The Salt Road (19 page)

‘I saw that a cairn had been piled up by the entrance to the village. I almost passed it without a thought; but the moonlight was suddenly too bright. It was heads that were piled there, not rocks. The shock knocked me from my camel: I hit the ground and lay there insensible till the sun rose the next day.

‘There were thirty-four heads, to be precise. I counted each one of them. Thirty-four people whose spirits would wander for eternity. I could feel them in the air around me, swirling angrily. Manta’s was the thirty-first I found. I sat with it cradled in my lap. She who had been so beautiful, so charged with life, reduced to hard, cold flesh, all blood-clotted and split apart. Her shining eyes dull and glassy …’

The words ground to a halt, but it was as if he reached down inside himself and forced himself to go on.

‘I begged her spirit to speak to me, but it was silent with reproof. I had not been there to save her, and the amulet I had given her for protection had done nothing to ward away the evil that had come to her village.

‘I found the amulet, still on her body: they had not burned her as they had so many others, and the goats and cattle too, split apart by machetes, their limbs scattered, stinking. I will say no more about how Manta was arrayed when I found her. I tried as hard as I could to reunite her head with what was left of her body, but the pieces would not knit, though I raged and wailed at them. It must have been then that my wits finally left me and the Kel Asuf came for me, for I remember nothing more. I have no idea of how I returned to the Teggart; I do not know how I survived, whether I ate or drank or slept. I was human no longer. I was not human till you came to me and looked into my eyes. I thought you were her, that she had come back to me. And then I knew that you were not.’

‘And that was why you wept.’ Mariata took his hand into her lap; but as soon as she did so she was assailed by the horrible image of Amastan sitting there on the ground of the murdered village with his beloved’s severed head in his lap, talking to it like a madman, stroking the dead skin.

The next thing she knew, she was running, running as if a thousand djenoun were after her. She did not stop until she reached the camp; and when she found herself in Rahma’s tent she stared around, bewildered, not knowing how she had got there.

14

Where was I? I blinked and tried to focus, but my head was muzzy and the ground was moving past my face, and before I could do anything about it I was throwing up uncontrollably, heaving and retching, till it felt as if my stomach was going to flip right out of my mouth.

‘
Comment allez-vous?
’

The voice was kind, but the question seemed absurd. I swallowed the last of the bile and tried to reorient myself. It dawned on me gradually that I was travelling face-down over the back of a donkey.

‘Can we stop, please?’ I croaked. ‘
Pouvons-nous arrêter?
’ Given current circumstances, some small distant part of me congratulated myself for possessing such wherewithal as to be able to attempt to communicate in two languages.

Miraculously, the world stopped moving around me and the nausea began to subside. Firm hands helped me reposition myself on the beast, and then an unfamiliar, dark face hove into view.

‘
Ça va? Vous allez bien?
’ he asked, and I remembered the young man in native clothing who had helped me off the mountain.

‘Where are you taking me?’ I demanded ungraciously, feeling panic at being at someone else’s mercy.

‘To Nana’s house,’ he told me.

‘Nana?’

‘Our grandmother, Lalla Fatma. She is a renowned healer and herbalist. There are plants growing here that grow nowhere else in the world, and Nana is expert in their use.’

The panic took a grip. ‘No, no, that won’t do at all,’ I said, trying to muster the firm voice I used on the ditzy temps they sent me when my own assistant was away, enunciating slowly and with exaggerated clarity. ‘It’s very kind of you, but no. You need to take me to a
hospital
. For
X-rays
.’

The man laughed; but what was amusing about wanting to go to hospital with a suspected broken ankle? I forced myself to try again. ‘Look, it needs to be X-rayed and set in a cast so that it can mend properly. I really don’t think a few plants are going to do the trick.’

But my rescuer turned away without a word and it struck me suddenly that maybe his French was not as fluent as I had thought. I sighed. Over his shoulder I could see the beginnings of a medieval-looking peasant village – a jumble of adobe buildings in the same rose-red hue as the surrounding rocks, as if they too were excrescences of the natural landscape. They had flat roofs and tiny, iron-fretted windows, and some were so ancient they appeared to be crumbling back into boulder and crag. Not much chance of a hospital here. Black-robed women stopped chopping vegetation or digging in the ground and silently watched us go by with their wary, sloe-black eyes. By contrast, the children ran about shouting and laughing at the sight of a European on a donkey. Goats and sheep jostled around us, baaing in confusion; this was not the time they usually came down from grazing on the mountain. What was going on? An enormous white cockerel standing on a wall flared its carnal red coxcomb at us; its harem of chickens clucked and scratched in the dust below.

