A Thousand Nights

by E. K. Johnston

  I went and stood beside Lo-Melkhiin, and took Lo-Melkhiin’s hand in mine. For the first time, I saw the cold light without his prompting, and felt something settle in my skin. The copper fire was there, and wound itself around his fingers.

  “I know you have tried,” I said to to the healer. “Can you tell me what you did?”

  “I have cleaned the wounds with water and bound them up to stop the bleeding,” he said to me. “The herbs in the bindings are to help the skin regrow, though he may scar.”

  “My son is a hunter,” said Lo-Melkhiin’s mother. “He will not mind the scars.”

  The healer bowed to her.

  “Will it damage the wound for me to see it unbound?” I asked. The healer hesitated, and I laid my other hand on his. The copper fire shone. “Only in the desert have I seen such wounds before.”

  I did not lie, exactly. I had seen the wounds, but the sheep was already dead. In any case, the healer was so desperate he agreed, and carefully pulled back the bindings. Unbound, they were gruesome looking.

  “Have they always been this vibrant?” I asked.

  “No, lady-bless.” The healer pointed to a charcoal mark on Lo-Melkhiin’s arm. “Here is the extent of the coloring two hours ago. It has spread a handspan since then.”

  He offered me clean oil, that I might touch the wounds without causing infection. When I touched Lo-Melkhiin, no fire passed between us, but I could feel the rhythm of his blood. It was like the fountain, like the spindle, and like my own heart. I closed my eyes, and tried to match my breathing to his, but it was too shallow. Instead, for every three of his breaths, I took one, and that helped me sink into his blood.

  It was not like spinning. That was orderly and productive. This was a mess of blood and marrow and bone, and a spark that linked them all together that I did not want to touch. The blood was heavy, too heavy for the body to carry. It moved through his veins sluggishly, carrying the weight toward his heart. I did not like to think what would happen when the weight reached its destination. Shifting, I found myself in an artery, rushing fast now, through his body and to his brain. It was like a lightning storm there, except for one corner that was friendly and dark. I tried to look at my own brain, and saw no dark spots like his, but the movement pulled me out of the trance, back to Lo-Melkhiin’s side.

  I could say nothing, and he would die. I could return to our father’s tents, and we would endure while the men of the city fought over the throne. I could say nothing, but others would suffer: other traders, the women and children in other tents, the villages that were closer to the border than they were to the qasr. I could say nothing, or I could make sure that when Lo-Melkhiin woke up, he would owe his life to me.

  “His blood is poisoned,” I said to the healer. “The bird must have had something on its talons.”

  “But the horse isn’t ill,” said the healer. “And neither is the guard, who was also scratched.”

  “Perhaps it only affects Lo-Melkhiin, but I tell you, his blood is poisoned,” I said to him. And that would be a good poison to know.

  “Cut the wounds,” Lo-Melkhiin’s mother said. “I know it is dangerous, but it may be the only way.”

  The healer looked at both of us helplessly, and then began to roll up his sleeves. I saw the copper fire run up his arms, toward his heart and his mind. He would do it.

  “I beg you both, leave us,” he said. “This will not be pleasant to see.”

  I pulled Lo-Melkhiin’s mother from the room as the healer summoned his aide and they began to heat their blades in the fire. I knew when they began to cut, though, without seeing them, because that is when Lo-Melkhiin woke up, and at last began to scream.

  LO-MELKHIIN DID NOT DIE that night, nor the next. It took three full nights of bleeding before the poison was leeched from him and he woke, and knew the sky from the sand. I found a pot of desert flowers in my rooms that day, and knew they were a sign of gratitude from Lo-Melkhiin’s mother. I put them in the sun so that they wilted and died, rootless as they were. I wanted no memory of what I had done.

