The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  One time, when I was little, I helped Zahra dye Huda’s hair. She was asleep, and we snuck up on her. Henna paste is green like ground-up olives, even though it turns your hair red. I helped Zahra paint the henna onto a handful of Huda’s hair. It was funny until Huda turned over and the henna got on the couch. Mama grounded Zahra for a week when it stained.

  “I didn’t mean to stain it,” I say.

  Mama frowns down at me. “Stain what?”

  “The couch. Remember?”

  “What makes you think of that?”

  We cross the plaza, avoiding the car lanes. I scratch at my shorts plastered to my legs. “I didn’t know we would only have it for five years.” My torn fingernails catch on my shorts. “I ruined it.”

  “If anything,” Mama says, “it was Zahra who ruined it.”

  “But if I’d known, I wouldn’t have helped.” I didn’t know how quickly things could change. One minute Huda was laughing, and the next the metal was lodged in her bone. Her skin bled heat through her sleeves the whole ride to Cairo. She never burned up like that before, not even with the flu.

  “It wasn’t such a terrible stain.” Mama turns and follows the crowded sidewalk along the road, fidgeting with a milk-white button on her blouse where the stitching is starting to unravel. “The cushions were already old. They don’t last that long, not with three little ones.”

  “But I didn’t know what a nice couch it was.” I wipe my nose on my arm, leaving a long wet streak. “I thought we would have it forever.”

  Women in long dresses and men in short-sleeved button-downs and sandals dart in and out of traffic. Cairo is thick with trucks and bicycles again after the Eid holiday weekend. I watch the drawn-out needle of my shadow as people hurry past. My shadow isn’t even as wide as a rack of lamb in the supermarket.

  Mama puts her arm around my shoulders as we walk. “Somewhere,” she says quietly, “your baba is very proud of you.”

  “For what?”

  “For being brave.”

  I cross my arms. “If Baba was here,” I say, “I wouldn’t have to be brave.”

  “We all have to be brave.” Mama squeezes the horn of bone at the end of my shoulder. “This necklace—did I ever tell you?” She lifts the loop over her head and holds the broken piece of ceramic in her hand, the cord snaking between her fingers. Her shadow on the pavement does the same. “When your baba and I were first married, we lived in Ceuta. Did you know that?”

  “You mean Rawiya’s Ceuta?”

  “Just so,” Mama says, “although we lived a fair distance from the Moroccan border. We had a small riad near La Puntilla, by the harbor.”

  We go quiet. Palms and shop-filled alleys line the street. One is crowded with dozens of round hand-wrought lamps, another with scarves the colors of ripe pomegranates and figs, folded like sheets of rubies. Leather bags sit stacked in towers. Concrete apartment buildings cluster toward the cucumber smell of fresh water. One of them is still decorated with the shredded poster of a politician in a pinstripe suit and black tie.

  “We had a big garden and a tiled fountain,” Mama says. “They said the house used to belong to a nobleman, that it was hundreds of years old. They were just stories, you know, but we chose to believe them. We watched the sea and said one day we would go to America, when the time was right.”

  “When was it right?”

  “Never.” Mama laughs and bounces the piece of ceramic in her palm. When was the last time I heard her laugh? “A storm came through the strait one night like a cloud of bats. The winds ripped out the garden and cracked the roof. When the storm fell away, we walked outside and found this.”

  Mama hands me the necklace. The ceramic is warm and curved a little, a rounded tile painted with blue and white vines. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another round tile like it.

  “What is it?”

  “All that was left of the fountain tiles. Go on.” She nudges me, so I lift the cord over my head and put it on. The warm ceramic taps my belly, swinging with my steps.

  “Did you fix the fountain?”

  “No.” Mama brushes her hair off her shoulders. “We took it as a sign and bought our plane tickets the next day.”

  “For the city?”

  “For Syria first,” she says. “It would be a better place, I thought, to have the girls. But it wasn’t the same for your father with his brother away, and with Abu Sayeed studying abroad, besides. And even after a decade, that thirst never left him—for distant places, I suppose, the blank parts of his map. So we took Zahra and Huda when they were still small and left Syria for New York.”

