Sandstorm Read online

  In trance his astral spirit had roamed a broad, sunlit plain in disembodied form, seen a white antelope running across it — a magnificent, powerful animal that seemed to carry the sun on its head. In the trance he had seen himself tracking and shooting the antelope, taking from its stomach the small black bezoar stones that were to be found there, and which the Ulad al-Mizna considered sacred. He had come out of the trance knowing that an initiation task had been granted him.

  When the circumcision wound had healed, he had set off alone into the desert to track down the white antelope, the most elusive of desert creatures. It had taken him twelve days, and in that time he had learned more about the desert and how to survive there than in the whole of the previous year. Finally he had identified the tracks of a white antelope bull of advanced age, a creature that had lived long and produced many offspring, and would soon fall to a leopard or a hyena pack. He had followed the antelope’s spoor for two days without food and water, right to the foot of Jebel Sarhro, where he had trapped it in a gorge and killed it with a single shot. It was only after he had butchered it and retrieved the bezoar stones from its belly that he realized he was in Morocco, and could easily have found his way back to civilization. The chance he had been waiting for had presented itself at last, and there was no one and nothing to prevent him leaving. That he no longer wanted to return came as a revelation to him; so did the sudden insight that it was this, not the tracking of the white antelope, that had been the real test.

  *

  Taha felt the black stones now. They hung around his neck on a thong of gazelle sinew, next to the leopard paw, to remind him of that momentous insight, the realization that he himself had become one of the ‘Blue Men’.

  He was drawn out of his recollections by an imprecation to God from the smith, who was smiling through his yellow teeth and proudly holding up the empty brass cartridge casing in his pincers. Taha took the casing and examined it. ‘God reward you for your skill,’ he said.

  The tea was ready, and Fahal offered them the first round in tiny glasses on the brass tray. Khamis took the glass and drank the strong tea in a single gulp. Taha sipped the liquid with polite slurping sounds of appreciation. Both returned the glasses to the tray, and Fahal refilled them. It was the custom among the nomads to drink three rounds of tea — no more and no less. Each successive glass was strikingly different from the one before. The first was bitter, the second slightly sweet, and the third cloyingly sweet. The server would not drink until the others had finished their three glasses; the tea ceremony could not be rushed.

  The smith smacked his lips as he finished his third glass and returned it to the tray. As Fahal poured himself a glass, Khamis looked around him and scratched under his ragged head-cloth. ‘Strange thing,’ he said. ‘A week back I came across a lot of camel-tracks heading north across the Seguiet al-Hamra. Fresh ones. I have smithied for most of the Reguibat clans at one time or another, and I know the tracks of their camels, but I didn’t recognize any Reguibat camels amongst these. No, by God, it was a Delim raiding party, and a big one, too.’

  Both Fahal and Taha were suddenly watching him with rapt attention. The smith grinned triumphantly, and Taha realized he’d been holding back this important morsel of news deliberately, for effect.

  ‘No Delim raiders have come into this territory for years,’ Fahal said. ‘Not since their yama’a agreed to the treaty.’

  ‘Where were they going?’ Taha asked.

  Khamis gulped compulsively. ‘That was the curious thing,’ he said. ‘They went in the direction of the Ghaydat al-Jahoucha.’

  Taha stared in surprise. ‘The only ways in are through the dunes of Uruq ash-Shaytan or the quicksand. I doubt if any of the Delim know the path through the quicksand, and the dunes are a hard slog for camels. Unless they were heading north towards the Zrouft, there is no reason to go there.’

  ‘God only is all-knowing,’ Khamis said. ‘The only thing of interest there is the wrecked iron bird.’

  He was watching Taha intensely now. ‘They must have gone no further than that,’ he said, ‘because this morning I found the same tracks heading back south.’

  Taha and Fahal exchanged glances. ‘Why would they have been looking at the wreck?’ Taha enquired casually.

  ‘God only knows,’ the smith said, making a two-fingered sign against the evil eye. ‘But you mark my words — there’s going to be trouble before the season’s out.’

  *

  They picked up the raiders’ tracks within an hour of leaving the smith’s camp. Fahal slipped out of the saddle and examined them carefully. ‘It is as Khamis said,’ he declared. ‘Except I reckon there are nineteen riders, not eighteen. The camels are tired — they have been ridden hard.’

