‘Yes,’ Fahal hissed, ‘but we are Ulad al-Mizna ... and anyway, the night is on our side.’
Fahal looked instinctively at his brother. Taha considered it for a moment, then said, ‘We should take only the camels that have wandered furthest from the camp. We will sneak up and unhobble them, then drive them off silently. Let us leave the rest. Twenty-five camels are too many for us, anyway.’
‘I should have liked to see them walk home!’ Auwra chuckled.
‘By God,’ Quddam said. ‘This is folly. They are too many.’
‘Think of the songs the clan will make up about us if we succeed,’ Fahal whispered. ‘They will speak of us in hushed voices.’
‘I’m thinking of Latif,’ Taha said. ‘Of his wife and children, and the camels these devils stole from the Znaga —our camels.’
‘He’s right,’ Auwra told his brother. ‘It is our duty to avenge Latif.’
Quddam shook his head, realizing he was outvoted and that he ran the risk of being called ‘cautious’. ‘All right then,’ he said.
The Delim had made camp in a shallow dry wash the Arabs called an ‘elbow’, full of tamarisk and acacia, and the camels had spread along it, browsing the shrubs. The four Reguibat crawled and monkey-ran silently, making cunning use of the shadows, until they were among the bushes on the western side. As they caught their breath among the trees, Fahal made a stabbing gesture with his finger. Not ten steps away, a large, fat-humped she-camel was feeding on a bush. Fahal pointed at himself, and began to crawl stealthily towards the she-camel. He reached her and crouched between her front legs, trying to undo the knot in her foreleg hobble. The others watched tensely, all attention on Fahal now. He pulled the hobble free, and at that moment the she-camel let out a deafening roar, hawing like a dissatisfied donkey. She skipped forward, kicking her back legs, knocking Fahal aside. He rolled in the dust, grabbed for his rifle and turned to run. Suddenly there were guttural shouts and shadows streaming through the dry wash. Shots rang out, a salvo of fire more intense than anything Taha had ever heard. Tree branches crashed and rattled, bullets whined off stones, Fahal grunted and fell. Footsteps padded in the sand, harsh voices approached.
Taha fixed his sights on one of the flickering shadows and fired. His old rifle kicked and slapped orange flame, and the shadow vanished. The others kept coming, but more cautiously now. Taha saw Quddam taking aim and shouted, ‘Don’t shoot. Save it!’ He dashed forward, grabbed his brother, lifted him onto his shoulder by an arm and leg and ran. More crisp shots exploded behind them like rocks cracking in the heat; Taha couldn’t tell how many. Rounds yawed and fizzed past him. He was vaguely aware of Quddam and Auwra running beside him, and the panting of his own breath as he struggled with Fahal’s weight. In a moment they were back at their camels, and Taha tried to tie Fahal to one of them with rope. ‘I’m all right!’ Fahal gasped groggily. ‘I can ride!’
His brother’s face was ashen, Taha noticed, but he let him go, and kicked his camel till it rose. Then he unhobbled the others while the two brothers stood guard. ‘They’re coming!’ Auwra bawled. There was an almighty boom as he fired, a spear of orange and a scream from the other side. Taha glanced at the lean youth as he slipped the ramrod from under the muzzle of his weapon, stuck it down the barrel and started poking the shell-case out. Just then Quddam fired another ear-splitting shot. ‘Got one, by God!’ he yelled.
Fahal was in the saddle but sagging over the horn. Taha tied his head-rope to his own saddle, and leapt onto his animal’s back. ‘Come on!’ he yelled.
The brothers jumped up and onto their camels in a few bounds. Taha was already racing away, with Fahal bouncing behind him. Flashes and the crack and thump of bullets pursued them into the darkness.
*
They did not stop until Fahal’s screams were too much to bear and they were sure no raiders were pursuing them. They couched the camels in a copse of thorn trees, amid nests of giant boulders that would give them some protection if the enemy came, and Taha helped Fahal out of the saddle and laid him gently on a sheepskin.
He had been hit in the arm, and the bone was shattered. It wasn’t a mortal wound, but he had lost a lot of blood — his dara’a was soaked in it. He apologized for screaming. At first, he said, he hadn’t been able to feel it at all, but after a while the pain had set in, and the camel’s jolting had caused the fractured bones to chafe, which had been agonizing. Unless the arm was set properly and treated soon, he might lose the use of it. ‘And all for a stupid she-camel,’ he choked. ‘Never trust a female!’
