Sandstorm Page 8

  It was a sharp night and the full moon was out, bathing the desert in velveteen blue. There was no wind. Taha pushed his furled black head-cloth out of his eyes and adjusted his robes, then grasped for the old rifle his father had given him. The octagonal barrel was cold to his touch.

  He eased himself up silently, letting the weapon nuzzle loosely against his shoulder, straining the cold air in through his nostrils to try and scent the beast. He smelt only the musk of the camels, the potash odours of the dead fire, the chalk scent of the desert. He wondered what kind of animal it could be. Not a hyena: they hunted in pairs and would have given themselves away with their deep-throated hunting-call. A lion? It was unlikely. There were a few lions in Jebel Zemmour, but none had been seen this far up the Seguiet al-Hamra in years. Suddenly there was a dry cough from the saltwort thickets. Taha froze.

  Only a leopard coughed like that, and a she-leopard had been harassing the flocks of the Ulad al-Mizna for the past year. His brother, Fahal, had once winged her in the back leg, but she had escaped and eluded even the tribe’s best trackers. For some months the attacks had ceased, but then she had returned with a vengeance, more savage and cunning than ever. Those who had glimpsed her had noticed that her rear right leg had been slightly twisted by Fahal’s shot. Ever since, they had called her the Twisted One.

  Taha shivered. A leopard was the most fearsome of all beasts. Shy, retiring, she was a mistress of stealth and concealment, but once she had decided to attack she was as fleet as the wind, capable of outrunning even a gazelle. The hyena and the lion were lumbering and slow by comparison. Leopards were also incredibly strong. His father, Belhaan, had once tracked a missing camel-calf for three days and found its remains high in the branches of a tamarisk tree where a leopard had dragged it.

  Taha took a step forward, bracing the old rifle hard against his body. It was a weapon made long ago by the mu’allimin, the travelling smiths who occasionally visited his tribe here in the remote desert. The rifle was already loaded with a blunt round he had moulded himself, no more than a flat-nosed slug of lead wedged into an old brass cartridge case. Taha knew that whatever happened he would get only one shot. Once fired, the cartridge case had to be prised out with a knife and another inserted, and no leopard he had ever heard of was going to wait patiently while he did that.

  He narrowed his eyes trying to observe movement in the thickets, which rose out of the desert like a white mist. He thought of calling out for his brother, Fahal, who was sleeping with his own camels down the wadi, but he hesitated. A shout might startle the leopard and goad her into attack, and in any case he judged that his brother was too far away to hear him. The idea was put out of his mind when the leopard suddenly emerged from cover.

  She was big, bigger than Taha could ever have imagined, her head massive, her jaw hanging open so that her fangs gleamed dully. Her body was long and lean, the hide not speckled as Taha had expected, but a dull ochre colour in the moonlight. The creature paused, and Taha saw the flecks of vapour that rose from her nostrils, heard the snarl that seemed to come from deep in her belly. He saw clearly that her back right foot was slightly askew, and knew that this was indeed the terrible Twisted One that had been plaguing his family’s flocks all winter.

  He closed one eye and peered at the beast across the rifle’s crude sights. For a moment the leopard’s eyes were locked on his own, and then the beast sprang forward, her feet leaving puffs of dust as they pawed the earth. Taha felt the urge to scream out and run away in terror, but instead he held his ground and squeezed the trigger.

  There was a fearsome recoil, a clap like thunder, and a tongue of flame and smoke that belched from the weapon’s muzzle. The leopard kept on coming. Taha shut his eyes and dropped the rifle. He had half turned to run when the beast smashed into him, knocking him down. He felt the creature’s weight on him, smelt her rank breath, felt the searing pain in his left hand as the leopard’s claws mauled him. In that moment, though, he ceased to be afraid. It was almost as if he suddenly stood apart from himself, looking on with no more than curiosity to see what transpired. He heard the camels mewling, and as he rolled he noticed the glorious brightness of the stars above him. Then the stars went out.

  *

  When he came to, his brother was bending over him, deep concern etched on his broad face. Taha’s first thought was for the camels, and he sat up suddenly to check them; but where they had been there was now only a mush of churned-up ground and fresh droppings. ‘Where are they?’ he demanded, clutching Fahal’s arm. ‘Did the Twisted One get them?’

