The Martian seemed to spot Emre. It stopped, freezing to an eerie stillness. Emre too waited, sitting on his cart, as the Martian sat on its own machine. They were strange mirror images, Emre thought, each dependent for movement on a mechanical aid.
Afterwards, Emre would always wonder how the encounter would have worked out, if not for the child.
It was a boy, barefoot, aged no more than five or six – Emre wasn’t sure if he knew him – somehow left behind in the evacuation. Now he stumbled from a doorway. He looked around, and then started running towards Emre, presumably the only adult he had seen all morning.
Emre reacted quickly. He waved his arms. ‘Get back!’
But the Martian was almost as fast. Emre saw from the corner of his eye as a metallic limb held out a cylinder – it was a Heat-Ray projector – and swept it through the air like a wand. Walls exploded, windows shattered, wooden frames burst into sudden flame.
And the near-invisible beam brushed the child.
Emre was not the only Turk to encounter Martians that day. After the invasion of England in 1907 the great Islamic empire had studied the Martians as a potential enemy, for, among much other damage, they had destroyed the Shah Jahan mosque in Woking. Even now a brave young officer called Mustafa Ataturk was leading a force in defence of the ancient and glorious Ayasofya – and later this heroism would be a platform for Ataturk, rehabilitated under the Sultanate and encouraged by the Federation of Federations, to achieve great things on a world stage. The old city itself was resilient; it had survived invasions, the fall of empires, earthquakes, fires, and in recent decades coups and counter-coups. It would survive even an invasion from another world.
But at that moment Emre knew none of this. He was alone against the Martians – but not powerless. Emre had been crippled for ten years, but he was only thirty years old, and still strong in his upper arms. Enraged by the wanton destruction of the child, paddling at the road’s cobbles, he used all his strength to hurl himself at the Martian. Perhaps he could smash a hole in that great fleshy lump in the top of the machine before he was killed.
But the Martian coolly regarded him, from lidless eyes. Then it turned and receded from his view, effortlessly outrunning him, before Emre had to give up, exhausted.
It was some time before Emre had the courage to seek out the remains of the child. And he found a strange shadow play.
So rapidly had the Heat-Ray passed – and perhaps it was on some reduced setting for the safe use by its controlling Martian in such an enclosed space – that it had incinerated the child entirely, but had merely scorched the surface of a wall behind. And so a kind of inverted shadow of the child remained, caught running in its final moment, as if painted on the darkened wall.
17
ABOVE DURBAN
‘Ulla! Ulla!…’ The Martian cry was heard around the world, in the Americas, in Australia, in Asia – and in Africa.
It was in the early morning of that Saturday, high above Durban on a foothill of the Drakensberg Mountains – and with the Martian walking machines still ravaging the city below – that Gopal Tilak came upon the Zulu woman. She sat alone, a small pile of belongings at her side, the morning light on her rather expressionless face.
I met Gopal Tilak much later, when I visited the ruins of Bombay, only to happen, by chance, upon this eyewitness to the destruction of Durban. By the time I met him Gopal had become a prominent lawyer advising a newly independent Indian government on the proper application of the human rights legislation imposed by the Federation of Federations in Basra. In the calm environs of a very English tea shop on the outskirts of Bombay, Gopal would tell me of that dreadful morning, and his accidental meeting in the foothills.
He had judged the woman to be perhaps thirty years old, more than ten years younger than himself. She did not seem to have noticed him coming. The world was quiet, up there; the detonation of the buildings and the screams of the people of the city were whispers on the wind. He could still make out, however, rising from a dozen places, the ugly, discordant cry of the Martians: ‘Ulla…’
He coughed, so as not to alarm her; the sound seemed magnified.
She turned her head, glanced at him, turned away with no apparent interest.
He said to her, in English, ‘May I join you?’
She looked at him again and shrugged. ‘I do not own hill.’
‘Quite so.’ In fact, he knew, the native folk were allowed to own land in only seven per cent of the territory of the Union of South Africa. And here he was thinking like a lawyer, even now; on such a morning as this, surely it was only common humanity that mattered.
Moving stiffly, he sat beside her. He wore a suit, dusty now and the tie long loosened, and his patent leather shoes, meant for carpeted city offices rather than rough hikes, were badly scuffed. He was not unfit, he played tennis and a little cricket, but he was new to the way of life of the refugee. This woman, he instinctively felt, presumably after a life of toil, was more sturdy than he.
‘I have water,’ he said.
‘I too.’ She looked at him again. ‘We can share if one is short. Water is scarce just here.’
‘Thank you. And food? I have some biscuits…’
‘Are you hungry?’
‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Though I should be, I suppose, it is a long time since I ate.’ He carried a satchel; long emptied of books and other weighty objects, now it held little but the identity papers which had to be carried throughout the British Empire, a few biscuits, a flask of water. He took the flask, sipped from it, and offered it to the woman. ‘I was on a train coming into Durban. I have been advising on employment rights for the Indian population here. I have been trying to leave this country since the news of the Martian attacks in America. I wished to travel home, to Bombay. But the Martians fell there some hours ago. And now the Martians are in Durban too!’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I am a lucky man. Before we reached the city my train stopped, the crew wished to turn back. But I need to get to the coast, to the ships…’
‘You walked.’
‘Yes,’ he said. He hesitated. ‘My name is Gopal Tilak.’
She nodded. She said her name was Nada, and a surname that he would later not recollect.
‘“Nada.” Is that an unusual name?’
She shrugged. ‘My mother, worker on a farm. The farmer’s wife, she give me name. Nada. Name from a book. Means “nothing” in some tongues. Thought that was funny. Later I read book.’
‘You speak English—’
‘Afrikaans better.’
‘You read and write.’
‘And count. Family workers on farm, in the country. I work in a company in the city. Exports diamonds.’
Diamonds, and the gold of the Transvaal, Gopal reflected: the huge mineral wealth of this country that flowed out into the world, mostly benefiting the British who owned the mining rights.
She said now, ‘When Martians came—’
‘You decided to walk home? Just like me. It’s just that we’re walking in opposite directions.’
She looked at him. ‘Know Durban?’
‘Not well. My work mostly took me inland, to the towns, the villages. That’s where most of the problems are in this strange stitched-together country, of Afrikaners, Indians – and Zulus like yourself.’