The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  We settle into the back of the truck, looking for a tight spot. I try not to think of the hold of the aid ferry.

  “Itto and her family saved our lives,” Zahra whispers.

  “I knew they would help us.”

  “Yeah?”

  The tang of oranges and dates fills up my nose when I breathe in. We crouch down between the crates, cramped and shivering. Goose bumps scrape my palms when I rub my elbows.

  “Because,” I whisper, “nobody can love the stars and hurt people. They just can’t.”

  The crushed fruit between our toes is like a cool gelatin bath. It seeps into the holes in our shoes and stings our blisters like wet fire. Seeds and pulp stick to our ankles and the laces of Zahra’s sneakers.

  I shiver, blowing on my fingers, and wonder how long I can stand the cold before my skin starts to harden and burn.

  Zahra whispers, “I guess you’re right.”

  Underneath

  Though she ached in her bones for what she had lost, Rawiya didn’t chance the palace again. She and al-Idrisi hid under the palmettos, and flecks of soot streaked al-Idrisi’s white robe with gray. Rawiya picked them off, blackening her fingers. The stubborn sun refused to rise between Monte Pellegrino and the green fields beyond the city. The flames burned on. They covered their faces.

  “Khaldun survived the roc,” Rawiya said. “He survived the desert storms. He survived the Fatimids and the Almohads—just to be murdered in his adopted home.”

  “Khaldun pledged his life to protect you,” al-Idrisi said.

  Rawiya said, “I would have given my own to stop him.”

  “He wanted you to live.”

  “Then he was a fool.” Rawiya spat, and her saliva was gray with ash, her mouth bitter with it.

  Al-Idrisi looked up at her, his eyes ringed red. “We have to deal with things as they are.”

  Rawiya laughed in spite of herself. “That’s just what Khaldun said. That we had our years of peace. That we should be grateful.”

  Al-Idrisi tugged his book and his map from his robe. He brushed sooty cobwebs from the book’s cover. “These are all we have left,” he said.

  Rawiya pulled Ptolemy’s Geography from her robe. “And this.”

  “The Jugrafiya!” Al-Idrisi set his things on the ground and took Ptolemy’s book. “Roger and I read and reread these words. I learned much of what I know of mapmaking from Ptolemy.”

  Rawiya bent and picked up al-Idrisi’s book, the one he had prepared for King Roger. She studied the lettering. “This doesn’t say al-Kitab ar-Rujari.” The Book of Roger.

  “Roger wouldn’t let me name the book for him,” al-Idrisi said. “No, officially this is Kitab Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi Ikhtiraq al-Afaq.” The Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands. Al-Idrisi laughed. “Only I call it The Book of Roger.”

  “Then we both will,” Rawiya said.

  At that moment, a weak whinnying reached their ears. Rawiya held her breath, thinking rebels on horseback had found them. But from out of the darkness came a horse with its neck bowed, and Bauza stumbled into the clearing under the palms where Rawiya and al-Idrisi stood.

  “Bauza!” Rawiya rushed to him, stroking his singed mane. Bauza nuzzled her neck, his breathing labored with exertion.

  “He must have escaped the stables before they burned,” al-Idrisi said.

  Rawiya laid her head against Bauza’s cheek, and he nibbled at her fingers. She laughed in spite of herself. “I don’t have any sugar for you tonight, boy,” she whispered, “but you’ll have some soon. I promise you that.”

  Across the gardens, a shadow moved, and with it came the smell of burning. The figure curled into itself, then slumped down between two charred date palms. Ash puffed from its back as the body hit the ground. Behind it, something large and smeared with soot rolled to a stop at the base of one of the palms’ trunks.

  Rawiya tied Bauza to one of the palms and crept toward the two shadows. Neither moved. The hems of the cloths draped over them were torn into a burnt fringe, and as Rawiya and al-Idrisi approached, they saw that one of them was a man covered by his cloak.

  Rawiya circled the man on the ground. His hood covered his head and his face, and his hands were charred and bloody. She kept a pace away, holding her distance, but he didn’t move. Al-Idrisi watched the rubble of the servants’ kitchen for other intruders, but no one had followed.

  Taking a breath, Rawiya swept back the man’s hood.

