The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  Al-Idrisi listened and noted these things, sketching a map of the Ghouta and the city. But as they neared its walls, the expedition fell silent. Even from far off, they could see the winged beast clinging to the roof of the citadel.

  They entered the city before dawn, while the roc slept, and made their way toward the citadel. Ash-Sham was deserted, its people driven off by the roc.

  They tied up their camels and began their preparations. The night before, Rawiya had detailed their plan. “I will hide on a rooftop nearby,” she had said. “When Khaldun mounts the roc, I will have a full view so I can aim.”

  “You would have me climb atop the beast’s back?” Khaldun had said. “Why would I do something so foolish—and how?”

  Rawiya had said, “By distracting him with your song.”

  Al-Idrisi had smiled his catlike smile. “You have outdone yourself, Rami,” he had said. “For it is well known that the roc has but one weakness: the hypnotic notes of song. He cannot resist a lovely voice and immediately falls to sleep.” Al-Idrisi had sat back, grinning. “He especially likes tenors.”

  “Well, Rami.” Khaldun had stood and lifted his face. “If a beautiful voice you require, my boy, then as beautiful a voice as you could wish for you shall get. For I am the foremost poet of the court of Nur ad-Din, and I—”

  “And al-Idrisi and I?” Bakr asked. “What shall we do?”

  “You will wake the roc,” Rawiya said.

  Bakr grew pale, and so did Khaldun. “The beast will throw Khaldun from his back and send him hurtling to his death.”

  “Khaldun will lash himself to the roc’s back,” Rawiya said. “Then he can try to stab at the beast. As the roc descends, I will aim my stone.” She wrung her hands. “We will see if it will work.”

  Now in place, Rawiya crouched on the rooftop with her sling in her hands. The minarets of the Umayyad Mosque gleamed red and violet. Khaldun’s black-cloaked figure emerged onto the turret of the citadel. The roc was awake now, clinging to the northern gate. He crushed the keystones at the tops of windows, twisting iron in his talons. The wind carried Khaldun’s song as he climbed the turret.

  The roc began to drift to sleep, shuddering his wings. Khaldun climbed, his voice never faltering. Al-Idrisi and Bakr huddled in the shadows of the Bab al-Hadid, the Iron Gate, on which the roc sat. Al-Idrisi grasped a horn and Bakr a drum—the only instruments Khaldun had taken with him into the steppe that would be loud enough to wake the roc.

  Khaldun took hold of the roc’s white feathers and braced his boot on the roc’s back. He trilled out a sweet note, but he trembled.

  A part of Rawiya feared for him, the part that had been happy she let him share her camel. It had made sense: she was the lightest member of the expedition, and Khaldun’s weight would trouble her camel the least. But there had been something in his eyes when he had bowed to her, something small and gentle, like the sea drawing out its breath. It stirred something in her. Rawiya told herself it was only a longing for home, for familiar songs and faces, and quelled her fear by touching her mother’s wooden misbaha in her pocket.

  The roc shifted in his sleep, swinging his bulk off the gate and draping himself over the walls of the central courtyard. Khaldun panicked and hauled his weight onto the beast’s flank. After a moment’s hush, the roc settled. Music pattered to the ground, sweet as rose water.

  Khaldun pulled himself atop the roc’s broad back, mounted himself between the roc’s shoulder blades, and sang into his ear. The new sensation set the roc’s shoulder muscles rippling. The creature gave a contented sigh and lolled his head over the turret.

  Khaldun lashed himself to the creature’s shoulders and the base of his wings with al-Idrisi’s ropes. Then he signaled to his friends and fell silent.

  Seeing this signal, al-Idrisi took up his horn, blaring and shrieking. Bakr pounded awkward time on his drum, his elbows flying. Doves fled from rooftops. Jackals napping in the Ghouta howled and cackled.

  The roc twitched. Then he squawked and beat his wings, and his dark eyes flared to life. Khaldun flattened himself against the bird’s back and let out a terrified howl. The beast rose, dropping pale feathers on the gate. His shadow roiled across the city, throwing the Souq al-Hamidiyah and the minarets of the Umayyad Mosque into darkness. The roc lifted up into the sky, screeching, searching for the source of the noise.

  Khaldun drove his dagger into the roc’s back, cutting at his feathers, but could not draw blood. As Rawiya had feared, the roc’s only weak spot was his eye.

