Over the weeks that followed the tribe welcomed Amastan back little by little into their society in their courteous, reserved manner, accepting outwardly at least that he had recovered from a long and mysterious illness. By the end of this recuperative period no one mentioned the nature or cause of his erstwhile madness; no one gossiped any more about the fate of the sweetheart he had left in the mountains. He was his own self again: the spirits had left him, cast out by the girl from the Hoggar, and they were proud to count Mariata as one of their own. Mariata found herself accepted by the other women, encouraged to take her place amongst them. After the antagonism of the Kel Bazgan it was a relief to be treated with a measure of acceptance; more pleasant still to have her lineage acknowledged with a degree of respect. Here, no one poked fun at her or called her Tukalinden – Little Princess – with a curled lip or a sneer, and, while she knew that it was Tana who had proved to be the real catalyst in Amastan’s return, Mariata found that she did not mind at all that they credited her with the cure. The older women brought her dates and listened to her poetry with real appreciation, bringing drums and setting her words to music with which they all joined in; the mothers urged her to teach their little ones to write the Tifinagh, and the unmarried girls came to her increasingly for slips of paper to put in their amulets – the more devout ones asking for verses from the Qur’an to carry around for good luck, the more superstitious amongst them seeking love charms and magic to ward off the tehot, the evil eye. In return, they offered advice of their own: ‘You should marry and stay here with us,’ said Khadija.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Nofa chided. ‘Mariata is Kel Taitok: why should she lower herself to marry a man of the Kel Teggart?’
There was a certain amount of head-nodding at this, but Yehali said fiercely, ‘Our men are as good as those of the Hoggar! They are tall and handsome and toughened by much hardship. It has made them sinewy of limb and serious of spirit.’
‘Too serious, where Ibrahim is concerned!’ someone said, and they all laughed. ‘But his brother Abdallah is a good man, and Akli is good company. She need not marry if she does not wish to spoil her descent-line.’
‘She must want to dance!’
‘Ah, well if you want to dance, then Kheddou is the one.’
‘He likes to dance too much,’ said Nofa, and they all brought their headscarves across their mouths and laughed uproariously, and Mariata suddenly realized that here they used the word for dance to mean other things entirely, and found herself blushing.
‘Ah, we have all danced with Kheddou in our time,’ agreed Tadla. ‘He is an excellent dancer. But you’ll have to be quick if you wish to take your pleasure with him, for he marries Leïla next moon.’
‘Poor Leïla: she will have her hands full with that one,’ Nofa said with mock seriousness, and they all took the double meaning and fell about laughing at her wit.
Mariata shook her head, grinning. They were a scurrilous lot, these women of the Kel Teggart; they worked hard, for without many slaves or harratin to do the daily manual work there was not much time for leisure, but when they did enjoy themselves it was clearly with a whole heart.
Tadla sighed. ‘It is not easy to find a good husband here, it is true. We have lost men on the salt road, and others have gone into the mountains. There are not enough good men to go around.’
‘There is Bazu.’
‘Too fat.’
‘Makhammad?’
‘Too religious.’
‘Azelouane?
‘Too old.’
‘There is Amastan ag Moussa,’ someone said. ‘He is the son of an amenokal after all. He would not sully Mariata’s bloodline.’
There was a pause as if people were weighing their words before letting them free. After a time Yehali said, ‘He is very handsome, the son of Rahma. He has the most beautiful hands,’ and after that they all joined in with good things to say about him.
‘He is the best poet in the region. He beat all comers at the ahal in the year before the locusts came.’
‘And he can dance too – no, really dance; don’t be so rude, Nofa, you will shock Mariata. He has the most nimble feet and he can leap as high as a gazelle.’
‘He is most expert when it comes to racing camels.’
‘He can wield a sword.’
‘He is a good shot too!’
‘He has travelled far.’
From all this Mariata learnt that before he had ‘gone away’, as the girls put it, Amastan had been a celebrated visitor to the settlement, passing through infrequently en route from his annual trading trips to visit his family and bring treats for the girls. He had been popular and admired, a proper figure of a man, and one they all would have wished to marry. They were sad when they learnt he had found a bride elsewhere. But then … Tadla changed the subject. ‘Well, maybe not Amastan. He is not a lucky man, and in these days we all need lucky men, eh, Nofa?’
‘Lucky and rich,’ Nofa agreed. ‘Five camels at least.’
‘Ten!’
