“You should say goodbye to the lands you know,” her new owner told her, as he led her to his camp.
“I already have,” she answered. The burden of loneliness Aini's heart carried across the dry earth eased when distant mirage figures grew into real and familiar shapes. Instead of slaves and hardened men, women and a few teenagers mingled with the men, who appeared weathered by desert and work rather than darkness. A baby cried out from one of the tents. The caravaners were a family, perhaps a small tribe. She wouldn’t be sleeping with the slaves.
“I hear you tell stories. We could use them on the way to where we’re going.”
The tall man stared ahead, as if searching for something beyond the camp. His scent brought back memories of the place she’d been born in, faintly sweet, slightly metallic like blood. Her mother had worn a perfume with a trace of that scent. Bitter orange. Caravans sometimes carried them. Men who did not have to work with their hands were comfortable with such scents.
She tried not to smile with relief. She’d learned enough to know she’d be traded again for whatever desire lived in this man’s secret heart. But she was confident she’d survived the worst of what could happen to her, and was destined to find a home in a place she might have made up in one of her tales.
And then, there was the dog.
He watched her from a distance as he patrolled the camp perimeter, white and brown-masked face turning back and forth from the wilderness to her, as if nervous about a stranger allowed into his camp. He stopped occasionally to rub his thick, shedding coat against one of the larger boulders on the rocky plain
Aini went to him as soon as she could. The dog pushed against her slight body but she held her ground. He sniffed her body, stared into the camp as if searching for any sense of alarm, then drifted off, plumed tail erect.
Stopped, looked back at her.
Well?
The word wasn’t spoken, but it was what came to mind to match the feeling/image/memory she became aware of when his gaze fell on her. He didn’t talk to her with words. But she understood him, like she did the spirits, as if their thoughts and memories were carried by the same breeze gusting across the hard desert floor.
At least spirits had been human once, and remembered words. But spirits didn’t have warm bodies or wet tongues.
She walked with him on his patrol that day, and on most other days, and though she learned he was called Kayden and he heard others call her Aini, names had no meaning between them. When they were together, they just were.
She was his caretaker, mending him when he needed it, brushing his coat and making sure he fed, and he was her guide and teacher. The first thing he taught her was to kill.
She’d seen men do it, with knives and spears and guns, on the hunt, or defending camp or caravan from predators or raiders. Fights in the souks settling vendattas or debts. She’d seen a slave killed in the last year, because he was too sick to sell. She never thought she would, or could, kill.
Scent.
A picture came into her mind, a cat. Wild, a thing of tooth and claws.
Trust.
Not.
He ran off into the desert as night chased away the dusk and the moon’s light cast its pale glow over the rough terrain. She followed. If her mother and father had been around, they would have called for her to come back. But no one did.
They hunted as a pair. In their mind, she was a sleek hound, the favored partner of a hunting pair, the killer to his tracker. She pushed the image away, replacing it with the picture of a scrawny nine-year old girl cleaning camels. He answered with the memory of the hound, and of men stabbing.
He found the prey, took the cat’s first frantic swipes while clamping his powerful jaws on the throat. She came with a branch she’d fashioned into a spear and spiked the cat through the heart, taking her share of cuts from talons at the end of desperately flailing hind legs.
They brought back their prize to the caravan. The women looked at her in horror. The man who’d bought her stared at the girl and the dog for a breath, took the cat.
“I can dress the meat,” she told him.
He gave the animal back, and asked, “So tomorrow, you’ll tell us a tale of the hunt, instead of a story of far-away cities and their stupid people?”
She did.
Women and children kept their distance, but no one ever turned her away when she helped with chores, from camels to cooking. The only time the dog left her was when the head caravaner called his name. When he left, she missed the smell of him, and watching his side rise and fall with every breath as he slept by her side. She missed him nestled beside her in her mind.
Rief visited, silent at first, but the dog and her brother took a liking to each other and soon he was joining them in patrols and hunts. He teased Aini, as always, but with none of the envy for the living, or the bitterness of the dead, she’d felt from him in the past. He spoke often to the dog, his lips moving to shape words Aini could not hear. The dog tilted his head, and sometimes he sat and stared, as if listening intently. Other times he ignored the boy as if suddenly blind to ghosts.
They hunted well together. Another set of eyes, even dead ones, never hurt.
Other dead things appeared. Maybe it was the dog who led them to her, seeing how well she got along with her dead brother, or Rief, inviting the rest of his kind to the new home his living sister had found, a place less likely than the previous caravans for ghosts to remember their endings.
Or, the caravaners had made room in their company for the dead by staying as far away from her as possible.
Perhaps the desert she’d never traveled through before, a place where the stars had changed just slightly from their familiar alignments, had opened its own doors. The caravan’s leader, consulting charts and crystal orbs, performing rites and ceremonies by himself or with select members of his family, could well have called spirits to him for guidance.
Aini believed that, mostly, the dog helped.
