A Thousand Nights (21 page)

I WAS NOT DEAD IN THE MORNING, but when I woke, I thought I might be the next thing to it. I could barely sit up to drink my tea; I was weak as a newborn lamb. When my
breakfast was brought, the smell of it made me heave up all I had drunk.

“It’s all right, lady-bless,” cooed the serving girl, as she helped me back to my bed. “If you miss one day, it will still work.”

“I do not feel all right,” I told her. The world spun around me, and I could not make it stop.

“You look very pale,” she said to me. “I will fetch a cold cloth and the healer, and tell the cook. He does not like it when we vomit. He says that is the first sign that the
sun has been too much.”

When she said it, it sounded straightforward. I had seen men felled by the sun if they worked through the heat of the day or if they did not drink enough. Yet I knew that could not be the cause
of my illness. I had not spent enough time in the sun. The girl was gone before I could say any of that to her, though, so I waited in my bed, and hoped my head would not split in half before she
returned.

I dozed, and when I dreamed, I saw a lion. It drank at an oasis in the cool of the morning. I knew that it was the oasis from Lo-Melkhiin’s map. He had pored over it, planning every angle
of this hunt. I had thought he might be plotting where to find his next bride, but I ought to have known better: he did not care from whence we came.

There were no tents in this oasis, and it was far from a path of trade. Only a madman or a man with very good horses would ride so far, to an oasis on the way to nowhere. Lo-Melkhiin was not
mad, easy as it might have been to accept him if he were, but he did have good mounts.

The lion was old, its mane tawny and bright in the sun. Its back and face were scarred with long claw marks. It had fought to keep this oasis, and driven off or killed younger lions to do it. He
kept no pride in his old age, but he kept his home in the desert.

Lo-Melkhiin hunted him for no reason other than to kill him, and he had nowhere to go.

I saw the other guardsmen draw back, an empty saddle where Lo-Melkhiin had left them behind to do the hunt alone. Before the demon, Lo-Melkhiin had hunted lions that were a threat. This old
creature was too smart to harry the villages and oases of men. And now he would grow no older.

As I watched, Lo-Melkhiin came down to the water of the oasis, across from where the lion stood. The old beast stared at him, wise enough to know that fleeing would get him nothing. For a moment
I thought Lo-Melkhiin might spare the beast, but then he hefted his spear in one hand, and between one breath and the next, landed it between the old lion’s eyes.

It fell face-first in the water, fouling it with its blood. Lo-Melkhiin drew a knife and whistled for the men to come, and I knew he meant to skin it. That I would not watch. I felt the vomit
rise in my stomach again, though I did not think I had anything left; and then I was in my bed, and the serving girl held my hair as I emptied my stomach again. This time, only white water came
out. The cook watched me, shaking his head.

“Juice, lady-bless,” he said to me. “As much as you can.”

“I wish you would mind your own craft,” snapped the healer.

“I’ll fetch it,” said the girl, but the cook shook his head. She had to stay as long as one of the men was with me.

The healer examined me quickly, a soft hand on my forehead and a light touch at my wrist.

“Lady-bless, did you have wine?” he asked me.

“No,” I said to him. My voice was hoarse. “I drank water, and ate what was brought.”

“Did you sit in the sun?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Perhaps she is only tired?” the serving girl suggested. “She spent the whole afternoon in the spinning room yesterday, and the girls there said she spun without stopping for
hours.”

As soon as she said the word “spinning,” my stomach heaved again. She was so fast, turning me and holding my hair back from the bowl. I had nothing to bring up, but I appreciated her
efforts in any case.

“Perhaps that is what has taken the water from your body,” the healer said. He was not entirely incorrect, but it was not for the right reason. “Today you must stay abed, drink
everything that busybody from the kitchen brings you, and touch no craft.”

I nodded, miserable, and the serving girl put another cool cloth to my head.

It was the copper fire that had done this—or rather, the fact that I had done so much spinning with it. It had been too much. Once the healer left and the serving girl went to fetch a
comb, I could not stop myself from crying. I had only been able to protect one room. I could not shield the other work rooms if this was the result.

Soft hands undid my braids, and began to work through my hair with the comb. I forced myself to breathe softly, hoping that I would fall asleep and rest without dreaming. I had no wish to see
more lions meet their end. Not even the thought that I might see my sister tempted me to seek a dream. I wanted only blackness and oblivion.

A finger brushed my skull. It was much too big to be the serving girl’s. I tried to move before I remembered the consequences, and then struggled weakly while Lo-Melkhiin wound his fingers
tightly into my hair.

“I went out for a lion this morning, my wife,” he said to me. It was the over-friendly tone I hated. My head already ached, and his grip on my hair exacerbated it. “But you
know this. I would tell you that the beast ravaged poor men’s sheep and stole poor women’s children, but you know better.”

I said nothing, and his hands tightened. “Tell me!” he commanded.

“I saw,” I said to him, spitting the words the way a viper spits poison. “I saw you kill the old lion, far away from where he might have done harm.”

“Good,” he said to me. “I do not like to kill without an audience.”

He released my hair, but I was too weak to get away from him. I would be easy to smother now, if he wanted. He could display my hair next to his new lion mane. Instead, he spread my hair back
out on the pillow and began to comb it.

“Your sister did this,” he said to me. “When you were small.”

“Yes,” I said to him. I hated to tell him any truths, but hating gave me strength now. “She would do it still, if I still lived in our father’s tents, and I would comb
her hair as well.”

“We have not spoken of her in some time,” he said to me. “Did you see the maps I had? They show where all of my wives have come from.”

“I saw,” I said to him. “There have been very many of us.”

