Empire of Sand

by Tasha Suri

  She lifted the blade up and waited for it to cool again.

  She’d been too afraid to use the dagger on the journey, with Nuri always near, with her guards ever vigilant. Once in her palanquin, she’d made a small cut to her thumb, and daubed blood behind her ear, in the manner mothers daubed kohl behind children’s ears to keep the evil eye at bay. She’d hoped it would be enough, and perhaps it had been. She’d seen no shadows. Felt no evil descend, winged and silent.

  Once the blade had cooled, she placed its sharp edge to a finger, and watched the blood well up. The cut was shallow, the pain negligible. She placed her finger against the window ledge and drew a line across its surface.

  The lantern flame flickered, caught by a faint breeze. Arwa watched it move. She thought of her husband. Of Kamran. Of a circle of blood, and a hand on her sleeve, and eyes that gleamed like gold. Her stomach felt uneasy again, roiling inside her. Her mouth was full of the taste of old iron.

  Curious, how even when the heart was silent and the mind declined to recall suffering, the body still remembered.

  She wiped the dagger clean on an old cloth and pressed the material to her finger finally to stem the last of the bleeding. She looked at the window. The blood was still there, illuminated by her lantern, a firm line demarcating the dark and the light, the safety of the room, and what lay beyond it.

  She sat on the bed, curling up her knees. She placed the dagger by her feet and watched the flame move. Waiting.

  The night remained silent.

  Nuri’s voice rose up in her. You … you need someone to take care of you. To protect you.

  What a nice idea, Arwa thought idly, as sleep began to creep over her. If only someone existed who truly could.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The walls of the hermitage were thinner than they first appeared. Arwa was woken from an uneasy sleep by the sound of women chattering as they headed to breakfast. The widows, it seemed, were early risers.

  Once the corridors were quiet again, Arwa dressed and left her room. The night’s bitter chill had softened, and now the indoor air of the hermitage felt no more than pleasantly cool on her skin. She drew her shawl loosely around her head and her shoulders, her bare feet moving soundless across the stone floor.

  She found the prayer room much more quickly than she’d expected to. It was set farther down the corridor from where she’d slept, the scent of incense wafting from its open doors inviting her in. She had hoped it would be quiet, now that many of the women were breaking their fast, and it was. Two very elderly ladies were asleep against one wall, leaning against each other with their shawls tucked up to their chins. Apart from them—and their gentle snores—the room was empty and silent.

  Arwa did not know if the women had come to pray at dawn as the most pious did and fallen asleep shortly after, or if they’d come here to surreptitiously share the carafe of wine she could see tucked between them. Although her guess was firmly on the latter, Arwa was just grateful they were not awake to speak to her, to question her or pity her with soft eyes.

  She was tired of people and their pity.

  One of the walls was a latticed screen carved to resemble tree roots and great sprouting leaves. The light poured through it in honeycomb shadows. Before the screen stood a statue as tall as Arwa herself. She drew her shawl tighter around her and approached it.

  The statue was of a male figure, garbed in a turban and robes. Its upraised palm held the world inside it.

  It was a statue of the Emperor—of all Emperors, past and future—and their blessed bloodline. It was a statue of the Maha, the Great One and first Emperor, who built the Ambhan Empire and then raised a temple upon the sands of Irinah province, where his power and piety had ensured the blessings of the Gods would shower for centuries down upon the Empire and grant him a lifespan far beyond mortal reckoning.

  The sight of the effigy’s blank face—of the eternity of its varnished, bare surface—brought Arwa an immense sense of comfort that she couldn’t fully explain. Perhaps it reminded her of kinder times during her childhood, when she’d prayed at her mother’s side for the sake of the Empire and for its future glory. Perhaps it merely helped her believe that all suffering was finite, and even the anger and grief coiled within her now would one day fade to the void.

  There was no one to see her or to scold her. So Arwa took another step forward and placed her hands against the smooth face. The feel of it reminded her of the opal in her dagger hilt: smooth and somehow achingly familiar against her palms.

  She let out a slow breath. Some of that awful tension in her unfurled. She stepped back and kneeled before the altar.

