Excerpt
Dream Swimmers
Jo Carthage © 2025
All Rights Reserved
Chapter One
The Arabian Sea
A month before winter monsoon season, Yemen
1227 A.H. / December 1812 A.D.
Noor fell asleep in her hammock onboard the Cormorant and opened her eyes beneath the cold waters off the coast of Gaza, two thousand imperial miles northwest. The full moon revealed the strange shapes the tides had wrought on the rocks deep in the water beneath her. She searched the sea floor for Rami, born the son of Yemen’s rightful ruler, lately a traitor and alam mage for the British invaders. Their shared dreams haunted her sleep as Rami rotted in a British prison, and Noor planned to free him and bring him to face his people’s justice.
She found his body near the lagoon floor and struck out, able to swim in her dreams. Noor couldn’t in the waking world, a still bleeding lacuna from her earlier life when she’d been enslaved by a cruel master in the spice markets of Tadjoura. He’d kept that knowledge and much more from her until she’d killed him with a scavenged dagger and fought her way to freedom. Rami had sunk deeper and deeper in each dream, but Noor didn’t let the burning in her lungs pull her back up. She wrapped her arm around his still-warm body and pulled him to the surface. Once there, Noor dragged him through the shallow waves and into the cave she’d once sheltered in with other families beneath the ancient city.
“Breathe, damn you.” Noor pumped his chest, willing him to live.
Rami gasped and shot up. He struggled away from her, dark eyes wild. The scar she’d given him on the HMS Victory stood out, stark on his dark skin.
“Have it your way,” Noor said and moved to the other side of the cave. In the waking world, she’d spent one week here a half-decade ago, camping out as her then-master Musa sold fake holy water to pilgrims.
But in dreams, all things were possible, so Noor concentrated on a patch of brilliantly white sand, and a moment later, a clutter of kindling lay stacked there as if it had always been. It took no haya magic, no life power, to conjure here in a dream. She would have never been able to turn nothing into something like this on the Cormorant. In dreams though…
“The fire will be ready whenever you are,” Noor called out. She folded her legs and gazed out at the moonlit Mediterranean Sea.
Rami approached. He stood so close the water ran out of his long hair and dripped down the back of her guntiino—the red-and-gold wrap dress she wore—trickling down her spine. Rami knelt beside her, careful not to touch, and frowned at the wood she’d conjured.
“Let me,” he said, and the wood burst into flame, nearly consuming it all in a single fireball.
She laughed at the extravagance, at his powers’ excess.
He stiffened and glared.
She couldn’t help that she found him absurd sometimes now, this terror of a man who had haunted her friends’ nightmares. If he was going to pout, she would just go swimming with the hammerhead sharks and pilot whales off the coast for a few hours before waking up and trying again tomorrow night.
It wasn’t as though he could sulk in the waking world.
And it wasn’t likely his British jailers allowed it.
He moved to the other side of the fire and grumbled, “What’s so funny?”
She bit her lip.
His voice was hoarse and raw. She hated this change in him, the damage done to his deep, soft voice. She’d only heard it a few times during their brief time together aboard the HMS Victory. The Victory had once been Lord Admiral Nelson’s flagship, and Noor had sunk it with her own extravagant display of magic, turning the ship into a burning heap of broken oak planks and sails of flame. It had been enough of a mess to block British warships from taking Aden. And they’d bought Yemen’s resistance precious months to prepare to defend themselves again.
Noor had wrecked the ship and freed Rami from a cruel master who’d taught him only pain and the style of magic that came from it, but she’d been unable to take him with her. So here they were, mysteriously connecting through her dreams as he grew thinner and more ragged under his jailer’s persistent hatred. The British had once seen the mage as their best weapon and now viewed him as a traitor to their empire. Rami’s body showed the wear of their unkind hands, as did his voice’s increasing hoarseness. She figured it was from the screaming, his dream mind not remembering how a voice should sound free from hurt.
Noor hated the guards at whatever prison he was in. It didn’t matter that he had wielded his master’s whip against them when they’d served together on the Victory. No one deserved to suffer like this, night after night after night.
He eased a little closer to the fire, drawn to the heat or the company or something else entirely.
