She packed a small bundle of belongings and left the camp, followed only by the younger children, already overflowing with tales of the adventures she would have. Kayden tried to chase her, but his master called him back and he could do nothing but watch her leave and howl. The familiar ache of loss spread from her chest, made her legs and arms weak. She let the tears flow for the dog, but didn’t look back. They’d never really belonged to each other.
As she’d arrived, a baby cried when she left.
The woman who could have been her mother allowed her into the women’s tent, saying, “You will not live to be his new wife.”
The other women huddled in corners, servants, daughters and wives mixed together. The ghost woman, fainter than the last time, bowed her head.
“You’re right,” Aini answered. She found a place to claim as her own, left the bundle, went back out into the camp. The caravan leaders had returned to their tent while the two camps prepared for the feast. She went to the men butchering meat and said, “I will fix that one,” pointing to a goat tied to a stake, awaiting slaughter.
Before anyone could stop her, she grabbed a knife stuck between raw ribs, slit the animal’s throat, and held the body tightly as it convulsed and the blood seeped between stones into the dry, hard earth. One of the men hurriedly whispered a prayer, as if suddenly remembering to capture the power of the animal’s sacrifice. She thought of the dog and the company she’d lost, and kissed the goat’s head goodbye. Rief watched from the emptiness between the two camps.
She dressed the kill as she’d done many times before, this time letting the blood stain her dress and mat her hair. When she was done, she gave the lungs to the children to blow up and play with, then tossed the blade at the nearest man’s feet and returned to the woman’s tent. The blood on her was all she could smell.
The woman who might have been her mother stood in her way for a moment. The spirit haunting her was a faint glimmer by her shoulder. The woman held Aini by the shoulders, looked her up and down, peered into her eyes. The hard lines of her face softened until she looked like the mother Aini wished she’d had. Finally, she said, “Thank you.”
The ghost bowed one more time, then faded like the dusk’s last light. Aini stared at the space the ghost had taken up, thinking of her mother, setting spirits free, and what she might have done or said to set the ghost free so she could grant Rief the same gift.
The women cleaned her, using water sparingly and burning the clothes she’d bloodied. Her hair was combed and hennaed, as if she was a bride. Aini refused perfume, as the sweet smell went to her head and made her feel like someone else. She was happier with the olive oil in her hair as her scent. She did let them paint her face, hands and feet, enjoying the gentle caress of ink against her skin. Though she didn’t know what the painted symbols meant, she felt like parchment receiving a scribe’s ink, and was comforted. She chose the plain wool dress of a servant from the piles of clothing offered to her.
When she’d finished, the women took her down to the tent rugs. She tried to fight off their gift of a scent on her neck, behind her ear, between her small breasts, in her belly button and on her feet. But the women laughed as they pinned her, pointing out that her secret bleeding had already started and she was a woman whether she wanted to be or not. She did not tell them the sandalwood scent made her feel as if a garden had bloomed in her heart, and kept struggling until they were done.
At the feast, her new owner stared at her as men whispered into his ears. Her old owner showed no joy at the bargain he’d made, and asked for one more story before she left.
She gave him one about chests of dreams opening to consume their owners, which pleased everyone who listened as if it had touched the hidden wisdom they’d known all along, except for the two head caravaners.
She lived with the women, and Le Camelier never spoke of marriage or the uses he might have had for her besides bearing his children.
“Will he ever marry me?” Aini asked the woman who reminded her of her mother.
“You are worth more as a virgin,” she answered. “And, I told him you would make someone else a better First Wife than a fifth one for him.” The woman gave her a sidelong glance. “In this country, men do not have so many choices for a First.”
“And he can’t handle his only First, much less a fifth.”
The woman almost smiled, coming as close to laughter as Aini ever saw.
Though Aini became a woman in blood as well as responsibility, performing the tasks and rituals assigned to her new station in society, she still played in ruins, under the stars in the night’s secret heart. In lost temples and the remains of palaces, in the crawl spaces between rocks in the hills and mountains, she let the glyphs, carvings and drawings she found guide adventures with gods, kings, queens, priests and warriors. Her voice carried far as she practiced the songs and poetry the women taught her, as well as dances both public and private, and the lessons on lute, rebab and drum. But the classic tunes, meters and rhythms were quickly diverted by the landscape of her dreams.
Searching for missing constellations, she found patterns in the stars no one else could see. The careful steps of a traditional woman’s walk and dance veered into forbidden territory in battles against brigands and caliphs, sharp stones and desiccated acacia. She was taught the meaning of the lines painted on her skin and the embroidery on the bodices and sleeves of formal dress, but preferred what she imagined them to say.
The women accepted the occasional stone carving or metal relic she brought back from her explorations. They took her discoveries back to their secret altars and offered to show her their uses and meaning. But Aini had already wrapped her gifts in the meanings she’d given them, and was saddened by the coldness that greeted her stories about them.
Sometimes, she heard a dog barking in the distance. When she searched for him, she found other things: a couple living in at the bottom of sand pit, digging away the sand from their house; a Western tea setting for three, abandoned, cups filled with sand; a woman’s head, serpents writhing in her hair, blood seeping endlessly from her neck into the sand, from which a line of ants emerged in a line vanishing into the horizon.
