The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  It was a rhetorical question. Taïb squeezed my hand and I curled my fingers around his – we were transfixed.

  ‘And Mariata, well … She was a proper little princess, that one, when she arrived here, claimed to be descended from Tin Hinan herself, but who knows the truth of that? The Kel Taitok love to boast of such things. I say it’s better to be yourself than to carry a thousand ancestors around on your back, but that’s how our culture always has been. It can hold you back.’ She considered this with her head on one side like an intelligent blackbird interrogating a worm. ‘But then of course it can give you the backbone and the pride you need to carry you through tough situations. You can look at it both ways. It was Amastan’s mother who brought her here.’ And then she told us about the woman she called Rahma and how she had been happily married to a great chieftain, until he had taken a second wife. ‘That’s a rare thing amongst our people,’ she said to me gently. ‘Polygamy. One man, one wife: each for the other their heart and eyes and soul. That’s how it usually works in Tuareg society and it’s always the best way. The many-wives custom came in from the east and caused nothing but trouble. Women hate to share their men and men can’t understand it. Anyway: Rahma, she had nothing left after she divorced Moussa except for Amastan, her only surviving child. She loved that boy: loved him too much for sense. So when he lost his mind, I had to do something or she’d have lost hers too. I sent her off to the Aïr to fetch Mariata. She needed something to do, and I thought it might serve. You hear things in the inadan community that others don’t hear; and you read signs others can’t read. None of the girls here was pretty enough or sharp enough to attract Amastan’s eye, not after what he’d gone through. And she was something special – she still is, you’ve seen for yourselves. A beauty: not pretty, mind you, but properly handsome, which is much more enduring than prettiness anyway. A strong, strong face, and a strong will to go with it. How could he resist? I wish now that I’d read the rest of the signs around that union; but I did what I thought was right at the time. I didn’t look far enough forward, and by the time I did they were inseparable. Love is stronger than fate, isn’t that remarkable? Some say it’s stronger than death, but bless my stars I haven’t had the chance to find out that yet.’

  And then she told us about the extraordinary events that had separated the man I knew as the Fennec, whom she called Amastan almost with a mother’s fondness, and the desert woman, Mariata.

  ‘When the soldiers came it was on their wedding night. Of course, they’d been lying together for weeks – months, probably – not that any would think the less of them for it. The People of the Veil turn a blind eye to things like that. Try not to get caught, is what we say, and if you do you’d better come up with a good story to entertain us with. She was already pregnant by the time they married. Married and widowed on the same day: at least, that’s what she thought, for years. Poor Mariata. Poor Amastan! It wasn’t the soldier’s bullet that nearly killed him, it was the blow to his head. The bullet struck him here’ – she pressed her hand just above her heart – ‘but he hit his skull so hard when he went down that that might as easily have done for him. He was unconscious for weeks: God at his most merciful. He’d already seen the aftermath of a massacre once, he had no need to see one again, to see what I saw …’ She shuddered. ‘It was a terrible night.’

  ‘How did you survive?’ Taïb’s eyes searched her face.

  The blacksmith’s mouth twisted into a grimace. ‘They raped and killed just about every woman they could lay hands on. But when they came to me –’ She paused. ‘Well, let’s just say they’d never seen anything quite like that before. Terrified, they were. Ran off. Never was so happy to be born different in all my life.’

  ‘So it was you who saved the Fennec’s life, was it?’ I asked.

  She scoffed at the name. ‘Always the romantic, that one. Couldn’t bear to use his own name any more after she was gone. I thought he’d find her and bring her back, but life isn’t like water, it doesn’t follow the line of least resistance, does it? It took him a long time to recuperate after that wound and the head blow; months. By the time he was able to walk, let alone think straight, she’d already gone; first of all taken by her father into the Tafilalt, and then setting off on her own into the desert. She trekked all the way from the south of Morocco back to the edge of the Hoggar, over a thousand miles. A feat for anyone, let alone a pregnant woman.’

