by Claire North
“Thanks for the warning – I’ll call back.”
I hung up, threw my phones and my laptop out of the window of the still-moving train, gathered my bag and walked for three carriages before bumping into a Chinese tourist and his wife heading the other way, whereupon I stole his phone.
Eight minutes later, the train slowed for a long curve towards an ancient bridge, and as it dropped to near running speed, I creaked open a door between two interconnecting carriages, threw my bag onto the tracks and jumped out after it, rolling, knees to chest, as I fell.
Chapter 22
Mongolia is one of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth. Her beauty changes with the eye of the beholder. To a man freshly flung from a still-moving train, it is flat, vast, terrifying, a desert of grass where you might roam for ever, still bleeding, still stinging, and see barely another soul. To a tired wanderer, it is a blessed place, rolling hills and dry shrub where you might start a fire, a warning of mountains in the distance, but an infinite space between you and them. To a thirsty man, it is a damned place, bare and infertile, until you find a little stream running down from a stony hill, when Mongolia becomes again the most beautiful place on this surface of the earth, a hallowed sanctuary from the intrusion of brutal men, an uninhabited wilderness built only for pilgrims and the sky.
I saw in Mongolia all these things, but mostly I saw danger. The irritating customs official on the Mongolian border had known someone, or said something to someone, which now put me in danger, and so I walked from the railway line only far enough to find a little cover, and on my purloined telephone called the only suitable piece I had in play within the Mongolian steppe.
Batukhan, when he answered, bellowed, “Who’s this? What do you want?”
“It’s Silver. I want you to make a move for me.”
He fell very quiet then, and breathed a long while before he said at last, “What do you need?”
“A pickup, and a lift across the Chinese border.”
“I’m very busy right now, very busy…”
“Your soul is mine,” I replied. “I won it and gave you your freedom where other men would have sucked you dry. Now I claim my debt.”
Silence again. Then an overdramatic groan, a flustered sound to cover the terror he would not permit himself to feel. “Tell me where you are.”
“I’d say about a hundred miles north of Erenhot.”
“That’s eleven hours’ drive from here!”
“Then I suggest you get going.”
He drove; I walked.
I walked with my stolen mobile phone turned off until it would be needed. I had crunched something in my ankle and, while it wasn’t unbearable, the discomfort slowed my pace. I could see no trees for miles save for a single scrubby thing of white bark and no leaves which hung in the far distance like a signpost to a hidden cemetery. I walked through a landscape of no roads, no fields, no farms, no people, only sky, until I came at last to a dirt track, no wider than the width of my left foot, near-overgrown save that the odd unnamed animal (my mind leapt to predators and creatures of sharp temperament) had kept it clear. Where there were animal tracks, there was some thin hope of water, so I followed it to a downward curve in the landscape I hadn’t observed coming, and then down a little more to a soft gully where a stream flowed and where, set to one side of the water, stood a low grey wall, half tumbled to obscurity, the land risen to meet its stones so now a man could climb over it in an easy step. Within, a few more broken walls, places where once words and names had been scratched into stone, gone, only an echo in the dust. I wandered through it as the sun began to set, until my eye caught a glimmer of metal beneath the earth. Kneeling down, I brushed away a little dirt to see the corner of a bell of bleached brass, ancient characters still visible on it, cradled by what at first seemed to be a mound of clay, but which, when I pushed a little deeper, I found to be a human arm, dry-grass bone shrouded in faded cloth, and following the line of this stick which still embraced the bell, I saw that the mound I had took for soil was in fact a skull, shrouded also in fabric, a second arm pulled across its face as if the unknown stranger in this place had pulled the cloth across his eyes to shield himself and his precious possession from a storm, and died just so, too weary to live longer.
I left the corpse and the bell, and sat by the stream instead, thumbing my mobile phone back on as the sun set so that Batukhan could find me in the dark.
