The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  Rawiya gasped and snatched her hand back. The roc’s eye stone, heavy and hot as a coal, upended the pouch and went tumbling to the ground.

  Ibn Hakim’s horse reared at the drop of the stone. Ibn Hakim eyed it and, dismounting, bent to pick it up. As soon as he touched it, the skin from his arm to his jaw grew pale and pricked with goose bumps, and he dropped it with a gasp.

  “What sorcery is this?” Ibn Hakim said. “My mother’s voice is with God. She went to the Garden years ago.”

  “What is this stone?” al-Idrisi whispered.

  Rawiya stammered, her fingers still tingling. “It is nothing but a stone.”

  But Ibn Hakim was shaken, and any injury to his pride only made him angrier. He drew his scimitar. “This blasphemous sorcery must be destroyed,” he said. Raising his blade over his head, he struck the stone.

  A great light flashed, and Rawiya, al-Idrisi, and the whole expedition covered their eyes. When they looked back, the stone had been sliced clean in half. One half had exploded upward and lodged in a stony cliff nearby. The other half had been blasted several yards away, wedged in the sand.

  Ibn Hakim bent to tap the second half of the stone with his fingers. Sensing nothing, he curled his upper lip into a sneer and lifted it. “Its dark magic has been weakened,” he said. “The caliph will examine it himself.”

  Ibn Hakim turned his horse for the Gulf. The riders flanked the expedition as they approached the port city of Aqabat Aila, trotting hard on their sides. Rawiya glanced back, once, at the rocky outcropping where the other half of the roc’s eye stone had landed. It was lodged deep into a crack, partly hidden by a coating of dust and small pebbles, like a shard of emerald sea glass.

  It had been late afternoon when the expedition had come into view of the Gulf, and night came on while they were still far from the city. Their captors set up camp on the wide, flat plain that ran along the shore of the Gulf of Aila. The expedition said their evening prayers and ate a small meal of bread and lentils while Ibn Hakim stood guard. His men were alert, keeping watch around them.

  But a plan had come to Khaldun while he had knelt in prayer, and now he sprang up. “We must celebrate,” he said. “This evening calls for song. Surely you would not mind a verse in praise of the generous Fatimid caliph?”

  Ibn Hakim reached into his tunic, pulled out the half of the roc’s eye stone that he had taken, and set it on the ground before the fire. Tongues of peacock green flickered in its depths. “Sing, then, poet,” he said, smirking.

  Khaldun pulled an oud from his pack. He had been a master oud player at Nur ad-Din’s court, and the instrument’s pear-shaped wooden belly and silk strings were as familiar to him as his own body. Strumming and tuning the oud, Khaldun sat down by the fire. He began to sing a lilting ballad, his voice rolling green as the hills and then surging skyward, like a wadi full of spring flowers.

  Then he paused and motioned to his pack, and Bakr tugged out the drum he had beat awkwardly during their battle with the roc. After a moment, Bakr handed the drum to Rawiya.

  “I have no gift for music,” he said. “If I play, they will have my head.”

  So Rawiya kept up a rhythm to Khaldun’s ballad. At first, Ibn Hakim and his men only glared, their arms crossed over their chests. But as Khaldun’s verses became more impassioned, as he thrummed the strings and trilled his voice, Ibn Hakim and his men began to sway and bounce their knees. Soon they were up and dancing, circling the fire and singing along.

  When the ballad ended, they collapsed around the flames, grinning and exhausted. Khaldun continued to play his oud: first a song of tragic love that made Ibn Hakim and his men weep, then a lullaby that would have made a camel blink with sleep. Al-Idrisi yawned, and Bakr began to nod. Soon Ibn Hakim and his men, worn out from their dancing and their singing, drifted to sleep around the fire.

  Khaldun stopped playing, checking that Ibn Hakim’s eyelashes had fallen to his cheeks. Their guards were fast asleep.

  Khaldun motioned for Rawiya and the expedition to rise and pack the oud and drum. Rawiya snatched up the remaining half of the roc’s eye stone from in front of Ibn Hakim’s toes. Then they mounted their camels and sped off into the night, leaving their tents and their captors behind.

  “What will we do now?” Bakr huffed when they were out of earshot. “We’ve left our tents.”

