THE CEDAR EXILE

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Night 19

The Cedar Road

The forest began where the road ended. Not gradually — suddenly, as if the forest had decided on a precise boundary that men and their roads could not cross. The cedars were enormous, ancient, with trunks as wide as three men with outstretched arms. Their bark was reddish, furrowed, smelling of resin and time. Their branches formed a vault so dense that the sky was only visible in fragments — small blue windows between the needles.

She was sitting on a flat stone by the side of the path, as if she had been waiting for them. A very old woman. Small, wrapped in a white wool haik embroidered with red and black patterns. Her hands were covered in tattoos — Tifinagh symbols, the ancient Amazigh script that predated Arabic by thousands of years.

— Lalla Zineb? said Youssef. The old woman smiled. — Yes. And you are Baaddi's son. I was waiting.

She rose with an agility that belied her age and took the lead without asking permission. She walked quickly, on paths no one else would have seen — passages between trees, shortcuts through brush, trails that only feet knowing them since childhood could find.

As she walked, she spoke. She spoke of Baaddi — how he had arrived in these forests twenty years earlier, thin and exhausted, with his lute on his back and his notebooks under his arm. How she had found him sleeping under a cedar and brought him home. How he had spent three months in her house listening, noting, learning. How he had left with the melodies of a whole life in his notebooks.

— He told me he would return, she said. I knew he would not return. But I also knew he would send someone in his place. Fathers who cannot finish their journey send their sons.

She stopped and looked at Youssef.

— You have arrived. That is good. Now the real work begins.

✦ Night 20 awaits you — The Secret Garden ✦