PART ONE THE BOAT
The sun slips down below the curved horizon, painting a path of glowing tangerine across the dark blue sea, illuminating a three-metre diameter inflatable boat bobbing around on the choppy water. Sixteen people are sitting in a circle, their backs pressed against the sides of the fragile vessel. Fourteen of them have their eyes closed. Several of the sleepers are sliding down where they sit, slumping onto the next one’s shoulder; muttering in their sleep; drooling. The fifteenth is beside a small engine bought from fishermen, holding limply onto the miniature wheel. But he’s not steering and the engine is switched off. In his other hand he’s holding something round and shiny. From time to time he stares at it in disbelief. See his pupils. They’re huge like two black planets. See the whites turned pink and veiny. See the sweat pouring down his face despite the chill of the darkening evening. The 900 milligrams of Lyrica he took before the voyage was supposed to give him stamina and courage. Now the face of his first primary school teacher is looming across the water, duplicated a thousand times, each of them saying, “Tarek! Pay attention!” He turns away from the faces, looks down into the flat bottom of the boat, where curled up between the sand-encrusted trainers of the sleepers is the puppy he found when he was seven, the one his father drowned. The sixteenth occupant of the boat is a woman of twenty years. But though her skin is smooth and unlined, there is something ancient within her, not merely traces of ancestral DNA, but something very much alive and kicking. Shadows of frustration and anger flit across her sharp cheekbones, but they’re not the emotions of this bold twenty-year-old, they’re the emotions of an even bolder woman, a leader, a queen. Her name is Tin Hanan. Since her own death around 1,700 years ago she has been jumping between bodies. Two decades ago, when the mountain dweller who she’d inhabited for ninety one years took her last breath, Queen Tin Hanan, being curious about urban life, flew to the city and chose this about-to-be-born girl, who would be named Yara. But now Tin Hanan is furious. Yara wasn’t supposed to leave the country. The Tuareg queen would never even imagine abandoning the land where she ruled a vast tribe, over thousands of square kilometres of desert. As Yara boarded the inflatable twelve hours ago, Tin Hanan struggled to stop her from getting in, but without success. The young woman had done as she pleased, placing her navy blue holdall with a white stripe between her feet, smiling as she pictured her foul-tempered violent husband awakening to find her gone. And not only her. For inside the holdall with a white stripe is the secret seventeenth traveller, a three-month-old baby girl. The faces of the schoolteacher have sunk into the waves, but the puppy remains, whimpering a little. Tarek tells it to be quiet for it may wake the fourteen sleepers and they‘ll check the time and remind him that he promised they’d reach Spain in two hours, and now twelve have passed. Then he will have to tell them that just after they lost sight of the North African coast he discovered that the compass was broken.
