She looked beyond the circle, searching for a landmark by which to find her course. From a low ridge, the master thief watched as his men and camels chased the sun. She looked away, knowing he’d be gone, soon.
Sand and stones shifted under her feet. A chill, like a blast from the dark spaces between the stars, made her flesh shiver. Abd Al-Azrad’s gaze burned her even as she looked away from him, as if something inside him had suddenly caught fire. She struggled to keep her balance, part of her wanting to throw herself deeper into what was happening, while another wanted only to fall and escape. She might have been walking on Al-Sirat’s knife edge between life and death, halfway between the world of cars and televisions she remembered as a dream, and the country of sand and camels.
An arm rose, from among the dead. A leg twitched.
Al-Azrad signed to the others. They stopped, except for Mafufunyana, who had to be restrained by Bomaye, and Sifr. No one stepped forward to stop him.
Aini stumbled, fell to her knees. Her voice dried up, her throat felt like a wadi that had not seen water in centuries. Sifr’s rhythms dragged her heart beating into its embrace, but her body refused to follow.
Like drunken men beaten down in a brawl, the dead struggled to their feet. Their wounds were dry, their chests still. Their eyes were glassy pebbles, smooth and empty, set into slack, pale faces mottled by bruises. She finally recognized them all, though they did not stand as they once had, each with a lean or a tilt, a favored shoulder, a stoop or twist.
She found the old man, went to him. Sift stopped drumming. Her heart felt as if it had been freed from heavy reins. It skipped, faltered, regained its pace.
Close up, she tried to meet Ajouz’s gaze. But it seemed to her that he was looking at something else, even when she put her face a finger’s width away from his.
Aini struggled for some measure of mastery over her world and the things she knew in them. She wanted to show something to the old man, to the Al-Azrad and the rest, to the master thief, if he was still watching. She drew a long breath, searched for words, sounds, anything to transform what was happening into something she could understand.
“She’s weak,” Al-Lahu said.
She wanted to scream, but instead, she blew her breath softly, as gently as she could, into the old man’s face, as if he was an infant and she was carefully bringing him out of his dreams and into the waking world.
The old man blinked, took a rattling, dry breath. Gasped as he fixed his gaze on her. His head jerked back, his hands went to the wounded chest. He flinched, gasped, brought bloody hands to his eyes to hold back tears that would not flow.
The seven were silent, still, as if life had been snatched out of them for the air that had come from Aini and Ajouz.
“I love you,” she said, drawing back.
“Save your love for the living,” the old man said.
She looked for something to give him that would connect them, but she had nothing but filthy clothes. She searched the ground, the others who’d risen, putting her hands in their rags hoping for some trinket.
Bomaye parted his clothing for her, revealing a scarred and withered carcass, nearly hollowed, every space framed by blackened bones teeming with things she couldn’t grasp. He motioned for her to approach, to search, as he thrust his cock out at her, erect, crooked. A beetle crawled from crinkled folds of flesh to ride his organ. His companions laughed, except for Dejjal and Al-Azrad.
She ignored his invitation, continued searching, and found a few coins, beads, an odd metal pendant which seemed to shiver in her hand, bags half-filled with bits of dried fruit and meat, flasks and bottles, packets of seeds and powders that had provided the comfort of dreams and memories for their owners. None of it connected her to the old man.
Looking up to the ridge, baggage from the camels lay strewn in a trail. Aini cried out, ran. Mafufunyana moved to intercept her but Bomaye held him back. She picked up her satchel, rifled through it until she found patchouli and a flint lighter. She lit a piece in a stone holder, ran back to the old man, let the smoke rise to his face.
The old man’s eyes widened. He laughed, briefly, a rattle of rocks falling down a slope that silenced Al-Azrad and his men.
“That will be enough,” Dejjal said, knocking down the burner and stamping out the coal.
Before Aini could react, he had her satchel. He threw it to Houssin and said, “Make the story of this day. And get rid of that, out of our sight.”
