In the Country of Dreaming Caravans

by Gerard Houarner

  Dejjal laughed. Houssin cursed.

  Ripples passed through the walls of wind whirling about them.

  The scorpion in her hand danced over her arm. Aini shivered as she watched, entranced by the delicate coordination of its eight legs, its pincers and claws, as it made its way to her shoulder, as if it wanted to whisper something in her ear.

  Sifr cried out. Al-Azrad grunted. Houssin cursed again. Dejjal remained silent.

  The scorpion scampered across her chest, stopped at the base of her throat, and stung itself. The sting passed through carapace and head to prick Aini’s flesh. The venom flamed through her chest, burning breasts and nipples, shot through to her fingertips and the top of her head. Light blazed behind her eyes as it never had in the world. In the instant, a desert was born inside Aini.

  When she could see again, the Caravaners had fallen to the ground. They writhed in the dirt and rocks, robes flying, faces twisted, as vipers, locusts, spiders and beetles carried dead scorpions, strung by their own tails, through billowing cloth and sand. Their weapons lay scattered around them, drawing the poison-bearers like mothers their long-lost children.

  The dead, along with the Caravan’s living servants mingling with the dead, pressed close to Aini. She felt the cold touch of dead hands, and the warm gasp of live ones, as the crowd gently pressed fingers against her flesh as if she were a tent flap that would give way to a new world.

  The little girl who’d attended to her the first night in camp embraced her around the hips. She stared at Aini’s chest, brown eyes wide, face coated with dust as if she’d been sleeping with the dead.

  “You have a scorpion on you,” she said.

  Aini reflexively brushed her hand over her chest, knocking away the scorpion pinned to her.

  “It’s still there,” the girl said, pointing.

  Aini’s fingertips traced swollen flesh. She thought the girl might have a future telling stories. The scorpion’s blessing, perhaps only in the right light, would leave a scar in the shape of the creature’s shadow. That’s how it would work, if she were telling the tale. She’d have a sign, to set her apart, and to protect her from scorpions, the evil eye, even from death.

  Other storytellers would be tempted to make the mark a curse, tying its bearer to the Caravan of the Dead forever. But she wasn’t that kind of entertainer.

  The Caravan men, shed of dead scorpions, slowly stood with the return of desert life, straightening robes they no longer filled completely. The living cliffs of djinn, whirling winds laced with fire and lightning, climbed higher as if fed by the spectacle, high enough to blind the sun with veils of desert dust. They screamed like every devil wind, Khamsin, Haboob, Harmattan and all the others, and every storm born from heat and sand and desolation that had ever torn through all the world’s deserts. They made the storm in which she’d been kidnapped seem kind.

  Al-Azrad, his voice echoing in halls of angry air, called for his brothers, but Al-Lahu and Bomaye did not answer. Mafufunyana remained absent, failing to appear with the bloodthirsty glee Aini anticipated.

  The story unfolded in Aini, through the Caravan, in darkness between stars, between djinn. She gathered herself while there was still time for tales.

  “What would happen,” Aini shouted, “if all that made you fell under my spell, like ghosts, the djinn, the ghuls, these dead, your scorpions? What if I told you lies so strong you forgot the ones you’ve told yourself? What if the truth in the heart of these lies made you more than what you were before you heard them? Would you still be the Caravan of the Dead?”

  “Is that all you have to sell?” Sifr asked.

  “Is it enough, Sifr, to upset your precious equations? Is it enough, Al-Azrad, to spark your own apocalypse? Houssin, do you have enough inside you to match me in the market for creation’s stories? And you, Dejjal, do you still believe the sweet poison in your voice can silence mine?”

  “Do you think the Caravan of the Dead can be destroyed?” Al-Azrad asked. “Do you believe the djinn, the dead, your stories can do what all the living and what made the living could not do?” He looked to the towering walls of sand coming closer, pushing the Caravan together, as if squeezing juice from an oasis orange, and called out again for Al-Lahu. When there was no answer, he turned back to Aini and said, “If we die, so will you.”

