A Thousand Nights (8 page)

“When I woke, my tools were already in my hands, and I was halfway to my feet before I thought about it. I had never carved stone before, and the statue I had seen in my dream was
beautiful. I knew it was foolish to think that I could make something of that quality on my first attempt. Even arrow shafts take practice.

“I did not stop for food or drink, not even when the sun was high above where I worked. My hands cracked and bled, and my throat screamed for water, and I did not stop. I baked in the sun,
and I did not care. I thought only of the statue, the one that I would free from the stone.”

If you separate the ram from the ewes when they are in heat, he will go mad trying to get to them. It does not matter how you tie him down. If he can smell them, he will break all his bones, and
yours, trying to reach them. It sounded as though the madness that had overtaken the carver was the same.

“At last, it was finished. I came out of my trance and Lo-Melkhiin was there. I think he had watched me for some time, though I had been lost in the work and did not see him arrive,”
he said. “He looked at it, from top to bottom, and declared it perfect. He thanked me for so wonderful a work in the name of his mother, and named me Firh Stonetouched, because when the stone
and I worked together, we wrought beauty. He asked what boon I would have from him, and I told him that I was happy as a guard. I do not love stone, you see, but sand and sky. I did not wish to
leave them.”

“But the other statues?” I asked. “What about them?”

“Those I carved in fits like madness,” he told me. “Sometimes Lo-Melkhiin rides with me, and then gives me stone. And I always carve it, even though I do not like to, and the
results haunt me in every garden in this place.”

I looked at his hands. They were dark brown from the sun and wind, and callused from his horse’s reins and the shaft of the spear he carried when it was his turn to walk the wall. I saw no
cuts or damage. It had been seven days since I had come here, and that would not have been enough time for his hands to heal if the carving-madness had overtaken him.

“Did you carve nothing when I came?” I asked him.

He smiled, truly smiled for the first time since he had begun to speak to me.

“I carved arrow shafts, my lady,” he said, “in the tradition of my father’s father’s father. I do not trade them for gold and herds, as he does. Instead I use them
to buy my way out of chores in the barracks I would rather not do. Then I have free time to come here, to the garden.”

“I am surprised,” I said. “I would think, from what you have said, that you would stay as far from your statues as you could.”

“You are right, lady-bless,” he said. “But the flowers are lovely, despite the stone, and the fountains are still as wondrous to me as they were the day I got here. For those
two beauties, I will overlook my dislike of the statues, and of their eyes. I cannot ever seem to fix their eyes.”

“The fountains are magnificent,” I agreed, but suddenly I was uncomfortable.

Always, it seemed, men would overlook unpleasant things for the sake of those that went well. The statues’ eyes for the melodious sounds of the fountain. The deaths of their daughters for
the bounty of their trade.

There was great beauty in this qasr, but there was also great ugliness and fear. I would not be like those men who turned their eyes from one to see the other. I would remember what those things
cost. Whether he knew it or not, the carver’s hands were moving over the lion’s bodies, like he was carving them again. Had he his tools, I’ve no doubt he would have found some
new stone to make it into some dreadful semblance of life. Even so, I could not hate him. He had given me salt in the desert, and he had looked at me when the other guards had avoided my gaze. It
was possible that he, who had come here to serve a man he loved, was as much a prisoner as I was, though he was held by different promises. I could not be saved from the death that awaited me
inside these stone walls, but he might yet find his freedom in sand and sky. I watched as he lost himself to the quiet music and ever-changing patterns of falling water.

“May your hands find what you love,” I whispered, too softly for any but my smallgods to hear. “May your work not frighten you, but bring you joy instead, and may it bring joy
to others. May you carve for yourself, and not for Lo-Melkhiin.”

I left him there, with his hands on the flanks of the lions he disliked and his eyes on the falling water. As I came close to the garden’s arch, I heard a rustle in the low shrubs, and
knew that one of the serving girls had watched us as we spoke. My marriage might be unconventional, and as yet unconsummated, but it seemed that at least my attendants were certain to mind me. I
would not be left unchaperoned with another man, not even one as respected as Firh Stonetouched.

Lo-Melkhiin had given him that name, he said. I wondered what his name had been before, if he had had one—or if the sun had baked it from his mind the day he carved Lo-Melkhiin’s
mother.

ON THE TENTH MORNING, when I woke alone in my comfortable room and was not dead, I was not surprised. A chill ran through my blood, and the walls closed in around me. I had
seen the strange power ebb and flow between Lo-Melkhiin’s hands and mine. I suspected that my inevitable death would not be the result of poison, nor a blade, nor his fingers crushing my
windpipe. There was something at work here that I did not understand; some wicked smallgod of Lo-Melkhiin’s family, or perhaps the demon from the stories, played upon our linked fingers. That
would be my end. I could not pray to the smallgod my sister had made of me. The words stuck in my throat. But I could pray as I always had, to the bones of our father’s father’s father,
even though they were very far away.

I breathed deep, as my mother had taught me, and drew the picture of clear blue sky and calm brown sand in my mind. Before, when my sister and I had done this, we had held hands and pinched each
other to keep from giggling. We did not lack piety by any means, but we were children, and children will find laughter wherever they can. My mother had frowned, but my sister’s mother smiled
with us.

“The smallgods hear of so many sad things, so many hopeless wants and desires,” she said. “Let them hear laughter for a time.”

I did not laugh now, and clouds roiled through the desert in my mind. In vain, I tried to call the blue sky into focus, but it would not come, and the smooth sand was punctured in many places by
sharp rock, and by bushes with thorns so long they would pierce a lamb’s heart, if the creature stumbled into them. I opened my eyes, and lamented my failure. Perhaps I really was too far
away from the places of my dead to pray.

