After war broke out along the northern coasts, the movement of caravans through the interior of the continent began to falter, then stopped. The famine intensified and spread across the entire desert. At first, this did not affect desert commerce. But as the war went on, it drove peasants to raise the price on grains and dates. Later, many began to bury their harvests in secret caches, and refused to barter or buy. Those two sacks had disappeared at the very moment Ukhayyad had needed them the most. That only increased his rage and self-loathing. And his contempt for women.
He despised women because, now, he looked at things with his eyes rather than his heart; and as his feelings melted into cool reason, Ayur’s magic began to dissipate. He had once thought that her charm would last forever. Once upon a time, he had thought it was as powerful as the vision of fate he saw during his tumble into the well. Now, he was certain that to draw near to love was to bury oneself in a grave. Now he knew that the passing of time was a kind of magical charm as well, one that broke love’s spell and scattered its poetry.
It was this woman who had brought calamity on the piebald; she had driven Ukhayyad to break his promise. He had never before broken an oath in his life. Now, without thinking, he had done so. And with whom? With the hieroglyphs of the ancients, with the goddess Tanit herself. He wished he had known it was her shrine, or he would not have forgotten. But truth only shows itself after time has passed. This is the law of truth, on the authority of the elders who repeat it over and over.
He concealed his secret from the soothsayer and stepped out into the open desert. He sat until midnight, unable to arrive at a solution to his problem. Since he had realized the truth only after the fact, and only after famine had come to reign in the desert, there was no way to fight fate’s prescription. Where would he find a healthy, strong, and sane camel after these lean, dry years? How would he acquire a camel when he himself went without food and when his wife and child were nearly starving? He recalled an incident in a sandy region of the desert a few weeks earlier when he had cooked his leather sandal and eaten it. Ukhayyad had been following the tracks of a camel he had purchased back in easier times and then left to pasture in a valley between the northern and southern deserts. Along the way, he met one of the herders there who told him that he had seen the camel weeks before toward the east. He rode on the back of the piebald until he arrived at Zurzatin, and the herders of the Kel Abada there told him that they had seen thieves taking the animal with a herd of stolen camels across the eastern desert toward Ghadamès where they would be sold. Their stories contradicted one another and did not make sense. Others claimed that bandits had slaughtered and eaten the camel right where they found him. In a daze, Ukhayyad wandered about, hungry and miserable. He had not tasted real food in days. Despite that, he refused the invitation of the Kel Abada to eat with them. The sandy parts of the desert promised nothing. They were treacherous and devoid of herbs, scrub brush, and game. The desert of the Hamada was paradise compared to this heartless place. In the Hamada, if you did not find a gazelle or moufflon, it would offer you a rabbit. If you did not find a rabbit, it would give you a lizard. If it was not the right season for reptiles, the Hamada would set you a green table garnished with wild herbs. If the heavens held back their rains, the Hamada would show you mercy, providing you with the fruits of the lote tree left over from the previous year. My God — how merciful the Hamada was! In contrast, this desert fed you nothing but sand, dust, and the scorching southern winds.
When he could stand it no longer, he took off his leather sandal. He gathered wood and lit a fire. He roasted the leather on the fire until it became soft and puckered — then he devoured it. It was delicious, not any different from the camel skins he had eaten many times before. He opened his eyes after the meal. He began to stare at the piebald’s profile. It seemed to him that the camel was smirking. His eyes were smiling, laughing at him. He stood up and shook his finger at him, warning, “You better not tell anyone what you saw here. Do you understand? This is my secret.”
He removed the other sandal and studied it in his hands. Collapsing on the ground, he spoke to his friend as if he were addressing himself: “Don’t laugh at me. A warrior is also a pitiful creature — someone who might eat his sandal when he’s dying of hunger. Don’t measure me by your standards. Unlike you, God didn’t give me a place to store water and food. Hunger strikes down even the noblest of creatures. Starvation can bring even sultans to their knees and force them to grovel like slaves. Show some mercy!”
17
I heard Sufyan ibn Ainiya once say, “Those with children never have enough and never find rest. We used to have a cat that never once got into our cooking pots. But as soon as she gave birth to kittens, she started to.”
Ukhayyad woke up in the night, alarmed.
He had seen the local soothsayer standing over him, telling him to slaughter the piebald.
He wiped away the sweat and slipped out of the hut. A pale moon peeked timidly in the sky. In the magnificent silence of the oasis, the night-time singing of crickets could be heard in the palm grove. He walked about the open desert and thought: this soothsayer from Tiba must be a ghoul. What he had seen was not a real dream, but a ghost who wanted to eat the piebald’s flesh. Who would dare to eat the flesh of a stately animal with graceful limbs?
Tomorrow he would find the witch and kill her in cold blood. But, beforehand, he would find out what she meant by telling him this. Perhaps that too had been a sign of something else. The language of soothsayers is never self-evident. He returned to the hut, but was afraid to go back to sleep. Those who suffer nightmares fear the bed.
In the morning, a peasant woman told him that the soothsayer from Tiba had left the oasis. Her son had come and taken her away with him in a caravan passing toward Aghadès. Three days after the woman had left, Ukhayyad saw her in a dream. She spoke to him directly: “I am not the one who demands the head of your piebald. It is Tanit.” Then she vanished, and he never saw her again after that. In a few days, he forgot her altogether. He returned to his old self and devoted his energies to staving off the hunger that surrounded them. Only the day before, a whole family — husband, wife, and three children — had died. The doors of life had closed in their face and they shut themselves up in a hut. No one saw them until their corpses began to rot and one of their neighbors broke down the door. They found the family heaped in a pile, their bodies decomposed and crawling with maggots. The children’s eyes had almost popped out of their sockets. The imam at the mosque said that they had been strangled to death. Apparently, the father had choked them to prevent neighbors from hearing their cries.
That night, Ayur told him, “If you don’t do something about the state we’re in, we might as well do what that family did. But we should do it out in the desert rather than here. There will always be three bullets for your rifle, right?”
He did not reply.
In the morning, he went to the merchant to borrow some oil. He had known the man during better times and had bartered with him in the past, exchanging strips of dried gazelle and moufflon meat for barley, dates, and sugar. The man would not turn him away disappointed. But the merchant swore that he did not have enough for his own supper. He did not have enough for his own supper?! Only a few months ago the man had received a caravan from Timbuktu and purchased their entire merchandise. Then he turned around and quickly sold the same goods at twice the price to the merchants of Ghadamès. Then, as the food shortage intensified, he began to sell them at exorbitant prices to the peasants. Once a profiteer, always a profiteer! The merchant had caught the whiff of starvation before it had started to spread. He knew the war would go on and on.