Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [17]
It was not until they had stopped to pray and make camp for the night that her hopes rose again. The traders talked rapidly among themselves, and the one who had declared she was crazy kept stepping to the edge of their encampment and staring at the northern sky. There the fading light made way for the advent of a few glistering stars, and more and more of them appeared as she watched that dark part of the world return after a day away on the other side of the desert, or wherever the darkness went.
Something happened that night, and it wasn’t until a while later that she fully understood. After a series of calm evenings, when only the cool wind that blew after the sun went down gave her any cause for worry, she was awakened by an animal crying, and it took her a few minutes of listening to it before she understood that it was her mother, weeping, as silently as she could but still loud enough to wake her.
Mother, no, Zainab urged her. Please quiet down or the traders will awake.
I will not, her mother said in protest, squirming and squealing like a child.
Mother!
I will not!
At which point Zainab picked up a rather large stone—three horizontal lines across it, she noticed, one vertical—and smashed it into her mother’s face.
And sat up awake, crying out, breathing hard. She looked around and saw one of the traders sitting up with a rifle on his lap and keeping watch on the night.
“You have bad dreams? I can give you good dreams.” He smiled at her, and she looked away in fear, but he came no closer and finally she slept again.
The next morning came their rendezvous with five traders leading a long line of nearly naked dark men connected by chains attached to iron collars. Some of the men walked upright, others stooped, others had to be dragged by those just in front or pushed along by those just behind them. Their misery sounded on the air like the buzzing of a plague of locusts.
At the end of that day’s journey, Zainab stayed close to her mother and the other children. At sundown, a terrible chill overtook her and she shivered through the night. Now and then a strange voice, and then another, broke through the darkness and she heard the sound of the dark men shifting in their chains. At one point she awoke to find one of the new traders hovering over her, smiling, with filed teeth. Or was that a dream again, like the vision of her mother the night before? All through her childhood it had taken her a while to sort out the differences between dreams and actual events, and now she was fast slipping back again into that realm of confusion. She shivered at sunrise, shivered through the long day’s ride. Her mother hovered near her all the while as they moved along the river bank, where they found women bathing and washing clothes, small children clinging to their backs. The traders kept their cargo moving, though the one with filed teeth whistled at the women and his chief gave him a nasty look.
Damp, nearly liquid, heat rose all through what turned out to be the last day of their journey. People began to fill the paths and the traders now and then had to shoo away curious children who poked at the captives with fingers and sticks. Voices of chanting women shimmered through the air, and on the horizon low brown buildings appeared, as if painted into the pale lower half of the sky. Only slightly higher than the rest stood a mosque, also red-brown against the pearl-like scrim of the world.
Zainab, following on her mount the animal of the trader before her, raised her head at the sound of the call to prayer. She was astonished at the noise that followed, the rattle of sticks on drums rising somewhere in the town ahead. And then a great trumpeting, and lurching into view near-stumbled a long-nosed creature, rough, gray, ridged, and monstrous, red lines streaked across its serrated back and enormous plumes tied to its long tusks, and a long line of dancers following behind.
One of the traders turned and grabbed the reins of her beast, and the long line of men chained together at the neck crumpled, one