The Scorpions of Zahir

by Christine Brodien-Jones

  “Why are you named for a desert town in Morocco?” asked Mina. “My grandmother wants to know.”

  “My dad named me.” Zagora decided to tell the short version of how she got her name. “He’s an archaeologist, and when he came to Morocco to translate glyphs, he stayed in Zagora.”

  Mina gave her a funny look and translated. The old woman’s thin lips cracked into a smile. Seeing her small crooked teeth, Zagora relaxed a little.

  “Do you know what is desert sight?” asked Mina. Zagora shook her head and she continued: “Certain people are born with this talent, and when they travel to the desert, they find they have this power. They see into the past: they see all things of the desert that have vanished over time.” She paused, staring at Zagora. “Grandmother thinks you have this gift.”

  Zagora stared back, confused. Was that the reason she’d seen the ghost oryxes? But the idea of oryxes suddenly appearing out of the past seemed fantastic, like something from a time-travel book.

  “Why does she think I have desert sight?” she asked Mina. “I mean, I’d know if I had an amazing talent like that, right? I think your grandmother’s got it wrong.”

  Noor stood with her shoulders thrown back, regal as a desert queen. Her wizened face grew solemn and she uttered a string of words, short and clipped, with a frantic undertone. Zagora grew uneasy again.

  “Grandmother had a vision,” said Mina in a half whisper. “A vision of you in Zahir.”

  “But I haven’t even been to Zahir,” Zagora whispered back.

  “I do not know Grandmother’s heart; she does not tell me all things,” said Mina, sounding a bit sad. “You have traveled many kilometers over the sea, here to Morocco. Grandmother says the stone has found you, and you must show us the path through the desert—not the old path, the one we were lost on, but the new path. You could help free the Azimuth from a terrible fate.”

  “The Azimuth? But the Azimuth are extinct!” said Zagora. Seeing Mina’s baffled look, she added, “You know: dead, gone. My dad told me, and he knows about those kinds of things.”

  “No, not all Azimuth are dead,” said the girl. “Our tribe still lives in the desert, in a hidden place, a half day’s camel ride from Zahir.”

  Zagora’s eyes went wide. “Are you serious? The Azimuth are actually living in the desert, near Zahir?” Her father would go bananas when he heard this.

  “When the stone of the oryx was taken, many Azimuth fell sick, and their beloved oryxes vanished. The scorpions grew stronger. The Azimuth were forced to leave Zahir.” Mina’s eyes filled with tears. “Our city was lost to the scorpions.”

  What a sad story, thought Zagora. In comparison, her life seemed easy. She wondered if Mina had a mother or a father. Maybe Noor was all she had.

  “The stone of the oryx belongs to the Azimuth,” said Mina with a fearsome look. “Grandmother says it must be returned to Zahir—because of the foretelling. The prophecy.”

  Before Zagora could say anything more, Noor began to sway on her feet, whispering under her breath, her face oddly radiant. Her bones seemed to be glowing beneath her skin. Zagora watched, fascinated, drawn to the woman’s terrible magic, the fever of her dark tattoos. Yet although Zagora believed in prophecies, she also worried that Noor might be confused. Sometimes elderly people’s minds were fragile.

  With brass tongs, Noor picked embers from the fire and placed them in a brightly painted clay incense burner shaped like the head of an oryx. Then she added crystals—“Frankincense,” whispered Mina—which glowed brightly, and soon a fragrant, smoky plume enveloped the three of them, cutting them off from the rest of the crowd.

  A spidery hand darted to Zagora’s neck, searching for what could only be the Oryx Stone.

  “I don’t have the stone!” she whispered, terrified of what the old woman might do.

  For an instant something older than the Earth itself showed through the creases of the old woman’s face. Then the light went out of Noor’s eyes and from her lips fell words Zagora couldn’t comprehend, whispering away into space, until, with a shudder, Noor sank to the ground.

  Zagora backed away, watching the smoke dissolve around her. What language had the old woman been speaking? She hoped Noor hadn’t cast some kind of freaky spell over her.

  Then she heard a different voice, shouting her name. It was Duncan!

  “Oh no, I forgot!” she cried, spinning around in a panic. She’d messed up again! “I’m supposed to be watching out for Olivia’s goons!”