  The ground was cold. She sang a prayer, soft under her breath so as not to disturb the sleepers behind her. At the feet of the effigy was incense and a cluster of flowers, freshly picked. Tucked discreetly at the base of the statute were tiny baskets, woven of leaves and grass. Filled with soil. Arwa paused in her prayer, thoughtful, and touched one with her fingertips.

  She knew what they were. She had seen them on dozens of roadside altars during the journey through Chand to the hermitage.

  Grave-tokens.

  Tokens of grief. Symbolic burials, for the Maha, who had died when Arwa was only a girl. Four hundred years he’d lived, some claimed. And then he had died, and the Empire had been falling to curse and ruin ever since.

  Or perhaps he’d risen to the Gods. Perhaps one day he would return. Perhaps he had not died at all, and was simply biding his time, waiting for the people of his Empire to prove their faith and their strength before he would deign to return and guide them once more.

  She’d heard all the arguments before, at the celebrations and dinners she’d attended in her brief time as a married woman. Politics and faith, tangled together as they were, were never far from the minds—or tongues—of the nobility.

  She wondered sorely if she was going to be privy to heated exchanges of faith here, too. No doubt a hermitage of widows was rich soil for questions of death and mourning. Rabia was clearly one of that hopeful number who believed the Maha was not truly gone, and she was also clearly stupid enough to announce her views to strangers like Arwa, who didn’t care a whit what she thought about anything. The grave-tokens were proof enough that many widows held the opposite view and weren’t afraid to profess their faith, or their grief.

  Well, when the arguments began, Arwa would just follow the lead of the snoring friends behind her and turn to the quiet comfort of a prayer room—or wine, if required.

  A noise startled her out of her reverie. Someone had rapped their knuckles deliberately against the doorframe, startling one of the elderly women mid-snore into wakefulness.

  “Wh-what is it?”

  “Nothing, Aunt,” said Gulshera. Her eyes met Arwa’s. “I’ve come for the girl. Rest.”

  The woman mumbled and subsided back into sleep. Arwa stood.

  “Please come with me,” Gulshera said.

  Arwa followed her out.

  In the morning light, Gulshera’s hair was as pale as snow, her skin the lightest shade of brown. As a young woman, she must have been considered the epitome of Ambhan beauty, despite the severe shape of her mouth and the way she held herself, with a ramrod straight posture reminiscent of a military-trained nobleman’s.

  “You ate nothing this morning,” Gulshera said, gesturing for Arwa to walk with her down the corridor. Arwa obeyed. “Roshana worried.”

  Arwa did not think it would take a great deal of effort to worry Roshana.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry anyone. I only wanted to pray.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time for prayer here,” said Gulshera. “Right now, we need to get you some food. The tables have been cleared, so we’ll see what the cooks have left.”

  “If you direct me to the kitchens, I can go on my own,” Arwa said with studied politeness.

  “Ah, I see.” Gulshera’s voice was terribly matter-of-fact. “You want me to leave you alone.”

  Ye
s, thought Arwa.

  “Not at all,” she said. “I simply don’t want to trouble you.”

  “Indeed. Well, perhaps I want to be troubled.”

  She took Arwa’s arm imperiously.

  “Come,” she said. “A servant always brings hot tea to my room in the morning. You’ll share it with me.”

  There was no way to refuse her now, so Arwa didn’t try to. She allowed herself to be led.

  Gulshera’s room was a cluttered, lived-in space, with a low dining table by the lattice window and large sheaves of paper stacked neatly on her writing desk. Arwa saw silk-bound parchments, marked with the unfamiliar seal of a noble Ambhan family, balanced precariously on the edge of the bed. A set of bows hung on the opposing wall.

  The largest of them caught Arwa’s attention and held it. It was taller than her—tall as a grown man—its surface gilded with mother-of-pearl. Arwa itched to hold it. Its ends were shaped like the mouths of tigers, with serrated teeth stretched into an open snarl.

  “It’s a relic,” Gulshera said, startling Arwa back to reality. “It takes a full-grown man all his strength to string and shoot an arrow from it. My husband was full proud of it. But of course, it’s only good for display now.”