  “I was told you destroy the Caravan of Healing every time you find it,” Aini said. “But it always returns. Your apocalypse carries the seeds of creation. These dead ache to pass what’s left of them to anyone and anything, including the stars. In our destruction, there will be a rebirth. There always is. Even for the Caravan of the Dead. Even for me.”

  “For us, yes,” Sifr said. “But not for flesh and blood.”

  “Wake up little girl,” Dejjal said. “You dream.”

  “Aren’t we in the right country for dreams?” Aini asked.

  Al-Azrad turned half-way to face the oncoming djinn, waving to Dejjal and Sifr to join him, telling Houssin to look for the others. Houssin looked to Al-Azrad, then pushed through the dead.

  Aini looked to the Caravan’s servants among them. Many had vanished, perhaps to hide, or to take their chances running through djinn and ghuls. Despite the little girl’s return to her, the group who had tended to her camp had still not come forward. She thought they might be among those who’d rather die with the Caravaners rather than make a choice to be free.

  She pointed to the nearest camels, gave the sign to round them up and head out, hoping they had the courage to try.

  Al-Azrad glanced back at Aini and asked, “What do you offer for your freedom? Your collection of dead hearts and useless dreams?”

  “The djinn are almost here,” she said. “I can always scream again.” She tried to push the little girl still at her side toward the servants, but she held on tightly to Aini’s waist. Aini dropped an arm around the girl’s shoulder, and suddenly did not want to let her go.

  Dejjal began to chant, and Sifr quickly joined him. Al-Azrad motioned for Aini to join them as they stood in a circle with their backs to one another.

  Aini took a few steps closer so she could be heard. The girl came with her, along with a knot of the dead. The girl buried her face in Aini’s ribs. Aini raised the scarf around her neck to cover her head, leaving only a slit to see through. She made another slit so she could keep talking, until either the djinn or the Caravaners stopped her. “What if I stripped the veil of the sky’s blue and told you what the stars have to say about your dead and your djinn, about who you will meet and what will happen on the road to your apocalypse?”

  Dejjal’s chanting stayed strong, but Sifr faltered, as if his equations had taken a blow. Al-Azrad screamed at him, looked in the direction Houssin had taken. Dejjal took a step toward the djinn, bracing himself against the rising wind ripping through the heart of the storm, but followed Al-Azrad’s gaze looking for help.

  Their faces might have held fear, or reflected the death coming for them. Aini couldn’t see the difference, only that the Caravaners found no comfort in the promise of a rebirth they had not engineered.

  “Don’t listen to the stars,” she told them. “Don’t be dazzled by their brightness or number. They lie and warn you about dangers that don’t exist, and then let you fall to your real enemies. Don’t listen to me. I can’t be trusted to tell a true thing when a lie will find a bigger audience.”

  Her voice boomed, buoyed by the chorus of djinn.

  “Listen to the space between the stars,” she continued, “the breath between words, where there is nothing. Liars try to fill that emptiness, but a truth teller lets the emptiness be so others can feel it. Do you know what that emptiness says? That stars and words seem plentiful, like sand, but they are as far apart and as lonely as people in the desert. Emptiness is the promise made to all things.

  “Emptiness is what waits for you, after you destroy the world and recreate it in your image. Because you are the emptiness, made to walk this country and all the lands on its b
orders so the stars of the living can know what waits for them and burn brighter against you.

  “Don’t be afraid to die,” she said. “Be afraid to be reborn in a place where there are no stars, no sand, no other caravans, no living or dead to fill the lines that follow you through never ending darkness. There you will be slaves to your hungers, forever.”

  “She’s worse than the djinn,” Dejjal shouted, breaking the flow of his chanting.

  Sifr bowed his head. His chanting faltered.

  Al-Azrad glanced at one of the curved blades on the ground. His hand closed into a fist, his arm cocked half-way as if he had the weapon in hand, ready to slash or throw.

  “Do you remember how it was to be alive?” Aini asked, dancing across the edge of the Caravaners’ rage, daring their terror to lash out. “Can you still feel the cool shade of a palm’s shade, taste the thick sweetness of a fig, smell savory spices from a stew cooking over a fire? Do you have a sliver left of brightness to guide you through any darkness, to feed your starving souls? They do,” she said, pointing to the dead. Reinvigorated by her words, they surged toward the Caravaners once more like a tide under a new risen moon.

