The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  With a burst of effort, she flung the rope across the roc’s path, and it caught his talons. He jerked back, stuck, and twisted himself free. He slid low over the sea and rose again.

  “I’m sorry,” Rawiya called to al-Idrisi, clinging to the mast. “I did what I had to. I wanted to see the world. You showed me its wonders—rivers, stars, deserts.” She lifted her chin. “You once said I had courage, heart. That same heart still beats. The body that cradles it is no large matter.”

  Khaldun, crouching across from her with his scimitar drawn, said to al-Idrisi, “We live in strange days, but that changes nothing. Rawiya has proven herself a cunning warrior. She has saved us more than once.”

  Al-Idrisi watched the roc’s shadow grow. “Never did I think,” he said, “that such a dear friend would deceive me this way.”

  Rawiya pulled out her sling again and fitted her half of the roc’s eye stone into its leather strap. It was too big, wider than any stone she had used before. She remembered her training, her father’s hands guiding hers, and the stone grew warm in her hand.

  The roc dove for them again, his wings tight against his body. Thinking the roc meant to pierce the sails and disable the ship, Rawiya searched for the beast’s lone eye, but he kept his head raised.

  Instead, the roc stretched out his talons and grasped the ship’s bow. Using his wings to stay airborne, he rocked the ship forward, sending the crew sprawling along its length. Then he let it snap back, sending crates rolling and men crashing into each other.

  Rawiya fell and dropped her stone, red pain shooting through her chest. The half of the roc’s eye stone rolled away across the deck.

  The roc crowed his triumph and dove. With a crunch, his talons cut into the wooden deck on either side of Rawiya. The roc’s weight pushed the ship deeper into the water, spilling spray over the sides. Rawiya clawed at the talons, but the roc held her fast and began to crush her in his grip.

  “What do you think of me now, daughter of men?” the roc said. “I have shown you my true power and strength. Behold, puny one! Have I not given you a dazzling show of my magnificence and beauty?”

  “Truly, O roc,” Rawiya gasped, “you are both magnificent and beautiful.”

  “Truly I am. And now, stone thrower,” the roc said, “I will give you your death.”

  “But there is something, O great roc, that you don’t know.” Rawiya struggled against his talons. “Your power is not as great as you pretend.”

  “What?” The beast beat his wings, blasting the crew flat. “You are nothing to me. I am all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing.”

  “Rawiya!” Across the deck, al-Idrisi had caught the roc’s eye stone. He held it up, his hands pressed around it as if in prayer. The roc turned his head toward al-Idrisi and snapped his beak.

  Al-Idrisi called out to Rawiya, “I was wrong to judge your secret. Though I never told you, I had a wife and daughter in Ceuta. They drowned in the strait, crossing from Ceuta to al-Andalus. You have all the courage and the strength I would have wished for my daughter. Nothing can change that.” He tossed the roc’s eye stone to Rawiya, and she strained to catch it. Al-Idrisi smiled his catlike smile, but his eyes were afraid. “You and only you, Lady Rawiya,” he said, “can save us.”

  And in one swift motion, as the roc dug his talons deeper into the ship’s wood, Rawiya steadied her breath and set the half-stone in her sling. O Creator of the wonders of the world, she prayed, of this stone and this creature. If the dead can hear, then ask Bakr to give me his eyes. Let his hands and yours steady mine.

  Rawiya struggled for breath against the roc’s iron grip and saw herself reflected in his one remaining eye.

  “You say you are all-knowing, O roc, but you are wrong,” she said. “Only God knows everything.”

  She released the roc’s eye stone from her sling, and it flashed green in the sun. Fired from close range, it burst the roc’s remaining eye and pierced soft flesh. Blood exploded from his brow. With a garbled cry, the blind roc lifted his talons from the deck, his wings twisting. The ship bobbed up from the water, freed of his weight, and his lifeless body rolled off the ship. The beast fell into the sea, his great wings spread, blood streaked across his white-whiskered head.

  The crew scrambled as the ship listed and bobbed, rocking violently from end to end. The bloated white body of the roc crashed into the green, releasing huge waves. The roc slowly sank, creamy feathers wet with seawater, his beak poking above the whitecaps. Then his blind face slipped below the marbled sea.

