He took his foot off the pedal and glanced in the rearview mirror at the track he had just passed. The road here was too narrow and treacherous to try to turn the car around so he braked as carefully as he could to slow the car to a stop. He put on the hand brake and the hazard warning lights then opened the door and stepped out into the cold, leaving the engine running.
The road was more slippery than he had thought, and he skated across it, holding his arms out for balance, heading back to the break in the trees. The wall of branches seemed bigger up close with dense twigs and dry, dead leaves bulking it out, making it seem impenetrable. But whereas the ground and the trees surrounding it were weighed down with snow, the branches had hardly any on them at all and there were drag marks in the snow on either side, showing where they had been pulled across the track. There were footprints too, softened a little by the recent snowfall, but footprints nonetheless — just one person by the look of things, though he couldn’t be sure. They clumped together in groups around the branches then split off and headed up the track, ending at a spot where deep tire marks chewed up the snow and ice and drew two lines straight up toward the summit of the mountain. And there was something else. Something that carried on the breeze sifting down through the rapidly darkening woods triggering a memory of the last time he had been here. It was wood smoke, coming no doubt from the potbellied stove that warmed the cabin and brewed the coffee.
Shepherd smiled. “Hello, Professor,” he murmured under his breath. “Remember me?”
70
Dawn rose fast in the desert, rapidly warming the land and the buildings of the compound.
The soldiers were the first to appear, rising with the sun, their bodies conditioned to early starts by military life. They stretched and scratched as they emerged from the main building, their eyes screwed almost shut against the brightening sky, then abruptly stopped as they saw the swathed figures hunkered down by the water, filling their canteens.
Williamson instinctively held his hand up to halt his men and a crackle of adrenaline passed through each of them as they saw what had prompted it. They were nomadic goat herders, their faces whitened by desert dust and still partly wrapped in keffiyeh. Williamson glanced over to the guard tower where their weapons were stashed and noticed the gate next to it, rolled all the way back, a team of goats drinking from one of the streams in the desert beyond it.
“Who the hell are these guys?” he muttered.
“They arrived about an hour ago.” Liv and Tariq appeared behind him, dragging a crate out of the transport hangar. “They are welcome here,” Liv said, “just as you are.”
“How do we know they can be trusted?”
“I don’t, not fully, any more than I knew you could be trusted. What I do know is they are here because they felt the same pull as you, which means others will undoubtedly be coming here too. We can either choose to meet them with closed gates, suspicion and loaded guns, or welcome them, as we did you.”
Williamson continued to stare at the newcomers. “The way I remember it, the gate was closed when we arrived. Seems pretty sensible to me.”
Liv shot Tariq a look. “That was not my idea. But letting you in was.”
Williamson tipped his head. “Much obliged.”
Others had started to drift out of the compound buildings, roused by the heat and raised voices. Liv had intended to talk to everyone individually, quietly sowing the seeds of her plan rather than risking a public debate that she might well end up losing. Now she had no choice.
“Tell me, what would you have done if we hadn’t let you in? What if we had kept the gate shut, turned the big guns in the guard tower on you and told you to leave, would you have just turned around and gone away, after traveling so far to find this place?” Williamson said nothing. “Or would you have camped out in the desert, sticking close to one of the rivers so you had plenty of water, maybe far enough to be out of range of the cannons but still close enough to watch us and assess our strengths and weaknesses? Perhaps you would have decided eventually that you could take us. You might even have managed it, stormed this fortress in the middle of the night and taken control. Then what? What would you have done with us — killed us, kept us prisoner, banished us to the desert? And what about all the other people who are on their way here now, answering the same call you did, the same one they did?” She pointed to the goat herders who had stopped drinking and were now listening too. “Would you try and keep them out, keep the gate locked and defend this scrap of desert with your last bullet, or until a stronger force arrived and took it from you so the whole thing could start all over again? Would you do that — for a bunch of buildings and a pool of water?”
Williamson continued to stare at her, though she sensed the challenge in his eyes had slipped a little. She shook her head. “This has been the pattern throughout human history: men possessing things, others seeking to take those things away by force. And what good has any of it done? Few things can truly be possessed.” She pointed to one of the holding pits where the water had broken the banks and flowed freely through the links of the perimeter fence. “And some things cannot be contained. And whatever this place is, whatever it represents to the people drawn here, it is not something to be owned or fought over. It is simply something to be shared. A place where people can come together and not be divided or driven apart. A place of safety. A kind of home.”
She moved over to the crate and levered the lid off with her foot to reveal its contents. Williamson and his men gathered around. The nomads by the waterline moved closer too. It was full of tools: crowbars, wire cutters, shovels still coated in dust from the graves they had recently dug. “We should take down the fences,” Liv said. “They have no place here.”
Silence surged back in on the heels of her words but nobody moved. Liv surveyed the line of faces. They were looking at the tools, the fence, each other — but not at her. She was done talking and didn’t know what else she could say.
“Dust cloud!”
The shout snagged everyone’s attention. All heads turned to the horizon. A new column of dust was rising in the east, backlit by the sun now clawing its way up into the white sky. The timing could not have been worse. Liv felt sure that no one would want to start dismantling the perimeter fence with more strangers on the way. They would wait and see who it was first, and then the moment would be lost and she would have to try and persuade them all over again.
A movement to her right caught her eye. Williamson had stepped forward and reached down to pick up the lid of the crate. He fitted it back on top, sealing the tools inside in a wordless, symbolic full stop on the whole argument. Then he did a curious thing; he turned toward the nomads and waved them over. They hesitated at first then slowly responded, walking over to join the main group.
Corporal Williamson smiled a greeting then turned to his fellow soldiers. “Why don’t y’all go find what other tools they got in the transport bay, maybe see if they got a winch back there, or some kind of a towline we can hook up to the truck.” He turned to the nomads, smiled again and ambled to one end of the crate. “Williamson.” He patted his chest with the flat of his hand then pointed back at the man. “What’s your name? Asmuk?”