by Tim Kindberg
“It’s probably nothing.” She became nonchalant again. “We still haven’t done what we came here to do. What about over there, that cabinet in the corner? Did you look?”
“No, I don’t remember seeing it. Let’s look together.”
Chemchi raised an eyebrow at Akimbe. “Very well, it is rather dark over there.”
As they drew closer, they saw that the cabinet was of black wood covered with finely carved animals. They were lions, antelopes, giraffes and other species from the sub-Sahara.
Akimbe gasped. “My people could have made this!”
Chemchi withdrew a wooden pin that held the doors together. But before she could open them a familiar rasping voice came from behind them.
“Lovelies!”
Camel-breath. Chemchi kept her nerve and opened the cabinet’s doors. Inside was a journal, which she quickly stuffed in her bag. She took Akimbe’s hand — he was staring at Camel-breath with his mouth open — and almost dragged him back to the shadow carpet. Once they were the other side of it, she spoke to the grisly figure.
“Sir, why I didn’t expect to see you again. Why sir, please come closer into the candlelight.”
She held out her hand to him.
Camel-breath shuffled over and stood directly across the carpet from them.
“Sir, please shake hands.”
Camel-breath scratched his blotchy beard then stretched his lips in a smile that revealed the craggy horror of his bite. Chemchi was glad the full extent of the carpet lay between them.
“But I can’t cross lovelies, no I can’t cross. For look.” He pointed down with his eyes for a split second.
A shadow was rippling out of the crazy pattern. The shadow of a man. But she hadn’t shone her torch there. The beginnings of his face had formed. Two little pools were his eyes, and his nose and knees were tiny mountains on the carpet.
“You’d better leave,” she said. “You have no right to be here.”
“And I suppose you have a right.”
“We’re carrying out an investigation. Certainly we do.”
“And what are you investigating. Do tell.”
Chemchi couldn’t stop herself thinking of the foul vapours rushing through the holes between his few teeth.
“None of your business. However you managed to … trespass here, sir, you’d better leave. Now. Or I’ll talk to Morchid.”
Camel-breath laughed and rubbed his eyes as though they were filled with tears of laughter then turned his expression just as quickly to one of concern.
“But there is someone I must wait for.”
Once again he dipped his eyes at the de-shadowing figure, whose gaze seemed to have turned, although it was difficult to be sure, to Akimbe. Akimbe was dumbstruck with horror.
Then, without any warning, Ibtissam, whom Chemchi and Akimbe had tried not to look at as she crept around the chamber and onto a table, launched herself onto the head of Camel-breath. She dug in her claws and hissed and scratched like an animal possessed. He flailed at her but she jumped off and attacked his ankles.
Meanwhile, Chemchi ran around. She pushed Camel-breath onto the carpet as hard as she could. He resisted but when Akimbe joined in as well he couldn’t stop himself from falling into the carpet’s threads, which reached out to take him, an insistent tangle he couldn’t withstand.
The two of them watched him disappear in a tight weave of blackness. A painfully slow sewing of gold began around him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MORCHID, THE BUTCHER of Marrakech, could never sleep. And yet waking dreams plagued him, this one particularly. Blood rose from the floor. It puddled and seeped at first, gradually coalescing until it covered the tiles, and swelled so that he had to wade through blood to the door, where it poured out to follow him.
Then his son came and led him to a place where the blood could not flow. It was his son who saved him.
But his son was lost to him.
Morchid retraced his steps to the chamber where he had furiously taken him that night, along the corridors in darkness in bare feet, feeling with his fingers on the cold stone walls.
He slid the door aside. Someone had lit all six candles around the carpet. He stepped up to the edge and examined it.
There was a fresh shadow there, the shadow of a man. It was that fool, the sickening creature he had had brought from the nether regions of the Eastern Sudan, the nincompoop who was supposed to be able to see what others could not see, to find even that which did not want to be found. Every so often he’d had the cleverest and most resourceful people he could find put down there. They never returned. And then this one had found a way back: the hunter.
Had he failed too many times now? Was it time to get rid of him? Or might this old goat still come up with the goods? He was down there looking for him now, sniffing around as Morchid had commanded him, looking for Morchid’s son in the under-carpet world, the world that refused to take Morchid himself.
He lay on his back on the carpet, away from the fresh shadow. Nothing. The threads remained hunkered in their weave. It was soft. He could imagine sleeping there — if only he could sleep.
He must have his son back. To banish him, that had been his one mistake. A moment’s thoughtless union with a slave-woman, a moment of weakness put out of his mind, then shame when the wriggling brat appeared from her womb, a potential threat when he grew. His ice-cold judgement had deserted him. Dispatching the woman to a box was one thing. But when in fury he placed the baby on the carpet, he had done what he himself could not undo. Never, never, do that again, he told himself. Because now, you need him back. To save yourself from these fools. He did not know how, but that blood would be after him in some form and threaten all the centuries for which he had held dominion in the souks. Centuries. Centuries alone. Then his son. It had been a terrible mistake.
