Then Nasser came across a device in the form of Ursa Major at the bottom of the tree. The three stood looking at it for ages, some intuition alerting them that it contained a sign, until their flashlight died and the darkness became dense around them. Suddenly, a silver beam penetrated the pitch black, and they became aware of the full moon outside shining in through a hole in the roof and falling upon the furthest corner of the hall, the spot where they had been bedding down at night. The silver beam revealed the disturbed surface of the soil, and when they scraped it away they found a stone marked with seven depressions representing the stars of Ursa Major. It felt as if the remains of the fort were conspiring to shed their every last mask before them in one go, or as if, because of all the time they’d spent there, they’d been accepted into the fort’s mind. They applied themselves immediately to digging up the stone, and it lifted as soon as Yusuf slid the shovel beneath it. Underneath was a copper-lined wooden box, and inside it lay a piece of parchment spread carefully between two sheets of blotting paper. Mushabbab held it up to the faint light, displaying a tree illuminated with colored inks: they were certain that it could only be the missing final page of the parchment inside the amulet, containing the rest of the tree that began on the wall, and whose later branches Ayif al-Ghatafani’s descendants must have diligently added over the centuries.
In the dim light, the three heads fused into one and the three hearts throbbed with a single beat, as their sleep-deprived eyes took in the complete tree, spread between wall and parchment. They traced the tree’s two oldest branches — the first beginning with Moses and Aaron and leading to Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf in the year 629 A.D., and the other descending from Wa’il, Rabi’a, and Nizar — to where they met in Marid, Sarah’s son born in the bed of Sa’d, sheikh of the Sabkha tribe.
On the paper was the more recent half of the tree, which showed the descendants of Marid Sabkha born of Arab women exclusively from the heart of the peninsula. The ink was faded, blotched, and smeared in places, varying with the skill of Ayif al-Ghatafani’s many descendants at handling the fine old parchment, and revealing the difficulty they faced in documenting the lineage over fourteen centuries to the present day. Impatiently, the three pairs of eyes scanned the branches passing through Iyad, Qays, Saleem, Ma’ad, Bakr, Mu’awiya, and Awf to the present, where Nasser’s eyes settled on the final entry in the document, which Muflih al-Ghatafani had added to that long branch of Marid’s descendants. The name was clear and unmistakable: Khalid al-Sibaykhan.
Nasser laughed hysterically, while a shudder ran through Mushabbab. “This is Long Belt! Al-Sibaykhan a descendant of Sarah and her son Marid, and right in Mecca!” He sputtered.
A single sentence uttered about that parchment pierced their dream, destroying it and expelling them. A glaring light flooded the hall and figures in khaki uniforms appeared.
“Give yourselves up!” they barked, quickly closing around the tree on the wall. Nasser stepped forward calmly with his hands in the air, but Mushabbab hurled himself blindly and without warning at the source of the light. Hands attacked him and everything became a confused tumult; Nasser hit out in the darkness and was hit back at, and it was impossible to tell who were the attackers and who the prey. In the chaos a shadow slipped out and limped away, vanishing into the darkness.
Cyber Attack
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 90
It scares me sometimes the way you read my thoughts. The last article you sent me was about the legendary game designer Miyamoto, who’s banned by Nintendo, the company he works for, from talking about his hobbies and dreams because they’re worth a fortune. This is the man who has transformed the most banal aspects of his daily life into obsessions that have gripped the entire world. He invented Nintendogs after his family got a dog and he invented Pikmin because he loves gardening.
I’ve been watching break-dancers who walk on their hands and move their bodies as though they’re made of rubber. And I’ve been watching Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter who broke the world record for the hundred-meter race at the 2008 Olympics, reaching the finish line so far ahead of six of the world’s best sprinters no one could believe it. All these physical accomplishments make me feel like there’s a new species of humans being created that we’re not part of. My species, physically and emotionally stagnant, ought to just die out.
No dreams worth mentioning, or movement.
Nora set the message down so she could take a look around the military plane that was taking her to Medina. The art exhibition had come and gone and now she was back to the series of sporadic moves that determined her life on the sheikh’s chessboard. She resumed her silence thousands of meters in the air. A few luxurious chairs and a circular meeting table were all there was to the troop-carrier they were flying in. That and the roaring engines, which shook her heart and relieved her from having to speak or listen. She shut her eyes and pictured her paintings hanging on the gallery walls. Beings not male or female, limbs severed, in the paintings and the gallery, visitors were all on a single plane. They held animated conversations. Saying things they’d never dared to say before, or hadn’t been able to fit in, as the sea air salted their exchanges. They missed their missing limbs, or criticized them, or justified their absence. The female university students who’d come to the exhibition on an organized visit were a challenge. They provoked the darkest lines, they dug up the empty canvas and poured their rebellion or apathy onto it. They stood in front of her paintings, laughing and winking to one another, giving the figures a taste of life’s sting, if only for a few seconds. Nora was standing there, facing life’s onslaught, when they dragged her into conversation.
“Are you scared?” one of them asked.
Nora nodded, indifferently. “Maybe. It’s fear that makes us fight,” she said sarcastically.
“Your paintings make me feel beaten down,” another one of them said. “Why are you so cruel to bodies? You should leave them alone.”
Another girl laughed, not bothering to hide her malice or lower her voice as she sniggered. “This is the work of a butcher’s daughter.”
Nora’s skin was tanned for the first time in her life, by the sea air, and it came to life. For a few days, her figures were more than a monologue delivered by her fingers to the canvas. They’d become human in those gazes, but the exhibition was over and at that altitude, she allowed her figures to be wrapped up, like a cinema reel, back to their hiding place, back to the faint El Greco sky on the grave. The airplane banked sharply and when Nora looked out she could see the lava fields spread around Medina, as if a volcano had dipped its giant fingers into the earth’s core and sprinkled its coal around. Another look was enough to transform all that coal into diamonds, like the source of all her paintings. At that moment, she wished she could come back as a line of coal over that land, which had given shelter to the Prophet in his flight, and could be safe. She drove the black lava fields from her mind as, in the midst of a cloud of palm trees, the minaret of the Prophet’s Mosque came into view. Nora had missed those minarets, “which will never cease calling people to prayer until they hear Israfil blow his horn for the resurrection, and they shall be the first, and their dead shall be the first to come up out of the earth to answer the call.”