They halted in front of the little compound. The lead rider unwound the cloth that covered his face.

  ‘Imagine finding you here, Couillon.’

  Paul felt his insides turn to liquid. It was Sergeant Bastiat, with two men Paul remembered from his platoon: a Breton nicknamed Coquille, and a man from Tours whose face was always such a mess of shaving cuts that the men called him Razor. Paul would have felt safer with the Bishareen.

  What have I done to deserve this?

  Bastiat studied Paul with mock concern.

  ‘When you did not return to the column, we thought you must have died in the desert. I said we should leave you, but Colonel Quenot said we had to be sure. He said the general in Cairo would not want any doubt as to what had happened to you.’

  Paul licked his lips, though the rising wind dried them almost before his tongue was back in his mouth. To be caught alone in the desert with Bastiat was what he had dreaded ever since they left Cairo.

  ‘As you see, I am perfectly safe.’

  ‘Safe, yes.’ Bastiat jumped down from his camel. ‘But a long way from your regiment. You know the penalty for desertion.’

  ‘I went to sketch the ruins. I lost my bearings when I tried to go back.’

  Rote protestations, barely worth the effort. Paul knew Bastiat would not believe him. He had to keep the sergeant talking, endure as long as he could and hope for a miracle to save him.

  I will raise you up, the god from the temple whispered to him. For everything you suffer, you will have your reward.

  Empty words.

  ‘I am in your debt. I might have wandered in the desert for days.’

  ‘Then it is lucky we found you.’ Bastiat gave a sadistic laugh, which trailed off as he caught sight of Sana. ‘Who is this?’

  A new terror trickled through Paul’s heart.

  ‘I found her. Her mother had died.’

  Bastiat ran his eyes over Sana’s frame, the bare skin showing through the scraps of her dress.

  ‘She is a little young for my tastes.’

  Paul flushed, furious. ‘Not that.’

  He wanted to hit Bastiat. Even the suggestion of such a violation felt like a crime.

  Sana couldn’t understand what the soldiers were saying. But she saw the looks the soldiers were giving her – hungry and pitiless. She shrank against Paul, pressing herself to him. The soldiers thought it was hilarious.

  ‘That’s where you want her.’

  ‘She’ll keep you warm at night.’

  Coquille licked his lips. ‘While we’re here, we might as well have some entertainment.’

  A slow smile spread over Razor’s lumpen face.

  ‘I haven’t had any foufoune since we left Cairo.’

  ‘You’ve never had any pussy in your life,’ Coquille retorted.

  ‘She’s a child,’ Paul protested.

  ‘Then imagine how tight she’ll be.’

  Paul edged back, pulling Sana away. But the compound walls surrounded him on every side: there was nowhere he could go.

  ‘Sergeant?’ he said to Bastiat. ‘You must stop this.’

  Bastiat gave a shrug. ‘Do I care what they do to your little Arab bitch? Maybe when they’re finished, I’ll let them have a go at you, eh?’

  He grabbed Paul’s shirt front and threw him aside. Sana made to run, but Coquille caught her in a second. She bit him; he yelped, but didn’t let her go. He struck her face so hard it sent her sprawling onto the sand. Before she could move, Razor had pinned her arms. Bastiat slit open her dress with his knife and tore it away. Paul lunged towards them, but Coquille tackled him and pushed him against the wall. Over his shoulder, Paul could see Sana’s head twisted around, staring at him with eyes that pierced like daggers.

  ‘What the devil is that?’

  Coquille pointed between Sana’s thighs. Paul had averted his eyes in shame, but the surprise in Coquille’s voice drew his eyes unwillingly. With horror, he saw a small line of stitches running up her hairless cleft. Someone had sewn her shut, leaving the tiniest holes for her bodily functions.

  Sana blushed and writhed. Bastiat laughed.

  ‘I have seen it before,’ he said. ‘These Egyptian mothers, they would rather mutilate their daughters than see them screwed by a Frenchman.’ He puckered his lips and made an exaggerated thrusting motion with his hips. ‘You think they would be grateful for some prime French cock.’