  Fahal chuckled. ‘I let them off the hobbles,’ he said. ‘The Twisted One is dead.’

  ‘But I missed her.’

  ‘No. The blessing of God was with you. Look.’

  Taha looked to where his brother pointed and saw the cadaver of the leopard sprawled sideways in the sand. Her mouth was open slightly, showing yellowed fangs, and blood trickled from one nostril. Somehow, she looked smaller and less fearsome than she had done just before she attacked.

  Taha stood up to examine her more closely and felt a biting pain in his left hand. He looked down in surprise to see that the skin had been torn away where the Twisted One’s claws had raked it. Fahal lifted his brother’s hand to inspect it, and saw that the wound wasn’t deep and that the bleeding had stopped. ‘It is not so bad as it looks,’ he said. ‘Praise God it wasn’t the right.’

  Fahal took some strips of bark and a small leather flask out of the skin bag he wore slung across his blue dara’a. He tipped oil from the flask, smeared it on the strips and bound them around Taha’s hand. For such a big, strong man, his touch was surprisingly gentle, Taha thought. He did not flinch as Fahal worked on him, but he wrinkled up his nose at the oil, which smelt of rotten fish.

  When Fahal had finished dressing the wound, he knelt down next to the leopard, and slid out the curved knife he wore at his waist. It was razor-sharp from constant honing. Then, with a sawing movement, he sliced off the leopard’s left front paw. ‘This is your prize,’ he said, handing it to Taha. ‘When the clan know you have killed the Twisted One, there will be rejoicing indeed.’

  *

  It was a day’s journey back to their camp under the cliffs of al-Lehauf. The brothers left at first light, saddling their riding camels and slinging the leopard’s cadaver on the back of one of them. Taha knew they must skin it soon or the pelt would be spoiled.

  For the first hours after sunrise the brothers walked, leading their mounts, driving the rest of the herd before them. Taha’s hand did not trouble him — the fish-oil and bark poultice had dulled the pain to a throb. The desert stretched to every horizon, ochre-coloured dunes in fish-scale patterns, rocky outcrops, plains where cores of quartz sparkled from the wind-graded, gravel-covered desert, the serir.

  Before noon they arrived at the lone black tent of a mu’allim — one of the gypsy metal-smiths who wandered from tribe to tribe — and they halted to get the news. They stopped the camels twenty-five paces from the tent, as politeness demanded, and waited until their host came to greet them. He was a sullen man named Khamis, powerful and dark-skinned, as many smiths were. His rough shirt was a ragged mess of dirt, grease and tatters. His eyes, narrow and suspicious, missed nothing, lingering on Taha’s bound hand and the leopard slung across the saddle of his mount.

  They greeted him in turn, shaking hands over and over. ‘Come to my tent,’ he growled.

  The brothers accepted the offer mutely. Hospitality was the code of the desert, and anyone who refused it would be branded a miser for life. To be known as a miser was as bad as being known as a coward, for the nomads considered courage and generosity to be the same thing. Wealth and possessions mattered little to Taha’s people. A man’s status was not assessed by what he owned but by his reputation, and reputation could only be gained by the display of generosity, hospitality, courage, endurance and loyalty. These five qualities constituted what the nomads called miruwa or ‘humanness’. To be known for one’s
humanness was the ambition of every man, and though the smiths were not considered tribesmen, even they were not immune from the code.

  There were four almost-naked brown children in the tent, and a Negroid woman who greeted them but did not shake hands. Beside the tent there was an ill-made shack of wood and straw where the mud oven was housed; a few thin goats grazed in the thorn-brush round about. An elderly bull-camel with almost no hump was tethered to a peg a little distance away. It bore the curious diamond-shaped brand of the smiths on its neck, Taha saw.

  Khamis wordlessly spread an esparto mat for them in a square of shade outside. His manner was surly, but Taha did not expect anything else from a smith. They were a people apart, a fraternity who married only within each other’s families. They were not trusted by the tribesmen, who thought of them as sorcerers and feared their ability to work with fire, to change metal from one shape to another. Some said they were skin-changers themselves, able to turn into werewolves or were-hyenas at the time of the full moon. ‘Better trust a slave than a smith,’ the saying went. Yet the nomads could not survive without them, since no one else had the skill to work metal that the smiths had passed down from generation to generation.

