A Red Country

I wish we had met in Cairo. Instead, we’re shaking hands in a sweaty little hotel room in Tobruk five hundred miles up the coast. Call the ceiling fan Sisyphus, it doesn’t falter in pushing hot air round and round in its slow, futile orbit. The window is only open a crack, hinges rusted by the salt air. Someone must have fought to get it this far. Fought, lost, given up, and left it as it was. That’s the army for you.

Some Major no one has heard of is talking excitedly about how you’re T.E. Lawrence reborn. None of us tell him that he only died five years ago, but I see your lips move ever so slightly. Like a dune, shifting sand in the wind, falling into ever bemused shapes. The Major keeps going, singing your praises and giving me the autobiography. Impeccable stock, a Cambridge boy don’t you know, the pride of the Royal Geographical Society, had dinner with King George once. An explorer of high renown, better than anyone the Jerries have, unparalleled in reading the land, etcetera etcetera.

 Even as he’s droning on, and I’m hiding my grimace in warm whisky, I find myself stealing glances at you. I can picture it, easier than I care to admit. You the adventurer on some peak or at sea, rough hands on the rigging and the spark of the hunt in your eye. It’s the jaw, I think. Below those coffee coloured eyes, stubbled and tanned, cut like those statues rubbed to brass by passersby who can’t help but cup that face in their hands. All the praise is making you uncomfortable, you keep looking at your feet and your muddy blonde hair keeps falling in front of your face, so deliciously against regulation cut. There’s a broadness in your chest, your shoulders, a grip in your palms that makes me think you’d be happy scaling stones under the sun or feeling a pistol shudder in your hands.

The Major is explaining the expedition now. Surveying, deep in the Libyan interior, where red sands meet red skies. We’re not expecting any resistance, he tells us, but we’re anticipating a force from Italy at some point. They will most likely travel through the desert, snapping up airstrips as they go, and flank Allied command. We are to map their potential routes, or rather you are, and I am to give my strategic opinion on possible defences. Apparently, together we are the riposte of the Axis sword thrust, and the war effort thanks our vital service. I look at you and you smile for the first time. The Major tells us again that they do not expect resistance.

*

Two days later we’re taking fire behind a rocky outcropping, that primordial stone formed over millions of years just to be chipped away, saving our life. I think that’s what made you the angriest. I cover you as you run for the horses, leaning out of cover to give our side of the argument. The iron of my rifle burns against my cheek as I draw a bead on the closest man, sweating in his uniform, and I fire. Ruby spray in the lamplight orange sun.

            I feel like one of those cowboys in the westerns the Americans love so much. Me, on my own, buying you time as you sprint like Achilles across the sand. I fire again and another goes down before I curl up against the stone from a hail of gunfire. I don’t have time to think before a shadow falls over me and I’m kicking out on instinct. My boot gets his knee, a lucky shot, that sends his bullet searing across my cheek. I feel the hot wasp sting pain of it, feel the blood start to pour, the smell metallic and sticky sweet in my nose.

            I don’t have space to aim so I swing my gun like a club, trying to take his head off his shoulders like some barbarian of old. He ducks, drops his own rifle, and pushes himself forward, wrapping his arms around my waist and hurling us both away. For a moment I’m weightless and even the gunfire sounds quiet against the rushing of the wind before we crash amongst some stone. A whole desert of sand and I still manage to land with a rock in my spine as my breath is forced out of my lungs. My attacker is twisting with his sidearm tangled up in its holster so I spare half a moment to greedily suck down some air before I throw a jab at his face.

He dodges out of the way so I only graze his ear but I follow up with a left hook that catches his chin and he spins away. I don’t give him a moment as I flatten myself against his back, wrapping my arm around his neck. He says something that could be Sicilian before I wrench his head back and send him home. I roll off him and crab crawl to the fallen gun when the world around me explodes in gunfire. Scalding plumes of sand reach for the sun like geysers around my feet as I run for cover that seems to have done the smart thing and made itself scarce.

Just as I’m expecting a bullet in the back, I see him. Riding out of a heat haze, one hand on the reins, the other a patient pistol that takes its time with each shot as he brings down another and another. I leap and haul myself onto the back and he spares me a feral grin before we’re hightailing it out of there, as quick as lightning and twice as deadly we ride.

