They switched off their torches after that, and Nabila wondered how many times more they would see one another’s faces. In the darkness, they held hands. They were both tired, but sleep would not come. It seemed an excess to use up precious time by sleeping anyway. It was too cold to make love, too dark to talk, too silent to listen.
But in the end, sleep did come, a heavy, fitful sleep that gave them no real rest. It was disturbed by the ghosts whose slumbers they had broken after so many years.
Once, Nabila woke to hear a noise, a rattling and clicking somewhere in the dark, and she switched on her torch and shone its light in that direction. Facing her, startled by the sudden brightness, was a gazelle. Perhaps it was the one they had surprised in the forest, perhaps a companion. It stood blinking into the light for long, troubled seconds, then dashed away among the bones and clutter. Did it too know it was trapped in here, that there could be no escape back to the sand or the green trees?
Large grey spiders scuttled and strutted everywhere, their long agile legs using men’s fingers as their ladders. They made nests in the empty skulls, and emerged like grey crabs through the eyes and mouths. They would sit very still at times, then run in a sudden jerking movement that made Nabila shiver. She wondered if this was their constant abode, if this was just the latest generation in a long line of tomb-dwelling spiders, or whether they knew ways to pass between this place and the world of sunlight above.
David woke shortly after dawn, reading the time from his twenty-four-hour watch. He’d been dreaming of long stretches of desert filled with armies, their golden and red banners stretched out high above their heads like floating pavilions.
Letting Nabila sleep, he switched on his torch and opened his pack to get some water. As he did so, he noticed the old map that his father had given him. The sight of it jogged something in his memory. It was too vague to pinpoint, but he thought that, if he looked carefully, he might remember what it was.
He got up and walked about a little, in order to stretch his limbs. He knew they were going to die in here. There was barely enough food and water for another two days. They could eat and drink it all at once, it would make next to no difference. He thought of Nabila, dead and staring here, with spiders walking through her hair, and in time nesting in her empty skull.
‘Where are you, David? I can’t see you.’
He turned and saw a light blinking at him.
‘Over here’ he said.
He went back to her, and they sat together, making as good a breakfast as they could with what rations they had: Nothing hot, nothing particularly palatable, just the dull business of keeping the body alive no matter what.
‘David, I’ve had a thought. Would your satellite communications thing work through all this stone and sand?’
‘The Ultralite? I’m not sure.’
‘Why don’t you give it a try?’
‘What’s the point in that? Even if I could speak to somebody back in England, they could hardly come out here to rescue us. And even if there was a way of sending people out, how the hell would they get into this place? They’d need heavy equipment to dig us out. That bastard Chang Zhangyi isn’t going to be content to sit around watching them, you know.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, try,’ Nabila snapped, not petulantly, but out of a sudden passion that denied the despair that had been gripping both of them. ‘We can’t sit here doing nothing,’ she hurried on, ‘or wait till we starve to death. If you could speak to someone, they might come up with a way round the problem. Why can’t you just try?’
Stung, David said nothing, but found the Ultralite and set it up on the nearest tomb, a monument to a woman called Wu Zhengmei, who had lived out her life as the principal concubine of Sima Hsiarou, puppet ruler of Ts’ang Mi.
He keyed in a series of codes and passwords, then gave it the number that would put him through to the all-day and all-night monitoring desk in London. Nothing happened. He tried again, several times, but each time the apparatus simply went dead on him. The signal simply could not penetrate all that sand and stone.
He put the little case away in silence. Nabila said nothing. Perhaps he’d been right, she thought, but that wasn’t the point. She walked quietly away into the darkness, wondering if he would follow her, or stay where he was, nursing his wounded pride.
As she walked, she let the torch she carried play over the walls. Some of them had paintings, faded now, but still distinguishable, others held niches in which tall statues had been placed. It seemed an extravagance to walk past like this, letting the torch-beam play on dust-covered walls. Was not light now the most precious thing in existence, the only thing between them and eternal darkness? But what would she have saved the light for? To brighten her death? To let her see David’s face as he breathed his last?
The thought of that suffocated her, and she turned abruptly, just to be sure he was there. The torch found him bending over the tomb, stooped, weary, packing the Ultralite back inside the bergen, as though that was important now. She decided to go up to him and kiss him and apologize.
Even as she watched, she saw him straighten and then, out of the corner of one eye, she caught sight of something moving. She thought it might be the gazelle again, drawn by the light. She turned her gaze and, for a moment, or perhaps two moments, she saw a woman, a young woman in long robes, crimson and beaten gold and copper, with her long hair falling almost to the floor. She seemed to be pointing with one arm towards the ceiling. Their eyes met, then the woman was gone, and David was standing alone, bent over the tomb like a runner at the end of a long run.
She was about to rush to him when, suddenly, she stood stock still. Something had just occurred to her. She swung the beam, letting light play on the wall, then up higher, across the ceiling. More paintings, more carvings, more shadows. And yet…
‘David,’ she shouted. ‘David, come over here!’
