the LAST CEDARS of ATLAS: A Novel Berber Resistance

A.D. 686. An exhausted rider climbs into the Middle Atlas with news no one wants to hear: Kusaila, the Berber chief who held off the armies from the East, is dead. In the cedar villages of the Awraba, the spring festival goes on. Nobody believes the war will climb this high. Amayas is twenty-four, the chief's son, and has never raised his spear against a man. He loves Tiziri, who writes down on hides what the elders remember. He thinks he knows his father. He doesn't. For twenty-five years, Amezian has carried a fault he has confessed to no one, and it weighs on every word he speaks in the council of chiefs. Then the envoys arrive, courteous and patient, offering peace in exchange for obedience. The tribes split. A shepherds' trail that appears on no map changes hands. And Amayas must decide what a free people's liberty is worth when resisting costs lives, and giving in costs something else. From the streets of Volubilis to the high passes of the Atlas, a historical epic rooted in the real history of the Amazigh world, set at the moment the conquest reaches it. A people has twenty years to decide what it will keep of itself.