25°17'57.1"N 16°43'46.3"E

  Waw al Kabir, Libya

  20.05.2024 - 22.00 UTC +02.00

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A map. For your journey,” she responded. “But it is not for free.”

  She turned, facing me, holding a paper, scrolled and crumpled in her palms. Her eyes glinted, hinting that her gift would be even less straightforward than her words. Who knew what kind of Curses she had? There were all kinds of malicious Cursed people out there – how did I know she was not one of them?

  A gust of evening wind burst through the open window. The woman’s dirty fingers tapped eagerly one by one onto the paper. She waved the scroll around, as if she was having second thoughts.

  “That is, if you are really here for a purpose. Not wasting my time, are you?”

  “No. I have a purpose.”

  “But you are fighting it. Doubting it? What is this about?”

  The woman, mysterious scroll still in her hands, walked to the window. She took a moment to struggle and close it, blowing in the dirt brought in by the Saharan breeze.

  I considered violence. Did I really need her permission to get what my Calling beckoned? A weak, frail woman, turning her back to me and failing to close a window.

  I stepped closer, still unsure if I was going to cooperate or take it from her hands forcefully. She sighed.

  “Let me make it easy for you, witchling, I am useful. I can form a Bay'a. A Dealing,” she turned back to my direction, the map gone from her hands. Had she sensed my intentions? Where had she hidden it? She continued, her voice raspier by each word: “I can offer you this treasure, and more in the future. In a Bay’a, your actions must abide by the pact I set until it is fulfilled or I break it.”

  I had never heard of a Curse like this. Could she be lying? The map reappeared in her hands as she waved them. Taunting me. I was not going to get anything valuable out of her through violence.

  “This map I am holding can show you the routes in Central Africa to avoid the most powerful and treacherous Nitaq. Without it, you don’t stand a chance to reach much further than the borders of Chad.”

  I had no interest in making any Cursed bargains. The risk outweighed any benef-

  “What are your terms?” I asked, compelled by my Calling. I saw her smile shine beneath her veil. This old witch knew how a Calling worked, and she enjoyed toying with me.

  Or did my Calling understand how she worked and toyed with both of us?

  She walked slowly in my direction, each step uncertain, and every inch she closed the gap, revealing more details of her face. More wrinkles. More things witnessed. And then she spoke:

  “Once you fulfill your Calling, you will have to come back here to me, and have a cup of tea.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “And if I don’t?” I asked.

  “Then, you die. That’s how Baya’at work, dear,” she responded, her voice hinting at disappointment that I did not already know that fact. “So? Is that a deal done?”

  No chance. Below the folds of the veil and wrinkly skin, her eyes glinted with intention. I knew the intention was not good. I knew this was a trap. But my Calling had been presented with an option to expedite its purpose.

  “Yes, it is a deal,” I responded, hating with every fiber of my body that I was Cursed by a Calling. My hand trembled as I stretched it to grab the map of her hands, shearing pain climbing up my fingertips. I held the map, my jaw tightened, and the ache dissipated.

  “Good. Now please, go. Your men will start to worry outside,” she said calmly approaching her table again.

  My hands were trembling. I had just bound my life to her – for what? What was even the point? To have tea? Why would my Calling force me to accept this?

  I took one last look at her and the kitchen. The smell of spice had a hint of rotting stench in them. Or it was the foulness of the deal that I had just sealed that made my tongue bitter.

  “Go!” The witch shrieked, startling me. I leaped into running. Running back, outside her den. I should not have been there. It was miasma. It was sacrilegious.

  “It was her ward,” I said to myself, as I jumped out the entrance door. She said, no one could withstand her miasma. My Calling had no reason to keep me there anymore.

  “Khalida?” my brother yelled. “I was ready to call the rest of the men. I could not sense you in there.”

  He was there, just outside the house, keeping his distance still. Neither he nor his men dared come closer.

  I ran to him and hugged him. I could feel his intense breathing, his Nabd making his heart beat with worry.

