The men in black hauled Samir towards the steps beneath the colonnade. He was shouting, screaming oaths. Black tears running with kohl streamed down my face.
The Emir turned back to me and spat on the ground, the spray touching my feet.
Yasmeen came forward with a robe she wrapped around my shoulders. As the men urged me across the courtyard, she bent swiftly, retrieved the St Christopher and pushed it into my palm.
One of the men grabbed an oil lamp and I was hurried down the steps to the cellars I had explored during my long wait for Samir. I was shoved into the first cell. The man leading the way placed the lamp in the corner and I was grateful for the light that he left behind, for this mote of human kindness. The door closed behind them and I heard the metallic rasp of the bolt sliding into place.
There was no escape. I wilted into the straw mattress and wept the night through. Were they going to kill me? Behead me? Cut me in pieces and feed me to the jackals? All night I lay without sleep clutching the St Christopher waiting to find out.
Eleven
The Sahara
IT WAS UMAH WHO unlocked the door. He was carrying my one set of clothes, the white hijab, pantaloons, the long cloth he turned neatly into a turban. He gave me a pita stuffed with meat and rice.
‘Eat,’ he whispered.
He smoothed the robe Yasmeen had given me around my shoulders and tucked in the folds. I ate quickly like a prisoner not knowing when I might eat again.
Umah never said another word. He carried the lamp, long extinguished, and I followed him up the stairs. The Emir and his men were smoking as the waited beside the black-windowed vehicles, the word Nissan in shiny chrome letters on the back of each one. The men were armed with Kalashnikovs and looked like revolutionaries with belts of cartridges across the chests.
As I crossed the courtyard, the yellow parakeets rose into the air and swept down in a circle.
I heard Samir’s voice.
‘Chengi. Chengi.’
He appeared, racing along the walkway behind the battlements.
‘Chengi, I come. I come,’ he cried.
‘Samir …’
One of the men grabbed my arm. As he was bundling me into one of the cars, Samir climbed up on the narrow wall and summoned up more words of English.
‘Chengi. You wait.’
I pulled away from the man and ran back across the courtyard. Samir was leaning over so far I thought he was going to fall and I wanted to be up there with him, behind the door with its brass spider guarding the lock, in the tower with its twelve windows and long memories. Tears filled my eyes.
‘You wait,’ he cried.
‘I will wait, Samir.’
A smile touched his lips. ‘Habibi,’ he said.
An arm went around my waist, a hand clasped my mouth. I was carried kicking and finally thrown into the back of the vehicle. The driver was already seated. The Emir got in the front and the automatic locks clicked into place. The other men, eight of them, climbed into the other two cars and our driver took the central position as our convoy sped out of the gate. The red fort quickly disappeared behind me. I looked back. I kept looking and suddenly there was nothing, only dust.
The sun was in our eyes and slowly arced over the shiny black roofs of the Nissans. We drove over rutted tracks, for how long I didn’t know. I had lost the habit of thinking in hours. I watched the light change. A half a day must have passed, mile after mile of scrub and rock, scraggly trees, Arabs in file riding or leading camels or donkeys, the occasional 4x4 churning up cones of sand. The landscape was empty, biblical. Time didn’t matter here.
The Emir stared out of the window as if for some suitable place to stop, his hard profile like a face on a coin. The driver never caught my eye in the rear-view mirror. I had thought at first that they were taking me out in the desert to kill me. But you don’t drive hundreds of miles to do that. This wasn’t the end of my journey. I was in transit, between things, moving on further and further from where I had started.
A nest of low buildings appeared on the horizon. The Emir pulled out a mobile phone; it was black, sleek, state of the art, a reminder of that other world, a reminder that I had never seen Samir with the same device. The Emir mumbled a few terse words and snapped the machine shut.
We passed through a sun-bleached shanty town and where the track ran out we stopped beneath the shade of a dozen windswept palms. Four men and five camels were corralled in the shade. The men stood, they waited, lowering their heads as if royalty had come to visit. I stepped out of the car and the driver took my arm. One of the men came forward and bowed.
‘My Emir,’ he said.
