Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  “Merci,” he said, nodding in gratitude. “How many days’ ride to Arak?”

  “Eight.”

  “After eight days I will be the picture of grace at this.”

  She laughed. “Or the camel will be riding you.”

  They rode hard, setting off in single file through the narrow wadi that wound its way off the plateau. Mile after mile passed by and they did not stop or slow or talk. The camels were superb animals in top condition. They kept a rapid pace, maintaining a steady rhythm as their hooves plodded through the soft sand of the wadi. Henri watched the Tuareg ride, crossing his legs over the camel’s neck as he saw them do, but his animal would not respond to the movements of his feet. His mount occasionally tried to break away to graze on brush or the sparse foliage they passed, but he reined it in tightly. As he pulled on the nose ring the camel glared at him balefully, and once tried to bite him. He could only hope that during the journey he would be able to settle into a strained coexistence with the beast.

  Henri pulled a small notebook from his pocket and tried to make sketches and notes as they rode, but the rocking motion of the camel made it impossible. He put the book away and contented himself just watching, enjoying the view from the great height of his camel’s back. After a time the wadi broadened, and soon he found himself next to Serena.

  “I am pleased, Monsieur deVries. You have stayed on the camel all this way!”

  “He is waiting until tonight to unload me as he wishes,” Henri admitted ruefully. “I think he would rather I’d stayed in the balloon. I shall have to remember not to turn my back on him.”

  She showed him the Tuareg manner of sitting in the saddle and holding the rein, and how to make the camel respond to his feet, a task for which he had to remove his shoes. But the camel wouldn’t cooperate. It complained loudly and spit in disgust, much to her delight. “It must be your French toes,” she said.

  “How is it you speak French so well?” Henri asked her.

  “In the spring of my tenth year a small group of us traveled to El Gassi,” she said. “I became separated from the group and fell from some rocks. I broke my leg so badly the bone came through the skin. No one with us knew what to do. The marabout who would normally care for such an injury was not with us, and I could not travel. There was a White Father living in the town, a French missionary from Algiers. He knew what to do and set the leg. And when I developed fever and nearly died, he tended to me. I was there a long time, and could not rise from my mat. It was then he taught me to speak the language.”

  “He did it very well.”

  “He was a kind man. He grew vegetables and gave them away though he had not enough to eat himself. He tried to convert me to his religion, as he tried with others. But for all his effort he made not a single convert. And then one day someone cut the father’s throat. My lessons were finished.” He was startled by the matter-of-fact way she said it, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. The Shamba, I think.” She used the word as a curse. The Shamba were Arabs of the north central oases, while the Tuareg were Berbers. For centuries there had been a blood feud between them, with caravan raiding and looting of camps embittering one generation after another. “They are devout of Islam and have no patience for the White Fathers. It was only a matter of time until someone did it.”

  “How is it the Shamba left you alone?”

  “They are ben haloof,” she said, “but even sons of pigs will not harm a girl. The father had hidden me anyway, to be sure. He was worried about my safety. In the end he worried about the wrong throat. They would have taken me hostage, I suppose, had they known I was there, and traded me back to my people. The Shamba despise us worse than… well, than you, and would do anything to bring us harm. They have never been able to master us or bring us to their ways. When we meet in battle they always get worse than they give. It is intolerable for them. They call us the abandoned of God, but God has not abandoned us, as you see. He is all around us.” With a sweep of her hand she indicated the remarkable country through which they traveled. To their west lay a long, low range of dunes, their slopes rippled with hard sand that shimmered like copper in the sun. To the east a flat was strewn with pebbles in colors ranging from salmon to deep purple. A plateau rose before them, its face fractured with jagged gorges to whose sides clung stubborn thorn trees on which bright flowers blossomed. There was no monotony to it, nothing bleak or empty. For Henri it was a world of variety and surprise.

