by Jane Johnson
He shook his head. ‘It’s Tifinagh, the written form of the language of the desert tribes, kept alive by the women of the Tuareg, the Kel Tamacheq. But can I read it?’ He shook his head. ‘My family has Tuareg roots, but those who could read the Tifinagh are long since buried.’
‘Not even your grandmother?’ I saw the old woman craning her neck to see what we had found; her eyes were wide, as if she knew something but was keeping it to herself. Then she put up her hands as if to ward off evil influences, turned and walked away. We both watched her duck under the low doorway into the courtyard outside and disappear from view.
15
Mariata avoided Amastan’s company after his hard confession. She could think of nothing to say to him. Why could she not find the right words? Why could she not respond to the huge sacrifice he had made in opening up to her? What sort of poet was she; more, what sort of woman? Her failure to speak was causing him a new order of pain: she could see it in the way he gazed at her, then glanced quickly away; always the shade of Manta shimmered between them. Mariata imagined her as she must have been, vital and full of confidence; prettier than most, a bit of a rebel, not afraid to kiss a young man she liked, willing to trust her heart to him even though she hardly knew him. In other words, a girl rather like herself. And making this connection made it even more difficult to go to Amastan: in some strange way to do so seemed a betrayal of the dead woman and the tragic love she and he had shared.
About a week later Amastan left with a group of hunters heading north to look for game for the wedding feast for Leïla and Kheddou. For the first few days she was relieved not to bear the constant reminder of his presence, but soon after that she began to miss him so badly she felt as if her heart would calcify if she did not set eyes on him again soon. As if by way of revenge for this yearning, Manta insinuated herself into Mariata’s dreams night by night, waking her in a sweat. She heard a disembodied voice; saw the decapitated body moving of its own accord; the head rolling to her feet, opening its mouth to reveal within the bloodied amulet Mariata now wore around her neck …
One morning Rahma came to sit beside her as she pummelled the dough for the day’s tagella.
‘You look tired, daughter.’
Mariata had to admit she was not sleeping well.
‘It has been hotter than usual,’ Rahma conceded with a half-smile that told Mariata she knew very well there was more to it than that. When once more she raised the matter of her son taking the salt road, Mariata smacked the dough down hard. ‘I do not think your son is ever going back to the caravans.’
Rahma stopped brushing the dust and sand from the proving stone and looked intently at Mariata. ‘What has he said to you? Has he told you what happened to Manta yet?’
Even the name was like a knife to her, but she said nothing. It was not her tale to tell, even if she could bear to tell it.
Rahma pressed on. ‘I think we must find out; but it is you who will need to ask him; he has always kept secrets from me, even as a child. When his uncle gave him a knife when he was five, he concealed it in the sand behind the tent, lest I found it and took it from him. When he hurt his knee playing with the older boys he was too proud to tell me about it in case I stopped him from playing with them any more: the congealed blood stuck to his breeches and he hid it from me for a week, until the cotton had grown into the wound. He bears the scar still.’ She looked sad. ‘Promise me, Mariata, that you will find out. Promise me, for both our sakes.’
Mariata regarded her curiously. ‘Why do you ask this of me?’
‘I have seen the way you look at him –’ She waved a hand to flick away the girl’s denial. ‘We both love him. When he returns to us, I will do what I can to help you in this, and you will do what you can to help me, and between us Amastan shall have what he needs.’
‘And that is what?’
Rahma watched her with hooded eyes. ‘He will stay here with us both and raise the family that will be the making of him and give him the hope he needs to remake his world.’
‘I do not think he is ready to do this,’ Mariata said warily. ‘In fact, I am quite sure he is not, with me or anyone else.’
‘Then we shall have to make sure that events overtake him,’ Rahma said, and folded her lips.
Guests began to arrive for the marriage from the surrounding area, from as far away as Tafadek and Iferouane: aunts and cousins, brothers and uncles and old friends. Resources were stretched to feed and accommodate them: some of the precious goats were slaughtered, chickens too, though the older people would not eat them, regarding them as taboo. As sweetmeats, a dish of locusts cooked and coated in sugar was prepared – a special treat.
