The Salt Road (48 page)

For two more days she stayed with the corpse of poor Acacia, cooking and eating what she could of the flesh and drinking the blood before it congealed. The herbs that Tana had included in the wedding bag enabled her to eat when she thought she could eat no more and warded off any sickness or discomfort that eating so much meat might otherwise have brought about. As the sun fell on the third day she gathered the cured jerky into a bag fashioned from the camel’s stomach, which she fastened across her back with strips of hide. It was heavy and uncomfortable, but it represented survival. Now I shall bear Acacia’s hump and it will lend me its strength, she told herself fiercely, slinging the gerbers across her front.

She stumbled south and east, following the passage of the stars. She walked through a region of flat, compacted sand that the wind had left striated in thousands upon thousands of tiny wavelets. The patterns, so elegant in their perfect regularity, distracted her mind and soothed her eye; she was sorry when the sands rose again and she found herself wading ankle-deep through their soft tide, but soon the dunes flattened out once more and before long she found herself in an area of perfect camel-dun as far as the eye could see, a dun unspoilt except for an irregular studding of dark stones, each the size of a child’s fist. When she sat to rest she picked up one of these stones and felt how it gave weight and meaning to her hand. It seemed far heavier than any ordinary stone should seem: she examined it curiously. Flecked with brown and pitted as if by fire, the stone seemed more like metal than rock, and it was then that she recalled how Amastan had told her of the thunderstones that fell from the skies. They had been sitting on one of the tall sentinel rocks that guarded the way into the tribe’s grounds from the Tamesna, watching falling stars blaze a silver trail through the night. ‘I walked in a place where the hearts of such stars had fallen in their hundreds,’ he had told her, and she had made a face at him, her expression eloquent with disbelief.

‘Another of your wild tales!’ she chided him, though she loved to listen to the cadence of his voice no matter how absurd the subject.

‘
Insh’allah
you will never be in such a place. Many have tried to cross that plain, but Al Djumsjab, the glooming breath of the erg, who separates companions and devastates caravans, has devoured them all. Now all that is left of them is their bones parching white in the sun while their spirits wander the wastes with the Kel Asuf, playing ball with the iron hearts that have fallen from the skies.’

She had thought it one of his poetic fancies, but now she remembered how he had at another time asked if she thought that the stars that shone above might be the souls of the dead, and she threw the stone away from her and got to her feet and walked as quickly as she could manage through the field of thunderstones, itching with dread every step of the way.

The next day while negotiating a steep dune she slipped and fell and rolled to the bottom and lay there, panting. Her left hand ached and burned. She turned it over and examined it. Right in the centre, where a long, straight line bisected the palm, a thorn had lodged itself so deeply that no part of it protruded. Dark blood lay stoppered around the thorn. Wincing, Mariata squeezed and pressed the flesh around it, to no avail. She tried to dig it out with the blade of the little knife, but the thorn buried itself more deeply. Had she been able to, she would have wept with pain and frustration, but there was nothing behind her eyes but a hot ache.

The next day her hand was swollen; pads of reddened flesh pushed up around the wound like pillows. It throbbed with every step she took and felt as heavy as if she were carrying a thunderstone. Before long it felt as if the wound was at the very centre of her, a raw and pulsing other heart, and the rest of her as insubstantial as smokeless fire, trapped by some magic in human form but ready to fly up into the air if the spell somehow broke. She was almost delirious by the time the oasis came into view and stumbled towards it thinking it a trick of the desert, a mirage of heat-haze sent to taunt her, even though it was barely dawn. The closer she got, though, the clearer it became, the green of the palm trees an assault to the eyes after the unending duns and reds. The water shone the sky back at her like a mirror, so still as to seem a solid mass. Suddenly, with a clarity so intense it was like hallucination, she saw herself immerse the burning hand, saw the water closing over it so that there was nothing but wrist; felt the coolness with a piercing bliss that rivalled the sweetest moment in Amastan’s arms. She imagined it so clearly that dream and reality merged into one long swooning fall. It was when she started to drink that she came back to herself, for that was not bliss but a raw and fiery sensation. Her throat was so dry and closed that she almost could not swallow; instead she choked and rasped and retched. At last she managed to get some water down; then like a dying thing she shouldered her bundles, crawled in amongst the shady roots and fell asleep in the cool darkness there.

