Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  And then the music stopped, and she slept.

  Much later, just before dawn, Tamrit set his cover aside and rolled silently off his mat. He listened for a moment to be certain no one stirred in the camp. A wind had picked up. It would help cover the sounds of his movement. Carrying the Shamba knife in one hand, he began his stealthy crawl toward the sleeping Frenchmen. The killers would leave no trail, for the ground was hard and rocky. There would be no way for anyone to determine from whence they had come, or where they had fled. There was nothing he could do about the moon, but he would be operating away from the rest of the sleeping Tuareg, and knew that if the Frenchmen saw anything it would not matter, for it would be the last thing they saw. He would kill deVries first, then the other one, and leave the knife and crawl back to his mat. After dawn someone else would find the bodies and raise the alarm. It would be someone else who would accuse the Shamba. Tamrit would be outraged along with the rest of them, and it would be done.

  He moved quickly through the silent forms and baggage of the camp. No one moved and the camels were quiet. He stayed in a crouch as he approached the Frenchmen, his feet sure and steady. He had done this a score of times before, in caravans and camps, to the Shamba and his other enemies. It was pathetically easy at this time of night, when men slept most soundly. The blade was sharp and would slice cleanly through the flesh.

  He arrived at the sleeping form of Henri, which was covered by a cloak. Tamrit steeled himself. He reached forward to draw back the edge of the cloak.

  The voice hissed low and deadly and stunned him like a blow.

  “If your word is so easily abandoned, Tamrit, do not abandon mine.” The dark form of Serena stood behind him. She held one of the lances and was poised to use it. “By all that is holy to you, touch him and I will run you through.” The hard steel tip of the lance prodded the folds of cloth at the nape of his neck. At the same instant she spoke, Gascon’s blanket moved. His pistol was cocked and pointed squarely at Tamrit’s forehead. He had watched them both coming. He had no idea what the woman had said and briefly wondered if he would have to shoot her too, but when he saw the position of her lance he understood.

  Then Henri stirred and startled them all. He was not under the cloak on the mat, but had been sitting with his back to the basket of the balloon. More than an hour earlier, unable to sleep and unheard by anyone, he had moved to the packs to sit and watch the sky. He was awake and held a knife.

  The magnitude of his defeat shook Tamrit to the quick of his being. He had been completely humiliated by two ikufar and the woman he loved. He made no pretense of innocence. Dishonored and alone, he left the camp before dawn. He took one camel and his simple possessions and headed off across the plain. He rode without a destination, his mind in turmoil. When the sun came up he dismounted from his camel. He prepared himself in the ritual manner, placing his prayer mat toward Mecca and using sand rather than water for his ablutions. His voice rang strong through the emptiness as he recited his litany of prayers. When he had finished he added a silent vow of holy vengeance upon the infidel Henri deVries, upon his life and his descendants and his possessions. He swore it in the name of Allah, and swore it for his sons unborn. Afterward he scooped out some sand to make a hollow and with dried vegetation made a small fire. He brewed a pot of tea and ate a handful of dates. Once again he mounted his camel and began to ride. It would be more than twenty years before anyone in the deVries family would see him again.

  * * *

  The next night Serena took Henri by the hand and led him out of camp. No words passed between them, for words were not needed. They climbed to the top of another dune, this time where no one could watch. Henri threw down his cloak and made a soft bed in the sand and they made love under the stars, oblivious to the cold, touching, exploring, clinging to each other, laughing and crying quiet tears of joy. They stayed awake all through a night of whispers and promises and shared hopes and watched the sun come up over the gravelly plain.

