A Thousand Nights

by Johnston, E. K.

  My sister promised, words spilling from her lips like oil from a jug. I was so in awe of the tale and of the promise of something my brothers could not have, I could only nod.

  “The baby that lived because of the milk goat was my mother’s mother’s mother,” my mother said to us. “If she had died, I would not have wed your father, and you, my daughter, would not have been born at all.”

  “I would not have my dearest friend,” my sister’s mother said to us. “And you, my daughter, would have no sister.”

  We clasped hands, my sister and I. We had come so close to never having each other, and we had not known it until that moment. All at once, our bond was even stronger. We had always prayed to our family’s smallgod, but now we put our hearts into every word, and our work into every offering we left at the shrine. We gave thanks as much as we asked for blessings, and we made sure to pour out cool water where the bones of the camel were laid. And if we left oil and bread where my mother’s mother’s mother was buried, we were not the only ones to do so, but that was a secret too.

  Until that day in the garden when I sat down with Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered, and learned to spit olive pits through the air, that was all I had known of smallgods.

  “DO YOU BELIEVE IN SMALLGODS?” I asked of Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered.

  “I do not disbelieve them,” he said to me. “That is the nature of Skeptics, remember. We would rather debate than know for certain.”

  “Do you understand how smallgods receive their powers?” I asked then. I had to come at him like the wadi, with its meandering lines. I could not come at him as the sand-crow flew.

  “I do,” he said to me. “But when Skeptics talk, we often explain things we already know. In the telling, we dredge up the memory of half-forgotten facts or inspire new ones. So tell me how smallgods are made.”

  “When a person dies, if he has done something great, his son and his grandsons will build a shrine,” I said to him. “They will pray to him and leave offerings of oil and bread. They will carry memories of him with them in the caravan, and he will help them if he can.”

  Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered was nodding.

  “And the more prayers that are said and the more offerings that are laid will increase the smallgod’s power,” he said. “Until his children’s children’s children forget him, and he becomes nothing more than a pile of bones in the desert sand.”

  “That is what the Priests say,” I said to him.

  “What do you say?” he asked of me.

  I thought about it, chewing on a piece of bread longer than I needed to before swallowing it down.

  “I say that our father and my brothers have always returned to us,” I told him. “And that our herds multiply and no one goes hungry in our father’s tents, even if there is a season when the wadi does not flood.”

  “But is that the smallgod?” he asked of me. “Or is it that your father is a good tradesman?”

  “Can it not be both?” I asked in return. “Can our father be a pious man and a clever one, who is served by himself and favored by a smallgod?”

  “There is no way to test that,” he said to me. “And it must be tested to be proven.”

  I considered his words. I had never thought to prove that a smallgod existed. I had only ever known they had.

  “How do you prove that the sun will rise tomorrow?” I asked of him, and he smiled at me like I had won a prize.

  “I have observed it many times,” he said to me. “But that alone does not guarantee that it will rise again tomorrow.”

  “The same way that I have observed our father return home with fine silks—it does not mean that the smallgod favors him,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said to me. “However,” he continued. “My companion Sokath, His Eyes To The Stars has determined that the world we stand on, in addition to being round as we discussed, also spins like a spindle and whorl, and that is why we have day and night. He has a model that shows that as long as we continue to spin, the sun will continue to come up in the morning.”

  “I thought you said that Skeptics would rather debate than know,” I said to him. I smiled. It was better than talking to our father.

  “We all have our own moments of weakness,” he said to me. There was a laugh—a real one—in his voice, but then his face darkened. “To be honest, lady-bless, the Skeptics have changed since Lo-Melkhiin took the throne. Debate is no longer enough for the younger ones. They seek only to know, not to think.”

  “I am not sure why that is so bad,” I told him. “I can think of many things I would like to know.”

  “Yes, but a knowing mind is a closed one,” he said to me. “On that, at least we Skeptics and Priests agree.”

  “We have the water clock because someone needed to know the time when it was night,” I said to him.

  “Yes,” he said to me, “and because someone needed to know that there would always be water in the qasr cisterns, they built a dam in the wadi which dried up everything downstream of the city. As everything does, knowledge comes with a price.”

  “The Priests agree with you on that too,” I said to him, and thought of my sister’s brother.

  He was quiet for a time, picking olives up one by one, no longer spitting the pits out. He ignored the bread, which was hardening in the heat anyway.

  “I think you cannot prove if smallgods have power because they are dead, and you cannot ask them directly,” I said to him.

  “That is true,” he said to me. “The dead cannot speak.”

  “What would happen if you built a shrine to someone who was alive?” I asked of him. “What would happen if you prayed and left offerings?”

  He rolled the olive pit between his fingers.

  “I think that person would become lucky,” he said. “I do not think it would be enough to notice.”

  “What if a whole village prayed?” I asked. “What if traders went out and spoke of this living smallgod to others? What if they sent out a token and built shrines, and more people prayed?”

  Now he looked troubled. I wondered if, for all his fine words, he really did believe that smallgods had powers to work on the living.

