Dark Water

by Parker Bilal

  DARK WATER

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  (writing as Jamal Mahjoub)

  Navigation of a Rainmaker

  Wings of Dust

  In the Hour of Signs

  The Carrier

  Travelling with Djinns

  The Drift Latitudes

  Nubian Indigo

  The Makana Mysteries

  The Golden Scales

  Dogstar Rising

  The Ghost Runner

  The Burning Gates

  City of Jackals

  DARK WATER

  PARKER BILAL

  CONTENTS

  By the Same Author

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  A Note on the Author

  Also available by Parker Bilal

  I come and stand at every door

  But no one hears my silent tread

  I knock and yet remain unseen

  For I am dead, for I am dead.

  Nazim Hikmet

  Prologue

  Dark water rising. The spinning silver crescent of the moon. The earliest memory she has. The dream replayed itself time and again. She wakes spluttering and kicking, screaming for the mother she knows will never answer. It is the one thing that still frightens her. She has learned to deal with fear. This is what they taught her at the camp, drilled into her, year in and year out, ever since she was old enough to understand orders. But nothing ever came close to the fear that seized her in that dream.

  Al-Muaskar. The Camp. That was all she knew for almost twelve years. She arrived at the age of three and she was fifteen when she left.

  There was something about the dream that always stayed shrouded in mystery. It took her back to a time she could hardly recall in her waking hours; some part of her memory that was lost to her. It contained a force, an anger so powerful that it gave her special strength. A force that she would learn to harness, learn to make her own. The dreams were the only thing to connect her to who she had been, where she came from. Scary though they were – she would always wake up crying, waking everyone else in the dormitory – there was something about these dreams that was reassuring. She believed they returned for a reason. They were telling her who she was and where she came from.

  Somewhere inside the scene that played itself over and over lay a key to how she had come to be here. She could not tell what it might be. In the dream she was falling in darkness. Falling from a great height. That was all. Then the darkness dissolved into water. It closed around her, sucked her in, pulled her down.

  It was forbidden to talk about the past, to talk about anything outside of the camp itself. It was a place of dust and wind. Walls made of mud that kept the desert at bay. Beyond them there was nothing. Open ground. Not a tree in sight. Inside the compound life was hard. There were about two hundred children in all, who had come from all over. They had been picked up off the streets. Some had watched parents die in war. Some had been dumped on an orphanage doorstep, the offspring of sin. Others had run away from home. They were abused and abandoned, criminals and thieves. Where they came from did not matter. Once inside the camp that was where they belonged. Nothing else remained.

  They were woken at dawn by a trumpet sound, an old elephant-tusk horn that blared out of the darkness for them to rise up, wash and say their prayers. Then followed an hour of callisthenics – jump and run, turn and stretch. The physical education teacher was a slim man with dark eyes as cold and black as stones. He had trained somewhere abroad and carried himself like a weapon, primed to explode. She once watched him drag a boy across the parade ground by his ear. Another time, when a boy answered back, he kicked him senseless.

  They ate once a day. One simple meal of steamed sorghum, sometimes lentils you had to pick the grit out of. To go without food was to learn discipline. It was to show humility and thankfulness to Our Lord, the Almighty. They ate with their fingers, scraping their tin bowls clean. The food often left her sicker than not eating, but she forced herself to eat what she was given and be thankful for it, no matter how disgusting. She learned early on to keep her head down. Not to do so was to risk being dragged out and chained to the post in the middle of the yard. You were whipped with a leather switch, then left out in the burning sun. She had seen people die out there. The gnarled old pole told its own stories, its sides scarred and chipped, scratched with sharp pebbles and torn fingernails, daubed here and there with brown stains of dried blood. Flies buzzed around it, eager for more.

  The afternoons were for skills training. Unarmed combat, karate, judo, how to use a knife, how to kill with your hands. They learned to climb ropes, to haul themselves over fences, crawl under barbed wire. They ran for hours at a time, down to the river where the air was cool and then back out into the burning desert heat. The girls were expected to be equal to the boys. No exceptions were made. Weapons training and target practice happened twice a week. They learned to strip and reassemble half a dozen small arms, from Kalashnikovs to M16s to handguns. They spent hours on the target range, shooting from a standing position, crouching, lying down, running. They learned about using cover, about concealment in open spaces.

  They were taught that the greatest sacrifice was to give your life in jihad, for Allah. For four hours each day, two in the morning and two in the evening, they would learn the Quran by rote. Page by page, line by line, syllable by syllable – often without fully understanding what it was they were reciting. Understanding would come in the fullness of time their teacher, the sheikh, assured them. They would copy a passage onto their wooden tablets. They sat cross-legged in rows, reading the words aloud over and over, rocking back and forth, their voices rising into one complex chorus. The teacher passed among them. Whenever anyone faltered, or lost the rhythm, he would bring down the long, slender switch onto their heads or shoulders. As soon as they had learned one passage they would be ordered to wash the ink off carefully and start to copy out a new one.