He rose and paced around the carpet, looking at the jumbled gold from all angles. He’d left the chamber unlocked in his rage and there were other ways in: his son’s tiny shadow was lost beneath the arms, legs and other body-parts of countless beings trapped by the carpet since he had lain him there.
Like the boxes, the carpet was a means of disposal without death, for to kill was something else withheld from him. No killing. No going beyond the souks. No going to the under-carpet world. All those were denied him. If he had boxed the baby, he could simply have released him. But he hadn’t trusted himself against his own curiosity. He had been afraid of the threat, that his son would have brought about his destruction. Now the dreams told him otherwise. His son was to be his saviour, not his destroyer.
He smashed his fist through one of the cabinets.
Morchid knew the world down there, had gone through as soon as his men had told him about the carpet’s discovery, to escape from these hellish souks, from his meat-ridden, blood-soaked nightmares and these worthless creatures with all their savagery. It was the most beautiful place he could imagine. It stood for pure simplification, where everything was made out of the expectations of those who existed there, a mirror that took an image of certain parts of what was in the mind and made it real. The mind and reality became one. No one needed to change, much less grow. It suckled on minds and was their own conception. Eternal tranquility.
Except that he had been rejected, from the place that absorbed everyone else. But only after it had taken something from him. He had searched his mind to see what it had taken — his mind like a house that had been burgled. But he couldn’t tell what it was. Somewhere down there, the under-carpet world had made something from it, something unknown that continued to function beyond his reach, like the twitching corpse of his plans to leave these creatures behind.
And now the carpet refused him; it refused him alone, while gleefully transporting any manner of these creatures around him. And it had taken his son.
From the reports the hunter had given him, the other world had kept pace with Marrakech. It existed in the one moment — noon. But as it had pilfer
ed the minds of those who went there, it had updated itself and was a semblance of modern Marrakech. But always at noon — the stitched-together noons from the minds of those it had absorbed since, without night, or mid-morning, or afternoon. Hence no one who went through the carpet could grow there: if they stayed for more than a few hours, they were bound to the moment at which they had been absorbed.
His son must be a baby still.
And that fool down there, whose shadow lay on the carpet before him, can come and go as he pleased, his one saving grace that he knew how to return before he was absorbed and report, even if it was always to cringe and say that his son was still nowhere to be found. That phrase, it maddened him. He was there to be found.
But the girl, the girl with the cat. He had sensed something in her, a talent for finding the lost, a talent for casting light and illuminating what was there but unseen. She had passed the test.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“IT’S MORCHID,” SAID Ali. “The word in the souks is that he expects to see you, that you’ve made an arrangement with him.”
“Oh? I don’t believe I made any specific arrangement,” said Chemchi. “If he wants to see me, he knows where I am.” She sounded so confident, like another person, not the person who wanted only to put in a DVD and watch and re-watch, to be transported away to where she didn’t need to think.
Ali was not to be put off. “Chemchi, think carefully. You cannot cross Morchid. What bond did he hold you to?”
Akimbe, who had been studying the journal they found in the chamber, popped his head up to listen.
“He didn’t say what,” she said. “Just that there was something he would ask for afterwards if he helped me.”
“And he helped you.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes I suppose he did. But I did all the work. It was I who rescued Ibtissam.”
“In a place where he told you to look.”
“If he knew she was there, why was it a big deal for him to tell me?”
Akimbe bent his head down to the journal again. She could see why he wouldn’t want to get involved in her argument with Ali. She regarded his curly hair, his scars, the funny sandals he insisted on wearing, that he had worn in the other world. He was an enigma. Was this world strange to him or wasn’t it? He was so detached, and said so little, she couldn’t be sure.
She wanted to speak to him about his family, who may be long dead now, and he could never have them back. Any more than that she could find her mother, given that Ali, the only person who knew where she was, refused to tell her. Unless of course she was to run away and look, and look everywhere, throughout the mountains, in all the villages nestled there. She wanted to kick him.
“Chemchi, I need you here,” Ali said. “You have duties in the riad, whether you like it or not. First, see Morchid. Get it over with. He’ll have a task for you. Honour your agreement, then everything will be all right again and we can go back to where we were.”
“You mean: where you were.”
****
The next day, despite everything she had said to Ali, Chemchi found herself on her knees cleaning the tiled floor of the atrium. For there were guests arriving. The floor needed to be cleaned and who else was going to do it? She hadn’t kept the riad spotless all that time only to have it become an embarrassment.
But she could never go back to where she was before the effects of the torch. She scrubbed extra hard at a spot on the floor that wasn’t even dirty. No, Chemchi, don’t give in, she told herself: he kept that secret from you, as though the whole world would shatter into tiny pieces if he told you about your own mother, making it sound like it was for your own good.
She put away the scrubbing brush and bucket, and climbed three flights to the top of the riad where Akimbe sat in the shade of the pergola, intent on the journal from the chamber. She watched him turning the pages.
“What language is it written in? Can you understand it? Why don’t you let me have a look?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Aren’t we in this together? I thought you needed my help.”
