For stealing her stepmother’s jewellery, only half of which Ousman had managed to get back from the one-eyed camel trader, Mariata was punished in small ways each and every day. Lalla Zohra came in the mornings to read the Qur’an at her; but after initial resistance Mariata surprised herself by enjoying the stories it contained. Some even made her think about things other than the massacre at the village and the void of loneliness inside her. Almost as if Aicha intuited that this punishment was not sufficiently painful to Mariata, she sent chores at her thick and fast. Mariata was to clean and sweep and wash every item of clothing and every piece of fabric in the house until her knuckles were raw and red and her back ached to the marrow. She washed every item of clothing in the house, or so it seemed: garments that had never before seen the light of day. When she had done that, Aicha brought her armfuls of rugs and blankets, couch covers and cushions, dishrags and dusters and teacloths, and Mariata washed and beat them all, carrying out her tasks mindlessly, in a sort of haze. Physical movement of any kind provided some sort of release from the blackness inside her; and it stopped Aicha’s incessant nagging.
Her brother Azaz found her one day in the courtyard bent over a new tub of washing, spitting with fury over the stinging detergent. He watched as she rinsed and wrung out a huge white item and draped it, dripping, over the line.
‘What in the world is this?’ He took it down and held it up against himself: it was twice his size.
‘Mama Erquia’s bloomers,’ Mariata told him with a sigh. ‘She wears them underneath her robe. They do that here, you know.’
Azaz hadn’t had the chance to find out such information yet: the girls in Imteghren seemed to want nothing to do with him, had wailed and flapped him away when he tried to court them. They weren’t like desert girls at all. He made a face and swiftly slung the bloomers back over the washing line. ‘That old witch! Why are you washing her filthy underthings? You’re Kel Taitok, it’s insulting!’
Mariata gave him a small, exhausted smile. ‘You think I don’t know that?’
‘I’m going to tell Father: they can’t treat you like this!’
She looked away. ‘It won’t do any good.’
But while Aicha and Hafida were out of the house one day and their poisonous grandmother was snoring in her room, Mariata sought out her father. ‘They are treating me like a slave,’ she said wearily, showing him her cracked and reddened hands.
Ousman looked away, awkward. ‘The way of life here in Morocco is different from ours: there are no slaves in this community. Here, everyone has to do their own “work”.’ For this concept, he used a word unfamiliar to Mariata; in Tamacheq there was no such verb.
‘Aicha and Hafida do nothing!’
‘They cook, and they cook well – even you have put a little more meat on your bones.’
They had tried to make Mariata cook. It had been an experiment that lasted only a single day.
‘I hate them, and I hate their food!’ She caught him by the arm. ‘Let me go home, Father, back to the Hoggar. I will go with whatever caravan comes through Imteghren; I will have no pride. They can pack me up with the merchandise for all I care: just let me go.’
But he was adamant. ‘You will stay. The old way is dying out and we have to adapt to change. Besides, the conflict between Morocco and Algeria means that there are no caravans coming through Imteghren now; there are soldiers enforcing the border.’
‘What do I care about their borders and boundaries? We’re the People of the Veil. We have no boundaries: our country is wherever we wish it to be, we carry our territory within ourselves.’ How many times had she heard Amastan say these things? Her eyes filled with tears. ‘How can you bear this dull, settled life, amongst these awful people?’
Her father’s jaw set: she could see he would not shift on this matter. And she knew why. Every night, even from the other side of the house, she heard his groans of pleasure and the shrill, birdlike cries of his new wife. It brought back unwelcome memories of her life with Amastan, of the life that had been so brutally wrenched from her. Night after night she dreamt of lying with him down by the river, of how his skin felt beneath the palms of her hands: warm and smooth, the muscles bunching and shifting under her touch, and she would wake with tears still wet on her face and a dull, deep ache in her belly.