  “Khaldun!” She threw herself down next to him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders, kissing the top of his head.

  He coughed. “You always seem to find me out of sorts,” he said.

  Rawiya touched his chest, then pulled back when her fingers found the shaft of an arrow buried in his shoulder. “You need a doctor,” she said. “We have to stop your bleeding—”

  But Khaldun grasped the arrow, grimacing. “I must have sung a song God liked,” he said. Turning on his side, he showed Rawiya the other end of the arrow sticking out from his back. “Straight through,” he said. “A clean wound.” And he was right, for the arrow had not pierced his heart, and the shaft itself had stopped the bleeding.

  “Why did you stay in the workshop?” Rawiya brushed ash from Khaldun’s beard. She brought his fingers to her cheek and smelled iron and bitter burnt flesh. “What good is a book or a map if you are lost?”

  Khaldun said, “I made a pledge I wanted to keep.”

  “You are a fool,” she said. “You are a kind and lionhearted fool, and I love you for it.”

  Khaldun touched her face, smiling through his mask of pain. “That has a sort of poetry to it,” he said.

  And Rawiya kissed his forehead and his lips, the arrow between them.

  “You didn’t lose as much as you thought,” Khaldun said, pulling away from her. He pointed to the linen-covered lump behind him. The linen was a serving cloth from the ruined servants’ kitchen, stained with soot and the dust of broken tile.

  Al-Idrisi pulled back the cloth and sank to his knees. A wide disk of silver gleamed on a pallet in the moonlight.

  “The planisphere,” al-Idrisi said.

  “The difficult part was leaving the workshop.” Khaldun told them how the arrow had struck him down, how his weight had pulled a tapestry from the wall, tangling him up in the cloth. His attackers had set fire to the workshop, the library, and the tapestry, trying to burn him alive. He had taken the tapestry and thrown it, catching his attackers in the burning cloth instead.

  “I pushed them out of the workshop with the flaming fabric,” Khaldun said, “and left the tapestry to burn out on the stone.” He lifted his hands. The top layer of skin had been scorched away, revealing red flesh and pus.

  Rawiya tore a strip of cloth from her cloak and wrapped his one hand. Al-Idrisi wrapped the other in his white turban.

  “They will heal,” she said.

  “In time, and with scars,” al-Idrisi said. “But it is a small price to pay for your life.”

  Khaldun went on to tell how he, badly burned and hiding his face to look like a looter, had pulled the pallet from the workshop. He had escaped through the servants’ tunnel after seeing Rawiya and al-Idrisi duck through. Exhausted and weighted down by the planisphere, he had collapsed in the palace garden, hidden under the leaves and darkness.

  “Then you were already gone,” Rawiya said. “You had escaped by the time I came back for you.”

  Khaldun blinked away the thick paste of ash on his eyelashes. “You came back for me?”

  Rawiya bent her forehead to his, dotting her face with soot. “You are the only home I have. I left home once, years ago. I am through with leaving.” She kissed his ashen lips. “Yes, I will marry you, Khaldun,” she said. “I will marry you.”

  In reply, Khaldun raised his good arm to her hair and kissed her, lifting his burnt fingertips to the sky.

  “You have done more for me than I ever could have asked,” al-Idrisi said. “The looters would have melted down my life’s work, des
troyed everything. Yet I would give it a thousand times over to have you both survive—you, who are like the children God has given back to me.” Al-Idrisi bent to kiss the top of Khaldun’s head, and his eyelashes left damp scratches in the soot on Khaldun’s face. “Bless you.”

  But all three of them knew that the danger was not over. The silver planisphere, as wide across as a man was tall, was impossible to hide. The metal alone was worth thousands of dirhams. Al-Idrisi’s prized device was no longer safe on the island of Sicily, and neither were Rawiya or her friends. As long as they remained, they would be targets.

  Together, they decided to take the planisphere to a safe and secret place and to tell no one of its location. For a hiding place, al-Idrisi selected Ustica, the abandoned island of charred rock northwest of the Sicilian coast they had passed at the start of their journey. They would hide the planisphere in one of Ustica’s deep grottoes, where it would be protected by the tides and the volcanic rock of the island known as “the black pearl.”