  They moved through the rest of the journey to Arak as if through a dream, where all the edges were soft and everything felt both real and unreal and fragile and desperately wonderful. They lost all sense of time, except to notice that it seemed to pass too quickly. One day stretched into the next. They slept little, instead sharing every moment, fighting sleep for fear of missing even one second of it, then holding each other tightly when at last sleep came to take them. Neither of them had ever known anything like it, ever felt so consumed by the fire and ecstasy of love first discovered. They shut out the Tuareg and Gascon and moved through the days in a private place that only the two of them shared, eating alone and riding together as they embarked on a slow passionate journey of discovery of each other’s minds and bodies. They played games in the sand, tumbling down the sides of dunes. He taught her how the French danced, and she taught him how the Tuareg danced, and they mixed it together and collapsed in hilarity at the end of it all, and made love again.

  Their approach to Arak was announced by a sudden riot of color and wild geological turbulence. Serena pointed out highlights of a landscape that looked to Henri as though Dante must have made it. It was the gateway to the Hoggar, a massive basalt plateau of the high desert that was the fortress of the Tuareg during those times of the year when the rains and forage were good. There were sudden steep walls and massive boulders strewn upon the sands, and Henri was struck dumb by the beauty, by the oddity of it all. Spectacular cathedrals of rock stood before him, towering great monuments of violet and mauve with spires and parapets, and he moved before them in a silence approaching reverence, as he might have moved through a church. For two days more they passed through valleys and across plateaus, until they stood in the camp of the Hoggar Tuareg.

  * * *

  The amenokal of the Hoggar Tuareg, Sultan El Hadj Akhmed, lord of the Tuareg tribes, master of the central Sahara, sat back on his haunches in his red-roofed tent and thundered at his sister. He was a man accustomed to having his way. His commands affected the lives of entire villages and tribes. His whims altered trade and commerce in vast regions of the desert. Yet now he sat nearly impotent before his sister, who would not listen. He had been making preparations to break camp, to travel with a salt caravan over the southern route to Bilma, when Serena had suddenly announced her intention of marrying a foreigner who had fallen from the sky in a balloon. She would leave everything – her family, her people, her way of life, and return with him to France.

  Just like that.

  And in all of this she had not asked. She had decreed. At his side sat the marabout Moulay Hassan, a revered and wise man who was also his uncle. Across from them sat Serena, and next to her sat the source of the amenokal’s present troubles, Count Henri deVries.

  The count sat quietly; there was nothing Henri could say. He knew only that the discussion was heated, and he could guess the content easily enough without knowing the words or seeing any face but hers. She was tough, he thought, and she was standing up to, them, taking a terrible verbal beating, but giving no quarter, setting her jaw and leaning forward, sometimes clenching her fists, shrugging, waving, shaking her head. He watched her with admiration. She is a wondrous woman.

  They had been arguing for the better part of the afternoon, and for the amenokal it was not going well. He had tried everything: persuasion, bribery, orders, threats. Nothing had worked. He had begun at the logical place, by simply forbidding it.

  “You cannot!” she retorted.

  “I can and will! I will have him killed and take you prisoner!”

  “Raise a hand against him and I will cut it off! If you lock me up it will have to be until the day I die, for I will have no other man but this one.” She looked at Henri and spoke with fierce conviction. “Accept my word, Brother, for I have given it.”

  The amenokal sighed. Had Serena been able to see behind the blue cloth, she would have seen a face that was weary and discouraged. He was often certain that the Arabs knew better when it came to the treatment o
f women, w’allahi! When a man decided his daughter or sister was to be married, or not married, that was that. The discussion was limited, simple, the transaction finished. Life lived in such a manner was manageable, predictable, serene. A Tuareg woman could be more contrary than a camel, and Serena could be more stubborn than any ten of them together.

  The amenokal regarded Henri. He looks strong enough. His face shows character. But he is ikufar. He is wrong for Serena. He is trouble. And if they marry I shall be rich, but I shall never have an heir. It was true that the Frenchman had pledged a dowry unheard-of in his memory. Six hundred camels, he had promised. Six hundred! A vast fortune! Henri had started with four hundred, and at that stupendous amount the amenokal had gasped. Assuming the gasp meant his initial offer was too low, Henri immediately raised it. Then he had presented the amenokal with a pouch of gold and silver coins and a rifle with ammunition. The delighted amenokal had fired it with stunning inaccuracy, missing a huge boulder at a hundred paces, while everyone smiled and pretended he’d shot well.

