In the Country of Dreaming Caravans

by Gerard Houarner

  “You’d think they were brothers,” Dejjal said to her as he passed by, peering ahead for a better view. Looking back, he paused and said, “You know, they do this is for you. We let the ghuls satisfy their appetites on our ruined merchandise, in return for visits to their camps for our own needs. But today, my companions mean to entice you with a demonstration of their ardor and their skills. They have their own interpretation of Vatsyayana’s wisdom on fulfilling a lady’s bliss, their own piercing embrace and climbing the tree.” Dejjal smiled a beautiful smile, radiant in the mid-day sun. “We are never too old to learn, even from the most savage of hearts. Don’t worry, I won’t let them get too far with you.”

  Aini looked to Houssin, but his attention had turned to the mound and the two caravaners. When she turned back, Dejjal stood on the feeding’s edge, as if torn between watching the spectacle and joining it.

  Mafufunyana dived into the mound, grabbed a jackal. With one hand, he slipped out of his trousers, and with the other, pinned the struggling animal to the ground. He mounted the creature, penetrated it, drowned its howl with his own roar.

  Nearby jackals and hyenas spun around, barked savagely. Bomaye appeared, an enormous snake wrapped around his torso, and picked up a hyena and impaled the creature on his erect cock while laughing and licking the serpent’s scaled hide. The animal convulsed in its desperation while the snake tried to dart away. Bomaye kept his grip on both creatures.

  More of the feasting ghuls turned, but none dared attack the caravaners. Dejjal shouted something from the outskirts. Al-Azrad’s palanquin appeared on the near side, its curtains nearly closed. Sifr and Al-Lahu stalked the farther edge of the mound, the latter lashing out randomly in a blind frenzy at corpses passing by. Sifr remained as still and blank as a weathered monolith.

  The jackal beneath Mafufunyana shifted into a man’s shape, naked, still, while the two animals Bomaye had taken transformed, hide and scales melting to reveal a man and a woman. The caravaners strode deeper into the mound, taking other animals in a fury of lust, reducing each to a human foundation.

  The first to be taken stirred, and Aini was relieved to find that some things could survive the Caravan of the Dead.

  The orgy went on until the last of the carrion eaters had fled or lay still, trembling as they recovered. Al-Azrad’s palanquin turned away. Sifr and Al-Lahu vanished. Dejjal threaded through columns of the marching dead toward the caravan’s head, but his gaze lingered on her with an empty look that reminded Aini of the desert at dusk, spent and dark, hope fading with the last of the light. She searched for Houssin, he was already gone.

  The dead marched on, with the lines stretched around the original mound now closing together over bones and shredded meat. Overhead, a few vultures circled. Aini could not tell if they were true birds or shape-changers. The ghuls on the desert floor helped each other rise, or pulled those too worn out of the way of the dead. They made their way out of the caravan, heading for the horizon’s dust clouds.

  Mafufunyana and Bomaye slowly made their way to her, making a show of inspecting the dead, as if they were buyers looking for cheap palace-builders or field-laborers. Aini remembered the world she’d come from, the men and women in suits rushing in the morning and evening, the adults in the stores, clinics, trains, the workers on the road or shells of rising buildings. She wondered how many from that world would one day find their way as merchandise to the Caravan of the Dead, how many had already been sold.

  She caught herself searching, as she had from the moment she’d seen the dead by daylight, for her mother and father.

  The wind whistled in her ears. Dust blew into her eyes, stung her face. She looked down, pulled the scarf across her face, looked up through slitted eyelids at the horizon that now, suddenly, seemed much nearer.

  Two shadows joined hers. The stench of death took on a musky bite. Another shadow attached itself to the first two. Three voices joined in a chorus of laughter.

  She pointed to the closing wall of swirling sand and said, “A storm’s coming.”

  “Djinn,” Dejjal said.

  Mafufunyana grunted.

  “You had your turn,” Bomaye said.

  “They’re curious,” Dejjal said. “Drawn to you, like so many of the rest of us.”

  “I feel like spirits have found me, again,” she said.

