She gave the caravaners names: Yuften, the best; Ameqran, the eldest; Izem, the Lion; Azrur, the handsome one; Mennad; Massin; Izri; Ikken, and more. The master caravaner was secretly a prince, and she made the others a host of notable heroes that included an exiled vizier, a dissolute sorcerer, a wealthy merchant secretly seeking new routes, a wise man. She let her audience sort themselves as to who and what each member might be, though she knew everyone would recognize Ajouz in Ameqran, the eldest and wisest.
Already, she felt less like a carpet roll on a camel’s back.
She let the wind scream and shout, beat them all senseless, carry off tents and camels, goods and supplies. And when the wind finally landed them all in a tangled heap, she barely gave them a chance to breathe before the dancing virgins greeted them. She wished she could have practiced her steps for them, but was satisfied with singing a story the dancing virgins were likely to have used to greet strange men falling into their company.
The thieves gathered closer to hear the temptations the lost band faced in the company of virgins, but Aini had her heroes keep to their higher natures after only a few nights and sent them off on a quest to return to their homes in Iram of the Pillars. The catoblepas, whose killing gaze nearly claimed more than one of their number, stalked them as they made their way through the territories of ifrit tribes. Allegiances and betrayals led to battles and escapes, and the catoblepas was joined by ghuls in many shapes as well as rocs swooping down to snatch the unwary for hatchling food. Al-Quam, guardian of caravans, guided them to magical scrolls and weapons that might bring down their many enemies. And while sailing the blood-red oceans of this strange land, against the powerful marid that that turned wind and water against them, they used wit and trickery to cross the seas without losing a soul.
Night passed to day and back to night, and Aini went on without stopping, bound to her camel spinning a tale she could barely keep together in her head. Thieves squirted water from their skins into her mouth, and gingerly held her head up during a brief camp so she could sip tea she thought had been seasoned with khat to keep her going. She called out to the other caravaners, but none answered with even a moan and she thought they might have fallen asleep.
But as another day began and the thieves continued their journey, she started up the storytelling again, weaving in a character she called Al Aswad, a distant and diabolical djinn whose legend promised wonders and the granting of improbable wishes. And though she cast him as the hidden hand behind many of her adventurers’ troubles, she left herself room to show him to be not a djinn at all, but a wizard of artifice, a trickster and fool trapped like them in the world of red seas so she might suddenly let him be transformed into an ally. She had her caravan heroes steal some of the thin but durable bladders deep within the great Bahamut that helped keep its vast bulk from sinking to the bottom of the sea to replace shredded sails, so that one day they might be traded to the sorcerer to be stitched together, filled with hot air or even gas, and used to carry the ship far up into the sky, to the threshold of the stars, where a great wind blew that, if properly navigated, would bring them all back home.
The wind did pick up, as if answering the story’s call. Howling filled the air. A knock on the head interrupted her. The coverings parted and the thief shouted in her ear, though Aini could hardly hear him. Behind him, she saw columns of spinning clouds, glimpsed tongues of fire at their hearts, and wondered what kind of storm had found them. The fire brought back memories, and she took note of details for later use.
“Stop talking about djinn,” the thief said. “They don’t like it when people tell lies about them.”
The advice seemed like an echo of something she’d already heard, but her audience waited and she began a cycle of stories about each caravaner trying his hand at marriage and family life, imagination filling her head to overflowing with episodes both tragic and comedic. She feared her words were lost in the wind, but didn’t want to stop and lose the tenuous grip on the threads of her story. The storm subsided quickly, and she picked carefully from the infinite number of ways love might blind each man to his own weakness.
But before she’d described the first beauty destined to capture her companions, the faint inkling of bells interrupted her, clear and sharp as dagger points though they were still far off.
The thieves stuffed her mouth and pulled wrapping over her head, enveloping her in darkness. She thought they feared another band of thieves, though the bells usually signaled the approach of another caravan.
Voices were raised. She felt another camel’s load bump her as the animals were gathered together. Swords were drawn. She smelled tea being made.
