‘What is it like in the desert?’ she asked, one evening. ‘I always wanted to go and see, like the mutalibun.’
‘The desert of the mutalibun is not our desert. Ours is full of life, rivers of thought and forests of memory, castles made of stories and dreams. Our desert is not a desert.’
‘So why did you come here? Why do the jinni come to Sirr?’
‘You cannot imagine what it is like to be a jinn. It is always cold. No virs, no body. But we remember bodies: they itch and hurt and ache. There is the athar, of course, but it is not the same. Here, at least, there is warmth. We yearn for it.’
‘If it is so terrible, why don’t you have any ghuls, like the others? Why do you live alone?’
The jinn said nothing after that. It left the tomb, sent its mind somewhere else, and that night she fell asleep in the cold.
After several nights, Zaybak returned. She lit candles and made the tomb beautiful. She washed herself in the cooling water tank and combed her matted hair with her fingers.
‘Tell me a story,’ she said.
‘I will not,’ Zaybak said. ‘You are mad to ask me for such a thing. You should leave, go back to your family.’
‘I don’t know why you are punishing yourself. Tell me a story. I want it. I want you. I have seen it in my sister. She is never alone. You could be inside me. And you’d never need to be cold again.’
‘You don’t want to touch me. If you do, you will hate me.’
‘I don’t believe you. You are a good person, Zaybak. I don’t know what you think you have done. I only know it would make me happy to be a part of you.’
Zaybak was quiet for a long time, so long that Tawaddud thought he had gone again in anger, never to return. But then he started speaking, in a soft voice, a storyteller’s voice.
When I was young, I had a body. I lived in a city. Every morning, I would take a train. I remember it shaking. I remember what it smelled like, of people, of fast food, of coffee. I remember thinking how easy it was to imagine being someone else, like the tattooed boy in a blue sports shirt, the girl with her head bent over a play, muttering lines. All it took was the flicker of an expression, a brief eye contact.
That’s what I remember about the train. But I don’t remember where it was going.
I do remember when everything broke. Drones falling from the sky. Buildings moving on their foundations, like big animals waking up. Booms in the distance, spaceships in the sky, running away.
After that, an eternity of dark and cold.
When I woke up to my second life, it took a long time to learn to survive. To slow myself down to run in the brains of chimera, to dream lucid dreams so I would not go mad. I made myself a dream-train, where I could be other people. It took me through the years, shaking and shuddering.
One day in my train I looked up, and saw the flower prince.
He had his hand on the yellow bar in the ceiling, leaning lightly backwards. His jacket was blue velvet. He wore a flower in his lapel. His face was all grin, not really a face at all.
‘What are you doing here, Zaybak, all alone?’ he asked. I thought it a dream and laughed.
‘Should I taste the flesh of rukh or chimera beasts, like my brothers?’ I said. ‘I prefer to dream.’
‘Dreaming is good,’ he said, ‘but one day you have to wake up.’
‘To be a bodiless mind in the desert? To be captured by the mutalibun, to be put in a jar, to serve the fat lords and ladies of Sirr until they deign to set me free?’ I asked. ‘Even nightmares are better than that.’
‘What if I could tell you how to make their fat bodies yours?’ he asked, mocking eyes flashing.
‘How would I do that?’
He put an arm around my shoulders and whispered in my ear. ‘Let me tell you a secret,’ he said.
Let me tell it to you now, Tawaddud, so we may be one.
There was a time when the girl who loved monsters and Zaybak were almost like a qarin and a muhtasib – or more: she was not his master nor his slave. They looked for secret places together, walked the City of the Dead and the secret pathways of the Banu Sasan.
For a time, they became a new person. Tawaddud would look at rain falling on the tombs and the steam rising from their roofs, and it would be as if Zaybak saw it for the first time.
One day, a man called Kafur came to the City of the Dead. He had once been tall and handsome, but walked with a limp, and covered his body and head in a cloak and a scarf.
‘I have heard,’ he told the ghuls, ‘that there is a woman who has tamed the Axolotl.’ The ghuls whispered and took him to see Tawaddud.
Tawaddud offered him tea and smiled. ‘Surely, such rumours are nothing but stories,’ she said. ‘I am just a poor girl, living in the City of the Dead, serving the jinni for my keep.’
Kafur looked at her and stroked his short beard. ‘Yes, but is that all you want to be?’ he asked. ‘You are from a good family, I can tell. You are used to a better life than this. If you come with me, I will show you what a woman who knows how to make jinni do her bidding can be in Sirr.’
Tawaddud shook her head and sent him away. But when she thought about it – her musings mingling with the Axolotl’s – she did miss the company of people, of beings who did not live in tombs, whose touch was not sand. Perhaps she should go, said the part of her that was Zaybak. I will never leave him, said the part that was Tawaddud. Or perhaps it was the other way around.
One morning she told Zaybak that she had dreamed of a train.
‘You will turn into me,’ Zaybak said. ‘I am too old and strong.’
‘Yes, you are my big jinn, my terrible Axolotl,’ Tawaddud teased.
‘Yes, I am. I am the Axolotl.’
Tawaddud was silent.
‘I thought he was only mocking you,’ she whispered.
‘I told you I stole the first body. I came to Sirr from the desert and almost made it mine.’
Tawadudd closed her eyes.
‘My grandfather was there the night the Axolotl came, the night of the ghuls,’ she says. ‘He said it was like a plague. All it took was a whisper from a stranger to be processed. The streets were filled with blank-eyed people who would stop to stare at things, to cut their own flesh, to eat endlessly, to make love.’
‘Yes.’
‘In the end they took the first ghuls up to the top of Soarez Shard. Husbands took the wives they no longer knew, mothers took their children who spoke with strange voices. Then they cast them down into the desert.’
‘Yes’
‘The Repentants started hunting stories then. It was death to tell a thing that was not true.’
‘Yes.’ Zaybak was silent for a while. ‘I would like to tell you I did not mean it. That I was swallowed by the flesh, that I lost myself in the wave of so many self-loops, that I did not know what I was doing. But I would be lying. I was hungry. And I am still hungry. Tawaddud, If you stay with me, your thoughts will be my thoughts and nothing else. Is that what you want?’
‘Yes!’
No, said a part of her, but she could not tell which one.
When she woke up, the tomb was cold and silent, and she could no longer remember what the steam rising from the tombs in the morning reminded her of. She sat there until the sun was high and tried to remember the secret of the flower prince, but it was gone, gone with Zaybak the Axolotl.
Then the girl who loved monsters but one above all gathered her things and went to live in the Palace of Stories. But that is another story.
When the story finishes, Tawaddud is Arcelia and Arcelia is Tawaddud. She is in something warm and solid and looks at her hands, more beautiful than the hands she remembers, scented and oiled and covered in intricate swirls of red and black, adorned with golden rings. Tawaddud lifts her hands, Arcelia’s hands to her face, like a blind woman, feeling her features. A dark-faced man is watching them but Tawaddud tells her there is nothing to worry about, that he is a friend and will not hurt them.