A Thousand Nights Page 4

  It was a statue of a woman standing tall and proud, with each foot on the back of a lion. In her hands there was a jug, held downwards, and from it poured a thin stream of water, which fell on the multicolored pebbles below. She was beautiful, but there was something in her eyes I did not like, something that did not match her face.

  “Lady-bless,” said the serving girl, “that is Lo-Melkhiin’s mother, as carved by Firh Stonetouched to celebrate her recovery.”

  Lo-Melkhiin’s mother had suffered long and hard; her health leeched from her like bones left out in the sun, white and brittle and bereft of all that gave life. When Lo-Melkhiin had come out of the desert, possessed by whatever demon he found there, he had cured her, but now she went no longer beneath the sun. I wondered if she ever met her son’s wives, or if she ignored them.

  “Lady-bless,” said the serving girl, and I followed her into the bathhouse.

  Today they dressed me more simply, and used much less perfume. They combed my hair, and coiled it, and pinned it underneath my veil. I did not know what had become of my sister’s purple dishdashah that I had worn here. It had seemed so fine when I put it on, and I did not even really remember when they had taken it off. I wondered if it had simply been discarded, or if it had been passed on to another to wear. I wondered if they had kept it to bury me in.

  The dress I wore now was much finer, the silk thinner and the stitching so tiny I had to squint to see it. They painted my face, which they had not done the night before, lining my eyes with black and then blue, to match the color of the dress. With my eyes closed, I saw the people of my village as they woke in the morning and prepared for the day.

  Our father, returning, would find his second daughter gone. He might even mourn me, remembering the girl who had held his robe when the floods came, and the woman he might have bartered along with my sister for a marriage match. My brothers would not know what to say. After my sister and I had reached our tenth summer and came in from the herds to learn the tent-crafts that would serve us during marriage, we had seen them infrequently. I looked past them in my mind’s eye, to the tent where my mother and my sister and my sister’s mother now slept together.

  I pulled back the tent flap, and leaned in. There was my sister’s shrine, smaller than the one she had made for me in the caves, but lovingly crafted. It was built of dark stones, and bound by a circle of purple cloth I knew was from the dress we had made together, the one I had taken from her when I saved her life. On it there stood a tallow candle in place of a lamp. These candles burned more quickly and were more expensive, but the light was cleaner, and it was said that smallgods paid more attention to light that more closely matched the sun.

  My sister knelt before the shrine and whispered in the family tongue. My mother knelt beside her, though she did not speak. Her face was tearstained, and I knew that she would not pray for me until her prayers were made of anger and hope. Tear-prayers were for the dead, the kind we had said for my sister’s brother when the flood took him, and for the babies that my mother had lost. My sister’s mother knotted black threads and laid them atop the purple silk, to finish the binding. I hoped they would remember that my sister needed a new dress. There was no need for this shrine to become their lives.

  “Lady-bless,” said a serving girl, and I opened my eyes.

  “I wore a purple dishdashah last night,” I said. The words came unbidden, and they were the first I had spoken in hours. The serving girls jumped, but then smoothed their faces.

  “Yes, lady-bless,” said the girl who had carried my breakfast.

  “I would like it back,” I said to her. “My sister made it with me, and I do not wish for it to be destroyed.”

  “Of course, lady-bless,” she said to me.

  I was not used to idleness, and so the day dragged on. There were no craft tools in my room, and the serving girl who sat with me did not speak. I endured the morning, and a lunch of roasted peppers, and then when evening fell I was taken back to the bathhouse. My face was washed and my hair let down and combed with perfume. Again they wrapped me in fine silks, with ties so fragile that they might leave me bare at any moment, and again they returned me to my room to wait.

  Lo-Melkhiin came as he had the night before, and sat down, this time on the bed.

  “You still have no fear of me,” he said.

  “I still have nothing to fear,” I told him.

  “Tell me more about your sister,” he said then. “If you would die for her, she must be worthy of tales.”

