The Salt Road (21 page)

While Nofa painted the bride’s hands and feet with flames and flowers of henna paste, Leïla begged Mariata to braid her hair in the Hoggar style, which seemed glamorous and outlandish to the women of the Kel Teggart. Hours passed in a comfortable haze of plaiting and chatter, and once they had seen the results all the other single girls clamoured for similar treatment, but Mariata waved them away. ‘This is only for the bride: how will she feel herself to be special if you all look the same?’ They looked so disappointed that in the end she relented and rebraided some of the youngest girls’ hair in a different fashion. Her fingers were sore before she got to the end of the jostling queue and found there Idrissa, four years old and determined not to miss out on whatever excitement his older sister was a part of. ‘Me,’ he demanded. ‘I want my hair done too.’

Tired and heartsore though she was, Mariata had to hide a smile. Like all the other infants in the tribe, he had a single braid that sprouted from the top of his shaved head, and she took hold of it. ‘But, Idrissa, if I braid your hair flat against your head like your sister’s, how will the angels catch you if you fall?’

He looked thoughtful; then sly. ‘Do my hair like Tarichat’s and I promise I’ll be careful not to fall. Then you can redo it for me tomorrow.’

All the girls laughed. ‘He’ll be a trader, this one.’

‘Already he strikes a hard bargain,’ Mariata agreed. ‘But you know, Idrissa, that if I do your hair like Tarichat’s you’ll look like a girl and all the other boys will laugh at you.’

Idrissa considered this solemnly, then declared, ‘I don’t want to look like a girl.’ And with that he was off, laughing and shouting, to hurl himself into a noisy game the other boys were playing with dogs and sticks on the far side of the goat-pens.

Mariata was still smiling as she walked out into the enclosure, until she became aware that someone was watching her. She turned. Behind her were the women’s tents, loud with laughter; but everyone was engaged in their happy tasks and paid her no attention. To her right were the animal pens and the playing children; to her left, the deserted olive grove; in front of her, the area where the men of the tribe were drinking tea, smoking and talking. No one looked her way. The prickling sensation came over her again, and she turned back to the olive grove. Very slowly, as if interpreting some lost language, her eyes made out the still form of a tall figure, his dark robes a pool of shadow against the silver-green foliage. Her pulse raced suddenly: even at such a distance it was impossible not to recognize Amastan. Why was he just standing there, watching her? All around there was the buzz and hubbub of the wedding preparations: people laughing and singing, carrying pots and cooking implements, food and rugs and drums towards the feast-ground. He was an outsider looking in, an isolated still point amidst the bustle. Mariata felt her heart drawn to him as if on a wire. I must go to him, she thought. I must talk to him, heal the rift between us, on this day of all days. She trembled on the edge of her decision; and someone stepped in front of her. It was Tana, her hands still bloody from dressing the meat.

‘Don’t,’ she said, staring intently down at Mariata.

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t go to him. Leave him be.’

‘I was doing nothing,’ Mariata said, unnerved. How could the enad know her mind? Her hand went to the amulet under her robe.

Nothing escaped Tana’s sharp eyes. ‘I see it is already too late. Well, that talisman won’t help you, and it’s hardly me you need to be warding away. I’ll say again: don’t go to him. No good will come of it.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. I was just going to help Leïla with her jewellery.’

‘She has her sisters to help her with that.’

‘Why are you speaking to me like this, as if I were an intruder, one who has no place here?’

Tana’s gaze was black and opaque, her secrets shuttered behind it. ‘I saw death in the entrails and came to warn you straight away. You should leave. You can take my mule.’

Mariata stared at her. ‘What? Whose death did you see?’

But the enad was already walking away.

‘Where would I go?’ Mariata called after her, but the enad did not reply.