  Al-Lahu’s voice cut through the din as he shouted, “Isn’t she dead, yet?” He appeared carving out a path through the dead with his blade, sending some of the living to their ends, as well. He glared at Aini, threw a dead scorpion at her.

  Houssin came up behind him, at his left flank, barely keeping the dead at bay with one hand slicing a blade wildly through the air while carrying a kanun, wind already plucking its many strings stretched across a soundboard inlaid with odd geometries. As if tortured by the play of sharp-edged notes, the wind’s screaming writhed, diminished, twisted until it sounded less like air and more like the intrusion of something no human organ could sense. Bomaye smashed his way through dead flesh, passing Al-Lahu in the race to the others while carrying an ivory and silver horn.

  Mafufunyana had already joined his brothers and taken up a mad, hopping dance in front of Al-Azrad, leering as bulging eyes turned up and inward into some ecstatic vision. His cheeks were puffed as he blew into a larger horn, spittle escaping from the corner of his lips. His twisted cock, strapped on over his the wound of his unmanning, stood exposed like a thick limb broken off from a dead tree, half-buried in sand.

  Bomaye joined him a moment later, moving with discipline, grace and precision, but without his brother Caravaner’s raw vitality. The swirling wind whipped around them, streaked by lightning, as if together they were stealing a djinn’s form. Al-Lahu staggered to Al-Azrad, gave his voice to the chant. Houssin sat in their midst, and with steel-tipped fingers picked at strings tuned to a maqam scale Aini had never heard before. The music wound through the Caravaners’ strange phrases, swirled in the spirit amphitheater of djinn, chilling Aini’s flesh.

  “Please, go,” the little girl cried out, tugging at Aini’s hips.

  Aini looked down, shocked. The fear reverberating inside her gathered itself around the memory of leaving her parents’ caravan. She wanted to say she’d never leave the girl, the living or the dead, not even the djinn. Panic swelled, rising with the speed and pitch of Houssin’s playing. She’d left so much behind, she couldn’t leave, again. She’d have to stay, comfort the girl and all the living and dead trapped in the Caravan, the djinn, the Caravaners trapped in their dreams. They needed her tales, the life inside her that would renew the barren ground on which they’d all lost themselves.

  The little girl’s insistent pulls reached through the fog of Aini’s fears and needs, the howls of djinn clashing with the revived song of the Caravan of the Dead. Aini looked to the girl, searching for terror in her eyes. But the girl was looking elsewhere, and Aini followed her gaze to a line of camels heading out to the djinn, figures clinging to the sides of camels trying to advance against the fierce winds and dust.

  Their struggle dragged Aini from the embrace of the Caravaners’ spell, which could only be a tale, Aini was certain, about weakness and fear designed to steal the hearts of djinn.

  She let the girl lead her a few steps as she shook herself free from the tangle of lies and truths, her own and the world’s. The lonely string of life and death, a thing she’d made out of words and dreams, opened another road for her to take.

  She picked the girl up and made her way toward the head of the line. As she struggled against the wind, feeling as light as papyrus, her prince, the tall African, took hold of her. Rooted by death, she passed the girl to a mix of living and dead clinging to a camel, and pointed toward the front.

  On her way, partly sheltered by her King, she began a tale of djinn setting out to trick Solomon into giving them their freedom. She called her hero Kahab, hoping the name was not a true one or at least not the name of one from her audience. And if it was, all she had left was the grace earned from the last story she’d told them, and perhaps the vanity of a djinn.

  She made him noble and strong, to soothe any possible hurt, one of the djinn who stood behind King Solomon’s advisors, wise in the lore of seeds and their nurturing, helping to feed their master’s people.

  The wind died down to a gusting breeze as she caught the djinns’ attention. She danced away from her protector’s arms to take the caravan lead, spinning, dipping to the ground and then rising, arms high, swaying, fingers spread. Her steps and her song of Kahab took them forward, parting the wall of djinn and seducing her audience with a promise of freedom in her hero’s cleverness.

