In the Country of Dreaming Caravans

by Gerard Houarner

  IN THE COUNTRY OF DREAMING CARAVANS

  Gerard Houarner

  Bedlam Press

  — 2017 —

  An imprint of

  Necro Publications

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  IN THE COUNTRY OF DREAMING CARAVANS

  © 2017 by Gerard Houarner

  Cover art © 2017 Wojciech Magierski

  This edition

  © 2017 Bedlam Press

  an imprint of Necro Publications

  LCCN: 2017943273

  ISBN: 978-1-944703-39-4

  Book design & typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  Assistant editors:

  C. Dennis Moore

  Necro Publications

  5139 Maxon Terrace, Sanford, FL 32771

  necropublications.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, or his agent, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio or television.

  All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

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  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  Acknowledgments

  The Davids of my publishing life—Dave Barnett, founder of Necro/Bedlam, who gave Max and the Caravan of the Dead their first homes, and David Niall Wilson and David Dodd, Crossroad Press founders, who brought them into the digital realm.

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  Dedication

  For the lost children…

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  Aini’s parents sold her to a caravan for passage when she was eight. She didn’t mind. By then, she’d traveled long and far into the desert. She knew how to clean and load camels, cook when windy and bake bread in sand, recognize storm signs, and make friends with almost every living, and most dead things. Her tea was impeccable.

  When her turn came, she liked to tell stories by the campfire from what she remembered of city lights holding back the night, roads teeming with cars stuck in traffic, one-way television windows to worlds and everyone in them. In her stories, villains stole her toys and magical friends invisible to the world took her away to other lands to find something better to do than chase down old stolen toys.

  “You make what everybody knows sound strange and different,” a missionary once told her, before trying to convince her parents they needed to send her back to civilization. “Everything she might be will be burned away by sun and sand,” the missionary warned, “and the world beyond the desert will become another mirage to her. She’ll belong to the wilderness, and be as savage as a sand storm.”

  “She’s part of our adventure,” her mother had said then.

  “She’ll learn more with us than in any school memorizing lessons everyone else always has and always will,” her father added.

  The missionary glanced at Aini’s calloused feet before she could draw them in, passed over scars and bruises on her arms and legs as she re-arranged her robe.

  “Keep running fast,” the missionary said, “and stay small. And stop telling stories where, when and how they’re not wanted.”

  But Aini was already telling herself the story of the missionary who was run over during a camel race.

  Before they surrendered her to a new life, her mother and father brought her inside their tent. She lay on the thick Persian rug that smelled of camel and her parents. Something was about to happen. She knew from her father’s frown, her mother’s wandering gaze. They looked like haunted people.

  Aini remembered later that they’d often looked this way, and wondered if they’d taken up journeying on caravan trails to run away from what they feared, or to finally find it.

  Before she’d settled into her place before them, her father asked, “Do you remember what your name means?” He usually didn’t start conversations with her, and when he did, they ended in smoke. It was her mother started the other kind, which ended in her knowing exactly what was going to happen next.

  She had a feeling that this time, it wouldn’t be just words that turned to smoke. “It’s a flower,” she said.

  “Aini also means choice,” her mother said.

  Her father nodded his head. “That’s what the book said. It also means source.”

  “I like flower,” Aini said.

  “Do you know why we gave you that name?” her mother asked.

  “Because it was pretty.”

  “Yes. That’s true. What’s also true is that it’s what we felt in the caravan we belonged to when our love made you.”

  “Free,” her father added. “Bright. Blossoming. Open to the world. A part of a never-ending field that is vast and glorious and wonderful.”

  Aini looked into her mother’s green eyes, wide and oval, like gems set in alabaster; the ones that everyone said would be hers when she was older, except that she was already darker than any alabaster. “Did you sell my brother to be on that caravan?”

  “No,” her mother said. “We sold other things.”

  “So, what happened to him?”

  Her mother shifted, as if assaulted by fleas. “What makes you think we had a child before you?”

  “The old clothes. What people say about you, about us. The things you say, sometimes, in your sleep.” She didn’t bother telling them she’d met Rief’s ghost a few times in her long walks out of camp. Like other girls’ older brothers, he liked to keep secrets from her and kick sand in her face, so she’d never been able to find out what had happened to him before he turned into a ghost. She’d gathered from his expression when she asked that how he’d been turned into a ghost had been painful.

  “What do you think we’re feeling now?” her mother asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Excited,” her mother said, quickly. “So excited for you.”

  “You’re about to fly off on a great adventure,” her father began. “A magic carpet ride.”

  “We wish our moms and dads had done the same for us.”

