A Thousand Nights

by Johnston, E. K.

  “How is this possible?” I demanded, though I thought I might know. If she had heard the story of my embroidery, she gave no sign of it.

  “A giant demon in the form of a bird,” she said. “Lady-bless, they say it came out of the sky so quickly that not even Fleetfoot could have matched it for speed. Lo-Melkhiin had a bow, but he could not fire fast enough, and the monster gored him in the side.”

  “Surely he has been wounded hunting before,” I said to her.

  “No, lady-bless,” she said to me. “Sometimes a graze, maybe, but there have been hunts where the lions took four guards, and Lo-Melkhiin came back without a scratch.”

  “You may go,” I said to her, straightening myself where I sat. “Should my husband send for me, I will of course go, but leaving that aside, I do not wish to be disturbed again tonight—understood?”

  She murmured her acquiescence and fled back to the comfortable safety of the kitchen.

  I ate my dinner slowly, rolling the pieces of spiced goat in bread and dipping them in oil before taking a bite, and then chewing with more care than I might have needed.

  This was like the gown, I realized; only, I had woven men and birds, not gold thread. I had not just seen it, I had caused it. I looked at the golden ball that had awaited me when I woke up that morning. I had made that, too. I held my breath.

  It was not enough to wander, to set my power loose like the goats and hope that it found good grazing, and heeded my call when I bid it to return. I needed it to be like that storm. Something I could see coming, something I could prepare for. I would have to try again, and see if I could do this work on purpose.

  Lo-Melkhiin did not rise from his sickbed that night, and so I slept alone. When I woke in the morning, there was a new-made lamp next to the golden ball.

  I HAD NOT TOLD THE WOMEN in the spinning room the truth about the great birds from the mountains. When my sister and I were six years old and the fire of summer had burned down to embers, we saw the birds for the first time. They came in a great flock, not in ones and twos, and they flew above us when we took the sheep and goats out to graze. They reminded me of our father’s caravan—a long line of men with purpose, but who tired and sometimes grew sad when they were away from home.

  My sister had her sling and a rock in her hands, at the ready in case one of them dropped down for a sheep. I had nothing.

  “Sister,” she said to me, “where is your sling? You must help me if the birds are hungry.”

  “I will not,” I said to her. “They are on a caravan, can you not see? If we turn them away, we have broken the laws of hospitality.”

  My sister looked at me as if I had spent too long in the sun and suggested that we might eat sand for sweetmeats. Then the birds started to call, a hard and lonely sound, and one of them dropped like a stone from the sky.

  “Sister!” my sister shouted, but she did not raise her sling.

  The sheep panicked and tried to run, but the bird was faster. I thought it would snag its talons in the wool and fly away, but instead it landed on a sheep’s back and slit its throat with a great claw. The beast slumped to the side as the bird began to eat.

  We looked aloft. If a sand-crow finds prey in the desert sand, more will join it and fight over the meal. If these birds were the same, my sister and I and the sheep would be in trouble. The dogs barked and barked, bringing the sheep under control again even as the great bird feasted, but the goats were gone. We could only hope they would come back. We had some small luck; none of the other birds came down from the sky. They circled and watched, as though they were waiting for something.

  At last, the grounded bird gave another terrible cry and took to wing, dragging the carcass of the sheep into the air, trailing blood. On the ground where it had sat was an egg. It was bigger than my sister’s head, and we stared at it in awe.

  “Sister,” she said to me, “you were wise. It was hospitality.”

  “Come,” I said to her. “Let us take the egg to our mothers. The goats will find their own ways home, and the sheep will graze no more today.”

  It took the pair of us trading off to carry it. We could not share the weight, as we did with the water jars, because of the odd shape. One of us had to wrap her arms around the egg, not too firmly lest we crush it, while the other minded the dogs and the flock. We switched when the egg bearer’s arms grew too tired to keep a steady grip.

