Mariata’s fierce optimism did not last. For days, her instinct had been urging her to move eastwards, but she ignored it because not to keep moving south seemed plainly wrong; and so it was that when she passed between the Oasesat and Aguedal she did not even realize it, for by seeking the shadow of the Jebel el-Kabla she took a col that led only into yet another long arm of the bone-dry Hamada du Guir by mistake. The terrain through which she travelled alternated between crumbling towers of red rock and areas in which a strange dark patina lay plastered against the ground, a brittle glaze that shone dully in the sun and cracked beneath the pressure of the camel’s wide pads. Not a plant grew here, not even the hardiest cactus or euphorbia, and the camel bellowed his displeasure whenever they stopped, twisting his head tortuously to try to steal the ever-diminishing bundle of fodder strapped to his back. He was starving, she knew: the usually solid hump was collapsed and soft, its fat reserves almost gone.
‘No, Acacia!’ she told him fiercely. She had not meant to form a bond with the camel – he was a pack animal, as functional as her own feet – but, after being all day and night in his company and sharing his trials, she had been ambushed by an unexpected affection for the smelly, bad-tempered, recalcitrant beast. The name had offered itself easily: the animal shared the tree’s spiky hardiness. If one of those tough and thorny trees were able to express itself, she was sure that it would roar and grumble and gargle and spit in just the same way as its namesake. ‘If you eat it all now there will be nothing left and then you will regret your greed. Be strong and patient and bear your troubles without complaint and you will be rewarded.’
Strength and patience and obduracy: these were the values her people most valued. No man ever complained about the hardships he had faced in the desert; his pride would not let him, for to complain rendered him less than a man. Instead, they vied with one another to recount the worst trials they had faced: the sand beetles they had cracked with their teeth and chewed to a bitter paste; the vipers they had eaten raw; the urine drunk at the worst of times. She remembered the near-legendary tale of the trader separated from his caravan on his way to Sijilmassa, who had wandered without food and was down to his last mouthful of water when a caravan of merchants from a rival tribe had happened upon him. As is the way of the desert, they had offered him their hospitality: some dried camel meat and water from their gerbers; but he had merely smiled and patted his pack and told them he had all he needed and offered to prepare tea for all of them instead. The situation was quite clear to both sides; but no one would shame the lone traveller by calling his bluff, and so the merchants had gone their way and the trader had died a day later. His story lived on, five hundred years later. And is that not a better legacy, the men of the Kel Ahaggar said, to die nobly and with your pride intact than to have survived by taking sustenance from your enemy?
Mariata was not sure her own resolve would hold quite as firm: even if Rhossi ag Bahedi himself were to suddenly appear bearing fragrant lamb and apricots, she would probably fall upon the food and devour every last morsel before remembering that she had such a luxurious thing as pride, so she could hardly blame the camel for his attempted thievery. She felt the saliva glands in the corners of her jaw twitch and clench, but she was so dry her mouth could not even water. She had not taken a drink since the sun went down. One waterskin hung slack and useless, slowly baking to a crisp; what was left in the other furry black gerber tasted warm and brackish, as if the liquid in the goatskin had transmuted back to blood. And as if it too were complaining at the lack of nutrition, the baby kicked out hard, once, twice. She placed her hand over her belly, fingers spread. ‘Quiet in there, little man. Kicking your mama won’t make it any better.’
By the thirteenth day all the fodder was gone and there was so little water to spare that she had enough only with which to wet Acacia’s nostrils, and when she did so the ungrateful beast did his best to bite her. He nosed at her sandals, but these were too precious to be eaten, so she let him eat the reed mat that she slept on, and he chewed slowly and with painful effort, grinding the mat to a dry cud with a determined back and forth sawing of his long jaw. For herself, she tried to eat the rice uncooked and all but cracked her teeth, and even grinding it between stones just reduced it to a flourlike powder that coated the inside of the mouth and was impossible to swallow without water to mix it with. Now she realized why Atisi had brought two female camels with him: their milk would have sustained them in such hard circumstances, and she remembered poor Moushi lying dead by the roadside and cursed her luck that the only mount left to her was male. She had heard of traders reduced to tapping the blood from their camel’s neck; but when she approached Acacia with the little knife from Tana’s bag he peeled his lips from his long yellow teeth and pronounced he would bite her arm off if she came a step closer; or at least that was what she imputed to his bellow of rage, and so she persuaded herself that things were not yet so desperate.