‘Ali-Sayad, my good friend,’ the Emir responded; the two men did the heart touching greeting, and the Emir stood back. ‘I will remember this,’ he added.
‘Ma’assalama.’
That was it. The men with the man I now knew was Ali-Sayad took the hobbles from the camels. The men with the Emir carried some hessian sacks from the vehicles, helped load them in the big leather panniers strapped to the animals, then returned to wait.
The Emir never looked at me. He never spoke to me. I existed only as a problem solved.
The four men, my minders, glanced at me with little interest. I was led to the smallest of the camels; it was kneeling on its forelegs and I climbed into the wide saddle. The convoy started and the engines roared as the three Nissans sped off. I looked back as if at the past and it had gone.
The sun dried my tears and I watched the shifting, drifting, constantly moving sands as the camel lurched towards the horizon. My mind was a black slate wiped clean. My throat was parched and I told myself that this journey had a purpose, that we are all continuously discarding and becoming.
It was illogical, but I was more afraid of my camel than Ali-Sayad and his three companions, men with hard eyes and weathered faces the same tawny-hued colour as the sand. They carried rifles across their backs; they wore soft leather boots and robes striped in shades of brown that billowed about them as we rode east with the sun behind us. One of the men had blue eyes and wore a moustache veined in coppery threads; the others heavy beards, heavy brows and impenetrable expressions.
It was terrifying to be alone with these men, but they were only men, after all. They would take from me what they wanted and I would remain safe. Like cattle and date palms, women are commodities. I had no reason to believe I would be harmed. Violence grows from deprivation and these men with next to nothing appeared to have everything they needed.
The silence was only broken by the occasional grunt of the camel and the rhythm of its cloven hooves, regular as a heartbeat. The desert is endless. The stillness acquires an anonymity, the predictability of things dying and dead. The rocky ground edging the Sahara quickly turns to sand. The dunes roll as far as the curve of the earth, a constantly changing ocean. The clarity of the light seems to illuminate your very being. The Sahara offers a glimpse of eternity that fixes you in the present and removes the context of time. Hours and days come and go, all the same, pale skies and sand, black skies and stars.
I did not regret swimming away from La Gomera, nor leaving Spain with Samir. We only regret what we do not do, not what we do. Perhaps my one misgiving was deceiving the sheikh with the boy. But perhaps not. One of the joys of love is the certainty of betrayal. Like the snake and the scorpion, denizens of the desert, treachery, I had learned, was my true nature. Within my imperfections, I had loved Samir. He was my first love. Probably my last. Like Maysoon, I learned not to think about the future.
The landscape at first seemed to be the same, rolling dunes on an endless sea. But my eyes acclimatised to the infinitesimal changes, the low mountains that grew as we drew closer, a lone tree, a bird.
We approached a settlement clinging to the shade of soaring cliffs and filled the goatskin bags with water. Ali-Sayad paid the man who controlled the well with a couple of hessian sacks of rice. I slipped down from my camel. I washed my face and the men glowered at me as
you would a thief. One of them spat and I was reminded of the old men who had disapproved of me from the moment I had arrived at the red fort.
Ali-Sayad said something and Hussein, the man who had spat, the one with blue eyes, levered me brusquely back into the saddle. We journeyed on, leaving the scant shade of the oasis, tenuous home to an enduring population of desert people, the last in the line of men who left behind no tomb nor tool, just scattered bones crumbling to dust. The people lived in huts made of reeds. They cultivated cypress and olives, pink laurel and lavender, the smell of things growing embracing my senses like flowers at a funeral.
The men I was with never spoke to me and seldom spoke to each other. The sun carved its path across the empty sky. It had been cool by the coast, but the Sahara takes little heed of the seasons. It is always hot. The camels lope along in an ungainly way. They are known as the ships of the desert and that’s the feeling you get rocking backwards and forwards in the same slow, unchanging rhythm. Sweat poured from my body. The top of my head was baked beneath the folds of the turban. I kept the loose tail of the fabric over my nose, covering my face, blinking away the showers of sand blown up by vagrant winds and the camels before me.
