ‘Then the Devil hasn’t gone away,’ she whispered.

  He ran his hand softly across the surface of the map, as though by some process of divination he could locate a city that had been hidden for generations. And that was when he understood that he would have to venture into the Taklamakan alone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Nabila called for him early the next morning in a battered Suzuki 4X4 with "Traditional Uighur Medical Hospital" inscribed in tall red letters across both sides in Uighur and Chinese. Her arrival took him by surprise. He was still writing his letter to Maddie. In the end, he’d decided against saying anything about Sam.

  ‘Just let me finish this,’ he said, scribbling a few last endearments.

  Nabila watched him impatiently, wanting to get on the road before it was too hot. The previous evening, she’d taken David to the apartment of one of her cousins, Momin, who was a musician with a local troupe that played at weddings and festivals. Momin turned out to be first-class company. He refused to take a penny in rent, and said he was honoured to have a colleague of Nabila’s as a guest. David sensed that Nabila was held in high esteem by her family, and was treated very differently to most Uighur women as a result.

  Momin was a Muslim, but a lot less severe than Nabila’s part of the family. He laughed when she turned up to take the doctor from Kazakhstan on a herb-hunting expedition. It was the sort of thing she did all the time.

  ‘Would you like musical accompaniment?’ he asked.

  Nabila, sensing that she was about to be chaperoned, told him to mind his own business.

  ‘Get her to sing for you’ he said to David as they prepared to leave. ‘She has a wonderful voice.’

  She took her headscarf off as they left Kashgar, and put it into a glove compartment stuffed full of glass jars. Her hair was black and fine, and it caught the sun as they drove.

  ‘We won’t just be looking for Snow Lotuses,’ Nabila said. ‘That whole area’s thick with healing plants.’

  ‘It’s nice to know,’ he said, ‘but I’m worried about losing a day. I don’t think we have much time in which to f
ind this weapons plant.’

  ‘Who are we?’

  ‘You and I.’

  ‘No, you meant somebody else. If I can find it, there’s nothing I can do about it except smuggle the documents I’ve got outside. Maybe I can get some campaigning group in the West to make a lot of noise about it. From my point of view, a day or two doesn’t make such a difference. But for you ...’

  ‘I can’t tell you why, Nabila, but if the weapon they’re testing now goes into full production, it could entail loss of life on a tremendous scale.’

  ‘I rather guessed that. Don’t worry. We aren’t just looking for flowers at Karakul.’

  They drove on rapidly. The jeep’s official name was "Spirit of Revolution", but Nabila called it the Camel and banged it every time it gave them trouble, which was often.

  It took them several hours to get to their destination. They stopped at Upal for a quick breakfast of samosas. At Ghez, a weary soldier laid his gun aside and checked their permits. Handing them back, he waved them through without a word. David looked back at the tiny outpost and watched it dwindle until it faded from sight entirely.

  Technically speaking, they were on the great Karakoram Highway that led through the Khunjerab Pass into Pakistan. For the moment, though, it was just a dirt track that appeared to be going nowhere. Sometimes a heavy truck passed them filled with tourists or traders. The gaudily painted Pakistani lorries seemed to have been sent there from a different world. When they passed, the drab landscape reverted to its hues of grey and ochre. Nothing seemed to live here. At times, they seemed the only moving thing on the face of a dead planet. And then they came to Karakul. They mounted a steep rise, and topping it came upon a carpet of grass wider than half the world. These were the high pastures, the lush pamirs where the Kirghiz horsemen rode among their herds. The mountains towered above them, steep and white, and their summits were cradled by high, never-ending winds. Nabila pointed upwards to where snow-banners drifted against a dark blue sky. Grey mist clung like a shroud to the shoulders of the nearest peak, so high it took their breath away to watch it turn and twist.