A Thousand Nights Read online

  Our father’s tents saw no shortage of happy gatherings. We celebrated the Longest Day and the Longest Night, and those two days when the dark and light of the sky were held at balance. We danced for the lambing and again for the shearing. When our father and my brothers returned from the caravan with traded goods instead of carded wool and spun yarn, we welcomed them with fire and song and food. My mother and my sister’s mother danced for the dead and for the rain, alone in the sacred caves. Even after my sister’s brother died, we sang for the joys of his life, and wished him well wherever his bones had come to their rest.

  Lo-Melkhiin’s party was not like any of those at all.

  It was cold and dark, not just because it was nighttime. In our father’s tents, the daytime was for labor and the nighttime was for songs and tales, but we had always had the heat from the fire and the light from our poor lamps. As I had seen on our circuitous walk along the wall, all the lights in the qasr had been concealed. The sky was not as bright as it was in the desert, because the city lights still shone, but it was close.

  There was a stir, and I looked to the carved door. There Lo-Melkhiin stood, with an old man beside him. I knew he must be a Skeptic, for his robe was dark, its color stolen by the night. I wondered if it was he who had predicted the starfall, and if that was what accorded him the honor of standing by Lo-Melkhiin’s side. Lo-Melkhiin looked at all of us the way a shepherd counts his sheep before moving to another pasture. His eyes were bright, even though there was no light for them to reflect, and few could meet his gaze. His mother held out the longest, and he smiled at her. It was almost kind.

  “I am grateful to you all for attending tonight,” Lo-Melkhiin said to us. His was the voice of a man who watered his own horse, but I did not trust it. “I know that you weary yourselves during the day to serve me and to serve our kingdom. I thank you for putting off your rest for a time, that you might watch this miracle with me.”

  They murmured that it was no trouble, of course. There was nothing else they could do.

  “Before the sky begins its show,” Lo-Melkhiin continued, “we will hear from the Skeptic Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered, as he has won the right to speak before us tonight.”

  The Skeptic beside Lo-Melkhiin bowed to him, and then to the other Skeptics and Priests before walking to the middle of the balcony.

  “How does he win the right to speak?” I said to Lo-Melkhiin’s mother as softly as I could. It was the voice I used to speak to my sister when we did not wish for any of the other women to hear us. I used it now because I did not wish to show ignorance on this grand a stage.

  “They threw dice,” she said to me. She used the same voice. I wondered who she might have learned it with. “Thus do they appease both the odds and the gods.”

  The Skeptic had drawn himself up into a pose I recognized. It was how our father stood when he made a marriage in the village or announced the season’s trade route. It was how my brothers stood when they imitated him and gave my sister and me petty orders, which we invariably disobeyed. It was not, I noticed, how Lo-Melkhiin stood. He did not have to draw anyone’s eye to earn attention or respect. He could command both, and there was no one who could refuse either.

  “Gather, gather,” the Skeptic intoned. Instinctively I leaned forward. So did the others. Then Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered looked directly at me. “Listen, and I will tell you the secrets of the skies.”

  If I had stayed in our father’s tents, I would have learned no secrets beyond those of how to run a household with my sister when we were married. The men we wed would have had their own mothers to wear the priestly-whites, and those women their own acolytes to train. I would have learned the secrets of the grain and the sheep, the hearth and the bed, the kitchen and the loom, but nothing else. I had not stayed in our father’s tents. My sister learned the songs her mother sang for the dead, and now I might learn the secrets of the sky. If I died, I would not know them for very long, but I would know them. Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered did not seem to mind that the girl he spoke to might not have time to ponder his lesson. I looked back at him, though I wasn’t sure if he could tell in the dark, and through my veil, which way my eyes were turned.

  “There is a wanderer in the sky,” Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered said to us, to me. “It circles us the way we circle the sun, but its journey is far longer than ours. As it travels, it gathers a caravan of stars in its wake, and when it passes above our heads, we see the caravan in the sky.”