Chapter 23
Batukhan, five foot two, smuggler, gambler, petty crook, dealer in used cars and bad horses, would-be player who lost on his very first game, (“I don’t know how I lost – perhaps it wasn’t me losing; perhaps it was just you who won?”) and whose life I acquired and spared, drove a monster of a truck with the casual ease of a teenager on a bicycle. One hand on the steering wheel, another gesturing in the air, a bad Chinese cigarette hanging out of his mouth, all windows down and the speed gauge hitting sixty miles an hour despite the total lack of roads as we bounced across the midnight steppe, he exclaimed:
“You’re in real trouble! Real trouble, Silver, like trouble I haven’t seen before, and I’ve seen trouble!”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The Chinese closed the border crossing three hours ago – no trains, no cars, no planes, no nothing! Then two hours ago, the Russians closed their borders too! The government is panic; everyone says we’re about to be invaded, the PLA sent helicopters into Mongolian airspace, denied it of course but we know what we saw – every pony-riding nomad’s on Sina Weibo these days anyway, posting pictures of special forces guys, armour, guns, the whole works, getting on the train and threatening to shoot anyone who looked even slightly Western, slightly like you! They stopped Dae Jang Geum to show a picture of your face – I nearly died! My mother was on the phone to me: ‘They’ve interrupted Dae Jang Geum,’ she was screaming, I tell you, screaming, ‘They’ve interrupted it, just when we were going to find out if it was exile or death – what am I supposed to do?’ ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘they’ll resume broadcasting in a second, just you wait’, – my mother, you see, my mother – but I love her, of course I do – your face on TV! You’re famous, you are.”
“I could do with anonymity.”
“Is this a game?” he asked abruptly as we bounced our way across a surge of stones. “Are you playing a game?”
“Yes. It’s a game – the game, in fact. She’s putting me in check again, removing options, forcing me to…” I hesitated. He was too frightened to hear the words left unspoken. What pieces could I sacrifice to protect myself? Was Batukhan more useful to me dead or alive?
“Well, it’s a disaster! My mother, my mother screaming – the government’s mobilising the army, do you know that? Not to catch you – at least, probably not to catch you – but because the PLA is massing on the south and the Russians are massing in the north and the border’s been closed and the mining companies are asking what’s going on and no one seems to know but it’s all about you, your game ruining my mother’s calm. And when she’s angry, I’m angry, and I have to take my anger out on someone, so if you’ve got someone you’re angry at, you should call them, right now!”
He slapped the steering wheel for emphasis, then clung on tight as a sudden, unseen lurch in the landscape bounced us in our seats. The motion seemed to knock the fury from his lungs, and for a while we rattled on in silence, our headlights tearing through the gathered dark like gunshots through silence.
“Can you get me across the border?” I asked at last.
“Sure – sure I can. I’m me, this is my country, these are my hills, I do anything.” Then, as a sullen afterthought he added, “I’m a player in these parts, I am. I’m a proper player.”
The words, no sooner spoken, fell dull into the night.
We drove on in silence.
His plan for getting me across the border was a travelling family who, as the eldest woman shuffled me into her yurt, proclaimed through her toothless gums that they were of the Baat
uds, an ancient and noble people who had been destroyed by other worthless tribes down the centuries until only a few now, only a few, carried their sacred songs and stories, and would I like coffee?
Batukhan babbled at high speed outside with the woman’s husband, a dialect I didn’t know, and when it seemed that an agreement might never be reached, the old woman rose up and hollered at them both in the same language and they hung their heads, and that seemed to settle the debate.
“They’ll get you into China,” said Batukhan as the woman padded round me and pushed me onto what I suspected was her finest rug. “Any problem, you don’t call me, okay?”
And with that, he was gone.
Impressions of a family travelling through Mongolia.