Then her father and brothers went on a buying trip to fetch supplies for the new shop in Marrakech, and Mariata found herself fully at Aicha’s mercy. With no one to intervene, Aicha treated her with sneering disdain, observing her as she went about her tasks, making comments all the while to her sister.
‘See how clumsy she is with the dishes, Hafida. In the desert they eat off stones. Even she couldn’t break those.’
‘Are those rat-tails growing out of her head, do you think? Perhaps she has a rat’s nest for a brain.’
‘It does not look much like hair to me, sister.’
‘And that great piece of tin she wears around her neck: I have never seen a necklace so badly made. Poor thing, she probably thinks it is worth something.’
‘I expect she thinks a spirit lives in it: an afrit or a djinn!’
‘They are a backward people, the nomads, old-fashioned and barbaric. What do they know of the modern world? They don’t even have houses, Hafida: can you imagine? They live in houses made of goatskins, with their goats.’
‘That will be why she smells as she does.’
‘Don’t worry, sister, it’s her bath-day tomorrow.’
‘Imagine living without electricity or running water.’ The sisters were very proud to inhabit one of the first houses in the town to own such amenities.
‘No showers.’
‘No cars.’
‘No market, and only one smelly old dress.’
‘Did her father lie with a goat to get her, do you think?’
There was a pause, and a slap, followed by a cry, and then Aicha said icily, ‘Do not speak of my husband so.’
*
The next day at the hammam Aicha regarded Mariata critically as she got undressed. ‘You’ve put on weight, daughter. It suits you.’
‘My mother was a Tuareg princess, and she is dead,’ Mariata replied sullenly. ‘Do not call me daughter.’
Aicha shrugged. ‘Like it or not, I stand in place of a mother to you now.’ She put her head on one side and looked Mariata up and down. Then a line appeared between her brows. She turned to her sister. ‘Take hold of her, Hafida.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t question me, just do as I say.’
Obediently, Hafida took Mariata by the arms. Aicha walked around Mariata, scrutinizing. She frowned as she took in the girl’s fuller breasts and rounded contours. ‘When was your last period?’ she asked sharply.
Mariata stared at her dully. ‘What?’
‘Your period. Your monthly bleed.’
Mariata flushed to the roots of her hair. ‘It is none of your business.’
Aicha was not to be put off. ‘I am your stepmother and you will answer me. So think: when was it?’
Silence. Mariata thought about the question, for her own benefit. She could not remember the last time she had bled. Not since leaving the Adagh, that much was certain. She had not given it a thought: there had been too much else to think about, to mourn. But now that Aicha had called her attention to it, she turned her mind inward to examine herself as she had not done in a long, long time; and then she knew. Just like that, she knew. The realization was world-changing, immense. A spark of warmth flickered in the core of her, flowing up from her belly and around her ribs, engulfing her heart until she felt as if she were on fire – on fire with hope. Amastan, oh, Amastan …
She must have smiled to herself, because when she focused on Aicha again, the older woman was staring at her in rising fury. Gathering herself, she said, ‘I really have no idea.’
‘Insolent brat!’ Aicha took her by the upper arms and shook her till her head flopped this way and that. ‘Think, damn you! Think. When did you bleed? You have been here for three months now: have you not bled during all that time? Are you ill? You don’t look ill.’ She thrust her face aggressively at Mariata. ‘Have you somehow managed to sneak out of the house and sell yourself to men?’
The whites of Mariata’s eyes showed all around her dark pupils. Unable to fight free of Hafida, she spat at Aicha, who slapped her hard across the face, so hard that the sound ricocheted off the tiles.
Mariata’s shriek of rage drew Khadija Chafni from the hammam’s antechamber. ‘What is going on here? Are you having trouble with the Tuareg girl again? People will talk!’
‘They certainly will.’ Aicha shoved Mariata’s robe at her. ‘Put that on: we’re going home before anyone guesses your shame.’
But Mariata felt no shame: only a glorious, rising triumph.
