Rebel of the Sands (10 page)

My hand fit well in his.

J
in was standing motionless in the middle of the ring, the muscles across his bare back glistening with sweat as they rose and fell. He let his opponent circle him. The other man dove at Jin, who caught him and slammed him to the ground. I heard the crack of the man's nose just before the cheers drowned anything else out.

“He can throw a hit as well as take one, I'll give him that.” Parviz of the Camel's Knees Caravan ran his knuckles along his jaw as he watched Jin's opponent wipe his bloody nose.

I snorted, pitching my voice low to go with my disguise. I was a boy again tonight. No matter how many noses Jin turned bloody, no one was going to take us on as hired muscle so long as I was a girl. And we needed a caravan
to get across the Sand Sea without dying of thirst.

It had taken us a day of walking and all our supplies to get to Massil. What was left of our money we spent getting into the city. It was five fouza for every camel to enter the ancient walls and three fouza for every person. The cost of a life told you all you needed to know about a place, especially in the Trader City, where everything was a commodity. Here, human life was the cheapest thing going. Those were Jin's words as we passed beneath a huge stone arch into the once glorious city.

Even I knew the story of Massil. A wise and powerful Djinni once ruled there, back when it was the greatest city on the edge of the Small Sea. The Djinni fell in love with the daughter of one of the traders and offered him the whole city in exchange for her hand. The girl was already promised to another trader from far across the Small Sea, but the greedy father wanted the city. So he fashioned a living doll of wax and magic to trick the Djinni while marrying his daughter to the trader. When the Djinni discovered the trick, he had already given the man the city. And Djinn were only able to tell the truth, which meant they were bound by their word. Unable to take the city back, he raised a sandstorm so great that the sea filled up and up and up until the water was swallowed and there was nothing but sand as far as the eye could see. And then he vanished, leaving the worthless city on the edge of the desert to the greedy merchant.

Massil, the last bastion of civilization before the Sand Sea crossing.

The crowd roared as Jin landed a punch on his opponent's face with a crunch and sent him down to the ground again.

No more civilized than anywhere else, best I could see.

“You ought to see him in a real tight spot,” I said to Parviz. “I've seen him break a man's hand like that.” I clicked my fingers, thinking of the noise Dahmad's wrist made when it cracked. Just then Jin's opponent dove at him again. Jin sidestepped him, his leg lashing out, catching the man's knee and flipping him over to land flat in the sand. Parviz had a trader's face, even better than a gambler's. But I reckoned he was impressed.

“He'd have to be able to fight if he's always got to be rescuing scrawny little brothers,” a voice chimed in from a few bodies over. I knew before I made the mistake of raising my head that the comment was meant for me. A boy with crooked front teeth had been trying to get a rise out of me all night. I reckoned he wanted me to take a swing at him so he could beat me up and impress some caravan leader without having to step into the ring and fight someone his own size. Jin might be able to hit him hard enough to straighten out his teeth, but I wasn't fixing to get my arm broke.

Parviz turned to me and eyed me up against Jin. “He's your brother?”

“We had different mothers.” Our charade was rickety as an old henhouse, but it was the only thing we had that was likely to get us hired and across the desert without being picked apart by buzzards two days out. “We'll work
for half of what the others are asking for,” I said instead of answering the question. We'd been turned down twice already tonight, maybe on account of Jin's foreignness or my size. But the Camel's Knees clan had a reputation for being cheapskates.

“I've been trading since I was high as a camel's knee.” Parviz chuckled at his own joke. “I can count well enough to know that with two of you it works out the same fee as a single man, and then there's an extra mouth to feed. I don't need dead weight, Alidad.” He called me by the fake name I'd given. “Even if you don't hardly weigh nothing.”

Parviz turned away, and already my heckler was stepping out to meet him. “You've a fine eye for business, my friend. Now I could take any of these fellows any time of the day.” He gestured in a wide arc with a glass of dark liquor dangling from his fingers.

My gun was in my hand in a flash, ready to execute some half-formed plan.

I squeezed the trigger.

The glass in the heckler's hand shattered before the bullet sank into the wall behind him.

The pit fell silent. The heckler stared dumbly at his handful of glass, blood, and liquor. Someone in the crowd burst out laughing, and then the roar of conversation went up again.

“You son of a bitch!” The heckler had a piece of glass sticking out from his thumb. “You shot me!”

“No, I shot your glass. Don't worry, the liquor'll wash the blood off.” I holstered my pistol, hoping I wasn't about
to get shot back. “Like I was about to say before getting interrupted, it's a modern age. I don't need a lot of muscle to pull a trigger.”

Parviz's eyes swept the heckler, then me. Traders knew the worth of things. And they knew when they were getting a bargain, too. “We're leaving from the West Gate at dawn. Don't be late.”

Jin was at my side, pulling his shirt on over his head, as Parviz disappeared. “Did you just shoot someone?”

“I got us hired, if that's what you're asking.” I scratched the back of my head and tried to look sheepish. I was sure I wasn't successful judging by the look Jin was giving me. “And I only shot his glass.”

