The Storyteller of Marrakesh Read Online Free

It’s like a visitation from Saturn, that baleful entity. You can almost taste its burn on your tongue. In its ochre light we’ve stopped casting shadows, or haven’t you noticed? There’s something wrong here! These are auguries that must not be ignored. That moon has robbed us of our traces! It has made us empty.
    I tried to reassure him. I tried telling him that the Jemaa is like a field of smoke; it transforms everything, even the moon. As for the red fork of lightning, it signified fire, and the element of fire, even as it destroys, holds the key to purification. So he should linger and listen to the story that I was about to tell, for I would banish his fears with the cooling stream of my imagination.
    If you delve into fear, I said soothingly, you can turn it around so that the predator becomes the prey. Have faith in yourself. Trust in my ability to transform what terrifies you.
    But Saïd would have none of it. He said that, in the middle of a leap, he had glimpsed the ground where the lightning had struck. In the smoke and ashes he had read warnings that we were all in grave danger. He said that it was imperative that we leave immediately.
    I watched him go. Then I waited as usual for my audience to gather, but my heart was uneasy.

‌ El Amara
    Marrakesh, El Amara, imperial capital, red-walled oasis between the desert and the mountains. Here the ochre expanse of the sky is mirrored in the tabia bricks and façades, and, especially at dawn, when silence cloaks everything, there is no more satisfying way to greet the new day than to stroll along the ramparts and watch the camel trains arrive from the south and the east. In the distance lie the dark fringes of the Palmeraie. Beyond, hues of cinnabar, rust, crimson, vermilion settle on the snow-capped peaks of the High Atlas Mountains.
    It is a landscape filled with allegories, where the imagination is law, and storytellers can spend entire days resuscitating mysteries. We sit cross-legged on our kilims and craft chronicles from the air in our sonorous voices. The kilim is our castle for the evening. It is our luminous heart, the crucible for our imagined histories. It is our winter in the Jemaa, our summer in the mountains, our perennially fruitful season that we carry everywhere we visit. It is our home, our kasbah, our makhzen , our sanctuary. The door is always open; we wait inside and also outside it, fitting all possible tales into chronicles of our making.

‌ Voyage
    On the evening of the strangers’ disappearance, I’d decided to use the colour red as the theme for my storytelling, for red was the shade of the ringed moon, as it is of fire and, of course, of blood and of sacrifice. Turning my face towards the Jemaa el Fna – which, in our tongue, has two meanings, “Assembly of the Dead” and “Mosque of Nothingness” – I spread out my kilim and prepared to begin. Surrounding me were the usual implements of my trade: the battered leather trunk that held my parchments, the mirror with which to reflect my listeners’ faces, the knotted piece of thuja wood from which I derived inspiration, the dream symbols in the form of sheaves of wheat and carved wooden rattles and glossy black pebbles shaped like snake heads and porcupine quills. The kilim was a gift from my father. It had been in our family for generations, its faded red weave patterned with stars and bordered by black clouds of precisely configured geometry. I customarily sat in the centre and arranged my collection of story sticks in a half-circle in front of me. Each stick was carved out of ebony and notched with ivory rings. The sticks represented particular storylines and the rings stood for themes. I waited for dusk to see which stick the setting sun would light upon first and thereby determine the story I would be telling.
    The Jemaa was especially crowded that evening. Busloads of villagers had arrived from the interior, from the