Çeda could hear the man she’d come to see, old Ibrahim the storyteller, but she couldn’t yet see him. The sheer density of the gathering wouldn’t allow it from her current vantage, so she skirted the crowd, standing tiptoes every so often and looking for an opening. As she walked, the desert wind toyed with the fig tree’s branches. The movement gave life to the sunlight, stippling the assemblage with pinpricks of light. Men, women, and children, burnooses and kaftans and abayas, brightened then darkened, making them seem to sway, first this way, then that. It was a riot of color and movement that became so dreamlike Çeda had to blink and look away until she’d recovered. Ibrahim was one of the city’s most popular storytellers, but even so this crowd was unusually large. Çeda had no idea why at first, but then she vaguely recalled Seyhan the spice merchant mentioning the caravans when she’d stopped by his stall the day before.
