A Thousand Nights (2 page)

My hair was unbound under my veil, and both blew wildly around my face. My sister had tied back her braid and stood with straight shoulders, her veil pulled back and her black hair gleaming in
the sun. She was looking out at the coming storm, but there was a storm brewing in her eyes that only made her more beautiful. I could not lose her, and surely once Lo-Melkhiin saw her, she would
be lost.

I thought of all the stories I had heard, those whispered at my mother’s hearth and those told in the booming voice of our father when the village elders met in his tent for council. I
knew them all: where we had come from, who our ancestors had been, what heroes were in my lineage, which smallgods my family had made and loved. I tried to think if there was any one thing in the
stories that I could use, but there was not. The world had never seen another like Lo-Melkhiin, and it had no stories to combat him.

Not whole stories, but maybe there was something smaller. A thread in the story of a warrior who laid siege to a walled city. A fragment in the story of a father who had two daughters, and was
forced to choose which of them to send into the desert at night. An intrigue in the story of two lovers who wed against the wishes of their fathers. A path in the story of an old woman whose sons
were taken, unlawfully, to fight a war they were not part of. There were stories, and then there were stories.

No single tale that I could draw from would save my sister from a short and cruel marriage, but I had pieces aplenty. I held them in my hands like so many grains of sand, and they slipped away
from me, running through my fingers, even as I tried to gather more. But I knew sand. I had been born to it and learned to walk on it. It had blown in my face and I had picked it from my food. I
knew that I had only to hold it for long enough, to find the right fire, and the sand would harden into glass—into something I could use.

My sister watched the dust cloud for Lo-Melkhiin, but I watched it for the sand. I took strength from her bravery in the face of that storm, and she took my hand and smiled, even though she did
not know what I was trying to do. She had accepted that she would be the one to save us, the one to be made a smallgod and sung to after her time of leaving. The one who died. But I would not allow
it.

By the time the village elders could see flashes of bronze armor in the dust cloud, and hear the footfalls of horses that rode, too hard, under the sun—by the time the wind pulled at my
sister’s braid and worked a few strands loose to play with, as though it, too, feared to lose her—by then, I had a plan.

WHEN LO-MELKHIIN CAME, some of the girls rent their veils and cut off their hair with sheep-shears. I looked at them and felt their fear. I was the only one with a sister the
right age, the only one who was a spare. I could stand beside her and be unseen. The others had no one to shield them this way. They would face Lo-Melkhiin alone, and they disfigured themselves in
the hope that this would put them beneath his attention.

Lo-Melkhiin did not always notice, not anymore. Now that he no longer took only the most beautiful, it seemed that he chose at random. It was not as though his bride would last. Our father had
heard tales when he was out with the caravan, that Lo-Melkhiin would take his new bride away, to his qasr in the Great Oasis, and she would be given new silks, and perfumed so that she no longer
smelled of the desert. It did not matter what she looked like in the dust of her village, for dust could be washed away. But if there was a girl who was like my sister, who drew the eyes of men and
smallgods when she walked past with the water jar balanced on her hip, Lo-Melkhiin would be sure to take her.

My sister was dressed in white linen that blistered the eye with the sun’s glare. She looked simple and striking, and all the more so because she was surrounded by girls who keened in
terror as the horses drew near. I knew that I must work quickly.

I went into her mother’s tent, where my sister had been made and born and learned to dance. Her mother sat upon the pillows of her bed, weeping quietly. I went to her and knelt beside her,
extending the silk of my veil should she need to wipe her eyes.

“Lady mother,” I said to her, for that was how mothers who did not bear you were called. “Lady mother, we must be quick if we are to save your daughter.”

My sister’s mother looked up and clung to the silk I offered to her.

“How?” she said to me, and I saw a desperate hope burn in her eyes.

“Dress me in my sister’s clothes,” I bade her. “Braid my hair as you would hers, and give me those charms she would not grieve to lose.”

“She will grieve to lose her sister,” my sister’s mother said, but her hands had already begun the work. Like me, she was eager to save her daughter, and was not thinking too
much of the cost.

“Someone must be chosen,” I said. I was not yet afraid. “My mother has sons.”

“Perhaps,” my sister’s mother said. “But a son is not a daughter.”

I did not tell her that a daughter is less than a son. She knew it, for she had brothers of her own. Her daughter, my sister, had no brothers left, and her marriage would be what kept her mother
alive should our father die. My mother would survive without me, but without my sister, her mother had no such assurance. I would save more than my sister, though that had not been my intent. I
never thought that maybe, maybe, my mother would grieve for me, for no reason other than her heart.

My sister burst into the tent as her mother was fastening the last gilt necklace around my neck. I wore her purple dishdashah, bound at my wrists and waist with braided cord. My sister and I had
done the black embroidery on the collar, chest, and arms ourselves, stitching a map of the whispers we spoke to one another as we worked. It had taken us the better part of our fifteenth winter to
do it, from raw threads to finished cloth. It was to be her marriage dress, and I had nothing like it. She had told me, as we stitched, that because I had put my hands to making it, it was as much
mine as it was hers. There were secrets in this dress—dreams and confessions we had kept even from our mothers—in the weave and weft, and in the decorations and in the dye. It was to be
hers, but since she wished us to share it, I looked beautiful, cased in purple and black, and beauty was what I needed.

