No One Talks About the Camels
“Do not play with the cats,” the Elders told her on the day she arrived at the citadel. “They are not dolls, or pets, they are not for your amusement. And do not disturb the horses. They are noble beasts, worthy of the gods, and they do not take kindly to strangers.”
So Akila did not play with the cats. She did not approach them, or try to pet them.
She didn’t go to the stables, either. She would look at them sometimes, from afar, and she could smell the stink of them. The manure in the heat was never a pleasant smell. Sometimes she could hear the noise they made, the horses and the camels with them. No one had told her to stay away from the camels, no one had needed to. Akila knew that camels were mean by nature, or possibly by design. They would kick or bite any humans they could. No one talked about the camels much anyway.
Everyone liked talking about the cats. They were long, slender beasts, with short tawny fur, large ears, and bright eyes, like the Gods that were said to have crafted them. She watched them from a great distance, across the yard or over the top of whatever book she was reading at the time.
Sometimes, the cats watched her back. They sat on the low walls around the gardens, sunning themselves and staring. They would look at her, then look at each other, and then look back at her. Akila was concerned by this. What did the cats see in her? Maybe they could see the curse. The Elders said that the cats could see many things, and that they always knew more than they let on. But the Elders had also said that it would be possible to break her curse, and they were the men to do it, if only she would come to the citadel.
That had been two years ago, when she was only thirteen years old. Three months later, Akila’s home, and the whole village of Al-Qadir had been destroyed by British shells. The British insisted they had been aiming for a Turkish military installation near her hometown, but the Turkish army had never been in that part of the desert. Akila knew that she would never return home. Her house was gone, her family was dead, and Al-Qadir destroyed. Yet the British continued to fight the Turks, and her curse continued to spread.
One morning Akila took a book into the gardens, intending to sit in the sun and read. The cats were watching her, of course. She walked around for awhile, and finally sat on the wall at the far edge of the garden. It was made of smooth stone, a few feet wide, and looked over a rocky slope that ran all the way to the desert beneath the Citadel’s high towers.
She had to hitch her skirts to scramble up, feeling very foolish as she did so. She’d never worn long skirts when she was little, but the Elders insisted that all of the skin that carried her curse be concealed. She was covered from her scalp to her ankles. There was also a veil for her face, when the time came. The curse was only on her arms and stomach for now, but it was still spreading. The Elders said that one day it would consume all of her body, then kill her.
She settled herself on the wall, her back against one of the turrets, above the desert she couldn’t wander and the citadel she couldn’t leave, and began to read. She’d thought it would be an interesting book, because it talked about all the known worlds and how to travel between them, but it was written by an old man, and it expected other old men to read it. She lowered it and stared out over the desert.
The citadel had water supplied by a great aquifer, miles beneath the wall where she sat. Its gardens were full of plants, and the cats, a lush paradise handed to the Elders as if they were destined for it.
The world beyond the walls was dry and dead, an empty expanse that reached down to ocean in one direction and away inland in every other. The desert had always been Akila’s home, so she did not fear it, but she did have respect for its enormity.
From away to her right and slightly down the hill came a series of shouts, and a loud crashing sound.
Akila stood up on her section of the wall and leaned out to get a better look. One of the stable walls had a gaping hole in it, which some men were climbing out of. They were chasing after a magnificent horse, a huge one, with a lustrous dark coat. He was running across the desert, seeming almost to soar over the sand, looking at least as godlike as the cats. Each leaping stride kicked up sand, and his human pursuit was left ever farther behind.
Akila watched, mesmerised by the flight of the stallion into the desert. There was a man in front of the horse. The man hadn’t been there a moment ago. He was wearing black clothing, but that was all she could see at the distance. The man held out a hand and the racing horse stopped almost at once, his beautiful head bent down to the man’s hand.