  The girls who came to do my hair and bathe me bowed low, and would not meet my eyes. They did not make idle chatter as they had before, and they did not speak directly to me either, save to ask if a pin vexed me or if the design was good. They were afraid, or perhaps they thought I was a fool. I had saved Lo-Melkhiin, after all, for reasons of men, and the women who lived in the qasr would suffer for it. I would pay with my life, as like as anything. I was short-tempered, and did not hold that back from my answers to them. By the time I was dressed, we were all upset. At least they could flee.

  I went into the water garden, thinking that the fountain would soothe me as it had the day before, and found once again that I was not alone there. This time, it was Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered who waited for me, and he had breakfast for two spread on the blanket where he sat in the shade. I sat across from him, and did not speak.

  “In times gone past,” said Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered, “a person who saved a king or a queen would be richly rewarded. Nothing their heart desired would be too large. Yet here you sit, lady-bless, with a hard heart in your chest.”

  “Should I rejoice?” I asked him. “Am I not a silly sheep who cannot think for herself, and goes willingly to the pen rather than face the possibility of jackals in the night?”

  “I think rather that you are a goat,” said Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered. “You go to the pen because it is your home, but you could think your way out of it, should you need to.”

  I made an impolite sound that would have galled my sister’s mother to hear.

  “Tell me what you saw when you healed him,” said Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered. “I shall be the sun, and you the ball, and together we will judge the shadows.”

  I told him about the heaviness in Lo-Melkhiin’s blood and the dark spot in his brain that had seemed so unlike the rest of it.

  “Unlike in what manner?” he asked.

  I considered the words I might use to describe it to him. The threads were there, I found, in the rhythm of the fountain’s falling water.

  “When we slaughter animals for our feast days, we set aside the head for our offerings,” I said to him. “My mother and my sister’s mother wait until the skulls have dried, and then they crack them open. That is how I know what the brain looks like. I have seen sheep and goat, and once a camel. In Lo-Melkhiin’s brain, it is like there is a viper, but the corner is that of a camel.”

  Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered rolled an olive between his fingers.

  “And the camel-section was dark, like it was asleep,” I continued. “The viper section was full of lightning.”

  “That lightning is what the Priests might call your soul,” he said. “The Skeptics think it is like the sun on green plants, making them grow tall and strong.”

  “Does that mean the dark part does not have a soul?” I asked.

  “Or that it is being held back,” said Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered. “Do you know the story of how Lo-Melkhiin became like he is?”

  “I do,” I said to him. “He went into the desert and came back changed.”

  “You must never tell my colleagues,” he said to me, “but I think they are wrong. The sun can bake a man’s thoughts for a time, but if it does not kill him, he becomes cool-headed again. I think the Priests are right. There was a demon in the dunes that day, and it came back instead of Lo-Melkhiin.”

  “Not instead of,” I said to him. “As well as. If it was instead of, the whole brain would be the same.”

  “That is true, I suppose,” he said to me. “It does not matter, in the end. The demon is too strong.”

  “Not so strong that I am dead,” I reminded him.

  “That is what gives me hope,” he said. “We must have Lo-Melkhiin until there is an heir. An heir can have a regent, and a regent can step aside. An heir can be taught, molded. Without an heir, the powerful men of the court will step in, and we will be generations without peace as they squabble.”
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  I knew the laws of men. A regent must be a Priest or a Skeptic. Often, it was one of each. They were always old, so that they would not hold on to their lives for too much longer after the heir came of age and took his place. An heir would bring peace, but there was only one way to get one, and the idea made my blood cold. I felt nauseated even thinking of it.

  “I know it is not fair to ask,” said Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered. “It is not fair to ask a price I cannot pay. But it is the only solution that I can see.”

  He rose, knees creaking, and bowed, then turned to leave me in the water garden. If he expected an answer, he gave no sign of it, and I gave him none. I thought of the tea I had drunk this morning. It tasted so foul, and now I craved it more than anything I had ever had before. I must find my way into the tea stores and take some, I thought, in case someone orders the women to stop bringing it to me in the morning. So far, Lo-Melkhiin had touched little besides my hands, but I would take no chances.