  Dejjal stood next to her, passed a finger across the scarf on the side of her face. “Are you shy with me, now? Have I made you adopt the desert’s faith and wear a veil?”

  She turned away from him, straight into Bomaye’s grinning face. He carried his pants in one hand. The other held his stiffening cock. She slid past him, veered toward Mafufunyana, his twisted cock as stiff as it had been when he’d fallen on the shape-changers. She fell into his arms, and he caught her, cradled her like the child she’d been when she’d been sold by her parents. His leer faltered, appearing confused by surrendering prey.

  She quickly kissed him, through the kerchief covering his face, on the lips, and then danced out of his stiffened arms.

  Mafufunyana remained crouched, arms holding air. Bomaye’s smile dimmed. Dejjal shook his head, a light sparking in his dead eyes.

  She walked toward the dust clouds, to the flashes of fire and lightning at their heart.

  “They’re bound to us,” Dejjal called out. “They will serve our need at world’s end. But they are not tame.”

  “Do you know them?” Aini asked. Every step she took felt lighter. Though the sand storm intensified, her breathing came easier.

  “We don’t need to,” Dejjal said.

  “You should always know your enemies, even if they’re your slaves.”

  “And what would you tell us?”

  She let the question go, though the beginning of a story came to her. It began with her walking from a caravan into the desert and the waiting spirits. She let the tale unfold before her eyes, in her ears, on her skin, in her mouth, with every step she took.

  The stench of death lingered as she left the caravan behind. She glanced over her shoulder to find Dejjal gone, but Bomaye and Mafufunyana following her. They had put their pants back on.

  “Tell them a story,” Bomaye called out. “One about them losing to Solomon, again.”

  “Mafufunyana, don’t you have anything to say?” Aini said. “Or did you swallow your little snake?” She smiled as she quickened her pace.

  Clouds parted, sand settled, and the wind died down to a gusting breeze. Aini slid the kerchief down and took a deep breath, rich with the scent of violets and fruit trees, as if she’d stumbled into an oasis garden. A gift, she thought. She wished she still had the bag of scents to reach into for an exchange. All she had to give the djinn was the stink of dead men.

  Maybe the warning of open mouths around djinn had been a lie. Or perhaps, they wanted more than just to possess her.

  A clicking sound filled the wind’s silent wake as stones collided high in spinning vortexes of dust and fire scattered across the rocky desert floor. Aini found a pattern, laughed, and stepped lightly to the rhythm, building a dance of surprise and delight.

  Mafufunyana bounded forward to join her, but retreated under a hail of pebbles directed at the softer parts of his head. He joined Bomaye squatting in the distance like a hawk on a dead acacia limb studying antelope too large to take down.

  Aini danced into the gathered djinn as they made way for her. She told a child’s story of lonely owls falling in love in the shade of an oasis, accompanying words with stylized hand motions. When she was done, owls flew through the clouds of djinn and circled above her head while the air filled with the scents of orange flowers, mint, ginger, sandalwood, pomegranate. She laughed at catching her favorite scent and broadened her dance to carve wide, curved paths through the dirt, changing directions suddenly, rising and falling in dramatic leaps and falls, becoming larger than the slight flesh and blood virgin she was, but not as great as the magical creatures watching her perform.

  Figures appeared
around her, and for a moment she thought the Caravan of the Dead had come to beat back the djinn and reclaim her. But what approached her were jackals, hyenas, and other, harder to fathom shapes that all melted as they walked through the dust clouds to resolve into human shapes.

  Aini glanced at Mafufunyana and Bomaye, thinking they would take the ghuls’ appearance as an invitation to join her. But the pair remained small against the sky, and far, content to watch.

  The shape-changers kept their distance and watched, as well. Aini thought of all the stories she knew about ghuls, and found none she dared repeat in their company. So, she took one about a prince who battled a ghul to protect his dead love’s corpse, and shook up the pieces like dice. The death-eater became the protector of his lover’s slain body, which was the prize sought by an ambitious prince eager to prove himself worthy to his father.

