Shadows of Marrakech

by Tim Kindberg

  There was no one in the stall.

  “Excuse me,” said Deobia to one of the people queuing next to him. “How long have you waited?”

  “I really can’t remember.”

  “And when will the stall owner arrive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So all of you, you’re all waiting here but you don’t know when he’ll turn up?” They nodded.

  “And who is he?” They looked at one another.

  “I can’t seem to think of his name,” said one. “But I’m sure I know it.” She touched her companion’s arm. “Oh, put me out of my misery. What’s his name?”

  The other screwed up her face in thought. “It’s on the tip of my tongue. Anyway, he sells the finest meats, I know that for sure.”

  Two others left the queue and drifted off. The queue shuffled up. Another person joined the tail of it.

  Deobia led Akimbe a little way from the queue. “This is Marrakech. But it is not Marrakech. These people are like you and me. But they are not.”

  “But this is Morchid’s stall,” said Akimbe. “Everyone is acting like it is, just like they do in Marrakech. He’s probably just minding his trafficking operations. So they’re waiting.”

  “No, believe me, he’s never there. And yet they queue.”

  Akimbe picked up Ibtissam, and thought as he did so of how she had led to all of this. “These people have been drugged, or something. No, it’s a spell he has cast. It’s magic. I don’t know how, but his fingers are in every part of the situation we’re in. Chemchi’s disappearance, the slave trade. Maybe he forced Chemchi through the carpet to do his bidding.”

  “You are jumping to a conclusion,” said Deobia. “That he is the link between this world and Marrakech, the other side of the gates, the carpet. Or maybe you’re thinking he’s involved with the disappearance of your family. But I would know about them, wouldn’t I? And I don’t.”

  “You say you know everything. First you said you know all about the slaves that are captive in Marrakech and trafficked through it. Now you’re implying you’ve been here so much that you know everything about it, too. But you can’t. You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s why searching is hard. It’s not supposed to be easy. That’s what my mother used to tell me. And she was right.”

  “Anyway, be that as it may. You think Morchid has powers, magical powers.”

  “Well, how do you explain all of this — this fragment, like a part of Marrakech where we’ve just come from, but full of people who may or may not be new ones and where people queue for nobody? And do you think carpets that suck people through to other worlds and leave a woven shadow are normal? Where did you say you came from? Oh, no, you didn’t say, did you.”

  “I told you, it’s a bug in reality.”

  “A bug? What’s that?”

  “I Just mean it’s broken. Reality is broken.”

  And what makes you say that, exactly?”

  “Someone told me.”

  “Did they, indeed. A wise person, I imagine, for you to accept what he says so readily. I wouldn’t have thought you were the type. You have your own thoughts on everything else, don’t you?”

  Deobia didn’t reply. Akimbe continued.

  “So reality is broken. But that’s not possible: reality is reality. Whatever happens in fact is part of it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be reality. It would be appearance.”

  “You’re very logical about reality, Akimbe, but you believe in magic!”

  “Magic is part of reality.”

  Deobia, who had been about to continue, closed his mouth and turned his head to one side. Akimbe looked at the goggles atop the frizzy hair, the long upper lip, the high cheekbones.

  “Well, man from the stars, do you have nothing to say to that?”

  “Akimbe, you and I, the ones who have lost something, or don’t know or have lost touch with where they come from, are in the best position to find answers to these questions. We feel as though we don’t belong. But that is our strength, too.”

  Ibtissam dug her claws in Akimbe’s arm. He let her drop into the human traffic. “Let’s go. We have people to find.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ALL AROUND THEM, the call and babel of trade took place just as it did in Marrakech. People wended their way through the narrow streets, stopped and haggled. The price of any particular item fluctuated wildly.

  Deobia said, “Some of Marrakech is missing, not just the bricks and mortar but many of the people, too. And yet the people walk and cycle around, the mopeds come and go, just as though the absences don’t matter. These people live here as though they’re not aware that the city gives way abruptly to sand. You heard it for yourself from that man.”

