The Dhow House by Jean McNeil

artery presents oxygenated blood flow. Platelets advancing to hippocampus translated as: news heard that Al-Nur is advancing from the interior to the coastal capital, Port Al-Saidi. She came up with an emergency code consisting entirely of anti-malarials: chloroquine, atovaquone, progruanil hydrochloride, doxycycline.
    It must have been later that week when she finished a repair job, not particularly challenging. Femoral artery of the left leg, frayed but not severed by metal shards from an exploded RPG. Shrapnel came in several disguises, but the blackened residue at the edges of ragged epidermis betrayed the culprit.
    She peeled off her gloves and went to stand at the door of the tent. The sun fell on the perimeter of the tented verandah. She wanted to smoke, to drink, to stand on her head. But the nearest cigarette was two hundred and seventy kilometres away, and she didn’t smoke anyway. She tried to remember if a swash remained in the bottle of the contraband vodka she and her colleagues kept stashed under her bed, away from the breathalyser eyes of the Christian logistics organisation. She might have downed it the week before in a similar frenzy of remorse, she couldn’t remember.
    A bustard – black bellied, she guessed, from the dark shadow on its underside – winged across the sky like a scar.
    She went to visit Aisha. She had been living in the Vango tent for two weeks. She refused to speak to men, Andy had told her.
    They sat cross-legged on the ground in the meagre shade thrown by a whistling thorn. The camel sat next to them, its long legs folded primly under its body.
    ‘Do you know about the Wir ?’
    La , she said. No .
    ‘You people call it luck,’ she said.
    ‘What is it then?’
    Aisha thought for a moment. ‘Justice.’
    She knew the word in Arabic – eadala . She knew that people who lived ruined lives clung to justice over luck. She could hardly blame them for being unconvinced that ordinary humans were responsible for their suffering
    Two months before she had left England an expert from the School of Oriental and African Studies had come to speak to them, a strikingly handsome professor with dark malachite eyes. For the Bora and the Nisa alike, he’d told them, spirit possession meant being in the grip of an external force much more powerful than yourself. Attempts to tame or understand it were futile. For them, these forces represented not ecstasy, nor exorcism, nor possession, only a geometry of the soul and a restitution of order.
    She’d worked in places in the grip of similar beliefs: spirit-dogs that stalked the living, harbouring souls of the dead; vultures that were actually someone or other’s great-grandfather given wings. Dark fortune lapped effortlessly at the edges of villages razed by rebel forces or visited by famine. She was chastened by the relentlessness of this moral system and she was too tired, these days, to challenge another culture’s shamanism. So she did not tell Aisha what she herself believed: that nothing else existed other than human order and morality, human cruelty and human chaos.
    She lacked the Arabic to say all this, besides, she no longer had to be right, she no longer wanted to change things. She felt muted, she had felt this way for some time. She seemed to be entering a new phase of life. She was getting used to existence, finally. She felt the pleasant authority of maturity settle within her, but also, connected to it, something dulled, like old silver.
    She excused herself and rose. Aisha smiled and thanked her for her visit. She had filled out, somewhat. Her vital signs and iron count had improved.
    She walked towards her office. The wind picked up, ruffling the valence of the giant tent. She ought to do paperwork. She didn’t know why she was standing, looking out again into a land that gave nothing back, save for the edge of a burning column of setting sun.
    Aisha’s camel levered himself to his feet at the same moment she had risen. He