The Salt Road (10 page)

Mariata tried several times to draw her further on the subject of the soldiers as they rode through dune after dune and then over a wide sandy plain, but the older woman kept her counsel and barely spoke a word during either day. Towards the end of the third day after they had left the oasis, the sun veered westwards, dipped and fell, stealing all the red from the landscape and leaving it violet and chill.

The rising moon filled the sand with light and rendered the solitary thorn trees they passed a ghostly silver. Mariata had never seen country like this: it seemed unending, unrelenting, and still they rode on. As the land flattened it became more solid underfoot, little tufts of vegetation poking up through the ever-increasing scatters of stones. Finally, in an area in which huge detached blocks formed towering, solitary boulders, Rahma drew her camel to a halt.

‘We’ll stop here till dawn,’ she decreed. ‘We can’t go up into the hills by night: the ancestor spirits become vengeful by moonlight.’

Even the most benevolent spirits changed their nature as night fell. Mariata muttered a charm that might ward off such dangerous influences and stared into the shadowed hills. It was hard to tell what was night and what was land, but she could see no sign in the darkness of any camp, no fires, no lanterns. All she could see were the boulders, dumped all over the place as if by a giant grown suddenly bored with a game.

‘This is an ancient, magical place, full of
baraka
,’ Rahma said softly. ‘No spirits will harm us here.’

The boulders were vast, but to Mariata they looked neither magical nor full of blessings. She closed her eyes, exhausted. Every muscle ached, every hair on her head. She had been looking forward to lying down in the shelter of a tent; she wanted to rest her cheek on a cushion, to cover herself with a blanket and sleep and sleep and sleep. She was so tired she found herself swaying and had to reach out a hand to the closest stone for balance. The heat of the day had gone right out of it: it felt cold and rough beneath her fingers; rough and cold, but somehow alive …

A succession of images flitted suddenly through her head: a woman whose tears darkened the indigo of her robe where they fell; a round-headed child grabbing its mother’s skirts; the flash of a sword thrown in the air, silver gleaming in blue. A swaddled baby with great dark eyes, lying helpless in the sand. A man’s naked body rising and falling, the curve of his buttocks lit by the jumping light of a candle. Her eyes snapped open, shocked.

‘What is it?’ Rahma said sharply, taking her by the arm. ‘Did you see something?’

Obscurely ashamed, Mariata snatched her arm away. ‘No, nothing. I’m just tired.’

She took the blanket from her camel and lay down on the ground, but sleep was hard to find. The world moved within her, as if she were walking still; her head swam. Images came rushing at her – armed men shouldering rifles, Rhossi’s leering face too close, a skeleton they had passed in the desert, its bones picked at by vultures and bleached by the sun; starved children, a weeping woman – until she felt sick with anxiety. When she sat up to clear her head, the only thought that came to her was that she was alone in the world and at its mercy, with no protection except for a strange, mad woman. Up above, the stars shone down, unmoved by her circumstances. Tears of self-pity stung her eyes, and it was then she heard the voice.

Remember who you are, Mariata. Remember your heritage. You carry all of us within you: we are always with you, all the way back to the Mother of Us All. Remember who you are and do not despair
…

That night Mariata dreamt. She was back in the Hoggar: its hills rose jagged against a brilliant blue sky, and she sat in the sun watching her mother braiding Azaz’s hair. The last time she had seen her brother he had been tall and skinny, almost a man in his robes and blue veil, but in the dream he was still a boy, with round, laughing eyes and a wide gap between his front teeth, and she remembered how they had run rings around the old women and told stories to keep each other from punishment when one or the other had been caught misbehaving. Baye, the youngest, crawled naked in the sand. Her mother was so beautiful, Mariata thought, watching her quick, deft hands and the way the sunlight fell across the elegant bones of her face. How long she watched this tranquil scene she did not know: she was in dream-time. Behind Yemma’s head high clouds streamed; the sun fell and rose, fell and rose again as she plaited Baye’s first braids, reaching over the huge and growing swell of her belly. And then a shadow fell across her and she looked up and smiled and the world stood still. What a smile that was! Mariata could have looked at that smile all day, all night. Such love was in it, such pleasure. For a moment she wondered what it was that had made her mother smile in such a blissful way, and then she saw herself walking beside her tall father, carrying a basket of figs, the figs her mother craved in this, her last pregnancy. And she knew, as she had always known, that her mother loved her, that she had not willingly left her in this world; that she watched her always.