She awoke to the sound of voices and sat up suddenly, terrified. Three camels were drinking at the waterhole, legs splayed as they craned their necks; three men sat at the other end of the oasis, refilling their waterskins. They did not seem to have noticed her. With her dark and dusty clothing and black gerbers she was well camouflaged in the shadows. Part of her wanted to call out to them and ask their help; but another, warier instinct prevailed. She settled back against the palms and watched and waited. She watched as two of the men settled themselves on the ground beneath the palms and rested, while the third stamped impatiently around and tried to get them moving, without success. At last he too sat down with his back against a tree and appeared to sleep, but still Mariata dared not move.

As night fell the men made a camp fire and gathered around it to prepare tea and food. The smell of their preparations wafted across the still pool towards her so that her stomach clenched and growled. She drew a piece of camel meat from the stomach-bag and chewed on it, all the while yearning for the taste of green tea and sugar. The jumping firelight lit their forms: Mariata saw that two of them were veiled, and in Hoggar fashion, and this gave her the heart she needed to move closer. Treading softly through the fallen branches with their crisped brown fronds, she reached the edge of her cover, and there she squatted down and listened.

The man who wore only a loose head-covering seemed unhappy. He could not sit still, and appeared infuriated by his companions’ equanimity. ‘I do not understand why we are stopping here!’ he said again. ‘After all, it is I who am paying you: you should do what I say!’

The taller of the two veiled men gave him a level look. ‘The camels are exhausted, and so are we.’

Mariata’s heart stilled in her chest. She knew that voice: it was her brother, Azaz.

‘She may yet be ahead of us; she may have taken a faster route!’

Azaz sighed. ‘There is no faster route. All travellers know the Valley of the Oases is the only safe way through this part of the desert. Deviate from it and all you will find is a swift death.’

The butcher, Mbarek Aït Ali, threw up his hands as if to ward off evil. ‘I pray to Allah she did not, it would be a waste of such a juicy peach.’

At this, the second veiled figure got up and kicked sand over the fire in a gesture that spoke of repressed violence. ‘This is no more than a wild hare chase.’ Mariata heard how his voice broke like that of a boy on the threshold of manhood. It was her young brother, Baye.

‘The storm must have covered her traces; or she has used some sort of magic to hide them,’ the butcher said.

‘My sister is no sorceress: you should not listen to my father’s wife.’

‘Then where is she? Has she vanished into thin air, or taken to flight? No one has seen her since Douira, in the company of that raggedy old trader.’

‘They may have parted company.’

‘Or they have made better time than us,’ the butcher persisted. ‘Whatever the way of it, I am determined to find her. I cannot go back without her: I will be a laughing-stock. Another day or two, I tell you. We will continue into the desert.’

Azaz and Baye exchanged glances but said nothing. At last Baye clicked his tongue. ‘My sister has lived a pampered life: she is not made for tramping deserts. She’s probably back in Imteghren by now, feasting on couscous and laughing up her sleeve. We should give this up as a bad job.’

‘We have gone further than expected, and further than you have paid for. As it is, if we’re caught by the Algerian Army it will not go well for us,’ Azaz added.

‘I thought you nomads didn’t give a pig’s arse for borders!’ the butcher sneered.

‘I care about my neck,’ Azaz replied levelly.

The butcher slapped one massive fist into his other palm. ‘Perhaps if I raise the price by another hundred dirhams you may find a tad more courage.’

Azaz shook his head. ‘It’s not just the money. We simply do not have the supplies to go any further.’ The expression with which he regarded the butcher was one that Mariata recognized. Even as a child of three Azaz had been strong-willed, his wails of fury heard far from their camp when he was forced to wear even a scrap of clothing.

The two men locked eyes, but it was the butcher who looked away first. ‘I would have thought you would wish to save your sister from a hard journey, and probably death.’

Azaz turned his back on the man, rudely. ‘There are worse things in the world than death in the desert,’ he said softly, but only Mariata heard him.