  “She is,” I said. “Together, we made a dress that was beautiful enough to fool a king into picking the magpie instead of the wren.”

  “That dress is lost to her,” Lo-Melkhiin said. “If I wished, I could have it destroyed. I know you have asked for its return.”

  “My sister will make other dresses,” I said to him. “Our father loves her mother well, and brings her the finest silks. Her mother is not so foolish as to waste them on herself, and has taught my sister to make the most delicate skirts and veils, so that when she goes to market, she catches the eyes of everyone who sees her. She will stitch her own secrets now, and they will be all the more powerful, for they will not be shared with anyone, not even with me.”

  “Maybe I will see her in the market and break the law,” Lo-Melkhiin said.

  “You will not,” I told him. I did not fear him, and thus it was easy to tell him the truth. “You need the merchants. If you break that law in the market, they will wonder what other laws you might bend.”

  Lo-Melkhiin smiled like a lion, and again he reached for my hands. Again I let him take them without resisting, even though tonight his fingers were clasped more tightly around my wrists. I watched as purple and black fire, silk and secrets, stretched from my hands to his. Blood roared in my ears and the lamps flared more brightly, and then the copper fire came from his fingers to mine. It was no imagined sight, these lights. The cold light was his power, I was sure of it, and somehow the copper fire was mine; tonight it shone even more brightly. My vision and hearing cleared, and I let Lo-Melkhiin see that I would not be cowed. He leaned forward and placed his lips in the center of my forehead. I would not say it was a kiss, but it seemed to be all he required.

  “We stitched it together over many desert nights, and wove such secrets with threads as cannot be unbroken.” I said the words in my storyteller’s voice. His fingers did not lessen their hold. I could sense he wanted to know, that he would compel it from me, yet I felt my own fire and would not be compelled.

  The secrets were little things, for the most part. Which of the sheep we would try to ensure were part of her dowry; which of the pots she would take with her when she went wedded from our father’s tents; which meals she would never serve, once she had the run of her own household. They were nothing, and they were everything; they were my sister, and I would never tell him what he had missed.

  In the morning there was a neatly folded dishdashah, made from purple silk and stitched with black thread, lying at my feet. And I was alive to see it.

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I learned some measure of the qasr’s operation. The girls who brought my tea and fresh clothing each morning, and presumably the girls who would shroud my body and sing the last songs when Lo-Melkhiin finally tired of me, were all pretty. They wore simple white gowns with a shift beneath, the color my mother wore when she played priestly roles, but in a much more severe style. Their hair was as dark as my own, but of a shorter length, and braided in a single coil around their heads. I longed for a style of that sort, but each day when I was dressed, the woman who did my hair fell to experimentation. The elaborate designs put weight in strange places, and I often had a headache by noon. Also, they itched.

  The bathhouse attendants were much the same, though they wore only their shifts when they were at their work. I was given a bath each morning, and I confess I took no small amount of joy in the sheer amount of water that was allotted to me. It was so hot that it steamed, and it seemed that I br
eathed the water in my lungs as much as I sat in it. If I was to be here, I would enjoy what I could of this place.

  I was less enamored of the afternoons. I might walk in the gardens before the sun grew too hot, or again as it began to set and the night flowers bloomed, but I soon tired of the same statues, with their haunted eyes, and the same fountains, though I did love their songs. On the fourth day I caught the hem of a serving girl’s dress, when she would have left me.

  “Please,” I said to her, as I would have spoken to my mother, “is there not some craft that I might do? The hours are long, and I am not accustomed to idleness.”

  She hesitated, and I knew the reason. As Lo-Melkhiin’s wife, I ought to have had the run of the qasr’s crafthalls, supervising the embroidery and the weaving. At the same time, they could not give me anything sharp, nor strong weaving cords, lest I turn them upon myself. That left spinning. I supposed I could do some damage with a spindle whorl, but once the distaff was broken, I would have naught but a ceramic disc. I drew myself up, remembering that here, I was no one’s daughter. Here I was a queen, for however long I might last.

