A Thousand Nights (7 page)

ON THE SEVENTH MORNING, an old woman brought my tea. She was not old the way the master-weavers were, with their gnarled fingers and stooped shoulders, their white hair braided
about their heads in that simple, coiled style of which I was so jealous. She was old like desert rock, bleached and hard, all the impurities worn away. And her hair, which hung loose about her
face, was a tawny color the like of which I had never seen.

It was her hair that gave her away. This was Lo-Melkhiin’s mother, who had been so ill and then was cured by him in the days after he came back from the desert. Her hair had not recovered
as she had, once her sickness was gone, and since no more of it ever grew she had made for herself a wig out of the lion manes she loved so dearly. It could not be braided or oiled, and could no
more be tamed than the beasts themselves. It was unearthly to look upon, so early in the morning with the golden sunlight around her, but it was beautiful nonetheless.

I sat up and took the cup from her hand. I wondered if I ought to rise altogether and bow, but before I could move again, she took a seat amongst the cushions at the foot of my bed and tucked
her feet beneath her, as though she were a daughter of shepherds herself.

“Seven nights,” she said to me. “I suppose I will not be able to avoid you for much longer.”

I wondered if she had thought to care at all for her son’s wives at the start, and learned to ignore them the way the rest of the qasr seemed to. The women in the thread room still did not
speak to me, though they spoke to themselves in louder and less cautious voices. At least they no longer looked so surprised when I appeared each morning, and no longer avoided my gaze when I told
them I would see them the next day.

“It is my honor to meet you,” I said. I did not know what to do, or even what to call her, so I drank my tea and prayed that I did not give offense.

“My son says that you are not afraid of him,” she said to me.

I had not known that they were on speaking terms. I did not know if she approved of his marriages. I did not know if she feared him.

“I do fear him,” I said, which was close to the truth. “I fear him as I fear the desert sun and poisonous snakes. They are all part of the life I live. But the sun gives light,
and snakes will feed a caravan if they are caught and cooked.”

“And under my son’s rule, we have peace and prosperity,” she said, her voice bitter. Her husband had not ruled well.

“And I have no escape from him,” I agreed.

She looked at me for a long time, and I finished my tea.

“I will tell you of my son,” she said. “Not the man he is now, for that you know as well as I do. But I will tell you what he was like when he was a boy, and what he was like
when he learned to hunt.”

I wondered if she meant for me to pity him, but I remembered the others who had lived in this room before me, and my heart was not moved. Still, I had no other business today, and our father had
always told my brothers that the best routes are the ones best known.

“I will hear you,” I said.

“Come to the gardens when you are dressed, and we will speak,” she said to me, and then she left, the wooden screen sliding shut behind her.

The serving girls came in, breathless with excitement, though they did their best to keep their faces blank. Today, at last, my hair was coiled simply about my head, though they twisted it
instead of braiding it, which looked better and was more difficult to secure. I thought I might have more pegs in my hair than held our father’s tents to the sand by the time they were done.
Then they led me to the garden, the one with the fountain I had seen on my first night, and I sat down next to Lo-Melkhiin’s mother. There was a basket of figs before us, and a jug of
sweet-water.

“I am from the south,” she said to me. “Where our desert is blue and looks like water, but will kill you if you drink it.”

Our father had told me of this, and my brothers had seen it too. It was their favorite tale to tell to me and to my sister. A great blue and boundless desert, that heaved under the wind and grew
or shrank with the size of the moon. Creatures did live in it, underneath the surface, like our burrowing snakes and insects; but if a man drank from it, he went mad and died, the same as if he had
tried to drink sand.

“We have different animals there,” she continued, and I remembered myself and paid attention. “So when my lord came to marry me, and brought me my first lion skin, I knew that
I must follow him back to see the creature that had such glorious fur.”

I wondered what it must have been like to be unafraid of lions. When my sister and I first took up the herds, we were told how to kill jackals and hyenas;
but
, my brothers insisted,
should a lioness come, she can take whatever sheep she likes
. The males, I had learned when I was older, were different, but still vicious, particularly when they were alone.

“I loved him, though he was something of a fool,” she said. “He was kind and fair-minded. In better times, he would have made a fair ruler. But it was not to be. I grew ill,
and whatever makes the water come to us from far away failed. The lords he trusted betrayed him, and lined their own pockets instead of looking after their people in the towns and villages. And
then my son was born.”

Lo-Melkhiin had, I think, ten summers more than I did. By the time I was born, we were accustomed to the hard times. My father traveled farther and was home less frequently. My mother and my
sister’s mother had learned to stretch every thread, every loaf, every cut of meat, as far as they could. We did not starve, and neither did any in our father’s tents; but in the towns,
they did not fare as smoothly.

“My son grew up hard, like the times, but with the kindness of his father’s smile,” she said. “I knew that he would be a better lord than his father, and my husband knew
it too. He spent hours ensuring that Lo-Melkhiin had all the best teachers and weapons-masters. If there was a craft my son wished to try his hand at, his father found him a craft-master.

“But what he loved most of all was hunting,” she said. “He learned the desert’s secrets with the ease a hawk learns to fly. By the time he had twelve summers, he was
already bringing home more meat than the qasr’s huntsmen, though the pickings were still lean in those times. He traveled far and wide, seeing more of the land and the desert than his father
ever did, protected by his loyal guards wherever he went.”

I had heard of the guards of which she spoke. Their names were legend now, as was his. Fleetfoot and Farsight had not saved him from whatever-it-was, the day he last went into the desert. His
mother spoke fondly of them, though, so I did my best to control the emotions that would otherwise have rioted on my face.

