A Thousand Nights by E. K. Johnston Read Free Book Online

fountains, though I did love their songs. On the fourth day I caught the hem of a serving girl’s dress, when she would have left me.
    “Please,” I said to her, as I would have spoken to my mother, “is there not some craft that I might do? The hours are long, and I am not accustomed to idleness.”
    She hesitated, and I knew the reason. As Lo-Melkhiin’s wife, I ought to have had the run of the qasr’s crafthalls, supervising the embroidery and the weaving. At the same time, they
could not give me anything sharp, nor strong weaving cords, lest I turn them upon myself. That left spinning. I supposed I could do some damage with a spindle whorl, but once the distaff was
broken, I would have naught but a ceramic disc. I drew myself up, remembering that here, I was no one’s daughter. Here I was a queen, for however long I might last.
    “I shall spin,” I said, taking the decision from her. “It is my favorite, and I do not wish to interrupt what process your craft-mistresses have established.”
    “Yes, lady-bless,” the girl said, and led me into the corridor.
    When we entered the thread room, all heads turned and all conversation ceased. There were some two dozen women sitting grouped at various tasks, and yet if any of them had dropped their needles,
the sound would have echoed. The girl looked as though she wished the floor would eat her bones, but I walked proudly. I followed her to the piles of new-carded wool, and she handed me a spindle
before moving to take her own seat with the embroiderers.
    It took my fingers some time to regain their skill. I had not had much cause to spin at home, being put to embroidery as soon as I was able to understand its worth. Moreover, our wool was a good
deal coarser. My mother could have had finer threads, if she wished them, but they were brought to us by our father. We did not make them. My hands were chapped from the desert wind and callused
from my earlier years with a shepherd’s crook. They snagged my thread and frayed it, and again and again I undid my work.
    The others said nothing, but I could feel their eyes on me. Before, I had wanted their attention, had wanted them to remember who, and what, I was. Now they looked upon me still, but they saw a
poor desert girl who could not even spin properly, and I wished for it to stop.
    “Lady-bless.” There was a voice at my elbow. I turned, and there stood an older woman, with gnarled fingers and a kind smile. She held out a pair of soft white gloves, and I took
them with a nod of thanks.
    “The desert breeds strong,” she said. It was an old saying that our father liked to tell my brothers when they complained of the wind and the sand and their herds.
    “And we must find ways to live in our father’s tent.” I finished the words, and her smile grew.
    She returned to her seat, and I took up the spindle again. Now the thread grew beneath my fingers, coiling into the basket between my feet in an even strand. I felt the eyes of my companions
turn to their own work, and when they no longer looked at me, they forgot that I was there to hear their words.
    My mother had told me that when she first married our father, when he had not yet built the fortune to establish a permanent camp in his father’s settlement, she and my sister’s
mother had gone with him in the caravan. It was a harder life for them. In addition to constant travel, they were each night at the mercy of some new trader’s wives and mother. The men all
respected our father as a merchant who was set to establish himself, but the women were not so sure. Why had he married, then, if he was not yet wealthy enough to keep his wives at home? And why
had he married twice?
    Yet every night, my mother and my sister’s mother had gone to the women’s tents and taken out their thread boxes. There was always mending to do, and sometimes they had finer work,
if our father’s trades had gone well. The others saw the work they did, saw the work they did