  “I shall spin,” I said, taking the decision from her. “It is my favorite, and I do not wish to interrupt what process your craft-mistresses have established.”

  “Yes, lady-bless,” the girl said, and led me into the corridor.

  When we entered the thread room, all heads turned and all conversation ceased. There were some two dozen women sitting grouped at various tasks, and yet if any of them had dropped their needles, the sound would have echoed. The girl looked as though she wished the floor would eat her bones, but I walked proudly. I followed her to the piles of new-carded wool, and she handed me a spindle before moving to take her own seat with the embroiderers.

  It took my fingers some time to regain their skill. I had not had much cause to spin at home, being put to embroidery as soon as I was able to understand its worth. Moreover, our wool was a good deal coarser. My mother could have had finer threads, if she wished them, but they were brought to us by our father. We did not make them. My hands were chapped from the desert wind and callused from my earlier years with a shepherd’s crook. They snagged my thread and frayed it, and again and again I undid my work.

  The others said nothing, but I could feel their eyes on me. Before, I had wanted their attention, had wanted them to remember who, and what, I was. Now they looked upon me still, but they saw a poor desert girl who could not even spin properly, and I wished for it to stop.

  “Lady-bless.” There was a voice at my elbow. I turned, and there stood an older woman, with gnarled fingers and a kind smile. She held out a pair of soft white gloves, and I took them with a nod of thanks.

  “The desert breeds strong,” she said. It was an old saying that our father liked to tell my brothers when they complained of the wind and the sand and their herds.

  “And we must find ways to live in our father’s tent.” I finished the words, and her smile grew.

  She returned to her seat, and I took up the spindle again. Now the thread grew beneath my fingers, coiling into the basket between my feet in an even strand. I felt the eyes of my companions turn to their own work, and when they no longer looked at me, they forgot that I was there to hear their words.

  My mother had told me that when she first married our father, when he had not yet built the fortune to establish a permanent camp in his father’s settlement, she and my sister’s mother had gone with him in the caravan. It was a harder life for them. In addition to constant travel, they were each night at the mercy of some new trader’s wives and mother. The men all respected our father as a merchant who was set to establish himself, but the women were not so sure. Why had he married, then, if he was not yet wealthy enough to keep his wives at home? And why had he married twice?

  Yet every night, my mother and my sister’s mother had gone to the women’s tents and taken out their thread boxes. There was always mending to do, and sometimes they had finer work, if our father’s trades had gone well. The others saw the work they did, saw the work they did together, and they understood that our father was not foolish, and neither were his wives. Then the other women would start to talk to one another. Through them, my mothers learned more of the habits of the men our father traded with than he had ever dreamed of.

  “With your eyes on your work,” my mother had said to me, thinking to prepare me for a trader’s life, “it is easy to forget who is present to hear your mouth. You and your sister must remember that, when you are wed. Do good work, and those you work with will tell you things beyond what you can imagine.”

  Advice for a trader’s wife, perhaps, but it would serve me well in the qasr too. As I spun, the women fell to talking around me. It was quiet at first, like the whispers in water-starved wadi reeds. They did not say anything that day about Lo-Melkhiin, or about the qasr, but they did not hold their tongues when I was present; I knew that, if I lived, I might soon hear something I could put to use.

  I focused on the whorl instead. This too was a trick I had learned from my mother. Spinning does not require a great deal of thought, and when you have become accustomed to the weight of the spindle and the feel of the wool, even your eyes are not necessary. My mother’s mother had spun while blind for the last ten years of her life, and yet the threads my mother used to embroider her wedding dishdashah were as fine as any our father might have bought for her later. Spinning is a dreamer’s craft, and I wished to dream of my sister, and of a place that was not so closed and full of fear.