In the wan moonlight, Taha examined the smashed arm as well as he could, and saw that there were two wounds — an entry and an exit. ‘May God protect us!’ he exclaimed. ‘The bullet passed right through.’
‘They were using Mothers-of-Ten-Shots,’ Quddam said.
‘No,’ Taha said, ‘the fire was too rapid. I have never heard fire as fast as that.’
‘We didn’t stand a chance,’ Auwra said. ‘So much for “hushed voices”. We’ll never hear the end of it.’
‘I hit one of them,’ Quddam said eagerly.
‘I think I did too,’ said Auwra.
‘You think they will come after us?’ Taha asked.
‘Not now, not till morning at least,’ Fahal groaned. ‘They’re in hostile territory — and besides, they drove us off.’
Taha searched for his brother’s pouch of evil-smelling ointment and began smearing it carefully on the crippled arm. Then he took out his knife and cut some lengths of green wood from a bush, stripping them of their bark-fibre, which he used to strap on the splint while his brother grunted and gritted his teeth.
‘Where did you learn to do that?’ Auwra asked.
‘My father taught me,’ Taha said. ‘Belhaan.’
When the splint was fixed, the youths sat down and drank water from a skin — Fahal first. ‘You have to take Fahal back to camp,’ Taha told the brothers. ‘He needs proper treatment from our father.’
‘What about you?’ Quddam demanded.
‘I’m staying,’ Taha said. ‘Belhaan told us to stay with the enemy and one of us has to do it.’
‘You must come back, Brother,’ Fahal choked. ‘Return with us. Father will be angry with you.’
Taha felt an unexpected strength flowing through him. He had been on his own in the desert many times. He had brought back the bezoar stones; he had killed the Twisted One: all his training in the desert had prepared him for this.
‘It needs two to get you back to the camp,’ he said. ‘Father may be angry, but he will also understand that I am a man, and a man must follow his own path. Besides, I am not alone. God will be my companion.’
*
For five days Taha followed the trail, sleeping close by his camel at night, living on the water in his goatskin and on bread baked in the sand under the embers of the fire. Twice he tracked hares to their burrows and bopped them on the head with his club; once he dug a fennec out of its lair. He saw dorcas gazelle in the distance and even Hubara bustard, whose meat was tender and delicious; but he had only five rounds for his rifle and didn’t want to waste any of them.
Being alone did not bother Taha. The long silences did not overwhelm him; indeed he relished the opportunity to become absorbed into the elemental tranquillity of the landscape. It was not empty — it resonated with the spirits of times past, the millions of souls who had crossed over it and through it from the dim reaches of the Time Before Time. Neither was it alien. The landscape had a familiar logic to it: regs — flat and stony desert plains — of wind-graded sediment with saltwort bush that not only provided fodder for goats and camels, but also stored dew in tiny reservoirs; pillow dunes or sbar with tamarisks in wind-scooped hollows, and white-spined acacias; grassy savannas that were home to the gazelle, the addax, the oryx and the wild boar. And almost every bit of it had been a camp, a hearth, a home at some time in the past — a place where ancestors had been born, lived rich lives, and died, their bodies giving substance to
the land, giving way to new blooms. It did not matter to Taha that he was an adopted son of the land — he belonged to it, it was part of him. Life was like a wave, he thought, now ebbing back far into the distance, now flowing strong and powerful, but never fading out completely. Every day he came across sights that gave him a sense of connection with the eternal community of time: a primitive burial mound of a pattern unknown to the People of the Clouds, ancient runes on a rock, once a rare ibex scampering up a steep slope in the distance, and once a flight of cranes, so many that the sky was black with them, and the whole desert seemed filled with the swish of their wings.
On the morning of the fifth day, though, it was the circling of vultures in the near distance that drew his attention, and as he rode nearer he saw that they were of two kinds — the large black vulture and the smaller yellow-headed race — sweeping, dipping and banking in continuous play. As he topped a swell in the desert surface, an ugly sight met his eyes. There, in the dish-shaped depression beneath him, a family of six lemha had been butchered, their dark winter coats ripped and slashed by the carrion eaters to expose the ruby-coloured flesh beneath. He slipped from his camel to get a closer look, and a squad of vultures flapped away, gobbling and cackling in protest. The antelopes were lying in pools of blood and guts — a large bull, three cows and a couple of calves, all with spiral horns, white faces and tufts of dark hair on the forehead.
