The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  Mariata bridled. ‘You underestimate me.’

  ‘Do I? Haven’t you heard the saying that neither women nor goats have the hardiness to cross the desert?’

  ‘Well, how do you think I got here, then?’ Mariata demanded, rising to his bait. ‘Do not forget that I was born in the Hoggar and had already travelled far to reach the Aïr before I crossed the Tamesna to order to persuade the djenoun to leave you in peace! And never forget that I am descended in direct line from the Mother of Us All, who walked a thousand miles into the desert to establish our people!’ By the end of this tirade, her cheeks were flushed and her fists balled.

  Amastan was delighted; she could see it in the crinkling of the skin about his eyes. Then he reached up and picked a bright pink oleander blossom from the tall shrub behind them and, leaning forward, tucked it behind her ear, a gesture so uncharacteristically intimate that Mariata’s colour deepened to a shade even darker than that of the flower. When he spoke again his voice was gentle. ‘When Tin Hinan made her epic journey it was through a landscape that rippled with wind-blown grass where acacia trees spread their shady limbs and herds of antelope and gazelle grazed. It was no desert then but a very paradise.’

  Mariata stared at him. ‘How could that be? The desert is eternal. The desert is the fiery heart of the world, the cauldron in which life began. Everyone knows that. Even the djenoun originated here, and they are creatures of heat and flame, fiery spirits; how could they have come out of a grassland?’

  ‘I could take you to caves in the Tassili and show you rock engravings by the Kel Nad, the People of the Past, by hunters who made pictures of the animals they hunted – antelopes and gazelles, striped horses and giraffes; creatures of the savannah and the plain – and it is believed by the elders that these pictures were made even before the time of the Mother of Us All.’

  Mariata turned her head away. This was not what she wished to hear. ‘They dreamt those scenes,’ she said contemptuously. ‘I have seen such depictions myself in the caves of my own homeland. I have seen the White Lady of Inawanghat carrying the horned Moon on her head, with a river of stars stretched beneath the horns and seeds shining in her belly and falling from her hands. Is this some picture they made from the life too?’

  ‘Ah, you have me there, with your woman’s logic. Perhaps you do not have the heart of a poet after all.’

  ‘At least I have a heart,’ she returned, suddenly reckless.

  Amastan stood up all in a rush and strode away from her with jagged strides; then, as if changing his mind, turned on his heel and stalked back to tower over her. ‘Never say such a thing!’ he demanded angrily. ‘Never.’ He took the blossom from her hair and threw it down in the dust, ground it underfoot with a sudden furious gesture and stalked away into the falling darkness.

  The next evening he did not come to her; nor the next, and she wept herself to sleep. On the third morning she rose before the sun, milked the goats, reunited them with their kids, and led the troop down to the river to forage and feed. There, she laid cold river stones against her hot and swollen eyelids until the redness receded and she did not look like a frog any more.

  ‘I am sorry.’

  She whirled around. Amastan detached himself from the bole of a tree, one shadow emerging from another. His veil was wound high; he looked as tall as the tree; taller. He looked as tall as the sky. Kohl made his eyes brilliant.

  ‘You have not slept?’

  Mariata shook her head, not trusting herself to answer.

  ‘Nor I. Sleep doesn’t offer me the refuge that others find in it.’ He fell silent, brooding. After a long pause he said, ‘I am no good for you. No good for any woman. But I will not trouble you any longer.’

  She stared at him dismayed. ‘Why would you say such a thing? I enjoy the time we spend together. I had … hoped …’ She did not dare say what was in her heart.

  ‘Do not hope, Mariata. It is too dangerous.’

  ‘Dangerous?’

  He turned away from her. When he looked back at her she thought she saw madness in his eyes once more. When he opened his mouth, she thought he might howl, but all he said, so quietly that she could hardly catch the words, was, ‘I have a heart; but it is torn in two.’

  He still thinks of his dead sweetheart, Mariata thought, and pain lanced through her. ‘What do you mean by that?’ she asked in dread.

  Amastan lowered his long frame to the rock beside her. ‘I wish that the world was a different place, Mariata. I wish I could erase the past.’ He paused, glanced at her, then away again. ‘I wish I could make a fresh start. Take a wife, have children; be happy.’ It was almost a whisper. ‘But I cannot.’

  ‘You cannot?’ she echoed.

  ‘The world is not the place I thought it was a year ago; and I am not the same man.’

  Silence settled heavily between them, and in that moment the sun rose over the horizon and poured its red light all around them. The river at their feet ran like blood. Mariata said gently, ‘The world is never the same. Everything moves, and we must move too. There is a stream that runs through the rocks close to our winter camp where I lived as a child. When I was small I placed a line of stones by the side of its flow; and when we returned to our camp the next year I searched for them, but they were gone. So I placed some more; and the next year those pebbles were gone too. I searched for them, thinking someone was playing games with me, but there was no sign of the stones. At last I realized that the stream’s course was moving sideways across the ground, just a hand’s width with each passing year. But I knew that by the time I was an old woman it would be a different stream to the one I looked at then. Nothing in this world stands still, Amastan, and because the world changes around us, we change with it. We are never the same person from one day to the next, because our experiences change us. I am not the naive child who left the Hoggar.’ The look she gave him was eloquent, but he turned away.

