Bakr came up beside her. “Wherever did you learn to do that?”
Rawiya held up her sling. “I would have hit him in the eyes, but he saw me coming. He threw up wind with his wings.” She uncurled her fingers, letting the sling’s leather slacken. “A trick my father taught me.”
Al-Idrisi stroked his beard, his white turban streaked with dust. “That is no trick,” he said. “A talent like that may prove useful on a road with many dangers. How did you know where to aim?”
“My father told me stories as a child,” Rawiya said. “Tales of a selfish, bloodthirsty creature with no love for songs or beautiful things. He kills and steals what he pleases. His whole body is armored with thick feathers, so the beast’s only vulnerable spot is his eye.”
Bakr shuddered and caught his breath. “What kind of creature is this?”
The sun rose, pomegranate red. “This is the pale terror,” Rawiya said. “This is the great white bird the poets call the roc.”
THE LIGHTS HAVE gone out. The lights in the apartments, the streetlamps, the traffic signals. The city is darker than I have ever seen it, like the bottom of the ocean. Manhattan was never this dark. Baba used to say Manhattan was more alive at night than during the day.
Mama slides a worn pair of slippers on my feet. I watch her through the curtain of my hair. My head doesn’t hurt anymore; my whole body is a numb lump. I rub my elbows, shivering at the first twinge of cold.
“Get up, Nour.” Her hands shake my ankles, yanking the slippers higher so they’ll stay on. The seams have started to split, melted by heat, and a couple of toes poke out.
Mama pushes matted hair off her cheeks. When she puts her hands on my feet again, her fingers are damp. The salt is back, ringing my ankles.
“It’s dark, Mama.”
“The power is out.” Beetles have chewed on her voice.
The city streets are a maze of twisted concrete and steel skeletons. The thought of getting up and walking makes my fingers tingle and my guts scrunch up. “My stomach hurts,” I say. “And I want to lay down.”
“Not here, habibti. We’re not safe here.” Mama touches Huda on the forehead and tosses Zahra a pair of canvas sneakers with the tongues ripped out. Zahra has her head on her knees and won’t put them on. Mama scans the wreck of the house one more time for Zahra’s smashed phone and curses when she finds it. She counts the coins in the pocket of her skirt. She stuffs a charred wad of bills to the bottom of her burlap bag.
Mama and Abu Sayeed pass Arabic back and forth. I wiggle my toes in my slippers. The stones press against my big toe. Nothing feels real. It feels like the minute before you have to throw up, and you can’t think about anything else, just getting through the next five seconds. It feels like that. I wonder if the whole city is flattened out there, and we just don’t know it. I wonder how many other places lost power today, how many other blocks are missing their streetlights.
Then I remember what Abu Sayeed said at dinner about the power being out at his house, and the back of my neck hums with fear like a radio snapping to life.
I ask, “What about your house, Abu Sayeed? Is your house still there?”
Abu Sayeed looks at Mama, but no one answers me. All our ears are ringing. Then he goes over to Huda and picks her up in both hands, like a stack of firewood. The knees of his pants are shredded, the linen stained with blood. His legs bow out to the side under Huda’s weight, his shoulders straining to stay up. He looks nothing like the smiling man with the mustache from Baba’s Polaroids.
Mama pulls Zahra up by the wrist. Abu Sayeed says, “We’ll find out.”
They cross through the garden gate first—Mama, Zahra, and Abu Sayeed with Huda in his arms. I’m the last to leave the house. The alley in front of me is a cut-open canyon, like somebody took a hot knife to crumbly pastry dough. Behind me, the cracked fig tree trails a branch through a broken window, its trunk smeared with soot and blood. One brown fig hangs ragged, shot through by metal and the sharp splinters of stones. Juice and seeds ooze, splattered on the gate. I touch the latch, and it sticks to my fingers, tugging me back when I pull away.
We leave the garden and the mess of frames and canvas, the paint splatter and the broken dishes. We walk in the dark toward Quwatli Street, but things don’t look the same, and even though Abu Sayeed must know where he’s going, he seems confused.
