She had them returning home to his city, marrying, having many children and more adventures.
The young man left, never looking back at her.
The old man came to her in the hazy quiet of the tent after everyone else was gone. He took a deep breath, bowed his head. “You should have let him rescue you sooner,” he said. “And you should have left out all those djinn and ghuls, they’re bad luck in these circumstances. A thief or two would have sufficed.”
“He wanted what I didn’t have in me to give.”
“He was a pharaoh expecting monuments filled with stories about himself to hide what he is not.”
“He wasn’t my prince,” she answered, with a touch of regret.
But she took his face, and those of other young men she remembered from the country of deserts beneath less restless stars, and told herself stories in which they did become her prince, one after another. It took no time for stories she imagined to become dreams that rocked and held her until her virginity seemed like a false treasure.
Outside the sanctity of stories, she would never tell others, she kept her purity, knowing its value for her safety. She made sure to dream deeper, with the right scents, and with pillows and carpets arrayed in proper order, so that she might never be tempted into disappointment by flesh.
Another time, she was shown to a one-armed man with few teeth and no hearing. She danced him a story of a warrior who only needed one arm to wield the sword that killed all his enemies. She kept the tale simple and straight forward, and made sure all his enemies were mortal. She wasn’t given to his small, ragged caravan, but he left with a nearly toothless grin. For this, she was grateful. Al-Fals rewarded her with a vizier’s space in his tent.
What the master of the caravan received in trade for her skills, she never found out. But neither did the one-armed man ever join the harem of men she kept in dreams.
One night, she was sharing a bouquet of scents from her bag with the old man, treating herself to a strong thread of sandalwood while the old man basked in the patchouli of his wild younger days, when she pointed to a thread of light nearly lost among the stars and asked, “Is that the secret path we follow through this desert?”
Ajouz didn’t bother looking up. “No, my ignorant child. That is Al-Sirat. Or, as another faith would have it, the Chinvat Bridge. It has other names, older, lost along with their believers.”
“It’s a bridge?”
“Between one world and the next.”
She looked at him, tightening her head kerchief against the night’s chill.
The old man looked up, squinted. “As thin as a single strand of hair, sharper than any sword, it is the bridge over Hell that delivers the deserved to Paradise.”
She stared at the line of light, following it as it arced over the horizon. “Paradise is over there?” she asked.
“Paradise is usually someplace else.”
“So this is Hell?”
“Is it not lonely?”
“Yes.”
The silence between them went on so long she thought days, weeks might have passed in the darkness under the stars since they’d spoken. The bouquet of scents dissipated, the night’s crisp cool seeped through her jacket. She looked away from the faint trace of bridge and asked, “Who walks the bridge?”
“The dead.”
“Well, then, at least we’re not dead.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. Or we’d be up there and not down here.”
“Yet, we’ve found our way to this place.”
“By our choices. The dead don’t have choices, anymore.”
“You squeeze a drop of sweetness from bitter fruit.”
Aini cocked her head, looked at the ground, and said, “You know, I tell stories.” She couldn’t hide all of her smile.
“I know you tell lies,” the old man said, turning his head away.
“I’m not the only one.”
“Lies, they’re like a warm fire against the chill of loneliness.” Ajouz got up and retreated to his corner of their master’s tent.
Aini stared at the light that was Al-Sirat for a while longer. She wondered if her mother or father had walked the bridge, if they’d made it to the other side or fallen off. She imagined herself on Al-Sirat, among the stars, alone on a path that promised a journey, not a destination.
She couldn’t decide if the razor’s edge bridge would cut into her feet. It would depend, she supposed, on whether she deserved to reach Paradise or fall to Hell. When she went to sleep, she dreamed of Paradise, where there were many ruins to explore, and all the lost people she thought she would never meet again.
Through nights beneath Al-Sirat, Ajouz broke slowly before Aini’s talk and tales, like stone she’d seen worked by masons using fiery coals and water to crack their solid face. She thought of her gift of oils and incense as her fire, setting the old man’s past ablaze. She felt her words flowing in a gentle current through him, like water cooling the heat his memories and fissuring his hard heart, so that some of who he really was might escape. She thought if she could reach such a man, there was no one she couldn’t touch with the tricks she’d learned in weaving lies others, even if only for a moment, wanted to believe.
Sometimes, she laughed to herself, imagining the old man’s fissured heart becoming the mirror image to his wrinkled face.
The company they kept with each other carried the weight of the hell through which they traveled. They were to each other what the quest for his secret heart was to the caravan’s master, what palm wine and khat was to the men. She was grateful for the rough companionship he gave her. But, she still missed the dog most of all.
“Don’t you know any other stories?” the old man asked.
The question came after Aini had finished another evening of tale-telling for the men. Though the caravaners were usually in no condition to criticize, the old man’s tone gave her cause to think that she’d repeated a story. The old man had a critic’s heart, harder than most who liked to throw out their opinion.
“Yes. But the ones I tell are the ones they need.”
