So Tris did, only too aware of the sheer drop towards which she shuffled, edging backwards so slowly she barely moved. Tris found the spike by dropping to a crouch and reaching behind her, fingers closing on cold metal.
It was stuck fast in the rock.
"Twist the top," Luca said again.
And Tris felt the spike slide free.
"We had hundreds once," said Luca, "thousands, maybe more." He sounded tired, old beyond his wish. "They were for building."
"You brought them with you?"
"It's possible," Luca admitted.
Holding the narrow spike in one hand, Tris twisted the top with her other.
"It's broken," she said.
Luca shook his head. Whatever was meant to happen took place at a level invisible to human eyes.
"It's working," he promised her.
She held a fortune in her hand, Tris realized, while another three fortunes lay at her feet. Doc Joyce would have restrung her entire body and thrown in new bones and buckytubes for her brain for one chance to work out what the spikes did and how.
Even fake tek was worth something. Certainly enough for the Doc to manufacture idiot-looking artifacts that tourists bought time and again, just in case they turned out to be real.
Tris grinned.
"What?" Luca said.
"Nothing that matters." Glancing back at the plateau, Tris was bemused both by the distance and the breath-catching beauty of a landscape she and Luca had crossed without really noticing. She was tired now. Almost as tired as Luca and the Baron was so tired that at times he seemed almost transparent.
"Focus," Luca said crossly. He nodded to the spike still gripped in her fingers. "And put that back."
Tris did, twisting the top to lock the spike in place.
"Right," said Luca. "Empty your head of everything but locating the next spike, reaching for it with one foot and letting the spike take your weight. You'll be roped to me and I'll be fixed to the cliff face with this." Luca pulled a final piece of climbing equipment from his bag. This spike had an eye at the top through which a rope could pass.
"One last thing," said the Baron. "You don't move until I tell you."
Tris understood that bit.
"A little to the right." Luca was doing his best not to sound worried. "Left a bit. That's it. The next spike's below your foot."
They'd been hanging on the edge of the drop for almost fifteen minutes and hardly made any progress at all. In fact, the lip over which they'd climbed was barely out of Tris's reach. All Tris had to do to follow Luca was remove the first and original spike, tuck it into her waistband and shift her weight so she could hang from a second spike, while using one foot to feel for a third that Luca had already fixed into the cliff.
"I know where it is," said Tris.
"Then use it."
Darkness was coming in faster than either had expected and Luca was running out of reassuring clichés about the first step being the most difficult, things getting easier, it just being a matter of practice...
"I thought you did this all the time in the Rip," Luca said, irritation winning out over tact.
"That's jumping," said Tris. "It's different."
Give her a rope long enough and she'd have been halfway down the cliff before Luca had finished fixing his wretched spikes.
"You must have climbed on Rip," said Luca.
"Of course I did," Tris said. "That was up, though. This is down..." All the same she twisted the spike, slid it from the rock and pushed it into the waistband of her thin trousers. She was climbing in her rope sandals, Luca having insisted that this would be better than bare toes.
"Well done," said Luca.
"Yeah," Tris said, "and you can fuck off too." But she said it too quietly for Luca to hear.
CHAPTER 50
Marrakech, Summer 1977 [Then]
Several years before she died Malika told Moz a fairy tale. It was the summer she turned nine and Malika told it without once looking at Moz, her eyes fixed on a distant line of clouds.
Moz told the story to Jake and Celia as they all drove north in the VW campervan, the earth beyond their windows turning from red to yellow and finally to brown as they travelled the two hundred kilometres that took them to Casablanca and three seats on an Air Maroc caravelle to Tangiers, where a ferry to Alicante waited for them.
It was a flat road and mostly straight, dotted occasionally with spindly cedar, larch and imported eucalyptus and it cut through the Middle Atlas, a mountain range so scrawny and underfed by the time the mountains met the Marrakech-Casablanca road that it barely merited the name.
The fields along either side of the road were hedged with prickly pear and occasionally stone, the plots broken into smaller and smaller fragments as farms passed from fathers to sons and parcels of land were divided time and again.
At this point Jake still intended to buy a house in Spain, although he changed his mind shortly after docking at Alicante when three gun-toting, green-cloaked members of the Guarda Civile, having ordered everyone out of the car he'd just bought, emptied Jake's luggage onto the road, dismantled the seats and ripped the spare tyre from its wheel.
A body search followed for each of them.
That was when Celia announced she was going back to Cheyne Walk as soon as possible and Jake decided he might try Amsterdam instead. They had a short and bitter argument about who had responsibility for Moz.
Jake lost.
Moz told them Malika's story when the VW was an hour outside Marrakech and Jake and Celia were still talking to each other. He told it because he hated them and because he knew they would not understand. The story began on the sixteenth day of Jumaada al Thamy in the year 1375 AH, which Jake and Celia knew as 1956.
On that day, Monday 30 January, in a square near Bab Doukkala, three Arab stallholders poured petrol through the broken window of a racing-green Studebaker, the 1954 model. They were watched by a heavily veiled woman chewing on a dried fig and a small boy who hopped from leg to leg with excitement.
Waving the boy and his grandmother away from the car, the eldest of the three men pulled a brass lighter from his jellaba pocket and lit a petrol-soaked rag he'd already tied to a stone, tossing the stone high in the air, so the rag flamed like a comet on its way down.
So huge was the explosion that the small boy tipped backwards and suddenly found himself sitting in the dirt. For a second his bottom lip quivered and then he began to clap.
At the other end of Derb Ali, in what had once been stables, a young Berber shouldered open a locked door. He did this as quietly as he could. Something of a rarity for Driss Mahmud, a man who liked to make his presence felt.
Sultan Mohammed V had returned from French-imposed exile to declare himself King. On the morning in question, at 11.30, his old enemy Thami al Glaoui, eagle of Telouet, the black panther and mountain gazelle, the last great lord of the Atlas and Pasha of Marrakech, had died, having made profession of his faith.
He was seventy-eight years of age, feared and revered in equal measure. A hero to many and a traitor to more. And with his final breath withered not only the Glaoui's life, but the protection his reputation gave to those who had served him.
"Hide me." Driss Mahmud's voice was jagged with fear, although one had to know the man to realize this.
"Where?"
He could hear contempt in Maria's question, which was the first time she'd ever dared reveal such an emotion to his face. Her mother had been an esclave in the Glaoui kasbah as had her grandmother before that. The girl's father was unknown, a man who'd given his unclaimed daughter little to remember him by but pale skin and green eyes.
This room had been Driss Mahmud's present to Maria. Not really his to give but that seldom mattered to the servants of Si Thami al Glaoui. All Driss had done was order a café to give up its storeroom and the girl had been living there ever since.