  The wind had blown her hair into her face. She brushed it back, and as she did Henri found himself staring at her. He was struck by the complexity of this woman of the desert, who spoke so frankly and whose spirit was so free, who could laugh so easily and completely enjoy herself with simple things, and yet in the next moment deal just as readily with death. The Sahara was a harsh environment that bred tough people. He had no doubt that if need be she could kill a man just as easily as – just as easily as kiss him. She was fresh and a little insolent. He liked that, the insolence, for it was so apart from what he always experienced. He was accustomed to women who fawned over him for his money or position. This woman would be unimpressed by both. She seemed to have everything she needed atop her camel.

  With a start he realized that he hadn’t been listening to what she was saying. She caught his gaze and held it for a moment, then dropped her eyes as she continued talking.

  “… the northern oases, and there I had a chance to practice the language with the French settlers. Then two years ago I accompanied my uncle to Algiers. He is a great marabout, and has taught me much.” She explained that marabouts were holy men who taught religion and served as physicians and instructed the Tuareg in astronomy, geography, botany, reading and writing. “I waited there while he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. It was there I saw a balloon. One that flew, that is.”

  It was springtime in the desert, warm but not hot. They rode comfortably as midday became afternoon, and the long afternoon hours stretched into early evening. They talked without stopping, riding alongside each other and all but oblivious to the others, who had stretched out into a long languid procession. The countryside gradually flattened, the ground changing from the coarse sand of the wadis to a blend of finer sand mixed with colorful stones. Henri and Serena talked easily and endlessly about scores of things, about birds they saw and plants that could be eaten and plants that would kill you, about the sultan in Istanbul (was it true, she wanted to know, that he bathed in a golden tub?), about ships that plied the Mediterranean, about horned lizards and snakes, about the desert and its weather, its nights and its floods, its quirks and its beauty. She seemed to know everything about it, and saw it all through eyes that were observant and sensitive and engaged. Once she spotted something in the distance and without a word rode off to get it. When she returned she held a delicate sand rose, a desert blossom sculpted by eons of wind. She held the gift out to him as they rode. He had to lean to take it and nearly lost his balance, but she caught him and steadied him with her free hand, and pressed the rose to him with her other, and their palms touched lightly. The touch was a fleeting one, but there was a moment of magic in it for them both. Gently he murmured his thanks and looked at the rose. Its crystals blazed brilliantly in the sun. He placed it carefully into the inside pocket of his cloak.

  They traded tales of the places they had seen. She held her breath at his description of the Seine, flowing in a slow lazy arc past his home, of the snow that covered the peaks of France, and of the icefields he had crossed in Scandinavia, She told him of the great caravan routes and of caves where ancient rock paintings showed that what was now her desert home had once been a fertile jungle full of animals. She delighted him with tales of ostrich hunts that lasted two or even three days, and pointed out places where there would be water, places he would never have thought to look, and she told him of the thunder noise that the dunes made when the sun was coming up. There was too much to say, so mu
ch to share, and it all came in a rush between them that consumed the whole day.

  Twice Tamrit rode back to her and told her to stop her foolish talk with the Frenchman and to conduct herself with more dignity. Twice she responded with fire in her voice and sent him away, sulking and miserable. He despaired at the chasm that separated him from what he desired and what he could have. Serena had spurned many suitors over the years. Tamrit knew that he had come closer than any of the others to winning her, but this afternoon he had suddenly seen with startling clarity the contrast between the way that she responded to him and the way she behaved with the Frenchman. He loved to hear her laugh, it was true, but it tore at him to hear the difference in the tone of her laughter with this accursed ikufar. She never sounded like that with him, never acted that way or laughed so easily. She was always so distant, so unattainable. And her talk! Tamrit had trouble getting twenty words out of her, yet she hadn’t stopped chattering all day to this devil-of-the-sky. At first there was more ache than anger in him, but each passing hour he was forced to endure it shifted the balance until he was seething inside. He spurred his camel viciously and rode ahead for a while, but gave that up when he realized it made him look foolish and feel even more isolated from her. It would be better to stay closer in order to keep an eye on things. He selected a position to ride from which he could not help looking at them, even though he hated doing so. The afternoon wore long on his patience. Gradually his focus shifted away from her indifference and toward the interloper, his anger simmering against the Frenchman.

