E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten
Hunt Red Smoking Mirror
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80075-322-8
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
'The love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin' Joanna Pocock
E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80075-322-8
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Nick Hunt has written a trilogy of books about walking in Europe - Outlandish, Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water - two of which were shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. His articles have appeared in the Guardian, Emergence, Resurgence & Ecologist, New Internationalist, Geographical ?and numerous other publications, and he works as co-director for the Dark Mountain Project. Red Smoking Mirror is his first novel.
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· One ·
She takes me by the hand and says, The smoke is on the mountain.
It is only cloud, I say.
It is more than cloud, she says.
We have come to the place of willow trees to watch the caravan depart. But the call has not yet come and so we watch the mountain. The mountain stands beyond the lake, its slopes rising bare and blue, the same parched colour as the sky. The lake is dull because the sun has not yet met the water.
We stand together looking up at the far naked peak. A foaming whiteness spews and rolls, clings to the mountain’s sides. My wife has younger eyes than I.
It is smoke, she says again.
Perhaps, I say.
She is seldom wrong.
Do you hear it speak? she says.
We stand together listening. I do not hear the mountain. All I hear is the morning wind, the cry of a bird I cannot name, the gentle lapping of small waves against the floating gardens.
No, I say.
It is sleeping now. But it spoke last night, she says.
My wife goes to the waterside and dips her ankles in. The water’s skin appears to flinch as if it is repulsed. She tweaks the hem of her white dress and steps a little deeper in. Bright bubbles break the surface.
It spoke while you snored, she says, without looking back at me. The water laps her calves, her knees.
Not too far in, I say.
I am mistrustful of the lake as I was mistrustful of the sea. For a man who has drifted far I do not like the water. A mountain does not speak, I say, correcting her as I do with declining frequency these days. A mountain rumbles, booms or roars. It does not possess a voice.
Everything speaks, she says.
Thigh-deep now, her dress held high, she wades along the shallow shore. The floating beds are fulsome with crops before the harvest. Idly, as if thoughtlessly, she snaps off a cob of maiz and proffers me some yellow grains.
When I shake my head she shrugs and casts the maiz on the water.
A mushrik boy is watching us. Bare-footed, with a shaven skull, six or seven years of age, he is lurking in the trees where the road forks to the city gate. He might be hunting rats or water-gods.
I smile and call a greeting.
At first I think I am the cause of the fear on his face. I am used to this. Such fear is innocent. But his eyes are on my wife and the maiz floating on the lake. That wanton, wasted offering.
My wife’s gaze fixes on him.
The child appears caught in fright but my wife speaks a word I do not know, something sharp that releases him, and he vanishes among the trees. The maiz bobs up and down. Ripples slowly spread from it, rolling out across the lake. I feel uneasy watching them, as I do increasingly.
Men are made of maiz, she says.
We are made of dust, I say.
Water glistens on her shins as she wades back onto shore. A slimy stripe of green weed is stuck between her toes. My eyes climb to the peak again, to the cloud-smoke bulging from its snout.
My man of dust, says my wife.
And with that I am joyful.
The rising sun has cleared the hills. Light spills across the valley. The dark lake turns to silver shards, scintillating blindingly, and the ripples from the broken maiz portend nothing more than peace rolling out across the world, its circles ever widening. The two of us are standing here at its very centre.
I am happier here, a foreigner, than I have been anywhere.
We stand together in the light. Her hand joins my hand.
Then from behind us comes the call, a single ululating voice, followed by the clash of drums and the twang of stringed instruments, and then the cries, the groans of beasts, the clattering hooves, the dust, the din.
We turn towards the city gate. The caravan is leaving.
The mushriks say it is the greatest sight in all of Mexica. Six hundred camels swaying through the gate of Tenochtitlan. Out they come in single file, their loads stacked high upon their backs, their lips curled back, their eyelids low, with expressions of great suffering. Red pom-poms bounce around their necks. Green banners fly above them. Twelve cavalrymen ride ahead on shining black and chestnut mares, then a herald with a horn, and behind him strides the first camel, and the second, and the third. One camel-driver hacks and spits. Another plucks an oud. The causeway shudders with the beat as they mount the floating road that connects the city to the shore, where the smoking mountain lies. And beyond the mountain, the high pass that is called the Moor’s First Sigh. And beyond the pass, the brown plains, the verdant coast, the shining sea.