  “How long does it travel, revered Skeptic?” Lo-Melkhiin asked.

  “For every night that it is in our sky, it will be gone from us for ten years,” the Skeptic said. “And it will light our sky for seven nights, beginning now.”

  I would not see the caravan of stars return again in my lifetime, I knew then. It did not matter how many nights more I survived Lo-Melkhiin’s marriage. Any child I might one day have would never see it at all, unless she lived longer than most born in the desert do. The idea might have frightened me before, but now I understood the dangers of the world with greater clarity than I had when I lived in my father’s tents. I might die tonight or tomorrow, but soon, in any case.

  “My lords and ladies,” said Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered. “I bid you, look up to the sky and see the wonders there.”

  It began slowly. One moving spark in a sky full of fixed lights, spiraling blue and gold, and then doused by the blackness of the sky. Not all of us saw it, it burned so quickly, but soon there were plenty of lights to marvel at.

  I hoped my sister was watching. I hoped she did not fear the sight, but stood in the sand and watched this beauty with her strong heart. Our father and my brothers should be home by now, watching with my mother and my sister’s mother as the sky danced above them.

  And then I forgot about the stars, because Lo-Melkhiin moved from where he stood and watched. Everyone else, Priests and Skeptics, lords and ladies, had their eyes fixed upon the dancing skies, but I saw him. He stalked across the balcony, his hunter’s feet stepping lightly as a lion on the sand, and stopped beside where I stood. His mother looked at us, but did not speak. I could not see her expression, nor his, and took some small comfort in the fact that my veil hid my face from him. Then he closed one hand upon my shoulder, crushing the fine weave of my dress, and pulled me into a darkness that was beyond the reach of the stars.

  IT WAS A SMALL ROOM, I could tell that much. The stone against my back was hard. There was a breeze—it had followed us through the door—but no silks or perfumes were stirred by it. This was not a room much used. Lo-Melkhiin loomed above me, his breath heavy with spice from his dinner. One of his hands was at my waist, and the other arm was pressed across my breastbone. If he wished, he had only to shift it upwards and it would crush my throat.

  “I am glad you could join us tonight, wife,” he said to me. He did not sound threatening, merely careless and unkind. A man who had fine things and did not care for the work it had taken to get them.

  “I had few alternatives,” I said to him. Surely he would not kill me here, not with everyone on the balcony. They might still watch the sky, but they had all seen me. How far, I wondered, did their acceptance of Lo-Melkhiin’s murders go? No, we would both go back out onto the balcony, after he had what he wanted. I lamented that the ties on my dress were not likely to hold.

  “I suppose your sister watches tonight as well?” he asked, almost conversationally. The arm against my breastbone had not relaxed. Tomorrow, I would have a bruise. I was determined to see it. “Do you think she cowers in fear, thinking the sky will fall down upon her head?”

  “My people know the Priests’ ways, as much as anyone in the city,” I told him. Our father walked the desert and my sister was neither foolish nor timid. She was worth ten of Lo-Melkhiin. “My mother and my sister’s mother know the songs. They will have known about tonight as much as your Priests did, even if they do not have a Skeptic to tell a pretty story about it before it starts.”

  “I suppose even a common d
esert girl like you is better than that,” he said to me. He pulled back, but I did not relax. If he moved away from me, I was not going to follow him. “Your dress is beautiful. The cloth was only orange when I bought it for you. However did you manage to add the gold?”

  I did not answer him. I was not about to tell him that I had woven it in my dreams, if that is what had happened. I did not like the sudden gleam in his eyes; it flickered, like a lamp left exposed to a breeze. It might flare up and catch fire to all surrounding it with no warning.

  “It matters not,” he went on. “You and I have a ritual to perform, same as every night.”

  I had not considered it a ritual until he said it. There were no special words or songs. We lit no candles, and I am not sure either of us had any peace from it. Yet every day, every night, we came together. It was not a marriage as I had been taught, but it was something, and he had given me its name.

