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

together, and they understood that our father was not foolish, and neither were his wives. Then
the other women would start to talk to one another. Through them, my mothers learned more of the habits of the men our father traded with than he had ever dreamed of.
    “With your eyes on your work,” my mother had said to me, thinking to prepare me for a trader’s life, “it is easy to forget who is present to hear your mouth. You and your
sister must remember that, when you are wed. Do good work, and those you work with will tell you things beyond what you can imagine.”
    Advice for a trader’s wife, perhaps, but it would serve me well in the qasr too. As I spun, the women fell to talking around me. It was quiet at first, like the whispers in water-starved
wadi reeds. They did not say anything that day about Lo-Melkhiin, or about the qasr, but they did not hold their tongues when I was present; I knew that, if I lived, I might soon hear something I
could put to use.
    I focused on the whorl instead. This too was a trick I had learned from my mother. Spinning does not require a great deal of thought, and when you have become accustomed to the weight of the
spindle and the feel of the wool, even your eyes are not necessary. My mother’s mother had spun while blind for the last ten years of her life, and yet the threads my mother used to embroider
her wedding dishdashah were as fine as any our father might have bought for her later. Spinning is a dreamer’s craft, and I wished to dream of my sister, and of a place that was not so closed
and full of fear.
    My breath slowed to match the rise and fall of the spindle, and my eyes drifted back and forth with the whorl. The thread I spun was raw—they would dye it later—but soon enough I saw
the black fire of my sister’s dark hair in the dirty-white of the wool.
    She was in the caves, the hill where we buried our dead, and where we had first seen the rain. My mother and my sister’s mother stood beside her, and all of them were clad in the
priestly-whites the women of my family wore in that place. I could see their mouths moving, though I could not hear their words, and I knew that no one had died. My sister was learning the songs,
not burying someone, and our mothers were teaching her to follow in their work.
    I was puzzled by this. My sister would still marry, surely, and leave our father’s tents. If she were to learn the songs to sing to the dead, it would be her husband’s songs she
sang. If she learned our songs, if she were tied to our family’s caves, the dead might not let her leave them. They would always require her to keep them. But I knew the vision before me did
not lie. My sister was learning our own death songs, and that meant she would stay in our father’s tents forever—and always near my shrine.
    I wondered if our father knew what they were doing. I could not imagine that he would give his approval. He respected the dead, of course, not least because his father’s father’s
father was the smallgod to whom he owed his trade. That shrine was the most often visited in our catacombs. Even in the dry season, it had sweet-water flowers on it, and pickled roots. It was not
the shrine before which my sister now stood.
    This shrine was new, stone still bleached white from the desert sun and not shadowed by time under the earth. On it there was a scattering of purple cloth that I recognized immediately. When we
had cut the dishdashah for my sister’s wedding, her mother had kept the scraps, to use for luck-pieces in later works. We had not yet begun those, and so the pieces had stayed in her thread
box. But now they were on the shrine, laid out for the smallgods to see.
    Laid out for
me
to see.
    It was my shrine they were teaching her to keep. The shrine that would make me a smallgod when I died, and the same one she had promised to build while I yet lived. I had seen them praying to
another, smaller, shrine in the tent, and thought it the