That night as the men slept she stole past them and grabbed up one of the
tassoufras
, delved into it and discovered a skin of dates. They tasted impossibly sweet, and the corners of her jaws sent shooting pangs through her bones at the first bite. She could not help herself: she ate them all, gathering the sticky stones up in her skirt to hide amongst the roots of the palms. She considered, briefly, stealing one of the camels, but her brothers were expert trackers and would soon find her, and no matter what sympathy they might have for her plight, they were duty-bound to carry out the job the butcher was paying them for. Nor would they shame their father by going against his word. Besides, this reminder of her suitor’s bull-like features and his overbearing temperament steeled her resolve: she would let them go where they would without her. Close to death she might be, but it was still better than being close to the butcher.

The next morning the light seeped slowly over the horizon, a dull grey-blue to start with, followed by a burnt-orange glow that gradually lightened and spread itself like a flood into the night sky, so that the stars were put out one by one. Azaz was the first to rise. He uncoiled himself from his blanket and went straight to the foodsacks. He lifted the tassoufra that had contained the dates and weighed it contemplatively. Baye came to stand at his shoulder. He bent down and examined the gritty sand, then looked back up at his older brother. Azaz nodded once, then put a finger to his lips. They both glanced around to where Mbarek lay snoring. Then Azaz scuffed the sand as if erasing something. He picked up one of the other tassoufras, walked into the shade of the nearest palms and hung it up out of sight, looking around all the while as he did so. Then he walked to where the camels sat couched and unhobbled the smallest of them. ‘When he wakes tell him one of the camels wandered off in the night,’ he told his brother quietly, ‘and that I have gone to look for it and when I find it I will catch you up. Break camp quickly and head back on the same path on which we arrived. Wait for me in the hills by the oued with the blue stones in its bed; I will be there by noon.’ He pulled the camel’s head around by its lip, threw a leg over and urged it to its feet. ‘If I am not, do not wait for me.’ Moments later both man and camel had vanished from sight.

Baye scratched his head, then went to brew tea.

The butcher grumbled mightily about having to turn back, and one camel light at that, but an hour later he and Baye were gone, and Mariata was left alone at the oasis. But she was not alone for long. A lone figure on a camel came slowly into view.

‘Mariata!’ he called.

She did not answer; nor did she show herself.

Azaz rode right up to the water’s edge and allowed the camel to drink. He filled his own waterskin and took a mighty swig from it. ‘I know you are there,’ he said softly. ‘Your footprints were by our stores this morning and the dates were gone – unless a monkey has stolen my sister’s red leather sandals with the carved instep …’

Mariata stood up and walked out into the sunlight. ‘I will not go back with you, so do not try to make me.’ Her voice, which had once been so mellifluous that grown men had wept when she sang, sounded now as harsh as a crow’s.

Azaz regarded the ragged figure before him. ‘The desert has not been kind to you, sister.’

‘It is kinder to me than a butcher might be.’

‘What about the baby?’

It was the first time either of her brothers had acknowledged her condition: back in Imteghren they had averted their eyes and said not a word on the matter.

Mariata put her hands over her belly, and, as if on cue, the baby kicked not once but twice. She smiled and looked down, and was at once struck by how thin her wrists were, how the bones showed through the tops of her hands. She knew that beneath her robe her ribs and pelvis would be equally prominent. What would Amastan say if he saw her now, he who had peeled away her clothing under the indulgent eye of the moon and run his hands over her sleek, opulent curves? The desert was paring her away, layer by layer, like a healer peeling a wolf onion. Soon she would be down to the thin green quick. ‘We are both fine,’ she said.

‘And where will you go?’

‘Home. Home to have my child in the lands of the Kel Ahaggar.’

‘It is a long way to the Hoggar, sister, and you are alone. Perhaps two would stand more chance than one?’

‘We are already two,’ she smiled at him, touched by this oblique offer. ‘Go back to the others and say nothing about me.’

Azaz caught the camel’s halter and held it out. ‘For you. And there is food, up there in the palm. Our father would wish it, if he were here. No one should force a woman of the Veil to marry against her will.’