  Gulshera was already seated by the window. There was a tray set before her. “Sit,” she said. “You can pour the tea.”

  There were herbs steeped in water, a small bowl of honey, and a shallow tray of attar-scented water. Next to the tea were vegetables fried golden in gram flour. Arwa poured the tea and heaped in honey for both her and Gulshera, then took a quick sip from her own cup that was burning sweet.

  “You didn’t sleep,” said Gulshera.

  It wasn’t a question. “I slept a little,” Arwa said anyway.

  “No food, and no sleep.” Gulshera sipped her own drink; steam rose up around her face in coils. “I see.”

  Arwa picked up a fritter and bit into it pointedly, resisting the urge to bristle. No doubt Gulshera thought she was a fragile creature, a young and witless thing fueled by love and religious fervor, shattered by what she had seen that day and night at the fort a mere handful of months ago.

  Let her think it. It was better than the truth.

  She waited for Gulshera to begin lecturing her. She stared down at her oil-stained fingers in silence as Gulshera sipped her tea and took one of the fritters for herself.

  Instead, Gulshera said, “Eat. Drink your tea. Then go, when you like.”

  “Go?”

  “When you like,” Gulshera repeated. She soaked her fingers in the attar-water, then stood, leaving Arwa alone with her tea and the cooling fritters, under a pale slant of sunlight pouring in through the window. She heard Gulshera settle at the writing desk. The sound of rustling paper followed.

  Arwa hesitated.

  A memory came to her, unbidden, of the feral cat she’d found in the gardens of her first home in the province Hara, where she had lived as a girl of ten. She’d been determined to make a friend of that cat, with its one bad eye and fanged teeth, but it ran and hid in the foliage whenever Arwa approached it. She’d gained a number of scratches before she’d learned that if she left slivers of meat on the ground near her, it would come and eat by her warily, as long as she studiously ignored its presence. In the end, it had grown warm with her, following her around the gardens, sleeping on her lap if she sat in the right patch of sun. Indifference and food had won it better than any straightforward affection ever could have.

  Arwa had the discomforting sense that Gulshera was treating her with the same studied, indifferent regard Arwa had once shown that cat.

  She wants something from me, Arwa thought.

  She ate another fritter, and drank her tea, before she murmured a suitably gracious thank-you and moved to leave.

  “Come back whenever you like,” Gulshera said, not raising her head as Arwa left the room. “I always have enough for two.”

  Arwa had liked the brusqueness of Gulshera’s care, somewhat despite herself. But as time went on—as she walked from Gulshera’s room across the hermitage, passing rooms and other widows—the memory of Gulshera’s words began to feed her disquiet.

  You didn’t sleep, Gulshera had said. It hadn’t sounded like a guess. Perhaps Arwa was simply that transparent, but she went to her room regardless, checking the undisturbed line of blood on her window ledge, hidden carefully beneath her own miniature effigy of the Emperor. No one had searched her room. And her dagger was in her sash, concealed where no one would find it and recognize it for what it was.

  Arwa looked out of the lattice window. Without the dark of the night beyond it, she could see that the hermitage stood above a deep valley studded with rich swathes of flowers. The hermitage curved like a crescent moon, following the shape of the valley below it. Arwa’s window faced another, far at the other edge of the building.

  Gulshera’s room lay at the other end of the hermitage. She’d walked the journey between their bedrooms and knew that now. No doubt she must have looked out of her own window in the night and seen Arwa’s oil lantern burning. Perhaps she’d looked for a moment only, then gone back to bed. Perhaps she’d watched for a long time, marking the constant flicker of light in Arwa’s window, wondering what dark thoughts kept Arwa far from rest.

  Either way, she knew the exact location of Arwa’s room. She’d stared through the press of the dark at Arwa’s lantern light, deliberately, thoughtfully. It disturbed Arwa to be so watched. She stepped back from the lattice and sat on her bed, hands clenched, searching for calm. She thought of how she’d listened to Gulshera’s words without discerning their full import, and stared about the older woman’s room wide-eyed without using any of the thought and cunning a noblewoman should sensibly employ. Fool. She was a fool.

  What else, she thought, did I miss?