Aini and the dog ranged ahead, behind, and far afield in the flanks of the caravan as the line of camels traveled deeper into desert that was new to her, but still familiar. Harada gave way to volcanic fields, dunes, hills, river and lake beds, chasms, canyons and rifts. Salt flats crinkled underfoot, turning into clinging sand, then hard black rippled rock and stony plains. The sun’s arc made the colors of exposed raw earth hot or cool, depending on how high or low in the sky it blazed. Striations blazed in crimson and scarlet, quieted to glowing pink. Sparse patches of grass and shrubs clung to life even as they surrendered to the camels.
The landscape was broken by the occasional ruin, skeleton, half-buried oasis or village, or mysterious artifacts of broken machinery, cast like ancient shadows across their path, burned into the desert by the sun’s stare, hardened by the night’s cold and the weight of its vast sky. Each was a treasure to be explored, sniffed, pissed on, and reshaped by dreams.
Kayden refused only once to follow her, when she descended into a spiraling crevasse lined with coral and bone, following a faint sound, like a voice whispering. At the boundary between light and dark, nearly swallowed by earth, a series of stone flat carvings began of men with arms crossed over their chests, eyes closed, mouths open.
She put her ear to the closest of the open mouths. Something tickled her ear, and she snapped her head back. Inside the mouth, a tiny smokeless fire burned, and in her mind she heard the beginning of a story of djinn enslaved to build a temple.
The dog barked furiously above, sent stones and dust raining down on her. His head appeared against the tiny patch of sky above her, shaking wildly. She thought something had happened to him and reluctantly left the tale unheard, and then had to chase him until they’d left the statues and the story so far behind it wasn’t worth retracing steps to find them again.
Twice, they were caught in sandstorms. They sheltered in the shell of a fallen plane, and in a cave at the end of a long, low tunnel, the pool of clear water they discovered illuminated by phosphoresc
ent growths on the walls. Both times, the caravan moved on before they returned and both times, the dog found the way back, trying to teach her both the trick of finding shelter, and finding home, that only dogs know. He let her know she would have made a poor dog.
In stops at trading towns, Kayden answered his master’s call and closely guarded the goods and women. Dogs stayed away from him. Rief and the other spirits also kept their distance. The noise and bustle, though slight compared to Aini’s memories of the cities she’d seen, was harsh after weeks in the desert’s stoic silence. Calls to prayer were less frequent.
She kept busy with the camels, listened as she had all her life to the trading banter about strange lands, wondrous goods, thieves and ghuls and djinn. Storytellers drew her closest attention. She added to her stock of old stories, and she joined them with her own tales, or with versions of traditional tales locals found more irritating than charming. She dared more than she had under her parents’ watch, and was almost always paid with curses, stones and chases. She paid the closest attention to the richest source of story, one she’d ignored until now because it belonged to the boring world of older people: gossip.
She learned her worth as a story-telling virgin was six camels.
And climbing, despite the lack of meat on her bones.
She also heard a tale about the caravan she had just left, swept up in a sudden sandstorm and vanishing before the eyes of witnesses. She wanted to ask if a chest had been found, but understood her place, as well as the value of mystery a desert’s monotony.
She picked up gossip about her current owner, who it was said had given up a fortune, a wife and a family to chase a dream. There were equally bitter crumbs about many other men she knew from the trading towns and oases, and more about those who led caravans she’d never encountered in all her years of traveling.
Once, she heard someone mention the Caravan of Dreams. But the name killed the conversation, and the silence that was left returned to her in her sleep to give her nightmares.
Ruins and empty towns were Aini’s favorite. Ghosts congregated to them, coming in from lost expeditions, forgotten battlegrounds, ambushed caravans, storm smothered tribes, overwhelming the relic spirits of their original inhabitants.
“Do you remember where you come from?” she asked them.
Sometimes, they replied, “Do you?” and she’d tell her old stories about the city and her imaginary adventures, and the spirits would listen for a while but then drift off, as if they could tell her tales were as insubstantial as their existence.
Sometimes, they’d answer with what they could remember, speaking from shadows or under the stars or from the depths of dry wells.
The dog played with the spirits of tigers and elephants, reptiles that had once wandered long-gone jungles, the fish that had swum through vanished seas.
When Aini returned to camp, she nourished the seeds of what she’d heard with the wilderness and storms inside her, and brought back dead souls through stories. Between trading stops, her audience grew, and instead of throwing stones they asked questions, challenged her telling, demanded more details, argued over endings. Her heart raced with the thrill of wrestling the living soul of a story into a shape that could find a place in everyone.
She never thought to use the gossip she’d overheard from the living. Everyone seemed to know those kinds of stories better than their prayers or their gods, and the heat of the arguments that fed them seemed to kill whatever spirit they might have had.
The caravan head demanded she prepare tea in his tent. In the privacy of her service, he questioned the sources of her inspiration, displaying an envy of her powers of creation. In time, he grew bolder, tried to hold her close, sweetening his scent with patchouli and amber, to work the secret of ghosts and spirits from her. He called her his habibi, the intimacy of the endearment chilling her like the caress of a desert night.
