Chapter 2
As you might imagine, witnessing a youth being taken over by malevolent sea-foam in hopes of summoning Iblis’s daughter was
not an experience easily forgotten. If we had awakened some sort of vengeful spirit in the lagoon, however, I did not return
to find out. Instead, I fell back into the routines of family and harvest, which meant on the day I returned to a life of
misadventure, I was locked in battle with the constant enemy of my retirement: my roof.
Had I held fast to the payment the young men and I had agreed upon weeks ago, I might have been able to purchase a few good
boards from a carpenter in Salalah, the town a half day’s journey away. Instead, I had taken the boys back to shore for free,
moved by their fear and hoping my benevolence would buy their silence in return. A decision I cursed as I laid down a mat
of rushes across the latest leak and sat back to assess my work.
It was not an inspiring sight. For nearly a decade, my family had called this decomposing stone house in the seaside mountains home.
With commanding views of both ocean and countryside, walls thick enough to block arrows, and a crude escape tunnel hacked into the storage room floor (complete with claw marks and bloodstains on the cramped walls), the place had likely once been the fort of a petty, paranoid warlord.
During the khareef, the jungle grew so thick that a screen of greenery hid the house completely, and strange hisses emanated from the surround ing thickets of banana trees.
A nearby coconut grove was always cold, too cold, and the crashing waves on the narrow beach sounded like the shrieks of lost souls.
Add the horned stone idol my brother had uncovered while cleaning out the courtyard and you would be correct in assuming locals
avoided the place. Which made it perfect for my chief purpose in those years, which was to hide. Less perfect were the endless
repairs. Repairs I was required do myself, as I could not bribe workmen from any of the neighboring villages to visit such
a haunted abode. The holes in the roof were the worst of them. It was not enough that I had spent my career trying to keep
a ship watertight; no, I had to have a house that wanted to be one with the rain and the sea air, a particular curse in the
wet season.
“Do you need more rushes, Mama?” my daughter, Marjana, chirped from where she was spinning wool.
“No, little love.” I wiped the sweat from my brow, my eyes stinging. “But would you get me some water?”
“Of course!” Marjana dropped her spindle to skip-run away, and I returned to my knots, trying not to despair at the roof’s
appearance. Between my sailor’s stitches and the rushes, it looked less like a roof and more like a reed boat that a shark
had devoured and vomited up.
Ever a blessing, Marjana returned with not only a pitcher of water, but a bowl of sliced mango.
“God reward you, my light.” I straightened up with care, pinching my brow to keep black spots from dancing before my eyes.
House repairs and farming had kept me strong, but my body did not like swiftly moving positions during afternoons so humid
it felt as though you could have wrung out the air. I collapsed into a damp hammock strung in the corner and drank directly
from the pitcher.
Marjana settled between my feet. “When do you think Grandma and Uncle Mustafa will be back?”
“By sunset, God willing.”
“Do you think Auntie Hala will come with them?”
“If she is feeling well enough.” Unable to afford a place big enough to host his workshop and his family, my little brother,
Mustafa, and his wife, Hala, split their time between her parents’ home in Salalah and ours in the hills. But the trip could
be an arduous one, and at six months pregnant, with another toddler in tow, Hala was returning less and less.
Marjana wiggled her toes. “If we moved to Salalah, we would get to see her all the time. And I could go to school at the masjid.”
The hope in her small face broke my heart. Marjana had been asking about school more often. Though I tried to minimize her
ventures to Salalah, my mother was not above spiriting her out for day trips to the market and gossip circles of elderly ladies.
“It is cruel to isolate her so, Amina,” she would chide. “Marjana blossoms when she is out and about. You cannot let your
fears rule her life.”
If only my mother knew the depths of my fears. “It is not safe, Jana,” I said gently. “Maybe in a few more years.”
My daughter stared at me now, a hundred questions in her dark eyes. When she was younger, she would ask them with the relentless
curiosity of a child. Why do we not leave the cliffs? Are there bad people after us? Will they hurt you? I knew my stammered, evasive answers were never enough, and yet it only made me feel guiltier when she stopped asking them.
She seemed too young to have surrendered to fate.
