Rhys pulled his burnous close against the bitter cold of the desert night. Out here, the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures was extreme. Despite nearly a year in this quiet desert outpost, he still was not dressed properly for it.
Behind him, inside the two rooms he shared with his wife and children, his son squalled. He had been wailing since midnight prayer. Rhys had given up on sleep even before his wife had, and retreated to the balcony to watch the suns rise.
The boy had been unplanned, as had the two girls before him. When his wife told him she was pregnant for the second time in as many years, he had not greeted the news as a good man should have. They wouldn’t have had the first one at all if Elahyiah hadn’t been four weeks pregnant the night the bel dames murdered their other children. When he found out about this third pregnancy, he yelled at her, questioning why the old methods they had used to prevent pregnancy were no longer working. She had wept and told him she did not know.
“I had no choice! Do you think a woman has a choice? The old ways don’t always work. That is God’s will. We must bear the consequences of our actions. And it is my burden and blessing more than yours.”
He suspected some deception on her part until the day his son was born. It was a long, painful labor lasting nearly two days. After, she begged him to allow one of the magicians to put a hex on her—semipermanent sterilization. He had refused. He refused because a moment before she asked he held his son for the first time. When he did, some great unknown emotion rose up in him, something he had not felt since the bel dames came and mangled his wife and killed his children. He nearly lost everything that night. He badly wanted to rebuild. As the years passed, and his eldest daughter grew without either of them talking about more children and his wife became more and more distant, he had stopped believing rebuilding was possible.
But now he had a son. It was as if anything were possible again, as if he himself had been reborn with a second chance at life.
As if to punish him for his decision, the boy squalled day and night. Elahyiah no sooner put him down than he started screaming again. Rhys once insisted they simply leave him in the house while they went to dinner—he, Elahyiah, their eldest daughter Mehry and the younger girl, Nasrin. When they came back three hours later, the infant was still screaming. Elahyiah thought there must be something wrong with him. They brought him to hedge witches and even the local Khairian midwives, but they all came back with the same answer. If you want him to sleep, give him a bit of whiskey.
This part of Khairi was a dry town—it was a Chenjan-occupied settlement called Shaesta, and had been for some time. Whiskey was nearly impossible to find, and came with a sentence of six lashes for possession. Some nights, Rhys thought the lashes might be worth it.
Rhys tried to listen for the more soothing sounds of the settlement, the susurrus of the massive sand caterpillars in the pen opposite their building as the creatures chewed their leafy breakfast, and the singing of a caravan member in Khairian, her voice high and warbling. He knew it was a Khairian because no Chenjan woman would dare sing in public. She emerged from a tent posted next to the caterpillar pen. Like most Khairians, she was tall and wiry, her hair bound up in a scarlet turban.
As he watched, her voice drew a swarm of wild insects, mostly harmless—desert fireflies and grasshoppers. They emerged from the sand, scurrying toward her like a locust to a body. Rhys saw her two husbands step outside after her and begin collecting them in jars. As the jars filled, the men took them back into the tent, presumably to throw the bugs into the cook pot for breakfast. Rhys had asked these strange singing Khairians if they were magicians—he had not gotten any sort of sense of talent from any of them, which was highly unusual. But each one he asked laughed and said it was just something their people had always done, as if conversing with insects was as natural to them all as breathing. The call to prayer sounded from the settlement mosque just as the Khairian ended her song. He leaned over the stone rail and listened. The call to prayer was the only sound that could drown out his son’s cry.
He took another pull on his cigarette. He had prayed at midnight prayer, and though joining the throng of other men headed toward the mosque was tempting, he refrained. If he wanted to keep food on the table, he needed to be at the tea house before the end of prayer.
“Rhys?”
Elahyiah’s voice. Tired. Strained. She sounded the way he felt.
He quickly dropped the hand with the cigarette below the balcony rail, hoping she could not see the burning glow of its tip in the dawn light.