There were fifteen of them. Grandpa Baatud (nominally in charge), Grandma Baatud (mistress of all she surveyed), two sons and their wives, a daughter and her husband and seven progeny. The eldest of this brood was a boy of fourteen, his face scaled red by the wind, who rode a brown and white pony and glared with a fire that his father lacked, daring anyone to deny his right as eldest, strongest, smartest – a little man in a tiny world. The youngest was a four-year-old who stared at me with astonished eyes and, over the course of the five days I spent with them, only once dared touch me, and having done so clung on, as if unbelieving that I might not dissolve before her. I let her cling; the strength of her arms around my leg reminded me of…something. Something distant which had faded. Something that might have been like trust, but more. Something more, which had vanished with my name.
They rode a mixture of ponies and sour-faced camels. They travelled with two yurts, which could be raised and lowered in a matter of hours, the fine-boned internal structure whisked away and the thick skins that covered it unfurled almost too fast to follow motion; yet the ropes that bound these goods to their animals’ flanks were bright blue, nylon-woven, and as she trotted along, one of the middle daughters, an eleven-year-old who looked at no one, finding no one interesting, kept checking text messages on a mobile phone which was recharged from a solar battery the size of a small frying pan. This heavy object seemed indulgent for just one teenager to use for her social needs as we travelled through this empty land, but lo, when we stopped for food on the second day, out it came and her brothers and sisters leapt to charge their devices while Grandma looked on and said it was the school holidays, and the children did miss their friends when away.
I said nothing, swaddled in a loaned jacket, hat pulled low against the glare of the sun, the grumbling camel beneath my folded legs burping toxic gases in sulky criticism of my presence on its hump.
We ate dishes enriched by camel butter, and drank hot cups of camel milk. The husbands and sons sang songs at night, tales of ancient battles and dead witches, whose contents I barely understood, while their children sat around to listen, the youngest agape, the eldest silent in the face of unappreciated repetition.
Once, a military fighter plane flew over, and during the three hours that followed, I heard engines higher in the clouds. One of the sons declared he knew it to be Chinese by the sound, having served in the Mongolian army, whereupon the second son laughed and said his brother couldn’t tell the difference between a vulture and an eagle, let alone a Chinese or a Russian jet, and he was to stop boasting about his time in the army, given he’d only served for three months before being dismissed as unfit for duty. Then the eldest son flushed red and said at least he’d served, at least he’d travelled, and an argument broke out between them, silenced at last by Grandma who proclaimed that they were giving her a headache and didn’t they know better than to put her into one of her moods?
It seemed they did, and they fell silent.
Grass dried, thinned, failed.
We swathed ourselves in bright fabric dulled by sunlight, wrapping it around our faces, our fingers, our clothes, barrier against the dust and the sun. My eyes burned, skin flaking from the lids. My face, even shielded, began to crunch to the lizard-like redness of my companions. I craved water, but drank only when they did, obeying their rules, knowing their rules had been formed to survive. The daughter stopped texting after a while; the dust took the inclination from her. I wondered what she might have said? DESERT SUCKS SO BORED ATM. CAN’T WAIT TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL
I laughed out loud thinking about it, and the convoy stared at me and I laughed no more.
On the fifth night, as the fire blazed in the centre of the camp, and the men sat round boasting of impossible deeds while camels churned and ponies slumbered, I saw shapes move on the edge of the dark and, fearing the worst, made to run. Then the shapes resolved into the form of the women and their daughters, moving against the edge of the starlight, and creeping further, I saw hands sweeping across the turning skies, and heard soft voices whispering secrets, and strained my ears to catch some few words of the truths being told there.
By this star you may find north, whispered a mother, and by that you may know how far you are from dawn in winter. When you head south, you will see this constellation grow brighter, and may count the hours by the turning of this light as it journeys through the heavens. Remember these lessons, they whispered, for one day you may find yourself lost and alone in this land, far from friends, and only the earth beneath your feet, the water of the rivers and the rains of the skies, the journey of the sun, the shriek of the eagle as it returns to its nest and the turning of the stars will guide you. Believe in these, believe in yourself, and you will always find your way home.
