Chapter 16 · Chapter 16

The silver came out of a rag the colour of the tent floor, and he did not pour it out. He set it down piece by piece, in a line, on the carpet in front of Sheikh Aber, and the tent went quiet the way a tent goes quiet when the wind lets go of it.

Nine bracelets.

I counted, because counting is what a woman does in a tent where she is not to speak.

The first was twisted like rope. The second had a hinge and a pin. The third was hammered broad and flat, the kind a man wears so his forearm looks like more than it is. The fourth had a snake's head and the mouth of it was worn smooth.

The fifth was cut with a name in a script that was not ours. The sixth was worn thin at the inner edge, from a thumb turning it and turning it through years I was not there for. The seventh had a dent that had been hammered out and left a shadow. The eighth was plain and heavy and meant to be sold.

The ninth he took off his own wrist. He set it down last, and the hinge hung open, and the metal was still warm.

Nobody moved. My mother's hand rested on my sleeve, the smallest weight, and then she took it away, because in the open she does not.

"That is all of it," he said. "If a tenth one turns up in this camp, it is not mine."

Aber looked at the line a while, the way a man looks at a thing he has already understood and would rather not have understood.

"I did not ask you to empty your hands in my tent."

"No," he said. "You never had to."

"Then say what you are buying."

"Nothing."

He did not kneel. He put his hand flat on the carpet, and then turned it over, and showed the palm. Behind me a boy stopped chewing. The old man by the pole said the word quietly, once, as though it had to be given back to him before the tent could hold it, and then louder, and then the tent said it too, not as a shout but as many mouths at once, so that it belonged to none of them.

Aber sat back. "Do you know what you have asked me for?"

"I have read it."

"Then say it in your own words, so the tent hears it from you and not from a custom."

"My blood is yours in this valley. If you spend it, no man may raise his voice at you about it."

"And you give me that for a name."

"For one name. Not as a price. A price can be refused. This cannot."

"Whose?"

"Arwa's."

He said my name to the tent with his hand still turned over, and he did not look at me once while he said it.

Aber noticed that before I did. "You have not looked at her this whole hour."

"No."

"Why not?"

"A man who argues for a name and watches the face it belongs to has argued for the face."

My cousin spoke from the left side, and he spoke pleasantly, which was the worst way he had.

"There is still a line in the gravel," he said. "He may be dakheel to this tent. He is not dakheel across my line."

Aber turned his head slowly. "You drew it?"

"I drew it."

"Then rub it out."

"It is mine to draw and mine to keep."

"It was," Aber said. "Rub it out. With your heel. Not with a boy's."

The tent did not breathe while he went out and did it. We heard the gravel go flat. When he came back in he stood, because there was no one to tell him to sit.

"You will take the left of the pole until I say otherwise," Aber said.

"I have sat at the head since I was fourteen."

"You have. Count the years on the left side. You are good at counting."

My cousin looked at the bracelets then, and he laughed one short breath through his nose. "Nine pieces of Egyptian scrap," he said. "And a man's blood thrown in on top of it. I hope the name is worth the price you say is not a price."

Aber took the plain heavy one off the carpet — the one meant to be sold — and set it beside his own knee.

"One is a plea," he said. "Nine is a price. I take one, so the tent has something in its hand to remember this by, and I leave eight, because a plea with nothing left in the hand is only wind." He pushed the rest across the carpet, not towards Shimon. "These are not mine and not yours. They are hers, if she takes them."

The tent turned, all of it, and I was standing in it.

"I will take the thin one," I said. My voice came out flat and did not shake, and I did not step forward to say it.

"Why that one?" Aber said.

"Nobody would give anything for it. It is the only thing here that is not a price."

My mother made a small sound behind me that was not disapproval.

Aber considered me for a while with his old flat eyes. "Take it, then," he said, "and keep your own hand on it, because I will not be holding it for you."

I crossed the carpet and picked it up and put it on my own wrist, and it was too big, and I turned it once with my thumb and left it where it fell.

Shimon did not watch me do that either.

He saluted Aber first, before he saluted the tent, and then he went out, and the flap dropped, and the tent began to talk all at once like water let out of a channel.

By dark the wedding tent was up at the end of the camp, and the boys had pegged the last rope and gone off to eat. I walked out to it alone. It is two panels of goat hair and a knot, and nothing else, and a woman may stand in front of it as long as she likes before she is inside it.

I stood there while the lamps came on in the camp behind me, one, then another, then the row of them.

I want that written down, since writing is what will be left of this: on the last evening I was still outside, and the knot was still tied, and no one had put a hand on me in the open.