Back within the safe walls of the house, Aicha was inexorable. She consulted feverishly with Mama Erquia, as the resident expert on such matters, and the old woman sent a boy and a donkey to fetch a healer from an outlying village. It took several long hours for this person to arrive, by which time Aicha had worked herself into a froth of rage and Mariata had settled herself comfortably in the knowledge of her changed state.
The healer was not from Imteghren but was of the Aït Khabbash, a semi-nomadic tribe living on the fringe of the desert. She wore a blue robe pinned with huge silver fibulae and had a sigil tattooed uncompromisingly on her forehead: two diagonal lines crossing at the top with a triangle of three dots seated above the intersection. A huge, colourful scarf enveloped her head and draped down her back. Ushered into the room in which Mariata had been shut, she removed this with a flourish.
After a few minutes of prodding the healer declared the Tuareg girl four months pregnant; maybe more. Aicha paled. Her hands flew to her mouth. ‘Oh my God,’ she muttered. ‘My God, what will we do? Such shame it will bring down on us all. It will destroy our reputation.’ She turned to the healing woman. ‘What can you do about it?’
The Aït Khabbashi considered Mariata with her head on one side, her eye as bright as a bird’s. ‘I can attend the birth when it comes.’
Aicha glared at her. ‘No, no, you’ve misunderstood. I want you to get rid of it.’
‘No one is getting rid of my baby,’ Mariata said quietly, but nobody paid her any attention.
The healer regarded Aicha steadily. ‘She’s too far along for me to do anything other than that.’ Out of Aicha’s sight, the woman looked Mariata briefly in the eye. One lid dropped swiftly, then she turned back to Aicha. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you.’
Aicha let out a wail. ‘Are you quite sure?’
‘Quite sure. I’m sorry.’
‘A lot of use you are as a healer, you old charlatan!’
The Aït Khabbashi shook her head in mock sadness. ‘What will people say when I tell them? Great goodness, they’ll be surprised to hear the Tuareg’s daughter will be beating you to the first birth in this house.’ She rubbed her hands in glee.
Aicha pursed her lips. Then she took off one of her gold bangles and thrust it at the woman. ‘Take that and stop your mouth. If I hear one whisper of this I will send someone to come and find you. In the night. Do you hear me?’
The healer regarded her with loathing. Then she turned to Mariata and said something to her in the old language. Mariata caught her hands and kissed them, smiling, then kissed her own hands and pressed them to her heart. ‘Thank you,’ she replied in the same tongue. ‘Thank you.’
‘Get out!’ Aicha caught the healer by the arm, digging her nails in hard, and propelled her towards the door.
The woman did not flinch. At the door she disengaged herself from Aicha’s grip and made a complicated gesture in the air, chanting as she did so. ‘And that is no more than you deserve!’
The next day they found strange symbols chalked on the door. When she saw them, Mama Erquia almost swooned in horror. She subsided against the door with her head in her hands. ‘Sehura,’ she kept saying, ‘sehura, sehura … It is my fault: I knew she was a sorceress. I have brought woe upon our house!’ and no one could get anything more out of her for the rest of the morning. Mariata noticed when they went to the souq to buy vegetables that people who had most likely passed their door on the way regarded them curiously and no one greeted Aicha with their usual warmth, keeping their distance as if she carried some contagious disease.
By the time they got back to the house, Aicha was in a foul temper. She marched into the old woman’s quarters and switched on the electric light, flooding the room with its harsh glare. ‘Put it off, put it off!’ Mama Erquia covered her head with her hands, moaning that now the djenoun would come for her.
Mariata smiled to herself. Today she could hardly keep from smiling. She felt as if she carried a furnace within her, as if the world was being remade in her own belly. It was just as she had suspected: the healing woman had cursed the house and placed a waymarker on the front door to attract any passing djinn. But before leaving the house she had blessed Mariata, and the baby she was carrying, to exempt them from this curse. ‘May you have a fine son,’ she had told Mariata. ‘As fine and strong as his father.’ For that, Mariata had kissed her hands.