  “Tonight,” al-Idrisi said, “we sleep under the stars.”

  Bakr lowered his face. “Not again.”

  “And tomorrow,” al-Idrisi continued, “when we come to Aqabat Aila, we will seek out more supplies. Luckily”—he patted the leather pouch that held Nur ad-Din’s gold dinars—“monies are in no short supply.”

  But fear tugged at Rawiya, and she looked back toward the fire where Ibn Hakim’s men sat slumped and dreaming. Would they follow?

  Soon the fire was only a tiny dot at their backs. The expedition broke for the coast, galloping toward the dark ribbon of the Gulf of Aila.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER we arrive, we leave the tiny apartment in east Amman, and it’s like we were never there at all. Umm Yusuf packs the cushions in the van, fills the leather trunk with Sitt Shadid’s things, and tugs the bare bulb off. We leave only clumps of our dust behind. Mama spends the morning ripping open the tongues of my sneakers and stuffing paper money inside, sewing them up with a double stitch, and I watch her without asking why.

  On the way out, Sitt Shadid shakes the water from the soda can and leaves the anchusa flower we picked the day before on the front step. I press my face to the window while we drive off, stretching the imaginary thread between the flower and me until it snaps.

  Umm Yusuf drives the van south. She takes Highway 35 until it splits outside the city, and then we follow Highway 15, the one Umm Yusuf calls the Desert Highway. She says it will take us all the way to Aqaba.

  “From Aqaba,” Mama says from the front seat, “we can get a ferry into Egypt.” She musses the baby hairs on her forehead in the sun visor mirror and then claps it shut. “Ya mama, did you know Aqaba used to be called Aila? And al-Idrisi called the Red Sea the Bahr al-Qulzum.”

  Zahra rolls her eyes. “Mom. Give it a rest, okay, before Nour starts.”

  I scowl and curve back into the seat. “Like I was even going to say anything.”

  Out the window, the desert is nothing like I thought it would be. Red sandstone and pebbles, big top-hatted cliffs. The fingers of fallen rocks reach for the road. Telephone poles and power lines are stuck in the hills like toothpicks. Deserts never looked like this in American schoolbooks, where every desert looked like the emptiest stretches of the Sahara.

  We drive for three hours before Zahra starts whining about how she has to pee. Since we haven’t passed a town in a while and we’re the only car around, we stop in a long stretch of rocky hills, and Mama tells us to pee behind a rock if we have to go. Mama stays by the van, unrolling her map on the backseat. She must have saved some old tubes of paint from the house, because she takes them out of her burlap bag and brushes new colors onto the map, yellow and turquoise and salmon pink.

  Umm Yusuf and Abu Sayeed help Sitt Shadid get out and stretch her legs. Huda and Rahila stay in the van, fanning themselves. Yusuf bends his knees and rolls his shoulders before pulling out his pocketknife. I hurry in the opposite direction. He makes me nervous.

  A quarter mile down the road, the cliffs break open. The land is changing. I can see straight through to the sky here, like looking down a city block in Manhattan. On the horizon, the desert’s edges blend red-orange into robin’s egg, robin’s egg into steel blue, and steel blue into sky without ever stopping.

  At least we can see the sky today. Yesterday we couldn’t leave Amman because the wind whipped up a bad storm, and everybody nearly snapped, being stuck inside all day while half of us were fasting. There was so much sand in the air, you couldn’t even see the clouds. Winds like that must mold the mountains, cut the cliffs, dig up hundreds of years of dust.

  I run to the bottom of a tall c
liff and squat by the side of the road, away from the van. The breeze tickles my backside, making me look around. But there’s nobody here—just me and the red cliffs. It gives me a triumphant little thrill, getting to pee outside for the first time, like I’ve shrugged off the weight of rules and sadness.

  I pull up my shorts and walk up the road a ways so I can look down into the valley ahead. Way out, the Gulf of Aqaba glistens like frog skin, the pinky finger of the Red Sea. When I was little, Mama made me practice my geography by drawing maps. I used to anchor the Middle East around the Red Sea. I wonder if it will really be red or just regular blue, whether real life will match up to the map I’ve got in my head. But then, Baba used to say a map is only one way of looking at things.