The carcasses had not been carved up for meat, merely left to rot, but each had been peppered with bullets — in the neck, head, and even the rump, as if they had been used for target practice. The sight sickened Taha. The nomads shot the lemha, or addax, occasionally for meat, or in dire need to drink the water from its stomach. But since nomad weapons had only one shot, the antelope had a more-than-even chance of escape and the hunter needed great skill. This purposeless killing was a crime akin to murder.
As he turned away from the sight in disgust, he noticed that the tracks of the Delim intruders had paused here. Men had couched their camels and dismounted to inspect the carcasses. There could be little doubt that this was the work of the Delim and their powerful new rifles. Taha groped for some explanation as to why a desert people should have desecrated these animals, but could not explain it.
He led his nervous camel away, clearing the lip of the depression, and couched it to remount. He had slung his rifle from the saddle and was about to cock his leg over when the animal snorted and jerked up prematurely: Taha had to skip backwards to avoid being sent sprawling. Just then there was the crack of a rifle shot, and Taha felt the shockwave of a bullet as it zapped past him, burning air. He let go of the camel’s head-rope and fell flat. The animal raced off, carrying his rifle with it. Taha crawled up behind some sedge and drew his dagger. Below him half a dozen men had sprung out of the earth itself — dwarf-like men in shapeless, dust-coloured cloths, with rags of the same shade over their heads, like hoods. Taha realized the men had been there all the time, lying flat with their coverings over them, blending in perfectly with the sage bushes and stones. His eyes, keen as they were, had not picked them out. They were not Delim. The men were fair-skinned but quite distinct in appearance from the nomads, with hairy hands, thick-bearded faces and large, splayed feet. They were pointing well-oiled rifles his way, and they looked angry.
Taha knew they were Nemadi, the almost-legendary hunting people who ranged immense distances on foot across the desert, with their dogs and donkeys. They were the best shots and trackers in the Sahara, capable of following spoor for days without food or water. They had no camels and did not live in tents as the nomads did, neither did they keep goats or sheep. They were said to be a very ancient folk, the direct descendants of the Bafour. It was said that the Nemadi were skilled herbalists and medicine men, whose knowledge of the properties of desert plants and animals was unequalled even by the marabouts. Taha had once heard a story of how a Nemadi hunter had sucked the venom from the foot of an Arab woman who had been bitten by a puff adder, a treatment unknown to the nomads. The woman had survived.
Taha also knew the little men had been trying to kill him and that he’d been saved only by the nervousness of his camel, and the protection of the spirits. He did not know why the hunters wanted him dead, but, small as they were, he knew he wasn’t capable of killing all six with his dagger.
He slipped it back into its sheath. When the Nemadi were within fifty paces of him, he stood up suddenly holding his hands high. ‘I am Taha ould Belhaan of the Ulad al-Mizna,’ he cried.
The little men halted, but did not fire. One of them stepped forward, a squat but immensely powerful-looking man, who moved with dignity and grace despite his dwarfish appearance. ‘I am Bes,’ he said in a high-pitched voice. ‘And my name means no more to you than yours to me. I see only one of the camel-folk, the “hook-noses”; the same folk who slaughtered the lemha for cruelty alone. You deserve to die for what your people have done here.’
He spoke Hassaniyya with an odd inflection, using archaic words and expressions, and with a curiously grave tone that Taha found slightly comical. But there was nothing comical about the six rifle-muzzles pointing at him, and from what he’d heard of the Nemadi they weren’t likely to miss. It was said a Nemadi hunter could hit a running gazelle at three hundred paces. Taha knew he was trapped. His missing finger-joint began to throb suddenly.
‘I had nothing to do with this carnage,’ he said. ‘It was done by my enemies the Ulad Delim. I have been tracking them for ten days, almost since they entered our territory. Five days ago they shot and wounded my brother — I continued after them alone.’
