Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

  All this with Edrasi's hand on the revolver in his belt and the Tuareg's swords unsheathed.

  Jacob, struggling to gain control of this situation, recalled his study of Tamahak and stepped forward. "Matulid, " he said to the Targui, and to Edrasi, 'Tell him we've paid tribute—mouna—for safe passage and received the ghefara from his tribe to travel here."

  The Targui ignored Jacob's Tamahak greeting and spoke directly to Edrasi, who translated. I caught the words sukkar and shayy, bundegeeya and something else.

  Edrasi explained, "They want tea and sugar, rifles and two camels."

  "They want what?" said Jacob incredulously.

  "Attini, " said the Targui, holding out his hand for gifts. "Attini. "

  I looked at Jacob, who had lost his compass, his sleep, the trail to Ghadames and was struggling against heavy odds to seize control of this confrontation. To my astonishment I saw that he was livid with anger as he faced these tall skeletal men in their outlandish veils and robes with their old flintlocks and swords at their side.

  'Tell them to go, they'll get nothing," he said furiously.

  utterly blind to the fact that we were outflanked. "This is piracy, I won't have it, 1 won't have it."

  Caressa, I thought, this is what you get for marrying above your station, he must think these men are Halloween trick-or-treaters, for heaven's sake. The man has no sense. He looked very small, too, next to the Tuareg astride their camels and he wouldn't be liking that either, I thought, and—Oh damn, he's going to try and prove himself—all those colleges, all those blasted papers for his Geographical Society—

  Edrasi said patiently, "They wish tribute, sir. Rifles, a few camels, tea and sugar."

  "Ridiculous," scoffed Jacob. "We gave food to three of them who came begging only hours ago."

  "Sir, Tuareg do not beg."

  "No?" said Jacob, amused.

  Edrasi shook his head. "They demand."

  "Demand!" sputtered Jacob, outraged, and he drew his revolver out of its holster. "Unspeakable effrontery! Damn it I paid a small fortune in safe-conduct money for passage through this territory."

  Vehemently Edrasi shook his head. "No sir, you pay Ajjer Tuareg, these be Hoggar Tuareg. Mukh-ta'lif—Give now, I beg of you."

  "Bloodsuckers and blackmailers," snapped Jacob, waving his revolver wildly. 'Tell them they get nothing more from me, tell them to be off or I'll shoot."

  I shouted to him lest he not understand, "Jacob they're a different tribe, give them what they ask!"

  "Never," he shouted.

  I heard him release the safety catch on his gun and I thought, He's gone mad, he's really gone mad.

  Edrasi screamed, "Lah! Hayir, hayir! No!"

  But it was too late. Jacob—angry, stubborn Jacob— pulled the trigger and fired three times.

  Three of the Tuareg fell, one clutching his stomach, barely alive and making strange keening sounds, the other two dead as they hit the earth.

  There followed an unearthly silence and it seemed to me that even the Tuareg were in shock, never expecting this. Behind me one of our caravan men struggled to dismount from his camel but it was too late, it had been too late the minute Jacob's finger pulled the trigger. The silence ended with a great angry cry, a lashing of camels, and the Tuareg moved among us with infinite skill, their swords flashing in the sun. Heads literally rolled, and Jacob's was the first.

  I stared in horror at his head lying in the sand, his eyes still wide open. The sounds of carnage were hideous: shouts, screams, camels roaring in fright; others were falling now, too. I was stunned by the sight of steam rising from the severed heads, sickened by the reek of blood sending the camels into panic, but there was no time for thought, I was still alive beside my camel and it was my turn.

  It was damnable not to see his face, only those fierce kohl-rimmed eyes blazing at me. As he lifted his bloodstained sword with both hands I could see his muscles straining for the blow that would end my life and instinctively 1 shrank back, lifting my arm in a foolish, useless attempt to shield my head, scarcely aware that when I lifted my arm a finger of my right hand still wore a puppet.