  Above the stalls she could see the flashing auto rentals sign and what looked like her father’s safari hat.

  “I’ve got to go—now,” she said. “See you later!” Waving to Mina and Noor, she dashed off toward the squat pink building, a hundred questions tumbling through her brain.

  “Until the desert!” she thought she heard Mina shout after her.

  Zagora sat in the front seat of a rusted Mercedes-Benz with bug-spattered windows and faulty air-conditioning, thinking about Mina and Noor, mulling over the things they’d told her about the Azimuth and the Oryx Stone. She was astonished and bewildered to think she might actually have desert sight. Was it possible that she had the power to see into the desert’s past?

  They chugged up a narrow winding road with crumbling edges along a steep-walled valley. She couldn’t wait to tell her dad the Azimuth were still alive, but at the moment he was too preoccupied with driving—and intent on getting as far away as possible from Marrakech.

  Her father shifted into a lower gear, and they just managed to make it up the gradient, which was getting steeper and steeper. He sat hunched at the wheel, jaws clenched, pressing the pedal to the floor as they wound higher into the Atlas Mountains, braking for goats and donkeys. Occasionally a bus or a taxi or some beat-up vehicle whizzed by, missing their car by only inches. Zagora’s heart was in her mouth every time.

  Even with the windows rolled down the upholstery gave off a gamy odor; the smell reminded her of the tinned food Auntie Agnes fed her Manx cat. Zagora noticed that it was getting harder to breathe, but she knew the reason: thin mountain air.

  “Dad, have you ever heard of desert sight?” she asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I have. Desert sight is an ancient term referring to visionaries and seers: gifted people of the desert who have the innate ability to see into the past. Very rare, of course. Why do you ask?”

  Being a desert visionary sounded pretty amazing, but she didn’t want to give too much away, especially with her brother listening to the conversation.

  “I met a girl in Marrakech who told me about it. Her name’s Mina and her grandmother sells birds,” Zagora said, avoiding the whole truth. “Do you think someone with desert sight could see animals that are extinct?”

  Her father considered. “Yes, of course, it makes perfect sense.”

  “I’ll ask Pitblade Yegen about it when I see him,” said Zagora dreamily. Maybe she really had seen oryxes from the past. “And about the legend of the oryxes returning to Zahir.” She was sure her father’s friend would have the answers to all her questions.

  At this elevation there was little traffic on the narrow, twisting mountain road, although Zagora had already counted two near collisions: one with a bus, and the other with a turquoise spray-painted car that Duncan said was circa 1960 and that nearly ran them off the road. Sometimes she could almost see, or imagined she could see, oryxes in the far-off hills.

  “My guts are all shook up!” hollered Duncan as they rounded another hairpin curve. “I think I’m going to be sick!”

  Zagora twisted around in her seat. “You’d better not be,” she said in a threatening tone. “In the desert the weak ones get left behind.”

  “We’d never leave Duncan behind,” said her father, giving Zagora a comical look.

  “But in the desert you can’t let the weak ones drag you down,” she argued. “If Duncan gets sick, he puts us all in danger. He could doom our expedition! Ask Freya Stark.”

  “Danger?”
said Duncan, and she sensed a dramatic moment coming on. “What about Nar Azrak, do you call that safe? Think about it: we’re in Morocco and we’re going to the Sahara, to the exact same place where the astronomers are saying the planet might crash!”

  “They’re fanatics, Duncan. All that talk is nonsense,” said their father, slowing on a turn. “You’ll be glad you went to the desert. It’s the experience of a lifetime.”

  A boy in a T-shirt jumped in front of the car, holding up a giant quartz crystal. “Special price, not tourist price!” He thumped his hand on the hood. “Crystals and fossils, very special!”

  Zagora thought it would be cool to buy a Moroccan fossil, but she knew explorers and archaeologists didn’t do that sort of thing. In fact, they were the ones who dug up the fossils.

  “Windows up!” cried Duncan in a panicky voice.

  “Chill out, he’s just selling sparkly rocks,” said Zagora irritably.

  “Not today, thanks!” called their father, swerving around an elderly man wearing a ski cap and holding a jar of honey. “If we stop now, we might not get going again.”