It was the first rays of sun on her own face that woke Mariata, and for a moment she did not know where she was; all she knew was that she felt refreshed and at peace. When she stretched, her joints did not crack or protest; when she got to her feet she was steady, and her muscles did not complain. Perhaps, she thought, there was something in what Rahma had said about the stones: perhaps they did hold some form of power. She folded away her blanket and went to have a closer look at one of the boulders.

Three quarters of the huge rock was in shadow. She walked around it, marvelling at its immensity, at the chill of the shadow it threw. But as she rounded the final side, she found the eastern face was now brightly lit by the rising sun. In the middle of the face, snaking from the ground almost to the summit fifteen feet above, were carved letters and symbols in the ancient language of her people. She craned her neck.

‘Today we buried Majid, a brave man, husband to Tata and father to Rhissa, Elaga and Houna,’ read one inscription.

A second read simply, ‘Sarid loves Dinbiden, who loves him not.’

A third was the beginning of a poem. ‘
Asshet nan-nana shin ded Moussa, tishenan n ejil-di du-nedwa
,’ she read aloud.
Daughters of our tents, daughters of Moussa, think of the evening of our departure
…

Another, slanting up and away to the right, she read at first as ‘Love endures, though life does not.’ Then she realized it could be read as ‘Long love is rarer than life.’ She frowned, unable to decide on the correct meaning. A third possible interpretation offered itself as, ‘Where love is found, remain.’

‘Poetic, no?’

Mariata turned to find Rahma at her side.

‘Who carved these – people from your village?’

The older woman laughed. ‘Some of these inscriptions were made by the Kel Nad, the People of the Past. No one knows how old they are; they have been here before the memory of even the very old, before the memory of their parents and grandparents.’

Mariata frowned. ‘But they seem so … new.’ It was an inadequate word, especially for one who fancied herself a poet. What she meant was the sentiments in these carvings were the same as those felt by her own people, every day.

‘The past is always with us,’ Rahma declared. ‘And people are all the same, in their essentials, whether they are modern or ancient.’ She seemed more cheerful this morning, perhaps at the prospect of returning home triumphantly with the descendant of the Founder.

Mariata began to feel nervous now about what was expected of her. Leaving the Kel Bazgan had not been a difficult decision at the time. She had done it without giving much thought to the future and since then crossing the desert had largely emptied her mind. She tried not to think about it. People are all the same, in their essentials, she told herself. There is nothing to be frightened of.

They entered the village and the older woman greeted everyone who came out to see her (of whom there were many) at length and with great politeness. ‘I am well,’ she answered to all inquiries. ‘Thanks be, I am well.’ She would then ask about their family and news and listen patiently to the answers, although these were always the same: I am well, my wife is well, my sons are well, my daughters are well, thanks be to God. At last, she would turn and indicate Mariata and introduce her as ‘Mariata ult Yemma ult Tofenat, daughter of the Kel Taitok, who has come down out of the Aïr Mountains from the Kel Bazgan with whom she was staying, and has crossed the Tamesna with me in order to see my son and drive out the spirits that have possessed him.’

Initial respect for Mariata’s noble descent-group and the journey she had taken swiftly gave way to shuttered expressions at the mention of Amastan, she noticed, but everyone was polite and wished her well and that blessings would protect her from any evil spirits that she might encounter.

Rahma spoke to a small dark-skinned woman wearing a bright red headscarf and the woman ran off and returned moments later with a bowl of rice mixed with milk. ‘To cool his heat,’ she said, and Rahma agreed, taking the bowl from her. Mariata gazed at it longingly and her stomach began to rumble, but, ‘We must try to return him to some sort of equilibrium,’ Rahma was saying to the other woman, and it seemed there was no likelihood of breakfast until they had seen the patient.