  The sight of the clown's face on my index finger startled the Targui. "Ugarra," he snarled, taking a step back, and lowering his sword he called to a companion who came to his side. There was pointing at the wooden face on my finger, words were exchanged and then to my relief there came a fresh shout and they turned away for the moment to the men who were rounding up the camels.

  It had been cruel enough to face my own death but it was even cruder to look around me now and learn that I was the only living person left from our caravan. In the space of five minutes everything I'd known was gone: Jacob, home, past and future. Every man of them lay dead, some decapitated like Jacob, others lying on the earth with crushed skulls. A great nausea rose in me but I swallowed the vomit in my throat, determined to show no weakness. It was all of it beyond understanding until a terrible thought occurred to me. I left the shelter of my camel and began a walk among the dead, kneeling beside those who had fallen to check each face, and when 1 had identified each man— avoiding poor Jacob—I knew that Umar had not returned from the sand ridge and was not among them.

  Not so long ago Mohammed had said to me in Tripoli, "There are rumors in the suks, little Bowman, that the consul may not have heard." Of greed he'd said, and then he'd stopped.

  Now naively I'd assumed that Umar would only charge Jacob ten times the price. Now I knew it had to have been Umar who betrayed us to the Tuareg, wanting some of Jacob's wealth for himself and cunningly removing himself once he'd led us into the trap. How fortuitous that sandstorm had been for him, and the disappearance of Jacob's compass, which I had no doubt was in Umar's pocket all the time. Standing there in the midst of this carnage I swore that if I lived and met with Umar again I would kill him. It was a vow that was enough to sustain me, as anger so often will, and I needed that anger as I faced my situation, which was death by sword, captivity or worse. I threaded my way among the bodies and found the deaf-mute's donkey and seated myself upon it, for a donkey had little value, it was the camels they would prize. I would sit here, hard-faced, and wait for them to decide my fate.

  Still, remembering that something about my finger puppet had preserved my life a little longer, I drew Mr. Jappy from the pocket in my barracan and inserted him into a finger of my other hand. I did not look again toward Jacob, it was as if the months I'd known him had been severed from me as neatly as his head had been severed from his body; indeed I dared not think of Jacob, for it was his obsession with writing papers for his Society that had brought us to this terrible moment. I thought instead of the father I'd never known who had walked a tightrope night after night, and how Grams had said it was a thing of beauty to see him in his spangled tights so high above the spellbound crowds. It was after he'd fallen to his death that Mum had learned to roll with the punches, Grams said, and "What doesn't kill you makes you strong."

  Well, they've not killed me yet, I thought, and certainly as I looked out at the empty scorching desert I could see how strong I was going to have to be. I watched as three shallow graves were scratched in the gravel, three Tuareg placed in them and handfuls of stone and rock found to cover each one. There would be no graves for the, others, and already the vultures were circling. I watched as packs were ripped open and the French Bibles Jacob had brought for the White Father scattered across the ground; Jacob's rifles were distributed and ammunition unwrapped. Camels that had wandered were led back, Jacob's beautiful white mahari among them .., these Tuareg would leave rich in animals and weapons. I watched a caravan slowly take shape, the packs reloaded, men shouting, camels barking and groaning. When they were ready to leave the Targui who seemed to be their leader walked over and looked at me: I stared back at him without expression. His eyes fell again to my fingers and he scowled. After a moment he reached for the donkey's lead rope and led me and the donkey silently toward the caravan. I was to go with them.

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  I would learn later how uneasy those two finger puppets made them, for they feared I might be a wizard or sorceress and dared not kill me. Apparently they talked seriously of changing their route and taking me to Murzuk to sell to a slave-dealer, a good way to be rid of me without bringing evil spells upon themselves, but their route lay directly to the south, and then west over the Tassili n' Ajjer massif, and Murzuk was too far to the east. It was hoped they might instead meet with a slave caravan on their way, or so decided their chief, the amrar.

