The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  ‘It’s in Africa,’ Eve said. ‘In the south-west of Morocco, to be exact, a day away from the Sahara.’

  I stared at her, then back at the photo. A crawling sensation started halfway down my spine and worked its way up to the nape of my neck until my whole head was buzzing. ‘Morocco?’ I echoed, and it felt as if my voice were coming from a different continent. Morocco, land of gold and spices; and maybe the starting point for the ‘story’ mentioned in my father’s letter. The idea was intriguing, intoxicating, and suddenly I was engulfed by a wave of positivity, sweeping away all doubts.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said, taking us both by surprise. ‘Let’s go there, Eve. Take a holiday, go climbing, maybe even drive into the desert. I can take the amulet with me; we can do a bit of detective work, find out something about it …’

  ‘What’s got into you?’ Eve was round-eyed.

  ‘I don’t know.’ My grin started to fade. I felt confused, hijacked by the force of an idea that did not even feel like my own. ‘I don’t even know if I want to find out more about the amulet. And I’ve never had the slightest interest in going to Africa.’ A headache was starting to insinuate itself into the bones in my head: I felt as if opposing forces were trying to pull my skull apart.

  On the way back I suffered a full-blown migraine attack, complete with little sunbursts and flashes of internal neon lightning. I managed to get home, somehow, as if the car were on auto-pilot. In the kitchen I grabbed a glass of water and turned to walk with it to the bathroom, where I would find the Migraleve. But there, in the middle of the table, was the box, just as I had left it. For some reason I found myself putting down the glass and picking up the pouch. The amulet within slid out on to my hand and nestled there comfortably. There was something reassuring about the solidity of it, the way it weighed in my hand, as if it had been made to fit there.

  Suddenly, I had put it on. It lay heavy against my ribs, but not unpleasantly so. When I blinked, it was as if the neon sunbursts had become bright silver gazelles flickering past my eyelids. I went to find the Migraleve.

  In the bathroom, instead of hitting the main light-switch, I activated the one that controlled the lights around the mirror. The brightness of the bulbs illumined my face and cast the background into shadow. I had never really appreciated the odd effect of this until now. I looked as if I had been cut out and pasted in somewhere else, on to a different background. My face and eyes glowed above the navy T-shirt I had on; and so did the amulet. Together, we were super-real, and the rest of the world was dark and indistinct.

  The jewellery I usually wore was barely noticeable, never showy. I had never owned anything that made such an emphatic statement as the amulet. But it suited me. I could see that now. There was something powerful about its solid lines, something uncompromising and individual about its unashamed ethnicity. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was rather pleased with my reflection. I looked like a different me: striking and confident.

  I had inherited a darker than usual colouring from my French mother. Amongst the pale, golden-rose girls at the private school to which I was subjected between the ages of eleven and sixteen, those most sensitive of formative years, I had always felt myself to be the odd one out. They teased me for my differences, made fun of the shading of soft, dark down on my arms, the wiry blackness of my hair. I hated them for it; and soon began to hate myself. My breasts grew in more quickly than those of my peers, as did the dark triangle of hair that began to sprout between my legs. I took to undressing in the corner of the changing rooms, facing away from everyone else. I was the last out on the hockey pitch, the last to take a shower. I began to starve myself, taking pleasure in seeing my curves diminish. No one noticed, not for a long time; no one but Eve, and she thought thinness was a fashion statement rather than a problem. Then one day in the kitchen I turned around, aware of scrutiny, to find my father watching me.

  ‘You’ve lost weight.’

  I nodded, non-committal. I was thirteen and awkward: it wasn’t something I wanted to discuss.

  ‘You shouldn’t, you know. Skinny women –’ He made a face. ‘Not attractive. And you’re a beautiful young girl. Young woman. You shouldn’t be ashamed of the body God gave you.’

  I was startled by this. No one had ever called me ‘beautiful’, and it was certainly not how I thought of myself. But it was a word you couldn’t trust, coming from your own father. Don’t all parents think their children beautiful?