Some days later the hunters returned with a number of rabbits, many of the pretty speckled fowl that ran wild in the hills and two gazelles they had chased down on the plateau above the village. The elderly ram that had that day been earmarked for slaughter if the hunters returned empty-handed was reprieved. The men of the village joked about this and one of them hung a leather amulet around its neck to ensure it was blessed with baraka, and everyone was in fine spirits. Everyone, that is, except for Rahma and Mariata, for Amastan had not returned with the group. He had, the hunters said, gone his own way, but they did not know where.
Mariata tried to throw herself into the preparations for the marriage celebration, but her heart was not in it. She spent the morning baking loaf after loaf of bread: pummelling the dough, proving it on the sun-warmed bread-stones, keeping fire after fire alight till the embers were glowing, laying the embers of each fire aside and placing the dough into the hot sand beneath the fires to cook with the glowing charcoal replaced on top; then turning the loaves halfway through the cooking time. It was a process that required concentration, and, even though Amastan’s absence had left an unfillable hollow within her, she was meticulous in the bread-making and won praise even from the wizened old women who had been preparing bridal loaves for half a century.
In the afternoon, when it was too hot to prepare food or move around in the burning sun, the women took to the tents, to sleep and gossip and select their clothing and jewellery for the night ahead, and to apply their kohl and henna; while the men took themselves off to the shade of the trees on the other side of the encampment.
While Nofa painted the bride’s hands and feet with flames and flowers of henna paste, Leïla begged Mariata to braid her hair in the Hoggar style, which seemed glamorous and outlandish to the women of the Kel Teggart. Hours passed in a comfortable haze of plaiting and chatter, and once they had seen the results all the other single girls clamoured for similar treatment, but Mariata waved them away. ‘This is only for the bride: how will she feel herself to be special if you all look the same?’ They looked so disappointed that in the end she relented and rebraided some of the youngest girls’ hair in a different fashion. Her fingers were sore before she got to the end of the jostling queue and found there Idrissa, four years old and determined not to miss out on whatever excitement his older sister was a part of. ‘Me,’ he demanded. ‘I want my hair done too.’
Tired and heartsore though she was, Mariata had to hide a smile. Like all the other infants in the tribe, he had a single braid that sprouted from the top of his shaved head, and she took hold of it. ‘But, Idrissa, if I braid your hair flat against your head like your sister’s, how will the angels catch you if you fall?’
He looked thoughtful; then sly. ‘Do my hair like Tarichat’s and I promise I’ll be careful not to fall. Then you can redo it for me tomorrow.’
All the girls laughed. ‘He’ll be a trader, this one.’
‘Already he strikes a hard bargain,’ Mariata agreed. ‘But you know, Idrissa, that if I do your hair like Tarichat’s you’ll look like a girl and all the other boys will laugh at you.’
Idrissa considered this solemnly, then declared, ‘I don’t want to look like a girl.’ And with that he was off, laughing and shouting, to hurl himself into a noisy game the other boys were playing with do
gs and sticks on the far side of the goat-pens.
Mariata was still smiling as she walked out into the enclosure, until she became aware that someone was watching her. She turned. Behind her were the women’s tents, loud with laughter; but everyone was engaged in their happy tasks and paid her no attention. To her right were the animal pens and the playing children; to her left, the deserted olive grove; in front of her, the area where the men of the tribe were drinking tea, smoking and talking. No one looked her way. The prickling sensation came over her again, and she turned back to the olive grove. Very slowly, as if interpreting some lost language, her eyes made out the still form of a tall figure, his dark robes a pool of shadow against the silver-green foliage. Her pulse raced suddenly: even at such a distance it was impossible not to recognize Amastan. Why was he just standing there, watching her? All around there was the buzz and hubbub of the wedding preparations: people laughing and singing, carrying pots and cooking implements, food and rugs and drums towards the feast-ground. He was an outsider looking in, an isolated still point amidst the bustle. Mariata felt her heart drawn to him as if on a wire. I must go to him, she thought. I must talk to him, heal the rift between us, on this day of all days. She trembled on the edge of her decision; and someone stepped in front of her. It was Tana, her hands still bloody from dressing the meat.