  It was merciful that I did not know this, for my thoughts were dark enough as the long line of camels made its way south that day, with me at the end of it leading the donkey, choosing to walk most of the time with nothing to look at but the dung dropping from the camel ahead of me. Despite my hopelessness—and setting up a merry conflict—I knew I must stay aware and not be careless.... Careless, when I scarcely cared whether I lived or died? There were moments that day when I'd gladly have ridden off into the desert to end it all, and other moments when my anger climbed so high I wanted to scream at these people at the cost of my life. These moments came and went, leaving me trembling and the worse for them, until it came to me slowly that if it's not written in the palm of one's hand to die young, as Grams might say, then it can be as hard to find a way to die as it is to live in misery.

  And so I plodded on, hour by hour, hungry and thirsty, until near dusk I sensed a quickening in the caravan, heard voices and laughter among the men, and peering ahead I saw half a dozen low tents in a cluster against the dunes. Much to my surprise I could see women there as we drew nearer: it was a Tuareg camp, and I realized this terrible day was about to end; I would soon learn what my fate was to be, and whether death with Jacob would have been kinder.

  That evening I knew they spoke much of me around the fire because of their frequent glances seeking me out in the shadows of the tent. What surprised me was to see the women sharing equally in whatever arguments took place; I had supposed that being Muslim they would be hidden away and mute, but this was not so. Nor did they wear veils as their men did. On that first night it wasn't known to me that Tuareg women are given much power as well as leisure, and blessed by chivalrous songs and poems composed in their honor. Not then: it needed time for me to realize the women did not intend a captive roumi to share a bed with any of their men or boys, which I only began to understand later by their gestures, and the way they kept me near them.

  I was moved that night to another tent, given or assigned to a woman named Marsaya and her family. Marsaya was not young and so far as I could see she was a widow, for the man who slept behind the partition in the tent appeared to belong to her daughter. The flesh on Marsaya's face had slackened, finding a new existence in folds and sharp lines between nose and lips, but once she must have been as sleek and doe-eyed as her daughter. From head to foot she was swathed in black that matched her thick eyebrows with their twin frown lines between them. Her eyes, set close under her brows, were thickly fringed with lashes. Her voice could be sharp or gentle, but I could see that in her tent, in the whole encampment, she was treated with respect.

  There were four of us in the tent that night, one of them a child, but in the morning the man left with the other men, who took all the camels with them leaving only the sheep and goats. I watched the caravan move out, watched it for a long time until it shrank in size and disappeared, heading back in the direction from which we'd come, but there was no one to tell me why or where they were going.

  In Marsaya's tent I was treated as half-servant and half-guest, an inconsistency born of a certain unease because of the word ettama, a word I heard about myself often enough to recognize it, and which I came to realize had to mean magic power. Yet I was also a convenience and not to be wasted. It was astonishing to find that all the Tuareg had servants, called imrid, but I could still be useful, and if the imrid built the fires in the morning I was often the one to carry tea to the others, and my eyes were useful in guarding the little boy against scorpions and snakes outside the tent while the women chattered, which they did much of afternoons.

  But the words hurled at me that first night were, "Attini, attini..." with Marsaya's daughter pointing to the wedding ring gleaming gold on my left hand.

  Intimidated, I made an attempt to slip off the ring, feeling my life still precarious, and then in the light of the fire a long shadow fell across me. It was Marsaya, standing erect and looking very commanding. "La," she said sternly, and the others were silenced. More words followed, one of them ettama, repeated twice. Eyes widened and it was then that a bowl of gruel was brought to me which 1 later learned was called assink in their language, as well as a piece of hard dried cheese called tikamarin that smelled so dreadfully I put it aside as discreetly as I could.

  But not speaking their language was a hardship—that language that poor Jacob had begun learning but was never to use—because I did not know whether they regarded my "magic" as dangerous to them or not. They had not killed me because of it, or so I thought, but whether out of fear of me or for some future usefulness was unknown, so that for many days I could not take my survival for granted. By sign language and by repeating words we communicated. Marsaya's daughter one morning pointed to herself and said, "Fadessa," and hearing her called this later I understood that it was her name. Her small son was made much of as he crawled naked around the tent, and I deduced from hearing it often spoken that his name was Sebeki, and later that the name of his absent father was Yunis.

