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My parents were fighting for my life. I knew that because somewhere, there was a place full of shouts and heat and pain. I shied away from it.
I went to that other place instead.
The one with the cool evening breeze caressing my damp brow, foreshadowing another nightly visit from the one for whom I had left my window open. My mother would scold me whenever she saw this. Creatures of the night could enter. Creatures of the desert.
Ah yes, they could.
I had been pretending to read when I heard the soft crunching of pebbles. I hastily set aside my pen and crumpled up the silly bit of poetry, hid it deep inside the pockets of my shirt.
A familiar sound of scratches and a swift struggle. When I heard her sharply sucking in a breath, my fists clenched and my eyelids pressed shut. I immediately opened my eyes again, before the blackness could fill with images of red and green welts on cracked skin.
How I anticipated her visits. How I dreaded them, caught by the knowledge of what they usually meant.
I lowered my book and over the rim of worn pages I watched the figure that emerged from my window like a bucket of water hauled from a deep well: refreshing, otherworldly. Scarce.
“Ghoul!,” my mother would have screamed, and fled.
“Hello, Amani,” I said, set aside the book, and stood.
***
My body pulled me back. I fought against it. I stared into my father’s smiling eyes, but the meaning of his words was lost on me.
“The medication will give him the respite he needs. To get strong again. It will work. It will work!”
I heard my mother cry. I did not want to stay with these people. Amani never cried.
***
I saw it in her face. That the beating had been a bad one. In how she moved cautiously, as not to rub fabric on sores. A feeling I cannot describe started to spread inside my chest. It was dark and strong and sweet and dangerous. I cleared my throat. Put on a smile. I watched her face lighten up in response. Imposter, I chided myself. But I was too good at playing my part, after all those years.
“Got into trouble? Need some medicine? Tamid’s all-night-open miraculous shop is right here for you.” I reached for my crutch. I had teased out a twitch of her lips. It was enough, for now.
“Let’s see what we have.” I hobbled over to the secret drawer where I stored the pills pilfered from my father’s work shelf. “These should do the trick.”
Amani’s eyes held their steely glint while she took the painkillers from my outstretched hand. Clutching them, she shuddered, then released the pills into her pouch. From its depths, she drew a book.
“Thank you,” she said, carefully placing it onto my table. She always came to trade, never to beg. I accepted this.
“I’ve got some water here. You should take one. Now.” I knew that I could ease her tension, if she gave me time. It was not difficult to make her laugh, usually. She knew this, too.
“I can’t stay tonight.”
Daylight would see her working in her uncle’s store again, lifting crates in the dry heat, loose garments swishing over the dusty floor. They would not hide away her bruises, and whoever had done it would be boasting with the deed. Beating sense into the silly, foolhardy girl. Nor would she want to hide the marks. Defiance and spite at the confinements of their dim, monotonous lives would be written all over her face, show in her bearing, vibrate through the tone of her voice, through her very being.
It was not about what she did that got her into trouble all the time. It was about what others saw when they looked into those eyes; eyes which the iron dust had not yet sapped of their shine. Dreams. Which would never come true. Not here.
This was the Last County, this was Dustwalk. Where the choice was between the sometimes slow, sometimes sudden death of a worker in the weapon factory and the tedious chores of those livelihoods necessary to accommodate such a venture. Even the Sultan’s army was not desperate enough to recruit in a backwater like ours.
“Will you come tomorrow?”
“Would you wait for me if I promised?”
She slipped out of the window again, the spirit of the desert trapped inside a shell of flesh and bones. I longed to shelter her.
***
Arms wrapped around me, close, uncomfortable, too hot. I struggled weakly. Pain engulfed me. It ebbed away again, leaving me with a dull buzz swirling inside me. It was grainy somehow, like the pattern in the clay walls of my chamber. I heard my mother apologizing, but I was unable to listen.
***
She didn’t come the next night. Nor the other. Nor any night of the following week.
My daily chores did not intersect much with hers, so it was by coincidence that I glimpsed her drab clothes among the billowing flowers of her cousins’ Khalats. The gaggle of girls and young women eyed me suspiciously from behind long eyelashes in lowered faces, then snickered as they passed.
All except her. Of course, she would do the opposite, regardless what.
So she smiled at me and the dust lifted, the sky became a near unbearable blue. I straightened on my good leg and smiled back. The sun was relentless that day, it stabbed my head with glowing claws.
They would hang her if she continued like this.
***
When I awoke, I was shivering. I cried out for more blankets to fill the void, anything, anyone. They came, but their faces meant nothing to me. I whispered my thanks to them nonetheless. The trade was not good, but sufficient.
***
I opened the first chapter and my fingers trailed lightly over the ink.