We stopped at sunset at the foot of a range of low hills. Ali-Sayad and his men conjured up small twigs from the sand and lit a fire they kept going with camel dung. They fed and watered the camels. They fed and watered me. The sky was pierced by a billion stars and I watched the celestial display as Ali-Sayad stripped off my clothes. I laid back on a coarse blanket and he entered me as if this were something he should do but did with little interest. I was neither wet nor dry, aroused nor frigid. This was what I did. This was my gift, and I accepted his blunt cock inside me as the palm accepts the wind and the calm with equanimity. I closed my eyes. I thought of Samir’s marble penis nudging my clitoris and took what infinitesimal pleasure there was to be had.
The other men, those men without names, took their turn to leave their semen in my mouth, my vagina, across my belly. They were not brutal or unkind, nor tender and loving. I wasn’t raped. I wasn’t hurt. Hussein came last to my blanket. He rolled me over, parted the cheeks of my bottom and drove into me like a battering ram. He grunted, he dribbled on my back, he dragged at my forearms and rode me like a wild Arabian horse that needed breaking.
There was a rage in Hussein, like Samir’s father, and with men you never know if the violent way in which they take you is a punishment for something you have done to upset them, or if there is something in their lives that you know nothing about, some anguish or doubt or disappointment. A tension runs through their bodies, you can feel it as they take their revenge on your yielding flesh. Hussein pushed into my back passage as if he were trying to cut me in two and pumped out his fiery sperm in one shot like a sniper.
I dressed and pulled the blanket around me. I looked up at the stars weaving and juggling time. There was no question of trying to escape. Not here, in the desert. I would watch the stars and wait for my moment.
The nights are cold and it is a pleasure those first minutes of cool while the men take the hobbles from the camels. We continue, five shadows crossing a wasteland. The heat stokes up quickly and my sweat draws out the smell of sex. After washing my face with a handful of water, I do not wash again. The only water I take is sucked sparingly from a goatskin bag and no champagne in the best clubs of London has tasted more divine.
A single day without bathing is disagreeable. A week passes and it doesn’t bother you. Once a layer of dirt coats your skin, there’s no room for more. The filth the men leave on me doesn’t penetrate and the smell of sweat and semen is a relief from the vile odour of the camels. These couplings on bitter nights are dreary and mechanical. The men have never learned love nor found the heady delights of passion. I could have been a vinyl doll or a sheep or a hole in a piece of fruit. We mate, we sleep, we travel on.
The nights grow colder, the days hotter. The desert plays with your mind. I saw marble cities and aquamarine lakes below the colourless sky, people appearing and vanishing like smoke. I feel the weight of gravity above my head, the sun like a hammer. The Sahara is home to the last surviving nomads, but more it is a place of passage, the paths going from nowhere to nowhere.
The wind comes and goes with different names, Irifi, Ouahdj, Ghibli, each more menacing than the last. The Irifi arrives in spirals like a detachment of tornadoes; the Ouahdj burns your skin like dragon breath; the Ghibli shrieks like banshees as she beats grit into your eyes and mouth. I cover my head, I fold into myself and feel sorry for my camel making slow progress from one sandy plain to the next. I couldn’t see the desert. I was travelling into myself, into an alien geography. I had been afraid of what was going to happen to me, but my fear had passed. I was a precious resource like the diminishing supply of water.
We stopped at rocky hills that seemed to mark a border and I knew we were leaving Mauritania when Ali-Sayad pointed into the windstorm and said in French Il y a Mali.
We sheltered in a cave. The men made tea and Ali-Sayad took a flaming torch to show me the paintings on the walls, hippopotamus, ostrich, giraffe, creatures that must have lived there in prehistoric times when the desert was savannah and jungle. He turned to me with a grin that seemed devilish in the thin light. He asked me if I liked the drawings and I told them they were marvellous, a lasting gift.
‘Nous allons à Mali? I then asked. We are going to Mali?
He nodded. ‘Mali,’ he replied. ‘À Timbuktu.’
‘Et après Timbuktu?’
