In the Country of Dreaming Caravans

by Gerard Houarner

  The scene ended, but her principle players continued to gesture. They raised their arms higher to the stars as if speaking to the constellations, asking for the secrets hidden in the stars’ glittering array to be revealed. Their need was patient, stubborn, unyielding, as if they were at the start of a long journey to find a thing they’d lost. Life, Aini thought, or death. A way to understand what had happened to them, where they were, what could come next. Purpose.

  Aini understood. She found their persistence moving, a sign of story’s impact, for both tellers and audiences. Pride stirred in the melding of reality and imagination. And in the consideration of similarities between her life and the existence of the dead, she discovered the fragile traces of bonds that made her want to hold the broken-necked boy who’d been her nightingale, the silent princess of a girl in the torn shift.

  A cold knot tightened in her belly, giving her a moment of what it felt like to belong to the Caravan of the Dead. Light faded, darkness thickened, as the silent, barren infinity of the story of the dead emerged, the first shoots of new growth in a world of reality and imagination.

  Her heart raced. Hands, feet and spine turned to ice as she felt herself giving birth to nothingness, with starless night as prince to her love and father to her child.

  With a shake of her head, she tried ripping free of the trap of falling into a tale to which she’d given birth. Dreams entangled her, filled her eyes. She braced for Al-Azrad’s cold touch, Dejjal’s stinging laughter, hoping the trick was theirs and not her own. But the Caravan, preoccupied with djinn, left her to their dead.

  She took a deep breath, taking in the smell of camel shit and half-mummified, half- decaying flesh. The lonely glow of torches sharpened as she focused on bringing them closer. Their light cut through dream. The waking world made her eyes itch.

  With another breath, she shook her head, clearing away illusions. For a change, she welcomed the critic’s voice that rose like the sun over the desert, exposing every flaw.

  For all its raw, mechanical delivery, the story and performance had achieved more than she’d expected. Her players had told a piece of a story, and done what every storyteller hoped to do: make others listen. Their fellows in death had heard and taken notice. Not all the ghosts and spirits of her youth, obsessed with their own tragedies, ever did the same.

  With practice, they would get better. She could see a story going on for days, weeks, unfolding endlessly.

  Voices barked, screamed, grumbled from further out in the desert. More torches burst into ragged, raging life. Creaking and clicking, like old, leathery flesh and bones straining under the pressure of being pressed together, rippled back and forth across the dark of the surrounding countryside. Camels moaned, bellowed, rumbled. A few bleated, as if in high-pitched protest, against a collapse of the Caravan’s ordered lines and its relentless progress across wasteland.

  “That wasn’t bad,” Aini said, taking the light back. “We need to rehearse. It takes time to learn the timing, become more flexible, improvise. I change the story depending on how I feel, how things are going, so you always have to be ready to follow my lead.

  “But we’ll do this again, and again, and it’ll be fun. Something to do while you’re walking, or when we camp and the caravan men need entertaining. I know it sounds like work, but you have to trust me, it’ll be better than anything that happens to you afterwards, when you’re sold.”

  Aini stopped, the last word she uttered ringing in her head. She looked to the boy nightingale. Death, and the implausible angle of his head as he peered at the stars through intertwined fingers, made him seem more innocent than he might have been alive. The tall African, slowly forming the shapes she’d taught him with stiff fingers, stared at his reluctant flesh without a hint of frustration crossing his impassive face. The girl’s eyes together might have made a full moon in the sky; even if they’d been ripped out she would not have appeared more vulnerable.

  Others beyond her players raised their hands, looked to the stars, even as a surging mass of bodies pushed them out of the torchlight. The signing passed on to newcomers, as if the few precious motions were symptoms of a plague transmitted by the slightest exposure.

  The spreading gestures were more than the echoes of a story, Aini realized. The need to question, to seek meaning, was resonating through the language of the story she’d taught the dead. Hungers still burning somewhere in their cold flesh had found release. The needs haunting spirits bound to corpses had found a voice. In their silent way, the dead were using what they understood to cry out from the depths of secret hearts no different than those that drove caravan leaders and all who followed them far beyond the sands of the known world.

