MALI EMPIRE 1290
THE SAHARA SHIMMERED WITH heat as our strongest camel drew water from the well. Grunting with exertion, it walked staunchly in the opposite direction while a neat snare of camel-hair ropes and leather buckets collected our lifeblood.
I looked around, stomach knotted with worry. My best friend, Lalla, usually coaxed and comforted the beasts as they worked, but she was nowhere to be seen in the baked vastness.
In fact, I had not seen her all morning.
After setting off at dawn to the call of horns and kettledrums, we had stopped to assemble a crop of tents in which to seek shade from the ferocious midday sun. Our thousand-strong caravan was travelling north from Timbuktu, hauling as much gold and ivory as we could carry. Back to the West we would bring salt and cloth, metal and incense, pearls and garnets and writing paper.
We were only two days into the two-month journey and already it had been fraught with problems, despite our having doubled our numbers to protect ourselves from bandits. First there had been the sandstorm, then the nest of vicious scorpions. Then our runners had returned from the oasis at which we were supposed to resupply, reporting that the tribe was demanding a far higher passage tax than on our last trip. We could not afford the chunk of profits it would devour, and so while the khabir had gone to negotiate, the rest of us were doing the best we could with a small well – thinking longingly of the date palms and fig trees at the oasis nearby. After such a prolific streak of bad luck, Lalla’s grandfather, Yufayyur, was convinced our caravan was plagued by one of the supernatural demons rumoured to haunt the desert.
As I worked at the ropes dangling in the well, Aderfi, one of Yufayyur’s friends, nudged me with a teasing elbow. In our caravan, a child of one was a child of all, and Aderfi treated me like his own granddaughter – warm, always, but with an air of elder authority.
‘Thiyya, you are far more useful when you are not being distracted by our Lalla.’ His tone was one of jest, not vexation. The rigours of the desert had not yet eroded his good spirits.
Lalla and I were always being chastised for messing around instead of working. A gifted scribe at just ten years old, she was supposed to be learning the ways of her father, mapping our routes and recording transactions. But I was the omnipresent parrot squawking at her shoulder, making fun of everyone and everything. We had been inseparable almost since birth – our friendship was gods-fated, our families believed, as we had been born within moments of each other.
‘Do you know where she is?’ I asked Aderfi, running the rough rope over my calloused palms. A bead of salted sweat slicked into the corner of my stinging eye.
‘Last time I saw her, she was in her tent with Ridha,’ said Aderfi, leaning over the side of the well to adjust a bucket.
Ridha was Lalla’s father – a studious man made all the more earnest by the recent death of Lalla’s brother, who had fallen victim to the guinea worm. Some dark part of me was grateful that Lalla, too, was wracked with grief. I’d spent years mourning my own mother; a raindrop falling through the cracks in my cupped palms, returning irrevocably to the scorched earth below. The necessary cycle, the fountain of life, but still so unbearably painful. I longed for her embrace with a thirst I could never slake.
I looked up from the well, and after scanning the company saw Ridha deep in conversation with another scribe. Abandoning my task as though water was of little importance, I set off in the direction of Lalla’s tent, ignoring the calls of protest from Aderfi.
The distant dunes were warped with heat, the hot breeze carrying the scent of lovegrass flowers and desert thyme. Ducking into Lalla’s goat-hide tent, the cool of the shade was an instant balm. My skin felt tight and raw, as though the top layer had been peeled off and rubbed with salt.
Lalla sat cross-legged on a woven mat, loose leaves of paper and parchment sprawled out around her. Ridha had been teaching her how to navigate and record routes with traditional methods – dune shadows and desert winds, mountains and rocks and pebbles, the sun and the stars, ancient eroded gullies and the presence of mirages. But Lalla had an almost supernatural sense of direction, an internal compass the rest of the caravan had always marvelled at, as though she were connected to the terrain in some fundamental way.
‘Do you want to cause some trouble?’ I asked playfully, wondering how we might trick Yufayyur this time.
She jolted as though I’d awoken her from a strange reverie, a transaction ledger falling from her lap. Her smooth cheeks were wet with tears.
I sat down beside her and nudged my shoulder against hers. Her skin was far cooler than mine. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine.’ Her tone was terse and irritable. She was always prickly as a cactus whenever she was upset.
Rolling my eyes, I replied, ‘No, you are not.’