Our street isn’t the only one that got flattened in our neighborhood. Another street is blocked by walls that came down, collapsed roofs, bricks piled in the road. I don’t recognize the shops with their faces crumbled away, the husks of apartment buildings where sofas and bathtubs have been tossed over the curb.
How many Polaroids are there of places that no longer exist?
We turn around, try another way. Everything is gray, that cloud of dust hanging over the road. It’s hard to breathe. Zahra whines about her feet. She lags behind, and Mama pulls her. I’ve got cuts on my toes, but I don’t say anything. I watch the dark spot on Huda’s shoulder spread, trace the outlines of blood on her chest and Mama’s. I think about box jellies.
With all the streetlights out and dust over everything, we grope along the walls on the next block. Dark clouds mixed with smoke cover the moon tonight. Now and then, a car flies around a corner without its lights on, and we dive against the nearest wall. We try to find Quwatli Street, but we end up veering off into a little alley so old and narrow it doesn’t have a sidewalk. We go single file.
Abu Sayeed stops and turns around. Huda is limp in his arms. He looks exhausted, like he’s carrying an armful of marble. I wonder if his pockets are still full of stones. I wonder if the stones on my dresser burned and cracked when our house came down, whether Zahra’s plum-fat perfume bottle exploded like a potato in the microwave. The months it took me to collect all those stones sit in my belly, an indigestible ache.
Abu Sayeed melts into the dark. The only point of light is Huda’s flowered headscarf against the collar of his shirt. Her arm hangs, swinging like a chain.
I poke around for Mama’s hand, tapping my fingers up her thigh until I find her thumbnail. I hold on tight and burrow my face into her side. She wraps her palm around my ear. She smells like days-old turpentine, that sharp teal smell, and cooking fat.
Mama’s hand blocks the loud voices from the next street over, the chalk-gray shouts and pounding footsteps. The burlap bag sways in her other hand, the map’s corners peeking out like broad feathers. Through everything, the painted borders of its countries haven’t gotten smudged. Acrylic paint dries fast.
“The side street is blocked off,” Abu Sayeed says. “Something is happening in the square.”
“Happening?” Mama clenches her hand against my hair.
“Where are we going?” Zahra’s voice is too loud. “We can’t stay out all night. What if it happens again? What if—”
“Hush.” Mama’s voice is a rough whisper, grainy as concrete.
“We need another route.” Abu Sayeed turns slowly from one wall of the alley to the other, like he’s looking for a door to open out of the stone, like somebody might send down a fire escape from the sky.
Zahra twists her hands around her wrists, the muscles in her neck stiff as reeds. She hisses, “We have to move, Mama.”
“Hush!” Mama’s hands flit across her face, her hair, her bag. She’s vibrating. “The first week of May,” she says, just loud enough that we can hear. “The first week of May, we left.” She holds her fist over her mouth, tapping the words back between her lips.
“You can stay with me,” Abu Sayeed says. “Just let me think of another way.” A stain spreads behind Huda’s collarbone like a wing.
A helicopter grazes the rooftops, churning up the hanging dust. When my ankles and the balls of my feet start to shake with the road, everything in me wants to bolt. I hold on to Mama. Blood swells my scalp and my fingertips, like I might pop.
I whisper, “I want to go home.”
“Abu Sayeed’s house—that’s where we’ll go.
It’s not far.” But it’s like Mama is somewhere else. She says a list of things that haven’t happened yet: “We’ll get the car. We’ll put the girls to sleep. We’ll have water. Clean clothes. We’ll take Huda to a doctor.” She strokes my hair while she talks. In the dark, her eyes and cheeks are just holes. She says, “It will be all right,” and then under her breath, she adds, “insha’Allah.” God willing.
It’s something Baba used to say when he thought nobody was listening to him, when it was quiet enough that I could hear him pray. Like on summer afternoons in the city, when people used to lie on the floors of their apartments and Baba was so tired from fasting during Ramadan that he would lie on the rug and read to me over the sound of traffic. Or on Christmas mornings after we had opened up our presents, before Baba would break the silence with Umm Kulthum, before he and Mama would dance in front of the Christmas tree. Those were the only times quiet enough to hear Baba praying.
