The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  ‘No.’ It was as if someone else was acting through me; someone reckless. I saw, as if from another place, how my hand reached out and touched his mouth to stop his words. ‘No, I want to go with you. I want to see the desert too. With you and Lallawa. Take me with you, into the Sahara.’

  It was just like starting out on a lead, or making the first step out into the void on an abseil. Just like that, it was done, and my life would never be the same.

  19

  Over the days and weeks that followed, Mariata’s thoughts spun constantly around her awakening into the new sensual world Amastan had introduced her to. She thought about it so often that sometimes she wondered whether her personal demon had access to these thoughts and was using them to haunt her in a new and inventive way. She remembered every detail of their time together in an hallucinatory fashion, as if she were reliving it again from within and without. She could recall how as they lay beneath the oleanders, with their heavy perfume filling the air above them, Amastan unwound his tagelmust with slow and deliberate calm; how hungrily she had gazed at the planes of his face, revealed to her for only the second time and in such different circumstances to the first. How he had laid his naked cheek against hers and she had held her breath until it seemed she might pass out. How his breath had been hot on her neck, then her breast. The memory of it still made her shiver with rapture and anticipation for the next time he touched her.

  She found herself looking differently at everyone in the tribe. Had they too experienced such wonder? The harder she stared at them going about their daily business the more unlikely it seemed. Old Taïb there, sitting on the rock working a piece of coloured cloth with needle and twine: had his heart ever beat so fast at the sight of someone that he thought it would break his ribs? Or Nadia, her brown face seamed with lines made by sun and laughter, whose husband was away trading: did she lie in her tent at night and think of him, with her hand between her legs? Or bad-tempered Noura: with six children she must surely have felt something for Abdelrahman, though you’d hardly think it to see the two of them now, chiding one another over the moths having got into the wool, or a lack of sugar in their stores. She could not imagine they had once eaten one another with their eyes the way that she and Amastan did. And when the subject in the women’s camp turned to Kheddou and Leïla, the newly-wed couple, the tone of the girls was not one of envy or of wistfulness but of ribaldry and coarseness. Yet Leïla’s eyes were sparkling and her cheeks reddened when at last she emerged from the bridal tent; and Mariata saw in the days that followed how she would sometimes stare off into the distance, or into the heart of the fire at night, and smile secretly to herself, and then she knew she was not the only one in the world to feel the way she did. The world was bathed in a glorious haze: she could hardly distinguish one day from the rest. Her mind wandered during her tasks. She burned the bread, overfed the chickens, overslept when it was her turn to milk the goats. She wished the daylight hours away: all she wanted to do was to lie down in the dark with Amastan and feel their blood beat together. Sometimes, she was aware of Tana watching her narrow-eyed, but the enad said no more to her about leaving the tribe and it seemed to Mariata that nothing could dent the perfect sphere of happiness in which she spent her days, shielded as she was by the power of her own sensuality. Even the sight of Amastan and the other men talking with two dark-robed figures who rode in to the edge of the camp one night as the sun was going down did not alarm her as it might have done, despite the glimpse of the bandoliers of ammunition they wore criss-crossing their chests, or the rifles slung across their backs. When he came to her that night, later than usual, all thought of asking who these men were fled her head, washed away by her desire. But as he started to rewind his veil before stealing back to the men’s camp, she put her hand on his arm.

  ‘Who were they, the men you spoke with?’

  Amastan’s regard became shuttered. ‘Some friends. Just some friends. Nothing for you to concern yourself with.’

  Mariata bridled. ‘Because I am a woman?’

  ‘Because it does not concern you.’

  ‘Do not say that! Everything that concerns you concerns me!’

  ‘There are some things we can never share.’

  Jealousy flared through her. ‘You mean like Manta?’

  ‘I will always honour her memory.’

  ‘I will make you forget her!’ She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him ferociously.

  After a while, Amastan handed her away gently. He cupped her face in his palm. ‘I will never forget Manta, even though you own my heart now.’

