A Thousand Nights

by E. K. Johnston

  “Speak no more of that here, I beg you,” I said to them. They looked surprised. “I cannot explain why. Only say nothing more of the metal within these walls, or within the hearing of anyone from the city.”

  “Even you, sister?” asked the oldest.

  “I am not from the city,” I told them. “Lo-Melkhiin has decided I am his queen, but that does not make me belong here.”

  “He called you the star of his skies.” This brother was the most quiet. He did not often speak, joking that the others spoke enough for him, but when he did, even my father listened to his words. I listened to them now.

  “He did that only because you were there to hear it,” I said to him.

  “He mocks us,” said my youngest brother. “And he mocks you.”

  “Hush,” said three of my brothers at once, and then they spoke no more for some time.

  I had spent most of my time in visions seeking my sister. Perhaps I ought to have looked upon my brothers from time to time. They simmered with anger and inaction, like a pot of lentils left in the embers of the cook fire. I wondered what they had plotted while they were out with the caravan, far from the watching eyes of any who knew even where Lo-Melkhiin’s qasr was, let alone any who might speak to him. For a breath, I saw them in the desert, trading spices in purple cloth packets and wrapping unfamiliar ore in broadcloth of the same color.

  My brothers doubtless thought to use my sister’s wedding as a staging ground for my rescue. I hoped my father would be wiser, and stern enough to hold them back. I must return to Lo-Melkhiin, or I would never grow powerful enough to defeat him. With Lo-Melkhiin’s mother along, they would be unable to make much mischief, but I still feared they would do something rash.

  I found my father’s gaze, and saw he understood my concern, though he did not understand why it was I had to return. He would fear reprisals on the others who lived in his tents, and I hoped that it would be enough to keep the storm in his eyes from brewing full. I hoped also that it would be enough to temper my brothers’ fires as well.

  A serving girl came into the garden and coughed. She would come no closer with my brothers there, so I went to her instead. She was pink behind her veil. I suppose my brothers were handsome enough to catch the eye. Three of them were married, after all.

  “Lady-bless,” she said to me, her voice low, “your things will be ready when the hottest part of the day has passed. You will leave then, if that suits your father.”

  “Wait a moment,” I said to her, and went back to where my father sat. “Will you be rested enough when the sun goes behind the wall to travel?” I asked him. “Will the camels be?”

  My father squinted up at the sky. He did not think to check the water clock, if he even knew what it was. It was not my custom to check it either, for all I had lived here so long by now. I still judged the hour by the sun.

  “Yes, daughter of mine,” he said to me. “We will be ready, and the camels can find their way under the stars.”

  I went back to the serving girl and told her as much. She bowed to me, cast one quick look at my brothers, and left to see to her tasks. When I looked back at them, my brothers were smirking at one another.

  “Shall I tell your wives you found the city so lovely?” I said to the oldest three. They laughed, and kissed me again.

  I told them I would see them by the gates when the sun had reached the walls, and went back to my rooms to oversee the last of the packing effort. I wanted to be sure that my clothes were not over-fine. I found the henna mistress had taken charge, though it was not precisely her place. She showed me the dishdashah she had selected for the wedding feast and for the dancing. I nodded my approval.

  “Lady-bless, would your sister take one of your gowns to be wed in?” the henna mistress said. It was a heartfelt offer, but I shook my head.

  “No, mistress,” I said to her. “She will be wed in a dishdashah she has stitched herself, as I was. It is luckier. But I thank you for the generous thought.”

  She bowed and left me to select shoes for riding. Soon, everything was sent away to be bound to the camels. I walked to the gate with Lo-Melkhiin’s mother at my side, and the desert whispering welcome before me.

  THIS TIME WHEN I PASSED through the city, the streets teemed with people who had come to see Lo-Melkhiin’s bride. Men stared at my father’s camels as they walked slowly past. Little girls waved scraps of purple cloth like flags. Their mothers twined the cloth around their fingers. When I passed, they kissed the cloth and raised their hands. I could not fathom where they had gotten it. Purple dye was the most expensive of all the goods my father traded, and yet I saw so much of it, both in and out of my trance.