“You can’t stand the scent of life,” Aini said.
“We can stand anything,” Al-Lahu said.
The old man mumbled. His hand brushed against Aini’s face.
“We prefer our own perfumes,” Al-Azrad said.
Aini rubbed her nose. “You stink of death.”
“Wait until you join the caravan,” Al-Azrad answered.
She looked to the ridge, to the thief, to see if she could run back to him, but he was gone, the sun close behind him. She turned to the old man, but his eyes were empty, his smile gone. His spirit had slipped away, leaving an empty shell. He was gone in some other place, as she wished she could be. She was alone, as she had ever been.
Sifr stepped forward to shepherd the dead. The others followed Al-Azrad, paying no attention to her, walking in single file. Their servants fell into step behind them.
Aini stood her ground as the dead men she’d told her stories to lined up, jostling one another and her. Sifr gave the last man a push, and the line moved in Al-Azrad’s footsteps.
“The camp is over that rise,” Sifr said, pointing in the direction his companions were walking. “I calculate that by the time I reach the top, you will follow.”
The procession moved on. The sun sank behind the ridge. Aini watched the western sky’s fire wane.
Al-Azrad and the rest passed over the rise. Sifr waited. Dusk gathered at his back. The coming night’s chill kissed her neck.
Stars appeared, bright and glittering like needle points, their meaning cryptic. The thin sliver of Al-Sirat hung over head like a thread nearly lost among diamonds. Where she’d found many stories, she could see only a single ending.
The blackness between stars held her attention, spreading the lights farther apart in her mind until it seemed there were few needle points, isolated and far apart, on a vast black carpet of infinite depth. The moon, though nearly full and rising, shrank as it climbed. Darkness bled through its shadowed crescent. The Al-Sirat faded like a wisp of a cloud high over hot sands.
In the desert night she’d known most of her life, Aini felt as she never had before: small and alone. She bowed her head and closed her eyes, surrendering to the darkness, retreating into the world she knew best, a place of ghosts and spirits, caravaners and camels, merchants and towns people who had touched her spirit. She played in the memories of oasis gardens and camps, up and down the caravan line, in the cities of her birth land. But where she’d always found stories in the place where the dream that was the world and the dreams that were her own met and nourished one another, now grew a garden of night, dry and silent, feeding on emptiness, offering no seeds of truth, meaning or sensation that might crack open and fill the air with wonders and laughter and the sorrow of understanding.
Aini jerked as if scratched by brush. Aini felt something inside her break. She opened her mouth to scream, but she could not reach her voice.
The night crystallized, trapping her in a moment of clarity, stillness and silence. Every grain of sand, every rock and desiccated shrub stood as vivid as a single moment of sunset, complete and immoveable.
Her heart raced. She broke into a sweat, but at the same time, shivered. She felt as if she’d been shocked into waking from dream into a naked reality she’d never seen. All that she had ever known, from stars to the dust of the earth, was separated by a gulf she’d crossed walking a razor’s edge of tales like the path to the gates of Paradise and Hell. But the bridge was gone. The stories, silenced.
A breeze blew down from the rise, a last hot
breath of sunset. She breathed in deeply, searching for a hint of thief or camel, simple piss or shit or a cooking fire. Tea. A whisper, an echo of a story she’d told still in the air.
The breeze passed through her, more savage than the sand storm she’d survived even as it caressed skin and hair, kissed eyes, lips and ears, fingers. It worked through her flesh, scouring mind and memories, digging into recesses of the moment, wiping away past and future. She knew better than to try screaming again. Slowly, she blew air out through pursed lips and managed a soft whistle. The lonely sound died instantly.
She turned to follow the passing breeze as it slipped Sifr to her future. She waited for a push to go forward, a call from what was to come. But like the sand and the stars, they were cut off from each other and her. Darkness waited.