  ‘I saw a girl who died of it,’ said Razor. ‘The mother made sure that nothing could get in, nothing could get out either. Her bowels ruptured and she died.’

  ‘Then we’d better open her up.’ Leering at Sana, Bastiat took his bayonet from his belt and ran his thumb down the blade. Paul had seen him grinding it against the whetstone so many times in camp, he knew how sharp the edge was. ‘I will do the honours.’

  Sana understood what was happening. Her jaw was clenched, her eyes blazing furiously. She squirmed and kicked, mouthing curses that no one could understand.

  Bastiat sauntered towards her with the bayonet.

  ‘She is a child!’ Paul raged.

  He struggled against Coquille, but the Breton was a big man, and Paul was weak from the march through the desert. Once again, he was powerless.

  ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten you,’ Bastiat assured him. ‘I will take care of you, after I have made you watch what we do to her.’

  The blowing sand hid the sun and made its light a smoky red. It felt like sunset, but it could have been any time. Paul couldn’t watch. He raised his eyes to the horizon and . . .

  ‘What’s that?’

  Something was moving in the clouds of sand. Like a man, but unfeasibly tall, with stick-like legs and a long snout. Paul stared. He knew that figure. It was the bird-headed god from the temple, born from the fragments of Paul’s visions and nightmares.

  The figure halted. Paul blinked. His head cleared and he saw it was only a camel and rider – of course. With his face shrouded against the flying sand, there was no way of telling if the man was friend or foe.

  Coquille realised Paul had stopped struggling. He glanced back and saw the figure.

  ‘Sergeant!’ he called.

  Bastiat, who had the Devil’s gift for sensing danger, was already rising. With his trousers around his ankles, he snatched up his musket and levelled it at the new arrival.

  ‘Qui va?’ he shouted, voice rasping with the sand in his throat.

  The rider did not reply. He swung his arm in a kind of salute, and as he did so he released an object from his hand. It flew over the wall and landed in the centre of their enclosure, a few feet from where Sana lay.

  Paul looked at it long enough to know he would never forget the sight. It was a severed human head. Quenot’s gaunt eyes stared out of his sun-scarred face, a picture of horror. Fresh blood dripped from the remains of his neck, making Paul wonder if some feeble pulse of life still beat in his brain.

  A musket fired. Hooves drummed on the hard desert floor. The lone rider had become a company, scores of men mounted on camels who flitted through the haze around them. They circled the enclosure like sharks homing in on a wounded fish, hollering their eerie battle cry.

  ‘Mamelukes.’

  Bastiat, Razor and Coquille ran into the compound and kneeled behind the mud-brick wall with their muskets. Paul lifted Sana to her feet. A livid bruise was forming on her face where Coquille had hit her, and there were more bruises on her wrists and legs where Bastiat and Razor had held her. But she was unbowed. She picked up the bayonet Bastiat had dropped and took a step towards the Frenchman.

  ‘Leave him,’ said Paul.

  Sana ignored him. The wind howled around them. Even sheltered by the enclosure, Paul could hardly stand upright.

  Bastiat’s musket flashed fire as he took aim at the riders. One of them went down. Bastiat hunched over his musket to reload, struggling to keep the wind from scattering his powder. He did not notice Sana approaching behind him.

  Paul told himself afterwards she could not have known what she was doing. She was a child, after all, her arms so thin they looked as if they might snap. Bastiat could have knocked her away with a swat of his fist.

  But Bastiat didn’t see her.

  Sana drove the bayonet into Bastiat’s side, under the ribs and up into the vital organs. His body convulsed. He dropped the musket and jerked back, head up, staring in astonished horror at his unlikely nemesis.

  Sana spat in his face.

  Bastiat keeled over, knocking into Razor beside him. Before Sana could retrieve the blade, Razor saw what had happened. He raised the butt of his rifle to club her brains out.

  That was unwise. He had put his head above the parapet, and the Mameluke riders with their long jezails needed no second chance. A bullet opened his skull and threw him to the ground.

  Now only Coquille was left. He gazed at Sana, an imp standing straight-backed and remorseless. He had a musket; she was unarmed. Yet it was the Breton who looked frightened.

