Chorus Line
Harris Coverley
Harris Coverley has had short fiction published in Curiosities, Hypnos, The Periodical, Forlorn*, Horla, The Centropic Oracle, Pulp Modern Flash, and many, many others. He is also a Rhysling Award-nominated poet with over 160 individual verse published around the world. He lives in Manchester, England.
Dahsaan knew he was on the verge of death, but also that he had to keep going. The sun was so vicious that the young man was nearly blind, and his loose robe, usually the most effective method of keeping cool in such a climate, was not halting the continuous theft of the last bits of fluid from his body. He tightened his keffiyeh around his head, trying to get a stronger seal around his mouth. To allow himself to pant would be to loose even more moisture, and to dry his mouth out completely.
Part of him wanted to sit on the edge of the dune he was crossing and rest, but to stop would be to invite death even sooner. He would lose momentum and be unable to get up again, or he would begin to sink into the deceitful sand and join its other victims beneath.
The desert is my enemy, Dahsaan thought. To cross it is to conquer it.
He stopped at the dune’s edge and had to make a choice of direction. He looked ahead: it would be difficult to go straight, but he knew that going either left or right would take him too far off course.
Dahsaan made his decision. He tightened his keffiyeh again and, arching sideways, started to make his way slowly down the incline. His ankles felt bruised and twisted, but he was making good on his awkward descent—until his left foot slipped on a particularly soft patch of sand and he fell, rolling down the dune’s edge. His keffiyeh unravelling, his lips tasted the treacherous grains. When he came to a stop at its base he got on his hands and spat them out. He had heard tales, rumours really, of men going mad between the dunes, worshipping the sand as though it was a heathen god, getting on their knees and eating it, or snorting it like the snuff the Christians had brought back from the New World—and they would choke to death or suffocate, and be eaten by the foxes or by other madmen.
He himself began to choke, a rogue cloud of powdery sand having drifted through his mouth and into his throat. He hocked and hocked, but it would not leave him—it was stuck to his inner flesh. An agony went though his neck and down into his chest.
So this, this, is death, Dahsaan thought.
As he struggled he thought bitterly of the caravan that had abandoned him, of its leaders who had expelled him from their group without a canteen, of his uncles for not having taught him better how to survive in such a situation.
They have sentenced me to death! he wanted to shout.
He then thought of Asma, and of the city he was going to where she was waiting for him. He thought of his promise to her and to her parents, and to his own mother. He thought of the will of God and the example of the Prophet, and of his ancestors whom had conquered this very land.
His hands caked in sand, and still choking, Dahsaan stood up and summoned will. From somewhere in his body the saliva returned to move the sand from his throat, and it left him in three great viscous lumps.
Looking down into the sand, Dahsaan saw a little blood in his expelled detritus, but that did not worry him too much. He had survived for one more minute at least. The wind kicked up and quickly hid it.
Dahsaan gathered his keffiyeh, shook it free of sand, and wrapped it back about his head, before gathering a sandal which had fallen off in his tumble. He thanked God and re-started his journey.
If I keep going in this direction, he thought, I will surely hit water soon—or perhaps the rains will come? It is the season after all…I think…
As he walked his body became more content after its test of mortality, and gradually got better used to the searing realm.
Dahsaan tried to take bigger and bigger strides, but he was tiring fast and opted to be more leisurely.
If I am destined to die I can at least ease into it, he thought.
The wind had begun to blow again. Dahsaan’s eyes had recovered from the sun, but now he was being blinded by sand. Under foot the sand itself had begun to squelch obnoxiously, as though it was wet with the water he so desperately needed.
Mocking me? he asked the sand in his head. I’ll show you…
He carried on, new reserves of energy rising into his bodily core, increasing his speed. The wind’s force lessened and it became a gentle breeze, relatively free of specks. Dahsaan loosened his keffiyeh and let it cool his cheeks.
You can be my friend yet, he thought of the breeze.
It was then that he noticed a squeaking voice coming from his right side.
Dahsaan stopped and turned, but saw nothing.
He decided not to waste previous saliva through calling out and exposing it to the heat. Besides, he believed it to just be his imagination.
But soon the squeaking voice returned, and Dahsaan could not help but turn back and ask who was there, muffled through his headgear.
There was no answer. The tall dune at his side exhibited no interlopers. And yet as he continued to walk, the voice resumed, forcing him in fear to go faster.
As Dahsaan watched the wind blow the lighter sand granules across the denser layers, he realised what was happening: `azif al jinn, the jinn singing in the desert, or rather, the singing sands. One of his uncles had told of such things, although he had never before heard it with his own ears.
Dahsaan slowed and returned to a more manageable pace. He smiled to himself.
You fool, he thought. You need a drink, you’re getting weary…
But as he carried on, the squeaking voice grew louder, even as the wind stayed at the same strength. Dahsaan tried to ignore it, but within his liquid-deprived head arose migraines, and his vision blurred.
He put his hands over his covered ears as he walked, but the voice became shriller still. The squeaking gave rise to a chorus line of whining singers, punctuated with barking, oinking, and other, uglier noises. Eventually, to Dahsaan’s despair, screaming became predominant.
“Curse you!” he screamed back at the dune, and began to choke. He managed to stop it and broke into a run.
The screaming was then transcended by what to Dahsaan sounded like laughter, but not just one man laughing, but dozens, hundreds, thousands even.
In his mind he came to the conclusion that the sand had always been his enemy, but that he had been reckless to think the wind could have been a friend: it and the sand were clearly in league with each other, and had his soul in their sights.
Dahsaan ran across a steep incline and, in his panic, slipped, falling into a deep pit, his keffiyeh undone and caught on a dead vine high out of reach.
On his hands and knees once more, he could hear the laughing sand so intensely it was deafening him. He could feel his ear drums bending inwards with the overwhelming pressure of sound.
Through his coughing he cried out: “What do you want from me, but a mere trader?! What do want from me, but a poor man with a bride to keep and not a coin to his word?!”
The sands and the wind did not care, but swelled their laughter to the level of explosions, to the roar of volcanos, the howl of a dying Earth, the wail of a woman in eternal childbirth.
Dahsaan looked into his landing place, and wondered what they could possibly desire. If he ate of the sand as if it were an offering it would congest within him and he would die; if he snorted the sand as if it were a drug he would suffocate. He could stuff the sand into his ears to block the sound, but that would probably make both the wind and the sands angrier. The God of the universe could not save him now; he was now the quarry of the Elements.
He stripped, exposing his naked flesh to the lash of the wind’s grit. He then began to dig himself into the sand. To Dahsaan it seemed so obvious: only total submission to the sand could save him. The sand was his mother now, his god, his creator, his destroyer. He thought briefly of his own mother, of Asma, of the city where they were, of the family he had yet to raise, of all his present and possible futures—and waved them off as if they were flies.
Dahsaan dug and dug, sinking down, and the winds grew heavy with sand and began to cover him utterly. He descended further and further into the loose ground, until to an observer there was but a little bulging movement, and then nothing.
Moments later, the winds died down to trickles of air, and the sands became as still as a rock face, the whole desert tranquil.
Two miles north, a caravan travelled slowly in the afternoon heat.
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