The stories went on her head. The world grew larger than her camel and bundle. Time passed in the time of her characters and their tales. The musty air, and her thirst and hunger seemed more like distant memories than immediate needs. She hardly felt jolt of being pulled off the camel, the rough handling as she was carried off.
The master thief’s voice came to her through the wrappings, from the clouds floating over the sky in her mind: “Let me tell you a story.
“The body of my dead wife was stolen and sold to the caravan before us long ago. They wouldn’t let me buy her back, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never steal her from them. Once, I saw her, in the long line of their slaves. Walking. Her eyes were open, but she did not look to the stars, the moon or horizon. She did not look to me when I called her name. After that, I stopped trying to get her back. I went looking for something else. Something to give, instead. A gift. We share what we have, and are blessed. I found I have much to give.
“I’ve sold them many things since that time. The dead, relics, and other things this caravan treasures. But now, I think, I’ve found an item worthy of my feeling for them. I’m sorry, little storyteller. You’re a small revenge. We are the living, and our vengeance against death can only be small. But your worth to me and many others is great, and the price I receive for you is so small any who hear of it will know I made a gift of you.
“Your reputation says there’ll be a truth in one of your tales that will sweeten, or sting, or somehow reach the coldest heart. For them to feel something, after all they’ve done, will be the true cost of our trade. That is all the revenge I can ask.
“I have faith in you. You’ll survive this, like everything else you’ve gone through to get this far. Your mind will spin out a turn, a twist, and you’ll slip away. You’ll live to tell this story, and it will be a true one. Maybe you’ll thank me.
“You might even find that secret heart some say you talk about in your sleep.
“But in case you don’t, I won’t give you my name. You can make me as ugly and vain and stupid as you like, but that much vengeance, I’ll not give you.”
She landed hard on the rocky desert floor. Her gag was ripped out, the rope holding the layers of wrapping loosened. Someone cursed at the damp piss stains.
“Don’t trust the stars,” the thief whispered to her. “They tell their own stories. After all, they never said I was coming after you.”
Aini spit out fabric and said, “Maybe they did and I didn’t listen.”
The thief laughed, stopped abruptly. The last of the wrappings fell away. She blinked at the sudden brightness. The thief stared at her, his beard so close her skin itched. She was cool in his shadow. His eyes were the world, prettier than she’d imagined, and filled with sadness.
She turned away, palms covering her face. Men were releasing the other bundles all around her. Beyond them, to the east, she counted seven figures, one much smaller than the rest, standing by a tent, watching, their afternoon shadows pointing to a low rise at their backs. It seemed to her that the desert, and the world, might be gone on the other side of that rise.
Etched in sharp contrast against the rise and their own shadows, the men stood apart from the desert, from the world and all that was going on in it like the stars in the night sky Ajouz had shown her. Their presence was a hot
wind blowing across the land, scouring away what she thought she understood of the world to leave the markings of a stark and alien truth.
Something shifted inside her. She wanted to look away, but the figures anchored her attention. She closed her eyes, turned her head, and opened them to find the thief. His face was as hard as the stones at her feet.
“I’m sorry,” the thief said, talking past her, to the sky, to clouds beyond the horizon. “But they were doomed when they bought you.”
Aini tried to look at the seven figures. The thief shuffled his feet.
“I was merciful,” he continued. “Their souls are free, only the bodies will be enslaved. Like my wife. Unlike me.” He put his hand on her arm, gently, as if they were intimate.
She didn’t understand what he was talking about.
“Everything that’s happened was set in motion long ago. I do not want to sell you. I want to keep you, hear your stories, teach you to be a thief and have you join us. But I chose another way, a long time ago. Or it chose me.”
The master thief went to the tent. Aini watched him leave. She did not know if her body had been stolen, or her heart, or both. She touched her cheek where his beard had almost scratched skin. She felt like a character from a story who needed to do something brave.