  I picture Mama and Baba holding hands in the airport, watching the eel-bodied planes slip down the runway. I picture the blue pantsuit she used to wear for meetings with people who bought her maps, that crisp white blouse, that boxy pocketbook in black leather.

  “I don’t get how you can draw a map without the blank parts,” I say.

  We pass movie posters and vines of graffiti in red and black. On the corner, a riot policeman stands with his hips squared to the street.

  “Some people are born knowing they have to fill those places in,” Mama says. “They are born with a wound, and they know from the beginning that if they don’t find the story that belongs to them, that wound will never heal.” Mama pauses and twists her amber ring. She says, “Others take a long time to figure that out.”

  Old buildings turn their faces toward the sun, their carved wooden window frames and high doors dulled by hundreds of years of heat and wind.

  “What about the house in Ceuta?” I ask.

  “We sold it to your uncle Ma’mun.” Mama laughs again, and I can’t believe my luck, the laughing, this necklace. “Gave it, more like. We charged him a quarter of the price.”

  “So he fixed it?”

  Mama frowns and raises her eyebrows, which I guess is a no. “I haven’t been back in years,” she says. “During our last visit—before you were born—he was still fixing the fountain. It’s hard to make something twice, you know, and in just the same way.”

  “Maybe you can’t,” I say.

  “Maybe not.” Mama tilts her head toward the orange sun. “Not exactly.”

  We turn left and walk until we come to the 26th of July Corridor. The street is a clogged artery of cars and bicycles, men walking by with bread and packages on their heads. We pass a shop I would have called a bodega in Manhattan, stacked high with boxes of packaged foods and rows of soda lined up like toy soldiers.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I thought you would want to see the Nile,” Mama says.

  I finger the broken piece of tile. “No. I mean bigger than that. Why are we going all this way? You said somebody is waiting for us, but I don’t know where they are.”

  “Somewhere they can help,” Mama says.

  But I’m impatient. I want to know what Mama meant when she said if the wrong person finds out who is waiting to Abu Sayeed. “Who is they? Who is waiting for us?”

  Mama looks off down the street where the palms are waving. “Please understand, habibti, there are some things it is safer for you not to know. And I don’t want to get our hopes up.”

  “Don’t you mean my hopes?”

  “Yours too.”

  The water unfolds before us across the street, but I don’t register it until we stop walking. We wait to cross the sidewalk opposite the divided highway and watch the Nile turn the color of apricots while the sun gets lower.

  “I will tell you this,” Mama says. “If we get separated, use the map. You will see what’s important, where the road is. We’ll end up in the same place.”

  It sounds like one of Baba’s riddles, and the world is too alien and senseless now for riddles. “The map is stupid,” I say, folding my arms over the necklace cord. “It hasn’t even got any names. I saw.”

  We cross the street. “It’s dangerous to tell the world where you’re going all the time,” Mama says. “And anyway, you didn’t look hard en
ough.”

  “Mmph.”

  And then there’s nothing between us and the Nile: muddy, gray green, and wide as the East River. The water is the color of a crocodile’s back, rolling and pitching in broad burls and carved ridges. The other side of the river is a blur of yellow concrete buildings, red billboards, and lights coming on in skyscrapers. It almost feels like New York. Almost.

  “How many miles do we have to go tonight?”

  “In al-Idrisi’s time, they used the word league more often than mile,” Mama says. “Farsakh.”

  “But it’s not al-Idrisi’s time,” I say, “and I’m not Rawiya. Rawiya never had to ride on a hot bus.”

  Mama chuckles. “You’re more Rawiya than anyone, I think.”

  The ground hums and vibrates under me when a truck goes by. I squat and run my finger over my own laces, the tongue where Mama ripped open the seams and put money in, thick packs of bills, and sewed it up again. I didn’t understand when we were in Amman. Now, far away, the bills make my sneakers heavier. They press me into the pavement. If my shoes are connected to the concrete and the concrete is spread over the earth like batter in a pan, I can send my story through my bones, through my soles, through the streets, into the earth and the river. Can Baba hear my story, our story, through the Nile mud?