  My brothers could not stare at me, surprised as they were by the acclaim I was receiving in the streets, because they were too busy with the camels. Lo-Melkhiin had sent my sister and her husband-to-be rich gifts, but also had he given gifts to my father. They were a shadow of what he would have paid, had he bargained a bride price fairly, but they were still worth a small fortune. There were jars of the clear oil that burned in the palace lamps, bales of fine silks and silken threads, wine from grapes that only grew in the lands by the blue desert, and a lion skin. I would not tell them the price of that. They all thought it a marvel, and my youngest brother would not stop petting it. I remembered too well how the lion had looked in my vision, when it yet lived.

  Lo-Melkhiin’s mother rode beside me, sitting as straight as I did on her own camel. We both had canopies above our heads, and veils to cover our faces. She carried a fan as well, having no need to use her hands; a boy led her camel for her. I had one hand on the camel’s mouth rope and one on the saddle horn, but I would need no fan once we were in the desert wind. I had worried that she would be vexed to travel, especially on short notice, but she looked pleased—a true smile was on her face as she swayed back and forth, matching the camel’s stride. Lo-Melkhiin had kissed her when we left him, and he had not worn his viper’s face to do it. We went out through the gate, the guardsmen drawn up in straight lines, their armor gleaming in the sun as we passed them, and then into the desert.

  We could not go across the sand, as Lo-Melkhiin’s horses had the day I came to the qasr, because camels are not as fast-moving. Theirs is a plodding, steady pace. A horse can get you somewhere quickly, but you cannot carry very much with you. A camel will take its time, but it will also carry your house if you ask it nicely enough. Instead, we turned into the dry wadi bed and followed its meandering path between the oleander flowers. The scent was overwhelming, but I knew better than to get too close. There was poison in the blossoms, and while they would not kill you if you smelled them, they could make you ill. I turned to say as much to my serving girl, and to the woman who served Lo-Melkhiin’s mother, but they sat on the backs of their own camels and did not lean toward the blooms.

  The camels plodded forward, and the sun sank. My oldest brother came with water and bread, offering it to Lo-Melkhiin’s mother first, as was proper, but we did not halt.

  “Sister of mine,” he said to me. “We will ride through the dark tonight. There will be stars enough to guide us. Can you keep to your saddle?”

  I certainly knew I could, and he knew it too. I knew also that he was uncomfortable speaking to Lo-Melkhiin’s mother. My brothers might have liked the lion skin Lo-Melkhiin gave my father, but they felt differently about a woman who wore lion manes upon her head.

  “Mother of my heart,” I said to her, ignoring my brother’s wince at how I addressed her, “will that suit you? And will it suit the boy who leads you?”

  In truth, it was he I was most concerned about. Sitting on a camel is awkward and uncomfortable if you are not used to it, but it is not as tiring as walking.

  “He will ride with me if he tires,” said Lo-Melkhiin’s mother to me. The boy looked up, surprised. “I know better than to play at nobility in the desert. The sun does not care who you are when it bakes you.”

  “We will go on,” I said to my broth
er. He nodded, and went to offer water to the two who rode behind me.

  The sun sank lower, turning the desert a friendly orange, and then a deep red. At length it set, leeching all color from the horizon, until all that remained was white sand beneath us and a dark sky overhead. Behind me, the serving girl shifted uncomfortably. She did not like the empty dark of the desert night. I turned to smile at her. I knew she would not see it, but I hoped she would hear it in my voice when I spoke.

  “Do not worry,” I said to her. “The desert night takes a moment to wake, but once it does, you will think you have never seen anything so beautiful.”

  There was no moon yet, but our eyes were still dazzled by the glare of the sun on the sand. I knew that it would take some few moments to fade. When my eyes finally cleared, I looked up and found that I was not disappointed. Everything was just as beautiful as I had remembered.