  As the last pale feathers sank, al-Idrisi cried, “Lady Rawiya has saved us.”

  The crew cheered. Khaldun knelt beside Rawiya lying on the deck, his hair matted to his face by sweat and salt and tears.

  “You.” Rawiya touched his cheek. “You once said we are the stories we tell ourselves, that we can be drowned out by other people’s voices.” She kissed his fingers. “I love you. Whatever happens, that, at least, will not be drowned out.”

  And Khaldun bowed his head to their hands. “Your story, my lady, could never be unsung. I will follow you wherever the road leads.”

  As Khaldun helped Rawiya to her feet, al-Idrisi drew his scimitar. Taking it in both hands, he bowed his head and knelt. He offered the blade to Rawiya, saying, “Forgive me.”

  “There is no need,” Rawiya said, holding her ribs. “We have both given up our secrets, both lost something precious. I have only done my duty for my friends.”

  But soon the whole crew followed. The Norman sailors went silent and knelt on the deck. Soon the ship was an unbroken carpet of bowed heads.

  “We owe you our lives, Lady Rawiya,” al-Idrisi said. “God has made you a brave warrior, a daughter of the mountains and the desert. He has guarded your steps.” Al-Idrisi lifted Nur ad-Din’s jeweled scimitar. “I beg you to accept my blade.”

  “I can’t take from you the blade that saved your life,” Rawiya said.

  “Our expedition succeeded because of you,” al-Idrisi said. “You are the one who saved us.” He bowed his head. “If Bakr were here, he would say the same.”

  So Rawiya lifted the jeweled scimitar, the carved eagle at its hilt crusted with pearls and rubies. The blade reflected the sea and its white-feathered prize.

  As the ship’s crew turned toward Palermo, they erupted again in cheers.

  IT’S BEEN HOURS below the deck of the ferry, the sun arcing by overhead, dipping toward the horizon. I can only tell because the light from the crack above has turned reddish. Every few minutes we hold our breath when someone walks over us on the deck, and my belly knots up with wondering how long it will be until someone comes down the stairs into the cargo hold, how long it will be until someone notices two stowaway girls traveling alone.

  We sit without talking for a long time while I roll up the map and stuff it back into Mama’s plastic bag. I tie it shut, making the same airtight bubble Mama did, and return it to the burlap backpack.

  “I used to think Mama’s maps and facts were easier to understand than Baba’s stories,” Zahra says. She rocks back and forth, her knees to her chest. “He used to tell all these stories, and I used to get angry because he never said what he meant. But even a map doesn’t tell you everything. How are we supposed to find our uncle once we get to Ceuta?”

  “I don’t know.” I let my shoulders sag, and my necklace clinks against the metal floor.

  “And how do we get from Misrata to Ceuta without Mama?”

  The ship and the gulf groan like a seagull crying.

  “Do you think they’ll be okay?” I whisper. “Can they fix Huda’s arm again?”

  Zahra bites her nails, jangling her bracelet. “I don’t know how much they can fix anymore.”

  Footsteps on the stairs ring out in the half dark, and Zahra and I seize up. Someone is coming, jingling keys in his pocket. For a moment, I hear instead the clang of a brass belt buckle.

  We scramble farther back into our little square, but the light hits our faces. Voices tap the cr
ates. Zahra and I squeeze ourselves between boxes, scraping our knees against metal and splintered wood so we don’t bang them. We hold our breath.

  A man walks by, the heels of his shoes drumming on the metal floor of the hold, reading off a list in Arabic.

  There isn’t enough room for both of us to stand up all the way, but not enough to sit down either. I brace myself between two steel containers, putting my weight on my knees, hoping the metal doesn’t dent and boom like a cymbal.

  My calves start to burn.

  The voices stop, feet shuffling. Somebody taps the crates. Zahra breathes out, her air hot on my nose, and fills her lungs again as slow as she can. My thoughts get tangled. I imagine in spite of myself how Huda must have felt before the bad men pulled her into the alley, whether she knew before I did what it was they wanted. Did she sense what would happen before it happened? Did she expect to feel their calloused hands on her thighs? Did she know how heavy they would be when they pinned her to the asphalt?