  Once she had asked the sheikh what it meant to dream about drowning. Drowning is a kind of hell, he told her sternly. To dream of drowning means that you have had impure thoughts, your weakness is making you stray from the path of virtue. She was nine years old at the time. If, however, you do not drown, he went on, it means you have corrected your mistakes, that your heart is pure and you are set on the path of righteousness.

  ‘You survived for a reason, and that reason is to serve Allah.’

  When she was thirteen she was told she had a special visitor, a very important man. He arrived one day in a big car with dark windows so you could not see inside. The sheikh stood in the sun waiting to greet him. The visitor didn’t look all that special. He was dark and his face bore tribal scars, a cro
ss on each cheek. A gold eye tooth glinted when he spoke. Everyone showed him respect, and she could see that they all feared him.

  ‘Is this her?’ he asked when she was brought forward. The sheikh nodded.

  ‘She is one of our finest. Strong and fast. She shoots better than any of the boys. And she is clever, a quick learner.’

  It surprised her that a man who had never shown any personal interest in her could sing her praises.

  In the shade of the sheikh’s office the man spoke.

  ‘You know why I am here?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I have taken a special interest in your case. I have known you since you were born.’

  She looked towards the sheikh, seeking permission to speak. He gave a slight nod.

  ‘Did you know my parents?’

  ‘I knew your father, many years ago.’

  This was new. She had never met anyone who had known her parents. She wanted to ask more, but from the look on the sheikh’s face she knew she was to remain silent. The visitor went on:

  ‘Your time here is almost at an end. As you may know, the lucky ones are offered a place in the military academy, where their training continues. Everything depends on how well you do in the next couple of years.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I shall be your sponsor. I will receive reports every week on your progress.’ The man’s voice was a low rasp. He moved about the room as if seeking shadows to hide in.

  ‘When you are ready here you will go to live in his house,’ said the sheikh. His nervousness vibrated in his voice.

  ‘How do you like the idea of that?’ the man asked, coming to a halt and turning to face her. His eyes were cold and unblinking, like those of an animal who sees only enemies around him, or food.

  ‘What would I do in your house?’

  ‘You would fetch and carry, clean and serve my family in any way you are asked.’

  ‘I would be your servant? So you would pay me?’

  ‘Your reward would be in learning humility.’

  ‘Then, like a slave?’

  She saw the beginnings of a smile on his face. There wasn’t a lot of warmth in that smile.

  ‘In time, even slaves have their reward,’ he said.

  She was curious to know who he was and how he had known her father, but she imagined, rightly, that that would come in the fullness of time. For now, all she had to do was be the best, and she knew she was good at that.

  She still dreamed of falling into dark water, of drowning. In the darkness there was only one spot of light. As she struggled and called out to her mother, it floated ahead of her, drawing her in. Where was her father in her dreams? Why was he never there?

  The light came from the glittering curve of the moon. A silver crescent that turned slowly on its axis. The chain it hung from was made of brass. It dangled from the rearview mirror. Where had it come from, she often wondered. A lucky charm? A family heirloom? A trinket that had caught her mother’s eye one afternoon in the market? All she knew was that she would drown if she didn’t reach the moon. She kicked against the water, reaching for the sliver of light. When she grasped it she held onto it so tightly that when they finally prised her hand open the moon’s horns had drawn blood. It was the last thing she remembered, grabbing the moon and holding on. Then the darkness closed in.

  When they pulled her from the water they thought she was dead. Then she coughed and spluttered, gasping for air, just as she still did now whenever she woke up from a dream.

  Chapter One

  Cairo April 2006

  Makana was woken by the small brass bell on the lower deck that rang to announce a visitor. It took him a moment to remember where he was and to realise what had woken him. It seemed early for visitors.

  He sat up and stretched. It was a clear day. The sun had that gentle spring warmth which held the vague promise of a rise in temperatures, an end to the winter rain, and to the cold that blew through the flimsy walls of the awama and cut deep into his bones. A promise that things would soon begin to warm up. The thin wooden walls of his houseboat were scant protection against extreme temperatures. In the winter you struggled to retain any warmth, and in the summer the hot air seared through the place like a blazing fire. Despite this, it felt as much like home as anywhere – so much so that he was having trouble these days reconciling the solitude he enjoyed here with the novelty of another person in his life. He would have had difficulty explaining exactly what his relationship was with the pathologist Jehan Siham. The situation still felt new and unfamiliar, and a part of him was resisting the prospect of change. Moments like this, waking up on the awama alone, helped him to centre himself.

