Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  Below them the two policemen stood helplessly and watched from their position outside the fence as the balloon was swallowed by the night. The guard had rushed toward them on hearing the shots. “Are you crazy?” he shouted. “What are you doing? That’s the Count deVries in that balloon! There is coal gas in it! If you hit it it will explode! From here it will kill us all!” The sergeant thought about it, about bringing them down that way, but he’d seen a boy inside the basket.

  “To the calèche,” he snapped to the one with the rifle. “We’ll follow them as long as we can. Maybe the balloon won’t make it outside of the city.” He didn’t believe it, but he had to try. They raced for their carriage.

  Moussa was panicked. Things were happening too fast. He didn’t know what to do. “Maman!” he shrieked, his eyes moving between his wounded father below and the massive balloon above. The world was falling away quickly and he was terrified of the height and the night and the unknown before him. “Maman, I don’t know what to do! I don’t know how to fly this! We’re in the sky! What should I do?”

  But Serena wasn’t listening. She held her husband’s head in her lap and rocked back and forth, gently rocked, stroking his hair, kissing his forehead, squeezing his hand, whispering, her warm tears falling onto his face. She knew there was but a moment left. It was with a balloon that their love had begun. It was in a balloon that it was ending. His breathing became shallow and she felt him slipping away. She cried out desperately but couldn’t stop it. There was nothing she could do.

  His eyes closed once again and he was gone.

  Moussa heard his mother’s wail and from the terrible sound knew his father was dead. His heart froze. It was too much to comprehend. He looked out over the edge of the basket and forced himself to deal with their situation. His mother wasn’t responding. He had to do it himself. He could see the rooftops below, and lights twinkling in a few of the houses, but he couldn’t make anything out clearly. He had no idea where they were, or in what direction they were heading. He tried to calm himself, to think. They had to keep altitude, and he saw that they were already beginning to lose a little, getting a little closer to the ground. He reached over the side and with the pocketknife Paul had given him cut free one of the sandbags hanging around the outside. The bag dropped away, and immediately he felt the difference.

  The snow fell more heavily now. He thought it would be wise to get above it, in case the snow might damage the envelope or make it too heavy. He cut loose a few other bags, and the balloon soared upward. The clouds grew thicker, and soon there was no sight of the city or anything else. They were wrapped in a shroud of silence and the clouds.

  Moussa pulled in the ropes hanging free and tied them to the side of the basket. After a while the balloon broke through the blanket of snow clouds and rose above them. The sky above was cold and black and full of stars, the brightest stars he had ever seen. The clouds stretched away forever like a carpet at his feet. It looked as if he could climb out of the balloon and just walk across them. It was beautiful. He cut away more ballast. He couldn’t feel any wind, but from the clouds he could tell they were moving. He thought it was to the south, but he couldn’t be sure. It didn’t matter. There was nothing else to be done.

  He sat down in the basket, next to his mother and the body of his father. He drew a blanket over them all, and his mother put her arm around him. Moussa gently touched his father’s face, and it was only then that he knew for himself, for certain, that it was true. Softly he began to cry.

  Far below them, too distant now to hear, the bells in the towers of Notre Dame rang in the joyous day of Christmas, the ninety-seventh day of the siege. The archbishop of Paris lifted the chalice of the blood of Christ to the congregation. Outside the ramparts, French troops froze to death in their trenches. At Versailles, Bismarck stood before a warm fire and lifted a toast to Wilhelm, the next emperor of all Germany, the master of Europe.

  The next morning the balloon came to earth in south-central France, in the province of Auvergne. They landed hard in a field, and would have been hurt but for the soft blanket of snow that cushioned their landing. No one saw them come down. Mother and son buried Henri as best they could, under rocks they hauled with frozen hands from across the fields. When they were done they stood holding each other, staring at the mound of stone. Then they set off through the storm to find a road.

  Through the long night in the air, the Countess deVries had cradled her husband’s head in her lap and thought about what to do without him. She didn’t want to go on. There was only blackness without him, only desolation and despair. But there was Moussa to think of.

