The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  It was the first rays of sun on her own face that woke Mariata, and for a moment she did not know where she was; all she knew was that she felt refreshed and at peace. When she stretched, her joints did not crack or protest; when she got to her feet she was steady, and her muscles did not complain. Perhaps, she thought, there was something in what Rahma had said about the stones: perhaps they did hold some form of power. She folded away her blanket and went to have a closer look at one of the boulders.

  Three quarters of the huge rock was in shadow. She walked around it, marvelling at its immensity, at the chill of the shadow it threw. But as she rounded the final side, she found the eastern face was now brightly lit by the rising sun. In the middle of the face, snaking from the ground almost to the summit fifteen feet above, were carved letters and symbols in the ancient language of her people. She craned her neck.

  ‘Today we buried Majid, a brave man, husband to Tata and father to Rhissa, Elaga and Houna,’ read one inscription.

  A second read simply, ‘Sarid loves Dinbiden, who loves him not.’

  A third was the beginning of a poem. ‘Asshet nan-nana shin ded Moussa, tishenan n ejil-di du-nedwa,’ she read aloud. Daughters of our tents, daughters of Moussa, think of the evening of our departure …

  Another, slanting up and away to the right, she read at first as ‘Love endures, though life does not.’ Then she realized it could be read as ‘Long love is rarer than life.’ She frowned, unable to decide on the correct meaning. A third possible interpretation offered itself as, ‘Where love is found, remain.’

  ‘Poetic, no?’

  Mariata turned to find Rahma at her side.

  ‘Who carved these – people from your village?’

  The older woman laughed. ‘Some of these inscriptions were made by the Kel Nad, the People of the Past. No one knows how old they are; they have been here before the memory of even the very old, before the memory of their parents and grandparents.’

  Mariata frowned. ‘But they seem so … new.’ It was an inadequate word, especially for one who fancied herself a poet. What she meant was the sentiments in these carvings were the same as those felt by her own people, every day.

  ‘The past is always with us,’ Rahma declared. ‘And people are all the same, in their essentials, whether they are modern or ancient.’ She seemed more cheerful this morning, perhaps at the prospect of returning home triumphantly with the descendant of the Founder.

  Mariata began to feel nervous now about what was expected of her. Leaving the Kel Bazgan had not been a difficult decision at the time. She had done it without giving much thought to the future and since then crossing the desert had largely emptied her mind. She tried not to think about it. People are all the same, in their essentials, she told herself. There is nothing to be frightened of.

  They entered the village and the older woman greeted everyone who came out to see her (of whom there were many) at length and with great politeness. ‘I am well,’ she answered to all inquiries. ‘Thanks be, I am well.’ She would then ask about their family and news and listen patiently to the answers, although these were always the same: I am well, my wife is well, my sons are well, my daughters are well, thanks be to God. At last, she would turn and indicate Mariata and introduce her as ‘Mariata ult Yemma ult Tofenat, daughter of the Kel Taitok, who has come down out of the Aïr Mountains from the Kel Bazgan with whom she was staying, and has crossed the Tamesna with me in order to see my son and drive out the spirits that have possessed him.’

  Initial respect for Mariata’s noble descent-group and the journey she had taken swiftly gave way to shuttered expressions at the mention of Amastan, she noticed, but everyone was polite and wished her well and that blessings would protect her from any evil spirits that she might encounter.

  Rahma spoke to a small dark-skinned woman wearing a bright red headscarf and the woman ran off and returned moments later with a bowl of rice mixed with milk. ‘To cool his heat,’ she said, and Rahma agreed, taking the bowl from her. Mariata gazed at it longingly and her stomach began to rumble, but, ‘We must try to return him to some sort of equilibrium,’ Rahma was saying to the other woman, and it seemed there was no likelihood of breakfast until they had seen the patient.

  They passed an enclosure where chickens ran and pecked, which surprised Mariata: nomadic peoples did not keep chickens, for the creatures could not walk through the desert or overfly the route, and the camels and donkeys were always fully enough laden without adding chicken coops to their burden. She had also noticed that there were a number of permanent-looking adobe huts dotted about the encampment, and that some boasted well-grown-in vegetation – a fig tree here, tomato plants there.