She felt hot, then cold. She had thought of Tana as a friend, another outsider who had been embraced by the tribe. But the smith’s gaze had been no more friendly than her unsettling words, despite the offer of the mule. Did she so badly want Mariata to leave the tribe? Had she really seen death in the entrails, and was that death Mariata’s own? Another thought struck her, somehow worse than the first: perhaps it was Amastan’s death that Tana had seen, and somehow she, Mariata, was the cause of it and that was why she had to leave. All through the long hours of the feasting, through the joyful music and the dancing, through the ritual abduction of the bride and the shutting of the bridal pair into Leïla’s new tent, Mariata felt the enad’s words looping back and forth in her head, making a spider’s web of thoughts in which she felt trapped like a fly. When the sun went down, she could not get warm. She found herself shivering even when she sat next to the fire, and her heart was not in the singing, which she usually loved. When she danced it was as if to a different rhythm to the other girls, to a drumbeat heard at a great distance, one that beat out a slower, more insistent tattoo. The poetry did not fall from her lips as easily as it normally did during the song-challenge: she lost her way, forgot the link-words she was supposed to follow, became tongue-tied. At one point she intercepted a glance between Yehali and Nofa that was eloquent in its exasperation. What is the matter with Mariata tonight? She can do nothing right: she is making us all look stupid! She even caught Amastan watching her quizzically, the ridge of a frown visible through the opening of his veil. At last she could bear it no longer and slipped away from the gathering. From the tent she took the few belongings with which she had come here, a goatskin for water that she was sure no one would begrudge her, and some of the bread she had made that day. Then, as if in a trance, she walked out of the encampment towards the enad’s forge and the little enclosure where she kept her mule, and at last found herself at the post to which the beast was tethered. She stared at the mule, and it stared back at her incuriously, its eyes glinting in the darkness. ‘Well, there you are, and here I am,’ Mariata whispered to it. ‘Though where we shall go who can say?’

The mule, of course, had no reply to this, but the air behind Mariata seemed to stir and then a low voice said, ‘Wherever you want to go, I will take you there,’ and when she turned around, there was Amastan, his indigo robes all of a piece with the night.

‘Do you want me to leave too?’

‘I? No.’

‘Even though I have been cruel to you?’

He said nothing to this but she thought she saw the small flame of a smile light his eyes. Night insects chirred; from the distant river the mating cries of the frogs were carried on the breeze. At last he said, ‘Cruelty and kindness; kindness and cruelty. Who can tell which is which? Toss them in the air, they are but two sides of the same coin.’

Mariata frowned. ‘Surely you have seen tonight that I am not in the right frame of mind for a game of words, or to be teased like a child.’ She took the mule’s panniers from the ground where they lay, placed them across the beast’s back and arranged her few things in them. Then, sighing, she turned back to Amastan. ‘Since I am about to leave I had better speak plainly. When I first came here, it was to help a man everyone believed was mad, a murderer possessed by the djenoun, who had in all likelihood killed his sweetheart while in the grip of evil spirits. Your mother crossed the Tamesna to find me, convinced that because of my lineage I could help; but it was soon clear there was no magic in me at all, for I couldn’t do anything for you. It was Tana who released you from the spirits, not I; and she did it for my sake, not yours. Because, you see … ah, this is so hard …’ She ran a hand over her face, and continued quickly in an almost-whisper, ‘Because, you see, it was not you she took pity on but me.’ She darted a fearful look at him to see how he would respond to this, but he gave no sign of understanding her at all. ‘And then you told me the true story of what happened … to Manta. You opened your heart to me and instead of showing you the sympathy I should have shown to one who had experienced such horrors, I ran away, like a child running from a tale of monsters! You had held those terrible memories inside you for so long, and I … ran away. I am ashamed of myself for it. Perhaps I am not as grown up as I thought, but, even so, you should not tease me like a child.’

‘The effect you have on me is not that of a child, I can assure you,’ Amastan said gravely. ‘Indeed, you disturb me.’

‘
I
disturb
you
?’