They passed an enclosure where chickens ran and pecked, which surprised Mariata: nomadic peoples did not keep chickens, for the creatures could not walk through the desert or overfly the route, and the camels and donkeys were always fully enough laden without adding chicken coops to their burden. She had also noticed that there were a number of permanent-looking adobe huts dotted about the encampment, and that some boasted well-grown-in vegetation – a fig tree here, tomato plants there.

‘Does your tribe no longer travel the salt road?’ she asked curiously.

‘Some do. We still have a few caravanners, but we lost an entire caravan to the desert two years back; and disease killed a number of our camels last season. Poverty and unrest have caused many of our harratin and slaves to run away into the towns, and the new government is encouraging them in this: life is hard and getting harder. Our people are going to need young men like Amastan more than we have ever needed our young men at any time in our history. Without him and others like him, we are doomed to scratch a living in the dust.’

Mariata was aghast. ‘But we are the masters of the desert, not poor peasants!’

‘Our proud heritage will stand for nothing if things continue as they are.’

The last villager they came upon was an odd-looking person with a loosely wound tagelmust that exposed, shockingly, the lower half of the face, skin the colour of charcoal and heavy silver earrings that dragged down both earlobes. This odd personage now caught hold of Mariata’s hands and held them tight. Mariata put this lack of reticence down to the fact that this person was clearly not properly one of the People of the Veil, and forced herself not to pull away. Not that she could even if she had wanted to, for the stranger appeared to have her in a remarkably powerful grip. But when he spoke, it was the voice of a boy whose vocal cords have not yet acquired the deep timbre of a man; and the hand he had in his grip was pressed against what felt suspiciously like a soft female breast, so now Mariata was entirely confused. ‘Ah, the far-travelled daughter of the Hoggar. Welcome, welcome to the Teggart.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mariata, dipping her head politely. She tried once more to take her hands away, unsuccessfully.

‘Lovely girl, the spirits take many forms. Beware the melancholy beauty of the Kel Asuf lest you be seduced. I can see there is a wildness in you; and wildness calls to wildness. I hope you have a complete head.’

And with these enigmatic words, the strange person let go of Mariata’s hand and went on his way.

Mariata stared after him. ‘What does he mean? Indeed, is he a he?’

‘Tana?’ Rahma smiled. ‘We have no word for what Tana is. I have heard strangers called her an
homme-femme
, but that does her no justice. God has blessed her twice over, shall we say. In her is to be found the perfect symmetry between the genders and she is a most remarkable person. Sometimes she knows more than normal people know. She was the daughter of our smith, when the village was wealthy enough to keep one of its own, and when he died she stayed and carries out some of an
enad
’s duties.’

The inadan were smiths and masters of mystic ritual: a resident smith would oversee ceremonies, kill the sacrificial goats, command the fires and work the things of iron that no Kel Tagelmust, and certainly no woman, could safely touch.

‘Can she not heal Amastan?’

‘She went to see him once after he returned; after that she would not go near him.’

Mariata digested this silently. After a while she asked, ‘And what did she mean about a complete head?’

‘It’s what we say sometimes about an apprentice of medicine coming of age, when their knowledge is complete.’

Mariata felt the panic rising again. ‘But I have no learning of medicine! I’ve never apprenticed at anything.’

‘There are some things that cannot be learnt: gifts from on high; gifts that run in the blood.’ Rahma took her by the arm as if she feared Mariata might run away; and suddenly Mariata was filled with fear: fear that Rahma’s son might be mad and raving, frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog, prone to bouts of violence. She was afraid too that he might look quite normal, except for the dancing of the spirits in his eyes. She was afraid she would have no effect on him, that despite her grand ancestry she would be found to be quite an ordinary girl after all. And somehow that possibility was the worst fear of all.

*

Beyond the last of the tents, huts and animal enclosures lay a grove of olive trees, and beyond that, across a stretch of rock-strewn ground, a makeshift shelter had been erected between a pair of tamarisk trees, little more than a simple frame of branches draped with blankets and old grain sacks. In the shade beneath this, Mariata could make out the figure of a man in a black robe and a tightly wound tagelmust that left only a sliver of his face visible, a sliver through which a pair of dark eyes glittered balefully.