  “Come on,” Mama says. “Let’s go.”

  We start back toward the station. I take Mama’s hand. “Baba must have really liked the fountain in Ceuta,” I say. “He always liked the one in Central Park. It was like it made him a different person.”

  Sometimes I used to catch Baba staring into the water, like he was waiting for something to come out and smack into him. I remember the weight in my pocket, the green-and-purple half-stone wrapped in Abu Sayeed’s handkerchief. Can I ask him myself?

  “Your father was lost when we met,” Mama says. “He was looking for himself. But there aren’t any maps for that.” She smiles and runs a finger over the bridge of my nose. I pull away. “You look so much like him. When I look at you, all I see is him.”

  “But I’m not him.”

  “No,” Mama says. She pauses and looks away. “I’m sorry.”

  When I was little, I used to tell myself that if somebody came and took Baba and pretended to be him, I would know the difference because of the color his voice made, that brown streak. I would know it by the color of his smell, the dark-green and gray circles I saw when I breathed into his wrists. But now I think, if the colors were only in me, did I know him at all?

  “If Baba didn’t have a map of himself,” I say, “did I ever see the real him?”

  “You know what?” Mama reaches over to touch the necklace. “The most important places on a map are the places we haven’t been yet.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He found the map he was looking for,” she says. “It was you.”

  We trudge toward the bus station’s glass face. I ask, “Do you think there’s a place in the world where nobody has ever put their feet?”

  “I think there are more of them than the other way around,” Mama says.

  THE ROCKING OF the bus to Libya puts me to sleep again. I drift off on Huda’s shoulder to the sound of Yusuf and Sitt Shadid talking in quiet Arabic.

  I drift in and out, not remembering what city or country I’m in. I ask myself if we’ve crossed the border yet, never sure what border I mean.

  I don’t have dreams anymore, not real ones, not since the bomb fell on our house. The dreams I’ve got, I don’t want to call them dreams. In the dark hours between sleeping and waking, I am screaming and screaming, but nobody hears me, not even myself.

  The red zigzags of the bus brakes screech me awake. Is it the same day? It’s dark, but not after-dinner dark. More like before-work dark, the kind of dark when the street sweepers are the emperors of the block.

  I rub my eyes. Fresh air drifts in through the cracked windows, sharp and yellow with salt.

  Mama nudges me. “We’re in Benghazi.”

  I don’t hear her at first. “Where are we?”

  “Libya,” Zahra says into her lap, waiting for people to pass. She doesn’t look at me. “On the eastern shore of the Gulf of Sidra.”

  But Mama whispers a name from the story in my heart, saying, “Barneek.”

  PART III

  * * *

  LIBYA

  Sea of Swords and Teeth

  The next morning, the Almohads woke Rawiya and her friends before dawn. The expedition was outfitted with leather armor, chain mail, and pointed silver helmets. Over their armor, they were forced to wear the red tunics of Almohad warriors. Mennad ordered Rawiya to carry a lance with the red, black, and white Almohad flag at the blunted end. Mennad and his men did not intend to kill her and her friends but to absorb them into their ranks. In the battle to come, the deadly Fatimid army would take care of the rest.

  The Almohads did not plunder the expedition’s packs for treasure. Mennad was a seasoned and cunning leader, and he had told his men they would be given a share when the battle was over. Even so, the Almohad warriors taunted the expedition’s servants, boasting of their luck. And although the remaining half of the roc’s eye stone had stayed hidden, Rawiya feared what would happen if Mennad discovered its power to speak with the dead. Where Ibn Hakim had been foolhardy and suspicious of the stone’s magic, Mennad would be shrewd enough to see its value, and Rawiya feared the roc’s eye stone would allow Mennad to become the most powerful ruler in the Maghreb. So she stuffed the plum-sized half-stone into the folds of her tunic.