  “That sort of person would be special indeed.” He said the words so softly that I barely heard him over the water in the fountain. “That sort of person would have had to do a great deed, and survived it. I do not know what sort of man that would be, or if we would like him very much.”

  He meant Lo-Melkhiin; I could see it in his face. I had not considered that. It was possible that the men who became richer under Lo-Melkhiin’s rule built shrines to him, but I had seen the way his power worked, and it did not look like any smallgod power I had ever seen.

  “Men pray in the morning and in the evening,” I said to him. “In the heat of the day, they speak to one another. They trade and they talk and they drink cool water.”

  He looked at me, and for a fraction of a breath, I saw fear in his eyes, but then it was replaced by wonder, and a hope so desperate that it made my heart hurt. Lo-Melkhiin would never have shrines.

  “Women pray waking and walking and working,” I said to him. “They pray with the spindle’s drop and the shuttle’s shift. They weave their words into the warp and the weft of the cloth they make, and they send that cloth out into the world where everyone can see it, and remark upon its beauty.”

  “That would wake the dead,” said Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered. His voice was breathless with awe. “I cannot imagine what it would do to the living.”

  “To a living woman,” I said to him.

  “To a woman who saved a sister who loved her,” he said to me. “And saved all the other girls in her village. And came to the qasr. And did not die in the night.”

  “Not yet,” I said to him.

  “When I talk to Lo-Melkhiin, my thoughts run faster than they ever did before,” he said to me. “I can see things clearly, and it does not cost me effort. I miss the days when I had to work to see with the same clarity. Other men,
though...they are glad of the lesser effort.”

  “Like weaving with wide thread,” I said to him. “The cloth is done quickly, but there are gaps where holes can appear, and the decoration is not so fine.”

  “Yes,” he said to me. “It is like that.”

  “Lo-Melkhiin does not talk to me,” I said to him. “Or, rather, he does, but he mocks my home even as he asks for stories of it.”

  “He does not understand what he has got, this time,” he said to me.

  “I think he might,” I said to him. I thought of the ram’s look in my husband’s eyes. “Every night, he takes my hands, and a cold-fire light runs from my skin to his. I saw the same sparks the night of the starfall party when he moved amongst the men there, only the sparks jumped from him to them.”

  “Did that happen to Firh Stonetouched?” For the first time, there was urgency in his voice, and he leaned toward me.

  “Yes,” I said to him. “It happened to everyone. It happened to you.”

  I knew, then, that this was a debate he had labored over for months, but never shared. It had gone on only in his head, round and round in circles, like sheep when the dogs bring them in, until he had caught a piece of proof from me, a direction that made sense, and followed it.

  “Does anything else happen when Lo-Melkhiin comes to you?” he asked of me.

  It was an impertinent question, if I chose to misinterpret it, but I did not. I knew exactly what he meant in the asking, and decided to tell him the truth.

  “Yes,” I said to him. “Always Lo-Melkhiin takes my hands, and the cold-fire blooms from me to him. Sometimes there are pictures in it: my village, my sister, things he would like to take and burn away. And then, when it is done, thin copper lines stretch from his fingertips to mine, and I feel like my heart grows in my chest. I do not know if he sees the cold-fire as I do, but I know he does not see the copper at all—it is as though we trade, though he does not mean to.”

  Again, there was silence from Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered. The olives were gone, and the bread was too hard for even me, with my desert-scoured teeth, to chew. I sat and waited, though suddenly it galled me. It was still morning, yes, but the day would wear on and then I might die, and here I sat while an old man who did not even believe in smallgods wasted thoughts with no action.

  “My queen,” he said to me at last. His tone was quite formal, and I lamented that the easiness of our conversation was gone. He no longer spoke to me as though I were one of his students. “I am sorry that I do not have better answers for you, or better answers to guide your thoughts. I know that you do not know how much time you have left, but I need just that to consider.”

  “Revered Skeptic,” I said to him, returning his formality, though I did not much like it. I stood, preparing to leave the garden. “I hear your words. Should you have more later, I will hear them too.”

  “Lady-bless.” He was just an old man spitting olive pits again, and despite the title he gave me, he might have been talking with a girl instead of a queen. “I do not have answers or questions for you, but I do have some advice.”

  “I will take it gladly,” I said to him, and let the warmth back into my tone. At the same time, I was done with talking. Unaccountably, I chafed at my inaction. I knew it was futile. I was a prisoner of the walls, and though the spinning room was open to me, I was not content to spend my days making thread. I missed stitching and weaving. I missed grinding grain and kneading dough. I missed being useful and part of a family. I missed my sister, her eyes and her spirit and our fingers meeting as we worked. I felt anger burn hotly in my chest, though I fought to master it and gave no outward sign. Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered had been nothing but polite and considerate to me. It was not his fault that I was trapped in this nightmare of Lo-Melkhiin’s making.

  “I think,” he said to me, “that you are going to need a ball. And a lamp.”