Elahyiah stepped onto the balcony. She cradled their son, Rahim, in her arms. At six months old, he was still a slip of a thing. Rhys worried he was underfed. Elahyiah insisted she fed him all he would eat. She herself was terribly thin for a woman so recently in child bed. Only the fullness of her chest gave any indication that she was the mother of this child. Her stomach had flattened in time with their dwindling funds. Most nights, they ate fried grasshoppers.
“I’m going out to meet Payam for a job,” Rhys said.
“Can you bring back coconut milk?”
“If they have some, certainly.” And if they allowed him to take out any more credit.
She wrinkled her nose. He suspected she could smell the cigarette smoke. But she said nothing.
The supplies at the local trade house varied considerably by the day. It depended on what caravan had come in. Many had been delayed by early spring sandstorms. Others were diverted by the mine cleanup efforts now that the ceasefire had begun. Chenja had issued the ceasefire first. They were also the first to pardon their deserters and criminals, a full two years before Nasheen. It was why he agreed to come out here to a Chenjan-held Khairian outpost—that and the promise of fast money. He hoped it would be like coming home again. He hoped that maybe, away from Elahyiah’s family and the bad memories in Tirhan, things would be easier.
He had been very wrong.
“Have you asked the mullah if he needs help during prayer days?” Elahyiah said.
“There’s no money in that.”
“I thought you would enjoy teaching the Kitab to children. It has been… many months since we sat and read together as we once did.”
“I have been busy, Elahyiah.” Trying to make sure they didn’t starve.
Elahyiah averted her eyes. “I understand,” she said. “I just thought it may soothe your nerves more to read the Kitab than… other things.” She ducked back inside.
Rhys put out his cigarette on the rail and followed her. The girls were awake. Mehry was nearly seven now, and far too precocious for a girl growing up in a Chenjan settlement. Always full of questions. Her sister Nasrin was two, and sat up in her basinet watching Mehry pray. Rhys saw nothing of himself in either of them. Like the two girls he and Elahyiah had raised before, these resembled their mother. But now he could not help but compare them to their dead sisters as well.
Elahyiah paced back and forth with Rahim, admonishing Mehry to finish prayer, though by all counts Mehry was still too young for anyone to insist that she observe so many of them. Mehry studied at the madrassa at the end of the street, one of only six girls. They learned from the same teacher as the boys, a balding old mullah who had not, blessedly, asked that Mehry learn her lessons from behind a screen. But she did have to go to school in a uniform that was becoming less modest as she grew, tall and lanky as a mantis. The madrassa and uniform were not cheap. Nor was the two-room flat that stank perpetually of cabbage and peppercorns from the Heidian family on the floor beneath them.
Rhys washed his face and hands at the kitchen sink; just a sluice set in the wall above a chipped clay basin. They shared a privy down the hall with the rest of their floor. He avoided it as much as possible. Someone had found a dead infant there not three weeks past, cold and unmoving in a pool of blood and afterbirth. Insects had already eaten out the eyes and hollowed the placenta. The bugs were worse out here than even the Tirhani wilderness. After they heard about the baby, Elahyiah insisted that Rahim sleep beside them. There was no more talk of leaving him on his own for hours to scream out his frustrations.
Rhys pulled on his burnous. He leaned toward Elahyiah to kiss her, but she turned her head away.
“Remember the milk,” she said.
“We may not have enough for milk.”
“We seem to have enough for your filthy habits. I expect you can find something for milk.”
“Don’t presume to tell me what to spend.”
“It is our money. Our family’s money. We used to decide everything together, Rhys. Now you shut me out like I’m some stranger.”
The anger came then, unbidden. “Isn’t this enough? Selling myself into servitude? What else can I do for you and this family? Bleed all over your shoes?”
“It was your idea to come here to the edge of nothing,” Elahyiah said. “I believed we would do better in Chenja itself, not this terrible outpost.”
“I’ve told you why I can’t go back to Chenja.”
“Things have changed. We can do much good there. Have you heard about the women’s initiatives there?”
“What we don’t need is Chenja becoming another Nasheen.”
“It won’t be Nasheen. It can be another Tirhan. I want to help them, Rhys. They’re our people.”