  I jerk and tingle when something skitters across the tops of my feet. The legs are stiff and sharp with claws—a crab’s legs or a lizard’s. I press my eyes shut, but a high whine dribbles from my chest. I think about what I would do if these men pull Zahra and me from our hiding place: which is better, clawing or biting?

  My breaths come high and shallow. The crab or lizard scampers away behind the crates. I force myself to stay still.

  We used to have a red-tailed hawk that roosted somewhere up by the chimneys at the top of our building in New York. Baba told me how rare it was, that there were only a few breeding pairs in the city, that sometimes birds like to live near humans because they get more food that way. I remember walking down to the subway with Baba while he explained it, staring down the yawning tunnels and wondering if God was on the other side, watching the rats run between the tracks, realizing the city was more animal than human.

  But the dark below the ferry’s deck has more people in it than anything else, and I’ve learned already that people are more dangerous than animals, more dangerous than anything else in the world. I keep my eyes closed while the ferry workers start to move again, muttering, shoving crates back into place with their shoulders and the sides of their shoes.

  One man calls out in Arabic, crouching down just past the crack where Zahra and I are hiding. We have a leak, he calls. When he stands up again, he bangs his head on the corner of a crate and curses.

  Until the man mentions the leak, I don’t notice the steady pattering of water on the crown of my bristly head. Now I feel it, cold, smelling like wood and motor oil. Where the water touches me, my skin feels like an open wound. I think of Huda’s bandages, black smears of blood, the edges of the linen yellow with pus. Didn’t Mama say it could get infected? Can a person live with a new bone like that, a bone made of metal and fire, and still be the same person?

  I shiver against the metal containers. The tiny space feels like a coffin. In the dark space behind my eyes, I see Huda in the hospital bed, death clinging to her like a bad smell.

  The feel of death is strong below the deck of the ferry, and it clings to everything. I thought after the hospital we had left that feeling behind, and I thought the same thing again after Abu Sayeed chased the bad men away from Huda in the alley, after I drew blood.

  Now I realize that feeling only followed us. The bad men grabbed Huda without knowing anything about her, without knowing her like I did, how she was more than brown calves, more than screams, more than the body crumpled under them. I am angry they didn’t know her, that they thought they were entitled to her belly and her legs, that Zahra and I are here in this dark under the deck, that we’ve lost everything except each other.

  And while the ship rolls, I start to think that maybe death is in us all along, that it doesn’t stick to us at all. Maybe it just seems like death clings to us when we notice it inside us for the first time. Maybe, like Mama said, we are all born with a wound that needs fixing.

  My calves vibrate and twitch. I watch the red-and-purple light above us, listening for the brown-and-gray voices. The sun is almost down.

  I reach for my burlap backpack, where the map is stuffed in its plastic bag, but I don’t feel anything. I dig my nails into my palms when I realize the backpack has rolled out from between my feet. It’s sitting out in the open, on the floor of the cargo hold.

  I wait, biting my lip, hoping nobody has noticed the bag. I count the seconds. I can’t see my arms or my legs. I only know I exist by the splinters in my thumbs and the backs of my knees that shake like jelly from holding one position. My heartbeat is the only part of me that feels brave.

  One of the ferry workers lets out a bored whistle, that high songbird whistle I used to hear in Central Park.

  When we still lived in Manhattan, there came a day that the red-tailed hawk stopped coming to our window. I didn’t see it preening anymore, couldn’t watch it looking down on Eighty-Fifth Street with that cold stare, like something else used to be there and the city had grown over it. That hawk glared down at the city like something important was missing.

  I found the hawk a few weeks later in the rooftop garden. The stars were coming out over the buildings, and I almost didn’t notice the feathers. The hawk had buried itself in the moss, digging its beak into the dirt like it was trying to bore through the earth. One last airborne dive.

  I remember thinking maybe it had just lain down to rest. It had one wing over its eyes, like a person napping in a bright room. Its feathers were a perfect marbling of brown and red, the wind ruffling them.

  I picked the hawk up, gently, listening for a heartbeat. It was still a little warm, its wings stiff as paper. But I heard nothing.

