Tea in the Sahara
The caravan slithered through the dune noiselessly. Only the whistling of the winds and the shuffling of the sand beneath tired feet and tired hooves could be heard. Men and their beasts were silenced by thirst, a thirst that gnawed at their innards, eating its way up from the gut, devouring the throat and exploding on their salivating mouths in wave after wave of painful desire. None could think about anything other than water. As they died of thirst, their minds drowned in water.
Their pain, overwhelming as it was, had a benefit they couldn’t suspect. For if they weren’t writhing in agony, their minds consumed in the herculean task of finding and slurping the smallest drop of moisture on their lips, they might have been held in the cruel grip of an altogether different kind of pain.
The pain that comes from having seen your kin consumed by the dune, charred by the sun and transformed into precocious mummies by dehydration. Half the caravan, almost fifty men, women and, mostly, children, devoured by the desert. The living should have been thankful the thirst kept those thoughts at bay.
It was the third night of their agony, the third night since the last reserves had been exhausted, and all hope was lost. As they laid down on their hastily assembled tents, some found the strength to feebly curse Aisha the Trickster, who hid the city from them, and whose mocking laugh they heard in the wind. Most just let themselves fall limp into the cooling sand, many never to get up again.
Jalal could not sleep. His body conspired against him, staging a futile but violent rebellion against the coming death. His head throbbed, his fingers spasmed uncontrollably, his stomach convulsed. He found himself outside his tent with no idea how he had gotten out and no strength to crawl back in again.
What a sad way to die, he thought, looking at the sky. Even from beneath his veil of suffering, he could make out the stars. So many of them, all shimmering in unison to illuminate his demise. When he was a child, the Man from Beyond had told his mother “He will touch them.” and pointed at the bright star that always showed the north. His mother had laughed “Shoo, get out rat catcher. Get out or I’ll turn you into rat food, you beggar.” And the Man from Beyond had gone. But inside Jalal, the dream had been seeded.
That was why he had joined the caravan, heading north with almost a hundred more of his city, abandoning family, wife and a prospering business in cattle trading to head East, to the Green Lair where the Monks dreamt and laboured to reach the same goal as he. He had always known he would never return from this pilgrimage, and what saddened him most was the realization the Man of Beyond had been wrong. He could gaze, but he would never touch.
He closed his eyes, felt his body surrender to the inevitable, and slowly began to depart from the world. First his feet, in a moment there they were, in the next gone. Then legs, crotch, belly. He was less than half a man when a drop hit his lips. A tiny, minuscule droplet, but it was the most wonderful droplet anyone ever tasted. It jolted him awake, his body spasmed in delight, and as more drops fell and a trickle turned to a river, streaming into his agape mouth, he began spasming uncontrollably. Waves of senseless pleasure rammed through his body. He could feel his every nerve, every fiber of his body was being pierced by the most magnificent delight. He watched, in his mind’s eye, as his whole body spasmed in a dry but sublime orgasm, his hands tore at his clothes until he was naked, and when the pleasure finally subsided, there was no more thirst, no more pain, no more pleasure, no more feeling. Just an empty joy that contained everything he could ever want.
He opened his eyes and looked around. He was exactly where he had been before, next to his ragged tent, but there was no caravan, no caravaners, no animals, nothing. Just the vast desert stretching out all around. And above him the stars.
The realization of his solitude did not bother him at all. In fact, the first thought that came into his mind was that he had never been able to fully contemplate how wonderful being alone was.
Jalal was still marvelling at his predicament when the sun began to peer above the horizon, waking him from his trance. He tried to get up, but realized he had sunk until his legs were fully submerged in the sand. In fact, he could no longer swear he still had legs and wondered whether there were no legs anymore and it was all just sand below his waist.
He felt a soft hand on his bare shoulder.
“Would you give us the honour of joining us for tea?” Someone said.
He turned round and stared at the most numinous woman he had ever seen in his life. Her hair was like mist softly perched upon her shoulders, her eyes were two gleaming oases, and her scent seemed to him to be the scent of the stars themselves.
“My sisters and I would be most delighted by your company.” She said, smiling. Her voice sounded like sand rolling under water. Her smile had a curve as beautiful as the crescent moon.
He tried to voice his agreement, but the only sound that escaped his lips was a muffled gargle. In other circumstances he would have panicked at his sudden mutism. Now, he found it no longer mattered. He nodded sheepishly.
