The Lord's Inconvenient Vow

I am Sam.

She raised her arms to the world, tipped back her head and told the world that truth at the top of her lungs.

‘I am Sam!’

* * *

Edge was viciously thirsty. His heart was beating and his legs burned from the climb, but none of the many physical discomforts concerned him as much at the moment as what he would see when he crested the sandstone cliff.

If he was wrong, if he’d made a single mistake on the crisscrossing camel and goat paths from Zarqa, there would be nothing but more desert—an endless, taunting ochre grin. Even the faint but distinct scent of the Nile could be nothing more than a sarab, a desert illusion like the shimmering trees and water that danced on the horizons until they were sucked under as he approached.

If he was wrong, he might end up like the jackal’s carcass he’d passed hours ago. He should have taken into consideration that eight-year-old memories of terrain were not necessarily reliable. He was older, slower, less alert. But the path had looked so very familiar...

He stumbled a little as he crested the cliff, pebbles skittering under his feet. He stopped, narrowing his burning eyes against the glints that splintered along the broad green scar of the Nile. But it wasn’t the Nile that held his gaze. Or the sprawling city of Qetara on the far side of the bank. It was the green gardens of Bab el-Nur tucked below the cliffs.

Home.

The word shivered in the air like a sarab threatening to disappear. Home. Not any more and not for many years since he’d tried and failed to build his own. They said third time lucky, but he didn’t believe in sayings. Or in anything much any more.

He closed his eyes and heard nothing but air moving up the cliff below him, a distinctive hollow presaging the rise of the afternoon winds. He’d once loved this time of day when the sun finally showed signs of exhaustion from its brutal assault and the desert began changing, all kinds of new forces entering its stark stage. New colours, new animals, new sounds.

It had been so long since he’d just...listened. Absorbed. It had been so long since he’d felt like listening. Since he’d felt anything much at all.

He didn’t know if this was a good sign. He liked not feeling.

At least he’d finally made it. More or less in one piece.

A very tired, aching piece.

Edge glanced up at the keening of a bird swooping in and out of tiny indentations on the cliff face and winced as the glare of the sun made his head pound. He’d finished the last of his water some hours ago, a miscalculation on his part. The hiss of the wind cooled the perspiration on his forehead and nape and he smiled at how good it felt now that he no longer feared for his life. His smile itself felt like a crack in the cliff face, sharp and threatening, but he allowed it to linger.

The sound struck him as harshly as if he had fallen off the cliff and hit the ground.

‘Aimsa!’

It carried out over the valley and for a mad second he was willing to consider he had been wrong about his disbelief in all matters supernatural. But somehow he doubted an ancient Egyptian spirit would be yelling at the tops of its lungs. He hurried as best he could on his stiff legs along the cliff and stopped.

The image was worthy of any of the locals’ tales: carved into a sky ignited into a blaze of orange and mauve by the setting sun was a figure cloaked in a pale billowing gown that snapped and surged under the evening wind as if being pulled towards the lip of the crater by desert furies. Then the figure raised its arms and the wind seemed to carry it upwards, as if preparing to hurl it over the cliff like a leaf.

Edge didn’t stop to think, just vaulted over the boulders and ran towards it, his mind already anticipating the image of this woman casting herself off the cliff.

‘Don’t!’ he called in Arabic. ‘Laa! Tawaqfi!’

The figure whirled, one hand outflung as if to hold him back.

They stood facing each other in mutual shock.

His breathing was harsh from the fear of what he had expected to witness and the need to stop it. But his mind was already rushing ahead with a series of realisations—that the woman who had just keened like a vengeful houri at the top of her lungs into the desert air was neither a local nor a hallucination of his, but something far worse.

Egypt had taught him to always expect the unexpected. Especially when it came to Sam Sinclair.

She was dressed in local dress, and local male dress at that, a cream-coloured gibbeh tied with a red cotton sash around her waist over a simple muslin gown. She was still staring at him, her blue-grey eyes wide and far away, but then the pupils dilated as recognition settled in and with it wariness. For a moment he wondered whether he was mistaken. After all, almost a decade had passed and this was no child. She looked very much like Sam and yet she did not.