  “There the planisphere will remain,” al-Idrisi said, “guarded forever, safe from selfish hands.”

  Above them, the great lion and the gazelles ran the gauntlet of the stars.

  “And what of us?” Rawiya asked. “Our quest is done, our peaceful years in Palermo over. Someone waits for me across the sea, someone who has been waiting a long time for my return.”

  Al-Idrisi smiled and raised his face to the heavens. “It is time I return home myself,” he said, “to the place where God knit me up in my mother’s womb. After all, I have been under way for almost twenty years.” He laughed and rose. “Come,” he said. “I still have friends among the merchants. Surely one can find us a doctor and a ship that will take us to Ustica and into the west.”

  “To Ceuta, then,” Rawiya said.

  Al-Idrisi smiled, his eyes young again. “To Ceuta.”

  THE REAR DOOR of the truck shuts with a bang. We’re left in the dark, sticky sweet and freezing cold. Then the truck shudders to life, the engine popping and backfiring, and we rumble away.

  The cold seems to take on a life of its own when the truck starts. Cold air circulates around our feet and our bare legs, cutting and stinging us. The vents might as well be pumping out frozen knives. I finger Mama’s piece of blue-and-white ceramic tile on its cord around my neck. It’s held my body heat, and I use it to warm my fingers.

  “Do you think we’re headed in the right direction?” Zahra whispers. “Could they have made a mistake?”

  “Maybe Itto read a sign off the building,” I say, “or the truck.” I pause, and fear sticks to my legs with the smashed fruit. “Itto wasn’t wrong. She couldn’t be.”

  We lean on the crates, crouching until our calves go numb. We make no sound, afraid every time the truck stalls or stops that someone has heard us whispering. It’s darker than the closet in our New York apartment where I used to play hide-and-seek. It’s darker than the beach at Rockaway when we watched the shooting stars, darker than the bushes in Central Park.

  The only reason I still know I’m there is because it’s too cold not to notice my goose bumps. The cold air swirls across our shins and the backs of our necks, chapping and burning them. Each new blast seems colder than the last, making us wrap our arms around our ribs and burrow into ourselves. The dark is a frozen vice that crushes the delicate bones in my wrists and my ankles until I think they will snap. Zahra and I shiver so hard we bump into each other and into the crates of fruit, cracking our jaws and our elbows on the wood.

  It’s too cold to fall asleep, but we soon lose control of our numb knees. We bounce and crash to the wooden floor when the truck goes over a hill. We slide in the fruit we crushed, and grainy seeds embed themselves in the hems of my shorts. Pulp fills my sneakers.

  We lean on each other, shivering our arms and chins together hard enough to bruise. I get hard cold, aching cold, stinging cold. The tips of my fingers pulse, blood pricking them. Our bodies get rigid, our fingernails stony, our skin like glass. My whole body screams fire. If a crate falls on me, will I shatter?

  “How many miles is it to Ceuta?” I whisper to Zahra so the driver doesn’t hear.

  “Five hundred, maybe, or a thousand.”

  I brace myself against Zahra, my jaws grinding with spasms. “How much longer?” My words are grit and ice. I don’t want to freeze to death. “We’ll get there fast, right? Right?”

  Zahra pauses before saying, “It depends how much the truck is carrying.”

  After that, we don’t talk anymore.

  The truck stops and starts, climbs hills and slides down sharp valleys. Our teeth chatter until our jaws lock up. I go numb. My skin becomes a thick gray blanket, and I start to get sleepy and warm.

  That first sensation of warmth is what tells me we really could die in here. It tells me Mama might have sent us out of Libya for nothing. It tells me we might get all the way to Ceuta just for them to find our blue-frosted bodies in the back of this fruit truck.

  I read in a book once that freezing to death isn’t a bad way to go, that right before you die you feel warm instead of cold. But I don’t want to die. I thump my numb fingers against my bristly head, trying to stay awake. The sheen of sweat that once coated my hand flakes away, hardened into tiny crystals of white frost. And then my arms won’t lift my hands anymore, so I sag down into Zahra and close my eyes.

  If you die in your sleep, do you still dream?

  The truck bounces to a stop.

  The door slides open and heat pours into the back of the truck. The pain of warmth sweeps over us in waves. We mewl like cats, our skin unbroken sheets of flame.

