Jon Grimwood - Effendi

“Then why say almost?”

“What?” Sarah glanced round, then shrugged and turned her attention back to Saul. They were moored under an overhanging thorn that kept the afternoon at bay, while lapping water cooled their hiding place and tossed sunlight onto the underside of its spiky canopy.

Ka was ignoring all questions. He was getting good at that. Ignoring the others meant not facing questions he couldn’t answer.

“Well?” Ka asked the voice.

“No dead would mean an unfair fight. Strong against weak. A few dead equals luck, skill, better weapons . . . It’s about presentation.” The voice paused and, without having to ask, Ka suddenly found himself looking down on a thornbush rather than at a battlefield.

“Who are you?” the voice demanded.

Ka sighed. “You’ve asked me this already . . .”

“Humour me,” said the voice. It didn’t sound very humorous at all. “That’s a basic rule, okay?”

“Sergeant Ka,” said Ka. “We were part of the Army.”

“Were?”

Ka thought of the ploughs turning over sand and blinked as his p.o.v. changed. The 4¥4s were done now, even out at the edge of what had been Ka’s camp. Some trucks were even leaving, helmeted troops waving to a blonde woman who stood atop a dune, laden down with power pack and portable satellite dish.

Ka turned off the radio. “We can’t go back,” he told the others, as if that was an end to the argument.

“Oh yes we fucking can.” Saul’s voice was deeper than Ka’s own. His superior age showing in its gruffness and the ease with which he dropped swear words into his conversation. “We just turn this shitty boat around.”

“They’d flog us publicly,” Sarah reminded him. “Maybe shoot us.”

“Yeah.” Bec flicked her gaze from Sarah to Ka, then back again. “We’ll need an excuse.”

Lifting his shades, Ka stared at Bec. “We can’t go back,” he said slowly. “You know why we can’t go back? Because everyone’s dead.”

Mouths dropped open and Zac instantly flung his hands over his ears, as if to block out Ka’s lies. Both his sisters were in that camp, Ka realized; had been, rather . . .

“It was quick,” Ka insisted. “Instant,” he added hurriedly. “It was instant. A bomb made a small bang and everyone just fell over.”

“Yeah?” said Saul. “And how do you know . . . ?”

“I just do. Then the ’copters came and trucks full of soldiers.”

“Why did they send soldiers?” Bec asked. “If the bomb had already killed everyone?”

Ka didn’t have an answer to that.

“Because the bomb doesn’t exist,” said the voice in his ear. “That’s why . . . In a moment your radio is going to come on. Talk to it direct.”

My radio is switched off, Ka wanted to say, but the blue box was already noisily swooping hi-to-low at exactly sixty cycles a minute, like a miniature police siren.

“Sergeant Ka,” said the boy, holding the radio to his ear and feeling stupid.

“Lieutenant Ka,” corrected the voice. “As of now. Lieutenant Ka, Sergeant Sarah, Corporal Bec . . .”

“What about Saul and Zac?”

“Zac’s a baby. And Saul . . .”

Ka waited.

“He’s a spy, you understand?”

“I understand,” said Ka, sitting up so straight his hair almost caught in down-hanging thorns.

“I understand, sir.”

“Sir.”

“And you know who I am?”

Ka shook his head. Somehow that was enough.

“Colonel Abad,” said the Colonel, introducing himself. “You’ve heard of me?”

Oh yes. Ka grinned stupidly at the badge on his shirt. Those shades, the cigar, that black beard. The Colonel.

“Where are you exactly?”

The boy looked round him. Cliffs tight on both sides of the river and white-headed vultures overhead. But then there were always vultures circling thermals over this stretch of the Nile. Above the vultures, made smaller both by reality and distance, hovered raptors. Black-winged kites, most probably.

Sarah’s felucca was tied at the river’s bend, on the side where floodwater flowed less fast and silt almost buried rocks that were pale and strangely square. Three thousand years earlier, during the flood season, a cargo boat had run aground there. Staying with his freshly hewn sandstone, the captain had sent slaves downriver to get help. He died in the night waiting for their return, killed by an adder as he sat by a small fire lit to keep jackals at bay.

Colonel Abad knew these things. The hieroglyphs of the pharaohs cartouched below their statues, the genera of birds and animals, even the molecular structure of each rock that made up the crumbling cliffs and temples, statues and ruins.

Ka could identify concrete, sandstone and polycrete, the frothy stuff that set hard and could be coated with sand or gravel, provided any covering was whacked on before the crete had time to dry. Both sides used it to make HQs that blended into any background.

“We’re upriver from the camp,” Ka said, “on a bend near low cliffs . . . And we haven’t eaten all day,” he added as an afterthought.

“You got grenades?”

“Yes,” said Ka. At least Saul had. Zac, Sarah and Bec had two rifles, a knife and a pistol between them. He had the plastic gun. What his dead lieutenant called a doublePup. He didn’t like it very much.

“Swap it,” said Colonel Abad. “First chance you get. Right . . .” The radio crackled for a second. “Listen up. Food first. That means losing a grenade to the river. Get Saul to throw and Bec and Zac to collect the fish . . . All of them.”

“Do we eat them raw?”

“Sushi.” The voice sounded amused. “Only if you want. Personally I’d suggest a small fire and usually I’d recommend dry twigs, but today we want smoke, don’t we?”

“Do we?”

“Oh yes,” said the voice, “very definitely.”

Ka shuffled backward, then stopped when his foot hit Sarah’s shoulder. The girl didn’t move but she did glare, waiting while Ka edged sideways to give her space. They were alone together in the desert, on an important mission . . . That was how Ka had explained it to the others.

“Accident,” said Ka.

Sarah nodded. Opened her mouth as if she was about to say something, then shut it. She had perfect teeth, Ka realized. Tourist’s teeth. All in a neat line and with no chipped edges.

“How old are you?” He’d asked the question without thinking. “I mean, really?” He knew Sarah said she was fourteen but then he said he was thirteen.

“Fifteen,” Sarah said firmly.

“Me too . . .” Ka smiled, then shrugged. Questions were never welcome, he should have known that. Ka just wanted to be the one who persuaded her to open up and talk. Already he could describe how she looked without looking. Hair as black as her eyes, braided into long plaits. Her skin somewhere between dark chocolate and purple, not café noir like his. She’d taken grief for that in the camp; grief, comments and idle slaps. Mostly from the older girls.

There were more girls than boys in the Ragged Army. That was because they fought better, according to Saul, having more to fear if captured. Although Saul was the only person Ka had ever heard say this and, besides, both sides chopped off the hands of those who wouldn’t change and it was hard to think of much worse than that.