  “My sister does her rituals too; proper ones, far from the city walls,” I said to him, though I could not say how I had seen it. “She prepares for her wedding, and leaves offerings for our dead.”

  I knew that my shrine flourished in the place where our ancestors slept, but I would not tell Lo-Melkhiin that I was held in such regard. The other girls brought offerings there, as did their mothers. In the privacy of their own tents, they had smaller shrines, personal mementos of me that they whispered to without the formality of song. They told me their secrets there, their loves and hopes and dreams, and when I was a smallgod, I would be able to whisper back. Our father would carry my token in his belt pouch, as would my brothers, when they went out to trade again. The scraps from the purple dishdashah would go out into the desert, and the sun would give them strength there.

  In the cold of that small stone room, I felt the desert’s scouring wind heat my face. I held my hands out to Lo-Melkhiin, and he took them. His face, visible, just barely now that my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, had the look of victory to it. I wondered if mine did too, because I felt like I had won something, but I did not know how both of us could be victorious. I did not know how I could win.

  His fingers closed around mine, and the strange light began to move between us. Always before, we had done this in the lamplight of my chamber. Now, in the dark, I could not help but notice that the cold light did not illuminate the room. It was bright enough, but it was of no use to actually see anything by. I had never seen light behave in that way before; like it was only the idea of light and not the real thing. When the copper fire stretched out from him to me as a reply, it was the same; a fire burning without smoke or glow or warmth, but it made me feel like I was growing.

  He released me abruptly, and I swayed on my feet. He held out his arm, a mockery of a perfect husband, but I leaned on the wall and did not take it. Instead, I quickly felt each of the knots that held my dress in place. They had, by some luck, not moved. I would be decently covered when we returned. Lo-Melkhiin laughed, and turned toward the door. I followed him out because there was nothing else I could do. I was light-headed, and felt as though my very blood were singing. It did not feel the same as when I was ill. I was rarely sick as a child, but I knew what it felt like. It did not have this draining feeling, as though I were a gage-tree and the wind was pulling the water from my bones. Usually when we did this, I was sitting down, and I did not have to walk anywhere.

  “Mother,” Lo-Melkhiin said, once we were back on the main balcony. She turned her face from the sky to look at her son, and at me. “I must go and speak with my counselors. Will you see to my wife? I fear the lateness of the hour has stolen some of her vivacity. Perhaps the fruit juice will restore it?”

  The light of the stars seemed bright in comparison with the darkness of the stone room. I could see in her face that Lo-Melkhiin’s mother did not believe her son entirely, but she waved to a serving girl, and got two cups anyway. Lo-Melkhiin left us without a backward glance, which belied his earlier concern.

  I drank the juice. It did not cost me to be obedient, and I was thirsty anyway. Somehow it was cool, beyond the chill offered by the night air, and it did make me feel more grounded. This was fruit I knew, even if it was presented in a different way than when my sister and I shared a pomegranate in our father’s tents. There was nothing otherworldly about it. Lo-Melkhiin’s mother did not ask me what I had done with her son only moments before. Perhaps she did not wish to know. I felt her eyes skim over the ties of my dress, though, and when she saw that they were all intact, she frowned. Perhaps she did not like mysteries.

  I watched Lo-Melkhiin instead of the sky. He moved from group to group, talking with his advisors and listening to the Priests and the Skeptics both, clasping their arms as though they were his comrades and not members of his court. Every time he went from one gathering to another, the knot of men he left would fall to talking in hushed tones, waving their hands at one another as though they were excited by what they spoke of. Before long, it was as though I stood in one of the night gardens, and heard the wind moving through the leaves.