‘I am, Thiyya.’
‘You are the most stubborn person I have ever known,’ I said, with a half-chuckle. ‘Like a mule. Remember that herd of ornery goats that blocked our path for days last year? You belong with them. Go on, give me your finest bleat.’ She did not even toss me a cursory smile, and the mirth in my stomach curdled. This was serious. ‘What is it? Is it your brother?’
‘Not in the way you think.’
She tucked her knees to her chest. Her body was curved and rounded where mine was sinewy and lithe; she filled out her djellaba in ways I never would. ‘I mourn my brother, yes, but …’ She peered up at the roof of the tent. ‘What if I never live up to him, in my father’s eyes?’
I made a pssh noise. ‘Not to speak ill of the dead, but you have ten times the talent of Maqrin.’
‘But no penis.’
A bark of laughter escaped my lips before I could snatch it back. ‘True enough.’
‘I often wish I did,’ she whispered, as though confessing something deeply sinful. ‘Everything would be simpler.’
Nodding sagely, I said, ‘I shall make you one, if you like. Perhaps with goat meat, wrapped in a vine leaf. Or you can borrow one from the next camel who dies.’
She finally laughed, then – a glorious peal that spread warmth through the tent – and shoved me, playfully, so that I toppled over. ‘You are disgusting.’
‘But you love me for it.’
Sitting back up, I noticed I had squashed some precious papers as I fell. I smoothed out the maps, running a soft finger over Lalla’s distinctive swirling penmanship. I struggled to read any of it, in truth. It was as though the letters danced and rearranged themselves as I tried to parse them.
‘What is your secret, anyway?’ I asked. ‘How can you read the land in a way none of your ancestors have been able to?’
Brushing away the last of her tears, she sighed. ‘You really want to know?’
‘I do.’
A long beat, then she said plainly, ‘Camel dung.’
‘Pardon?’ I blinked, not sure I’d heard her correctly. Was she cursing at me in some new and inventive way?
Her lips twitched. ‘It always points in the direction of the next water source.’
‘That cannot be true.’
She shrugged, a smile pulling at her lips. ‘I have not yet been wrong.’
Camel dung.
She was no genius. Or perhaps she was, in her own way.
Suddenly, nothing had ever been so hilarious. I roared with laughter so loud my ribs ached, and soon Lalla was shrieking too. We rocked and rolled on the woven mat, clutching at each other the moment we caught our breath.
‘Does your father know of this?’ I asked, gasping from the hilarity.
‘No,’ she chuckled, sitting up and dusting off her djellaba. ‘Let him think me magic. It is the only value I have, in his eyes.’
Her features sank once more into sorrow. She rubbed at her collarbone, and I fought the pang of fear that she’d been bitten by something again. Last time it had got infected, and she had almost succumbed to the fever. I had never been so frightened in all my life.
Who would I be without her?
‘Do you want a game of senterej?’ I offered, gesturing at the velvet drawstring bag containing our favourite board game. ‘It might cheer you up.’
‘Are you sure? I always beat you so horribly.’
It was true. Her intellect was a different breed to my own. I contributed to the caravan in broad strokes and raw enthusiasm, wild but inaccurate passion, while she agonized over the finest of details, every grain of sand as important as the next.
Stroking my chin like a sage old bearded man, I said, ‘I shall blindfold you. It might give me a fighting chance.’
‘As you wish.’ Lalla would rather have rolled around in a scorpions’ nest than lose at senterej, so I knew winning even with her eyes closed would give her immense satisfaction.
We set up the game – green and gold pieces on a blue-and-red-striped board – and I tied a long silk scarf around her eyes so that only the tip of her nose protruded from the bottom. Then we moved our pieces around the board in the werera marshalling phase, and I read aloud the squares they had moved to so Lalla could visualize it in her mind’s eye. After mere moments, Lalla had captured my feresenya, and we began taking turns.
‘I heard on the winds that Badis has been sniffing around your skirts,’ I said, watching with dismay as Lalla captured my alfil.
‘Sniffing around my skirts?’ Lalla snorted. ‘Thiyya! He is not a feral dog!’
‘Well, you know what I mean. He likes you.’ I swallowed down the jealousy bobbing in my throat. I did not want to share her with her brother’s best friend. ‘Do you like him?’
