Stone Kingdoms (30 page)

He came towards us and grabbed her by the arm and bundled her into the undergrowth by the side of the path. And then we were both screaming, and suddenly she was shouting at me to run but I followed them as they slid down the little bank that sloped away from the path and levelled out in a narrow terrace before it fell away again down steeper scrub into a gully strewn with rocks. He had pushed her to the ground and was kneeling astride her, holding the knife close to her face, but his head was turned towards me and he was shouting, while all the time she was telling me to run, to run as fast as I could. And then he held the knife blade up under her chin and she fell silent and he was talking to her, telling her
something.
I stood motionless at the base of the slope, but when I started to speak he screamed at me and pushed the knife closer to her and I fell silent.

‘He wants you, Naomi,' she whispered.

He turned his face towards me as she spoke, and I nodded my head again and again. ‘Tell him yes, Nadra. Tell him yes, tell him to let you go.'

He listened to her words, turning his eyes away from me to look at her, and the hand holding the knife relaxed to his side. And in that second I had grabbed a stump of wood off the slope and as he turned back towards me I already had it high in the air and though he tried to squirm aside I brought it down on him, striking the side of his head with a blow that almost shuddered it out of my hand. He tried to stand but Nadra pushed him back with her feet and I clubbed him again, and as it hit him the wood splintered into a spray of fragments and he stumbled backwards, staggered forward a few steps with skittering eyes, then lost his footing on the loose scree and slid down into the gully below, rolling and tumbling down the slope until he lay face down on the rocks below. We stared down at him, saw him move slightly then fall still again. Nadra picked up the knife he had dropped and we stood looking at it and then back down into the gully. She sidled closer to the edge but I put out my hand and stopped her, and then without speaking or looking again we turned and clambered back to the path.

22

After
about an hour we finally climbed out of the ravine, only gradually losing the urge to look over our shoulders. Nadra still had the knife, but she kept it hidden under her clothing and we hurried on, stopping for only the shortest of rests. Down below us, we saw a band of scrub crossed by broad shallow watercourses that were now dry beds of sand, and beyond this a stretch of plain that looked as if a fire had burnt it black. But there was no sign of road or village, and we were faced with no alternative but to continue following the narrow path and hope that soon it would lead us to somewhere we could find help. It meandered across the scrub until it brought us to a landscape that stopped us in our tracks, as if it belonged to another world, a dream, and I stared at the earth as I felt the last fringes of grass disappearing under my feet, to be replaced by the hardness of stone. Nadra looked confused, and I knew from her face that I didn't dream it. All around us stretched a black lava bed, strewn with igneous rocks, many of them sculpted into conical spires and pinnacles like children's sandcastles shredded by the wind. A ridged and cratered world, suffocated by a compression of thick black ash, where nothing grew – no crevices or pockets of plants – and where all sound seemed to have been distilled into the whine of wind that shaped and eroded the rock. There was no path, and only the blue-domed mountains beyond the blackness beckoned us on.

Sometimes the wind whipped the dust into our faces, and we covered them so only our eyes were bare. In places the rock was sharp underfoot, pressing into skin already blistered; in others
we
sank into troughs of thick, granular ash which made walking difficult and pulled at the muscles on our legs. We passed through narrow corridors of black rock with riddled, pockmarked surfaces and which stretched upwards into fluted and grooved configurations. Across wave-shaped ridges where the spray was frozen into pitted curves of stone, and the sun that beat down seemed powerless to stir anything into life or unlock the deadness. The ash left a bitter taste in the mouth and I tried to spit it out but couldn't, and we trudged on, accompanied by the strange, high whine of the wind rushing through the pipes and channels it had fashioned over centuries.