“No. They’re the tales you believe you need to tell to be able to live with them. I’d like to hear you try the men with something else.”
“Like what?”
“If you’re not going to give them sex, give them blood. Sew a bound thief into a cow with its guts removed, leave him under the sun for a day or two, and after the maggots start, bring in the scorpions. Flaying. Castration. Amputations. Blinding. Impalements.”
“Scaphismus.”
Ajouz frowned.
“The scarab’s shell. A ghost told me about it. He died locked between two half-shells with head, feet and hands sticking out, forced-fed to keep him alive, coated with honey. He was eaten alive by the vermin drawn to his filth and the honey.”
Ajouz nodded. “Yes. They’ll need more details. You could spend an evening just on the food and shit and piss.”
Aini tried to hang on the old man’s suggestions, but instead she had to ask, “Why?”
Her question hung in the air, frail, wounded. She felt a touch of dread at the possibility that her powers were fading, that she was failing her audience. She hadn’t spent as long a time without contact with anyone living or dead outside a caravan since she’d started traveling deserts. Even a small ruin or a single petroglyph in the rocks might have nourished her imagination, sparked fresher inspiration.
“You don’t have to be so small.”
Aini frowned. She wanted to pack the bag of scents and go back to her private chamber. But then, she understood her own heroes and heroines would never do such a thing. She felt like she was standing on top of a huge pile of stones, and if she took a wrong step to get down the pile would collapse and she’d be buried alive and crushed under their weight.
Maybe there were simpler reasons than the ones she imagined for her parents selling her off; her choice of an exile’s life; desperately clinging to her physical virginity after l
osing lost it long ago in her imagination; preferring dead over living friends.
“What stories do you tell yourself?” the old man asked.
“You mean, what lies do I tell myself?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
She looked to the nearest lamp’s flame as she said, “I tell myself that I’m someone else, free, brave, commanding the power to keep my freedom.”
“Why are these lies?”
“Because they’re like my stories. Not real. True, maybe, somewhere inside me. But what is real is that I’m only merchandise of value belonging to a caravan. I am something others use to get what they want.”
“Then your lies protect what is valuable to you.”
“Is that enough?”
The old man shifted where he sat, as if riding a difficult camel. “You’re not a child, anymore.”
“Then what am I? A slave? A bundle of tales reserved for the highest bidder? A virgin no one wants?”
The old man grunted. It was as much of a display of emotion Aini had seen from him.
“You’ve done well to keep from being a slave,” he said. “But I don’t know how much longer your gift of lies can keep you free.”
They sat in silence for a while. In the caravan master’s quarters, a faint chanting rose, like sand shifting in a breeze. Aini began another story, a gift of change for the old man, choosing a spider instead of a person, thinking to reach for a tale of clever tricks and an escape from sharp retribution. The old man interrupted before she’d said a dozen words.
“Do you remember the stars?” he asked.
She closed her eyes, remembered Al-Sirat and the stars scattered over a bridge to a Paradise she would never reach.
“Caravans find their way through the emptiness by their light and signs,” he continued. “So can you.”
The old man picked through patterns she’d found and used in her stories, re-arranged a cat’s paw, a jet, a curved blade, and a dozen other memories magnified by imagination and turned them into the Mendicant, the Watching Baboon, Jackal’s Jaws, Wanderer, the Leaping Fox, the Lost King, Toad on a Rock, the Two-Faced Poet, the Raven’s Fan, the Concubines, the Serpent Striking, the Prince Ascending, Eagle’s Claws, the Porter and His Treasure, the Chameleons, the Hanged Virgin, Owl’s Spread Wings, Thief on the Roof, Scorpion’s Tail.
He told her their stories: the Mendicant, dipping below and then rising above the horizon, hands held out for alms; the Wanderer, a whirling set of bodies passing back and forth restlessly across the sky; the Raven’s Fan, spreading the shimmering cloud of its tail in vain display of pride; the Porter, hunched over beneath the burden of the treasure he carried; the Scorpion’s Tail, stinging in times of great trouble and suffering.
“Let’s go out and see them,” Aini said, opening her eyes, starting to push herself up.
The old man raised a hand. “You have to do more than see. You need to feel them moving, as if you’re the sky and they’re whispering their secrets inside you,” he said, tapping his chest with a finger. “Just like your stories, letting them live inside you so your listeners will feel them with you when you speak.”
She settled back, sifted through the questions she had before asking, “What good are they to me?”
“You know east and west by the sun,” he said. “You know trouble’s coming by the scorpion’s tale descending, as it does now. Where you find the Wanderer, above or below Al-Sirat, suggests that friends or enemies may be near. The Lost King, close to the moon, tells a wise caravaner he should head into the rising sun. The Concubines, when they kneel before the Two-Faced Poet, is a bad time for trading. When they are beneath the Striking Serpent, it means of course that danger is close by, and other signs should be studied to see which direction to take.”