‘Don’t,’ she said, staring intently down at Mariata.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t go to him. Leave him be.’
‘I was doing nothing,’ Mariata said, unnerved. How could the enad know her mind? Her hand went to the amulet under her robe.
Nothing escaped Tana’s sharp eyes. ‘I see it is already too late. Well, that talisman won’t help you, and it’s hardly me you need to be warding away. I’ll say again: don’t go to him. No good will come of it.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I was just going to help Leïla with her jewellery.’
‘She has her sisters to help her with that.’
‘Why are you speaking to me like this, as if I were an intruder, one who has no place here?’
Tana’s gaze was black and opaque, her secrets shuttered behind it. ‘I saw death in the entrails and came to warn you straight away. You should leave. You can take my mule.’
Mariata stared at her. ‘What? Whose death did you see?’
But the enad was already walking away.
‘Where would I go?’ Mariata called after her, but the enad did not reply.
She felt hot, then cold. She had thought of Tana as a friend, another outsider who had been embraced by the tribe. But the smith’s gaze had been no more friendly than her unsettling words, despite the offer of the mule. Did she so badly want Mariata to leave the tribe? Had she really seen death in the entrails, and was that death Mariata’s own? Another thought struck her, somehow worse than the first: perhaps it was Amastan’s death that Tana had seen, and somehow she, Mariata, was the cause of it and that was why she had to leave. All through the long hours of the feasting, through the joyful music and the dancing, through the ritual abduction of the bride and the shutting of the bridal pair into Leïla’s new tent, Mariata felt the enad’s words looping back and forth in her head, making a spider’s web of thoughts in which she felt trapped like a fly. When the sun went down, she could not get warm. She found herself shivering even when she sat next to the fire, and her heart was not in the singing, which she usually loved. When she danced it was as if to a different rhythm to the other girls, to a drumbeat heard at a great distance, one that beat out a slower, more insistent tattoo. The poetry did not fall from her lips as easily as it normally did during the song-challenge: she lost her way, forgot the link-words she was supposed to follow, became tongue-tied. At one point she intercepted a glance between Yehali and Nofa that was eloquent in its exasperation. What is the matter with Mariata tonight? She can do nothing right: she is making us all look stupid! She even caught Amastan watching her quizzically, the ridge of a frown visible through the opening of his veil. At last she could bear it no longer and slipped away from the gathering. From the tent she took the few belongings with which she had come here, a goatskin for water that she was sure no one would begrudge her, and some of the bread she had made that day. Then, as if in a trance, she walked out of the encampment towards the enad’s forge and the little enclosure where she kept her mule, and at last found herself at the post to which the beast was tethered. She stared at the mule, and it stared back at her incuriously, its eyes glinting in the darkness. ‘Well, there you are, and here I am,’ Mariata whispered to it. ‘Though where we shall go who can say?’
The mule, of course, had no reply to this, but the air behind Mariata seemed to stir and then a low voice said, ‘Wherever you want to go, I will take you there,’ and when she turned around, there was Amastan, his indigo robes all of a piece with the night.
‘Do you want me to leave too?’
‘I? No.’
‘Even though I have been cruel to you?’
He said nothing to this but she thought she saw the small flame of a smile light his eyes. Night insects chirred; from the distant river the mating cries of the frogs were carried on the breeze. At last he said, ‘Cruelty and kindness; kindness and cruelty. Who can tell which is which? Toss them in the air, they are but two sides of the same coin.’