I tried to think of other worlds, of the sea, of the coolness of the blue mountains, but nothing seemed strong enough to resist the black press on the senses. Past and future were absorbed into the slow trek across the lava bed until I no longer knew if the world around me belonged to some blistered past beyond time, or the time that was called the future. All around, the contorted, broken rock seemed to channel us into a world from which there could be no human escape, and then I thought of God. And of a mountain that moved. The top of the mountain brushed by cloud, the women's hair hanging wet and lank over their weary faces. Watching through the car window as long lines of people moved up and down the mountain, climbing the stony paths with their bloodied, frozen feet. People hoping to please God through their act of penance, wanting to make themselves righteous through their pain. We had listened while my father ridiculed their superstition. Maybe I had stumbled into God's punishment, His penance imposed for my foolishness, for a man's body lying in a gully, for my sin. But I walked on, crossing the black bed of ash as the wind piped and squirmed through the fissures in the rock and dust flurried round our faces.

Where our hands touched the rock, or our clothes brushed against it, dark smudges were left and, as the strengthening wind stung our eyes, we walked with bowed heads, barely
looking
beyond the next few steps. We passed rocks covered with lizards, their languid bodies slowly inflating and their long tails curled like question marks. We took turns to walk in front, allowing the other to find some shelter, and then after what seemed like many hours I looked up to see the shapes of trees, and through their branches a waving flag of greenness. We pushed on with new determination, and in another short while the rock formations petered out and the blue mountains seemed within reach. The lava bed came to a jagged end, with long black fingers of ash stretching into the softness of the plain, and when we had left even these behind we slumped down to rest. But darkness was only a short time away. We had to find food and water while we still had strength left, and so after a little while we trudged on, walking mostly in silence.

They saw us before we shook ourselves free of our stupor and noticed their existence. Standing motionless like part of the landscape, momentarily forgetting their grazing sheep, their thin white whips thrown back over their shoulders. Two boys, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, standing as if frozen to the spot, watching as we walked towards them. We didn't shout or even raise our hands, frightened that any sudden gesture or sound might send them fleeing into the bush. But they held their ground, with their heads angled in animated conversation, perhaps unwilling or unable to leave their sheep. Then Nadra led us closer until we could see their faces, but she stopped, leaving a short distance between us. As she spoke, they looked at each other and past her at me. When she had finished, one of them took his skin-covered water carrier and held it out to us, and we took it and sluiced the tepid water round our mouths and splashed our faces. Then we followed them towards the base of the mountain, and in the falling darkness we found a straggle of makeshift shelters, and rearing up behind them a cliff pitted with caves. In the entrances burned scores of fires so the whole rock flickered with flame. As we came into the light
people
seemed to pour out of every crevice and flood around us. A hundred voices spoke at once. Nadra answered them and I knew she was telling the same story she had used in the last village. But when she said that we had come across the lava bed they rustled with surprise and some heads shook in wonder and disbelief.

An elderly woman with a shock of white hair came forward and, taking us by the hand, led us to a fire at the base of the cliff, then gestured us to sit and had food and drink brought to us. We drank thick warm milk from green plastic cups and ate tough strips of meat. Women we thought were her daughters brought water in a zinc bucket, and when we had finished eating we used it to wash. Slowly and painfully we eased off our shoes, and when they saw our bloodied feet they brought more water and cloths to bandage them. There were few males to be seen, apart from the young and the very old, and the woman told us that there had been much fighting round the villages where they had lived, and to escape the warring factions they had fled to the caves. The men had stayed behind to protect their homes or to join the struggle, but nothing had been heard from them for many months. Too frightened to make the journey back, they had chosen to stay until they were sure it was safe. There was a natural spring from which they could draw water, and good grazing for the sheep, goats and few camels they had brought with them, and so they lived there in the rickety shelters or in the colander of caves. They seemed to accept us as displaced people like themselves and the help they gave us seemed genuine, umprompted by other motives. Even their curiosity about us was restrained and discreet, and soon other families came to offer tokens of help – blankets, a wooden comb, a cooking pot, soap, a plastic canister for water.