  Without a storm to hold them back, the camels picked up to their normal pace, and then pushed Aini forward, as if the ghosts of lions nipped at their legs. Aini danced ahead, leaving a tale for all to follow.

  In her story, Kahab studied seeds and crops, the rhythm of water and drought, in their home among the elements and in the eye of their Creator watching over them. In those seeds, Kahab discovered a promise, a path to escape the master who ruled him and all the djinn.

  The song of the Caravan of the Dead rose to rival hers, and the choir of the djinn faltered. Among her followers, a few of the dead and the living slowed, looked back, distracted by fears. A nearby servant rummaged through camel packs, pulled drum out, began striking an erratic rhythm that matched Mafufunyana’s frenetic steps.

  Aini bowed her head under the burden of fresh terror. Her dance broke to a slow walk, one foot ahead of the other, pushing ahead like any tale through trials, marching toward a patch of daylight containing blue sky and dusty earth that might be truth’s deliverance, or another terrible lie.

  “The secret Kahab found lay in the djinn learning to take the form and nature of seeds,” Aini called out, fighting the Caravan’s influence, raising her voice as loud as she could, trying to catch the updrafts of djinn hope. “While his brothers laughed, he reminded his brothers and sisters that some had already learned to take on the appearance of beasts and humans. Solomon could see through those lies. But who would suspect a seed, a vessel of life even the great Solomon could not live without?

  “The lessons would be hard, as the nature of seeds remains invisible until they are transformed by earth and water, unlike men and animals. But djinn understand stone, and the changes of wind and water. They understand the workings of time, and patience. And so Kahab taught himself to be a kind of seed that might ride the wind, or a camel’s back, or the leggings of a traveler, and find, in time, the soil fertile in blood and pain that would feed a djinni and bring that spirit back into the world.”

  The djinn found strength in Kahab’s story. They charged the Caravan of Death, leaving a clear path ahead. Their joy and rage whistled through her like wind through canyons, their spirit infecting her with confidence. Years of bondage and servitude burned bright and hot behind her eyes. For an instant, she wanted to join their assault on the Caravaners, as some had wanted to turn back for the Caravaners’ song.

  The drumming servant did turn back, leading the dead and living who’d hesitated before into the djinn’s wake, his rhythms stirring and strong. Ai
ni called to them, pointed to the clearing ahead. But they ignored her, swept up by the djinn, and by blood hot for vengeance.

  Aini forged ahead, feeling like an overloaded camel, carrying the burden of what she’d done. She’d wanted only to free the djinn, the living and the dead, with her words. But she’d freed them only to choose among their many natures, to attack what they feared or hated, or embrace the absence of what had oppressed them. Even for the ones who remained with her, she could not be sure if they’d chosen to follow what was in their hearts, or simply fallen under a spell she’d made to bolster the hearts of djinn.

  She could only tell the tale. Perhaps cruelty was in the act of telling lies and truths. Perhaps, it was in what others heard.

  Behind her, lightning rained in jagged streaks through djinn to rake the desert floor. She shouted the rest of her story for all the good it would do, or for all the evil it might cause, because it needed an end.

  “Kahab found what he wanted in the water and earth, in the sleeping heart of seeds, and became one himself, leaving his body still and quiet in the shadows. The great King Solomon did not see the single seed of thyme fly off on the Laawan wind that winnowed the grain of his farmers. The advisor did not miss his djinni, so filled with his own grand dreams that he was glad to be relieved of a voice whispering to him out of the shadows. The djinn were left with the lessons Kahab gave them, to believe and learn and follow to their own freedom.

  “And if God not taken King Solomon while he stood in silence, so that the djinn did not know he’d died until God let him fall to the ground by making a worm of the earth weaken the cane holding him up, perhaps the djinn would have found their own way beyond the reach of their mighty Master.”

  Hearing the tale told and finished, the burden she carried lightened to bittersweet sadness. In the end, the kernel of truth in the lie she’d told wouldn’t matter. The djinn would eventually gain their freedom because, like the mighty Solomon and his great city, all walls, no matter how great, fall. And if she’d lied to herself, that didn’t matter, either. A promise of freedom could only be guaranteed by those who wanted it.