The men from the citadel caught up to the stallion and the man who had stopped his escape. A few minutes later they were taking him back to the stables he had recently vacated. He frisked a bit at the end of the ropes, but he allowed himself to be taken. The man in black followed.
Akila watched them, fascinated by the horse, and the man who had stopped him. As they came closer she saw the man’s clothes were a western style, a tunic and trousers, not the robes the people in the citadel wore. He had dark hair, like hers, and a face that looked almost white in the glare. She leaned further around the turret to get a better look, almost lost her balance, and sat back down sharply.
There was a cat by her feet, staring at her.
She froze and stared back. The cat twitched one ear and stepped closer. It moved until their noses were only a few inches apart, then it startled suddenly and leapt down into the garden. Akila sat there alone for a while, watching the cats, and then tried to read her book.
A few pages later, she looked back at the stable. The hole in the wall was already mended, though she could see it was a different kind of wood than the rest. How? Maybe the workmen of the citadel could repair things that quickly. Or perhaps it had been magic.
* . * . *
“Akila Ghali, straighten your back. I can’t examine the extent of the curse if you continue to slouch like an invalid,” the Elder Bakkal said, slapping her back with his camel stick. The rod smacked against Akila’s skin, as she stood naked in the middle of his study.
The Elder Farhi took notes as Bakkal circled her. “The curse has spread again,” Bakkal said. He prodded her ribs. “See? The discolored skin now covers the stomach, most of the chest, and part of the arms. It’s spreading to the back.”
The patch of milky white skin was still growing over Akila’s soft dark body. It had started six years ago, shortly before her ninth birthday, and it had just been a speckle on her stomach. Within months, that speckle had grown to the size of a coin, and kept growing. Occasionally new speckles would appear, spreading and growing into each other.
Sometimes Akila didn’t think of the paleness as a growing thing. Maybe the darkness of her skin was receding, drying up like water, leaving the white skin behind like parched earth. Most often, Akila didn’t think like this. She saw the curse as what it was, as sickness crawling over her skin that would eventually kill her.
The Elders kept circling her naked body, poking her with the camel stick, and writing notes about how it continued to spread. She was trying very hard not to cry. She clenched her right hand into a fist, and clenched it harder, until she could feel her fingernails stabbing her palm, but could no longer feel her fingers. She longed to snatch the camel stick from Elder Bakkal’s hand and beat him with it, until the hard Khaiserian wood snapped and splintered against his skull. She wished he would stop staring at her like some specimen on his workbench-
There was an absolutely horrible sound. Both of the Elders stopped and listened. Akila, for the longest time, could not figure out what could make a sound like that. The first thought she had was perhaps a donkey, or maybe several donkeys. But the sound was too deep to be a donkey. Unless perhaps it were dying. It sounded a little like dragging something heavy over stone, maybe metal, or a different kind of stone, but alive. Like dying donkeys and living stone. Akila trembled.
The Elder Farhi shook his head. “Why are they angry now? If it’s that fool of a stallion kicking again-”
“Don’t blame the horse,” the Elder Bakkal snapped. “His bloodline is nobler than yours, Farhi. We all know who is responsible for this commotion, just like the last time.”
“Just like always,” Farhi agreed, and, sighing, set down his papers. “I suppose we still have to sort it out, though?”
The Elder Bakkal was already striding towards the door. “Of course we do. No one else is bothered with the brutes. Akila Ghali, put your clothes back on. This is a citadel of learning, there’s no place for a woman’s nudity here.”
“But, you’re the ones-” Akila began, her nails biting harder into the flesh of her palm.
“I don’t have time for this, girl!” Bakkal snapped. “Put your clothes on and get out. We’ve got a situation to deal with in the stables!” The Elders left the room, complaining about the noise, the insolence of children, and the laziness of the stable hands.
Akila started putting her clothes back on. It took a long time with the new garments, but with how the Elders had poked at her bare skin, she didn’t want anyone seeing her curse anymore. Fighting back tears, she hauled the layers of cloth over her body until they were in approximately the correct places.