  ‘What you say may be true,’ he said, ‘but I am too much changed by the things I have seen. The things I have done.’ He paused for a long moment. ‘What I am going to tell you now I never intended to tell anyone. It is hardly the stuff of poetry or songs. But I have carried it inside me for long enough, and I owe you the truth.’ He took a deep breath; exhaled it slowly. ‘The last woman I loved died, and in the most horrible fashion.’

  This is it, Mariata thought. He is going to tell me how he killed her now, and then I will know him for the monster he is. She wanted to run; but she had to know, and so she stayed.

  ‘Her death lies heavy on my conscience,’ he started, confirming her worst fears; but the story he dragged out of himself, word by agonized word, was not at all what she had expected.

  He had met Manta when he was little more than a boy and had passed through her village with a caravan. She had made a great impression on him, for she was not shy like the other girls; she had kissed him before he left and the touch of her lips had lived with him through the long winter months as he travelled through the desert. He bought her gifts with the money he earned; at last, on his third season’s visit, she had promised to marry him. He had given her an amulet to seal their betrothal.

  ‘It should have kept her safe.’

  Mariata felt the heavy piece of silver pressing against her skin. Her hand rose to touch it through the thin cotton of her robe.

  ‘You have it with you.’

  She started guiltily and found his eyes upon her.

  ‘I don’t want it back; it carries bad luck. You should not wear it either; it brought no luck to the last one who wore it.’

  Mariata took out the amulet from under her robe and pulled it over her head. It sat there in her hand, the light glinting on the black beads of its string, and they both stared at it. ‘But I love it,’ she said softly. ‘How could it be unlucky? See how it has the symbols for tefok, the sun, here and here.’ She ran her fingers over the carnelian discs. ‘Red is a lucky colour.’

  Amastan’s expression was grim. ‘Open it,’ he
said.

  Mariata examined the talisman, turning it over and over. She slid a nail into the seam at top and bottom, but the amulet was solid and nothing moved. She spun the carnelian discs and pressed the raised central boss: nothing. She turned the amulet over and searched for an opening on the back but found no solution. ‘How?’

  Amastan reached across and gripped the central boss, moving it sideways.

  Mariata watched as the amulet offered up its secret: a hidden compartment containing … nothing. She looked up and found Amastan had not moved, that his face was very close to hers: she could feel the warmth of his breath as he exhaled. ‘There is nothing in here,’ she said, stating the obvious.

  ‘I went to the enad – to Tana – to ask for a protective charm to put inside it. But she … she saw something when she touched it. She knew … something. She tried to take the amulet from me, said it was touched by the evil eye. I was angry. I took it back, forcibly, and left her with insults. I meant to visit a marabout to buy a Qur’anic verse instead, but I never got around to it. I don’t know what stopped me: superstition, maybe. Or pride. I thought the gift itself would be enough, that my love was so strong it would protect her.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I thought. She was so happy to be given it. It’s very old, and of the finest silver. She wore it all the time, until …’

  ‘Until?’ Whatever was coming, she had to hear it.

  Amastan took his time. She heard his breathing, ragged, slowing as he composed himself. ‘This new government, which calls itself independent, is filled with men from the south, those who hate us most. They accuse us of enslaving their ancestors, of abusing their people: they have decided to use this as their excuse to persecute us. Elements in the government have been using its power against us, enforcing arbitrary boundaries, stopping our people from crossing them without the papers they have decreed necessary; but what do the Tuareg have to do with borders and papers? We have always traded far and wide, from the Sahel to the sea. Who are they, with their Russian guns and their Western uniforms, to call us “uncivilized” and “barbaric”, to try to force their way of life upon us? They have always hated our people because we are free and they are poor, because we refuse to live in the squalor of their cities, to subject ourselves to their rules, to be imprisoned by their boundaries. They call what they do “law”: but it is no more than murder and oppression. They are cowards!’ He thumped a fist down on to the rock. ‘They use any resistance as an excuse to attack old men, unarmed women and children.’

  His voice caught in his throat; with a sideways glance, Mariata saw his eyes glitter with unshed tears.

  Manta lived, he told her, in a northern village. She told him there had been trouble; petty stuff mainly. Made bold by the change of government, by the French withdrawal, Songhai villagers had been raiding whatever property they could lay hands on, be it ever so meagre: livestock, foodstuffs, blankets, even cooking implements. Complaints were made but never addressed. Rumours abounded of injustices and attacks. The young men who were either out on the salt road or on hunting trips would come home to find their camp desecrated, their mothers and sweethearts insulted or robbed, but there were no official reprimands. Worse was happening elsewhere. People were disappearing, taken away for ‘questioning’. Ancient grudges resurfaced; wells were poisoned, crops destroyed.