Mariata let their joking float like a cloud around her. She had not needed their praise of Amastan to rekindle her interest in him, for in truth she thought of little else. But it was curious to note that the other girls had not noticed his attention towards her over these past weeks, and for that she was grateful. Every evening as the sun set, he would seek her out and they would walk together and talk a little; once he had taken her hand and brushed it with his lips. When he looked at her she felt as if his eyes were burning her; it was not a comfortable sensation, but even so she longed for it and a day was not a good day unless it ended with him gazing from his place at the men’s fire to where she sat amongst the other women at their own fire.
And because she was a part of his community she found herself embracing a way of life she once would have thought beneath her. She immersed herself in the quiet daily rhythms, every morning rising at dawn to help to milk the goats, and on those days when she did not accompany the animals while they foraged she was content to stay behind at the village, pounding the grain to make the day’s tagella with the other women, listening to their chatter and gossip, entertaining them with her poetry as they prepared and drank endless pots of green tea. It was perhaps the very simplicity and absorbing practicality of this new routine that brought her this unaccustomed sense of peace.
Even so, every morning before setting out with the goats or going about her other chores she would walk out to the highest vantage point beyond the village and gaze eastward for any sign that Rhossi ag Bahedi had come to take her and his camels back with him to the Aïr. But one day she realized that five full moons had come and gone since she had fled the Kel Bazgan, and that if he had still not managed to link her disappearance to his hated aunt, or persuaded the harratin to give him the information they held, that it was unlikely he was going to suddenly turn up in the Teggart. For her part, Rahma had arranged that the two distinctive white mehari be taken to the camel market far to the north, at Goulemime, and there their Bazgan brands were subtly changed and they were sold for an excellent price, for it was unusual that two white Tibestis of such quality should make it to market in that area. She had given into Mariata’s hands all the money the animals fetched, which was a not inconsiderable sum, even after the traders had taken their cut, and refused a small commission for her part in arranging the sale. ‘You are a woman alone now, and as I know to my cost it is hard to be a woman of no family and no wealth. You might think to invest some of it in a caravan when the azalay sets out again, maybe entrust it to Amastan when he takes up the trade once more.’
Mariata did not think this was likely, for in the conversations she had shared with Rahma’s son in these past weeks he had professed little interest in returning to the salt road; not that she had managed to persuade him to talk of many serious things, for every time she moved towards dangerous ground, he would become silent and withdrawn. But she raised the subject again when they walked together down by the river that night.
‘I have seen enough of the old trade routes in my time,’ he said, his low voice a contrast to the singing of the frogs, which was shrill with challenge and desire. ‘I shall never travel them again.’
‘Tell me what you have seen,’ Mariata begged, her eyes shining. ‘Your mother told me that you once swore to walk to the Arbre de Ténéré, to see the sea and to touch the snows on the highest mountains; she also told me you achieved all of these things.’
Amastan’s eyes glittered with the red light of the sunset, but since the rest of his face was hidden behind the very proper arrangement of his veil Mariata could not read his expression. Then he sat down on a rock and spoke as if addressing an audience, all the while turning over a dried twig of oleander in his hands as if the repetitive movement enabled him to channel his memories, and all at once she remembered the storyteller who had once visited her home in the Hoggar, who came with a bag of pebbles, each pebble relating to one of the great tales, and how he had offered the bag so that the women might choose the story they wished to hear. Amastan spoke with just the same authority.
‘I have crossed the desert of stone and the desert of rock and the desert of sand; on foot and on camel I have traversed the old roads. I have seen the sun come up like a fire over the dune-sea; I have seen night steal every colour from the world, leaving everything a ghostly grey, while above the stars shone like a houri’s jewels. I have carried indigo from the dyeworks at Kano, millet and dates to and from Ingal and Ghat. I have seen the gold markets of the Tafilalt and crossed the great Atlas; it was there I saw the pure white substance they call snow, which though cold burns the skin like flame. In the famed city of Marrakech I walked the central square and was assailed by the clamour of dancing boys and snake charmers and speaking birds, magicians, soothsayers and charlatans by the hundred. I have seen the wide blue ocean at Agadir, which like the endless dunes shimmers and shifts beneath the caresses of the wind just as our own sands do; I have followed the foot-worn market-routes through the Anti-Atlas Mountains from the fortified walls of Taroudant over the mighty Jebel el-Kest and down into the lovely oasis town of Tafraout …
‘It was while we crossed the Great Emptiness on our way to the saltworks at Bilma and Kauar in the Sudan that I saw the famed Arbre de Ténéré: a solitary acacia standing like an ancient sentinel in the middle of the cruellest waste land in the world. Our azalay ringed it and paid our respects as caravanners have for centuries; it endures, blind and thorny, alone and hardy, in the blasting heat of the desert as a talisman for the survival of our people. It is said that if the Arbre fails, so will the People of the Veil. I wanted to see it, just once, to ensure it lived still. But that was five long years ago, and, given what I have seen since, I fear it is dying, or may even be dead.’