  But I soon discovered that I was not allowed to touch the child Sebeki. On a day that I tried to take him into my arms the women froze. Marsaya called out sharply, "La! La!" and Fadessa rushed to the boy and took him away, giving me a frightened, reproachful glance. Again I heard the word ettama. They did not know what to make of me, or perhaps what to do with me, and one day when the finger puppet Mr. Jappy fell from the pocket in my barracan a hiss like a snake issued from their closed lips and they stared at him almost with terror. Ettama, I thought, plucking him from the mat and returning him to my pocket. Their eyes watched him disappear and then rushed to my face to scrutinize me carefully.

  "Attini, " I said, the only other word familiar to me, but if it meant "give to me," or "I want that," it was near enough.

  After six or seven days, when I saw that I was not going to be killed—not now at least—my thoughts turned to the future and to thoughts of escape: I wanted to escape, longed to escape, dreamed of escape, all the while knowing that 1 was captive not only of these people but of the desert surrounding me, this great and dangerous tableland stretching to the horizon with its treacheries of heat, cold and thirst. It went hard for me to accept my helplessness and in the end I refused it; there grew in me the thought that if I carefully observed and learned what the Tuareg knew I might one day find a way to both escape and to survive. How I would do this without compass, map or camel I had no idea, but it was this that steadied me, and this that gave my days some purpose. I began to study and memorize the stars and their positions each night. I watched one of the imrid cure a goatskin, waterproof it with a liquid made out of acacia bark and fashion a waterbag or guerba, as Edrasi had named it. I could not save food because the mats were swept and turned each day and anything hidden under them would have been found; I would have liked to save pieces of the cheese called tikamarin but its odor was so potent the smell would have preceded me anywhere.

  Feeling as much a slave as the imrid, I began to watch them and was sometimes allowed to help: to hand them the twigs or dried camel's dung with which they fueled the fire, to watch how they made it flame by rubbing a green stick, sharpened at one end, against a dry stick, until the friction ignited the slivers of wood that had been sliced away. Eventually I could do this myself. I thought it a pity as well as a bore that the women never left the tents unless to visit a neighbor. They spent their afternoons in handwork, spinning wool, plaiting mats and making leather pouches; I asked by sign language if I might help, for it was tire
some to watch and I knew I might learn something of value, and so I joined them. They spent a great amount of time on their hair, too, washing it often in a strange liquid that eventually I discovered was camel's urine. In time I joined them in this, too, and why not, I thought, when water was so scarce and precious that hands were washed in the sand.

  There was no way of marking time, but when I'd been among them for four or five weeks I had gained a few words of their language. Matulid meant "How are you?" El kheir la bes meant "All is well," and I learned that the desert held a few terrors for these people after all, for as fearful as thirst or drought were the djinns, the spirits who haunted the lonely wayfarer. Perhaps they thought I was a djinn made visible, I didn't know.

  One day Fadessa was sitting on a mat outside the tent when abruptly she picked up Sebeki and carried him inside, speaking sharply to the others, who moved back into the shadows. I looked up from plaiting a mat to see a scraggly group of strangers ride past on two camels and four donkeys: men, women and children with two pack animals behind, the men wearing their tagelmousts carelessly, faces half-exposed, and the camels loaded with strange objects. At the end of the procession strode a black boy of nine or ten, his head high, one hand swinging a stick. As he passed he turned his head and glanced at me, then looked again, drew his brows together in surprise and gave me a radiant smile, as if he shared a secret with me.

  When they had passed by I pointed after them, and with signs questioned who they were, for they looked almost like gypsies. "Enaden, " said Fadessa, and twisted her lovely features into a grimace.

  "Enaden," repeated Marsaya, and with more kindness than Fadessa pointed to her low bed made of tamarisk. When I remained puzzled she went and fetched a beautiful dagger. "Enaden," she said, and made motions with her hands of shaping it, after which she walked to Yunis's spare saddle hanging on the tent pole and patted it. "Enaden," she repeated.