  He picked up a piece of camel-turd, the size and colour of a large olive, and broke it in his fingers, examining the content. ‘The animals are being fed on grain,’ he said, ‘but they are thirsty. They are carrying heavy loads, which means they have come a long way. The raiders are certainly Delim, and they are heading back into their own country.’

  Taha couched his camel and crouched down by his brother, peering at the tracks.

  ‘We should go after them,’ he said.

  ‘They passed by after sunrise this morning,’ Fahal said. ‘That means they have half a day’s start. We won’t catch them, not with the herd. What can we do against nineteen, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Taha said, ‘but I want to know why they came here. Why did they break the treaty? Why were they looking at the iron bird?’

  Suddenly the wound in his left hand pained him, and he squeezed it with his right. Fahal shrugged. ‘God alone is all-knowing,’ he said.

  He took a long sniff of the air and suddenly stood upright.

  ‘What is it?’ Taha asked.

  ‘Fire,’ Fahal said. He shaded his eyes and began to scan the horizon methodically. ‘There!’ he gasped. ‘South!’

  Taha followed his gaze until, on the southern horizon, far across the ochre plain, he made out a pall of black smoke curling up into the cloudless screen of the sky.

  ‘That’s no cooking fire,’ Fahal said. ‘Come on, mount up.’

  It took them many minutes to reach the source of the fire, but even from far off they could tell it was a camp that had gone up in flames. ‘By God, this is Delim work!’ Fahal declared.

  Closer up, the devastation became only too clear. The camp had stood on a low, pebbly promontory over a dry stream bed, in a copse of thorn trees, but now there was nothing left of it but a smouldering ruin. Three black tents had been burned to cinders, and their contents — old saddles, saddlebags, sacks, milking-vessels, bowls, tin boxes and tea things had been smashed and scattered about over a large area. Taha counted five goats and three camels lying hacked and mutilated in pools of congealing blood. There was a smell of singed flesh on the air that made their stomachs turn, and suddenly their camels began to shy, backing away and quivering. The brothers leapt out of the saddle and hobbled them tightly, tying the riding animals to thorn bushes by their head-ropes.

  Taha gagged, but forced himself to examine one of the dead camels. Its neck had been severed, its entrails almost ripped out. In the shade of a tree nearby stood a rack of water-skins, all of which had been punctured or slashed. The water still dripped out of them into the brown, wet sand beneath.

  It was only when the brothers got nearer still that they saw the human victims. Two small children — a girl and a boy — lay by one of the smouldering tents like castaway dolls. Their throats had been slit. A naked woman was splayed out behind a thorn tree, wrists and ankles strapped to stakes driven in the ground. The woman had been shot in the head, but her breasts, arms and thighs had been viciously slashed with knives. One eye stared at them blindly through a mask of thick blood that obscured what was left of her disfigured face and hair. Steeling himself, Fahal knelt down and tried to clean the blood off the woman’s face. ‘By God!’ he said, shocked. ‘I know this woman. It is Sara min
t Mashili. May they abide in the fires of hell for ever! This is a Znaga camp!’

  Taha’s mouth fell open, as he too recognized the woman. His senses baulked, his mind groping to grasp the enormity of the crime that had been committed here. Znaga were vassals of either warrior or marabout tribes, and were considered inviolable in raids. They were unarmed and unable to protect themselves, and were not expected to fight. The camels they herded did not even belong to them.

  Taha glanced around him. Every desert law had been flouted here, he realized, every decency corrupted. Raids were carried out only for livestock; camps were never touched, let alone burned, children were not harmed, women were not violated, animals the raiders could not take were spared, and water-vessels were never interfered with. The men who had done this could not have been tribesmen, he thought.

  ‘It can’t have been the Delim,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t have done this.’

  Fahal pointed out the camel-tracks that had churned up the surface around the camp. ‘The same tracks we picked up back there,’ he said. ‘It’s them all right.’