  She settled on the only thing she knew to do. She would take her son away. They would make their way to Marseilles and find a boat to Algiers. From there they would cross Algeria to the Sahara.

  In the Sahara they would find the Tuareg.

  She was taking him home.

  PART 2

  THE SAHARA

  1876

  CHAPTER 16

  Something moved. Something was there.

  The great gangly bird stopped grazing and raised its head. Keen brown eyes watched patiently for a sign, a movement. The bird stood quietly in the tall grass of the wadi, a riverbed in the Hoggar, the high desert mountains of the Sahara. The ostrich was a three-year-old male, more than two and a half meters tall. A light wind rippled the grass but there was no scent.

  The bird was near exhaustion. For three days it had eluded its hunters, through long awful hours of panic and flight interspersed with calm, as the hunters first found, then lost the track, then picked it up again, and the deadly game wore on. The effort was telling now. Even at rest its heart was pounding, its breath labored, its reserves of strength nearly gone.

  The whole flock desperately needed rest. The little ones would falter first, then the adults. At the beginning there had been forty of them. Now only nine or ten others grazed nearby, their long necks appearing through the grass, bobbing up and down as they watched and grazed and wandered along the trickle of water that still ran down the sandy wadi in the wake of the storm. The rest had been caught or gotten separated during the chase, which had led hunter and hunted across the wild volcanic plateau that was torn with violent cliffs and veined with sharp valleys and strewn throughout with boulders. The plateau was a giant maze of natural tunnels and caves and passageways. It held a thousand hiding places to help the birds, but a thousand more traps and dead ends to help the hunters. Survival depended on taking the right turns.

  Across the rocks, Moussa raised his head carefully. He wore the blue veil of a nobleman of the Ihaggaren, the master race of Tuareg who ruled the Hoggar. The blue men, the Tuareg were called, for the deep indigo dyes used in their robes and in the sheshes that covered their heads, and that often rubbed off and colored their skin. The soft cloth was wound round his head like a helmet, high and wide on top, then wrapped round and round his head and neck, covering everything except for a narrow slit like a visor, through which only his eyes could be seen. He wore his takatkat, the flowing blue summer robes of light cotton that covered everything except his hands and feet, and beneath it takirbai, broad trousers. He carried only a lance and club for weapons; a rope; a spyglass that had belonged to his father; and a guerba, a goatskin water bag, slung across his shoulder.

  He maneuvered carefully downwind from the birds. He chose his steps cautiously, making his way through the boulders that lay upon the valley floor between him and the birds. It was the height of the Saharan summer, and the rocks were blazing hot, blistering the skin of anyone who touched them.

  He, too, was near exhaustion. His body ached with fatigue. He had eaten no food since the previous morning, when he had permitted himself a handful of dates. His body had grown lean and hard in the desert. He was accustomed to infrequent meals, but now he wished he’d taken more. His stomach growled with neglect, and his muscles burned with the effects of extended effort. But this was his first hunt, and he pushed the discomfort from
his mind.

  The hunt was a timeless ritual between old adversaries, the blue men and the big birds. It had been five summers since there had been a chase with so many in the flocks. During two of the summers there had been drought and the birds had not come at all. For three summers after that there had been war in the desert, and no time for the chase. But then one afternoon they looked up from camp and saw the dark storm over distant mountains, and their blood ran fast and the Tuareg sprang to action.

  Essamen! Lightning! Like magic, a great siren that beckoned man and bird alike. When the rare summer storms came, the skies grew angry and black and crackled with fire. The birds would see it and some instinct drew them together in pairs and the pairs joined with others until there were flocks and the flocks grew large, and then they would travel vast distances straight toward the fire in the sky, knowing that the lightning meant water to drink, and that water meant flowers and grasses to eat.

