Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [16]
That night as the fire crackled and whistled she listened to the traders talking about their work. It quickly became clear to her that they were traveling toward a city some great long distance away. She stared at the black, star-flushed sky, and at dawn she was still gazing up, up, up, as all the stars paled except one bright point near the west, a crescent moon hovering near it.
Their trail hugged the river, passed over sand and salt-flats, as it turned out, with only low vegetation to break the horizon line, and now and then, after days of travel, they came upon a village and a well. Her mother seemed scarcely able to catch her breath, growing weaker by the day and eventually lying across the saddle like an animal brought down in a hunt, and so Zainab attended to the care of her younger siblings. It became important to her that their hair be neat. And that they stop their quiet weeping.
“Do you miss Father?” she said. “He will meet us where we’re going. He will, he told me so.”
After a while her lies calmed them, and she began to believe them herself. Yes, Father would be there. He had returned to their house in order to pack more tools, and he would hire another animal and catch up with them. No, he had traveled without stopping—how much faster men can travel without women or children to slow them down! He had passed them on one of the nights when they had camped and built a fire and passed around a jug of fresh water and roasted a lamb and torn away pieces of meat.
But why was it that the traders took so long to make this journey?
She had not wondered, until worried, in her fantasy, that father would pass them by altogether, she dared to ask one of them.
“What?” he said with a laugh. “What?” And he went lurching away into the night, laughing still, saying the word over and over.
A few days later she received an answer. They had been following the sun, and at one point it crossed over the river, or so it seemed, as the river meandered slightly to the north, and then back again, and when she again noticed, the sun had returned to the same place in the sky, only farther away, if that made sense. She felt soaked with sweat, which was unusual for a child her age. Everything was bright with the high sun and yet deeply carved with shadows, as if both the inside of her life—the thoughts she thought, the fears she held clenched in her mind like a fist—and the outside had appeared at the same time, one aspect pressed atop the other into a palimpsest of distress.
As if to ease this, she allowed her heart to take flight!
A small cloud of dust appeared on the horizon to the north, and the leader of the traders said something to the others, and they slowed down.
Father? she said to herself. Oh, Father, hurry, hurry to meet us!
As the animals moved forward along the river she kept peering to the north and watching the small cloud of dust become larger and larger.
At a certain point the traders began to talk among themselves.
It was her father! Yes! It had to be!
“Mother!” she called out. And then she called to her siblings to watch the horizon.
One of the traders turned his beast back toward her and came trotting up.
“Do not make trouble,” he said, baring his teeth at her.
“My father, my father is coming!” she said.
He shook his head, and clicked at his mount and turned away.
“Crazy child,” he said. “Worth nothing.” He rode toward the head of the column as Zainab closed her eyes and prayed to the rhythm of the ambling camel. When next she looked at the horizon to the north the dust cloud had settled, and her heart sank, as she feared all had been an illusion, something even girls her age knew about, at least girls with active minds who sometimes dreamed while awake about things in