high of earlier. He was anxious to get away and was about to insist as much when a thin line of green appeared on the screen, getting thicker as the world turned revealing a large patch of green with tendrils snaking out across the brown earth like the roots of a huge plant.
‘There it is,’ Kinderman said, with something close to wonder. ‘Paradise found.’ He squinted at the telemetry and wrote down the terrestrial coordinates. ‘It’s southeast from here, about a thousand kilometres or so, somewhere in Iraq. Less than a day’s drive if we take turns at the wheel.’ He hit a command button and another window popped up containing the same countdown application Shepherd had downloaded from Douglas’s computer, the numbers now much lower. ‘We should just be able to make it in time.’
His fingers drummed on the keyboard as he copied links to the countdown and to the Hubble feed into a website and pressed Publish. He turned and smiled up at Shepherd. ‘Mala.org just went live – the modern way to follow a star. Come on, we need to get going. My jeep is right over there.’
‘I need to grab Hevva’s things from the other car.’ Shepherd stood upright and felt the world lurch. He reached out to steady himself against the trunk of the tree but missed, grazing his cheek against the bark as he fell to the ground. Something sharp jarred his ribs as he hit the ground. He reached for it with his hand and it came away wet and bloody.
Oh Jesus, he thought as darkness claimed him, damn woman didn’t miss after all.
105
Seven days after the initial inoculations, the first patient recovered.
She was a forty-three-year-old bank clerk, born and raised in Ruin, who seemed more impressed by where she now found herself than by the fact that she had just survived a disease that had wiped out a quarter of the city’s population.
The cathedral cave now contained over three hundred beds, most of which were occupied. Normally the numbers remained steady at around fifty, the new intake being roughly balanced by the death toll: but no one had died since they had begun the inoculations, the daily ritual of removing the bodies to the garden had stopped and the pyre on the firestone that had burned without pause since the very beginning had now gone out.
That same afternoon trucks and personnel drove into the city from the outside world, the first vehicles to have done so for more than half a year. They were laden with stocks of the vaccine, manufactured in readiness at industrial labs in Ankara, and a small army of volunteers who had already been inoculated.
The quarantined quarters were kept in place, to make the vaccinations easier to police and monitor. By evening every living soul in the city of Ruin was lining up, waiting patiently for the salvation they had prayed for, everyone so relieved that deliverance was finally at hand that they failed to notice the creak of ropes as, down the side of the Citadel, the ascension platform began to descend with a lone figure standing in the centre of it, watching the world rise to meet him.
VII
The earth laughs in flowers
Ralph Waldo Emerson
106
Shepherd woke to the vibration and hum of an engine. He opened his eyes and found a dark-eyed angel staring down at him. Hevva’s face instantly exploded into a smile; he smiled back and noticed that the nick in her ear was hidden behind a fresh plaster and she was wearing different clothes. He was lying in the back of a jeep that was bouncing over very rough ground.
‘Hi,’ he croaked, his voice dry and raw.
‘Ah, the sleeping beauty awakes,’ Kinderman piped from the driver’s seat. ‘Just in time for our arrival.’
‘Arrival?’
‘Yes. We’re here.’
Shepherd tried to sit up and pain shot through his side. He reached down to discover thick bandages bound tightly across his chest.
‘I’d take it easy if I were you. The bullet grazed your side pretty badly. Fortunately it hit a rib, which deflected it around your body so it passed out the other side without causing too much damage. Your rib’s probably cracked, which is why it hurts so much. Pretty apt though, don’t you think, being saved by a rib, considering where we’re headed?’
Shepherd struggled upright, feeling every bounce of the jeep jarring in his side like someone was repeatedly stabbing him. Outside, the sun was hanging low in a burnt sky above a world bleached almost white;