Another man, leaner and younger-looking than Bes, stepped forward, whipping off his hood to reveal a broad, pug nose that looked as if it had been squashed, and a bald pate. ‘Ulad this, Ulad that,’ he said. ‘You are all of one folk — hook-noses, with your big camels and your goats that go gobbling up the ranges. What squabbles you are having between you are no concern of ours. Hook-noses are hook-noses, sir. As for the land being your land, the hunting-folk were living here long, long before your hook-nose grandfathers came. Before there were camels here. When the land was still green and rivers running. This is not your land, sir, it is the land of the Great God.’
Taha nodded, realizing that he would have to choose his words carefully. His fate hung in the balance.
‘God knows, you are right,’ he said. ‘Only these men have killed more than the lemha. They have killed defenceless people under our protection — women and children, too. They have powerful weapons — look at the damage they have done to the lemha. Could I have wreaked such havoc with my poor old one-shot gun? They have guns that fire many bullets without needing to be reloaded, guns made by the Christians. If they are allowed to escape, they may wipe out all the lemha in the desert, and God knows they are already few.’
Taha stopped for breath. Bes halted one pace in front of him, and Taha saw that his eyes were green, not blue-grey or brown like those of the nomads. The little hunter peered into Taha’s face. ‘Words,’ he said. ‘You camel-folk are skilled at weaving them, but we hunting-folk see the deeper language, the language of the earth.’
Taha did not flinch, knowing that death faced him now. ‘I speak truth,’ he said simply.
Bes hesitated. ‘It is true,’ he said, ‘that the lemha were killed with weapons we have never seen before. We have heard of Christian weapons, and of the Christians — the people of the iron chariots. They have no respect for the animals. Only two summers back some Christians in iron chariots shot eighty lemha in one hunt and took only their horns! Eighty! Enough to feed every man here and his family for a year. By the Great God, such obscenity cannot go unpunished.’
‘Kill him and be done talking,’ the bald man said. ‘He seeks to trap you with words. He is a hook-nose. He is one of them.’
Bes looked at him, then at Taha, examining his face curiously. ‘No, Hawwash,’ he said. ‘This one is strange. He is a hook-nose. He speaks their language, but there is something ... aah!�
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Bes’s eye had fallen on the severed leopard’s paw that hung around Taha’s neck — the paw of the Twisted One, mummified and withered now, and so light that Taha scarcely noticed it. The small man’s eyes opened wide as if he had had a sudden epiphany.
‘Qalb al-Kuhl,’ he gasped. ‘The Black-Hearted One. By the Great God!’ His eyes fell on Taha’s left hand and the missing finger-joint. ‘You are he!’ he said with awe in his voice. ‘He who killed the demon leopard. They said his name was Fell-From-The-Stars and that part of his small finger on the left hand was missing. You are surely he!’
Taha nodded. ‘Thank God, who guided my hand.’
Bes lowered his rifle and smiled, showing perfect white teeth. ‘My cousin was killed by that beast,’ he said. ‘You have avenged his death. I am now in your debt, sir.’
‘God was with me,’ Taha said again, scanning the other faces, seeing hesitation. Bes was evidently their leader. Only the bald Hawwash seemed unconvinced.
‘He is a hook-nose,’ he piped again. ‘I say we should kill him anyway.’
Bes glanced at him. ‘He avenged Rass,’ he said. ‘It would be a disgrace. The blessing of the Great God is upon him.’
He let his weapon drop and offered Taha a hand like a huge knot of old rope. Taha shook. ‘Come, get your animal back,’ Bes said, pointing to where Taha’s camel stood browsing in saltwort, a hundred paces away. ‘Let us leave this place of ill omen. You shall eat our poor fare with us, sir, and afterwards you shall tell us of the Black-Hearted One and how you killed her.’
*
The Nemadi had made camp in some saltwort north of the depression where the addax had been slaughtered. To Taha’s eyes it was a poor place, where a trio of bony donkeys were hobbled and animal skins had been thrown over the bushes to make low shelters, invisible until you were on them. A pack of wild-looking hunting dogs pelted towards them as they arrived, yapping and barking, only to be driven off by some fierce curses from Bes. The Nemadi had left two children to look after the animals, boys not much older than Taha’s own sons, who stared at him with wide eyes as he couched his camel. As soon as they had arrived they began to prepare the meat of a gazelle they had shot the previous day, cooking it on a pile of red-hot stones.
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