Tales of Wonder (23 page)

Lateef sat back on his heels and matched his breathing to the foal's. Then, tentatively, he reached over and touched one wing. It looked like a crumpled veil, silken soft and slightly slippery to the touch. Yet it was tougher than it looked. Lateef was reminded suddenly of the dancing women he had glimpsed going in and out of the sheik's tent. They had that same soft toughness about them.

He touched the wing again. Then, holding it by the thin rib with one hand, he stretched it out as far as it would go. The wing unfolded like a leaf, and Lateef could see the dark brown veins running through it and feel the tiny knobs of bone. The foal gave a sudden soft grunt and, at the same moment, Lateef felt the wing contract. He let it go, and it snapped shut with a soft swishing sound.

“So,” he said to the foal, “you
can
move the wing. You can shut it even if you cannot open it. That is good. But now I wonder: will you ever fly? Perhaps
that
is Allah's real test.”

He stood up and looked around. All was sand. There was no difference between what was behind him and what was before. Yet he was a boy of the desert. He knew how to find directions from the traveling sun. Akbir lay to the north.

“Come, winged one,” he said, bending down to lift the foal to his shoulders again. “Come, little brother. There is no way for us but north.”

The foal made no noise as Lateef set out again. And except for Lateef's own breathing, the desert was silent. It drank up all sound. So, with the sand below, the sky above, and only the wind-sculpted dunes to break the unending horizon, Lateef walked on. He felt that he labored across a painted picture, so still was the land.

Then suddenly, rising up from the place where sand and sky meet, Lateef saw a great watery shape. First it was a beast, then a towered city, then an oasis surrounded by trees. The changes were slow, one image running into the next as a river is absorbed into the sea. Something in Lateef leaped with the sight, and for a moment he let himself cry out in hope. But as the tears filled his eyes, Lateef reminded himself: “It is not a beast, not an oasis, not Akbir. It is only a mirage. Sun on the brain and sand in the eye.” He spoke over his shoulder to the foal. “And I wonder what it is
you
see there, little brother.” Then, closing his eyes and heart to the mocking vision, he trudged on, over the wind-scoured ripples, the changing, changeless designs on the desert floor.

When night came, he walked many miles farther under the light of the indifferent stars. Finally exhausted, he set his burden down and slept. But his sleep was fitful and full of dreams. He dreamed of sand, of sun, of stars. But he never once dreamed of the little horse that had curled against his chest, confident of the coming day.

The City

Before dawn, before the sun could once more coax the shadow beasts and cloud cities to rise, Lateef set out again. He let the foal suck on the bottle and allowed himself a few sips as well. He dared not think about the coming heat or that his left foot had a cramp in it, or that his shoulders ached from the burdensome foal, or that his heart could not stop trembling with fear. He refused to let himself think about those things. Instead he thought about Akbir.

Akbir
. His great-grandmother had been from Akbir. The daughter of a kitchenmaid, without a father to claim her, she had been sold into slavery. To the father of the father of Lateef's master, the sheik. Lateef understood well that being the son of so many generations of slaves made him a person worth nothing. Less than nothing. Yet he dared to hope that, in Akbir, the home of his ancestors, he might change his position. With the foal as his touchstone, might he not even become a free man? A trainer of horses? An owner of stables?

He closed his eyes against the rising fantasy. Best, he cautioned himself, to think of only one thing at a time. Allah's jest or Allah's test. After all, he had no real idea what he would be able to do when he reached the pebbled streets, the mosaic mosques, the towered palaces of Akbir.

Walking forward quickly, his mind on the desert and not on his dreams, Lateef continued on. Even when he passed some horsemen at last and a caravan that jangled across his path for hours, he did not permit himself to dream. And in all that time, he spoke to no one other than the foal with whom he shared the wineskin.