His hurrying feet came skittering across the floor, narrowly missing the obstacles that lay in his path. She saw the light he carried dip and weave towards her, then he was there.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘not a thing. I’ve just figured out how we can get out of here.’
‘Oh, Nabila …’
‘No, listen. These tombs were built to stand on their own. They were never meant to be buried beneath tons of sand. Isn’t that right?’
‘Well, yes, obviously.’
‘The ceilings are slightly vaulted, which is why they’ve been able to hold all this weight. But not even the best-built roof can resist pressure like that for very long. It would take very little to dislodge part of a roof, and then we’d see the whole thing give way.’
‘You mean, let’s pull the roof in, then stand around while a million tons of sand crashes in on top of our heads?’
‘No, I don’t mean that at all. Just listen for once, will you? This is the only chance we’ve got.’
‘I’m sorry … Go on.’
'Take a proper look up there. Use your torch, it’s better than mine. Here, let me show you.’
She swung the beam of her torch on to a central section of the ceiling, where stone beams intersected with a central boss.
‘Can you see?’ she asked. ‘The keystone is coming loose already, so are some of the beams. It might take another hundred years, maybe more, but I guarantee it’s going to give in the end. Look further down, and there - do you see? - a lot of the beams are skewed or sagging.’
‘That still doesn’t help us.’
‘Of course it does. You’re just not using your brain. We don’t try to dislodge any of these, because, as you say, we’ll end up crushed to death beneath whatever’s up there. But there are places where only one section shows signs of potential collapse. If we choose our spot carefully enough, what we should get is a controlled opening, maybe something a yard across, maybe even less. Once it’s open, sand will start pouring inside. Like an hour-glass. After a while, there’ll be no more sand. We climb up
to the hole and squeeze our way out.’
David hesitated, studying the ceiling, thinking over everything she’d said. He hated the role he’d come to play, deflating her hopes for escape. But what use were false hopes, in the end?
‘You’re forgetting one thing,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘How the hell are we supposed to get up to the ceiling in the first place? I haven’t noticed any ladders lying conveniently about, have you?’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
The water in the lake had cooled after a long hot day. The fish, sensing the coolness, swam up closer to the surface. Moonlight struck the water at an angle. There were more stars than he had ever seen in his life.
Drifting in the cool centre of the loch, Anthony felt himself cut off from everything, suspended on a pool of ink, waiting for a fish to snare itself on his line.
There were times when the killings became a little hard to cope with. Most of the time, he found he could keep them at a distance. The men in Iraq, for example, did not matter in the least to him. Matthew Hyde had not mattered to him.
But Meihua had disturbed his equilibrium, her beauty had got under his skin, and the sense of her dead made him shiver at night, in the solitary hours of the morning. Now Lizzie. Too many deaths, too close to home.
He wondered again whether David Laing was dead. In all likelihood, he would never know for sure. But he could be reasonably certain that Laing and his girlfriend were lying face down in the heart of the Taklamakan, drawing vultures from every direction. If so, it didn’t bother him. He’d be more worried to learn that Laing was alive and still looking for Chaofe Ling.
He looked up at the house. One light was on downstairs, another in the bedroom where Maddie slept. If you could call it sleep. He’d undressed her, washed her, and dressed her again in a simple nightdress that he’d found hanging in a wardrobe. And finally put her to bed.
The lake was wide and deep and cold. How deep, he neither knew nor cared. Ducks and other water birds glided across its surface, and sometimes they dipped their heads down and dived far below, to come up with small fish in their beaks. At the bottom of the lake grew dark green weeds and waving fronds and willow moss. It was cold and dark at the bottom of the lake, and no one ever went there, and no one ever came back from there.
He returned his oars to the rowlocks and began to move slowly back to shore. Only a few more days, he thought; only a few more days.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
The solution might never have occurred to Nabila had it not been for the image she’d already conjured up, sand pouring through a hole in the ceiling to form a sort of cone that would lead them up to the breach and out into the open air.
‘David, let’s get our packs. I want to go back to the spot where we came in.’
‘Darling, you saw how enormous that slab of rock was. There’s no way out.’
‘I’m not interested in the rock. I’m interested in the sand.’
She explained to him how it could be done, and for the first time he thought she might have cracked it after all.
‘How do we transport the sand from the entrance to here or further back?’
‘We’ll think of something,’ she said. ‘First of all, I think we should choose our place in the ceiling very carefully. And I think we should hurry. These torches aren’t going to last for ever.’
‘I think we should start at the entrance,’ David said.
‘Won’t the roof be badly damaged after that helicopter crashed into it?’
‘It could be. But I still think we should examine that area first.’
Right at the front, there were visible signs of cracking and collapsing masonry. But a little back from that they found exactly what they were looking for. About twenty yards from the way in, the ceilings showed fewer signs of stress. There was a stretch where everything seemed firm, followed by one ceiling with a keystone that had already slipped. They settled on it as their way out, and marked the spot by erecting several spears and flagpoles above the nearest tomb. In spite of the cold, David hung his jacket between two of the poles, where it would pick up the light from a distance. They could not afford the luxury of leaving one torch lit on the tomb.
