Chapter Nine
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In the land of cloud and rain, first, they separated Zainab from her mother—she, as it turned out, was put into service as one of the caretakers in a nursery—leading her into a large compound where a fountain flowed in a central courtyard and many servants, some jet black, some as brown as the desert and herself, moved languidly to and fro as they carried out various tasks. Two tall dark women led her into a room off this courtyard where they undressed her and bathed her in warm water and rubbed her with oils. They gave her sweet food and something to drink.
“I want my mother,” was the last thing she remembered saying before waking up under a carpeted canopy, with moonlight spilling down onto a small central pool. A huge man with a smooth face who smelled of animals held her in his flabby arms.
“From this moment on, I am your mother, and I am your father,” the man said, and raised her face to his to give her a wet animal kiss. He reached down toward his waist, as if he were groping for lice or a hidden bag of gold, and before she knew it he had her lying on the carpet, her silks tossed aside, jabbing at her with a large purple-tipped growth from his groin. In he shoved and she screamed in fear that he would rip her apart.
Two-thirds of a year later she felt the same way as she gave birth to her first child, a plump brown girl. Motherhood gave her pleasure. Not so for her own mother, not so when she caught a glimpse of her son carried off in chains to some unknown destination, not so when she heard that one of her sisters had died in child-birth and other, who after producing two children, ran off with one of the other slaves and died somewhere in the forests to the south.
The news of the first death sent her mother into a despair from which she never recovered. She lasted a year, and then came a morning when she never awoke. Ten years after that first morning when the family fled from Timbuktu, Zainab had given birth to four children (one of whom, her second boy, had died within days of being born), and acquired a wealth of silk clothing, and still possessed that stone with the markings. She carried the object with her wherever she went, and at night she kneaded it in her palm, trying to recall the fading details of her father, the jar-maker, her last images of his smiling face and the work of his hands, those plates and pots and jars, but mostly what came to mind was his outstretched hand, the small marked stone resting in his still palm.
Zainab’s children grew around her, and she grew complacent in her silks, happy to have her health despite all the births, and happy with the attentions of the Master, the big man, the head of a large clan whose political branch ruled the empire of Koulikoro, who came to her a few months after each child had been born and wedded her again.
How many wives there were altogether, Zainab wasn’t sure. The number waxed and waned, and then waxed again. She knew at least half a dozen others here in this compound, and she learned about other harems in other places where he lived, in the city, and in clan villages to the west and south. The women in the compound whispered about his power and reach, from the capital here all the way into the southern forests. His rivals, and he had some in outlying parts of the kingdom, acted feebly, as weak as ants. His powers, if not infinite, for only God had infinite powers, were many. He was big, and grew bigger, in his body and in reputation, and his wives felt big, as though their lives meant something more than what they seemed to be, because they belonged to the big man. But it wasn’t until the day of their fateful boat trip that she had any idea of the politics and intrigue that surrounded him.
Heavy rains that winter had made for a large spring flow, and the river swelled beyond its usual borders, a perfect time for an excursion toward the mountains. Five large rafts, each with a tent and a surplus of slaves, who were cooks and tenders and body servants, one or two of whom she thought she recognized as the survivors of that long chain of captives who had accompanied her on her initial journey along the river all those years ago, and there were nurse-maids and young boys whose job was to do everything that none of the others did. The last raft transported the bodyguards and warrior-slaves, a mean-looking dozen or so of them.
The sky, a light blue dome above them. The air, warm, a gentle wind rippling the pennants toward the east even as the boatmen poled the rafts westward.
Zainab and her children—just imagine, because she could never have thought of this before she had given birth the first time, a clutch of children—sat on cushions on the lead raft, with the big man, and the others trailing behind her on another of the boats. Women at the shoreline working at their wash waved limp palms at the passing spectacle. From the second boat came intermittent sounds of flutes and drums as the wind carried the noise here and there along the brown swathe of water.
All of this put a big smile on the face of the Master.
“You are happy, Master,” Zainab said, addressing him, but averting her eyes, as always.
“The kingdom is quiet, we float on the river, we take our food and drink…What could be better in life? May, God willing, in the years we have left, such calm always descend on us.” With a hand the span of which could encompass the heads of two of his small children, he gestured upriver. “As with those fishermen—” a group of men stood and sat in a boat with wings like those of a butterfly, with another boat just like it drifting a few yards behind—“may we find simple fare beneath the slow-flowing waters…”
The Niger current lapped gently at the prow of their barge. A few minutes later and they turned toward the shore, where the chefs would make a feast and the musicians and dancers would perform into the night.
As darkness set in around them and the drumming subsided Zainab, her belly full and her head a bit woozy from the heat of the day-long trip in the sun, felt herself sinking slowly into a familiar state, the dreamy false freedom of the lifelong captive whose only escape from her condition was sleep. And yes, she did dream, dreamed she was dreaming, and listening to a voice from the river.
“Oh, dear girl, I have fallen as rain to meet you here, to assure you that whatever happens all will in the end be well. Lean toward me.” Zainab bent her head toward the stream. Out of the flowing current a hand arose and painted her forehead with water from the current. This made her feel so calm she said to herself as she slept that if life always felt like this—a gentle palm upon her forehead—she could live it all the way through.
At which point she was torn from her sleep by shouts and high screams.
Tall figures stood at the fire, waving sticks of flame.
A gunshot rang out across the star-diffused sky, and other screams rose into the shadowy dark.
“Mama!” Her youngest child, a boy as plump as the big man, shouted in her ear. “The fishermen! They killed my father!”
Her daughters came screaming, and nightmares rode into the camp on camels higher than the tallest among the slaves, dark bodies of the beasts and dark bodies of the men blocking out the stars.
These were indeed fishermen, fishers of men.
And women.