by Jodi Taylor
They made no pretence at marching in neat lines. They had cloths tied around the lower part of their faces and, heads down, were eating up the miles. Several chariots broke ranks to check out our rock. Ronan and I lowered our heads and kept very, very still, but the check was cursory. It had already been cleared and everyone out there in the heat had other things to worry about anyway.
It took the army nearly two hours to pass by, and towards the end, we didn’t even bother trying to record. Visibility was almost zero and the dust wasn’t doing my equipment any good at all. The ground was shaking as they passed, and dust, grit, tiny pebbles and the odd stinging insect kept dropping from the stone roof over our heads.
Finally, the last of them marched out of view and silence fell. We sat up, drank some water, and literally waited for the dust to settle.
‘Well,’ Ronan said, handing me back the recorder he’d been using. ‘That brought back unpleasant memories. I had honestly forgotten how tedious History is.’
Which might well be true, but looking at his power levels, he’d nearly drained the battery, so he’d been recording solidly for at least two hours. I refrained from pointing this out.
We sat back to take a moment. The sun had moved around behind us and our patch of shade was a little larger. I eased my cramped position, groaned, and tried to stretch out my aching legs.
Ronan stood up stiffly and rubbed his back. ‘Do you think, after that unwelcome interlude, we could resume our negotiations?’
‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back to my pod. I’m desperate for a cup of tea. And I want to see what we’ve managed to record.’
I made to stand up but my legs had gone to sleep. He hesitated and then offered me his hand. ‘Here.’
We both looked at each other for a very long moment, then I took it and he hauled me to my feet. Sadly, my legs still weren’t doing their job properly and I collapsed against him. He staggered before regaining his footing.
‘Bloody hell, isn’t it about time you lost some of that baby weight?’
I flexed my aching knees. ‘Well, I did make a start this morning but some dozy pillock put a stop to that, didn’t he?’
He made no response.
‘Anyway,’ I said, stuffing the recorders back into my pack. ‘If that was the famous sandstorm then I have to say that as sandstorms go, it wasn’t too bad, was it?’
‘Far be it from me to rain on your ill-informed parade, but I don’t think that was it.’ He pointed over my shoulder.
I turned slowly. ‘Oh.’
We all say stupid things from time to time.
‘Peace in our time.’
‘I did not have sex with that woman.’
‘Britain will never rejoin the EU.’
‘As sandstorms go that wasn’t too bad.’
The entire horizon – the shimmering heat haze – everything had gone. Completely vanished. Disappeared. In its place, a huge, vast billowing cloud of brown was storming towards us. Not the horizon-blurring dust kicked up by a passing army. This cloud had to be hundreds and hundreds of feet high and it was solid dust and sand. Soon, it would swallow the sun. Already, the day was darker and colder. I could see intermittent flashes within the swirling mass. Lightning. And it was moving fast, sucking up everything in its path, whirling it around and then spitting it back out again.
This was what the army had been running from.
My pod was several hundred yards away. I had no idea where Ronan’s was, and he wasn’t saying. I would have made a run for mine, but last year I’d been at Stonehenge and we were caught in a snowstorm. Within only a very few yards, we’d become completely lost. If Leon – husband and hero – hadn’t arrived, then we would have frozen to death.
This would not be dissimilar. Once down at ground level, poor visibility and buffeting winds meant we would soon lose our sense of direction. We probably wouldn’t even be able to keep our feet. This rock would give us some protection. We should stay put.
The same thought had obviously occurred to him.
‘Here,’ I said, ‘give me your bandana and water flask.’
He ripped off his bandana and handed it over, together with his flask. I spread it out together with my scarf and gave them both a good soaking of water.
He looked around. ‘We don’t want to be caught up here. We’ll take shelter in the lee of this rock.’
We wrapped our wet scarves around our faces and clambered down to ground level.
‘Here,’ he said, pointing to a large outcrop jutting at right angles from the main rock. We crawled in as close in as we could possibly get, facing towards the rock itself.
He pushed me down on the sand. ‘Get down on your hands and knees.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t be alarmed. If you were a camel, I would shelter behind you. Sadly, you’re only a small and very irritating historian, but I am, for reasons which escape me at the moment, doing my best to ensure your survival. Get down and make yourself as small as you can.’
He was giving good advice. I crawled as close against the rock as I could get. It would, to some extent, protect us from the wind, but nothing would save us from the sand.
I nodded to his arms. ‘Pull your sleeves right down. In a very short while your skin’s going to feel as if it’s been sandpapered.’
We knelt, side by side, making ourselves as small as possible. Already the sand was whipping itself into stinging little dust devils. Not long now. We huddled together, protected our faces and braced ourselves.
There was no gentle build-up.
The world grew cold and dark.
I could hear the usual sighing hiss of sand and then, suddenly, the wind came roaring across the desert, changing its note to a shriek as the storm hit our very inadequate rock, head on.
I turned my head to look. Lightning flashed somewhere, illuminating the dirty clouds with an inner glow. Ronan reached out and pushed my head down and suddenly the whole world contracted into just this tiny space.