  I put my hand to my face now and watched as my reflection mirrored the action. Beautiful. I hadn’t thought of myself as even attractive, not for a long time, and yet the reflection told another story. In the mirror I glowed. It was the amulet that did it: it lit me with its own light.

  I don’t remember what I did with the rest of my day. Perhaps I watched TV; perhaps the migraine returned with a vengeance. I do remember that when I closed my eyes, flashes of another landscape flickered past my inner vision. At one point, with the clarity of hallucination, I saw the face of a girl with bold black eyes, who touched me on my arm as if she had something to tell me and I was not paying proper attention. She said my name, over and over and over.

  Except that it wasn’t my name she was saying. The word was foreign, unfamiliar; a syllable repeated into absurdity. I strained to hear better, and it was as if someone were speaking to me, telling me a story I couldn’t quite hear …

  5

  High above a mountain valley a girl sat sitting beneath a tree, gazing out over the landscape. She had a striking face, strong and distinctive, with a long, straight nose, bold black eyes and an uncompromising chin. No one ever called her pretty or likened her to delicate things – to moonlight or gossamer or the tiny, elegant songbirds that soared in the twilight air. The men who had attempted (unsuccessfully) to woo her spoke in their clumsy verses of wild camels and the great winds of the desert: elemental things over which they could hope to have little control. They strove, and failed, to find rhymes for her name (Mariata); and she repaid their attention with verses as abrasive as a sandstorm and they soon went away.

  She had been sitting very still for some time, staring into space as if concentrating hard on something just out of reach. The tree was on the crest of a rocky peak: on the horizon Mount Bazgan loomed as a shadowy presence, and it was from this mountain that the tribe amongst whom she now lived took its name. At this altitude the air was cool and scented with wild thyme and lavender, but even so you could sense the presence of the desert that lay beyond the hills.

  A long moment passed in concentration and then she bent to make a mark in the sandy soil at her feet. As she did so a fly settled on her cheek, and then suddenly there were hundreds, an iridescent cloud of them. She swatted them away.

  ‘God curse all flies!’ What use were the vile things, with their pointless meandering and their stupid noise? And so many of them, thousands, all over the food, the animals, the babies. Surely if God were a woman, there would be no flies in the world. She could almost hear her mother’s voice scolding her for that: Mariata, you cannot say such things: have some respect!

  But her mother was dead, and she was an outsider in the home of her father’s sister. She sighed, and dragged her mind back to the poem she was attempting to compose. An image hovered: she was just beginning to frame it in words when she heard someone approaching. Bones and dust! She shrank into the shadows. If she were disturbed, the poem would evaporate like spit on a hot stone. Sarid would pay her if it was good, and when the travelling smith came back she would be able to buy the earrings she had set her heart on. It was her first commission; if she did well, others would follow. It was demeaning to work for pay, but much to her disgust she depended on the charity of others now. Her Aunt Dassine and the other women of the Kel Bazgan treated her with no respect, and certainly not the respect someone of her lineage deserved. They even expected her to milk goats with her own hands – to bind them head to head and pull on their teats! It was disgusting. Everyone knew that such a
task was designed only for the hands of the iklan. But, despite the lack of deference they accorded her, Mariata was beginning to wish she hadn’t moved so far away from the rest of the tribe.

  She stilled her breathing. It was probably just a goatherd, but there were bandits in the region, who came by night to steal camels or goats, and recently stories had reached them of peasants murdered as they worked in the garden-farms, of brutal attacks on villages; and here she was, alone and a long way from the camp.

  A twig cracked under someone’s foot and a moment later a figure moved into her line of sight: a man, his veil lying loose upon his chest. By this detail she knew he was alone and that he did not expect to meet any other man. By the lazy position of the veil and the carriage of the man’s head, Mariata knew that this was no bandit but Rhossi, the nephew of the chieftain. Only Rhossi was so arrogant as to think himself immune from the spirits.