  A spear flew over the wall and stuck quivering in the sand two feet from Sana. Paul took her hand.

  ‘Leave him,’ he said. ‘He is dead already.’

  He lifted Sana over the mud-brick wall and scrambled after her. On the other side, the sand had drifted so high there was hardly any distance to drop. They rolled to the foot of the slope, picked themselves up, and were immediately knocked flat again by the wind.

  Lightning flashed. The wind raised clouds of sand so high they blotted out the sky. The burning sun was reduced to a dim moon. Head down, eyes almost closed, Paul crawled forward. Sana came after him, gripping his ankle. If they were separated now, they would lose each other for ever.

  The ground shook: maybe a gust of wind, or a lightning bolt hitting the earth. Paul risked a glance – and froze. They had been seen. A rider was coming towards them, robes flapping around him and lance raised for the kill.

  Paul flung himself over Sana. At least his body might stop the lance going through her. The rider was so close Paul could smell the camel, and he had time to feel an irrational burst of anger that this was the last sensation he would feel.

  The rider towered over him, arm back, spear point aimed at Paul’s chest.

  A gust of wind hit them, stronger than anything Paul had felt before. Through the raging sand, Paul saw the rider blown out of his saddle and carried away like a sheet of paper. Then, as if an invisible fist had let go, the man fell to the ground.

  The fall had concussed him. Before he could move, Paul was on him. Every Mameluke carried a beautifully wrought dagger with a curved blade in his belt. Paul found it and cut the man’s throat. Blood spilled out, but sand clogged the wound so quickly Paul worried the man might live after all. He stuck him through the heart to be sure.

  Sana came out of the storm, leading the camel by its bridle. There was no question of riding, and no chance of going back to the enclosure. They could worry about escaping if they survived the next ten minutes.

  Paul had no compass. He could not see the sun; he could barely stand upright and could hardly breathe. Sand clogged his nostrils, but if he opened his mouth sand was forced down his throat. All he had to keep him alive was fear.

  It would have to be enough. Head down, he chose a direction at random and set off through the sandstorm.

  *

  Paul woke alone. He was lying against the camel’s flank, with Sana curled up in the crook of his elbow. But when he stood, in a shower of sand, the desert horizon was empty of life.

  He had escaped. From Bastiat, from the army, from the Mamelukes. A bubble of elation rose through his chest. He was free.

  Then he remembered where he was. Miles from the river, and hundreds of miles from any town or city. Without water, without food, without hope of rescue.

  Sana woke. She spat sand out of her mouth and frowned at him. The camel grunted.

  ‘Where are we?’ Paul wondered aloud.

  They could not have gone far in the storm, yet there was no sign of the mud walls at the oasis. The sand must have covered it. And where were the Mamelukes? Had they been wiped out, too?

  Sana shrugged.

  Paul knew the river was west. In Cairo, he had seen maps that showed the Red Sea coast running down the east side of the continent. He supposed he would find villages there, too, ships that could take him . . . where?

  He was an enemy of the revolution, a deserter from the army, an invader in a foreign land, and an infidel among the heathen. Where could he go?

  The elation he had felt when he woke turned in on itself, shrinking to a black hole of despair. He was an outcast. There was not a place on earth he could be accepted.

  Sana’s cool gaze restored his senses. Self-pity could come later; it would do him no good if he did not find water and food. He pointed west.

  ‘River.’ Then east. ‘Sea.’ Then spread both arms wide. ‘Which?’

  Sana squinted, then pointed south.

  ‘Gondar.’

  ‘What is Gondar?’

  ‘Kingdom. Rich.’

  Paul looked the way she had indicated. The desert seemed to stretch to the limits of the world, red sand and grey hills.

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Caravans come. Slaves. Gold.’

  ‘Across the desert?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Far?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Is there water?’

  She nodded, eagerly this time.

  ‘The mother of rivers.’

  Her words conjured a vision of green trees, still waters and soft rain. Paul’s mouth puckered at the thought – but it was probably a fairy tale, he told himself, something Sana’s mother had told her. He could not trust his life to that. As for the other options, west meant the Nile and a way back to Cairo. Back to Lefebvre.

