A Thousand Nights by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-03-19T15:42:37+00:00

same way I had felt the spindle and the thread. The evening flow-

ers were just beginning to blossom, and their light scent wakened

me from the last of my exhaustion.

I was not alone. Lo-Melkhiin’s mother sat under one of the

date palms on a broad cushion, a pitcher of watered wine at her

elbow. When I met her gaze, she gestured to the space at her side,

and I crossed the walkway to sit. My place was not quite shaded,

but the sun no longer hammered down, and it did not seem so

bright after what I had seen in my vision.

148

E . K . J o h n s T o n

“When my son began to hunt, I feared for his safety,” she said

to me, when I had settled. She did not offer me a cup.

“The desert is a hard place,” I said to her. “It is full of many

dangers.”

“Your words are true,” she said to me. “Yet my son did not

fall prey to any of them. Even when he first went into the desert,

it loved him and did not harm him.”

“He must be wise to its ways,” I told her. “Our father is like

that. He goes out with the caravan and comes back, and is only

marked by the dust of the road.”

“My son studied the desert well,” she agreed. “But when his

spirit was changed, he began to flaunt his desert wisdom.”

I thought about what the women in the spinning room had

said. Lo-Melkhiin might go into the desert and return unscathed,

but his men did not. Our father’s pride was not only in his own

resilience, but in the strength of the whole caravan, down to the

sheep they took with them to trade.

“The desert does not like to be mocked,” I said to her. “It will

always take a price in the end.”

“And now at last my son has paid,” she said to me. “A great

bird attacked him, sliced him with silver-colored talons so bright

the other huntsmen could not look at them, and now he lies abed

as he has not done in months and months, and does not know the

sky from the sand.”

I remembered the ease with which I had seen the great bird

slit the throat of the sheep my sister and I had watched over, and

did not doubt her.

149

A T h o u s A n d n i g h T s

“Are the wounds so deep as to be fevered already?” I asked.

“He has no fever,” she said to me. “There is no infection that

our healers can see. The cuts are more like scratches, barely

bleeding now that the compresses have been laid, and yet he

does not wake.”

At last, she poured a cup of wine and passed it to me. I took

it with thanks and drank it slowly. It tasted bitter on my tongue,

and as I drank, I felt the world sharpen around me. The white

light of my vision faded and the rhythm with it, though I could

still hear the echo in the fountain’s song.

“The women say you stitched it in thread, before you could

have known,” Lo-Melkhiin’s mother said to me.

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