‘There is no hospital here,’ the man said conversationally, confirming my worst fears, ‘not in the sense that you mean. There is no X-ray machine; and the doctor … well,’ he paused, ‘my grandmother is more skilled than any doctor. People come to consult her from Taroudant and Tiznit; even from Marrakech.’

My thoughts raced ahead to a time when I would walk with a stick because of a joint that had healed badly; no, my frantic brain amended, with a prosthetic leg to replace the one lost to blood poisoning and gangrene brought on by the use of weird herbs …

‘For God’s sake!’ I cried out, on the edge of hysteria, feeling all control slip away, now and in my future. ‘I need a
doctor
!’

No one paid me the least attention, except the ragged children with their dark, laughing eyes. They thought I was hilarious.

The girl leading the donkey handed its rope to the man and ran ahead calling, ‘Lalla Fatma! Lalla Fatma!’

Women of all ages and descriptions emerged from the mudbrick houses to see what the commotion was all about; seeing me, a European woman, they pulled their veils up to hide their hair and faces as if I might suddenly assault them with a camera, like any other ignorant tourist. A few moments later the donkey came to a halt outside a wall washed in the same pinky-ochre as the rest of the village. My rescuer pulled me down off the animal and into his arms, revealing surprising strength in his wiry frame, and carried me through a garden fragrant with orange and lemon trees, olives and roses. Up the beaten-earth path he went, then over the threshold, ducking almost double to take me through the low door.

The contrast between the virulent sunlight and the cave-like interior was so intense that for a moment I thought I had gone blind. When my eyes adjusted I realized that the large chamber we had entered was full of women in the midst of domestic tasks, or sitting with their backs against the walls chattering like birds, their henna-patterned hands gesturing busily. One woman ground something in a large stone mortar; a second attended to the coals in a brazier in the centre of the room over which a big, tarnished copper kettle sat steaming; another sorted through a dish of lentils, discarding small stones from amongst the pulses; a fourth carded wool. The fifth – vastly fat – assembled a number of clay pots on a low circular table, helped by the girl who had led the donkey down the mountain. If this was not enough for me to take in, four goats now came bursting through the open door after us, bleating wildly. One of the women lumbered to her feet, grabbed the broom and, addressing each one by name –
Teaza! Imshi! Tufila! Azri!
– shooed them all out again. Already my head was spinning.

The big woman got to her feet and said something to the others. One by one they all got up, kissed her hands respectfully and departed, leaving only four of us in the room. Where there had been bustle and noise there was an abrupt and pregnant quiet. The Berber man set me down gently on a mat on the floor, but the old woman scolded him furiously until he made me a bed of cushions. I lay there, looking up at her, not knowing what to do or say. She was extraordinary-looking, dark-skinned and imposing; unlike the other women in their plain black robes she wore a long blue chemise and over that a vibrantly striped swathe of silk in orange and black knotted over her ample chest, and draped up over her head. Around her neck was a necklace of amber beads, each bead as large as an egg; heavy silver earrings weighed down her pendulous earlobes. The sleeves of the under-dress were pinned back to reveal muscled forearms glittering with silver bracelets that rattled and clacked as she gestured at me.

‘
Marhaban, marhaban!
’ she exclaimed, and then began chattering loudly at the pair who had brought me to this place. While the three were engaged in what seemed to be a heated discussion, I looked around. Great oil jars, of such a size that they might easily have hidden Ali Baba’s band of thieves, lined two walls; a series of sacks of what I thought would be grain or flour or rice sat next to them; and all around the uneven adobe walls were jars and boxes and tins – vintage caddies of Tetley and Lyons and Chinese gunpowder tea – that, from the look of their brands and packaging, must have originated in the pre-war period, although their gilt and glitter were as bright as new. And now a new sensation assailed me: a dozen different odours, some rank, some pungent. Amongst them I clearly identified animal shit, lanolin, cooking oil, spices and sweat; and over all something entirely unidentifiable and foreign. My head reeled from the pain, the noise and the smells, and the sheer strangeness of it all, waves of nausea washing over me, accompanied by the dancing black stars that presaged loss of consciousness.