  But more than dowry, more than any wealth the Frenchman might bestow, the amenokal wanted an heir, someone to command the tobol of the Tuareg after he died, to preserve their standing as princes of the desert, to retain their traditions. It was on this matter that he could tolerate no union between them.

  “You could marry so well! Men of a hundred families would give all to have you!”

  “Hah! They care nothing for me. They would marry me to father the next amenokal. Nothing more.”

  “You are both wrong and too harsh, Sister. You are a woman to treasure. Yet that is not the point. This man is of a different world. He looks solid enough. But it is neither he who concerns me, nor your contentment. It is your unborn son.”

  “There is no son!”

  “There will be.”

  “When there is we will discuss it.”

  “Then it will be too late, when what is done is done. Now is the time to consider his life. There will be a son, Serena. And he will not be of us, and he will not be of the French.”

  “He will be of me. He will be of his father.”

  “It is not enough. A man needs a tribe. A man needs to belong. Bring a son into the world who does not belong, and you condemn him to a life in between. That is a life no mother should choose for her son. That is a life no child should be forced to live. It is a cruel thing to do, Serena. A selfish thing.”

  She lowered her head when he said that, so that he could not see her eyes. He had found that place inside her that was the most vulnerable, through an appeal to her sense of duty to children yet unborn. Was she being selfish? Which mattered more, that she follow the longings of her heart, or that she provide the amenokal with a perfect heir? There was no guarantee that her own son would even be the heir. While succession to leadership of the Tuareg was matrilineal, there were others who might succeed El Hadj Akhmed first, including her own cousin Ahitagel, the son of Serena’s mother’s sister. But fate might someday make her son that leader. To become amenokal was a desperately difficult path for any boy or man to follow, all the more so if his veins carried the mixed blood of her union with Henri. She knew all that, yet there was no argument within her strong enough to overcome her feelings for the man sitting beside her. She knew what she must do.

  “If it is the child’s destiny to be amenokal, if he is the right one, then his blood will not matter. And if he is not the right one, pure blood will not help.”

  “Speak sense to her,” the amenokal said to the marabout, raising his hands in supplication. Moulay Hassan had been Serena’s teacher, her guide as she grew from infant to girl to woman. He had been her surrogate father since her own had died. He was as close to her, as influential with her as anyone among the Tuareg. She had been one of his prized students, a quick study whose questions soon outpaced his answers, whose mastery of Tuareg lore and the sciences outstripped his own. It was because he knew her well that he knew it was useless. He had seen her set her mind, as he had seen her do so many times before. She would not be deterred. But to please the amenokal he tried mightily, and failed miserably. Serena was master of her will.

  “I will miss you, child,” said the marabout when he finally gave in. His eyes misted. “But promise to bring the boy back to know his own one day. Bring him back to know his great-uncle.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The holy man of the Sahara took the union of Henri and Serena with far more equanimity than a holy man of France, Monseigneur Murat, the bishop of Boulogne-Billancourt.

  At the time of his father’s death, Marius Murat was too young to understand the events that led up to it. His father was a merchant of modest means. The family had a little money and a littler house. One day a visitor came, an arrogant man with a top hat and silk cloak and shiny black boots. He arrived in a closed calèche that had a driver and was drawn by two matched chestnut horses. Carriages like that did not come often to their quartier. Murat stared at the beautiful horses and the rich carriage in wonder. Then he heard his mother crying hysterically.

  The stranger brought terrible news. Murat had vivid memories of huddling in the corner of a room with his mother and his sister while the man and Murat’s father argued. The details were hazy: investments and property and bad luck. His father had gambled on a land deal. Not only was the original investment lost but the house and all the family’s possessions as well. Men would be coming to take everything – the meager furnishings, the wardrobes and dressers and the oak table in the kitchen and the carved maple washstand that had belonged to Murat’s grandmother. Murat flushed with shame as his father dropped to his knees to plead, and the stranger laughed with scorn. His father clenched his fists and shouted things about frauds and swindlers. There was violent pushing and the man threw Murat’s sobbing father to the floor. Murat saw a look on the stranger’s face that he never forgot. It was not a look of pity or anger. It was a look of smug superiority.

