The Salt Road (47 page)

‘No, Acacia!’ she told him fiercely. She had not meant to form a bond with the camel – he was a pack animal, as functional as her own feet – but, after being all day and night in his company and sharing his trials, she had been ambushed by an unexpected affection for the smelly, bad-tempered, recalcitrant beast. The name had offered itself easily: the animal shared the tree’s spiky hardiness. If one of those tough and thorny trees were able to express itself, she was sure that it would roar and grumble and gargle and spit in just the same way as its namesake. ‘If you eat it all now there will be nothing left and then you will regret your greed. Be strong and patient and bear your troubles without complaint and you will be rewarded.’

Strength and patience and obduracy: these were the values her people most valued. No man ever complained about the hardships he had faced in the desert; his pride would not let him, for to complain rendered him less than a man. Instead, they vied with one another to recount the worst trials they had faced: the sand beetles they had cracked with their teeth and chewed to a bitter paste; the vipers they had eaten raw; the urine drunk at the worst of times. She remembered the near-legendary tale of the trader separated from his caravan on his way to Sijilmassa, who had wandered without food and was down to his last mouthful of water when a caravan of merchants from a rival tribe had happened upon him. As is the way of the desert, they had offered him their hospitality: some dried camel meat and water from their gerbers; but he had merely smiled and patted his pack and told them he had all he needed and offered to prepare tea for all of them instead. The situation was quite clear to both sides; but no one would shame the lone traveller by calling his bluff, and so the merchants had gone their way and the trader had died a day later. His story lived on, five hundred years later. And is that not a better legacy, the men of the Kel Ahaggar said, to die nobly and with your pride intact than to have survived by taking sustenance from your enemy?

Mariata was not sure her own resolve would hold quite as firm: even if Rhossi ag Bahedi himself were to suddenly appear bearing fragrant lamb and apricots, she would probably fall upon the food and devour every last morsel before remembering that she had such a luxurious thing as pride, so she could hardly blame the camel for his attempted thievery. She felt the saliva glands in the corners of her jaw twitch and clench, but she was so dry her mouth could not even water. She had not taken a drink since the sun went down. One waterskin hung slack and useless, slowly baking to a crisp; what was left in the other furry black gerber tasted warm and brackish, as if the liquid in the goatskin had transmuted back to blood. And as if it too were complaining at the lack of nutrition, the baby kicked out hard, once, twice. She placed her hand over her belly, fingers spread. ‘Quiet in there, little man. Kicking your mama won’t make it any better.’

By the thirteenth day all the fodder was gone and there was so little water to spare that she had enough only with which to wet Acacia’s nostrils, and when she did so the ungrateful beast did his best to bite her. He nosed at her sandals, but these were too precious to be eaten, so she let him eat the reed mat that she slept on, and he chewed slowly and with painful effort, grinding the mat to a dry cud with a determined back and forth sawing of his long jaw. For herself, she tried to eat the rice uncooked and all but cracked her teeth, and even grinding it between stones just reduced it to a flour-like powder that coated the inside of the mouth and was impossible to swallow without water to mix it with. Now she realized why Atisi had brought two female camels with him: their milk would have sustained them in such hard circumstances, and she remembered poor Moushi lying dead by the roadside and cursed her luck that the only mount left to her was male. She had heard of traders reduced to tapping the blood from their camel’s neck; but when she approached Acacia with the little knife from Tana’s bag he peeled his lips from his long yellow teeth and pronounced he would bite her arm off if she came a step closer; or at least that was what she imputed to his bellow of rage, and so she persuaded herself that things were not yet so desperate.

Even so, when they stopped on the thirteenth day, she tipped the bag upside down for the hundredth time and interrogated its contents in the vain hope that she had missed something useful. She pushed the objects around in a desultory manner as the camel chewed the handful of fodder, seeing nothing new. Just as she was about to scoop the items back into the bag, a small, striped pebble caught her eye. It was a bluish-green with a single white horizontal band running around its centre: quite different to the ambient red and dun. Mariata picked it up. It sat smooth and tiny in her hand, as smooth and tiny as a songbird’s egg. She brushed grains of sand from its surface and then, without a single conscious thought, placed the pebble under her tongue, where it fitted with perfect comfort. Within moments saliva had flooded her mouth, trickling over her teeth, and she swallowed gratefully. She kept sucking at the pebble and moving it around with her tongue and found for the rest of the day that it kept her mouth moistened and took the edge off her thirst; but it was the smallest of aids and at best a temporary measure.