“He took his first lion in his sixteenth summer,” she said. “The beast had been stealing sheep from a village close to the city, and there was worry that it would soon develop
a taste for children. My husband forbade Lo-Melkhiin to go after it, but he made his guards take him out anyway, and three days later, he returned with a fine pelt.

“After that, it was as though the beasts took to taunting him,” she said. “Though I suppose they had no more game than we did, and were forced to find the easy prey of sheep.
And every time he rode out, he came home with a pelt. I loved them dearly. They were soft, and they smelled of such wildness. I was fading then, breaking under the sun, and the lion skins my son
brought to me were one of the few joys I still had.”

She carded her fingers through her wig as she spoke, smiling at the memory.

“And then he went out after one last pelt.” The smile disappeared from her face. “And you know what happened after that.”

We sat, listening to the fountain, and the sun climbed above us.

“My lady mother,” I said at length, not thinking it odd that I should call her the same thing I called my sister’s mother. “Why do you tell me this?”

“I would have you know your husband,” she said. “It is not fair for you to think him only a monster. The men of the court will tell you that he has done much good for us, and
that your death and those of the others are the price we must pay. I wanted to tell you that he was good, before, and that his father and I wished for him to be a better man. He is not that man.
But every day you live, I will pray to the smallgods of my house that he will become that man again.”

She left me then, and I sat in the garden until the hammer of the sun became so hard that I was forced to seek shade. It still did not matter to me that Lo-Melkhiin had once loved his mother and
his people. He shed blood and kept peace, but only the peace was of note. I was not content with that, though I did not wish for some other girl’s death to pay the price instead. Seven days
in the qasr had made me determined to get seven more, and then more besides. But I had a map of the trade route now, or at least a better one than I did before Lo-Melkhiin’s mother told me
about her son. Perhaps there was a weakness, a fault, I could exploit in him.

But I thought also of what she had said at the end, of what all the stories said: he is not that man anymore.

I DID NOT GO TO THE thread room that afternoon. Instead, I went through the gardens to see the great statues that Lo-Melkhiin’s artists had made. When I saw the statue of
his mother again, standing strong and straight on the backs of the lion pair, I stopped. The first day that I saw the statue, I had thought it striking and beautiful. Now, having met the
flesh-and-blood woman herself, I was less sure. The statue seemed harder, and not because it was made of stone. The face was more pointed, the mouth drawn down, and the shoulders broader than they
were in life.

The worst, though, were the eyes.

I had seen the like on the other statues in the qasr gardens. It did not seem to matter if they were men, women, or animals. All were carved in an uncomfortable beauty, such that no living
creature could duplicate. And all had eyes that were not quite right, staring off into corners as if they expected to find unspoken horrors there. To look too long at any of them was to court
madness.

“Do you like this one?” said a voice behind me. I turned, and saw the guardsman who had given me salt in the desert. He was not dressed in his uniform, the leather armor that
deflected blades and arrows—and must have been murderous in the sun—but wore linen breeches and a tunic belted at the waist. The carved wooden box hung there, next to his eating
knife.

“It is striking,” I said to him. “But having met the subject, I do not think I like it.”

“I do not like it, either,” he confessed, coming to stand beside me. “And I feel I am allowed to say as much, as it was me that carved it.”

I choked. I had never met a stone carver before, let alone one as famous as Firh Stonetouched.

“My lord, I am sorry,” I said. “I meant no offense.”

“I am no lord,” he said, “and I spoke true when I told you I do not like it. I do not like many of the statues I have made for Lo-Melkhiin, even though he does me great honor
by putting them on display in such fine settings as his own gardens.”

“I thought you were a guardsman,” I said. I wished, not for the first time in my life, that I had my sister’s gift with words. I could tell stories well, if I learned and
practiced their telling, but I was not gifted when it came to making them from whole cloth.

“I am,” he said. “I came here to serve Lo-Melkhiin’s father, right before he died, and then I served Lo-Melkhiin.”

“Carving, then, is entertainment to you?” I said. My mother did not approve of idleness, and since my brothers would not lower themselves to sew, many of them whittled bone tools as
they sat around the fire at night.

“It was, once,” he said. “I could make shafts for arrows, or tent pegs—nothing finer. It kept my hands busy, you see, on long watches when the night was cold.”

I looked at the statue. It was a long way from arrows and pegs by the evening’s fire to carven rock in the center of Lo-Melkhiin’s gardens.

“What turned you to stone?” I asked.

His face darkened.

“I rode with Lo-Melkhiin to fetch a bride,” he said. He had forgotten to whom he spoke, and I saw when he remembered, looking at me with a jerk of his head.

“It is all right,” I said. “Please continue.”

“Very well,” he said. “On those rides, we number few, and Lo-Melkhiin takes his turn at keeping watch and saddling the horse, as if he was a common guard. He spoke to us, and
we to him, and he watched me carve. He said I had good hands for stone, should I want to; when we returned, I found this great hulk of rock had been quartered to me.

“I ignored it for a good long while. Six wives, I think. Or maybe eight. I apologize, my lady, but sometimes I do not like to keep track.”

I could not blame the qasr folk. Lo-Melkhiin’s wives numbered in the hundreds, and some had barely survived long enough to make a mark upon the qasr way of life. It was too much to expect
them to mourn.

“Each time we rode out, Lo-Melkhiin watched me carve, and told me that I had hands for stone. And each time, I did not listen,” he said. “And then one night I dreamed, more
vividly than I have ever done, of a statue that was trapped inside a great block—a statue of Lo-Melkhiin’s mother, astride a pair of lions.