Even so, when they stopped on the thirteenth day, she tipped the bag upside down for the hundredth time and interrogated its contents in the vain hope that she had missed something useful. She pushed the objects around in a desultory manner as the camel chewed the handful of fodder, seeing nothing new. Just as she was about to scoop the items back into the bag, a small, striped pebble caught her eye. It was a bluish-green with a single white horizontal band running around its centre: quite different to the ambient red and dun. Mariata picked it up. It sat smooth and tiny in her hand, as smooth and tiny as a songbird’s egg. She brushed grains of sand from its surface and then, without a single conscious thought, placed the pebble under her tongue, where it fitted with perfect comfort. Within moments saliva had flooded her mouth, trickling over her teeth, and she swallowed gratefully. She kept sucking at the pebble and moving it around with her tongue and found for the rest of the day that it kept her mouth moistened and took the edge off her thirst; but it was the smallest of aids and at best a temporary measure.
They kept out of the sun when they could, moving around the leeside of rock towers till dusk, then walked by the light of the waxing moon. South and east they went across the dry, rock-strewn plateaus and found only dried-up watercourses and hardly a leaf or plant that was not withered almost to dust. Acacia walked with his head down, slower and slower, until at last he sat down and simply refused to get up. Mariata waited, but he would not even look at her. She tried to cajole him with the last of the fodder, but he gave her the briefest glance of reproach and turned his head away as if to say: too late! Now you will be sorry for your meanness. She dragged on his halter, but obstinacy made him strong. She sat down beside him and sighed. She sang to him, a song her grandmother used to sing to her when she was little: he snorted and gargled raspily in his throat and just sat there, flicking sand spitefully with his tail.
Mariata got up and stood in front of him with her hands on her hips. Acacia pretended she wasn’t there. Mariata moved into his eyeline so that he would have to make an effort to ignore her. The camel looked at her with dull eyes. ‘You need a rest. I understand. I need a rest too. But we cannot stop here: we have to keep moving till we find an oasis or a well. Then we will rest, and you can dip your head into the cool water and drink to your heart’s content and feed on palms and dates. But you have to get up, get on your feet. Because if you don’t, you will die. And if you die, I will die.’ She paused and touched her swelling abdomen. ‘And so will my child.’
Eventually, unable to evade her penetrating gaze, Acacia struggled painfully to his feet once more; and Mariata walked beside him, shuffling one foot in front of the other. It was impossible to avoid the thought of death. Her mind kept circling around the idea like a hawk gyring around its prey. They came down into a valley in which the desert sands had been blown in a smooth, pale carpet, but down in the soft hollow something was sticking up through the sand. As soon as it saw what it was, the camel jinked sideways and began to bellow piteously. Mariata stared at the bones, bleached white by the sun, polished to a fine sheen by the windborne sand, and her heart thudded dully inside her own bones. Was this all that was left of the last traveller who had passed this way? Would she and Acacia be prey to the same fate? A terrible image drifted through her mind then, of a skeleton curled upon its side, lapped by waves of sand, its knees drawn up to protect the tiny skeleton cradled beneath its ribs.
The image filled her with determination. ‘Damn you!’ she told the camel. ‘Pick your feet up. We will survive!’
It was an instruction to herself as much as to the exhausted animal. Jaw out-thrust, Mariata drove them both on, though she was tired, so tired, setting a course directly east. Why she changed direction she did not know, but her hand itched and burned and her skull buzzed with hidden knowledge. Somewhere out there was the Valley of the Oases the traders in the funduq had spoken of, the long valley that ran from north to south, studded with ancient wells and oases, through which the trade route that had been followed for thousands of years wound its way. She would find it or die.
The hamada gave way to erg – a great sea of dunes, sweeping and sickle-shaped, their long crests carved to a pitiless knife-edge by the wind. She stood on a rock and looked out across the dunes that rolled away from her, their bright ridges alternating with their shady troughs, striping the ground like the barring on a falcon’s wing, and knew they were on the edge of the Grand Occidental Erg, and that if they did not find a well soon, they had no chance of survival at all.
Acacia collapsed the next day. His knees folded under him and he fell in a heap, a great huff of foul-smelling air rushing at the same time out of his mouth and his rectum. After this, he sat staring into space as if he could see his own death, a speck on the far horizon, advancing step by inexorable step. Mariata cried out and then threw her arms around his neck, burying her face in his burning hide. ‘Get up!’ she urged him. ‘Get to your feet!’