  My stomach heaved, and I vomited my breakfast into the bowl it had been served in. The serving girl heard me, and came at a run. It took some time to assure her that I was well enough, that I just required plain bread and water to settle my stomach. I had ruined the breakfast tray, so I helped her wrap it in the blanket before she took it away.

  There will be no heir. I will not pay that price for them. I am finished with the laws of men. I will find another way.

  I followed at a distance, hoping she would lead me to the kitchens, and she did. The cook took one look at the bundle she carried and ordered it consigned to the fire. When he saw me, he would have made a fuss, but I raised a hand to forestall him.

  “Revered bread-minder,” I said to him. “I know that you are busy with the day’s meals. Plain bread and a quiet corner are all I ask.”

  “Of course, lady-bless,” he said to me, and guided me to a stool by the window, far enough from the hearth fires that it would be out of the path of the blasts of heat, and near enough a window to catch the breeze.

  There I sat, chewing the bread and drinking the cool fruit juice he set on a low table next to me. I watched him and his helpers as they worked. At first, it looked like an unordered melee, but as I sat, I saw the patterns emerge as surely as they did in weaving or in spinning.

  Lo-Melkhiin’s mother had begged me to fix him, and I had. Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered wished for an heir, but he would get none from me. Lo-Melkhiin ruled because men let him, regardless of the price. I had lived in his qasr nearly two moons’ wanings now, and I did not die. I had called the bird. But now I did not know what to do, so I sat in the kitchen, and watched the boy whose job it was to turn the goats upon their spits so they cooked evenly.

  As I watched, the chief cook came to the boy and looked at the meat. He nodded, telling the lad that his job was well done, and then took his knife and pointed to a part of the roast that was a different color than the rest.

  “You see, it was bad when we put it on, and we knew it, but sometimes cooking can save it,” he said to the boy. “But this cannot be saved. If a man ate this, he would be sick. Remember this color, boy, in case you see it when I am not here, or in your own kitchen someday. This color goes to the dogs.”

  With quick and practiced strokes he cut the spoiled meat free, and whistled. The hounds who turned the largest roasts—cattle, I assumed—perked up their ears and sat down, paws folded before them as neatly as though they sat at the king’s high table. The cook threw the scraps he’d cut in front of them, and then whistled again. At the second signal, the dogs began to eat, licking their teeth to get every morsel until they were done, and then returning to their work before the side of beef began to burn.

  “Even the spoiled bits have their uses, lady-bless,” the cook said to me, smiling. “And the lads appreciate the treat whether they’ve two legs or four, eh?”

  I watched as he passed a sweet-roll to the boy who turned the goat spit, and then went back to his work at the kneading tables.

  Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered thought that the demon was too strong, but perhaps I had found a weakness when I saw the dark spot in the first place. Lo-Melkhiin’s mother was certain that her son, her good son, still lived. The dark spot had felt kindly when I saw it. Perhaps it was the lightning that gave the demon control.

  “Fix him,” Lo-Melkhiin’s mother had said to me, and fix him I had. But I had only fixed his body. The dark spot in his brain was still there. If it were bigger, perhaps Lo-Melkhiin would return to the way he had been before he met the demon in the sand dunes. I could not cut with a knife, the way the head cook had, to separate the two pieces from one another, but I did not need to. I had reached my sister across the desert, and I had called a great bird from the sky. The lightning inside Lo-Melkhiin had scared me before I knew what it was, but I knew my soul was strong and could grapple with his if need be.

  The men needed a king. Most were content with the one they had. The Skeptics wished for another to put in his place—treason, should anyone hear of it. I would not settle for the king we had, but neither would I give them an heir. Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered had bid me to be the ball, and he the sun, but I would do that no longer. I would be the sun, now, and I would test the limits of what this strange power could do. I would call upon the prayers my sister offered at my shrine, and I would change what I saw fit to change.

