The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel

by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

  “From what the poets say,” Khaldun said, “the death of the roc, the greatest of the eagles, was foretold hundreds of years ago. He has vanished from the earth now, leaving only the white eagles in his wake.”

  “The legend is complete,” al-Idrisi said, “and at its end.”

  “What legend?” Rawiya asked.

  “Vega. The star called Waqi, the great falling eagle.” Al-Idrisi motioned at the blue heavens where the stars turned, invisible above them. “The great eagle fell. The legend of Vega is complete.” He pulled his astrolabe from the pocket of his robe. “This is all that remains of the roc,” he said, pointing to the shape of a bird on the rete, the symbol that indicated Vega. “But we who know the truth will pass on the legend to the generations after us, telling the story of his might and his power and his tyranny, and also the story of how tyranny met its end.”

  They came again to the fountain. Rawiya and Khaldun helped al-Idrisi sit at its edge. They looked out onto the white and yellow houses on the peninsula far below and, beyond that, the open palm of the sea.

  “But what is the lesson?” Rawiya asked. “What is there to learn from all this—this brokenness, this chaos? We saw the wounded, magnificent world, its mountains, its rivers, its deserts. Is there any making sense of it?”

  Al-Idrisi laughed and held the astrolabe out to Rawiya. The sun glinted off its engraved rete, the silver shifting like lace. Rawiya took it. Just as it had so many years ago, the fat disk warmed her hand.

  “Must there be a lesson?” al-Idrisi said. “Perhaps the story simply goes on and on. Time rises and falls like an ever-breathing lung. The road comes and goes and suffering with it. But the generations of men, some kind and some cruel, go on and on beneath the stars.”

  SITT SHADID AGREES to walk us to the neck of the dock but no farther. She waves us on. “I will wait here, habibti,” she tells me in Arabic, and settles into a bench under a palm tree. “Don’t drag your feet. Your mama and uncle will have lunch ready before long.”

  Zahra, Huda, and I walk out onto the La Puntilla dock, past the red-roofed bunkers and the loose piles of steel beams and wire. It’s the second weekend of October, and the shearwater migration has begun. The air is full of brown and white feathers. They fill in the cracks between Ceuta’s seven hills like the glue between the Pleiades’ seven stars.

  Somewhere on the hill near the harbor, Mama is in Uncle Ma’mun’s kitchen painting maps again, and he is clearing out an upstairs bedroom for the two refugee women, Aisha and Fatima, who arrived early this morning. After kneeling in his midday prayers, Uncle Ma’mun will explain to them how to apply for asylum over cups of tea and bowls of lentils and burghul. The light will be coming through the curtains now, the late morning haze muffling the car horns.

  I trot ahead past the old tire bumpers chained to the dock, out to the edge of the pier. Across the entrance to the harbor is the Alfau dock, reaching toward us like an arm.

  I sit down at the edge of the dock, swinging my legs over the green water, and the sun glints off the pink ovals of my scars. Zahra and Huda sit down next to me. The sea moves like a living thing, scraping wood and concrete, a rainbow of voiceless mumbling.

  “I wish Yusuf could see this,” Zahra says, the salt tangling her curls.

  I tap each of the wooden supports along the dock, one at a time. “I bet he asked you.”

  Zahra smiles and tucks a black curl behind her ear. “Mama said he asked her permission first. She told him it wasn’t up to her.”

  “Are you going to marry him?” I ask. “After you finish school?”

  Zahra looks out at the clouds, her hair brushing the soft scar on her jaw. “I think I already said yes inside,” she says, “that first day in Ceuta, when I saw him coming down the hill.” The words come out surprised, like they came from someone else’s tongue.

  Huda points with her right hand and says, “You can see the Spanish mainland from here.”

  Tarifa is a blue strip on the horizon, the ribs of low mountains. How many miles of water are there between Europe and Africa? The green mirror of the sea twists my reflection with ripples. I think about how the water, like the earth, touches everything. A pebble dropped into the East River could make the Strait of Gibraltar ring with echoes.

  I fidget with the green-and-purple half-stone in my pocket. Somewhere in the green, Abu Sayeed is still holding his flat little stone, the one he kept for his son. Did God ever speak to us through stones?