Kayden growled, paced restlessly, but never challenged his master when he was called to sit and be still.
Aini found ways to escape, breaking the mood with a spill that doused glowing embers or an indiscreet mention of a woman’s secrets. Strategic smears of camel dung also worked. Demands for private tea preparation came less often, and she avoided him in camp.
But his attention threw light into the depths of her loneliness, exposing raw edges of vulnerability. She felt the absence of her old, protected life.
The caravan head shifted his approach to public settings, around the campfires, in the souks and public squares where she went to practice and learn. “How can ghosts really talk to the living?” he’d ask. “Why don’t they just blow away in with the wind? What does a little girl know about ghuls eating the dead or what princes find beautiful about slave girls or the chamberlain’s daughter?” He laughed as his criticisms incited arguments meant to reveal what he wanted to know.
“How can a king know what is wise?” she’d ask, and, “Why do spirits wait in this world rather than go on to the next?” Answering questions with more questions slid her past his provocations, and before anyone could answer, she wove those questions into new characters and story threads, making the tales she told twist and turn like snakes caught in a hawk’s beak. Endings became beginnings, stealing the breath of her listeners as they were propelled down new paths before realizing the journey they’d undertaken had changed. For all his knowledge and experience, the caravan leader fell as deeply into her stories as any of her other listeners.
“You feed the heart and soul so we forget the hunger in our bellies,” he told her, the last time he caught her alone. He loomed over her, squeezing her arm, his flowery breath on her neck. “You will pass great gifts to your children, and make a good mother.” He let her go, making her promise to bring at least one story thread before starting another.
“I wish I’d had a mother like you,” a man from the audience told her one day.
“I wish I had a wife like you,” another said, stopped in mid-bargaining.
The women said nothing, but surrounded her whenever the men, and especially the head caravaner, closed on her.
Kayden’s circling patrol around the camp tightened when she was telling tales, and he was never far in the market places, finding shadows and spaces under carts and in the narrowest alleyways to listen to the sound of her voice and wait for his turn to be with her. She always found him by the shine of his eyes. When stones flew instead of questions, the dog raced to silence her critics.
The children listened most closely of all, and soon began telling their own stories, whether or not they ever saw or heard Rief or the other spirits haunting the darkness beyond the camp fires’ light.
Aini thought they did not so much learn how to tell stories as, by her example, resist the hardening of heart and mind by the desert’s truths. They forgot the forgetting the endless cleaning of camels and preparation of tea brought on.
“You make me wish I’d lived,” Rief said to her one day, at dawn.
Aini wept like she never had before, not after the worst fall or kick from the unruliest camel. Though her little ghost brother had been her parents’ secret and died before she was born, she felt the loss of him as if they’d shared their mother’s womb before he’d been taken away, leaving her with a loneliness she didn’t believe could ever be filled.
In that moment, she came to understand the power a story might have, to bring the dead and the living together in life, and to make real a loss that never was.
One day, another caravan crossed their path, far from any oases or merchant towns. Both stopped. Bells chimed, tea was brewed, courtesies were exchanged. But no one from her caravan smiled in anticipation of good company. No one came to hear her stories.
Aini understood something was about to happen that was related to secret hearts.
The caravan head went out to meet his peer alone, in the night, between both camps. They negotiated through the morning, into the day, while servants erected a tent around them. Both had chests brought to the t
ent. Some were sent back. Whispers hinted at the ferocity of the bargaining going on, like two jackals fighting over a goat. Some said he liked to be called Le Camelier.
Aini tried to stay awake, waiting for sandstorms to explode from chests, but sleep caught up to her. She was awakened by a short, barrel-chested man with a neatly trimmed beard and too-short arms who’d poked her with his foot while the other women in the tent looked on from a corner. Outside, caravan men grumbled.
“You would be my fifth wife,” he said. “But not for children.”
Even in the tent’s gloom, a deeper shadow hung by his shoulder. Aini squinted at the shape, thinking of smoke and fire and danger.
“You don’t want any more,” she told him. She wasn’t sure why she’d said that, except that it felt like a truth that needed to be born. The shadow trembled. She thought it might be laughing.
The furrows of the man’s wrinkled face deepened. He showed yellow teeth.
The next day, a woman who might have been a youthful version of her mother except for her complexion stared at her from the other camp. Aini stopped her chores and went to her.
“You won’t last,” the woman told her.
The shape Aini had seen the night before stood by the woman’s shoulder: a ghost woman, features smoothed over like a weathered statue. The ghost woman said, “You have to tell them things they want to hear if you’re going to stay on their good side. Save the bad things for when you need them, otherwise they’ll kill you quick.”
She was glad someone had taken enough of an interest in her to offer advice.
Her old, sweet-smelling owner told her he’d traded her, but the bargain could only be finalized on the completion of certain rituals before a great feast. He showed no regret over her loss. His face was clouded by things that had not yet happened, possessions he did yet own.
In the Country of Dreaming Caravans Page 2