Panic made her harsh. She pummelled the camel with her fists; but he bore the assault without reaction. She kicked him and sobbed drily as she did so; but he did not move. And so at last she lay down beside him, in the shadow his form made, and waited until he stopped breathing. Even then, he did not fall, but sat there as unmoving as a sphinx, alive one second, gone the next. It was impossible to judge the exact moment of his passing, for nothing essential appeared to have changed in him. Mariata put her hand to the camel’s mouth and felt no breath there. She laid her cheek against the hollow ribs and heard no heartbeat. She pulled at his long eyelashes: he did not even twitch. At last she had to admit the terrible truth: that he was dead and she was alone, and too far now from anywhere to turn back and seek help. She did not imagine that she could survive in such a place, with nothing but her own feet to bear her. She sat with her back propped against the camel’s corpse and stared deadly out into the sands. So this was how it would end for her and her unborn child. It would be a bleak ending, but at least they would die as People of the Veil, in the desert where they belonged.
That night the djenoun came for her soul. She heard them on the wind as it picked up at nightfall, whipping streamers of sand off the peaks of the dunes. Their song was faint at first, a sort of dull hum that thrummed through her bones, making her ribs vibrate; and then it was all about her, in the air, in the ground beneath her feet: a slow drumbeat of life, a drumbeat that had always existed, had been here before the dunes formed, before the grasslands that came before the sands, when the gazelles and the giraffes ran here and the world was lush and green; when God formed the djenoun from smokeless fire. The song became a roar and then a howl. Mariata let the sound flow through her, by turns terrified and fascinated. The Kel Asuf, the People of the Wilderness: they were singing to her because they recognized her as one of their own, one of those who speak with no one, who travel through the empty places. They had come for her. In some ways this was a relief: she would not have to battle on towards her doom, and her death would be taken out of her own hands. She stood up and let the wind and sand batter her.
She awoke the next morning with her face buried against the belly of the dead camel. A blanket of sand encased them both, trapping a large pocket of foul but breathable air: there was no doubt that Acacia, in death, had saved her life. Pushing herself to her feet through the tide of sand, Mariata stared around her, marvelling at the pale bright blue of the sky, the gleaming gold of the dunes. The wind in the night had been so strong that the landscape she awoke to was pristine and unfamiliar, as if its hollows and curves had all been rearranged by a giant hand. For a brief moment she felt a keen disappointment that her trials in this world were not over; but then the life inside her delivered a powerful kick. Despite her desperate situation, Mariata laughed aloud. ‘Hello, little one! Did you think I needed to be reminded that you were in there?’
Charged with new energy, Mariata took Tana’s knife from the fringed bag strapped across her back, sharpened it with the whetstone until its edge was as thin as a sickle moon, and set about butchering the dead camel. She tapped its blood into one of the gerbers and dressed the corpse: flayed off its skin, cut out the last of the fat reserves, set aside long strips of meat from its flanks and shoulders for drying. Soon poor Acacia was reduced to nothing more than bones and hooves and his big, sad head. Many would have chided her for leaving the skull intact, with its nutritious brain and its juice-filled eyes untouched, but an unwonted sentimentality came upon her, by which it seemed wrong to defile the head of a friend, particularly one whose great efforts had saved her life, and so she patted it uncomfortably on the poll, smoothed a patch of sand beside it and with the blade inscribed a prayer: May your spirit wander cool gueltas and rich pasturage; may cool shadows ease your soul. Mariata ult Yemma thanks you. The child of Amastan ag Moussa thanks you. No breath of wind disturbed the stark Tifinagh symbols.
Using the coarse hair of the camel’s tail as tinder and the last of its dried droppings as fuel, she made an acrid fire and cooked and ate the heart and liver. Having eaten so little for so long, this task alone took her a vast time. It felt strange to force food into herself in this way, but she knew that the more she could eat, the better prepared she would be to carry on her journey. The blanket was gone, taken by the desert winds, so that night she lay beneath a cover made from the flayed and bloody hide. Her practicality in arranging such things surprised her: she had not before been known for her capability, but then never before had she needed to rely entirely on her own resources.
For two more days she stayed with the corpse of poor Acacia, cooking and eating what she could of the flesh and drinking the blood before it congealed. The herbs that Tana had included in the wedding bag enabled her to eat when she thought she could eat no more and warded off any sickness or discomfort that eating so much meat might otherwise have brought about. As the sun fell on the third day she gathered the cured jerky into a bag fashioned from the camel’s stomach, which she fastened across her back with strips of hide. It was heavy and uncomfortable, but it represented survival. Now I shall bear Acacia’s hump and it will lend me its strength, she told herself fiercely, slinging the gerbers across her front.