“We have to chance the square,” Abu Sayeed says.
That’s when I notice the black-and-white archway on the building next to us. I close my eyes and run over the route we took this afternoon to get the cumin. Huda took us down this same street. There’s no mistaking that archway, the black and white stripes of stone. I can see the photo in my head, the picture I took with my eyes. I imagine the streets we turned down and picture the route like a piece of fabric, running my hands over its twists and turns. A left by the café. Straight past the apartment building with the gray and white stones. A right past the crooked poplar. Then I run over the directions a second time, there and back again. Huda’s shortcut. Abu Sayeed lives a street down from the spice shop. Huda saying, They say synesthesia is tied to memory.
“I know the way,” I say.
Mama lets go of me. “To where?”
“I remember this building.” I point away down the alley until it disappears around a sharp corner. “One block down, there’s a café. You turn right at the crooked poplar—”
“We’re in Syria,” Zahra says, “not New York. They don’t use blocks here.”
I try not to raise my voice because people are shouting from the next street over. “I know the way. I remember it.”
“You’ve only been here once.” Zahra glances toward the voices.
I stomp my ripped slipper. “Huda could tell you. It’s her shortcut. I always remember—right, Mama?”
Mama tightens her fingers on the burlap bag. “Tell Abu Sayeed the way, and let him go first. Don’t run off, habibti.”
I whisper the turns to Abu Sayeed. We round the corner of the alley and dart across the street, staying close together. Somebody lights a candle in a window. The flame bounces off Abu Sayeed’s eyes, bulging with the red branches of veins. The hems of his pants hang from the cuts at the knees, dragging on the ground. I look up and wonder if the moon would be going to bed soon, if I could see it.
We pass the apartment building with the tiny white pebbles and the crooked poplar. What stones have I missed in the dark? The night is too black and dusty to see even the stars over our heads.
It didn’t have to be like this. This walk could have been an adventure, an expedition. How many times did Mama tell me how to use an astrolabe, like the old mapmakers? How many times did she show me the rete, how it held all the stars? I think about how much faith people had to have back then to trust the stars would be there when they needed them to, to trust the sky wouldn’t fail them.
I watch Huda’s arms swing in front of me in the dark. On the next corner, Zahra’s golden bracelet catches my eye. I look around at what we have left: Zahra’s jewelry, Mama’s map. I wait for sharp jealousy to twist in my stomach, but it doesn’t come. Huda’s fingertips are black with soot. I would give the last thread off my slippers if she would say something.
We come to the spice shop, shut up with a metal curtain. I can tell Abu Sayeed knows where we are because he hurries ahead, his lips apart, words hanging on his tongue. He shifts Huda’s weight and whispers, “Bless you, little cloud.”
We turn down a side street. Ahead of us, like a minaret in the gray dust, is Abu Sayeed’s green car parked on the cobblestones, its lights and alarms going off bright yellow and pink.
For all the afternoons Abu Sayeed has come to our house, we’ve never been to his. I don’t recognize anything. I trip on pebbles I can’t see, odd-shaped rocks, bits of brick and concrete. I think again of the stones on the road. Maybe I’m stepping right over Abu Sayeed’s mystery stone, the purple and green one, and I don’t even know how important it is. Like the bombs that dropped from the sky, not realizing how important the house was they were landing on, not realizing it was ours.
Then Abu Sayeed cries out. We round the corner, past the car. The headlights pop on, then off again. In the flash, we see the rubble of a building, and for a minute I wonder if we’ve circled around and come back to our own house. But we haven’t.
Abu Sayeed walks toward his crumbled roof, the ruins of his kitchen. His feet brush halves of bricks, curling up dust like feathers toward the sky. I wonder how big the bomb was that flattened his house, his street. I wonder if anybody knew it was his.
If I hadn’t played in so many parks, would I still have Sitto’s doll?
I glance at Mama’s burlap bag again, at the map inside. I think to myself how stupid it is that acrylic paints dry so fast. Things change too much. We’ve always got to fix the maps, repaint the borders of ourselves.
