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

same.
    “At last, it was finished. I came out of my trance and Lo-Melkhiin was there. I think he had watched me for some time, though I had been lost in the work and did not see him arrive,”
he said. “He looked at it, from top to bottom, and declared it perfect. He thanked me for so wonderful a work in the name of his mother, and named me Firh Stonetouched, because when the stone
and I worked together, we wrought beauty. He asked what boon I would have from him, and I told him that I was happy as a guard. I do not love stone, you see, but sand and sky. I did not wish to
leave them.”
    “But the other statues?” I asked. “What about them?”
    “Those I carved in fits like madness,” he told me. “Sometimes Lo-Melkhiin rides with me, and then gives me stone. And I always carve it, even though I do not like to, and the
results haunt me in every garden in this place.”
    I looked at his hands. They were dark brown from the sun and wind, and callused from his horse’s reins and the shaft of the spear he carried when it was his turn to walk the wall. I saw no
cuts or damage. It had been seven days since I had come here, and that would not have been enough time for his hands to heal if the carving-madness had overtaken him.
    “Did you carve nothing when I came?” I asked him.
    He smiled, truly smiled for the first time since he had begun to speak to me.
    “I carved arrow shafts, my lady,” he said, “in the tradition of my father’s father’s father. I do not trade them for gold and herds, as he does. Instead I use them
to buy my way out of chores in the barracks I would rather not do. Then I have free time to come here, to the garden.”
    “I am surprised,” I said. “I would think, from what you have said, that you would stay as far from your statues as you could.”
    “You are right, lady-bless,” he said. “But the flowers are lovely, despite the stone, and the fountains are still as wondrous to me as they were the day I got here. For those
two beauties, I will overlook my dislike of the statues, and of their eyes. I cannot ever seem to fix their eyes.”
    “The fountains are magnificent,” I agreed, but suddenly I was uncomfortable.
    Always, it seemed, men would overlook unpleasant things for the sake of those that went well. The statues’ eyes for the melodious sounds of the fountain. The deaths of their daughters for
the bounty of their trade.
    There was great beauty in this qasr, but there was also great ugliness and fear. I would not be like those men who turned their eyes from one to see the other. I would remember what those things
cost. Whether he knew it or not, the carver’s hands were moving over the lion’s bodies, like he was carving them again. Had he his tools, I’ve no doubt he would have found some
new stone to make it into some dreadful semblance of life. Even so, I could not hate him. He had given me salt in the desert, and he had looked at me when the other guards had avoided my gaze. It
was possible that he, who had come here to serve a man he loved, was as much a prisoner as I was, though he was held by different promises. I could not be saved from the death that awaited me
inside these stone walls, but he might yet find his freedom in sand and sky. I watched as he lost himself to the quiet music and ever-changing patterns of falling water.
    “May your hands find what you love,” I whispered, too softly for any but my smallgods to hear. “May your work not frighten you, but bring you joy instead, and may it bring joy
to others. May you carve for yourself, and not for Lo-Melkhiin.”
    I left him there, with his hands on the flanks of the lions he disliked and his eyes on the falling water. As I came close to the garden’s arch, I heard a rustle in the low shrubs, and
knew that one of the serving girls had watched us as we spoke. My marriage might be unconventional, and as yet unconsummated, but it seemed that at least my attendants were certain to mind me. I