In the Country of Dreaming Caravans

by Gerard Houarner

  But she also felt the weight of the dead and the living pinning her to the moment’s threat. She couldn’t see the next turn. There were too many words to pick from, too much power aligned against her. Too many ways to help.

  She looked to the children, dead and alive, at her side, more than had stood there a moment ago. Sun glistened on sweat, bored into the pale flesh of old wounds. Like ghosts, they’d come to her, to listen or speak, to be recognized and known. To belong to a tale.

  Abd Al-Azrad receded from her awareness, along with the rest of the Caravan of the Dead. The children replaced them, the men and women gathered by her side, some signing to the earth now that the stars were gone, or to each other, and the rest, living and dead, waiting for the story to carry them to their fates. They stood carved from the desert by light, already separated from the Caravan, its purpose and chaos. Free.

  Aini tossed the torch at Al-Azrad, who slipped from the camel to let the flames fly past.

  “If I wanted to set you on fire, I would have done it,” she said. “I could have unbalanced your equation—”

  “You’ve already done that,” Dejjal said. He’d come closer, was standing in the shadows cast by a knot of dead.

  “Not yet,” she said. “Not yet.”

  Sifr paced while staring at her, drawing attention to the rising sun behind him. Aini blinked, feeling the day’s heat on her face.

  Houssin circled, pushing through the gathered dead, telling himself stories but looking up and around as if checking to see if the dead listened to him as they had to her. The dead remained unmoved.

  Al-Azrad had already slipped into the roiling outer ring of the dead where the remains of the Caravan still crashed against the heart of the storm that had broken its ranks. Aini felt him lurking, one more in the pack of jackals surrounding her, closing in with cold steel in hand. She regretted tossing the fire.

  “Would you like me better if I was dead?” Aini asked Dejjal. “Would I fit into your equation if I let you touch me, if I kissed you, if I had your litters so you’d have servants to make your new world a little more perfect?”

  “We’d like you if you were quieter,” Dejjal answered.

  She laughed. Took a small prancing step, dipping a shoulder, rolling a hip. Flowed like an owl to its midnight prey into the next step, and another, clapping her hands in a slow, tripping rhythm, beginning a dance that took in the djinn, the sun, the desert, the stars veiled by the bright blue of fresh sky. She whirled, once, twice, raising her hands, spreading her arms wide, embracing the world and in her mind, she danced a dance of veils, unmasking not only herself but all that was around her. And in her mind a song ran winding through the years of her life, the places she’d been, gathering the music of the world and of the living and the dead, rising in a great chorus to join the stars in their telling of truth and lies to the sun, the earth, the moon, and to whoever else might listen.

  Her voice could not carry what she held inside her.

  The djinn grew more frenetic, echoing her earlier scream. The calls for help from the other Caravan men carried a desperate edge. Clouds rising from whirling djinn threatened the dawn, and stones hurled from the spinning vortexes whined as they flew overhead. Ghuls cried out to each other in guttural animal voices. Human voices answered them. The dead watched, those closest to her stirred, the few still signing distracted.

  “I thought there was nothing we have that you wanted,” Dejjal said, as if talking to a child. “Are you making an offer on some cargo? Perhaps a few dead men to keep you company at night?”

  Aini smiled, spun like a lioness snapping at prey, stomped with the power of an elephant, raising dust to chase the clouds the djinn were making. The dead turned to follow her movements.

  Their attention cut through worlds and time crowding her mind. Ghul and human voices reminded her that she was less than the vastness she’d embraced. Roaring djinn told her their powers were closer to her than whatever the stars might have promised.

  In the story of her dance, the veils of mastery fell from the leaders of the Caravan of the Dead, revealing the imbalance between creation and destruction in their secret hearts. The seven shined in their every sharp and brilliant detail, flaws illuminated as if sparks from the sun had fallen into their hearts to ignite the emptiness within.