  As she sang and danced the tale, her eyes burned with tears as they never would have if she’d told the story as she’d first heard it.

  At the first glitter of stars in the eastern sky, the ghuls retreated, close enough to the end of the story to know their hero would survive. The whirling clouds collapsed on Aini, and she cried out in panic, afraid she’d made a terrible mistake in trusting her skills to survive the djinn.

  But the smell of sandalwood comforted her as she was swept off her feet and carried over the heads of Bomaye and Mafufunyana, alongside the caravan columns of the dead, as if on a magic carpet, until she reached the head where the proud palanquins of Abd Al-Azar and Al-Lahu, Dejjal, Houssin and Sifr all floated above the heads of the few living servants and the very many dead.

  The djinn released her, tumbling, to the rocky earth. She stood, scratched by sand, bruised by stones, and walked back to the caravan where a banner lit by torches flew high to guide her home.

  Even if she hadn’t finished the story, she was relieved to have found the wit and voice to tell it. The emptiness inside was not as vast as it had been only a few hours before.

  And, she was pleased she’d finally answered an old challenge to tell a tale to a djinn.

  The servants were pale as she walked among them, as if the djinn had stolen the fire’s color before the light reached their flesh. She smiled at them, trying to be reassuring, but they looked away as they directed her to the camel train with her supplies.

  The caravan continued through the night on to morning without stopping, but a place was made for her atop a camel, where she found sweet water, fresh tea, dates and light brown cakes of dry magaria fruit in a comfortable basket large enough for her to rest in. She fell asleep swaddled like an infant in blankets.

  Thunder woke her. She tried to get up, met stuffy, clinging darkness, and screamed. Flashes of blinding light stung her eyes, and for the moment she thought she was still a master thief’s property bound to a camel, with nothing but slivers between bolts of fabric through which to breathe and look out on to the world. She thought she’d have to piss on herself, again.

  Then remembered she’d been telling a tale, and struggled desperately to recapture the threads of adventure she’d let slip away. The stench reminded her where she really was, and with regret, she disentangled herself from the blankets to pop out into the day’s harsh sun.

  In the distance, on the caravan’s western flank, four figures stood on the near edge a ravine. On the other side, the djinn had gathered, their flames tall and thin without the cover of whirling dust clouds. Thunder cracked, rumbled, shook the ground. The servants fumbling to either help her down or hand food and drink up did not know where to look, doing everything in their power to avoid her, the djinn, and Dejjal, who appeared from behind a cluster of the dead as if he’d been waiting for Aini to awaken.

  “You tired yourself out, yesterday,” Dejjal said. “Your journey to us was long and trying. You need to take better care of yourself. I am your willing servant in such matters.”

  Aini ignored him, accepting tea and shredded meat wrapped in flat bread from one of the servants. She sniffed the meat to make sure it was from an animal and not one of the caravan’s walking stock, and satisfied herself that it was in fact lamb. Activity further back along the caravan caught her attention.

  Dejjal took the camel bridle from a servant, and the rest quickly vanished. “You must be careful what you play with,” he said, passing his fingers gently over her exposed calf, bruised and scratched by the djinn. “You might not survive another such encounter. My brothers must work hard to calm what you stirred.”

  Aini pointed to Bomaye and Mafufunyana at the center of a knot of figures, and said, “Not all your brothers.”

  She thought her thief had returned to bargain for her return. But then she noticed jeeps and trucks, uniformed men with guns, the machinery of her childhood in the other world. Another kind of bargain was being made.

  Bomaye was talking to the dead, calling them out of the crowd one by one, looking to a fat man in green and black. When the fat man nodded his head, Bomaye yelled at the pick, directing each to the line loading into the vehicles. Mafufunyana pulled the females out, dragged them to a smaller van while carrying a strong box on his shoulder. None of the children were chosen.

  The trucks started up as thunder rolled over the desert once more, drowning the noise of the engines. As the vehicles drove off to the east, the sky shimmered above them while ahead, the rocky, rolling landscape seemed to shrink and waver like a mirage.