“There have,” he agreed. “So many that soon I may start again. I do not have to go in order, you know. I might return to any village I like. I might return for your
sister.”

“She will be married by then,” I told him. I would make it true if it killed me to do it. “Our father brings a man back with him in the caravan, and she will love
him.”

“Then who will keep your dead?” he asked me.

I barely heard him. As soon as I spoke my tale to him, my head raged again. It was like the copper fire, only worse. If I were a well in the desert, then I had been in use for generations, and I
had nothing but a scraped bottom to offer any who came to fill their water jars.

The viper struck.

He left the comb and my hair, and held my hands beside my face. He used his own weight to hold me down, even though I could no more get away from him than I could fly. I felt every hard muscle
of his body pressing against mine. He was, I thought in the part of my mind that did not scream, very lucky I had already vomited up everything I had in my stomach, or he would have worn it on his
face as he hovered mere inches from me.

“Have you not learned, star of my skies?” he said to me. His voice hissed in my ears. I did not see a man’s face, but a viper’s hood. “We are the same, you and I.
That is why I cannot kill you, and why you do not die.”

I would not believe him. He was no smallgod and I was no demon. We were not the same. We were the opposite. He must know that.

“You think it is not true?” he said to me. “You think I do not speak words to men and have them come true the way you speak words to women? You think I could not reach into
your soul and take it, as easily as you reach into the soul of your sister, and bend her to your will?”

No! That was not how I did my work at all. I spun and made things new. He forced out craft where there was no want of it, and sped it up so fast that its makers could not control it. I might
have changed the path of my sister’s life, but I took no one’s soul.

“You doubt me, but I will prove it to you,” he said to me.

He rolled off of me, the absence of his weight a welcome relief, but he did not let go of my hands, and so the relief was short-lived as he pulled me to sit in front of him. My head screamed and
my stomach heaved, but he did not stop. He called the cold light, and I recoiled, thinking it would burn me worse than I already was.

Instead, the light flared and my head cleared. It was though a cool drink had been poured down my throat and cool water put all over my body. My stomach settled and the pain stopped. I watched,
horror-struck, as the cold light licked my arms like fire consuming dry wood in a camp hearth, reaching as high up as my elbows before returning back to Lo-Melkhiin’s hands.

Then the copper fire coiled between us, and my breathing stilled. I was a gage-tree, roots scrambling for water, and the wadi was at its highest flood. I traced the water’s source,
expecting to find my way back to my sister. Instead, it was as though every wadi in the desert was feeding me. I wanted more and more, and Lo-Melkhiin was making me strong enough to get it. This
was more fire than I had used to ward the spinning room. This was enough fire to shield the whole qasr, with enough left over besides. I thought of my sister and the husband I had conjured for her.
Now he would come, as surely as the sun would rise tomorrow.

Lo-Melkhiin sank his fingernails deep into my skin, bringing small crescents of blood welling up around them. This new pain brought me back to him, and away from foolish desert dreams. His
viper’s smile was uncontrollable now, and he leered at me like I was his perfect thing, to do with as he liked.

I would not, I swore. I would never.

“Well, my love,” he said to me, passing me a cup of juice, “it seems we will need each other for a little bit longer after all.”

AFTER LO-MELKHIIN HAD cleared my head with his cold fire, he left me, and I finally ventured out into the day. It was after noon, and I was terrified to meet anyone who might
guess what I had done, so I did not venture past the water garden. The fountain’s song did not soothe me today. Instead, it reminded me that I was not in the desert; that such a thing could
only exist near Lo-Melkhiin, thanks to his power. It sang and played when no one watched it, surely, but it was his. And so was I.

I went into the baths. At this time of day, there was but one attendant, and she dozed in the heat by the coal basket, ready to stoke the fires that heated the water if need be, but otherwise
resting. I did not wake her. I passed into the room with the hot steam, leaving my shift on the floor as I climbed the steps to reach the bench. It was not hot like the air of the desert, which
dried as it blew past one, but hot like soup—like blood—and as I breathed it in, I wilted.

I slid off the bench, trying to get to the cooler air at the door. My skin was slick with sweat and it took me a moment to find my feet, but I stumbled back down the steps, gasping as the air
cooled. The attendant was there, woken by my clumsy flailing. She helped me into the hot pool, and brought me a cup of cool hibiscus tea.

“Lady-bless, you must be careful in the steam room,” she said to me. “Stand closer to the door next time.”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to go back in the room again. The pool I sat in might have been a cooking pot, the water was so hot, and that was enough for me. When she thought I
had borne enough, the attendant took me to a cooler pool, and laid down soap and a soft brush by the side of it.

“I wish for a harder brush,” I said to her.

She looked at me as a spinner eyes wool, or like a cook weighs flour.

“Lady-bless, you do not need it,” she said to me. “Your skin—”

I held up a hand and she stopped. “I know,” I said to her. “You and the others who labor here have done well turning my desert hide into a city skin.” She blushed, and I
continued to speak. “But I wish for a harder brush.”

She nodded, and left to fetch it. She was right. I did not need it. My skin had lost its desert roughness, even my hands, which had been worked the hardest. But I could feel Lo-Melkhiin’s
touch, the cold fire up to my elbows, and worse, the press of him against me as he held me down, and I wanted to be rid of that.

The attendant returned with the brush, and I lathered it with soap. I began to scrub, a sandstorm on my bare skin—no, the storm that hardened the camel bones—pressing down as hard as
I could and dragging mercilessly across the surface. I was not content to wash away Lo-Melkhiin. I wanted the whole qasr, the whole
city
gone from my memory.