  She looked to the torch flame whipping in the gusting breeze, so small and delicate against the night, and saw herself, the dead, the ghosts and spirits and wandering souls of the desert, all desperate to be seen, to be heard, to belong. That was the real bond that brought them all together.

  It’ll be better than anything that happens to you afterwards, when you’re sold.

  Pain cut through Aini like a river of thorns as what she’d said echoed in the parts and places she’d forgotten were empty. She felt as if she’d died, quietly, silently, sometime during her last sleep, and slipped unknowingly beneath sand and stone, into the company of the Caravan of the Dead. Cold turned to nausea, pooled like an oil bubble trapped between gut and heart, searching for release from the pressure of flesh and emotion.

  This wasn’t a trap of entangled dream and reality.

  She’d treated the dead like Mafufunyana and Bomaye had, like common trade goods brought to market and dressed up for display. She’d treated them as Al-Azrad planned to, as tools for transforming a world. Instead of djinn and whatever other powers Al-Azrad had harnessed for his apocalypse, Aini had used a story to destroy the Caravan’s spell of enslavement, if only for a few moments. She’d turned them into puppets, but their grasping for answers from stars had cut the strings tying them to her.

  She’d lost herself in telling tales for the sake of the telling, instead of searching for what the story meant, what even the act of telling a story might mean, for her players or her audience. She’d forgotten lessons she’d learned as a child trying to capture the attention of adults. Her flesh ached from the memory of stones and slaps.

  She’d used the dead to bring life to the world in her imagination, as Al-Azrad intended in his own vision. But neither her story nor the Caravan’s apocalyptic future had anything to do with who the dead had really been in life, or what they were supposed to be, dragged back to a semblance of life in this strange country between life and death.

  She sobbed as the cold cutting through her lay bare her betrayal of the dead. The river of thorns dissolved into a pain that ripped flesh, stopping breath and heart, closed throat and eyes.

  Aini dropped to her knees while flesh numbed and a terrible, vast silence burst from the broken ground on which she’d built herself, and spread further than the stars to surround her in soundless darkness. She died for an instant without bounds, becoming another lost soul chained to ruined flesh.

  Time and the world fell away. Bonds to the living and the dead dissolved. A haze thickened around Aini, holding her still in the moment of recognition that she was lost.

  She cried out, but silence swallowed her voice. Its embrace tightened, smothering her, until it seemed as if tiny bursts of light were flashing in the darkness, like signals from her spirit that it was being extinguished.

  The pattern of lights drew her attention. She felt herself moving, swaying to their rhythmic flashes. She needed more, but what held her seemed immoveable.

  Relaxing, melting into the silence and the darkness, Aini gave herself a sliver of freedom. In that space, where not even the memory of sound could live, she imagined hearing the noise made by her dying soul.

  In what was left of her, the sight and sound of her death joined, and she became a dance, a song. She laughed with joy in a sm
all creation, and though her joy stayed silent, it spilled from her and into the silence, across the darkness.

  Lights grew brighter. The silence strained like a sail trying to hold the wind.

  Darkness cracked, revealing light, and in that light Aini saw bits and pieces of a story: a little girl among tall, grey structures of stone, glass and metal, dodging speeding carts, calling out for mommy, daddy in a crowd of faceless bodies.

  She called out to the girl, but the story moved on, coming to a desert, traveling on a caravan, then many caravans, then one again that went on and on across the sand and through the years heading for a horizon she could almost see, until the tale was too big to be told by the play of light and dark.

  Silence crumbled, unable to hold back life desperate to escape the boundaries of story. Aini heard her first breath, then her own cry. The haze broke, slipped away like the darkness while more stories burst from the lights and rushed to fill the emptiness.