  Gascon rode near the rear. He was puzzled by the behavior of the count, who was overly preoccupied, he thought, with the Tuareg woman. Gascon was still wary of their escort but took some comfort from the fact that while the rifles were out of reach on the back of a pack camel, he had at least succeeded in keeping the count’s valise with him, which contained a pistol.

  When at last they stopped for the night, Henri found that he was quite sore from the ride. It was with a great sense of relief that he was able to get off his camel without making a spectacle of it. He realized that it mattered to him that this graceful desert woman not witness another bout of clumsiness on his part. When he acknowledged the thought he blushed privately and shook his head at the crazy notion. Why should it matter? he wondered.

  Camp was quickly established by Buzu, who once again did all the work while the others did nothing. Henri and Gascon tried to help but he brushed them aside. “He is Irawellan,” Serena explained. “A slave. It is his task to mind the needs of the camp.” She explained their caste system to him. Except for Buzu all the men of her party were noblemen, warrior-overlords who acted as guides and guardians to caravans, and patrolled their districts against attack. In other Tuareg camps there were marabouts. The imrad were vassals who worked the land and tended the herds and paid levies for protection, and sometimes accompanied the nobles as their squires. At the end of the chain were the slaves who cultivated gardens and tended to the livestock and saw to the needs of travel. The social order she described, like the appearance of their men, struck Henri as medieval.

  Buzu unloaded and hobbled each of the camels by folding a foreleg up and tying it with rope, then leaving it to wander as it sought its meager pasture. Henri watched the slave start a fire, a process that required no steel or flint. He rubbed a small green stick sharpened like a pencil down the length of a dry stick, creating a small channel into which dry bits of wood fiber were rubbed off and collected at one end. The small pile grew and began to smoke, finally igniting. He put a battered tin pot on the fire for tea. Then he heated a thick millet porridge, which started as a paste to which he added a small quantity of nearly black water from his goatskin.

  The group squatted around the fire, Henri and Gascon with them. They passed the bowl of porridge around a circle, each person taking a bite with a wooden spoon before passing it to the next. The Tuareg revealed nothing of themselves as they ate, for they did not lower their veils to eat, but rather lifted them and turned away as they brought the spoon up under the cloth covering their mouths. The porridge was filling, but brackish and dry and full of sand. Henri didn’t notice. He was watching her. For dessert they ate dates that were kept fresh in leather pouches, and drank tea. As Serena translated Henri answered a thousand questions from the Tuareg men, who, except for Tamrit, seemed to have gotten over their initial hostility and had accepted their presence. Soon they were all laughing.

  Tamrit kept to himself, hunched over by the fire. He sat quietly, ignoring the chatter. He was no longer angry at the intruders. His anger had been replaced with a plan. He knew what to do. Their journey to Arak had brought them very near Shamba country. He had a Shamba knife taken from a corpse during a raid. It would be a simple enough matter to steal up on the French devils in the middle of the night and silently cut their throats. He would leave the knife where anyone could see that the perfidious Shamba had been at it again. Only Serena would have doubts or even care, and he would deal with her.

  Gascon looked about for the best place to sleep. He didn’t want to camp close to the Tuareg. He would not trust what he could not see, and their faces were hidden. He had shared his concerns with the count, who had only shrugged. It was not like the count to let his guard down, Gascon reflected, but he seemed truly unconcerned. Well, then, he would watch for both of them. He selected a spot on the opposite side of the fire from where the balloon and their other supplies sat in a pile. While he knew he couldn’t easily get to the rifles, he didn’t want anyone else getting to them either. He satisfied himself that it was the best position available. He would sleep with the valise as his pillow and keep one hand on the gun.