  “Yes, it’s a kind of blindness. Did you ever manage to make sense of it?”

  Once again, Deobia didn’t answer. He became distracted so easily, and it was starting to irritate Akimbe. Now he was looking at something a little way off.

  “There’s something I need to check,” Deobia said. “Wait here.” He gestured to a nearby tea shop.

  “But Ibtissam is running ahead!” said Akimbe.

  Deobia ran, faster than Akimbe had ever seen anyone run before, darting expertly among the moving crowd. He scooped up Ibtissam and brought her back to Akimbe.

  “Sit at that table at the back, please, and wait for me. I won’t be long. I’m sorry. It’s an enslaver. He might know something.”

  Akimbe watched Deobia, taller than everyone around him, disappear around a corner. He moved this time without running but somehow much faster than everyone else. He glided through the crowd, who seemed oblivious. It was impossible to think of them as complete human beings. How could someone queue for someone who wasn’t there? Live in a fragment of a place and not realise it? Were they all like that, like automata? He didn’t want to become one of them, not at any cost.

  Ibtissam was looking up at Akimbe from his lap. Sitting there, he felt at everyone’s mercy. First Chemchi, now Deobia both seemed to be stronger than him, in one way at least: they were more at home with their aloneness. The torch sat on the table, the torch that was no good to him. His mother’s bracelet lay in his pouch. He possessed nothing else, anywhere, as far as he knew. How long had they been here? An eternity, it seemed, and yet the sun remained high in the sky. It was beating mercilessly on the netting above the souks, breaking through in dapples. One lozenge of it burned Akimbe’s forearm. His mouth was dusty and dry. He was hungry but had no money. His real home, the grand house he had lived in with his family before the men dragged them all away from it — it all came back in a flood.

  A man appeared from nowhere in the crowd and sat at the next table. “Little one!” It was Camel-breath.

  Akimbe looked up in horror. “You’ve followed me through the carpet.”

  “Followed you? Just you? Isn’t there someone else you want to tell me about? Someone whose address I gave you? Tell me, how are you two getting on? Like a house on fire, I’ll bet!”

  “Stay out of our lives. And tell Morchid the same.”

  “Ah, but if it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have met Deobia. And would you have lain on the shadow carpet by yourself? Would you be here, where your precious Chemchi is?”

  Camel-breath leaned towards him across the table, as though to speak in confidence. His brown teeth criss-crossed one another and his breath was like a vapour from a long-forgotten marsh. “You assume I have some influence with Morchid. And that Morchid knows you’re here. You make assumptions, little one, and you should always be prepared for your assumptions to be wrong. Perhaps I am your friend. Perhaps the one who gave you Deobia’s address is your friend.”

  “There you are.” Deobia had walked out of the crowd and loomed behind Camel-breath. “I’ve just been looking for you.”

  Camel-breath kept his eyes fixed on Akimbe, like a snake. Clearly he was not surprised by the arrival of Deobia’s voice behind him.

  “Will someone please tell me
what’s going on?” said Akimbe, looking from one to the other.

  ‘I’ve brought him here as you asked,” said Deobia. “I’ve even brought the cat with him. Now what?”

  “What?!” said Akimbe. “You bastard. I trusted you!”

  Camel-breath just laughed, a sickening retch of a laugh. “He did tell you he worked in my trade, didn’t he, little one? Are you so surprised? Now, welcome, welcome to our little world! You must come with us.”

  Akimbe stared up at Deobia. “Look at me. Look me in the eye.” But Deobia, still standing, kept his eyes on the back of Camel-breath’s head. For the first time, the youth was shifting his feet, looking decidedly earth-bound.

  Ibtissam was still on his lap. Camel-breath, enjoying every second of his discomfort, was waiting for him to get up. He thought about running. But where? How would he ever get back again?

  “Are you going to take me to find Chemchi?”

  “Hah! Do I look stupid, little one?”