  In the distance the jangled chords of a million cars hooting at one another was settling into its familiar daily pattern. He rose to his feet, threw off the blanket and reached for the old brass coffee pot. He’d spent most of the night in the big chair, a habit of years. He almost never slept through the entire night without a break. These days it seemed to be getting worse, as a growing restlessness tightened its grip on him. Work had been slow and sometimes he worried that he was losing his touch.

  There was something else too, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something that left him tossing and turning, his mind running in circles, refusing to let him sleep. Instead he would sit on the upper deck and try to make out the stars that hovered beyond the glow of the city lights. Or he would read, one of the old Arab geographers he was so fond of, and travel with them on their journeys through the world, following old routes. Long, detailed descriptions of every road, each stone along the way, each tree, each village custom. He found it comforting to read their descriptions and it made him feel as if he too was on the move. Not sitting here in his favourite armchair, reading, but travelling through the world on an endless pilgrimage to nowhere. And he would stay like that, with the book in his lap, until his mind didn’t realise he was gone.

  He was not expecting anyone this morning, which meant that the bell could mean work. It might also mean a thousand other things, including unpaid bills or a salesman hauling a sackful of useless gadgets and household appliances that he had no need of. Work would be an improvement. It was over a month since he had had anything but mundane divorce cases, following unfaithful men to cheap hotels and nightclubs. Anything else would be a relief. Makana was in that half-awake, half-drowsy state of mind where everything was fluid and soft.

  ‘I came straight up. I hope you don’t mind.’

  Makana looked round to see a man standing at the top of the stairs: tall, thin, and with the tanned complexion of a European who had spent long seasons in sunny climes. He was clad in a rumpled cream-coloured linen suit, elegantly tailored but also well worn. The suit of a man who liked comfort and had the resources to afford it, yet had apparently fallen on hard times. Either that or he was trying to appear not too concerned about his appearance. A man who had travelled a lot, one who could rise in one city and go to bed that night on the far side of the globe and still feel at home. While the jacket was wrinkled, the blue shirt underneath looked crisp and fresh. No tie. When the sunglasses came off they revealed creased lines around the eyes; a man who smiles a lot, or squints as he was in this case, at the light coming off the water. Without waiting for an invitation, or even a response, he moved across the room towards the open rear deck.

  ‘I’ve always wondered who lives on these things. I suppose it must get damp and cold in winter, and hot in the summer.’ The visitor gestured at the water. ‘The river keeps it cool though, I would imagine.’

  Makana realised he was still holding the coffee pot. He lifted it up in offering.

  ‘Can I offer you coffee, Mr … ?’

  ‘Winslow. Marcus Winslow,’ said the visitor by way of introduction, before turning away. He was clearly English. Makana estimated him to be in his fifties. He moved cautiously, like a man who needs constant awareness of his surroundings. Hands in his pockets, he seemed to be taking care no
t to touch anything.

  By the window that served as a makeshift kitchen, Makana pumped the handle on the kerosene stove and struck a match, holding it forward until the blue flame came to life before turning it down low. Then he filled the small brass coffee pot with water and three spoons of coffee from the tin that he kept on a shelf. As he placed the pot on the stove he glanced out through the open window. Umm Ali’s vegetable patch looked barren and untended. The steep path winding up the riverbank to the road was deserted. She was away, gone to visit her family in the delta, taking with her Aziza, her daughter. Their absence added a further touch of desolation to their home, a simple shack made of wooden pallets, crates and tin sheets hammered haphazardly together. At the top of the path Makana could make out the outline of a dark SUV, possibly a Range Rover, parked in the shade of the big eucalyptus tree whose branches curled down over the bank, like a hand. Marcus Winslow seemed to travel with no sign of any kind of protection, and yet Makana had the sense that his visitor was not a civilian.

  ‘How can I help you?’ he asked, turning back to his visitor.

  ‘May I?’ Winslow gestured at a chair and sat before Makana could reply. ‘It’s a very pleasant spot you have here. Basic, but very pleasant.’

  ‘I take it you are here for a reason, and not simply to admire the view?’

  With one eye on the coffee as it began to bubble, Makana shook a cigarette free from a crumpled pack of Cleopatras, keenly aware that Winslow was studying his every movement.

  ‘Quite right. I have, as they say, a proposition for you.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Your English is very good, by the way, where did you learn it?’

  ‘My wife studied in England for a time. Many years ago. I accompanied her and took advantage of your public library service.’

  ‘Alas, a thing of the past.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ There was something absurdly British about the conversation.

  ‘And where is she now, your wife?’

  ‘She passed away.’