  The concrete is warm beneath our thighs, the sun hot on our brown shoulders.

  “Do you still have it?” Huda asks. “Mama’s map of stories?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Of course I do.”

  Sailboats slice the water, tipped by the wind.

  I swing my legs. “I wonder if all maps are stories.”

  “Or all stories are maps,” Huda says.

  I finger the half-stone in my pocket. “Maybe we’re maps too. Our whole bodies.”

  Zahra leans back and stretches out her arms on the pier. “To what?”

  I lean over the water, and my face appears. Ripples stretch my eyes and nose. By a trick of the light, I see Baba’s face instead. “Ourselves?”

  “Your wonderings are over my head.” Zahra laughs and stretches. “Come on. Sitt Shadid is waiting.”

  “Coming.” I pull the half-stone from my pocket. I don’t listen for Baba’s caramel and oak-brown voice. I open my hand and drop the stone into the sea. It sinks slow. It seems to pulse, like I had dropped in a heart.

  We start back. A flock of shearwaters bursts over our heads toward the strait, the air humming with thousands of wings. Their white bellies pass over us, and for a second, all we hear are their joyful cries.

  AT THE HOUSE, Zahra helps Mama dry her brushes. Rahila helps Umm Yusuf set out blue ceramic plates, and Yusuf and Sitt Shadid open the curtains to let the light in.

  I pass through the kitchen on the way to my bedroom. Uncle Ma’mun is sitting at the table with Aisha and Fatima, scattered tufts of papers and half-full cups of sage tea between them. The women turn to smile at Huda and me. Aisha tucks two slender fingers into the handle of her peony-patterned teacup. A single button on Fatima’s cardigan is mismatched, and I recognize the milk-white plastic of the unraveling button from Mama’s blouse. Mama must have sewed it on for her this morning. Warmth fills up the little kitchen.

  “Come and sit down,” Uncle Ma’mun says. “Lunch is almost ready.”

  “We’ll be right back.” I twine my fingers into Huda’s. “I want to show her something.”

  “Ya ‘amo,” Uncle Ma’mun calls out as we climb the stairs, laughing, “you are always running. Where are you going to in such a hurry?”

  “Just a minute.” I tug Huda to my room with me, pushing open my wooden door.

  Up here, you can smell the sea and the pine forest. I take the burlap bag from its place in the corner and pull out the map, unrolling the canvas.

  “See,” I say to Huda. “I still have it. I would’ve hung it up, but I can’t reach.”

  Huda smiles. The dust never really washed out of her hijab. The roses are faded, one of those things that have been loved into disrepair.

  She says, “I can.”

  We choose an empty spot on the wall, above my bed. Huda holds the top left corner with her right hand while I tack the map in place. We hang it together, smoothing out the wrinkled corners.

  I lie down on the bed with my legs up the wall, and Huda sits next to me. I stare at my knees that aren’t so knobby anymore, the way my bony toes are long enough now to reach the bottom of the map.

  Canvas peeks through at the corner from under a fleck of paint. The map’s fabric is the same pink-gray color as Huda’s roses.

  That blank spot draws my eye again, the only one Mama didn’t fill with color or words.

  Huda follows my eye. She asks me, “What do you see?”

  “What’s missing.” I grab a pen and uncap it. A breeze flutters the corners of the map, and w
hite shearwater feathers balance themselves on the sill like tiny clouds. My pen hovers over the last empty space. Steadying my hand, I fill it in.

  Author’s Note

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters of al-Idrisi, King Roger, and King William are based on real people—Caliph az-Zafir, mentioned briefly, was an actual Fatimid caliph in Cairo from 1149 to 1154 as well—but all the other characters are fictional, including all the characters in the contemporary timeline. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental. None of the characters or situations in the contemporary timeline are based on the lives or experiences of myself or my family.