The twig snapped loudly between his hands, and even the frogs fell silent at the sharp report. Amastan sat staring into space as if seeing the bleakest of futures playing itself out on the vast, reddening sky.
Mariata sighed, entranced. ‘If I were a man I would surely spend my life on a camel’s back travelling from wonder to wonder.’
Amastan snorted, brought back to himself. ‘Ah, little wanderer: what a romantic view of the world you have! I have learnt to spin words like dervishes, to bewitch and blur reality. You don’t often hear the poets telling of the difficulties of digging out a drifted-in well, of the stench of decayed bodies and shit found rotting in the base; of the disgusting taste of brackish water that you have to drink to stay alive, of the foul gripes that rack you; of how your skin feels like old leather tanned by the flying sand and your arse is so pained by the wood of the saddle that it is easier to walk than to ride, even though the hot ground burns through the soles of your sandals. They never make songs about how even in the deepest wilderness weevils get into the bread and the dried strips of goat meat you eat become so hard you can break your teeth on them because there is no water in which to soak it and all your saliva has dried up; nor do they make verses that tell how the tongue swells till it feels as if your mouth is full of wadded cotton; how fear and thirst lead you to hatred and distrust of every stranger. And no one says a word about the scorpions, the horned vipers, the jackals or the bandits. I do not think the azalay is a place for a girl.’
Mariata bridled. ‘You underestimate me.’
‘Do I? Haven’t you heard the saying that neither women nor goats have the hardiness to cross the desert?’
‘Well, how do you think I got here, then?’ Mariata demanded, rising to his bait. ‘Do not forget that I was born in the Hoggar and had already travelled far to reach the Aïr before I crossed the Tamesna to order to persuade the djenoun to leave you in peace! And never forget that I am descended in direct line from the Mother of Us All, who walked a thousand miles into the desert to establish our people!’ By the end of this tirade, her cheeks were flushed and her fists balled.
Amastan was delighted; she could see it in the crinkling of the skin about his eyes. Then he reached up and picked a bright pink oleander blossom from the tall shrub behind them and, leaning forward, tucked it behind her ear, a gesture so uncharacteristically intimate that Mariata’s colour deepened to a shade even darker than that of the flower. When he spoke again his voice was gentle. ‘When Tin Hinan made her epic journey it was through a landscape that rippled with wind-blown grass where acacia trees spread their shady limbs and herds of antelope and gazelle grazed. It was no desert then but a very paradise.’
Mariata stared at him. ‘How could that be? The desert is eternal. The desert is the fiery heart of the world, the cauldron in which life began. Everyone knows that. Even the djenoun originated here, and they are creatures of heat and flame, fiery spirits; how could they have come out of a grassland?’
‘I could take you to caves in the Tassili and show you rock engravings by the Kel Nad, the People of the Past, by hunters who made pictures of the animals they hunted – antelopes and gazelles, striped horses and giraffes; creatures of the savannah and the plain – and it is believed by the elders that these pictures were made even before the time of the Mother of Us All.’
Mariata turned her head away. This was not what she wished to hear. ‘They dreamt those scenes,’ she said contemptuously. ‘I have seen such depictions myself in the caves of my own homeland. I have seen the White Lady of Inawanghat carrying the horned Moon on her head, with a river of stars stretched beneath the horns and seeds shining in her belly and falling from her hands. Is this some picture they made from the life too?’
‘Ah, you have me there, with your woman’s logic. Perhaps you do not have the heart of a poet after all.’
‘At least I have a heart,’ she returned, suddenly reckless.
Amastan stood up all in a rush and strode away from her with jagged strides; then, as if changing his mind, turned on his heel and stalked back to tower over her. ‘Never say such a thing!’ he demanded angrily. ‘Never.’ He took the blossom from her hair and threw it down in the dust, ground it underfoot with a sudden furious gesture and stalked away into the falling darkness.
The next evening he did not come to her; nor the next, and she wept herself to sleep. On the third morning she rose before the sun, milked the goats, reunited them with their kids, and led the troop down to the river to forage and feed. There, she laid cold river stones against her hot and swollen eyelids until the redness receded and she did not look like a frog any more.
‘I am sorry.’
She whirled around. Amastan detached himself from the bole of a tree, one shadow emerging from another. His veil was wound high; he looked as tall as the tree; taller. He looked as tall as the sky. Kohl made his eyes brilliant.