She stumbled south and east, following the passage of the stars. She walked through a region of flat, compacted sand that the wind had left striated in thousands upon thousands of tiny wavelets. The patterns, so elegant in their perfect regularity, distracted her mind and soothed her eye; she was sorry when the sands rose again and she found herself wading ankle-deep through their soft tide, but soon the dunes flattened out once more and before long she found herself in an area of perfect camel-dun as far as the eye could see, a dun unspoilt except for an irregular studding of dark stones, each the size of a child’s fist. When she sat to rest she picked up one of these stones and felt how it gave weight and meaning to her hand. It seemed far heavier than any ordinary stone should seem: she examined it curiously. Flecked with brown and pitted as if by fire, the stone seemed more like metal than rock, and it was then that she recalled how Amastan had told her of the thunderstones that fell from the skies. They had been sitting on one of the tall sentinel rocks that guarded the way into the tribe’s grounds from the Tamesna, watching falling stars blaze a silver trail through the night. ‘I walked in a place where the hearts of such stars had fallen in their hundreds,’ he had told her, and she had made a face at him, her expression eloquent with disbelief.
‘Another of your wild tales!’ she chided him, though she loved to listen to the cadence of his voice no matter how absurd the subject.
‘Insh’allah you will never be in such a place. Many have tried to cross that plain, but Al Djumsjab, the glooming breath of the erg, who separates companions and devastates caravans, has devoured them all. Now all that is left of them is their bones parching white in the sun while their spirits wander the wastes with the Kel Asuf, playing ball with the iron hearts that have fallen from the skies.’
She had thought it one of his poetic fancies, but now she remembered how he had at another time asked if she thought that the stars that shone above might be the souls of the dead, and she threw the stone away from her and got to her feet and walked as quickly as she could manage through the field of thunderstones, itching with dread every step of the way.
The next day while negotiating a steep dune she slipped and fell and rolled to the bottom and lay there, panting. Her left hand ached and burned. She turned it over and examined it. Right in the centre, where a long, straight line bisected the palm, a thorn had lodged itself so deeply that no part of it protruded. Dark blood lay stoppered around the thorn. Wincing, Mariata squeezed and pressed the flesh around it, to no avail. She tried to dig it out with the blade of the little knife, but the thorn buried itself more deeply. Had she been able to, she would have wept with pain and frustration, but there was nothing behind her eyes but a hot ache.
The next day her hand was swollen; pads of reddened flesh pushed up around the wound like pillows. It throbbed with every step she took and felt as heavy as if she were carrying a thunderstone. Before long it felt as if the wound was at the very centre of her, a raw and pulsing other heart, and the rest of her as insubstantial as smokeless fire, trapped by some magic in human form but ready to fly up into the air if the spell somehow broke. She was almost delirious by the time the oasis came into view and stumbled towards it thinking it a trick of the desert, a mirage of heat-haze sent to taunt her, even though it was barely dawn. The closer she got, though, the clearer it became, the green of the palm trees an assault to the eyes after the unending duns and reds. The water shone the sky back at her like a mirror, so still as to seem a solid mass. Suddenly, with a clarity so intense it was like hallucination, she saw herself immerse the burning hand, saw the water closing over it so that there was nothing but wrist; felt the coolness with a piercing bliss that rivalled the sweetest moment in Amastan’s arms. She imagined it so clearly that dream and reality merged into one long swooning fall. It was when she started to drink that she came back to herself, for that was not bliss but a raw and fiery sensation. Her throat was so dry and closed that she almost could not swallow; instead she choked and rasped and retched. At last she managed to get some water down; then like a dying thing she shouldered her bundles, crawled in amongst the shady roots and fell asleep in the cool darkness there.
She awoke to the sound of voices and sat up suddenly, terrified. Three camels were drinking at the waterhole, legs splayed as they craned their necks; three men sat at the other end of the oasis, refilling their waterskins. They did not seem to have noticed her. With her dark and dusty clothing and black gerbers she was well camouflaged in the shadows. Part of her wanted to call out to them and ask their help; but another, warier instinct prevailed. She settled back against the palms and watched and waited. She watched as two of the men settled themselves on the ground beneath the palms and rested, while the third stamped impatiently around and tried to get them moving, without success. At last he too sat down with his back against a tree and appeared to sleep, but still Mariata dared not move.
