Rebel of the Sands (Rebel of the Sands, #1)(33)

There were sixty-odd people in the Camel’s Knees, plus two dozen camels heavy with supplies and goods for trade. The years of travel between them were obvious; they moved as one when they made camp.

“Is this what the real sea is like?” I asked Jin, taking my food to sit next to him on a darkened dune just away from the fire. Jin had started a rumor that I was in a fire as a kid so I was ashamed to show my face. I loosened my sheema enough to eat without taking it off.

“You don’t have to walk across the sea.” He stabbed at his food with a piece of burned flatbread.

“So what do sailors do all day? Lounge around growing soft?” I poked him in the stomach, which was all muscle. I was stupidly pleased when he laughed. Before he could reply, Old Daud spoke up from beside the fire.

“Settle, children, and I will tell you a story.” The storyteller had a voice deep like the desert night and quick like the fire. It was a good voice for stories.

“I wonder if he could set you straight on the moral of Atiyah and Sakhr,” Jin whispered to me teasingly. I knew he was getting it wrong to annoy me.

“Maybe he ought to tell the one of the Foreign Man who pushed his luck,” I whispered back.

“In the new days of the world, God looked down on the earth and decided to fill it. From his own body of fire he made immortal life. First the clever Djinn were crafted, then giant Rocs who soared through the skies from one mountaintop to the next, and wild Buraqi who raced from one side of the desert to the other, until the whole earth was full.”

“I wonder if God could save me from having to hear this story again.” A girl startled me, dropping down in the sand between me and Jin without warning. I already knew her: Yasmin, Parviz’s daughter, the princess of the caravan.

Isra, her grandmother, walked past and reached over me to smack her on the back of the head, making Yasmin’s braid flip over her shoulder. “You will be quiet and listen, Princess Big Mouth.” That name worked, too, I supposed.

Yasmin stuck her tongue out at her grandmother’s retreating back before leaning toward me. “Old Daud is telling the story for your benefit, you know.” She lowered her voice. “It’s a warning for the hired muscle about the dangers that creep in the dark.” She waggled her fingers comically, which made the tin plate she was balancing on her knees almost tip over. She caught it before it could, rolling her eyes as she stuffed food in her mouth and talked around it. “The ones you’re supposed to be keeping us safe from. Though it’s been years since we saw a ghoul out here.” Same as Dustwalk, I thought. I’d last seen a Nightmare when I was eight years old. “It’s mortal men that cause the most trouble these days.”

Isra raised her hand, threatening a slap from the other side of the fire. The caravan princess pulled a face but shut up for good, letting Old Daud lapse into the story.

Everybody knew the story of the First Mortal. But Yasmin wasn’t wrong; Old Daud did seem to be giving me and Jin pointed looks as he told it. So I listened close as he told of a golden age when only First Beings roamed the earth. How, after time beyond counting had passed, the Destroyer of Worlds came from deep within the earth. She brought with her a huge black snake who swallowed the sun and turned the sky to endless night, and a thousand new creatures—the monsters she called children, but that First Beings named ghouls. And when the Destroyer of Worlds killed the first First Being, he exploded into the first star in the newly black sky. God had made the First Beings with endless life, so when they learned of death they were afraid. That was the dawn of the first war, and as First Beings fell, the night sky filled. The Djinn, the brightest of God’s First Beings, feared death so much, they came together and gathered earth and water and used the wind to mold a being and set it alive with a spark of fire. They made the First Mortal. To do what they feared most, but what needed to be done in any war: die.

So the First Mortal took up steel, and with it he beheaded the huge snake who had swallowed God in his sun form. The sun was released from the monster’s throat and the endless night ended.

The First Beings looked upon this mortal thing they had made and saw with awe that he wasn’t afraid of death. He dared to fight because his destiny was to die. And where the Destroyer of Worlds had created fear, the First Mortal had bravery to meet it. The immortals had never had a need for it before. But mortals did.

So the First Beings made another mortal and another. They fashioned each in a duller image of an immortal thing—men instead of Djinn, horses instead of Buraqi, birds instead of Rocs. They worked until they had an army. And against the might of mortality, the Destroyer of Worlds finally fell. Her rule over the earth broke and the creatures she brought with her were left alone, stalking the desert night.

The story ended, the air full of the silent spell Old Daud’s words had woven. Then the world rushed back in, the one the First Mortal had fought and died for, filled with idle camp chatter and the flicker of pipe smoke and Isra calling Yasmin away to scold her over the luridly bright khalat she’d just found among her other clothes.

“I’ll take your watch,” I offered as Yasmin joined her grandmother with a roll of her eyes and the camp settled around us. I felt alive. Filled up by the desert. Lit on fire. “I don’t think I could sleep anyway.”

“I’d rather stay up after that.” Jin offered me a drink across the empty space between us. “He’s got me half terrified I’m going to get eaten by a ghoul in my sleep.”