Chapter Eleven
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The further west they traveled, the worse things became. Unlike most of the Arab men, these slavers, mostly dark-skinned ruffians, some with decorative scars on faces and foreheads and some with filed teeth, treated them roughly and without respect. They touched, they pinched, they pulled, and then laughed and spat. Brutes, infidels who never stopped to pray, they worried her. They harried everyone to move along during the day, and at night around the fires, as if picking a piece of roasted meat from a tray, they would pluck a woman from the group and carry her off into the dark.
Twice they took Zainab, and each time she prayed and resisted, but to no avail. The pain settled into her as if an exquisite punishment from God. Bruised in the flesh and chilled in her blood she returned to her family at the fire, refusing to speak, and taking the smallest child in her arms in the hopes of finding some warmth to live for—almost to no avail. Her soul felt as though she had dropped it into a deep well and left it to drown.
Lilith, her middle daughter, a willowy tan-complected girl with an even disposition, tried to calm her.
“Mama,” she said, “one day our father will find us and take his revenge on these awful men.”
Zainab shuddered, with a chill even more cutting than the remorse that already cooled her blood—that a child of hers would find it necessary to say such things! It was a horror, a horror! And yet things might have been worse, because she could not know what we know, that every hour and every day and month and year brought them closer and closer—the children’s children, at least, because she herself would not live to see it—to their terrifying passage over nearly limitless water.
More days of rough travel, the land becoming hilly and the trail turning away from the river, to climb and climb in the direction of the retreating sun. For the first time Zainab felt the chill of nights at a high elevation, and she slumped into a fever, and again her children attended to her while the dark enveloped them all and the noise of drums and the high ringing chirps of animals rang around them. She had been born into a land of few trees. Now that it became a possibility that she might die beneath a canopy of dark wood which at night seemed to fall slowly upon her as the flames of the cook-fire dimmed down to feebly glowing embers, she fought with the demonic thought of welcoming her end sooner than later. If the traders approached her one more time she would fight with them, until they killed her.
But then the worry of the children living without her changed her mind. And then the thought of the children living as captives in this dark and cooling land made her want to kill them and herself on the spot.
She slept holding Lilith to her breast, as if that might hide the girl from any traders with wandering eyes.
It did not.
After a long day’s trek westward through the dry bush of a long valley the traders stopped the caravan to camp beneath a giant acacia tree and settled in to cook. Zainab had herself long ago given up on prayer, unable to find it within herself to submit to a god who would allow such torment to persist. Her own years were over, but the worry that her children would live as chattel, however well treated, for the rest of their lives filled her with dread. What kind of a god would inflict such suffering on so many for such a long period of time?
Daughter Lilith appeared at her side with a thick piece of bark that held a slice of fruit and some mashed vegetable.
“Mama, you must eat,” she said.
“Ah, I’ve become the child and you’ve become the mother,” Zainab said. “The whole world is turned around, upside down.”
“Yes, mother,” Lilith said, “backwards is forwards and forwards is back. Please eat. I heard the traders talking and it seems we still have at least one more day to walk before we reach Tambacounda.”
“Tambacounda?”
“That is where we are going,” Lilith said. “There is a market there.”
Zainab could not help but groan.
“You heard them talking about that, too?”
“Yes, Mama.”
Zainab felt a stabbing pain in her chest and turned away from her daughter to clutch her hands to her heart.
“What is it, Mama?”
“In that town, a place I have never heard of before all in the days we lived in Timbuktu, they will sell us.”
“No, Mama,” Lilith said. “No, no, no, no. They have a chief there, and he will take care of us, feed us, and give us clothing.”
“He will buy us first,” Zainab said. “For you and me and your sisters he will offer these brutes some coins. Or cloth. Or perhaps even a horse or a camel or two.” She took her daughter in her arms and pulled her tightly to her chest. “You know we are worth more than anything anyone can pay…”
“I like to ride a horse, Mama,” Lilith said. Such innocence in her eyes when she spoke, and when she remained silent—the thought of some man riding her daughter was almost more than Zainab could bear.
“Here,” she said, pushing the sack with the marked stone into her daughter’s hands. “This is not for you to lose.”
***
At a crossroads—could this be Tambacounda?—they entered a large market. Stalls and tents, horses and camels tethered behind them, the vast animal smell of caravan life rose like smoke from a vast fire as they approached. One half the sky lay in darkness—this to the east—the other with the last light of the day. Drums resounded behind the large array of covers and pennants, and Zainab could also hear, ever so faintly, a wavering call to prayer.
The traders led their entourage into the city where from the gates of a domed palace hundreds and hundreds of slaves, armed with various weapons—bows, short lances, shields—burst forth into the large square before it. Within the walls a sultan presided over business in a lofty pavilion, and off to one side stood troops, governors, young men, slaves. Musicians among the slaves blew bugles and beat drums with sticks and made a wonderful sound. Before the sultan’s chair jugglers and acrobats performed. The traders led their entourage off to one side of the courtyard, where a long-bearded man with a book inscribed numbers with a reed pen. His wives and many concubines stood behind him wearing fine silks, bands of gold and silver around their heads, singing quietly among themselves while their master went about his work of dispatching the goods presented to them by the traders.
Zainab screamed and the girls wailed and before they knew it they lived apart from each other for the rest of their lives.