He went on, taking her outside beside the embers of a fire and pointing at constellations as he told their stories, drawing the patterns of their motion through the sky, connecting their ever-changing relationships. His voice rose slightly, infused with vigor, as he stabbed at the Moon and certain bright stars like Blood Stone, the Leopard’s Eye, and Daggerpoint while talking about how they and other celestial bodies could influence the meaning of the night’s sky. He scowled, forgetting the occasional glances to keep the connection between storyteller and audience, as he complained about random changes that sometimes swept the field of stars, further revising relationships and meanings.
She considered the possibilities of all that he had described, past the time when the old man had tired of talking and had fallen asleep. At last, she said, “You’re making this up.”
The old man started. He looked to Aini, faint surprise prying his eyes wider. “I thought…I dreamed—” He stopped himself, coughed, looked away. “The caravan masters know all about the stars and their signs,” he said. “They use the stars and their cycles and meanings to navigate the vastness around us. If you want your freedom, you’d better learn to do the same.”
Aini took a deep breath, let it out slowly. She looked at the stars, feeling their coldness and distance, which might have been truth as easily as lies. The old man, the caravan, the desert all fell out of focus, leaving her alone with only stars and their stark light cutting through the uncertain haze, sharp and separate from the rest of existence.
Inside her, the stars carved their meaning on the walls of empty places, leaving no room for words, pictures, songs, shapes or dance to tell their story.
A change came through her, like the time of her blood, only deeper, hotter. The sensation pricked at the base of her skull, wriggled between her legs, tickled her feet, chilled her spine.
She felt like screaming.
She left the embers, their dying heat unable to warm her, and hurried back into the tent. The old man quickly followed, settling into his pillows, wheezing as if he carried the night in his chest.
With a slight tremor possessing her hand, she reached for sandalwood from her satchel, but chose patchouli and lit it for the old man. “Tell me about the other caravans out here,” she said. “Tell me about the Caravan of Dreams.”
The old man grumbled, but the scent roused him. “We don’t talk about such things.”
Aini raised her arms to embrace the tent and all that was outside its walls. She’d never run from the desert, and missed it, already. “But we’re in a caravan. There’s hardly anything else to talk about except other caravans.”
The old man shook his head. “You are a difficult child.” He closed his eyes, veiled his lips with a trembling hand. “In this country,” he said, voice hushed, “we must be careful what we name, what we call. Caravans are more than what you know them to be. In this country, merchants do not command what goods are moved, or their price. The seeds from which these caravans grow are not nourished by a lust for wealth. Something else feeds them.”
“Dreams,” Aini said.
“If you say so.”
“You’re the one telling the story.”
“And you are the one wanting to hear what you need said.”
“Just tell me.”
The old man opened his eyes for an instant to glance at her, continued. “The seeds of what caravans become in this country grow in their masters and followers. Some seeds came with men who wandered this far out into the desert. Others were in the world before men ever came to be, already drifting with the sand on the breeze, waiting for flesh and a world to define them.
“Call the seeds angels, demons, dreams. An emptiness that makes the desert seem crowded. What feeds them may be fear, hunger, madness, perhaps hope, even love, if that is what you wish to believe. But in my old age, I have come to believe that whatever it is that takes root in us from seed is more wound than appetite. And what drives us in these caravans is not the fulfillment of what can be, but relief from what it is.”
“People call it the Caravan of Dreams,” Aini said. “But it’s something bigger.” She put her hands to her chest to feel her fast-beating heart, and whatever else might be nestled behind
flesh and bone.
“That is one way of understanding. Why do you care about that one?”
“My Mom and Dad were looking for it.”
“Then you should know all there is to know.”
She shook her head with frustration. “Is it one of the first ones?”
“Yes.” The old man hesitated, but could not stop himself. “Some say,” he continued, “the Caravan of Dreams was before all others, before the world, before whatever God you believe in made this world. Some say God was born from it so that there might be something to make a world for the Caravan to walk, others say God is its master, and that it carries souls back from the world to Paradise.”
“What do you believe?”
“When I was young, I heard someone say that the Caravan of Dreams was God’s breath, and even today when the wind raises the sand or the sirocco kisses my neck, I wonder what mood passes over God. For a long time, I was sure the Caravan was one of God’s dreams, and that anyone who joined it would be forgotten when God awoke. Now, I like to think we are all that Caravan’s children, thrown into the world to make a place for dreams.”
“Is any of that true?”
“Who can say?”
“People say a lot of things.”
“Everyone tells stories. But not many dare tell them as I’ve told you.”
“Why?”
“Because lies can become truth, stories travel from the imagined to the real. Words can summon what has no place in this world, or bring their shadows. And even if the tale told is about the heart’s desire, many have reason to fear that desire’s fulfillment. There are costs. Sacrifices must be made.
“And understand, child, that what grows from a need or a wound that drives a man to this country can be a thing of terror. Not everyone wants to find the Caravan of Dreams, even if it will take them to Paradise, even if it is a manifestation of God.”
“I know.”
The old man pressed his hand against his lips for a moment. He opened his eyes, looked at Aini.
In the Country of Dreaming Caravans Page 4