  Rawiya is a figment of my imagination, one of the windows through which I hoped to show readers an extraordinary historical time period. Al-Idrisi was a scholar and mapmaker, born in Ceuta around 1099, who collaborated with the Norman King Roger II in Palermo to create, in 1154, what is known as the Tabula Rogeriana, the most accurate world map ever made to that date, as well as al-Kitab ar-Rujari (The Book of Roger) and the silver planisphere. It is unclear how much of al-Idrisi’s knowledge of the world was gathered through firsthand accounts of his own travels, as much of the information contained in al-Kitab ar-Rujari was based on the accounts of other travelers and merchants passing through Palermo, but al-Idrisi himself did travel widely, including a trip to Anatolia (in modern-day Turkey) when he was a teenager. From my research, it is unclear whether al-Idrisi ever married or had any children, as details about his personal life are scant; allusions to his family life made in the text are imaginative speculation on my part.

  Al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana was, indeed, oriented with south at the top, as was common for Arab mapmakers at that time. Al-Idrisi’s maps were considered the most accurate in the world for many years. For three centuries, they were copied without alteration. Al-Kitab ar-Rujari or Kitab Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi Ikhtiraq al-Afaq (typically loosely translated from the Arabic as The Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands) has been translated in full into Latin and French, and excerpts have been translated into several other languages. The manuscript survives to this day in libraries across the world, though copies are rare and hard to come by. A digital copy of a 1592 Arabic manuscript without maps is available via the Yale University Library’s Digital Collections (http://findit.library.yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:177851).

  I am grateful to have had the opportunity to study analyses and excerpts of the Kitab Nuzhat al-Mushtaq translated into Spanish and Catalán via the work of Juan Piqueras Haba and Ghaleb Fansa (“Cartografía Islámica de Sharq Al-Andalus. Siglos X–XII. Al-Idrisi y Los Precursores,” Cuadernos de Geografía 86, 2009, pp. 137–64; “Geografia dels països catalans segons el llibre de Roger d’Al-Sarif Al-Idrisi,” Cuadernos de Geografía 87, 2010, pp. 65–88) as well as in descriptions included in Palestine under the Moslems, translated by Guy Le Strange, originally published in 1890 by A. P. Watt, London, and in The History of Cartography: Volume Two, Book One, cited below. After doing research in Ceuta, I also had the chance to study scholarly work on al-Idrisi’s life, translations of excerpts of Kitab Nuzhat al-Mushtaq into Spanish, and descriptions of medieval Andalucía compiled by the Instituto de Estudios Ceutíes in a book entitled El Mundo del Geógrafo Ceutí al Idrisi (Ceuta, Spain, 2011). In addition, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to study Konrad Miller’s 1927 restoration (and romanized transliteration) of al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana, available from the Library of Congress (Idrīsī and Konrad Miller, Weltkarte des Idrisi vom Jahr 1154 n. Ch., Charta Rogeriana, Stuttgart: Konrad Miller, 1928. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2007626789/). Miller’s Mappae Arabicae (Mappae Arabicae: Arabische Welt- und Länderkarten, I.–III. Band, Stuttgart: 1926 & 1927) also proved very helpful in interpreting al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana.

  As for the silver planisphere, no one really knows what happened to it; some say it was melted down or disappeared after the coup against King William in 1160, which took place six years after King Roger’s death. The novel’s speculation as to its possible survival and whereabouts, including the hiding place on the island of Ustica, are just that, I’m afraid—purely imaginative speculation.

  In telling the tale of Rawiya and al-Idrisi, I did my best to keep geographical locations and the years of historical events as accurate as possible, with as few deviations as necessary to accommodate the plot. Nur ad-Din did, in fact, take possession of Damascus in 1154 when his help was requested to repel the Crusader siege of Damascus during the Second Crusade, though the mythical roc, of course, had nothing to do with this. In actuality, the roc comes from The Thousand and One Nights, specifically the tale of Sinbad the Sailor, in which the giant serpents also make an appearance. The roc’s conquest of Bilad ash-Sham and subsequent defeat are purely symbolic inventions of my own imagination, as is the legend of the roc’s eye stone (though aspects of the stone itself have their basis in a real gemstone). This “legend” referred to in the text is loosely based on the tale of the fisherman and the jinni from The Thousand and One Nights. The inclusion of these elements of the Thousand and One Nights serve to anchor the tale of Rawiya and al-Idrisi firmly in the storytelling traditions of the Arab and Islamic world. I am sorry to report that there is no legend that relates the roc to the star Vega; this was a connection of my own making, owing to the old Arabic name for the star: an-Nasr al-Waqi, the Falling Eagle.

