The Age of Ra

8. Luxor

In a restaurant on Luxor's Corniche, which ran alongside the Nile, they ate shish kebab and pigeon stuffed with rice and washed it down with ice-cold Alexandrian beer. Feluccas plied the river, their lateen-rigged sails spread to catch the syrupy evening breeze. Mopeds farted up and down the street, swerving around donkey carts and battered old Mercedes Lotus taxis and filling the air with their two-stroke tang.

Luxor, the village-with-aspirations city, teemed. According to Zafirah it had never been so busy, not even during its heyday, back when Freegypt was more stable and tourists used to flood in from all over to view the temples and monuments and breathe in the dusty atmosphere of the cradle of the world's religion. Nowadays only a trickle of visitors came. You hardly saw a sunburned white face any more, and chances were it belonged to a journalist, down here to write some tone-piece on the Upper Freegypt ''crisis''. Either that or an executive from a holiday company on a jaunt sponsored by the national tourist board. The difference was easy to spot. The journalist came alone and looked intrepid. The holiday company exec came with an armed escort and looked scared.

''Visit Freegypt,'' David said. ''You probably won't get caught in the crossfire.''

Zafirah nodded as though not seeing the flippancy behind his deadpan tone. ''It must be said, things have got a lot better. There are still territorial skirmishes between the militias now and then, but for the past three years we have known something close to peace. The south and the north are trading along the Nile again, and Cairo is supplying us with essentials such as medicine and baby milk, which it withheld during the worst of the fighting.''

''You think one day this country will be whole again?'' David asked, swatting away one of the many flies that were buzzing around his meal.

''I don't think it. I know it.''

''Why?''

''Same reason Luxor is full right now.''

''The bloke we've all come to see. Your mystery man, the Lightbringer. About whom you're not prepared to tell me any more. Or are you?''

Zafirah turned her gaze across the river, looking over towards the west bank, the place of tombs and dead pharaohs. Several of her men were clustered around a nearby table, two of them playing senet, the others looking on and offering advice on moves. One of the spectators made a coarse remark and everyone guffawed. Amid the general hilarity the tabletop was nudged and the game pieces were scattered across the board, much to the players' annoyance.

By the way Zafirah smiled, David had the feeling the remark had had nothing to do with the game and a lot to do with him and her.

''OK,'' he said, sensing a change of subject was in order. ''Let me ask you this then. How does a nice girl like you end up in charge of a band of paramilitaries?''

''Am I a nice girl?''

''Educated, thoughtful, brave…''

''I could turn it around. How does a nice boy like you end up as a paratrooper, fighting on behalf of god, goddess, pharaoh, and country?''

''Because I enlisted,'' David said. ''Because I felt I had to. Because… of other reasons.''

''Personal reasons.''

''More or less.''

''So a sense of duty, coupled with a private need. Two motivations, inner and outer, converging.''

''Yes.''

''Same here,'' said Zafirah. ''For one thing, I come from these parts, so signing up with a force that stands against outside aggression seemed a sensible thing to do. When I was a girl there were times when Luxor was under attack from three sides at once — the Red Sea Fellahin from the east, the Aswan Ulama from the south, and the Integrationist Army from the west. The Fellahin wanted to embrace us with their communist utopia, the Ulama wanted to convert us to their vestigial, politicised version of Islam, and the Integrationists, funded by Libya, wanted to incorporate us into a segment of the country they consider belongs to the Nephthysian states. Luxor didn't want to be any of these things. It just wanted to be Luxor. You've seen the price it paid for that.''

On the way into the city David had passed countless buildings that were either husks pocked with shell holes or just plain ruins. They were still inhabited, many of them, stretched tarpaulins doing the job that missing roofs used to, corrugated iron for doors, sheets of polythene for windows.

''To preserve itself, to resist these attacks,'' Zafirah went on, ''Luxor had to form its own guerrilla army.''

''The Liberators.''

''Yes. They had nothing, to begin with. No weapons, no vehicles, nothing except manpower and a will to survive. But with guile and subterfuge they captured enemy equipment and little by little gathered together the resources they needed. Whichever direction an assault came from, they were ready to meet and repel it. I grew up with the sound of gunfire and shelling. Year upon year, some faction or other would make a play for Luxor, usually around harvest time. I'd go to school watching raw recruits doing drill in the public parks, knowing many of them would be dead by the autumn. Boys and girls only slightly older than me were learning how to strip and clean a rifle, how to manufacture a roadside bomb, how to disable an enemy vehicle using only breezeblocks and barbed wire. This all seemed normal to me, commonplace, a way of life. Of course it did. I was a child, and as a child you take everything in your stride. I knew that Luxor had to be protected. I expected that one day I would be doing the protecting myself.''