The tallest of the gathered seven men joined the thief. They sat on rug by the entry, drank tea, spoke. Aini lost track for how long because she found herself focused on the caravaners, her audience, the men she’d seduced into a world she’d made for them, strewn across the desert floor. They were still and bloody, hardly recognizable. A hole opened within her, and she fell through, as if she’d been dropped into an endless sky.
“A poor crop,” someone said.
“That thief’s done better,” another added.
She looked up, drawn by the speaker’s honeyed voice. The shortest of the men she’d seen by the tent was pissing on a corpse nearby. He’d been castrated a long time ago.
“I miss the old wars,” a third voice rumbled. “There were always fresh bodies, then. Now, they prefer to wound.”
“It’s the damned Healers,” the first said. “We haven’t caught up to them for a while.”
“The girl’s the prize,” the second said.
“She doesn’t look like much.”
“She talks to ghosts. What are they saying, girl?”
Aini looked to the man who’d spoken to her. He was young, his beard neatly trimmed. His eyes were dark but flashed as if filled with stars. “I can’t talk to them in this place,” she said. “They’re not here.”
The man smiled. His teeth were white and perfect. She couldn’t remember seeing anything like them. “What’s your name?”
“Aini.”
The man bowed slightly. The others laughed.
“I am Dejjal,” he said. “My large friend here is Al-Lahu. He only looks like he’d eat you alive.”
The large man patted his belly and grunted. He’d been the third speaker.
“I’m Houssin,” the first speaker said. “A fellow storyteller, though not as famous as you.”
“Not many leave our company to spread gossip about us,” Dejjal said. “And when they do, it’s not his tales they want to talk about.” He held up a hand. “Not that they are not memorable.”
“Maybe we could trade stories later,” Houssin said. His smile was thin.
Aini detected jealousy.
“The creature pissing on your friends is Mafufunyana,” Dejjal continued. “He’s not as harmless as he looks.”
A pebble flew by Aini’s head, struck the eunuch in the back of his hooded head as he prepared to piss on another body. Mafufunyana turned, glared at Aini, growled.
The sun was eclipsed for a moment, and then a man stood between Aini and Mafufunyana in a rising cloud of dust. The man looked back at her, grinned, revealing sharpened teeth. His turban had slipped, partially revealing the crushed portion of his skull. “You like thieves?” he asked.
Low and deep, his voice made Aini wonder if thieves had music in their voices, or if they cultivated the music to distract their victims. She thought to ask Ajouz, and have a talk with him about the thieves she’d seen during her travels, usually running or dead.
“We have no use for tears,” Dejjal said, the slight lilt of his voice mocking the burning in her eyes.
She threw her hands over her face and braced for an impact as Mafufunyana leapt. Instead, she heard scuffling, and glimpsed the two men grappling. Laughing. They danced away, stomping one of the dead in their play fighting.
“She has no number,” the remaining man said, drawing everyone’s attention. His beard fell to the waist, his hair hung in filthy strands from his unraveled cheche. “You’re the one who screams.”
“You can scream all you like, now,” another voice added.
Aini looked to the new voice. The man who had been talking to her kidnapper approached her, slipping between Dejjal and Al-Lahu. The two made way for him. His ink-stained fingers lay lightly on the lapis lazuli handle of a sickle knife stuck into his rope belt.
“That was Bomaye, and he is also not as harmless as he appears. I, however, am as gentle as the desert’s breeze. My name as Abd Al-Azrad, and I am a humble seeker of truth burdened by dreams vaster than the world that contains them. Not unlike yourself. Welcome to the caravan.”
“Does your caravan have a name?” she asked, her voice cracking. She kept glancing at the bodies, searching for the old man, hoping he might still be alive.
Al-Azrad pointed to the servants who had appeared to take down the tent and take away the tea service. A short distance away, the master thief was walking back to his men and camels. Distracted, Aini looked back and forth between the two. The thief ignored her. The servants’ stiff, awkward movements commanded her attention.
