Free The Salt Road by Jane Johnson Page B

sandals to its hobble rope, caught hold of the creature by its lower lip, threw a leg over its neck and settled herself in front of its hump, over the withers. She kept one leg folded under her as if in place of a saddle. She looked down to catch Mariata’s fleeting gaze of admiration. ‘My father only had girls; when times were hard, I went with the caravan.’
    Mariata looked at her own mehari dubiously. She had travelled all the way from the Alhaggar to the Aïr, but most of the time she had been sitting in a palanquin, as befitted a woman of her status.
    ‘Pull its head down,’ Rahma instructed her. Mariata did so and the well-trained beast sank to its knees. ‘Take your shoes off and keep them in your lap. Tap the right side of his neck to turn left and the left to turn right. Rest the soles of your feet against the curve of his neck so you can feel his movement. You can guide him like that as much as by using the reins. To make him trot, hit him on the rump – not too hard or he’ll bolt; or dig your heels into his neck; or both. If you want to stop, pull on his head rope. And if you want to make him sit down, just tap him smartly on the back of his head and hiss loudly. Ready?’
    Mariata twitched her camel’s head rope, but all it did was give a low bellow. ‘How do you make it start?’
    They rode all that night, down through steep river-cut gullies and rocky defiles, heading north and west. The moon shone out of a cloudless sky, outlining everything in silver. A jackal called and its mate responded, their cries shivering over the hills and down Mariata’s spine.
    At every night sound she turned her head, seeking for pursuers, but there were none. The Bazgan range rose up at their back, rugged and imposing; down below they could see where watercourses – some iridescent, others apparently dry – snaked across the grasslands to the south.
    ‘Down there,’ said Rahma, waving her left hand vaguely, ‘half a day’s ride away, lies Agadez, the gateway to the Ténéré.’
    The Ténéré: ‘the Emptiness’ in their tongue, or simply ‘the Desert’ – over a thousand miles of barren rock and sand. Even now Mariata’s father and brothers were tracking across it, moving along part of the ancient trade route between Fezzan and Egypt and the ancient Songhai Empire. For centuries caravans had ferried gold, ivory, cotton, leather and slaves through the Ténéré to the great civilizations at either end of the route, but the halcyon days were long gone: now the caravanners were reduced to trading dried vegetables and bags of millet for cones of salt and whatever meagre profit they could make once they had bargained hard with the Kanuri who ran the mines, and paid their fees to the men whose territory they crossed and from whose wells they drew water. Sometimes raiders attacked the traders; sometimes dust storms or treacherous quicksands – fesh-fesh – swallowed entire caravans, leaving only their bones to be found years later. Sometimes no trace was ever found of them at all.
    ‘Are we going into the Ténéré?’ Mariata asked. The idea filled her with a mixture of anticipation and disquiet. She realized for the first time now, out in the quiet night air, her body swaying to the rhythm of the camel’s strange gait, that she didn’t have the least idea where they were going. All she knew was what Rahma had told her: that she had walked for eight days to find her.
    Rahma laughed softly. ‘Good heavens, no!’
    She offered no more and they rode on in silence. Down out of the Aïr Plateau they came, into the wide oueds that gave out on to the floor of the valley below – shale-filled dried riverbeds in which the camels walked easily, their great pads crunching the loose stones underfoot. As the sun came up over the hills behind them, it cast long red rays across the landscape, filling the acacia trees with fire. But still there was no sign of Rhossi.
    As the land flattened out into a broad plain, Rahma