tried to respect the ancient laws of the desert.
Gazel remained very still, watching the convoy as it moved further away until the noise and the dust had completely disappeared from view. Then, slowly, he turned away and walked towards the largest jaima, which his children, wife and slaves had all gathered in front of. He did not need to go in, to find out what had happened inside it. The young boy was in the same place that he had left him in after their last exchange, with his eyes shut as if he was still fast asleep, the only difference in his appearance being the small red circle on his forehead. He looked at him sadly and angrily for a long time and then called Suilem over.
‘Bury him,’ he said. ‘And get my camel ready for me.’
For the first time in his life Suilem did not do what his master had ordered him to and an hour later he went into his tent and grabbed his feet, trying to kiss his sandals.
‘Do not do it!’ he begged. ‘You will achieve nothing by it.’
Gazel pulled his foot away in disgust.
‘You think I will just allow for such an offence to go unchallenged?’ he asked angrily. ‘Do you think that I could go on living at peace with myself, having allowed one of my guests to be assassinated and the other taken away?’
‘There was nothing else you could have done,’ he protested. ‘They would have killed you.’
‘I know, but now I must avenge the insult.’
‘And what will you achieve by doing that?’ the black man asked. ‘Will that bring the dead man back to life?’
‘No. But I will remind them that they cannot offend an Imohag so impertinently. That is the difference between your race and mine, Suilem. The Aklis allow themselves to be offended and oppressed and you are satisfied with your role as slaves, you carry it in your blood, from parents to children, from generation to generation and you will always be slaves.’
He paused and stroked the long saber that he had just taken out of the large chest, where he kept his most precious belongings. ‘But we the Tuaregs are a free, warrior race, who has remained that way because we have never given in to humiliation or insult.’
He shook his head. ‘And we are not about to change.’
‘But there are many of them,’ he warned. ‘And they are powerful.’
‘That is true,’ the Targui admitted. ‘And that is how it is. It is only a coward who challenges the weaker side and that kind of a victory will never make a nobleman of you. And only a fool fights with his equal because only luck will decide who wins that battle. The Imohag, the real warriors of my race, will always take on someone who is much more powerful than they are because if victory smiles on them, their efforts will be rewarded a thousand times over and they can be proud of what they have achieved and carry on.’
‘And if they kill you? What will become of us?’
‘If they kill me, my camel and I will make a straight run for paradise as promised to me by Allah, because it is written that whoever dies in a fair battle can be sure of reaching Eternity.’
‘But you have not answered my question,’ the old slave insisted. ‘What will become of us? Of your children, your wife, your livestock and your servants?’
He shrugged fatalistically.
‘Was I able to defend you before?’ he asked. ‘If I could not stop one of my guests from being killed then how can I defend my family against rape and murder?’ He lent over and with a firm gesture forced his slave to stand up. ‘Go and get my camel ready and my weapons,’ he ordered. ‘I will leave at dawn. Then, pack up the settlement and take it and my family far away to the Huaila guelta, where my first wife died.’
It was always the wind that heralded the arrival of dawn across the plains, as its nocturnal howling became more of a screeching wail, usually about an hour or so before the first ray of light appeared in the sky, some distance away, near the rocky Huaila mountains.
He listened to it with his eyes wide open, contemplating the familiar striped roof of his jaima and imagined the tumbleweed outside, rolling away across the sand. Those vagrant bushes that were always in a hurry, always looking for somewhere or something to attach themselves to, for a proper home and somewhere that would take them in and free them from their eternal wanderings, from journeys without destiny that took them from one end of Africa to the other.
In the milky light of dawn that was filtered through millions of tiny suspended dust particles, these bushes would appear out of nowhere, like ghosts waiting to pounce on man and beast. Then they would disappear, as discreetly as they had arrived, back into the infinite emptiness of a desert without borders.
‘There must be a border somewhere. I am sure,’ he had said in a voice that was heavy with anxiety and desperation. Now he was dead.
Nobody had informed Gazel of these borders because there had never been any borders in the Sahara until now.
‘How could you stop the sand and wind from crossing a border?’
He turned his face to the night as if searching for an answer, but found none.
Those men had not been criminals, but they had killed one of them and where they had taken the older man was anybody’s guess. It was wrong to kill someone in such cold blood, whatever his crime, even worse when that person was under the protection of an inmouchar.
There was something odd about the whole incident, but Gazel could not quite put his finger on it. One thing, however, remained startlingly clear: that an ancient law of the desert had been broken and that, for an Imohag, was unacceptable.
He remembered the old lady Khaltoum and the fear he had felt emanate from her icy hand as she placed it on the nape of his neck. Then he turned towards Laila’s huge open eyes, shining widely in the half light, reflecting the dying embers of the fire and he felt sorry for her and the fifteen paltry years she had barely reached and for the emptiness she would feel at night without him. He also felt sorry for himself and for the emptiness he would feel at night without her by his side.
He stroked her hair and her eyes widened like a startled gazelle in open appreciation of his gesture.
‘When will you return?’ she asked, almost pleadingly.
He shook his head:
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘When justice has been done.’
‘What do these men mean to you?’
‘They meant nothing,’ he confessed. ‘Until yesterday, that is. But it’s not about them. It’s about me. You would not understand.’
Laila understood, but did not protest further. She just moved closer to him as if trying to absorb as much of his strength and warmth as was physically possible. Then she stretched out her hand in one last effort to keep him back, as he stood up to leave the tent.
Outside, the wind was moaning gently. It was cold and he wrapped himself up in his djelabba as a shiver ran down his back. This often happened to him and he never knew if it was a reaction to the cold or to the black space that stretched out before him. Entering into that black space was like immersing yourself into a sea of black ink. Suilem came out of the shadows and passed him the reins of “R’Orab.”
