In the Country of Dreaming Caravans

by Gerard Houarner

  Her dance transformed the barren landscape into a new country of mountains and streams, towers and domes, while she guided the ghul of her tale through vengeance against the prince, the mourning of his lost love, and the discovery of a new mate. Letting the softening expressions and the gradual pairing-off of her audience guide her, Aini dared to go as far as she could imagine into what love might look like among the ghuls. She let the tale drift off, trusting everyone listening to find their own satisfying end.

  She waited for a few moments, noticing that the thunder had stopped at last and the djinn were scattered again along the caravan flank. Her breaths came fast and shallow as she felt dreams, in the wake of invention, rush to fill her emptiness. Her body trembled, and she hoped ghuls truly did feed only on the dead, and not occasionally on the living they might mistake as ill.

  “Thank you,” another of the ghuls said, from a distance. The pack began moving off, even as another group appeared in the distance to take over their natural encampment.

  Aini watched them leave, waiting for an invitation, or a demand, to join them. In the space between the two ghul groups, between desert and caravan, she finished the water and food she’d carried. She searched for the freedom of her own life in every direction, but as night swept sunlight from sky and scattered its stars across the darkness, she saw only a death that no story she could ever tell would turn away.

  She began the walk back to the Caravan of the Dead, where at least there was the certainty of more food and water, and passable tea, in the immediate future.

  A sudden gust of djinn blew over her, picked her up and swept her over rocks and ravine, until she was back at the caravan’s head, in sight of her own camel train’s flag. Bleeding more than the first time she’d been handled by djinn, she found the strength to make her way through the dead to her servants. They picked her up, cleaned wounds, changed clothes, and deposited her in the nest of a camel basket.

  It was Abd Al-Azrad who woke her from a dream of men and machines beneath a sky made of fire. The caravan was still moving, the sun not quite fully arisen, and Aini could not be sure she was not still dreaming. The caravan leader looked down from his raised palanquin, poking her with a gold-tipped staff and pushing aside blankets, as he shouted, “They only toy with you because they know you’re valuable to us. But the djinn can’t help you. They cannot even help themselves. And the ghuls are only animals who follow us to pick at our droppings.

  “Stop pretending you have choices, little girl, or you won’t survive this country for much longer.”

  Al-Azrad gave her a hard poke in the ribs, signed to his bearers.

  “I thought they all liked me because I told them stories they liked to hear,” Aini said, curling into a corner to avoid any more blows. “I could do the same for you—are there any you want to hear?”

  Al-Azrad called out and the bearers swung the palanquin back. “Houssin tells us all we want to hear,” he said. His stick hovered over her head, threatening, like his frown.

  “They’re old tales.”

  “Old tales, for an old world.”

  “I can make new ones.”

  “I’d hoped you were cured of that disease.”

  “I think Houssin’s tired old stories infected me with a need for something fresher.”

  The stick wavered, Al-Azrad’s frown cracked. “There are other tales he knows. New ones, about the world to come. He can teach you how they go.”

  “He made them?”

  “No. We, our brotherhood, did. Well, mostly me. But Al-Lau and Dejjal had a hand. Sifr contributed puzzles. Bomaye added...vividness.”

  “What did Mafufunyana add?” she asked, cringing in anticipation of a blow.

  “New tales, for a new world,” Al-Azrad said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “You can tell them in the new world. Maybe better than Houssin.”

  “Maybe we won’t need Houssin at all,” Dejjal said, a disembodied voice from the other side of the camel.

  Aini imagined Houssin frowning. “Every world needs its storytellers,” she said, lending Houssin her support in case he was also nearby.

  Al-Azrad waved the staff in the air and grumbled, but didn’t strike her. His bearers took him away.

  “You may not survive many more of your own adventures,” Dejjal said, remaining beyond her sight.

  She resisted the temptation to look over the camel at him, covered herself from the sun and went back to sleep.