  The serving girl gasped, and I knew that she had seen it too. There were stars in the city, of course. I had been to a party to watch them specifically, and I had seen how they shone there. Most nights, though, we had not gone outside, and if we had, it was only to the garden, where the view of the sky was blocked by the trees and the walls. The girls went to bed early, to be up before the sun; if they went to visit family in the city, the sky was obscured by torchlight and by the hazy light of the lamps.

  There was none of that now. The sky burned above us, full of stars beyond the counting of a hundred Skeptics, even if they were given a hundred years to count them. From horizon to horizon the glory stretched, like a great dark bowl had been overturned above us, sealing the lights in for us alone to see them. This was true beauty, I decided—better than all the fine cloth and finer embroidery, better than all the food and well-made ceramics it was served in. This was something Lo-Melkhiin could not buy, could not copy, and could not steal. It gave me great peace to see it, and it also gave me hope.

  It was well the camel I rode was a docile beast, for I confess I did naught to steer him as we went along. I watched the sky, not the path in front of me, but the camel was as steady as my father had promised my husband, and it did not miss a step, even when there were rocks on the bottom of the wadi bed. Beside me, Lo-Melkhiin’s mother told the boy to join her after he tripped for a third time, trying to watch both his path and the skies. He climbed up behind her, leaning against the saddle but sitting on the camel’s rump, and gawked unfettered while she took the rein.

  At last I found myself swaying overmuch in the saddle, and my father called a halt. I slid down, and would have helped to pitch the tents as I used to do, but the serving girl came to me with a lamp and asked a hundred questions about the sky. By the time I had answered half of them, the work was done.

  “Daughter of mine,” my father said to me, and I went to where he stood in front of the tent that was usually his. It was large, because he had got it when my mothers still traveled with him in the caravan.

  “Thank you, Father,” I said to him, and turned to see that Lo-Melkhiin’s mother stood beside me already. The old woman who was her companion, and my own serving girl, stood behind her. The boy had disappeared.

  The four of us went into the tent. My father had put down rugs so that we would not sleep on the sand, and had weighted down the side flaps with rocks from the wadi so that no creatures would disturb us in the night. The old woman lit the lamps, and we sat while she and the serving girl laid out our beds.

  “Your father is a good man,” Lo-Melkhiin’s mother said to me. “He keeps his caravan well, and he is kind to old women.”

  “He is wise,” I said to her. “If he is kind to a man’s mother, then the man will trade fairly.”

  “Does he think my son will trade fairly?” she asked.

  “No,” I said to her, after I had thought about it for a moment. “Perhaps it is only his habit.”

  “Or perhaps he does not judge the mother the way he judges the son,” she said to me.

  “That is a wise guess, lady mother,” I said to her. “For he has helped teach me how to work in the world, and I do not judge mothers by their sons either.”

  “Yet I think I will like your mother, and your sister’s mother, given what I have seen of your brothers and of you,” she said to me.

  “It is my hope that you do,” I said to her. “My mother is a kind woman, and my sister’s mother too, though I did not know how much she loved me until the day I took her daughter’s place and came to wed your son.”

  “You are easy to love, daughter of my heart,” she said to me. I looked at her, surprised, but there was no lie in her face. “I think even my son loves you, in his way.”

  I was silent for a long moment, watching as the bedrolls were unrolled and the pillows brought out and sorted. Lo-Melkhiin’s way of loving was to use and to burn. It was not like my mother and my sister’s mother and my father. We might work together, he and I, but it was dangerous work, and I did not see how it would come to a good end.

  “I am not sure that means I have less cause to fear him,” I said to her at last. “If anything, perhaps I should fear him more.”

  “You are as wise as your father has taught you, then,” she said to me.

  “The camels will be rested in a few hours,” I said to her. “We should not waste our own rest with talk of what we fear.”

