Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

Caleb lay in the sand and waited for the first light in the east.

Murky pale, the dawn came as Beth finally regained her bungalow, dead tired, hungry and thirsty. Although her headlights had caught the car she did not register it until she had to swerve to miss it. It was parked in the unmade road outside the gates that led up to the carport beside the villa. She knew the Mercedes, top of the range, and she swore. She took her time. Outside her front door, which was ajar, she unloaded the Land Rover. On the patio, she dumped her cold box, her water canisters, which were empty, her sleeping-bag, her clipboard and the filled sample sack. She felt a wreck. Sand was stuck to her face, held there by the sweat, oil streaks were on her hands and her blouse, and grime was caked under her fingernails.

She wanted to lie in a bath, gorge herself from the refrigerator, then sleep. What she did not want was a visitor. The exhaustion caught her as she pushed the door wider. For a moment she leaned against the jamb, then went inside to face him.

The deputy governor was sitting on the couch in her living room.

How long had be been there? The answer was in the ashtray on the couch's arm, filled with crushed filters… God.

'Hello,' she said, playing natural and failing. 'What a surprise.'

The response was bitter, an attack that the politeness and softness of the voice did not hide. 'Where have you been? I came yesterday in the morning, yesterday in the evening. In the morning the maid told me you had packed food and water as if for the desert, and in the evening the bungalow was still empty. In two hours' time, if you had not returned, I was going to call out the trackers, a search would have been mounted for you… I was worried. You left no note, no indication of where you had gone. While you were away there was a storm in the Sands. You can easily understand my anxiety.'

'I was on a field survey trip, it took longer,' she said, and knew the explanation was inadequate and hollow.

'There was a storm and you were alone. I am disappointed, Miss Bethany, that you declined to take the offer that I have always made to you, that I provide an escort with reliable vehicles for you to go into the Sands – exceptionally disappointed. A person such as yourself, a distinguished scholar… under my patronage and support – has no need to travel by herself, with all the attendant risks that creates.'

He was indeed, and Beth understood it, her patron and supporter.

Without that patronage and support, her visa was worthless. She would be on the next night's flight out of Riyadh.

'I'm sorry, truly sorry,' she said. 'I just didn't think, being selfish, that anyone would worry.'

She could still feel the touch of him. She had thought of him, no name, all through the night as she had bumped, sped and woven, always searching for the hard salt flats ahead, the lights' beams arrowing over the sand and guiding her. He had been with her. He had left her. He had roused feelings in her passionless, loveless life.

Yet she had not owned him. She owned everything she wanted, except him. He had gone away from her, gone away into the Sands, gone beyond reach. The deputy governor, prince of the Kingdom, owned her. She was his chattel.

'I sincerely apologize. It was selfishness. What else can I say? I thought only of myself. I very much respect, and am grateful, that you worried for me.'

Well, short of getting down on her knees and ripping off her blouse and exposing her back for a bloody good flogging, there was not much more she could do. At the convent, when in minor trouble, she had learned that the contrite approach softened anger, reduced punishment. Beth hung her head.

'You, better than any foreigner, understand the dangers of the Sands. You know them as the Bedu do. You know them as I know them.'

'I do.'

'It is basic procedure that if you go into the Sands for even half a day, you leave a map of your route.'

'It is.'

'I was fearful for you.'

The ashtray told her he had been on her couch for the whole night.

His robe was crumpled, creased, from sitting through the long hours in the quiet of her bungalow… She wondered where the man without a name was – where a little caravan of camels was. Had he already moved because the dawn had come, along with the men who had wanted to kill her, and him? She owned nothing of him. He was not of the Bedu, not of the Arabs, she did not know where he came from or what was his destination, or the purpose of his journey. He went in secrecy – others, to preserve the secret, would have killed her. Her life was saved by his trust in her… She smiled, dreamed.

'You take it lightly, Miss Bethany, my anxiety and your danger?'

'No, no… I can only apologize.'

The silken voice hardened. 'The storm, Miss Bethany? The airfield here was closed. I could not come back from Riyadh because of the storm. Nothing moved here. Because of the storm I was concerned for your welfare.'

The lie came easily 'I missed it, no problem. I saw it coming, hunkered down in shelter. There was some drifting round the wheels but I dug them out.'

When had she last lied? Beth could not remember. It was not in her nature to lie. Everything she had learned at the convent, and at home, had told her that an untruth chased a liar.

The question slithered quietly from him. 'Did you see anybody, Miss Bethany, in the Sands?'

She blustered: 'No… Who?'

'Any travellers, any traders?'

'Why do you ask?'

'I merely ask because, if we had had to search for you, Miss Bethany, I wonder if we would have met travellers or traders who had seen you and would have directed us towards where you were.'

'No.' It was the second lie. 'I did not see anybody.'

'These are difficult times… there are rumours… It is said men travel in the Sands, who are illegal and dangerous… only whispers, I do not have evidence of it.'

The lie tripped from her tongue. 'I told you, there was nobody.'

'Promise me, you will not go alone again into the Sands.'

'I saw nobody… But I want to tell you what I did see.'

She told the deputy governor about the ejecta field where the iron-ore fragments had come down, and she ran outside. She tipped the sample bag on to the plastic patio table, and the stones and glass pieces rattled and rolled on the table's surface. His hands were cupped and she laid the largest pieces in them. His fingers stroked them. She told him that when she had written her paper, when it was submitted with maps, photographs and samples to the American-based society that collated meteorite finds, she would give the field his name. She saw the pleasure in his face and the joy with which his fingers, hesitant, touched the pieces. He had been frightened for her

– he did not own her, she owned him. There was one man whom she did not own.

As he handled the pieces, with love, Beth heard the soft drone in the air and looked down from her patio into the brightness of the low sun. She saw the small aircraft lift from the runway. It did not have the grace she had seen before, but seemed to yaw and struggle clumsily for height. There were khaki tubes, one under each wing…

The aircraft climbed. She saw that her patron looked up, watched the aircraft's slow, pained climb, then his eyes were back on the stones, bright with fascination for them.

She had lied, she had avoided the promise. She let the deputy governor keep two pieces for his collection, then saw him go.

Beth ran her bath, and stripped… She did not recognize how greatly the lies she had spoken had changed her.

High in the control tower beside the runway, the deputy governor was given binoculars. He raised them and studied the tent camp by the far edge of the perimeter fence, and a frown puckered on his forehead. The beauty of the glass and the stones slipped from his mind.