  “Daughters, are you ill?” called my sister’s mother when we came in sight of the tents. “Why have you come back while the sun is still so high?”

  We were too worn out to speak at first, and set the egg down at my sister’s mother’s feet. She called for my mother, and for cool water, and by the time both had arrived, we were able to tell the story of what had happened.

  “We saw the birds,” my mother said. “We hoped they would leave the flock alone. They flew so high we wondered if they would even see it.”

  “Were we right, mother of my heart?” I asked her. “Was it the same as hospitality?”

  “I think you were right,” she said to me. “And look what they have given in thanks!”

  The egg was too large for our biggest jars and cooking pots, even the dormouse pot that our father had brought back in the caravan from far away, that we only used for special meals. In the end, our mothers settled for pushing the egg into the fire, right atop the coals, and then rolling it out with a long bronze dagger when they decided it was done.

  By then our father and my brothers had returned, and were told the tale. Our father thanked us for being so wise, with a bright light in his eyes. We knew then that he thought it was funny, that we had thought the birds deserved hospitality, but also that he was proud of us.

  “Look at what your sisters hunted!” he told my brothers as he turned away from us. “And they did not hunt with spears or arrows, but with their own minds.”

  My mother cut the egg in half the long way, and scooped out the white and yellow insides. There was enough that everyone in the village could have some, and there was still some left over to offer the dead. When the shell was empty, she faced the two halves back to the fire to dry them out. In the morning, my mother and my sister’s mother went to the caves to offer the cooked egg to the dead. They took the shell with them, and afterward, told us that they had used them to hold the lamps that burned over the shrine of our father’s father’s father.

  The dead share with one another, and do not mind as long as proper respect is paid. When my mother told us about my mother’s mother’s mother, my sister and I moved one of the eggshell lamps to her small shrine. I had seen my sister building a shrine for me, but I had not been able to see what she had used to make it. I knew that the older objects would have the most power, but since I was not yet dead, I did not know if she would be able to use them.

  There was a cord in my room that would bring a serving girl to me. I had never used it, because I had never needed anything I did not have. I used it now, and if the girl was startled she gave no sign. Perhaps she was fearful of me now, and called stone into her face to hide it, as I did when I faced Lo-Melkhiin. In any case, when I asked for a spindle and something to spin into yarn, she said nothing, only nodded and fled to do as I had asked.

  When she was gone I lit the other lamps, including the new one I had found that morning. It was decorated with goats, with round circles I took to be balls, and with images of the sun. It was very finely made, and would have taken hours to cast and fire, had it been made in the usual way. It was not as expensive as the ball—wood was hard to come by in the desert, and a piece that could be carved into a ball even more so—but it was a good piece, nonetheless.

  I dressed myself quickly in a light gown, twisting my hair around my head as the spinners did to keep their long braids from mucking up their work. The serving girl returned with my spindle and a basket of undyed wool, and I dismissed her with as much kindness as I could muster. I did not wish for people to fear me. There was a cushion next to my low table, and I s
at on it with the basket beside me, my dress pulled out of the way of the spindle. The lamp burned strongly, giving out clear light even though the room was already lit by the sun. The ball did not roll, but rather sat next to the lamp and cast shadows on the tabletop.

  I attached raw wool to the leading thread and spun a handspan or so, to be sure I had enough of it to start. Holding the whorl to keep the work from unraveling, I took a deep breath, and then another, and began to spin.

  At first, nothing happened except that the yarn grew under my fingers. Without thinking, I began to match my breath to the rise and fall of the spindle, and my heartbeat followed suit. Between one blink of the eye and the next, I was flying over the desert sand, faster than any horse or sand-crow, toward our father’s tents. Toward my sister.

  Our father’s camels were gone, and I knew that I was seeing the days that had gone before, as I had wished to. These were the days after I had left with Lo-Melkhiin, yet before our father had returned with the caravan. My mother’s tent flew a purple flag, which was not the color of mourning. There were no piles of pickled gage-root or desert flowers on either side of the tent flap, to remind her that the dead wanted for nothing. They were not mourning me as one who had died, though they were grieving my absence from them. My sister knew I yet lived, and she was spreading the word of my survival down the wadi like a flood.

