Chapter 3
Children were being ushered into their homes as Aicha returned, and despite their curfew, some of her neighbours had begun to linger at their doorsteps later and later.
The trickle of soldiers being called back to their homeland meant fewer patrols, fuelling rumours within the citadel that they were losing the war, with territories of Maghreb taken back by the Sultan.
The invaders were fleeing from all port citadels, according to said rumours.
Aicha waved at one of the aunties who sat on a rug of goatskin just outside her iron door, sunflower seed shells being cracked between her teeth.
When darkness greeted her in her own home, she shut the door firmly behind her and ventured back out onto the street, making the short few steps towards her baba’s smithy.
The scorching heat of the forge hit her like a thick gust of wind.
She stepped in, shutting the door behind her.
Samira was beating into the weakened metal with a hammer, sweat lining her forehead and upper lip, the sound drowning out any and all conversation that her baba was having across the room with Sidi Mohammed.
He was as good as her uncle, having been her baba’s oldest friend.
Streaks of white coated his dark hair, and he threw Aicha a small wave from his position beside her baba.
The noise of her sister’s task was deliberate, one that they tended to alternate when her baba did not want to risk any prying ears. Growing up with a rebel leader for a father meant that the current view she had was not unfamiliar, but it also meant that they were constantly in a state of alert.
With Samira focused on her task, and no sign of her letting up in her movements, Aicha moved towards her baba and uncle. She threw an arm around Fouad, head leaning on his shoulder as he hunched in his stool by the workstation.
“You’re late,” he said loudly, though Aicha believed he would have much rather grumbled it to emphasise his frustrations. “You missed l’asha prayer, again, Aicha.”
“I promise I’ll make it up.”
He shook his head. “Stop doing that; you cannot keep making them up. It is not good.”
Aicha only patted his shoulder in response, and while Sidi Mohammed grinned, her baba bristled.
She loved when he bristled, he looked petulant and silly, and it always made her laugh.
With Aicha leaning against him, he placed an elbow on the workstation to support himself, and resumed his conversation. Ignoring Aicha.
“If Samira’s messenger speaks the truth, then we are the last port the invaders maintain control of.”
“She has yet to lead us astray,” Sidi Mohammed reasoned, and he rubbed at his bearded chin. “Mugadur was reclaimed by the Sultan not three moon cycles ago. It would explain why more and more soldiers flee everyday, and the food shortages.”
Mugadur was a port citadel, much like their own, that had been invaded and rebuilt over centuries of Portuguese rule.
It was to the south of their home, a three-day ride.
Since the gates had closed—with the Portuguese prohibiting anyone from leaving or entering out of fear of invasion—Aicha had heard nothing of Mugadur.
“I thought that was because of the gate blockade,” Aicha interjected, but her query went unheard, as if she didn’t exist despite her presence.
Annoyance lashed at her sides.
“What of the Sultan’s ships?” Sidi Mohammed pressed.
“They set sail from Tanger in the winter; they have been attacking any Portuguese who approach.”
Aicha’s mind whirled, circling the news that her father so often didn’t bother to tell her.
Unless she invited herself into meetings, or eavesdropped, she was the last to know anything of value.
Sometimes, she pestered Rachid to fill in the gaps, or her sister, in the rare times when she made a statement that had value, and their baba involved her.
Despite Aicha’s age, her baba tended to relegate her to the pettier jobs, message sending across the citadel, or small thefts.
Nothing like the smuggling Samira and Rachid partook in on a weekly basis, nor the deliberate and coordinated attacks on the soldiers’ supplies and ships in the night.
It made her feel loved, cherished, but also suffocated.
“They’ll be weakened enough in numbers when the Sultan’s armies arrive,” her baba concluded, and she noted the hint of pleasure in his voice. He wouldn’t allow for excitement, he never allowed himself the luxury of hoping too much.
Sidi Mohammed released a bark of laughter. “And with their rations low, their stamina will be pitiful.”
“Sidi Abdelhak said the sultan is attacking with seventy thousand men. Is that true?”
This time, her father humoured her. “Yes, and they bring with them thirty-five cannons.”