“What’s so funny?” He repeated.
She had to answer that terrible grate of a voice coming out of his irritated, strange-soft face. “You are.”
He huffed and folded his legs, then held two large, sword-calloused hands out to the smaller, swiftly burning fire. She glanced at his arms, but the intricate cuts that had covered them like a trader’s route tattoos when she’d seen him in a dream the night before weren’t there now. Whether he’d healed himself or his mind wasn’t including them, she didn’t know. Noor was grateful for the expanse of clean, dark skin, flecked only with moles.
“I think you need to let me go,” Rami said, and every bit of the fire’s warmth left Noor’s body.
She’d thought they wouldn’t talk about this, not give voice to it.
“Hmm?” she said, hoping he would drop it.
He leaned around the fire, voice darker and steadier. “Your magic—it’s warping. You can’t have missed it. You can’t be both a haya and an alam mage, not in this world, not in this time. I think—” He choked this time, weakening for the barest of breaths, and it squeezed her heart as if he’d slipped his fingers beneath her skin. “I think you need to let me go. I’ll never be free. I’m getting weaker. There’s no way you can get to me in time. After Taiz, after Sidon, after everything I’ve done, there is no one left in the resistance who would want you to.”
Noor stood. “Just you try me,” she said and strode to the edge of the lagoon. She dove in and let the dark sea close her ears.
But speaking wasn’t the only way they could connect in dreams. His words followed her in her mind as, in the darkening deep, she took solace from a world gone mad.
That’s what I was afraid you’d say.
*
Noor woke with a start, swaying gently in her hammock in the hold of the Cormorant. Razan snored gently in the hammock below hers. Noor took a long moment to soak in her lover’s sleep-softened features, her tall brow now smooth without the wrinkles of rightful hurt and anger that too often marred her face.
Noor flopped onto her back and took heaving breaths as she combed through her dream for any details that might help her and her crew find Rami more quickly. She scanned the long, arching lines of the cedar planks which made up the hull of the Cormorant. Warm, red-gold wood filled the air with sweet spice, nothing like the whitewashed hell of the HMS Victory where she’d first met Rami in a prison cell.
Razan stirred, her long black lashes fluttering, and Noor peeked over the edge of her hammock. She watched for wakefulness, unsure she was up for her lover’s disappointment so early in the day. Razan settled, and Noor felt her chest loosen. She crept out of her hammock and climbed to the top deck, where she grabbed some dried dates before joining James at the wheel.
“We have to go faster,” Noor told James in English as he piloted the Cormorant across the vast, dark, dancing waves of the Arabian Sea. “Socotra was a waste of time. It’s been three weeks of sneaking lunella shells to Usama’s contacts so they can tell us as soon as they know something. Have we narrowed down the list of prisons?”
Her friend shook his head. He’d gotten a proper haircut in Aden by someone familiar with the tightly kinked hair they both shared. Nothing like that hack job the British barber had left him with from his long, unwanted years of indentured servitude on the Victory before he’d escaped and freed Noor in the process. James may have known some of the sailors who now guarded Rami, but perhaps not. The Victory had a crew of over 800 when Noor sank it, but James had been one of the few men stolen from Freetown. She’d gathered there had been little love lost between them and less socialization.
James’s expression was serious when he spoke, his deep voice slow and precise as he repeated their mission’s hard facts. “The British navy isn’t telling Usama’s spies where they’re keeping him because the lord admiral hasn’t decided if he wants the Sword of Sidon dead or alive.” James referred to Rami by his nom de guerre, and his hatred for the man showed through in his words.
“I hate this,” Noor said, the tiring night catching its claws in her back, pulling her spirit lower, and making her ache.
James laid his hand softly on her shoulder, held her there in the warmth and sunlight among those who loved her.
“Usama’s people are doing their best, but there are so many places they could have stashed him. Any harbour prison, any governor’s mansion, any embassy.”
“Did Razan have any ideas of better ways we could use the lunella shells to coordinate search efforts?”
