Read Online The Age of Ra by James Lovegrove - Free Book Online

finding it a relief simply to be in motorised transport. A bench seat in the rear of a canvas-topped Luaz ZT off-roader was the plushest armchair imaginable. The rumble of a Ukrainian-built engine was a lullaby. For a large portion of each journey he slept soundly, head angled against the canvas awning, feet perched on a case of grenades.
    Zafirah, the group's leader, seemed amused by this.
    ''Stiff?'' she asked him one morning as he stood beside the car massaging a crick out of his neck. ''Perhaps I could arrange to get you a pillow.''
    ''Sheets and blankets too, if you don't mind,'' David replied.
    She didn't quite laugh but the skin around her lustrous green-and-brown eyes did crinkle slightly.
    ''You don't behave like a captive at all,'' she said. ''You seem so calm.''
    ''Am I a captive, Zafirah?''
    ''That depends. Maybe.''
    ''Only, I've been taken prisoner twice in the past month or so, so I'm getting to be something of an expert. And this doesn't feel like captivity to me. You've even given me a change of clothes.'' His uniform was gone, replaced by a borrowed shirt and jeans.
    ''So if this isn't captivity, what does it feel like?''
    David frowned. ''Hard to put into words. It's more like you're letting me come along for the ride, rather than forcing me to. Besides, Freegyptian guerrillas aren't renowned for kidnapping foreigners, as far as I'm aware.''
    ''Perhaps not. But we are always looking for ways to fund our efforts. What if we're taking you somewhere in order to ransom you back to the British army?''
    ''Then,'' said David, ''I say go right ahead, and I hope you get a decent sum for me.''

    They were members of the Liberators of Luxor, one of the dozen or more rogue paramilitary factions at large within Freegypt. Ostensibly the country was under the rule of the Secular People's Front, the dominant political party in the government, but it and Prime Minister Bayoumi controlled little more than a swathe of the north-east. South of Cairo all the way down to Abu Simbel, everything became a broiling free-for-all, particularly along the Nile's fertile banks. Up in Lower Freegypt, around the Nile Delta, they were welcome to fiddle about with democracy if they liked. They could do as they pleased there in the north, with their industry and their urbanisation and their trading ports. But down south, in the Upper part of the country, where poverty was rife and most people lived at subsistence level, democracy remained a notional concept at best, a nice idea but as unaffordable as silk. There was either lawlessness or there were warlords imposing their own regional dominion, which amounted to the same thing.
    A land without gods is a land without order . This was the collective international consensus on Freegypt, and most Freegyptians would admit that their nation was not without its chaotic elements.
    But look at the rest of the world , they would reply. Look at the divine power blocs and their constant warring. Look at the death and madness that ravages the entire globe. And then tell us that lands with gods are doing any better .

    Zafirah had no surname that David knew of - none that she would tell him, at any rate. She seemed fascinated by his surname, however. She would use it at almost every opportunity. ''West ween ter,'' laying marvellous, elongating emphasis on the middle syllable. He liked to watch her closely when she said it. Her lips would purse, then part in a shape that could be as equally a smile as a sneer, before coming together again at the end as if to kiss. Her soft accent made the fusty Englishness of the name exotic. In her mouth it became weird, unfamiliar, a kind of incantation. It seemed to mean something to her that it didn't to anyone else.
    He also liked to watch Zafirah closely when she wasn't saying his name, or even talking to him. When she was ordering her men around, for instance. She would stand and issue rapid-fire instructions, her hand cocked on her hip, her head raised at an angle -