Aicha

Prologue

From the moment Aicha opened her eyes, her baba knew that she would be trouble.

He often retold the story of her birth with fondness, an affectionate glint in his eye whenever he cast her a glance.

It was a memory that he clung to with both joy and an aching sadness.

For Aicha’s birth meant finding one love and losing another.

He claimed that Aicha’s cries were short as he held her, swaddled in a cleaning fabric, the evidence of being birthed still clinging to her skin. Aicha’s eyes opened to stare at him. Her mama, Tadla, lay dying beside them, blood seeping into the sheets that the nursing maid had laid beneath her.

Aicha’s short cries echoed around the birthing room. When her father placed his thumb in her mouth to pacify her, she suckled greedily, as if she had been starving for the nine moon cycles she had spent enveloped by her mother.

“Hungry little thing,” he remarked, eyes soft. “My little shanewla.”

She stopped crying and stared up at him again with eyes dark and clouded, yet holding a certainty that he had only ever seen in her mother.

He held the baby to his chest, as if loosening his grip would cause her to disappear completely, and bent beside his wife. He leaned his bearded cheek into her hand as she weakly raised it to caress him, her fingers already cooling as life slowly ebbed away.

“Aicha,” she whispered, her tone low and weighted with exhaustion. “Call her Aicha.”

Whenever he told the story of his and Tadla’s first meeting, fractured memories danced across his vision, blurred by the tears he kept at bay.

It was one he would never tire of telling his daughters in their later years, and had created in him a certainty that true love was as real as the night sky.

The daughter of an Amazigh amghar, Tadla had travelled with her tribe from the northern mountains.

She arrived in the citadel after a long journey to such scorching heat that it felt as if it singed her skin, and she demanded water from the first body she met once passing the gates.

She yanked the sleeve of Fouad’s djilaba, and his wide, youthful eyes turned to face her.

“Boy. Give me water.” She was assertive in a way he seldom encountered. “Now.”

It was the confidence of someone respected, someone of a higher class, a boldness that Tadla’s mother had instilled in her, and that would be passed to both Aicha and her sister, Samira. Tadla didn’t know it then, but Fouad fell in love the moment those words spilled from her lips.

When he watched her, fingers pressed into his cheek and her gaze losing focus on both him and their daughter, that flicker of defiance she was so fond of lingered.

He pulled her hand away from his cheek, and onto the soft, bloodied head of their new daughter.

Tadla was too weak to hold her child, but Fouad wished to at least grant her this.

The soft skin of the child she had grown and given him.

Tadla had slipped away into Janna with a smile on her face.