  The roc reached back, snapping his beak. He swooped low over the city, his long tail feathers brushing the dome of the Umayyad Mosque.

  Rawiya raised her sling and set a stone in the strap.

  The roc thrashed. Khaldun cried out. Feathers skimmed the earth like early snow. Rawiya took aim, squinting against the bright band of the sun.

  The roc saw her.

  The beast’s eyes, yellow as quail yolks, hurtled toward her. It was as though he knew what she had planned, as though he was telling her she could not hide. Rawiya took a deep breath, listening to the crackle and groan of the leather as she stretched the sling.

  The beast drew in his wings to dive.

  Rawiya let the stone fly.

  She had aimed for the roc’s right eye. But once again the beast threw up wind with his wings, throwing off her aim. She fought to keep her hand close to true, and the stone hit the roc just above the eye, shattering the bone.

  The creature let out a screech that broke every window in the citadel and plummeted to earth. The roc landed in the central courtyard like an earthquake, knocking everyone and everything flat, even the date palms. The beast’s great, sharp beak dug into the earthen floor and stuck, his body heavy and still as though dead. Rawiya stopped breathing.

  Khaldun.

  Rawiya flew down the steps and through the Iron Gate. The roc had landed in the middle of the citadel on the bones of his victims, his face a mess of blood and feathers. The courtyard had become a butcher’s floor.

  Khaldun, limp and unconscious, slid off the creature’s back to the ground. Rawiya rushed to him. The roc had fallen from a great height, and even though the beast had broken Khaldun’s fall, he had been stunned senseless and did not move.

  His eyes had rolled back in his head, and no breath passed between his lips. Rawiya, her hands trembling, brushed dirt off Khaldun’s handsome face and stray tufts of white feathers from his beard. To her own surprise, she began to weep. “Dear poet,” she whispered, “I’ve killed you.”

  But at her words, Khaldun coughed and, delirious, rasped out a line of poetry: “Wherever there are brave men,” he said, “there also is my heart.” Then he lost his senses.

  “Fascinating.” Al-Idrisi entered the courtyard with Bakr and rounded the bird, touching feathers as long as his arm, scratching out notes in his book.

  One yellowed eye had broken free of the roc’s brow bone where Rawiya had smashed it. Now the eyeball rolled out and wobbled toward her, dull and wide as a large pomegranate. She picked it up. The pupil shrank to a purple-black speck. The fleshy globe began to harden until the eye turned to crystal, perfectly round and smooth. The stone glittered ripe plum, beet purple, fig violet. At the first rays of sunlight, it flashed emerald in her hand.

  The roc twitched.

  “Back, everyone!” Al-Idrisi and Rawiya carried Khaldun from the courtyard as the wounded roc lifted his head and gnashed at the air. Blood matted the feathers of his one-eyed face. The roc stumbled up, clawed at the stone with his talons, and spread his wings. The beast rose up over the citadel.

  “One day,” the one-eyed roc cried in a voice like mountains crumbling, “I will have my revenge.” Then he vanished west over the mountains toward the distant Maghreb, toward the lands where the mythic valley of the serpents was rumored to lie.

  The emir Nur ad-Din rewarded Khaldun and his friends richly for driving the roc out of ash-Sham. He released Khaldun’s mother and sister and gave the expedition
silver chalices, purses of gold dinars, gem-crusted statuettes, and embroidered robes of finest silk. He promised them great honor to remain at his court.

  But Khaldun begged his forgiveness. “I owe my life to these heroes,” he said. “I will follow them wherever they go.” And at this pledge, Rawiya was filled with secret joy.

  Nur ad-Din agreed to release Khaldun from his service and gifted the expedition an engraved scimitar from his armory. The hilt was solid gold carved in the shape of an eagle, its wings flared, its eye a hundred-faceted ruby.

  The next day, the servants loaded the camels with gold and gems. Rawiya checked her sling, frowning when she realized her pouch of sharp stones was empty. Instead, the pouch held a purple-and-green stone split by a dark speck of pupil—the roc’s eye.

  As the crowd surrounding Nur ad-Din’s palace looked on, Khaldun took Rawiya’s hand and held it up before the cheering crowd. “This is the hand of Rami,” he cried, “who loosed the stone and drove out the beast. As long as I live, I will follow him.”