She walked quickly through the echoing halls of the citadel until she reached an outer door, and then ran to the corner of the garden where she liked to sit and read. Once she was there, she finally allowed herself to cry.
The tears streamed down her face and dappled her clothing. The distant caterwauling had not quieted down, it seemed to have gotten louder. She wrapped her hands around her knees and rocked slightly, trying to steady her breathing. The more panicked she felt, the louder the noise from the stables seemed to be. She pressed her face against her legs and wept.
She cried for her shame, how the Elders treated her, and for the place and life she had lost when she left her home, now robbed from her permanently by British heavy artillery. She mourned her mother, and father, and younger brother, and the neighbors and friends of her childhood. Akila wept for hatred of the British and the Turks, waging a war that killed her people most of all, and she sobbed for fear of how much she still had to lose, as the curse spread and destroyed her. She cried even in fear of herself, the thought of the horrible, deadly, all-consuming rage she felt at the men who treated her this way, the soldiers with their guns and the elders with the camel stick. She wept until she couldn’t cry anymore, and at last her breathing steadied.
Akila felt that she was not alone. She looked up, to see if one of the elders had wandered into the garden, or one of workmen, who she was not supposed to talk to. She found herself staring directly into the yellow-green eyes of a cat. It was not the same one that had confronted her last time. This was one was older, with scars on its nose, and a piece missing from one ear.
It leaned forward and sniffed Akila’s tear-stained face. It came so close that she could feel the breath on her cheeks, and the prick of whiskers against her nose. She blinked, and the cat blinked. After a moment, the cat stood up and walked away. It didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry. A few steps later, it stopped, and looked back at Akila. It turned and walked away. Akila stood up to follow it, remembered a moment later that she was not supposed to, and stopped. The Elders had never given consequences for following the cats, unique among the rules they had given her. Every piece of advice, each word of wisdom, and especially the commands, had a reason, an explanation. But not the cats. They had simply told her not to.
She shook her head. “Damn Elder Bakkal! ‘Don’t bother the cats, Akila!’ What if the cats are coming to me? ‘Don’t upset the horses, Akila!’ I haven’t gone near them, and they’re upset anyway. ‘Have these clothes to cover your curse, Akila! Take your clothes off, Akila, we need to examine you! Put the clothes back on, Akila, it’s immodest!’ Damn, damn, damn!” She was becoming angry again, with the same rage that urged her to beat Elder Bakkal’s head in. She was afraid to feel this way, but found that she liked it as well. The fury felt clean, somehow, like running water. It did not sit and stagnate, it went and did. So Akila unstuck her feet and followed the cat.
The old cat with the scarred face led Akila through the winding paths of the citadel, down corridors and paths that belonged to much older parts of the building, where the walls were made of smooth stone, into a courtyard she had never been to before. There was a fountain there, a huge one, and trees, growing green against the grey walls of the citadel.
There were cats there by the dozen, and a man. He was sitting on a platform, so that his legs dangled above the water. There were cats all around him, basking. He was singing. His voice was soft, and mixed with the sound of splashing water. He felt like he belonged in this garden, that he was as old as the stone walls that surrounded them. Akila felt all this, and a sense of awe. It seemed the cats understood every word that came out of his mouth, though it was not a language that she knew.
She knew him, though. He was the man who had stopped the horse that day in the desert. The horse had seemed to trust him, and the cats did too. The one with the scars and the nicked ear leapt up beside him and rubbed its head against his hand. His skin was as white as it had looked in the desert, even whiter than where her own skin had lost its colour under the curse. Paler than the British soldiers she had seen, their skin tanned with sun and dust. His was as pale as sand in the moonlight, or even milk.
