A Thousand Nights (5 page)

And I had survived.

L
o-Melkhiin rode into the desert as a man, and he was something else when he came out.

He had gone to hunt lions, for his mother was fond of spinning yarn from the hair of their tawny manes, and because they preyed upon the villages around the desert’s hem. He rode
alone, as befitted a hunter of his class, but Nadarqwi the Farsighted watched his progress from the red stone cliffs, and Sareeyah the Fleetfooted stood beside, ready to dash to Lo-Melkhiin if aid
was required.

Some say Lo-Melkhiin met a cruel god in the dunes that day. Others say he bargained with a devil there. The Skeptics looked up from their marble writing slabs and said he had stayed too long
in the sun. God, demon, or otherwise, it mattered not. The true difference was me.

When I saw him, I knew he should be mine. He was taller than most, shoulders unstooped; he had never ground his own grain. His cloth was tightly woven, and there was
something in his eyes that spoke of power. I wanted it, as I had wanted many things. And so I took.

His mind was harder than I had expected, and it required some effort to slip into the cracks. He loved his people—and he had many of these—well. His sense of duty was strong. He
could mend armor and bake bread, though his station rarely required either of him. But at the bottom, underneath the pride he took in his work and home, there was a worry that dragged a chasm
through his thoughts.

He was so young. And his father had ruled so poorly. And his mother was so ill.

That is where I set my claws and teeth. I pulled upon his doubts, laying them bare beneath the hot sun. And where he quailed, I set my conquest.

He fought—the best ones fight—but it was too late. I had him and he was mine. I stepped upon his duties and buried his loves. I kept only those pieces of him I wanted. The power.
The knowledge. The ability to rule.

When I opened his eyes for the first time, the world was smaller, but it was mine. The air filled his lungs because I let it. I could just as easily have snuffed him out. If I had wanted, I
could have made him remove his shoes and let the sand burn his feet.

I kept him in a corner of his mind, which I had not always done before. Usually when I took someone, they burned out fast and left me hungry. But Lo-Melkhiin was different. He was stronger.
And it pleased me to hear him scream.

There was a roar, and I stood, leaning on his spear. My spear. I held it in his hands—my hands—as the lion drew near. Lo-Melkhiin knew how to kill them without spoiling the pelt.
He could make their deaths swift and painless, and take the mane home to his mother, who loved them even through her illness.

But there were hyenas close by, too, and when I threw his spear—my spear—I pinned down the lion’s paw. My prey roared again, this time in pain. The hyenas heard the call
and answered, their laughter rolling across the dunes as they spread out to surround the injured beast.

The lion tried to fight them, but the hyenas were too many, their jaws too strong. They tore the golden beast to pieces, hair and blood and bone spread out across the sand, and then they ate
him, because they could.

I made Lo-Melkhiin watch.

IT WAS A BREEZE THAT WOKE ME, sweet-smelling air untouched by heavy incense. And for a moment, I forgot where it was I slept, but then the serving girl laid the tray beside my
pillowed head and I remembered. I breathed the clean air, let in by the open door I had not even seen the night before when the candles had turned my eyes to haze, and sat up.

“Lady-bless,” said the serving girl, “you must drink the tea.”

I wondered if she had come to bring breakfast to the other girls and found only their corpses in the silk. She showed no surprise at finding me alive, and no relief either. She held the cup out
to me, its ceramic shell so thin I marveled it could hold liquid at all, and I took it from her with both hands. It tasted awful, and I recognized the flavor of the herbs from my mother’s
description of them. This was the tea that kept a babe from settling. Lo-Melkhiin had only touched my hands, but I drank it down nonetheless.

There had been powers I did not understand in the room with us last night. In the soft sunlight, it was hard to remember, but easier to believe. I still felt the faint stirrings in my chest and
knew I could not doubt. The light that had passed between us, first from me to him and then back as different colors, was like nothing of which I had seen or heard. And I did not know who in this
place I could ask.

“Lady-bless,” said the serving girl, “will you eat?”

I wondered if she expected tears from me, or lamentations. I crossed my ankles, and held out a hand for the bowl instead. She bowed over it, and the bronze was cool in my fingers. The food was
simple, as though the cook who prepared it knew that I was desert-born and feared that my new surroundings would make me ill. I folded hummus into bread and ate slowly, and the serving girl
watched.

She had my number of summers, I thought, though she was lighter skinned beneath her veils. She had not seen the sun and felt the wind as I had. Her nails were short, like mine, and her hair was
bound up neatly in coils around her head. It was a more elaborate style than I had ever attempted, and I wondered how I might duplicate it, since I could not see how it was fastened beneath her
silks. Then I remembered the bathhouse the evening before, and remembered that I might never do my own hair again. A queen’s hair would be elegant, and put in place by someone else.