  She watched the peddler grow smaller in the rearview mirror. These people almost don’t seem real, she thought. What if they’re, like, high-altitude mirages? The road grew steeper, with no barriers along the sides. She gnawed on her knuckles as a bus overloaded with passengers whipped around a bend, one wheel suspended over the edge.

  “I knew we should’ve rented a four-wheel drive Jeep,” said Duncan. “The car rental guy said it’s reliable on mountain roads, plus you can drive all over the desert with a four-wheeler.”

  The car swerved and Zagora glanced out the window at a hundred-foot drop, her stomach fluttering. “Jeeps are for tourists,” she said. “And we’re not tourists, we’re travelers.”

  “For centuries explorers have been drawn to the desert,” mused their father, shifting to his egghead professor voice. Zagora loved when he got philosophical and off topic. “Some travelers set off on spiritual quests, in search of mystical revelation, while others seek treasures beneath the sand, remnants of ancient cultures—”

  “I’d just like to find a Burger King,” muttered Duncan, irritation filling his voice yet again. “I’m telling you guys, we cannot drive over sand in this clunker.”

  “Who said anything about driving?” Zagora’s dad looked over at her and winked.

  She smiled back. In a heightened state of exhilaration, she wiggled her feet on the dashboard, staring out at the red earth and distant trees and heart-stopping drops.

  A gloomy silence settled over the backseat. Deprived of creature comforts like air-conditioning and indoor plumbing, Duncan was shutting down. Zagora knew he was desperate for cyberspace, online chat rooms, the science channel, Twinkies and lemon-filled doughnuts. He missed sitting on the couch, tearing open bags of chips while he flipped the remote, watching endless reruns of Star Trek, The Outer Limits and PBS’s Star Gazer.

  As for Zagora, she didn’t miss anything. She was prepared to abandon it all.

  “Here we are. We’re at the highest point, the Tizi-n-Tichka pass,” announced Zagora’s father, pulling up to a square mud-brick building at the edge of the road. “Rumor has it that the last lion in Morocco was killed here in 1942.”

  “I wish there were still lions here,” said Zagora, who loved all kinds of wild cats.

  “You know, I think we have enough to deal with at the moment,” her dad replied with a chuckle. “Time for a break. Let’s see if we can order chebakia here.”

  “Is that an Arab dessert?” asked Duncan, who could never resist anything sweet.

  “It sure is, and I think you’ll like it.”

  Zagora jumped out of the car, thinking how the word chebakia sounded warm and plump and golden. Chebakia, chubby, cherub, all fat words rolling around inside her head. She breathed in the dry mountain air, her nostrils sticking together as if someone were pinching them. Her dad had said that might happen, because there wasn’t much oxygen in the High Atlas.

  She looked out at the dry mountain landscape, the red-tinted houses scattered in the valley below. It would be another day before they reached the desert. Smells of fried meat and vegetables drifted out of the café, where colored plastic strips hung in the doorway; she could hear an Arabic song playing on a radio. To one side of the building the scrubby land dropped off into a ravine. It seemed like a sad place, maybe because it was so isolated.

  Zagora suddenly remembered that Edgar Yegen had taken a bus from Marrakech to Sumnorum, following this same route. In his journal he’d written:

  The ancient creaky bus winds slowly through the narrow twisting roads of the Atlas Mountains, stopping along the way at roadside cafés so passengers may stretch their limbs and partake of a cup of tea or perhaps a small meal.

  Maybe Edgar had stopped at this café and ordered chebakia. How awesome would that be?

  Their father chose a table outside and opened his map. A man wearing a long brown-and-white caftan, smelling of tobacco and strong coffee, greeted them with “As-Salāmu ‘Alaykum” and took their order.

  “Here’s our route so far,” said their father, his finger tracing a road through the Atlas Mountains. “After the Tizi-n-Tichka pass, we’ll be driving downhill out of the mountains and across the Drâa Valley.” His finger hovered over a line of tiny dots, and Zagora grew excited, seeing that one town was marked Zagora. “We can stop in Zagora for a break. I’ll show you the famous sign there.”