Ousman had barely set foot inside the house on his return from Marrakech before Aicha was upon him. ‘She is pregnant!’
‘Who is pregnant?’
‘Your daughter! Your stupid, stupid daughter!’ And when he threw his hands up as if to deflect her words, she rounded on him accusingly. ‘Did you know?’
Ousman sighed. Then he said, ‘It is no shame for a woman to bear her husband’s child.’
‘What husband? There is no husband!’ Aicha stormed, hands on hips.
‘Not now, no: he is dead.’
‘No one will believe that tale for a moment. Well, she had better have a husband, and soon: I will not have her dragging my family’s reputation through the streets.’
‘She is still in mourning for his death. And our women have always made their own decisions about whom, and whether or not, they marry. I cannot force Mariata to marry if she does not wish it.’
‘What nonsense! What sort of man are you if you cannot even command your own daughter?’
‘You’re not living in a tent any more like an animal, and your daughter cannot just spread her legs for anyone she chooses. We have standards, and I’ll not have a bastard under this roof!’
Another man might have struck her, but Ousman was a Tuareg, bred to respect women no matter how annoying they might be. Instead, he turned and stalked off into the gathering night and did not return while any of the inhabitants were awake. Mariata found him the next morning when she rose early to have some time to herself before the inevitable chores started, rolled in a blanket in the salon. At first she thought there was a stranger in the house, a wandering man who had come in off the streets, for she had never seen her father without his veil before. And he had a beard! Such a thing was rare amongst their people. But when he opened his eyes she knew him.
She folded her arms, uncomfortable. ‘So, has she told you?’
Ousman uncoiled himself from the floor, retrieved his tagelmust and wound it slowly and neatly until he was decently covered once more. Only then, it seemed, did he feel able to address the subject. ‘Felicitations, Daughter.’ He inclined his head.
‘You do not seem overly happy about it.’
‘I am neither happy nor unhappy. But I worry for you.’
‘As well you might, since your new wife is intent on finding someone to destroy my baby!’
Ousman looked pained. ‘It would be better if you were to take a husband, Mariata. A man from the region, to take care of you and the child, when it comes.’
Mariata recoiled. ‘Never! How can you even think of it?’
‘Aicha will not let you live under this roof with an illegitimate baby.’
‘It is not illegitimate!’
‘Even so: there is no husband here to claim the baby as his own. No husband to protect you. And this house is not mine to rule over. I am in business with Aicha’s father, and I have my sons to think about as well as you. The best thing you can do for yourself would be to take a husband, to protect you in the eyes of this society.’
‘I don’t care what these people think of me – I despise the lot of them! Do you really think I would take as a husband one of these barefaced men, who have no respect, no heritage and no code of asshak?’
‘Hush. These folk may have different ways to our own now, it’s true, but once, a long time ago, we were the same people. Our own founder came from this very region in the time of the Romans: your own ancestor, Tin Hinan. Your bloodline began here, in the soil of this place.’
Mariata stared at him in disbelief. ‘From here? No wonder she left: I would walk a thousand miles out into the desert to escape Imteghren!’
Her father sighed. ‘Mariata, there is no dishonour in marrying a man from Imteghren.’
‘I would not pass this child off as some other man’s. I had rather live on the streets.’
Ousman made the sign against the evil eye. ‘Be careful what you wish for, Daughter.’
Ousman and his new wife were reconciled: once more the quiet night air of the house was disturbed by their cries. And somehow a compromise was reached. Aicha would make it known that her stepdaughter was to be offered on the marriage market; but in the proper Tuareg tradition Mariata would be allowed to have the final say in choosing her husband from the young men put forward.
‘There is no time to waste,’ she told Hafida grimly. ‘If she’s already starting to show, how will a man accept the baby as his own if it comes too soon?’