  ‘Does your tribe no longer travel the salt road?’ she asked curiously.

  ‘Some do. We still have a few caravanners, but we lost an entire caravan to the desert two years back; and disease killed a number of our camels last season. Poverty and unrest have caused many of our harratin and slaves to run away into the towns, and the new government is encouraging them in this: life is hard and getting harder. Our people are going to need young men like Amastan more than we have ever needed our young men at any time in our history. Without him and others like him, we are doomed to scratch a living in the dust.’

  Mariata was aghast. ‘But we are the masters of the desert, not poor peasants!’

  ‘Our proud heritage will stand for nothing if things continue as they are.’

  The last villager they came upon was an odd-looking person with a loosely wound tagelmust that exposed, shockingly, the lower half of the face, skin the colour of charcoal and heavy silver earrings that dragged down both earlobes. This odd personage now caught hold of Mariata’s hands and held them tight. Mariata put this lack of reticence down to the fact that this person was clearly not properly one of the People of the Veil, and forced herself not to pull away. Not that she could even if she had wanted to, for the stranger appeared to have her in a remarkably powerful grip. But when he spoke, it was the voice of a boy whose vocal cords have not yet acquired the deep timbre of a man; and the hand he had in his grip was pressed against what felt suspiciously like a soft female breast, so now Mariata was entirely confused. ‘Ah, the far-travelled daughter of the Hoggar. Welcome, welcome to the Teggart.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mariata, dipping her head politely. She tried once more to take her hands away, unsuccessfully.

  ‘Lovely girl, the spirits take many forms. Beware the melancholy beauty of the Kel Asuf lest you be seduced. I can see there is a wildness in you; and wildness calls to wildness. I hope you have a complete head.’

  And with these enigmatic words, the strange person let go of Mariata’s hand and went on his way.

  Mariata stared after him. ‘What does he mean? Indeed, is he a he?’

  ‘Tana?’ Rahma smiled. ‘We have no word for what Tana is. I have heard strangers called her an homme-femme, but that does her no justice. God has blessed her twice over, shall we say. In her is to be found the perfect symmetry between the genders and she is a most remarkable person. Sometimes she knows more than normal people know. She was the daughter of our smith, when the village was wealthy enough to keep one of its own, and when he died she stayed and carries out some of an enad’s duties.’

  The inadan were smiths and masters of mystic ritual: a resident smith would oversee ceremonies, kill the sacrificial goats, command the fires and work the things of iron that no Kel Tagelmust, and certainly no woman, could safely touch.

  ‘Can she not heal Amastan?’

  ‘She went to see him once after he returned; after that she would not go near him.’

  Mariata digested this silently. After a while she asked, ‘And what did she mean about a complete head?’

  ‘It’s what we say sometimes about an apprentice of medicine coming of age, when their knowledge is complete.’

  Mariata felt the panic rising again. ‘But I have no learning of medicine! I’ve never apprenticed at anything.’

/>   ‘There are some things that cannot be learnt: gifts from on high; gifts that run in the blood.’ Rahma took her by the arm as if she feared Mariata might run away; and suddenly Mariata was filled with fear: fear that Rahma’s son might be mad and raving, frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog, prone to bouts of violence. She was afraid too that he might look quite normal, except for the dancing of the spirits in his eyes. She was afraid she would have no effect on him, that despite her grand ancestry she would be found to be quite an ordinary girl after all. And somehow that possibility was the worst fear of all.

  *

  Beyond the last of the tents, huts and animal enclosures lay a grove of olive trees, and beyond that, across a stretch of rock-strewn ground, a makeshift shelter had been erected between a pair of tamarisk trees, little more than a simple frame of branches draped with blankets and old grain sacks. In the shade beneath this, Mariata could make out the figure of a man in a black robe and a tightly wound tagelmust that left only a sliver of his face visible, a sliver through which a pair of dark eyes glittered balefully.