“No,” my sister said to me when her eyes lost their desert-sun haze and she saw me standing clearly before her. She knew, for one time only, the eyes that looked at us would slide
past her and fix on me. “No, my sister, you must not.”

“It is too late,” I said to her. “Lo-Melkhiin’s men come for us.”

“Thank you, daughter of my heart,” my sister’s mother breathed. She had always been fair and kind to me when I was a child. She had taught me the ways of mourning alongside my
sister, but at that moment I knew that she loved me also. “I will pray to you, when you have gone.”

My sister took my hand and pulled me into the sunlight so that Lo-Melkhiin’s men would not have cause to drag us from the tent. I would walk to my fate, and she would walk beside me. For
the first time, I was the one who drew looks. We rejoined the other girls, all of them staring at me as I walked past them in my finery. I stood at the very front, dark and bright. My sister, who
had been so radiant in her simple garb, now looked unfinished at my side. Lovely, but second. I could hear the men whisper.

“Pity,” they hissed. “Pity we did not notice she was as beautiful as her sister.”

I did not look at them. I held my sister’s hand, and we led the way toward the horses that stamped and sweated by the well. We passed the tents of the other families, those with fewer
sheep and fewer children. The girls followed us, staying close. They sensed that they could hide in my shadow, my purple oasis, and perhaps be safe. We drew our lives from the well, and now one of
us would go to her death by it.

Lo-Melkhiin did not get down from his horse. He sat above us, casting a shadow across the sand where we stood. I could not see his face. When I looked up at him, all I could see was black and
sun, and it was too bright to bear. I stared at the horse instead. I would not look at the ground. Behind me stood the other girls, and behind them the village elders held the girls’ mothers
back. I wondered who held my mother, with my father and brothers gone, but I did not look back to see. I wished to be stone, to be resolute, but fear whispered in my heart. What if my sister was
chosen, despite my efforts? What if I was chosen, and died? I pushed those thoughts away, and called on the stories I had woven together to make my plan. Those heroes did not falter. They walked
their paths, regardless of what lay before them, and they did not look back.

“Make me a smallgod,” I whispered to my sister. “When I have gone.”

“I will make you a smallgod now,” she said to me, and the tack jingled as Lo-Melkhiin’s men dismounted and came near. “What good to be revered when you are dead? We will
begin the moment they take you, and you shall be a smallgod before you reach the qasr.”

I had prayed to smallgods my whole life. Our father’s father’s father had been a great herdsman, with more sheep than a man could count in one day. He had traded wool to villages far
and near, and it was to him we prayed when our father was away with the caravan. Our father always returned home safely, with gifts for our mothers and work for my brothers and profit for us all,
but sometimes I wondered if it was the smallgod’s doing. For the first time, I wished that our father was here. I knew he would not have saved me, but I might have asked if he had ever felt
the smallgod we prayed to aiding him on the road.

“Thank you, sister,” I said. I was unsure if it would help me, but it could not harm me.

Lo-Melkhiin’s guard closed his hand on my arm, but I followed him willingly toward the horses. His face was covered by a sand-scarf, but his eyes betrayed him. He wanted to be here no more
than I did, yet he did his duty, as did I. When he saw that I would not fight him, he relaxed, and his hand became more a guide than a shackle. I stood straight and did not look back, though I
could hear the wails behind me as my mother began to grieve. Perhaps I should have gone to her, instead of my sister’s mother. But she would not have helped me. She would have done what my
father could not, and she would have tried to keep me safe. She would have cost me my sister.

“I love you,” I called out. The words were for everyone, for my mothers, and the words were only for my sister.

My sister was on her knees when they put me on the horse, her white linen browned by the sand and her hair falling forward across her face. She chanted in the family tongue, the one my
father’s father’s father practiced when he tended his sheep, the one we heard at my father’s knee as he taught it to my brothers and we sat close by to overhear. My sister’s
mother knelt beside her and chanted too. I could hear the words, but I could not make them out. I knew they were for me, for I could feel the way the wind pulled at my veil, curious to see the face
of the girl who received such fervent prayer.

Lo-Melkhiin sat atop his horse and laughed, for he thought she wept to lose me. But I knew better. I could feel it, in my soul.

LO-MELKHIIN’S HORSES WERE SWIFT, like the wind circles that danced on the sand. Our father’s tents, and the tents around our well, were swallowed up by the sky
before I had time to look back at them. They had been my whole world, before the guard lifted me into the saddle, and now they were lost to me. Never again would I tell my sister stories, using the
warm light of the lamp to make shadows with my hands on the canvas. I would be a queen, for however short a time, and I would never live in a tent again.

Lo-Melkhiin rode at the head of the party, and his guards arrayed themselves around me in a loose formation. They need not have bothered. I was new to riding, and spent my concentration staying
upright. Even had I been able to get away, I had nowhere to go. If I went home to my village, the guards could simply follow me there, and if I tried to flee into the desert, I would be food for
the sand-crows sooner than if I stayed my course. So I watched the guards, how they sat and how they held their legs against their horses’ flanks. I did my best to mimic their seat, and after
a while my muscles ached. I was glad my veil hid my face. I had no wish for them to see me suffer.