The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  They kept out of the sun when they could, moving around the leeside of rock towers till dusk, then walked by the light of the waxing moon. South and east they went across the dry, rock-strewn plateaus and found only dried-up watercourses and hardly a leaf or plant that was not withered almost to dust. Acacia walked with his head down, slower and slower, until at last he sat down and simply refused to get up. Mariata waited, but he would not even look at her. She tried to cajole him with the last of the fodder, but he gave her the briefest glance of reproach and turned his head away as if to say: too late! Now you will be sorry for your meanness. She dragged on his halter, but obstinacy made him strong. She sat down beside him and sighed. She sang to him, a song her grandmother used to sing to her when she was little: he snorted and gargled raspily in his throat and just sat there, flicking sand spitefully with his tail.

  Mariata got up and stood in front of him with her hands on her hips. Acacia pretended she wasn’t there. Mariata moved into his eyeline so that he would have to make an effort to ignore her. The camel looked at her with dull eyes. ‘You need a rest. I understand. I need a rest too. But we cannot stop here: we have to keep moving till we find an oasis or a well. Then we will rest, and you can dip your head into the cool water and drink to your heart’s content and feed on palms and dates. But you have to get up, get on your feet. Because if you don’t, you will die. And if you die, I will die.’ She paused and touched her swelling abdomen. ‘And so will my child.’

  Eventually, unable to evade her penetrating gaze, Acacia struggled painfully to his feet once more; and Mariata walked beside him, shuffling one foot in front of the other. It was impossible to avoid the thought of death. Her mind kept circling around the idea like a hawk gyring around its prey. They came down into a valley in which the desert sands had been blown in a smooth, pale carpet, but down in the soft hollow something was sticking up through the sand. As soon as it saw what it was, the camel jinked sideways and began to bellow piteously. Mariata stared at the bones, bleached white by the sun, polished to a fine sheen by the windborne sand, and her heart thudded dully inside her own bones. Was this all that was left of the last traveller who had passed this way? Would she and Acacia be prey to the same fate? A terrible image drifted through her mind then, of a skeleton curled upon its side, lapped by waves of sand, its knees drawn up to protect the tiny skeleton cradled beneath its ribs.

  The image filled her with determination. ‘Damn you!’ she told the camel. ‘Pick your feet up. We will survive!’

  It was an instruction to herself as much as to the exhausted animal. Jaw out-thrust, Mariata drove them both on, though she was tired, so tired, setting a course directly east. Why she changed direction she did not know, but her hand itched and burned and her skull buzzed with hidden knowledge. Somewhere out there was the Valley of the Oases the traders in the funduq had spoken of, the long valley that ran from north to south, studded with ancient wells and oases, through which the trade route that had been followed for thousands of years wound its way. She would find it or die.

  The hamada gave way to erg – a great sea of dunes, sweeping and sickle-shaped, their long crests carved to a pitiless knife-edge by the wind. She stood on a rock and looked out across the dunes that rolled away from her, their bright ridges alternating with their shady troughs, striping the ground like the barring on a falcon’s wing, and knew they were on the edge of the Grand Occidental Erg, and that if they did not find a well soon, they had no chance of survival at all.

  Acacia collapsed the next day. His knees folded under him and he fell in a heap, a great huff of foul-smelling air rushing at the same time out of his mouth and his rectum. After this, he sat staring into space as if he could see his own death, a speck on the far horizon, advancing step by inexorable step. Mariata cried out and then threw her arms around his neck, burying her face in his burning hide. ‘Get up!’ she urged him. ‘Get to your feet!’