  Firh Stonetouched stood apart from the others, his eyes still fixed on the stars. When Lo-Melkhiin came to stand beside him, he flinched, but recovered well enough. They spoke only briefly, and then Lo-Melkhiin put his hand on the carver’s shoulder. I saw, as I had not seen when he spoke to the others, the spark of light that was not light as it jumped from my husband’s hand to Firh’s body. And then Lo-Melkhiin moved on.

  I walked to where the carver stood. Lo-Melkhiin’s mother did not try to stop me, nor did she follow me. More than anything, I wanted to see the desert, to imagine that if I looked in the right direction, I would see the fires that burned around our father’s tents. To imagine that I would see a way back to my sister. Firh Stonetouched stood there instead, and I saw that his hands were shaking before he wrapped his fingers around the crenellations that decorated the top of the wall, and gripped so hard I thought for a moment they might crumble.

  “Do you miss the tents of your father, lady-bless?” he asked me.

  “I do,” I said to him. I had not expected to be gone long enough to miss them. I had thought to die and return to the place where the bones of our father’s father’s father lay in peace.

  “I miss mine as well,” he said to me. “I miss them especially on nights like this.”

  “The Skeptic said that there have been no nights like this while you or I have been living,” I reminded him gently.

  “No,” he said to me. “I meant nights when we come together as a court. When...”

  His voice trailed away, but I heard the rest of his thought as if he had spoken the words clearly in my ear. He did not like the nights when Lo-Melkhiin came to him and laid his hands upon his shoulder.

  “Will you have to carve now?” I asked him.

  “I think so,” he said to me. “I can’t tell what yet, but I know that I will carve something.”

  I laid my own hands on top of his where they still gripped the top of the wall. For a heartbeat, they were lit with copper fire, but he did not see it.

  “I will tell the serving girls to bring you water,” I said to him.

  He pulled his hands out from under mine, glancing nervously to see if anyone had seen us, but no one had.

  “I will not stop to drink it, lady-bless,” he said to me.

  “Then I will tell a footman to make you drink,” I said to him. “As long as he does not hurt you too much.”

  Firh Stonetouched laughed. It was not a happy sound. I knew that he would hurt whether he drank or not.

  “I am sorry,” I said to him. “It is the only way I can think of that I can help.”

  “I understand, lady-bless,” he said to me. He bowed formally, and I returned to stand by Lo-Melkhiin’s mother until we were all finally dismissed to find our beds.

  In the morning, the carving madness came upon Firh Stonetouched, and he would not be stopped from his work. All day, he stood in the hot sun and set his tools to the stone. Yet whenever a serving girl came i
nto the courtyard with a jug at her waist, he would go to her and drink. Beneath his hands, the statue took shape. The watching guards and footmen were certain that it would be a lion, but the henna mistress said that the shape of the face was wrong. She was correct: by the time the sun had set, a lioness stood proudly in the courtyard.

  When Lo-Melkhiin came to me that night, before he went back out to watch the second night of falling stars, he looked at me for a long time before he took my hands. This time, it was not the way a lion stalks a gazelle, but rather the way a ram surveys the ewes.

  “I ordered them to move the statue,” he said to me, once the fire had faded from our fingers. He did not release my hands. “I will not destroy something that took such work, but it is not like the others.”

  “Oh?” I said to him. I did not pretend interest; it was genuine.

  “Yes,” he said to me. “There was something wrong with its eyes.”

  Then he left me to dream of sand.

  THE SEVEN NIGHTS OF FALLING STARS had ended, and I was still alive. I had been almost three weeks in Lo-Melkhiin’s qasr. There were few now who would not meet my eyes when I called upon them, though they always looked away from my gaze. It befit my status as their queen, so I did not let it trouble me. I missed my sister every day, because she was my sister, and because although I could talk to the women in the spinning room or any of the gardeners, none of them were my friend. I had not seen Firh Stonetouched again since the night of the starfall party. The girl who brought my tea told me that he had been sent out on patrol. I did not find the lioness he had carved, either. Wherever Lo-Melkhiin had hidden it, it was hidden well.