Mariata frowned. ‘Surely you have seen tonight that I am not in the right frame of mind for a game of words, or to be teased like a child.’ She took the mule’s panniers from the ground where they lay, placed them across the beast’s back and arranged her few things in them. Then, sighing, she turned back to Amastan. ‘Since I am about to leave I had better speak plainly. When I first came here, it was to help a man everyone believed was mad, a murderer possessed by the djenoun, who had in all likelihood killed his sweetheart while in the grip of evil spirits. Your mother crossed the Tamesna to find me, convinced that because of my lineage I could help; but it was soon clear there was no magic in me at all, for I couldn’t do anything for you. It was Tana who released you from the spirits, not I; and she did it for my sake, not yours. Because, you see … ah, this is so hard …’ She ran a hand over her face, and continued quickly in an almost-whisper, ‘Because, you see, it was not you she took pity on but me.’ She darted a fearful look at him to see how he would respond to this, but he gave no sign of understanding her at all. ‘And then you told me the true story of what happened … to Manta. You opened your heart to me and instead of showing you the sympathy I should have shown to one who had experienced such horrors, I ran away, like a child running from a tale of monsters! You had held those terrible memories inside you for so long, and I … ran away. I am ashamed of myself for it. Perhaps I am not as grown up as I thought, but, even so, you should not tease me like a child.’
‘The effect you have on me is not that of a child, I can assure you,’ Amastan said gravely. ‘Indeed, you disturb me.’
‘I disturb you?’
‘I was safe in my darkness, hidden from all. No one could touch me there; and my demons were my shield from the world. And then you came and struck through that shield with the light in your eyes and the sharp words of your poetry. Tana may have released the demons, Mariata, but it was you who opened the door through which they fled. Your grace pierced me; but your silence terrified me. When you would not speak with me or even look at me, it was as if the night had come to swallow me once more. I felt there was no hope left. So when the hunters set out, I went with them. Away from you; away from the tribe, away from everything. Then I left the hunters and walked alone. I walked far, without food, without water, and waited for death to come to me. But while I sat there, waiting, I saw that the world went on around me as if I were insignificant in it; no more important than a stick or a stone. Rock-squirrels ran around me, burying the nuts they had gathered and watering them to mark their cache; but while I sat still they thought of me as no more than an inanimate obstacle they had to run around. A lizard skittered past on feet that moved so fast they
barely touched the hot ground, and I saw before it did the viper that darted out from between the boulders and caught it in its jaws. When night fell, I lay on my back and watched the stars wheel overhead, watched the Guide with his three-starred stick shepherding the constellations across the heavens, and felt both as great and as small as one of those specks of life. And I realized there was probably nothing I could have done to save Manta; no magic that would have kept her death from her, that the plan of the universe is too great for one man to rearrange, that maybe there is no such thing as the world of the spirits, of magic or curses, and that these are things that men speak of in fear because they cannot accept the harsh truth: that death and danger are around us all the time, and there is nothing we can do to ward them off. That life is hard and short and vicious, but the stars – those tiny jewels of light up there amongst the darkness – they go on for ever. And perhaps it is where we go too, when all is done. Do you believe that, Mariata? Do we become stars when we die, little specks of brilliance in a relentless field of black? Or do we just go into the ground and rot?’
Mariata stared at him unhappily, not sure what to say. For a moment it seemed as though his mind had been turning towards her, towards matters of the heart and things that might be understood and discussed between a man and a woman. But then he had veered away into a dangerous quicksand. She had been raised to believe in the spirits – the djenoun in all their varied forms. To discuss them so was surely tantamount to inviting them to appear in numbers, and at this time of the night, it would not be the good djenoun who would be visiting but the Kel Asuf, the People of the Wilderness, those who seduced the minds of the living away from their families and the safety of the campfires to become as jackals, feral scavengers of the wilds; the afrits and demons, spirits of the night; the ghûls, those vengeful spirits of the wronged and the damned, which haunted the sites of their untimely deaths, hungry for others’ pain to assuage their own; the qareen, the personal demons ever ready to whisper wicked desires into the fertile mind and lead the good soul astray.
