He went into the interrogation block where a prisoner, an escort and an interpreter waited for him, and he thought of the chaos he had let loose. He sat in front of the prisoner, a Yemeni, but another face was there. The Yemeni's features were gone, had merged into those of a taller man with a strong nose and a powerful jaw that the cringing protestations of innocence could not hide, and he thought of the skill of the man who had deceived them all.
The woman was forgotten, as Tommy was. Danger was forgotten.
Only survival counted. His mind was deadened and his memory gone.
The sun was in Caleb's eyes. The dried air scraped his throat and the growing wind lifted sand from the hoofs of Hosni's camel, which pricked his face. His eyes were squeezed shut against the grains. If he opened his eyes, blinked, he saw Hosni's back low across his saddle. He rocked on the hump of the Beautiful One, and he thought lhat only her courage carried her forward. She moved with leaden slow steps over the soft sand. More often than on any other day, he thought he would fall, and he yearned for the evening and the smaller portion of water that his tongue would move round his mouth, and the cold of the night, the uncooked dough, the handful of dates, and then sleep. He had heard Fahd fall behind him and the shouts of the boy, but he had not stopped, had let the boy get Fahd hack on to his camel. At the last stop, when the sun had been highest, fiercest, when they had remounted the kneeling camels, Rashid had put a rope round Hosni's waist and had knotted it to the saddle.
Hiss survival depended on himself.
The anger billowed in him.
Caleb recognized it, understood it.
The anger came in sharp surges… It was the same anger as in the camps. In X-Ray and Delta, the target of the anger had been the guards. The guards imprisoned him… Fahd and Hosni were his gaolers. They had the keys and the batons, and they were around him. His mind wandered loose. He was their prisoner. He had the hate for them, as for the guards. His throat, without water, was pricking with the pain, his eyes hurt, the blister sores ate at him. He was the one, supposedly, with the strength, and he was rocking, sliding.
Caleb toppled, lost his hold.
He went down the Beautiful One's flank, was dumped in the sand.
He fell face first.
He heard the shrill laughter behind him.
The Beautiful One had stopped and towered over him and the great brown eyes gazed down on him. It was Fahd's laughter.
Fahd reached down and Caleb took his hand. Fahd heaved him up and Caleb caught the reins that hung from the Beautiful One's neck.
He climbed, struggled, pulled himself back into the saddle.
'Are you going to fail us? We do not expect the mule to fail us.'
Caleb spat the sand. 'Is that what I am, a mule?'
'A mule is noble, a beast of burden.'
He ran his tongue round his mouth, let it gather the sand, then scraped it with his finger off his tongue. 'Is that what I am to you, a mule?' he repeated.
'What else?' All the laughter had gone from Fahd's face. It was grim, closed. 'A mule is important to us because it carries what we put on its back. It goes where we want it to go, carries what we want it to carry. It is necessary for us to use the mule, but if we thought it would fail us we would shoot it. We would not waste food on it and we would find another mule. You are a mule – a pack animal. You will carry what we put on your back.'
Caleb rode on towards his family.
Instinctively, he looked up around him, ignored the sand blown into his face. He scanned the dunes and the tips of the sand walls, and he looked for danger, and saw nothing. Once, briefly, he looked into the blue sky but then the low sun burned his eyes.
Chapter Twelve
He thought of rain, cooling, healing and sweet, spattering on to the panes of windows.
That last night he had slept, had not dreamed, woken as exhausted as when he had lain down on the sand. In the morning they had set out again. Twice, a bull camel loaded with two of the boxes had slopped, had refused to go forward, and each time Rashid had come back from the front of them, had taken the bull's head in his hands, had put his own face close to it, stroked and soothed its bellowing, and whispered to it. Twice, the bull camel had responded to the kindness of the guide, had shown its loyalty to him, had started again to walk into the strength of the wind.
It was late in the afternoon when they had halted, not to pitch camp. The guide said they would stop for a short time, then go on.
Caleb sat against the body of the kneeling Beautiful One and felt the rhythmic panting of the beast against his back.
If he went where his memory took him, he would have stood with his arms outstretched, his head thrown back and his shirt unbuttoned, and he would have let the rain cascade on to him. When it had drenched him, and his clothes had clung to him, he would have danced and sung, gloried in it. He would not have huddled like the woman who pushed her baby in a buggy on the pavement or cringed from it like the man on the towpath who dragged his tiny ratting dog on a lead. He yearned for the rain that would have cooled the heat burning him and soothed the blister sores, that would have dribbled sweet on his lips.
The guide had poured water from the neck of a water bag into a metal mug that Fahd had held. Fahd had carried the mug to Hosni.
Perhaps Hosni did not see the mug clearly. Perhaps his eyesight failed him, perhaps he was too confused by exhaustion, by sunstroke. Hosni reached out, snatched at the mug, missed it and caught Fahd's wrist, twisted it. The mug toppled. Water fell from it, like rain.
The water drops from the mug sparkled, jerked Caleb from his fantasy.
'Idiot… fool,' Fahd screamed.
Hosni whimpered.
'You wasted water – imbecile.'
Hosni had the mug in his thin claw fingers and tugged for it. More water slurped over the rim. When Fahd released his hold on the mug and Hosni sagged back, more water spilled.
'I bring you water. What do you do? You throw it in the sand.'
Caleb watched, said nothing. The mug would have been a third full when Fahd had offered it to Hosni's stretched-out hands. Now there would only be a wetness at the mug's bottom.
'You don't get any more. You waste water, you go without,' Fahd yelled in his fury and his body quivered. 'We should never have brought you.'
He saw Hosni tilt the mug so that the last drops would run into his mouth, and then run his tongue round the sides and the base of it.
Hosni's wet watery eyes seemed to plead with Fahd as he prised the mug back from the fingers.
'There is no more water for you. I am not sharing my water with you.'
Fahd took away the mug. Caleb saw Hosni, his head bent, scrape the film of sand off the place where the water had fallen to retrieve the sand that was darkened. He cupped it into his hands, gobbled it into his mouth, then choked. The guide poured out Fahd's measure and Fahd drank it to the final drop.
'You will learn it for the next time, you do not throw away water,'
Fahd shouted.
Without water, they died. The camels could go a maximum of eighteen days without water, the boy had said, then they would die
– Caleb had long ago lost count of how many days they had been in the Sands. The men could not go eighteen hours without water. The bags on the Beautiful One were all empty. Caleb was not sure how many bags remained, filled, on the guide's camel; one or two, he hoped… Water went again into the mug, and Fahd brought it to him. Caleb took the mug.
He looked down into the water. It was green-coloured, dead. He felt the dryness of his throat, the roughness inside his mouth.