Chapter 6: The Cousin's Mark

Julian learned about the tracks at sunrise, in the way he suspected he deserved: from a man standing over him with a glass of tea.

“I said I would tell you last night,” said Boubacar. He lowered himself onto the cold sand with a small grunt and set the glass in Julian’s hand. “I did not. You were talking about your father, and my cousin was talking about hers, and it seemed a bad night to drop a stone in the water. So I am telling you now, before the sun is up and you are cheerful again.”

He told it plainly: a heavy truck, loaded, and two pickups close behind it, leaving the Araouane road two or three days earlier and heading north-west across the reg. The same direction, he said, that they were going. He pointed with his chin at the pale line of the dunes.

Julian’s first feeling was not fear. It was anger, and he knew while he said it that it was unfair. “You waited a night.”

“I waited an afternoon and a night.”

“That wasn’t your decision to make.”

“It was my decision as the man responsible for the water and the road,” said Boubacar, unruffled. “A guide who frightens his client before breakfast soon has no clients. A guide who lies to his client has a funeral. I chose the first, and then I chose to be sorry about it. I am sorry.”

“We both knew,” Amina said. She had come up quietly and stood with her arms folded against the cold, her face tired and clear. “If you are angry, be angry with both of us.”

“I’m not angry.” He was, and he looked out at the empty horizon and understood why. It was not the delay. It was the quiet efficiency of having been handled, like a map in a drawer that would be consulted when convenient. He had done that to people for years, and had never once wondered how it felt from the other side. He set down the glass. “How old? How many? Which way did they turn?”

Boubacar’s eyebrows rose a fraction. They were, Julian realized, the right questions, and they were asked in the right order.

They agreed on rules over breakfast. Issa would keep the fuel truck two kilometers back instead of one. Everyone would carry their phone or beacon on their bodies, and no one would walk away from the vehicles alone. If Boubacar said they were leaving, they would leave, and the argument could happen afterward, in a place with walls.

“And if the tracks lead where we are going?” said Julian.

“Then we will see who we are going with,” said Boubacar.

They found the place in the early afternoon, and for a while none of them said anything at all.

It lay in the lap of a black ridge, an escarpment of iron-hard rock that rose abruptly from the plain like a wall left by something that had lost interest in finishing it. Beyond it, twelve or fifteen kilometers north, a second line of hills caught the light, and Amina, who had been leaning forward in her seat for an hour, drew a quick breath.

“Steps,” she said. “Look. They are red. They go up in steps.”

Julian looked. Faint on the horizon, a terraced ridge showed rust and ochre bands where the strata broke back in a long staircase. “The Red Steps,” he said. “Moussa’s well.”

“Then this is—” She did not finish. Boubacar had already turned the vehicle toward the foot of the black ridge, and as they came around a shoulder of rock the ground opened into a shallow bowl, and there it was.

It was not much to look at. Julian would think of that later, with some wonder: how little the past required to be present. A low ring of stacked stone, waist-high in places, marked what had once been walls. There was a larger rectangle perhaps thirty paces on a side, and the circles of what might have been huts, and, at the center, a shallow collapsed shaft ringed with big, rough-hewn blocks. Under the wind-blown sand lay scatter: potsherds, comb-incised and rust-red, a green-black scoriae of slag, grinding stones worn to dishes, and, when Amina crouched and let sand run through her fingers, a handful of tiny white discs. Ostrich-eggshell beads.