‘I was safe in my darkness, hidden from all. No one could touch me there; and my demons were my shield from the world. And then you came and struck through that shield with the light in your eyes and the sharp words of your poetry. Tana may have released the demons, Mariata, but it was you who opened the door through which they fled. Your grace pierced me; but your silence terrified me. When you would not speak with me or even look at me, it was as if the night had come to swallow me once more. I felt there was no hope left. So when the hunters set out, I went with them. Away from you; away from the tribe, away from everything. Then I left the hunters and walked alone. I walked far, without food, without water, and waited for death to come to me. But while I sat there, waiting, I saw that the world went on around me as if I were insignificant in it; no more important than a stick or a stone. Rock-squirrels ran around me, burying the nuts they had gathered and watering them to mark their cache; but while I sat still they thought of me as no more than an inanimate obstacle they had to run around. A lizard skittered past on feet that moved so fast they barely touched the hot ground, and I saw before it did the viper that darted out from between the boulders and caught it in its jaws. When night fell, I lay on my back and watched the stars wheel overhead, watched the Guide with his three-starred stick shepherding the constellations across the heavens, and felt both as great and as small as one of those specks of life. And I realized there was probably nothing I could have done to save Manta; no magic that would have kept her death from her, that the plan of the universe is too great for one man to rearrange, that maybe there is no such thing as the world of the spirits, of magic or curses, and that these are things that men speak of in fear because they cannot accept the harsh truth: that death and danger are around us all the time, and there is nothing we can do to ward them off. That life is hard and short and vicious, but the stars – those tiny jewels of light up there amongst the darkness – they go on for ever. And perhaps it is where we go too, when all is done. Do you believe that, Mariata? Do we become stars when we die, little specks of brilliance in a relentless field of black? Or do we just go into the ground and rot?’

Mariata stared at him unhappily, not sure what to say. For a moment it seemed as though his mind had been turning towards her, towards matters of the heart and things that might be understood and discussed between a man and a woman. But then he had veered away into a dangerous quicksand. She had been raised to believe in the spirits – the djenoun in all their varied forms. To discuss them so was surely tantamount to inviting them to appear in numbers, and at this time of the night, it would not be the good djenoun who would be visiting but the Kel Asuf, the People of the Wilderness, those who seduced the minds of the living away from their families and the safety of the campfires to become as jackals, feral scavengers of the wilds; the afrits and demons, spirits of the night; the ghûls, those vengeful spirits of the wronged and the damned, which haunted the sites of their untimely deaths, hungry for others’ pain to assuage their own; the
qareen
, the personal demons ever ready to whisper wicked desires into the fertile mind and lead the good soul astray.

And all this talk of stars and death: where had that come from? Her grandmother had taught her the cosmology of their world, framing each element of it in stories and poetry from her own grandmother’s time, which in turn had been passed down by elder generations. She knew that the unquiet dead walked the earth; that you had to inter a body immediately upon its death, intact and with its face turned to the east, and top the grave with seven flat stones to keep the soul in its right place, thorny branches to stop wild animals tearing the flesh. The physical body would surely rot away down in the ground: surrounded by death all the time – of goats and dogs, of camels and babies – it was impossible to deny such a fact; but the life of the spirit was another matter. Those who followed the new religion spoke of some nebulous heaven for the souls of the elect, but people like her grandmother, and those like Rahma who rejected the call of Islam, held a darker, more elemental view of the world. But none of them had ever spoken of spirits in the stars. The wild concept of the dead hanging over her head in the endless sky seemed at once oppressive and revolutionary; she could feel her mind rebelling even as it entertained the possibility. She shook her head. ‘No one should speak of such things by night. It attracts the wrong sort of attention.’ And she touched the amulet she wore about her neck.

Amastan smiled. ‘You are still wearing my amulet.’

‘I have worn it ever since we took it from you.’

‘I once believed that all the ills of the world resided in it.’ He took a step towards her, took hold of the bright string of beads on which it was suspended and lifted it out on to her robe. ‘But when I see it on you, I know that cannot be true. It lifts my heart to see you wear it, Mariata.’ He gave her a steady look. ‘Before Manta, there was no one who stirred my heart. I thought there never again would be.’

‘And now?’ she asked unsteadily, the longing plain in her eyes.

He was silent for such a long time that she thought she had pressed him too hard, overstepped the bounds of respect. Then he took her hand in his, turned it over and gazed at it intently. ‘Such a little hand,’ he said, and pressed her palm to his lips.