“The decision has been made.”
Rahim began to squall again.
Rhys threw up his hands. “Enough. You want him to eat, let me do my work.”
He shut the door behind him without waiting for a response. He knew what Elahyiah wanted. What he could not tell her was that going home to Chenja terrified him. Being this close had given him many sleepless nights, but what she wanted was to go home to Chenja—her parents’ country more than hers—and teach women to read. He had to tell her, gently, that only the very poorest Chenjan women did not know how to read. Some of the gross generalizations he heard in Tirhan about how Chenjans treated their wives often offended him. Yet after many years abroad, he could not help but hope for a future for his daughters that looked a little more like a Tirhani one than a Chenjan one. Why couldn’t his daughters have good marriages to men who honored and protected them but retain the freedom to vote and speak in matters of governance, so long as they did so modestly?
Outside, the second dawn touched the world. A blaze of fiery red scorched the eastern sky, banded in deep purple along the horizon. He made his way to the settlement’s only tea house, a squat mud-brick building set with cracked amber tiles that spoke of better days. As he walked, an arthropod as long and thick as his leg uncurled from the nearest ditch and moved across the road in front of him. His skin crawled. Khairians called them mauta kita, and killed them at every opportunity. They were purported to grow large enough to swallow a wagon of goods whole, further north. Most of the wagons in this desert were pulled by native armored caterpillars instead of sand cats—both because the mauta kita were more likely to eat the cats and because the caterpillars lasted longer on the open sand without water.
As he walked, he paused at the window of a clothier. Displayed there were two headless mannequins wearing brilliant red and amber burquas. The burquas themselves were not strange. What made him stop was that he noticed that the mannequins had hands. In his childhood, mannequins were sexless, formless things—the less lifelike, the better. Most store windows simply put clothing on vaguely human-shaped leather hangers. The few mannequins he did see were just torsos. No legs. No hands. But these had hands, and as he got closer, he saw something like feet and legs as well.
Elahyiah had told him for many years that things in Chenja were changing. Her parents still had family there. Words were one thing, yes, but seeing these mannequins and their hands was quite another.
Rhys turned away from the window, and ducked into the tea house opposite. There were prayer wheels hung at each of the windows. He heard the sound of someone reciting from the Kitab, voice low and beautiful, almost musical. It calmed him.
Payam already waited for him at a far table. He dressed like a Tirhani businessman in a long white khameez and somber bisht, but his scarlet turban was a more local affectation. Payam was younger than Rhys by nearly a decade, with a fleshy face and soft hands that marked him as a Tirhani, not just a Chenjan in Tirhani garb. Most Chenjans bore bodies that had seen the war.
He was speaking to a swarm of red beetles at his left elbow—not something he had called but sent to him by one of his caravans. He concluded whatever his message was and waved the bugs away. The swarm buzzed past Rhys and out into the dawn.
“Punctual as ever,” Payam said.
Rhys sat opposite him and ordered green tea with honey from a woman wearing a creamy burqua.
“What do you have for me today?” Rhys asked.
“I have exciting news today,” Payam said, and he grinned so broadly Rhys thought his head might split in two. “No more one-off translations or bacterial infusions. Oh no! I have something quite fine. Something perfectly suited to your skills. You came and God brought you!”
That meant it was something that would make Payam a lot of money. It didn’t always mean it made Rhys much. He had come out here not just because of its remoteness to Chenja itself but also because he heard that magicians and translators were making obscene money working with the Khairian nomads. That, more than anything, finally persuaded Elahyiah. The ceasefire meant more traffic coming down from Khairi—safer trade routes were good for everyone’s business but the black marketers. But when he arrived, he found that most jobs were taken, or involved joining up with a caravan for a year or more, or indenturing himself to some middleman like Payam. By the time Rhys realized he was going to be spending most of his days begging for work, his family was already settled, and they did not have enough currency to get them back to Tirhan.
So Rhys waited. Payam kept grinning. Rhys began to feel uneasy. “Are you going to tell me about the job?” Rhys asked.