Aicha knew very little about who the Sultan was. He had always just been the Sultan, the ruler of Maghreb, a man who was revered for his aggressive war tactics.
Her baba spoke of his heroics when he had driven French invaders out of Larache—a citadel to the north-west of Maghreb.
She knew just that, and the fact that her baba’s messengers relayed information to the Sultan’s men often to facilitate the revolt.
She could not tell if he was married, or whether he liked prunes in his dwaes for dinner.
She did not know if he loved Maghreb as much as her baba did.
She just knew that her father believed in him enough to risk the fate of their family to fight back.
“Thirty-five!” Aicha gasped, eyes wide. “That’s well over double what the Portuguese garrison has.”
He nodded, though he didn’t seem particularly pleased about the cannons. “Our goal is to lead an attack on the gates, so that there will be no need for cannons.”
Aicha’s brow furrowed. “Why not?”
“We must protect our people where we can, Aicha,” he answered, as if it were obvious. Though he didn’t do so unkindly. “Allowing round after round of cannon fire increases loss of life.”
“At best, we hope that the cannons will act as a deterrent to the settlers,” Sidi Mohammed clarified. “They’re evacuating with each passing day, and the blockade has helped.”
Aicha nodded, unsure of what else to say.
Her father spent the next ten minutes listing their inventory of weapons, hidden in tunnels beneath the city.
The siege that he had planned, for what felt like decades now, was closer than Aicha had anticipated.
For so long, their freedom had been spoken of as a hopeful tale, as if one saviour would rise from the ashes and break the chains of the invaders that had held their citadel captive.
Stories that her juddi had recited to her baba, and his juddi had recited to him.
It scaled back centuries, countless stories of failed sieges before it, cautionary tales of how those oppressed must remain brothers and sisters in arms.
But with the news of ports falling across the coast of Maghreb, the freedom her ancestors had longed for felt within reach.
Like fingertips brushing against the wind, caressing her skin and making it almost tangible.
It was tantalising, torturous, but Aicha couldn’t help the kernel of excitement that bloomed inside her.
Crawling into the emptiest crevices in her chest and lighting the darkness with something less… despairing.
“Send word to your messenger, Samira; confirm that the Portuguese garrison’s numbers have dwindled to below one hundred,” her baba finalised, before rising from his stool.
Aicha rose with him, and when he turned to face her, there was the barest hint of a smile emerging from beneath his beard.
It was a smile he seldom used, one reserved for their lighter moments.
She remembered that smile when he used to indulge her demands for a bedtime story, but as she aged—becoming toughened from his lessons and the roughness of the invaders—she saw it less and less. Now, it felt like a reward.
“You have arrowheads to shine and pack, shanewla,” he pointed out.
For the first time, she didn’t feel annoyed at the prospect of chores.
“Do you think if I killed someone, Baba would finally respect me?”
Samira chortled at the query, and despite the darkness in the forge, Aicha could still tell her sister was rolling her eyes.
“He respects you already. You just see it as babying.”
An annoying statement Samira tended to repeat every time the question came up, because it was a statement soaked in a lack of awareness. Samira had always been treated with the respect Aicha craved, implicitly trusted and left to her own devices to make informed decisions. Not like Aicha.
They sat beside each other, Samira polishing the daggers that were ready to be sold and Aicha on the arrowheads her baba had reminded needed to be cleaned.
It was late, and they would need to retire to bed soon, but Aicha found she liked these moments of quiet and exhaustion with Samira.
They were on an equal footing, both relegated to boring chores that Fouad would let neither of them escape.
It built character, he insisted. Something his own baba had forced on him.
Sometimes, she wished she had the chance to meet her juddi, but he had died just after the birth of Samira. A fever had plagued the citadel, stealing the lives of many of their elders and young.
“I don’t know why you’re in such a hurry to escape your youth,” Samira said softly. “I wish I had had the chance to linger in mine.”
Samira seldom spoke of how much responsibility lay on her shoulders, and it often made Aicha forget just how heavy her burden was. The two were permanently wishing for what the other had: Aicha the opportunity to be treated as an adult, and Samira longing for less responsibility.