“There was and there was not a city at the fringes of the Small Sea, a city of dates and honey and green ponds. And it was a mighty First Being who ruled there and saw his peoples’ needs cared for. For the Djinn were the cleverest of God’s creations.”
Amani rolled her eyes at the mention of God and my smile at that wove in between the words of the story. I was content that she had found back to her snappy self. Unsurprisingly, but still reassuring. I brushed a few insubordinate strands of my hair from my brow.
My voice didn’t shake as I read her the story of Massil. It told how the love-blind Djinn fell for the schemes of the shrewd merchant who had promised the hand of his daughter in exchange for the bustling city at the Sea. I filled my small chamber with the pictures of pomegranates in full bloom and of a veiled beauty who cried her anguished songs out into the desert, to let them rise into a vast and unforgiving sky.
Amani had settled into the chair, comfortable, relaxed. I gripped the frail spine of the book harder to stop me from reaching out to her.
It was a sad story. Of the greed of men. Of trying to be cunning, but losing it all, because when a waxen doll instead of his bride melted in the blazing hands of the Djinn, he rose a powerful storm which turned the churning sea into waves of sand. Thus the Djinn had kept his word, but had traded the worthless for the worthless.
My voice, which had risen and fallen, following the singsong of the epic, finally settled back into my throat. I cleared it.
“This was my story – a story it was. Listen to tell it and tell it to listen.”
Amani lifted her mug with a swift and determined motion. The scent of spice tea mixed with the omnipresent tang of metal and other, stranger smells that the evening gusts brought in from the desert. The candle flickered and cast specks of light onto the walls, illuminating random edges and panes, leaving others in the shadows.
I tapped onto the cover of the book.
“This is a rare copy to come across, you knew that? Worth much more than a few painkillers.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it sooner.”
“Being late is a sin,” we said simultaneously and likewise broke into a grin.
Amani cocked an eyebrow. “Beware the justice of those more powerful than you?”
“Huh?” I swallowed. I had been distracted.
“The morality."
Of course she would see it that way. She would cheer the deceptive and sly. The little rebel.
I knew I would lose her if I were to give a sermon now on the workings of the world, and how justice ultimately came from God.
“Whatever the morality, the journey was worth it, don’t you agree?”
“The journey.” She blinked and her gaze grew distant. “Yes. The journey is always worth it.”
Fear clenched my stomach.
She was out of the window and over the ledge before I could finish struggling to my feet. Time stretched as I stood there. The candlelight breathed in and out, drew dancing shadows from the books on my shelves. I stood and listened to the drum of my heart.
***
“Go away, Hayfa.”
The maidservant lowered her head and backed away. She would come back, stubborn and dumb like the black flies that gathered just out of my reach, drawn by the stink of blood and pus.
I would never walk again.
The Commander had shot straight through the knee of my malformed leg, making me twice a cripple. When the weapon factory exploded, I got pressed into the dust, splintered bones and all. My mother wailed over the ensuing infection, while my father made me a subject to the drugs he sold.
I survived. Somehow.
I prayed. My days were full of sweat and pain. The nights were cooler, but not better. The pain went deeper then. I tried to wall it in, but it leaked.
Go, I had told Amani, and she had left.
The whispers went through town and when they reached me, it was an image straight out of a fairy tale: a man and a beautiful woman, on a beast of wind and sand and legend. Rebels riding into the new dawn. The new desert. Soon, the talk of the Blue-Eyed Bandit crossed the borders of the Last County and traveled beyond.
The fairy tale was finally hers. It had always been hers.
--
I hated the smell of the oil lamps.
They had wheeled me out of my chamber on my new chair, a clunky thing made of spare iron. They wheeled me outside, onto the veranda, each night, so that I could watch the darkness. Then, they forgot me there, speaking in low voices that sank bleakly into my mind.
“The Galla are still searching after the rebels.”
“Might well not find ‘em. Are sons of the desert, the whole lot. The desert protects her sons.”
And her daughters.
“Rumor has it that they have Demdjis at their call and beck.”
I pressed my eyes shut. It did not make much of a difference. I wanted to press my ears shut as well. I felt stupid.
“Meddling with the powers of the First Beings and their offspring – a dangerous thing, that!”
My father made that mmhh sound. As if he knew.
I nearly felt a spark of anger. Nearly. Demdjis were abominations. They were the poison of the desert.
I croaked after Hayfa, who pushed me back into my room.
That night, I realized I no longer prayed to God.
***
I had kept the translation of the Origin Myth in front of my face. I only lowered it when I heard the tapping of her feet approaching.
“Well?” I made a face I hoped was convincing.
I failed. She grinned. Her eyes lit up for a moment, with a glint of startling blue. Then she grew serious.
“I have to go. As fast as I can. Now. Yesterday, better.”