Jin hooked one arm around my shoulder, leaning on me. “I knew I liked you, Bandit.”

And then came that grin. I might have traitor eyes, but Jin had the sort of smile that would turn over whole empires to the enemy—that made me feel like suddenly I understood him exactly, even though I knew nothing about him. The kind that made me feel like if I was on the right side of it, we could do anything together. I had the next six weeks to find out if that was true.

W
e left at dawn with the Camel's Knees as promised. I thought I knew the desert, but as I watched the sun rise in a perfect clear sky over an unbroken stretch of gold, I knew this was something else. The Sand Sea was huge and restless. The Camel's Knees treated it like something between a beast to be broken and a tyrant to cower in front of. I felt at home instantly.

The landscape shifted from one moment to the next, the moving sands dragging me irresistibly down a dune one moment and trapping me in place the next. Some of the dunes seemed infinite—no matter how long we walked we never seemed to crest them. The wind sliced its path through the land, scattering sand like shrapnel into my eyes and my mouth, in spite of my sheema. In
the middle of the day the whole desert shifted and a huge wooden structure appeared out of the sand, red and blue paint flaking off of it with the wind.

“What's that?” I asked Jin, shielding my eyes from the sun.

“It's a shipwreck,” Jin told me. And just as quickly as it had appeared, the sand swallowed it up again.

When we pitched camp on the first evening, my skin was raw, my whole body ached from walking, and I was happy.

There were sixty-odd people in the Camel's Knees, plus two dozen camels heavy with supplies and goods for trade. The years of travel between them were obvious; they moved as one when they made camp.

“Is this what the real sea is like?” I asked Jin, taking my food to sit next to him on a darkened dune just away from the fire. Jin had started a rumor that I was in a fire as a kid so I was ashamed to show my face. I loosened my sheema enough to eat without taking it off.

“You don't have to walk across the sea.” He stabbed at his food with a piece of burned flatbread.

“So what do sailors do all day? Lounge around growing soft?” I poked him in the stomach, which was all muscle. I was stupidly pleased when he laughed. Before he could reply, Old Daud spoke up from beside the fire.

“Settle, children, and I will tell you a story.” The storyteller had a voice deep like the desert night and quick like the fire. It was a good voice for stories.

“I wonder if he could set you straight on the moral of Atiyah and Sakhr,” Jin whispered to me teasingly. I
knew he was getting it wrong to annoy me.

“Maybe he ought to tell the one of the Foreign Man who pushed his luck,” I whispered back.

“In the new days of the world, God looked down on the earth and decided to fill it. From his own body of fire he made immortal life. First the clever Djinn were crafted, then giant Rocs who soared through the skies from one mountaintop to the next, and wild Buraqi who raced from one side of the desert to the other, until the whole earth was full.”

“I wonder if God could save me from having to hear this story again.” A girl startled me, dropping down in the sand between me and Jin without warning. I already knew her: Yasmin, Parviz's daughter, the princess of the caravan.

Isra, her grandmother, walked past and reached over me to smack her on the back of the head, making Yasmin's braid flip over her shoulder. “You will be quiet and listen, Princess Big Mouth.” That name worked, too, I supposed.

Yasmin stuck her tongue out at her grandmother's retreating back before leaning toward me. “Old Daud is telling the story for your benefit, you know.” She lowered her voice. “It's a warning for the hired muscle about the dangers that creep in the dark.” She waggled her fingers comically, which made the tin plate she was balancing on her knees almost tip over. She caught it before it could, rolling her eyes as she stuffed food in her mouth and talked around it. “The ones you're supposed
to be keeping us safe from. Though it's been years since we saw a ghoul out here.”
Same as Dustwalk
, I thought. I'd last seen a Nightmare when I was eight years old. “It's mortal men that cause the most trouble these days.”

Isra raised her hand, threatening a slap from the other side of the fire. The caravan princess pulled a face but shut up for good, letting Old Daud lapse into the story.

Everybody knew the story of the First Mortal. But Yasmin wasn't wrong; Old Daud did seem to be giving me and Jin pointed looks as he told it. So I listened close as he told of a golden age when only First Beings roamed the earth. How, after time beyond counting had passed, the Destroyer of Worlds came from deep within the earth. She brought with her a huge black snake who swallowed the sun and turned the sky to endless night, and a thousand new creatures—the monsters she called children, but that First Beings named ghouls. And when the Destroyer of Worlds killed the first First Being, he exploded into the first star in the newly black sky. God had made the First Beings with endless life, so when they learned of death they were afraid. That was the dawn of the first war, and as First Beings fell, the night sky filled. The Djinn, the brightest of God's First Beings, feared death so much, they came together and gathered earth and water and used the wind to mold a being and set it alive with a spark of fire. They made the First Mortal. To do what they feared most, but what needed to be done in any war: die.

So the First Mortal took up steel, and with it he beheaded the huge snake who had swallowed God in his sun form. The sun was released from the monster's throat and the endless night ended.