The next morning, without any ado, as we travelled in silence across a plain of yellow dirt, Grandpa Baatud half turned in his saddle to look back at me and said, “This is China.”
“Is it?” I looked for sign of life, a change in the land, an appearance of people, but the landscape was as empty as it had been, the sky as wide.
“Oh yes,” he replied merrily. “We’ve been in China for a while now. You can tell by the smell.”
I sniffed the air and smelt nothing new.
Two days later, we came to a village in the middle of yellow sand and white rocks whose name translated as something akin to “The Beginning of the Sun Near the Death Tree”, and whose inhabitants, all two hundred and twenty-nine of them, had the same sun-blasted, sand-scraped, wind-scrubbed features as my guides. I looked for signs of a police station and saw none. I looked for a military presence and saw none. I wrapped myself in my scarf, buried my face in my hat and asked in Mandarin if there was anywhere I could stay. Eventually, the mayor of the town, a man who had more than a little of the Mongol in him, put me up on his sofa, which was in his bedroom, which was his house, and refused any payment for his kindness.
Alone, in a nowhere place, in a nowhere land.
Grassland had yielded to dust. Desert is not merely a place of dunes but of dryness, of solid packed earth and dust, of stones and rocks and flatness that will not be dug, sky that does not forgive. I asked the ayor why there was a town here.
“There was copper,” he said sadly, “but that was a long time ago.”
So it had been; yet it was no more. I did not ask further.
The nearest town was four hours’ drive away.
I caught a lift on the back of a truck loaded with rubble.
“It’s all we sell,” explained the driver. “People seem to find a use for it. Why are you here?”
“Just travelling.”
“No one travels here,” he replied. “Here is death.”
“Everyone travels to death sooner or later,” I replied with a smile. “In one way or another.”
He stared at me in surprise, then turned away and looked for a brief moment like the loneliest, saddest man in the world.
The next town had a population of nine hundred and thirty-three, and a market on Thursdays, and the last gasping remnants of a mine nearby. It even had a guest house with four rooms and a visitor balcony. I sat on a wobbly plastic chair on the balcony watching the dust rise from the mine nearby, smelt chemicals on the air, heard the gri
nding of great machines tearing through the earth.
It had been over a week since the Gamesmaster plastered my face on Mongolian TV. Will she have the power to plaster it on China’s networks too?
I watched TV on a tiny black and white set in my little, roach-crawling room, and saw no evidence of this. One computer in the town had an internet connection, and after a great deal of bartering with the man who owned it (something middling in the mining corporation) I secured twenty minutes on it, watching the system crawl into reluctant life.
My face, it turned out, was not on the Chinese evening news, but the Interpol search warrant had somehow evolved into a thing that had both the Russian and Chinese police forces excited at the idea of finding me. The FBI, I was relieved to see, had yet to join in with this mania – clearly my control of that institution still exceeded the Gamesmaster’s.
Twenty minutes on a computer was not enough to wreck any real havoc against this exasperating move, so I deleted my internet history, shut down and moved on.
There was a bus to the next nearest town, population fifteen thousand. As we drove through the desolate landscape, I looked out of the window to see machines bigger than swimming pools crunching through solid rock, great axels like tearing teeth rending the earth into shreds, men walking along gantries within these creatures’ bellies, dust flying, flying all around, turning the windows of the cramped bus grey.
Ten miles outside town, the bus stopped at a road marking in the middle of nowhere, a place with no name, and a man got on. I looked at him and he looked at me, and I thought I recognised in him a thing that I did not like and looked around at my fellow passengers to see if anyone else had that instinct, and at least three or four had turned away.
On our arrival in the swollen red dusk, at a bus station that smelt of urine and rotting eggs, I got off, and the man who’d boarded ten miles ago got off with me, walked up behind me, drew a gun from the holster underneath his black padded coat and a badge from inside the pockets of his trousers and said, “Stop, please.”