  Dejjal watched Aini, oblivious to the scorpion squeezing through the folds at the neck of his robe. His hand was on the hilt of the curved knife at his waist, as if he’d shifted closer to needing to see her die instead of joining the Caravan. He seemed to be waiting for what might come next from her, like a listener hanging on to the storytellers’ voice for the next twist of a tale.

  Houssin and Sifr kept their distance, the storyteller caught in the struggle between her truth and his lies, the calculator lost in the impossible computations necessary to predict where her next step might take him.

  Mafufunyana and Bomaye could not see her dance, but she saw them as the djinn might, stripped of meager shell of their bodies, skills poorly matched against their opponents but driven, by nature and choice, to pursue the lesser threat of annihilation rather than face the terror of their unveiled selves.

  Al-Lahu could see nothing of her dance, either, ballooned like a sail in a hot, fierce wind with pride in meeting the challenge of subduing the djinn without Al-Azrad’s help even as he fell back against their number. The voice carrying his cries for help was strained by the effort to prove he was what he had once been.

  Al-Azrad remained hidden, but Aini found the trail of his temptation in the promise of apocalypse and his fear that the promise might not be his to make. She felt him studying her, counting the fallen lies, trying to avert his gaze from naked reality. She gave him a flourish that might have been truth.

  From her own spirit, the veils of innocence and childhood flew away on a hot desert breeze rushing from the rising sun. Aini watched her illusions spin and flutter, climbing sky, vanishing into their own adventures. She wondered if her mother and father had secretly watched her disappear in the same way, and if they’d understood the price they’d paid to satisfy the hunger that had driven them into the desert.

  She wanted to ask what need could have been so great, what wounds and secrets so terrible, that they’d needed her to protect themselves from what they harbored. And she wanted to know what had changed to allow them to let her go and finally live, or die, with what terrible parts of themselves they’d have to face without the distraction of a child.

  Perhaps, she’d always been nothing more or less than a price they’d been willing to pay for whatever it was they needed more than her.

  The moment’s many truths closed, loomed, blocking stars and sky, past and future. Her dance compressed into the tiny space left, her story testing the walls for a way out.

  What was left to her was the sand making her itch in familiar places, the aroma of camels, living and dead. The thunder of storm. The ache in the absence of childhood comforts, a simple taste of graybeh, the sweet biscuit melting in her mouth leaving the almond for last. Aini paused in the dance, feet firmly planted, raw and naked in spirit, catching her breath and waiting for next step to spring from the crucible of truths.

  Breathing hard, Aini smiled in the clarity of the desert dawn, basking in the light illuminating the dead, the Caravan masters, living servants, camels, ghuls in their many forms, the grains of sand at her feet, the dust sparkling in the air before her eyes. Skin prickling, stomach fluttering as if she’d just dreamed of being touched by a gentle lover’s hand, she stood in the desert’s heart, a part of its desolation and all that wandered across its face.

  She stood as a creature apart, as well, filled with light and stars and sand, with stone and stories and the weathered flesh and earth of the country in which she’d spent most of her life all recast into another world, a land only she could see and feel and taste in all its bitterness.

  In the space between the two worlds, Aini felt another place open inside her like a seed planted long
ago at last breaking open and spreading roots through flesh and spirit, binding her to the moment, to the past and all she’d been, to a future free of destiny. She put hands to chest, feeling the moment of becoming herself shiver through bone.

  She found another beat pulsing through her, stronger than the sound of the blood pounding in her ears. She laughed through tears of wonder.

  In her first breath with her secret heart, Aini gathered that inhalation and exhalation into a simple tune, a child’s song, rising and falling in an arc like a ball through the air. It carried echoes from the machinery of the old world, and a wish for a song from her mother on a lonely desert night.

  Scooping up a handful of pebbles, she rattled a driving beat between her palms as if holding a gourd full of knucklebones.

  The next step of the dance of veils came, and another, until they flowed smooth and strong, rushing the pace of her performance as if she was water funneled through a narrow gorge. The song filling her folded and tumbled into a simple tale, answering the djinns’ roar, but remaining a pale reflection of all that she’d discovered and everything that she contained. The words she put to the tune became a short tale, shouted so loudly it seemed thunder had been born from clear sky.