David caught the waiter's eye and ordered another round of beers. Zafirah was distantly related to the restaurant owner — a second cousin? — and as far as David could tell everything was on the house.

''My father, however, was keen for me to be a teacher,'' she continued. ''He was determined that I should go to university, most likely in Cairo. I had a flair for languages. He saw me as an English teacher, perhaps after spending a couple of years in your country perfecting my syntax and grammar. He had high hopes for me, his only child. That was why he named me Zafirah. It means victorious, successful. That was also why he fought with the Liberators of Luxor, to keep me safe and give me the future he dreamed I would have. He was a Liberator commander, in fact. He was there at Karnak, nine years ago, seeing off a major offensive by the Fellahin…''

Zafirah's eyes glistened.

''Karnak,'' she said. ''Its ancient name was Ipet-Isut: 'The most perfect of places'. Not any more.''

David recalled seeing the temple at Karnak, on Luxor's outskirts. It had been devastated, its pylons and obelisks toppled, its hypostyle halls reduced to fields of shattered columns.

The fresh beers arrived and Zafirah took a swig. ''The Fellahin nearly overwhelmed us that time. We won. We lost Karnak itself and hundreds of our soldiers, but we won.''

''Your father…?'' David asked, knowing the answer.

''The Fellahin had a Scarab tank. They'd captured it off the Integrationist Army, along with a priest who was being forced to perform the rites to keep recharging its ba cells. The tank was cutting a swathe through our ranks, scything them down with its blaster nozzles. Long-range conventional weapons couldn't pierce its armour, and it wasn't letting anyone get close enough to do anything at short range. My father found himself a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher and a horse. He rode at the tank, screaming at the top of his lungs. The tank took out the horse from under him. Took off my father's legs as well. But he'd got within a stone's throw of it, and that was all he needed. Somehow he managed to sit up. Somehow he managed to fire the rocket. The tank went up in a great ball of ba energy, vaporising everything within a two hundred foot radius, including a large number of Fellahin… and my father.''

''A hero.''

''Undoubtedly. But to me, also, a coward. Because he was my father. He should not have sacrificed himself. He should have lived so that he could continue to be my father and love me and my mother and look after us. He was a coward to throw away his life, when the heroic thing to do would have been come home alive.''

''There are causes that matter more than individuals.''

''You believe that,'' Zafirah said with a caustic laugh. ''I suppose I believe it too. But not when I was eighteen.''

''Your father saved the city, and you. He was giving you the future he promised he would.''

''Not like that, though. I didn't want it like that.'' She sighed. ''Anyway, it was impossible now. University? England? How could I even consider it when I had a new goal in life? One future had replaced another. I couldn't become a teacher. I had shoes to fill. The Liberators were down by hundreds of troops and one great, inspirational leader. How could I do anything else but volunteer my services and help make up the numbers that had been lost?''

''You make it sound like it wasn't a choice.''

''It wasn't. The instant my father died, it was a calling.''

With a wince, Zafirah finished her beer. David had the impression she hadn't revealed this much about her past to anyone in a long time. Alcohol was a factor, but it helped, too, that he was a foreigner and still something of a stranger. Often it was easier to unburden yourself to someone you didn't know too well. Christians in the old days would pour their hearts out to their priests, telling them things they wouldn't have dared admit to their nearest and dearest.

David decided to make it a two-way street. ''Five years ago I was helping to run a company with a multimillion-europound turnover,'' he said. ''I was chauffeured to work every morning in a Rolls Royce Silver Ka. I entertained clients at five-star restaurants. I lived in a townhouse in Kensington, just around the corner from the Harrods Pyramid. All this by the age of twenty-five.''

''And you gave it up for an officer's commission and paltry pay,'' Zafirah said. ''Or did you lose it all and join the army because you were out of other options? Either way, that makes you a fool.''

''Harsh.''

''Although in one case slightly less of a fool than the other.''

''Which one?''

''Which did you do?''

''Gave it up, voluntarily.''

''That's the one. Because…?''

''Because, in the first place, none of it was my achievement,'' David said, smarting somewhat. ''I inherited my position on the board of directors. I didn't have to work for it and earn it. The company was founded by my great-grandfather and the job of running it has been passed on through the generations like a hand-me-down suit.''

''And what was this job? What did you actually do?''

He gestured at the nearby game of senet. ''That.''

She frowned exaggeratedly. ''Play board games?''

