Stewart, Angus (23 page)

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Outside the tent the stars were sharply defined as Jay had anticipated. So depthless was the sky, the thousands of cold points of light so clear, yet infinitely graded in brightness relative to one another, as to give an extraordinary and awesome effect of distance and perspective. The wind still stretched elastic membranes of flame in paraffin lamps, found a guy-rope to play upon, or flapped a temporary structure precariously formed from whatever inconsequent assembly of textiles the pilgrim family had been able to lay hands upon. They stood beside one of these; a pathetic little wigwam built about the stunted growth of a wild olive, whose arid branches, just gathering leaf, sprouted from the top of the conical dwelling. It seemed to be the only tree on the plateau. Jay held uncertain communion with Naima’s eyes.

They began to walk. Everywhere still was the curiously diaphanous transparency of the encampment. Fully dimensioned beings passed them; but more numerous were the mobile shadows clearly perceived through the gauze-like sides of brightly-lit tents. In the distance too, and in the open, it was silhouettes which flitted between the brightly glowing mouths of dwellings, squatted with bellows over the charcoal embers in a
mishma
on a threshold, or to the scouring and rinsing of pots. The simplest habitations were of brushwood, and these threw patterns of latticed or dappled light on the ground.

They came unexpectedly upon the silk booths of prostitutes, their
suq
as politely illuminated as the 'street of sweets'.

The unengaged girls mostly reclined upon one elbow, on what amounted to a stage that might be curtained off. Heavy Berber bangles cluttered their wrists and forearms, and their faces, sometimes elegantly tattooed, seemed for all their often enticing sweetness shadowed by an awareness of social ostracism that had been lacking in Brown's small friend. Jay glimpsed just so much before steering Naima away.

On the edge of the nomad town Naima faltered. She looked hack at the mottled lights. Yet it was through no fear of himself, Jay sensed. The transitory human settlement in so wild a place must have attracted the attention of all manner of malign spirits, enviously, or maliciously congregated about the periphery of the holy ground, inhibited only by the numbers of the humans, and by their fires.

Jay stood close to the girl; gently drew down her veil. There rose in him a tenderness so intense that an idiot vacancy momentarily possessed his face. Unknown to himself, wonder and alarm contracted his features until he was frowning in perplexity. Naima looked at him unsmiling. She had an absurdly beautiful face. But deeper than its neat regularity, the butterfly-dust of youth that is almost an incandescence, there was a quality that was very still, wholly sovereign. Naima's face was really very old. And gathered in her
eyes was a consciousness of her antiquity. The weight of nobility must have made any head impressive. In so young a girl it was magical. Naima was brand new; yet sprung from an ageless, perhaps inimical archetype.

The constriction at Jay's throat eased, quite audibly. At the same time he laughed, scratched his ear, scowled again. 'Baraka,' he said, indicating them both. 'We don't need to fear
djnoun
.'

Naima smiled then; though less perhaps through any conviction that the two of them possessed saving grace, than because of Jay's having intuitively understood her fear.

' "He created man from potters' clay, and the
djinn
from smokeless fire" ' Jay now quoted seriously. It was one of the few Arabic phrases from the
Qu'ran
he knew. Even as he spoke he became aware that, paradoxically, it must be for something very similar to smokeless fire that Naima, from time to time, apprehensively scanned the darkness ahead. An evil spirit was most likely to first manifest itself as a bright light. He held her tightly to him. It was strange that the same melted moon had been visible since they had known each other, it was simply lower in the sky. The night had lasted a long time. Jay wondered what had happened to him before that evening's solitary walk up to the Kasbah, Naima's eruption from an apparently dead house, the bone-shaking descent down the rubbish-tip, which was an irreparable introduction if one thought about it. He couldn't remember; then ceased to try. But he realised now that the sullen girl at Catherine Diergardt's tea party had been smouldering, an incipient explosive, these three days inside him. There had been something incomplete about her then. And it was as a cipher himself that he had reacted to her. He didn't attempt to analyse any catalyst, beyond inconsequence. Three outcasts had coincided in the night. A girl thrown from her father's front door, Jay Gadston, a maker of bird-tables, or so he supposed, and the disposable contents of the trash cans of Tangier. Then minutes ago, within himself at least, there had been sudden, quite radical sealing. Jay didn't doubt for a moment that Brown's baby too had forged some indignant, assertive link of its own in his unconscious.

