In the Country of Dreaming Caravans

by Gerard Houarner

  She thought that, if they had not been in the desert and water was so precious, he might have wept.

  “Yes,” he said, lowering his gaze but keeping his lips hidden. “This is why we should not talk of caravans.” After a moment, he continued, speaking more quickly, as if to fill the silence before something else claimed it. “Well, there are other kinds of caravans, as I said. Most, like this one, have no names or stories, other than the ones locked in their master’s hearts. Others are known by their nature. Dreams, of course. But vices, also. At least one caravan for each. Not so many for the graces. There are as many for madness as there are spices and scents in all a souk’s alleys, from those who travel in the desert naked to the one manned by caravaners who babble in a tongue no one understands. Disease also claims a following, perhaps among fallen healers, or maybe those who like to suffer. I hear that anyone who survives meeting the Caravan of Plagues delivers a new plague to the larger world. There is a Caravan of Healing, but it never grows large or wanders far because the Caravan of Death tries to destroy it whenever they can. There are caravans of forgotten gods searching for a new home, and others seeking the bliss of Paradise without crossing through its gates. There is a Caravan of Silence, and others for the many forms of music, of dance.

  “The demons that drive men to run away from each other own their share of caravans. I think we find ourselves in one, though I cannot name the demon possessing our master. But our kind are small, and of no consequence. Not like the Caravan of War, or the Caravan of Death.”

  “How many of them have you met?”

  “Many dedicated to the vices. They’re easily fed by the world we’ve left behind and are always freshly stocked. Caravans driven by gluttony are best for food and drink. Our men look forward to the others, as well.”

  “Lust,” Aini said.

  “You don’t know your audience as well as you think,” the old man said. “They prefer forgetting what they really are, in drink, or khat, or whatever else may come their way. The graces are harder to find, and I’ve yet to see any mend what is broken in us. We’ve come across caravans of music and of dance, exiled gods, babbling madmen, and these at least are entertaining.”

  “How about ghosts? I miss them.”

  “The desert is already haunted by us.”

  “Have you ever met a caravan of storytellers?”

  “No.”

  Aini straightened. “Maybe that’s the one I’m supposed to lead.”

  “I doubt it,” Ajouz said, with a flick of the hand as if swatting a fly. “Once we found the broken bones of men and animals, and I think they’d met the Caravan of War. Another time, we came across the dried husks of men who’d died staring at the sun. But mostly, we meet caravans like ourselves, small, half-mad, trading one broken piece of a dream for another.”

  “It must be a very big desert.”

  “Yes, it is a very big desert. The greater caravans, the one of Dreams, and War, and Death, and a few others, they have their own territories much further out in the emptiness, and rarely come this close to the world we come from. This may be a mercy on us. Or a part of our curse.”

  “How do you find each other?”

  “As I told you, read the sky, the stars. They will tell you, most times, what is coming. You can choose to wait or run. But sometimes, the stars are silent, and other times, there is no escaping what is coming.”

  Aini wiped sweat from her brow. She felt flushed, as if she’d worked hard loading camels or putting up tents. Her head was full of stars and their constellations, crowded with caravans wandering into dusty corners of her mind. “We’ve gone a long way tonight,” she said, suddenly breathless.

  “Sometimes the longest journeys don’t require a single step.”

  Falling, at least in her mind, she held on tightly to the edges of the carpet beneath her. “Aren’t you afraid?”

  The old man hesitated, glanced over his shoulder. “Of what?”

  “Of what will happen after you talked so much about caravans.”

  “Child, you are the curse that feeds my madness. I already pay the cost for having asked, and listened, so many times. My head is heavy with the burden of what I’ve heard. It drives one to talk too much.”

  “I know.” She bowed her head, feeling the cost of having asked and listened.

  The old man reached over a lantern, tapped her shoulder. “What are you looking for, besides these parents of yours? What is your demon?”