A shiver ran down my spine. This was not one of her normal rants about Dustwalk being a godforsaken hellhole of a town. There was a thrumming urgency in her speech that rattled me.
I pushed myself up and reached for my crutch.
“Where would you go, Amani?,” I asked, facing her. “Izman? You would still be who you are. A girl,” I said. A woman, I thought.
She kept balling her fists. “So what? Aunt Safiyah – “
“Do you really think that your aunt’s life isn’t controlled by the men around her? Capital or city or crossroads, this changes nothing. Nothing at all. Wherever we went, we would be worthless. Me a cripple and you a – “
“A girl, I know.” She said it with her chest raised and her jaw set, showing all the minuscule details that spoke of her otherness. Then she clawed at her Khalat.
“By the Destroyer, Tamid!” She started pacing through my chamber. “You of all people, you should understand. Have you never felt that there was more – needs to be more to life than this?” She flung her arms wide.
I understood very well. The dust. The iron. The familiar people, living and dying in familiar ways. I also understood that she would not make it far. There was no place for a girl on her own in Miraji society. She lived in some danger here, but it was reckonable. Trade that with the infamous peril of the unknown.
I changed tactics.
I touched her shoulder with a fleeting brush of my hand. She whirled around.
“Amani,” I said. Her eyes were very wide and very blue. “Know that I am always there for you. Don’t do something stupid. Don’t go to the shooting arena. There were women who got hung for smaller feats. I would – ” I swallowed. My pulse raced. “I could – ” The words got stuck in my throat.
Her eyes narrowed.
“I would miss you like hell.” I covered up the trembling of my fingers and my heart with a grin.
I was a miserable coward.
***
The smooth wood of my new crutches bit deeply into the roughened skin of my armpits. I had to leave the wheelchair behind. My chamber. My books. Dustwalk.
The weapon factory was no more. No longer had our small town an excuse for its existence. Those who could had packed their things and went away. Those who could were those who were better off. My parents were better off. They had packed while I watched them in silence. Behind my back, the talk was that the fever had addled my brain. What a record. Twice a cripple and thick-witted.
Before the caravan left, I had snatched my crutch from the wall, dusted it off and handed it over to the hirelings in charge of securing the baggage.
It had broken at the first stop.
When they lowered me from the camel for the second halt, I had flipped a boy a coin for two long cuts of ironwood. I had whittled away. I had carved and filed and polished. The next day, I started training with the new crutches. I loved the speed. It felt like flying over the desert on three legs.
--
My parents settled on Juniper City. It was a livid metropolis with a train station and a steady flow of people coming and going from near and far. Where there were people, there was pain, and thus the need for painkillers. My father successfully reopened his business. My days were full of administrating orders and overseeing the weighing and mixing of components.
There was war.
I heard about the Sultan’s army fighting the rebels, and about the Sultan, in turn, revolting against the Gallan occupation. About cities fighting against the rebels' rule. It was as convoluted as it was irrelevant. Rebellion after rebellion, all claiming reform. I continued with my powders and my scales, undisturbed. Only my treacherous ears perked up when someone eventually spoke of a mighty Demdji who had joined the rebellion and fought at the side of princes and monsters, a Demdji with the powers to raise sandstorms at her will and with blue eyes.
I went out into the desert that day.
I flew over the expanse of dust and pebbles on my three legs. The sun tore at my white-powdered skin with its claws. I drank deeply from its rays, inhaled the smell of the sky.
When I came back to my new chamber, I was slick with sweat. I washed and changed. On a whim, I picked a shirt that looked comfortingly familiar. My fingers closed around an item in the pocket. I flattened out the ball of paper.
I crumbled, staring at the revelations of love from my stupid younger self. She had left me bleeding in the sand. She had traded a friend for a stranger, never to return. She had never trusted me as I had trusted her. She would have never said yes.
I let her go.
I lifted my crutch and smashed everything from my desk, sent books and pens and paper flying. I tore to pieces what I could grab. Voices at the door did not stop me. I ravaged my room, my life, until I found myself crawling on the floor with bleeding fingers, cowering into a corner of my upturned desk.
I stretched out a trembling hand for a pen that was not broken. Then I gathered fluttering scraps. I wrote over the ink, pressed my pen into the paper like a stamp.
I wrote furiously and fiercelessly. A city began to bud and blossom out of my words. A city at a sea of sand. A merchant lived there, who loved the desert’s own daughter with all his heart, and so he tried to trap and tame her. But when he caught her, she slowly changed, shedding a layer of her self each night until the merchant found but a stiff wax doll in his arms. And when he pulled her before the sun in his pain, the desert did not recognize her daughter and burned her, until the merchant stood in a puddle of wax surrounded by empty sand.
The next day, I boarded a train and left the desert for good.