  “Let’s go. I have what we need.”

  ? ? ?

  “Khalida? Aren’t you going to sleep?”

  Qadir walked into my five-square-meter room, now smelling more like my anxious sweat rather than the initial moldy rocky stench. I was kneeling in front of maps and books, and at the center of it was the new parchment provided by that witch.

  “I will. Once I make sense of this. I have to make sense of this…” I muttered.

  “It’s late.”

  I looked to my right and tapped at my cellphone’s screen. Past two after midnight.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “It’s fine. I am close. I think.”

  “What is it? Star charts?” He leaned against the frame of the door.

  “No, this is…” I looked at him, trying to discern the meaning of the maps in front of me, and then back at them. “No that cannot be.”

  “But look this is…”

  “Aldubu al'asghar.” He was right. He must have been. It was in front of me all along.

  I picked up one of the many books handed over by our mother and my teacher, Tadwin al-Nutuq. A Recording of The Domains. I had spent the past week taking notes, memorizing, and highlighting. It was too old to provide contemporary knowledge; I had already been warned as such. But it did explain how things had worked the past millennium. There was one passage about mountains and stars. I remembered it. I read out loud.

  “And throughout the Sahara, Cursed realized the virtue of reaching high altitudes and defining boundaries based on the night sky. The stars became their maps, and they drew borders based on their Cursed wishes.”

  Qadir walked in the room and kneeled by my side, listening carefully.

  “I… I had read this a few days ago. I assumed it was a poetic way of describing how Domains work, but brother, you are a genius. Look!”

  I dropped the book on the side and turned to our maps.

  “See here? I could not work with digital maps, so I found and bought a map of the area. From Tarabulus to Al-Kamerun. The largest map I could find that denotes cities, towns, villages, and roads. We are here.”

  I pointed to a point on the tourist map near the Waw an Namus volcano.

  “We have travelled far, huh?” Qadir said, trailing his finger from Sabha all the way to the volcano.

  “And there is still plenty left. But see, the witch’s map,” I laid over the map with the hand-drawn symbols and lines. “I have tried to overlay the map in all the ways possible. I could not get it too much. Its symbols, these ones here, they would not make sense. I could not align them with anything. I tried all the historic settlements I could think of, besides just contemporary ones. Nothing matched.”

  I shifted the map to demonstrate to him. The symbols, circles inked in tar black, with lines drawn around them to denote the shapes of the Nutuq, could not match anything on the map. It was a map of shapes, useless unless properly overlaid over the real geography of the region. “But, if these are the star charts, maybe then…”

  I shifted the map. Interpreting the points as stars instead of cities, it was clear that I had to focus on the brightest stars of the constellations. Al-Qutb, Polaris, on top of the peak in Jibal al-Ayir, the A?r Mountains in Niger. Al-Alyat, Alioth, on top of the peak of the Jibal Tibesti, the Tibesti Mountains in Chad. My hands trembled as I instinctively aligned the witch’s star chart with the highest mountain ranges in the region.

  “The Cursed realized the virtue of reaching high altitudes,” I said. The lines that were drawn connecting the circles – previously confusing me – now clearly defined the constellations. The outer lines were borders.

  “Tibesti and A?r. Do you think there is a Cursed Nitaq around them?” Qadir asked.

  “If that’s the case, we will have to go through the middle then,” I said, my finger trailing the line drawn between the two Ursa constellations. A line with no circle symbols, no warning of Nitaq, heading south.

  “We were planning to go through Chad, though. Travelling through the desert in Niger instead? I don’t know, sis,” Qadir hesitated.

  “This can’t be a coincidence. We have to change our plans. This must be what this map means.” I gazed at him. His face was lined with worry. Our itinerary was carefully designed by our mother, who feared our clan interacting with anybody from the East of Niger. “You cracked this, Qadir. This line here is the path my Calling is leading us to. We have to go through Bilma.”