  “My secret heart?” she said, thinking of her parents, the head caravaners who’d traded her, the ghosts who’d lingered in the places and by the people connecting them to life. “Maybe it’s the demons that I’m looking for.”

  “Then I pray that you never find them,” the old man said. “They will only drive you deeper into the emptiness. Better to belong to the caravan of your master’s dream. Let him make the bargains, pay the price.”

  Aini lay back on the carpet pile to ease the spinning in her head. The old man left her, putting out the lights. She closed her eyes, just for a moment.

  Dreams rushed from the darkness, crowding her sleep. They lifted and carried her through a starless night on a wind of words. She rushed headlong into a void, letting dreams and words fill her with life, with tales, with stars and a moon and clouds reflecting their light while casting shadows on a waking world below. Stories spilled from her lips, falling like soft rain on the dry land, bringing it back to life, rebuilding ruined cities, raising forgotten souls to life.

  The sounds of camels snuffling and tents and carpets being packed woke Aini to the next morning. Blinking madly, she hurried to her tasks. And though she’d done them all thousands of times through her years of desert life, they felt fresh, and strange, and both trivial and grand, in the wake of the dreams that had brought her to the shore of the new sun and all its shadows.

  The days that followed passed faster than any she’d ever lived. And at the end of each, she lay down breathless, heart racing, flushed and trembling, eager to surrender to the flood of sleep rich with wonders that washed away memories of dust and heat and emptiness. She lost count of the moons, what passed for seasons in the desert. She lived only for each day, each step, and each moment dreams took her far away.

  “I’m sorry,” the old man said to her one night after they’d traded stories about the stars in the tent’s cloud of incense smoke.

  “About what?” Aini had already replaced the night sky’s meanings the old man had tried to pass on with what she imagined made better sense.

  “Corrupting you.”

  Aini laughed, but quickly sobered. “Sometimes, when I’m working in the camp, or just walking in the camel’s shade, I suddenly feel dizzy, like I’ve woken up and don’t know where I am or what I’m doing. I have a terrible feeling that this place is not real, and neither am I, and that I belong someplace else but I can’t get back to it. In that moment, sky and earth are about to tear themselves apart and I’m about to be shattered, with everything that I was scattered to the sands.”

  “Yes. We hear you scream.”

  “I thought I’d walked off far enough.”

  “The desert favors some sounds over others, and grants them the privilege of being heard over great distances. A scream is a rare, and always welcomed by the emptiness.”

  “I wondered why so few of the men come to hear my stories.”

  “I did ask, a while ago, if you knew any other stories,” the old man said. “The truth is, most still come. They like the pain. But they listen from the outside, through the tent walls. They don’t want to be under the same roof as you.”

  “They don’t want to touch me, anymore?”

  “No, they don’t. And the ones who do enter are driven by their addiction to the scent from the oils and incense you use.”

  Aini smiled. Her body had filled out a little, and she’d wondered if she’d reached an age when virginity was less valued. “If I’d known screaming was all it took, I wouldn’t have made up all those storie
s to keep them thinking and feeling other things.”

  The old man answered her smile with his own. “You can’t help telling lies, to others, yourself, or to nobody at all.”

  She laughed, but again, it vanished as quickly as desert rain. “It’s the scrub, when it scratches my legs, that scares me the most,” she said. “It feels like something trying to grab me, and then I fall out of my dream, and keep falling, until I’m here, back with the rest of you, outside of myself and the world that I see through my eyes.”

  The old man let the silence stretch until the last coal of incense was ash, and then he asked, “Is that so terrible?”

  He left her a long while after he asked the question, without an answer.

  In the days that followed one after another like the line of camels, head to hind, sandstorms were a respite from work, a chance to fly dreams farther, further, deeper. Other caravans and water holes were opportunities for trading stories for scented oils and incense. Despite the old man’s criticisms, and hints of vicious caravan gossip, her audiences were large. The only complaints came from the masters trying to get their men back to work.