She walked to the horizon of her future, stopped when she came next to Sifr. She thought they might stand together forever in the night, ancient as sphinxes, both mysteries and warnings to whoever would come their way.
“Some say ride to the rising sun to wake it,” Sifr said, at last. “Others say chase the sun and to see it safely to its setting. We ride to the sunrise to make it stop.”
“I’ve chased the sun all over the desert,” Aini said. “In this country, I don’t think it matters which direction you take, or what you intend to do.”
Sifr turned to follow Al-Azrad. The desert floor seethed before them under the light of moon and stars. A faint shuffling sound, accented by the creaking of leather and rope, rose to greet them. The stench of death was a suffocating curtain.
“You did not act as I had calculated you would,” Sifr said.
“Maybe your calculations are worth as much as stars and storytellers when it comes to truth,” Aini said.
Sifr’s cold touch on her back propelled her to walk in the caravaners’ path. “You will not be with us for long,” he said.
“We’ll have to make the best of our time together,” she said.
Sifr made a sound deep in his throat, part cough, part choking. “You should be careful not to cut yourself with your own tongue,” he said, after a few moments.
“I’ve been told much the same thing,” she answered, “but usually by less patient people.”
They descended into a camp, seemingly endless, under night. Camels were everywhere, next to piles of bags and boxes of goods. They were restless in sleep, shifting where they lay and giving the desert floor a living coat. Their occasional moans, bleats and groans, and the creaking of harnesses, broke the night’s stillness. Figures sat or lay on the ground next to them, without tent or fires. The stench of death fought the stink of camels shitting, belching and farting.
A single fire sprang to life to her right. A saffron flag flew high on a center tent pole extending beyond the canopy. Sifr stopped, and Aini turned to him.
“Your tent,” he said, nodding his head in the light’s direction. “Servants were picked to put you at ease. They will have food, water and tea. Clothes. Whatever you desire for comfort.”
He walked away before she could say anything, heading for a large tent blotting out part of the sky. Some of the tent panels glowed dimly from interior lanterns.
She went to her fire, where a bath in a giant cooking pot and a meal waited. A dark-skinned healer examined her, spread ointment over sores and cuts, left her questions unanswered. The tea was well made.
A single servant dared to respond to her gentle questions. “We rarely have guests,” the little girl said, looking over Aini’s clothing choices picked from the caravan’s cargo—loose trousers and a hooded tunic, a man’s vest, an embroidered shawl and sand-colored boots—as if not quite believing she was looking at a woman. “Except when the masters bargain.”
The girl’s spark of curiosity, wild hair and wiry frame made her seem like a reflection in a mirror sitting in a different time.
Aini thought to entertain the servants with a tale, but struggled for her voice and a beginning. She started an old story about Tagurmat leading her tribe on horseback into battle, but the servants drifted off, taking the girl with them. Unlike the servants she’d seen earlier, these walked with ease.
She finished the story for herself, but found it short and plain, lacking the twists and turns she preferred. At the end, her throat was dry and she felt empty.
If she couldn’t spin a tale of adventure, Aini decided to live one. She returned to where Sifr had left her, using configurations of shadowy, sleeping camels she remembered as landmarks. She found the caravaners’ tent by its dimly glowing panels, circled it, stopping at the sound of voices. Not knowing if guards were posted, she lay down, making herself a part of the landscape, and listened.
She recognized the voices of Abd Al-Azrad and the rest, though not always their language. They talked freely over one to another, discussions spiraling into different tongues shifting among the changing members of two and three groups. Aini listened, picking out a word, a phrase, from her travels, until at the seven settled into one discussion, in the Old Arabian dialect she’d learned from Ajouz.
“We should have killed her,” Sifr said.
“Then we wouldn’t have seen a miracle,” Dejjal said.
Aini heard a cutting smile in his tone.
“We saw what she can do,” Al-Lahu said. “She has nothing we can use.”
“I disagree,” Dejjal said.
Bomaye and Mafufunyana laughed.