As night fell the men made a camp fire and gathered around it to prepare tea and food. The smell of their preparations wafted across the still pool towards her so that her stomach clenched and growled. She drew a piece of camel meat from the stomach-bag and chewed on it, all the while yearning for the taste of green tea and sugar. The jumping firelight lit their forms: Mariata saw that two of them were veiled, and in Hoggar fashion, and this gave her the heart she needed to move closer. Treading softly through the fallen branches with their crisped brown fronds, she reached the edge of her cover, and there she squatted down and listened.
The man who wore only a loose head-covering seemed unhappy. He could not sit still, and appeared infuriated by his companions’ equanimity. ‘I do not understand why we are stopping here!’ he said again. ‘After all, it is I who am paying you: you should do what I say!’
The taller of the two veiled men gave him a level look. ‘The camels are exhausted, and so are we.’
Mariata’s heart stilled in her chest. She knew that voice: it was her brother, Azaz.
‘She may yet be ahead of us; she may have taken a faster route!’
Azaz sighed. ‘There is no faster route. All travellers know the Valley of the Oases is the only safe way through this part of the desert. Deviate from it and all you will find is a swift death.’
The butcher, Mbarek Aït Ali, threw up his hands as if to ward off evil. ‘I pray to Allah she did not, it would be a waste of such a juicy peach.’
At this, the second veiled figure got up and kicked sand over the fire in a gesture that spoke of repressed violence. ‘This is no more than a wild hare chase.’ Mariata heard how his voice broke like that of a boy on the threshold of manhood. It was her young brother, Baye.
‘The storm must have covered her traces; or she has used some sort of magic to hide them,’ the butcher said.
‘My sister is no sorceress: you should not listen to my father’s wife.’
‘Then where is she? Has she vanished into thin air, or taken to flight? No one has seen her since Douira, in the company of that raggedy old trader.’
‘They may have parted company.’
‘Or they have made better time than us,’ the butcher persisted. ‘Whatever the way of it, I am determined to find her. I cannot go back without her: I will be a laughing-stock. Another day or two, I tell you. We will continue into the desert.’
Azaz and Baye exchanged glances but said nothing. At last Baye clicked his tongue. ‘My sister has lived a pampered life: she is not made for tramping deserts. She’s probably back in Imteghren by now, feasting on couscous and laughing up her sleeve. We should give this up as a bad job.’
‘We have gone further than expected, and further than you have paid for. As it is, if we’re caught by the Algerian Army it will not go well for us,’ Azaz added.
‘I thought you nomads didn’t give a pig’s arse for borders!’ the butcher sneered.
‘I care about my neck,’ Azaz replied levelly.
The butcher slapped one massive fist into his other palm. ‘Perhaps if I raise the price by another hundred dirhams you may find a tad more courage.’
Azaz shook his head. ‘It’s not just the money. We simply do not have the supplies to go any further.’ The expression with which he regarded the butcher was one that Mariata recognized. Even as a child of three Azaz had been strong-willed, his wails of fury heard far from their camp when he was forced to wear even a scrap of clothing.
The two men locked eyes, but it was the butcher who looked away first. ‘I would have thought you would wish to save your sister from a hard journey, and probably death.’
Azaz turned his back on the man, rudely. ‘There are worse things in the world than death in the desert,’ he said softly, but only Mariata heard him.
That night as the men slept she stole past them and grabbed up one of the tassoufras, delved into it and discovered a skin of dates. They tasted impossibly sweet, and the corners of her jaws sent shooting pangs through her bones at the first bite. She could not help herself: she ate them all, gathering the sticky stones up in her skirt to hide amongst the roots of the palms. She considered, briefly, stealing one of the camels, but her brothers were expert trackers and would soon find her, and no matter what sympathy they might have for her plight, they were duty-bound to carry out the job the butcher was paying them for. Nor would they shame their father by going against his word. Besides, this reminder of her suitor’s bull-like features and his overbearing temperament steeled her resolve: she would let them go where they would without her. Close to death she might be, but it was still better than being close to the butcher.