  By the way strangers watched as she performed and as she worked the caravan, Aini thought her value had risen despite being an aging virgin. She couldn’t tell if they found her principal value to be in her many skills, or in the master’s reluctance to let her go. Sex, it seemed, was always a consideration.

  There were days when she had a hard time waking up and leaving the embrace of the sweet, beautiful men that kept her sleep company. She hardly felt the sun or the work, but when time came to rest, frustration kept her awake.

  On those days, she thought of her imaginary young men and how they’d feel inside her, how they’d move when they were on top, and under her. She moved and touched herself as she hoped they might, in quiet moments between tasks, and by the end of the day she slept well and deep, returning to her dream men’s arms without regret.

  There were times when she sat on a dune crest or atop a rock, staring at the horizon, and let the truth come to her that she’d never meet anyone in the country of dreaming caravans who could inspire her desire as much as a prince on the moon she might, by chance, someday rescue from his cold, dark prison. If the sadness that followed was too dark and bitter to bear, she let her imaginary men tell her the beautiful lies that, sooner or later, pulled her away from dark truths and put her safely back to sleep.

  Sometimes, to amuse herself and keep from thinking of men at all, she’d let a camel loose so others would have to chase it, or put a touch of salt in the tea to hear the complaints, or spread a bit of gossip that would set off a brief feud before she stepped in and settled the argument. Often, she randomly perfumed the camels and men. When his turn came, even Ajouz man didn’t seem to mind.

  When a red sandstorm swallowed the sky and desert, sweeping over a hill and descending on the caravan in the space of a few breaths, Aini couldn’t tell if she was dreaming or in the world. She braced herself to be swept up and away again, flying far off on another adventure. Instead, sand stung her like a hive’s worth of raging wasps and wind pushed her back and almost off her feet. She gasped for breath, choking, until she pulled the scarf down over her head.

  She did her best to find and settle camels, head wrapped with only a sliver through which to see.

  As she staggered across shifting earth, pushing against wind, she thought an army had been slaughtered nearby by the blood-stained sands caught up in a whirlwind of screams from the dying. The possibility of so many dead made her think of ghosts and spirits, and for a moment she hoped her brother and all her old companions had gathered to chase her down because they missed her enough to leave living lands. But there were no familiar faces in the haze, no familiar voices whispering reassurances.

  She remembered an old, rusty ship she’d found half-buried in sand, long ago on one of her adventures with Kaydan, and wondered if the storm’s wrath had crushed a similar hulk and carried it off. Then she thought of the Caravan of War, and she called for the old man to tell her if it was coming for them. Her voice was lost in the wind’s roar.

  She fell against the side of one of her rescued camels, wrapped herself in blankets. The screaming penetrated her shelter, made her ears ring. The ground shook from the storm’s violence. She waited for sword thrusts to pierce her. Eyes shut, she cast herself to the world’s rushing madness, searching for a dream to take her, but found no escape. The world and its wind did not carry her off.

  Tasting the blood of her wounds, she knew she wasn’t dreaming. She wondered if her blood would feed the sand’s tint.

  Sand seeped into the crevices of her shelter, exploded through cracks she made to let in air. The animal at her back shuddered, died. She craved water, and wished for a knife to get at the camel’s blood. The Caravan of War would have given her a quicker death.

  She screamed as the storm’s embrace tightened, as sand crawled over her skin, pinching and scratching, burrowing into the thousand tiny cuts it made. She gasped for air as the darkness of her shelter seemed to solidify into a tomb, solid, thick, heavy. The tale of a storm so terrible that was struggling to take shape on her tongue withered under its fury. She regretted not having the opportunity to terrify listeners with a true story.

  The wind gusted, pushing the dead camel, picking at her coverings. In its howling, she thought she heard a dog’s voice, and her heart beat faster. That was who she’d really wanted, all along.

