The Salt Road (15 page)

Mariata felt like one of the pieces of the coloured glass the smith worked into her creations: transparent to her eagle eye. Her heart began to beat very fast; she could feel her pulse throbbing around the coin she held tightly in her fist.

Tana put down the key and the file. ‘Such a fiery love is never a good thing, child. The desert lies outside you: why bring it within?’

‘He needs someone to love him,’ Mariata said, not looking at her.

‘His mother loves him enough for everyone,’ Tana said drily.

‘She crossed the Tamesna to find me because she believed I could help him. I must make him better: I must! And he will get better, I know it.’

‘You are very young and the young never listen to the old, especially in matters of the heart.’ Tana shook her head. ‘You will have heard the rumours, I am sure. Well, I am no great advocate of rumours: heaven knows I’ve been subjected to enough of those in my long life; but what I will say, child, is that you must beware of Amastan. He carries the scent of death with him. He does not smell like a lucky man, or one who brings luck to those close to him.’

The hairs on the back of Mariata’s neck rose.

‘You must ask yourself why the spirits follow him,’ the enad went on. ‘Do they haunt him for the lives he may have taken, or for those he has yet to take?’

Mariata stared at her, dismayed. She could not believe him a murderer – she could not. ‘He is beset by spirits, that is true: they invade his dreams. But it is not his fault,’ she said steadfastly. ‘They gather around the thing he has clutched in his right hand.’

‘Have you seen what it is?’

‘It is an amulet. And there is dried blood upon it.’

The enad gave a little hiss, or maybe it was just a sudden spurt of flame in the fire. Then she said, ‘When he first came here there was much of his father in him: his tongue was as sharp as a viper’s, and there was a lot of anger in him. It can be hard to shake one’s first impressions of a person.’ She pushed herself to her feet and walked across the smithy. ‘But I should have helped him when he came to me with that amulet. All actions have consequences; things come back to haunt you later in life.’

From a plain leather box Tana took a small pouch on a black string, and this she hung around Mariata’s neck. It smelt musty and unpleasant, and when Mariata craned her neck to look at it she was sure she could see something that resembled a chicken’s foot inside, as well as other, less identifiable things.

‘The gris-gris will protect you from what we are about to attempt,’ Tana pronounced. ‘But I am trusting you never to mention what you will see me do here today. It is hard enough to be an enad who is not precisely a man, without adding the accusation of sorcerer to my reputation.’

Mariata’s eyes became round. ‘You are a sorcerer?’

‘Not really, child, no. I make divinations; I speak with the spirits from time to time. But there are some in this tribe who might look for a reason to chase me away, even though I am just one weak creature.’

The tall smith did not seem weak to Mariata – not in the least, with her well-muscled arms, her big hands and her considerable height, as well as her fierce golden-brown eyes that seemed so bright in comparison with her charcoal skin.

‘Come, let us visit your Amastan and I will see what I can do.’

When he saw them coming, Amastan adjusted his veil and set his back against the wall of his shelter, looking, Mariata thought, like a dog that fears a beating. As they approached, his eyes never left Tana’s face.

‘Amastan ag Moussa. It is time to give up the amulet.’ And the smith walked right up to him and held out her hand, palm up.

Amastan’s eyes went so wide you could see the white above and below the dark pupils. Then he clutched his right hand to his chest, while holding his veil close against his face with his left, as if he were using it as a shield against the enad. They remained like this, unmoving, for long moments. Then Tana began to chant in a language Mariata did not understand, although she heard Amastan’s name repeated over and over amongst the unfamiliar sing-song words. Taking a piece of silver on a long string from beneath her robe, she started to swing it back and forth in front of him. Mariata watched his eyes flicking from side to side, captured by the movement of the pendant.

This went on for so long that Mariata began to feel light-headed. Then she heard Tana stop her melodic chanting and say, quite distinctly, ‘It is the amulet that is holding you prisoner like this, Amastan ag Moussa. All you have to do is to give it up. The spirits inside it must be released: it is as cruel to them as it is to you to keep them trapped in this way. I will not ask you to relinquish the amulet to me; I know you fear me, as do the spirits you guard. But perhaps you will give it to one whose heart is open to you.’ And she beckoned for Mariata to come forward. ‘Give up the amulet, Amastan ag Moussa. Let Mariata ult Yemma, daughter of the line of Tin Hinan, take it from you. Place the amulet in her hand. Do it now.’