  Before I buried it properly, I wanted it to feel the wind one last time. So I took the hawk and walked to the edge of the rooftop, and the breeze tugged my curls over the edge. The hawk’s glassy eye reflected the lights coming on in the other high-rises, the taillights of taxis passing below. Clumps of dirt stuck to its curved beak and its rigid brow bone. Is this why they bury people, to help them kiss the earth?

  At last, the voices fade. Palms smack wood and bang metal as they go, until the workers mount the stairs and shouts pop brown and red on the deck.

  I breathe again.

  As soon as I think the ferry workers are gone, I dive out and grab the backpack. I put it on, making sure the strap is snug.

  There’s a bang. Voices shout loud above us. The floorboards pucker and creak. I flatten my back against the crates, hoping if somebody bursts down the stairs, they’ll think I’m a shadow.

  An eerie silence comes over the ferry, and that’s when I hear it. A high whine fills the air, a thrumming like the night the house fell down. It builds into a screech, and Zahra reaches out of the crack toward me.

  The ferry rolls like an empty barrel. I go flying, my shoulder hitting a crate. I cry out. Deep in the ship, something groans and cracks. My ears ring.

  I scramble and try to crawl back between the crates. “Zahra—”

  The ferry tilts back again, the spray smashing its sides. I brace myself on a box, catching my backpack on its corner. Through the gray speckles of white noise, the ferry shrieks red like an animal in pain.

  “Something’s hit us.” I can’t hear my shouts over the scream of snapping wood and the yelling on the deck.

  Wood splinters above us like bones breaking. Sound and spray rush in, and the cargo hold fills with a roar.

  I’m underwater before I know it, the shock of cold bruising my ears, blocking any other feeling. Everything is liquid. My skin is blue, my eyes, my ankles, my scalp. I am swallowed by sapphires, my shoulder blades sliced by frosted knives. I am crushed by every shade of blue I have ever seen: Ultramarine. Lapis. Navy. Night.

  The Ribbon of Good-bye

  When at last the Norman ship docked in the harbor at Palermo, Rawiya was glad to see the limestone hump of Monte Pellegrino, the white marble churches clustered against stucco houses, and the red-domed mosques. Th
e expedition had been away for more than a year, and a royal welcoming party was waiting at the dock to greet them.

  As they passed through the streets, musicians accompanied them on the oud and the horn, and al-Idrisi led Bakr’s riderless camel as a sign of honor. The camel’s hump was draped with Bakr’s rich olive cloak, its fabric embroidered with the stars of the Pleiades.

  While the expedition brought al-Idrisi’s books, maps, and sketches into the palace workshop, Rawiya insisted on following King Roger’s servants to the stables. Bauza stood in a stall, his head bowed, looking thin and forlorn. Not for the first time, Rawiya was reminded that she had brought Bauza far from their home in Benzú, and that she was not the only one missing home.

  The servants apologized, saying Bauza had eaten less and less the longer Rawiya had been away. They said he had even refused sugar cubes and brushings.

  But when he saw Rawiya, Bauza whinnied and reared, stamping in his stall. When she came close, he wrapped his neck around her shoulders and nuzzled her. Rawiya buried her face in Bauza’s mane and wept, saying, “You don’t know how I missed you, old friend.”

  THOUGH THEIR HOMECOMING was a happy one, it was days until they saw King Roger, who had fallen ill just before they had arrived. The king was bedridden and could not take visitors. But al-Idrisi’s return seemed to give the ailing king some strength, and soon he was sitting up in bed, eagerly listening to the tales of al-Idrisi’s adventures until late into the night.

  For months, al-Idrisi worked from dawn to dusk, and Rawiya and Khaldun served as his chief witnesses in creating a final map of their journeys. This was to be the most accurate map of the inhabited world that had ever been made, a collaboration on a grand scale and the culmination of the long journey they had taken. They prepared too for the most difficult of all the tasks King Roger had set before them: to create a planisphere, a two-dimensional representation of the curved surface of the earth with all its cities and rivers and seas, inscribing these features upon a disk of solid silver. Such a thing had never been created before, and the task was daunting. Still Rawiya and Khaldun found joy in their work transcribing al-Idrisi’s sketched maps, never leaving each other’s side as they brushed cinnabar or indigo pigment onto parchment paper, blushing with a smile whenever their elbows touched.