  Through the tatters of silence, voices answered Aini’s breath and her cry, propelling scenes from countless tales into the space waiting and eager to accept them, until the din of stories filled her head, and words sparked images that became too bright to bear, and the heat of creation and the chill of terror made flesh she’d forgotten feel alive once more.

  Too much, she wanted to shout, but instead she screamed.

  Raw and stark, her voice swept through the noise, gathering sounds and sights, harvesting a universe of tales that filled her to overflowing. Something inside her turned and twisted like a viper writhing to escape a spear.

  She slipped, the burden too much to carry. Fell, a long way through the shattered darkness, the viper dancing inside, then trailing out of her, curling across the sky. She felt the moment receding, awareness disintegrating, night and with it the memory of a caravan in the desert racing for a horizon she could almost see.

  Through the birth of stars, she fell, as they followed night to clothe darkness with the glitter of lies, the shadows of truths. She fell until she landed in the soft embrace of sand and dreams, of the living and the dead, of all the stories that had been told and all the tales that were yet to be.

  Aini woke to sand and rocks under her feet, torches flaring, a comforting stench that was part death and part camel mixed with smoke and the stink of cesspools and old, dried, tainted blood.

  The ground trembled from the uncertain staggering of the dead. Voices rose in alarm from the background rustle that sounded like an enormous rug being unraveled. A familiar roaring swept in, fell back, grumbled in the background. Fires burned, feeding on flesh and goods, throwing flickering blades of flame up into the sky and spilling panicked shadows. Camels screeched.

  The powerful man with no neck held her up under her left arm while holding the torch in his right. A younger man, thin, his chest pierced cleanly through, his beardless face soft and rounded, lips full and nearly smiling, held her up from the right.

  Aini breathed deep, fighting off dream to hang on to what was real. She wanted to scream as she’d done in creation’s heart, but swallowed her terror. She needed to understand the threads of the unfolding story to find an ending she’d survive, the only Paradise the land had to offer.

  She held on to her dead men, searching for inspiration in their presence at her side. Nearby, she spotted the tall African, and around him, the rest of her company of players and a few stragglers from her audience still signing to fading stars. She called to them, but they didn’t notice.

  The sun broke over the horizon, shedding first light on djinn dancing on the edges of a spreading stain of death on the desert. Torch light paled, fires shrank. Aini held the breath she’d taken as the waking world emerged from night.

  Djinn towered over the Caravan flanks, flinging the dead and camels that had wandered off without a lead. Spilled cargo lay everywhere. Ghuls slid through the chaos, herding their food and only rarely breaking down to snap off a chunk of flesh.

  Bomaye’s voice rose above the shouting, then Al-Lahu’s, as both rode camels hard through the crowd, followed by Mafufunyana, shoving bodies back into lines. Dozens of voices answered, servants to convey what they’d seen and done, eager for instructions.

  Aini slipped out of her torch bearer’s grip, grabbed the tall African and gathered the other players as well as any of the dead still signing to the sky. She kept the youngest near, not sure what she’d do with them all, knowing only that, even in death, they were the closest to whatever it was she might be.

  With djinn testing their bindings, supplies littering the desert floor and camels unattended, an opportunity was taking shape. But before she could drag all her thoughts into the moment’s reality, familiar voices froze her.

  “Are you mad?” Houssin screamed nearby.

  “Too soon,” Sifr said, from behind. “It’s not time to ignite the apocalypse.”

  The caravaners came into sharp focus for Aini, stark against the dead, apart from the rest of the world, disconnected. They reminded her of ghosts. Aini backed away, broke for her torch bearer.

  “Do you want to wake the dead?” Dejjal asked, moving beside her.

  “I thought that’s what you wanted,” Aini said. “I thought you were ready.”

  She ran back to the torch bearer. Dejjal followed, Houssin circled while talking to himself and gesticulating as if deliberately drawing attention to himself. Sifr remained with the tall African, distracted by the dead man’s gesturing.

  Aini snatched the torch, waved the fire. Dejjal took a step back.