  Panic made her harsh. She pummelled the camel with her fists; but he bore the assault without reaction. She kicked him and sobbed drily as she did so; but he did not move. And so at last she lay down beside him, in the shadow his form made, and waited until he stopped breathing. Even then, he did not fall, but sat there as unmoving as a sphinx, alive one second, gone the next. It was impossible to judge the exact moment of his passing, for nothing essential appeared to have changed in him. Mariata put her hand to the camel’s mouth and felt no breath there. She laid her cheek against the hollow ribs and heard no heartbeat. She pulled at his long eyelashes: he did not even twitch. At last she had to admit the terrible truth: that he was dead and she was alone, and too far now from anywhere to turn back and seek help. She did not imagine that she could survive in such a place, with nothing but her own feet to bear her. She sat with her back propped against the camel’s corpse and stared deadly out into the sands. So this was how it would end for her and her unborn child. It would be a bleak ending, but at least they would die as People of the Veil, in the desert where they belonged.

  That night the djenoun came for her soul. She heard them on the wind as it picked up at nightfall, whipping streamers of sand off the peaks of the dunes. Their song was faint at first, a sort of dull hum that thrummed through her bones, making her ribs vibrate; and then it was all about her, in the air, in the ground beneath her feet: a slow drumbeat of life, a drumbeat that had always existed, had been here before the dunes formed, before the grasslands that came before the sands, when the gazelles and the giraffes ran here and the world was lush and green; when God formed the djenoun from smokeless fire. The song became a roar and then a howl. Mariata let the sound flow through her, by turns terrified and fascinated. The Kel Asuf, the People of the Wilderness: they were singing to her because they recognized her as one of their own, one of those who speak with no one, who travel through the empty places. They had come for her. In some ways this was a relief: she would not have to battle on towards her doom, and her death would be taken out of her own hands. She stood up and let the wind and sand batter her.

  She awoke the next morning with her face buried against the belly of the dead camel. A blanket of sand encased them both, trapping a large pocket of foul but breathable air: there was no doubt that Acacia, in death, had saved her life. Pushing herself to her feet through the tide of sand, Mariata stared around her, marvelling at the pale bright blue of the sky, the gleaming gold of the dunes. The wind in the night had been so strong that the landscape she awoke to was pristine and unfamiliar, as if its hollows and curves had all been rearranged] by a giant hand. For a brief moment she felt a keen disappointment that her trials in this world were not over; but then the life inside her delivered a powerful kick. Despite her desperate situation, Mariata laughed aloud. ‘Hello, little one! Did you think I needed to be reminded that you were in there?’

  Charged with new energy, Mariata took Tana’s knife from the fringed bag strapped across her back, sharpened it with the whetstone until its edge was as thin as a sickle moon, and set about butchering the dead camel. She tapped its blood into one of the gerbers and dressed the corpse: flayed off its skin, cut out the last of the fat reserves, set aside long strips of meat from its flanks and shoulders for drying. Soon poor Acacia was reduced to nothing more than bones and hooves and his big, sad head. Many would have chided her for leaving the skull intact, with its nutritious brain and its juice-filled eyes untouched, but an unwonted sentimentality came upon her, by which it seemed wrong to defile the head of a friend, particularly one whose great efforts had saved her life, and so she patted it uncomfortably on the poll, smoothed a patch of sand beside it and with the blade inscribed a prayer: May your spirit wander cool gueltas and rich pasturage; may cool shadows ease your soul. Mariata ult Yemma thanks you. The child of Amastan ag Moussa thanks you. No breath of wind disturbed the stark Tifinagh symbols.

  Using the coarse hair of the camel’s tail as tinder and the last of its dried droppings as fuel, she made an acrid fire and cooked and ate the heart and liver. Having eaten so lit
tle for so long, this task alone took her a vast time. It felt strange to force food into herself in this way, but she knew that the more she could eat, the better prepared she would be to carry on her journey. The blanket was gone, taken by the desert winds, so that night she lay beneath a cover made from the flayed and bloody hide. Her practicality in arranging such things surprised her: she had not before been known for her capability, but then never before had she needed to rely entirely on her own resources.

  For two more days she stayed with the corpse of poor Acacia, cooking and eating what she could of the flesh and drinking the blood before it congealed. The herbs that Tana had included in the wedding bag enabled her to eat when she thought she could eat no more and warded off any sickness or discomfort that eating so much meat might otherwise have brought about. As the sun fell on the third day she gathered the cured jerky into a bag fashioned from the camel’s stomach, which she fastened across her back with strips of hide. It was heavy and uncomfortable, but it represented survival. Now I shall bear Acacia’s hump and it will lend me its strength, she told herself fiercely, slinging the gerbers across her front.