  That night Murat’s father went out and was gone a long time. When he came back he was raging drunk and carried a pistol in his belt. His eyes were blood-red and wild. Murat felt his spittle as he talked and swore and whimpered his rage. His anger built, until Murat and his mother and sister had to cower again in the corner. They listened in terror while his father waved the pistol and said frightful things – that he ought to kill the man, kill himself, kill them all. Sobbing, he took another drink of rum. He wiped his defeated eyes and wandered into the kitchen. A terrible loud bang shook the house and left a smell of powder and blood. Long minutes passed when the only sound was a haunted noise coming from Murat’s mother. The boy was the first to brave the kitchen, to see what his father had done.

  The stranger returned even before the funeral, accompanied by the prefect of police. There were other officials, sullen-looking men with rifles and mustaches and papers with wax seals. The family was allowed to gather its clothing, nothing more, and leave.

  At the time, Murat understood nothing of what had happened. As he grew from child to boy, from boy to youth, he began to distill the lessons he had learned. He drew them from memories of his father. He drew them from his passage through the slums of Paris, where the rats lived better than the cats and the cats lived better than the children, and where he had to stand aside while nobles passed in their carriages and splashed him with the filth of the streets. He drew them from his job carrying heavy bales of cloth and sweeping the floors of the little hat factory where he worked twenty hours a day for thirty sous. He drew them from cynical adolescence.

  It is better to be the man evicting than the man vanquished.

  It is better to wear the black boot of power than to die beneath it.

  Only fools have no money and live like dogs.

  Murat did not grieve for his father, for he was a boy who did not feel things as others did. There had always been an empty place inside him. He puzzled at other children who cried when possessions were broken or lost, or who disintegrated in tears when classmates called them names. Murat cou
ld call the names, or be called them, and it didn’t matter. Pets died; Murat was indifferent. He did not make friends easily. His appearance was forbidding. His eyes were penetrating, wolf gray and cold. His manner was aloof. When he did make friends they soon tired of his brooding and sullen nature, of his authoritarianism, and they left him. Murat didn’t care. He didn’t need friends, not their approval or their confidence. Intimacy was trivial, unimportant. He found his own company entirely satisfying and kept to himself.

  Time strengthened his resolve that no man would ever come and take away his possessions. He would not live as his father had lived, in a futile pursuit of meager means, all acquired under rules made by someone else. I will not be my father, he told himself. I will have influence and wealth. He swore it to himself at every meal, when his stomach growled in hunger before his near-empty plate. He swore it to himself at night when he went to sleep. He swore it to himself every morning when he woke up. He swore it to himself when his mother made him sit next to her while she cried; and he despised her for her sniveling and her weakness. He hated having to sit that way, hated having to pretend to comfort her. He stared off into some distant place while she cried herself to sleep.

  I will not be my father. I will be my father’s master.

  Murat had a coldly practical personality, given to detailed planning of everything he did. He looked for ways to make his resolution a reality. There were precious few means open to him. In most areas of French life, merit was of far less importance than birth. As he was not noble born, whatever he might achieve would have to come from his own effort. Commerce was not practical. He was quite clever enough for it but lacked capital, and disdained a life fighting for scraps somewhere in a pathetic netherworld between poverty and success as his father had done. The military might bring him power but no wealth, and even the power would be limited without a birthright with which to secure the highest ranks. Besides, he had no desire to risk his life in the pursuit of his goals. The trades? Only bare sustenance. The professions were just a shade better, and quite costly to study. He had no talent for the arts, in which no money or power was to be found anyway. He racked his brains and bided his time in the wretched apartment and pushed his broom in the factory.