  I had kept Lo-Melkhiin in a corner of his own mind, for my own amusement at first. I grew accustomed to his screaming and pleading, and then his sullen silence when he became inured to each horror in its turn. When the bird attacked us, I found a new use for that corner.

  I had felt pain before—not as myself, but only once I had entered Lo-Melkhiin’s body. He might have stiff legs from a day’s ride, or cut himself with his eating knife. It was interesting, this pain. It made me feel alive inside his body, and I rather liked it. The day the great bird took us, though, I felt something entirely new. It seared me, inside and out, as though I were cooking and could not find the fire to put it out before it engulfed me. I had thought we might die.

  I pulled myself out of his hands and his feet and his chest. His own awareness, so long caged, rushed in to take my place, and only found too late the trap I had set. Now the pain was his alone, save for the small amount that boiled in his head, and I had to bear very little of it.

  I did not think I would ever tire of his screaming, but he screamed so much that day that I made him go to sleep. I expected that we would heal, and then I would wake him again, but though I had poured as much of my power into the healer as I dared, the healing did not come. There was something in the blood, something put there by the foul carrion—carried from the mountains in its wretched claws—that would not be healed. I was loath to leave Lo-Melkhiin if he could be saved, but he was no good to me dead, so I prepared myself for the long trip back to the hottest part of the desert. I would have power enough for a while there at least, though of course I craved more.

  Then there was the lightest of touches on Lo-Melkhiin’s skin. A cool compress, where the healer’s craft had only sealed the burning in. I waited, and did not leave Lo-Melkhiin yet, as that coolness spread through the blood and the brain, and then retreated as it had come.

  It was her.

  When she left us, the compresses were removed, and then came a new pain, sharp and sure. We bled, but I felt the poison leaving us, and decided that I could endure a little longer if it meant not leaving Lo-Melkhiin’s body on the table where it lay. I let him have that pain, too. I had had enough to suit me forever more.

  I woke three days later, weak but whole. The healers filled me with soups and fruit juice until I thought I would burst, but each swallow restored me. On the fourth day, I could walk again. On the fifth, I overheard two of the serving girls whispering as they cleaned the room where they thought I slept.

  “She stitched it, before she could have known,” one said to the other.

  “She couldn’t have,” said the second.

  “She burned it, so no one
would see,” said the first. “Only, the spinners all saw, and weavers too.”

  “Did she see it, then?” said the second. “Or did she cause it?”

  They hushed each other as I shifted, hardly able to keep still, and then fled. I was sure the creature I had married was human, common and sun-hammered like the rest of them, but if the girls were right, then she did have some power to her use, whether she knew it or not.

  I thought of the cool touch that had come before the knives. That had been her hand. She had come into my blood and seen the damage there, and then told the healers how to fix it. She had let me live. I would not have done the same for her.

  Power twists men’s minds so easily. They bend toward it like a tree reaches for light and water. That was why I had chosen Lo-Melkhiin’s body and Lo-Melkhiin’s hands; his were the most powerful. The merchant-lords of his court, the Skeptics and the Priests, the artisans and laborers and their sons, had all turned to him—to us—the way sand follows the direction of the wind.

  I had spent all the years I had been in Lo-Melkhiin’s body giving power to men who I thought would use it in ways that might serve me. I had given them great art and great thoughts, and they never guessed that they fed a terrible hunger in me that would require feeding until they died trying to sate it. They had done great things and made great tales, but I had been blind.

  All of this time, I had had access to more power than I had imagined, and I had missed it because I saw with men’s eyes. I had forgotten the girls who scrubbed the floors and spun the yarn. I had forgotten the women who dyed the cloth and worked with henna. I had married three hundred girls, and as much as eaten them all before they were done cooking.

  She knew. She knew, and yet she saved me anyway, when I lay weak and dying in front of her. She had not struck me as malleable, but she must have been. Only a fool or a puppet would save a man who might kill him, and I knew she was no fool.