Gold Dust

5

While traveling through the various encampments, Ukhayyad acquired some thick salve from the Bouseif tribes. He sheared the piebald’s fleece and massaged the blackened skin with it three times a day. This soon made the skin supple. But the blackness continued to consume the camel’s body, creeping ever lower, wrapping around the belly and eating at the legs. Another man knowledgeable in animal diseases arrived with a caravan of merchants from Aïr. He gave Ukhayyad a dark ointment in a small vial and told him he had distilled it from herbs. Ukhayyad applied the medication until it ran out. A few weeks later, the blackened skin began to peel off. Blood oozed profusely, but the scabs would not congeal. Ukhayyad could not bear to see the threads of blood that trickled from the piebald’s body. In the eyes of others, he saw pity and sympathy. But the sympathy was only for him, not the afflicted beast.

By now the piebald was no longer piebald. The lustrous speckles had disappeared from his gray body. The keen glance had faded from his beguiling eyes. His lean, graceful frame had been transformed into a bloated and splotched skeleton. He was now the pale and wretched image of his former self. God may create, but disease can transform His creations into completely other beings. And as with beasts, so too with humans.

The piebald would no longer go near him in the light of day. The camel spent his hours chasing angels whose flight shimmered in the mirages on the horizon. He was embarrassed when Ukhayyad showed him affection in public, so much so that when the young man came to rub him with medicine, the Mahri would dodge and try to flee. Sometimes he would complain miserably, “Aw-a-a-a-a-a-a.”

It was only with the shadows of the night that the piebald would sneak up on him, long after everything in the desert had faded and died down. In the deep darkness, when only jinn moved across the open wastes, murmuring among each other in secret conversation, the miserable piebald crept up and nuzzled his head against the blankets of his friend. Ukhayyad, sleepless with anxiety, was trying to steal a short spell before dawn shot its light at the horizon. The camel nudged at the covers. He prodded at the exposed parts of Ukhayyad’s body with fleshy lips. Then he thrust his long head under the blanket. With a groan, Ukhayyad embraced him, and together the two wept, each licking away the tears of the other, tasting the salt and the pain. When the shadows of death descend, this is all creatures can do. Ukhayyad turned his eyes toward the pale, shamefaced moon and sighed, “Why does God create if death must follow birth? Why must His creatures suffer before they die?” Then he bit his lip: “God damn women!”

One day, he grew sick of complaining. In the evening, beneath the covers so that no other creature would hear them, Ukhayyad told his friend, “That’s enough. We’ve had our fill of suffering. We need to do something, even if it’s madness. We’ll try Sheikh Musa’s plan. Islamic scholars from Fez are wise — everyone in the desert knows that. Even if the price is madness, what’s so wrong for a creature to lose his senses? Don’t you see — we’re going to go crazy whether we eat silphium or not! I don’t want to watch any longer as your body falls apart piece by piece. I will go insane before you die that way. Yes, that way, you will die and I will be the one who loses his mind. Now can you see what small moments of carelessness can cost?”

With that resolve, Ukhayyad traveled with the camel to the merciful western Hamada desert, heading toward the ancient pagan shrine nestled within its mountains. He never realized that had he delayed his travel even days longer, his father would have taken matters into his own hand and killed the sick animal. The man had been planning to end the mangy thoroughbred’s misery by putting a bullet in its head.