The Abrupt Physics of Dying by Paul E. Hardisty Read Free Book Online Page A

haze. A woman driving alone out here was unusual enough. Even more startling was that she had been unveiled, and uncommonly beautiful.
    Clay arrived in the village at the height of day, when the sun had reached its zenith and the ground baked in the heat. At a distance, Al Urush looked like any other hamlet on the coastal plain, a cluster of earthen-brick huts nestled within a shock of green palms at the base of the cliffs. The mouth of a steep canyon yawned above the settlement as if ready to swallow it complete.
    He stared up at the escarpment, a massive wall of Palaeocene limestone that ran parallel to the coast for hundreds of kilometres inboth directions and rose up to the barren tablelands of the Masila. The rock here was riven with long deep faults, veins carrying life to the ancient spring that wept from the base of the canyon walls.
Aflaj
, ancient hand-laid stone canals the width and depth of a man’s hand, carried the water to the fields, houses and palm groves of the village below. And somewhere up there, high on the plateau, five kilometres up-wadi, the Petro-Tex central processing facility, the CPF, gathered in the oil produced from two major fields and dozens of wells.
    The dirt track ended in a small clearing at the base of a massive dolomite boulder calved from the cliff face. Clay stopped the vehicle at the edge of the clearing. Nearby, two veiled women in black
burqas
and conical reed hats toiled in a stone field. Bent double at the waist, they worked the ground with medieval hands, pulling up sheaves of a meagre crop.
    He sniffed the hot dry air – burnished stone and ripening dates, a trace of wood smoke. Nothing unusual or even vaguely industrial. At the far side of the clearing a small boy sat in the shade of a trio of date palms, cradling an old bicycle wheel between his knees as if it were a harp. Head bent to the instrument, the boy flicked a short stick down across the spokes, one after the other,
click, click, click
, with slow deliberation until the lower clunk of the rim sent him back to the hub to begin again. The boy looked up as Clay approached but did not stop playing, only watched and clicked out the one-note melody in time with Clay’s footsteps through the dust.
    Clay greeted the boy in Arabic. He could not have been more than five or six, the same age as Abdulkader’s youngest son. The boy’s face was sullen and grey, but his eyes were bright. There were open sores on his neck and arms. His name was Mohamed. Clay asked the boy to show him the
ghayl
, the spring.
    The boy looked at him for a moment and then frowned. ‘Why you are angry?’ he asked in high-pitched Arabic.
    Clay stood for a moment looking out across the plain, this part of the country so different from the veldt of his childhood and yet so reminiscent in its heat and unforgiving dry. He crouched downto the boy’s level and tried to smile. ‘I am not angry with you.’ It was always easier speaking with children. His Arabic was almost at a six-year-old’s level.
    The boy’s eyes widened and he smiled. His gums were red and inflamed. The boy pushed himself to his feet and stood clutching the bicycle wheel in both hands, turning it right and left, leaning into the turns, chattering in a shrill cracked boy voice.
    Clay could not make out all the words.
    ‘Toyota,’ the boy said, pointing at Abdulkader’s dust-covered vehicle.
    ‘You want a ride?’ he replied in English. The boy was making engine noises now from deep in his throat, changing gears, accelerating. Clay reached into his pocket and offered the boy a sweet. The boy took it and smiled again.
    ‘
Ya’llah
,’ said Clay, reaching down and swinging the boy up onto his shoulders. The boy squealed in delight, still holding his wheel. ‘Let’s take a look at the
ghayl
,’ said Clay. ‘Maybe we’ll find something further up.’
    Clay buckled Mohamed into the passenger’s seat and jumped behind the wheel. The boy was chattering excitedly, pulling at his