  She woke up to the night’s cool embrace. The servants had left warm tea, dried lamb, yoghurt, almonds and pinenuts, dates and water in her basket. She finished the meal before realizing she’d craved a good, warm maraq over couscous or rice, along with a simple camp, a fire, and someone to tell a tale to. Someone alive, and who didn’t eat the dead.

  She’d spent less than a week with the Caravan of the Dead, but already everything that had come before felt like it had happened to someone else. Or, something she’d heard in a story.

  Aini slipped out of the basket, searched her train until she found spare torches and lit one from her camp signal flame. Her life confirmed the debate over her value had not yet been resolved. Potential still outweighed the cost of her company. She held the torch high, to make the work easier for whoever had to follow her next adventure.

  Her appetite for djinn, ghuls and camels dulled, she kept to the long lines of the dead. In the light’s circle of illumination, there was nowhere else to look but at their faces. Most of their expressions were slack. The rest wore the pain of their deaths carved into skin and bone.

  Each step brought a new tableau into view. Shadows danced with the flame’s flickering across faces ranging from light to dark, old to young. Light sparked in their lusterless eyes. Life haunted the illusion of expressions: rage, curiosity, laughter, terror, sadness.

  Aini tried to look away, but was trapped by the night’s suffocating darkness, the cold distance of stars, the secret mass suggested by their footsteps, the creak of leather and the rustle of cloth. She bumped into their cold flesh as they trudged one after the other past her.

  She was accustomed to being alone in the desert night, and to being in the middle of a raucous band of lonely men. But she’d never experienced such busy silence.

  Fear fluttered inside her like birds in an overcrowded cage. She stumbled, the torch dipped. Her imagination leapt ahead to a story of burning corpses marching over dry earth and hard stone, a lost little girl trapped in their midst.

  She pulled away from that story, seeing an ending she didn’t like. Looking long and hard at the dead, she searched for the thing that was eating away at her, the true face of the lurking monster.

  Faces. She’d been looking at them since she’d been brought to the Caravan. In the tiny circle of her light, they haunted her with laughter and tears, with silent screams and urgent messages whispered too low to hear. They glowered at her as if she’d given offence, and they watched her, mouths open, eager to answer the question she was supposed to ask.

  In the window of light, she waited for a voice to greet her, for arms to hold her, for lips to kiss her gently goodnight with the promise of a waking kiss the next morning.

  Aini trembled. She was afraid of being trapped in the memory of loss and pain by the recognition of someone from the past. Ghosts were one thing, different from the living, as intangible as memory, often endearing in their confusion. But shuffling shells of flesh were the vivid reminders of life lost. Their solid presence in the world promised speech, personality, memories of who and what they’d been. Or, a terrible distortion of all they’d once been.

  She didn’t want to run into familiar porters, caravan heads, medina gossips, even the occasional distracted prince who’d passed her by. Not the old man, not the first wife. Not even her mother and father, as hard as she’d tried to forget them, as desperately she hungered to see them, to feel their touch and hear their voices.

  Not this way. Not this moment. Ghosts would do, if that was what destiny required.

&nbs
p; The mass of bodies remained strangers to Aini. The rush of fear subsided, her heart settled. The burden of memories she’d put on the walking corpses fell away. Their steady, plodding, and oblivious progress across the desert reminded Aini more of camels than people.

  The image made her smile. Though they carried their own distinctive stink, the dead were certainly more attractive than camels. But less useful. At least she didn’t have to worry about spit or kicks in their company. And, the dead were a relief from the moodiness of bored and sour caravan men stuck too long in the desert with nothing to do, or ravenous ghuls, or ignorant djinn unfamiliar or simply uncaring about the fragility of a young woman’s skin.

  It seemed to her that the masters of the Caravan of the Dead could learn much from their own merchandise.

  As she let her breath come and go with the rhythm of her steps, she became accustomed to forced intimacy with the dead, as if Death was introducing itself to her, slowly, carefully, one small grain of its endless form at a time.