  Djinn panicked servants with their laughter.

  Dejjal took another step back, blinking at the torch flame. Scarabs and snakes teemed at his collar and sleeves. “I think we are ready for something very different,” he said, like an angry merchant catching a thief practicing his trade.

  “This was never a part of the equation,” Sifr said, covering the tall African’s signing hands with his own. Dead fingers still moved in Sifr’s hold. Sifr quickly pulled his hands away and stared at them as if they’d been corrupted.

  “You poisoned them with your stories,” Houssin cried out, turning to Aini, closing in, eyes wide open but blind to everything except Aini.

  “Aren’t your stories strong enough to cure them?” she said, and shoved the flames at him.

  Houssin cried out, stumbled to a stop while shielding his face. Scorpions danced on his hands.

  “Death is coming,” Abd Al-Azrad shouted from atop a camel pushing through the dead. “Do you feel its cold breath?”

  “Do you?” Aini yelled back at him. She pulled the torch back, looked to the young man with the pierced chest.

  “Always,” Al-Azrad said, reining in the camel before the animal knocked her down. He scowled as he urged the camel away from the fire.

  Aini pushed the young man and her torch bearer toward the others, walked behind them. “What about life?”

  “Every dish requires seasoning,” Dejjal said.

  “You’ll need more than za’atar to make a new world,” Aini said. “Houssin only repeats what he was taught and takes what little life there was in that. Your Caravan’s new land will be an even deeper grave than the one you left behind.

  “But a story from the living woke the dead,” she continued. “It made them need, gave them a voice. They’re not tools.”

  “We need tools,” Dejjal said. “To build our world.”

  “The dead don’t have stories,” Al-Azrad said. “They’ll never be alive. You’re not that One.”

  “They won’t be dead and gone forever,” she answered. “You’re not that One, either.”

  “You belong with us,” Dejjal said. “You’re a Queen of liars.”

  “Your stories are foolish,” Houssin shouted. “Ridiculous. Absurd. The rantings of a mad woman.”

  “Dejjal is right,” al- Azrad said. “You’re a liar. I’ve heard your stories. The great Bahamut has no bladders inside to keep it afloat.”

  “How do you know?” Aini asked.


  “Because I killed it.”

  “Then hail to the new King of Liars,” Aini said, reaching her performers and audience.

  “Dejjal is also right about you being with us,” Al-Azrad continued.

  “No,” Houssin screamed.

  “She upsets the balance of our equations,” Sifr said.

  “She’s our property,” Dejjal said, “like our camels and our dead and the trade we carry.”

  From far-off, Al-Lahu shouted, “The djinn!”

  “I don’t belong to anyone. Or anything. I’m the wind that touches everything, but can’t be contained. I’m another grain of sand blown across the desert.” Aini stumbled into the crowd that had gathered around her players. A handful of servants had joined the gathering, looking to her torch. The little girl from her first night in the Caravan waved to her. The rest from Aini’s train were not with her.

  “Wind and sand don’t lie,” Dejjal said. “They just annoy.”

  “My lies live because their hearts are true,” Aini said. “Your lies are dead all the way through.”

  “Bring your lies and your heart of truth to us,” Al-Azrad said. “You know there’s no greater truth than death.”

  Aini held the torch higher. “I’m not afraid to tell death’s stories. But I also tell the ones from life. There’s nothing you have that can bring me to you. You have nothing I want, and what I see and sell, you can’t use. We have no business with each other.”

  “You defy us,” Al-Azrad said, thundering above the djinn.

  “I’m trying to help you,” she said, at the same time hearing her own words as if someone else had spoken them and thinking she’d lost herself in one of her stories, again.

  She felt the truth in the lie she’d just told. She meant no harm in having her way. She even caught a visionary glimpse of the rightful place the Caravan of the Dead held in this country filled with dreaming caravans, and understood she had no right to interfere any more than stopping a cheetah from running down a young antelope, or a crocodile from snapping up an aging water buffalo.