‘Best not to choose a man who can count,’ was Hafida’s only advice.
For some reason there were far more unwed men than women in Imteghren. No one knew why exactly there should be such a shortage of girls of marriageable age, but that was how it was. In addition, the word appeared to have gone around the town that although something of a firebrand Mariata was a beauty; and men were intrigued by the possibility of taking a fiery young Tuareg girl to wife. They had heard that nomad girls were wild in more ways than one, not as shy and buttoned-up as the local girls, and Mariata’s reputation (no doubt earned by her scenes in the hammam) bore this out, and so they begged their mothers and aunts to pay their suit. Rather to her horror, Mariata found herself in some demand. Rigged out in one of Aicha’s second-best robes in pastel colours that flattered her skin colour, and a headscarf that hid her tribal braids, she gazed at her reflection in the big mirror in Hafida’s room. With kohl painted around her eyes and the creamy rouge that Hafida had rubbed into her pale cheeks, she thought she looked like one of the ugly plastic dolls she had seen in the souq: make-believe mannequins like fake miniature human beings. Her spirit rebelled at such treatment but she quelled it. ‘It is not you they are seeing,’ she told herself fiercely, ‘but only a mask.’
Besides, she would soon see off any suitors and their crow-like mothers. Of that she had no doubt. And the longer she played along with Aicha’s ridiculous scheme, the longer her baby would be safe.
Her brothers found the whole idea of their sister being paraded for sale offensive and demeaning, and for a short time Mariata’s hopes were raised that Azaz and Baye might talk their father round; but they were soon to find that Aicha had a greater hold over Ousman than his own kin.
It was not long before the mothers and aunts and cousins of certain young men of the town came calling. They would spend an hour or so sitting in the salon with Aicha and her grandmother, sipping mint tea and extolling the virtues of their sons and nephews – so handsome, so hard-working, the eldest of ten, or eight, or seven; such a good man, so pious and good with children, and with his hands, and able to pay three thousand dirham and some goats for the right bride. And then Mariata, in her alien disguise, would be trotted out and made to sit hemmed in by her hated new family, nodding and smiling and inwardly seething as the women asked Aicha about her skills. Could Mariata make good bread? And keep a clean house? Did she rise before cockcrow: was she a hard worker? Could she make goat’s cheese and card wool? Did she embroider and sew clothes? Could she make a proper couscous and did she know the secret of harissa paste? Could she recite the Qur’an and observe Ramadan and the prayer times like a proper Muslim? And, with lowered voices as if she had no ears or wasn’t even there, was she a clean girl, and possessed of an unbroken hymen? To all these questions, Aicha looked them in the eye and answered yes, and yes, and yes, while Mariata flushed to the roots of her hair and dreamt of flinging off her borrowed robes and setting about the lot of them with a large stick, whooping Tuareg war-cries all the while. But for her child’s sake she endured the shame and the fury: now let the young men come.
A few days later, the first suitor – Hassan Boufouss – turned up in his best white going-to-mosque robe and skullcap, accompanied by his two grandmothers, father and three sisters. In the guest salon Hassan’s large lugubrious eyes roamed in panic over the smooth-plastered walls, the shelf of plates and ornaments, the coloured rug and fretted windows, and returned constantly to the open door as if he might at any moment bolt out of it.
Aicha ushered Mariata in ahead of her. The Tuareg girl’s headwrap was askew and her cheeks were flushed, as if there had been a tussle preceding this entrance. She cast a contemptuous gaze over the gathered crowd and turned to Aicha. ‘Who are all these people?’ She folded her arms. ‘I’m not going to do this with all of them staring at me.’
The old women exchanged glances.
‘Forgive the girl: she’s shy and not used to our ways,’ explained Aicha, pushing Mariata in the back.
‘I am certainly not shy!’ Mariata tore off the offending scarf, uncovering her tribal braids.