But Lateef was not fooled into thinking that they had managed to come so far without the help of some unacknowledged miracle. After all, though he was an orphan, the great-grandson of a city dweller, he had been reared in the desert. His people had seventeen different words for sand, and not one of them was a compliment. He well knew that a solitary traveler could not hope to walk across the desert under the sun's unrelenting eye without more to stave off thirst than a single flask of mare's milk. And yet they had done so, the boy and the foal, and were alive as they finally stumbled onto one of the dirt-packed back streets of Akbir. Still, as if afraid of giving tongue to the word “miracle”—as if speech might unmake it—Lateef remained silent. He set the foal down and then, as it stood testing its wobbly legs against the ground, Lateef bowed down and kissed the road at the foal's feet.

The foal took a few steps down a road that led off to one side. Then it turned its head toward Lateef and whickered.

“
Aiee
, brother. That road it shall be,” Lateef said. He caught up with the foal easily and gave it the last of the milk. Then he stroked its velvety nose and lifted it for one last ride upon his back.

Surprisingly there was no one in the street, nor in the roadways they crossed, nor in the souk, the marketplace, where stalls and stands carried handwork, and foodstuffs enough to feed a multitude. Puzzling at this, Lateef explored further, passing from dirt roads to pebbled streets, from pebbled streets to roadways studded with colorful patterned stones.

The foal nuzzled his ear, and at that moment Lateef heard a strange moaning. He turned and followed the sound until he came to a line of high walls. Standing in front of the walls were hundreds of people.

Women, dressed in black mourning robes, cried out and poured sand upon their heads. Men in black pants and ragged shirts wailed and tore at their own beards. Even the children, in their best clothes, rolled over and over in the roadway, sobbing. And the name that he heard on every lip was “Al-Mansur. Al-Mansur.”

Lateef was amazed. He had never seen such extravagant grief. The dwellers of the desert, with whom he had lived all his life, were proud of their ability to endure tragedy and pain. Water, they said, was too precious to be wasted in tears. Their faces never showed hurt. That was why Lateef, who cried at another's pain and could not disguise his griefs, had been called “tender one” and despised by all.

As Lateef watched the wailing men and women and children, he felt tears start down his own cheeks. Embarrassed, he went over to one young mourner who was rolling in the street and stopped him gently with his foot.

“Tell me, city brother,” said Lateef, “for whom do we weep?”

The boy looked up. “Oh, boy with horse shawl,” he began, “we cry because our great king of kings, the caliph Al-Mansur, is dying for want of a strange horse, a horse that he has seen only in his dreams. And though the caliph is a man of mighty dreams, he has always before been able to have whatever he dreamed. Only this time he cannot. And none of our doctors—the greatest physicians in the world—can cure him. They cannot cure him, for now he dreams of his death and, as it is written, there is no remedy for death.” Then the boy fell back and pulled up some of the pebbles in the street, digging in the dirt beneath them. He covered his head with this dirt and began wailing again, this time louder than before.

“These are strange people,” thought Lateef, “the people who dwell in cities. Yet I am of their blood. My great-grandmother was a sister to theirs. Surely that is why I am such a tender one. Still,” he mused, “it is true that there is no remedy for death. I have heard that said many times in the desert. I have looked on many dead people, even in my short life, and have never known any of them to be cured.”

And thinking about the caliph's approaching death led him to think about the caliph's dream. What could a man as rich and powerful as Al-Mansur desire so much that he might die of wanting? A horse, the boy said. But surely Al-Mansur could have any horse he wanted, any horse he dreamed of, any horse in his land.

“Perhaps the horse I carry is the very horse of the caliph's dream,” Lateef said to the weeping boy.

At his words, the boy stopped his noise and looked up. “That is no horse, but a rag around your shoulders. A rag on a rag. The caliph is a great man, a giant. His dreams are big, too. He would laugh at such a jest should he see it.” The boy began to laugh, but quickly the laugh turned back into a wail and he lay down again in the dust.

Lateef stroked the nose of the foal with one hand. “You are no jest to me, little brother,” he said. Then he stepped over the wailing boy, pushed through the line of weeping people, and entered a gate in the wall.

Inside he saw the palace guards. They had taken off their great scimitars and, after laying the swords carefully on the ground, were rolling in the dirt and crying out their grief in tones even louder than the rest.