They kept out of the sun when they could, moving around the leeside of rock towers till dusk, then walked by the light of the waxing moon. South and east they went across the dry, rock-strewn plateaus and found only dried-up watercourses and hardly a leaf or plant that was not withered almost to dust. Acacia walked with his head down, slower and slower, until at last he sat down and simply refused to get up. Mariata waited, but he would not even look at her. She tried to cajole him with the last of the fodder, but he gave her the briefest glance of reproach and turned his head away as if to say: too late! Now you will be sorry for your meanness. She dragged on his halter, but obstinacy made him strong. She sat down beside him and sighed. She sang to him, a song her grandmother used to sing to her when she was little: he snorted and gargled raspily in his throat and just sat there, flicking sand spitefully with his tail.

Mariata got up and stood in front of him with her hands on her hips. Acacia pretended she wasn’t there. Mariata moved into his eyeline so that he would have to make an effort to ignore her. The camel looked at her with dull eyes. ‘You need a rest. I understand. I need a rest too. But we cannot stop here: we have to keep moving till we find an oasis or a well. Then we will rest, and you can dip your head into the cool water and drink to your heart’s content and feed on palms and dates. But you have to get up, get on your feet. Because if you don’t, you will die. And if you die, I will die.’ She paused and touched her swelling abdomen. ‘And so will my child.’

Eventually, unable to evade her penetrating gaze, Acacia struggled painfully to his feet once more; and Mariata walked beside him, shuffling one foot in front of the other. It was impossible to avoid the thought of death. Her mind kept circling around the idea like a hawk gyring around its prey. They came down into a valley in which the desert sands had been blown in a smooth, pale carpet, but down in the soft hollow something was sticking up through the sand. As soon as it saw what it was, the camel jinked sideways and began to bellow piteously. Mariata stared at the bones, bleached white by the sun, polished to a fine sheen by the windborne sand, and her heart thudded dully inside her own bones. Was this all that was left of the last traveller who had passed this way? Would she and Acacia be prey to the same fate? A terrible image drifted through her mind then, of a skeleton curled upon its side, lapped by waves of sand, its knees drawn up to protect the tiny skeleton cradled beneath its ribs.

The image filled her with determination. ‘Damn you!’ she told the camel. ‘Pick your feet up. We
will
survive!’

It was an instruction to herself as much as to the exhausted animal. Jaw out-thrust, Mariata drove them both on, though she was tired, so tired, setting a course directly east. Why she changed direction she did not know, but her hand itched and burned and her skull buzzed with hidden knowledge. Somewhere out there was the Valley of the Oases the traders in the funduq had spoken of, the long valley that ran from north to south, studded with ancient wells and oases, through which the trade route that had been followed for thousands of years wound its way. She would find it or die.

The hamada gave way to
erg
– a great sea of dunes, sweeping and sickle-shaped, their long crests carved to a pitiless knife-edge by the wind. She stood on a rock and looked out across the dunes that rolled away from her, their bright ridges alternating with their shady troughs, striping the ground like the barring on a falcon’s wing, and knew they were on the edge of the Grand Occidental Erg, and that if they did not find a well soon, they had no chance of survival at all.

Acacia collapsed the next day. His knees folded under him and he fell in a heap, a great huff of foul-smelling air rushing at the same time out of his mouth and his rectum. After this, he sat staring into space as if he could see his own death, a speck on the far horizon, advancing step by inexorable step. Mariata cried out and then threw her arms around his neck, burying her face in his burning hide. ‘Get up!’ she urged him. ‘Get to your feet!’