  Somebody shouts in Arabic: “A crate broke.”

  Then there are more words in Spanish. It reminds me of kindergarten in the city, the way our Spanish teacher came once a week to read picture books while we sat crisscross-applesauce on the rug.

  Spanish!

  “Ceuta,” I whisper, loud enough to knock Zahra against a crate of oranges. “We’re in Ceuta.”

  A man climbs into the back of the truck and sees us. He freezes. The cold has locked our teeth together—we can’t move or yell. I raise my arm to my ribs, my limp hand frozen into a fist.

  Then the man is gone. Three border guards with guns climb up between the crates in his place. They haul us out of the truck and into the searing light. I wrap my arm through the strap of my burlap backpack, holding it in my elbow as tight as I can.

  They put us in a van. Zahra and I collapse, my shoulder on her chest, her chin on the top of my head. Compared to the icy truck, the plastic seats are so hot they burn.

  Out the back window, everything is green. Hills roll into the sea. A tall silver fence curves away from us into the elbow of low mountains. Square plaster houses with red tile roofs cluster up the sides of the hills and down into the valleys. In the distance, the city snakes down toward the Strait of Gibraltar, thinning to a narrow strip of land near the harbor before widening into the Península de Almina. A low mountain—Monte Hacho, the mountain Mama told me used to be called Abyla—stands watch over the strait like a whale’s bent back. Fig and carob trees rise up, white poplars, dwarf pines. Thick stands of aloe shrink between the homes and roads.

  I haven’t seen so much green in weeks. My brain screams with it.

  We come to houses in yellow, beige, rose, and white. The buildings sport satellite dishes, laundry lines, and weathervanes. Palms and orange trees line the streets. After the unbroken desert, I notice the hints of people everywhere: traffic signs. Streetlights. Fences and balconies. Garbage bins.

  The van makes a turn. We wander down a hill and curve away from the houses. I press my face to the window. We head for a blank clearing on the edge of the city, lined by a high fence of wire mesh. Beyond the gate are dozens of boxy concrete bunkhouses.

  “No.” I grab Zahra’s sleeve. “We came all this way. They can’t put us in a camp.” I try and get the driver’s attention, behind the partition. “We have to get to my uncle. Nuestro t�
�o. Tío.”

  But he can’t hear me. Zahra slumps down, and I bury my face in her collarbone. We pass the tan concrete and drive through the red-and-white metal gate, past the mesh fence. The van brakes hard. I stare at my hands, clenching and unclenching them, and the muscles burn as feeling comes back.

  Out the back window, the gates close.

  They let us out of the van, and a policeman takes us into the camp. There are two levels, one upstairs that looks like offices and, on the ground, those matchbox bunkhouses. People stand outside, tapping at phones or chasing kids. Laundry dries everywhere, on fences and bushes and benches. A lady Mama’s age strolls around handing out cigarettes to people who ask for them. She counts them, chatting in Spanish.

  Another lady with short silver hair thanks the policeman and takes us upstairs. The room is crowded with metal filing cabinets, the desk cluttered with manila folders. In here, it’s quiet, and the smells are different: the gray smell of cloth seat cushions, the green of metal. Stale perfume. Soap.

  The lady gives us bottled water and takes down our names. She says we’re in the CETI, the Centro de Estancia Temporal de Inmigrantes. It’s where they keep refugees and migrants, she says.

  “We’ve got to find our uncle Ma’mun,” I tell her. I say it in English and Arabic and Spanish, searching her face.

  But all she does is take down his name. “You will have to wait here until he comes for you,” she says in Spanish.

  “But what will happen to us?” I ask.

  The lady softens. “You will have to wait for a decision on your case,” she says. “You might be moved to a detention center, but here you can come and go as you please. You will stay in a shared room, with a bed to yourself. You’ll find the showers nearby, when you’d like to get washed up. You can take Spanish classes.”

  Spanish classes? The thought hits me that this place is for processing people who have nowhere else to go, that people stay here a long time.

  I turn to Zahra, mouthing the words in English: We can’t stay.

  The lady hands me an extra water bottle. “If you need help,” she says, “talk to one of the madres—the women who do the rounds.”