  “Like a seed, blowing on the wind.”

  “We’ll miss you.”

  “Don’t be too quick to take root.”

  “Please, don’t forget us.”

  “We’re still flying. Haven’t settled yet.”

  “And remember, we love you very much.”

  “Yes. Yes, we do.”

  “Until we see each other again,” her mother said, hugging Aini.

  Before Aini could find something to say, a man came to claim her. He grabbed her hand, pulled her up and out, away from her mother. He put her atop a camel, like she was a sack of goods. They crossed the oasis to where the other caravan had camped. The man kept her on the camel while the other caravan finished breaking camp. They moved out before the sun had set. Aini didn’t mind riding into the fading day, or being with strangers, or leaving her mother and father behind. There was comfort in the sun’s last light and heat, like her mother’s warmth lingerin
g in her body, on her face.

  She thought of the things she might say to her mother, when she saw her again.

  She looked back, but her parents had not come out to wave farewell. Instead, she saw children and their mothers coming out to the ground where the camp had stood. They played with and picked over what had been left behind, and their laughter danced over the sand like lost scarves in the wind.

  It was early for spirits, but Rief stood in the shade of the very last palm, pointing at her and laughing.

  The sand in her eyes made them tear.

  At their first stop, the caravaners took Aini down and sat her in the middle of their circle. They fed and watered her, like an animal, and talked about what price she might bring, and how her eyes were like a cat’s, and how sad it was that the desert had darkened her skin so much. They stroked their beards as they laughed, and then they talked about what she would feel like under them, and how she would taste, and sound.

  And when their talk and laughter had subsided, and they had nothing in them left to give her except their hollow stare, Aini said, “I’m still a virgin.”

  Even the camels would not break the silence that followed. The man who had taken her, pot-bellied, one leg shorter than the other, as if a crocodile had stolen a finger’s length of bone, stood and walked around her once before sitting down, cross-legged in the sand in front of her.

  “You speak well,” he said.

  “You must know my qualities,” Aini said. “You bought me.”

  “Yes, yes we do,” the man replied. “We don’t believe all of them, but we like the ones we’ve seen.” A ripple of laughter passed through the men surrounding them.

  “Would you like to hear a story?”

  “Would you?” the man asked. “There’s one about a little girl, odd but pretty. Not born where she finds herself, but not belonging any place else, either. She speaks like us. Works, cooks, smells like us. More than her mother and father ever could. Her stories are not ours, but they amuse some of us.”

  “What is this girl worth?” Aini asked.

  “To some, a caravan passage to the desert’s secret heart.”

  “The desert doesn’t have a secret heart.”

  This time, the laughter was subdued. “Everything has a secret heart.”

  She’d told enough stories to know when a thing was true, and where a turn might lead to next. “Even you,” she said.

  “Even I. And you. And your mother and father. And the desert. Travel into the Sun, into the night, through the sands, to where the Ahl at-trab live in their Palace of the Djinn, and you will find the desert’s heart.”

  “Why?”

  The man rocked where he sat. He looked down. Men murmured. Someone at her back said, “You’ll never ask questions again.”

  The man who’d taken her said, “Your parents sold you to chase a dream. The Caravan of Dreams. They want what they wish they had, but could never find. Not in themselves, in you, in the world or out of it. That is the story of their secret heart, and it is one that will end in sadness for them. And for you.”

  “You bought me to chase your dream.”

  The man stared at her as if from the dull end of a sword. “Yes, little girl. Would you like to know what that is?”

  She did. Very much. But she wasn’t the one telling the story. The man was driving the tale of their meeting, and every turn she took brought her closer to the truth that would be her end.

  She gasped. The men laughed. For the first time in her life, she felt alone. Her mother and father would not collect her. No invisible creatures would rescue her from bullies. There was no place else to go.

  She’d told stories to amuse herself, pass the time, make herself feel better. Stories were her toys, her medicine. Her only weapon. She needed to find the story that would save herself.

  Aini thought that if the thread from which she hung like a spider in the wind was not her own secret heart, it was very close to it.

  “You don’t want to be taken anywhere by the Caravan of Dreams,” she heard herself say, grasping again at another thread upon which to build a web.

  The man stared at her, his face a stone. “No. Or by any other.”

  “There are other caravans?”

  “Yes. There are as many as there are hearts with secrets.”

  “Then keep your heart and your secret.”

  “Yes. I will. And I will keep yours, as well.”

  “Then you’ll never know how much that little girl is worth.”