  Early Arab and Islamic astronomy is a particular area of interest of mine, and I enjoyed researching it immensely. All the names and histories of the constellations mentioned are based in fact. For further reading, I highly suggest the following sources: “Bedouin Star-Lore in Sinai and the Negev,” by Clinton Bailey, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, vol. 37, no. 3 (1974), pp. 580–96 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/613801); The History of Cartography, Volume Two, Book One: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward, University of Chicago Press (pdfs available here: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/HOC_V2_B1/Volume2_Book1.html); and An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The Book of Curiosities, edited with an annotated translation by Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith, Boston, MA: Brill, 2014. For further reading on the culinary traditions of the medieval Middle East and North Africa (including recipes), I suggest Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes, California Studies in Food and Culture no. 18, by Lilia Zaouali and translated by M. B. DeBevoise, with a foreword by Charles Perry (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2007). The research of ArchAtlas at the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield proved very helpful in making the locations of khans and caravanserais in twelfth-century Syria as historically accurate as possible (Cinzia Tavernari, “The CIERA program and activities: focus on the roads and wayside caravanserais in medieval Syria,” ArchAtlas, Version 4.1, 2009, http://www.archatlas.org/workshop09/works09-tavernari.php).

  The Imazighen (singular: Amazigh) are an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa. The term Imazighen encompasses several different communities, all of which have been marginalized to varying degrees by both Arabization and European colonialism, and their history is only alluded to in this novel. I strongly suggest that the reader seek out literature written by Amazigh authors who detail their own experiences in their own words. As a starting point, I recommend several sources, including We Are Imazighen: The Development of Algerian Berber Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture by Fazia Aïtel (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2014) and the works of Assia Djebar, particularly Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, translated by Dorothy S. Blair (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993).

  I need not remind the reader that the war in Syria and the Syrian refugee crisis are both very real and that refugees face horrific violence and injustice in their attempts to find safety. Refugee women are at particular risk of violence, especially sexual violence. A March 2017 study by Save the Child
ren found that more than 70 percent of Syrian children showed signs of toxic stress or post–traumatic stress disorder after their country had been wracked with war for nearly six years (A. McDonald, M. Buswell, S. Khush, M. Brophy, “Invisible Wounds: The Impact of Six Years of War on Syria’s Children”). Over the course of this conflict, childhoods have been cut short; dreams and promising careers have been shattered; families have been broken. I hope that this book serves as a starting point for education and empathy and that readers will seek out additional resources, particularly those written by Syrians in their own words.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not exist were it not for the help of a great many people, to each of whom it would be impossible for me to express the full depth of my gratitude:

  Trish Todd, this book is so much stronger because of you, and I am honored to have you as my editor. Thank you for polishing the salt from the raw stone and making this book the best it could be. To the whole incredible team at Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, particularly Susan Moldow, David Falk, Tara Parsons, Cherlynne Li, Kaitlin Olson, Kelsey Manning, Martha Schwartz, and Peg Haller, thank you for your passion for this book and for shepherding it into the world. Thank you for making my mission your mission.

  Michelle Brower, my literary agent extraordinaire: Thank you for your insight and for seeing what this book was trying to be from the beginning. Thank you for tirelessly championing my work, for believing in me, and for making my dreams come true. Thank you also to Chelsey Heller, Esmond Harmsworth, the whole team at Aevitas Creative Management, and all my international co-agents for working to bring this book to readers around the world. I am deeply grateful for your efforts.

  Beth Phelan, thank you for creating the #DVPit Twitter pitching contest and for constantly uplifting the voices of marginalized writers. I am also endlessly grateful to Amy Rosenbaum for finding me via #DVPit and referring me to Michelle, an act of generosity I will never forget. Thank you to my friends in the #DVSquad for sharing in this journey. I can’t wait to hold all your books in my hands.