  From other parts of the desert, the hunters would come as well, teams of them on fast, light camels who would alternate in relays as they wore their quarry down. The meat was a great delicacy, but it was the birds’ skins and feathers that were much prized. They would be traded with the caravans that came from the southlands on the way north to the sea, where it was said they were shipped to distant lands to become hats and boots. No one believed the stories, even when Moussa told them of the glorious chapeaux seen on the Champs-Élysées. What was not in doubt was that a good hunt meant great wealth for the tribe and honor to the hunters, and often laughter to those who managed to witness part of the chase. It was never certain who looked sillier, the hunters or the hunted.

  Moussa found a resting place and stopped. He watched the ostriches and pondered what to do. He had become separated from the others late the previous afternoon. First his camel had died. No, that wasn’t right, he’d killed it with his empty-headedness. And then Mahdi had abandoned him, leaving him alone and on foot. Moussa flushed with embarrassment and anger when he thought of it: first his own stupidity, then his cousin’s treachery. Moussa had been riding his prized camel, Taba, with a group of ten other men. They were moving in a loosely spaced line to flush the ostriches toward another group of Tuareg who waited near Temassint. The ostriches would see them and run away, only to be turned again by the other group, the lines of hunters moving closer together as the birds ran themselves to exhaustion and could be caught.

  Taba was a fawn-colored Tibesti camel, a present from the amenokal on the day Moussa had become a man and donned his veil. It was a superb animal, agile and cooperative and fast, surefooted on the rocks, and magnificent through the hunt. Together he and Taba had goaded six of the birds into a blind alley. Moussa was riding alone, consumed with excitement and the thrill of closing in on the quarry. He hadn’t called for help, hadn’t stopped to think. In his eagerness he had ridden up fast behind them, until they ran out of room. They turned around to flee, and found the tall rider,and camel blocking the way.

  “Be careful,” the amenokal had warned him with typical brevity. It was Moussa’s first hunt, and his only lesson. “They kick.” Moussa knew the amenokal’s way with words, and to look for hidden meaning, to think beyond the obvious. But this time he hadn’t thought carefully enough.

  Moussa had slowed and was gently moving toward the biggest bird, a giant black-and-white male that stood as tall as the camel, when he made the very mistake the amenokal had warned him about. Overeager, he got too close. The birds were tiring, but still had plenty of fire. In a panic the giant one lashed out with its powerful leg. Taba took the full force of the blow on the right foreleg. The bone snapped sharply. The camel bellowed and bucked and crashed to the ground, nearly crushing Moussa, who was just thrown free. Before he’d had a chance to get to his feet the ostriches had rushed past him, a little one in the rear running right over him in its mad flight and knocking him unceremoniously to the ground. Moussa grunted at the impact and fell hard on his back. The fall jarred him all the way through to his teeth. At length he picked himself up again, shaking his head to clear it.

  Taba’s shrieks and sobs echoed off the big rocks and filled Moussa with anguish. As he brushed himself off he heard laughter. Without looking he knew who it was, and his heart sank. Mahdi had a knack for being there when Moussa did something stupid, and was never shy about rubbing it in. He had appeared just in time to see the disaster. He had come down a steep slope on one side of the rocks, too far out of the way to stop the fleeing birds, who by then were disappearing gracefully back down the wadi, bobbing and weaving, kicking up sand and splashing in the water as they went. They pranced like feather dusters on legs, stretching their stubby wings to help them in their flight. They made barely a sound as they disappeared.

  Mahdi watched them go, then paused to savor Moussa’s situation before moving on. Mahdi despised his cousin, despised the way his own father, the amenokal, treated Moussa, despised the way he showered him with attention and gifts. The amenokal never treated Mahdi that way. Toward his own son the amenokal was harsh and unforgiving. Mahdi’s eyes had burned with jealousy since the day his aunt Serena had brought the soft child from France to live among them. Mahdi could beat him when they fought, for he was two years older and much larger, but he took no real pleasure in such victories. All he really wanted was for Moussa to tire of the hard life of the desert and return to France. Each passing year made that less likely, until all Mahdi could do was make each day as difficult as possible for the intruder.