  He looked at the map and back at me. “Okay then, I will let the Khamsat Banadiq know. I bet you they will ask for more money.”

  He patted me on the back and left. I sighed. I would get some hours of sleep after all.

  “Wait,” I said to myself. I traced the line heading south, the path we had just agreed to take. “If this is Ursa Minor, and this is Ursa Major… Then our path is Al-Tinnin. Draco.”

  Bring him back, Khalida. In N’Djamena, Catastrophe will find you.

  The words of my Calling echoed back from when it first found me through an omen. The omen that had shown the same constellations. “Wait.” I wanted to shout, warn Qadir. Maybe we had to rethink this. My mind flashed with light, a sudden rush of adrenaline spiking before subsiding. My Calling was exerting its control. It wanted me on this path.

  And I should not stop it.

  ? ? ?

  The next morning, we boarded our fully fueled vehicles and went ahead with the itinerary. Our entourage seemed awkward about the change of plans at the beginning, but I had armed my brother with good arguments. In the end, the men in our company had signed up for the whole trip and to get paid when it was done. This would extend the mission but make it safer.

  The trip was long and boring. Both of us were sitting in the passenger seat, and my brother had just woken up from a quick afternoon nap.

  “You know, I hope you are right. Really, I am,” he said, first thing when he woke up.

  “Depends on how accurate the map is. We can’t know for sure. But Bilma is not part of either of the two Nutuq marked here, and the best case for us is to stay the night and refuel.”

  Qadir muttered under his breath. He pushed the sunglasses he was wearing higher, fully covering his eyes, and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Look, let’s just be happy we dodged the trouble we were running into.” I tried to argue once again. “We are now way more to the South than we would have been if we had tried to go through Chad. My Calling led me to this map for a reason, and so far, so good.”

  Qadir clicked his tongue. I turned to myself and the notes on my maps. Not three minutes had passed when he clapped his hands and slightly rose from his seat. He turned towards me.

  “Aha. That’s nice!” he exclaimed, as the worries shook off himself. “Look!”

  The car slowly turned around some dunes, and then it became visible through my window as well: Bilma’s skyline.

  My brother rushed over to my side of the car, excited.

  “Wow.”

  Tall buildings reflected in his shades already from a distance. They were not quite tall enough to be called skyscrapers, but taller than what my brother and I had ever seen up close. Bilma was known to be an oasis town, and it lived up to its name. Its buildings were covered in green while we approached, as vines and ivy plants enveloped the beige structures and blended with the city.

  “Okay, I guess your ideas are cool sometimes,” Qadir said, chuckling, and I could not help but smile a little. “That’s what I am talking about!”

  It was a positive surprise. We didn’t have much access to the internet during our trip, and we had no idea what the town would look like. From the old map in my hands, it could have been a decrepit village, a dot between two borders.

  Before I could say anything, Qadir had already opened his phone searching for a fancy hotel to stay in. And before I could ask him to show some restraint for our limited budget, he was already bargaining over the phone.

  “Welcome, welcome!” yelled the hotel manager as our cars entered the parking lot. Next to him, two members of the staff sported excited smiles.

  My brother matched his excitement upon exiting the car and already started discussing an upgrade. One of the ladies – who must have been a receptionist – approached me.

  “Would you like me to guide you to your room?” she asked nicely and showed with her stance that she would accompany me regardless. I followed her towards the tall hotel.

  “Fitting,” I mentioned as we reached the entrance: Baobab Inn, written in Arabic and Latin. The hotel was surrounded by tall Baobab trees, planted to encircle the building. Or perhaps the Inn was built in their grove. Some looked taller than others, reaching even the highest of the balconies, almost.

  “Yes, we are very proud of our garden,” said the woman, “and our suite guests always love living higher than the Upside-Down trees.”

  “Today, I rest,” I said to Qadir, just before reaching my room. He booked us suites at the top of the Inn, and I had been looking forward to losing myself to sleep, even if it was early hours in the afternoon.