A Thousand Nights (15 page)

Before, they had talked around me, and I had learned from them. Now, they tried to include me in their conversation as much as they could, though there were, of course, some things we did not
discuss. They were all city born, though, and hungered to hear my stories about growing up in the desert.

“Will it make you homesick to tell?” one of the weavers asked.

“No, I do not think so,” I said to her. “It makes me happy to remember.”

I did not tell them any of our special stories, the ones that my mother and my sister’s mother whispered to my sister and me over the fire when our father and brothers were away on
caravan. Nor did I tell them the stories I spun for Lo-Melkhiin. Instead, I told them of the great silver-colored birds that tried to take goats and even sheep from the herds my sister and I had
watched when we were children.

“My sister had better aim than I did,” I said to them. “But I could throw a rock farther. When the great birds came, we shouted and waved our arms, and threw stones. Even if we
hit them, the birds were so big that we could not injure them too badly. They would fly away and leave our flocks in peace.”

“Lady-bless, that sounds terrifying!” a spinner said. “Big enough to carry you off, and you only armed with stones!”

“They do not have a taste for children,” I told her. “In the desert, the only things that do are lions and snakes, and both of those creatures will hunt anything. The birds
only came for the flocks, and we drove them off.”

“Where do they live?” This from the embroiderer who specialized in stitching desert flowers into the hems of dresses for city women. I had no notion of where the birds lived, but I
was in the rhythm of a story now, and could feel the word-threads coming together for an answer.

“Far away to the north of us, beyond the sand desert and the scrub desert, there is a range of mountains, higher than anything you can imagine.” A Skeptic had lectured about
mountains at dinner a few nights ago, and shown pictures of them, incised on baked clay tablets. His mountains were by the blue desert, though, where Lo-Melkhiin’s mother had come from.

“And they come all this way for food?” the embroiderer asked.

“Sometimes there are too many of them in the mountains,” I said to her. “So they pick the youngest and strongest birds, and send them out across the desert to look for
food.”

“Poor things, to come so far for nothing,” said the spinner.

I smiled at her. “Our father gives them the oldest sheep, who would be too tough for us to eat, and whose wool has failed,” I said. “He knows what it is like to go out with the
caravan and provide for a family at home.”

“What makes them so big?” a weaver asked. “We’ve large sand-crows here, but nothing so big as that.”

Again, I did not know, and again, I felt the story-threads come to me when I wished for them.

“There is a metal in those mountains that we do not have in the desert,” I said to them. “It is in the rocks there, and when the water in the mountain wadis rushes over them,
part of the metal goes into the water. The birds drink of it, and grow strong.”

“That sounds like Skeptic talk,” said one of the oldest weavers. “Lady-bless, you are no Skeptic.”

“I am not,” I said to her. “But I have the stories of my village, and our father has traveled widely to bring us even more tales. It may not be the truth, but it is what I
know.”

“You are wise, lady-bless,” the old weaver said. “And you are desert-strong.”

“Perhaps that is why she—” The spinner who had started to speak cut off abruptly. Her spindle thudded to the ground, as though someone had kicked her and she’d dropped it
in her surprise. All her thread was unwound. She would have to start again.

I had been embroidering; my hands were finally soft enough to use the silk thread without snagging it at every turn. When I started talking I had stopped paying attention to what I worked, but
the work had not stopped.

Needlecraft, whether carding, spinning, weaving, or embroidering, is a craft of the eyes. Talk is easy when you work, because you can talk without taking your eyes from your task. Until the
clatter of the dropped spindle, we had all been looking at our laps or hands, where we held hoops, raw yarn, or small looms. Even the women who worked the bigger floor looms in the corner could
talk with us without looking away from what they were doing. Now, they all stared at me, and there was fear in their eyes. Surely they did not think I would be so cruel as to punish a girl for
speaking what everyone already knew.

Then I saw that they weren’t looking at my face. They were looking at my hands.

I looked down at my hoop. I had meant to make a caravan: camels and men, all brightly colored on the desert sand, beneath an endless blue sky. I had done the sky right enough, and the sand,
because I had done them before I started to tell my story. But where I had meant to do camels, I had instead done sheep. They were scattered on the ground, running away. The shepherd—no, the
hunter with them—had his bow trained on the sky, but I knew he would not be able to fire his arrow in time.

Plummeting out of the blue was an enormous bird, wings extended longer than the man was tall, and terrible talons stretching for its prey. There was no way to be sure—embroidery does not
let you make pictures of people’s faces in great detail—but I knew in my heart that the hunter was Lo-Melkhiin.

“Lady-bless,” began the spinner.

“Will you hush, woman?” said the old weaver. She looked at me with an awed expression on her face. “Lady-bless, your work is very good, but perhaps that is all you should do
today?”

She was terrified. I could hear it in the polite way she spoke, and the others in the room fairly quivered with it. They were like the sheep before the rainstorm that had flooded the wadi and
taken my sister’s brother. This was strange to them, and they knew, somehow, that a storm was coming.

“Perhaps you are right,” I said to her. “I am unused to such a long time at one craft. In our father’s tents, we had too many tasks to spend so long at only
one.”