Around us, the desert thundered. Like many people, I’ve used the expression sandblasted without any idea of what it truly means. Even through my clothes I could feel a thousand-thousand tiny pinpricks as wind-driven sand hit us from all directions. Keeping low was no help at all. The bloody stuff bounces. It flays you alive as it comes down and then does it again on the way back up.
And it gets everywhere. Inside your clothing. Inside your boots. In your hair. Up your nose. In your mouth. Under your eyelids. I tried squeezing my eyes tighter and that only made things worse. I could feel tiny grains of sand caught under my eyelids, grating painfully across my eyeballs.
My wet scarf dried out almost instantly. The mucus in my nose dried out. With that and the sand, every breath became first just painful, and then as time dragged by, searingly agonising. Sand was beginning to build up around us. Every now and then, one of us would try to shrug our shoulders or shake ourselves, and I would feel it cascading off me. Without the shelter of our rock, we would have been buried alive. I no longer doubted that Cambyses’s army had been lost in this sandstorm.
I lost all sense of time. My knees were on fire. I ached to stand up. Every muscle was screaming in protest. I could feel the sand scraping away at my back. I was convinced my T-shirt had been torn from my body. I hunched my shoulders even higher to protect my ears, which felt as if they were on fire, and just tried to hang on. After a while, I wasn’t even sure I was the right way up. I had no idea if Ronan was even still with me. Had he taken advantage of the storm to push off back to his own pod and abandon me here?
That was just plain ridiculous. There was no way anyone could stand up in this lot, let alone navigate their way back to a small pod. Besides, he wouldn’t leave me alone in all this. Would he?
Of course he would, said the voice in my head. How do you know he didn’t lure you to this here and now for precisely that purpose? It won’t take long for the sand to cover you completely. And your pod as well. No one will ever find you. No
one will ever know what became of you. They never found Cambyses’s army and there were fifty thousand of them, so you’re not going to stand much of a chance, are you?
Unbelievably, I actually toyed with the idea of staggering to my feet and making a run for it. Of straightening my aching legs. Of getting away somehow. Of returning to the cool, damp silence of St Mary’s. I could feel sand piling up again. How long before I was buried completely? It was stupid to remain here. I should go and go now. Before I couldn’t go at all.
I shifted my weight slightly, feeling sand move around me, and an arm as rigid as an iron bar shot out, pushed me down, and held me there. I heard him shout something but the words were torn away in the wind.
I subsided, tried to close my mind to everything going on around me, and endure. It was all I could do. Occasionally, I would shake my head fractionally, dislodging sand and grit, trying to protect my face as best as could.
Unbelievably, the noise of the wind increased. A sudden buffet caught us both unawares. I heard Ronan shout something and suddenly, he wasn’t there. I didn’t stop to think – I just automatically grabbed at him. I felt some kind of cloth – his T-shirt, I think. I seized whatever it was and hung on, but now we’d both changed our position slightly and the tiny, but vitally important shelter we’d had from our rock was gone.
I felt Ronan shift in the wind. I reached out blindly with my other hand. I couldn’t see a thing. I found his arm. I hung on to him and he to me. Together, we were too heavy to blow away. Ladies – before heading to the gym you might want to consider hanging on to that baby weight. Very useful in preventing you being blown away in an unexpected desert sandstorm. Just saying.
More sand started to pile up around us. We crouched together, hanging on to each other for grim death – and a grim death it was likely to be if this didn’t let up
soon.
I lost all track of time. Every breath hurt. My arms felt as if they were being pulled from their sockets. Wind, sand, and sound tore at us. Our skin was on fire. Well, mine definitely was and it seemed safe to assume Ronan didn’t have some special dispensation. I was suffocating. I kept trying to lift my head out of the sand. It was coming down faster than I could clear it. It was in my mouth. I started to cough which didn’t help at all. Ronan wrapped both arms around me and pulled me close. The shelter of his body helped a little. Huge amounts of sand were whirling around us. It was as if the entire desert was trying to pick itself up and take itself off somewhere else. I buried my head in his chest. He was sheltering me so I wrapped my arms around his head to try to give him what protection I could and we just endured.
It ended as abruptly as it had begun. It wasn’t exactly that one moment there was shrieking wind and sand and the next moment the sun came out, but we were both aware that the storm was passing.
There was no sun – the air was still full of dirty brown grit and sand – but the wind had moved on. Chasing and catching a Pharaoh’s army who, almost certainly, were breathing their last at this very moment.
I found myself lying on my side, half buried. If it hadn’t been for the protection of the rock, we would have been completely covered. I twisted my head out of the sand and slowly unwrapped my arms from around Ronan’s head. He rolled off me with a groan and lay very still.
I coughed, spat sand, and coughed some more. ‘So – not dead then?’
He began to cough, as I had done. ‘No thanks to you. You’re a bloody madwoman. You do know that, don’t you?’
‘It’s been mentioned, once or twice.’
I lay back and concentrated just on not breathing in great lumps of desert.
I’d saved him. He’d saved me. God, this was embarrassing.