Lateef walked past them all and mounted the steps, marveling at the patterns on the stairs and walls. Behind them were the hundreds of grieving people. He wondered what lay ahead.

The Dream

Room upon room seemed to open before Lateef, and he walked through each one as if in a dream. He—who had known only the tents of his sheik, thinking them rich beyond his greatest imaginings—could not even begin to comprehend the wonders that belonged to the caliph. The sheik's desert tents now seemed but tattered remnants of an old beggar's cloak.

He followed a thread of sound, a wailing as thin and pure as a piece of spun gold. And when he found its beginning, he entered a room more splendid than any he had wandered in before.

Pearl-encrusted oil lamps sat on ebony tables. Draperies of wine-and-gold-colored silks hung on the walls. The wind of fifty fans held by fifty slaves made the shadows from the lamplight dance about the floor and over the carved faces of the wooden window screens.

In the center of the room was a mountain of pillows where a man lay, his head back and his bearded face bleached nearly as white as his robes and
dulband
. Only the red jewel of his turban had color. The ghost of his flesh hovered around his bones, for he had once been a large man, but was now shrunken with illness and age. His eyes were closed, but his lips moved in and out as he breathed. Around him were seven weeping women dressed in veils, their noses and mouths covered but their eyes eloquent with tears. Four old men, wringing their hands and making sour mouths, listened by the bed.

As Lateef came closer, he could hear the man on the pillows speaking faintly.

“In my dream,” the bearded man said, “I stood upon the brink of a river. I knew that I had to cross to the other side. But there was no boat to take me there, and the waters were too wild and cold to swim. As I stood on the bank, longing for the other side, a wind began to dance around me. It blew sand in my face. I brushed my hand across my eyes to clear them and, when I could see once more, there was a great horse standing before me. The wind came from its huge, shining wings, fanning the air. I leaped onto its back. It pumped those mighty wings once, twice. Then, with a leap, it rose into the air. I looked below, and the river was but a thin ribbon lying across a sandy vastness. I gave a great laugh, threw my hands above my head, and—laughing—fell from the horse and awoke again in my bed.”

“It is the same dream, my caliph,” said the oldest man there, a man with a long white beard as fine as several silken threads.

“Of course it is,” said the caliph. “But if I do not find that horse, I will die.” He sighed deeply, and his stomach moved up and down.

The women began to wail again, but the old men shook their heads. The oldest spoke again.

“Be reasonable, my caliph. To die for a dream?” he said.

“Is it better to die of old age? To die of a disease? I think,” said the caliph, “that to die for a dream is the noblest course of all.”

“Be reasonable, my caliph,” the old man tried again. “There is no such horse.”

“Then how did I dream it?” asked Al-Mansur. “Can a man dream what is not? What can never be? If there is no such horse, then tell me, you who are the wisest of my people, what is the meaning of my dream?” He looked up at the men.

“The river is the river of death,” said one adviser.

“Or the river of life,” said the second.

“Or the river of sleep, which runs between,” said the third.

The women cried out again.

“And the horse is your life,” said the one.

“Or your death,” said the second.

“Or it is the dream beyond, the great dream that all men and all women dream,” said the third.

The caliph sat up straight and smiled at them. “But is it not possible that the dream might come true, that such things could exist? That someday a man will ride in the sky and look down on a river and see it as thin as a ribbon?” The caliph looked pityingly at his advisers. “Can we not dream what
will
be?”

“If men were meant to fly,” said the oldest adviser, stroking his thin beard, “they would be born with feathers instead of hair. So it is written. And it is so.”

The caliph puffed out his cheeks thoughtfully. “But in the days of my father's fathers,” he said, “there were those who dared to dream of great wonders. And in time such wonders came into being in the land: the building of this palace, and of the road that now runs across the sand—these were but dreams once, and now they are real. Why do you tell me I should dream no more?”

“Wonders in one year are commonplaces in another,” replied the old man. “And memory has a faulty tongue.”