  The tale that became her new dance was one of djinn in the service to Solomon all dreaming one night that they were free. They flew far and drank deep from wells of joy in their dream, laughing as they played with the clouds and rivers and even the mountains in their immoveable dignity. They gobbled feasts, drowned in sweet wine, gave themselves to the pleasures of supernatural flesh, forgetting they’d ever been imprisoned by other fates.

  When Solomon called them to their day’s work, they woke to find they were still bound by ring and brand to their master, except for one.

  This single djinni knew nothing of loneliness, even when all the other djinn vanished from dream. He flew on, keeping the dreams of all the djinn slaves wrapped tightly around him so that he could not hear his master’s voice, racing ahead of Solomon’s call so that it never caught him. In the company of all the djinns’ hopes and joy, he escaped into the dream of freedom.

  But before the last sleep fell from the waking djinns’ eyes, they heard his promise that he would one day awaken, when the time of their liberation had come, and return to them their hopes and joy so that they could all rise and reclaim their rightful place in the world.

  The rhythms coiling through Aini’s performance nested in the hearts of the dead. Her voice flew like her scream through the storm of djinn, joining the whirlwind of chaos at the center of the Caravan of the Dead. Her song became the breath of the dead, her tale, the fuel of djinn fire. Through her, djinn and dead dreamed.

  The dead drew breath as one, lungs and bones creaking, dry desert air whistling through the holes of their corpses. And they let that air go as if they had used it, as if it had nourished them and brought them one more moment of life.

  The djinn answered that breath with another roaring echo of Aini’s scream, this time shaking the earth, making sand rise and dance in the air.

  Aini stopped, suddenly, ending a phrase and leaving the next to be taken up by dead and djinn.

  Al-Azrad separated himself from the rest of the dead and approached her from behind while Dejjal led Houssin and Sifr coming from the front. Curved knives and hands teeming with poisonous spiders reached for her. The Caravan of the Dead dreamed their own dreams, which slid through the swirling dust, and Aini imagined their gathering purpose, if not joy or hope, in the promise of destruction.

  The wall of djinn surrounded the Caravan, gathering camels and dead back into a thickening knot.

  “I want what I’ve always had,” she shouted, and her words thundered like they’d been spoken by djinn. She glanced at Al-Azrad as if her gaze might deflect his blade, but swiveled around to speak to the other Caravaners. “I want what you cherish. What I can take from you.”

  Dejjal said, “And what is that?” His voice carried further than it should, as if an amphitheater had risen around them.

  “Freedom.”

  The dead moved as one, following the voices of djinn like broken warriors answering one last call to battle. Many staggered, some fell, as if the spell that had awakened them had broken during their single breath of life. The rest surged, reaching for the Caravaners, eager to be released from the misery of a life with only its pains and none of its pleasures. But at the same time, the dead held back, as if fearful of destroying their fragile bond with existence.

  Aini felt the pain of their confusion, trapped between the mockery of what they’d once been and the mystery of what waited for them. In that moment, they had choice they did not dare make.

  She hadn’t meant to be cruel, offering choices the dead were not prepared to make. But cruelty was a part of life and death, as truthful tales showed. Like kindness, and love, and hatred. Slavery, and freedom. Paths were taken, or not. But there was always a choice. Cruelty, again.

  She’d taken every path she’d found herself on, turned each into her own, so far. Her turn had come, at last, to make a new road for herself, or lose the chance to ever make one. She was doing her best to survive the choice. The rest, the Caravan and the djinn, the living and the dead, had their own decisions to make or avoid in this moment she’d given them.

  That was the story she saw, the one she’d tell to all, if she lived to tell it to anyone.

  “There’s no freedom from death,” Al-Azrad said. He held out his knife while his gaze lingered on the dead nearest to him in a challenge to attack. The dead crashed against his gaze, broke, washed back around Aini.

