The Age of Ra

anywhere. They were gone, along with the strongboxes. The Bedouin were firing blind into the darkness, more in anger than in the hope of hitting anything.

It was time for him to make a getaway as well. David loped off into the dunes, intending to lie low for a while, then go in search of a camel. The beasts, though terrified, would not have gone far. They were too tame, too institutionalised, to want to live wild. Once everything was calm again, they might well begin to drift back towards the camp. He would intercept them before they go there.

A figure appeared in front of him, a black silhouette like a shadow.

''You,'' said the woman who had held him at gunpoint. She was holding him at gunpoint again. ''A choice. Come with me or I kill you.''

Her eyes glinted in the distant light of the campfire, as did the barrel of her pistol.

David weighed his options, such as they were.

''I'll come with you,'' he said, as though it was a decision.

7. Zafirah

It was another kind of caravan, albeit a modern one consisting of a motley assortment of jeeps and other four-wheel drives, the majority of them converted to carry heavy-calibre machine guns and RPG launchers. They filed across the desert in a ragged line, travelling mostly at night. By day the vehicles would be parked in the lee of a rock formation or the shade of a palm oasis and have camouflage netting pulled over them. Their occupants would then sleep, or play cards, or roll cigarettes and aromatic joints and drink endless glasses of sweet mint tea, which David would share with them even though to him it tasted like liquid chewing gum.

After days of walking followed by weeks on camel back, David was finding it a relief simply to be in motorised transport. A bench seat in the rear of a canvas-topped Luaz ZT off-roader was the plushest armchair imaginable. The rumble of a Ukrainian-built engine was a lullaby. For a large portion of each journey he slept soundly, head angled against the canvas awning, feet perched on a case of grenades.

Zafirah, the group's leader, seemed amused by this.

''Stiff?'' she asked him one morning as he stood beside the car massaging a crick out of his neck. ''Perhaps I could arrange to get you a pillow.''

''Sheets and blankets too, if you don't mind,'' David replied.

She didn't quite laugh but the skin around her lustrous green-and-brown eyes did crinkle slightly.

''You don't behave like a captive at all,'' she said. ''You seem so calm.''

''Am I a captive, Zafirah?''

''That depends. Maybe.''

''Only, I've been taken prisoner twice in the past month or so, so I'm getting to be something of an expert. And this doesn't feel like captivity to me. You've even given me a change of clothes.'' His uniform was gone, replaced by a borrowed shirt and jeans.

''So if this isn't captivity, what does it feel like?''

David frowned. ''Hard to put into words. It's more like you're letting me come along for the ride, rather than forcing me to. Besides, Freegyptian guerrillas aren't renowned for kidnapping foreigners, as far as I'm aware.''

''Perhaps not. But we are always looking for ways to fund our efforts. What if we're taking you somewhere in order to ransom you back to the British army?''

''Then,'' said David, ''I say go right ahead, and I hope you get a decent sum for me.''

They were members of the Liberators of Luxor, one of the dozen or more rogue paramilitary factions at large within Freegypt. Ostensibly the country was under the rule of the Secular People's Front, the dominant political party in the government, but it and Prime Minister Bayoumi controlled little more than a swathe of the north-east. South of Cairo all the way down to Abu Simbel, everything became a broiling free-for-all, particularly along the Nile's fertile banks. Up in Lower Freegypt, around the Nile Delta, they were welcome to fiddle about with democracy if they liked. They could do as they pleased there in the north, with their industry and their urbanisation and their trading ports. But down south, in the Upper part of the country, where poverty was rife and most people lived at subsistence level, democracy remained a notional concept at best, a nice idea but as unaffordable as silk. There was either lawlessness or there were warlords imposing their own regional dominion, which amounted to the same thing.

A land without gods is a land without order. This was the collective international consensus on Freegypt, and most Freegyptians would admit that their nation was not without its chaotic elements.

But look at the rest of the world, they would reply. Look at the divine power blocs and their constant warring. Look at the death and madness that ravages the entire globe. And then tell us that lands with gods are doing any better.

Zafirah had no surname that David knew of — none that she would tell him, at any rate. She seemed fascinated by his surname, however. She would use it at almost every opportunity. ''Westweenter,'' laying marvellous, elongating emphasis on the middle syllable. He liked to watch her closely when she said it. Her lips would purse, then part in a shape that could be as equally a smile as a sneer, before coming together again at the end as if to kiss. Her soft accent made the fusty Englishness of the name exotic. In her mouth it became weird, unfamiliar, a kind of incantation. It seemed to mean something to her that it didn't to anyone else.

He also liked to watch Zafirah closely when she wasn't saying his name, or even talking to him. When she was ordering her men around, for instance. She would stand and issue rapid-fire instructions, her hand cocked on her hip, her head raised at an angle — jauntiness and haughtiness combined, a perfect blend of opposites. The men scurried when she spoke. They feared her but, more than that, they were besotted with her.

David could see why. It was the same reason he liked watching her so much. Zafirah had long sleek black hair, a figure made for the tight khaki shirts and chinos she liked to wear, and squarish features which offset one another nicely, the straight nose complementing the full lips, the full lips complementing the firm chin, and so on. Above all she had those eyes, the green starring the brown of their irises, jade on topaz. She didn't surround them thickly with kohl, as all the fashionable women in England did. She left them bare, unframed, open, and their paleness contrasted hauntingly with the dark tawniness of her complexion.

No, he didn't feel like her captive. Not in the conventional sense.

But in another sense he did.

She caught him one afternoon studying the strongboxes which the Liberators had stolen from the Bedouin. It was five days since the raid on the camp, and the strongboxes hadn't yet been broached. They were stacked in the back of one of the cars, padlocks still in place.

''Curious?''

David jumped. He wasn't a nervy sort but she could move stealthily, could Zafirah.

''You lost men to get hold of these,'' he said. ''Whatever's in them is clearly worth a great deal. I hope it is, at any rate.''

She pointed to the markings. ''Do you not read hieroglyph? Or did you stare out of the window all the time you were supposed to be learning it at school?''

''Mine's pretty rusty. I see the ideograms for 'god' and 'servant' joined together, meaning 'priest', so I'm assuming there's something ba-blessed inside. But as for the rest of it… Those are the names of the gods, aren't they? And the sign of a necklace can stand for any number of things — strength, happiness, gold. I can't put it all together in a way that makes sense.''

''It's a puzzle for you, then. A challenge. You strike me as a man who likes challenges.''

You're a challenge and I like you, David thought.

Then, to his shock, he realised he had actually said it out loud.

Zafirah blinked slowly, a deprivation of treasures.