I watched as her delicate hands manipulated the stalks into knots, holding each crosspiece up against its post. Though she was unpracticed, her hands were steady, and there was a calm to her countenance that I had never seen before. In the tower, I would not have called her beautiful. Now, in this sunny garden with mud under her nails and her veil sliding off her shorn head, she was lovely.
When the fence was mended, she stepped lightly over it. She walked carefully between the rows, bare feet sinking into the turned dirt with every step. She was cautious and measured, taking very little but immediately going to that which would be the most useful to us. This was the dragon’s gift made manifest: to see a thing and know its worth. She carried her small harvest in her veil, leaving her head uncovered in the sun, and before long she came back to me with a smile on her face. She threw me a pomegranate, and I caught it.
I looked at the fence then, and felt the oddest sense of pride. Here was a thing we had made together. Out of everyone who had known the Little Rose in Kharuf, who had helped to raise her after the curse, who had served her as princess and lady, I was probably the only one who could say that I had made something with her. I felt a chill, though there was no wind or any sign of a cloud in the sky. The fence had been the price of the garden, but I did not know the price of the fence.
“We’ll come back tomorrow to see if we have caught anything’s attention,” I told her.
“All right,” she said, nodding. We both remembered that the gnomes were shy.
The fruit was perfect.
WE DID NOT SPEAK on our way back to the valley. It was mostly downhill anyway, and the Little Rose was concentrating on walking without dropping anything that she carried. I had the pack and the bigger of the bundles, but she was not particularly well balanced with her burdens, and the sloping ground was potentially treacherous under her bare feet. By the time we slid down next to the pool for a drink, it was nearly sunset; or at least it was in our narrow cutout of the mountain. The Little Rose filled the cooking pot with water. I cleared aside the message I had left for Saoud, but kept the materials, so that I could leave another the next time we left the cave.
“Will you tell me about Kharuf?” I asked, when she had set the pot above the fire and cleared the way so I could make our supper. “My mother’s stories were mostly about you.”
“Of course,” she said, and took a seat across from where I worked. She ran her fingers along the hem of her veil for a moment before she remembered herself and forcibly returned her hands to her lap.
“Something old, if you please,” I said. “So, perhaps not about Kharuf, but about how Kharuf was made.”
She nodded, took a moment to settle and consider her words, and then began.
“When my ancestress, the sister of the Storyteller Queen, led her people through the desert, she had more than just her kin in her company.” I set the lid on the cooking pot and sat back to listen. This was about my family too, however far removed. “She had to leave her sister behind, you see, because the queen had a qasr and the desert to rule, and children to raise to the ruling of them. The Storyteller Queen was older than most when her sons and daughters were born, because the King-Who-Was-Good would not go to her bed until she trusted him, and it took her a long time to come to that. Her sister’s children were old enough to make the journey, and so all but one of them did. They brought with them the kin of those they hoped to marry, who followed the queen’s sister because they trusted in the power of her leadership, and thus their caravan was long.”
I had heard variations of this tale before, as they had told it in Qamih as well, but the Little Rose told it with a style to which I was unaccustomed. I had not known, for example, about the children of the Storyteller Queen. The men in Qamih who spoke the words did not really care where the heirs had come from, only that there were heirs to be had. I leaned back on my hands and let the words of the story flow over me.
“They had camels beyond counting, given by the Storyteller Queen’s father, who was the greatest of merchants before he died,” the Little Rose continued. “And they had with them sheep and goats and cattle as well, with the promise that the King-Who-Was-Good would send horses when they had a place to be stabled.”
She paused, and I could not read the expression in her eyes. This was her history, and mine, but she bore the physical marking that connected her without any possibility for denial to those who had trekked across the sand, and perhaps that made the story all the closer to her heart.