  My thoughts snag on Baba like a stray nail in a picnic table. Something about this cliff and this view looks familiar, as though somebody had told me a long time ago to look out for a place like this—to keep an eye out for a rocky cliff to the left and a view of Aqaba in the distance. Baba always painted his landscapes with words, letting Mama take the paintbrush. Now, matching up the world to the picture in my head, it slips into place. Didn’t I imagine this view a hundred times?

  The winds have peeled thick layers of dust off the cliff. Something greenish is stuck high up, glinting like sea glass.

  I scramble up the rock, scraping my knees and my elbows. Stones slip and roll between my legs. There it is, a walnut-sized shard of something. It’s a smooth pistachio green, like a bead of knobby glass. I reach for it, stretching my arm.

  I can’t reach. I burrow my fingernails into the pebbles and sand, scattering the dirt until the green stone starts to wobble. I tear at the ground, ripping up handfuls of scrub grass until it comes free.

  The stone tumbles down, bouncing along the hillside, showering the pavement with dust.

  I race back down and pick it up. It’s bigger than I thought, the size and shape of a plum, and weirdly warm. My fingers send a purple shadow right through the middle of it, but in the sun, it’s traffic-light green.

  A little thrill goes through me.

  I remember Rawiya dropping the stone, Ibn Hakim drawing his scimitar. I inspect the smooth slice on one side, and the skin on my arms draws up into goose bumps. Could time and wind have cut so clean?

  There was a time, when I was small and first played the magic spinning game that Baba taught me, that nothing I laid eyes on was less than extraordinary. Now I turn the stone into and out of the sun, and it turns purple—green—purple. I hold my breath and ask myself, is there still space in the world for extraordinary things?

  “Nour!”

  “Coming.” I stuff the stone in my pocket. It sags in my shorts, tugging the waistband down on one side.

  Mama stands by the van, her hands on her hips. “You wandered off again, habibti.”

  “No.”

  She sighs and motions toward the middle row of seats. “Yalla. In. Now.”

  In the van, I shift around so nobody notices the stone in my pocket. Abu Sayeed turns around in the driver’s seat and smiles at me, but I don’t say anything. I’ll show him the stone when we get to the water. Abu Sayeed will know for sure what it is. He’ll know, like I do, that it’s special.

  We pass a blue sign with a choice: Aqaba / Ma’an / Wadi Musa. We turn toward Aqaba. Mama hugs her bag tight between her knees, bracing it against the bumps. Zahra and Yusuf roll their windows up, and sweat tingles at my temples and in the small of my back.

  I lean forward to Mama. “Put the air on,” I say. “Please. It’s hot back here.”

  But Mama isn’t listening. Her head is turned out the front passenger window, her chin in one hand, her fingertips resting on her lips. With her other hand, she rubs the corner of the map canvas, stroking it without thinking.

  “Mama.”

  Still nothing. Sweaty and ignored, my eyes bore holes in that corner of canvas. How many months has it been now that Mama has paid more attention to her maps than to me, always preferring to paint instead of talk? It felt like as soon as Baba went into the earth, Mama went back to her facts and her borders, and everybody else went with her. But maybe I’m not ready to let go.

  Something mean swishes through me. I hope Mama’s acrylic paint smeared before it had a chance to dry. But then I remember that acrylic paint dries fast.

  I put my face to the cracked window and swallow dust. I raise my voice almost to a shout. “Why are you so obsessed with maps?”

  Mama doesn’t realize right away that I’m talking to her. “Obsessed?” She leans back from the front seat. “What obsessed?”

  Zahra swats me on the back of the head. “No one wants to hear you.”

  “You’re obsessed,” I say. “Like the maps are your kids, not us.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Mama bats the dust in the air.

  “Is everybody who makes maps crazy like that?”

  Mama softens, even though I don’t expect her to. “Most of them.”

  “And engineers—like Baba?”

  “Some of them are crazy about maps too.”

  I frown. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “When I first met him, I thought he was stuck up,” Mama says. “Too good to say anything. Imagine: he and his brother were the only other Syrians in my class at Córdoba, and he would not say a word.”

  “Who?” Huda asks.

  “Your father.”

  “But that’s where you met.” I lean forward, gripping the back of Abu Sayeed’s seat. “Isn’t it?”