  My breath slowed to match the rise and fall of the spindle, and my eyes drifted back and forth with the whorl. The thread I spun was raw—they would dye it later—but soon enough I saw the black fire of my sister’s dark hair in the dirty-white of the wool.

  She was in the caves, the hill where we buried our dead, and where we had first seen the rain. My mother and my sister’s mother stood beside her, and all of them were clad in the priestly-whites the women of my family wore in that place. I could see their mouths moving, though I could not hear their words, and I knew that no one had died. My sister was learning the songs, not burying someone, and our mothers were teaching her to follow in their work.

  I was puzzled by this. My sister would still marry, surely, and leave our father’s tents. If she were to learn the songs to sing to the dead, it would be her husband’s songs she sang. If she learned our songs, if she were tied to our family’s caves, the dead might not let her leave them. They would always require her to keep them. But I knew the vision before me did not lie. My sister was learning our own death songs, and that meant she would stay in our father’s tents forever—and always near my shrine.

  I wondered if our father knew what they were doing. I could not imagine that he would give his approval. He respected the dead, of course, not least because his father’s father’s father was the smallgod to whom he owed his trade. That shrine was the most often visited in our catacombs. Even in the dry season, it had sweet-water flowers on it, and pickled roots. It was not the shrine before which my sister now stood.

  This shrine was new, stone still bleached white from the desert sun and not shadowed by time under the earth. On it there was a scattering of purple cloth that I recognized immediately. When we had cut the dishdashah for my sister’s wedding, her mother had kept the scraps, to use for luck-pieces in later works. We had not yet begun those, and so the pieces had stayed in her thread box. But now they were on the shrine, laid out for the smallgods to see.

  Laid out for me to see.

  It was my shrine they were teaching her to keep. The shrine that would make me a smallgod when I died, and the same one she had promised to build while I yet lived. I had seen them praying to another, smaller, shrine in the tent, and thought it the full extent of her vow. She must have told my mother, perhaps to stay her grief, and then they must have decided together to move their worship to our holiest place. She would never leave, not now. She would be mine forever.

  “Lady-
bless?” said the kind woman from earlier. “Lady-bless, it is time for you to go.”

  I shook myself from the trance. I was surrounded by dirty-white thread, neatly spun and coiled, and the lamps were lit. It had been hours.

  “I thank you,” I said to them, all of them. “I will see you tomorrow.”

  They nodded. It was a pretty wish.

  That night, Lo-Melkhiin came to me, and asked me to tell him of my sister.

  “My father will be back with the caravan now,” I said to him. He had not yet taken my hands, and yet I felt a fire in my skin nonetheless. It spun, burning, like the spindle whorl. “He will have brought with him final news of my sister’s marriage.”

  “Her marriage?” he said to me. “You lie.”

  “I do not,” I said to him, though I did. “These past few seasons my father has sought a husband for my sister, and he has found one to his liking, and to hers.”

  “He cares so much for her tastes?”

  “My sister must love the one she weds,” I said, and the heat within me surged. “And in him, she will stir all the fires of creation.”

  I lied, but I saw the morning all the same.

  ON THE SEVENTH MORNING, an old woman brought my tea. She was not old the way the master-weavers were, with their gnarled fingers and stooped shoulders, their white hair braided about their heads in that simple, coiled style of which I was so jealous. She was old like desert rock, bleached and hard, all the impurities worn away. And her hair, which hung loose about her face, was a tawny color the like of which I had never seen.

  It was her hair that gave her away. This was Lo-Melkhiin’s mother, who had been so ill and then was cured by him in the days after he came back from the desert. Her hair had not recovered as she had, once her sickness was gone, and since no more of it ever grew she had made for herself a wig out of the lion manes she loved so dearly. It could not be braided or oiled, and could no more be tamed than the beasts themselves. It was unearthly to look upon, so early in the morning with the golden sunlight around her, but it was beautiful nonetheless.