right at the bottom of the smoothed area.
‘Well, whoever wrote it in the first place,’ I said, ‘it was put here by Hadrian.’ I pointed at the attestation. Hadrian it had been. He’d passed by on one of his Imperial tours not far off five hundred years before. The blown sands had smoothed out nearly everything but the hexameters. But Martin stood beside me to see it as well as he could, and read what he could.
‘… caused to be placed here among the lone and level sands. ..’ was the last line of the attestation we could read. After this, the words came to an end.
‘A pity it’s the Greek that has worn away,’ I said. ‘All that horrid Egyptian stuff has survived well enough.’
‘Your friend Lucas might wish to comment on that,’ Martin quipped.
I looked at him and reached for the water sack. He was still smiling, and this was the first joke I’d heard him make since Christmas – and then he’d been drunk. Perhaps the sun was getting to him.
You might ask what on earth we thought we were about. We were still lost in the desert, still running out of water and, for all we knew, ready to dry up like slugs in the sun. We were still being hunted down by the agents of what we had no reason to deny was an implacable and highly effective conspiracy. And we were dancing before some wog monument that had taken an Emperor’s fancy half a millennium before. I suppose it was because anything bearing a human mark was welcome after so much wandering in that sandy void. It also suggested the possibility that we weren’t so far from the Nile. Or perhaps the stress of everything had got to both of us.
It was as we were arguing over reconstructions of the missing words – and, more importantly, over what could have led Hadrian to put up something so utterly incongruous – that I heard the jingling. It came from the other side of a dune that rose above the height of the monument. We fell silent and looked at each other.
‘If we bury ourselves in the sand again,’ Martin said with shaking voice – his piety wearing as thin for the moment as the inscription – ‘they might not see us.’
‘That’s not the sound they were making on their camels,’ I said hesitantly. We both listened hard. It was more a jingling of bells than of harness. It was the sort of thing you heard in the more sedate religious processions.
‘Let me look over,’ I said. ‘My hair is almost the same colour as the sand. It saved us once.’
We pulled back below the peak of the dune and looked at each other.
‘What the…?’ Martin asked in a whisper.
We looked over again. There are many things you expect to come across in a desert. There are bandits, of course, and soldiers. There are merchants, with their trains of camels or of slaves. There are the natives as they shuffle from one water hole to another. The last thing you expect is a carrying chair with white silken curtains. Carried by four strong blacks, it moved briskly along with two camels behind to carry some rather light baggage. Around the chair four maidservants walked, their bodies swathed in white robes. It was the sort of thing you didn’t give a second look back in Alexandria. How else do fine ladies get to church? But out here, and in the middle of the desert?
‘We can’t be far at all from the Nile,’ I said, with a doubtful look to the still unvaried horizon. ‘I wonder where the other attendants could be? Come on,’ I said, getting up. ‘We might beg a bite to eat, along with a few directions.’
The bearers saw us waving as we hurried down the dune towards them. They looked briefly at us and then back down, not once breaking their pace. The four women responded with a shrill twittering in a language I hadn’t before heard. They pointed to us and looked back at each other – again, though, not breaking pace. I couldn’t see their faces. But their hands were as black as the bearers.
‘Hello,’ I cried in a voice that trailed off to a croak. I stepped clumsily and the sand gave way. I fell flat on my back, before rolling forward and then sideways. I came to a stop at the foot of the dune. Martin got there shortly after and helped me up.
‘Hello,’ I cried again, trying to ignore the loss of what little skin the camels had left on my bottom. ‘Do any of you know Greek?’
About six yards from me, the front curtains of the chair fluttered. Holding a little gold stick, a white and decidedly female arm stretched out briefly to tap one of the bearers. The procession stopped. The bells that were dangling around the top frame of the chair suddenly stopped their jingling. There was another movement of the curtains.
‘Greek is a language I have not heard in many years,’ a voice said from within. ‘I think, nevertheless, I may still be able to understand it.’ It was a deep, though again a decidedly female voice. The Greek wasn’t that of the natives, nor of the Alexandrians, nor of any other city dwellers I’d heard so far. It had a finely judged fluency, and was in the odd, lilting accent I’d once heard in Constantinople from an old man who’d studied in Athens before the universities there had been fully dispersed.
‘Come closer, young man,’ the voice said again from within the curtains. ‘Say what you would ask of me.’
‘I, er…’ I’d not expected that question. I glanced at the tiny and almost festive party around the chair. ‘Madam,’ I said, trying to sound more composed than I felt, ‘I must ask you to consider the danger of your situation. You are lost in a desert that is filled with bandits. If you would care to accept my protection-’
The curtains shook with the peal of laughter that came from behind them.
‘Young man,’ the voice said again, now mocking, ‘I have travelled without want or molestation from beyond the limits of Abyssinia. I am now accosted by two beggars evidently lacking both arms and supplies, and warned to look for my safety. You might consider speaking again.’
Martin clutched suddenly at my arm. I turned and looked back up the dune. Silent, mounted on their camels, Lucas and his men looked steadily down.
‘Oh, fuck!’ I said. I reached to my belt for the knife I’d taken from the murdered man. It was hardly worth the effort of pulling it out. I looked at the four bearers. Their black muscles rippled hugely in the sun. But they were, so far as I could tell, unarmed. I looked uncertainly back at the curtains.
‘Madam,’ I said, ‘these men surely mean you no harm. If you would only start again on your journey-’
Cutting off my words, the voice gave curt orders in that unknown language. Two of the attendants drew the curtains aside. Another produced a little sunshade and positioned herself.
Covered from head to toe in white silk, her face covered with a white veil, the owner of the chair stepped delicately on to the sand. I heard it crunch beneath the fine leather of her sandal. From habit, and exactly as if we were outside one of the Constantinopolitan churches, Martin and I bowed as she stepped past us. The robe of the maidservant who carried the sunshade brushed against my bowed head.
The owner of the chair stopped at the foot of the dune. From her general manner behind the curtains, I’d expected someone at least of middle years. Yet what I could see of her trim figure, and her firm tread on the sand, showed a woman barely older than me. She looked up, her veil fluttering in the gentle breeze that had come on suddenly. There was a long silence. Lucas stared back at her and then at me. There was an odd look on his face. Then one of the camels beside him made a spitting noise as its rider wheeled it round. From further along the line of silent riders, there was another movement. I heard the rustle of hastily disturbed sand on the other side. In an instant, Lucas alone was looking down at us.
The owner of the chair raised her arms towards him. It might have been in supplication or in mockery – when you can see neither face nor body, motions are hard things to gauge. Lucas stared back a moment longer. Then, with a snort of his own camel, he too had wheeled round and was gone.
The afternoon was pressing on. The sun was no longer so high above us. There was now a soft moan of the rising desert winds. In the midst of all this, we stood alone.
There were further orders to the maidservants, who now began fussing with one of the camels. The owner of the chair turned to me. I’ll swear I felt the long look she gave me through her veil. I felt Martin’s hand reaching nervously from beside me. I took it in my own. I suddenly noticed how cold my hand had become.
‘It is, you will agree, a universal custom,’ the owner of the chair said with slightly suppressed amusement, ‘that those who rescue strays take on further duties for their welfare. You will not, therefore, refuse my offer of dinner, nor of safe conduct tomorrow morning to the nearest town.’ She pointed over to some dead trees in the middle distance. The water hole that had once sustained them was long since dried up. But the shelter would be useful.
‘Your name, madam, would be most welcome,’ I said, remembering my manners.