When I finished, she set the bowl down on the tray and pulled a cord near the foot of the bed. It rang with a soft chime, calling the other serving girls into the room. They began to open
shutters and windows, air and light streaming in, and one took away the dishes. The first girl held her hands out to me, and I let her pull me from the bed. I followed her back along the path,
where I could hear the whispering water again. I stopped, to see if she would let me, and when she did not push, I looked at the source of the sound. I had lived the night to see this, and I was
not disappointed.

It was a statue of a woman standing tall and proud, with each foot on the back of a lion. In her hands there was a jug, held downwards, and from it poured a thin stream of water, which fell on
the multicolored pebbles below. She was beautiful, but there was something in her eyes I did not like, something that did not match her face.

“Lady-bless,” said the serving girl, “that is Lo-Melkhiin’s mother, as carved by Firh Stonetouched to celebrate her recovery.”

Lo-Melkhiin’s mother had suffered long and hard; her health leeched from her like bones left out in the sun, white and brittle and bereft of all that gave life. When Lo-Melkhiin had come
out of the desert, possessed by whatever demon he found there, he had cured her, but now she went no longer beneath the sun. I wondered if she ever met her son’s wives, or if she ignored
them.

“Lady-bless,” said the serving girl, and I followed her into the bathhouse.

Today they dressed me more simply, and used much less perfume. They combed my hair, and coiled it, and pinned it underneath my veil. I did not know what had become of my sister’s purple
dishdashah that I had worn here. It had seemed so fine when I put it on, and I did not even really remember when they had taken it off. I wondered if it had simply been discarded, or if it had been
passed on to another to wear. I wondered if they had kept it to bury me in.

The dress I wore now was much finer, the silk thinner and the stitching so tiny I had to squint to see it. They painted my face, which they had not done the night before, lining my eyes with
black and then blue, to match the color of the dress. With my eyes closed, I saw the people of my village as they woke in the morning and prepared for the day.

Our father, returning, would find his second daughter gone. He might even mourn me, remembering the girl who had held his robe when the floods came, and the woman he might have bartered along
with my sister for a marriage match. My brothers would not know what to say. After my sister and I had reached our tenth summer and came in from the herds to learn the tent-crafts that would serve
us during marriage, we had seen them infrequently. I looked past them in my mind’s eye, to the tent where my mother and my sister and my sister’s mother now slept together.

I pulled back the tent flap, and leaned in. There was my sister’s shrine, smaller than the one she had made for me in the caves, but lovingly crafted. It was built of dark stones, and
bound by a circle of purple cloth I knew was from the dress we had made together, the one I had taken from her when I saved her life. On it there stood a tallow candle in place of a lamp. These
candles burned more quickly and were more expensive, but the light was cleaner, and it was said that smallgods paid more attention to light that more closely matched the sun.

My sister knelt before the shrine and whispered in the family tongue. My mother knelt beside her, though she did not speak. Her face was tearstained, and I knew that she would not pray for me
until her prayers were made of anger and hope. Tear-prayers were for the dead, the kind we had said for my sister’s brother when the flood took him, and for the babies that my mother had
lost. My sister’s mother knotted black threads and laid them atop the purple silk, to finish the binding. I hoped they would remember that my sister needed a new dress. There was no need for
this shrine to become their lives.

“Lady-bless,” said a serving girl, and I opened my eyes.

“I wore a purple dishdashah last night,” I said. The words came unbidden, and they were the first I had spoken in hours. The serving girls jumped, but then smoothed their faces.

“Yes, lady-bless,” said the girl who had carried my breakfast.

“I would like it back,” I said to her. “My sister made it with me, and I do not wish for it to be destroyed.”

“Of course, lady-bless,” she said to me.

I was not used to idleness, and so the day dragged on. There were no craft tools in my room, and the serving girl who sat with me did not speak. I endured the morning, and a lunch of roasted
peppers, and then when evening fell I was taken back to the bathhouse. My face was washed and my hair let down and combed with perfume. Again they wrapped me in fine silks, with ties so fragile
that they might leave me bare at any moment, and again they returned me to my room to wait.

Lo-Melkhiin came as he had the night before, and sat down, this time on the bed.

“You still have no fear of me,” he said.

“I still have nothing to fear,” I told him.

“Tell me more about your sister,” he said then. “If you would die for her, she must be worthy of tales.”

“She is,” I said. “Together, we made a dress that was beautiful enough to fool a king into picking the magpie instead of the wren.”

“That dress is lost to her,” Lo-Melkhiin said. “If I wished, I could have it destroyed. I know you have asked for its return.”

“My sister will make other dresses,” I said to him. “Our father loves her mother well, and brings her the finest silks. Her mother is not so foolish as to waste them on
herself, and has taught my sister to make the most delicate skirts and veils, so that when she goes to market, she catches the eyes of everyone who sees her. She will stitch her own secrets now,
and they will be all the more powerful, for they will not be shared with anyone, not even with me.”