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It was in a shallow ravine that they first sat down. There was shelter from the wind. Some species of weeping tree reproached a shrunken stream, which would be dry before the end of summer. Their roots were locked in the broken, eroded soil like talons maintaining precarious balance against gravity. The bank was steep, sharp, with stones. It was purposefully that Naima now let herself he held.

Naima's body cradled down beneath the tingling emptiness of his chest and arms. Her hair fell free. Open, cupped, Jay's hand received, weighed her head; burrowing, the fingers spread through the soft confusion of hair to close tight, immovable about the velvet-textured skull. He lifted her to him, and his chest and arms became filled and alive. There was a miracle in the simplicity of her giving. He lived now through his lips. Her mouth was a place to drink. It held all sustenance a man could imagine or require. It was denying of fulfilment, which is beyond imagination.

And, gradually, he pressed the full length of her body against his own. Naima said something temporising about snakes; then didn't seem to care. Jay smiled at the idea of a mortal bite being inflicted in such a situation, deciding the very absurdity must preclude possibility. Heat stirred lazily, stood out sharply urgent at his groin. There was light in the sky to touch the liquid film in Naima's eyes. A contour of cheek-bones found definition, lips sprung in protest from sharp teeth, which scythed with sudden, real anger across Jay's chin, while at the same moment he sensed there had been a colloquial vulgarism in the mention of snakes; but Naima's fingers came up curiously to his chin. Her face softened into lines of concern, even apprehension. Jay took most of her jaw in his mouth in gentle reprisal. And Naima began playing a different game. With tactile deliberation her concern was to have as large an area of their now naked bodies as was possible adhere to one another. Jay drew away, testing the hypothesis, feeling Naima follow him, and acknowledging his discovery with a smile laid carefully across his wounded chin. Then he joined the exploration with possessive vengeance; dominating the search through the ceaselessly shifting planes of total contact until the girl seemed only a right extension of more complete self, and he was
unsure where the bounds of her body ended, and those of his own began.

And the hard bridge still stood incomplete between them. Naima's Loins thrashed away from the threat of
their joining. Her mouth held a taut line. Dimples deep with mockery quivered at its compressed ends, and the spine of cartilage defiantly rounded her nose; but her eyes were beginning to melt. Jay's forearms lay parallel the length of her hack. One
hand twined cruelly in the fall of hair. The other caressed the heaving moulds of her breasts, tentatively encircled the throbbing pillar of her neck. He immobilised her retreating body with deliberate strength. His eyes transmitted a long message, to find such chaos of emotion answering in her face that his bared swelling discovered resharpened imperatives of reach and burial, and he entered, while her slight body convulsed helplessly, and her features suffused, seemed to flow into one another as though her face lay beneath a rippling film of water.

Vacuum suspended time. There was joining made. Confluence withheld. And in the raw breadth of no time the sound of drums came from far away, permeating body and consciousness, themselves one, but indisseverable as well from the cold licking wind, abrasive harshness of soil, limply stirred leaves, and the tenacious spread of the tree roots near where they lay. Gravid earth claimed them. In the recognition was fulfilment. Still they reached more deeply within one another until the shadow of a return to mortal consciousness lent savage rebellion to the final search; though, when it came, true confluence was larger than Africa. And they were left amid the bathos of the rush back from eternity.

'Bloody I can't talk to you much,' Jay said. He felt emptied. Lay, after a moment, rolled away, looking with slowly returning sight into that mighty jewelled wilderness of stars; at the twisted branches above his head, the black solidity of rock against the fearful, unending sky.

'
Ouakà
!'
was all the girl said. She shivered. Began drawing clothes about herself as unthinkingly as she had discarded them.