  “Hello,” she said, more than once, as her mother had taught her to say as a little girl in a far-off land. “Goodbye.” The dead became like everything else she’d ever come to know in the desert: a story.

  Aini gave herself to studying their clothing, their colors and hair, the marks on their bodies, both decorative and purposeful. The illusion of life continued to distract her, but this time the cause was inspiration for one opening to a story after another. She focused on the nature of the Caravan’s chief commodity so she might better understand the material she had to work with before she started telling stories, like the desert had taught her.

  The mix of bodies, she noted, was split evenly between men and women. Though most had died in their prime, ages ranged from boys and girls as young as she’d been when she’d entered the caravan life to white-haired marabout and griots on stick legs. The Caravan, like any good merchant, stocked for a variety of needs and tastes.

  Violence had taken the majority, though there were signs of simpler, accidental injuries that didn’t involve mutilation or multiple wounds. Disease and failures of the body, or perhaps poison, seemed to have taken the rest. Unlike the dead further back, these corpses were relatively fresh and whole, without much bloating, their internal organs not yet leaking through gashes, orifices, or disintegrating stitching.

  The variety of skin colors, hair, sizes and shapes of eyes, lips and noses, the angles of cheekbones and forehead slopes, and especially clothing styles, was dizzying and often puzzling. It seemed as if the bodies had been harvested not only from the farthest corners of the world, but from different times, as well, with ancient breastplates mixing with fatigues, flowing robes, and Western fashions she’d only seen in old movies.

  Bits of gold and silver glittered in their moment of illumination, as well as jewels and fanciful weaves dusted with metallic powders, which along with painted bodies told her some had been honored at their death, and their tombs quickly robbed. Others carried bags slung over their backs or shoulders, weapons in sheaths and holsters, instruments hanging from belts and straps, as if they’d met their ends in travel.

  Though they never spoke, the dead overwhelmed her with their stories.

  She looked on the dead with fresh eyes. Though not as useful as camels providing the necessities of life for the living, the dead had their own value. As goods, it seemed they should be easily secured at little cost. They needed nothing to maintain themselves, moved on their own, and appeared quite manageable. Mines, plantations, foundries and factories would find them convenient laborers. In large enough numbers, their mass might even make a difference on a battlefield.

  Granted, as a buyer, in most cases she could think of, she’d have preferred the newly dead over decomposing bodies. They were more attractive, less fragile. For the Caravan’s reputation, she supposed, long lines of dead were striking images for potential customers, projecting a vast inventory to fit any possible need. The long lines also spoke of expertise in the trade, and trust placed in merchants who found it necessary to be so well stocked to satisfy the demands of many customers.

  And she knew only too well that making a show of selecting only the best among ragged wares was a sure technique in weakening the will of hard bargainers. Few could resist feeling special, seduced by the gentle caress of elevated opinions about their own wisdom, tastes, and discerning observations.

  Aini had to admit that the dead were very good merchandise. The Caravan men were wasting time with apocalypses and rebuilding worlds. The dead could re-shape the present world with much less effort.

  But she didn’t believe the dead were as worthy of a premium price as tales well told.

  “Who buys the dead?” she asked a tall, middle-aged African who seemed, by the mud-cloth patterns of his robe and the claws and teeth around his neck, to have attained enough wisdom to answer honestly.

  Of course, he didn’t answer, which suited Aini. She pushed the torch into his hand, closed his grip, pulled his arm up. He held the flame high, so that it blazed like a small sun above them.

  “Who were you?” she asked the man. “What were you? A king? A prince? A farmer, a master of herds, a hunter? Were you clever with words and numbers? Did women long for a soft look from you? Were those hands gentle with those you loved, or cruel with the ones you possessed?”

  The man continued to walk, his face veiled by shadows.

  “No answer? I’m not offended. I’m used to being ignored. Stand, right there, and I’ll tell you a story that could have been yours, that will be yours when I’m done because who is here that can say it isn’t?”

