He held the Mahri’s head in his embrace and stood there, consoling and consoling him in the pasture.
5
A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.
While traveling through the various encampments, Ukhayyad acquired some thick salve from the Bouseif tribes. He sheared the piebald’s fleece and massaged the blackened skin with it three times a day. This soon made the skin supple. But the blackness continued to consume the camel’s body, creeping ever lower, wrapping around the belly and eating at the legs. Another man knowledgeable in animal diseases arrived with a caravan of merchants from Aïr. He gave Ukhayyad a dark ointment in a small vial and told him he had distilled it from herbs. Ukhayyad applied the medication until it ran out. A few weeks later, the blackened skin began to peel off. Blood oozed profusely, but the scabs would not congeal. Ukhayyad could not bear to see the threads of blood that trickled from the piebald’s body. In the eyes of others, he saw pity and sympathy. But the sympathy was only for him, not the afflicted beast.
By now the piebald was no longer piebald. The lustrous speckles had disappeared from his gray body. The keen glance had faded from his beguiling eyes. His lean, graceful frame had been transformed into a bloated and splotched skeleton. He was now the pale and wretched image of his former self. God may create, but disease can transform His creations into completely other beings. And as with beasts, so too with humans.
The piebald would no longer go near him in the light of day. The camel spent his hours chasing angels whose flight shimmered in the mirages on the horizon. He was embarrassed when Ukhayyad showed him affection in public, so much so that when the young man came to rub him with medicine, the Mahri would dodge and try to flee. Sometimes he would complain miserably, “Aw-a-a-a-a-a-a.”
It was only with the shadows of the night that the piebald would sneak up on him, long after everything in the desert had faded and died down. In the deep darkness, when only jinn moved across the open wastes, murmuring among each other in secret conversation, the miserable piebald crept up and nuzzled his head against the blankets of his friend. Ukhayyad, sleepless with anxiety, was trying to steal a short spell before dawn shot its light at the horizon. The camel nudged at the covers. He prodded at the exposed parts of Ukhayyad’s body with fleshy lips. Then he thrust his long head under the blanket. With a groan, Ukhayyad embraced him, and together the two wept, each licking away the tears of the other, tasting the salt and the pain. When the shadows of death descend, this is all creatures can do. Ukhayyad turned his eyes toward the pale, shamefaced moon and sighed, “Why does God create if death must follow birth? Why must His creatures suffer before they die?” Then he bit his lip: “God damn women!”
One day, he grew sick of complaining. In the evening, beneath the covers so that no other creature would hear them, Ukhayyad told his friend, “That’s enough. We’ve had our fill of suffering. We need to do something, even if it’s madness. We’ll try Sheikh Musa’s plan. Islamic scholars from Fez are wise — everyone in the desert knows that. Even if the price is madness, what’s so wrong for a creature to lose his senses? Don’t you see — we’re going to go crazy whether we eat silphium or not! I don’t want to watch any longer as your body falls apart piece by piece. I will go insane before you die that way. Yes, that way, you will die and I will be the one who loses his mind. Now can you see what small moments of carelessness can cost?”
With that resolve, Ukhayyad traveled with the camel to the merciful western Hamada desert, heading toward the ancient pagan shrine nestled within its mountains. He never realized that had he delayed his travel even days longer, his father would have taken matters into his own hand and killed the sick animal. The man had been planning to end the mangy thoroughbred’s misery by putting a bullet in its head.
6
At the entrance to where the two mountains faced one another, in an open waste that stretched on forever, stood the shrine of the Magus, tucked into the folds of a lonely hillside. In the past, the tomb had had frequent visitors, even religious teachers and scholars. No one had considered it an idolatrous object. Everyone agreed that it belonged to a Muslim from Arabia who had been witness to the early Islamic conquests, a companion of the Prophet who had died of thirst in the desert while fighting on behalf of God’s religion. Nomads of the desert sought out the saint, sometimes visiting the monument alone, sometimes coming in large groups. They would sacrifice animals to him, spilling the blood of their offerings before the shrine. That was until the pagan soothsayer from Kano arrived. ‘The crow’ as people called him, was an old black man who wore a necklace of river oyster shells around his leathered neck. On his head, he wore a black turban, and his silky, broad robes were of the same color. The man traveled alone on an emaciated she-camel, and stayed away from other people. He chewed tobacco and would spit in the faces of curious children and people who got too close. It was this fearsome witch doctor who first demolished the myth of the shrine.
The stone base of the shrine was triangular. At the top, the image of the god was set into the body of a large stone. Its neckless head sat directly on the torso. Its enigmatic features suggested it had been worshiped for millennia. Only rocks accustomed to receiving supplications over the eons could ever take on such features. The idol evoked tenderness and harshness, mercy and vengeance, wisdom and arrogance, and above all, patience — the patience of immortals well acquainted with the treachery of time and the loneliness of existence. The god’s right eye and cheek had been devoured by a millennium of dust and sand blown by the hot southern winds. The left side, in contrast, still bore testimony to the sad history of the desert. It faced the northern mountain, looking heavenward toward a peak that was wrapped in a pale blue turban. The remains of ancient bones lay scattered around the idol. Some had crumbled, while the vestiges of others — other animal sacrifices — remained intact.
The witch doctor had undone the myth of the shrine by reading the symbols engraved on the pedestal of the idol. He said they spelled the name of an ancient Saharan god. He went on to decipher the ancient Tifinagh alphabet, but he refused to reveal the hidden truth that had been buried at the feet of the god. Months later, he was found dead in a nearby plain. No one had ever been able to get him to disclose the secret of the pagan talismans.
At the shrine, Ukhayyad forced the splotched piebald to kneel. He stood there a long time, attempting to divine the secrets of the desert from the structure of the inscrutable idol. Finally, he prostrated himself, raised his hands and cried, “O lord of the desert, god of the ancients! I promise to offer up to you one fat camel of sound body and mind. Cure my piebald of his malignant disease and protect him from the madness of silphium! You are the all hearing, the all knowing.” He poured dust from the shrine all over the Mahri’s half-consumed body, then lay down and slept until the desert burst forth with the light of dawn. He made a cup of green tea, then made his way to the desolate western pastures.
That night, he had dreamed that the piebald was drowning in the valley. A flash flood swept over and swallowed him up. Ukhayyad clutched at the camel’s reins and fought the cold water. He tore at the animal from one side, while the torrent tugged at the Mahri from the other. The camel stumbled onto its front knees more than once, then sank beneath the violent waters until his head went under. Ukhayyad resisted the water’s pull, yanking at the halter from the other end. Blood poured from the nostrils of the struggling beast. Had he torn the muzzle at the bridle? The struggle went on for a long time — a very long time — until the fury calmed and the dark waters began to recede across the roaring valley. To his astonishment, he saw that the murky water had been transformed into demons who, like the water, were pulling at the Mahri by the tail, intent on dragging the animal into a dark abyss. Ukhayyad awoke from the nightmare to see the first blaze as it pierced the twilight of dawn.