Weaveworld

III

THE WALL

1

istance was impossible to judge on the plain they now crossed. The dunes at their backs were soon obscured by the sand-thickened air, and ahead, the same veil shut the vista from sight. Though the wind was insistent, it did nothing to alleviate the assault of the sun: it merely added misery to misery, dragging at the legs until every step was a torment. But nothing slowed Shadwell. He marched like a man possessed until – after an hour of this inferno – he stopped dead, and pointed through the blur of heat and wind.

‘There,’ he said.

Hobart, who’d come abreast of him, narrowed his dazzled eyes and followed the direction of Shadwell’s finger. But the sand clouds defied his scrutiny.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

Shadwell seized hold of his arm.

‘Damn you, look!’

And this time Hobart realized Shadwell was not deceived. Some distance from where they stood the ground seemed to rise up again.

‘What is it?’ Hobart shouted against the wind.

‘A wall,’ Shadwell said.

It looked more like a range of hills than a wall, Hobart thought, for it ran along the entire visible horizon. Yet, though there were breaks in its length here and there, its regularity suggested Shadwell’s judgement was correct. It was indeed a wall.

Without further exchange, they began the march towards it.

There was no sign of any structure rising on the far side, but its builders must have valued whatever it had been made to enclose and protect, for with every yard they drew closer, its sheer scale became awesomely apparent. It rose fifty feet or more above the desert floor; yet such was the skill of the masons there was no visible sign of how it had been constructed.

Twenty yards from the wall the party halted, leaving Shadwell to approach it unaccompanied. He stretched his hand out to touch the stone, which was hot beneath his finger-tips, its surface so smooth it was almost silken. It was as if the wall had been raised out of molten rock, shaped by intelligences that could mould lava like cold clay. Clearly there was no practical way of scaling a surface so innocent of niche or scar, even if any of them had possessed the energy to do so.

‘There must be a gate,’ said Shadwell. ‘We’ll walk ‘til we find it.’

The sun was well past its peak now, the day beginning to cool. But the wind was not about to give the travellers a moment’s respite. It seemed to be keeping guard along the wall, lashing at their legs as though eager to throw them to the ground. But having got so far without being slaughtered, the party’s fears had been replaced by curiosity as to what lay on the other side. The Arabs had found their voices again, and kept up a constant dialogue, doubtless planning how they’d boast of their find once home.

They walked for fully half an hour, the wall unbroken. There were places where cracks had appeared in it – though none low enough to offer hand-holds – and others where the top edge showed signs of crumbling, but there was neither window nor gate in its length, however small.

‘Who built this?’ said Hobart as they walked.

Shadwell was watching their shadow on the wall, as it kept pace with them.

‘Ancients,’ he said.

‘To keep the desert out?’

‘Or keep the Scourge in.’

The last few minutes had brought a subtle change in the wind. It had given up nipping at their legs, and gone about braver business. It was Ibn Talaq who first spotted what.

‘There! There!’ he said, and pointed along the wall.

A few hundred yards from where they stood a stream of sand was being carried out through the wall, bellowing as it went. As they approached, it became apparent that this was not a gate, but a breach in the wall. The stone had been thrown down in heaps of rubble. Shadwell was first to reach the scattered pieces, many the size of small houses, and began to scramble up over them, until at last he looked down into the place the walls had been raised to guard.

Behind him, Hobart called:

‘What do you see?’

Shadwell didn’t speak. He simply surveyed the scene behind the wall with disbelieving eyes, as the wind that roared through the breach threatened to throw him from his perch.

There were neither palaces nor tombs on the other side of the wall. Indeed there was no sign, however vestigial, of habitation; no obelisks, no colonnades. There was only sand, and more sand; endless sand. Another desert, rolling away from them, as empty as the void at their backs.

‘Nothing.’

It wasn’t Shadwell who spoke but Hobart. He too had scaled the boulders, and stood at Shadwell’s side.

‘Oh Jesus … nothing.’

Shadwell made no reply. He simply clambered down the other side of the breach, and stepped into the shadow of the wall. What Hobart said appeared to be true: there was nothing here. Why then did he feel certain that this place was somehow sacred?

He walked through the mire of sand that the wind had heaped against the rubble of the breach, and surveyed the dunes. Was it possible that the sand had simply covered the secret they’d come here to find? Was the Scourge concealed here, its howl that of something buried alive? If so, how could they ever hope to locate it?

He turned back, and squinted up at the wall. Then, on impulse, he began to climb the open edge of the breach. It was heavy going. His limbs were weary, and the wind had polished the stone in its many years of passage, but he eventually gained the summit.

At first it seemed his efforts had been for nothing. All he’d won for his sweat was a view of the wall, running off in both directions until distance claimed it.

But when he came to survey the scene below, he realized that there was a pattern visible in the dunes. Not the natural wave patterns that the wind created, but something more elaborate – vast geometrical designs laid out in the sand – with walkways or roads between them. He’d read, in his research on wastelands, of designs drawn by some ancient people on the plains of South America; pictures of birds and gods that could have made no sense from the earth, but had been drawn as if to enchant some heavenly spectator. Was that the case here? Had the sand been raised in these furrows and banks as a message to the sky? If so, what power had done it? A small nation would be needed to move so much sand; and the wind would undo tomorrow what had been done today. Whose work was this then?

Perhaps night would tell.

He climbed back down the wall to where Hobart and the others were waiting amid the boulders.

‘We’ll camp here tonight.’ he said.

‘Inside the walls or out?’ Hobart wanted to know.

‘Inside.’