The throng gazed on, frozen by shock. Then one of the grandmothers grabbed Hassan by the arm. ‘She has no modesty, this one,’ she declared, and dragged him to his feet.
Mariata smiled and stood aside to let them pass. Led by his grandmother, Hassan went like a docile calf, though his gaze flickered wonderingly over the Tuareg girl as he left, as if she represented to him a glimpse of a forbidden world; a world from which he would ever be excluded.
The next day, undeterred by the whispers that at once circulated throughout the town following Mariata’s untoward conduct, Bachir Ben Hamdu and his parents arrived. Bachir was a very different proposition to his cousin, Hassan. Mariata was shocked by the immodesty of his clothing. Not only did he bare his face in the way of all the men here, but the garment on his lower half would normally be worn only as underclothing amongst her people, clinging as it did in a shamelessly revealing manner to every part of him. She stared at him, stone-faced, keeping her eyes fixed carefully on a point between his chin and his waist as he stood under the gaze of the portrait of King Hassan II, making his greetings. He told her his name and that he was delighted to make her acquaintance and hoped soon to know her better. He did not wink or in any other way accompany this last remark with a salacious gesture, but she felt his palm, hot and sweaty, as he touched her hand, and went rigid with disgust.
Aicha was delighted. ‘That went very well,’ she declared after he had gone. ‘I think he will offer for you.’
‘Offer? For me? What, am I a camel to be bought and sold?’
Aicha laughed mirthlessly. ‘Sadly, nothing so useful.’
One day a man knocked at the door. No one was in but Mariata and Mama Erquia, who was asleep. Mariata peered through the window grille beside the door. Outside stood a thickset man wearing a frayed brown robe, a bloodstained apron and a knitted hat pulled down low over his ears. His sleeves were too short, stopping three or four inches above the wrist to reveal large, hairy forearms; his hands looked filthy.
Not liking the look of him, Mariata called through the grille, ‘Who are you and what do you want?’
‘My name is Mbarek Aït Ali,’ the man replied gruffly, ‘and I have some business with the lady of the house.’
‘Aicha Saari is not here at present, but she’ll be back later,’ Mariata told him sharply, hoping he would go away. There was a musty scent to him, deep and animal, that was wafting through the window. She wrinkled her nose.
‘I’ll wait for her.’
‘You can do what you like,’ Mariata said curtly.
The man cocked his head. ‘To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?’ His accent was rough: the polite phrasing sounded sarcastic.
Mariata drew herself up. ‘I am Mariata ult Yemma of the Kel Taitok.’
The man took a step closer and applied an eye to the grille. Affronted, Mariata took a step back. ‘I see they do not lie,’ he said after a moment, and went away, laughing to himself.
When Aicha returned, Mariata said, ‘There was a man here looking for you. He said his name was Mbarek Aït Ali.’
Aicha looked surprised. ‘But he knew I would not be at home: I passed his shop on the edge of the souq an hour ago and he asked how Mama Erquia was.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Did you let him in?’
‘He smelt disgusting,’ Mariata said, ‘and he was wearing a bloodied apron; of course I didn’t let him in.’
A little while later there came another knock at the door and Aicha bustled off to answer it. Curious, Mariata slipped into the side room to see who it might be. It was a man with a deep voice that she thought she recognized. The usual greetings were exchanged and then Aicha said, ‘Mariata told me you had called by.’
‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘I came to make you a proposition.’ He sounded very pleased with himself.
‘A proposition?’
‘An important proposition.’
‘Are you sure it is not my husband you want to see?’
‘I believe these matters are usually brokered by the women of the house. Unfortunately, I have no female intermediaries I can ask to act for me since Mother died.’
‘Well,’ said Aicha, sounding perplexed, ‘I suppose you had better come in, then.’ But, after a look at his grubby shoes and frayed robe, she ushered him into the utility room rather than the guest salon, Mariata following at a safe distance.