  ‘Then shall we be married?’ She stared at him, her eyes sparking a challenge. The word reverberated in the air between them. Amastan’s expression was unreadable.

  After several long beats he asked softly, ‘Would you really take me as your own, a woman of your lineage? You know I have neither fortune nor an honourable bloodline to offer you.’

  ‘We will make our own fortune and a new bloodline: together.’

  He nodded slowly. Then he drew free of her and got to his feet. ‘I need to think about this.’ He would not meet her eye, and bundled the cloth of his veil clumsily around his head as if he could not wait to be away from her.

  Mariata shot to her feet, her fists balled as if they would strike him; instead, she beat violently at her robes, dislodging the dust, the dried leaves and crushed petals that clung to it. She felt the hot liquid he had left inside her run slowly down the inside of her thigh. ‘There is nothing to think about,’ she said through her teeth. ‘Have we been playing like children, lying together these past weeks? Did you think I did so lightly, taking my pleasures where I would? Or perhaps I had decided to perfect the skills – learning to dance, as the women of your tribe so delicately put it – I would need before choosing a proper husband elsewhere?’ She glared at him. ‘Whatever were you thinking?’

  Amastan raised a hand, palm up, placatory. ‘Please, Mariata, don’t. I have not been thinking at all, if truth be told. The time we have spent together has been a blessed balm poured on old wounds; but I should have thought about more than my own selfish needs. There is too much at stake for us to marry now. For you; for all of us.’

  Mariata eyed him haughtily, feeling herself invested with the power of her ancestor; the power of all women over men. ‘Please do not try to tell me what is best for me. Other men have tried to do so in my life, quite wrongly. When I was young my brothers told me that the best thing for a scorpion sting was to rub hot sand on it, which is the worst thing you can do: my finger swelled up like an egg. When my mother died, my father took me away from my tribe and left me to the mercies of the Kel Bazgan, and that was a worse mistake. It was I who made the decision to cross the Tamesna with your mother; I who chose to lie with you and no other, because I knew we should be wed. Only I know what is best for me; and since you love me, as I love you, I do not see what obstacle there is.’ She took hold of the amulet she wore about her neck, and declared, ‘I take you Amastan ag Moussa to be my husband for all time, and I wear your talisman as a sign of our union.’ Then she reached down and picked up her scarf, shook it out vigorously and covered her head with it like one of the married women. ‘You see? It is easily done. Tomorrow we will go to your mother and make our declaration of betrothal and she will arrange our wedding and send word out to find my father and brothers to invite them to join us in our celebration. There is nothing more to think about.’

  Amastan took her by the shoulders; but it was not a tender embrace. His fingers, tense with suppressed anger, dug into her. ‘Mariata.’ He had not finished rewinding his veil: the long tail of his tagelmust hung down his robe, leaving his lips, which minutes before had been kissing her greedily, naked to the night air. The corners of his mouth were downturned unhappily. ‘Now is not the time for weddings and celebrations. There is a war coming, a war that must be fought if our people are to survive. If we run, if we fail, we shall be the Free People no longer, for no trace of us will rema
in. Those men who were here tonight belong to a group the government call rebels: they are part of a resistance movement dedicated to creating an independent Tuareg state – the Azaouad, which will stretch all the way from the Aïr and the Adagh, even as far as your Hoggar. They are seeking fighters from every drum-group in the region. We will all go: me and Kheddou, Ibrahim, Bazu, Amud, Azelouane, Illi, Makhammad, Gibril, Abdallah, Hamid and the rest; all of us who are fit and able. We must, because if we do not stand and fight, what happened to Manta’s village will happen here and throughout the Adagh. What happened to Manta – rape, murder, desecration – will happen to my mother, my cousins, my friends. It will happen to you, Mariata; and that I could not bear. They hate us. They want to see us destroyed, obliterated from the very ground on which we walk. They begrudge us the air we breathe and the water we drink. Our very existence challenges them and all they believe in. So we must fight them as cruelly as they would fight us: for only fire can combat fire. Violent resistance is all that is left to us now, though we will have to call on all the strength and cunning and baraka of our ancestors if we are to withstand their guns and their gas and their wickedness. You have to let me go so that I can do this, Mariata; and when we have won the day and made our people safe, we can turn our thoughts to marriage. Only then can there be a chance of happiness and hope for our future, and a future for the children we will have together.’ His eyes shone with anger and zeal, as if he could see this future stretching out before them.