“But it’s written in Yoruba, I didn’t think you would know it. It’s the diary of one of my people, who was captured by the slave traders and dragged here just as I was, across the Sahara. He was a mathematician, though, which his owner eventually recognised and took him to the court of the king. One of my people, who helped the government plan. And yet look how they treated us. We were nothing to them. And he was still owned, only by the king. He never had his freedom.”
“How long ago was this?”
He didn’t answer.
“You’re from back in time, aren’t you?” Chemchi’s cheeked reddened as soon as she had asked.
Akimbe’s face froze as he absorbed what she had said. Then he broke into a raucous laugh, slapping his thigh.
“Ha, Chemchi! I didn’t know you had a sense of humour. You’re so serious, you don’t make jokes.”
“I’m not joking. Can’t you see, I’m just trying to understand things that …. that don’t make sense.”
Something about Akimbe felt more real — despite the peculiar circumstances she had found him in, and his haughty attitude — than anyone else she had talked to.
He spoke slowly. “My mother and my father and my sister are alive. They are definitely alive. I know this. And I am going to find them.”
“We have no way of knowing how long you were down there, and the scene you describe sounds like the days in old Marrakech when slave markets were held openly the souks.”
“But you said yourself there is trafficking now. And when you say ‘openly’: the difference between open and hidden isn’t so clear, is it? Think of the chamber, and the carpet. Revealing the hidden: isn’t that what you do? Your talent?”
“You called it a talent before,” Chemchi said, “and I’ve already said, it might equally be a curse.” She thought of all the films she had seen about curses and witchcraft, and the terrible consequences whether it was true or not. “But I have to admit, either way, it feels like a new part of me I’m just getting to know. And I suppose it’s up to me what I do with it. Anyway, it’s true that there are slaves in Marrakech still, and many more people trafficked from here and through here to Europe.”
“Since you know this,” Akimbe put the journal down. “then we must free them. Where are they? My family may be among them.” He rose.
“It’s not as simple as that, is it. Think of what kind of men — if you can call them that — trade in slaves and traffic in children. They’re probably armed. You can’t just take their ‘goods’ away from them. They’ll kill you. And that’s not counting Morchid. Nothing happens here without his fingers being in it.”
“You keep saying that name, as though it’s supposed to mean something to me. It doesn’t. I’m not from here, remember. I’m not like you, am I.”
“I suppose I don’t know much about Morchid or the slavery either. I don’t exactly get lots of free time out of here to explore, you know. He appears in his stall in the souks but then he’s the butcher. It’s the rest of the time, when he’s not there … no one exactly knows what he’s up to but it’s no good. And he must be bound up with the trafficking and the slaving. I told you, what you described is going on around us but it’s more subtle, if you could call it that. You go to someone’s house, and they come across as decent people but there is someone serving or nannying or working in the garden or whatever and you can tell by looking into their eyes, you can tell they have no hope. It makes you want to leave. Everyone knows about it but people are too scared or they feel helpless to change the way things are.”
“So you do know something. You do get away, even though you complain to Ali about keeping you here.”
“Oh, you were listening in, were you?”
“I couldn’t help it. Your voice carries up to the floors above, you know.”
“Well I leave only to run errands, and sometimes I st
ay out a little longer than Ali likes. But it’s not as though I can stop for a chat or get to know anyone.”
“I think I may have been a slave in the other world. Perhaps my family are slaves there too.”
“You don’t know what the other world did to your mind.”
“My memory is poor, except about where I grew up — where I was taken from. Then it’s as though a mist comes down”
“And where you come from: there were cars there, and mopeds and bikes?”
“No. Yes. Oh I don’t know.”
“Perhaps you’d been down there hardly any time at all.”
“You said the scene I described was from a hundred years ago or more…”
Chemchi shrugged. “There is no slave market in the Criée Berbère, there hasn’t been for all that time. It doesn’t make sense. But then the chamber doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t even fit right in the souks. It’s bigger than it should be.”
“There might be other ways through, not that strange wall that’s really a curtain.”
“You’re right, we should have another look. I want to understand the shadow carpet, too — and the world beneath it. There must be an explanation. I have a film about an object among the stars, that can affect the passage of time and hide what is happening from the world outside.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. The education of a warrior’s son is … special. What they teach us is very particular to our people. If I don’t know something, tell me. I will learn. And you can show me your films, whatever they are. Where I come from, we are busy trying to survive, to fight corruption, to stop ourselves becoming enslaved. Even our own people deal in slaves. You know of no such hardships, do you, here in Ali’s house.”
Chemchi looked at him, suddenly sharply with her green eyes. “You don’t know anything about me, what I have to put up with.”
“Ali?! You fight with him all the time, don’t you. You don’t know your station —”
“Stop, stop, I don’t want to hear what you think about me and Ali. You don’t know the half of it. And if you’re going to go back to all that princely warrior’s-son nonsense and tell me about my station then just forget it. You can find your own way out.”