  “Well done, Cousin,” he said derisively from his mehari. “Another grand coup for the noble ikufar.” He used the term for foreign infidel; it was his usual insult. Moussa felt his contempt, and at that moment knew it was deserved.

  “I almost had him,” he said lamely.

  Mahdi whooped at that. “He almost had you, w’allahi! Brilliant trade. A mehari for a wisp of dust.” He turned to ride after the birds.

  “Ekkel!” Moussa called. “Wait! I need another mehari! Leave one for me!” Mahdi was leading a dozen spare mounts. He was going to position them on the far side of the hunt, where they would be fresh and ready when needed. He could easily spare one, but had no intention of making it easy on Moussa.

  “And let you kill it with more stupidity? Do I look so foolish? If you will have another, walk back to camp and let the women and children see the noble Son of the Desert on foot. It is best to get moving, Cousin. It is hard to catch enough ostriches to make up for a dead camel when one is walking.” He snickered and turned to ride off.

  Moussa watched him disappear and kicked at the sand. He was angry with Mahdi, but angrier at himself. The amenokal would be disgusted. Oh yes, he would maintain an even gaze and his voice would have no sharp edges. He would not be so impolite as to directly chastise him. But Moussa would know the disappointment in his uncle’s heart and feel the failure worse in his own. In the desert, camels were life. Camels were wealth. Camels were everything. The others would talk about it, and laugh and shake their heads, and tell jokes at his expense. Except for Mahdi’s, their laughter would be good-natured, but that wouldn’t diminish his failure.

  Moussa felt wretched and overwhelmed. He had donned the veil only a month before, when he turned sixteen. The veil! So long awaited, the tagelmust, so eagerly anticipated, that enchanted moment when the bare face of the boy disappeared forever behind the blue veil of the man. The cloth had come from the southlands, eight meters of it, a gift from his mother. From seventy leagues around had come the people of the Hoggar: other nobles, and vassals of the Dag Rali, the women and the children, the serfs and slaves and smiths, the marabouts and the chiefs, all there to witness the ceremony, that grand moment when their lives paused and they grew hushed, the moment when he felt at the center of the universe; and from that point on the people watching could only guess at the proud grin blossoming beneath the folds of cotton.

  He stood in the sun that day and his great uncle, the holy marabout Moulay Hassan, invoked the blessings of God and with a flourish re
corded his name in the register of the Kel Rela, proclaiming him a man before all the world. Before the veil he had received the takouba, the heavy killing sword that marked his rank. Swords were handed down through generations, from father to son. The best blades were enchanted, endowed with the strength of the men who owned them, possessed of the best properties of chivalry and honor and bravery that made their owners great. Stories of the battles they’d seen and the virtues they’d defended and the raids they’d repulsed were passed along with them.

  As Moussa’s closest surviving male relative, the amenokal took the responsibility of finding him the blade. He had dispatched Keradji, the one-eyed inad who was the best smith of the Hoggar Mountains, to Murzuk, where a merchant had parted with the blade reluctantly, for it was hard and sharp, made of the finest gleaming steel of Seville. Keradji had fitted the blade to a hilt that was shaped like a cross. He inlaid the handle with jasper, and polished it until it was as bright as the sun itself, and it slid effortlessly into the tooled leather scabbard Moussa slung around his neck. It was a fine work. Moussa pointed out that the handle was too big for his grip, but Keradji squinted at it and then turned Moussa’s hand palm up. “You must be patient,” he said. “It is like the paw of a puppy. You’ll grow into it.” Moussa swung it for hours in practice until his muscles screamed, back and forth and over his head until he knew the sound it made as it swished through the air and could behead a willik weed at will. After the sword he had received new clothing and stone bands for both arms that would bring him strength and protect him from the swords of others. Afterward had come the finest prize of all, Taba. It was a heady time, the tides of masculine change swirling through his life, and he had reveled in it. For a month he had walked on air, practicing his swagger, strutting and standing tall and mixing with the men and their camels instead of the children and their goats. In a subtle way he thought people treated him differently. Nothing extreme, he thought, simply a new measure of deference and respect.