The First Beings looked upon this mortal thing they had made and saw with awe that he wasn't afraid of death. He dared to fight because his destiny was to die. And where the Destroyer of Worlds had created fear, the First Mortal had bravery to meet it. The immortals had never had a need for it before. But mortals did.

So the First Beings made another mortal and another. They fashioned each in a duller image of an immortal thing—men instead of Djinn, horses instead of Buraqi, birds instead of Rocs. They worked until they had an army. And against the might of mortality, the Destroyer of Worlds finally fell. Her rule over the earth broke and the creatures she brought with her were left alone, stalking the desert night.

The story ended, the air full of the silent spell Old Daud's words had woven. Then the world rushed back in, the one the First Mortal had fought and died for, filled with idle camp chatter and the flicker of pipe smoke and Isra calling Yasmin away to scold her over the luridly bright khalat she'd just found among her other clothes.

“I'll take your watch,” I offered as Yasmin joined her grandmother with a roll of her eyes and the camp settled around us. I felt alive. Filled up by the desert. Lit on fire. “I don't think I could sleep anyway.”

“I'd rather stay up after that.” Jin offered me a drink across the empty space between us. “He's got me half terrified I'm going to get eaten by a ghoul in my sleep.”

“In Dustwalk they say that only happens to sinners.” I took a swig from the flask and passed it back.

“And nonbelievers,” Jin said. “Like me.”

“You don't believe in God?”

“I've been a lot of places,” Jin said. “And I've heard a lot of what people think is true. When everyone seems so very sure, it's hard to figure anyone is right.”

I'd never thought about whether I believed in God. I believed in the stories in the Holy Books the same way I believed in the stories of the First Mortal or Rebel Prince Ahmed. It never mattered to me if they were true. They had enough truth of greater ideas, of heroes and sacrifice and the things everybody wanted to be.

“In Miraji you claim that God created the immortals, your Djinn, from fire, and they made the first mortals. In the Ionian Peninsula they say the immortals themselves are gods and they created us humans for their amusement. The Albish say that all things sprang straight from the river and from the trees, created by the heart of the world, immortal and mortal alike. The Gallan believe that First Beings and ghouls are no different—that they're both tools of the Destroyer of Worlds—and that some different god than yours created mankind to destroy them and purify the earth.”

Immortals could be killed by iron. Same as ghouls.
But the notion of murdering a Djinni made everything in me rebel. The relationship between humans and immortals was complicated. There were a thousand stories about mortals tricking Djinn, finding their true names and using the names to trap them. But immortals were forces of nature. Creatures of God. As ancient as the world itself. And our short lives were nothing compared to their endless ones. Killing immortals was what the Destroyer of Worlds did. Humanity was created to save them.

“Is that what the Gallan are using our guns for?”

“Mostly they use them against other humans these days,” he said. “They wiped out the First Beings in their country long ago. They're working on everywhere else now.”

“Like Xicha.” My eyes drifted to the open shirt collar where his tattoo was. I didn't realize until then that there'd been a part of me that was still angry at him for blowing up the factory in Dustwalk. Whether or not it hurt the Gallan, it crippled the whole of the Last County, too. And, sure, there were plenty of folks there who didn't deserve any better than starving to death. But there were also folks like Tamid who'd never learned to hate that place the way he should've. And my cousin Olia, who every once in a while caught my gaze behind Farrah's back and rolled her eyes with me. And my little cousin Nasima, who still hadn't caught on that she was supposed to be ashamed to be born a girl. Those people didn't deserve to starve.

Then again, Jin's country didn't deserve to get invaded the way Miraji had been.

Jin pulled up his collar. “The Gallan have been kept at bay for a thousand years now by their neighbors. When it used to be magic against swords, it was a fair fight. But the Gallan are armed with guns now, and magic is bleeding out of everywhere, no matter what you believe in.”

“So what
do
you believe?” I asked.

“I believe money and guns get you a lot further in a war than magic these days.”

“If that was true you'd be living rich in some city with a soft bed and five wives. Not blowing up factories in the dead end of nowhere, Xichian boy.”

“Five wives?” He snorted into his flask. “I'm not sure I could keep up with that many.” I didn't say anything. I'd figured out with Jin that if I gave him long enough usually he'd give me the truth. “I always figured the land creates its First Beings the way it creates its mortals. In the green forests and fields of the West, their magic grows from deep soil. In the frozen North it crawls and claws out of the ice. And here it burns from the sand. The world makes things for each place. Fish for the sea, Rocs for the mountain skies, and girls with sun in their skin and perfect aim for a desert that doesn't let weakness live.” I'd never had anyone describe me like that before. His gaze flicked away too fast for me to fall into it. “Of course, my brother would tell you that the First Beings are all just manifestations on earth of one Creator God. That's what the new philosophers are saying.”

“You've got a brother?” As soon as I said it I saw on his face that it was a slip. He hadn't meant to tell me that. But he couldn't take it back. “Where is he?”

Jin stood, brushing sand off his hands. “I think I'll take you up on that offer to cover my watch after all.”