  The man sat cross-legged on the ground, unmoving, his hands clasped in his lap. He did not change his attitude as they approached, making no effort to greet them in any way. He did not even respond when Rahma crouched beside him and laid a hand against his cheek.

  ‘Blessings on you, Amastan, my son. You look better than when I left you, I am sure of it. Just take a little rice and milk to cool the excess of heat that is in you.’

  She laid the bowl down on the ground beside an untouched dish of bread and dates. He did not so much as glance at it.

  ‘And see, I have brought you something else as well, a visitor from far away. Mariata ult Yemma ult Tofenat of the Kel Taitok, descended straight and true from Tin Hinan. She has crossed the Tamesna just to see you. Won’t you rise and greet her and make her welcome as befits the master of the house?’

  She was attempting to humour him, Mariata saw, for this was no house, and he was clearly master of nothing, including his own wits. She scanned what little she could see of his narrow brown face through the slit in his veil, seeing only that the bones lay close to the surface, that his eyebrows were well formed and that while he was expressionless the crow’s feet at the outer corners of his eyes stood out pale against the dark tan of his skin. He did not, now they were close up, look frightening at all, she thought with some relief, and was just beginning to relax when his gaze flickered away from the ground at which he had been staring so fixedly and came to rest upon her face.

  It is said that when a gazelle is cornered by hunters it will often become paralysed and stand stone-still even though if it chose to spring away it could easily outrun its pursuers. That was how Mariata felt when Amastan looked at her: transfixed, terrified to the core of her being and utterly unable to save herself.

  She found herself looking into the most expressive eyes she had ever seen. They were long and almond-shaped, the eyes of a poet, not a warrior or a madman; but in the instant that he pinned her with his gaze she was unable to think of anything except that that gaze was as deep and dark as water glimpsed at the bottom of a well: the last water of the season, before the well runs dry and those who rely on it go thirsty and eventually die.

  Mariata’s heart began to beat fast. She felt the muscles in her legs twitch as if they would carry her away, very far, very fast, whether she consciously asked them to or not. But despite this she stayed where she stood, as if she had suddenly taken root.

  Then the moment passed. Abruptly, Amastan’s eyes filled with tears, tears that gathered and brimmed and then fell, unchecked. It was shocking to see a man cry. Men were reticent with their emotions: it was part of the code of asshak, the code of pride and proper behaviour. Mariata felt her heart go out to him.

  There are some women who cannot resist trying to set to rights something that is broken, women who feel the weight of responsibility for restoring the order of the world – even if it is just in the little things such as washing the dirt out of clothes, the sweeping of a tent or the reweaving of an unravelling basket. Mariata had never considered herself to be one of these women. But before her she saw a man whom life had snapped in two and suddenly she yearned to put the two halves back together.

  ‘How long has he been like this?’ Mariata asked as she and Rahma walked back towards the village. As the distance increased between her and the possessed man, her heart resumed its normal rhythm; but even so she could feel his presence, as if a cord had been tied to each of them, which became tighter with every step she took.

  Rahma said nothing for a time. At last she arrived at a boulder of rock. Here she stopped and sat down, turning her face up to the sun so that Mariata saw the faint trace of tear tracks that had dried on her cheeks. ‘It was his camel brought him back, as if it knew its way home, even though he had not been here for a year or more. He was slumped over it, in a daze. He had no idea where he was: his eyes were open, but he did not even recognize his own mother. There was blood all over him. I thought …’ Her voice faltered. ‘I thought he was dead … or at least mortally wounded. His sword was gone – the Reaper, which had belonged to my brother, his anet ma, and to his anet ma before him. He would never willingly be parted from that sword: it was his pride personified. He had nothing with him: neither food nor water. How he survived I can’t imagine, except that the spirits must have kept him alive for their own purposes.

