hot wind away from his horse, when his skin started to prickle as if biting insects were suddenly swarming all over him. At the same time a sensation welled up inside him like a feeling of uncontrollable grief. Despite his efforts to put her from his mind he had been thinking about Liv, picturing her face, the green of her eyes and how her hair had spread bright and golden over the pillow the last time he had seen her, sleeping in the sick bay. This sadness of leaving her, fuelled by the fever, now spilled out of him and tears rolled through the dry dust on his cheeks. He raised a shaking hand to wipe his face and it came away bloody.
A blight – the monk from the Citadel had called it – a strong smell of oranges followed by a sudden and violent nosebleed.
It’s over, he thought, with something close to relief. Now I can lie down.
He steered his horse to an overhang that formed a small oasis of shadow amid the blinding white. This was it, the place his whole life had been heading towards, this dark nook that looked like a vertical grave.
This was where he would die.
7
Liv spent most of the first day hiding at the top of one of the compound’s empty guard towers, keeping to the shadows, out of the heat.
She had woken in the sick bay to find Gabriel gone and an unsteady peace rippling through the camp. She found the note he had left for her, trapped beneath the tablet of stone known as the Starmap.
My darling Liv,
Nothing is easy, but leaving you is the hardest thing I have ever done. I know now what pain my father must have felt when he had to leave. I hope to return when I can. In the meantime, do not look for me, just know that I love you. And keep yourself safe – until I find you again.
Gabriel
She clutched the note in her hand now, as though it were a spell that might summon him back to her. Her attention shifted between the vast emptiness of the Syrian desert and the fenced-in drilling compound below where arguments flared up in guttural, rapid-fire Arabic that she could somehow understand. Most of the angry exchanges were about money and the lack of it now the oil had gone, but some were about her. Angry whispers drifted up like smoke from a smouldering fire, calling her names in a variety of languages—
Hawwāh
Ishtar
Lilith
Some spoke in her defence, but most did not. The majority denounced her as a witch who had conjured water where oil had flowed and brought ruin upon them all.
Liv remained motionless as rock as she listened to the voices, as if stillness might make her invisible to all the milling men, like hornets disturbed from a nest. Peering down through the gaps in the heat-shrunk timbers of the tower, she studied the wreckage of the battle that had liberated the compound but not her: the hulk of the broken-down military helicopter that had spluttered and died when the water appeared; the lake with the drill derrick at the centre spewing water now from deep, deep underground – and everywhere rust-coloured stains on the ground where men had fallen and bled. She was pretty sure no one had spotted her when she had crept up here but she held tight to the scalpel she had taken from the sick bay, just in case. She was only too aware that she was the only woman in an isolated community of volatile and hostile men – and she knew how that tended to work out. If she could stay hidden until night she could steal down, take one of the horses that drank at the water’s edge and slip away.
It was late morning when she heard the first clang of boots climbing the metal ladder. She rolled silently across the floor, her heart jack-hammering, the scalpel slippery in her sweat-slicked grip. She positioned herself by the trapdoor, her legs drawn up tight to her chest, ready to kick hard at whatever appeared in the gap.
The footsteps rose, heavy and loud, stopping just below the trapdoor. ‘Hello,’ a deep, syrupy voice called up in English.
She didn’t reply.
‘I bring you water and food.’ Very slowly a hand raised the trap and pushed a canteen and a pack of K-rations through the gap, then a pair of eyes appeared. ‘No need to fight,’ the man said. ‘You are safe