  “Why are you even interested in me?”

  “But we’re not. You’re just another stray to round up. You’re really not important. Oh, I know, your worries seem to fill the entire universe. But to us you’re nothing but another slave-in-waiting. I was about to say you are two a penny but you’re not even that. No one needs to pay you, slave. And look at your young, fit, strong arms. They could be digging, sweeping, polishing for someone. Now, just tell me where the girl is and we can get on with our lives. I can get out of this … what do you call it?” He bent his eyes towards Deobia behind him. “Bug in reality! Ha! We laughed so much when he first told us that one. One of his little theories. One of many, I’m sure. Try telling that to Morchid. If there’s anyone who knows what it is, it’s him.”

  “Even if I knew where she was, do you really think I would tell you? You can go to hell.”

  “As if we weren’t already there.” Camel-breath’s smug smile closed like a door slammed shut. “Now listen to me and listen carefully. If you don’t help us…there’s your family.” He sliced his finger across his throat, rolled his eyes back, stuck out his tongue and let his head slump lifelessly.

  Akimbe looked at Deobia, who still wouldn’t meet his eyes. He looked drained, this traveller from the stars with his great goggles.

  “Where are the others?” said Deobia.

  “They’re off making enquiries about all the recent ‘new ones’. They found out about you two, all right. We’ve been causing quite a commotion down at the gates of hell, yes we have. But no one seems to know about the girl apart from that idiot who wants to give us all silly names.”

  “And are they nearby?” said Deobia.

  Camel-breath’s face contorted into a mockery of concern. However he arranged his face, he didn’t seem capable of keeping his tongue quite inside it. “Oh, why, are you worried about them? Or about you?”

  “No, I just wondered, that’s all. We should split up and look in a different part.”

  “Well they were headed for the Jamaa el Fna when I last saw. Or should I say where it ought to be. I —”

  Without warning, Deobia threw Camel-breath onto the ground, bent over him and hit him hard on the head. Akimbe had never seen anyone punch anyone else so seriously, not in the worst fight among his friends. Deobia hit him again and again until he was out cold.

  “Stop!” Akimbe said, “Stop! You’ll kill him!”

  “And you would care?” Deobia looked at his fist as though he didn’t believe what he had just done. “Now come.”

  Akimbe closed his mouth and scrambled from his chair, the cat in his arms, the torch abandoned on the table.

  They ran and ran through the souks, spilling people in the stalls. No one in the cafe had seemed much perturbed by what Deobia had done. The people they knocked over just picked themselves back up; the stallholders tidied up and everything continued as though nothing had happened as they tore through the souks.

  Deobia collided with someone on a moped rounding the corner. They both tumbled to the ground but neither was seriously hurt. “Sorry,” said Deobia through his panting breath before running on. It was all Akimbe could do to keep up with this long-legged youth who was well over a foot taller, and to stop Ibtissam flying out of his arms.

  Deobia turned sharply from the street into an even narrower one and slowed to a walking pace, suppressing his gasps for breath and wiping the sweat from his brow with his sleeve.

  Akimbe was thankful for the slowing down, his heart hammering.

  They walked and stopped and mingled with the crowd. No one paid them any attention. Deobia turned again into a narrow gap between two stalls.

  Akimbe followed, doubtful that he should follow the increasingly alien youth but not knowing what else to do.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHEMCHI SAW ROUGH-looking men hanging around in tea shops and stalking the streets in twos and threes. They were clearly looking for someone or something. Her, no doubt. But were they from here or had they come through the carpet like her?

  She did her best to look like a native, calml repeating her pretence at shopping every now and then, her headscarf pulled over her head and to the front so that only someone looking straight at her could see her features.

  Perhaps it was the forgetfulness creeping up on her, that caused her to take a wrong turn on her way to where, in the real Marrakech, the Criée Berbère would be. Or perhaps it was her unquenchable curiosity, which gained the upper hand over her more sensible instincts.