On the top of the wooden chest in the corner of my room, there lay folded the dishdashah that my sister and I had made, the one that someone had brought to me when I wished for it. I rose and
crossed the room to get it, bare feet used to rug-covered marble floors at last. Holding it in my hands, I returned to my seat on the bed and closed my eyes once more.

This time, I did not call the desert. Instead I saw my sister’s hands as we worked the embroidery into the fine fabric. I heard her voice, whispering in my ear. And there was something
more, something else deeper in the vision. I let go of the focus on my breathing, and fell into it.

It was a regular sound, rhythmic and comforting. It was the loom on which the cloth had been made. I did not know who had crafted the cloth—our father had brought it with him when he
returned with the caravan—but I could feel her hands on the shuttle, the way her fingers picked apart the strings of the warp to make a pattern for the weft. The cloth of my dishdashah had
been of deepest purple, a mark of our father’s wealth. The weaving this time was the brightest orange, with fine gold thread added as an accent every half-handspan or so. Though the color was
less rich, the pattern and weight of the fabric made it priceless. This would dress a queen.

I felt the strength of the weaving, and called it toward myself. I saw orange fire run from the fabric to my hands, and though the color was not bleached from the cloth, I felt stronger, calmer.
I thought I could call the blue sky desert now, but found I no longer needed it.

When I opened my eyes, a serving girl was kneeling at the foot of my bed. I had not seen her before, and wished that there might be some consistency in the women who came into my rooms. She had
not interrupted me, and I was glad of it. Her eyes were wide, but I did not know the reason until I looked down at my hands, still holding the dishdashah. It was pale in the sunlight of my room,
but undeniable nonetheless: the copper-colored glow that enveloped my hands and the dark purple silk. Alarmed, I opened my fingers and the dishdashah fell, taking that strange light with it.

“Lady-bless,” breathed the girl, and I thought she might fully genuflect before me. At least she did not flee in fear.

“Pay no mind to it,” I said to her. “The smallgods show favor in ways we cannot always understand.”

“Yes, lady-bless,” she said, but it was clear that she did not think the light was from a smallgod any more than I did. She took a breath and stood. “My lord will have a grand
feast tonight,” she said, as though nothing had happened. “There is a star shower, and he has called upon Skeptics and Priests to debate the matter. He bids you to come, else he will
not see you.”

I wondered if that meant I was safe tonight. If I did not go, Lo-Melkhiin would not see me, and could not kill me. If I went, he would surely not kill me in front of the others. I felt that
chill again, as when I had awoken, but it was less because of the copper fire I had called to myself. Lo-Melkhiin would not kill me with his hands, I was sure of it. There was some strange power to
him, even as there was some strange power to me, and I would not learn of it hiding in my room, or from the women as they crafted.

“I will go,” I told her, and she smiled at me.

She helped me to dress then, in a light shift for the morning, as I would soon begin preparing for what was to come. I broke my fast with flatbread and oil, and then was taken away to the baths.
The preparations were even more elaborate than they had been for my wedding night, presumably because this occasion called for a more involved hairstyle than had been required on that evening. I
sat for hours as I was scrubbed, pumiced, hennaed, plaited, and coiled. It was warm and I could have drifted into the weaving trance, or even called up the blue sky desert, but I was concerned that
if I made the attempt, that strange light would reappear. I did not wish to startle my attendants. Instead, I sat and listened to their talk.

“Last year, my lord only called upon the Skeptics,” the henna mistress said, dark brown hands working patterns on my skin. “The Priests were angry, but of course they could say
nothing about it.”

“The Skeptics said that the stars are not smallgods, but rock and fire,” said the girl whose job it was to pick the bath salts.

“Who lights a fire hot enough to burn rock, then?” said the henna mistress. “And how does it stay aflame in the sky with no one to tend it?”

“I am sure the Skeptics have an answer,” the girl said.

“Of course they do.” The henna mistress finished with my arms, and began to comb the dye into my hair—for the scent, not the color. “But in hearing their answers and the
answers from the Priests, we see a clearer picture of the sky.”

They continued to argue as they worked on my hair, and I withdrew into my thoughts in spite of my determinations otherwise. We did not have Skeptics in our father’s tents. They lived only
in the city, and in some of the larger villages. Unlike Priests, who can work alone, Skeptics require the company of their fellows so that they can debate the great questions they have set
themselves to. Small villages and encampments can spare folk to tend to the bones of the dead and the altars of the smallgods, but they cannot always spare a man to do nothing but think, no matter
how great his thoughts. I had never met a Skeptic, and tonight I would.

I was unfamiliar with what, exactly, was accorded to me by my rank. While the servants deferred to me, and Firh Stonetouched had been respectful, I was unsure if I could command. If I spoke to a
Skeptic, he would likely disregard me as a simple tent-born girl, come to die at Lo-Melkhiin’s hand as all the others before me had done. Perhaps my continued life would be interesting enough
to garner me the conversation I required. I wished to ask about the power of smallgods, if any knew how far their power reached. I knew the Priests’ answer already, because I had had it from
my mother, but now I wanted another opinion.

When my hair was done to satisfaction, the women brought me fruit to eat, and took some time to rest before the final steps of my decoration. I learned how to sit with the mass of coiled braids
upon my head, and how to handle a cup without ruining the tattoos on my fingers and wrists. The henna mistress watched me closely, and then nodded her approval.

“Do not worry overmuch about courtly manners tonight, lady-bless,” she said, her voice low and close to my ear. “It will be torchlight only, and standing to eat. With luck, all
eyes will be upon the stars.”