  HUDA RESTS IN the hospital five days. Mama, Zahra, and I take turns sharing a cot. Abu Sayeed sleeps propped up in the corner, his chin on his chest. Mama fills out paperwork. When she puts in our address in Homs, I think about where the envelopes of bills will go, now that the house is gone. Can the name of a street on a piece of paper prove that our family was there?

  Outside, the summer picks the Barada clean as a bone. When Abu Sayeed takes me for a walk, the river bottom pokes up like the fin of a whale.

  Zahra doesn’t want to leave the air conditioning, so Abu Sayeed takes me south of the river to the Souq al-Hamidiyah and the Umayyad Mosque and the old citadel. We walk the Old City of Damascus, tracing the ring of the ancient wall. Most of the gray stones are so ground down they almost disappear into the mortar.

  “This wall is falling apart,” Abu Sayeed says, crumbling stone between his fingers. I touch it and wonder if there’s a level where the old city wall is still strong, where things are still intact.

  The day before Huda is discharged, Mama comes with us. She walks with slow steps, wearing a twisted pair of pumps she found in the ruins of the house. Baba was right. She’s got no rips in her pantyhose.

  Mama shoulders her burlap bag in the heat. Abu Sayeed follows behind us. We walk south, past the river, past the souq. We come out at a long shop-lined street paved with cobblestones, almost too narrow for two lanes of cars. White plaster houses with stone archways sit on either side, their flat roofs decorated with satellite dishes and TV antennas.

  “This street is called Straight,” Mama says. “Ash-Shari al-Mustaqim. In the time of the Romans, it was near impossible to make a street straight.”

  I lean out to look one way, then the other. The street runs east to west across the city. We follow the sidewalk, dodging people hurrying by. I want so badly to stop somebody, anybody, and tell them my house burned up, that it fell down, that it exploded. How can life go on like it always did?

  “It’s the only street mentioned by name in the Bible,” Mama says. A beat-up pickup passes us, mumbling over lumps in the cobblestones. “You know the passage, don’t you?”

  But I don’t want to talk about it, so I lie. “I don’t remember.”

  Abu Sayeed says nothing, fingering a stone in his pocket.

  “This is the street where Saint Paul stayed, where he fled after Allah blinded him with a flash of light on the road to Damascus,” Mama says. “The street where the Lord sent Ananias to give Paul back his sight.”

  “Why did God blind him?” I asked.

  Abu Sayeed says, “Maybe so he could give Paul his eyes.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I say.

  Mama rubs my shoulder and nudges me along, her burlap bag swinging at her side. “You’ll understand one day,” she said. “When you’re older.”

  I frown. All the way back to the hospital, I remember what Huda would have said: Not when I’m older. Just when it’s time.

  HUDA IS AWAKE the next morning, but the pain medicine makes her not herself. When she gets discharged, her shoulder is wrapped in bandages, her bad arm in a sling. The doctor tells Huda what to do, how to keep the wound clean, how much medicine to take. No one needs to translate, because after the doctor is gone, Mama clucks and fusses and tells her again in English.

  We get in the green car again and drive, passing street vendors selling scarves and oranges, high-rise hotels, and half a dozen churches. Abu Sayeed pulls out onto the M5 highway. Mama says we have to go to Jordan, where there’s an American embassy and people who can help us get home again. I hope that means we’re going back to Manhattan.

  Beyond the Ghouta, flat squares of green turn to orange soil and scrub grass. An old white Mercedes passes us. The green car shimmies, one of the tires lower than the others. I realize this is the closest I’ve ever come to having a car. We only ever took cabs when we got those big burlap bags of rice from Chinatown.

  We’re between blue road signs when the car starts to buck, metal rumbling and scraping over road. We pull over. The tires churn dirt. When we get out, I put my finger in the ground, spiraling through chunks of sand, pebbles, and the dry roots of wild thyme. The soil is orange as muhammara, the dip Mama makes with red peppers and ground-up walnuts. I wonder what Abu Sayeed’s son would say the ground is made of: Calcium? Gypsum? Iron?

  Abu Sayeed curses and kicks the tires. Wings of steam lift up from under the hood. A quarter mile ahead, there’s another blue sign. Jordan, it says, an arrow pointing up. I look up at the Q-tips of the clouds.

