The Hidden Oasis (54 page)

‘Did my sister ever tell you what happened between us?’
she asked, removing her hand from his shoulder and hugging her arms around her. ‘Why we didn’t talk for so long?’

He glanced across at her again. ‘No. She never spoke about it.’

Freya nodded. Now it was her gaze that was fixed on the fire’s embers, the burning wood pulsing and twinkling as though it were alive. There was another silence – she had never discussed this with anyone, ever, it was just too painful – then, taking a breath, she told him.

How after their parents’ deaths in the car accident Alex and her fiancé Greg had moved back into the family home so she could take care of her younger sibling. How Greg had always been attentive to Freya, joking and flirting, and how that flirting had increased once he was living under the same roof. How initially it had been Greg who made all the running, but after a while, flattered, Freya had started to make some running of her own. How what had started as kisses and fondles – wrong, of course, but salvageable – had rapidly spiralled into something altogether more sordid, she and Greg hopping into bed together the moment Alex had set off for work each morning and staying there until just before she returned home in the evening. How it had continued even as Alex and Greg were planning their wedding, until her sister had come back early one day and, inevitably – crushingly – caught them together, Greg at that moment going down on Freya, which had somehow made the whole betrayal even more grotesque and humiliating, although she omitted that particular detail in her description to Flin, the memory of it still too eviscerating to share, even after all these years.

‘She wasn’t angry,’ she said, swiping a forearm across her eyes. ‘When she came into the bedroom. Shocked, yes, but
not angry. It would have been better if she had been, had screamed and shouted, launched herself at me, but she just looked so sad, so lonely …’

She choked, wiping at her eyes again. Flin reached out and took her hand, a reflex gesture, comforting, the two of them sitting there in silence, hypnotized by the flickering tongues of flame. The jackals started up again, behind them now, to the north, their wails drifting across the night like some mournful aria.

‘Is that what the Hassan thing was about?’ he asked after a while. ‘Agreeing to strip for him. A way of …?’

‘Balancing things out?’ Freya shrugged. ‘I guess we’ve both got stuff we’re trying to put right.’

His grip tightened.

‘Your sister loved you, Freya. She talked about you all the time, your climbing – she was so proud of you. Whatever happened, it was in the past. She’d want you to know that. Want you to know how much you meant to her.’

She bit her lip, touching a hand to her pocket, to the outline of the letter Alex had sent her.

‘I do know that,’ she whispered. ‘What hurts is that I never got the chance to say the same to her.’

She sighed and looked across at him. This time their eyes met and held. For a moment they remained like that, Flin’s hand still clasped around hers. Then, slowly, their faces started to come together. Their lips made fleeting contact, then they broke away. Freya reached out and touched his face. Flin brought a hand up and ran it through her hair, before as one they pulled back and stood, knowing this wasn’t the time or the place. Not now, not after all that had been spoken.

‘We should try and get some sleep,’ he said. ‘We’ve got an early start.’

Together they built up the fire, shook out the blankets and settled back down – on opposite sides of the blaze now. Their eyes met again briefly. Then, with a nod, they rolled away and disappeared into their own thoughts, the jackals still calling in the distance.

Four hundred metres away, the figure adjusted his night vision binoculars. He watched for a while longer before sliding down behind the lip of the dune, switching on the transceiver and radioing in. It only took a moment: they’ve turned in for the night, no movement, nothing else to report. Within a minute he had resumed his vigil – binoculars clamped to his eyes, M25 sniper rifle resting on the sand beside him – oblivious to all save the two motionless forms curled innocently beneath the towering arch of stone. The fire between them slowly burnt itself down until it had reduced to almost nothing, a tiny orange smudge on the vast moonlit desert.

It had been three days since Freya had had any proper rest, and her sleep was deep and dreamless, free from thoughts and worries, an empty black void into which she gratefully sank, as though her mind had been swaddled in dense black velvet. Only as dawn was starting to colour the east, a soft band of pinkish grey drifting up off the horizon, did she slowly return to consciousness. Not because she had slept enough – she could have gone on for a good few hours
more – but because she became aware of a curious droning sound that even in the fog of slumber she sensed was at odds with the remote desert setting.

For a while she lay listening, still only half awake, pulling the blankets tighter around herself against the early morning chill, trying to work out what was going on. The sound faded and then strengthened, as if whatever was causing it was moving back and forth, sometimes nearer, sometimes further away. Rolling onto her side, she looked across at Flin to see if he was aware of it too. He wasn’t there. She rolled the other way, looking for the microlight, but that too was gone. She jerked fully awake and leapt to her feet, spinning around, scanning the sky.

In the few minutes since she had first woken the world had already grown noticeably clearer and she spotted the microlight immediately, soaring over the Gilf like an enormous white-winged bird. How Flin had taken off without waking her she didn’t know – she really must have been out of it – and for the briefest of instants she felt a shock of alarm, convinced he was abandoning her. The thought disappeared before it had even properly lodged itself for he was clearly flying in a circle rather than away. Wheeling and swooping over the flat tableland on the top of the Gilf, he headed south and then north in a broad circuit whose central axis appeared to be on a westward line from the rock formation beneath which she was standing.

She stood watching as the microlight flew right out to the very extremity of her sight, dwindling to a barely visible dot against the greying sky before slowly enlarging and once more coming back into focus. Ten minutes passed, then the aircraft swung away from the plateau and, dropping low
above the desert, roared directly overhead. As it did Flin tipped the sail slightly and shouted, gesturing at something on the ground. Freya threw up her arms to show she didn’t understand, forcing him to loop round and come back over again. Dropping even lower and gesticulating towards the fire, he mouthed the word ‘coffee’. She smiled and gave him a thumbs-up. Flin held out a hand with fingers spread, indicating he’d be another five minutes, then picked up height again and headed back towards the Gilf. The gargling drone of the microlight’s engine slowly receded as he resumed his survey of the massif.