  “Not right away,” Mama says. “I talked to his brother.”

  “His brother?”

  “Uncle Ma’mun.” Mama straightens her sleeves, fidgeting. “A kindhearted man. He used to write every so often, when you were small. We were friends at university. In those days at Córdoba, he dragged his brother to Ceuta for a day’s adventure and me with him. I hated that painful silence. But even painful things,” she says, “are often veined with blessings we can’t yet see.”

  I picture Baba and our yellow house in Homs and think, No, they’re not. “So . . .” I drag out the word, waiting. “So you said . . . ?”

  “When?”

  “To get Baba to talk to you.”

  Mama rubs a grain of sand out of her eye. “I told him to jump into the strait.”

  Even Huda leans forward. “You didn’t!”

  “Ceuta is in Africa, you must remember, although it’s part of Spain. So I told him to swim back to Europe, if he was going to be so miserable.” Mama laughs. “And he said, ‘All these maps of the water and the mountains, and for what?’ ” Mama’s hand snakes up to her neck. She fingers the piece of white-and-blue ceramic on its cord. “He said, ‘People don’t get lost on the outside. They get lost on the inside. Why are there no maps of that?’ ” Then Mama drops her hand. “What day is it?”

  Huda touches Mama’s headrest with her good arm. “The thirtieth. Is it—it’s today!”

  “How could we have forgotten?” Mama’s hands fly to the door handle. “Stop, stop.”

  Abu Sayeed slams on the brakes. “What is it?”

  Huda sets her forehead to the back of Mama’s seat. “Eid al-Fitr,” she says. “We’ve forgotten everything.”

  “We aren’t far from Aqaba,” Abu Sayeed says. “I’ll stop there so we can find a butcher.”

  We descend into the valley. The desert is rockier here, with buttes and the hunched backs of low mountains. The steel pin of the Gulf of Aqaba lies on the horizon, next to the town people used to call Aila. Mama told me a long time ago that al-Idrisi was one of the first people to call it Aqabat Aila, the name that eventually became Aqaba.

  As we come down from the mountains, the road straightens, lined with palm trees. Mama is wild, even though Huda tries to calm her down. She and Baba celebrated Eid al-Fitr marking the end of Ramadan each year, and she says she won’t forget it now. My whole life, Mama and Baba celebrated two religions’ worth of holidays—Christmas, Eid al-Fitr, Easter. It used to make me
wonder whether the most important things we see in God are really in each other.

  The road winds between rosy-cheeked apartments, old mosques with chickpea-yellow walls. The sun is already going down when we find a butcher shop. Mama argues with Umm Yusuf in quiet Arabic about who will go and get the lamb. Zahra leans back on the hood of the van next to Yusuf, shaking her head.

  “I could use a walk,” Huda says. “Nour and I will stretch our legs.”

  “Take this.” Mama takes Huda aside and turns her back to us. She rummages in the burlap bag and pulls out a few coins, pressing them into Huda’s palm. She clasps her fingers over Huda’s. “Make it last, if you can.”

  “Come back quickly.” Abu Sayeed waits on the sidewalk. “If you don’t, I’ll come looking for you.”

  “Okay.” Huda and I walk down the hill toward the butcher shop a few blocks down. The tears in the canvas uppers of Huda’s sneakers pull and gape with every stride. Our shadows stretch out on their bellies, bouncing with our steps.

  “Where are we sleeping?” I ask.

  “Tonight? Mama will find a place.”

  I nod, even though I know Mama only had a few coins left. I twist up my mouth to bite my lip. “Are we refugees?”

  Huda looks away at a pair of green-shuttered windows. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I heard Mama say in Arabic that that’s what we are,” I say. “Lajiat. I asked Umm Yusuf what it meant.”

  “You’re full of surprises, you know that?” Huda lets out her air. “You choose what defines you. Being a refugee doesn’t have to.”

  “But you didn’t answer my question.” I answer it myself: we must be. And I already know what that means: Nails unhammering themselves. The smell of burning. Torn-up shoes. Newspaper sticking up from the kitchen tiles, a name circled in red.

  “I was careful all the time,” I say. “I always recycled my juice boxes. I even scraped the bottom of the peanut butter. But it wasn’t enough.”

  “It was nothing you did.”