  The moan came so unexpectedly that both the brothers were startled. They hunted about quickly, and Fahal found the man lying behind another bush, his hands tied behind his back. His feet and legs were black and blistered where they had been deliberately burned, and he had been stabbed repeatedly. Yet he was still alive. Leaning over him, Taha heard the ragged rattle of breath and saw a flicker of eyelids. ‘It is Sara’s husband,’ he whispered. ‘Latif ould Mahjub.’

  ‘Father employs him to look after some of our camels,’ Fahal said. ‘God have mercy.’

  Latif moaned again, and Fahal rushed to his camel and came back with a skin of water. He wetted the Znaga’s lips and splashed a little on his face. The man’s eyes flickered open momentarily. He stared at Taha, and a flash of recognition came into his eyes. A hand, wet with blood, gripped Taha’s wrist. ‘Delim raiders,’ he gasped, choking. ‘They took your father’s camels.’

  Taha smoothed the man’s blood-caked hair. ‘Don’t try to talk, Latif,’ he said. ‘We will get you to my father. He will know what to do.’

  ‘Nooo!’ Latif cried. ‘I don’t want to live.’

  ‘God is generous,’ Taha said.

  ‘They killed ... my children. My wife ... they violated her ... I had to tell them ... God help me ... I had no choice.’

  ‘What did you have to tell them?’ Taha asked softly. ‘What did they want to know?’

  Latif clutched his left arm in a vice-like grip. His eyes opened wide as they focused on Taha’s bandaged hand and sought out the missing joint of his little finger. ‘They ... wanted to know about ... Fell-From-The-Stars,’ he groaned. ‘They ... wanted ... to ... know ... about ... you.’

  *

  The camp of Taha’s clan was pitched along the cliff of al-Lehauf. It was made up of nine large black tents and two smaller ones; here there were three dozen men, women and children, as well as camels, goats and sheep. They had camped here every tifiski for generations — for as long as time itself. Belhaan was chief of the clan, both counsellor and holy man. People respected him for his wisdom but feared him because he was one of the inhaden yenun, those who talked to the spirits.

  The morning after his sons returned with the news of the Delim raid, Belhaan left the camp at dawn and walked quietly through the pools of shadow along the base of the cliff. There were rock overhangs here that the old man believed had been the home of the tribe’s predecessors, the people they called the Bafour, long ago, when the desert had been greener than it was today. He believed this because the Bafour had left pictures on the rocks: strikingly fresh images of men hunting giraffes with what looked like loops of rope, or spearing elephants or hippopotami. There were words for such animals in Hassaniyya, the dialect of Arabic spoken by the Ulad al-Mizna, though Belhaan had never seen them himself. Every nomad boy had seen ostrich, antelope, gazelle, oryx and addax, jackal, honey-badger, hyena — even leopard and lion — but never the animals in the ancient pictures. Today they lived far to the south of Reguibat territory, in the land around Timbuctou.

  And the skilful drawings of the Bafour were not the only things on the rocks. There were also writings in Tifinagh, the runic script of the tribe’s other ancestors, the Hawwara, who had first brought camels here. The meaning of the old writing had been lost long ago, but an echo of it was still to be found in the camel-brands used by the People of the Clouds.

  Belhaan drew comfort from the pictures and the runes because they portrayed the continuity of human life here in the desert. He needed such comfort today, because he was sorely troubled about the Delim incursion reported by Taha and Fahal, and the attack on the Znaga camp.

  Until now, he thought, it had been a successful season. The pasture had been abundant and the camels had given plenty of milk. The goats had multiplied, and even one of the women was pregnant. He had guided the clan through the winter, healed the sick, protected the children with his charms and amulets, fought off the evil yenun with his potions, propitiated the good spirits of the trees and wells. His standing had risen even higher. True, the Twisted One had taken two of their camel-calves and half a dozen goats, but first his eldest son, Fahal, had wounded her, and then his adopted son, Taha, had finished her off. The Twisted One had already been expertly skinned by his two sons, and her valuable pelt, with the head still attached, now lay pegged out by Taha’s tent to cure. It had been a good season until today, when the news of the Twisted One’s death had been overshadowed by the Delim’s heinous crime. Never had the old man heard of such iniquity.

