🐫 What the Caravan Carried
Age: 18+149 pagesA dramatic historical novel for adults in chapters, inspired by real events on the Silk Road and the siege of Caffa in 1346 — idea & editing by Dheiab Alawfi, written with AI assistance
Samarkand, spring 1346. Qasim, a dyer's son of seventeen, joins the caravan of Bahram of Kerman as a hired man, searching for his brother Yaqub, who vanished after the brawl at Tana. Six months of red sand, the Ustyurt plateau, the steppe and the cities of the Golden Horde, with a doctor from Bukhara, a Genoese merchant hiding a secret, a widow disguised as a boy, an orphan and his one-eyed cat. And on the road, something walks with them that no one can see, all the way to the besieged walls of Caffa. Qasim writes it down as an old man for his granddaughter Gulnar, fifty years later. (For adults: death, plague, war and slavery)
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How it begins: To Gulnar
Gulnar, my son's daughter, you who sit now at my feet and look at my trembling hands as if you were waiting for a story to fall out of them:
Yesterday, while you counted the wrinkles on my face the way a fisherman counts the knots of his net, you told me you had heard in the market that your grandfather travelled in his youth to the end of the world, that he saw the Black Sea, and saw death walking on two feet, and came back.
And you asked me: Is it true, Grandfather?
And I did not answer you.
And you cried, and fell asleep angry.
And I did not sleep.
I am sixty-seven now, Gulnar, and the year is 1396 as the Franks I once knew would count it. The Samarkand I was born in is no longer the Samarkand I left. It has grown bigger, and taller, and richer, and noisier. And the people in it do not remember what I remember. They do not know that the road their caravans walk every spring, loaded…
The lesson: A caravan carries neither silk nor fur; it carries people to each other, and sometimes it carries death with them without knowing
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