The young man knelt beside me and gently raised my head. ‘Nana says I am very impolite and must apologize to you.’ He placed his hand on his heart. ‘I am Taïb’ –
Tie-yeeb
– ‘and this is my sister Hasna.’ He nodded to the slim, solemn girl who stood behind him. ‘This is the house of my grandmother, Lalla Fatma.’

Recognizing her own name amidst the foreign words, the old woman inclined her head and patted her capacious bosom. ‘Fatma,
eyay
, Fatma,’ she repeated. They all looked expectantly at me.

For a moment I couldn’t remember my own name. Then, with a Herculean effort, I wrestled the information out of my head. ‘Isabelle Treslove-Fawcett,’ I said, and watched their faces go blank. ‘Isabelle,’ I amended, and finally, giving up, ‘Izzy.’

At that, they all burst out laughing. Grandmother Fatma made a low, buzzing noise, and they laughed even more. My disorientation was complete.

‘I’m sorry,’ Taïb said at last. ‘
Izi
is the Berber word for housefly: cursed and wretched things.’

Cursed and wretched: lucky me.

Now, Taïb turned to his grandmother and off they went again, chattering away in their guttural language. He gestured out of the door and up at the mountain, then back at me, still in my climbing harness, and the old woman looked with amazement at me. She said something loud and emphatic, hit a palm with a fist, shook her head. The subtext was clear: these modern European women who think they can do what the men do! Climbing a mountain, whatever next? Is it any wonder she has come to grief?

She waved her hands in resignation, then bustled off to supervise whatever Hasna was preparing over the brazier, and a moment later the scent of rose of attar mixed with something strange and bitter added itself to the layers of odour in the room. Having thus cleansed the atmosphere, she placed a thick sheepskin on the floor and lowered herself cross-legged on to it with the neat, controlled power of one who has trained her thigh muscles over long decades, and without further ceremony laid hands on my injured ankle. My cry ricocheted off the walls, but no one took any notice. Instead, they stared at my Salomon mountain boot as if it were a truly foreign object. It was, indeed, an old model, a dear favourite of mine, the intricate eyelet-lacings concealed beneath a flap of zipped Goretex. To the untutored eye it must have looked impenetrable, impossible to open: a magic boot. Taïb flourished a knife and made to start cutting it open. ‘No!’ I leant forward, despite the nausea, and showed him where the zip was that would unlock the secret. ‘
Mais doucement, s’il vous plaît. Très doucement
.’

True to my request, he worked the zip down, opened the lacing as wide as it would go and eased the boot off my foot with infinite care – which still managed to bring acrid tears to my eyes. Then for some reason he passed me the boot. I clasped it to my chest like a talisman.

Lalla Fatma folded her hands around the injured ankle, then with what seemed extraordinary expertise immobilized the joint while interrogating the swelling all around it, her fingers busy and probing. It all hurt, but nowhere near as much as I feared. ‘
La bes, la bes, la bes
,’ she murmured over and over, as if to reassure me.

Soon I found myself relaxing: which was a mistake. The next thing I knew she had clamped the ankle down with one hand and twisted and pulled the foot hard with the other and there was the most tremendous popping sound, as if someone had discharged a gun. A scarlet sea engulfed me, not pain exactly but something deep-seated and primal as if a flood of adrenalin had been released by the sound, a wild red inundation. And then it was replaced by a wash of white light and someone applauded; people chattered.

When I opened my eyes again I found that the old woman was looking remarkably pleased with herself, as if she had achieved something that added to her great renown. The other women, as if on cue, had come back in and she immediately began to boss them around, clapping her hands to chivvy them along, and the room after its moments of suspended quiet abruptly became noisy and bustling once more. Hasna passed her grandmother a dish containing a muddy green paste and the old woman promptly broke an egg, drank the white and added the yolk to the mixture. She set the dish down beside the brazier to warm and went to the shelves, returning with a clay jar whose lid was stoppered with wax. This she opened, after applying some force to the lid, and at once a powerfully revolting smell exploded into the air: rancid, decayed, indescribably rank. She sniffed it appreciatively, then dug her hand into the jar and came away with a handful of the dark goo within. Then she grinned at me, revealing a serious lack of teeth, and held out her hand. There was no way she was coming anywhere near me with whatever witches’ brew she had there. I jacked myself up against the wall. ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No, no. Water, please; just water.’