He turned to the cat and smiled. “Hello, my dear,” he said to it. He ran his thumb over its ears and it arched against his hand. “How keeps the Queen of the Cats?” The man looked up then, turning his milk-face to the gate they’d come in by, and met Akila’s gaze. “Ah,” he said. “It is you. I had wondered when we would meet.”
Akila didn’t move. She stared at the man, with his milk-face and strange clothing. The way he spoke seemed stilted and wrong, like the writing in the Elder’s books. His eyes were dark, much darker than they should have been. Darker than Akila’s or any of the Elder’s. It was as if the center of his eye, the pupil, didn’t stop, and covered all of the part that should usually be brown. The whites of his eyes stood out stark and glaring, even whiter than his milk-face.
“How do you know me?” she asked. The anger that had been pounding through her like blood had begun to fade away as soon as she chose to follow the cat, and now she felt almost calm. She was simply overwhelmed with curiosity.
He smiled. “I heard rumour of you when they first brought you here. The girl from Al-Qadir. Your name is Akila Ghali, is it not?”
She nodded. “I saw you stop the runaway horse. Who are you?”
“I am called Diamurge, and I come from far to the North.” He smiled again. His face, as odd as it looked, was somehow kind. “I have long awaited meeting you, Akila Ghali. For a girl-child to be taken into the citadel is most unusual.”
She considered for a moment. She could run away now, or she could speak with him. This man was very strange, and she did not think he was quite what he seemed. But in spite of logic telling her to beware of him, she liked him. He talked to her in a way that no one else had, not since she had first come to the citadel. He talked like a friend. “I know. I don’t think the Elders like women very much.”
The man who called himself Diamurge seemed to be trying not to laugh. He was certainly smiling, a secret kind of smile, as if she had unwittingly told a very clever joke. “I think you are right about that.”
“Why do the cats let you pet them?” Akila blurted. “I was told that they hated newcomers.”
Diamurge shrugged. “I am not a newcomer. I’ve been a frequent visitor at this citadel for years. The cats are quite used to me.” He scratched the one who had led Akila there under its chin. “See? She may even like me.”
“I thought the cats were all dangerous,” Akila said. “The Elders said–”
“They are not dangerous,” Diamurge said. “They are merely very powerful. Be careful of them by all means, but do not fear them. And do not put too much credence in the words of the Elders. They have great knowledge, but they lack understanding. They think the stars determine the fates of men.”
Akila frowned. “Don’t they?”
“Of course not. They merely spell out what has already been determined by other means. Most men’s fates are determined by other, more powerful men. Men with armoured ships and cannons and guns.”
He gestured to the place beside him on the platform. “Have a seat, young Akila. Let us talk about cats and curses and the fates of men.”
Akila didn’t move. “Forgive me,” she said, “But I don’t trust you. How do you know me? Why did you look to meet me? Why did you come to the citadel?”
Diamurge laughed. It was a loud, startling noise. He threw his head back, so that it echoed off the walls of the courtyard. “She is gifted and perceptive, indeed!” he called to the skies. After a moment, he stopped laughing, and turned to face her. “You are entirely right not to trust me. I am not even from this world. I heard of you through rumours and prophecy, and I came to this citadel to watch the events of this war unfold.”
She stared at him, wondering. “Where are you from, Diamurge?”
“I come from far away and farther still. My point of origin was Europe, the land that in this world is called Gaul. I owe no allegiance to any of the British, nor the Turks, if that worries you. And certainly not to any in this world.”
Akila nodded and sat, and before long, found herself telling him everything, things that she had not even revealed to the Elders. He listened attentively, commenting, asking question, nodding. She told him everything, except about her curse. She complained to him about the Elders, and the rules that made no sense, the parts of the citadel she was forbidden to go, the clothes she was compelled to wear, and the cats and the horses.
“No one talks about the camels, have you noticed?” Diamurge asked her. “Not really. They complain about the smell, the noise, the cost, and how they upset the horses. But they never really talk about the camels themselves.”