  “Great, Dad, I can’t wait to see it,” she said, smiling. The town of Zagora was old, she knew, dating back to the thirteenth century, with caravan routes from the Sahara winding around it.

  Duncan tapped a black X that was in the middle of nowhere on the map. “This can’t be Zahir—there’s no road to get there!”

  “Roads don’t last long in the desert,” replied their father. “They get swept away.”

  “That’s where the camels come in,” said Zagora, grinning.

  “You know, if we were normal tourists, we’d rent a four-wheel drive Jeep with super swamper tires—but I guess the Pym family isn’t what you’d call normal,” grumbled Duncan. He looked at Zagora. “No way I’m riding a smelly old camel.”

  “But camels are so cool, Dunkie.” When was he going to shape up? Zagora wondered if her brother was tough enough to go to the desert.

  “Chebakia?” said a voice.

  She looked up to see a barefoot boy with copper skin and a jaunty smile. Dressed in baggy shorts and a T-shirt patterned with guitars, he carried a tray with glasses of mint tea and a plate of steaming pastries, kicking up dust as he scuffed along. He seemed awfully young to be a waiter.

  “Right here, buddy,” said Duncan, thumping the table in front of him.

  I wish my brother wouldn’t act so ridiculous, thought Zagora. It’s embarrassing.

  The boy placed the chebakia in the center of the table. He looked to be around her age, and his black hair, sticking out in fuzzy knots, was even messier than hers. She could see nicks on his elbows, scars on his knees and dirt between his toes. His eyes were dark, bordering on mysterious: the kind of eyes that held secrets. A real cool misfit type.

  Their father took a bite of chebakia. “Très délicieux. Delicious,” he said.

  The boy gave a wide toothy grin. “My auntie makes this. Chebakia is everybody’s favorite.”

  Zagora thought it truly delicious, too—it tasted of honey and butter—and reached for another. If she didn’t move fast, she knew, her brother would eat them all.

  “We’ll be arriving in Sumnorum late this afternoon.” Her father folded his map with swift, precise movements. “I was unable to arrange a guide ahead of time, but I’m sure we can find one in Sumnorum. So plan to leave for the desert early tomorrow morning.”

  “Fantastic, Dad!” said Zagora, jumping up and hugging her father. “This is going to be so amazing!”

  It was hard to believe this was happening. For so long she’d envisioned going to the des
ert—all those imaginary treks she’d taken on imaginary camels as she’d conjured up ancient cities lost beneath the sand—and now her dream of Zahir was becoming a reality.

  “Hey, there goes that turquoise spray-painted car again,” said Duncan, finishing off the last piece of chebakia. “You don’t think anybody could be following us, do you?”

  “No. No, of course not,” said their father, looking a bit pale. Zagora had a funny feeling he might still be worried about Olivia’s henchmen. “Time to pay the bill,” he said, pushing back his chair, “then we can get back on the road.” He headed for the café, Duncan loping after him.

  Zagora looked at the boy, who was standing beneath an orange tree, turning a beetle over with his toes. Around him the ground was littered with feathers, crumpled napkins, melon rinds and rusty cans. She noticed holes in his shorts, and the way his big toe overlapped the one next to it.

  “You are going to Zahir?” he asked, giving her a curious look. “Nobody lives in Zahir.” He flicked the beetle into the air with his big toe. “It is a strange and dangerous place.”

  “I know that,” she said, a bit defensively. “You’re like the millionth person to say that.”

  “Things happen in Zahir, things nobody can explain,” the boy went on. “My cousin’s falcon was attacked there and was badly hurt.”

  “Oh, that’s really sad,” said Zagora, who hated to see animals of any kind suffer. “But we have to go to Zahir to find my father’s old friend. He was missing in the desert for eleven years! We’re sort of on a quest to rescue him.”

  The boy listened with a grave intensity, as if he’d heard this kind of thing before. “Many travelers are lost in the desert—and many never come back. Your friend is lucky.” Using a stick, he drew a squiggly line in the dust, stirring up insects. “Here is the road to the desert. And here is Zahir.” He marked an X in the dust, just as her father had done on his Kummerly & Frey map. “I hear many things about Zahir, and always they give me nightmares. My uncle Jamal says unnatural creatures live there, and he is not the kind of man who tells stories.”