After a moment more, Jay did the same. It was then that Naima gasped in terror; clutched suddenly at him with sharply crooked fingers. His first thought was of snakes. He was up on some incredibly agile reflex, dancing madly, wildly scanning the ground at their feet. But Naima found sufficient possession to point. She was uttering low, desolate moans, as if surrender to some unthinkable catastrophe was both imminent and inevitable. This time, Jay realised, it was not a coastguard Land Rover approaching. But rational thought took him no further. Apparently descending the dark, rock-strewn gully, the bright point of light came towards them in wild bounds, seeming to leap unpredictably down, sideways, or upwards in an arc like some hysterical semaphore. If it were a
djinn
,
then it was sufficiently substantial to chase. Angry cries came from the plateau above. Rocks chattered percussively into the gorge, rebounded, became lodged and suddenly silent, the aim and momentum of the next easily judged in the ensuing stillness. They were uncomfortably close. Perhaps it was the indubitably human cries of the pursuers that gave Naima courage in the midst of her fear.

'Pietras
!'
she whispered desperately, and began scrabbling for stones herself.

Jay reached out and grasped her hand. A second later Lom had blundered into them.

He was a pitiful sight. A scalp wound had soaked his shirt with blood. One of his shoes must have been lost in his chamois' leaping down the gully, and he was limping. His great head lolled uncontrollably above his slumping shoulders, while his chest heaved and fell irregularly to short, painful gasps. 'Better men,' he panted, nevertheless, and apparently unaware that the danger, whatever its origin, was still with them. 'Better men . . . have been stoned.' He took them both in more carefully. The maid . . . The maid with the rock cakes . . . And you . . .'

'Torch,' Jay said, taking it quickly from Lom's forgotten hand and switching it off. 'We must hide. And shut up.'

'Must hide,' Lom repeated.

Together they lowered his bewildered and collapsing bulk down among the tree roots. Jay drew over him the duffle coat that moments before had been their bed, uncompromisingly burying his shiny, bald head in the hood. He listened intently. Some people had gathered at the lip of the gorge now, but they were more than a hundred yards away to their left. One of them gave a cry, stark, ritual and penetrating in that desolate place; yet Jay was sure they had not been seen. The defiant war shout was followed by the crack of a rifle. Pressed close to the ground beside Jay, Naima seemed to find in this a cause for amusement. She began, in fact, to giggle. Perhaps with the
djinn
harmlessly revealed as Lom, she felt no cause to fear her own people, and presumably it had touched some archaic association with the ritual shot that declared the consummation of a marriage. Jay didn't feel comforted. He gestured to her angrily. More shots crashed out across the night.

'Not so romantic,' Lom wheezed out in a half-whisper. 'Not like stones.' And Jay wondered whether shock and exhaustion had made him delirious His next utterance seemed to prove as much. The duffle coat still heaved and juddered. 'Man out there dancing himself dead . . . Dancing
through
death . . . Big fire . . . Blood . . . But guns . . . Guns are cheating. Not real . . .'

'Shut
up
!'
Jay hissed savagely. 'Bullets are quite bloody final.'

'I must go back to the fire,' Lom moaned, but more quietly. 'We could send the maid . . . With a truce.'

'Maybe. If they came.' Jay felt uncomfortable. He didn't know how he might react confronted by a mob, what expedients, priorities might prevail. They had taken the only action they could, and now his fear was mounting proportionately with the confused pause.

'Yes, the maid,' Lom said; and with steady resolution, his voice rising in crescendo, '
To tell them I'll come back to the fire
!'

Neither the horror nor panic registered with any thinking consciousness in Jay. Lom's shout, and the long, terrible cry that followed it, triggered instinctive action. The animal moved faster than thought, or at least without it. In a fluid movement Jay was on top of the old man, his intention crystallised as single, the hood torn back, the jagged rock at swinging arm's length above the domed skull. It was only then that he paused. There was an idiot lack of interest, even an expression of connivance on Lom's face. Slowly Jay became aware of his own posture, of the significance of his own arm raised in savage arabesque against the sky. He sensed, rather than saw at first, that the men were gone from the edge of the gully. As the faculties abnegated by the single-mindedness of his leap at Lom returned, he realised he could no longer hear them either. His arm withered. Not without awkwardness, he released the old man.