“Is that what’s making that sound?” Akila asked, and then realised that the noise had stopped. It had stopped around the time she’d sat down beside him and started talking. “Oh, it’s gone now.”
Diamurge eyed her carefully. “It was, and it has. I wonder why. It is not in the nature of a camel to calm down.” His face changed, became open and cheerful again. “What is that you are learning here?”
Akila sighed. “Nearly nothing. I read books from the library, but they’re written by men a lot smarter than me, and I can’t understand them.”
“Old men are not always smart men,” Diamurge said. “Just because they wrote a book that’s hard to read does not mean that they’re clever. If they were really smart, they would have written a book that was easier to understand, don’t you think?”
Akila laughed. They spoke then about books, until the sun was low and red over the sands, and Akila remembered that she was expected to return for dinner. She apologised, and stood to leave. Before she had walked halfway across the courtyard, Diamurge called out to her.
“Before you go, Akila Ghali,” Diamurge said, “I am afraid I must pry.”
Akila stopped, standing motionless, and looked back at him, her face fading into the shadows of the garden.
“The curse that you carry,” he said. “Does it scare you?”
She nodded in silence. As the heat of the sun left the citadel, the cats stretched out on the cooling rocks. The wind picked up in the desert, and blew across the citadel’s towers. Their eyes held an unbroken line and the cat with the torn ear watched them both.
“May I see it?” He stood up as well, his face catching the last of the fading light and his black eyes gleaming red.
She did not move, afraid of showing the curse to a stranger, a man, and a foreign man at that. Her fingers again curled into a tight fist.
“Forgive me, child, but I need to speak to you of it. I travelled here to see you. I do not wish to cause you fear or discomfort, but you must be made aware. Know that the Elders do not fear the curse, they fear you as the bearer. You are spoken of even in the world that I come from, and I know that you have a great role to play.”
“What role?” Akila asked. The cats sat up on the wall and watched them. They were greyish-brown smudges against the masonry, but as the lights in the citadel came alight, their glowing eyes seemed to float as living things in their own right.
“In war, there are no true winners. There are only those who have lost worse. If you leave the fighting of the war to men, foreign men, then this land will lose worst of all.” Diamurge said. “The British are a cold, grey people. They thirst after this desert.”
She walked slowly back to him, and pulled up her sleeve. Even in the dimness of the garden, it was easy to see the dappled white flesh on the brown skin of her arm. Diamurge reached out and touched her arm gently, two fingers brushing the cursed skin.
“And does it hurt at all? Do you feel different than you did before it began?”
She shook her head. “I’m only afraid. It will cover my whole body, and then kill me.”
“No,” he said. “I have seen this condition before. We have it in my world. It may continue to spread, but I think it very unlikely that it will kill you.” He removed his hand. “It is not a curse, Akila Ghali. A god or some other power has touched you with this gift.”
“A gift for what?” Akila asked him.
“I am not yet sure.” His dark eyes, like the cats’, caught the light from the windows.“On a hundred worlds, they have the girl from Al-Qadir. In each of these hundred worlds she has done something different. But none of those versions had been touched like this. This so-called curse falls to you alone.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “I think, Akila Ghali, that it is up to you to discover what this power asks of you.”
They stood in silence for a moment. For the first time since she had left her parent’s house and come to the citadel, Akila was not afraid. “No,” she said. “It is up to me to tell this power what I shall do with it.”
Diamurge smiled. “Yes,” he said, though she had asked no question. “You will do very well indeed.”
She smiled at him, then nodded farewell and walked into the winding streets and halls of the citadel.
“Akila Ghali,” Diamurge called after her. “Will I speak to you again?”
“Only if the cats lead me to you!” she called back. She heard his loud, wild laughter tearing through the night, just before Elder Farhi grabbed her arm and berated her for being late to dinner.
* . * . *
Whenever Akila wasn’t sleeping, or eating, or being prodded at by the Elders, she slipped away to the courtyard with the fountain. They talked at first of all sorts of things, and then later of the curse and her fate.
