them had stuck. To this day she still called Physillis an orange eyeball tree.
She opened her eyes and the loamy smell of the earth escaped from her dream and drifted across the desert. It took her a few moments to recall where she was as she hung for some blissful heartbeats suspended between the past and the present before she remembered. The apartment was gone, incinerated along with everything in it by someone who had been looking for her. Her father was dead, so was her brother – and Gabriel was gone. It all struck her like a fresh loss, so hard that she just wanted to curl up again, go back to sleep and escape into the bliss of her dream.
Then she heard the noise, like the soft hiss of a huge snake.
Instinctively she rolled away from it, right across the grave, coming to rest so she was staring across the stone at the source of the sound.
Tariq was curled up and sleeping on the ground nearby, his AK47 cradled in his arms, his mouth forming words that escaped as sibilant whispers from his dream.
– Saa’so Ishtar – Saa’so Ishtar –
She watched him twitching in his sleep, whispering the words over and over until the lightening sky woke him too.
‘What is Ishtar?’ She fired the question at him while he was still blinking awake. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands then looked over at her, his forehead creased in a question. ‘You were saying it over and over in your sleep – what is it?’
‘Ishtar is a goddess,’ he said, pushing himself up and automatically checking his rifle for sand, ‘an ancient goddess from the time when all these lands were green. She was the goddess of fertility, and love, and war. It was she who made everything grow and gave names to every living thing.’
Liv remembered her dream and the memory of naming plants by her father’s side. ‘I heard people calling me that – amongst other things.’
Tariq unwrapped the keffiyeh from around his neck, shook it out and carefully laid it on the ground. ‘There is an old tale,’ he said, as well-practised hands removed the magazine from his rifle, ejected a shell from the breach then began taking it to pieces. ‘It is a nomad tale from the ancient times. It tells how Ishtar was tricked by jealous men and made prisoner in the caves of the underworld. She was kept in darkness, away from the sun, to make her weak. Her powers were stolen so that the men who had imprisoned her might live as gods, never ageing and never falling ill. And because of this the lands that had been nourished by her dried up and everything died.’ The top cover of the rifle and the recoil spring were carefully laid in turn on his keffiyeh.
‘But the story also tells that when time reaches the end of its long road Ishtar will escape from the darkness and return again, bringing back the water so the land may be reborn.’ He blew hard into the firing chamber, inspected inside then did the same with the other parts he had removed. ‘And you brought the water, that is why they call you Ishtar.’
Liv laughed. ‘I’m an unemployed, homeless reporter from New Jersey. Does that sound like a goddess to you?’ She stood up and stretched the kinks out of her back. ‘Listen, you said yesterday you could take me anywhere I wanted to go. You think you could take me as far as the Turkish border?’
‘If you wish,’ he said, snicking his rifle together again with impressive speed and smacking the magazine into place. ‘But first, let me show you something.’ He rose from the ground and slung the rifle over his back, heading around the perimeter fence to where the holding pits had been dug. They had been intended to catch the overspill of crude oil from the central well but were now brimming with water. Tariq helped Liv up the side of one of the banks and pointed past the edge of the second pit. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You see it?’
From her elevated position Liv saw how the water had breached the holding pits in several places, creating rivulets that snaked away across the baked earth, carving new channels as they went.
‘The blood is flowing back into the land,’ Tariq said. ‘And see –’ he pointed along the edge of the water ‘– the land is starting to live again.’
All along the banks of the new rivers, green shoots were bristling. ‘See there, we call that Ya’did or skeleton weed. And there, you see those tiny yellow flowers?’
‘Groundsel,’ Liv said. ‘And that is Artemisia, or some other sort of ephemeral grass; and that looks like a tamarisk seedling.’
Tariq turned to her smiling. ‘You see, you know the plants, you can name them all.’
Liv shook her head. ‘Don’t read too much into it. My dad was a horticulturalist and I had no mother so I grew up digging and planting instead of playing with dolls, I got dirt in my blood.’ She followed the lines of the water to where the heat rippled the air. In the distance a column of dust was rising, another illusion to raise her hopes that Gabriel might be returning. She stared at it, waiting for it to melt away like her hopes always did. Only this one didn’t. ‘Someone’s coming,’ she said, hope swelling in her chest.
Tariq looked up and saw it, his chin rising too as if he was sniffing the air. ‘Horses,’ he said, ‘many horses.’
‘Yours?’ Liv gazed at the distant dust as if her eyes were the only things keeping it there, hoping maybe that the riders had gone looking for Gabriel and were now bringing him back.
‘Maybe,’ Tariq said, his hand unconsciously drifting to the shoulder strap of his rifle. ‘We should get back to the compound – I have a bad feeling about this.’
By the time Liv and Tariq made it back inside the compound the approaching dust cloud was clearly visible in the sky and everyone had emerged from the silver-sided buildings and gathered by the central pool, all eyes looking in the same direction, waiting for whatever was heading their way to arrive. With everyone gathered together like this, Liv realized how few of them were left. She counted thirteen including her – a mixture of oil workers and a couple of the riders who had stayed along with Tariq.
‘Thirty riders!’ a voice called from halfway up the steps to one of the guard towers. ‘Maybe more.’
‘Ours?’ Tariq called back.
There was a pause as the man reached the top and raised a pair of field glasses to his eyes. ‘No,’ he shouted down, ‘not ours.’
Tariq snapped to attention like a shotgun being closed. ‘Close the gates.’ He barked at a startled-looking rigger still wearing his white work overalls. ‘NOW!’ He watched the rigger scurry off then called back up to the watchtower. ‘How long until they get here?’
‘Five minutes, maybe less. They’re riding pretty hard.’ The man paused again and stared through the field glasses. ‘They have guns.’
Tariq turned to the assembled few. ‘Who knows how to operate the fifty-calibre cannons?’ He was met with silence and a ring of frightened faces. ‘What about rifles – can anyone fire a rifle?’ A couple of drill technicians put their hands up nervously. ‘Good, go and get weapons from the locker in the transport hangar and push some of the vehicles outside to give us cover. We’ll use that as a fallback position and try and keep them at bay using the tower guns if we need to.’
Liv looked on with a sense of detachment. Part of her felt anxious about the approaching men and what their intentions might be, but another, stronger part felt that preparing to meet potential violence with more violence was the wrong move.