She’d seen fires burn in deserts before, smokeless, burning without consuming bare ground and bushes, drawing ascetics and prophets. She’d even practiced telling one sliver of hissing fire a tale about Najjar and the cross he had to bear, but she’d never been followed by one.
When she was, it kept its distance, appearing every few nights, never coming near the caravan. She shouted stories inspired by Al-Kalbi’s Book of Idols, thinking to entice a spirit with spirit tales, but the flame, unlike ghosts, stayed away.
Children gathered to her, dead in the lost places, living in camp and trading towns, to hear what she brought back from the night’s heart. Girls asked, “Can you tell me a story about a prince flying down from the moon to take away the girl he sees always looking up at him from the sands?
“No,” Aini would answer, “but I can tell you the tale of a girl who flies up to the moon to rescue the prince imprisoned by his evil brother.”
The boys mostly asked for adventures about men with horses and swords. The dead listened to anything.
She was never as alone in the world as she was in her heart.
When she was traded again, she was not surprised. She had already surmised that her status had changed when the women stopped painting her hands and feet, and hid the embroidered robes with cheap silver dowry coins sewn in and tin anklets that made her shine and feel grown up.
“They are being kind,” the First Wife told Aini, when she asked why she was being ignored in the women’s tent. “In some quarters, beauty distracts. In others, it invites problems.”
The gossip she’d harvested from women who wove their hopes and dreams into the petty truths and lies they repeated, from men who told her secrets about other men to diminish them and make themselves appear to be better suitors, told her the direction her future wa
s taking. Caravans this far out under the shifted stars either turned back to familiar skies and routes, or came in from beyond. Everyone talked about the caravans who tested the borderland sands, but those that came in were mysteries clouded by legends. Their reluctance to push too close to the world told her their leaders were true seekers of their secret hearts, spirit kin to her mother and father. That told her everything she needed to know.
One night, by a great rock outcrop surrounded by a plain of skeletal fingers of stone reaching skyward, beneath a full moon that had lined up with a string of stars in a sign that made Aini’s eyes tear, they met another caravan. Aini knew, by the number of men and camels, by the colors of their folded tents, the crescents decorating favored camels and the scars of their handlers, that the caravan had come in respect to bargain for her.
By the colors of their pennants and the leader’s description—tall, red-bearded and bald, with fingers like dead twigs—that the caravan was one that never saw the sea, never made stops in places that had seen airplanes or had radios or satellite phones. The caravaners were outcasts and survivors led by a man seeking gods and trading in sacred relics. He had no use for women and valued virgins only for their worth to those who could lead him to his secret heart. His men did not care about the virginity of women. They did not even pretend to pray, either to Mecca or to idols hidden deep in their tents.
She watched the caravan that was her future settle into their camp and thought of her mother and father. It had been a while since she’d looked for them in the new places she came to, or wondered if her own journey ever crossed the path they’d taken. She thought of what they’d left behind, what she was leaving, and what it was she was really seeking.
“I don’t know how far I can follow you,” Rief said, staring out into the wilderness from which the caravan had emerged.
“We’re all on the same road,” she answered, pulling on her woolen coat and wrapping the headdress around her hair. “We’ll meet again.”
Her brother remained silent.
Before Aini left, the First Wife gave her a collection of scents in a satchel, including her favorite, sandalwood. She’d expected a formal wedding costume on the chance of a marriage in her future. “Thank you,” Aini said. “But I won’t need these where I’m going.”
“They’re not for you,” the First Wife said. “But you can savor them, just the same.”
Aini wanted to know who the gift might be for, but the First Wife saved her answers for her husband. She had no choice but to accept the satchel. When she left, she looked back to see if anyone had come to see her leave. She wasn’t disappointed by the dust blowing against closed tent flaps.
In the new caravan, there were no women. The leader had no wives and only one servant, an old man whose tea could be improved upon. She was given a corner of a tent once used to shelter goats, where the men now retreated to drink and gamble. They laughed and talked among themselves in a desert dialect she had trouble understanding. But in Arabic, they teased her about not yet being married and her virginity, the worth of her tall tales, the small talent they’d heard she had in singing and in reciting the old poets, and in dancing. They were especially keen about her dancing, and laughed as they taunted her with raising flags over her tent so everyone would know that, after losing her virginity, she’d make a living not as a poet but as a baghaya.
She told them even if she became a prostitute, they wouldn’t be able to afford her, and if by the desert’s kindness they ever could, their pleasure would be their death.
And before the spark of her words ignited their anger, she started on a story of lost loves and heart break, of curses and banishments, betrayals and remorse. In the stories that followed, acts of contrition led to greater tragedy. The path of penitence never earned atonement. The songs she sang promised a paradise they would never attain. The poems she recited were mirages of pastoral peace they would never reach.
Her words reflected the truth they’d locked away in their secret hearts: they were comforted by the belief that they didn’t deserve to have their dreams fulfilled.
