After all the tales were told and forgotten, the only thing that mattered was the little caravan, its beasts and people, and the desert that held them in its dry and dusty palm.
Aini led them first into the west, away from the Caravan of the Dead. But the camels turned south, and Aini let them lead, trusting their instinct to guide them between sunrise and sunset to what was needed.
And to Aini’s surprise, the sun stayed over them, less a fire burning on their backs and more of a beacon lighting the way to the oasis the camels found after what seemed like days of travel.
Under the palms, night caught up to them, and the last haze of storm on the horizon, the faintest trace of death and magic and wonders, finally faded. The camels grazed, the living fed on date palm and figs, and the dead stared at their reflections in the still water by moonlight. Nightingales singing to the stars coming out made Aini laugh.
In the night’s quiet, she sat, watched and waited. Ghuls appeared on the horizon. They yipped and cackled, but did not come down to the water and left when their voices began to crack.
Her parents never appeared, and so she knew she’d found the desert’s secret heart before they had.
Before morning, when the living were deep in sleep and the dead were arrayed across the sandy landscape, signing to the stars, Aini rose from her sleep and found a place where she was alone. She knelt, and bowed deeply as worshippers sometimes did, picking the direction from which they’d come, the spot on the horizon where the she’d seen the last trace of the Caravan of the Dead.
She whispered a prayer that was only one line, an answer to Sifr to soothe the wounds her coming to and going from the Caravan might have caused. “As you calculated, I was not there for long,” she said. She hoped the words reached him, and gave him and his brothers comfort.
In the morning, the children played and the dead gathered in the deepest shade, each staring in a different direction as if waiting for someone to come. While the servants huddled by the pool lost in their discussions, Aini gathered her company of players and a few more of the dead and cleaned the camels. The little servant girl hurried to her side and Aini had her take stock of goods and supplies.
Pots were found, food and tea prepared, and in the comfort of the evening meal the little girl came to her bearing a message from the servants.
“They elected you to be the caravan master,” she said. And after a moment’s hesitation, she added, “I can be your faithful accountant, weighing the scales and counting the bundles. If you give me a dagger and teach me the dance, I can protect you from thieves. And I don’t have any friends back there,” she said, cocking her head back at the servants, “so you never have to worry about me betraying you.”
Aini sat for a long moment, measuring the caravan’s weight against her life’s, comparing past to future, imagining what stories might be told by her, and about her.
Better to trade than to be the trade, the Caravan of the Dead had taught her.
There was nothing else for her to do. She’d been given a caravan from her secret heart, of lost souls and untold tales. They belonged to her, and she did to them. She laughed and held the little girl’s face in her hands, kissed her on the forehead. “Come, let’s see what the pot has for us,” she said, and joined the rest for dinner.
Later in the night, Aini looked to the stars, forgetting the constellations Ajouz had taught her, and remembered the ones she’d made in the telling of her stories. She remembered, as well, Kayden’s trick of finding home, which was never the way he’d come. She found a direction, and the next day led the small caravan into the emptiness, beneath the invisible Al-Sitar, on the path to the paradise of her making. They walked between sunrise and sunset, never running to or from day or night, but letting the days pass over them like a caress from Allat’s hand to her children.
And when Aini told the story of her adventures, she made only a few small changes. The old man Ajouz was always her father, the First Wife, her mother, and the caravan men who’d traded her, wayward brothers. Rief and her true parents never objected. Kayden became a handsome young man with a mustache instead of a tail, and the prince who’d spurned her, a King who’d taken her into his harem. For the handsome master thief, she made a special place in her heart as a prisoner she’d rescued from his evil brother on the moon. She made it known through a long and complicated tale that he made her the instrument of vengeance against that brother, even though she hadn’t really meant any harm.
If anyone asked whatever happened to him, she always said he’d left her for a djinna.
Her audiences never discovered her players were dead, but she made sure to tell the story of the Caravan of the Dead as true as she remembered it. The little girl made sure that everyone who stayed to the end of any telling paid what they could afford for their pleasure. For the sake of the dead, and her secret pleasure, payment in scented oils was always welcomed.
Aini never joined a storytellers’ caravan, but invited many who needed to join one into hers. She met all the other caravans, great and small, that passed through the deserts, but never saw the Caravan of the Dead again, and knew of them only by what the stars told her, which was always that they had just left.
In this, Aini believed the stars told a truth.
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Gerard Houarner works by day as what could be described in Layman’s Terms as Arkham’s Recreation and Recovery Director. He’s had over 280 horror, fantasy, and science fiction stories published in the last 40 years, with some assembled in 6 collections, and 67 receiving Honorable Mentions in various St. Martin’s Press/Night Shade Year’s Best anthologies. He’s also had five novels published by both the small and commercial press. His latest, the The Sting of Wonder, The Seed of Faith will be available soon. He has served as Fiction Editor for Space and Time magazine since 1998. At night, he continues to write, mostly about the dark.
Website: http://www.cith.org/gerard
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/gerard.houarner
In the Country of Dreaming Caravans Page 14