  ‘What about Kheddou and Leïla? Only weeks ago you danced at their wedding and spoke no word of war.’

  ‘I cannot make others’ decisions for them.’

  ‘Then do not seek to make decisions for me! I am not some feeble creature that has to be protected from the wicked world. My mother always told me that everything important in life starts from the heart’ – she made a circle on the ground with a dot in the middle – ‘and we move wider and wider still into the Circle of Life, just as the world’s horizon circles around you and the herd of your tribe. We are part of everything and everything is a part of us. If there is to be war, there will be war,’ she said fiercely, ‘but we shall face it together, wed in the eyes of the world. And if you fight, I will fight too. Put a spear in my hand and a sword in my belt and I will fight like any man. And if everything is to come to an end in a sea of blood, I too will be swept away by it; and if we win, I will share your triumph.’

  In the darkness her eyes glinted with moonlight as if she were filled with cold fire, and to Amastan she seemed at that moment more like an elemental spirit than a flesh and blood woman. Many men would have quailed at the sight, but Amastan was suddenly filled with a brief chest-bursting pride in the force of her determination, the power of her love for him. His loins were immediately afire once more. What could stand in the way of such a force? If you did you would be immolated by it; and some essential part of him welcomed the immolation. He caught her to him and kissed her hard. ‘You are a lioness.’

  She shook her head, laughing. ‘A lioness? Not I. My spirit-animal is just the humble hare.’

  ‘Humble? I think not. The hare is the most noble of creatures; as is the woman who will be my wife.’

  The next morning they went to Rahma and declared their intentions.

  Rahma kissed her son’s hand, pressed it to her heart. Then she took Mariata in her arms. ‘Ah, daughter, you could never have brought more welcome news!’

  Seeing the two of them facing one another, Amastan thought how similar they were, with their strong profiles and gleaming dark eyes: like a pair of lionesses, afraid of nothing, ready to take on the world to defend their own. I am not worthy of them, he thought but did not say.

  News of the betrothal spread around the area like locusts through a crop. Everyone was buzzing with it. Opinions were mixed: although Mariata had generally made a favourable impression on the tribe, there were some who saw her as too elevated to be marrying a man of the Kel Teggart, even if his father was an amenokal of the Aïr drum-groups. The older people remembered their misgivings over Rahma’s marriage to Moussa ag Iba. They had nodded and sucked their teeth when she had come running back to the tribe with her tail between her legs and nothing more to show for her twelve years of trouble with a man known to be overweening and cruel than the tent with which she had left, a failing donkey and a sullen child, small for his age, prone to rages and sharp of tongue. Time had served to amend their opinion of Amastan somewhat, for he had grown tall and strong amongst them, had become a master of verse and dance, and was valued by them for his hunting skills; but they distrusted his temper and his judgement, and he was regarded as something of an unlucky man, one who too often attracted the evil eye. The idea of him settling here with his new bride made them nervous: how long would it be, they asked, before the good djenoun abandoned him once more and the Kel Asuf came for him, and for anyone else who stood too close? And so they greeted him as politely as ever and gave their felicitations, wished him baraka, long life and many children, and prayed fervently that he would do the right thing and take Mariata ult Yemma back to her mother’s encampment in the far-off mountains of the Hoggar. As was only fitting, they reminded one another, given her fine ancestry.