Not long after we’re hiding out in one of a hundred caves that dot this arid land. I’ve got eyes on the horizon, watching patrols scurry like ants looking for us, fail, and return to their holes. I turn to him and he’s lying with his back against the stone, unconcerned. Perhaps trusting my vigil, perhaps too exhausted to care. I see him sketching elevation rings with a grease pencil on thick card stock, ragged at the edges. The world put to paper.

I think about meeting you in Cairo. Taking you to the officers' club, where finding decent wine is like diving for pearls. I can see it, you tipping your head back and swallowing half a glass in one, no appetite for little pleasures when indulgence in wartime feels like a privilege. Instead, I watch you bring cracked lips to a canteen and see your throat, strangely thin and delicate against your rugged form, shiver in the failing sun.

As night falls, we dare not risk a fire. We stay close and you spare more than my share of the one blanket you were able to carry with you in our escape. In the dark, I find I can still see your face, like a phantom or a half-developed photograph. I listen to your voice, echoing in the cave, seemingly from everywhere, but able to trace it back to the rumble in your chest beside me as you talk. You ask me why China and India will never go to war. I know, even as early as now, that you won’t wait for an answer. You talk of the Himalayas, great snowcapped peaks forming an impassable wall. An army would break against it like waves. The power of Geography. I fall asleep, listening to your timbre and imagining far-off river banks, the cool water lapping at our feet.

*

Weeks later we’re hiding out in a village that has no name but does, miraculously, have a working radio. We’re bickering about which details are the most important in our report, me ever the tactician arguing for practical application. You, the explorer, fascinated by strange, secret paths through the wastes. Instead, the radio screeches to life and tells us Tobruk has fallen. A ten-day siege we were too far away to know about. I expect you to falter and that is my failing, not yours. I should know you better than that. Instead, you start pulling out your sketches, maps drawn by sunlight crouched in the dune. Whole sheaves of them, spread around you like leaves scattered in a park and I have the perfect image of you as a schoolboy, wild and enthralled.

I let you get where you need to go, waiting in the shade as you mutter to yourself before, finally, you smile. You pass me a single scribbled page and ask me for my opinion. As a military man, you say with a wry smile. I look for a moment and you must have rubbed off on me because I see it as you do, and I can’t help but smile back. This is how we win the war. Taking Tobruk was their first mistake. With this, it’ll be their last in the Middle East.

I finally get my wish. We’re going to Cairo. We don’t trust the radio and we can’t rely on anyone but each other so nothing else for it. Hundreds of miles of newly occupied territory, across some of the most hostile land known to man. But we have each other, and where he goes, I will follow.

We ride, only stopping for the midday heat to fade before we continue, long through the night, stealing glimpses of sleep, taking turns to rest our weary heads against the other's shoulders as we swap the reins. When we lose the horse we continue on foot, compass in hand and the stars as a guide. I put all my trust in him. I can read a map, I can figure out north, but I can’t read the land. It speaks to him. He takes us through windswept ruins of  fallen kingdoms, threads us silently through whole battalions on the march. There are times I can only see him in front of me for the glint in his eye as he glances back to make sure I’m following. My Orpheus. And I truly think that he could spend the rest of his life out here, scholar and animal together, in tune with the secret song of the faraway.

It’s the middle of the night, and we must be a stone's throw away when the land turns white. Perhaps we were both too tired to notice them or maybe we were simply blinded by excitement at getting to our destination, but now a dozen armed men are all around us. Their floodlights coat us in their sickly glow. They start shouting and I hear him laugh as he realises, they’re speaking English.

He's trying to tell them who we are, and I see him as they must do, a wild man lurking in the dark. My uniform is battered and torn in a way no enlisted man would leave it and I am a different man now, whom I would barely recognise myself. He goes to sling off his map case, the cracked brown leather creaking. They see something else. The rifles scream in the night. The flash roar of their muzzles lighting their grim faces. The smell of smoke in the air. Blood-drenched paper, the land turned red. Later, they will not be able to make sense of the black lines under the wine-coloured stains. They will find one page, miraculously untouched. A sketch of a soldier, face turned to the sun.