I sat up, shedding sand everywhere and looked around me. Clouds of fine dust still swirled around us, but I could see the sun trying to break through. It would be hot again soon.
I dug around and located a strap, pulled at it and my backpack came free. I shook off the sand, opened it up, and pulled out my flask of water. The way I felt, there wasn’t enough water in the entire world to quench my thirst, but he’d saved me, and you have to pay your debts.
He looked surprised.
‘Age before beauty,’ I said, just in case he thought I harboured kindly feelings towards him.
He grinned, cracking the sand that had settled on his face and in his hair. He meticulously took only two swigs and passed it back. I appreciated the thought, took my own two swigs, and passed it back again.
We leaned back against the rock, passing the flask between us, and saying nothing. Time passed, but I don’t think either of us was in any rush.
I don’t know when I first noticed it. I was absently staring out across the desert when I realised there was a problem with the sand. It was still blowing everywhere – sadly, that’s what sand does – but there was a small patch, slightly more than a hundred yards away, where it wasn’t blowing quite right. As if it was blowing around something. Something I couldn’t see.
There were two possibilities and both were good.
The first was that this was Ronan’s pod and that, finally, I had its location. The second was that this was Leon’s pod. As I mentioned, his pod has a camouflage device. High-def cameras feed info to the computer, which projects an image back again, making the pod virtually invisible. It sometimes has a bit of a problem with complicated backgrounds like leafy jungles, but a simple desert background would cause it no problems at all.
We have, occasionally, considered fitting similar devices to our own pods, but there are a number of arguments against this, not least because we often need to make a hasty exit. Imagine a group of historians – not the clearest thinkers at the best of times – racing in ever expanding circles shouting, ‘Where the bloody hell is the pod?’ as sundry armies, severe meteorological conditions, horrendous seismic activities and other catastrophes rain down upon them. To say nothing of a couple of harmless contemporaries walking smack into the side of an invisible pod after a night in the pub. So, on balance, we reckon we’re safer without it.
I tried not to smile. I should have guessed. Of course Dr Bairstow would send back-up. He hadn’t told me and that was fair enough. But I wasn’t alone. Leon – and, I suspected, Major Guthrie too, were out here with me, keeping an eye on things. I didn’t need them, but it was good to know they were here.
Not wanting Ronan to see where I was looking, I leaned back and closed my eyes. I was here at his invitation. I would leave him to take the initiative. And so, like an idiot, I sat in the desert and did nothing as the seconds counted down to disaster.
Finally, he handed me back the empty canteen. ‘Appreciated.’
‘You’re welcome. So – what now?’
He turned to face me. ‘I have two plans, actually. The first entails…’ He broke off to stare past me. ‘Who…?’
I twisted around.
From nowhere, I could see hazy black figures running towards us through the dust. I felt my mouth fall open with shock. No. No, no, no. This was so wrong. This wasn’t supposed to happen. They weren’t supposed to be here. This would ruin everything.
That patch of anomalous sand hadn’t been Ronan’s pod. It hadn’t been Leon’s either. It had been the Time Police. Waiting until it was safe to emerge and arrest us both.
I opened my mouth to warn him.
At the same time, I saw the realisation cross his face. He had been betrayed.
I stretched out a hand and said quickly, ‘No – it wasn’t St Mary’s,’ but it was too late. Too late to explain. Too late for everything.
He wrenched out his gun. His face was white. I could see the blue veins at his temples. His eyes were dark and empty and terrifying in a way I cannot describe. My stomach turned over. Suddenly, I was very, very afraid.
He said quietly and far more chillingly than screaming threats could ever be, ‘You traitorous ----’ using a really bad word. Hauling me to my feet, he raised his gun, jamming the barrel against my right eye.
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. I was going to die. I could feel my heart beating in my throat and the blood pounding in my head. I was going to die. Out here. In this blistering heat and emptiness. I was going to die.
And then, apparently he had second thoughts, because he lowered the gun again.
‘No, Maxwell. You’re going to live. Everyone else in your world will die, but you’ll live on. You’ll look back on today and wish I had killed you.’
Now that it was far too late, I knew beyond doubt that his offer had been genuine, because this was the face of a man who had revealed his inner self, in all its vulnerability. A man who had taken a step forwards if not towards friendship then at least towards peace. A man who had trusted me to do the right thing and now thought I’d betrayed him. There would never now be any sort of a deal. Any chance we might have had was gone for ever.
Voices were shouting to us to get down on our knees. To put our hands in the air. I shouted, ‘St Mary’s,’ and scrabbled for my pocket, but too late. I felt a familiar pain in my chest. The world swayed around me. The ground tilted. I couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. They had sonic weapons and they’d used them on us.
I began to run towards the Time Police, my legs feeling as if I was running through porridge. I had no control over them at all. I staggered a few steps sideways, tried again in a different direction, then another, and bumped into something hard that wasn’t rock. I remember thinking, now I find his bloody pod. I fumbled again for my pocket, but my arm wasn’t doing what I wanted it to. My last chance was fading and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I tried to speak, to call out, but those sonic weapons are bastards and I couldn’t get any part of me to do as it was told.