“Why don’t we play a game?” I suggested to lift her spirits. Marjana loves her games, inventing her own complicated versions
and designing boards and pawns with anything she can get her hands on. “Go find your mancala board.”
“Okay!” She beamed, thoughts of school forgotten, and was gone in a flash, her braids bouncing as she raced away.
I pulled off the cloth holding back my hair and mopped my face.
A breeze had kicked up, bringing the smell of the sea and rich wet earth more strongly.
The khareef was in full swing, patches of light fog cloaking the emerald hilltops.
If you have never witnessed the khareef in this part of the world, ah, but it is a wonder.
The mountains and valleys undergo an astonishing transformation, rocky cliffs and bone-dry wadis giving way to lush forests and roaring waterfalls.
The swiftness of the change and the vivid, ever-present green—a divine hue unlike any other I’ve witnessed—seems very nearly magical, evidence of God’s splendor.
And yet for me, the khareef signified more. The passing of all the seasons did. For if the sea was the heart of our world,
the winds were its lifeblood. And when the khareef lifted, so would those winds shift, heralding the beginning of the northeast
monsoon. While I labored on this roof, sailors from Kilwa to Zeila were loading the last of the ships to head to Arabia and
India with ivory and gold, mangrove poles, and all manner of trinkets; savoring last moments with wives and children. The
accountants and overzealous market inspectors of Aden would be absorbed in their tax scrolls, harassing new arrivals if they
had anything to declare while the pirate fleets hunkered in Socotra lifted their sails, heading for the unwary and ill protected.
On the other side of the ocean, mariners in places such as Cambay and Calicut would be waiting to depart westward, painting
the hulls of their sewn ships with fresh layers of pitch and shark oil and checking their sails.
Sailor or clerk, smuggler or trader—this steady calendar has ruled our lives and those of our ancestors since ancient times.
They say you can find goods from all over the sea in the ruins of pagan temples and forgotten kingdoms; Indian seal stamps
in Bahrain and Chinese glass in Mombasa. Our stories speak of trading cities built and lost before the time of the Prophet,
may peace be upon him, and the chants we sing to make ship work pass memorialize the losses of countless perished crossings.
My ancestors had attuned their lives to the sea for far too long for me to forget its rhythms.
At least that’s what I told myself when it hurt.
When watching the winds come and go and not follow them filled my soul with a blazing grief that made me take to my bed.
Take to stalking the hills and working the land until my hands bled and sweat poured down my limbs.
Until I was too weary to wallow in my memories and despair of never seeing the land recede into watery blue again.
And then Marjana reappeared. And if the grief did not disappear, it did fade. But though her beloved mancala board was in
her hands, her gaze was not upon me. She had stopped on the stairs and was looking beyond the edge of the roof.
“Mama...” She frowned. “There are people coming up the path.”
“People?”
“Strangers.”
The word had me on my feet and at her side in the next moment. We did not get strangers. Our location was too remote and removed
from the routes connecting Salalah and the coastal villages to attract lost travelers. But Marjana was correct. On the narrow,
zigzagging path that cut through the verdant scrubland was a small palanquin being carried by four men. Armed men—they bore
swords at their waists. Such precaution was the norm, of course. Bandits and the occasional leopard abound. But these were
big men, with a military bearing I did not trust. There were no other cargo animals or people accompanying the palanquin,
suggesting the traveler inside intended a short trip.
But a short trip here? Why?
I glanced across the roof. Carefully hidden in a watertight chest was my bow—a gift from a Sohari admirer whose tokens were
more appealing than his personality—and a quiver I kept supplied with fresh arrows. The bow is not my weapon of choice, but
I am fast with it. Fast enough that I could likely take out two of the men before the others hid. Maybe three.
“Mama?”
Marjana’s voice jolted me back to the present. I was not in the world where I shot people first and asked questions later.
I carefully pulled her out of sight. “Stay here and set up the mancala board. I will see what they want.”
Her expression was worried. “Should I—”
“You will stay on this roof and not come down until I call you, understand?”
She nodded, still looking a little scared, a sight that made me again contemplate my bow. But I left the weapon where it was,
instead picking up the hammer I’d been using to repair the roof. The house was silent as I crept through, the stone walls