  The thought of him made her skin prickle. Rhossi had been watching her since her father left her with the Bazgan tribe: she had felt his gaze crawling over her whenever she crossed the encampment, when she danced with the other girls, practising steps for the wedding dances, when she sat beside the fire at night.

  He wasn’t looking at her now; he was looking at the ground, touching something with the toe of his sandal. Perhaps he would pass by. She watched him kneel and touch the dry grass she had crushed underfoot. Then he raised his head, turned towards her and smiled.

  ‘Are you well there in the shadows, Mariata ult Yemma?’

  She saw his eyes fix on her, gleaming. ‘Thanks be to God, I am well, Rhossi ag Bahedi,’ she said, bringing the edge of her headscarf across the lower part of her face. Over the top of it she glared at him, furious at being discovered.

  He grinned. His teeth were sharp, each set slightly apart from the next. The other girls said he was handsome and flashed their eyes at him; but Mariata thought he had a face like a jackal’s, narrow and sly, and a regard that was calculating and without warmth even when his mouth was smiling.

  ‘And is it peace with you, Mariata?’

  ‘It is peace with me. Is it peace with you?’

  ‘With God’s blessing, it is peace, insh’allah.’ He kissed the palms of his hands, brought them down his face and touched his chest, just above the heart, all the while maintaining eye contact. It was politeness and piety personified, but somehow he managed to make the gesture obscene.

  Mariata glared at him. ‘Are you a man, Rhossi ag Bahedi?’

  He bridled. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I was always taught that only little boys and rogues go unveiled. Which are you?’

  Rhossi grinned all the more widely. ‘I veil only in the presence of my betters, Tukalinden.’

  Tukalinden. ‘Little Princess’. It was what some of the people of the tribe – those who honoured her lineage – had taken to calling her, for her mother’s bloodline could be traced directly back to Tin Hinan, through her daughter Tamerwelt, known as The Hare; but in Rhossi’s jackal-mouth the words were heavy with sarcasm.

  Mariata got to her feet. Even grinding millet was preferable to passing time with the high chieftain’s nephew; even milking goats or collecting dung for the fire. She made to pass him, but he caught her by the shoulder. His fingers dug into her muscle, and it hurt.

  ‘And what is this in the sand, Mariata?’ He touched with a toe the symbols she had drawn there while trying to compose the poem; a word here and there to fix the images in her memory, amongst them yar, the circle crossed by a line, yagh, the closed cross, and yaz, the symbol for freedom, and for a man. He squinted at them, suspicious. ‘Have you been making sorcery?’ His grip tightened. ‘Are you casting spells?’

  Idiot. He could not read. And he all of twenty-six or seven summers! Almost an old man. If he were able to read, he would have seen Kiiar’s name and Sarid’s too – the couple to be married next month; he would have seen the ideograms for palm trees and wheat, for a bird and for water. Her wedding poem so far regaled Kiiar thus:

  Her skin resembles palm trees,

  A garden of wheat, a flowering acacia.

  Her braids are like the wings of a bird

  Her glistening hair gleams with butter:

  It mirrors the sun and the moon.

  Her eyes are as round as a ring in the water

  When it has been riven by a stone.

  But this was lost on Rhossi. He had spent all his time learning swordplay and how to make his camel prance to show off to the girls, and none at all with reading; to him the symbols were nothing more than arcane marks; he could not perceive them as language, he could not understand them at all, and that which he did not understand made him afraid. He would know that women used symbols like these for making charms, harmless things for the most part; but not always, so she would let him think that, and serve him right for his ignorance. Besides, if he thought she made magic, he might just leave her alone.

  ‘Perhaps I am.’

  She was gratified to see how Rhossi touched his amulet to ward away the evil eye, but then with a sudden flurry he stamped compulsively on the symbols.

  Mariata cried out and made a grab for him, but he pushed her away and she fell back against the tree. ‘I’ll have no sorcerers in my tribe!’ he cried, kicking sand over the symbols, obliterating each one.