  The young men of the tribes tried to make some resistance; but there was no coherent strategy, no coordination of forces, just a number of small-scale reprisals against the brutalities visited on their people, and all this seemed to do was to make matters worse. But it was better than doing nothing at all. Amastan joined a resistance group in the N’Fughas Mountains. ‘We followed the example of Kaocen, the hero of the first uprising: we fought like jackals, not lions. We attacked and ran, doing what damage we could.’ He paused and took a long breath. He ran a hand over his face. One day word had reached them of incursions by soldiers into the remote regions to the south, where Manta lived. The rumours were unsettling: women were being raped to pollute the vaunted bloodlines of the Tuareg; Tuareg children were being forcibly removed to the cities. He tried to persuade other fighters to come with him, but they were engaged in their own struggles and so he took off alone.

  ‘I was going to bring her here out of harm’s way.’ He closed his eyes. The sky that hung over them was a pale and pitiless blue. Mariata felt that it might fall upon her if she uttered a sound.

  At last, Amastan continued, his voice flat with suppressed emotion, his gaze fixed on a still point in the river. ‘I rode all night up through the foothills, starting at every sound. For some reason, I had never been so afraid in my life. When my camel flushed a bird from the bushes, it scared me to the edge of death. Every shadow seemed filled with menace. The landscape with which I had become so familiar over my years of journeying through it by day in the dark seemed a different world, filled with afrits and ghûls, and the vengeful spirits of the dead. I smelt the village before I saw it. I cannot describe to you the peculiar quality of that smell: you could never imagine it. All I can say is that if like me you had smelt it, it would remain with you for life. I will never be clean of it. It made my camel skittish: it did not want to go further. It dragged its feet, became obstinate. Its bellow split the night. I had to exert my will over it to make it move at all. Even in the darkness I could tell that a pall hung in the air: a thick, black smoke with a filthy taste to it, a taste that coated my tongue as if with fat. Not a sound came from the encampment – no dogs barked, no goats bleated, no one sat round a fire. I thought perhaps people had evacuated the place, moved further up into the mountains …

  ‘As I got closer, I smelt petrol in the air. That was not a good smell. What use do the Tuareg have for petrol? It was a foreign odour. My senses were spiky with presentiment. I wanted to turn back. But I knew I could not.

  ‘I saw that a cairn had been piled up by the entrance to the village. I almost passed it without a thought; but the moonlight was suddenly too bright. It was heads that were piled there, not rocks. The shock knocked me from my camel: I hit the ground and lay there insensible till the sun rose the next day.

  ‘There were thirty-four heads, to be precise. I counted each one of them. Thirty-four people whose spirits would wander for eternity. I could feel them in the air around me, swirling angrily. Manta’s was the thirty-first I found. I sat with it cradled in my lap. She who had been so beautiful, so charged with life, reduced to hard, cold flesh, all blood-clotted and split apart. Her shining eyes dull and glassy …’

  The words ground to a halt, but it was as if he reached down inside himself and forced himself to go on.

  ‘I begged her spirit to speak to me, but it was silent with reproof. I had not been there to save her, and the amulet I had given her for protection had done nothing to ward away the evil that had come to her village.

  ‘I found the amulet, still on her body: they had not burned her as they had so many others, and the goats and cattle too, split apart by machetes, their limbs scattered, stinking. I will say no more about how Manta was arrayed when I found her. I tried as hard as I could to reunite her head with what was left of her body, but the pieces would not knit, though I raged and wailed at them. It must have been then that my wits finally left me and the Kel Asuf came for me, for I remember nothing more. I have no idea of how I returned to the Teggart; I do not know how I survived, whether I ate or drank or slept. I was human no longer. I was not human till you came to me and looked into my eyes. I thought you were her, that she had come back to me. And then I knew that you were not.’

  ‘And that was why you wept.’ Mariata took his hand into her lap; but as soon as she did so she was assailed by the horrible image of Amastan sitting there on the ground of the murdered village with his beloved’s severed head in his lap, talking to it like a madman, stroking the dead skin.

  The next thing she knew, she was running, running as if a thousand djenoun were after her. She did not stop until she reached the camp; and when s
he found herself in Rahma’s tent she stared around, bewildered, not knowing how she had got there.

  14

  Where was I? I blinked and tried to focus, but my head was muzzy and the ground was moving past my face, and before I could do anything about it I was throwing up uncontrollably, heaving and retching, till it felt as if my stomach was going to flip right out of my mouth.

  ‘Comment allez-vous?’

  The voice was kind, but the question seemed absurd. I swallowed the last of the bile and tried to reorient myself. It dawned on me gradually that I was travelling face-down over the back of a donkey.

  ‘Can we stop, please?’ I croaked. ‘Pouvons-nous arrêter?’ Given current circumstances, some small distant part of me congratulated myself for possessing such wherewithal as to be able to attempt to communicate in two languages.

  Miraculously, the world stopped moving around me and the nausea began to subside. Firm hands helped me reposition myself on the beast, and then an unfamiliar, dark face hove into view.

  ‘Ça va? Vous allez bien?’ he asked, and I remembered the young man in native clothing who had helped me off the mountain.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ I demanded ungraciously, feeling panic at being at someone else’s mercy.