On their way back to the sand piles, they paused to move any skeletons out of the path they meant to take once they started work. It felt like a terrible desecration to them both, to wreck bones that had stayed together for two thousand years.
Even though the distance was not particularly great, the task of moving a substantial amount of sand to where they wanted it was far from simple. David discovered two metal shields, each with slots through which straps had once been laced. He removed the straps from their bergens and managed to fit them to the shields, making two harnesses that enabled them to fill the insides of the shields and drag them over the floor to the spot they’d chosen.
Their biggest concern was light. Without it, they would have been in pitch darkness, forced to stumble about until exhaustion or despair dragged them down. It was impossible to guess how many hours there were left in the torch batteries, or how many hours it would take to build the hill of sand high enough to reach.
With practice, they established a clear route to the mound, and worked out that it was around thirty paces away. Slowly, the sand rose. It would grow more quickly as it got higher, but it would take a vast amount of sand.
They’d grow exhausted and fall asleep side by side on one or another mound of sand. It was worse than being out in the desert. Sand filled their hair and clothes. When they slept, they dreamed of it. When they woke, it was the first thing they became aware of.
'I thought I saw a girl standing by that tomb,’ said Nabila.
‘Really? Which one?’
‘The tomb of Wu Zhengmei,’ she whispered, almost frightened to speak the name out loud. ‘The concubine.’
‘Yes, I know.’
They were in darkness; she could not see his face or guess at his reaction.
‘When was that?’ he asked.
‘Just before I told you how we could get out of here.’
‘I see.’
‘Did you ...?’
‘See someone? No. No, I didn’t.’
‘I imagine it was a sort of hallucination. It was only for a few seconds. I thought she had long hair and a robe of silk, a robe of red and gold.’
‘Yes, I’d imagined her like that myself.’ He paused. ‘I think it’s time we got moving again.’
He switched on the torch so they could get their bearings. The light showed his face briefly. He had grown pale and haggard, not himself at all.
‘I’m sorry I ...’ Nabila began, but he cut her off.
‘I didn’t see her,’ he said. ‘But I felt her presence. At that same moment.’ He would not say more.
Work was harder on the second day. The backbreaking routine of dragging heavy shields full of sand across the stone floor was followed by the sheer agony of getting the loads up higher and higher as the day went on.
They finished their last food and water that night. The mound was not even half complete. As their strength waned, the task would stretch out longer and longer, perhaps too long for both of them to survive.
‘I looked at the map again yesterday,’ David said before they slept. ‘It makes sense now. These are the Tombs of Ts’ang Mi. I think Ts’ang Mi was Karakhoto. And I’m sure the tombs are no more than a mile or two from the city. We’re nearly there, Nabila. All we have to do is break through that roof.’
But she was already fast asleep. He kissed her and lay down on his bed of sand. The last thing he heard was the rattle of a spider walking over old bones.
It was late when they woke. Their limbs were aching badly. David could barely move at first. He did some exercises to get a bit of flexibility into his back, then headed for the entrance, dragging his empty shield behind him.
Nabila worked out how to make steps in the mound by using metal plates from sets of armour. By employing
enough of them, it was possible to create a shaky but reliable path from foot to summit. At this point, the mound was about twelve feet high.
Their strength was ebbing rapidly now. They rested more often, and went about their task more and more slowly. Carrying such heavy weights was wearing them out. Once, as they rested, Nabila turned to David.
‘If I die in here, promise you’ll leave me. Promise.’
‘Darling ...'
‘I’m serious. Please don’t argue with me. I feel perfectly safe here. Ever since I saw that woman.’
‘There was no woman. And I won’t let you die.’
‘David, it’s too late for that now. We may both die here. There were times I had to tell this to patients, now I have to tell it to you. And to myself. It could take some time, but frankly, I don’t think it will. We need rest and we need food, and we’ve no way of getting either. Once our strength gives out ...'
They got up after that and dragged ten more shields to the mound. Each time, the climb to the top was both higher and steeper. As David dumped the last load on top of the mound, he felt dizzy suddenly and slipped, falling on to the summit and sending all the sand they had just laid there tumbling back to the bottom.
They could do nothing after that. Instead, they lay together in the darkness, and in time they fell into a long sleep. When they woke, they found that one of the torches had been left switched on and would give no more light. With the remaining torch, they struggled back to the entrance.
They made the long journey to the mound on their hands and knees now, scraping their way along painfully through the dark, like Sisyphus. Before long, their hands were scraped red and their knees were bleeding. Climbing the mound had to be done in two or three passes, with a little sand at a time.
Then Nabila suggested that they should start shifting sand from the bottom of the heap directly to the top. Done carefully, it gave them a few more feet in height without the time-consuming journeys in between.
Checking with the remaining torch, they could see that they were now within a foot or two of making contact. While bringing more sand up, however, they noticed something else: the mound was now too narrow at the top to go any higher. They’d always reach this point just to see the sand slither away from them, down the side. If they wanted to lift it even another foot, they’d have to widen and thicken the whole thing considerably. The torch started flickering. David led the way slowly down to the bottom.
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