  ‘But he did have one thing. It was clasped in his right hand. We tried to prise his fingers open, but he turned on us like a wild animal. He has it still. I am sure that if we can separate him from it we can save him. The Kel Asuf draw their power from it, I am sure of it. We’ve tried everything: medicine women have offered him sleeping herbs, but he would not take them. The enad sang the song of the winds and we played the drums to dance out the spirits, but all to no effect. The marabouts have prayed over him and pinned Qur’anic verses to his robes. I could have told them that wouldn’t work: he tore them off in a rage and ran about naked! The magician from Tin Buktu surrounded his tent with charms and fetishes he had brought out of the south: Amastan ignored them all, and lay down to sleep with his right hand pinned firmly under his body. Anyone who tries to force his hand open is met by the fury of the wild spirits inside him. He has been this way for three months and more: he can’t go on like this much longer.’

  Mariata bit her lip. ‘I want to help, but I don’t know what I can do.’

  Rahma turned to look at her. ‘He wept when he saw you, Mariata: it is the first recognizably human emotion he has shown in all this time.’ She sighed and stood up, suddenly looking exhausted. ‘As a boy, Amastan loved poetry,’ she went on. ‘He loved to make songs and verses; he dazzled the local girls with his skill with words. They all wanted to marry him, but he would not marry, he said, until he had walked to the Arbre de Ténéré, seen the sea and touched the snow that fell on the highest mountains.’

  Mariata smiled. These were just the sort of romantic notions that appealed to her. ‘And how many of these things did he accomplish?’

  ‘All three. And, having reached these goals, he became at last betrothed. To a girl from the N’Fughas Mountains. He had gone there to fetch her back to meet me and his grandmother before they married. My mother was too old and ill to travel, you see. She died before he returned. That was probably a blessing.’

  Mariata felt a sharp stab of discomfort at this news. He was betrothed? She reminded herself it was none of her business that a man she did not know should be handfasted, but something in her felt a sudden keen disappointment. ‘Where is she, his beloved?’

  Rahma looked away. ‘I do not know. No one does: it seems she has disappeared. But do not listen to gossip, I beg you.’ Before Mariata could make anything of this odd request, Rahma went on hurriedly, ‘Words are the most powerful magic of all: your grandmother knew that. The power of words has run through your family since the time of the Mother of Us All: how else could she have persuaded others to come to her
in the desert and establish our people? She was just an ordinary girl – no older than you – just a girl from a dusty little village in the south of Morocco. Yet she had such power in her that she left a safe and settled place to make a new life in the wilderness. To do that she must have communed with the Kel Asuf, become one of them, or bent them to her will, for they helped her shape our people. That power of hers will have passed down the female line as with all such things of value, so it must reside in you. I have to believe that, or Amastan is lost to us for ever. Will you help him? Sit with him and tell him stories, make poetry and charms for him; quiet the spirits, bend them to your will. Try to persuade him to give up the thing in his right hand. Will you do this?’

  ‘I will try,’ Mariata said, but dread gnawed at her. Amastan had come back to the village covered in blood and without his betrothed. She was not to listen to gossip. But abruptly she remembered a folk tale from the Aïr, told often around the fire at night: ‘The Bloody Wedding of Iferouane’. It told how a handsome, richly arrayed stranger had ridden into a village to the great excitement of the local girls and over the subsequent weeks had chosen the prettiest of them and wooed her with fine words and then promptly married her with the blessing of her family; but on the first night of the wedding celebration a great commotion was heard coming from the tent of the newlyweds, and much piteous wailing from the girl. The elders had shaken their heads: it was rash of the groom to want to have his way with the bride on the very first night. A child conceived by moonlight was a child cursed for life. No good would come of it. And indeed when one of the old women came to bring the couple their breakfast the next morning she was met by a grim sight: a tent full of blood and hair and bone, and no sign of either bride or groom. The bride’s brothers, however, found the tracks of a great cat and they followed it to its mountain lair, and killed it after a great struggle. Inside its belly, they found the remains of their sister, but none at all of the groom; and from this they deduced that the handsome stranger had been a shape-changer, a spirit of the wilds, whose true form had been released on the wedding night.