  She nodded, and beckoned to the woman she had brought. The woman came to her side and carefully lifted the lion-mane wig from her head, placing it reverently in a corner of the tent where we would not kick or step on it if we left in the dark to make water. Lo-Melkhiin’s mother shook out her traveling robe and let it fall to the rugs on the floor before the woman could catch it. She did not look back as she went into her bed, but I did, and saw the care with which the woman folded it. Lo-Melkhiin’s mother had a loyal household, and that made me glad.

  I went to my own bed, letting the serving girl strip my traveling robe from me before I went, so that I would not get too much sand where I was to sleep. She set it down, folded her own beside it, and crawled into the bedroll next to mine. I heard her murmur as she began her prayers, and wondered what smallgods her family had. Before I might have asked her, though, I rolled over, and saw her traveling robe where she had put it next to mine. Tucked inside the cuff, where she might press her lips against it as she rode a-camel back, was a narrow piece of purple cloth.

  I went to sleep, and for the first time in weeks I had no fear that I would die.

  I KNEW I DREAMED, because I was with my sister, and we stitched a new wedding dress. This time, the cloth was yellow. It was a common color, neither as expensive as the purple nor as striking as the orange, but one that suited her well. The weave was very fine; I could see where she had put in stitches and then taken them out, displeased with the quality of the work she had done.

  “It is not the same when you are gone,” she said to me. “My stitches grow sloppy when I do not have you to keep me focused on the task.”

  “I am sorry, sister of mine,” I said to her. “I could think of no other way to save you.”

  “Do you think I feared him?” she asked. “Do you think Lo-Melkhiin or Lo-Melkhiin’s marriage bed frightened me? I know they frightened you, sister. I know they frighten you still.”

  “You have never feared anything,” I said to her, and my words made it true. “Not the lion or the viper or the scorpion. But that would not have saved you, if you had gone with him to be his wife.”

  “And what saved you, sister?” she asked. “Why have you lived these nights and days, when the ones before you have died?”

  “If I live, sister,” I said to her, “it is because of the work you have done for me.”

  Until I spoke those words, it was only the two of us and the dishdashah in my vision. Now I saw the shrine she had made for me in her tent, the rugs we sat upon, and the lamp that gave us light.

  “Do not forget that,” she said to me.

  “I would not,” I said to her. That remembrance stood between me and my nigh
tmare. So far, I had taken nothing. It had all been a gift.

  We stitched in silence for a time. Under our hands, the hemline was given flowers, and vines twined up the seams. My needle was bronze, a dull glint in the lamplight. My sister’s needle shone silver as it pulled the thread in its wake.

  “Sister,” I said to her. “What did the pale man from the mountains promise our father if he were allowed to marry you?”

  She smiled, a lioness’s smile that showed her teeth and tongue.

  “It was a higher price than if I left our father’s tents,” she said to me. “I love him well, but he must learn the desert ways. He cannot herd the cows, or even the sheep, without one of your brothers or one of the children to help him. He does not know which snakes can be eaten and which must be burned. He cannot tell the path that game will take. He must be cared for, and that is why the price was high.”

  I could not fathom why she would love him. When we had stitched the purple dishdashah and sewn our secrets into it, she had told me that her husband would be a man like our father, who had his own caravan and herds and tents. My father had the social standing to find such a man, and my sister had the beauty to capture his heart. It had been her wish that her husband would have a brother close in age, that I might wed him. That way, we would always have tents close to one another. I had not been gone from her side for so long that I thought her dreams would have changed so much.

  My needle stilled as a creeping cold swept over me. I had told Lo-Melkhiin that my sister would wed a merchant my father met when he was out with the caravan. I had said he would be from far away. I had said he would have the bright metal, like the needle with which my sister stitched. I had made a whole man from my words, and then I had brought him to my sister. I had made her love him.

  “Sister!”

  I jumped, and rammed the needle through my skin. One drop of bright red blood fell upon the dishdashah, and I watched in horror as it stained the fabric and the embroidery both.