  She stumbled south and east, following the passage of the stars. She walked through a region of flat, compacted sand that the wind had left striated in thousands upon thousands of tiny wavelets. The patterns, so elegant in their perfect regularity, distracted her mind and soothed her eye; she was sorry when the sands rose again and she found herself wading ankle-deep through their soft tide, but soon the dunes flattened out once more and before long she found herself in an area of perfect camel-dun as far as the eye could see, a dun unspoilt except for an irregular studding of dark stones, each the size of a child’s fist. When she sat to rest she picked up one of these stones and felt how it gave weight and meaning to her hand. It seemed far heavier than any ordinary stone should seem: she examined it curiously. Flecked with brown and pitted as if by fire, the stone seemed more like metal than rock, and it was then that she recalled how Amastan had told her of the thunderstones that fell from the skies. They had been sitting on one of the tall sentinel rocks that guarded the way into the tribe’s grounds from the Tamesna, watching falling stars blaze a silver trail through the night. ‘I walked in a place where the hearts of such stars had fallen in their hundreds,’ he had told her, and she had made a face at him, her expression eloquent with disbelief.

  ‘Another of your wild tales!’ she chided him, though she loved to listen to the cadence of his voice no matter how absurd the subject.

  ‘Insh’allah you will never be in such a place. Many have tried to cross that plain, but Al Djumsjab, the glooming breath of the erg, who separates companions and devastates caravans, has devoured them all. Now all that is left of them is their bones parching white in the sun while their spirits wander the wastes with the Kel Asuf, playing ball with the iron hearts that have fallen from the skies.’

  She had thought it one of his poetic fancies, but now she remembered how he had at another time asked if she thought that the stars that shone above might be the souls of the dead, and she threw the stone away from her and got to her feet and walked as quickly as she could manage through the field of thunderstones, itching with dread every step of the way.

  The next day while negotiating a steep dune she slipped and fell and rolled to the bottom and lay there, panting. Her left hand ached and burned. She turned it over and examined it. Right in the centre, where a long, straight line bisected the palm, a thorn had lodged itself so deeply that no part of it protruded. Dark blood lay stoppered around the thorn. Wincing, Mariata squeezed and pressed the flesh around it, to no avail. She tried to dig it out with the blade of the little knife, but the thorn buried itself more deeply. Had she been able to, she would have wept with pain and frustration, but there was nothing behind her eyes but a hot ache.

  The next day her hand was swollen; pads of reddened flesh pushed up around the wound like pillows. It throbbed with every step she took and felt as heavy as if she were carrying a thunderstone. Before long it felt as if the wound was at the very centre of her, a raw and pulsing other heart, and the rest of her as insubstantial as smokeless fire, trapped by some magic in human form but ready to fly up into the air if the spell somehow broke. She was almost delirious by the time the oasis came into view and stumbled towards it thinking it a trick of the desert, a mirage of heat-haze sent to taunt her, even though it was barely dawn. The closer she got, though, the clearer it became, the green of the palm trees an assault to the eyes after the unending duns and reds. The water shone the sky back at her like a mirror, so still as to seem a solid mass. Suddenly, with a clarity so intense it was like hallucination, she saw herself immerse the burning hand, saw the water closing over it so that there was nothing but wrist; felt the coolness with a piercing bliss that rivalled the sweetest moment in Amastan’s arms. She imagined it so clearly that dream and reality merged into one long swooning fall. It was when she started to drink that she came back to herself, for that was not bliss but a raw and fiery sensation. Her throat was so dry and closed that she almost could not swallow; instead she choked and rasped and retched. At last she managed to get some water down; then like a dying thing she shouldered her bundles, crawled in amongst the shady roots and fell asleep in the cool darkness there.