For several heartbeats the air hung still and heavy between them. Then, like a man in a dream, Amastan uncurled the fingers of his right hand and held out the talisman.

Without pausing the pendant in its action or taking her eyes from him, Tana said quietly, ‘Take it, Mariata. Take it from him, quickly now. You are protected against the spirits, I promise you; but only you can do this. There is a bond of trust between you.’

Mariata hesitated. What if the spirits were to swirl out of the amulet and engulf her? Would she be haunted by them all her life? Would she become mad, an outcast, condemned to live outside society, exiled to a mean shelter like this one, like a diseased dog? She shook the thoughts away: it was in her power to save Amastan. Tana said it was so, and, for all her oddness, she believed the smith when she said this was true. She dropped to one knee before him and quickly took the amulet, strung on a long cord threaded with bright black beads, into her own hand. For a moment she felt it throb in her palm, as if transferring the power it contained from Amastan to her; then the connection was broken.

Amastan’s entranced gaze slid from the smith’s pendant to Mariata. She watched him frown and look down at his empty hand, where the impression of the amulet was still deeply imprinted. The frown deepened. Then his head came up and he looked away from Tana and fixed his eyes upon Mariata. Dipping his head so that Mariata blocked Tana’s view, he dropped his other hand from his face, letting his veil fall. Mariata found herself staring. It was only the second time in her life that she had seen the naked face of a grown man, but Amastan’s gesture was one of vulnerability, and a gift to her, unlike Rhossi’s arrogant disregard for propriety. Neither did he resemble his cousin greatly: his bone structure was finer, and the cheeks that showed above his ragged beard were stained a dull blue. Here was a man who had travelled the world, buffeted by the desert winds, protected by a tagelmust whose powdery indigo dye had transferred itself to the skin. Then he bowed his head, ran a hand across his face to feel the rough and unaccustomed hair growing there, and slowly and very deliberately rewound his veil tightly about his face. ‘Would you ask my mother to let me have my shaving things, and bring me a bowl of water so that I can see who I am now?’ he asked after a while. ‘You can assure her I will not use the knife to slit my own throat.’

*

From that day Amastan returned to the tribe, though he largely kept to himself and exchanged few words with the other men. To begin with people tended to avoid him, casting askance glances at him when they thought he was not watching. His mother treated him like a recovering invalid, bringing him special foods and saving her meat for him. She was very pleased with Mariata, to whom she ascribed Amastan’s miraculous return to his true self. At first Mariata did not know how to respond; she could not tell Rahma what the enad had done, for she did not really understand what that was. Tana had employed some sort of strange magic; the spirits had left of their own accord; removing the amulet had indeed enabled Amastan to regain his sanity; or he had simply decided for some reason known only to himself to give up his long and perturbing period of desolation – any of these could have been true. And so she decided to smile and say how glad she was that Amastan was well again and that she had been able to help.

‘You must stay with us as long as you would like,’ Rahma told her, as if she had other choices. ‘I regard you as I would a daughter.’

‘That is very kind of you,’ Mariata returned, acknowledging the formal invitation, but she could not look the older woman in the eye: for she knew she had no wish to be seen as a sister to Amastan. She wore his amulet, washed clean of blood, beneath her robe, against her heart.

12

The nightmarish images that had plagued my sleep that first night in Tafraout remained with me in uncomfortable flickers as we made the hard two-hour walk-in up through spectacular rocky terrain to reach the foot of the Lion’s Head. For the next four hours, as we made our way by increments in two teams of two – Miles and me, followed by Jez and Eve – up the three hundred metres of the route, I moved from pitch to pitch with greater caution than was my usual style, feeling those unsettling dreams nagging at me. I placed my feet with exaggerated precision, consciously checked each hold before putting my weight on it, backed up every belay in textbook fashion, and checked knots and harness buckles with such neurotic care that I knew I was driving Miles mad with impatience. As it was, it was clear he would rather have been climbing with Jez alone, swift and Alpine-style. He was lucky: at least I pulled my weight, alternating leads with him and carrying out my duties with some degree of efficiency. Eve, being the slowest and least experienced climber of the four of us, led no part of the route, meaning that Jez had to lead each pitch, which necessitated a slow and tedious pulling-through of ropes at every belay, and inevitable tangles and further delays.

