Ben followed her gaze. “We need to find more people like us, Gail. Our people are dying, and there will be nothing left for them. Jake and Fatima get on well enough, but how about Saïd? Is there anyone he could be interested in?”

“So, what do you suggest?” she asked. Having children had been difficult for their village; even Gail and George had never been able to add to their family after Jake’s unexpected arrival, in the first year of the Chaos. She had fallen pregnant shortly after their reunion in Amarna, following her kidnapping by DEFCOMM.

After that, it had taken years to settle into the relative safety of their nomadic lifestyle, with its migrations between middle-Egypt and the south. By the time they were ready to start trying to make their family bigger again, her body was already too old. She was only fifty-nine now, and yet almost two decades of surviving had been unrelenting; she and George both looked, and for her part certainly felt, at least seventy.

“Europe,” he said calmly. “We leave Africa, and head for Europe, through Italy.”

By now the last of the village had walked past them. Zahra had held back, and the group of four stood in the middle of the dusty road. Gail kicked at the layers of sand and dirt till her toe scraped the tarmac beneath. It had been a poor road even then, but the years of neglect and disuse were rapidly turning it into little more than a scar running across the arid landscape.

“Europe, Asia and the Americas were worst hit by the war,” she said reflecting on the few news reports that had reached them during those early months. “Africa escaped the worst of it; we should stay here.”

“But Africa is dying, Gail,” Zahra said, almost in earnest. “You can see that for yourself. Every year we pass fewer people on the road. And what little remains is still at war with itself.”

“Europe may already be dead, for all we know.”

“But the climate will be better, there may be more food, we might find something left apart from slum and disease. This place was a mess even before the climate changed; it has so much further to go to be a good place to live again.”

George put his hand on his wife’s forearm. “We’re old, now. And tired. Who knows how many more migrations we’ll be able to make.”

She looked up at him and saw the love in his eyes, stronger now than ever before. She also saw a glint that she had not seen for a long time. They had not been apart for longer than a day since her kidnapping all those years ago. Looking in his eyes now, she could see that he wanted to go. But he would never leave her behind.

She looked to her son, who was still at the rear of the group that had overtaken them. He was carrying Fatima’s rucksack on his chest as well as his own on his back, and they were walking hand in hand. It was the first time she’d seen them that close.

“Alright, I agree we should at least try,” she said after a deep breath. “But we need to plan this properly; I don’t want to go into any danger we don’t need to face.”

Ben’s face opened up with the first grin she’d seen from him in days; George wrapped his arm around her shoulder and pulled her in tight, and they resumed their trek.

Chapter 91

On the third day of travelling north, they passed what little remained of the modern Egyptian town of Tell el-Amarna.

They enjoyed the hospitality of a local farmer and his wife for an evening, sleeping mostly in abandoned houses by the main road, although several of the travelling families decided to pitch their tents instead. The hospitality consisted in a few bottles of harsh, homebrewed liquor, along with a dozen rock-hard loaves of bread. In exchange, the farmer and his wife were given news of the growing strength of the Sudanese clans, and the lack of good hunting to the south. It wasn’t a fair trade; the information had been true every year for as long as they could remember, but it was gratefully received nonetheless.

The old couple had hosted their party many times over the years, and simply enjoying the company of people you knew was enough for them.

They didn’t share their plans to migrate to Europe, and the old couple neither asked nor seemed to care about where they were all heading. Travellers, though few and far between, were frequent enough not to warrant any special questioning. The only thing the farmer and his wife knew was that they either went north or south, and that sometimes they came past again in the opposite direction. Sometimes.

Gail toyed with the idea, as she always did, of staying in Amarna. She had a strong emotional attachment to the place, and on the surface there seemed to be plenty of room for their entire village to move in and live.

But the same drought and famine that affected the region they were leaving had already blighted Amarna. With the exception of the farmer and his wife, who were too old to move on and had resigned themselves to their fate, Tell el-Amarna had already been abandoned. This last couple would wait for their time to come, and then they would probably decide to leave this world together, rather than risk being left alone.

As they left Amarna on the fourth day, Gail felt drawn towards the cliffs where she had made her discovery all those years ago. She couldn’t be sure what it was, but something new, something powerful deep down inside her, was pulling her towards the Amarna Library.

Even so, as Tell el-Amarna disappeared behind them, she managed to shake the feeling off and march on.

What little still passed for government and authority bumped into them on the sixth day.

The lone horseman, an ancient firearm slung across his back, rested with them for the evening, gladly swapping some strands of sorry-looking jerky for a refill of clean, unpolluted water from one of the donkeys’ containers.

There could be few stories of worth to tell from the shambles that was Cairo and ‘government,’ though to hear the horseman’s rhetoric one could only assume that the city had risen from its embers and had taken over the world.

His audience knew better than to believe such propaganda, though it played along willingly, for the sake of old times.

The truth was that the sprawling, brightly-lit metropolis that Gail and George remembered so vividly since their first visits to the country no longer existed. Pestilence and famine were destroying what war had not, though the process was infinitely more drawn out and painful.

Slowly, what had for decades been the largest city in Africa had torn itself apart. Fires, started by the inhabitants to stem the flow of death and disease to new quarters, razed whole neighbourhoods, leaving black scars across Cairo. For the hundreds of thousands of Cairenes who had not either fled to the countryside or died in the years that followed the Chaos, the city was an unforgiving place, and the population shrank each year as tens of thousands more succumbed to this harsh new existence.

Egypt had played a key role in the Middle-East part of the global conflict. With the United States, Russia and China out of the picture and the United Nations and NATO effectively disbanded, the religious powder-keg had finally blown. Israel had found itself set-upon by Syria and Iran, in all-out, relentless war.

However, Egypt successfully mediated between the states, staving off the use of nuclear weapons for months.

By remaining impartial when history made vengeance so attractive, Egypt’s role in those stages was decisive in the closing chapter of the Chaos.

So when the last nuclear weapons were finally deployed, annihilating cities and stripping the very earth itself of life, Egypt alone in the Middle East, on the fringes of a world gone mad, was spared.

Chapter 92

On the tenth day they saw the smoke of the city, several kilometres before they saw the ruined capital itself. Fires raged to the west. Towards the centre and east, minarets and spires could still be seen rising from Old Cairo, reminders of a rich cultural past.