The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  He turned towards me again and gave me a steady look. ‘So perhaps now you will begin to understand why I do what I do, Isabelle Treslove-Fawcett, and forgive my rough methods a little.’

  I burst into sudden tears, overwhelmed by a combination of what he had told me and the tensions that pulled me in different directions. By comparison with the grim recent history of the Tuareg people my own woes were tiny; but at the same time somehow they felt huge and world-swallowing, as if something inside me had risen up in a great tide of fellow-feeling.

  The Fennec half turned away from me, embarrassed by my outburst. Then he turned back, staring. Not at my face, but lower down. I realized suddenly that the button of my shirt had come undone beneath the compulsive working of my fingers. Just as I was about to do the button up again to maintain my modesty, he caught me by the shoulder with one hand and caught hold of the amulet with the other.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ His eyes blazed at me; then he turned to Taïb. ‘Did you take this from the old woman you buried?’

  ‘No, no, of course not!’ Taïb looked horrified at the suggestion, as well he might. ‘It is Isabelle’s own. Tell him, Izzy.’

  The Fennec pulled the necklace out into full view just as I took a step backwards. In an instant, the leather thong – the thong that had held a huge fall and saved my life on the Lion’s Head – snapped and the amulet tumbled into the dust at our feet. Despite his age, the Tuareg chief was faster than me. Like a striking snake he was upon it, flipping it up into his hand, where he turned it over and over. Then he flicked open the hidden compartment behind the central boss as if he had some magical prior knowledge of its workings. The little roll of parchment fell out into his hand.

  ‘Tell me how you came by this thing!’ he demanded hoarsely.

  ‘My … my father,’ I stuttered. ‘My father left it to me in his will.’ And I told him about the box in the attic and its strange contents. ‘He was an archaeologist, my father, you see. In my handbag you’ll find the papers he left in the box for me.’

  He glowered at me but only briefly: it was as if now he had seen the amulet and its contents he could not take his eyes off them. After a long moment of contemplation he started to walk away from us with long, urgent strides. ‘Come with me,’ he called back over his shoulder, as if it was an afterthought.

  I trotted after him, feeling oddly naked without the amulet; light too, as if I might float away like a seedhead.

  Inside the Fennec’s tent – the same one that I had been in the morning before, miraculously re-erected in this place as if teleported there in exact and minute detail – he gestured for us to sit down while he rooted through a box, at last emerging with my handbag. He thrust it at me. ‘Show me,’ he said. He seemed almost feverish, frequently rubbing his hand across his face, all composure lost.

  I dug out the folded papers and handed them to him. When he opened them out, the illegible green form fell to the floor. He snatched it up and scrutinized it. ‘What is this?’

  ‘I’ve really no idea,’ I said truthfully.

  The Fennec tossed it away and turned his attention to the typed foolscap page, which he pored over for an interminable amount of time. At last he thrust it at me, pointing to two words with an accusatory finger. ‘Tin Hinan! What does it say here about Tin Hinan?’

  I realized these were the only words he’d recognized, and these with difficulty, so I translated my father’s paper roughly for him, stumbling over my lack of French for the words ‘bier’ and ‘carnelian’ and ‘amazonite’, which remarkably Taïb appeared to know.

  ‘So the amulet was found at the tomb of Tin Hinan?’

  ‘That’s what it says here.’ I was feeling distinctly uncomfortable now. My father had evidently stolen an important historical artefact from the tomb of the Tuareg queen. He was no more than a grave-robber, and I a grave-robber’s daughter. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I have no idea why he left it for me. He loved puzzles, my father; he loved to mystify people, tease them with his superior knowledge.’ And I told them about the letter he had written to me, the final bullying manipulation. ‘He knew I would never be able to simply let it lie.’ I paused, then leant forward. ‘Can you read the inscription? Do you read Tifinagh?’

  He was outraged. ‘Of course. All children raised as true Tuaregs learn the Tifinagh at their mother’s knee.’ He and Taïb exchanged a combative glance. Then the Fennec went outside and squatted down in front of the tent, brushing a square of sand smooth with his hand. With a car key he inscribed a series of symbols, checking them back and forth against the parchment. Then he shook his head, muttered something to himself and erased what he had written. He turned the scrap of paper on its side, examined it carefully and began again. After several false starts he gave an exclamation full of frustration, sprang to his feet and kicked over the sand. ‘Follow me!’ he ordered us imperiously and once more we trailed him across the encampment like dogs walking to heel. In the shade of a tree he found the crone who had been in the tent in which I had slept the night before. They went through a prolonged series of ritual greetings until I felt like wrenching the necklace and the parchment from him and thrusting it in her face. Luckily, English reserve and good manners prevailed, and I managed to confine myself to shifting impatiently from foot to foot. At last the Fennec got around to the matter of the amulet and we then had to endure a long pantomime as the old woman examined in minute detail its etched designs and discs of red, the raised central boss and intricately knotted leather thong, now broken in two. When the Fennec showed her the workings of the hidden compartment she chattered like a child, held it close to her eye and moved the boss back and forth with gleeful delight. They then started to share a discussion of its artful craftsmanship and the amulet’s provenance, and then at long last he flattened the inscription on the palm of his hand and held it out for her inspection. She clicked her tongue and swivelled her head to one side, then another, all the while muttering away. She poked a finger at one of the lines of symbols that ran from bottom to top of the paper. There were three of these lines, but another three lines ran across them.