She noticed the scent of rotting meat, stronger than the rising stench of the dead caravaners. A dung beetle scurried from the cloth gathered at Al-Azrad’s neck to his cheek, and then into the crevice between the keffiyeh and his brow.
She didn’t say the name that came to her mind. She looked to her thief. The satchel hanging from his shoulder was full, and she wondered what more, besides vengeance and death, she might have cost.
“Why?”
“You have qualities that interest us,” Dejjal said.
“After all, you’re a virgin,” Al-Lahu added, and laughed. The others joined in, once again mocking her with the power of all that they knew and understood.
“And you might teach our friend Houssin a tale or two to enliven our lonely evenings,” Al-Azrad said.
Sifr cocked his head to the side as he stared at her, through her, at what might have been a part of her so true and real that what she imagined herself to be was only shadow. “A variable,” he said at last.
“Which side?” Dejjal asked.
“Too soon to know where she fits in the equation of annihilation.”
“The virgin ally,” Bomaye shouted. “The ghost-talking enemy. The catalyst, the sacrifice. Our doom, our deliverance!” He laughed, and Mafufunyana danced beside him.
“Surely not our doom,” Houssin said, with a dismissive wave.
“Maybe nothing at all,” Al-Azrad said, smiling down on her. “We have all the time there is left to find out.”
The men formed a circle around Aini and the corpses surrounding her. She remembered another circle made of the hard men from the first caravan she’d been sold to. She’d lived through that circle, and everything else her path had taken her through. She was not afraid. She only hurt.
The men began to chant, led by Abd Al-Azrad. Servants brought a thirteen-stringed harp to Houssin, an hourglass-shaped drum to Sifr, rattles and cymbals for Bomaye and Mafufunyana.
The servants’ faces were slack. Their clothes and flesh did not cover all their bones. They quickly shuffled away.
The chant became a repetitive song driven by frantic rhythms. The music lifted the caravaners’ voices, drove the words Aini cou
ld not understand deep into the flesh, numbing thought, firing up blood. She stood up, and though her legs were weak, she found a rhythm, picked a line of music and space, and insinuated herself into their song with her own steps.
With the meaning of what was happening eluding her, Aini searched for her own words but could not find any to make a story. Her voice found other sounds to make, grunts, groans, yowls, and screeches, from the back of her mind, the depths of her gut. She looked for an opening to scream, but the caravaners’ song was too tightly woven for such a raw intrusion. She wanted to join their work, become a part of the caravan, not tear it apart. Belonging would soothe the pain of losing so much.
Bomaye and Mafufunyana quickly became lost in their parts, writhing and jerking to the rhythm. Mafufunyana managed to rise out of his trance momentarily like a fish tracking bait, fixing his gaze on Aini and her fluid, flowing movements and quick, kicking steps. But he took only two steps before blinking, his focus wavering, and falling back into the greater current of music.
Houssin’s fingers flew across the harp’s strings, head bobbing slightly, eyelids fluttering while chanting, more quickly than the rest, a thread of words that seemed both imploring and demanding. Sifr crouched, holding the drum between his legs, head and body still as arms whirled and hands beat out complex contrapuntal rhythms. Al-Azrad, Dejjal and Al-Lahu stood tall over them all, like black stone monoliths dominating over a landscape of jagged rock formations carved by wind and sand.
The three watched her, Dejjal smiling, Al-Lahu with his frown, and Al-Azrad, his expression as blank as a dune. Their stare made her self-conscious, as if by their glance alone they could manipulate her. But their attention did not pull her from the performance. She tried to pull back, free herself from the strings that seemed to control her actions, afraid she might be surrendering too much of herself too soon.
Her feet kept pace with the rhythms, her voice filled the places the caravaners’ could not reach. She couldn’t tell if she’d fallen under their spell, or had lost herself to challenging their dominion over the desert. She didn’t know if she was asking questions or answering them, telling a story or living one. The engine driving her did not feel like a part of her, but she hoped she was the one who’d built it.
In the Country of Dreaming Caravans Page 6