Miles had been tutting and swearing under his breath for the past two pitches, even though the sun was glorious, and the climbing sound, for the most part, and elegant. But when we reached the crux traverse beneath a vast, unclimbable roof, a long sideways expanse of unstable rock whose upper layers were exfoliating in thin skins due to their long exposure to heat and cold, he skittered sideways across it impatiently, not stopping to place any gear to protect me when I seconded the pitch. I paid the ropes out angrily. Long traverses like this were as dangerous for the second as for the leader. Take a fall on a vertical pitch and the rope is always above you, so that you fall only a metre or two at worst; but take a fall seconding a traverse and you’ll swing all the way from the point of the fall to beneath the point where the leader has taken his belay; and from where I stood that was a good twenty metres away. Unable to stop myself, I looked down, something I could usually do without feeling any great terror, and realized that the traverse was deeply undercut and that when I started out over it there would be a yawning void below me, a sheer drop of more than fifty metres. Or so I reckoned: the scale was simply impossible to calculate. All I could see down there were the tiny dots of trees green against the ambient orangey-pink of the rocky ground, and below those some tiny black dots like ants but which were probably goats.

I looked back, but Miles was out of sight now, having climbed over the lip above, and the rope had gone still. I looked to my left. Far below I could see Jez’s blue bandana bobbing as he made his way up the pitch. Of Eve there was no sign because of the curvature of the cliff. I was on my own. The temptation to wait until Jez made it to the belay ledge became immense; I found it cold and dark and lonely in the shadow of the overhanging roof, a nerve-racking place at the best of times, and all the more so when faced with the prospect ahead. But after a couple more minutes the ropes jerked three times: the signal that Miles had reached a safe place and made his anchor point. I detached the lead ropes from the belay device and watched them snake away across the rock till they went tight on my harness.
Jerk, jerk, jerk
. The next signal: that he had me on belay, and pretty much what I thought of him too. With shaking hands I removed the gear with which I had protected our belay and tugged the rope in turn.
Ready to climb
. I touched my amulet, which I had hung for luck on the back of my harness, out of harm’s way, and started the traverse. I teetered across the first two moves feeling acutely exposed. I was at the furthest extent of the rope now: one false move and I’d pendulum across the rock face, taking a leader fall that at best would rip the skin from my hands and face, at worst would put such force on the belay that it would see us both plunge down the mountain. The tremor in my hands transferred itself into the muscles of my forearms, then into my thighs and knees. I was balanced on five centimetres of flaky rock, without a handhold, both palms pressed against the quartzite: precarious, to say the least.
Get a grip, Izzy
, I told myself fiercely.
Just bloody well get a grip. You’re on a rope and you’re not going to die.

But I might …

I made another sideways move, leaning into the rock. Still no decent holds. Another move; toe in a crack. A tiny piece of rubble detached itself at the pressure of my foot and went bouncing away down the rock. I heard it go,
click, click, click
; then there was no sound at all as it peeled off into the void. The tremor became a shake.

Get a fucking grip, Izzy: it’s only 5a.

I looked down, seated my left foot as well as I could in order to move on again with my right, and reached across. Nothing, well nothing much. Nothing much would have to do. My whole body made a tremor of intent as I prepared to transfer my weight; then I saw the ropes. A great loop of them now hung between me and my invisible belayer: Miles, bored and annoyed, was not taking in as quickly as he should have been. I shouted up to him – ‘Tight!’– but the word fell like the stone into the empty air. A tight rope would pull me off-balance anyway, I reminded myself. Hell. I took a deep breath to steady myself and transferred my weight to the right …