“If I’m meant to play the sort of role you think I am, then I have a lot to learn,” she said to him one day.
“Would you like me to teach you? I haven’t written any books, like the Elders at this citadel, but I’ve read a lot. And I have travelled all over this world and a few others.”
She looked at him eagerly. “What kind of things can you teach me?”
“All sorts of things. What do you want to learn?”
She sat for a moment, thinking about the Elders, the curse, the camels, her blinding rage, and the men with guns coming from the west. “I want to learn how to fight.”
In the months that followed, Diamurge taught her many things. How to fight – with her fists and feet, with swords, with a gun – he trained her to be fast, and strong, and how to trust her instincts. Her hands became blistered from unfamiliar weapons, her muscles ached each night from the exertion.
She collected bruises like souvenirs, and would not have traded this for any one of the soft, feminine pursuits that the Elders offered.
The cats watched her studies, sometimes with what seemed to be interest, but more often with calm boredom, as if she were not important, but made a better distraction than staring at the walls all day.
They blinked with irritation when she tumbled too near to them, and twitched their ears whenever she made too much noise, whether it be the clash of saber on spear, the slap of a staff against the flesh of her arm.
After a while, Diamurge deemed her to be a worthy fighter, and proposed a break. He took her out into the desert, beyond the citadel’s walls, and taught her how to see, how to read tracks and dung and the slant of sun on the sand. How to not be blinded in the day, and how to follow the stars by night.
He took her to the stables, and brought her over to the same fine stallion that had escaped all that time ago. The Elders protested. They said it was not dignified, she was a lady, she was unclean and cursed, it was unsafe for her to leave the citadel. Diamurge waved their concerns aside, saying she carried herself with a dignity unrivaled, she was not cursed nor sick, she had left the citadel before, and he would watch her every step of the way.
The Elders fell silent, but were plainly unhappy. They seemed to not to respect Diamurge’s words, but to fear him. In the end he yielded to them. “Very well, Akila Ghali,” he said, sounding only slightly disappointed. “You shall not ride this horse.”
“Wait,” Akila said. “Can you teach me how to ride a camel?”
Diamurge smiled his strange kind smile. “I thought you’d never ask.”
* . * . *
No one talks about the camels. They discuss them, but only in whispers. The British soldiers sit around their fires in the desert, clutching their weaponry, and glancing into the dark.
“Guns are no good,” the old corporal hisses, “because you can’t aim in the dark, and camels aren’t frightened off as easily as horses, or nomad bandits. Swords are no good, because the camels are too tall, putting their rider far out of your reach. Landmines aren’t practical, and even if they were, a camel runs with its legs flailing in a thousand directions at once, and they never seem to step on them.”
“The camels move too fast for creatures that size, and they cross the desert like crossing the road.” The private spits into the fire. “They aren’t scared by the really dangerous places, where the armored cars sink and are buried by the winds, where the horses die of thirst and the men go mad from the heat.”
“And then there’s her,” a sergeant begins, before being shushed.
Then they hear it. A hideous braying, like donkeys being slaughtered. Like the enormous guns at Aqaba being turned to target your ships. Like heavy machinery being dragged over stone. And the thudding of thousands of two toed feet, many kneed monstrosities bearing down on them. As the camels reach the top of the hill, they see her. A dark face like the Bedouin attackers arrayed around her, but with a streak of white across her face like a galaxy. She draws her blade and charges. For a lot of the men, that face is the last thing they see, and that horrible noise is the last thing they hear.
The survivors, if there are any survivors, don’t want to talk about it.
* . * . *
Author's Note: This was the fourth version of No One Talks About The Camels, or NOTAC 4, written for the Kidd Tutorial, before I got annoyed with it and changed every single part in NOTAC 5. Akila Ghali and Diamurge will return in Aullivard.