James flinched. That told Noor all she needed to know. Razan wanted Rami dead by any means necessary. She had accompanied them on the Cormorant to retrieve him only once she’d been assured he would be tried for his actions on behalf of the British Empire. Razan was from Sidon, and she blamed Rami’s magic for the Victory shelling her city and killing her parents. Before Rami had shared Noor’s dreams, she and Razan had shared a bed. They still did, but Razan’s righteous fury at Rami and confusion that Noor did not see the world as she did had come between them.
“She would tell us if she had,” Noor reassured them both, thinking of her friend sleeping in the hammock below. “If only to be done with this mission sooner.”
“Give her some time,” James said and gave Noor’s shoulder a squeeze.
“It’s not that I don’t understand. I’m bringing him back to face justice, not saying he shouldn’t be held accountable.”
“I know, Noor.” James repeated, “She needs time.”
Noor nodded, and he gave her sad smile.
He jerked his head towards the waxed maps she’d borrowed from the emira’s library in Aden. “Want to take a turn piloting? I could use the rest.”
“Of course,” Noor said.
James bumped her shoulder before heading towards the captain’s cabin he shared with Usama.
Noor spent the rest of the morning at the wheel, watching the horizon for imperial patrol ships and trying to stay awake. Razan eventually came up to keep her company and record the daily updates from Usama’s spies. Usama’s contacts were using Noor’s lunella shells as if they’d been born to it. She had enchanted dozens of them after being inspired by Razan’s brilliant engineering mind. The shells allowed anyone holding them to speak across any distance and share perfectly accurate visual memories as well. After checking in with her contacts in the lunella shell network, Razan had heard nothing to change their current course, so she plotted and replotted their route. The ease and routine of it soothed Noor more than any number of kind words.
Maybe we’ll get through this in one piece.
As Noor eyed a cloud bank to the east, Usama sauntered over.
“You’re looking tired, habibati. Sleeping all right?”
She’d told him before they’d left for Aden that she was dreaming of the Sword of Sidon. Her friends worried when they saw her tumble from her hammock to clean her shaking hands in the sea. They watched silently when they caught her shivering in the tropical air because the winter wind had blown frigid into the cave, and Rami hadn’t been able to speak from remembered pain.
“Sleeping is easy, resting is harder. But I’ve got it under control,” she said, casting a smile his way.
Usama tipped his head back to grin up at the sun and soak in its rays. Then he took a long draught of his cup of coffee, made from some of the last free beans from Mocha, as he waited her out for more. Finally, he prompted her.
“You can control your dreams?” he asked.
“Can’t everyone?”
“A lot of people probably wish they could, but no, most of us just get to sail into whatever nightmare we’ve been handed.”
“I’ve never done it any other way. It’s—” She reached for a metaphor. “Before James helped me escape Tadjoura, sometimes I would see the theatre troupes in the souq. Some characters would sit back, watching, and the whole play would go on without them. Then, they’d step in and start changing things. Once, a troupe from India, in the souq to sell Mysorean rockets, did a play about a woman named Draupadi and her five husbands.” The rockets had been for defence, in theory; some of the boys had snagged them and set them off during Eid, nearly blowing themselves up and making the souq stink for weeks.
“Five?” he asked, voice going high.
She nodded with a grin.
“The scheduling must have been intense,” he murmured mildly, and Noor chuckled.
Then she grew more serious. “In my dreams, it’s as if when I step onto the stage, I can either follow the script or change it. I usually know the plot. I can step away from something if it’s too frightening.” Or too disturbing. “And I can move the plot another way, though it makes the dreams less vivid, paler.”
“That’s lucky. Do you know that they’re your dreams though? Since you’re sharing dreams, perhaps it’s been the Sword of Sidon’s dream you’ve been controlling—easing, perhaps. Maybe he can’t control his dreams, even though you can when you’re in them. Maybe you could teach him, give him something to hold on to while he waits for us to figure out what British cubbyhole he’s been socked away in.”
Usama spoke quietly under the waves’ tapping against the hull. “But I’m still most worried about you, habibati. If you can find a way to get more rest, I’ll be happy for you. I don’t really care if it helps him. I’m just worried for you.”
“I’ll try.” Noor checked the sun. She had a half day until she’d sleep again.
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