‘Well,’ Ronan said, handing me back the recorder he’d been using. ‘That brought back unpleasant memories. I had honestly forgotten how tedious History is.’
Which might well be true, but looking at his power levels, he’d nearly drained the battery, so he’d been recording solidly for at least two hours. I refrained from pointing this out.
We sat back to take a moment. The sun had moved around behind us and our patch of shade was a little larger. I eased my cramped position, groaned, and tried to stretch out my aching legs.
Ronan stood up stiffly and rubbed his back. ‘Do you think, after that unwelcome interlude, we could resume our negotiations?’
‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back to my pod. I’m desperate for a cup of tea. And I want to see what we’ve managed to record.’
I made to stand up but my legs had gone to sleep. He hesitated and then offered me his hand. ‘Here.’
We both looked at each other for a very long moment, then I took it and he hauled me to my feet. Sadly, my legs still weren’t doing their job properly and I collapsed against him. He staggered before regaining his footing.
‘Bloody hell, isn’t it about time you lost some of that baby weight?’
I flexed my aching knees. ‘Well, I did make a start this morning but some dozy pillock put a stop to that, didn’t he?’
He made no response.
‘Anyway,’ I said, stuffing the recorders back into my pack. ‘If that was the famous sandstorm then I have to say that as sandstorms go, it wasn’t too bad, was it?’
‘Far be it from me to rain on your ill-informed parade, but I don’t think that was it.’ He pointed over my shoulder.
I turned slowly. ‘Oh.’
We all say stupid things from time to time.
‘Peace in our time.’
‘I did not have sex with that woman.’
‘Britain will never rejoin the EU.’
‘As sandstorms go that wasn’t too bad.’
The entire horizon – the shimmering heat haze – everything had gone. Completely vanished. Disappeared. In its place, a huge, vast billowing cloud of brown was storming towards us. Not the horizon-blurring dust kicked up by a passing army. This cloud had to be hundreds and hundreds of feet high and it was solid dust and sand. Soon, it would swallow the sun. Already, the day was darker and colder. I could see intermittent flashes within the swirling mass. Lightning. And it was moving fast, sucking up everything in its path, whirling it around and then spitting it back out again.
This was what the army had been running from.
My pod was several hundred yards away. I had no idea where Ronan’s was, and he wasn’t saying. I would have made a run for mine, but last year I’d been at Stonehenge and we were caught in a snowstorm. Within only a very few yards, we’d become completely lost. If Leon – husband and hero – hadn’t arrived, then we would have frozen to death.
This would not be dissimilar. Once down at ground level, poor visibility and buffeting winds meant we would soon lose our sense of direction. We probably wouldn’t even be able to keep our feet. This rock would give us some protection. We should stay put.
The same thought had obviously occurred to him.
‘Here,’ I said, ‘give me your bandana and water flask.’
He ripped off his bandana and handed it over, together with his flask. I spread it out together with my scarf and gave them both a good soaking of water.
He looked around. ‘We don’t want to be caught up here. We’ll take shelter in the lee of this rock.’
We wrapped our wet scarves around our faces and clambered down to ground level.
‘Here,’ he said, pointing to a large outcrop jutting at right angles from the main rock. We crawled in as close in as we could possibly get, facing towards the rock itself.
He pushed me down on the sand. ‘Get down on your hands and knees.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t be alarmed. If you were a camel, I would shelter behind you. Sadly, you’re only a small and very irritating historian, but I am, for reasons which escape me at the moment, doing my best to ensure your survival. Get down and make yourself as small as you can.’
He was giving good advice. I crawled as close against the rock as I could get. It would, to some extent, protect us from the wind, but nothing would save us from the sand.
I nodded to his arms. ‘Pull your sleeves right down. In a very short while your skin’s going to feel as if it’s been sandpapered.’
We knelt, side by side, making ourselves as small as possible. Already the sand was whipping itself into stinging little dust devils. Not long now. We huddled together, protected our faces and braced ourselves.
There was no gentle build-up.
The world grew cold and dark.
I could hear the usual sighing hiss of sand and then, suddenly, the wind came roaring across the desert, changing its note to a shriek as the storm hit our very inadequate rock, head on.
I turned my head to look. Lightning flashed somewhere, illuminating the dirty clouds with an inner glow. Ronan reached out and pushed my head down and suddenly the whole world contracted into just this tiny space.
Around us, the desert thundered. Like many people, I’ve used the expression sandblasted without any idea of what it truly means. Even through my clothes I could feel a thousand-thousand tiny pinpricks as wind-driven sand hit us from all directions. Keeping low was no help at all. The bloody stuff bounces. It flays you alive as it comes down and then does it again on the way back up.
And it gets everywhere. Inside your clothing. Inside your boots. In your hair. Up your nose. In your mouth. Under your eyelids. I tried squeezing my eyes tighter and that only made things worse. I could feel tiny grains of sand caught under my eyelids, grating painfully across my eyeballs.
My wet scarf dried out almost instantly. The mucus in my nose dried out. With that and the sand, every breath became first just painful, and then as time dragged by, searingly agonising. Sand was beginning to build up around us. Every now and then, one of us would try to shrug our shoulders or shake ourselves, and I would feel it cascading off me. Without the shelter of our rock, we would have been buried alive. I no longer doubted that Cambyses’s army had been lost in this sandstorm.
I lost all sense of time. My knees were on fire. I ached to stand up. Every muscle was screaming in protest. I could feel the sand scraping away at my back. I was convinced my T-shirt had been torn from my body. I hunched my shoulders even higher to protect my ears, which felt as if they were on fire, and just tried to hang on. After a while, I wasn’t even sure I was the right way up. I had no idea if Ronan was even still with me. Had he taken advantage of the storm to push off back to his own pod and abandon me here?
That was just plain ridiculous. There was no way anyone could stand up in this lot, let alone navigate their way back to a small pod. Besides, he wouldn’t leave me alone in all this. Would he?
Of course he would, said the voice in my head. How do you know he didn’t lure you to this here and now for precisely that purpose? It won’t take long for the sand to cover you completely. And your pod as well. No one will ever find you. No one will ever know what became of you. They never found Cambyses’s army and there were fifty thousand of them, so you’re not going to stand much of a chance, are you?
Unbelievably, I actually toyed with the idea of staggering to my feet and making a run for it. Of straightening my aching legs. Of getting away somehow. Of returning to the cool, damp silence of St Mary’s. I could feel sand piling up again. How long before I was buried completely? It was stupid to remain here. I should go and go now. Before I couldn’t go at all.
I shifted my weight slightly, feeling sand move around me, and an arm as rigid as an iron bar shot out, pushed me down, and held me there. I heard him shout something but the words were torn away in the wind.