  She thought of the world her parents had left behind and what might be waiting for her on the other side of a mirage. Every land held a promise, and a price. It was a world, she was certain, filled with stories and wonders. But no Caravan of Death, or Dreams.

  Dejjal laughed as he followed her gaze and pointed at the rapidly diminishing trucks. “Finding the way to the Caravan of the Dead is half the cost of trading with us,” he said. “We claim the rest. And, of course, the way home requires its own payment. For those in need, what we offer is worth the sacrifice.

  “But do not believe that any journey in the company of those in such need would be gentle, or the world at the end of such roads a welcoming one for you.”

  Aini closed her eyes, listening to the crack and rumble of djinn until the many voices they’d awakened in her mind rose in a tide of tales, real and imagined, seasoned by fantasy and gossip, the occasional fact and the rare dashes of truth, to drown Dejjal’s seductive murmuring. Tears came to her eyes, the kind she might have had if she’d ever seen her parents one more time.

  Dejjal’s voice slipped through, a steel blade as hard and sharp as his smile. “You protected your virginity, but surrendered everything else to our world. You’re ruined for any other land you think you could run to.”

  Aini re-arranged her clothing until she was good to walk. Loaded with water and provisions, she jumped down on the other side of the camel, came around past Dejjal and set off toward the djinn.

  “We are the only home left to you,” Dejjal called out after her. “We will always be here for you.”

  His laughter was the poison in his smile and words. It reached her heart, and after the pain had passed, she envied him for the truth he’d managed to find and use against her. She was grateful he lacked the skill to give a story’s weight to his discovery, or else she might not have had the strength to walk away from him.

  But as she left Dejjal, her spirits lifted. Words bubbled in her mind. Bits and pieces of people, places, events flew around in her head as if all the djinn in the world had come to nest inside her skull.

  She found herself on the edge of the ravine separating the caravan from djinn before she knew she’d come out so far. Dejjal had joined the other caravan men lined up further along the precipice, facing the roiling mass of djinn. Mafufunyana and Bomaye, their business done, had broken away from the caravan and were hurrying to join their brothers.

  The air crackled, the ground trembled. Clumps of the ravine edge fell, forcing Aini to step back. Multiple thunder cracks forced hands to ears.

  The wind pic
ked up, tugged at clothes, whipped around and pushed her forward. Jagged depths yawned at her feet and once again she thought perhaps she’d gone too far, tried too hard, in search of something needed.

  But the wind screamed through the ravine, raising rocks and boulders, until a bridge arched over the emptiness, thicker and wider than Al-Sirat, perhaps, but surely less steady. She jumped on the bridge before she could be pushed, and trotted across as the caravaners called out after her. Reaching the other side, she rushed ahead, and the djinn yielded to her, allowing her a narrow, tumultuous path through their packed company.

  Aini thought she might be screaming as she advanced, but the constant thunder buried her voice, and any feelings that might have spilled from her depths. More than once, the cold fire of their forms touched her, leaving pale, freezing marks on her skin.

  The din subsided and she found herself in open desert, on ancient volcanic rock, black, undulating currents frozen, cracked, weathered. The thundering conflict between djinn and the Caravan of the Dead continued, but though they were near, the sound seemed remote. The sinking sun was close to kissing the horizon, but the first stars had not yet come out, as if in deference to a crescent moon hanging so low it might skewer anyone foolish enough to try to leap for it. Shadows lengthened, filling in hollows and spaces like silence in the souk of an abandoned desert town.

  Shadows moving made Aini stop.

  All around her, men and women rose from the earth, some naked, most covered in rags. Hair matted, skin filthy, they stared at her like mad animals. Their human stink mingled with the familiar stench of death.

  “The story,” one of them said. “Finish it.”

  It took a moment for Aini to understand the path the djinn had cleared for her had been meant to bring her to the camp of the same ghuls she’d entertained the day before. Unwinding a careful pattern of steps that spiraled through their number until she was on the edges rather in the heart of their company, she picked up the story and continued it beyond the original plot she’d adapted for her audience.