  He weighed his future, with nothing but the ramblings of a child to guide him.

  He pointed east, to the sea.

  ‘That way.’

  They rummaged through the food bags tied to the camel’s saddle and laid out what they found: dates, two stale flatbreads, and a handful of nuts. There was a flask with barely enough water inside to fill the cup that came with it. That was all. The look on Sana’s face was almost as heartbreaking as the sight of what little they had.

  ‘It will have to do.’

  For Sana’s sake, Paul tried to stay cheerful. With his clothes torn to rags by the storm, his skin scoured like a leper and his voice thorny dry, he probably looked and sounded demented. Sana gave him a glance and said nothing.

  She was still naked. He tried not to stare at the gruesome stitches between her legs, but now that he had seen them it was impossible to look at anything else. What sort of mother could do that to her daughter? Or how terrible must the French seem, that sewing a person shut seemed like the better alternative?

  He could not leave her like that. Razor’s words preyed on him: what if she died of a ruptured bladder, or something burst inside her?

  He took out the Mameluke’s knife and tested the blade. Lethally sharp, its point honed fine as a needle. Sana watched him warily.

  ‘I can undo you.’

  Undo? He did not know the right word in Arabic, or perhaps it did not exist. He pointed between her legs, flushing with embarrassment that flared even brighter as she shrank away, baring her teeth.

  ‘No. Not that. I am not like the others. I will not force you.’ He spread his arms in innocence.

  Her eyes locked on to his, brimming with an anger that verged on madness. How long had she spent in that city with her dead mother? What other tragedies had she suffered – even before Bastiat tried to rape her?

  No wonder she does not trust me.

  ‘I will protect you,’ he promised.

  If it was the sincerity in his voice, or the prospect of release, or if she saw something in his face that she believed: his words seemed to convince her. She lay on the ground and spread her thin legs. Paul kneeled beside her.

  ‘Hold still.’

  He took a deep breath. He had never thought of himself as dextrous, and he was squeamish when it came to blood. Any mistake would inflict horrible pain on her, maybe permanent mutilation. He gripped the knife like a pencil and tried to imagine he was drawing on the finest tissue paper. Even an ounce too much pressure would ruin everything. He moved slowly, tiny flicks of the blade, as if he were sketching in shadows. He cut each stitch one thread at a time. When the tip of the knife nicked her soft skin and drew a bead of blood, Sana hissed, but did not move.

  At last he was finished. Sana examined herself, then gave Paul an indecipherable look. Gratitude, perhaps, but so fierce he had to turn away. He wondered when was the last time anyone had shown her a kindness – if you could call it that.

  He wished he had a fire, and water to boil, so he could wash the wound and soothe some of the pain. The only thing he had to offer was a rag torn from a piece of his shirt. Sana pressed it against herself, covering her modesty, while Paul cut the saddle cloth into a rough tunic for her to wear, belted with a length of the reins.

  ‘We will have to guide the camel without a bridle.’

  He picked up the saddle to replace it on the camel’s back.

  The animal had other ideas. Separated from its master and freed of its tack, it decided to take its chance. It bolted. Paul lunged, but only managed to grab the tip of its tail. It tugged free; he was left holding the saddle in one hand, and a clump of camel hair in the other, as the camel receded towards the horizon.

  He dropped the useless saddle and kicked it in frustration.

  *

  Paul thought he had plumbed every torment of trekking through the desert. He was wrong. Marching with Quenot and the men had been miserable – he had hated every one of them – but at least they had had strength in numbers. Now, he and Sana were alone against the immensity of the desert.

  Step by step, the impossibility of the task was hammered into him. Even if they took the merest sips, their water wouldn’t last two days. He was already dizzy with thirst and faint with hunger. When he tripped, which was often, he did not have the strength to regain his balance, but flopped face forward onto the ground. Each time, it took him longer to rise. He told himself he had to keep going for Sana’s sake, but more often it was she who helped him up. The heat and hunger affected her less; in her short life, she had grown used to it. But even she could not last indefinitely. Every hour her pace slowed, and her head drooped lower.