  I found my sister in our tent, the one we had shared and the one where she now slept alone. Her bedroll and rugs were all pushed to the side, exposing hard-packed desert sand beneath. She walked in a long circle, trailing the shell-powder behind her as she went, until she closed the loop. Then she turned and knelt in front of the objects she had put in the center of her circle. There was my first spindle whorl, my favorite of my mother’s colored bowls, my shepherd’s staff, and the bronze knife I had used to cut my meat. My sister unwrapped a small bundle I knew held my stitching kit, and added it to the collection. Then she began to chant.

  I could not hear her words, but I could see the power come into her circle. Before, it had been dirt on dirt, colors mixing as they shifted on the ground. Now, the white of the powder was heightened until it blazed against the sand. It sent tendrils out toward each of the items, and to my sister, wrapping them and sealing them to her use.

  Just before the circle was too bright for me to look at, my sister reached into the bag beside her and pulled forth one of the two half-shell lamps, adding it to the rest. It already blazed with the prayers that had been said to it. Now it seared my eyes, and I rocked back from its harsh glare.

  As soon as I moved, I was flying again, across the desert to Lo-Melkhiin’s qasr and the room where I was spinning yarn. I blinked, my eyes still glamoured by the brightness of my sister’s work. My lamp burned with a white light, and my ball glowed with it. My lap was full of yarn. Though I had started with raw wool, I had spun it as white as it if had been bleached for days. I hurried to finish the end, so that my work would not undo itself, and then wound it tightly around a skein that I found at the bottom of the basket.

  I had asked for a vision, and done the work for one, and I had received it. The sun had moved to a different window, and the hour-candle had burned down to midday, yet I had none of the stiffness I would have expected from spinning for so long without moving. I was exhausted, though, and stumbled when I stood. I went back to my bed and lay down upon it, and if Lo-Melkhiin himself had summoned me, I could not have risen again.

  The darkness claimed me, but it was a soft and friendly one, edged in that familiar white light.

  I SLEPT THROUGH THE hottest part of the day, and when I woke and missed the desert, I went to the water garden. The sound of the fountain was like nothing I might find at home, and yet it soothed me. It had a rhythm, one I could feel in my fingers, the same way I had felt the spindle and the thread. The evening flowers were just beginning to blossom, and their light scent wakened me from the last of my exhaustion.

  I was not alone. Lo-Melkhiin’s mother sat under one of the date palms on a broad cushion, a pitcher of watered wine at her elbow. When I met her gaze, she gestured to the space at her side, and I crossed the walkway to sit. My place was not quite shaded, but the sun no longer hammered down, and it did not seem so bright after what I had seen in my vision.

  “When my son began to hunt, I feared for his safety,” she said to me when I had settled. She did not offer me a cup.

  “The desert is a hard place,” I said to her. “It is full of many dangers.”

  “Your words are true,” she said to me. “Yet my son did not fall prey to any of them. Even when he first went into the desert, it loved him and did not harm him.”

  “He must be wise to its ways,” I told her. “Our father is like that. He goes out with the caravan and comes back, and is only marked by the dust of the road.”

  “My son studied the desert well,” she agreed. “But when his spirit was changed, he began to flaunt his desert wisdom.”

  I thought about what the women in the spinning room had said. Lo-Melkhiin might go into the desert and return unscathed, but his men did not. Our father’s pride was not only in his own resilience, but in the strength of the whole caravan, down to the sheep they took with them to trade.

  “The desert does not like to be mocked,” I said to her. “It will always take a price in the end.”

  “And now at last my son has paid,” she said to me. “A great bird attacked him, sliced him with silver-colored talons so bright the other huntsmen could not look at them, and now he lies abed as he has not done in months and months, and does not know the sky from the sand.”

