discussion, weeping and gesticulating. Then Tamre ran back to them.
'Your people at the camp. Something terrible has happened. Bad men came
in the might. Many of the servants are dead,' he screamed.
Nicholas grabbed Royan's hand. 'Come on!' he snapped, 'let's find out
what is going on here.'
They ran the last mile to the camp, and arrived to find another circle
of monks gathered around something in front of the kitchen hut.
Nicholas pushed them aside and elbowed his way to the front. There he
stopped and stared with a sinking feeling in his gut, and the sweat on
his face turned cold with horror. Under a buzzing blue pall of flies lay
the bloodsplattered corpse of the cook and three other camp servants.
Their hands had been bound behind their backs, and then they had been
forced to kneel before being shot in the back of the head at close
range.
'Don't lookV Nicholas warned Royan as she came up.
'It's not very pretty.'
But she ignored his advice and came to stand beside him. 'Oh, sweet
heavens. They have been slaughtered like cattle in an abattoir,' She
gagged.
'This explains the sound of gunfire that I heard last night,' he
answered grimly. He went forward to identify the dead men. 'Aly and Kif
are not here. Where are they?' He raised his voice and called in Arabic,
turning to face the crowd. 'Aly, where are you?'
The tracker pushed his way forward. 'I am here, effendi.' His voice was
shaky and his face was haggard. 'Mere was blood on the front of his
shirt.
'How did this happen?' Nicholas seized his arm and steadied him.
'Men came in the night with the guns. Shufta. They shot into the huts
where we were sleeping. They gave us no warning. They just started
shooting.
'How many of them? Who were they?' Nicholas demanded.
'I do not know how many of them there were. It was dark. I was asleep. I
ran away when the shooting began.
They were shufta, bandits, killers. They were hyenas and jackals - there
was no reason for what they have done.
These men were my brothers, my friends.' He began to sob, and the tears
streamed down his face.
Royan turned away, sickened and horrified. She went to her hut and
stopped in the doorway. It had been ransacked. Her bags had been turned
out on to the floor.
Her bedding had been stripped, and the mattress thrown into the corner.
As though she were a sleepwalker in a nightmare, she crossed the floor
and picked up the canvas folder in which she kept her papers. She turned
it upside down and shook it. It was empty. The satellite photo graphs
and the maps, all her rubbings of the stele, the Polaroids that Nicholas
had taken in Tanus's tomb - everything was gone.
Royan picked up the bed and set it the right way up.
She sat down on it, and tried to gather her thoughts. She felt confused
and shaken. The image of those bloody, bullet-ripped corpses laid out in
front of the kitchen haunted her, and she found it difficult to
