Rebel of the Sands

“What?”

“It’s Atiyah and Ziyah, it rhymes. Who’s ever heard of Sakhr?” I argued. Everybody knew the story of Atiyah, the impulsive girl who was always getting herself into trouble and her Djinni lover Ziyah, who feared so much for her life that he gave her his name. His true name. Which she could speak and he would be summoned to her rescue. That she could use to bind him to her will. The name that she could whisper to the lock of any door and it would open into his secret kingdom.

“You think the point of the story is the Djinni’s name?”

“No, but I reckon you ought to get it right. She died because she said his name wrong in the story, not because she was impulsive, and why are we arguing about this?” I snapped. We both went silent.

“Is your aunt in Izman really worth your life?” he asked finally.

“I don’t know, I’ve never met her.”

Jin stopped, hands caught midway through his hair. He’d shoved his shirt up to his elbows and I saw the tension in the muscles in his forearms as he scrutinized me. “You’re going to Izman to find someone you’ve never met?”

“I’m going to Izman because it’s got to be a better life than out here.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Jin said. “Cities are worse, if anything. It’s not like Dustwalk, where everybody knows your name and kills you for a good reason. They’ll kill you for no reason at all. And that’d be a crying shame. You’re too remarkable to waste as a corpse in a gutter.” He got to his feet and offered me a hand. I ignored it. I ignored what he’d said about me being remarkable, too.

“You sound like my father,” I said, standing up without his help.

“Your father?” He dropped his hand.

“He used to say the city was for thieves and whores and politicians.” I mocked my father’s slurred tones with a wave of an imaginary drink. “I was better off staying where my family was going to keep me safe. Do you want to know how safe my father kept me?”

“What happened to him?” Jin asked. There was a tense note in his voice that I couldn’t read.

“My mother killed him.” He opened his mouth. “And don’t bother to say you’re sorry. He was an ass and he wasn’t my real father anyway.” I thought back to the blue-eyed soldier who’d been working for Commander Naguib and wondered how many half-Gallan children there were in the desert. No others that I knew of, but I hadn’t exactly traveled far. Until now.

“I was going to say that it sounds like he deserved it.” Jin said. “And your mother?” His voice said he already knew.

“What normally happens to murderers?” Sometimes in my nightmares I still saw her swinging from a rope. I squared my shoulders. Let him tell me she deserved it, like everybody else had.

“That I am sorry for,” he said. “A mother is a hard thing to lose.” I got the feeling he might know something about dead mothers.

“I’ve got nothing to go back to,” I admitted. “My aunt Safiyah in Izman is all I’ve got. So why not Izman?”

He didn’t answer me right away. There was some kind of war behind his eyes. “Fine,” he said on a long resigned exhale. “Here’s what we do.” He dropped to his knees and started sketching a lopsided triangle in the sand that I gathered was meant to be Miraji. “We walk to Massil. Here.” He jabbed at a point at the bottom of the triangle. “Trains are the only way to get through the mountains this time of year. And I don’t suppose you have enough money left to wait around for the next one.” He looked to me for confirmation as he drew a jagged line across Massil, cutting us off from Izman.

“First class tickets are expensive,” I admitted.

“But,” he went on, “there’ll be caravans preparing for the journey across the Sand Sea. Toward the port cities on the northwest coast.”

“That’s where your compass was pointing,” I prodded. His hat tipped over his face hid any answer from me.

“And they’ll be hiring.”

“Hiring what?” I asked.

“Muscle.” He shrugged. “Guns. Your desert’s not all that safe, you know. The crossing is nothing but sand from Massil to Dassama.” He pointed at another dot he’d made in the top left of the triangle. North and west. “It’s a month of walking.”

“It’s also the wrong direction from Izman.” I scuffed the top right corner with my toe, give or take where I knew the capital was.

He gave me an exasperated look that told me to shut up and let him finish. “From Dassama it’s another ten days of walking across the plains; the caravans do some trading on the way, so it can take longer. Then you get to the sea. It’s two days’ sailing to Izman. You can buy your way across with wages from the caravan. What do you say, Bandit?”

“You sure didn’t miss your calling as a mapmaker.” I looked at the muddled lines in the sand on which he’d sketched out our path. It seemed easy drawn out like that. But I knew better than to underestimate the desert. “It’s a lot harder than a train.” It came out as an accusation.

“Yes, but with fewer soldiers who want to kill you.” Jin stood up, brushing the sand off his hands onto his clothes. It was such a foreign thing to do. The gesture of somebody who wasn’t used to sand getting into everything. Who was still trying to fight it.