Mbarek cast a sardonic glance around the shabby room. ‘Is this where you conduct all your marriage discussions, Mistress Saari?’ he asked, amused.
‘Marriage?’ Aicha sounded surprised. ‘I thought you’d come to sell me meat.’
At her listening post, Mariata gasped. A butcher? A butcher had the gall to come and offer for a princess descended from Tin Hinan? She remembered the bull-necked man in the bloody apron and laughed aloud.
The sound alerted Aicha. ‘One moment,’ she told the butcher. ‘Go through to the salon and I’ll bring us some tea.’
In the kitchen Aicha caught Mariata trying to escape into the courtyard. ‘Come with me,’ she said sternly. ‘And be civil.’
‘You expect me to be civil to a man like that? A common butcher, with animal blood on his hands and slaves’ blood in his veins?’ Outrage drew out of her generations of Tuareg snobbery.
‘Beggars can’t be choosers!’ Aicha snapped. ‘Now, go and fetch a headscarf to hide those wretched rat-tails!’’
I realize it is not the done thing for a man to come into a house of women or to press his own suit,’ the butcher said, draining his glass of mint tea in a single mighty slurp, ‘but I have no female relatives I can call on to carry out such sensitive business. You must excuse my plain appearance and my plain words. I like to run all my own affairs, and in the same straightforward way.’ He placed the tea glass back on the tray and leant forward, hands clasped.
Mariata could not help but notice the caked black blood beneath his fingernails. At least, she thought contemptuously, seeing the balled-up cloth between his dusty naked feet – which looked huge and monstrous and yellow-taloned against the delicate colours of the best rug – he had taken off his bloodstained apron before coming in.
‘So, in the spirit of honourable business, I have come to make you a good offer for the girl.’ He nodded towards Mariata, but kept his eyes on Aicha. ‘She’s a nomad, I know, but I won’t hold that against her. I’m sure I can soon civilize her, eh?’ He spread his hands apologetically. ‘Not that you haven’t already done a fine job of that, I’m sure.’
‘An offer for the girl?’ Aicha echoed, sounding rather cowed.
‘I find myself in need of a second wife.’
‘A second wife?’
‘The first one is ill; and besides she has got too fat to run around after the children –’
‘Perhaps you would be better off employing a servant than seeking another wife,’ Aicha said acidly.
‘Ah, well I would, but a man has certain … needs. Besides, we’ve only girls, and I’ll need sons to run the business.’ Mbarek stared frankly at Mariata and wet his mouth.
Repulsed by the thick lips that now glistened like entrails, Mariata cried, ‘I wouldn’t be the second wife to a king, let alone a butcher!’
Aicha shot her a furious look, but the butcher only laughed. ‘No need to chastise the girl on my behalf. I like a woman with spirit. I’ll pay you good bride-wealth for this one.’
And he named, right out in the open and quite without shame, a sum that made Aicha’s jaw drop. ‘Goodness,’ she said weakly. ‘Goodness me.’ Then she just stared at him as if she had run out of words.
Mariata took her opportunity. ‘You cannot buy a princess of the Kel Taitok,’ she said scathingly. ‘I suggest you go down to the livestock market and purchase yourself a nice fat ewe to fulfil your … needs.’
She allowed herself the satisfaction of watching his slab of a face turn from ruddy brown to an unhealthy shade of puce before sweeping up the tea tray and marching from the room.
The next week brought Omar Agueram and his sisters. Omar was a pleasant man, tall and well-enough made to remind Mariata somewhat of Amastan. When he smiled at her, she burst into tears, surprising herself and everyone present. The sisters bustled around, dabbing at her eyes so as not to smudge her kohl, patting her shoulder. When everything had calmed down, Omar started again. ‘I have a little carpentry business,’ he explained. ‘By the kasbah wall. I inherited it from my father, who died last year. Since then I’ve been working hard to get the customers back; he was ill for a long time and fell behind with the orders, so I didn’t have time to think about myself. But now the business is doing well, very well. I’ve got more work than I can handle and I’ve just taken on two assistants. I’m ready to settle down and take a wife. And I’d like children, lots of children.’