  ‘Mariata,’ she said; and the Fennec gave out a great sigh of air, as if he had been holding his breath for an eternity. She touched the second line. ‘Amastan,’ she said.

  Neither of these words meant anything to me, but the air was so charged with emotional electricity that I felt the hairs prickle and stir on the back of my neck, and suddenly I knew what the third vertical line signified. ‘Lallawa,’ I whispered; and they all stared at me. I went hot, then cold; I began to sway.

  ‘Ey-yey,’ said the old woman, her voice sounding as if it came from a long, long way away. ‘Lallawa.’

  Taïb steadied me with an arm around the waist and I felt his breath warm against my neck, which very nearly had the opposite effect. ‘Did you just read that? Lallawa? Or did you guess it?’

  I shook my head, wordless. I had no idea.

  The Fennec was trembling now. I could see his hand shaking as the old woman turned the parchment ninety degrees. But no matter which way she looked at it, it seemed to fox her. At last she threw her hands up in the universal gesture of defeat and rattled out a long complaint. The Fennec tried to roll the parchment up again, but his hands were shaking too much. In the end, the crone took it from him and neatly folded it back into its nest, then slid the central boss over its abiding mystery.

  We went back across the camp at such speed that I was out of breath by the time we got back to the Fennec’s tent. ‘What, or who, is Mariata?’ I asked.

  I watched the older man’s grizzled brows knit hard over his eyes as if to shut out the question, then he turned away from us and put his head in his hands. And then this man – trabandiste, rebel leader, veteran fighter, Tuareg chief, whatever he was, who had just related the most harrowing stories of persecution and atrocity to me without a trace of emotion in his voice – broke into racking sobs. Awful sounds escaped his splayed fingers, filling the small space of the
tent with an immensity of pain.

  I was appalled, frightened even, to be trapped in this claustrophobic place with such raw feelings. I wanted to run outside and keep on running, but something kept me rooted there. I remembered how he had told me that his people were raised never to complain or to show weakness, and I wondered how on earth a pretty tribal necklace and its hidden charm could have had such an effect on this tough, fierce man. But even as I wondered this, I knew what I had always known: that my amulet was a powerful object, charged with magic and freighted with its own deep and tragic history.

  33

  The skin of my beloved shines like rain on high rocks

  Like rain on high rocks

  When the swollen clouds open themselves

  Amongst lightning and the roar of thunder

  The skin of my beloved is as bright as copper

  As bright as copper

  Beaten by the inadan over the fire

  Ah! I love the sheen of his cheekbone

  Sharp as a knife’s edge in the evening light

  When he unveils himself, only for me.

  Mariata’s voice caught on the last line, remembering, and tears threatened. A waste of water, she told herself fiercely, and started it again. Besides, she must not show weakness to her son. He was always with her now: she could feel him moving all the time, as if he were eager to escape the annoying prison of her womb. She sang the verse over and over, at first at a whisper, then like a chant, until it lulled them both almost to a trance. Beside her, the camel’s feet beat out the rhythm, slow and stately: The skin of my beloved shines like rain on high rocks.

  She had made the song for Amastan as they lay in the moonlight by the side of the water, when the frogs were singing at their loudest. On the night when the baby was made. How she knew this to be a fact she did not know; she just knew. Her eyes pricked, but they were too hot and dry to contain tears; instead they ached, though not as painfully as her heart.

  ‘Enough!’ she told herself fiercely and aloud, and started another, different song:

  Let us away from the abodes of men

  Even though there be water in plenty

  For water makes slaves of the wisest of men

  And I am but one and twenty.

  Those words stopped her in her tracks. One and twenty. How old was she? Now that she thought about it she was not sure. The women of her tribe usually commemorated the passing of each new summer with a border added to a handmade rug, a new carving or amulet, but Mariata had not been in the same place for long enough to have done the things that girls usually did to mark the turning of each new year, and now she realized she no longer knew her own age. Suddenly, it mattered to her terribly that she did not know. It was like having no real sense of herself, no identity. It was easy to lose a sense of identity in this immense place. At night under the stars she felt like the tiniest creature on the face of the earth, creeping and crawling along like one of the little long-legged desert beetles she saw climbing the dunes, their feet barely touching the hot ground as they scurried away, leaving their feathery traces in the sand. And even those tracks blew away at the sign of the first breeze. That was how she felt now, as if all trace of her existence on the earth might as easily be erased.