The caravaners fell into drunken sleep at her feet like camels, one following the other in a long, thin line to the empty end of their lives waiting for them on the horizon.
“You don’t tell the usual stories,” the old man told her.
“You don’t make good tea,” she answered. She showed him how she turned her wrist when pouring back and forth, and advised him to slow down and let the flavor settle.
“My hands are not as young as yours,” he said.
“Your hands are the least of the problem,” she said.
“So are your stories.”
Before she could answer, he was gone with the tray to his master.
The old man let her make the tea, and soon she found her place in the head caravaner’s tent, even if it was a small space reserved for slaves. But she went back to the old tent every night to remind the men that they did not need to be bothered with ambition or dreams, particularly in relation to her.
“Is your name really Ajouz?” she asked the old man a few days later, gently, like she was trying to convince a stubborn camel to move.
“They lack the memory to call me anything more than old man. They call the head man Al-Fals, as if he really is the red rock idol demanding sacrifices.”
“Have they changed my name, yet?”
“You? They wager the number of days left to your virginity.”
“Save your cowry shells.”
Days in the caravan’s life stretched out like an endless river. Men and animals became one, a shared dream of the desert. The silence was long, embracing even the camels, and was broken mostly by sputtering breezes. The cargo they carried remained packed, even on the rare occasion of meeting another caravan. What was traded remained intangible, invisible. Secret. The oases were few, abandoned by life, naked to the stars, their water bitter, shallow and dirty. Not even the ruins of trading towns rose from the desert.
Aini missed ruins and bones and the forbidden games played with both, the whispers of ghosts, the inexplicable left behind like sign posts to a past that never was, a future never to be. She wished for secret altars to bow to, hungered for the green and blossoms of a gentle oasis, and trading towns with the gossip of men blaming women gossiping when their secrets came out, their noise, smells, distractions and audiences. The emptiness the company of women had filled yawned wider, deeper, reflecting the expanse around her. Caravan men shimmered between sand and sky like mirages.
The caravan drifted deeper into the borderlands. Without the business of caravan trade or the company of women, there was nothing for her to do after telling the men a tale and drinking tea with the old man. The desert drew her deeper into its convoluted landscape, its canyons, dune crests, raw outcrops and volcanic seas locked in a moment of roiling storm. The few ghosts she saw kept their distance, as if fearful of being haunted by life. Sometimes, Rief stood with them, as faint as a wisp of a cloud, but she could never harvest their gossip.
The desert gave her few tales to tell, no treasures to return to altars or disinterested men. Once, she found a pile of dung teeming with beetles. The sandy ground was bare of tracks. Had there been just a few tracks, she would have found the courage to bring the pile back as a gift.
In the next to last of a series of narrowing caves beneath low, rocky hills, Aini took a rest between two worn and crumbling carvings after sipping from a trickle of water bubbling up from some deep and hidden source. She fell asleep and dreamed of creatures shaped like men and women but made of fire. She watched them kneel before a king and work stone, and then walk away to build a pyramid turned on to its apex beneath the desert. Aini laughed and woke. By the faint spear of sunlight piercing the cool, subterranean air, it seemed that the statues had gathered closer. A breeze started whispering to her. She woke again when she nearly understood what was said to her. After taking one more sip of water, she hurried out before the finality of a third nap trappe
d her in dreams.
She stood by the mosaic table sitting on the edge of a white sand plain, staring into horizon through the shimmering lens of air until she grew tired of waiting for someone to serve tea. She left the severed hand she found, golden and cornelian pearl, undisturbed beneath seven randomly crisscrossed arrows, though the sign filled her with both dread and sorrow.
She always found her way back to the amber glow of the caravan lanterns. In her dreams, she was tied up to a camel’s back like a slab of salt so she couldn’t wave back to her parents watching her leave.
Her brother faded. She never heard dogs barking, anymore. The men never prayed to or for anything. She practiced the old Arabic dialects the old man taught her by telling old stories to the stars, to the moon, the shadows, to the memories of those she’d already told stories to, and hoped she had the skill and the power and the magic to awaken her own secret heart so she could find her way. In her dreams, she felt her mother and father waiting beyond the next dune, the hill she was climbing, the far horizon.
Once, a beautiful young man in white robes at the head of a column of warriors and their supplies found them. The robes and the illusion of a hairless face startled her, until the shadow of his hood lifted to reveal his light and carefully-trimmed beard. Red-bearded Al-Fals presented her to the young man, who showed her no interest. Aini felt the hardness in him, unyielding, like the desert.
She told him a tale of a woman searching the ends of the earth for him, battling djinn and ghuls and thieves to find the true and secret love of her heart. The young man roused from his stupor, but frowned, refusing to surrender to her charms.
Aini had the woman captured by the three-headed dragon Dahag, and thrust the young man into the story as the warrior prince at the lead of a horde of flying serpents and their riders. Subtly, she lit one of the scented candles, snuffed other lights in the head caravaner’s tent, and led the young man through a battle in which he hid his flying legion in a great cloud of smoke from burning frankincense, myrrh and cassia. He surprised the distracted beast, killed it and rescued her.
In the Country of Dreaming Caravans Page 3