  After Khamis had brought them goats’ milk in a grease-smeared esparto bowl, and they had drunk deeply, Taha showed the smith his old rifle. The cartridge case had jammed in the breech after his single shot at the leopard. ‘Can you get it out?’ he enquired.

  Khamis sniffed and examined the weapon disdainfully. ‘This is a poor firearm,’ he commented finally. ‘It was not made by me, nor my brothers nor my father. Not even by my grandfather.’

  Taha did not register his irritation. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But it killed the Twisted One.’

  The smith’s jaundiced eyes fell on the severed leopard paw that Taha had strung around his neck. It was caked with blood and already stank. ‘The Twisted One?’ he repeated, and there was new respect in his voice. ‘You killed that beast?’

  ‘Can you get the cartridge out?’ Taha repeated.

  Khamis shrugged noncommittally. ‘Inshallah,’ he said, ‘but what will you pay me?’ He nodded towards Taha’s riding camel, now hobbled and grazing with the others some distance away. ‘What about the leopard skin?’

  Taha smiled. ‘The leopard skin is not for barter,’ he said. ‘I offer you half a cone of sugar. For you, it’s only a small job.’

  The smith grinned for the first time, showing teeth like yellow fangs. ‘All right,’ he said.

  A while later, after they had exchanged news about the pasture and the wells, Khamis brought his tea set and his tools. He wavered for a moment, wondering whom to give the tea set to, but in deference to Taha’s injured hand he laid it before Fahal — a charcoal brazier, a tiny kettle, an ostrich-skin sleeve containing glasses, an iron box that held a plug of sugar and a hammer, a pouch of green tea and a saucer-sized brass tray. ‘You make the tea,’ he told Fahal, ‘and I will fix the weapon.’

  As Fahal kindled a fire, striking a flint against his blade, Taha watched the smith unwrap his miniature anvil from its skin cover. The anvil was no more than half a forearm’s length. It stood on a long spike, which Khamis drove into the sand. Taha looked on with fascination as the dark man unrolled his toolkit. Everything else about Khamis was dirty and unkempt, but the tools were immaculately clean; Khamis handled them with loving care. The smith took out a pair of pincers, and broke open the rifle on its pin, gripping the barrel with the pincers. He slipped a slim, pointed file from the toolkit and began to work delicately on the rim of the cartridge case.

  Suddenly he stopped and looked up from his work. His eyes fixed on Taha’s, and the young man saw recognition in them. ‘I know you,’ he growled slowly. ‘I know who you are. You were not born among the tribes. You are the afrangi that Belhaan bin Hamed took as a son. The one they call Taha Minan Nijum: Fell-From-The-Stars.’

  *

  The word afrangi — ‘Frank’ — evoked a flood of memories for Taha. It was what the Blue Men had called him when he had first been brought to the camp of his adoptive father, Belhaan. He had long since ceased thinking of himself as a ‘Frank’. Indeed, he no longer thought — at least, not in waking moments — about anything that had happened to him before Belhaan had found him in the desert. That old life, when his name had been ‘Billy’, was a dream to him now. He was Taha, son of Belhaan, of the great nomad tribe of Reguibat, the Ulad al-Mizna, the People of the Clouds.

  It was as if he had locked those earlier memories in a box somewhere and thrown away the key. They were of no use to him here in the desert. It was a harsh landscape where only the strong survived, and to be strong you had to keep your mind on those things that were of use — how to track and shoot and ride; how to find food, water and shelter; how to tend your camels; how to defend your wife and children. At first he had not believed that the landscape was inhabited by spirits, malevolent and benign, but now he accepted it fully. Once he had believed that the earth was round, but now, like his adopted people, he knew that it was flat.

  At first he had been defensive and afraid, had fought Belhaan and the other men of the clan. Twice he had run away in the night, and twice Belhaan had tracked him down and brought him back. The third time he’d escaped, though, Belhaan had not come after him. Taha remembered that day — how he had lain cowering in the thorn scrub, seeing the trackless desert stretching to every horizon, knowing he could not survive alone.