Al-Lahu’s rumble rode over them as he said, “She won’t be one of us. We don’t need her. She should be killed before she makes trouble.”
Mafufunyana grunted.
Bomaye added, “We can do the work.”
“She’s a guest,” Dejjal said, and as if delivering the punch line to a joke. With more gravity, he added, “What if she comes back, like the healers always do, or the Caravan of Dreams?”
“You believe her power is so great?” Al-Lahu asked.
“If it is, she does not know it,” Sifr said. “She should die before she has a chance to discover herself, in case there is anything dangerous there to find.”
“What’s more important?” Dejjal asked. “Preserving your precious calculations, or finding out what she is?”
“We bought her to test her,” Abd Al-Azrad said. “She called a spirit back. That is a power.”
“A trick!” Bomaye shouted.
“We’ll need every trick we can steal to remake the world in our image,” said Al-Azrad.
Houssin said, “I don’t think she has any stories left in her.”
“We have your tales to fill the dead with our purpose on the other side of apocalypse,” Al-Azrad said. “But raising all the dead to make the next world will not be easy.”
“We are strong,” Al-Lahu said.
“Strong enough,” Bomaye added.
Mafufunyana squealed and grunted.
Aini imagined him thrusting his hips forward.
Dejjal cut Mafufunyana off. “We don’t need souls of the living poisoning our work.”
“And we do not want an empty land, with no one to rule,” Al-Azrad said.
The silence that followed made Aini think she’d been discovered, perhaps by her shallow breathing or her body’s warmth.
“If she has power to interfere with us, we need to contain it,” Sifr said. “Every time she comes back, we kill her. Kill her before she’s strong enough to start her own caravan.”
Dejjal hummed a phrase from a mourning prayer, then said, “Is it really wise to set aside a factor because it interferes with the equation you desire? I thought, dear Sifr, that you valued the cold precision of logic, no matter the outcome. That’s your worth to us, after all. Have our efforts to contain or support other factors ever mattered? The Caravan of Healers, The Caravan of War, all the rest, do they really bear any weight on our destiny? Or are we, alone, the shepherds of our fate?”
“We’re still working on the apocalypse,” Al-Lahu complained. “Why concern ourselves so much about what follows?”
“Your
appetite betrays you, again, old god,” Dejjal said.
“No more than yours,” Al-Lahu answered quickly.
“It is all one work,” Al-Azrad said. “The unmaking, and the making. Endings are simpler than creation. At least, for our kind.”
“She might be useful on the other side,” Dejjal said. “And entertaining on this one.”
Houssin cursed in tongues Aini could mostly understand.
“I don’t like the threat,” Al-Lahu said.
“We can make her obey,” said Bomaye, with Mafufunyana squealing in the background.
“The dead don’t need her stories,” said Houssin.
A brief silence of impasse was broken by Dejjal. “Sifr wasn’t entirely wrong. If we could find a way to make her our slave, harness her power…”
“We would have to keep her alive,” Sifr said.
“And what if breaking her takes whatever power you think she has?” Al-Lahu said.
“No, no, we wouldn’t kill her,” Dejjal said. “Seduce her, do to her what she’s done to others all this time. Tell her sweet stories. Sweeter than yours, Houssin. Plant lies in truth, truth in lies. Sing to her, dance with her, show her all that she’s missed in this harsh land.” Dejjal laughed. “Imagine, a virgin in the service of apocalypse.”
Houssin’s snort quickly drowned in Mafufunyana’s and Bomaye’s howls.
“Can this be done?” Al-Azrad said.
“It has been a while since I’ve had the chance to inspire worship among the living,” Al-Lahu said.
“She might be lost entirely in the wonder of my stories,” Houssin said.
“Her power, her purpose, these tricks, none of these are certainties,” Sifr said.
“You’re right, of course,” Dejjal said. “But there’ll be pleasure in discovery, one way or another.”
In the Country of Dreaming Caravans Page 7