  The blankets covering her fell away. She braced for the wind’s last blow, the sand’s final cuts. Instead, her arms and legs were snatched by rough hands. She gasped through head coverings, blinked away the grit covering her eyes. She kicked and writhed. Men laughed as they carried her off.

  The world remained a red haze of sand and wind, but the howling had lowered to a mourning keen. Shadows moved, clashed, metal rasping against metal. Voices grunted. Cursed. Mostly, there were small cries, grunts, gasps, nothing like the screams the wind had brought. She cried out for the caravan master, for Ajouz, for the faithful among her audience.

  Jerking her limbs and writhing like a cat threatened by a bath, she was tied up in a bundle of tenting and carpet, gagged, and loaded on to a camel like any load of common goods she’d spent her life helping to transport. Through a slit in her cocoon, she glimpsed the figures of men moving back and forth between camels in front and behind her. In their urgent whispering, she heard no familiar voices. Her best view was of the desert’s stony floor.

  The wind died down. Sand settled, trickling into crevices of folded flesh. The camel’s gait changed as they began climbing, and the sound of their footfalls grew sharper, as it did when they walked on rock. Night settled, but the group didn’t stop.

  A man barely lit by stars and a half moon walked beside her. He smelled of oud, rich and woody. His beard masked the contours of his face. He took the gag out of her mouth.

  “Promise not to scream, or I’ll put the gag back,” he said.

  His voice was a song, deep, with a melody that resonated in the place she hoped was her secret heart. “You heard me?” she asked, embarrassed that she still enjoyed screaming to the desert.

  “Yes. My men complained, even when we let you get ahead of us.”

  “And yet, you still took me.”

  “You tell stories.”

  “I’m also a virgin.”

  “You’re worth a great deal.”

  “To who?”

  “To those who pay.”

  “You could have bought me.”

  “A thief buying is like a storyteller telling nothing but the truth.”

  She smiled as if they had met under the roof of her family’s tent and he had come to offer them a price. If he had stolen her for himself, she would have let herself laugh. But as fed her dates and let her drink water from his bag without loosening her bonds or letting her sit up, she lost the smile. He was keeping his merchandise in good condition for his buyer.

  “I’ve heard ev
erything there is to know about you,” the man said, when she’d finished eating.

  “So have I. Please don’t tell me how beautiful I am.”

  The man bowed his head, and she imagined a face for him so that she could see him smiling. “Is there anything you need?”

  “I need to relieve myself.”

  The man shifted her body, loosened fabric. “Let it rain on the camel. He can use the wash. Anything else?”

  “The others, did you kill them?”

  “Do you miss them?”

  “I’ve come too far, too fast. Maybe I do. Are you going to sell them, too?”

  He was silent for a few moments, then called out to his band in a tribal tongue she didn’t understand. Men laughed. Rocks slid, shadows moved closer. Pale faces reflected the meager light. “I think I can sell them, or else I wouldn’t have bothered bringing them along. Don’t expect conversation. I haven’t been as generous with them as I have with you.”

  “Is the old man near?” she asked.

  “They’re all here. Is he your friend?”

  “I think I’m his secret heart,” she whispered. “Maybe, the whole caravan’s.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it. You’re going to tell them a story?”

  “That’s what I did for them.”

  “Would you tell me one?”

  “I could tell you the one about the time I sat so long in one place telling stories to myself, the desert ants built a nest at my feet. When I left, they followed me for a while, until they became lost because I’d lured them away from their home and they couldn’t find the scent that would take them back.”

  “Such a charming liar,” the man said, “to warn her audience about what she’ll do to them. But I can’t stay. A thief must guard against his own kind after he’s taken a prize. Go ahead. Entertain your friends. Seduce my men. It’ll be good practice. Just speak as you have with me, no louder. And don’t scream.”

  She started with what they all knew. A great wind had carried the entire caravan off like broken bundles of silk above land and sea, over the moon and past the stars, behind the curtain of night, to a land where the air was tinged red with the blood of those who had come before and failed to make their way back home.