  To restate her identity, if only to herself, Mariata dug deep in her memories. First, she brought out the summer when she had turned seven: watching frogs hatch in the guelta near their summer pasturage; then at eight, being shown the stars by her grandmother’s sister as they sat together on the nose of the Wolf, which projected out over the Outoul Valley. At twelve, winning the poetry challenge against a rival tribe, using words some of them had never heard of, making prettier transitions and buried insults that made the people of her own tribe shout with delight. More childhood images fleeted by as they walked on and on; once she even laughed aloud at the memory of teaching her little cousin Alina to catch figs, throwing them high in the air, so high that she was almost blinded by the sun as she followed their flight, catching them purely by instinct as they came down again. How Alina had laughed; and then, naughty five-year-old that she was, how she had run off giggling with a fig in her hand and eaten it whole to stop Mariata taking it back, and almost choked. Figs … She experienced a sudden, painful jet of saliva into the back of her mouth, and abruptly was so filled with desire to eat one that she almost fainted clean away. She must have figs, now; at once! She had not eaten a fig since she had left the Hoggar; and then only when they had passed through the harratin-tended gardens where the silver-barked trees grew in shady abundance.

  But there were no figs. Not here, not for hundreds of miles in all likelihood. She knew that to be an objective fact; but something inside her – maybe her son, unreasonable and demanding as only babies can be – could not accept the logic at all. Figs: she must eat them at all cost, no matter what she had to do to get them. If it was the baby’s demand, then not to give it what it craved was to risk the dark mark of the fruit appearing on its back or, worse, its face. There were always children in the encampment with such marks upon them, marks that spoilt their beauty; and mothers-to-be knew well that the only way to avoid their unborn being touched in the same way was to eat the thing their child demanded: whether it be ashes, or salt, or even camel dung.

  Taking down the bag that Azaz had left her, she burrowed to the bottom and took out the last handful of dates, the ones she had been saving these past several days. All else was eaten, except the strips of poor Acacia, now so sun-hardened that she feared for her teeth to attempt them. Pretend the date is a fig, she told herself fiercely, and if you imagine it hard enough perhaps you can fool your son into accepting that a date is a fig. Remember what a fig tastes like, remember how the skin resists your teeth at first, before the sugared fruit fills your mouth; remember the gush of juice, the soft seeds between your teeth …

  ‘Don’t ask me for figs again,’ she told the baby quietly a little while later. ‘They are all gone now.’

  They had been lucky thus far: they had found pasturage on the lee side of a dune untouched by other passing travellers, and there Takama had spent a day of grazing, burbling contentedly to herself, her jaw working from side to side as she masticated the hard, dry grass into an evil green cud. They had found water too: even those wells that were no more than holes in the ground, almost hidden from view, drifted in and lost to any but those who stumbled right upon them. She had followed her brother’s instructions – she had been guided by the stars and turned her face to the wind – but she had also followed her instinct, and let her feet take them where the line on her palm dictated. Even so, there was only so much water that a small female camel and one very pregnant woman could carry between them, and although Takama’s hump stood proud and firm, Mariata worried constantly about the camel’s well-being – more than she worried about her own, if truth be told. In the heat of the sun, when they took their rest, she would lie there, feeling her belly with the flats of her hands; feeling how it swelled and pushed out the little knot of flesh that was normally hidden from view – ‘your little desert well’, Amastan had called it, licking her flanks so that the night air felt chilly on the tracks he left, before pressing his tongue deep into the spot and making her writhe with laughter. ‘One day,’ he had said, ‘there will be a child attached to you here the way you were attached here to your mother; and that child will be mine and there will never be a child so beautiful or so loved in any corner of the world.’

  She wondered what he would think of her body as it was now, huge and swollen to bursting, the skin stretched as tight as a drum; her breasts, once so prettily tip-tilted, now as heavy and engorged as a ewe’s udders; her legs like palm-trunks, her ankles like sacks … There was no profit to be had from such thoughts: wearily she drove herself on, one foot shuffling before the other, with Takama following serenely.

  Planes flew overhead more than once, so fast that their noise preceded them and was left behind in their wake. The camel seemed unconcerned by their presence
, but to Mariata they seemed ominous, belonging neither to the earth nor the sky. She crossed the road Azaz had told her about in the early hours of a moonless night when the whole world was black and not a headlight could be seen in any direction. Leaving the Tanezrouft at her back and setting her sights on the stars, they crossed the Erg el-Agueïba, though she had no name for it; all she knew was that when the sun finally rose it was upon the most forsaken place she had ever seen, an endless sandflat punctuated with hard brown saltpans and the sort of thorny vegetation even Takama, who had thus far showed none of the characteristic neuroticism of other camels, would not go near.

  Some days south of the plain of salt, they came upon a huge dry riverbed and this they followed for three days, until Mariata’s sandals finally fell apart and they were forced to stop. Mariata sat on a rock in the bed of the river, inspecting her callused feet. She had been proud, once upon a time, of her pretty feet; they were dainty and long-boned, and when adorned with henna for her wedding everyone had exclaimed at their elegance. Since then the desert had taken a heavy toll. In the early days blisters had given way to sores, which had finally healed over, only to blister again. Now scar tissue lay over scar tissue and a great thick pad of hard skin had pushed the delicate lines of the sandals to a broader profile, pressing the seams outwards until at last they had simply given way. She bound them quickly with strips of cloth torn from her robe, before the ugly details made too much impression, and thought she would not be dancing barefoot for a long time to come. Her lips curled up in a brief sardonic smile.