  A blue van pulls up behind us, raking the gravel. A little girl tumbles out and then a tall lady, taller than Mama. The girl runs dirt through her fingers, puts it in her mouth. The lady walks over, her long skirt swaying, and says something in Arabic. I listen. Broken—your car—we saw your children.

  Mama’s hands and the lady’s move fast. Mama always talks with her hands. The tall lady’s voice is thick as water, ruby purple as pomegranate seeds. Sweat darkens the gauzy linen of her hijab where it meets her forehead and her temples, and it glistens in the spaces between her fingers when she talks.

  I walk over to the girl in the dirt. She must be really little, maybe three, because nobody who’s been to school puts things in their mouth unless they want to get sick. She smells like she hasn’t had a bath in a while. I crinkle my nose at the stinging smell of dirty diaper, the chicken-soup smell of armpits. But I feel bad, because I haven’t had a bath in five days either.

  “What’s your name?”

  The little girl doesn’t say anything. She wears a pair of fuzzy earmuffs, like something you’d wear in the snow, but it’s too hot for that now. Scraggly hair hangs down one side of her head. Her round face is all puffed cheeks and grinning mouth, showing a half-dozen gaps of lost teeth.

  Does she know I’m there? I crouch down and pick up a pebble, waiting for her to notice. The girl puts her palms in the dirt again, making paste with her spit. A car blows by us toward the Jordanian border, spinning dust into our eyes.

  “Can you hear?” I say. “What’s your name?” I try in Arabic: “Shu ismik?”

  The little girl spins her head toward me and grins, but she doesn’t say anything. The hair on the other side of her head has been shaved off, leaving a velvety layer over her skull. But when I look closer, it’s actually an uneven ring around her ear. The hair hasn’t been shaved. It’s been singed off.

  “Can you hear with those on?” I reach for her earmuffs and lift one side. She flings her arms at me, batting me away. The earmuffs fall off. She grabs her other ear, the one facing away from me. There’s only pulpy meat where her ear should be, a red mess wrapped in bandages. Her ear has been torn right off, the delicate bone and earlobe ripped from the side of her skull. Tiny nubs of flesh and cartilage poke through the rubbery mass, like strawberry Jell-O capped by a layer of pus. The ring of singed hair extends in a scar down her neck, jagged and pink.

  The little girl scrambles for her earmuffs
and runs for the tall lady’s skirt. I try to think what could have done something like that to the girl, what could have blown a person’s ear clear off their head. But then I remember the dining table snapped like stale bread, and I don’t want to know.

  I turn at a few words in Arabic from behind me. An old man gets out of the van, leaning his weight on the door handle. Abu Sayeed has helped him out of his seat. The old man wears a checked yellow shirt with sleeves to his elbows and tan trousers that are too short for him. When he unfolds himself from the car, his pants sag from his belt, covering up the white linen socks inside his brown loafers.

  “He says the girl’s name is Rahila,” Abu Sayeed says.

  “Who says?” I get up and stretch my knees.

  Abu Sayeed points to the old man with the crown of his head and then frowns at the dust on my pants and my slippers.

  “Are you Rahila’s jiddo?” I ask, using the Arabic word for grandfather. The old man looks wrinkled, ancient. His dark hair has a blue-black sheen, the kind you get from dyeing it with henna and indigo. It’s combed neatly back, an inch of gray sprouting on either side of the part.

  “He doesn’t speak any English,” Abu Sayeed says. “And I don’t think so.”

  The man says something in fast Arabic, like a deep river. Abu Sayeed translates: “I only had enough bus fare to get to Al-Kiswah. That’s where Umm Yusuf found me. She wouldn’t let an old man crumble on the side of the road.”

  When I frown at Umm Yusuf, Abu Sayeed leans down. “Rahila’s mother also has a son named Yusuf,” he says, and I remember how Abu Sayeed got his name, the son he lost.

  I sit down in the dirt. “But where are you going?”

  Abu Sayeed translates my question. Then the tall lady says something in a storm of Arabic, and Abu Sayeed moves to the back of the van. She gives him something. Abu Sayeed comes back holding a metal leg between two bars of steel, something like a wrench. He calls it a jack. He loosens up the hubcap bolts while the old man answers my question.

  “What did he say?” I have to yell over the cars swishing by.