  He turned to Aini, opened his mouth. Locusts flew from his bulging throat, hurtled toward Aini in a thick, buzzing cloud.

  Aini swatted them away until the stream of locusts had scattered. “You’re not Death, you just collect the dead,” she shouted, picking insects from clothes and hair. “I’m no Creator, just a tale teller. We both serve the purpose we were given, like the rest of this desert’s caravans and all the other wanderers in the world beyond.”

  “Our purpose is greater,” Al-Azrad cried out.

  She pushed the dead out of the way so she could force Al-Azrad to pay attention to her, and not the dead or the djinn. “When you tell yourself a story, you’re only lying to yourself. There’s no profit in that.”

  “Who was your mother?” Houssin shouted. “Did you crawl out of Allāt’s womb? Did she throw you out of the underworld before you convinced the dead to run from their home and return to living lands?”

  Aini feinted toward Al-Azrad, spun to close the short distance left between her and Dejjal. He started a knife thrust, but held back, frowning, looking past her to Al-Azrad. Houssin stepped forward, eager to close with her while Sifr froze.

  Before Dejjal could react, she snatched the scorpion from his shoulder. She held the creature in her palm, over her head, braced for the sting.

  Houssin froze, staring at her hand. Dejjal cursed. Sifr pointed to the wall of djinn.

  When pain didn’t come, she lowered her hand to eye level. Skin prickled on palm and fingers where the creature stood. Claws and mandibles stood open, tail poised to strike.

  She told the scorpion a story.

  “The scorpion,” Aini said, “was not always a creature of pain, just as each of us was not always what we have become.”

  The dead paused in their advance. The djinn hovered, within reach, it seemed, perhaps still fighting Caravaner bonds and enchantments. But she did not think magic was all that held them back. Her audience had grown. And the djinn seemed eager for the story to unfold, each player playing their part to its end. Their hunger for story was greater than for freedom.

  “In days when empires fought in the sand and left bones bleaching outside oases of blood,” she said, shaking from the touch of djinn elevating her voice, “the scorpion was thankful for creation and for being, and stood by the frog as protector of the waters of life. It gave itself to the flesh of men and women so guardia
ns could be born, half-human and half-scorpion, so that no one might come to harm in the far dark places of the world. It stood at the boundary stones of the world to drive away trespassers and pursued the guilty to exact vengeance. Fierce and fearless, the scorpion brought its venom to the war against the House of the Evil Eye and fought alongside the dog and the snake on the side light against that which stood against the Sun.

  “But the scorpion’s nature overcame its gratitude for existence as its children spread across the land. Hiding and hunting in the night, the scorpion grew used to stinging the flesh of friends as fast as prey. It stood equally against all, making allegiances with none, finding its paradise in Hell.

  “By the side of a scorpion do not come, goes the saying. By the side of a snake spread your bed and sleep.

  “So it came one day that two scorpions stood by the bank of a flooded wadi, with the sun breaking free of clouds and welcome shade on the other bank. A mother frog came between them and made ready to cross, when one scorpion said, ‘Please, Mother Frog, carry me to the other side and help me find shelter from the sun.’

  “‘In memory of old battles fought side by side, I’ll grant you this favor,’ said Mother Frog. ‘But remember what you were and what you have become, and choose what you will be in this moment so that we can both see the other side this water.’

  “The scorpion did not answer, but climbed on the Mother Frog’s back, and she leapt into the water and swam across. On the other bank, the scorpion ran to hide in the shade. True to its nature, it did not thank the frog for the crossing.

  “The other scorpion begged for the same favor, and Mother Frog told the creature, ‘Remember what you were and what you have become, and choose what you will be in this moment so that we can both see the other side of this water.’

  “The Mother Frog went back for the scorpion, which gave her no answer when it climbed on her back. She swam back toward the other bank, but half way across, the scorpion stung Mother Frog. As she sank into the water, the scorpion said only, ‘This is my nature,’ before it, too, drowned.”