  The poem was gone. Mariata knew well enough that she would never remember it perfectly. If she could use magic, she would do so now: she would send Rhossi to the demons, summon the Kel Asuf to consume his mind. She wanted to spit at him; she wanted to wound him, but she had seen how ferociously he beat his slaves. She got to her feet and furiously brushed the dust off her robe. ‘Your tribe?’

  ‘It will be soon enough.’ His uncle, Moussa ag Iba, had a painful growth in his gut and it was continuing to grow no matter what medicines he took for it. In the tradition of their people, the leadership would pass to the son of his sister.

  ‘Is that what you came all this way to tell me?’

  ‘No, of course not. How would I have known you were out here making spells?’

  ‘But you followed me, didn’t you?’

  Rhossi’s gaze narrowed, but he did not say anything. Instead, he caught one of her hands, gave it a twist and pressed it high between her shoulder-blades, lifting her close to him. His face was so close to hers it was a blur and his breath was hot on her face. She could almost feel the spirits flowing out of him, the fire and madness of them. Then his mouth was upon hers. She clamped her lips closed and began to fight in earnest to escape him, but all he did was laugh.

  ‘If I want to kiss you, I will kiss you. When I am amenokal all the people of the Aïr will answer to me. Women will beg me to take them as my third or fourth wife, even my slave! Do you think you are better than them?’ He held her at arm’s length, watching her. Then he leant in close, his face darkening. ‘Or perhaps you think you are better than me?’ He could read the answer to that in her eyes. They were fearless eyes, dark and bold. And in that moment she could see that he hated her as much as he desired her. ‘You need to learn that you are not!’ He caught her by the hair, winding a hand in its black, silky length. ‘You give yourself such airs, filling the children’s heads with your stupid tales, boasting about your family, holding the Kel Taitok above us as if we are just some filthy vassal tribe. It’s time you were taught a lesson –’ He thrust his free hand hard between her legs and began to drag her robe up.

  Mariata, crushed against him, was outraged. To touch a woman without her permission was taboo: forbidden, punishable by exile, or even death.

  Down in the valley a wild dog’s howl shivered in the air, followed by another and another and another. Something had disturbed them: normally they lay like dry, yellow carcases in untidy heaps in the shadows cast by the drystone terrace walls, while the harratin dug and weeded and watered on the other side. The howl hung in the valley like a vulture, buoyed up by the hot air currents; then faded away.

  But the disturbance had broken the moment for
Rhossi: his head came up; then he pushed Mariata away from him and walked fast to the crest of the hill, shading his eyes to see what had caught the dogs’ attention. Keeping a good distance between them, Mariata moved to where she could also stare down into the valley, but all there was to see was a figure making its way up the mountain path, a figure that eventually resolved itself into a woman in a black headscarf and a long, patched blue robe, her head bowed, her shoulders bent as if she bore a burden on her back. Mariata did not recognize her, but since she had only been with the Bazgan tribe for a few weeks, that was no surprise.

  But Rhossi was staring at the woman as if he had seen a ghost. Mariata watched as he adjusted his veil, wrapping it swiftly around his face until just a slit remained. His eyes glimmered through the slit. He looked scared.

  As if attracted by the movement, the woman looked up briefly and Mariata was surprised to see that she was old, her face a bag of wrinkles, her skin dark as acacia wood. She looked sad and exhausted; she looked as if she must have been driven by powerful forces to make this hard journey, up this steep, rocky path into another tribe’s territory. Was it hunger that drove her, Mariata wondered? Or did she bring news? Strangers usually had a tale to tell.

  As if it was the most natural reaction in the world, Rhossi picked up a rock and hurled it at the old woman, hurled it with real venom. It struck the stranger hard and she cried out, spun and lost her footing, slipping on the loose scree of the path and falling with some force. At once, Rhossi was off and running, leaving Mariata fixed in place, staring down at the injured woman, complicit in the attack by the mere fact of her presence.

  When the woman did not get up, Mariata shook off her torpor and climbed down through the scrub and thorn and rock. By the time she reached the stranger’s side, the old woman was groaning and trying to sit up. ‘Salaam aleikum,’ Mariata greeted her. Peace be upon you.