  His real father was a coward who had refused to fight, who had made him leave home and live among other boys he had hated, boys who’d made fun of him and called his dad a ‘yellow-belly’. He had never forgotten the shame of that, even now. His mother was a useless woman who did everything on whims, and his grandfather had entrusted him to the safekeeping of a bowqaa — a traitor. None of them had come for him, but now he did not care. It was only in his dreams, at night, sometimes, that he had visions of happier times — playing football with his ‘dad’, going to the cinema, flying kites on the beach — and felt a stirring of something he could not or did not want to name. But these visions had no place in the waking world, and when he awoke he deliberately banished them.

  The people he had found himself amongst — he called them the ‘Blue Men’ because, apart from their black head-cloths, blue was the only colour they wore — had been alien to him. They were primitive savages, he had thought, who never washed, who lived in flyblown squalor and abject poverty, who had disgusting habits like eating out of a common dish with their right hands, wiping the fat from their fingers on the tent flap, and using the other hand to clean themselves after going to the toilet. The food itself was equally disgusting: they ate lizards, rats, raw camel-liver and uncooked jelly from the camel’s hump, with the juice of the animal’s gall-bladder squirted over it.

  Yet, though he didn’t speak their language, he’d felt that they were also good-humoured, honest, generous and warm. Most of all, they knew how to survive here, and they did that by sticking together. Taha had been brought up to see himself as a free individual, but he was astute enough to realize that that brand of freedom meant nothing here. Here you could not live alone. Where was he going to across that great desert, anyway? The world he came from seemed as far away as the moon. Better to stay with these people, learn from them, and escape when the right moment came. When he had returned to the camp that night, parched and exhausted, the old man, Belhaan, had seemed delighted to see him. Taha had known that something important had changed between them that day.

  And gradually, as he had learned to speak their tongue and picked up their customs and skills, the idea of escaping had simply melted away. Slowly, he had come to love the primitive harmony of life in the desert. Bit by bit, imperceptibly, he had unlearned his old life and become one of them, had begun to feel that here he had all that he could ever want: a family, a place, an identity, and a sense of belonging he had never known.

  *

  Taha ignored the smith and turned away, watching Fahal as he
scooped glowing embers of wood into the tea-brazier with a stick, then set the small kettle on top. He and his stepbrother had become so close that he often forgot they were not real brothers. It must have been hard for Fahal, he thought, to find himself suddenly with a strange younger sibling just as he approached full manhood. It said much for Fahal’s generosity of spirit that he had never shown any jealousy towards him. Instead he had protected him from the taunts of the others, made it clear that any slight against Taha was a slight against himself, repeating the famous nomad adage:

  Me and my brother against my cousin,

  Me and my cousin against a stranger.

  That Fahal did not regard him as a stranger, or even a mere cousin, had always warmed Taha’s heart. And since Fahal was the strongest and most enduring of all the clan’s youths, his warnings had been heeded. It was not for nothing that his full name — Fahal Raakid — meant Bull-Camel-Running. He could still outwrestle, out-track and outride any of the clan, including Taha himself.

  It had been Fahal who had warned him not to cry out during his circumcision ceremony. He still remembered the excruciating pain as the travelling circumciser had sliced off the end of his foreskin with a sharp stone, while he sat on a camel-saddle in full view of the clan. He remembered the blood; how the women had ululated and danced afterwards. Even his father, Belhaan, had praised his fortitude. The same evening Belhaan had shown him the engravings on the rock-shelters of Lehauf for the first time, explained how some of the ancestors of the Ulad al-Mizna had lived here since the Time Before Time, while others had come across the endless desert aeons ago, fleeing from the great tribe of Rumm who had driven them from their homeland, the legendary Garama. That night, his father had given him his first taste of afyun, a mixture of hashish and the dried leaves of the efelehleh plant, inhaled from a ceremonial pipe. The narcotic had bowled him over, sent him into a trance in which he had suddenly perceived that the world was not the random juxtaposition of qualities that he had always supposed it to be, but a matrix of living dreams.