  The man waved her away. Someone grabbed her arm from behind, dragged her away to where the camels and slaves slept. Someone asked if she should be whipped. An answer followed her as she left the men’s company: “There will be worse for her.” The next day she took her place as working cargo in the caravan.

  She spent as much time as she could as far from the caravan as possible, in the peace and safety of the company of the dead. Rief asked about their parents and listened to stories about the lost world they’d both left behind, a long time ago across the water. The murdered buried her in thousand-year-old complaints about neighbors, weather and family. Warriors bragged about wounds.

  Sometimes caravan men came looking for her, though her work was always done and she never failed to come back. The lines at the corners of their eyes and lips showed the battles going on inside them, between fear of the caravan head and the temptation of a virgin, whenever they found themselves alone with her. But it was the uneasiness in what they could not see that made them tired of dragging her back for no reason, and in time they forgot why they troubled themselves and she was left to the world she made from death and desolation.

  After she’d lost the habit of looking for caravaners searching for her, Aini wondered what she’d done when her peace was broken by a man in white cloth approaching from a cleft in nearby cliffs. She turned when she remembered the caravan lay in the opposite direction, and began walking back after seeing that the man, unlike those belonging to the caravan, was beardless.

  “Are you Aini?” a voice asked, but from another direction.

  She studied the rolling terrain ahead of her, thinking she’d been surrounded by slavers. “No,” she shouted. This time, her fearful loneliness grew not from the company of men, but from their absence.

  Laughter echoed from yet another direction. A breeze whistled in her ear. She hurried, knowing the caravan was camped on the other side of the rise ahead of her. Glancing over her shoulder, the man rushed toward her, faster than any wind she knew.

  She’d been chased before by things in the desert. A crippled jackal, a lost leopard. They hadn’t been able to keep up with her.

  She was used to ghosts too eager for the presence of the living. Spirits were rarer, their habits less predictable.

  The flame, smokeless, burning without consuming bare ground and bushes, like the kind that drew ascetics and prophets, had been different. It had kept its distance from her parents’ caravan, appearing every few nights as she explored the country around each new campsite, but had approached whenever she was alone and on her own. She shouted stories at it, about cars and planes and other wonders from her old world, a tale of the Najjar and the cross he had to bear, stories inspired by the Book of Idols she’d been studying, thinking to appease a spirit with spirit tales. The flame had stayed away from the noise.

  She wondered if spirits could die, and if their ghosts might haunt people if they couldn’t find their own kind.

  Aini tried again, but her throat was dry, her words were croaks. For all her time in the desert, the unknown still had power over her.

  A wind howled all around her, kicking up dust and pebbles. Deep within its scream, she heard someone whisper, “Cover your mouth or djinn will enter you.”

  The wind exhausted itself. The man in white was suddenly ahead of her, going disappearing over the rise to the caravan.

  And then the air wavered beside her, in the corner of her eye, and she froze again as the voice whispered, “Turn bac
k, if you can’t tell djinn a story.”

  Her flesh chilled as if stroked by a roc’s feather, a thing so fantastic and dangerous she’d seen it only in her imagination. Six weeks passed before she went out as far as her habits demanded.

  It was another year before she learned her worth, when the man who’d bought her from her parents sold her for a chest, old and bound in iron, decorated with signs she had never seen before. “Go learn your value,” the man said as she followed a tall man with a henna beard to her new caravan. “May you find your secret heart.” He spoke the words as if they belonged to a curse.

  The wraiths surrounding the chest watched her leave. She wanted to ask them if they’d seen her mother and father. She changed her mind, and thought instead to inquire about the contents of the box. And once more, just before the tent flaps closed behind her, she wanted to ask who they’d been and why they stayed with the living. But their ragged appearance and hollowed faces told her they’d long forgotten the answers.

  She was glad to leave the man to his box. The caravan’s trade had been sparse, often involving slaves or occasional guns and ammunition; the stops, far off the routes she’d come to know, lonely and boring, with hardly any women or children. In the small villages with their meager souks, she’d learned some new stories, earned a few more stonings telling them her way.

  Caravan work had turned out to be harder without her parents’ protection, or tales and spirits to distract her. The men had been as cold as desert nights, with no patience for stories they hadn’t heard a thousand times or little girls their leader wouldn’t let them use or sell. They’d prayed five times a day with the dedication of the condemned. The few women who came to visit the men gave her no sympathy or comfort, as if their wombs had been eaten by the men, killing their hearts. Spirits avoided her. Even Rief never came to laugh at her. Dreams of her mother and father losing her in cities filled with people and machines chilled her more than the desert nights. The ghosts who haunted the chest that was her price were fit company for her old caravan.