  The red shield of the sun rose in the east. Mennad stood apart from his men, studying al-Idrisi’s notes.

  “He keeps the book always at his side,” al-Idrisi said. “We cannot steal it.”

  “We should not have to steal what is rightfully ours,” Khaldun said. But he lowered his face, for they all knew that al-Idrisi’s book held the knowledge of all the places they had traveled. Without it, they would never complete King Roger’s map or their quest.

  But Rawiya, who had studied the landscape as the Almohads had led them toward the Gulf of Sidra and Barneek, had other fears. Her father had told her tales of this land and its beasts, and she had not forgotten them.

  “There are other dangers we should be wary of,” she said to her friends. “Remember the stories of the roc’s ancestral hunting grounds, how he returned from ash-Sham to feed in a valley of great snakes?”

  Khaldun set his hand on the hilt of his scimitar. “You can’t mean here?”

  But al-Idrisi had noticed the gashes clawed into Cairo’s gates and the downy white feathers on the wind, the way these signs had seemed to follow the expedition from ash-Sham. He recalled that Rawiya had been right once before about the tales of the roc, and he held his tongue.

  As they stood brooding on these things, an Almohad guard ran up to Mennad, fear thick in his voice.

  “Sir,” the guard said, “our scouts killed a beast not far from here, an enormous serpent.”

  Khaldun met Rawiya’s eye. “The enemy of my enemy,” he said. And Rawiya nodded, a plan taking shape in her mind.

  The Almohads mounted the expedition on horseback and set them among the warrior ranks. Bowmen took their places behind warriors armed with scimitars, spears, and daggers.

  The Almohad army marched from the inland desert toward the coast, the expedition captive among them. The steppe became thick with juniper under the shadow of Jebel Akhdar, the wooded mountain to the east of Barneek. The Almohads cheered and sang of pushing the Fatimids back, of sweeping in a thick blade from the steppe to the sea.

  The Fatimid army, cloaked in green, rose on the horizon.

  Mennad signaled to his men. A great shout went up among their ranks, and they shook their spears and raised their bows. Mennad lifted al-Idrisi’s book like a talisman. And Rawiya, who knew how slim their chances were of escaping from the battle with either their lives or al-Idrisi’s book, clenched her hands at the reins.

  The armies surg
ed forward across the steppe. The Almohad warriors pushed Rawiya, her friends, and the expedition’s servants toward the front line, and their ears rang with war cries.

  The Almohads’ battle-trained horses flew across the steppe, and the warriors’ red tunics caught the wind as they went. The wall of Fatimid soldiers towered over them like a green wave, a sea of arrows and sword edges, the sound of their bellows flattening the earth.

  But as Rawiya and her friends raised their swords and spears, an echo like a sea wind passed between them. From the north, a third army marched on them, dressed in chain mail and steel, holding high the red-and-gold standard of a lion.

  It was King Roger’s flag, the royal colors of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily.

  The Almohads began to whisper and cry out, saying, “The Sicilian armies have come from the coast.” And they cursed their luck.

  But Mennad would not retreat. He turned his horse and lifted al-Idrisi’s book. “We are the Almohad dynasty,” he cried, “and we hold the secrets of the Fatimids’ spies in our hands. We fight.”

  Rawiya saw her opening.

  She plunged forward, spinning her lance in her hand, aiming its blade. Her horse sliced through rows of warriors toward the clearing where Mennad stood.

  Mennad spotted her. He raised his spear and thrust it toward Rawiya’s chest. She dodged, bracing her weight against her horse’s flank.

  Rawiya aimed her lance for Mennad’s tunic. But Mennad, who had earned the scar that split his face from a Fatimid lance, ducked and wrapped his arm around the pole of her weapon. He used his weight to swing the pole of the lance into her side, knocking her off her horse.

  Rawiya landed on her chest, the breath clapped out of her, and raised herself up on her palms.

  Mennad and his men surrounded her. Swordsmen spun their blades, scimitars flashing, twin daggers drawn. Bowmen notched their arrows.