  But the younger women had few of their parents’ and grandparents’ misgivings and treated Mariata as they would any of their number marrying a handsome young man. They painted the moons and flowers denoting betrothal on the palms of her hands with a dark henna paste. After a day the paste flaked and fell to reveal deep red-brown designs stained into the skin, to which Amastan pressed his lips during their nightly trysts. In the privacy of the tents, they taught her bawdy songs and verses that made her bellow with such loud laughter that old Nadia came in, thinking one of the heifers had strayed where it should not have. Leïla, playing the worldly new wife, took Mariata aside to impart to her the secrets of the marriage bed. ‘On the first wedding night you must resist his advances: he should act towards you only as a brother. That is the correct way. On the second night he may kiss you as a friend and hold you as you sleep; no more. It is only on the third night that he may behave towards you as a husband to a wife.’ And then she went on to explain, in much practical detail, exactly what this was likely to entail, and was surprised by the younger girl’s unblinking equanimity in the face of such earthy descriptions. For her part, Mariata thanked Leïla solemnly and slipped one of her fine silver bangles on to her slim brown wrist as a symbol of their friendship. Leïla later reported to Nofa and Yehali that she thought Mariata as frightened as a young gazelle at the very idea of it all.

  The only thing that marred Mariata’s happiness was having no family around her to share it with. Messengers were sent out with anyone of the routes south and east towards Bilma in the hope of finding her father and brothers. Travellers were questioned as to whether they had encountered them on their journeys. Some traders passing through from Zinder to Tin Buktu reported that tales were circulating in the funduqs, where the traders spent their nights in town, of a caravan returning from the salt mines of Bilma that had come to grief out in the Ténéré, a caravan that had included a father and his two sons; but no one could recall their names and since such a description could be applied to the vast majority of trading expeditions, no one took the news too much to heart. Mariata, though, trying not to show her anxiety, at last worked up the courage to approach the smith to have her read the omens regarding this rumour.

  She found Tana sewing leather in the shade of a huge tamarisk on the edge of the encampment. The colours of the thing she sewed gleamed as bright as fruit. Mariata wondered what it was, with its complex motifs and decorative fringes; but she had rarely seen anything so lovely and could hardly take her eyes from it.

  Tana regarded her gravely. They had not exchanged a word since the night of Kheddou and Leïla’s wedding. ‘It is a travelling bag,’ the enad said without preamble, holding it aloft so that its fringes swayed and jounced. ‘You will need one.’

  ‘I will?’


  ‘You are going on a long journey.’

  Mariata wondered about this. Was the smith trying to make her leave again? On the other hand, she herself had proposed to Amastan that after their marriage they should make the journey to the Hoggar to bring the news to her cousins, the last remnants of her revered mother’s family, and stay with them in the rampart of the hills beyond Abalessa in safety for the winter. She dearly wanted to show her beloved the mountains where she had grown up, the jutting pinnacles that turned to scarlet as the sun went down; the cool, shady gueltas in which water stood all year round. Amastan had been polite but non-committal on the subject. He would not speak them aloud, but she knew his thoughts turned on the conflict that edged ever nearer. Even so, she was sure she could persuade him once they were wed, so she did not press Tana for her meaning but instead asked the question she had come here to ask.

  ‘Will you make a divination for me and tell me if you see my father and brothers still amongst the living?’

  Tana’s sharp eyes fixed upon her, boring into her so hard that Mariata felt as though her gaze was piercing her through like a lance. At last the enad sighed and put aside the leatherwork.

  ‘Come with me.’

  In the gloom of the smithy, Tana brewed tea using tehergelé and tinhert and another herb Mariata did not recognize. She hammered fragments from a loaf of hard sugar and stirred them into the pot. Then she stood and poured it like a man, from a great height, so that the golden liquid fell foaming like a winter waterfall into the glass. ‘You must drink a glass from each of three pourings,’ she told Mariata sternly. ‘The first is as strong as life.’ She sat down opposite the girl and pushed the glass across the tray towards her, and Mariata drank it down, savouring the complex taste of the aromatic herbs.