‘You have not slept?’
Mariata shook her head, not trusting herself to answer.
‘Nor I. Sleep doesn’t offer me the refuge that others find in it.’ He fell silent, brooding. After a long pause he said, ‘I am no good for you. No good for any woman. But I will not trouble you any longer.’
She stared at him dismayed. ‘Why would you say such a thing? I enjoy the time we spend together. I had … hoped …’ She did not dare say what was in her heart.
‘Do not hope, Mariata. It is too dangerous.’
‘Dangerous?’
He turned away from her. When he looked back at her she thought she saw madness in his eyes once more. When he opened his mouth, she thought he might howl, but all he said, so quietly that she could hardly catch the words, was, ‘I have a heart; but it is torn in two.’
He still thinks of his dead sweetheart, Mariata thought, and pain lanced through her. ‘What do you mean by that?’ she asked in dread.
Amastan lowered his long frame to the rock beside her. ‘I wish that the world was a different place, Mariata. I wish I could erase the past.’ He paused, glanced at her, then away again. ‘I wish I could make a fresh start. Take a wife, have children; be happy.’ It was almost a whisper. ‘But I cannot.’
‘You cannot?’ she echoed.
‘The world is not the place I thought it was a year ago; and I am not the same man.’
Silence settled heavily between them, and in that moment the sun rose over the horizon and poured its red light all around them. The river at their feet ran like blood. Mariata said gently, ‘The world is never the same. Everything moves, and we must move too. There is a stream that runs through the rocks close to our winter camp where I lived as a child. When I was small I placed a line of stones by the side of its flow; and when we returned to our camp the next year I searched for them, but they were gone. So I placed some more; and the next year those pebbles were gone too. I searched for them, thinking someone was playing games with me, but there was no sign of the stones. At last I realized that the stream’s course was moving sideways across the ground, just a hand’s width with each passing year. But I knew that by the time I was an old woman it would be a different stream to the one I looked at then. Nothing in this world stands still, Amastan, and because the world changes around us, we change with it. We are never the same person from one day to the next, because our experiences change us. I am not the naive child who left the Hoggar.’ The look she gave him was eloquent, but he turned away.
‘What you say may be true,’ he said, ‘but I am too much changed by the things I have seen. The things I have done.’ He paused for a long moment. ‘What I am going to tell you now I never intended to tell anyone. It is hardly the stuff of poetry or songs. But I have carried it inside me for long enough, and I owe you the truth.’ He took a deep breath; exhaled it slowly. ‘The last woman I loved died, and in the most horrible fashion.’
This is it, Mariata thought. He is going to tell me how he killed her now, and then I will know him for the monster he is. She wanted to run; but she had to know, and so she stayed.
‘Her death lies heavy on my conscience,’ he started, confirming her worst fears; but the story he dragged out of himself, word by agonized word, was not at all what she had expected.
He had met Manta when he was little more than a boy and had passed through her village with a caravan. She had made a great impression on him, for she was not shy like the other girls; she had kissed him before he left and the touch of her lips had lived with him through the long winter months as he travelled through the desert. He bought her gifts with the money he earned; at last, on his third season’s visit, she had promised to marry him. He had given her an amulet to seal their betrothal.
‘It should have kept her safe.’
Mariata felt the heavy piece of silver pressing against her skin. Her hand rose to touch it through the thin cotton of her robe.
‘You have it with you.’
She started guiltily and found his eyes upon her.
‘I don’t want it back; it carries bad luck. You should not wear it either; it brought no luck to the last one who wore it.’
Mariata took out the amulet from under her robe and pulled it over her head. It sat there in her hand, the light glinting on the black beads of its string, and they both stared at it. ‘But I love it,’ she said softly. ‘How could it be unlucky? See how it has the symbols for tefok, the sun, here and here.’ She ran her fingers over the carnelian discs. ‘Red is a lucky colour.’
Amastan’s expression was grim. ‘Open it,’ he said.
Mariata examined the talisman, turning it over and over. She slid a nail into the seam at top and bottom, but the amulet was solid and nothing moved. She spun the carnelian discs and pressed the raised central boss: nothing. She turned the amulet over and searched for an opening on the back but found no solution. ‘How?’
Amastan reached across and gripped the central boss, moving it sideways.
Mariata watched as the amulet offered up its secret: a hidden compartment containing … nothing. She looked up and found Amastan had not moved, that his face was very close to hers: she could feel the warmth of his breath as he exhaled. ‘There is nothing in here,’ she said, stating the obvious.