  I stared at her in disbelief. ‘She crossed the desert? Alone?’

  ‘And pregnant.’ Tana gave a decisive nod. ‘As I said, she’s a remarkably strong-willed woman. Anyway, by the time Amastan found out where she’d been taken and made it to Imteghren, she was gone. He found the house she’d lived at, knocked at the door and it was opened by the woman Mariata’s father had married, no one else there. Well, she took one look at him, this ragged nomad asking awkward questions, and got the measure of him at once. Told him the girl was dead, just like that. Dead of a sickness, she said, and shut the door in his face. He asked around, but no one told him any different. What was left of his heart was broken. He came back here, couldn’t settle, and went off into the hills; got swallowed up by the rebel cause.’

  ‘So when did you find out she was still alive?’ Taïb asked.

  ‘A couple of years ago, that’s all. She too had changed her name. It’s hard enough to keep track of people in the desert at the best of times; but when they change the names they were given at birth?’ She clicked her tongue, shook her head. ‘I knew she wasn’t dead. I knew it here …’ She touched a finger to her heart. ‘And I read it in the bones too: but what was the point in telling him that? He’d never have listened to me.’

  ‘Why did she change her name?’ I asked, curious.

  Tana sat back, closed her eyes. ‘Fate is mischievous, sometimes positively malign. At the end of her long desert trek she was taken captive by the very man she hated most in all the world: Rhossi ag Bahedi, the heir to the Aïr drum-group. It is sometimes whispered that it was Rhossi who brought the soldiers down on our tribe: whispered, but never confirmed. It must be said that Rhossi managed to escape more easily than one might expect in such circumstances …’ She sighed. ‘Well, escape he did, and almost a year later he got exactly what he wanted: Mariata, to do with what he would. He took her to wife, as his second wife, to be precise. Poor dear: she held her lineage in such high esteem, such a fall must have been hard to bear, and Rhossi would never have allowed her to forget it. You can see why she might have decided to change her name. She got her own back, in her way: he never managed to get a child on her, so he bore his own measure of ridicule.’

  ‘And the baby? Did she have the baby? Did it survive?’ Taïb’s expression was avid. He seemed to be enjoying this little game of revelations more than I was. Something was gnawing at me, deep inside, something I didn’t have a name for and wasn’t sure I wanted to face.

  Tana weighed the amulet in her hand. ‘There are three names inside: Amastan, who had it first; Mariata, to whom he gave it …’

  ‘And Lallawa.’

  She gave me an approving nod. ‘Good girl. And Lallawa. Yes, Mariata had her child: a girl, which came as a surprise to her. It had been such an active baby she’d been sure it was a boy, had even named it Amastan in her own mind. But, clear as day, no boy-parts, just girl-parts. And so she named it Lallawa, spirit of freedom. Lallawa ult Mariata ult Yemma ult Tofenat. All the way back to Tin Hinan. She wrote the name in the amulet to protect her newborn; and she bound it up with the best protective charm I’ve ever seen, binding the spirits of the parents to take care of the child, weaving the words in and out of one another, drawing a web of safety, a net that would draw those three souls together. She thought it would never be in this world but only in the stars, but sometimes fate makes up for its mischief and writes its own pretty conte de fée.’

  She leant forward. ‘Tell me, child, how did you come by the amulet?’

  I told her, and watched her smile, a long, satisfied s
mile.

  ‘So that’s the story you were spun, was it? Well, let me give you an alternative version. Mariata had her child, and it was a girl, and she wrote its name in the amulet and tied the talisman around it for luck. Rhossi, he wanted sons. But the baby, someone else’s baby, he didn’t want that. He left it to die. She went back, though, ran away on the wedding night to where she’d left the child. In the tomb of Tin Hinan – ah, the patterns of life and death, they’re elegant and ineluctable. But there was no baby when she got there; just tyre tracks and the imprint of feet. Feet wearing shoes such as you’d not find in all of Mali or Niger. One man and one woman, she told me; and he was much bigger and heavier than the woman, whose feet were hardly larger than a child’s.’