  For she found herself wending her way to what would be Ali’s riad. And once she turned a corner or two in that direction, she was impelled as by a magnet, despite her realisation that she might not have long before the forgetting took an irresistible hold.

  The riad stood taller than its neighbours, reaching up to a little patch of blue sky just as it did in the real Marrakech. The front door was open. In Marrakech, that meant that either she or Ali would be in. Something cold gripped her heart. But she walked through the dark passageway that opened onto the bright tiled courtyard in the atrium.

  And there at the table, drinking tea in silence, was a group of the rough men she had seen about in the medina, four of them.

  Quick as a flash, she walked confidently up to the cupboard in the corner and withdrew a mop and pail with her back to them. She could feel the men watching her as she filled the bucket with soapy water, added her cloths, and began cleaning the other end of the courtyard on her hands and knees.

  They seemed to accept that she was the cleaning girl. Soon they ignored her and turned their silent attention back to the cooling mint tea. Then one of them spoke.

  “How many were there?”

  “Seven,” another answered.

  “Good specimens?”

  “Muscled, mostly.”

  “So we’d use them.”

  “Most definitely.” This from a third voice.

  “And the women?”

  “Very fine, and young: sure to attract a good few buyers.” A low guffaw spread round the table and quickly died.

  “But they’re here, in this hell-hole.”

  “Yes, not where we need ‘em. And look what happens when we do try to get them back to sell ‘em on.”

  “Well, lots of ‘em anyway, and you never know which.”

  “Why, what does happen? I thought we were—“

  “Turning into those creepy shadow creatures. Floating, then gone like a screen turning off. Don’t wanna think what becomes of ‘em. As long as they’re not creeping around back home somewhere.”

  “And that look in their eyes before, like they know what’s going to happen when you put them on the carpet. Only time you ever see them looking like… like they know something real’s going to happen. I mean really real.”

  “Anyway, enough. They’re not why we’re here.”

  “In this bastard place.”

  “No. As if we knew what we were bloody well looking for.”

  “A baby.”

  “Hah. A
s if there were babies here.”

  “More tea, gentlemen?” Chemchi heard Ali’s voice. Unmistakably. She couldn’t help herself. She swept around as though reaching for a new dirty patch of the floor, and stole a glance. He stood framed by the kitchen with a clear view of her. But he didn’t look at her. She knocked her bucket a little by accident. It clanked. He saw her but remained focussed on the enslavers.

  “Or can I get you something else?” They were ignoring him.

  If the riad was here and Ali was here, then there could be another version of her hereabouts. She might return any minute. She might be in the riad now.

  While the men talked and Ali, proud owner, served them fresh tea as though they had asked for it, she finished up. Boldly, she replaced the mop and pail in the cupboard and went over to him.

  “Why are you doing that now? You’re disturbing us.” Ali leaned against a counter with his arms folded. They stood behind the men, back in the kitchen out of earshot.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve stopped now.” She spoke with her head bent in case he spotted some difference from her counterpart. “I must do some shopping.”

  “But I thought that was what you’d just been out to do. Where is it?”

  “I … I forgot my list so I came back.”

  “And you started cleaning the floor.”

  “I know, it was silly of me. I’m not feeling myself.”

  “Then stay and rest for a while. These men … they could do with some company.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Strangers, foreigners. A bit rough if you ask me but they’ve behaved themselves. I only just found them in the Rue Mouassine. They asked some funny questions, though. They’re looking for someone. Something, called a ‘baby’. Except they don’t seem to know much about what it is. A bit silly, if you ask me, coming heaven knows how far and not knowing what you’re looking for.”

  “How far?” Chemchi pretended to busy herself by cleaning up the counter so that he couldn’t get a good look at her.

  “They didn’t say. The mountains probably. They’re like new ones only —”

  “Only they aren’t new.”

  “Well, yes. They use different words and say funny things but they seem to know this place, all right. They talk about the different places here but then ask questions about them as though they’re clueless.”