Where the Camel Sleeps
In those days, Homs was one of the largest cities in Syria. Lying on a fertile plain and watered by the Orontes, Homs was a place of many gardens, fruit trees, and vineyards. It lay a few days’ ride from a Crusader castle called the Krak des Chevaliers, near the border of the Crusader County of Tripoli. But Homs was walled and fortified by the emir Nur ad-Din, and many travelers and merchants gathered in its open markets and strolled its stone-paved streets. Rawiya marveled at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, one of the largest in all of Syria, and at the tomb of the Muslim general Khalid ibn al-Walid. The city was believed to be a place of protection from snakes and scorpions, a blessed place. In his leather-bound books, al-Idrisi noted the white stone statue of a man on horseback above a scorpion that stood over the gate of the mosque. He explained to Rawiya that he had heard the people of Homs say that if a scorpion stung you, you could be healed by rubbing clay on this statue, dissolving the clay in water, and drinking it. Rawiya was amazed.
They found a khan within the city, adjoined to a mosque, and stayed the night. In the morning, Rawiya woke before dawn, homesick and lonely. Merchants set out their wares in the open markets, selling pine nuts and quince, sumac and oranges, glass beads and silk. Amid the noise, she found herself listening in vain for the familiar lilt of her mother’s voice.
Looking around, Rawiya counted her companions. One of them was missing—al-Idrisi.
She wrapped her turban and tied her sling at her side. The khan was quiet, but humming drifted from the second story. She hurried up the stone stairs.
Beyond the khan, the flat gray roofs of stone houses were staggered like stepping-stones. To the west lay the Orontes, its banks scattered with poplars. Beyond the plain, sculpted farmland ringed the hills.
“Awake so early?”
The voice startled Rawiya. Al-Idrisi sat on the low wall, dangling his legs over the two-story drop. He wrote in a leather-bound book in his lap.
“Al-Idrisi—” Rawiya hurried over to him. “Come down before you fall.”
“My luck will hold,” he said, “and the view won’t do me any harm. Come.” He patted the stone beside him. “Take in the city before it wakes.”
Al-Idrisi’s beard was tinged with dust, and the wind lifted stray camel hairs from his turban. Rawiya decided to keep her feet on the ground. She weighed her words and said, “The roc followed us from the khan outside of Hama to the gates of Homs. It worries me. The road to come is exposed.”
Al-Idrisi paused, lifted his quill, and then began to scratch away aga
in. “If we ride hard, we can make it to ash-Sham in four days, five at the most.”
The laundry lines between the buildings swayed in the wind, and the wooden signs clapped against the stones.
“It’s a long way,” Rawiya said.
“You must understand,” said al-Idrisi, “there are no reliable maps of this region and its routes. This is our task—to create a more complete map than has ever existed before. For now, we follow the accounts of other travelers. Only when we see for ourselves will we know the distance for certain.”
“But it’s too long a distance,” Rawiya said. The wind flapped her sirwal, chafing the embroidered cuffs against her ankles. “If the roc seeks revenge, he will search for us at every roadside khan. He won’t let us go without a fight.”
Al-Idrisi swung his feet back over the wall and stood, shutting the clasp on his leather-bound book. “It seems your father told you more of this creature than you have said.”
Rawiya described sitting on her father’s lap as a child, the olives fat on the branch, gray-winged shrikes preening themselves. She spoke of the sun-wrinkled face of an Amazigh trader—a Berber—offering her something tender-skinned, green-purple. A ripe fig. She had taken a bite, gritty and sweet, and the Amazigh man had begun to recite the ancient story of the roc. When Rawiya had told al-Idrisi all of this, she said, “The roc is terrible when angered and will stop at nothing to get revenge on his enemies.”
Al-Idrisi tugged at his beard. “Then we hide in plain sight, among the hills and the fields.”
Rawiya smiled. “I, for one, will enjoy sleeping under the stars.”
LEAVING HOMS, THE expedition followed the trade routes toward ash-Sham, going out of their way to avoid each khan. At night, the servants lit fires, prepared pots of lentils, and warmed round pillars of bread. Al-Idrisi pored over his notes and glanced up at the stars. The green sunset peeled back, revealing the black rind of the sky.
The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel Page 7
