Amin Maalouf - Leo Africanus

Apart from myself, showered with attentions and already dreaming of delicious little treats, my family barely dared to breathe.

‘It was as if we were taking part in a ceremony which a baleful jinn had changed from a marriage into a funeral,’ said Muhammad. ‘I always considered your uncle like a brother, and I wanted to shout aloud that Warda had fled from her village to find me, risking her life, that she had left the land of the Rumis to come to us, that we no longer had the right to consider her as a captive, that we did not even have the right to call her Rumiyya. But no sound issued from my lips. I could do no more than turn round and go out, in the silence of the grave.’

Salma followed him without a moment’s hesitation, although she was almost fainting. Of them all, she was the most affected, even more than Warda. The concubine had been humiliated, certainly. But at least she had the consolation of knowing that henceforth Muhammad could never abandon her without losing face, and while she was trembling in her corner she had the soothing feeling of having been the victim of injustice. A feeling which wounds, but which puts balm on wounds, a feeling which sometimes kills, but one which much more often gives women powerful reasons to live and to struggle. Salma had none of this.

‘I felt myself crushed by adversity. For me that day was the Day of Judgement; I was about to lose your father after having lost the city of my birth and the house in which I had given birth.’

So we got back on to our mules without knowing which direction to take. Muhammad muttered to himself as he hammered the beast’s withers with his fist:

‘By the earth that covers my father and my ancestors, if I had been told that I would be received in such a fashion in this kingdom of Fez, I would never have left Granada.’

His words rang out in our frightened ears.

‘To leave, to abandon one’s house and lands, to run across mountains and seas, only to encounter closed doors, bandits on the roads and the fear of contagion!’

It was true that since our arrival in the land of Africa misfortunes and miseries had not ceased to rain down upon us, indeed since the very moment our galley drew up alongside the quay at Melilla. We thought that we should find there a haven of Islam, where reassuring hands would be stretched out towards us to wipe away the fatigue of the old and the tears of the weak. But only anxious questions had greeted us on the quayside: ‘Is it true that the Castilians are coming? Have you seen their galleys?’ For those who questioned us thus there was no question of preparing the defences of the port, but rather of not wasting any time before taking flight. Seeing that it was for us, the refugees, to offer words of comfort, we were only the more anxious to put a mountain or a desert between ourselves and this coast which presented itself so openly to the invaders.

A man came up to us. He was a muleteer, he said, and he wanted to leave for Fez immediately. If we wished, he would hire his services to us for a modest sum, a few dozen silver dirhams. Wishing to leave Melilla before nightfall, and probably tempted by the low price, Muhammad accepted without bargaining. However, he asked the muleteer to take the coast road as far as Bedis before striking due south towards Fez; but the man had a better idea, a short cut which, he swore, would save us two whole days. He went that way every month, he knew every bump like the back of his mule. He was so persuasive that half an hour after having disembarked we were already on our way, my father and me on one animal, my mother on another with most of the luggage, and Warda and Mariam on another, the muleteer walking alongside us with his son, an unpleasant urchin of about twelve, barefoot, with filthy fingers and a shifty look.

We had hardly gone three miles when two horsemen veiled in blue suddenly came into view in front of us, holding curved daggers in their hands. As if they had only been waiting for a signal, the muleteer and his son made off as fast as their legs would carry them. The bandits came closer. Seeing that they only had to deal with one man protecting two women and two children, and thus feeling themselves in complete control, they began to run experienced hands over the load on the backs of the mules. Their first trophy was a mother-of-pearl casket in which Salma had unwisely packed all her jewellery. Then they began to unpack one superb silk dress after another, as well as an embroidered sheet which had been part of my mother’s trousseau.

Then, going up to Warda, one of the bandits commanded her:

‘Jump up and down!’

As she remained dumbstruck with fear, he went up to Muhammad and held the point of his dagger to his neck. In mortal fear, the concubine shook herself and gesticulated like a contorted puppet, but without leaving the ground. Not fully comprehending the seriousness of the situation, I let out a loud laugh which my father silenced with a frown. The thief shouted:

‘Jump higher!’

Warda threw herself into the air as best she could, and a light tinkling of coins could be heard.

‘Give all that to me!’

Putting her hand under her dress, she drew out a small purse which she sent rolling on the ground with a disdainful gesture. The bandit picked it up without taking offence, and turned towards my mother:

‘Your turn now.’

At that moment, the call to prayer rang out from a distant village. My father glanced up at the sun standing high in the heavens, and deftly pulled his prayer rug from the side of his mount, spreading it out on the sand, and then, falling to his knees, his face turned towards Mecca, began to recite his midday prayer in a loud voice. This was all done in the twinkling of an eye and in such a matter-of-fact manner that the bandits did not know how to react. While they were exchanging glances with one another, as if by a miracle a thick cloud of dust appeared in the road less than a mile in front of us. The bandits just had time to mount their horses before making off in the opposite direction. We were saved, and my mother did not have to do their bidding.

‘If I had had to do that, it would not have been a jingling that would have been heard but a regular fusillade, because your father had made me carry hundreds of dinars, sewn up in ten fat purses, which I had attached all over me, convinced that no man would ever dare to search so far.’

When the providential arrivals on the scene caught up with us, we saw that they formed a detachment of soldiers. Muhammad hastened to describe to them in detail the stratagem to which we had fallen victims. Precisely for such reasons, their commander explained with a smile on his lips, he and his men had been ordered to patrol this road, which had become overrun with brigands since the Andalusians began to disembark by the boatload at Melilla. Generally, he said in the mildest of tones, the travellers would have their throats cut and the muleteer would get his animals back as well as the share of the booty which would have been left for him. According to the officer, many of the people of Granada travelling to Fez or Tlemcen had met with similar misfortunes, although those making for Tunis, Tetouan, Sale or the Mitidja of Algiers had not been bothered.

‘Go back to the harbour,’ he advised us, ‘and wait. When a merchant caravan forms up, leave with it. It will certainly be guarded, and you will be safe.’

When my mother asked whether she had any chance of retrieving her precious casket, he replied, like any wise man, with a verse from the Qur’an:

‘It may be that you detest something, but that it shows benefit to you; it may be that you rejoice over something and it brings harm to you; because God knows, and you, you do not know.’