  When he didn’t stop, Aini jumped in the man’s path and braced herself for a collision, determined to get his attention. At her touch, he stopped, and those behind and next to him bumped and jostled and stumbled to a halt in a cascade that spread in a rustling wave through the darkness surrounding her.

  Aini looked into the blankness of the gathered faces, startled by the impact of a simple touch. She pulled out a few bodies from the growing mass, dragged them to stand with the tall man under the light. “Don’t be shy,” she said, giddy from ideas rushing like strong wine through her head. “I won’t just tell you a story. You’ll be the story. I’ll teach you. You can do things; I know you can. That’s why people buy you. But this won’t be like any of that. It’ll be like nothing you’ve ever done, at least not since you’ve joined the Caravan. It’ll be like when you were alive, when you were little. Pretending is all it is. Being something different, something more than what you are. Just for a little while. You there,” she said, spotting a boy with a broken neck, and a girl in a torn shift whose swollen eyes made Aini’s heart ache, “I know you both still know how to play.”

  The dead piled up behind her line of players. A camel moaned, something crashed. A crackling like bones straining under too much weight filled the air, along with the thickening stench of death. She pushed away the distractions, giving herself to the work of telling a tale.

  “It’s only a game,” she told the dead. “You remember games? You must. You will. There’s a story, the Silent Princess, with parts for all of you. You,” she told the tall African, “can be the pasha’s son, cursed to fall in love with a silent princess. And you,” she said, to the girl with the swollen eyes, “will be the perfect silent princess. And back there, you,” she said, pointing to an old man in rags, “there’s a part for an old steward, and you,” she said, to the young broken-necked boy, “can be the nightingale, who’ll be very busy telling tales to the princess. Oh, and we’ll need a slave, and a candlestick, and a mountain of bones and mourners, and many failed suitors, and if you really want to play, some of you can be veils that will need to fall away at the end so the princess can marry her prince. And I’m sure we’ll need other parts played, because I’m sure I’ll make that princess do more than just sit around listening to stories and waiting for her prince.

  “Now, one thing I need to know. Can any of you talk?” Aini put hands to hips and pee
red into the faces of her characters, waiting for them to make a sound.

  “Well, for now, I’ll teach you to speak with these,” she said, holding up her hands. “And later, we’ll see how well you dance, and then you’ll be able to play your parts without ever needing to speak a word. We’ll go out to the djinn. They liked that kind of thing when I did it for them. I’m sure they’ll love your performance.”

  She took the torch from the tall African, gave it to another man, shorter but wider, with hardly any neck. He couldn’t hold it up as high, but the closer light suited her need to teach them the hand gestures she needed them to repeat on cue.

  She started with her story’s prince, and was surprised by how quickly he learned to move his arms, turn wrists and curl fingers, so that he could phrase his intent and feeling with a single motion. She was tempted to try teaching him a few steps, but the pressure of the dead gathering made her move on to her princess, nightingale, and steward, until she had enough for the beginning lines of a scene.

  “Watch my hands for your sign,” she told them, “and think of the stars as your audience. Tell your story to them, so they can feel like they’re a part of the world we make in our story.”

  With the dead pressing in from all sides, she began the tale with the Prince arriving at the palace of the Silent Princess and had the nightingale hide behind the candlestick. She had the Prince converse with the nightingale rather than the Princess, and began the first of nightingale’s tales about a king sending out three of his daughter’s suitors to find to learn something that would prove one of them worthy of the princess.

  Her troupe performed better than shadow puppets or marionettes, but not as well as most actors she’d seen as a child, in the old country or in missions. She held back from correcting a gesture, repositioning an actor, motioning for a move or a change in an expression. She ached for them to dance just a few steps, to bring a sense of life and motion to the story.

  But the circle of dead around them watched, drawn to their own kind doing more than walking endlessly through a desert hell. In the edges of the light’s circle, a few raised their arms and twitching fingers, imitating the silent expressions of their brothers and sisters.