A Thousand Nights (27 page)

T
he human sand-crawlers thought they were so clever. They thought if they buried their business in sand, and conducted it far away from the
walls of my city, that I would not learn what they were doing.

They were wrong.

I did not need the eyes and ears of men to spy for me, though I had plenty of both at my disposal. My kind were haunting the desert still, preying upon men as they were moved to, though none
of them had risen as high as I had done. I had shut myself off from them so they would not follow my example and supplant me, but now I opened myself to them again. It was they who brought me word,
whispered in my mind where only Lo-Melkhiin could overhear us; and he could not stop us, so I did not care.

The desert rats were gathering for a wedding that was not a wedding.

When my bride’s father had come to me, and brought his sons to ask my favor, I had had a choice. I craved their blood to be spilled at her feet, more than I craved sunlight and pretty
things. But if I had washed her with their blood, she would never have turned to me; their rebellion might have faltered without them, but it would not have died.

I had to let them go, to let them all go. I had not even kept a hostage to toy with and mutilate, or perhaps to turn over to another of my kin, while they were gone. I sent
Lo-Melkhiin’s mother, as would be expected of a human king who sent his wife into the desert. When they were gone, I found the qasr empty without them. Without her.

I did not muster my army. I refused to use a force of men to quell this desert uprising. Men might have seen me for what I was at last. I could have laid waste to their desert on my own, but
that would have taken time I did not care to spend, and much of my power. Instead I called my kind to me, meeting with them in the night, where once I had listened to my Skeptics talk about the
stars. They saw how powerful I had become, and listened to my words with hungry ears.

It did not take me very long to convince my kind to join me. They craved blood as I did, and did not much care that this time, they might have to kill quickly rather than linger over every
wound. There would be blood enough in every form to sate them, and power beyond what they had known after.

“But my queen is not to be touched,” I said to them. “I will have her whole in mind and body when this is done, and the desert is red with the blood of her
family.”

There were some quiet complaints at that
—
that I might choose a pet to lavish suffering upon while my kin were forced to deal the mercy of a fast death to those they caught. I
let them whisper. They must not guess the truth of why I wanted her. They must not take her, as I had taken Lo-Melkhiin. She was mine for that, if any were to get it, but I hoped instead to control
her through other means.

I nearly swooned to think of what we might do together. I could force people to do what I wanted, but I had to be close enough to touch them.
She
could reach across the desert and
do her work as easily as I might reach for more bread at the dinner table. I had not bothered to learn of smallgods when I had taken Lo-Melkhiin, but perhaps it was time to make Sokath, His Eyes
Uncovered have great thoughts about them. His heart might burst when he was done, which was why I had avoided him in favor of the younger Skeptics
—
he was nearly clever enough without
me. For this, though, I would risk his death. I had many others at my beck and call.

But first: the desert. I would take my kin onto the sand, and we would turn it red with blood. Men would not sing of the battle we fought there. They would whisper it around their campfires.
They would be afraid to speak of it any louder than that, lest the wrath of the victors be called down upon them. Women would wail in the desert, grieving their dead husbands and sons. They would
cling to those children who had been too young to fight and had not died
—
if we did not kill them anyway, of course. My kin were sometimes difficult to control.

Lo-Melkhiin worried about his mother, overhearing our plans as he did. He knew that I would save the girl at any cost, but he did not think I would expend the same effort to bring his mother
back to the safety of the qasr. It struck me how deeply he seemed to care for them both. A man might love his mother and not be judged weak by other men for it. Most men did not have the luxury of
loving their wives
—
at least, not so soon after marrying them.

And he did not love her, not quite. But he thought very highly of her. He was impressed with her bravery, and with her unwillingness to change her desert-spirit within city walls. He thought
her power was mysterious, but not terrifying as mine was. He wished he were able to know her better, as himself, without the specter that was me hanging between them. He thought she was born to be
a queen.

It was so different from how I coveted her. I looked forward to rubbing it in his face later
—
that he would only ever have her through me. I would touch her with his hands, and
use his mouth when I kissed her, and she would fight his body with all the strength in hers when I did it.

Now, though, I had my work before me. My army was not great in number, but we were great in power. We would drive the rebels back with the strength we gained from devouring their own
ancestors. We would rid the desert of their treachery.

And when we were done, I would return to the qasr with my bride, whether she willed it or not.

WHILE I HAD BEEN DREAMING OF my sister’s past, and watching the stars fall from the sky, and spinning useless thread in Lo-Melkhiin’s qasr, my father and my
brothers had been busy. They had returned with the caravan to find me gone, but my mother and my sister and my sister’s mother had not let them mourn, as would have been traditional and
proper. I lived—my sister was sure of it—and if I was to keep living, they must take their camels back into the desert and trade once more. This time, with every bolt of cloth, crock of
honey, and packet of myrrh that changed hands, they must tell what had happened, and what my sister was trying to do.

I know now that my father did not grieve. My brothers had been chafing under the rule of a king who lived so far away and was so cruel. Two of them had daughters. When they went back into the
desert they bartered no less shrewdly than usual, but with every bargain they told of my marriage: how I had made Lo-Melkhiin’s eye turn from my sister to me. My father told the men he traded
with that I was brave. My brothers said that I was clever—that I had made Lo-Melkhiin love me, and that was why I did not die.

