Amulets and Feathers: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff. Leila Aboulela

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Foreword by Kate Mosse

       Amulets and Feathers

      Note on the Author

      A Note on Emily Brontë

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD BY KATE MOSSE

      SO, WHAT MAKES Wuthering Heights – published the year before Emily Brontë’s own death – the powerful, enduring, exceptional novel it is? Is it a matter of character and sense of place? Depth of emotion or the beauty of her language? Epic and Gothic? Yes, but also because it is ambitious and uncompromising. Like many others, I have gone back to it in each decade of my life and found it subtly different each time. In my teens, I was swept away by the promise of a love story, though the anger and the violence and the pain were troubling to me. In my twenties, it was the history and the snapshot of social expectations that interested me. In my thirties, when I was starting to write fiction myself, I was gripped by the architecture of the novel – two narrators, two distinct periods of history and storytelling, the complicated switching of voice. In my forties, it was the colour and the texture, the Gothic spirit of place, the characterisation of Nature itself as sentient, violent, to be feared. Now, in my fifties, as well as all this, it is also the understanding of how utterly EB changed the rules of what was acceptable for a woman to write, and how we are all in her debt. This is monumental work, not domestic. This is about the nature of life, love, and the universe, not the details of how women and men live their lives. And Wuthering Heights is exceptional amongst the novels of the period for the absence of any explicit condemnation of Heathcliff’s conduct, or any suggestion that evil might bring its own punishment.

      This collection is published to celebrate the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth in 1818. What each story has in common is that, despite their shared moment of inspiration, they are themselves, and their quality stands testament both to our contemporary writers’ skills, and the timelessness of Wuthering Heights. For, though mores and expectations and opportunities alter, wherever we live and whoever we are, the human heart does not change very much. We understand love and hate, jealousy and peace, grief and injustice, because we experience these things too – as writers, as readers, as our individual selves.

       AMULET AND FEATHERS

       LEILA ABOULELA

      TODAY I SET OUT to avenge my father’s death. I took his dagger, the one with the two points, and I filled a pouch with poison leaves. I put on my brother’s clothes and his turban so I would not be recognised. I hid the shells, feathers, and cowries deep in my pocket – I would only need them when I arrived in Gobir. I looped my amulet on a cord and tied it around my neck. I did not feel afraid.

      My mother was alone in her room. She would mourn my father for months, not scenting her body or wearing gold. From outside, I heard her praying. She wanted to dream of him, to see how he was in his new life. But he had not yet visited any of us in a dream. I did not go into her room to say goodbye. She would stop me. She would say a young girl had no business travelling beyond the outskirts of town.

      In our courtyard, I looked at everything – at one of our goats heavy with kid, our water pots with their reddish-brown colour, and the coop where the pigeons fluttered and cooed. I looked at the ashy remains of yesterday’s cooking fire. I picked up my little cat. She knew who I was, she was not fooled. I kissed her and said, ‘I will not play with you today or give you milk. Even tomorrow I will still be away.’

      In the marketplace, I pulled down the sash that was wrapped around my turban and covered my mouth. I walked fast so that no one would recognise me. I bumped into my friend Aysha, her hair in corn rows. I almost cried out, ‘Aysha, you have plaited your hair at last!’ But she brushed past me and did not notice who I was.

      Bello was buying guava from a seller, but he happened to glance my way. Unlike Aysha, he stopped and looked again. He started to follow me, and I pretended not to hear him. ‘Maryam,’ he said, ‘it’s you, isn’t it, Maryam?’ He looked like the village idiot, gaping and shadowing me.

      At last I said, ‘Bello, go away and don’t tell my family that you have seen me.’

      He started to ask one question after the other. ‘Where are you going? Why are you dressed like that?’

      Bello and I had left the marketplace by now and were at the outskirts of the town. There was hardly anyone around. I stopped under a tree and we sat down. I moved the wrapper from my mouth and said, ‘I am going to Gobir to avenge my father’s death.’