The next morning the light seeped slowly over the horizon, a dull grey-blue to start with, followed by a burnt-orange glow that gradually lightened and spread itself like a flood into the night sky, so that the stars were put out one by one. Azaz was the first to rise. He uncoiled himself from his blanket and went straight to the foodsacks. He lifted the tassoufra that had contained the dates and weighed it contemplatively. Baye came to stand at his shoulder. He bent down and examined the gritty sand, then looked back up at his older brother. Azaz nodded once, then put a finger to his lips. They both glanced around to where Mbarek lay snoring. Then Azaz scuffed the sand as if erasing something. He picked up one of the other tassoufras, walked into the shade of the nearest palms and hung it up out of sight, looking around all the while as he did so. Then he walked to where the camels sat couched and unhobbled the smallest of them. ‘When he wakes tell him one of the camels wandered off in the night,’ he told his brother quietly, ‘and that I have gone to look for it and when I find it I will catch you up. Break camp quickly and head back on the same path on which we arrived. Wait for me in the hills by the oued with the blue stones in its bed; I will be there by noon.’ He pulled the camel’s head around by its lip, threw a leg over and urged it to its feet. ‘If I am not, do not wait for me.’ Moments later both man and camel had vanished from sight.
Baye scratched his head, then went to brew tea.
The butcher grumbled mightily about having to turn back, and one camel light at that, but an hour later he and Baye were gone, and Mariata was left alone at the oasis. But she was not alone for long. A lone figure on a camel came slowly into view.
‘Mariata!’ he called.
She did not answer; nor did she show herself.
Azaz rode right up to the water’s edge and allowed the camel to drink. He filled his own waterskin and took a mighty swig from it. ‘I know you are there,’ he said softly. ‘Your footprints were by our stores this morning and the dates were gone – unless a monkey has stolen my sister’s red leather sandals with the carved instep …’
Mariata stood up and walked out into the sunlight. ‘I will not go back with you, so do not try to make me.’ Her voice, which had once been so mellifluous that grown men had wept when she sang, sounded now as harsh as a crow’s.
Azaz regarded the ragged figure before him. ‘The desert has not been kind to you, sister.’
‘It is kinder to me than a butcher might be.’
‘What about the baby?’
It was the first time either of her brothers had acknowledged her condition: back in Imteghren they had averted their eyes and said not a word on the matter.
Mariata put her hands over her belly, and, as if on cue, the baby kicked not once but twice. She smiled and looked down, and was at once struck by how thin her wrists were, how the bones showed through the tops of her hands. She knew that beneath her robe her ribs and pelvis would be equally prominent. What would Amastan say if he saw her now, he who had peeled away her clothing under the indulgent eye of the moon and run his hands over her sleek, opulent curves? The desert was paring her away, layer by layer, like a healer peeling a wolf onion. Soon she would be down to the thin green quick. ‘We are both fine,’ she said.
‘And where will you go?’
‘Home. Home to have my child in the lands of the Kel Ahaggar.’
‘It is a long way to the Hoggar, sister, and you are alone. Perhaps two would stand more chance than one?’
‘We are already two,’ she smiled at him, touched by this oblique offer. ‘Go back to the others and say nothing about me.’
Azaz caught the camel’s halter and held it out. ‘For you. And there is food, up there in the palm. Our father would wish it, if he were here. No one should force a woman of the Veil to marry against her will.’
Mariata’s eyes filled with tears. She bowed her head so that he would not see her cry. ‘Won’t you be punished for the loss of the camel?’
She heard the smile in his voice. ‘It is a small price to pay. Just east of here there is a road. Do not go on to that road: there are military vehicles patrolling on their way to Timimoun and Tindouf. Try to keep its position clear in mind as you go. Cross the road at night on to the Tidikelt Plain, where you will see the three-horned hill; then keep moving east for three days. When the wind begins to pick up as the sun goes down, set your face into it and keep walking. The Guide will appear over your left shoulder and keep travelling around in front of you. In the hours when he has disappeared beneath the earth’s rim, keep the North Star at your back and the Daughters in front of you. There are waterholes along the way, but they are few and far between. The land rises steadily: follow the contours and they will take you to Abalessa. The camel is called Takama. She is generally sweet-natured, but can be headstrong. She should suit you well.’
Takama was the name of the servant who had walked out into the desert with their ancestress. Mariata looked up, surprised by both the grim irony of this and by the gift of her brother’s sudden invention, and tears spilt down her cheeks. ‘Tin Hinan should be proud of the men of her line.’ She took the halter as if it tethered her to life itself; the plaited rope felt at once massive and fine against her skin.
They touched hands; then Azaz turned and walked away, his back very straight, his arms swinging freely. Moments later he was gone, a diminishing figure running swiftly across the sands.