A Thousand Nights (25 page)

“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 nightmare. 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.

“I am sorry,” I said to her. “I have ruined it.”

“No, sister,” she said to me. “No one will see that; it is so small. And it is my fault for startling you, but you did not answer me when I spoke.”

“It is the smallgod,” I said to her. “Sometimes I lose myself.”

“If that is the price to keep you safe from your wretched husband, then so be it,” she said to me. “Come: we are almost finished.”

We stitched again as silence grew between us. I chewed the inside of my cheek so that I would not drift into the trance again. My sister was wrong about the price of my living. I had not paid
it; at least, not in the way she thought. She had paid more than I; her whole life was rerouted, as though a rock in the wadi bed had forced the water to find a new path. If a rock was large
enough, it could shift the whole course of the wadi. Any village that relied upon that wadi might dry out for want of water. The wells would run dry, and there would be nothing but scrub for the
sheep and goats to eat. The people would move their tents, leaving behind their dead; or they would stay, and die, and join them. She had made me a smallgod, and I had done this to her.

I thought to pray that I had not caused too much ruin with my actions, but I had no one to pray to. Our smallgod was gone, passed over for the new one, his spirit resting at last. I could not
pray to myself, and there was no comfort for me.

The lamp burned low as we tied off our threads, and then my sister looked up at me.

“Sister of mine,” she said to me. “I will see you in the morning.”

“You see me now,” I said to her, before I remembered that I was dreaming. I reached for her, and caught nothing. “Sister!” I called, but she was gone, and so were the
dishdashah and the tent and the lamp. I woke to darkness, sitting up and grasping at nothing in my father’s tent, where he had pitched it.

“Lady-bless,” said the woman who traveled with Lo-Melkhiin’s mother.

“I am well,” I said to her, though my heart raced and my breath heaved in my lungs.

“You are with your family, lady-bless,” she reminded me. “You are safer here than you are when you sleep in the stone qasr.”

“Yes,” I said to her. “I remember. I only dreamed, that is all. Please, sleep again. I am sorry to have disturbed you.”

“It is all right, lady-bless,” she said to me. “I do not sleep very much anymore.”

I lay back down and pulled my hair over my face. I did not know how long I had slept. With the tent flaps shut against the cool night air, it was impossible to tell the hour. I laughed, as
quietly as I could. I had become so dependent upon the hour-candles and the water clock, even though I had used the sun as much as possible when I was in the qasr. Without them, and without the
sky, I could not guess the time.

I heard the camels shifting their feet in the sand. Most of them would have knelt down to sleep. If they stood now, it meant that they were rested. I breathed deeply and smelled mostly the rug
and the burned oil in the lamp and the perfumes that my companions wore, but at the edge of those scents was the fire the watchman would be standing by. It smelled of embers; they had not added new
fuel in some time, so that none would be wasted when the fire was no longer needed.

If it was not close to dawn, then it was close to the time my father wished to leave. I would not try to sleep again.

In the dream, my sister had not known that I was the one who had brought her the man she was to marry. Perhaps she thought the smallgod’s power was only enough to keep me alive. I had seen
no falsehoods when I slept, but I wondered if, by the time I met her in the waking world, she would have realized what I had wrought. I could not bear her anger and her hatred if she did not like
the control I had exerted on her life, but I knew I had earned them both. If she spurned me, I would understand it.