  She awoke to the sound of voices and sat up suddenly, terrified. Three camels were drinking at the waterhole, legs splayed as they craned their necks; three men sat at the other end of the oasis, refilling their waterskins. They did not seem to have noticed her. With her dark and dusty clothing and black gerbers she was well camouflaged in the shadows. Part of her wanted to call out to them and ask their help; but another, warier instinct prevailed. She settled back against the palms and watched and waited. She watched as two of the men settled themselves on the ground beneath the palms and rested, while the third stamped impatiently around and tried to get them moving, without success. At last he too sat down with his back against a tree and appeared to sleep, but still Mariata dared not move.

  As night fell the men made a camp fire and gathered around it to prepare tea and food. The smell of their preparations wafted across the still pool towards her so that her stomach clenched and growled. She drew a piece of camel meat from the stomach-bag and chewed on it, all the while yearning for the taste of green tea and sugar. The jumping firelight lit their forms: Mariata saw that two of them were veiled, and in Hoggar fashion, and this gave her the heart she needed to move closer. Treading softly through the fallen branches with their crisped brown fronds, she reached the edge of her cover, and there she squatted down and listened.

  The man who wore only a loose head-covering seemed unhappy. He could not sit still, and appeared infuriated by his companions’ equanimity. ‘I do not understand why we are stopping here!’ he said again. ‘After all, it is I who am paying you: you should do what I say!’

  The taller of the two veiled men gave him a level look. ‘The camels are exhausted, and so are we.’

  Mariata’s heart stilled in her chest. She knew that voice: it was her brother, Azaz.

  ‘She may yet be ahead of us; she may have taken a faster route!’

  Azaz sighed. ‘There is no faster route. All travellers know the Valley of the Oases is the only safe way through this part of the desert. Deviate from it and all you will find is a swift death.’

  The butcher, Mbarek Aït Ali, threw up his hands as if to ward off evil. ‘I pray to Allah she did not, it would be a waste of such a juicy peach.’

  At this, the second veiled figure got up and kicked sand over the fire in a gesture that spoke of repressed violence. ‘This is no more than a wild hare chase.’ Mariata heard how his voice broke like that of a boy on the threshold of manhood. It was her young brother, Baye.

  ‘The storm must have covered her traces; or she has used some sort of magic to hide them,’ the butcher said.

  ‘My sister is no sorceress: you should not listen to my father’s wife.’

  ‘Then where is she? Has s
he vanished into thin air, or taken to flight? No one has seen her since Douira, in the company of that raggedy old trader.’

  ‘They may have parted company.’

  ‘Or they have made better time than us,’ the butcher persisted. ‘Whatever the way of it, I am determined to find her. I cannot go back without her: I will be a laughing-stock. Another day or two, I tell you. We will continue into the desert.’

  Azaz and Baye exchanged glances but said nothing. At last Baye clicked his tongue. ‘My sister has lived a pampered life: she is not made for tramping deserts. She’s probably back in Imteghren by now, feasting on couscous and laughing up her sleeve. We should give this up as a bad job.’

  ‘We have gone further than expected, and further than you have paid for. As it is, if we’re caught by the Algerian Army it will not go well for us,’ Azaz added.

  ‘I thought you nomads didn’t give a pig’s arse for borders!’ the butcher sneered.

  ‘I care about my neck,’ Azaz replied levelly.

  The butcher slapped one massive fist into his other palm. ‘Perhaps if I raise the price by another hundred dirhams you may find a tad more courage.’

  Azaz shook his head. ‘It’s not just the money. We simply do not have the supplies to go any further.’ The expression with which he regarded the butcher was one that Mariata recognized. Even as a child of three Azaz had been strong-willed, his wails of fury heard far from their camp when he was forced to wear even a scrap of clothing.

  The two men locked eyes, but it was the butcher who looked away first. ‘I would have thought you would wish to save your sister from a hard journey, and probably death.’

  Azaz turned his back on the man, rudely. ‘There are worse things in the world than death in the desert,’ he said softly, but only Mariata heard him.