Mariata felt the tears welling again. Another woman in her circumstances might well settle for this kind man and the life he had to offer, but her dreams still hung in rags around her. Forcing back the tears, she reminded herself of her Kel Taitok heritage and summoned her most haughty demeanour. ‘I’d prefer to raise goats,’ she said coldly.
Omar looked taken aback; but she was a nomad girl and their ways were different, so he tried again. Leaning forward earnestly on the couch, he said, ‘We can have goats, if you like; and perhaps we’ll come to children later.’
It was no good: he was too kind. Fearing she might suddenly lose control and accept his suit, Mariata ran from the room.
The weeks went by, and one by one they still continued to make their way to the Saari house, even though reports of the ‘Tuareg princess’ were less than inviting. There was a little round mechanic whose fingers bore the saffron stain of nicotine; an elderly schoolteacher whose wife had passed away; a bus driver with sunken cheeks and a greying moustache. Mariata was paraded in front of them like a prize mare; but even if she managed to keep a civil tongue, her eyes were insolent and it was not long before some of the sharper-eyed female relatives began to distinguish a swelling beneath even the most voluminous robe in which she was dressed. Aicha was beside herself. She cornered Mariata one morning in the courtyard. ‘You have to marry! You cannot bear a child without a husband in this town!’
‘I have a husband,’ Mariata answered dully.
‘He is dead! Dead, dead, dead!’ Aicha punctuated each word with a dig of a painted nail into her stepdaughter’s growing chest. ‘He’s dead and gone and he’s not coming back! Get that into your stupid, ignorant head.’
Again and again Mariata saw Amastan fall back lifeless into the dust, the black stain spreading across his wedding robe. The loss of him and of their future together cut through her like the chillest desert wind. ‘He may be dead,’ she said bleakly, though even to admit this to Aicha felt like a defeat, ‘but this is his child and I will not let any other man claim it as his own.’
‘If you give birth to a bastard, it will shame the entire community!’ Aicha shrilled.
‘They will be talking of it from here to Ouarzazate!’ Mama Erquia added, grinning horribly.
‘Let me tell you this.’ Aicha wagged a finger in Mariata’s face. ‘If you do not take a husband I will have you thrown out into the street and proclaim that any man in the town may take you as his whore.’
‘My father will not let you treat me so.’
‘Ousman? Ousman will do the best thing for this family. How will his business thrive or his sons find themselves decent wives if everyone knows you to be a whore? I tell you this,’ she said, leaning closer, ‘if you have this baby, I will take it from you while you lie weak in the birthing bed and I will kill it with my own hands. I will wring its neck as easily as a chicken’s and take its wretched, stinking little body out to the abattoir where the wild dogs wait for bones.’
Preposterous though this was, of all the things Aicha had threatened it rang most true to Mariata. She closed her eyes. ‘I will take Omar,’ she heard herself say faintly. ‘I will take the carpenter, Omar Agueram.’
The old woman cocked an eye at her and then cackled. ‘You may wish with one hand and crap in the other,’ she cackled. ‘See which hand fills up first.’
But the news when it came back was not good: Omar, under the urging of his family, who had heard the rumours of Mariata’s condition, had retracted the marriage offer. He sent his uncle to make his apologies to Ousman. ‘Omar regrets very much having placed the young lady in a false position, but it seems he is not in a situation to marry at this precise moment after all.’ The uncle, a dapper man in his fifties who worked for the caïd in the local administration, had a firm manner. He shook Ousman by the hand, turned on his heel and left.
Aicha, who had been listening on the other side of the door, flew into a rage. At last, unable to bear her tears and fury and screeching voice, Ousman gave up his daughter’s right to choose. The next day Aicha sold her to the butcher.