She collected wood and tinder, got the fire going and put the water on. Flin circled the plateau a couple more times before peeling off and bringing the microlight down to land, taxiing to a halt beside the rock just as the water came to the boil and Freya poured it into the mugs.

‘See anything?’ she asked as he clambered from the pod.

He shook his head.

‘I’ve gone twenty kilometres north, south and west and there’s nothing, just sand and rock and a few scattered patches of camel thorn. Whatever else happens here at dawn we’re sure as hell not going to be finding an oasis.’

Nodding a thank-you, he took a mug from her and slurped.

‘I just don’t understand it. There’s simply no other way of interpreting the text.
When the Eye of Khepri is opened, then shall the oasis be opened.
The oasis is near here, and at sunrise the rock somehow points the way. It has to mean that. You can’t read it any other way. Unless …’

He took a step backwards, peering up at the curving sweep of rock rearing overhead.

‘Is there something on the stone itself?’ he murmured, more to himself than to Freya. ‘An inscription, a direction marker? Is that what it’s trying to tell us?’

He ran his gaze up and down the spire’s glassy surface, his eyes narrowed. Walking slowly around it, he searched for marks or incisions or hieroglyphs, any sign of human interference. There was nothing: the rock was smooth and black and bare from its base to its tip, what chips and scratches there were clearly of natural origin rather than man-made. Only one feature seemed to give him pause for thought, something they had missed in their torch-lit examination the previous night: a small fist-size lens of opaque yellow crystal, punching right through the spire from one side to the other, about three-quarters of the way up its length, like a miniature porthole. It was a curious thing, a geological anomaly at odds with the surrounding stone. For almost a minute Flin stared up at it before reluctantly concluding that it, too, was simply a natural part of the formation. With a shake of the head, he turned away and went to refill his mug.

‘I’m fucked if I know,’ he said. ‘The oasis ought to be here, and that –’ he jerked a thumb over his shoulder – ‘… ought to point us towards it. I just don’t understand.’

‘Maybe the rock’s a red herring,’ suggested Freya, bending over the fire and refilling her own cup. ‘Hasn’t got anything to do with the oasis after all?’

Flin shrugged and checked his watch.

‘Sun-up’s only a few minutes away so we’ll see what happens then, but on current evidence I have a nasty suspicion you might be right and I’ve screwed up. Not for the first time, I can assure you.’

He sipped his coffee and looked east. The desert ran flat for a few hundred metres before flurrying into an untidy mess of dunes, the sand slopes growing progressively higher and steeper the further they marched off into the distance. Freya joined him and together they watched as in front of them the dawn strengthened and spread, the sky awash with greens and pinks, the landscape steadily brightening from monochrome grey to pale yellow and orange. A couple of minutes passed, the sky’s hem burning a deeper and deeper shade of red. Then, slowly, like a bubble of molten lava, the upper rim of the sun started to show itself above the dune tops, a wafer-thin curve of magenta pushing up through the horizon, the surrounding desert seeming to warp and shimmer as though melting in the face of its intense heat. The air grew rapidly warmer as the curve swelled into a dome and the dome into a circle. Their eyes moved back and forth, flicking from the sun to the rock tower and back again as they waited for something, anything, to happen, some sign to manifest itself. The rock just stood there, black and bent, unchanged, unyielding, revealing nothing as the sun continued its ascent until it was free of the horizon and dawn merged into early morning. Flin and Freya gazed a while longer, the sun’s heat pulsing into their faces, fierce even at this early hour, then looked at each other and shook their heads. The hoped-for revelation had not materialized. Their journey had been wasted.

‘At least we got to see some nice scenery,’ said Freya glumly.

They kicked sand over the fire and started gathering up the camping equipment ready for the flight back to civilization.

‘We’ve still got a fair bit of fuel left,’ said Flin as he clipped shut the lid on the cool box and stowed it inside the microlight pod. ‘So we might as well have a fly around, see if we’ve missed anything. I vote we head—’

He got no further, for Freya let out an exclamation and grabbed his wrist.

‘Look! There!’

Her free arm was stretched towards the west, at the face of the Gilf. He followed the line of it, squinting, scanning to and fro for a moment before he spotted what she was pointing at. On the towering cliff wall, about ten metres up from the desert floor, a tiny disc of light had appeared, clearly visible against the orangey-yellow stone all around.

‘What the … ?’

He took a step forward. Freya came with him, her hand still clasped around his arm as the two of them stared at the glinting blob, trying to work out what it was, what was causing it.

‘Is it something in the cliff?’ she asked. ‘Reflecting the light back at us?’

Flin stood with one hand shielding his eyes, brow furrowed in concentration before suddenly pulling his arm free of hers and back-pedalling across the sands, looking away from the cliffs and up at the curving spire of rock. A brief pause, then:

‘Oh my God that’s wonderful!’

Freya backed off too, coming up beside him, gasping as she saw what he had seen: a tiny pool of molten gold about three-quarters of the way up the rock spire where the sun’s rays were pouring through the lens of desert crystal, setting it ablaze and sending a diaphanous
beam of light lasering west towards the face of the massif.

‘Behold the Eye of Khepri,’ whispered Flin, his voice hushed, awed.

They stared up, open-mouthed in wonder as the crystal seemed to burn through the surrounding rock like a flame through black paper, its glow becoming increasingly fierce before slowly, imperceptibly, it started to pale, the beam weakening, the crystal fading back to a dull shade of amber.