  I could not take my eyes off her, but all the time my heart was racing and my mind was thinking ridiculous things like ‘My mother’s feet were tiny, she was a size 3 …’ And knowing there was something wrong with this sentence.

  Tana touched me on the forehead. ‘You have that serious look she used to get when she was concentrating on something. Except that her brows used to meet; I see you shape yours to prevent that. Yes, my dear, no matter what they told you, you did not belong to them. They did not make you. They found you in a desert tomb and they stole you away.’

  I felt the world spin. I blinked and swallowed and tried to focus.

  ‘You say the woman was French, yes?’

  I nodded.

  ‘They must have smuggled you out somehow,’ Tana mused. ‘I’m sure there are ways of doing these things, especially for rich Europeans … War of the Sands notwithstanding, such things never really touch Europeans: they live in a different world to the rest of us.’

  ‘The birth certificate, Izzy,’ Taïb said suddenly, his warm brown eyes filled with wonder. He dug in his pocket and drew out a piece of folded green paper. I stared at it: the last time I had seen it was when the Fennec had thrown it across his tent in frustration. ‘I knew as soon as I saw it that it was a Moroccan birth certificate. You see the stamp?’ He indicated the faded rectangle at the bottom of the faded green paper. ‘That’s Hassan II – our old king. It’s very faint, but show that image to any Moroccan and he’ll recognize it in an instant.’ He laughed. ‘You’ve got a Moroccan birth certificate!’

  A fake birth certificate, prepared and stamped by some corrupt official for a bit of baksheesh. ‘No, it’s not,’ I said so faintly it was almost a whisper. ‘It’s not my birth certificate. I don’t have one.’ But I could feel the joy slowly overcoming my confusion, seeing off my doubts, gradually, inexorably rising up inside me, like water drawn up into the light from the depths of a dark well.

  ‘Tana told me you would come.’

  ‘How could she know that?’

  ‘You know Tana: better than I do. She knows so much.’ A pause. ‘Do you know, I have carried you with me all these years, in my heart, over my heart.’ She unpinned a silver brooch that was fastened to the centre of her chest and unwound the leather binding that held it closed. From within she took a scrap of indigo cloth tinged with rusty brown, folded small. She gazed at it fondly for a moment, then let it flutter to the ground between them. ‘That came from your sleeve, when they tore me away from you. I thought it bore the last of your lifeblood, until I realized I carried your child inside me.’ The smile she turned on him was luminous. ‘Did you not recognize our girl when first you met?’ She chuckled. ‘Fancy abducting your own daughter!’

  He shook his head. ‘How could I know? I did not even know there was a child, and making a connection like that, in such circumstances …’ He let the sentence trail off. It was absurd. ‘Of course not.’ He paused, thinking. ‘And yet, you know, there was something about her. Something of you.’

  ‘I knew her at once. I would have known her amongst a thousand women. She has your eyes.’

  Amastan felt moisture gather in his own. He dashed it away with the back of his hand: the asshak demanded that you did not show weakness, even to your wife. But the tears were too strong for him, and at last he let them run down his face, into the cotton of the tagelmust. ‘She has your chin,’ he managed at last.

  Mariata reached a hand to his cheek. ‘Let me see you. Let me see your beautiful face.’ She drew the veil down and gazed at him, taking in greedily every muscle and pore of him, every line and wrinkle. ‘I do not care about the time that has passed between us: it means nothing. You are the same as ever. You are my Amastan; and I am your Mariata. Never leave me again. Promise me.’

  He found he could not say anything, so instead he simply nodded, and folded her hands against his heart.