  After a midday rest, some of the women apparently liked to go for a walk, or so Roshana told her as she dragged Arwa out to join them. Roshana spoke to Arwa anxiously, asking how well she was settling in and how she liked it here in Numriha so far from her old home. Arwa clamped down on her instinct to be waspish and tried to be gracious in response. Still, she was glad when Asima commandeered her, demanding that Arwa walk by her side instead.

  There was a gentle avenue that followed the edge of the hermitage, not quite dipping into the steeper territory of the valley. It was a smooth enough path for the widows of varying levels of health to walk it comfortably. From here, Arwa could see the valley, and also glimpse the guardswomen who walked the roof of the hermitage, on the lookout for bandits who’d normally consider a house of noblewomen a ripe target.

  “Pick some of that for me,” demanded Asima, pointing to some gnarled vegetation.

  “Not the flowers?” Arwa asked, leaning down.

  “No, no. Not flowers. What do I need them for?”

  Arwa picked Asima green vegetation and long grass. It took her a moment to realize the purpose of Asima’s commands. In Arwa’s defense, her thoughts were somewhat distracted. Her visit to Gulshera’s room was still running in small circles inside her brain, tying her insides into ever tighter knots.

  “Can you weave them together?” Asima asked.

  When Arwa shook her head, Asima clucked in response.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” she said, shaking her head. “A noble girl who can’t weave a simple basket! The Empire has truly fallen to shit, Gods save us.”

  Her words drew a startled laugh from Arwa, quickly quelled by Asima’s gimlet-eyed stare. “As you say, Aunt,” Arwa said quickly.

  “Can you embroider?” Asima demanded.

  “Yes, Aunt.”

  “But you can’t weave?”

  What followed was a demonstration of how to make a grave-token. It was a simple enough lesson, and one Arwa could follow without paying it all her attention. As she followed Asima’s directions, taking green roots into her hands, winding them into a miniature braid, she worried over the thought of Gulshera watching her lantern-bright window. She worr
ied over the thought as one worries over a sore tooth, incessantly, unable to soothe the irritation away.

  Something had to be done.

  Gulshera was not in her room. The door was locked. Arwa waited outside it for the woman to return. Eventually, Gulshera appeared, striding along the corridor. She hadn’t been attending to prayer or to mourning or ambling gently along a well-trodden path, as the other widows had. Her bow was at her back, her face flushed with the heat of the day.

  “Arwa,” Gulshera acknowledged, tipping her head.

  “You watched my room last night,” said Arwa, without preamble. “Why?”

  She saw Gulshera’s forehead furrow into a frown.

  “Did your mother not teach you subtlety?” Gulshera asked incredulously. “They would eat you alive in Jah Ambha, by the Emperor’s grace! Come inside.”

  Arwa followed Gulshera into her room, shutting the door behind her as the older woman swiftly divested herself of her boots and her bow and the long jacket she wore over her tunic. Finally, when Gulshera was done, she sat by the window and gestured for Arwa to join her.

  “I looked out of my window and saw the light in yours. For a moment,” Gulshera stressed. “No longer. I had no darker motive. I only cared about your welfare. Are you satisfied?”

  No, Arwa was not satisfied. Far from it.

  “In my experience,” Arwa said steadily, “people don’t just simply care about one another’s welfare. All actions have a purpose. I may be a child to you, Aunt, but I’ve lived long enough to know what people are.”

  “Then you’ve lived a terribly sad life,” Gulshera said, not mincing her words. “You’ll learn that we have to look after one another here. We’re not like the noblewomen you left behind, we have no need to play political games and tread on one another for the sake of our husbands or children or even ourselves. Our time of power and glory is finished.

  “Perhaps you don’t understand yet,” she continued, “that when your husband died, the part of you that shared in his world died with him. We all came here, by choice or by necessity, because we Ambhans hold our marriages more sacred than the lesser peoples of the world, and we respect our vows beyond death. We are the ghosts of who we once were, and accordingly we must take care of one another. No one else will.” Gulshera’s gaze was fixed on Arwa’s, her voice unrelenting. “You’ll think me dramatic, Arwa, but I assure you I am a realist. You must be one too. For your own sake.”