The Salt Road (52 page)

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.

As they walked now, she kept an eye on the weather, for clouds had been building these past days and she knew that the rainy season was almost upon them. ‘More people die from drowning in the desert than from thirst,’ Amastan had once told her, and she had laughed at him and called him a fool for expecting her to believe such nonsense. ‘You’ll see,’ was all he would say. The next day he had gone across the camp and fetched old Azelouane, who had confirmed the unlikely tale to her. ‘When the rain falls in the desert, it comes with thunder and downpour,’ he said. ‘It falls too hard and too fast for the sand to absorb it, and so it gathers in the oueds and becomes a torrent. When the clouds loom, we make for higher ground.’

She still had not quite believed him, and thought Amastan had persuaded the old cameleer to spin her this yarn; but even so the words came back to her now and as the day darkened she led Takama up on to the slopes of the rocky valley. The going here was harder and slower as they picked their way through rocks and between boulders; but she soon found that Takama had a knack for finding the best path, and at last got up on to the camel and rested her weary bones. They had walked side by side for the last weeks – she was simply too cumbersome to haul herself upon it – and now Mariata was glad that she had been sparing of the beast, for Takama moved with a care and intelligence that reassured her that the camel was in good fettle. Her intuition was good: towards dawn the first drops came pattering down, staining the dusty rocks with their black splashes, and soon they had to take cover as the water fell in sheets. From her vantage point on the hillside Mariata watched in amazement as a wall of water came tumbling down the oued: a great, churning bore of brown water, sand and soil suspended in a thick veil inside its ruthless cascade. If they had been walking down there, both she and Takama would have been swept away in an instant. Soon she was shuddering from top to toe; but whether it was because of the drop in temperature or the shock of imagining what might have happened had they kept to the oued, she did not know.

The coming of the rains was a catalyst for an intense burgeoning of life: plants sprang up in every nook and crevice, pushing their heads out into the world, only for Takama to greedily nip them off. Surrounded by this sudden abundance and vigour, all of Mariata’s energy seemed to be absorbed by the growing child, for her belly swelled like rising dough, though it seemed quite impossible it could grow any more. Exactly when had it been planted inside her, this giant child, she asked herself, and could not muster the energy to count back through the weeks and months to Amastan’s death and beyond. Exhausted, she slumped in the saddle, gripping its carved wooden fork with both hands, swaying with the movement of the camel. Suddenly, she had never felt so tired in her life.

Then one day as they walked on she felt a gush of wetness beneath her robes. For a moment she thought it was urine, even though she had hardly been producing any these past weeks; then a pain spasmed through her abdomen that made her bend double, gasping. A minute later it eased, but it was not long before another seized her; then another and another.

In the hills of the Adrar n’Ahnet, Mariata had her child. She was very matter-of-fact about the birth, willing herself not to panic. What was the point? There was no one who could help her. She stripped herself and chanted the words that would keep the djenoun away from her vulnerable places. In a sandy hollow between crumbling red rocks, alone but for her patient camel, naked to the single, boiling eye of the sun, Mariata squatted and pushed and prayed and sweated, and as the moon rose over Mount Tinnîret, the baby at last came slithering into the world while the jackals called to one another in the night.

Shaking with weariness, Mariata knotted and cut the cord as she had seen women do in her own tribe. The cord was as long and thick as a snake: she hung it over a bush to dry. The afterbirth she buried to stop the scent reaching the jackals, all except for a small piece that she ate so that a part of the baby would always be in her and she could fight the Kel Asuf for its soul.

The baby was strong but quiet. It lay on the sand, squirming as if it wanted to be up and walking there and then. Mariata brushed her hand over its tiny, swollen face and squeezed-shut eyelids, its mass of black hair, already drying in the cool night breeze. She cleaned it with sand and placed it on the soft leather bag that the enad had made for her. The knife, she thrust into the ground beside it to keep the spirits away. Until it was protected by the ritual on its naming day, six days hence, it would be at great risk from the djenoun. Next she cleaned herself as best she could and kicked fresh sand over the place of the birth. And then she dressed herself in her ragged robe, lay down and curled herself around the new life that she and Amastan had made.

The baby fed quickly and easily and never once complained, getting on with the task of living as if it knew the dire circumstances they faced and had no wish to draw the attention of the evil eye. Over the next couple of days Mariata rested and regained her strength. She could not stop looking at the child. She cooed over it and sang to it, every song she could remember from her childhood in the Hoggar, even the sad ones; even the war songs. When the baby opened its eyes they were as dark as shadows, and for a moment Mariata was afraid, but whether she was afraid of the child or for it, she did not know.

On the third day, when Mariata stirred in the afternoon heat to fetch some water from the gerber that hung from the bush where the afterbirth was curing, she disturbed something that shattered white and translucent into a hundred different pieces, exploding out into the light of the blue sky. She stared at them for a few seconds before realizing they were butterflies, tiny and fragile, their pale wings made translucent by the sun, and then she smiled to herself. ‘If you can survive in this place, so can we,’ she whispered.