Court of Lions by Jane Johnson

Author:Jane Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2017-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

20

Blessings

1483

I learned the Tifinagh at my mother’s knee, in the privacy of her tent. Among the tribes everything belongs to the women—the tents, the rugs, the silver, the lineage, the language. The men have their camels, their salt and their trade money. They come and they go, the men. Mainly go, leaving the women to run things, and to raise the children and teach us their secrets.

I don’t know why there was only me in the tent, no brothers or sisters. Maybe something happened during my birth that meant that my mother couldn’t have other children. Or perhaps she chose not to: after all, she was a wisewoman; she knew about such things—what herbs to use, what spells to cast, which djinn to summon. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have lovers—men were always coming by her tent, bringing her gifts of food and cloth and coins, and I would be shooed away with a laugh and a bauble to play with. Then, I thought how nice it was that she was loved. Now I know it was how we got by after my father left.

“See this set of symbols?” she asked me one day, not long before she died. “This will bind a man’s soul to you.”

I was puzzled. “Why would you want to do that?” I asked her. “Is it like binding a djinn to do your bidding?”

She laughed at that, but in a strange, solemn manner. “It’s really very like that,” she said. “In many ways it’s just the same thing. Love has its dark side.”

I didn’t know what she meant by that. Then.

“Memorize the symbols, their shape and their relationship to one another. How they flow from line to line.”

There were three lines—the top one long, the middle one shorter, the third just two words long: “to me” by name. This much I knew. When she erased the writing with a sweep of the hand and then patted the sand flat and smooth for me to prove the lesson, I wrote it out, quick and sharp. Three lines, from left to right in the normal way, blunt symbols and unfussy strokes, not like the writing of the Arabs, with its curls and flourishes and its strange right-side start. The Arabs came, sometimes alone on horseback to do business at the camp, to buy sheeny indigo cloth from the south, cones of salt from Taodenni; sometimes with slaves. Their horses were neat-hoofed and shiny, quieter, smaller and more elegant than the camels. But their shit smelled much the same. Thinking this, I had inscribed the word for shit in the sand and then sniggered at my own boldness. My mother rewarded this levity with a painful flick of my ear. “Never mock writing, child,” my mother told me severely. “Letters are sacred things, full of power.”

At that age I couldn’t understand how scribblings could possibly contain anything much, but I don’t claim to have been the brightest student.

Now I framed the words with a cartouche, to prevent their power from leaking.

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