''Make them. Specifically, senet boards and pieces and casting sticks. AW Games? Heard of them? That's us. Named after my great-grandfather, Archibald Westwynter, who took out the first and only worldwide patent on senet. This was back at the turn of the last century, during the Divine Diaspora, just when Carter, Carnavon and all the other evangelising archaeologists were busy bringing the gods of Old Egypt to the rest of the world. My great-grandfather was swept up in the fervour just like everyone else. He was mad keen on board games so he set about trying to fathom the rules of senet. There seem to be as many versions of the game as there are papyrus records mentioning it. Old Archibald read them all, synthesised them into one, and copyrighted that version, taking the game out of the public domain and firmly into his own hands. Then he started manufacturing copies and selling them, and in next to no time he was a millionaire. My family's been in the business of flogging senet ever since.''

''I'd have thought that was a fun way to make a living.''

''Hardly. The company's so big now it virtually runs itself. Junior executives make sure the suppliers keep supplying the raw materials we need as cheaply as possible and the factories keep turning out the required number of units per month. All the person at the top has to do is oversee the junior executives and count the profits and check the balance sheets to see that no one's ripping us off. That and mount the occasional intellectual property lawsuit against copycats and rivals. A trained monkey could do it, let alone a graduate with a degree in Economics and Business Studies.''

''So you hated it.''

''Hated's too strong. I got tired of it. At the start there was a feeling of heritage, of family responsibility, but it palled pretty quickly. After that, it was just drudgery. I suppose I could have stuck it out. Grinned and bore it. After all, if it was good enough for my dad, and his dad, it ought to have been good enough for me. But then…''

David paused, waiting to be prompted. This was the hard part of his story, mirroring the part about Zafirah's father in her story. He wanted to be sure she didn't fail to notice the equivalence.

''Then?'' she said.

''My brother died,'' he said. ''Younger brother by four years. Steven. He was a midshipman aboard HPMS Immortal. A dreadnought. She went down with all hands during the Battle of the Aegean. Torpedoed by a Setic Crocodile-class hunter-killer sub that had sailed down through the Bosporus to help out the Neph fleet. She sank in three minutes flat, according to eyewitnesses. Holed below the waterline. No one aboard stood a chance. A nine-hundred-strong crew, all gone. And the Immortal was just one of eighteen Osirisiac ships that were lost that day.''

''Yet the Hegemony still won the battle.''

''A Pyrrhic victory, like your Liberators at Karnak. Gained at such a price, you wonder if it was worth it. There was talk in government of approaching the Nephs and Setics with a peace plan after that. Pressure groups waged campaigns, saying we couldn't afford too many more Aegeans. The Nephs seemed amenable to the idea. They made the right noises, anyway. But of course it all came to nothing. All the high priests and holy royal advisors in Europe were counselling against peace, saying it was contrary to the will of Isis and Osiris. The Horusites were dead set against it, too. Jeb Wilkins threatened sanctions and trade embargos and the like. Good ol' Pastor-President Wilkins. Called a peace plan 'selling the cow to buy five magic beans'. And as for the Setics, the Commissariat of Holy Affairs forbade the Afro-Arabian Synodical Council even from considering the idea, so the Nephs, of course, bent the knee and complied, because that's the Bi-Continental Pact for you.''

''An opportunity lost,'' said Zafirah.

David made a wry face. ''It's out of our hands, isn't it? Whether or not we humans want war, the gods always do. It's their will, and if we didn't do their bidding we'd lose their favour, and that's unthinkable. They fight among themselves; therefore we have to too. Osiris and Isis will never forgive Set for what he did, so Europe will always be at loggerheads with Russia and China, and with Africa and the Middle East as well, because of Nephthys's love for Set. And the United States will always back Europe up because Horus is a good son, loyal to his parents, and loathes Set. Anubis isn't that fond of Set either, so Japan and South-East Asia are forever snapping at China's rear, while South America's gone to hell because Horus's kids can't see eye to eye on anything. The situation's never going to improve. We've had non-stop war for a century and we'll probably never not have war. So…'' He shrugged. ''So one naval battle, however disastrous, is hardly likely to be the start of a sea change in global affairs. You can applaud people for mentioning suing for peace, for even thinking the idea, but you know it's never going to happen.''

''Very fatalistic,'' said Zafirah.

''Just realistic. Geopolitics is theopolitics, and there's nothing we can do about it.''

''You don't think humankind has any say in its own destiny?''