A snap of fingers, a gust of sandy wind, and he was no longer trapped in the sands, but dangling from a palm tree by his waist, his legs occult (or inexistent?) amid the branches. Sitting cross legged on the lake’s shore were the woman and her two sisters. Identical as drops of water, except for the left hand missing on the one sat on the right, and the right hand missing from the one on the left.
The left sister smiled sweetly at him. She dipped her one gold-tinged hand into the sand and took out a teapot, beautifully decorated with motives of dragon-like creatures in white and blue. The teapot gleamed alluringly in the midday sun, promising beverage to the desert dweller. Not one speck of dirt or mark of use could be discerned in its surface.
The left sister passed the teapot to the right sister, who bowed her head slightly upon receiving it. She then sat up in one fluid movement and approached the water, walking, it seemed to Jalal, centimetres above the sand. She reached the shore, carefully sat on her knees and filled the teapot, creating an expanding galaxy of delicate ripples on the oasis.
She passed the filled teapot to the middle sister, who accepted it with a minuscule bow. She looked up to Jalal with a serene smile but eager eyes. “Would you join us for tea?” Her lips did not move yet he heard the question reverberating inside his head. He nodded. She held up her hand.
The palm tree grew, its branches shot like a tentacled mass above the water and, when they stopped, he had crossed the oasis and was holding her hand in his and staring into the teapot. He could feel the two other sisters moving to sit at his side, so that the four of them were arranged into a circle, with the teapot in the middle. He looked at their reflections on the water and saw a harmonious whole in the reflection. He felt a great peace in that fleeting moment.
When Jalal returned his gaze to the middle sister it occurred to him suddenly that the oases of her eyes were devoid of life. She was blind he mused, and wondered how he could have missed it.
“We all gave something for them, Jalal.” She whispered “And more must yet be freely given. Look into the teapot.”
He did as he was asked, and he saw it clearly. The whole galaxy, a sea of stars, an ocean of worlds, were reflected across the water’s surface. In the teapot, he glimpsed the cosmic shore and was gripped by a powerful sense of longing and desire, more intense than he had felt for any lover, brother, mother, or God. He knew then he would also have to make his sacrifice to reach them, and he knew it would be the most joyous moment of his life to be able to give in service of such a wonderful pursuit.
“My sister gave her hand and her voice, my sister gave her hand and her soul, I gave my sight and my heart, you will have to give your legs and your will. Only then will we be able to find the Redeemer. Only then will we be free and touch the heavens.”
“I will give whatever it is you desire.” He said, smiling. He began scratching the branch from which he was suspended, until a few voluptuous drops of sap plunged into the teapot. He heard a fizzling hiss and saw the sand beneath the teapot redden and vapour rise from the swampy mixture they had made.
The vapour dispersed, the middle sister took five cups from under the dune and gave one to each of them, putting the superfluous cup to the side. “Drink.” They said and heard in unison. The tea was distributed by agile hands and burned dry lips and numb tongues. Then, each of them began to change. Jalal was the first, smiling contentedly as his body became woody and sweet. A soft laughter escaped his body just before his eyes became two supple brown dates. The left sister fell slowly into the teapot, shattering herself and the pot into a million little pieces of porcelain when she touched it. The right sister caught a gust of wind and was dispersed through the whole dune, a hundred million perfectly identical grains of sand forever scattered.
Only the middle sister remained. With a grimace of pain, she stood up and walked to the shore of the oasis. She undressed, revealing a skin worn and battered like a papyrus. She turned her head to the sun one last time and sighed. Then, in one swift motion, she jumped into the oasis. The ripples spread rapidly, mixing her with the warm water until only a few buoyant strands of hair remained, peacefully drifting with no set course.
The day passed and the night fell. The whirling sand covered every trace of the four humans except for the leftover cup.
When Sirius appeared in the night sky, that cup too shattered. In that very moment, a figure emerged from the sands beneath it, climbing out with visible effort. It had the silhouette of a human, but one could not tell if it was man or woman, for its head was thoroughly bandaged like a leper, leaving uncovered only a single moist blue eye, and its body hidden with a tattered red daara. It had no hands, and a pronounced limp became apparent as it struggled to find it’s balance above the sands.
The leper coughed and wheezed. Then it looked up, at Sirius, blinked once, and set out to the west.
In it’s mind only one wish prevailed.
Find the Redeemer, reach the stars.
Image by François Schuiten for Les Cités obscures.
New story, pure narrative, stellaris is the end point, not the beguinning. Very infrequent updates. Comments and feedback on everything appreciated. Will be weird.
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