The Salt Road (11 page)

The man sat cross-legged on the ground, unmoving, his hands clasped in his lap. He did not change his attitude as they approached, making no effort to greet them in any way. He did not even respond when Rahma crouched beside him and laid a hand against his cheek.

‘Blessings on you, Amastan, my son. You look better than when I left you, I am sure of it. Just take a little rice and milk to cool the excess of heat that is in you.’

She laid the bowl down on the ground beside an untouched dish of bread and dates. He did not so much as glance at it.

‘And see, I have brought you something else as well, a visitor from far away. Mariata ult Yemma ult Tofenat of the Kel Taitok, descended straight and true from Tin Hinan. She has crossed the Tamesna just to see you. Won’t you rise and greet her and make her welcome as befits the master of the house?’

She was attempting to humour him, Mariata saw, for this was no house, and he was clearly master of nothing, including his own wits. She scanned what little she could see of his narrow brown face through the slit in his veil, seeing only that the bones lay close to the surface, that his eyebrows were well formed and that while he was expressionless the crow’s feet at the outer corners of his eyes stood out pale against the dark tan of his skin. He did not, now they were close up, look frightening at all, she thought with some relief, and was just beginning to relax when his gaze flickered away from the ground at which he had been staring so fixedly and came to rest upon her face.

It is said that when a gazelle is cornered by hunters it will often become paralysed and stand stone-still even though if it chose to spring away it could easily outrun its pursuers. That was how Mariata felt when Amastan looked at her: transfixed, terrified to the core of her being and utterly unable to save herself.

She found herself looking into the most expressive eyes she had ever seen. They were long and almond-shaped, the eyes of a poet, not a warrior or a madman; but in the instant that he pinned her with his gaze she was unable to think of anything except that that gaze was as deep and dark as water glimpsed at the bottom of a well: the last water of the season, before the well runs dry and those who rely on it go thirsty and eventually die.

Mariata’s heart began to beat fast. She felt the muscles in her legs twitch as if they would carry her away, very far, very fast, whether she consciously asked them to or not. But despite this she stayed where she stood, as if she had suddenly taken root.

Then the moment passed. Abruptly, Amastan’s eyes filled with tears, tears that gathered and brimmed and then fell, unchecked. It was shocking to see a man cry. Men were reticent with their emotions: it was part of the code of
asshak
, the code of pride and proper behaviour. Mariata felt her heart go out to him.

There are some women who cannot resist trying to set to rights something that is broken, women who feel the weight of responsibility for restoring the order of the world – even if it is just in the little things such as washing the dirt out of clothes, the sweeping of a tent or the reweaving of an unravelling basket. Mariata had never considered herself to be one of these women. But before her she saw a man whom life had snapped in two and suddenly she yearned to put the two halves back together.

‘How long has he been like this?’ Mariata asked as she and Rahma walked back towards the village. As the distance increased between her and the possessed man, her heart resumed its normal rhythm; but even so she could feel his presence, as if a cord had been tied to each of them, which became tighter with every step she took.

Rahma said nothing for a time. At last she arrived at a boulder of rock. Here she stopped and sat down, turning her face up to the sun so that Mariata saw the faint trace of tear tracks that had dried on her cheeks. ‘It was his camel brought him back, as if it knew its way home, even though he had not been here for a year or more. He was slumped over it, in a daze. He had no idea where he was: his eyes were open, but he did not even recognize his own mother. There was blood all over him. I thought …’ Her voice faltered. ‘I thought he was dead … or at least mortally wounded. His sword was gone – the Reaper, which had belonged to my brother, his
anet ma
, and to his
anet ma
before him. He would never willingly be parted from that sword: it was his pride personified. He had nothing with him: neither food nor water. How he survived I can’t imagine, except that the spirits must have kept him alive for their own purposes.