  For the Delim to enter Reguibat territory at all was a serious infringement of the agreement made by the tribal councils of both tribes back in the Year of the Treaty, five summers ago. And in all his years, Belhaan could not recall having heard of Znaga being violated in a raid before — he’d only once known a Delim to transgress the strict code. His own first-born son, Asil, had been a child when he’d been killed in a Delim raid. But that had been before the treaty, and the perpetrator, Agayl ould Selim, had been ostracized even by his own people.

  There were many questions to be answered, the old man thought. Why had the Delim broken the treaty? Why had they visited the wrecked iron bird that had brought Taha to him? Why had they killed a family just to get information about his son? He thought he knew the answer, but he didn’t yet want to admit it. He shook his head and frowned.

  He halted at the edge of the cliff and turned to survey the camp, the tents erected in a perfect line open to the rising sun. The day was windless, and the smoke from early morning cooking fires rose in vertical dark lines from among the tents. Belhaan knew that the men of the clan must decide what was to be done, but before that he wanted to talk to Taha.

  *

  Taha had been woken up by his two small sons, Dhaalib and Nofal, who’d thrown themselves on his bed of palm-stalks shrieking and snarling, pretending to be the Twisted One. It was late — already after sunrise — and his wife Rauda was milking the goats behind the tent. Although Taha couldn’t see her, he could hear the bleating of the animals and the click of the wooden goat-bells. Taha wrestled with the children until his injured hand stopped him, then took them to see the leopard skin pegged out nearby. It was drying well, he observed; the creature’s mouth had set in a satisfyingly ferocious expression.

  His twenty camels — sixteen she-camels and calves, and four trained house-camels — were still hobbled by the tent’s side. Five of the she-camels were nursing small calves and could not be milked, but the udders of the remaining six were bulging. Taha sent Dhaalib to fetch the milking-bowl, the aders, while he and Nofal, the younger of the two boys, let the house-camels off their hobbles and sent them out to graze on the sparse acacia bushes near the camp. When Dhaalib returned with the aders, Taha released the first female, encouraging her up with sucking sounds. He unfastened the covers on her udder, and, standing on one leg with the other balanced against his knee, he began to work at the teats, squirting
the fresh milk into the bowl. As he worked, wincing occasionally when his hand pained him, he told the story of the Twisted One again for the benefit of the two boys, who listened with wide eyes.

  This was the way it had always been, Taha reflected: the women milking the goats behind the tent, the men milking the camels by the side of the tent. It had been like this every day, morning and evening since the ancient Howwara had come across the distant horizons on their camels. It was a pattern prescribed and venerated by time. Nothing could be more satisfying than the simple rhythm of this life. Then a shadow fell across his face as he remembered the Znaga camp.

  He had ridden in several raids and counter-raids during his time here, and had killed men in open battle, but he had only once known a tribesman to harm the hair of a child’s head — when Belhaan’s small son, Asil, had been killed by Agayl ould Selim. The story of Sheikh Sa’adan al-Mutlag, though, was the one most often told around the camp fires. One of the sheikh’s warriors had got carried away during a victorious raid against the Tekna, and had tried to ravish a young girl. Sheikh Sa’adan had been so incensed by the dishonour to his name that he’d shot the warrior dead there and then — a member of his own family.

  Taha worked on the camels methodically, tying up the udders and letting the boys shoo them out to the grazing after he was done. There was a lot of milk this morning. Every time the bowl was filled, Dhaalib would take it into the tent to top up the great earthenware milk-pot, the tazua, balancing the bowl with careful precision. It would have been bad luck to spill a drop.

  As Taha drove the last camel off to graze, Rauda came around the tent, struggling with a full skin of goats’ milk. Taha did not offer to carry it: to do so would have been an insult to a Reguibat woman, suggesting that she was weak. She was dressed in a blue mehlafa, the single-piece wrap-around garment the nomad women wore, with her long braided hair covered, and the customary blue tinge to her skin. As she hurried past their eyes met, locked intensely. There was a small, sensuous smile on her lips, and Taha knew she too was remembering the passionate lovemaking they had enjoyed the previous night, when the boys were asleep. Now, they did not kiss, embrace or even shake hands: physical contact between the sexes was confined to the privacy of the tent. But the eyes said it all. There was a power between them, irresistible and invisible — like magic, Taha thought.