It was not a very good excuse, but it was good enough to get me from the room. I held the hoop and the embroidered cloth tightly against my chest, blocking it from the view of any that I passed.
When I got outside and reached the large vats where the dyers boiled the colorant we used to dye yarn and cloth, I threw the work, hoop and all, into the fire, and it burned just the same as any
cloth would do.

I returned to my room, anxious to not meet anyone in the gardens in case they had heard about what I had done. In our father’s tents, gossip spread quicker than fire, and
I knew that here would be no different. The women, at least, would all know by the time the sun set; and if the men did not, it would be because they did not care to, or because they did not
believe what the women said. Whether Lo-Melkhiin would hear, or believe, I did not know. And I did not know what his reaction would be.

I stared at the hour-candle in my room and prayed to the smallgods. I asked our father’s father’s father for his strength and luck. To my mother’s mother’s mother, I
prayed for survival. She had survived when she should not have, thanks to a talking camel. I did not think I was worthy of such a miracle, but I prayed for one all the same. Neither of the
smallgods had saved themselves, in the end. Both had been saved by other forces. Perhaps it was enough to do your best, and know when to ask for aid.

There was a clamor in the garden outside my rooms. On the other side of the garden was the bathhouse I used. It was not the only one in the qasr, but it was the most private. I had never seen
anyone else use it, and I knew only one person could be using it now.

I pulled on my darkest veil. They would see me, undoubtedly, standing in the sun, but I did not want them to see my face. I stood in my door and watched four guards, Firh Stonetouched among
them, carry a litter into the bathhouse. On the litter, his dark skin pale and his fine clothes dark with blood, was Lo-Melkhiin. I fled as they disappeared into the bath, and did not see another
soul until the serving girl brought me my dinner.

“What is happening?” I asked her. “What is going on?”

She was pale too, though her dark hair was still neatly bound up and her dress hung perfectly about her body. The cup on my dinner tray had clattered against the finger bowl when she set it
down, and I knew that her hands shook, though now she had them balled up inside the pleats in the front of her shift.

“Lady-bless,” she said. “They say a monster attacked Lo-Melkhiin while he was hunting in the desert.”

“How is this possible?” I demanded, though I thought I might know. If she had heard the story of my embroidery, she gave no sign of it.

“A giant demon in the form of a bird,” she said. “Lady-bless, they say it came out of the sky so quickly that not even Fleetfoot could have matched it for speed. Lo-Melkhiin
had a bow, but he could not fire fast enough, and the monster gored him in the side.”

“Surely he has been wounded hunting before,” I said to her.

“No, lady-bless,” she said to me. “Sometimes a graze, maybe, but there have been hunts where the lions took four guards, and Lo-Melkhiin came back without a scratch.”

“You may go,” I said to her, straightening myself where I sat. “Should my husband send for me, I will of course go, but leaving that aside, I do not wish to be disturbed again
tonight—understood?”

She murmured her acquiescence and fled back to the comfortable safety of the kitchen.

I ate my dinner slowly, rolling the pieces of spiced goat in bread and dipping them in oil before taking a bite, and then chewing with more care than I might have needed.

This was like the gown, I realized; only, I had woven men and birds, not gold thread. I had not just seen it, I had caused it. I looked at the golden ball that had awaited me when I woke up that
morning. I had made that, too. I held my breath.

It was not enough to wander, to set my power loose like the goats and hope that it found good grazing, and heeded my call when I bid it to return. I needed it to be like that storm. Something I
could see coming, something I could prepare for. I would have to try again, and see if I could do this work on purpose.

Lo-Melkhiin did not rise from his sickbed that night, and so I slept alone. When I woke in the morning, there was a new-made lamp next to the golden ball.

I HAD NOT TOLD THE WOMEN in the spinning room the truth about the great birds from the mountains. When my sister and I were six years old and the fire of summer had burned down
to embers, we saw the birds for the first time. They came in a great flock, not in ones and twos, and they flew above us when we took the sheep and goats out to graze. They reminded me of our
father’s caravan—a long line of men with purpose, but who tired and sometimes grew sad when they were away from home.

My sister had her sling and a rock in her hands, at the ready in case one of them dropped down for a sheep. I had nothing.

“Sister,” she said to me, “where is your sling? You must help me if the birds are hungry.”

“I will not,” I said to her. “They are on a caravan, can you not see? If we turn them away, we have broken the laws of hospitality.”

My sister looked at me as if I had spent too long in the sun and suggested that we might eat sand for sweetmeats. Then the birds started to call, a hard and lonely sound, and one of them dropped
like a stone from the sky.

“Sister!” my sister shouted, but she did not raise her sling.

The sheep panicked and tried to run, but the bird was faster. I thought it would snag its talons in the wool and fly away, but instead it landed on a sheep’s back and slit its throat with
a great claw. The beast slumped to the side as the bird began to eat.

We looked aloft. If a sand-crow finds prey in the desert sand, more will join it and fight over the meal. If these birds were the same, my sister and I and the sheep would be in trouble. The
dogs barked and barked, bringing the sheep under control again even as the great bird feasted, but the goats were gone. We could only hope they would come back. We had some small luck; none of the
other birds came down from the sky. They circled and watched, as though they were waiting for something.