  When darkness fell and the moon had not yet risen, Henri took his sextant and with Serena at his side walked over the gravelly plain toward a dune. The pebbles blended with sand and the sand became deeper, making for hard work. The dune was much higher and farther away than it had looked from camp. When they arrived at the top he sat cross-legged and began his sightings. He explained to her the workings of the sextant, making diagrams in the sand to illustrate how knowing the time and the position of the stars could tell him where he was. She grasped the concept quickly and eagerly, nodding her head in excitement, then sighting the stars herself. He pointed at the different stars he sometimes used. “That is Vega,” he said, “and Cepheus, and there—”

  “Is Rigel,” she interrupted, “in Orion,” and she went on and on, pointing at other stars and constellations, here Pegasus, there Cassiopeia and Delphinus, names that to his astonishment were the same or similar to those he knew. Though she couldn’t tell him where the names came from, she knew them all, it seemed, knew more than he did, and she had stories for some, taught her by the marabout.

  By the low light of a candle Henri marked their position on his map. He sketched the rough features of the terrain they had passed that day, and showed her where he had marked Bou Saada and the Grand Erg. She took his pencil and with a hand that was swift and sure drew more for him on the paper, much more, adding Timimoun and Arak and beyond it the great Tassili Hoggar, the high volcanic massif in the deep desert that was her home. She sketched in riverbeds and mountains and prominent features of the land, hesitating only slightly as she gauged where to place them. She worked quickly and confidently, and even without a sextant, Henri had no doubt that her markings would be reasonably close. She knew her subject well.

  He was surprised at the extent of the mountains she drew. “I had thought there would be more… emptiness,” he said. “More sand.”

  “There is plenty enough of that,” she laughed, “but there is much more to this land than the dunes. It is a wondrous place, as rich with life as it is with death. If you have a bigger paper,” she promised, “I will make a better map.”

  The moon rose huge over the plain before them. They looked at it through field glasses and gazed at the majesty of the view. The campfire flickered in the distance. The cold made them shiver and Henri pulled a blanket over
their shoulders, and produced a flask of wine. She coughed when she drank but it warmed her, and they sat there for hours, chattering and laughing. When it was very late they reluctantly came down off the dune and said good night.

  Tamrit burned inside as he watched them return. His eyes had never left them. He pretended to be asleep as she passed his mat.

  Later Serena lay awake on her mat and stared at the moon, dazzling white overhead. Her mind was on fire with the Frenchman. She felt the sweet stirrings of something beginning and reveled in it, for beginnings were such exquisite times. She struggled with her feelings, unsure and a little uncomfortable, knowing that everything was wrong with a relationship between cultures, yet not caring, not really caring at all. She only knew that she loved his company, that she had never felt so warm and happy beside another man. These are the foolish thoughts of a stupid girl, she told herself. How can I think these things? I have known him for less than a day. But such a wonderful day. She would let it develop as it would, in its own way.

  Suddenly the soft strains of a flute broke the night silence of the camp, and for the thousandth time since the balloon had fallen a smile came to her face. She hadn’t seen him with an instrument, but she knew at once it was he who played, and not Gascon. There was something in the melody that was the Frenchman, something gentle and sweet and warm. It was the custom of the Tuareg for a man to compose poems for the woman he loved in the ceremony of ahal, to demonstrate his feelings for her with a gift of verse. She knew that Henri would not know this, but she chose to make his music her private ahal. She let herself imagine that he was playing just for her, that they were alone under the moon and the stars, and she closed her eyes and lost herself in its magic. It was enchanting to her, that this man from Europe could know so well how to capture this place with music. It was a desert song he played, a song that brought to mind the lovely chant of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer from his minaret, a song of mystery that sang of the flowing of the sands and the passage of time and the beautiful slow steady rhythm of life.