And beyond that, Andalus.
The caravan is bunched up now, the camels loping nose to tail, but once it has crossed the floating road it will elongate for miles. The dust of its passing can be seen from fifty miles away, they say.
The ugly deer! the mushriks cry.
They call our horses swift deer and our camels ugly deer.
Atop the humps of the ugly deer are balanced tough, sun-hardened men, undulating with their loads, brandishing long whips. Camel-drivers from the sandy deserts of the Old Maghreb, I should think of them as my countrymen, but they are another breed.
Peace be with you, I call, seeing one I recognise. He mutters something back.
At times these men are hostile because of what I am. A dhimmi, a protected person and a person of the book, but not a person of the faith. I am like them but not like them. I do not judge their prejudice. If there is one thing I have learned it is how not to judge.
My wife stands next to me, watching in the way she does. Her expression seems far away but I know she is noting everything. The camel-drivers look at her and then quickly look away.
A charm against the evil eye hangs around one camel’s neck. Around another, a star and moon.
A hooded baggage guard slides past with an arquebus across his knees.
The procession rumbles on and on. The mushriks laugh and stare.
In those swaying camel-bags are bales of the finest cloth, ayate fibre, dried tubaq, quetzal feathers, jaguar skins, ornately worked jade ornaments, obsidian, silver, powdered gold, tortoiseshell, tomatl seeds, balls of uli, amaranth and Mexica’s other wondrous goods.
Yours are coming, says my wife.
She counts the loads as they go past, forty packs on forty beasts, marked with the sigil of my house.
The greatest shipment we have sent. My fortune in xocolatl.
My wife says something in her tongue, a prayer to the Lord of the Nose, god of merchants and travellers, whose symbol is a bunch of reeds.
God protect you, I say to my xocolatl.
Behind the camels come scores of mules roped one behind the next, backs bent beneath their loads. Strong deer, the mushriks call them. And at last some Berbers herding sheep, which are not bound for the sea but for the fertile pastureland between this valley and the coast, where they will graze under guard. They will return as meat and wool for the markets of the city.
The caravan is on the lake. Its head has reached the furthest shore.
Dust hangs in the air behind, collapsing like a blanket.
For twenty years I have watched these caravans leave and return, and it is still a miracle.
It is my miracle.
We turn our backs on the lake and look towards the city gate. It is the Gate of the South, of the Left-Handed Hummingbird. His sullen idol squats above, grimacing like a child. A flaming sun stands over it.
Together we walk beneath.
My wife’s name is Malinala, which means Woman of the Grass. She was born a Nahua slave but has been much elevated.
My name is Eli Ben Abram. I have been elevated too. I was born a dhimmi, a Jew in the Caliphate of Andalus.
We make an unusual coupling as we pass along the streets, through the sunlight and the shade, on bridges over green canals. She in her white dress and me in black with my bleached skullcap, sun-damaged, sweating through my beard. She is young and I am old, between us almost thirty years.
But this is a city, and an age, of unusual couplings.
The air feels disturbed from the passing of the caravan. Everyday city life is filling back in behind. A woman with black shining braids is sprinkling water on the dust, tamping it down with her feet. A man sits in the shade with a heap of spoiled kasava. We pass the Street of the Artisans and the Place of the Obsidian-Polishers, past the vegetable marketplace and the shrine to the Dog-Headed God, darkly stained, alive with flies. A naked child plays near it. Down a long stone avenue I catch a glimpse of some great lord passing in his palanquin, carried by costumed slaves, like a distant feathered bird.
From far away comes music and a smudge of purple smoke.
We come to the Moorish Quarter marked by the Caliph’s Gate, which is an archway made of mud. The archway is a symbol as is so much else. The usual man is standing guard, chewing on some kind of root which makes him salivate green juice. The cobblestones around his boots are splattered with expectorations.
He greets me punctiliously, lowering his scimitar. There is a scrape upon his cheek as if he has been fighting.
All is well? I ask.
Well enough, he answers.
The courtyard, deserted at this time, has not yet flooded with scalding light. The sun will take another hour to clear the steep stone buildings. Butterflies meander over stunted citrus trees in pots. The broken fountain gurgles, its workings gummed with slime. Shoes are lined up by the...