  When men give you their fear, it is easy to steer them on the path you wish them to travel. When men show you their worth, it is easy to determine what you will freely take. When men do both, it is easy to play upon their hearts as deftly as a musician might play upon his pipes.

  One dead girl was nothing. Two, only a little more. Ten was something to consider, at the very least, but it was not until I had used Lo-Melkhiin’s hands to kill fifteen of them that their fathers and brothers began to take notice. They enacted their puny law: one girl from every village and from every district within the city walls. It took them a full waning of the moon to do it, and by then my count numbered twenty-five.

  They were second and third daughters, or servants within the house passed off as kin by then. No one could turn Lo-Melkhiin down, of course, not even when he sought his bride before the family had finished the rites for her sister. Men clung to the chance of it, the idea that their houses would be linked with their lord’s. The women knew better.

  Their fear was a delicious thing, so raw and powerful that I could not steer it. It could only be consumed. Their terror gave me power before I was strong enough to bend the men of the court to my will. By the time the law was brought to bear, I did not need the girls so much anymore: I had stores of power to last. I did not stop, though. There was no reason to, not so long as they served their daughters up to me for the asking.

  Lo-Melkhiin hated it, of course. Hated that I used his hands for murder, and frivolous murder at that. Hated that I used his voice to give commands. Hated that I used his body to sit on his throne and issue edicts of my own. He did not care that I was a wise ruler, and kept well those of his people that I did not kill. He screamed and screamed inside his own head, and at times I was tempted to burn him out completely, as had been the custom of my kind, but I enjoyed his suffering, and so I did not.

  We rebuilt from the follies of his father’s reign, and that is why the men of the court let us do it, no matter the cost. Our Skeptics saw answers where before they had been content with questions, and built devices as wondrous as they were beautiful. Our Priests had money for their temples and shrines, and the best bread and oil to leave as offerings for the dead they called smallgods. Our people did not go hungry. Our army and our walls were strong.

  That was what men needed. I required something else.

  I found a carver who might have spent his days fletching arrows, and raised him up to be one of the greatest artisans of the age. I found a Skeptic who had labored with sand and glass as a way to tell the time, and gave him water and small wheels so that he, and any who looked at his clock, would always know the hour. My cook had once been a simple miller, his hands used to grind grain for others. When I brought him to my kitchens, he learned the craft, and before long his experiments had given us a flatbread that stayed fresh for days longer.

  A smith, a mathematician, an architect, a breaker-of-horses. The list went on.

  They were burning up, and they didn’t even know they were afire.

  I had chosen my kingdom well, when I took Lo-Melkhiin for my own in the desert. There were other kings and other lands in the world, but his had been a people on the edge of greatness. Two generations, perhaps three, had stood between them and the master craft, science and mathematics. I had given it to them now, cutting the corners and speeding them along wherever I could. Had I wanted to conquer, I could have done so, but I was content with what I had.

  None of them wondered why it happened so quickly. They were too pleased with the results, and raced ahead of me with all the enthusiasm of frisking colts. They made and wrought and calculated as though there were nothing that could stop them. If there was weakness left in a bridge too quickly made, or if a well was drained forever, I did not care. When I had power enough to last me, I would leave them. I did not care if they burned.

  None of them wondered how my wives died, save in their darkest dreams and most secret thoughts. As they did with their crafting, they simply accepted the deaths. The men stopped counting, as did I. No one paid any mind to the line of dark-haired, dark-skinned girls who came to th
e qasr, and met their end there. They were nameless and faceless under their veils. Sometimes I looked at them; sometimes I touched them. Sometimes I simply burned them, and then rode out for another.

  Until I got one that did not die. The first night she was mine, I did not bring the full force of my power to bear upon her. I was curious. This one had spirit. She had drawn my attention deliberately, and I did not know why until she was ahorse and we rode away. She had put herself before me to spare her sister, and that was something that had not happened before.

  The second night she did not die, I mocked her and made her speak to me. The third night, I gave her all of the fire I had, and still she lived.

  She was not of my kind, yet there was some power to her that was not human, not quite. She did not die, and I wondered if I might at last have found a queen for whom I could set the desert on fire.

  ON THE THIRTIETH NIGHT after I wed Lo-Melkhiin, he came to my rooms and did not leave them after he released my hands.

  Instead, he settled back on the soft silk pillows at the head of my bed. I still sat at the foot, dressed for sleep. The serving girls had extinguished all the lamps but the one that burned next to us, and the hour-candle that stood in the corner. The air was heavy with perfume, a scent I did not care for, and I did not like the weight of it in my lungs. I was not wearing my veil, could not hide my face from him, so I thought of a stone that did not move and held myself still. He smiled his hunter-smile at me.

  “You have lived with me longer now than any have, my wife,” he said to me. “Why do you think that is?”

  I could not tell if he knew the reason, or if he expected me to know. He did not mock me anymore when he spoke to me. Rather, he was hard and cruel, like a desert storm: visible for hours before it struck, but only to be endured, not evaded. I had preferred the mocking. At least then, he had not paid me much heed.