‘I went to the enad – to Tana – to ask for a protective charm to put inside it. But she … she saw something when she touched it. She knew … something. She tried to take the amulet from me, said it was touched by the evil eye. I was angry. I took it back, forcibly, and left her with insults. I meant to visit a marabout to buy a Qur’anic verse instead, but I never got around to it. I don’t know what stopped me: superstition, maybe. Or pride. I thought the gift itself would be enough, that my love was so strong it would protect her.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I thought. She was so happy to be given it. It’s very old, and of the finest silver. She wore it all the time, until …’
‘Until?’ Whatever was coming, she had to hear it.
Amastan took his time. She heard his breathing, ragged, slowing as he composed himself. ‘This new government, which calls itself independent, is filled with men from the south, those who hate us most. They accuse us of enslaving their ancestors, of abusing their people: they have decided to use this as their excuse to persecute us. Elements in the government have been using its power against us, enforcing arbitrary boundaries, stopping our people from crossing them without the papers they have decreed necessary; but what do the Tuareg have to do with borders and papers? We have always traded far and wide, from the Sahel to the sea. Who are they, with their Russian guns and their Western uniforms, to call us “uncivilized” and “barbaric”, to try to force their way of life upon us? They have always hated our people because we are free and they are poor, because we refuse to live in the squalor of their cities, to subject ourselves to their rules, to be imprisoned by their boundaries. They call what they do “law”: but it is no more than murder and oppression. They are cowards!’ He thumped a fist down on to the rock. ‘They use any resistance as an excuse to attack old men, unarmed women and children.’
His voice caught in his throat; with a sideways glance, Mariata saw his eyes glitter with unshed tears.
Manta lived, he told her, in a northern village. She told him there had been trouble; petty stuff mainly. Made bold by the change of government, by the French withdrawal, Songhai villagers had been raiding whatever property they could lay hands on, be it ever so meagre: livestock, foodstuffs, blankets, even cooking implements. Complaints were made but never addressed. Rumours abounded of injustices and attacks. The young men who were either out on the salt road or on hunting trips would come home to find their camp desecrated, their mothers and sweethearts insulted or robbed, but there were no official reprimands. Worse was happening elsewhere. People were disappearing, taken away for ‘questioning’. Ancient grudges resurfaced; wells were poisoned, crops destroyed.
The young men of the tribes tried to make some resistance; but there was no coherent strategy, no coordination of forces, just a number of small-scale reprisals against the brutalities visited on their people, and all this seemed to do was to make matters worse. But it was better than doing nothing at all. Amastan joined a resistance group in the N’Fughas Mountains. ‘We followed the example of Kaocen, the hero of the first uprising: we fought like jackals, not lions. We attacked and ran, doing what damage we could.’ He paused and took a long breath. He ran a hand over his face. One day word had reached them of incursions by soldiers into the remote regions to the south, where Manta lived. The rumours were unsettling: women were being raped to pollute the vaunted bloodlines of the Tuareg; Tuareg children were being forcibly removed to the cities. He tried to persuade other fighters to come with him, but they were engaged in their own struggles and so he took off alone.
‘I was going to bring her here out of harm’s way.’ He closed his eyes. The sky that hung over them was a pale and pitiless blue. Mariata felt that it might fall upon her if she uttered a sound.
At last, Amastan continued, his voice flat with suppressed emotion, his gaze fixed on a still point in the river. ‘I rode all night up through the foothills, starting at every sound. For some reason, I had never been so afraid in my life. When my camel flushed a bird from the bushes, it scared me to the edge of death. Every shadow seemed filled with menace. The landscape with which I had become so familiar over my years of journeying through it by day in the dark seemed a different world, filled with afrits and ghûls, and the vengeful spirits of the dead. I smelt the village before I saw it. I cannot describe to you the peculiar quality of that smell: you could never imagine it. All I can say is that if like me you had smelt it, it would remain with you for life. I will never be clean of it. It made my camel skittish: it did not want to go further. It dragged its feet, became obstinate. Its bellow split the night. I had to exert my will over it to make it move at all. Even in the darkness I could tell that a pall hung in the air: a thick, black smoke with a filthy taste to it, a taste that coated my tongue as if with fat. Not a sound came from the encampment – no dogs barked, no goats bleated, no one sat round a fire. I thought perhaps people had evacuated the place, moved further up into the mountains …
As I got closer, I smelt petrol in the air. That was not a good smell. What use do the Tuareg have for petrol? It was a foreign odour. My senses were spiky with presentiment. I wanted to turn back. But I knew I could not.
‘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.