And everywhere they went, they built a shrine, and they left purple cloth, and they prayed.

Soon, they found that women came to trade with them instead of men. The women listened to the story of my wedding with an attentiveness the men had not shared. Rarely now were my father and my
brothers tasked with building the shrines to me. Often they were already built, nestled in the sand or in the corner of a tent, or even in the caves where the dead were buried, though I had not
died. They left the purple cloth—as a gift, they said, for the living smallgod I had become.

Just when they were about to turn back, when they had reached the edge of the sand desert, could see the scrub desert and, at the full length of their sight, the low blue lines that were the
mountains to the north, they met a pale man who carried bright metal, the like of which they had not seen. They wondered if he was ill, his skin was so pale. He wore his kafiyyah like a woman
would, veiling his face to them. Men only covered their faces if there was too much sand in the air, or if there was a sickness about.

“If he stays too long in the sun, he burns red like a coal in the fire,” my sister said to me as she told me what had gone on after I had been taken away. “His skin peels away,
and he says he is very sick when it happens. Your brothers laughed at first, because it was something only a woman would do, to be concerned about her skin—but he showed them his hands, and
how they burned, and they held their tongues after that.”

My father traded for the bright metal, as much as he could carry. The pale man took honey and spices and dyes, light things that would not burden his camel, and said that if my father wished for
more metal, he had only to return in one month. My father could not say how he knew the metal would be needed, only that the smallgod had told him. In any case, my father returned to our wadi with
strange tales to tell my mothers and my sister, and with baskets of bright metal shaped as knives, arrowheads, and pins.

My sister told me that she was captivated by my father’s words about the pale man, and by the bright metal he had brought. She begged my father to go back, to trade for more, and to bring
the pale man with him if he would come. He listened to her, and went out into the desert with the caravan long before there was a need for new trade.

Everywhere he stopped to let his camels rest, my father saw new shrines built to me. There were offerings of pickled gage-root and sweet-water flowers, though the desert burned around them.
Girls sang new hymns at the shrines, their light voices carrying on the wind. In the evenings, when they sat around the fires and wove, they chanted prayers instead of working-songs; though my
father could not hear them, he knew what they said.

At last, my father came again to the edge of the scrub desert, and met the pale man there. This time, the pale man had two camels laden with metal and with ore, which he said he could shape
however my father liked.

“Come with me to my tents,” my father said to him. “It is a long journey, but your camels look strong, and we will do what we can to protect you from our sun. I promise you,
you will trade well while you are there.”

“Revered caravan master,” the pale man had said to my father, “I had hoped you would invite me. There is much of your desert that I wish to see.”

And so they went, my father retracing his steps back to his tents. He showed the metal to all the men he met, but the pale man would not trade.

“Come with us,” he had said to them instead. “Come and we will see what we might make.”

Around this time, word spread of the bird that had attacked Lo-Melkhiin and brought him low. My sister said she had prayed to me, unceasingly, that I would help him die. I could not tell her
that I had done the opposite of that, but now I knew where the swell of power had come from. It heartened me to learn I was not bound to grant the prayers that brought me power. I was bound enough
as Lo-Melkhiin’s wife. I did not wish to be bound any further, even to my sister.

“Others have been attacked by the birds,” my father had said to the men he traded with, and to the women who listened to his words. “Why is Lo-Melkhiin so ill when no one else
has ever been?”

“The birds are from the mountains, as am I,” the pale man had told them. “I have seen them drink the water that comes from the caves where I get my ore. I have seen them
sharpen their great claws on the mountainside, and the claws gleam brighter than the daggers that I make.”

“Could it be that the metal makes Lo-Melkhiin ill?” my quietest brother had asked.

My father said nothing for a very long time.

“If it is so...” the youngest said then. He was less wise, but kinder. “Then we might save our sister from him.”

The words had not been true when I thought of them, but in the silence between what I thought and what I said, I had made them real.

“If it is so,” said my father at last, “then we might save everyone.”

They could not test the metal against the king, of course, but they could test it against other metals. It was much harder than silver. It was far stronger than copper, though it could not be
made to shine as bright. It bent bronze, which is what most people were using for weapons. The arrows that Lo-Melkhiin’s archers carried, and the daggers and swords at their waists, were
bronze. If my father could get enough metal, and the pale man thought that he carried enough with him, then he could make weapons that Lo-Melkhiin’s army would not be able to withstand.

Now, instead of trading, my father was recruiting.

“Come with us,” he said to the men they met. “Come and bring your women and your children and your herds. Bring them to my wadi, where they will be safe, and we will go to meet
Lo-Melkhiin and stop him from stealing our daughters to die as his wives.”

Many of the men we met were from villages that had given a daughter already. Those who had not yet, knew that they would have to soon, if I died. They came to my father’s cause slowly at
first, but my sister said that it was their women who begged them to join. I did not doubt that. Men prospered under Lo-Melkhiin’s rule, and if it cost them a daughter, it was no more than a
hard winter might demand as payment for survival. The wives and mothers, though, grieved each loss and prayed at my shrines to avoid further losses. They told the men to go, and, after a time, the
men went.