We turned away from the Nile, dropping to a slow jog, because I was fighting for every painful breath. Egypt swam hazily around me and I couldn’t get my balance. The pod was less than one hundred yards away. We were nearly there.
He stopped and looked around at the empty landscape. ‘You go on ahead. Check the coast is clear. I’ll watch our backs, but I think we’re safe now.’
He turned and fell straight into the Great Drain.
Even by St Mary’s standards, we really weren’t having a good day.
I’m ashamed to say my first thought was, ‘Well, at least it wasn’t me this time,’ because my track record for getting from A to B without experiencing a major catastrophe at C was not so good. And then I thought it was funny.
I said, ‘What are you doing down there?’ and got that special exasperated look.
‘I told you to get back to the pod. Don’t you ever listen?’
‘Sorry? What did you say?’
He was clinging to the bank, about two feet down, covered in glistening Nile mud. Even as I watched, he slid a few more inches. He scrabbled with his feet and slid a few more.
I lay on the bank, reached down for him, and that was when I realised we had a real problem because there was no way I could pull him out. The sides were too steep and his flailing feet just couldn’t get a purchase. Every time he tried, he slipped that bit deeper into the ditch, and the bottom was a concoction of shallow, dirty water and thick, black, sticky mud. Once he slithered down into that, I knew he’d never get out because not too far away, a half-buried dead dog and a few rat skeletons told their own story.
He couldn’t climb out and I didn’t have the strength to pull him out. All I could do was just hold on and take the strain for a while.
It doesn’t sound that serious, but it was, because today was a holiday and there was no one around to help.
I lay on my stomach in the warm mud. The air smelled of hot, wet earth and, apart from the frogs, everything was quiet. The landscape was empty of people. Not even the Time Police. I suppose it was too much to hope they’d been eaten. Even the donkey seemed to have pushed off.
Tomorrow would be a working day, however, and someone would open the equivalent of a sluice and the water would come roaring up – or down – the channel and he’d be whirled away. If I’d managed to hang on to him through the night.
And if the crocodiles didn’t come.
I was face down, head and shoulders overhanging the edge, holding on to his wrists with both hands. He kept his head and stopped kicking and flailing around, because both he and I were muddy, and it would be so easy for his own weight to pull him through my grip. To fall into that quicksand of mud and slimy water far below.
I closed my mind to panic and lifted my head again, trying to see if there was anyone around to help. Anyone would do. Even the two sodding Time Police, whose fault all this was. Where are the bloody police when you actually need them? A part of my mind wondered if they’d been recalled to assist with the Medjay.
He lifted his head and said calmly, ‘I’m going to try to find some sort of foothold.’
‘Gently does it.’
I could feel him scrabbling around but all that happened was that part of the side fell away and we were worse off than before, because now I could feel myself slipping. His weight, apart from pulling my arms from their sockets, was slowly dragging me over the edge with him, and he knew it.
He lifted his head.
‘Let me go.’
‘No.’
I felt myself slip another inch and tried to will all my weight backwards. That didn’t work at all.
‘Lucy, let me go.’
He’d never called me that before. Leon’s private name for me. My thoughts took this particularly inappropriate moment to wonder when I’d stopped thinking of him as the other Leon. When I’d finally accepted him as my Leon. Because that’s such a useful thing to think about when you’re hanging over the edge of a fatally deep ditch, looking at a prolonged and unpleasant death.
I said, ‘Shut up, Leon.’
‘Lucy …’
I clenched my teeth against the pain and said, ‘Not going to happen so just shut up.’
Before he could say anything else, I lifted my head and shouted for help. I don’t know why I did it – I knew everyone was at the festival, but I wasn’t going to let him die and if he was going to die then I wasn’t interested in the future at all. Blood was pumping into my hanging head so I probably wasn’t thinking very clearly.
I slipped another inch. The edge of the ditch was crumbling. And another inch. I tried wedging my knees into the mud. That didn’t work, either.
The fiery pain in my arms and shoulders was unbearable. I knew, physically, I couldn’t hold on much longer.
And then the mud moved. At first, I thought I had imagined it, but no. The mud was moving. Two, no, three crocodiles were working their way up the ditch. The one in front was huge, obviously the alpha male. They didn’t appear to be in any hurry, but they covered the ground deceptively quickly. Half wading, half swimming, they were heading directly for us. They didn’t have to do anything. They just had to wait.
I shouted again. And again.