He shrugged. He didn’t know where I was going. My fate awaited me.
He strolled back to the camels and whistled cheerfully to the other men. Ali-Sayad had proudly shown me the rock paintings and, that night, he would leave his sperm in my vagina. It was perfectly natural for these men to treat me as a chattel, and in that empty world of wind and sand, it seemed normal to me, too. What we think of as normal is constantly changing, the widow remarries, the banker goes bankrupt. Like the waves on the sea, motion and change is the natural state, that in the end it is only change that we can trust and we hold fast to permanence at our peril.
The Ouahdj had dropped. I watched my camel sucking at the dry grasses through rubbery lips before scything off the tufts with vicious teeth. I wasn’t sure that she was a she but, with her sad eyes and faint squint, I had named her Yasmeen and she responded to the name. Yasmeen kept chewing as we continued. She peed and plopped out date-sized pellets of poo and I moved with her rhythm.
From the foothills, it is a brutal climb over sulphur-coloured slices of rock studded with mirrors of anthracite. The camel’s load swayed precariously and I wondered what it was the men moved from the coast and traded in the desert – salt, rice, guns, girls?
Where there are hills there are clouds, a greater likelihood of rain and a few desperate trees and flowers. We descended from the heights on a ladder trail and crossed a plateau paved with gigantic black slabs of petrified carbon. The sky is pallid. The sun remains all but motionless for many hours, burning my hands, burning my retina, shrivelling the spider disappearing beneath the stubble claiming my pubic mount.
The sun is pitiless, relentless, the sun and the wind a level of purgatory Dante never knew because you must cross the Sahara to know this hell on earth. My skin is as dry as parchment, stretched tight as a drum. I am ready to burst into flame. My body tingles and itches. My teeth ache. Sand enters every crevice. My mind swims and I see a misty picture of that girl shedding her clothes to cross the sea. I see water everywhere, gushing rivers and pounding surf, Jacuzzi whirlpools, Lake Windermere, the showers at school. I am on the edge of delirium and think of Samir as I press my eyes tightly shut.
Chengi, I come. I come.
The heat is furnace hot, searing, scorching, mind-numbing, uninterrupted and my heart bursts with relief when I see in the sky traces of pink as the sun dips into the horizon and sheds an orange glow over the empty landscape. I feel as if I have been delivered from an orde
al, heated on a brazier, beaten with hammer blows and stronger as a result.
The men did not come to my blanket that night. We ate little, we drank all the water in the goatskin bags and I slept drained and exhausted.
The desert next day gave way to tree scattered savannah. I saw huge termite mounds and squat baobab trees that reminded me of being a girl of twelve and reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. When the first buildings came into view the sound of the yellow parakeets brought a piercing, poignant moment of sorrow to my heart.
We reached a town I would learn was called Ségou. It clings to the banks of the Niger, the wide, sluggish brown river that winds its way into the dark heart of Africa. Ségou smelled of sewers, diesel and fish. I saw in the distance a water tower topped by a flag and the dome of a mosque. There were the usual traders selling CDs, red pottery and rifles. In places where there is little food, no sanitation or roads, schools or housing, you find cell phones and the most sophisticated weaponry in the world.
We dismounted beside the river and the camels dipped their heads into the flow. Their pink tongues were like scoops drawing at the surface of the water, they drank without haste and were surprising graceful.
We were joined by a tall, ebony-skinned man in a crocheted skullcap and a white burnoose. He was closely-shaved with smooth features. He slapped fingertips with Ali-Sayad, but his bright eyes had fallen on me. The man, his name was Mustaf, led my camel into a corral where two horses chewed at the grass on the river bank. The others followed. They hobbled the animals, then gathered to drink tea in the shade beneath a copse of palms.
When Ali-Sayad and Mustaf started to raise their voices I knew they were in negotiation and I had a feeling that it wasn’t the cost of stabling the camels they were discussing. They reached an agreement and my four travelling companions returned to their places beneath the trees.
Mustaf waggled his finger. ‘Vous venez,’ he commanded, and I followed him into the tin-roofed hut.
Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) Page 19