''Collectively. None at all. Individually? I'm not so sure. Look at me. I changed my course, didn't I? Joined the army. Felt I had to do something more practical with my life, something that served a higher purpose, something that would actually count. Steven's death…''

A bitter time. A dark patch in David's memory, like an ink-stained page in a book, or a long, cloudy season. His mother withdrawn, uncommunicative, often heavily sedated. Spending far too much of the day in Steven's empty bedroom, which was pristine, just as he'd left it the morning he drove off to Dartmouth to volunteer. A shrine to him. Either that or she was visiting an actual shrine, the local temple to Isis, where she'd offer sacrifices of milk and bread and pray to the Protector of Children for strength and guidance. Jack Westwynter, meanwhile, going through the motions of his life, walking as though in a dream. Drinking. Drinking slowly, steadily, stalwartly, from breakfast through till midnight. Each of them, husband and wife, struggling to fathom why Steven's death had happened and what either of them could have done to prevent it happening. Each, with hooded, accusing stares, blaming the other, and at the same time accepting the other's blame, feeling it might be merited. And David staying at the periphery of it all, leaving his parents to deal with their grief in their way while he dealt with his in his. Resenting Steven. Steven, for being such a wayward, rebellious sod. Steven, for turning his back on the golden opportunities he'd been presented with and going off to fight a war that would have no end. Steven, for being so…

So…

So right.

''I saw it,'' he said to Zafirah. ''I saw it in a flash on the way to work one morning. This was maybe a month after we got the letter of notification from the Admiralty, along with Steven's posthumous medal, a Golden Bee for, I don't know, Bravery While Drowning or whatever. I saw that Steven had had the right idea after all. Up till then I'd spent my life thinking he was a born pain in the arse, always doing the opposite of what he should, always going against the grain. Why be such a troublemaker? Why rock the boat? But then it struck me. He hadn't joined the navy to get away from his family and shirk his responsibilities. He'd done it so that he could be himself, not what someone else wanted him to be.''

''And you felt you needed that too,'' said Zafirah.

''That's it. That's pretty much it. Nail on the head. All my life, everyone else had been making choices for me. Now it was my turn to choose. So I tapped on the glass partition in the Roller. I told the chauffeur we weren't going to the office. I had him take a right turn at the Howard Carter Memorial instead of a left. Pretty soon we were outside a recruitment bureau. And that was that.''

''The poor little rich boy signed up with the army and started jumping out of aeroplanes. I bet Mummy and Daddy weren't pleased about that.''

''Furious.''

''One son killed in action, now the other looking like he wanted to go the same way…''

''My father tried to pay them to de-enlist me. Offered them who knows how much. They wouldn't take it. They didn't need the money. They needed the warm bodies.''

''But were you being selfless or selfish?''

''Honestly?'' David frowned. ''I don't know. A bit of both, probably. What I do know is, I make a decent soldier. The army certainly thought so, packing me off to Sandhurst straight away for six months to earn my commission. That shows confidence in me, and I deserve it. This is one job I can do with almost no doubts about my motives or capabilities. I enjoy it — the comradeship, the regimented life, the sense of purpose, all of it. This is, I think, what I'm meant for, and I'll do it for as long as I can. I'm content with that.''

''Even though, as you point out, the war is unlikely to end?'' Zafirah said. ''Even though taking part in it has come close to killing you?''

David pondered this. ''Better to do what you want to do and be happy than do what you don't and be unhappy. That's what Steven showed me. And hey…''

He raised his beer bottle.

''I'm still here, aren't I?''

Later, there was a moment. Just a moment. Zafirah had scored them accommodation in a fleapit hotel opposite the Medinat Habu temple. Her Liberators of Luxor staggered drunkenly to bed. She and David were the last two left standing. The time came for them to say goodnight and go off to their separate rooms. Or perhaps not.

They had exchanged truths about themselves over the meal. They'd reached out to each other, tendering painful reminiscences like olive branches. There was, now, something established between them, although David could not say for sure what it was. Not quite intimacy but almost.

They faced each other in the flickeringly lit corridor. Zafirah looked up at him. He noticed a stippling of downy hair across her upper lip, a moustache so thin and faint it could only be seen at this proximity. It wasn't a turn-off. If anything, the opposite. He almost put out a hand to touch her. He almost lowered his face to kiss her. He sensed it would be OK if he did. It would be the most natural thing in the world.

A moment.

Zafirah shied away.

''Big day tomorrow,'' she said, heading across creaking floorboards to her room. ''We need our sleep.''

The door closed behind her.

David felt the temptation to go over and knock on it.

But the temptation wasn't strong enough. It was a seed that needed deeper soil.

He went to bed. Mosquitoes whined around him infuriatingly all night long.