Some of the women led us up a path and showed us to a shallow pocket of cave as if to an empty room in a lodging house. Their children carried little bundles of wood and soon they had a fire lit, and it felt as if we were ensconced in
unspeakable
luxury, hidden somewhere between the earth and sky. The fire flickered into the cave, smoke drifting lazily upwards, a fine gauze which shielded us from the gaze of the world. When we spoke, our words echoed slightly then lingered in the stillness until other words came to replace them, and as we sat on the blankets it felt as if our physical exhaustion had taken us beyond sleep, to a place where only words could expel what we carried inside, and so we talked into the night and sometimes there was laughter. I watched her add new fuel to the fire from the supply they had left us, and as she did so there was a dark shift of air as hundreds of bats wheeled across the face of the cliff, for a second eclipsing the moonlight. When she sat down again she was silent.

‘Are you worried about your mother and Rula?'

‘Yes, I wonder what is happening in Bakalla.'

‘Maybe the Agency will have returned. Maybe they'll use planes to drop food. There's nothing there now for the soldiers, soon they will grow tired and look for somewhere else. You said that yourself.'

She nodded her head and stirred air into the fire with a stick. ‘Who looks after your mother, Naomi?'

‘She looks after herself. She lives with her parents now. They're old and she takes care of them. They have a shoe shop and she works in that.'

‘Do you miss her?'

‘I never feel she's separate from me. Even though I don't see her, I always feel she's with me and that I am with her. Does that make sense?'

She nodded and stared out through the smoke. ‘Do you want to go back to your country now? You must think this is a very bad country with bad people.'

‘I don't think that. I never think that. And I don't want to go back to Ireland, not for a long time.'

‘But you must think that we are very backward people, very
superstitious,
very cruel.' And she turned her face to me to catch my hesitation or evasion.

‘All countries have their superstitions, their cruel people. My country as much as yours. You shouldn't feel like that.'

She shook her head in disbelief. ‘The West calls us the Third World because you think we are backward, because we are poor.'

‘My country has more money than yours, but that's all. I come from people who worship stone statues they think can move or cry tears, people who believe it pleases God for them to climb mountains in their bare feet. And in the north of my country people kill each other because they belong to a different tribe.'

‘But you have books and education, schools and universities.'

‘Some things are stronger than education.'

‘Like magic?'

‘Like magic, and dreams, Nadra. Like history and the past. The hate men have in their hearts.'

She shook her head again. ‘Nothing is stronger than education, Naomi. You're a teacher, you should know that.'

I let her scold me, knowing it was pointless to argue, perhaps even cruel to damage the hope she held so tightly to, and so I listened in silence as she talked about how only science could make the desert green and only education could change the future. From somewhere on the cliff face came the slow dance of a woman's voice and the sound of children singing the chorus. We lay on the blankets, listening as the music floated in to echo in the chamber of the cave, and it made our own voices sound loud and hard and so for a little while we fell silent. And I remembered the young girls with white flowers in their hair as they sat in the gloom of the bar, heard the whirr of the fan and the song that drifted up to me through the clink of glasses and slap of hands on tables. His cry as he came in me.

‘What is the song about, Nadra?'

‘
It's a song for children about catching birds. The words are foolish.'

‘Would you like to have children?'

‘Yes, I would like children, but I think maybe I am too old.'

‘Too old? How are you too old?' I laughed.

‘Most girls my age have been married for ten years. My family is poor and there is no dowry to give. I think no one of any worth will want me.'

‘But among the young, the educated, many will want you for yourself.'

‘It doesn't matter if they are educated, their families will still expect them to marry someone from a good family, or else they will not give their approval. I have no father to give a dowry or to act for me now.' She paused and then lifted the wooden comb, turning it over in her hand to look at it. ‘Maybe I have to find my own love, like the women in your country.' She started to comb her hair, smoothing it first with her hand then slowly lifting and working it with the comb.