Panic made her harsh. She pummelled the camel with her fists; but he bore the assault without reaction. She kicked him and sobbed drily as she did so; but he did not move. And so at last she lay down beside him, in the shadow his form made, and waited until he stopped breathing. Even then, he did not fall, but sat there as unmoving as a sphinx, alive one second, gone the next. It was impossible to judge the exact moment of his passing, for nothing essential appeared to have changed in him. Mariata put her hand to the camel’s mouth and felt no breath there. She laid her cheek against the hollow ribs and heard no heartbeat. She pulled at his long eyelashes: he did not even twitch. At last she had to admit the terrible truth: that he was dead and she was alone, and too far now from anywhere to turn back and seek help. She did not imagine that she could survive in such a place, with nothing but her own feet to bear her. She sat with her back propped against the camel’s corpse and stared deadly out into the sands. So this was how it would end for her and her unborn child. It would be a bleak ending, but at least they would die as People of the Veil, in the desert where they belonged.

That night the djenoun came for her soul. She heard them on the wind as it picked up at nightfall, whipping streamers of sand off the peaks of the dunes. Their song was faint at first, a sort of dull hum that thrummed through her bones, making her ribs vibrate; and then it was all about her, in the air, in the ground beneath her feet: a slow drumbeat of life, a drumbeat that had always existed, had been here before the dunes formed, before the grasslands that came before the sands, when the gazelles and the giraffes ran here and the world was lush and green; when God formed the djenoun from smokeless fire. The song became a roar and then a howl. Mariata let the sound flow through her, by turns terrified and fascinated. The Kel Asuf, the People of the Wilderness: they were singing to her because they recognized her as one of their own, one of those who speak with no one, who travel through the empty places. They had come for her. In some ways this was a relief: she would not have to battle on towards her doom, and her death would be taken out of her own hands. She stood up and let the wind and sand batter her.

She awoke the next morning with her face buried against the belly of the dead camel. A blanket of sand encased them both, trapping a large pocket of foul but breathable air: there was no doubt that Acacia, in death, had saved her life. Pushing herself to her feet through the tide of sand, Mariata stared around her, marvelling at the pale bright blue of the sky, the gleaming gold of the dunes. The wind in the night had been so strong that the landscape she awoke to was pristine and unfamiliar, as if its hollows and curves had all been rearranged] by a giant hand. For a brief moment she felt a keen disappointment that her trials in this world were not over; but then the life inside her delivered a powerful kick. Despite her desperate situation, Mariata laughed aloud. ‘Hello, little one! Did you think I needed to be reminded that you were in there?’

Charged with new energy, Mariata took Tana’s knife from the fringed bag strapped across her back, sharpened it with the whetstone until its edge was as thin as a sickle moon, and set about butchering the dead camel. She tapped its blood into one of the gerbers and dressed the corpse: flayed off its skin, cut out the last of the fat reserves, set aside long strips of meat from its flanks and shoulders for drying. Soon poor Acacia was reduced to nothing more than bones and hooves and his big, sad head. Many would have chided her for leaving the skull intact, with its nutritious brain and its juice-filled eyes untouched, but an unwonted sentimentality came upon her, by which it seemed wrong to defile the head of a friend, particularly one whose great efforts had saved her life, and so she patted it uncomfortably on the poll, smoothed a patch of sand beside it and with the blade inscribed a prayer:
May your spirit wander cool gueltas and rich pasturage; may cool shadows ease your soul. Mariata ult Yemma thanks you. The child of Amastan ag Moussa thanks you
. No breath of wind disturbed the stark Tifinagh symbols.

Using the coarse hair of the camel’s tail as tinder and the last of its dried droppings as fuel, she made an acrid fire and cooked and ate the heart and liver. Having eaten so little for so long, this task alone took her a vast time. It felt strange to force food into herself in this way, but she knew that the more she could eat, the better prepared she would be to carry on her journey. The blanket was gone, taken by the desert winds, so that night she lay beneath a cover made from the flayed and bloody hide. Her practicality in arranging such things surprised her: she had not before been known for her capability, but then never before had she needed to rely entirely on her own resources.