  I remembered the ease with which I had seen the great bird slit the throat of the sheep my sister and I had watched over, and did not doubt her.

  “Are the wounds so deep as to be fevered already?” I asked.

  “He has no fever,” she said to me. “There is no infection that our healers can see. The cuts are more like scratches, barely bleeding now that the compresses have been laid, and yet he does not wake.”

  At last, she poured a cup of wine and passed it to me. I took it with thanks and drank it slowly. It tasted bitter on my tongue, and as I drank, I felt the world sharpen around me. The white light of my vision faded and the rhythm with it, though I could still hear the echo in the fountain’s song.

  “The women say you stitched it in thread, before you could have known,” Lo-Melkhiin’s mother said to me.

  I did not answer. Before, the story-threads had come to me easily, but now that I was not focused on a task, I had nothing.

  “When a king dies, there is always a scramble, even when there is an heir,” she said to me. “When there is no heir, it is madness, and can ruin a city and a realm.”

  Our boss-ram had died in the dark of my eighth winter. The ewes would not leave him, and the other rams had fought for days until one of them, the youngest of them, had died too—his horns were not yet strong enough to protect his skull, and still he would not stay out of the fighting. I imagined that with men it was worse.

  “My son is no longer a good man,” she said to me, “but he is a good king. If your desert power has caused this, I beg you to fix it. Fix him, if you can.”

  “If he dies, I can return to our father’s tents,” I said to her. I did not mean the words to be cruel, but she flinched at them anyway. “I would be a widow, and the laws of men say I must be allowed to go. I would no longer fear death at Lo-Melkhiin’s hands. I would go home, and take the priestly role from my sister, that she might wed.”

  “You could do that,” she said to me. Her words were slow, like it pained her to speak them. “But the city would be in chaos, and chaos crosses sand like the sand-crows do. Your family would not escape it, however well your father trades.”

  When Lo-Melkhiin’s father died, our father had not gone trading for a full year. The roads were not safe, he had said to my mother and my sister’s mother, when he thought we could not hear him. He would not risk the caravan, and we had enough to get
by, if we were careful. Three of the lambs died, and one camel, but we survived. If there were no new king, no one would hold the roads and enforce the trading laws. Our father would stay at home until he was forced out, and then he might pay too high a price for trading.

  “What could I do?” I asked of her.

  “You stitched this and knew it as it was happening,” Lo-Melkhiin’s mother said to me. “I do not know if you saw it or if you caused it, but come and look at my son, and perhaps you will know how to wake him from his illness.”

  I wanted to refuse her. I could see my home with such clarity that I could smell the sheep and taste the roasting meat on the fire. I could hear my brothers wrestling with each other to see who would have the unwanted chores. I could feel my sister’s hand in mine as we watched them, giggling at their antics. I would not heal Lo-Melkhiin for his own sake.

  “I will come,” I said to her.

  She stood, her lion-mane wig a tawny contrast to her dark skin, and pulled me to my feet. I went to my room for a veil and over-robe, and pinned up the locks of hair that had come loose while I slept. Then she led me into the bathhouse, past the steaming pools and the dressing room I used, and into the room where Lo-Melkhiin was kept.

  He tossed fitfully on a high table, rather than on pillows on the floor. The table was covered with white linen, and it looked like his skin had borrowed some of that color. His pallor extended from the crown of his head to his fingers and toes. His face showed pain, though his eyes were closed. I thought that if he were awake, he would be screaming with it. I was almost sad that he slept.

  “Lady-bless,” said the healer who stood at the head of the table. He bowed to me, but I thought it was to Lo-Melkhiin’s mother that he spoke.

  “May I take some of your time for questions?” I asked. “I do not wish to distract you.”

  “Lady-bless, I have done all that I can,” he said to me. “When he was awake, even though he was thrashing, it seemed like I had ideas how to make him better, but now that he is asleep, I can think of nothing but to wait.”