‘But he did have one thing. It was clasped in his right hand. We tried to prise his fingers open, but he turned on us like a wild animal. He has it still. I am sure that if we can separate him from it we can save him. The Kel Asuf draw their power from it, I am sure of it. We’ve tried everything: medicine women have offered him sleeping herbs, but he would not take them. The enad sang the song of the winds and we played the drums to dance out the spirits, but all to no effect. The marabouts have prayed over him and pinned Qur’anic verses to his robes. I could have told them that wouldn’t work: he tore them off in a rage and ran about naked! The magician from Tin Buktu surrounded his tent with charms and fetishes he had brought out of the south: Amastan ignored them all, and lay down to sleep with his right hand pinned firmly under his body. Anyone who tries to force his hand open is met by the fury of the wild spirits inside him. He has been this way for three months and more: he can’t go on like this much longer.’

Mariata bit her lip. ‘I want to help, but I don’t know what I can do.’

Rahma turned to look at her. ‘He wept when he saw you, Mariata: it is the first recognizably human emotion he has shown in all this time.’ She sighed and stood up, suddenly looking exhausted. ‘As a boy, Amastan loved poetry,’ she went on. ‘He loved to make songs and verses; he dazzled the local girls with his skill with words. They all wanted to marry him, but he would not marry, he said, until he had walked to the Arbre de Ténéré, seen the sea and touched the snow that fell on the highest mountains.’

Mariata smiled. These were just the sort of romantic notions that appealed to her. ‘And how many of these things did he accomplish?’

‘All three. And, having reached these goals, he became at last betrothed. To a girl from the N’Fughas Mountains. He had gone there to fetch her back to meet me and his grandmother before they married. My mother was too old and ill to travel, you see. She died before he returned. That was probably a blessing.’

Mariata felt a sharp stab of discomfort at this news. He was betrothed? She reminded herself it was none of her business that a man she did not know should be handfasted, but something in her felt a sudden keen disappointment. ‘Where is she, his beloved?’

Rahma looked away. ‘I do not know. No one does: it seems she has disappeared. But do not listen to gossip, I beg you.’ Before Mariata could make anything of this odd request, Rahma went on hurriedly, ‘Words are the most powerful magic of all: your grandmother knew that. The power of words has run through your family since the time of the Mother of Us All: how else could she have persuaded others to come to her in the desert and establish our people? She was just an ordinary girl – no older than you – just a girl from a dusty little village in the south of Morocco. Yet she had such power in her that she left a safe and settled place to make a new life in the wilderness. To do that she must have communed with the Kel Asuf, become one of them, or bent them to her will, for they helped her shape our people. That power of hers will have passed down the female line as with all such things of value, so it must reside in you. I have to believe that, or Amastan is lost to us for ever. Will you help him? Sit with him and tell him stories, make poetry and charms for him; quiet the spirits, bend them to your will. Try to persuade him to give up the thing in his right hand. Will you do this?’

‘I will try,’ Mariata said, but dread gnawed at her. Amastan had come back to the village covered in blood and without his betrothed. She was not to listen to gossip. But abruptly she remembered a folk tale from the Aïr, told often around the fire at night: ‘The Bloody Wedding of Iferouane’. It told how a handsome, richly arrayed stranger had ridden into a village to the great excitement of the local girls and over the subsequent weeks had chosen the prettiest of them and wooed her with fine words and then promptly married her with the blessing of her family; but on the first night of the wedding celebration a great commotion was heard coming from the tent of the newlyweds, and much piteous wailing from the girl. The elders had shaken their heads: it was rash of the groom to want to have his way with the bride on the very first night. A child conceived by moonlight was a child cursed for life. No good would come of it. And indeed when one of the old women came to bring the couple their breakfast the next morning she was met by a grim sight: a tent full of blood and hair and bone, and no sign of either bride or groom. The bride’s brothers, however, found the tracks of a great cat and they followed it to its mountain lair, and killed it after a great struggle. Inside its belly, they found the remains of their sister, but none at all of the groom; and from this they deduced that the handsome stranger had been a shape-changer, a spirit of the wilds, whose true form had been released on the wedding night.