  Two years later

  The desert sun, striking down out of the pale blaze of the sky, cast its light upon a group of figures in an encampment set at the foot of the mountain. The scenery was spectacular: on one side jagged, volcanic peaks rose to pierce the horizon; on the other a dramatic sea of sand lay unmoving, its crests and troughs caught as if frozen in a moment of time. In a pasture near by – vivid emerald against all the red – camels grazed or sat staring patiently into space, their jaws shuttling contentedly from side to side. Down by the silver strip of river a herd of black goats tumbled neatly from rock to rock. Play-fights broke out between some of the young males, and the bellows of the rams upbraiding this precocious behaviour echoed off the red walls. Across an enclosure on the far side of the camp, beyond a number of dusty vehicles, a knot of children had gathered outside one of the long, low-slung tents, listening intently to two men who were robed and veiled in the traditional fashion. The older man had a strong, craggy profile and watchful eyes. At present these were trained on the younger man, who gestured enthusiastically, and then bent and traced great looping lines in the sand at his feet with the aid of a pointed stick. He stood back to survey his handiwork, then walked quickly away and came back some moments later with the skirt of his robe full of stones. Beneath the robe he was wearing jeans, well cut and narrow-legged in the French style. He cast the stones down and a great cloud of dust rose up and made the nearest children sneeze and shout. The older man said something and they all laughed, so that even the harsh planes of his face for a moment gave themselves up to a less fearsome expression. The young man placed one round, red stone upon the path of one of the ellipses he had drawn, then another, larger and lighter in colour, a little further away. More stones were set amidst the whirling, concentric lines. The children looked on fascinated but bemused. He talked with great animation, pointing first to the stones, then up to the sky, then to the desert, and finally made a grand, expansive sweep of the arm that drew them all into the pattern he had made.

  Two women sat apart from all this lively education, looking on with a mixture of tenderness, pride and amusement. In profile they could be mirror images of one another, for the sun’s lavish attentions had erased the wrinkles on the face of one and hazed the detail of the other. If it were not for the contrasting colours – silver and black – of their braided hair, they might have been sisters, or maybe cousins. They both wore blue robes, loosely draped, cool in this heat, coloured head-wraps, silver jewellery and kohl that outlined their dark, expressive eyes; one wore a watch, but it was no kind of status symbol, being plastic, digital, uncompromisingly cheap and functional. She consulted it, stood up, pressed her hands into the small of her back and stretched as luxuriously as a cat, then walked towards the class. The other woman patted an amulet – a massive, four-square chunk of etched silver embellished with glowing red discs – that was displayed proudly upon her breast, then pushed herself to her feet, threw the long tail of her head-wrap back over one shoulder and followed.

  ‘And what is this?’ The young man pointed to a white pebble and the children craned their necks.

  ‘Tellit?’ one of them questioned, turning to the older man and regarding him solemnly.

  Amastan beamed. ‘Tellit,’ he confirmed.

  ‘The moon,’ echoed Taïb. ‘La lune.’ He touched a piece of rose granite sitting on the next of the e
lliptical rings he had inscribed in the sand. ‘And can any of you remember what this is?’

  A girl with her hair in half a dozen braids said something in little more than a whisper. Taïb cupped his hand to his ear and she repeated it timidly.

  ‘The red star, yes, exactly that: Mars. Well done, Tarichat.’

  He got them tracing their own ellipses and placing planets and their attendant moons in suitable positions, asking and answering questions in a mixture of English, French and Tamacheq. And then someone trod on Venus, fell over and knocked Earth out of its orbit, and suddenly everyone was laughing and adding new stars and asteroids where there had never been any before. At that moment a great shadow fell across the sand, and they all turned to see what had caused this phenomenon.

  One of the boys laughed and shouted something out and Amastan grinned, his teeth startling white in the tan that showed between the black folds of his tagelmust. ‘He says you have caused a solar eclipse!’

  Taïb walked over and placed an arm around the newcomer’s expanded waist. ‘How are we to teach them their place in the universe when my giant wife comes and bestrides an entire solar system?’