‘I suppose he is nice enough.’ She shrugged, as though she cared not either way. ‘But he is too sad without Maqrin. Like a crown with the garnet missing.’
‘I can think of one way you might make him happy.’
Ever the childish one, I started making vulgar kissing noises. Lalla shrieked with laughter, tugging down her blindfold.
‘Gods, Evelyn, will you stop –?’
Everything in me stilled, as though a great gust of wind through the dunes had suddenly died, every grain of sand dropping to earth at once.
‘What did you just call me?’ I whispered, a cold dread creeping up my ribcage.
Our eyes were fixed on each other with an intensity I could not parse.
Why was my heart thumping so hard?
‘Nothing, I –’
My lungs tightened as I said, ‘We have met before.’
I knew not where the realization came from, only that it answered a niggling question that had lurked on the tip of my tongue for years. I could not even say for certain what the question was, only that there was something critical that I did not know, something just beyond the horizon that threatened my very existence.
Lalla blinked, water filling her eyes once more. ‘What do you mean, before?’
But I knew that she knew. She was just testing how much I remembered.
Dragon gates painted red and gold. Lotus leaves on rolling rivers. Candles flickering in stone churches. Forests so dense they obliterated the sky. Greek tragedies in wine-drunk amphitheatres.
‘In other lives,’ I all but choked. ‘And you have hurt me. You have killed me before.’
She dropped her head into her hands, shoulders trembling. ‘It is not how you think. I do not kill you because I want to. After Bianjing … the memory of what you did for me plagues me still.’
Bianjing. It stood out as a kind of axis point; a place where things between the hunter and me had tilted. Northern Song was a blur of grey, but there was a general sense of sharpness, of rawness, in my final hours. I tried to pull at some of the half-memories – the dragon gates, the lotus leaves – but they were dug in too firmly at the root to unearth.
Images of our various ends stained my mind’s eye like mirages. A stone to the temple in Samarqand, a rope round my neck in Al-Andalus, a pillow over my face in deepest Iceland.
How could I reconcile those blunt and brutal deaths with Lalla?
My Lalla.
The pain of the betrayal bent me double.
‘In the past …’ I started, voice watery, ‘you did not allow us to become close. You killed me cleanly.’ My words became furnished with something anger-hot. ‘You are a hunter.’
Lalla shook her head wildly. ‘It is not for sport. I have to, Thiyya. Evelyn. I have to kill you, in every life. That is our true destiny. The true reason we were born within moments of each other. Gods-fated.’ Her moon-round face was wrinkled with sorrow. ‘I cannot tell you why, but you have to believe me. I have no choice.’
I began shaking involuntarily, with a fear so visceral it made my head light and my blood cold. ‘So you intend to kill me again, then?’
‘Not now,’ she replied hoarsely. ‘But before we are eighteen.’
‘How could you do this?’ Hysteria mounted in me like a storm. ‘How could you let me get so close to you when you knew what you would eventually do to me?’
‘How could I not?’ Lalla wept even harder, and my Berber spirit protested – albeit meekly – at all the water we were both wasting. ‘All our parents ever talked about was how we were destined to be best friends. How our bond was thicker than blood and water both, for it was written in the stars. And the first few years … I did not remember that mutual death was our true fate until we were seven or eight years old. What was I supposed to do then? Murder a child, when I was a child myself? Stop talking to you entirely, leaving you to agonize for years over why I suddenly hated you?’ A rollicking sob almost caved her chest inwards. ‘Gods, Thiyya, I love you. I love the bones of you. I cannot fathom how I will bring a blade to your throat after all that we have shared.’
All the childlike innocence in me withered and died in an instant.
The things she had done, knowing that she would one day bleed me dry.
She had played endless board games and screamed as I left empty snakeskins in her bed. She had braided my hair and applied salve to sunburnt shoulders, mourned my mother and listened to my worries about what it would be like to become a woman without her. She had shared with me her favourite poems and proverbs, and it had felt like she was baring her very soul. She had chased me through the midnight desert, pulling from a well of boundless energy that only tiny children can draw from.
Together we had stolen kola nuts from her grandfather’s reserves, and acted out silly little plays to entertain our fellow traders, and laughed and run and danced and cried and lived, every moment of every day, with each other.
The cruellest fate the gods and stars had ever written: the person I loved most in the world was the person who would ultimately destroy me.