She could not help but wonder: was Amastan another such monster? Had he, possessed by
djenoun
, killed his beloved? She did not want to find out; and yet she had to know.

Rahma took her to her tent. It was a fine affair, made from more than a hundred goatskins.

‘I brought it with me when I divorced Moussa ag Iba,’ she said, before Mariata could ask. ‘That, twelve-year-old Amastan and one old donkey, long since dead. The damned marabout ruled that I must give my bride-wealth back, although it was my right to keep it. He told me it was God’s burden to me to endure Moussa taking a second wife, that I was in the wrong to divorce him over such a small thing. I showed him the bruises on my arms and legs; he just smiled and said sometimes men have to beat their wives to teach them proper behaviour. Since that time I have returned to the old ways. The marabout is dead now; and Moussa’s gut gives him great pain, I hear.’

Mariata stared at her. ‘You cursed him?’

‘I cursed them both. It’s just that Moussa was always such a strong man. He’s held on a long time.’

Something inside Mariata shuddered. ‘If you can manipulate the spirits, why can’t you save Amastan?’

Rahma gave a bitter little smile. ‘There is balance in the universe: I think this is the spirits’ way of teaching me that.’

For a little time each day over the next few days Mariata put on a white robe and head cloth that Tana lent her – for luck and to balance out the blackness inside Amastan – and went to sit with him, making quiet poetry at first in her head, and then out loud. He did not seem to mind her presence; indeed, he did not seem to take any notice of her at all. There were no tears, no heart-stopping glances and no sign of the spirits that possessed him. If he heard her poems and stories, he did not betray any response to them; after a while she found his presence restful; inspirational, even. Soon she was making some of the best poems she had made in her life, manipulating the words, forming them into intricate acrostics with the power to trap magic between their lines. Some she scratched on the ground with a stick, but mainly she kept them in her head. None seemed to have any effect on the patient.

Each day, she took away untouched the food she had brought for him the day before. How could he live without eating? He must, she thought, be fuelled by other means, by something unnatural, maybe even unholy. Then one day she found the bowl overturned, the milk soaking into the earth. This was taboo and surely evidence of the spirits’ work. She scratched charms in a circle around the bowl to try to cancel out the malign influences.

A few days later her period started. A marabout would have banished her to her tent, but Rahma laughed. ‘You’re at your most powerful now: blood is stronger than the power of the spirits.’ And indeed when she took Amastan that day’s bowl of milk and rice he picked it up from the ground and ate it. But he did so with the fingers of his left hand, which was an abhorrence.

All the while he kept his right hand curled closed and she noticed that when she looked at it, the knuckles whitened, as if he clenched it harder.

One day, inspired by the ancient inscriptions on the rocks where she and Rahma had passed the last night of their journey before entering the village, Mariata made this poem, and started to recite it aloud:

Daughters of our tents, daughters of Moussa

Think of the evening of our departure

The saddles of the women lie ready on the camels

The women are coming now, stately in their robes

Amongst them is Amina, with her eyes shining

And Houna, a new scarf upon her head.

Beautiful Manta, as fresh as a seedling palm …

‘No!’

His cry was ear-splitting, heart-rending. Mariata leapt to her feet, suddenly terrified to see Amastan’s face contorted in some terrible excess of emotion. She half expected to see fangs spring from his mouth, claws from his hands, fur to push through his skin, but once the cry had escaped him he seemed exhausted and sank in on himself. He opened his right hand and she saw a glimpse of the object inside it.

‘Manta, oh, Manta,’ he whispered, or at least that was what Mariata thought she heard. Eyes closed in anguish, he pressed the thing in his hand against his forehead.

It was an amulet, she saw, a solid square of metal with a raised central boss embellished by circles of carnelian and bands of etched patterns. Something had dried all over it, like rust.

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